I agree with Cheerskep and humbly accept his criticism of my tipsy comment on art. I blame Friedrich Schiller for my fanciful nonsense. His Letters on The Aesthetic Education of Man led me astray for a few days. wc
________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, December 18, 2012 12:08:22 PM Subject: Re: degraded aesthetics > William writes: > > At Chicago's vaunted Stppenwolf Theater, the current play, > The Motherfucker With The Hat, may be a good play but why does it require > the > obscene title if not to add shock at the cost of cheapening the context > and > lowering the expectations of the audiences? > As perhaps the only playwright on our forum, I may alienate Stephen Adly Guirgis by saying I stand with William on this. Guirgis's title reduces the potential audience of his play, hurts the actors who want to be seen, and degrades the theater in the eyes of many sensitive audience-members. I myself am carelessly vulgar and obscene with a very few close friends, so my reaction doesn't stem from prudery. Our household is staffed by a number of religious caregivers, and I figure it would be a distinct unkindness to "curse" regularly in front of a captive audience of good people who need this job. Similarly, I know there are theater-goers who wince at Guirgis's title. As a theater-goer myself, I shy away from plays about dumb-and-dumber loser-s lackers. The title told me (when the play was in New York) that these were the sort of characters I'd be in for if I went to this play. So I didn't. It also told me Guirgis himself has a mind that lacks the judgment I like to be exposed to. It's juvenile to assume that allleged "honesty" justifies all. William goes on to say: "I think the best art alerts consciousness to an invisible and supremely confident presence that we can suddenly imagine as ourselves growing beyond ourselves." Alas, I recoil from such vague and tipsy-seeming grandiloquence.
