Misha Versus Joe

It is a long-standing fantasy among show people to perpetrate a “turn-about” and review the reviewers, but really, if want to do what you do best, stay at your own level and not sink to mere criticism, the proper “turn-about” for stage folk is to stage the critics.  That is exactly what we did here.

Misha vs Joe from NewsWrights United on Vimeo.

Misha Berson, Theatre Critic for The Seattle Times was not happy with this portrayal and made her displeasure clearly known to all of the producers including myself.  Others, especially ex-staffers for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer complained about how we savaged their former colleague, Joe Adcock; but I completely disagree with this appraisal and I suspect Joe might too.  For me the piece lands clearly on a final note of love.  The genuine pain I felt upon Joe’s departure was not shared by many in my community, but I have to hope this is because they did not know him very well, or care to. One Big House artistic director reportedly remarked on learning of Joe’s retirement: “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” I suspect that same AD will feel the same when/if I finally leave town, dead or alive.  I say, be careful when casting anyone as the witch: for all you know, many may picture you surrounded by ugly flying monkeys. For my part, I want to dance with the Big House witches, not wish them dead. I wish my dear witches would wake up. And I am determined to do everything it takes to make that happen. 

I have seen how theatre gets covered in other towns Seattle’s size. I am glad we have Misha and Brendan Kiley and all the others. In the current crisis of journalism, every critic we lose is an irrevocable loss. Alas, I suspect Misha does not feel the same about me. After all, playwrights are a dime a dozen, and happily we do not depend on the survival of any one institution. Formidable is the power of nothing to lose. At this ripe moment in the history of our art form, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Comments

[COMTE]

Joe was always an interesting, frustrating enigma. He seemed to be a genuinely nice person, interested in what you were doing, and generally very supportive of the community, particularly the fringe community, to a degree that Misha has never been. But at the same time, his writing was infuriatingly dissonant; his signature style of alternating positive/negative adjectives ("the play was long and short, loud and soft, funny and sad") and general inability to form complete sentences rendered him an object of derision within the community.

Granted, some of this can be placed squarely on the shoulders of his editors, who apparently cared so little for the content he produced that they would literally print what were essentially his on-the-scene notes without demanding any sort of compositional or stylistic standards (having sat directly behind him on numerous occasions, I can attest to this - what he jotted down on the back of his press packet envelope during a performance frequently wound up as "finished copy" in the print editions of the PI).

So, it wasn't necessarily that people dismissed Joe because he was a bad person. And, after more than 20 years reading his often incomprehensible reviews, it was clear to anyone paying attention that he wasn't even necessarily a bad writer, but quite simply a very lazy one. This was made even more maddeningly obvious on those rare occasions when he WOULD pen a decent, even insightful, write-up. All you could do was slap your forehead and wonder, "why can't he be bothered to try to write like that more often?"

[Paul Mullin]

Hah! I can personally vouch for suffering from that annoying, clunky trope of Joe's to punch the opposites in an almost Jesse-Jacksonian way (without the charm). This is from the script of the video clip itself.

PAUL: You called my AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, “interesting and dull, intriguing and frustrating, amusing and confusing.” I mean, what does that even mean?

JOE: It was, all of those things, I remember.