THE FIRST SCENE of Jordan Harrison’s futura is wonderful: A professor (Lori Larsen) lectures on the history of typeface, introducing various fonts and explaining their aesthetics and evolution. It’s interesting material, presented engagingly, and a natural fit for letterpress-happy Portland. But wait—what’s that noise thrumming in the background of the professor’s speech? It’s “ozone stabilizers”? Uh oh. We’re in the future.
This doesn’t bode well.
Some background: I saw a staged reading of futura at the JAW playwrighting festival last summer. Afterward, I wrote, “The first half was great—a funny, informative, engaging lecture about the history of fonts (really). Then it turned into a not terrifically original dystopian sketch of a text-free future. I hope the final production is more of the first half, and less of the second.”
But the pendulum swung hard the other direction, and the fully staged production presented here by Portland Center Stage is a sci-fi’d-out dystopian parable about the death of print, with a script that reads like last year’s lit blog conversations as processed by a playwright who’s just discovered Ray Bradbury.
In the future, the books have all been burned, paper is illegal, and no one knows how to write anymore. Ebooks that allowed readers to ad “tags” and “comments” gradually degraded the integrity of digital books; now world literature is so compromised that the original versions of books are completely unavailable.
The professor reveals some of this information in her lecture about typeface, before her presentation is abruptly interrupted and she’s kidnapped by two anti-government terrorists. Her clumsy captors think she has information about the whereabouts of a mythical device called a “Zero Drive,” rumored to contain original copies of all the world’s books. I won’t ruin the ending for you, though it’s sorely tempting—suffice to say that the primacy of physical books is established once and for all.
There are real concerns facing print media, and people are right to worry about the future of the medium they love—as I type this, news just broke about 31 layoffs at Powell’s Books, for example. The effect of ebooks on the publishing industry is worth discussing, and it’s equally worth considering the sagacity of accepting a reading environment in which Amazon can yank books off our Kindles at any time. These are legit concerns, counterbalanced by the genuine ease and pleasure people derive from their ebooks. But futura is not interested in having a discussion; it’s interested in pushing a narrative agenda rooted in narrow, technophobic hysteria, in which ebooks=bad books. Worse, it’s an agenda utterly reliant on worn-out science-fiction tropes—for all playwright Harrison’s hand-wringing about the future of books, he doesn’t seem to have spent much time in the Gold Room. (That’s the sci-fi section of Powell’s, to you non-nerds out there.) Harrison’s faceless bad guys are known as “The Company.” The massive book burning is euphemistically known as “The Great Collection.” This sort of boring, boilerplate writing offers no intrinsic justification for Harrison’s basic project: updating Fahrenheit 451 for a Kindle age.
Portland Center Stage has done some truly boundary-pushing work in recent years—the great experiment that was Nancy Keystone’s Apollo, for example, or even the JAW festival itself, which fosters the development of new scripts. They’ve also leveraged social media more effectively than any other arts organization in town—comments, tags, and all. For a company that is in so many ways so forward thinking, Futura feels like a step backward. One has to question the wisdom of a medium that’s constantly called upon to defend its cultural relevance (theater, I’m looking at you) aligning itself with such facile, backward-looking nostalgia.
Allison Hallett’s review of Portland Center Stage’s futura, while praising certain parts, accuses it of stifling discussion of issues that Hallett herself acknowledges. Yet as any reviewer should know, a polemical play sparks dialogue after the lights come back on – and often intentionally so. One doesn’t have to regard a work as flawless in order to not be disrespectful, as Ms. Hallett’s review is; if she thinks parts of futura are clichéd or unoriginal, that’s fine, but it’s uncalled for to lambast the playwright’s cultural literacy or cry “hysteria.” Most confusing of all is that Hallett, conflating a specific production with its art form, questions whether futura should be produced by “theater” as such, as if the latter must endorse the beliefs presented in the works it produces. Odd it is that a reviewer would be so ignorant of the nature of her specialty.
it is true that Hallett will tend to indulge her often lazy and under-informed perspectives. for me it is an art crime to have a mostly ignorant (and arrogant) critic, with what seems to be a free and un-edited hand, sitting in judgement on artists many of whom dedicate their lives, usually with great financial/social sacrifice, to the rigors and disciplines of performance. adopting a lofty attitude w/out doing the homework and then publishing it weekly harms much more than it helps.
What the fuck is an “art crime”? And the kind of people who refer to anything as a polemic need to go masturbate furiously some more.
While I often disagree with Alison’s reviews, I don’t feel the need to accuse her of boring ad-hominem attacks (lazy, under-informed, ignorant, et al). Too many artists think that just because they made something, people should respect their work. Bullshit.
“Just because I like drawing something, doesn’t mean it’s worth looking at.” – Laylah Ali
Brrrrrffff !!! {a.k.a.artsy fartsy}Eeeets all gooood!!
ya know graham…….you missed the point. those words – lazy, under-informed, arrogant/ignorant – are adjectives that accurately describe much , if not all, of Hallet’s theatre reviews. they are not attacks, they are words to amplify my opinion. what does have a destructive effect (on productions) are reviews that are lazy, under-informed and arrogant instead of thoughtful, mature criticism…..and, contrary to your knee-jerk assertions, i’m not interested automatic, undeserved respect from anyone – much less reviewers. however, when the work is clearly respectable, and not the usual intra-mural mug-and-mumble fest that generally passes for it here in PDX, it should be accorded a robust, well-informed review – negative or postive. in days of yore the role of the critic was assigned to an elder. this person would have demonstrated over time that they knew what they were talking about and therefore could be useful to the public by advising them on the bad, good and great shows they reviewed. it was hoped that these writers would have passed through their conceits by the time they were given this responsibilty and would as detachedly as possible craft reviews of value for the people. PDX audiences should not have to rely on such blatantly immature and narcissistic reviewing.
Setting aside the passionate discussion of Alison’s reviewing skills, I thought this was a pretty bad play. For a lot of reasons. The narrative structure was lame and didn’t really build to anything (while I was hopeful the play was over, I wasn’t sure I was free until they took a bow).
The lecture in the first half could have been intriguing, but rather than really going for a highly intelligent, abrasive, unpleasant woman, it teetered back and forth with dumb laughs (she’s making fun of you) and not very deep analysis that made her seem kind of dumb herself. The small ensemble second half was equally odd with unclear characterization and wavering between somewhat boring conversations about ideas.
And as the review above discusses, the ideas also seemed really weak. I love libraries, books (particularly science fiction), and technology. I even find typefaces interesting. But come on, this was DUMB. If people can still read, I bet they can still figure out to write. With a stick in the dirt, if it comes to that. If the guy can build EMP bombs, he can figure out how to write and probably isn’t the idiot you’re making him out to be. And it’s not either/or with physical books and digital books. Why draw the line with the futura typeface between all that is good or evil? I could keep going. Ei ei ei.
I suppose this achieved the PCS goal of sparking conversation, but mostly it made me think I’m tired of PCS plays. At least the Portland obsession with the standing ovation didn’t occur.
The best things about it: gooey blood and it was short.