How did it get there?

Thursday, January 06, 2005

The Theater of the New Ear



I was just listening to a radio play by charlie kaufman. It's mainly the inner monolog of a woman at a play, who's very self-absorbed and has many personal problems. Her cell phone goes off, meryl streep yells at her, she goes on a bus ride in the rain, etc. The radio play ends with a critic breaking the fourth wall and giving it a bad review, and while this is somewhat enjoyable, it's really not enough of a payoff to bother sitting through all the whiny crap for.

What bothers me is that the thing's post-modern claim to fame was basically just self-referentiality and an inventive use of panning to seperate multiple streams of audio, which firesign theater did better, and several decades ago, and managed to be funny at the same time, and top of all THAT, firesign theater had a POINT, for fuck's sake! They actually had something to communicate! Kaufman admits his play is a failure, but I think it's actually a much bigger failure than he realizes.