Old Losers: Federalists v Popularity
An episode so chockablock with failures and aspirants they had to break it into two!
In this first part Dennis and Aaron talk about the rest of the people who didn't quite make it to the presidency from our first election to 1820! When life gets you down remember that no matter how much you fail you'll never fail as big as them. Try not to remember that you probably won't ever accomplish as much as they did to get to that failure either.
Samuel Huntington, Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, and so many more people you've never heard of are covered in this week's salute to Old Losers!
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Thought Shapers: Clinton v MacArthur
It's a heady episode this week as we examine the success and failures of two real presidents (Wilson and FDR) in shaping public perception of wars that defined their administrations and compare the exploits of two non-presidents (DeWitt Clinton and Douglas MacArthur) and how they attempted to shape reality around them.
Special thanks to Jason Jonathan Rivas who graciously let his thesis, _Scripting Memory: Hollywood, The Federal Government and Public Memory in WWII, be the foundation of this episode.
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Living Dead in Denmark (Qui Nguyen)
Yesterday I talked about the stylistic aspects of Qui Nguyen’s work which didn’t sit well with me: an elevation of genre at the expense of characterization and plot. In today’s convenient excuse for a screed I’m going to use Living Dead in Denmark to talk about the things in his work that actually anger me, and one thing I’ve noticed more of which frustrates me in a lot of work: bad comedy, bad feminism, and shallow use of public domain characters.
But first, a summary: Living Dead in Denmark is a 2006 play about Ophelia waking up after the events of Hamlet to find that the world is overrun by zombies. She’s put on a team with Lady Macbeth and Juliet to stop the forces of evil (the council of Winter) and restore peace to the land. It’s formulaic in the ways you’d expect, and is an excuse to jam a bunch of Shakespeare characters into fights. Characters are strong or weak as the plot dictates with little rhyme or reason.
I first read this play over a decade ago on the suggestion of a friend, and I was surprised that I liked it more this time than I remember in the past, that’s fairly faint praise though.
I’m a comedian. I don’t shy away from comedy, and Pronoia is explicitly a comedic theater company. So I take comedy, jokes, and the use of them seriously, and Qui Nguyen is bad at comedy.
I want to make a distinction here, too frequently in our discourse we treat comedy’s worth as subjective and personal to the viewer: comedy is supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t laugh, therefore it’s bad comedy. I disagree, laughter is a byproduct of pointing out absurdities; it’s how we deal with the fundamental cruelty of existence. Therefore, as much as I think good comedy does aim for laughs, as much as I think laughter is a good sign, and as much as I crave laughs from things I do, it is not the actual thing comedy is doing, and so it is best used as a proxy.
So when I say “Qui Nguyen is bad at comedy,” I don’t mean that his work doesn’t make me laugh, although it doesn’t, I mean his attempts at comedy at obvious, lazy, and lowest common denominator. There’s only so much he can do when his characters are paper thin carbon copies of archetypes we’ve seen in movies, but every attempt at a joke is an out-of-place reference, or unclever verbal abuse towards a character onstage.
His stabs towards comedy are the humor equivalent of a jump scare: something that pops out and wants to shock you into a nervous laugh instead of something built up over time and informed by understanding. He trades in lazy stereotypes and cliche one-liners. A fighter delivers a pun-filled line after downing someone. An ugly character sings beautifully. Someone calls someone else “retarded”. That is the level of sophomoric humor Nguyen gives us.
Even in this play whose every character is taken from Shakespeare, and thus already has a deep amount of characterization behind them, he can’t pull anything relevant or interesting from the stories. The Danish Ghost constantly says “Mark me.” Characters call Puck “fairy” derisively. I can’t even come up with a third one there is so little grounding in the actual characters Shakespeare created.
Which brings me to the third point, quite out of order: for a play that draws heavily from characters created by someone else, it doesn’t actually do anything with those characters, settings, themes, or ideas! Ophelia, Juliet, and Lady Macbeth have no resemblance to the characters of their plays. Fortinbras and Horatio are nothing like themselves.
In this play Juliet’s whole characterization is that she’s a brainy girl who wears big glasses. Does that sound like the love-struck teenager of Shakespeare’s play? If it sounds like anyone it sounds like Portia, but she’s not as well known so we can’t pick her (also she didn’t die in her play,) but Nguyen wanted a brainy beauty stereotype so he made the one he could.
Harkening back to my look at The Book of Will too many playwrights are taking these characters because they’re recognizable and doing whatever they want with them, because that sells better than original work. It’s insulting, it’s distressing, and it’s frustrating. We should expect more from writers.
In today’s take-based world I think words that evoke hate are too broadly used, so I don’t want to call Nguyen’s body of work misogynistic, because I don’t think it is, but his shallow treatment of everything leads to disappointing patterns in the ways women appear in his work: always sexualized and frequently insulted for their base characteristic (that is, their femininity.)
All of his characters are mean. All of them. In any of his plays every character will constantly insult the other characters around them, regardless of whether they’re friends, enemies, or strangers, and because his writing has little apparent depth these insults are equally shallow: you suck, you’re stupid, you’re fat, dressed up in a lot of “yos” and “wacks” that is the essential meat of the message.
So his female characters are constantly subjected to the same treatment, but it rings a little different: you’re sexually too permissive, you’re not sexually permissive enough, you’re ugly, you’re so pretty you probably don’t work on anything else, you’re a dumb bitch (though that word isn’t used frequently.) Nguyen seems stuck in the old mold of writing “strong female characters” that are vicious, sexy, and without a lot of flaws.
This may have been fine in 2006, I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking deeply about literature at that point in my life, but at the very least I don’t think it should be the benchmark now, and it is part of what frustrates me about the very popular She Kills Monsters, which is the same dynamic, but now playing out with the power dynamic of teachers and students, with the most sexual and most violent characters being fantasy versions of high school girls being played by a high school boy at the demands of his teacher.
It isn’t the kind of work we should be exalting.
Living Dead in Denmark is a shallow, unfunny, poorly plotted show that is only notable for it’s wide variety of fights and giving characters proper nouns that theater-goers care about.
Soul Samurai (Qui Nguyen)
As a rule I don’t comment on playwrights until I’ve experienced three of their works. Three is enough to see patterns form and to understand if they have more than one idea, if some piece they did stands out, if their voice does or doesn’t work for me. That’s how I know that even though I probably won’t like a Sarah Ruhl play, I definitely want to read all of them; that’s I know Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is one of my favorite playwrights; that’s I how know Karen Zamarkias is replacement level at best; and that’s how I know that I can’t stand Qui Nguyen.
I don’t know much about the man except what I’ve learned through the notes of his plays. His work, which I’ve been acquainted with since college, is notable for its high degree of violence, and the (maybe knowingly) 90’s street language all of his characters seem to talk in.
Presumably he was a fight choreographer before becoming a playwright since his plays break out into fights like a musical breaks into songs, and from reading the accolades of his early work the plays themselves seemed like vibrant feasts for the visually visceral: they became sensations not so much because they were good in a traditional Aristotelian sense, but because they were different in a way that gave the audience something they were missing.
I disliked him before he became ubiquitous for Vietgone and She Kills Monsters, the former enormously popular at regional theaters since 2015, and the latter practically a requirement for any high school or college to put on. And why not? She Kills Monsters is useful for the educator since it gives an opportunity to teach stage combat; it has a female focused cast, which is useful for schools where men still don’t embrace the theatrical arts; and it’s the rare play that features an ensemble so you can accommodate all the students in your charge.
I’ve read both and I find Vietgone mostly a great show plagued by the same issues of all Qui Nguyen plays, albeit in lower doses, and I think She Kills Monsters is absolutely awful and I honestly don’t know why schools insist on putting on a show that sexualizes teenage girls to that extent, that’s not why we’re here though. We’re here to talk about Soul Samurai.
And it’s useful that we are, because Soul Samurai is a perfect example, for better and for worse, of what Qui Nguyen is all about. It’s told in a stylized fashion with characters who all sound the same where we the shallow story is merely a pretext to serve you complicated fight scenes between unsurprising and unnuanced characters, until we’ve filled two hours.
In this case it’s a 70’s crime thriller pastiche with Asian theatrical influences that functions as a cross between The Warriors and Death Wish. In an alternate New York the city has fallen to crime bosses who have organized themselves like Ronin. Young college student Dewdrop fails to save her girlfriend from a gang of vampires and trains for five years to defeat all the vampires and avenge her lover.
We get that story in flashback as we follow her on the night she carries out her revenge, trying to defeat Boss 2k, the leader of the Long Tooth (Vampire) gang. It probably won’t surprise you to know that she had a sensei who was killed by a former student, or that that student is her thought to be dead girlfriend who has actually risen through the ranks to become a lieutenant of the Long Tooths. or that there is a melancholy ending, or that Dewdrop has a long-suffering romantic hopeful who makes a tragic sacrifice at the end.
The plot is formulaic, but the plot isn’t the point: the fights are, the style is, the nods to old movies Nguyen presumably grew up loving is. None of that works for me. The characters talk in a patois so affective that it boggles the mind and evens everyone out (excepting for some early scenes where Dewdrop and Sally [her girlfriend] speak in a conventional American dialect.) It’s like listening to a music genre you don’t like: it doesn’t matter how great it might be, it’s presented in a form you find off-putting, and so it can never reach you.
There are inventive elements: there’s a puppet show in the middle of it, I loved that sequence. There’s one character represented by a shadow self on stage, that was interesting, even if I feel it didn’t get a proper payoff.
Throughout this I’ve tried to avoid using the word “normal,” tried to eschew saying “If Qui Nguyen wrote normally he could do great things.” Because that isn’t right. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t write normally, Quentin Tarantino doesn’t write normal, and I don’t want my writing to be seen as normal. Qui Nguyen stylistically doesn’t work for me, in the same way the Sarah Ruhl doesn’t work for me stylistically, but when he moderates his natural impulses I see what he’s trying to do and I appreciate that. I don’t think I need him in my artistic diet though.
But we’re going to look into him more tomorrow anyway.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series I (Douglas Adams)
My first love in storytelling was audio-drama: both television (through Wishbone and the Simpsons) and live theatre (through school productions) would follow soon after, but I grew up listening to audio storytelling, most predominantly Adventures in Odyssey, but also all manner of old-time radio dramas and other modern productions (including to first experiencing Return of the Jedi through a radio adaptation of it.)
Most people are unaware that Douglas Adams’ immortal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a series of six episodes on BBC Radio before he painfully convinced himself to write a book about it. And while I read and loved the book first, the radio series is an especially anarchic version of the story (since it is the first it is the most formless, which is how Adams seemed to like to work,) and I was excited to pick up all twelve of the original episodes in published form many years ago.
Since I am about to embark on producing a large audio-drama series of my own I wanted to go back to these scripts to see how a noted master does it.
As the Audience
If you don’t know the story of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it’s not going to do you any good telling you. As I found out the scripts don’t have a lot of plot, but trust me when I say it’s worth your time to read the novel or find the radio series (the movie is better than people say, but not as good as the other media and I’ve never seen the television show.)
Suffice to say that in the first episode the Earth is destroyed and the only survivors are an average man named Arthur Dent and his alien friend Ford Prefect, and after that’s out of the way they go on a variety of bizarre adventures and eventually try to figure out the meaning of life.
The scripts pull off an amazing duality of both being enormously funny on the page (which can be difficult since so much of comedy is timing and inflection) and not as funny as I remember. I definitely love it, but I found myself remembering more fondly the scripts for the posthumous radio dramas adapting the third through fifth books.
Regardless, it’s a fun story in a traditional adventure serial style that makes you want to return for more.
As a Producer
I don’t know that I learned a whole lot, which isn’t surprising, I was reading the scripts not sitting in the editing bay as they fiddled with knobs to get the robot voices right. There are commentaries by the producer at the end of each script which does give me some comfort as he explained some not glamorous things to get things done.
It is some comfort to know that everyone is just fumbling around trying to figure it out, so we may as well go with my instincts and then adjust as needed.
As a Writer
Oddly enough the most useful thing I learned in terms of writing audio-dramas might just be to take my time with the sound effects.
When I’ve written radio scripts I’ve either needed to hew to a useless (but mandatory) page count or I had the knowledge that I was using page count as a (bad) proxy for runtime, so I tended to be concise, sometimes to the point of uselessness, with sound effect description.
Douglass Adams would sometimes go half a page describing a quick sound so you really felt what it was supposed to be, and since I’m not a professional writer (yet, hopefully) I haven’t fully ingrained the idea in myself that scripts are blueprints so they need to be clear, not zippy.
Other than that, I was struck by how little plot was in any episode of Hitchhiker’s. They don’t have a B plot to speak of (unless you count the musings of the book as one, which I do) and their A plots are usually two, never more than three, concrete scenes built around a few running gags for each episode and the idiosyncrasies of the characters.
Each episode has a fairly simple formula: The book gives you a “What happened last time” then it tells a quick funny story of the absurdity of the universe, our heroes get out of whatever deathtrap they were in at the end of last episode, they find themselves in a new place and explore it briefly before being caught in a new trap.
I never noticed how sparse the actual plot is before because the book interjects frequently and tells us about something going on elsewhere in space and time so everything felt much bigger even though it was actually quite small.
This simply reinforces my observation that usually the best Space Train plots were the simple ones that let the characters be themselves in an easily understood situation, instead of the more ornate ones that were built like Rube Goldberg machines and it felt like it was just plot point after plot point and our characters were along for the ride.
I don’t know what else I may learn in the second set of six episodes, but I’ll report back when I do!