We saw Endpapers last night at the Variety Arts theatre in the East Village, thanks to some inexpensive tickets provided by the talented and very cool Alex Draper. The show itself, concerning the political intrigue inside a fading independent book publisher, was about six great lines shy of an good play, and in many ways was pretty inconsistent. The actors were, on the whole, nuanced and funny, and approximately two of the roles featured some reversals you couldn't see coming - but overall, the fight between "this company gotta make money" and "this company gotta stick to ideals" has been trite for about fifty years now.
Still, the blue-hairs were lining up to see the show; a busload of elderly Jewish couples were shipped in from Dix Hills and all of them tittered on cue. It works because it's a simple play, one that sets up a very recognizable battle between corporate reality and artistic imagination, and then plays it out to what everyone in the theater reasoned to be a fair conclusion.
I'm going to spoil the play for anyone who hasn't seen it right now...
but...
...basically, the banker who threatened to call the loan on the publishing house ends up being the CEO after the charismatic luminary dies which is okay, we're told, because he reads a lot and "gets it." Gramps in Seat 105B thought this was a terrific ending, but actually, it's a bit of a nightmare. The bank guy owns the publishing house? It's obvious the playwright also thought this was cool, as his other choices were unacceptably bipolar: a gruff idealist who makes bad business decisions, and a slick entrepreneur who has no heart. The bank guy (deftly played by Alex), and therefore the playwright, has informed the audience on sixteen different occasions that he likes books and quotes poetry, so he's the obvious choice: business with a heart. Compassionate conservatism.
But in my head I always extend a play's storyline longer than it runs, and in my extended remix, the bank guy eventually gets cold feet and sells the whole fucking company to AOL while the gettin's good. If not that, he makes bad decisions and ruins the company and then sells it to AOL. Either way, I think the wrong choice was made here. Bank guys aren't supposed to run publishing houses; that's why they don't.
If you accept that, you can also accept that the playwright wrote a tragedy and didn't even know it. Long is the tradition of the "unreliable narrator" in fiction, you know, the first-person storyteller who obviously misinterprets his own story. But how about the "unreliable novelist," someone who creates a work of "art" that has its own intention outside of the artist?
Joe Eszterhas became an "unreliable screenwriter" with Showgirls, which was unintentionally funny both Beck (Loser) and R. Crumb (Keep on Truckin') became an unreliable composer and cartoonist, respectively, when their work – to their horror – was adopted as a generational credo.
Maybe my own words, right here on this page, are telling you things that I don't want you to know. Perhaps this diary is having the opposite effect on you that I want, each word radiating the wrong meaning. God, am I an "unreliable blogger"?
Posted by at August 1, 2002 8:38 PM