Michael Feingold (1945-2022)

Michael Feingold was a brutal genius of the theatre. For decades, he was the chief theatre critic at The Village Voice. His death at age 77 will launch various remembrances, and plenty of them will be filled with a mix of awe and terror at just how negative his negative reviews could be — for years, I kept a sun-faded cutting of his May 9, 1995 review of Hamlet (starring Ralph Fiennes) because its sheer bravado took my breath away when I read it at age 19, and revisiting it always brought at least a little bit of my young passion back. The review begins:

The Ralph Fiennes production of Hamlet has unexpectedly altered my political views: I now totally support the death penalty for British actors, without trial. Apart from Fiennes himself — a blandly attractive, uncharismatic fellow with a loud, unvaried voice, good clear diction, and no sense of metrics — not a single person onstage is competent enough to be ranked as high as fourth-rate.

It ends:

If this disgraceful mess were anything to judge by, and not just a cheap attempt to hook the public with a movie star as bait, English acting and directing, especially in Shakespeare, would now have to be rated as one of the gross embarrassments of Western civilization.

However, to remember Feingold only for his barbs would be unfair to his memory. He was not John Simon. His standards were those of a man who believed in the theatre as an art form and saw it endlessly corrupted by commercialism, laziness, and ignorance. He was also an occasional practitioner, a relatively rare quality in a theatre reviewer, and a longtime judge for the Obie Awards.

During Feingold's lifetime, New York theatre went from the great, experimental, wild, and class-conscious work of off- and off-off-Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s to the expensive, yuppified spectacles of the 1980s and later, with Times Square's eventual dominance by Disney a final nail proving that what Americans want from their theatre is amusing spectacle and little else. Theatre as tourist attraction. Less expensive and experimental theatre survived, but in a terribly withered state, and having seen what it once could be, Feingold couldn't help but put acid into his fountain pen.

When I lived in New York and was trying myself to become a playwright in the experimental, uncommercial theatre (until I realized how empty and dessicated it had become), I read Feingold's reviews every week like holy writ. This was not only because of those reviews' own drama and insight, but because I had fallen in love with the idea of experimental theatre because of a book Michael Feingold edited: Grove New American Theater. It remains one of the most important books in my life. Not only for the remarkable selection of plays, but for Feingold's introduction, a manifesto of art for society's sake.

Feingold championed the strange and unloved, the rough and messy but brilliant works of playwrights, directors, and actors little known outside the theatre world, if even there. From him I learned about writers who would change my whole approach to writing: Mac Wellman, Karen Finlay, Ethyl Eichelberger, and, most importantly for me, David Greenspan, whose play in Feingold's anthology, Dead Mother, or, Shirley Not All in Vain, became a kind of talisman for me, a model of everything I wanted my own writing to do, a wild melding of performance and history and melodrama and queerness of every sort. Studying at NYU with David Greenspan for a few classes was the highlight of my time at that school, and one of the highlights of my life. He remains for me a tremendous inspiration, and Feingold was a fierce defender of him back in the days when it seemed like every other critic enjoyed nothing so much as making fun of him. (Things have changed. Feingold helped create that change.)

For comparison with the first paragraph of the Hamlet review, here is how Feingold began a glowing review of Suzan-Lori Parks's play In the Blood:

Do we want the theater to deal with social conditions, issues, ideas? Yes, always, constantly, and from every point of view. Do we want it to offer us predictable conclusions, morals, easy messages to take home? No, never. Too often, people who indict the theater for not dealing with "real life" only want it to tell them what they already know. Their desire's understandable; after all, as Gertrude Stein remarked, we need a kiss a lot more often than we need criticism. But the Judas kiss of ambiguity is the only one the theater knows how to give. If we go home tormented by the questions it raises in us, it's done its social duty.

A fine paragraph to print out and stick on your wall, kids. A credo, even. And Feingold uses it to good ends, with much praise:

Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood is as cogently phrased, and as unanswerable, as such questions get. It has the frantic feel of a trapped creature: On one side there's its literary source, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, its  Puritan hypocrisy, loathing of the flesh, and obstinate individualism all carried over complete. On the other, there's the terrifying everyday world of the homeless and their children, clawing to survive a crumbling welfare system and the flock of hard-nosed, harder-hearted exploiters eager to take its place.

Or consider this, chosen somewhat randomly from a database of Village Voice archives, about the wonderful actor Bill Irwin in a 1997 production of Scapin:

Unlike actors who mistake themselves for clowns (or directors who try to remold them into same), Irwin is a clown first, coming to the theater by way of the circus. He has an actor's reactability, the sense of an ongoing life-current that responds to everything going on in the scene around it, but combined with a clown's presentational sense: Even when the shtick he's performing involves having his pants fall down, or losing his wig while in drag, he approaches the audience with a certain degree of formality; an inner gravity that dignifies the crude joke. This is a gift, his presence seems to convey; I offer it to you; I neither cheapen myself nor insult you by pursuing a reaction; this crudity is part of our nature, that's all; if you don't laugh it's your loss. Naturally, this makes the laughter flow much more easily.

Angular and impassive, wearing a cap and a scowl ... Irwin puts his lanky body at the service of the play's action, stepping out of it only when a little extra kick is needed to spice up its bareness. Unlike "legit" actors, who often disguise their discomfort at transactions with the audience by putting on the unctuous false heartiness of talk-show hosts, Irwin and his sidekick, Christopher Evan Welch (as Scapin's fellow servant Sylvestre), carry these moments off in a speedy, deadpan monotone, like the verbal Ping-Pong of vaudeville routines. The result, once again, is the laughter that comes with the removal of pressure: Audiences, too, have their sense of dignity and distance.

Look at the precise set of insights there about acting and comedy, all tossed off in the middle of a piece that covers a lot of ground. He did this every week for decades.

I know nothing of Michael Feingold the man, whether he was a monster or a saint or, like most of us, a tattered mix of both and neither. I only know his words, and they are words that molded me, inspired me, scared me, made me angry and querelous, and brought dreams and wonder to my world.

In his introduction to Grove New American Theater, Michael Feingold wrote: "Art exists to expand the imagination; to do that, sooner or later, it has to provoke." Whatever we may say of him, we can say that Feingold's words provoked us and expanded our imaginations of what theatre can be and do, which is to say what art can be and do — which is to say what life can be and do.