Promotional Photo

The Pride of Parnell Street solf out its five-day run at the Long Wharf.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas 2008
Closed. artidea.org.

In retrospect, the poster for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas should probably have been that famous image of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite, with a brass key scientifically attached to its string, in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm. The unlucky 13th installment of New Haven’s most far-reaching cultural touchpoint was to contend with iffy weather throughout its two-week run.

But the similarities to Ben Franklin run deeper. Franklin was a quirky American ambassador to Europe, as Arts & Ideas is. He was a scientist and inventor as well as a cultural tastemaker, a pioneering political cartoonist and humorist; this year, Arts & Ideas provided cutting-edge computer-interactive dance pieces (from two different countries, for two distinct audiences), “Big Read” symposia devoted to the science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451, a lecture on comic history by the maverick Maus auteur Art Spiegelman and a fest-closing “Ideas” discussion of presidential politics that featured failed Connecticut senatorial candidate Ned Lamont and Quinnipiac pollster Douglas Schwartz, guys Ben Franklin would have surely appreciated, just as he would have dug the social justice analysts like Harold Koh and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who took part in an earlier “Ideas” panel on habeas corpus.

The grand finale arts piece was a months-in-the-making community-intensive dance about the many faces of communal faith, conducted by Liz Lerman, whose last major dance commission in Connecticut concerned the human genome.

That’s as well-rounded and thought-provoking a program as you could find at any festival that actually wants to attract a crowd. The unruly weather—so constantly threatening that it forced shows to move even on nights when no rain ultimately fell—became a character, a key player, in the festivities. Since this is far from the first A&I that’s had its big outdoor photo-ops dismantled by deluges, I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t force a rethinking by the A&I overseers about how many—or how few—outdoor events they can get away with.

The unfairest bitching about A&I I hear is by those who wish there were more free events, which usually translates to the complainer ignoring the oodles of free events there are and simply wishing that the one ticketed thing they want to see was free. When funders quibble about the fest’s budget, we should consider how much is wasted when the weather dampens a concert, and how smartly some of the indoor series could be expanded.

The key events of Arts & Ideas, I maintain, have never been the known music celebrities who would doubtless be passing through Connecticut on their latest tours anyhow and are booked to assure a familiar face on the brochure. The top stuff is inside, in the theater and dance spaces and the lecture halls.

So the best gauge of the success of A&I ’08 was not that the fest’s opening event, a Mavis Staples concert, had to be abruptly canceled, and that several big-deal outdoor events (whether free on the Green or for good money in the enclosed Yale Law School courtyard) had to be moved elsewhere on short notice. The way I’d measure the festival is by the side-by-side sell-outs on Sargent Drive June 24, when the Long Wharf Theatre’s mainstage hosted the world premiere of new-music cellist Maya Beiser and theater director Robert Woodruff’s conceptual multi-composer concert Provenance while the same theater’s Stage II space was beginning a five-day sold-out run of the American premiere of Sebastian Barry’s rock-bottom Irish romance The Pride of Parnell Street.

Those two smash successes—on a Tuesday night! in June!—crystallized Arts & Ideas for me this year. But the Barry piece in particular, and another A&I theater magnet, Seamus Heaney’s A Burial at Thebes (also at Long Wharf) lead me to my main gripe about the 2008 programming. For all its free-thinking, variety and progressive cultural ambitions, the festival played it far too safe with these shows.

Connecticut has never lacked for good productions of provocative Irish plays, from the community theater level to Long Wharf and Yale Rep (which have each presented works of shocking stylistic similarity to Heaney and Barry’s plays, years ago) to national tours. Programming directly to the fervent local Irish community is too easy, and these plays do not seem to be at the forefront of any new directions in Irish theater.

This festival was supposed to offer the welcome return of what had been an Arts & Ideas hallmark in its early years: daring productions of full-length new plays (and even operas). As it happens, such plays did exist in this year’s program—three bold new works by youngish Eastern European playwrights, plus a “Global Scenes” symposium on international theater. But these works were not afforded full productions, just lone readings (albeit with cool casts—the one I saw, Saviana Stanescu’s For a Barbarian Woman, alternated between contemporary and classical Romania, and co-starred Victor Slezak as the exiled Roman poet Ovid).

I can’t imagine that a well-planned series of truly new and edge-pushing plays—in full productions and promoted to an international audience of theater-savvy summer explorers—couldn’t break even if properly managed, in an environment that’s been properly primed for such artistic leaps.

Arts & Ideas director Mary Lou Aleskie attended the Global Scenes symposium and suggested that the festival was testing the waters of what A&I attendees could handle—foreign plays in foreign languages? Entirely new works rather than reconstructed or deconstructed classics? Verbally intense works rather than the currently fashionable design-heavy festival-circuit faves? Maybe it’s time to make those surefire music acts be the moneymaking crowdpleasers and take the same risks with theater that A&I’s already been taking with dance and neoclassical music.

Sorry to rain even more on the Arts & Ideas parade. Truth is, I only ask these questions because, under Aleskie’s leadership, the fest’s been brought back to a place where such groundbreaking is possible. The 2008 edition’s just ended, and I’m already salivating for the ’09 one. I want the sky to be the limit, even if it rains. ■

chris@scribblers.us