I’m really trying to open this theatre up and say, ‘This is your theatre, San Francisco.’ What is San Francisco? It’s 30 percent Asian, it’s very young, it’s Black as well as white.” Zooming out, she concludes, “This is a really exciting, dynamic time, and the field is talking about big stuff. But she would hope that the local press could be a partner in “figuring out how theatre can punch through and get attention in this market. To be clear, MacKinnon doesn’t expect the Chronicle, or theatre critics more generally, to only give good reviews or to do her marketing for her. Diamond, whose play Toni Stone begins performances at ACT on March 5, when she saw the Little Man: “Whoa-that guy has a jockey on his lawn.” It’s an image “made in another time, and very particular to that time,” says MacKinnon. She recalls the response of playwright Lydia R. “I don’t use this term lightly, but I think it’s true in this case: It’s a white supremacist icon,” says MacKinnon. As she attempts to create a forward-looking organization based on principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and as she brings in a wide range of national artists to ACT to write, direct, and perform, she has found herself increasingly questioning the relevance of this nearly-80-year-old cartoon as an avatar for contemporary Bay Area theatregoers. Those are the nicest things MacKinnon can say about the Little Man, though. “It’s a very visceral icon, and always has been-it’s really buzzy,” says Pam MacKinnon, who took over as artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in 2018. The last two-nodding off or absent altogether-speak for themselves, albeit with exaggerated rudeness. In the third (and most contested) pose, he sits crisply at attention but does not clap, which connotes some liminal range between positive interest and polite indifference. Created in 1942 by late cartoonist Warren Goodrich, he is a star rating system personified in the form of a bald white man in a theatre seat with five possible positions: In the first, he is either leaping out of, or crouching on the edge of, his seat, clapping so ecstatically hard that his bowler hat has been knocked to the floor, which obviously means the Chronicle ’s critic thinks your movie or show is a must-see in the next, he applauds enthusiastically, still a strong recommendation. For a black-and-white cartoon with a diminutive name, Little Man has loomed especially large and long over Bay Area arts. Long before the age of emojis, decades before even the thumbs-up/thumbs-down metric of film mavens Siskel & Ebert, San Francisco Chronicle readers were bequeathed their own shorthand consumer metric for films and plays, the so-called Little Man.
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February 2023
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