Driving Each Other Crazy

Many a short play revue are organized around a theme. Love, for instance, or the number ten. In Neil LaBute’s Autobahn, the unifying characteristic is the automobile, that symbol and begetter of American sprawl and freedom. The car is not a thematic interest, though, only the setting. Big Intimacy Group’s recent production of the short play cycle, directed by Rob Mueller, doesn’t belabor this point, with Colin McIlvaine’s straightforward and unfussy set, a couple elevated car seats with a steering wheel in front of a scene-setting scrim, being all that it needs to be without feeling just so. The plays showcase what kind of scenes can be staged within a vehicle, but cars in themselves do not figure much into the plays’ inquiries—that would be word games and Labute’s somewhat alarming gender politics. The production is, barring a few missteps, the best treatment the material could receive.

The proceedings start strong with “Bench Seat.” Two young lovers (Emma Thorne, Logan Sutherland) are up on a secluded hillside overlooking town to make out, or, maybe, to break up, as it becomes clear that the young lady has serious, serious issues. The piece is a neat study in contrasts, with Sutherland’s smooth jocularity (which eventually shades into a passive resignation) juxtaposed with Thorne’s jagged, twitchy paranoia. Like several of the pieces it goes on for too long, circling back to the same topics and comic devices, but the performers’ energy never flags and it entertains and unnerves in equal measure.

Said energy carries over to the next playlet, the best of them, “All Apologies.” It is a comic monologue, given by a man (Jonathan Berenson) to his wife (Jill Durso), in which he apologizes in his own fashion for being an abusive sack of shit. It flips the dynamic of the previous scene, with the woman now reacting, this time silently but so intently, to the increasingly unhinged man. His rambling is a tour-de-force performance in bullshit-spinning peppered with digressions on the origin and meaning of words like “awesome” and “golf,” in the end punctured simply and devastatingly by the wife’s incredulous laughter. The laugh is not in fact in LaBute’s script--she merely stares instead--but it’s a welcome addition that opens the storytelling perspective beyond the captivating and entertaining monster at the piece’s center and keeps it from letting him off the hook.

The same, alas, cannot be said for “Merge,” in which a husband (Anthony Taylor), having picking his wife (Haley Palmaer) up from a convention, tries to parse her ambiguous testimony about having been raped in her hotel room. She wasn’t raped, we learn, for she drunkenly invited all those/both those (the use of the word ‘all’ is a detail the husband clamps onto with the tenacity of a pit bull) men to join her. The script’s one-sidedness--we never get an explanation for or exploration of her nymphomania--makes the play problematic to begin with. Coupled with Anthony Taylor’s furious, accusatory take on his character, it makes the play an ugly exercise in slut-shaming which reaches its terminal conclusion in a nihilistic ending, a murder-suicide traffic swerve that is merely hinted at in the title and stage directions. Of the night’s proceedings, it’s a considerable bump in the road.

The show gets stuck in second gear for the the next piece, “Road Trip.” We’re presented a man (Todd Litzinger) and a young girl (Caroline Jordan) on a seemingly innocuous excursion. We learn that he’s a predator, and like most predators he’s family or something like it, probably her step-father, and this trip, for the girl at least, is decidedly one-way. The relationship between the two characters and the reveal of its true horrible nature is drawn delicately, but the tension of the play exists only between the audience's omniscience, and the limited perspective of the girl. Between the girl and the man there isn’t so much friction, and the piece never quite takes off because of it.

Though it shares similar subject matter, this is not true of the final and most intriguing piece, the show’s namesake, “Autobahn.” Like “All Apologies” it’s a monologue, this time given by the woman (Annie Grier) ruminating while her husband (Jonathan West) drives, about their troubled foster son’s accusations of sexual abuse. The play rightly doesn’t belabor the reveal of what it’s about and so spends its time exploring the two characters’ responses to this situation and, accordingly, forcing us to wonder what exactly the situation is. The wife’s chatter, her rationalizations and can-do optimism, increasingly feel like an evasion of a horrible truth. Meanwhile Jonathan West wears a mask of the most profound sadness--but is it a mask? Is it guilt? Self-pity? Manipulation? The play never tips its hand in either direction. This can be frustrating, playing up an ambiguity for which, as Dylan Farrow’s recently renewed allegations against Woody Allen have shown, there is no luxury in real life. As a work of drama, though, the did-he-or-didn’t-he question works, especially as a contrast to the other the earlier plays, whose creeps we were allowed to feel much more certain about.

The production, it should be noted, eliminates two of the seven vignettes, "Funny" and "Long Division." They are missed not for the plays in themselves, though "Funny" is quite good, but for their casts, two women and two men; the one man-one woman dynamic of the other plays, especially given Neil LaBute’s fixation on abusive sexual relationships, could use some variety. What we are given, however, is a solid offering, directed and performed with energy and attention, in service of an at-times uneven collection of plays. As a vehicle for drama, the engine occasionally threatens to stall, but the body is ever polished.

Once More, With Feeling

'Pretty durned good' is not meant to be a put-down. Yet for Once, the darling of critics and the Tonys, I can't help but feel a little disappointment. The ads promised transcendent, romantic rapture. What I got instead was a mostly rote tale of masculinity crisis, vigorous life by enormous talent. Not life-changing, but pretty durned good.

The story, adapted from a well-received indie film written and directed by John Carney, concerns a Dublin musician, Guy (Arthur Darvill), who's despondent over the departure of his girl to the New York City, and the resulting anguish in performing the repertoire of songs he had written about her. Enter Girl (Joanna Christie), a Czech immigrant who takes an interest in his music (and vacuum-repairing skills) and before long has  him booked in a recording studio to lay down a demo and potentially break out of his dreary routine and live life to the fullest.

The scenario, in its broad strokes, is a variation on what is now the well-worn Manic Pixie Dream Girl vehicle: sensitive nice guy is in the middle of an existential crisis, and in comes a quirky, life-affirming lady who exists solely in relation to him to help him realize his true inner potential. Girl here is not quite so simple: we see her at home among her family, and we learn that she has a daughter, and a husband. In perhaps the biggest departure from the trope, she doesn't end up with the boy, only helps him to follow and try to rekindle the magic with his former paramour. Yet Girl still feels like an adjunct to Guy's story; her daughter is a prop, not even a proper plot device, and it remains unclear what her stake in all of this is, and why she would be so intensely focused getting Guy straightened out (though it does help that, again, his musical skills are phenomenal). She feels secondary, which is fine in a story of about guy finding his footing, but suspect in a show whose promotional photos constantly show the two characters together. This is very much his story, not theirs.

The show would not be nearly the success it is were the rest of its elements not absolutely top-shelf. John Tiffany's direction creates an intimate environment within its pub interior set, having the cast all onstage at the top of the show jamming on old folk standards, and with drinks being served at the bar during intermission.  And the one time the staging does break out from the bar setting, in which the two leads stand up above it all, looking over Dublin, is both totally unexpected, and absolutely, brilliantly logical. Tiffany is immeasurably aided by Natasha Katz' lighting, deftly used not just to create moods but also delineate the playing spaces of a scene, and Steven Hoggett's choreography, which keep the sometimes subdued music and potentially momentum-halting scene changes lively.

Above all the show lives and dies by its music (supervised and orchestrated by Martin Lowe), which here operates a little differently than normal. Being a musical about musicians, the numbers are (mostly) not stylized renditions of a characters' inner turmoil or conflicts, but actual songs that the characters themselves are performing. In the wrong hands this could be disastrous, a creaky plot functioning as a skeleton on which to hang some tunes. Which it still sort of is, except the music itself is really quite wonderful. It's deceptively simple soft folk-rock, but with craft and texture applied to the composition and lyrics--Mumford and Sons-styled bellyaching, it ain't. It's performed by a cast/orchestra (when they're not playing secondary characters, the other actors are doubling as the show's musicians) with nary a weak link. It is a joy to listen to. The songs's emotional impact is boosted by the fact that they are often (in the story) being used as proxies for how the characters are feeling, such that the way they are played and sung is more important than what's being sung. This is just as well, as the story, at least as presented here, is not rich enough on which a traditional music-and-lyrics score could hang.

Make no mistake, the book is never bad, but nor is it as deep as it wants to be--the characters are, if there is such a thing, stock quirk: the banker who likes to play music, the bar owner who wants to get laid, the self-described "serious" Czech girl. The actors give these types considerably more life than exists on the page, as does the music, and the outstanding direction. Thus does Once find itself in an awkward position of being better than it is on paper, yet not as good as it's been in the papers.

More is Les

The reception of Les Mis, and the reception of the reception, is almost more interesting than the movie itself. Curmudgeons, with David Denby leading the charge, have reacted coolly to the movie’s bald appeals to emotion, while Megan McArdle, at least one Andrew Sullivan reader, and other more enthusiastically weepy viewers have celebrated its passion, forthrightness, and lack of ironic detachment. As a theatre person who’s seen Les Mis twice on stage (and had some nice things to say about it in London), and who even owns one of the cast albums, I think I have at least some standing to offer an opinion on Tom Hooper’s filmic adaptation, and by extension the show itself and the phenomenon as a whole. 

The movie is a fairly faithful adaptation, in that for better or worse, what one thinks of the original show is likely what one will think of the film. Anne Hathaway is as great as you've heard, and Russell Crowe as awful. The recreation of 19th century France is gorgeous, but you'd never know it by the abundance of long close-ups on the singers' faces. The much-ballyhooed live recording of the singing keeps the proceedings intimate and not as histrionic as the stage version often is (more on that in a minute). Anyone who loves the musical already should be satisfied with the film, which does not at all attempt to convert skeptics.

Like the stage show, it's a whirlwind telling--though, notably, slightly more complete than the stage version--of Victor Hugo's magnum opus, the tale of ex-convict Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), his theft from and mercy granted by the Bishop of Digne (Colm Wilkinson, who originated the role of Valjean), and his subsequent redemption through saving the life of Cosette (Isabelle Allen, later Amanda Seyfried), daughter of the ruined Fantine (Hathaway) from the vicious Thenardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter), and raising her to eventually fall in love with young Parisian Marius (Eddie Redmayne), who is pined after by the Thenardiers' daughter Eponine (Samantha Barks) and who with a group of students led by the revolutionary Enjolras (Aaron Tveit) revolts against the re-established monarchy--with Valjean all the while evading capture by the justice-obsessed inspector Javert (Crowe).

Watching the show and the movie is sort of like reading that last sentence but with more elaborate adjectives and in all capital letters, and here is where we get to critics' complaints about the movie's emotional pushiness. Hugo’s novel is 1200+ pages long, which gives it ample time to unspool in a deliberate fashion. For every extended essay on justice or the Parisian sewers or the Battle of Waterloo, there’s a well-pitched, page-turning sequence—Valjean’s escape from a coffin, say, or his race against time to prevent an innocent man accused of being him from going to jail. Reducing the original, gigantic tome to fit three hours’ traffic of the stage can’t be done without a lot of corner-cutting, even with the amount of story that gets completely left out. By keeping all the main players and giving them their big moments as the musical does, the finer narrative details get butchered, to the point that it all plays like a Cliffs Notes version of the book: it hits all the major plot points, but with no concern for things like tension and pacing. Most of these plot points are decisive moments of crisis, which are played with maximum emotion and minimal context.

This is most true in the first half hour or so, when something new is happening literally every minute. It's the most interesting section of the film, an adaptation of an adaptation, in that its fidelity to the source material highlights all the more the difference between the two media. Onstage, it's easy enough to go along with the compressed action of the Valjean and Fantine exposition scenes, as even the most literal staging is at least somewhat abstracted. On film, however, we actually see this compression in action, and it's seizure-inducing. Like an extended music video, the rapid-fire montage editing cuts not just to a new angle, but a new scene every two or three seconds--Valjean will be outside a church one moment, on a rocky hill another, and talking to a stranger a third--settling down only to focus on an actor's face. It's profoundly jarring and discomfitting, and not in a good way, and it is perhaps the clearest illustration of the musical's manic way of telling its story. 

Things settle down once the action moves comfortably into the 1832 storyline, but characterization and development remain threadbare. Things happen, lots of them, but with only the minimum explanation of cause-and-effect (and sometimes not even that; the movie abridges a critical scene in the Paris sewers that, coupled with the actors additionally being covered head-to-toe in shit, makes it difficult to register what is even happening), with the operatic emoting of the characters doing the heavy lifting to get us through.

That operatic, sung-through score is the not-so-secret weapon in the show's arsenal against its audience. The basic idea of a musical is that characters break into song at moments of heightened emotion, when speech won't suffice. But the characters in Les Mis never stop singing. This is exhausting, and it gives the proceedings a sense of sameness over time. Sung-through musicals can be done well, to be sure, but they need lyrical and musical invention and a variety in moods to break things up. Sweeney Todd does this; Les Mis does not. It has a great deal of clunky lyrics (phrases like "the hate that's in your head" and "the cry of my hate" are particularly gross examples), and with the exception of the Thenardiers' handful of songs, the show's mood is deadly serious straight through, the better to ram home the emotions that the book (of the musical, not of Hugo) is not doing the work of cultivating.

This is what critics mean when they accuse the show of being manipulative. Of course all stories, and particularly Hugo's novel, are manipulative; but there's no art in the musical's artifice. Instead of playing with an audience's experiences and hopes and expectations to produce an emotional response, it takes the most obvious route of parading a frenzy of emotions with which it bludgeons the audience into following suit. (For a contrasting example, "Being Alive" from Company has more to say about life and love than Les Mis's entire libretto.)

Les Mis, the musical and movie is thus, basically, emotion porn. It’s skeletal storytelling to get to the goods, all climaxes with no foreplay. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that—lots of people like porn! And I even like and appreciate Les Mis for the emotion porn that it is! It's obviously very good at what it does. But let’s not pretend that it’s above criticism, merely because it’s popular. Were popularity the only barometer of quality, the Transformers movies would be stone cold masterpieces.

Fortune of Soldiers

Americans were not the only ones serving in Iraq.

It's a fairly obvious observation, but one that I don't recall being much considered during the darkest days of that endless war. True, we often spoke of our faithful allies, the British, but even that term 'British' itself is an elision. For, as writer Gregory Burke notes in the program for Black Watch, imported for the second time from the National Theatre of Scotland by the Shakespeare Theatre Company, "Scotland has always provided a percentage of the British Army that is disproportionate to its population size." The only time I recall Scotland entering the Iraq conversation was the public dispute between a belligerent Christopher Hitchens and Scottish MP and Saddam Hussein apologist George Galloway.

We did not think much about Scotland, much less its military class, in the context of Iraq, but they thought about Iraq, and us, at considerable length. So we find in Black Watch, an exploration of the play's namesake, a famed Scottish infantry battalion, and the outsized role it played in Iraq. The play, directed by John Tiffany, is a marvel of performance and technical skill and shows a critical moment in time from an unusual perspective. Yet a crucial component is missing: the play's original audience, without which something has been lost in translation.

The play's story moves on two tracks--an unnamed writer, ostensibly Burke, interviewing the men of the Black Watch, and the stories they tell him, of daily life and daily death in Iraq. Interspersed among the interviews and vignettes are found objects of the war: a debate between two Scottish MPs; letters from an officer to his significant other; Scottish traditionals and military tattoos. Over time the team's rude banter and idle foolery gives way to frayed nerves and boiling anger as they are worn down as much by relentless shelling and suicide bombers as by the government's decision to fold the Black Watch in with other independent regiments into a single unit.

With the exception of the lights and sound, which work in tandem to create the deafening and blinding explosions characteristic of post-Saddam Iraq, the show's technical approach is deceptively simple. The Sydney Harmon Hall's proscenium arch has been reconfigured into a stadium-styled seating that requires much of the audience to cross the stage, where they must remain until the end of the performance (the show runs a fleet two hours with no intermission). At one end of the stage is strung a curtain that triples as both projection screen and scrim, and on the other end is a hefty door. A rough frame on either side allows certain moments to be played from elevated heights. Set pieces were otherwise minimal, though a great deal of mileage is made with a mobile pool table. The costuming is authentic, both in the Watch's military garb and in their easygoing civilian pub-wear. The swift action is realized by a helping dose of misdirection so that new business is constantly materializing right under the audience's noses.

No single actor stands out among the ensemble cast, as it should be in a piece about a military unit. A few, though, are given greater prominence, particularly Robert Jack, pulling double duty as the timid writer and an abrasive Sergeant, and Ryan Fletcher, as the team's de facto leader Cammy. What most impresses about the cast is the lived-in quality of their characterizations, moving with both a young, hangdog masculine swagger and military precision. Their dialects can occasionally be difficult for the American ear to untangle, but their sheer physicality does a lot of the necessary communication for them.

And there is much to communicate. The play offers some unusual perspectives, particularly for an American audience. The Watch views us, for instance, with a mixture of appallation and admiration at our overwhelming military superiority. So goes an exchange during a four hour bombing campaign:

"This is nay fucking fighting. This is just plain old-fashioned bullying like. 

"It’s good fun, though." 

"Do you think?"

"Aye. It’s good to be the bully."

There is too the realization that ours was far from the only nation that relaxed the standards of admission to its volunteer army in order to fully staff its ranks. Late in the play we learn that one of the characters was diagnosed depressive after his first tour and should never have even been in Iraq a second time, but all that pesky medical paperwork just happened to get lost when the military needed warm bodies.

Still, or all it has to recommend it, particularly in universal moments like these, I couldn't help but feel at some remove from the play as a whole. Theatre is a live event, with each production, to say nothing of each performance, born of given circumstances. All shows are particular, but some are more particular than others. Black Watch, both the play and this iteration of it, are very much artifacts of mid-2000s Scotland, a nation the size of South Carolina with the population of Colorado. Nor is it just a play by Scotland, but of Scotland for Scotland. The show began life as a National Theatre of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in an old drill hall and is saturated in a cultural shorthand--not just the dialects, but the politicians, the songs, the Black Watch itself--that could be taken for granted to forge a bond between performers and the audience that is at the heart of a live experience. Transplanting the play to one of the fanciest venues of the most powerful city in the world robs it of both its physical and cultural intimacy.

There's nothing wrong with the show. But without that full connection to the audience, it can't but feel slightly rote. All theatre, all theatre that matters, is local, and so it goes with Black Watch. As was said of another disastrous American military venture, "You weren't there, man."

A Daisey Train of Thoughts

Before The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, there was this, the original Daisey deception:



I am kidding, but not only kidding. The exaggerations of Mike Daisey and the Johnson campaign, while different in their specifics, are in fact much alike, for they were both done for a Noble Cause. The former is exposing Apple's shady manufacturing processes in order to effect their change, the other was beating Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Both causes contain clear villains whose (potential) offenses are so great as to justify whatever distortions may be used in service of the goal of defeating them.

That the things Mike Daisey described--child workers, workers poisoned by N-Hexane, workers whose hands are destroyed by repetitive motion--that these happened is not in dispute. That they happened to the people he talked to, is.

This matters. It's not enough to fall back on Apple's established bad record when attacking them. 'They've done bad before, why wouldn't they do it again?' is a righteous comfort, but not right; it's the hallmark of conspiracy theorist thinking. Indictments of individuals and organizations must rest on their actual offenses against the actual people in the actual factories.

That Daisey felt the need to make the victims he didn't meet seem as if if they were the ones he did, is also vaguely egotistical in a white savior kind of way, as if they wouldn't matter if they weren't a part of his China experience. It's irritating for the same reason that Tom MacMaster's posing as a Syrian lesbian is irritating: it re-channels the suffering of a group through a voyeur of the privileged class such that only by the contact of the one with the other is the story granted legitimacy. Granted, acknowledging that characters and events had been fictionalized might not fully inoculate Daisey from such a charge--white saviorism is the most crippling problem with The Help--but by declaring a work fiction it would justify concentrating Apple's accumulate transgressions into one narrative.

The issue of narrative is what galls the most about Daisey's defense on This American Life's retraction of their January excerpt from his show. I'm a man of the theater as Daisey is, and I am with Ira Glass a hundred percent on this:

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater.

I'm guessing the "context of the theater" refers to the work's own subjective, internal context. Seen on its own, as a story, it is powerful and moving. But so was Johnson's Daisy ad. It was great political theater, and it committed people to the (arguably) good cause of denying Goldwater the White House. But stories don't exist in a vacuum. And these particular stories, were not true.

Mike Daisey and Shakespeare and Greater Truths

The theater has ever been an ailing medium, wanting relevance in an increasingly technology-based world. It's with considerable discomfort, then, that I've read about Mike Daisey's fabrications in his monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, whose popularity and success in effecting some actual change to Apple's business practices were astonishing and admirable.

Daisey's defense is that he's "not a journalist" and that he shouldn't have consented to have his show excerpted on This American Life, which is a journalistic enterprise. True enough. Daisey is an actor and performer. But what has he been performing? He describes it as "a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license," but is this clear to the audience? When Daisey sat at his table onstage and described what he claimed to have seen in China, audiences were inclined to take him at his word. This wasn't a The Things They Carried exercise in meta-fiction; the assumption was we were hearing about the experiences of Mike Daisey, not "Mike Daisey."

But still: Daisey is a storyteller. Ought not he be allowed to use every storyteller's tool at his disposal to do his job? Well, yes and no. Many people would probably scoff at the idea that there's such thing as a "greater truth," that one doesn't need facts for, but in almost any kind of dramatic narrative, it's generally true. Any costume drama is going to elide certain facts simply for narrative convenience. There are too many details that are either irrelevant or would take too long to include in the two hours' traffic of the stage. Shakespeare was notoriously promiscuous with the facts in his "True Historie"s of England's monarchs, but to dwell on that would be to miss entirely the point of a powerful piece of theatre as Richard III.

The problem is Daisey isn't merely out to entertain the groundlings. His truth is greater than the Tudor Myth that Shakespeare appealed to; it is the very real and very bad conditions of Chinese factories manufacturing Apple products. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs deals with Daisey's own ambivalence with Apple, yes, but it functions also as an expose and chronicling of Daisey's discoveries. At that point, when the integrity of the work is dependent on the unearthing of facts, creative license is no longer a benefit but in fact a considerable detriment. This was the critical failure of a very different work involving Shakespeare, last year's historical disaster film by Roland Emmerich, Anonymous. The goal of that grand misadventure was to tell the "truth" that "Shakespeare" wasn't actually Shakespeare, but it couldn't be bothered to get basic facts about the time period straight.

There is plenty of room in the world for both fiction and journalism. Goodness knows the internet's made it easier than ever for the propagation of falsehoods, nonsense, and pablum (see: Kony 2012), but it can also illuminate the darkest of places, such as the way Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have helped document and sustain the Arab Spring. But one can't have it both ways. The fact of Daisey's fictions hurts the credibility of Apple's critics; mingling invention with reportage only reduces the story's potency to so much sound and fury. Thus does the illuminating power of art, that brief candle, go out, out.

Intellectual Perversity in Chicago

Again with David Mamet, who's doing more publicity to promote his book on why liberals are stoopid. He pulls off quite a feat here, attacking stupidity while at the same time defending it:

Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.

File this one under 'oh for fuck's sake.'

Contrarianism is all well and good, and goodness knows there are plenty of dippy hippies in the theatre world, but this is just making a virtue of idiocy. Put aside the issue of responsibility that comes with being tied into a precarious world economy. Mamet is reflexively arguing that any private business decision, no matter how reckless and collaterally damaging, is inherently better than government, just because, and he's relying on tired bumper sticker sloganeering--"on the road to serfdom"--to "prove" it to boot.

The modern conservative movement takes a nearly erotic pleasure in infuriating liberals (or at least thinking it's doing so), but saying something like this fills one with more pity than anger. David Mamet is a man of tremendous intelligence and talent, and so more than anything it's simply sad to see him now cutting off his brain to spite his face.

The Miseducation of David Mamet

This Weekly Standard piece on David Mamet's conversion to conservatism is an interesting read, in that it unwittingly reveals Mamet has learned the wrong lessons:

Mamet mentioned a screenplay that he hopes will soon be produced involving a young rich girl who applies to Harvard. When she’s rejected she suddenly declares herself an Aztec to qualify for affirmative action. Presumably high jinks ensue. A new two-character play opening in London this fall, The Anarchist, is a “verbal sword-fight” between two women of a certain age, one a veteran of 1960s radicalism, jailed for life on a bombing charge, and the other a reactionary prison governor from whom the aging radical hopes to receive parole. Regardless of the play’s true merits, we can expect the word didactic to get a workout from critics.

Also, regardless of its didacticism, we can also expect the words 'true merits' to get a workout from conservatives.

Terry Teachout noted the problem with this sledgehammer approach to political theatre a couple years back, incidentally amid a discussion on why there are hardly any conservative playwrights:

Mr. Hytner, in other words, wants to produce issue-driven conservative plays that are just like today's liberal plays, only in reverse, whereas the problem with today's political theater is that its practitioners see their plays not as works of art but as means to an end. In such tedious exercises in left-wing agitprop as Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," Caryl Churchill's "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" and Tim Robbins's "Embedded," we are presented with a black-and-white universe of victims and villains, a place where every deck is stacked and never is heard a surprising word. Why would anybody with half a brain in his head -- even a fire-breathing McCainiac, if such a creature exists -- want to suffer through their right-wing equivalent?

Mamet may have once worshipped Bertolt Brecht, but his strength as a playwright has always been his refreshing refusal to sermonize or caricature. Instead his characters interrupt each other constantly, lose trains of thought, and generally speak in short, often vulgar bursts. Even a politically charged play like Oleanna was laden with ambiguous intentions and misunderstanding, showing the strengths and weaknesses of both its characters and the "sides" they represent. In breaking away from his liberal peers and from the characteristics of his writing that often set him apart from them, Mamet is in fact indulging their worst habits.

Regrets, They Have a Few

The curtain rises. A ramshackle facility: crumbling columns, dingy brickwork, and piles of discarded chairs, onto which enter a multitude of brightly colored, ethereally lit Vaudevillian shades, clad in giant headpieces, scandalist skin-tight garments, and other ornate regalia. Normally their appearance would suggest exuberance and emotional buoyancy. But in these digs, and in the ghostly silence in which these apparitions make their circuits round the stage, the effect is fittingly funereal, for the show in which they appear in, the Kennedy Center's lavish, $6 million production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies, is melancholy at its heart.

Its characters, old-time performers of the Weismann Follies gathering in their old theater one last time before it's torn down, are similarly worn and faded: Buddy, bored with his marriage even though he still loves his wife Sally. She still carries a torch for Ben Stone, who true to his name is hard-hearted, caring little for the women he woos, including his wife Phyllis, jaded by her husband's indecency.

Not content to revisit their old showtunes, they reconsider their lives, including their marriages. Sally, played with a touching vulnerability by Bernadette Peters, is perhaps the most dissatisfied of the lot. Who but the most wounded soul would sing one of the most gorgeous tributes to love that she probably doesn't actually believe herself?

In Buddy's eyes
I'm young, I'm beautiful.
In Buddy's eyes
I can't get older.
I'm still the princess,
Still the prize.
In Buddy's eyes
I'm young, I'm beautiful.
In Buddy's arms,
On Buddy's shoulder
I won't get older.
Nothing dies.
And all I ever dreamed I'd be,
The best I ever thought of me,
Is every minute there to see
In Buddy's eyes.

The feeling of the show is best encapsulated in Ben's "The Road You Didn't Take:"

You take one road,
You try one door,
There isn't time for any more.
One's life consists of either/or.
One has regrets
Which one forgets,
And as the years go on.

The show flashes and dazzles, of course. This is a Broadway musical, about musical performers no less, and the conceit of having them relive their old routines makes for some stunning set-pieces, particularly the show-stopping "Who's That Woman?" in which the aging ladies of the cast tap-dance and twirl about the set like (and with!) their twenty year-old selves, within a shimmering silver curtain descending from the wings.

Most if not all of the material with the secondary characters is admittedly ancillary to the Phyllis-Ben-Sally-Buddy plot, a reiteration of the main story's ideas of nostalgia and regret, but it gives the show some much-needed kick, some honey with the medicine. The black joke is, of course, that the youthful energy of those scenes of the past are tempered with awareness of the present day's unsexiness.



Sondheim knows this, which leads to his ballsiest gambit, the spectacularly staged Loveland medley that takes up most of the play's second act. With the four main characters having all reached a moment of crisis, they translate their personal follies into the Follies of the type they once performed, with each character getting a song based on a different kind of routine (it's the same concept as Chicago, but driven by sadness and regret instead of hard-bitten cynicism).



This is probably the make-or-break point for most audience members, as it becomes most clear that the story, tender and affecting as it is, is a skeletal thing on which to hang its musical numbers. This would sink a lesser dramatist, but Sondheim is the crowned master of the craft. He knows what he's doing. Lines like

Now Lucy has the purity
Along with the unsurety
That comes with being only twenty-one.
Jessie has maturity
And plenty of security.
Whatever you can do with them she's done.

are so witty and attached to music so great, it would be churlish to complain of narrative irrelevance. It's actually the point, in a meta-theatrical way: the play is a follies show about follies, of many types, so the plot is almost secondary by design. It's executed with such aplomb that when the final actors, the final Vaudeville spirit, leave the stage, the characters's sadness, from which they only begin to move on, carries to the audience: for we, too, are a little sad to see it end.

Some More Skin of Our Teeth Excerpts

Because there's a lot of good material. First, Maggie Antrobus's kiss-off to her cheating husband is just some really great feminism:

Before I go, I have a letter.... I have a message to throw into the ocean.... It's a bottle. And in the bottle's a letter. And in the letter is written all the things that a woman knows.

It's never been told to any man and it's never been told to any woman, and if it finds its destination, a new time will come. We're not what books and plays say we are. We're not what advertisements say we are. We're not in the movies and we're not on the radio.

We're not what you're all told and what you think we are: We're ourselves. And if any man can find one of us he'll learn why the whole universe was set in motion. And if any man harm any one of us, his soul--the only soul he's got--had better be at the bottom of the ocean--and that's the only way to put it.

Next, George Antrobus to his son Henry, who he had been fighting in a just-ended seven-year war, articulating what every participant in armed conflict has ever felt afterward:

You're the last person I wanted to see. The sight of you dries up all my plans and hopes. I wish I were back at war still, because it's easier to fight you than to live with you. War's a pleasure--do you hear me?--War's a pleasure compared to what faces us now: trying to build up a peace-time with you in the middle of it.

This last one is actually Plato, selected by Wilder to embody one of the hours of the night. I found it most fitting to the late Donald Trump madness;

Then tell me, O Critias, how will a man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity can be multiplied a thousand fold in its effects upon the citizens?

Anger, pride, and vanity, of course, are all that Trump has going for him.

Putting the Playhouse to Rights

I've been digging into Thornton Wilder some more, swishing Our Town around and revisiting The Skin of Our Teeth. The two plays are his most famous works, for which he won two of his three(!) Pulitzer Prizes. The accolades are well-deserved, for in very different ways the two pieces pull off something theatre has boundless potential for, but is rarely done, and done well more seldom still: a truly cosmic scope.

This is not easily accomplished. Our Town is the more straightforward of the two in its approach--though ascetic in its staging, its dialogue is natural and unstylized--but compared with just about any other play it's a freak. Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it eludes pat synopses (I learned this first-hand trying to explain it to my roommate): a look into the goings-on of a sleepy, turn-of-the-century New England town, and in particular one of its citizens, Emily Webb, that questions our grasp of the significance of life by depicting both its most and least significant events.

See? How the hell does someone who hasn't read the play make sense of that? One could say that the first act shows a day in the town of Grover's Corners, the second zeroes in on the wedding day of two young characters from the first act, and the third shows, several years later, the bride, now dead, ruing her time squandered on Earth after her death. (This doesn't even mention the Stage Manager, who narrates and oversees all of the action, making sure we never get too drawn into the proceedings.) That doesn't get us much further, and what about that cosmic scope business I was talking about? It's best to let that speak for itself....

REBECCA: "I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letterand on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America."

GEORGE: "What's funny about that?"

REBECCA: "But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God--that's what it said on the envelope."

GEORGE: "What do you know!"

REBECCA: "And the postman brought it just the same."

Or this, from the play's grim finale:

EMILY: "...Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No." Pause. "The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."

This is easy enough to grasp, even with the Stage Manager demolishing the fourth wall by his very existence. The Skin of Our Teeth is a much stranger beast. It concerns the Antrobus family, a stand-in for no less than the whole of humanity. The first act deals with the family (and their maidservant, Sabina, whose actress is constantly breaking character and disparaging the play) dealing with an incoming ice age. The second act, taking place an indeterminate amount of time later, recapitulates the action of the first--the catastrophe this time is a world flood--while the setting and some of the character relations are played around with; Sabina is now a beauty pageant winner trying to seduce Antrobus (in the first act we were told that she had been raped away from her Sabine hills) and humanity, which the Antrobi went to great lengths to save the first time around, is left to drown while the animals, two of a kind, are brought onto a life boat. The third act, for a change, begins after the disaster, at the end of a war, and shows the family trying to rebuild humanity anew.

I did say it was strange, didn't I?

Several years back I was in a production of The Skin of Our Teeth (I played the stage manager, Fitz, and various ensemble roles), and I have to admit I couldn't make much sense of what was going on. I understood some of the allusions and parallels ("to Eva, from Adam," hardy har har), but the damned thing was just so odd.... I felt much the same while re-reading it, and it wasn't until I got to the relatively somber third act, and this exchange in particular, that I started to "get" it:

SABINA: "That's all we do--always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again....How do we know that it'll be any better than before? Why do we go on pretending? Some day the whole earth's going to have to turn cold anyway, and until that time all these other things'll be happening again: it will be more wars and more walls of ice and floods and earthquakes."

MRS. ANTROBUS: "Sabina!! Stop arguing and go on with your work."

SABINA: "All right, I'll go on just out of habit, but I won't believe in it."

These days, with seemingly a new crisis every week--a Japanese earthquake, Libya, the government shutdown standoff, another Japanese earthquake, Donald Trump--these words resonated.

So to, did Mrs. Antrobus's indignant reply, explaining "what nobody should ever have to say, because they can read it in each other's eyes:"

MRS. ANTROBUS: "Sabina, do you see this house,--216 Cedar Street,--do you see it?"

SABINA: "Yes, Mrs. Antrobus."

MRS. ANTROBUS: "Well, just to have known this house is to have seen the idea of what we can do someday if we keep our wits about is. Too many people have suffered and died for my children for us to start reneging now. So we'll start putting this house to rights. Now, Sabina, go and see what you can do in the kitchen."

SABINA: "Kitchens! Why is it that however far I go away, I always find myself back in the kitchen?"

The whole third act makes me want to re-read the first two with clearer eyes. This kind of approach should feel horribly belabored, but in part because the play is so bizarre--I haven't mentioned the business in the third act where the play stops in order to announce that the extras have gotten food poisoning and some volunteers will be playing the hours of the night, quoting Spinoza and Aristotle and Plato and the Bible--it works.

Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth as works for the stage, where conventional wisdom holds that relationships between characters are the key element, that manage to use those relationships--natural in the former, allegorical and grotesque in the latter--as a springboard for Big Ideas without ever becoming hoary and didactic. When confronted with these fiercely unconventional works one might ask, "What's the big idea?" and get a far different answer than one was expecting.

What it Was to Be Alive

I don't think I can say anything about Aristotle's Ethics without looking foolish, so instead I turned a few days ago to Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I only ever saw it for the first time last year in a stunning production in New York, and so I don't have the distasteful associations with saccharine nostalgia that others have.

Accordingly, in revisiting the play by reading it for the first time, I'm not struck by its folksy charm--it's there, which is all the more reason not to gild that lily--but by how much death hangs over even the cheeriest of the play's sections. In the opening of the first act the sun is rising and Joe Crowell the paperboy is delivering his stock. The Stage Manager narrating the proceedings casually drops this information:

Want to tell you something about that boy Joe Crowell there. Joe was awful bright--graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It aws all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin' to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France.--All that education for nothing.

Reading that brought back memories of the play's climax, which was particularly devastating in the show I saw. The rest of the production had been done with bare bones staging as per Thornton Wilder's directions and then some: mimed action, chairs as set pieces, street clothes costumes, basic lighting. But for the final scene the black curtains pulled back to reveal a meticulously detailed kitchen set, with frosted windows, rich set decoration, a working faucet, all in order to illustrate how the deceased Emily Webb, reliving a day in her life, only realizes after it's too late how terribly ignorant she was of what a gift her time on earth was. And then the curtains closed, and we were left again darkness and in drab.

It was one of the biggest theatrical gut-punches I've ever experienced, and having such raw feelings reignited almost made me not want to keep reading. And yet I did. And so I came to Simon Stimson, the drunken choir director. He is a doomed figure, and skipping ahead I find in the that brutal third act climax he, now dead, delivers the most bitter speech of the entire play:

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feeling of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To always be at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know--that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

When he half-staggers across the stage at the close of Act I, still alive, still only an alarming amusement as a drunkard, the police Constable Warren only says, "I don't know how that's goin' to end, Mr. Webb."

He wouldn't, would he?

Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness

Few figures of the modern stage are as revered as Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook. Both challenged and broadened the concepts of what theatre could be (the former with the anti-play Waiting for Godot, the latter with the landmark text The Empty Space); both work by ruthlessly stripping away all they find unnecessary to get at the essence of their art; for this both have amassed in drama circles a hero status most devoted, to which I will admit I belong. I thus almost felt obligated to catch Fragments, a collection of five Beckett shorts directed by Brook that just spent four days at the Kennedy Center.

Obligation is a terrible reason to do something--indeed, Brook himself mused, "it would be a sad day if people went to the theater out of duty"--and is often a preemptive excuse for not enjoying it. But there is great reason to enjoy the work of Beckett and Brook, and it was in evidence in Fragments, a revue surprisingly accessible and almost self-consciously aimed to deflate pretensions.

The staging fittingly contained only the essentials: a playing space, slightly raised, on which sat two boxes on either side, near either end, on the one sitting a staff, a violin on the other. Behind them a couple large sacks and a chair. Upstage center, a bench. The lighting was simple and precise: the stage would wash in red or blue in transitions, with only the necessary spaces illuminated. Subtle touches, like a strip of light focused on the thin side of the raised playing space, classed the proceedings up, but by and large it looked like a production that could have been done just about anywhere.

That is, of course, a point Brook has been making ever since the opening lines of The Empty Space:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

The minimal staging allowed for the range of Beckett's writing, and Brook's actors, to shine through. First was "Rough for Theater I," a sort of Endgame lite, with two damaged characters--a blind man and a cripple--relying on and squabbling with each other. There is some lively repartee that the actors, longtime Brooks collaborator Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oida, were game for, the former suitably imposing, the latter at a disconnect due to his character's blindness. It makes a good introduction to Beckett and was an effective opener for the evening.

"Rockaby," easily the most difficult piece from an audience and actor standpoint, involves an aged woman (played by the young Hayley Carmichael) repeating sentences and phrases in varying permutations that, fittingly for a memory play, would tax any actress's capacity for memorization:

sitting at her window
quiet at her window
only window
facing other windows
only other windows
all eyes
all sides
high and low
time she stopped

I'll be honest and say I didn't "get" it, but I note that the stage directions call for the monologue to be pre-recorded, and for the actress to remain seated. Neither instruction was observed, to the play's benefit. The recursive twistiness of the language raised the stakes for the actor in a way that wouldn't exist in a recording. And having the woman rise during the third section quietly offers some hope, however dashed, amid the play's bleakness.

Brook is no stranger to changing a work to suit his purposes--his staging of Carmen was cut to ninety minutes--and so minor deviations to open up a piece are always welcome, Samuel Beckett Estate be damned.


"Act Without Words II" is a straight-up clowning piece, in which two persons, A and B, are "goaded" into getting out of the giant sacks they sleep in, putting on a suit, taking it off, moving their sack, and returning to it. It was heavy on physical comedy, with Oida's A shiftless and unfocused, and Myers's B bursting with athleticism. It was the funniest piece of the night, but again the mirth served to underscore the menace that comes forward at the end, with the realization that these two figures will be endlessly replaying the same routine.

"Neither," an adaptation of one of Beckett's poems, involved actress Hayley Carmichael timing her step and delivery to back-and-forth spotlight cues. There isn't a plot to speak of, naturally, barely a scenario, and so it was interesting to see how the decisive ambivalence of the piece's title would translate into physical action. (I say this knowing Brook knows "interesting" to be a nice way of saying 'I didn't like it.')

Finally there was "Come and Go," a brief piece involving three ladies on a bench gossiping whenever one is a way. It's cyclical in dialogue and movement, dependent on its performers having great timing and physical grace. That they did by now should go without saying; indeed the control they maintained over their voices and bodies was one of the most noticeable aspects of all the evening's performances. There was no better evidence of this than "Come and Go"'s concluding hand-hold, "in the old way," a striking image carried out with such smoothness one could hear the audience murmur in an admixture of surprise, amusement, and wonder.



If this sounds like a Samuel Beckett Variety Hour--the bickering couple, the memory play, the clowns, the dark poem, the repetitions--it was. By turns grim, tense, hilarious, mysterious and mystifying, Fragments was a document of Beckett's scope and, most critically, his sense of humor. Brook's as well. Both men are widely thought of as sages of the theater, and sages aren't allowed to be funny. The playbill says this production "caps" Brook's career of over 60 years, which suggests this may be his final outing. That he should use the occasion to remind audiences that wisdom is best paired with wit, shows him deserving his distinctions.

Big Bad Woolf

How does one describe Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the uninitiated? Synopsis does no good: a middle-aged married couple invites a younger couple over for some very late drinks and proceeds to use them as foils in their marital power struggle. That's what the play "about," I suppose, but does little to explain its power, its appeal, success, and endurance.

It's the words.

George: You take the trouble to construct a civilization, to build a society based on the principles of... of principle. You make government and art and realize that they are, must be, both the same. You bring things to the saddest of all points, to the point where there is something to lose. Then, all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.

Virginia Woolf's story is practically secondary, what with the many long dialogues, stories and digressions. It could hit its marks in half the 3+ hour running time, but only to the play's great impoverishment. As another Edward Albee character once said, "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly."

For there is a point to be taken from the speechifying in this behemoth, something about the lies we tell ourselves and each other, including on the goodness of people. Convention holds that the protagonists of a book/movie/play, the mirror held up to nature, must be likable and/or sympathetic. Balls to that. Some people, many people, are, to quote the same character again, "mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag[s] of garbage." All the drama asks is that they clutch our morbid attent, vigorously and without relent.

George: Yes, Martha? Can I get you something?
Martha: Ah… well, sure! You can, um, light my cigarette, if you're of a mind to.
George: No. There are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the, uh, old evolutionary ladder, which is up your [Nick's] line. Now, I will, uh, hold your hand when it's dark and you're afraid of the boogeyman, and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see, but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that.

One can parse the text for such a meaning--the above is but a first try--but that's to miss enjoying the words. And this isn't to say they exist for their own sake: far be it. The witty, pedantic repartee is a facade to hide the desperation unmasked at play's end, which gets back to the lies being told. There is no better way to expose illusion than a smokescreen.

James Frey is the Kindest, Bravest, Warmest, Most Wonderful Human Being I've Ever Known in My Life

The infamous A Million Little Pieces author has started a publishing venture to crank out young-adult novels with the rigidly contracted help of aspiring writers. He sounds like he'd be a wonderful person to work for:

“I have very few friends who are writers … I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places. Contemporary artists like [Richard] Prince, Hirst, and Koons do that, but there are no literary equivalents. In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I’ve already been cast out of ‘proper’ American literary circles. I don’t have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.”

Setting aside whether finding a desperate MFA student to ghost-write the next Twilight is going to make literary history, let us consider hype. Frey uses the word 'radical' three times in this one quote, insisting that he is (a) radical. That's some high self-appraisal, but it really doesn't mean anything unless others will concur. The top results for a Googling of 'James Frey radical' brings up only responses to this New York Magazine piece. One should always approach media hype with a skeptical eye, even more so when it's the subject doing the hyping, and especially he is alone in doing so. If you have to talk about how radical you are, there's a good chance you're not really all that radical. Marketing is not radical.

For balance, let us also consider Edward Albee. Albee, author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is also stubborn and driven (he insists on only allowing what is to my mind an inferior version of The Zoo Story to be professionally produced), but his body of work speaks for itself. Ask any theatre critic about important American playwrights of the last half-century, and Albee's name will quickly fall from his lips.

Frey could learn from Albee's approach to fame:

GREEN -- Is that, in part, a way of looking out for posterity?

ALBEE -- Who is this posterity, and what does he want?

GREEN -- You tell me.

ALBEE -- I don't know.

GREEN -- Do you concern yourself with that?

ALBEE -- No. You can't think about yourself in the third person. That's madness.

GREEN -- But you have an impulse to protect what you've done.

ALBEE -- I am the guardian of the plays that are sitting in my head that want to come out.

GREEN -- And yet you're also the guardian of the plays that have already come out. At least the temporary guardian.

ALBEE -- I don't think we should think about legacies ourselves.

For what it's worth, Albee also runs a retreat for writers and other creative types. Frey offers young would-be authors stifling contracts to hitch their wagons to his star.

Me to Play

I was hoping to have something to say about a production of Beckett's Endgame I saw last night, but since I didn't get much out of it, I don't want to spend much time on it.

The great challenge of Beckett is trying to make sense of dialogue and situations that are often written to not make sense. That's just as a reader. When staging one must of course, by definition, keep the audience in mind. Carter Jahncke was successful in this, perhaps because Beckett's narrative is easier to wrap one's mouth around than his dialogue. But to my mind the Endgame I saw included much 'psychology' that only threw matters into further confusion.

Old Flame

As I wrote yesterday, a most unhappy summer left a bad taste in my mouth as far as theatre is concerned. I passed on a friend's play reading, didn't bother seeing anything here or in Philadelphia, and generally gave drama a wide berth. This is was somewhat of a big deal, since most of my free time for the past six years has been devoted to attending or writing or directing or performing in some show or another, whether a reading, a full production, or an improv gig. Losing the theatre love was like attending a seminary only to wake up one morning not believing in God. It was profoundly de-centering.

And thankfully, relatively, short-lived.

My distaste began to recede shortly after I arrived in DC. One of the newspapers had an ad, and a review, for Constellation Theatre's production of the Thomas Middleton's Jacobean revenge piece Women Beware Women. Among the events advertised at Busboys and Poets was Spooky Action Theater's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones. Some internet research on Women Beware Women led me to discover a nearby Endgame show. I was... excited.

You have to understand: English revenge plays are my favorite genre of drama. They can be contrived as hell, but even then one must appreciate how well they operate with an almost clock-like narrative precision, in which a group of terrible people commit terrible deeds and are killed in terrible ways. I love these works so much I devoted my Honors History thesis to taking this operating moral logic and applying it to Queen Elizabeth's gruesome treatment of traitors to the Crown. Incest, intrigue, and improbable death scenes. I can't imagine a better night's entertainment.

And Beckett! Never had pessimism a better, more articulate standard-bearer. I played Lucky in a community college production of Waiting for Godot that is still one of my favorite shows that I've done. Endgame fascinates me endlessly, and the notoriously uptight Beckett estate allowing an adaptation of one of the man's obscure prose works (The Lost Ones) is a secular miracle. There really wasn't much question in whether I would go.

That's important, as I know people who have gotten burned by something they enjoy (including some theatre folk), who then stay away for a long time. It's very easy for a bit of unpleasantness to poison the well, but it doesn't do any good to let that happen. This was bleeding obvious to everyone except myself, but I suppose everyone has to learn at their own pace.

And I'm very glad I went. The Lost Ones was stunning in its simplicity: a single cloth circle on which stood one man speaking Beckett's words, describing a strange subterranean cylinder populated by 200 beings, played by 60 or so little handcrafted, Giacometti-styled figurines. It wasn't clear if this narrator, played by Carter Jahncke, was one of them or some omniscient presence, but it almost doesn't matter. Beckett is best enjoyed for the language, and Jahncke's intensely delicate diction did the parable well.

I had a harder time with Women Beware Women, at first. It suffered from some of the same problems I find in many Shakespeare stagings: interpolations--basically, goofy sound effects and gestures--to hit the audience over the head with a joke, and an overbearing visual interpretation. In this case, a Tim Burton influence made for some gaudy Hot Topic-like costumes, Isabella's and Livia's in particular. The use of a therimin in the original music made for an obvious "spookiness" I found similarly off-putting.

The actors, particularly Thomas Keegan and Caley Milliken as the leads Leantio and Bianca, were all strong, though, if occasionally misdirected (Felipe Cabezas and David Zimmerman as Ward and Sordido had most of the loud and grating interpolations I mentioned). And the ending! The play's bloody masque banquet has been called a "ridiculous holocaust," to which one can only reply: so? It is ridiculous, it is a holocaust, and gloriously so. The very ending, in which "Cupid" surveyed the dead cast onstage and sang his final lines, drawing his bow and taking aim at the audience, sent me out of the theater with smile biggest smile I've had after such an event in quite some time. It capped what was probably the most redemptive second act I've ever seen.

Which is all to say, I'm in comfortable territory. I still don't know how large a role theatre will play in my life, but I'm glad to have moved beyond petulance and can enjoy myself again. I'm sure I'll do so when I check out Endgame, before it closes this weekend.

Fire to Ash

The wordsmithing is failing me on this particular topic, so in lieu of any organized thoughts I'm going to just ramble and see what happens to fall out of my brain through my keyboard.

One of the reasons I started hitting this blog with (relative) heaviness back in August was, essentially, burnout from Theatre. Though it wasn't quite so much burning myself out--that would imply things were getting done--as much as seeing everything else go up in smoke. Basically, three incidents and factors, independent of one another, converged to strike in rapid succession this summer and left me wearied and bitter.

The first was a protracted Playwriting MFA application process: seven of the eight schools turned me down outright (which is not unheard of), while the last one invited me for an interview in May and then took two months instead of two weeks to tell me they they weren't interested.

The final word on that came in early July. I was directing David Mamet's Oleanna at the Alpine Playhouse summer show by then. It was only a week later, two-and-a-half weeks before we were to open, that one of my actors fell extremely ill, so much so that, with her moving a week after we would have closed, we had no room to reschedule and had to cancel the show.

Shortly thereafter I finally got around to reading the much talked-about study Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, which quantifies the generally awful economics of new play production in the U.S. Suffice it to say that I wanted to throw the book against the wall while I was reading it and spent a lot of time brooding--on theatre, cultural (ir)relevance, the future--afterward.

The effect of this, following as it did on the heels of the exhausting MFA process and the Oleanna cancellation (sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel...), was traumatic. Never mind a perfect storm, this was starvation in a monsoon on top of an earthquake.

It killed any enthusiasm I had for the theater, which is why I didn't bother to see any shows on my September trip. It's also, as I said, why I've been spending so much more time on this blog than I was before (there were also some major writer's block issues at work, but that's another story).



I didn't write about any of this as it was going on--not here, anyway--because it was a lot of ugly anger and self-pity that I would have regretted publishing, and I had better things to blog about anyway. And I probably wouldn't be writing about it now, except that it provides some useful context for the past couple weekends, in which, to mix my metaphors, my burnout began to thaw.

But that's for another post; this one's long and unfocused enough as it is.

Notes From Onstage

Earlier this year I conceived of and aborted the idea of a contemporary, theatrical update of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground. What ultimately doomed the concept--along with fatigue and disgust--was the problem of the "Notes" themselves. How does one translate and recontextualize the Underground Man's first-person narrative to an audience-oriented medium like the stage?

Like this.

The Yale Repertory Theater’s production of “Notes From Underground,” adapted by Bill Camp and Robert Woodruff, is true to the outline, and often to the letter, of the bombshell of a book that inspired it: Dostoyevsky’s short, relentless novel of self-laceration from 1864. But this production, directed by Mr. Woodruff and starring Mr. Camp, never seems closer to its source’s spirit than in its use of an anachronism: the little camera with which the Underground Man records his sorry confessions.

Consider the show’s very first scene, in which Mr. Camp recites the litany of degradation that begins Dostoyevsky’s novel: “I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. I am an unattractive man.” As Mr. Camp says these words, the projected image of his smiling, snarling face looms large and scary on the back of the stage of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where “Notes,” presented here by Theater for a New Audience, runs through Nov. 28.

You look at that outsize, contemptuous, phantasmal face, and you see a charismatic specter in control, speaking words that unsettle you. But shift your gaze to stage left, to Mr. Camp in the flesh, hunched over his trinket-sized camera, which sits on a decrepit desk in a derelict room. In three dimensions, in a broader context, Mr. Camp seems small and pathetic. It’s like seeing both faces of the Wizard of Oz at the same time: a gigantic, bodiless head and that insignificant little man behind the curtain.

Dramatist Personae

This compilation of Time Magazine covers about authors also includes playwrights, of which there are, perhaps predictably, even more scarce than the novelists. Only five--five!--made the cut: Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams, the last of which was in 1962. Somewhat freakishly, O'Neill made the cover a four times.

I'm sure some of the authors listed wrote a play or two, but as far as full-on dramatists go, it's a pretty dismal showing.

(h/t Sullivan)