The Wicked Stage

Clean "Talk," Dirty Reviews

2012-01-25T09:49:00.005-05:00

The post-Tina Brown New Yorker has not been known for its squeamishness (am I the only one who vividly remembers the awkward shock of that hilariously severe Tilda Swinton nude photo spread of nearly 20 years ago?), so I was shocked in reverse to see the way a recent Talk of the Town handled Rick Santorum's infamous "Google problem":

“If Rick Santorum wants to invite himself into the bedrooms of gays and lesbians (and their dogs), I say we ‘include’ him in our sex lives—by naming a gay sex act after him.” [Dan] Savage, who has a long history as a bigot-baiter and civil libertarian (he started the “It Gets Better” project), pounced on the idea. He announced a contest, and readers wrote in with suggestions: “How about calling condoms ‘Ricks’?” In the end, Savage’s readers came up with an unprintable definition. If you have not yet Googled “Santorum,” take a deep breath first.

Readers at risk of hyperventilating over the finer points of sodomy got no such warning when they cast their eyes across Hilton Als' recent review of Thomas Bradshaw's Burning, which featured an extensive, hard-to-miss script excerpt about the distinctive pleasures of anal sex with black women, or when they surveyed John Lahr's exceptionally hostile review of The Book of Mormon, in which he seemed to take special delight in verbatim quotes of the show's most shocking language, including a script excerpt that begins with the immortal line of the Ugandan mission's show-within-the-show, "My name is Joseph Smit’. I’m going to fuck this baby."

I know every double standard cuts both ways; am I saying I'd rather have the New Yorker be more consistently filthy? Not necessarily. But this contrast between the demure smirk at the front of the book and the no-holds-barred frankness of the boys in the back pages is striking. Interesting, too, that this transgressive impulse seems to be the exclusive provenance of the magazine's theater critics; I don't recall Alex Ross or Anthony Lane or Peter Schjeldahl cutting loose like this, even in quotation. To each section its own rules, I guess—and it may be true, to mangle a conservative shibboleth, that when it comes to criticism an editorial policy governs best that governs the least.

Link Sees

2012-01-23T14:03:00.001-05:00

A start to a busy week, post-Queens move, means more quick hits out the gate:

Mike Daisey breaks through the Ira Glass ceiling and apparently gets through to Apple brass.
Terry Teachout's lovely tribute to composer Morten Lauridsen, with whom, true to form, I only became familiar by singing with the NYC Master Chorale.
StageGrade not dead.
Some of the best crowd-source blogging the medium has ever seen, with the intensely compelling follow-up here.
Hunka's farewell to theater blogging?

On the Rebound

2012-01-21T21:56:00.003-05:00

My friend and colleague Molly Smith Metzler had a really shitty Christmas: She got a bad case of mono just as her long-anticipated and star-studded New York debut, Close Up Space, got a bad case of bad reviews.

Just a few weeks later, her health on the mend, she was in Costa Mesa, California, to rehearse her other big play, Elemeno Pea, a caustic comedy of class envy which I saw and loved last June at Humana. That production proved she's better, and deserves better, than the Close Up Space reviews would indicate; with any luck, and the right cast under South Coast a.d. Marc Masterson, Elemeno Pea will again show the world what she can do, and the American theater will hold onto her sharp, funny voice.

At least, that's the hope behind my Los Angeles Times feature on the play.

Heading for the Hills

2012-01-19T07:10:00.004-05:00

After from a six-month sublet in Cobble Hill, Greenpoint, Brooklyn has been my New York home since early 2006. I moved here with my then-girlfriend when our relationship was shaky, and we were the only non-Polish residents in our six-unit building.

How much has changed: She and I are the married parents of an irrepressibly bright, sweet son, and the 'hood has become overrun with young non-Poles like ourselves (and much younger); the ratio in our building is now just 1/3 Polish. The area has become so gentrified, alas, that we can't afford the extra space for our growing family. So tomorrow we move to Forest Hills, a lovely Queens neighborhood where we'll have a slightly bigger shoebox to call home (and Oliver will at last have his own room).

That happens tomorrow, which means today is our last day in Greenpoint. There's a lot to say goodbye to, from Paulie Gee's to Cafe Royal, McGolrick Park (above) to McCarren Park (this neighborhood used to be Irish), Grumpy to Karczma. Nearby Williamsburg was the site of my first New York Times review assignment (at the Brick) and my first New York solo gig (at Pete's Candy Store). Above all, and honestly the hardest thing about leaving the hood, is our scrappy, warm little Greenpoint Church, which has been an extended family to all of us. That last affiliation provides us with at least the excuse to return once a week to the neighborhood that's been the only home our family has known in this world.

The rest of the week, we'll be busy making ourselves a new home. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Quote for the Week

2012-01-13T15:52:00.003-05:00

"The experience of watching Jerusalem confirmed something in me I’ve suspected for some time. In life, I may be a progressive Christian, but when it comes to the theater, I’m a complete pagan. In life, I want to align myself with the peacemakers. I want to educate myself about the injustices in the world and address them in whatever ways I can. But when I go to the theater, I want something more than an ennobling education. I want to be knocked on the side of my head with the mysteries of the universe; I want to explore the wild and the wooly terrains of myself that I keep a lid on in polite society; I want to fuck strangers and fear God and poke my eyes out with a needle."
-Catherine Treischmann, answering the accusation that the Christian characters in her own plays are "yokels," on HowlRound

Beth Mettle

2012-01-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

photo by Walter McBride

One of the first reviews I wrote for Back Stage West back in 1993 was a slam of Control Freaks, a lurid and seriously flawed attempt by the playwright Beth Henley to reach way outside her usual metier and do something attention-gettingly radical (my colleague Tom Jacobs liked it better than I did). In fact, Henley had for some time been trying to punch her way outside the box to which she'd been consigned by her early successes, Crimes of the Heart (essentially her first full-length play, which nabbed her a Pulitzer before the age of 30), and The Miss Firecracker Contest—to be specific, the quaint-and-dainty-Southern-lady box, a profoundly condescending stereotype that sells her best work short, but one she's been unable to shake, not least because neither her attempts to run from it nor her post-Crimes Southern plays have been up to her best work (though I think Abundance and The Lucky Spot deserve another shot, and I would pay serious money to see David Cromer direct any of her work, particularly Crimes).

All of which made me very interested in The Jacksonian, her newest play, which bows at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. next month. Remarkably, it marks her first premiere at a major resident theater in the town she's lived in for 30 years now; it's also the first play set in her own hometown of Jackson, Miss., and set during a particularly ugly and volatile time there (1964). I'm a terrible judge of plays on the page, so I can't say whether this extremely disturbing, intermittently funny new work is her best since Crimes of the Heart or not. But with its verbal and physical violence, and its undercurrent of fatalism, it's certainly a departure from the mostly-unfair stereotype of the quirky-sweet Beth Henley. As director Robert Falls puts it in my new New York Times feature on the play, if nothing else The Jacksonian returns to Henley's Southern territory, but with a new fearlessness he credits to her howling-in-the-wilderness period.

Alas, I won't be able to see the play, but with any luck—and the insurance not only of Falls' participation but a cast that includes Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Bill Pullman, and Glenne Headly—this won't be the end of the road for The Jacksonian, or for Henley's lopsided career.

RWK in Print, Sondheim Edition

2012-01-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

It just so happens that this month I've got two reviews of Sondheim that are only accessible in print form. First, a belated consideration of the current Follies in the latest Sondheim Review. Nut graf:

Director Eric Schaeffer's production seems to satisfy most of those who've wished for a Follies worthy of their lavish imaginings, as little expense has been spared, from the full 28-piece orchestra to the garish costumes for the Loveland sequence (courtesy of Gregg Barnes). For myself, though I find its musical virtues nearly definitive, this Follies is on the whole a bittersweet homecoming. What I glimpse through its whorl of disparate elements—many if not all of them exquisitely conceived and rendered—is not quite a great show but a great idea for a show, or perhaps more accurately, a number of great ideas for shows.

And in this month's American Theatre, I've got a review of the master's second volume of lyrics, Finishing the Hat:

The saving grace of this gargantuan literary effort—less a compendium of lyrics than a hybrid artistic memoir/deluxe liner notes collection—is its infectious enthusiasm; even when he has spent them on mistaken projects and blind alleys, Sondheim shows a questing vigor and restless creative spirit that offset his equally strong tendencies toward ruefulness, doubt and acerbic criticism of others as well as himself. Perhaps because the second volume contains two shows either savaged or dismissed by critics and audiences (Passion and the Mizner bros. debacle), as well as a number of never-finished pet projects, it has more than the usual tone of defensive special pleading.

This would be unpleasant were Sondheim not also so fair-minded and, yes, openhearted about his process and his foibles. At one point, he confesses that he cries easily; more startling, he later confesses that he only noticed the precious, irreducible ephemerality of theatre—the chosen medium of his entire adult life!—after a 1979 cocktail conversation with British directors, who seemed aghast at the notion of videotaping performances for archival purposes. “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal,” he belatedly realizes. “In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”

Talkbacks, for Real

2012-01-10T11:05:00.003-05:00

Forget tweeting in the theater; that's positively genteel next to the stories I got in response to this morning's question on American Theatre's Facebook page. I asked, "Have you ever talked back to the actors onstage during a performance?" My favorite response so far, from Florence Brammer, re: a production of Measure for Measure by Minneapolis' Ten Thousand Things:

As the chaste Isabella departed following her first scene with the lecherous Angelo, actor Steve Hendrickson turned toward a nearby woman in the audience to begin his soliloquy: "What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?"

Without missing a beat, the woman replied loudly, "I think it's you, shithead."

A quick Google search reveals that Brammer is actually quoting a story from a 2007 issue of American Theatre, which I hadn't read before—a great introduction, by the way, to the company that once employed the talented Brian Baumgartner, pictured above in a production of The Three Lives of Lucy Cabrol.

Tuesday on the Links

2012-01-10T07:55:00.000-05:00

Jill Dolan wins one for the blogosphere.
Won't this project simply reinforce the New York Times' disproportionate influence?
The overheated discussion about Tom Loughlin's slightly ridiculous post about theater and race just makes me think we all need a fresh look at this.
That said, this may be one of the best fuck-you posts I've read in a long time.
Along similar lines, Marshall Botvinick ponders his writer's block when it comes to black characters.

Quote for the Day

2012-01-09T14:02:00.001-05:00

"Video projection is to the experimental auteur as the second-act opening monologue, 'I had this dream last night' and late-night drunken truth-telling are to American playwrights."
-David Cote on his Facebook page, as he surveys this month's festival offerings

The Backwater

2012-01-06T16:21:00.006-05:00

Los Angeles skyscrapers & Echo Park lake from Bigstock

It took me a while—about five or six years, I'd say—of trial and error to figure out where the best theater in Los Angeles was (it was my beat from the early '90s until 2005, when I moved to NYC). It took me less time to figure out that there was good theater in Los Angeles—theater that was worth considering on its own merits, irrespective of New York or national standards, worthy of awarding and comparatively weighing and discussing as if it were a real, thriving scene of its own. I saw a lot of really, really bad theater in L.A., and I soon grew to understand the unique reasons why L.A. has so much of it. But I also saw enough great stuff onstage there to convince me it was worth covering critically and intently (names dropped here).

Charles McNulty has been the chief critic at the Los Angeles Times for six years now, but if former-Times-reporter-turned-Times-gadfly Don Shirley is to be believed, McNulty still doesn't "get" that L.A. theater is worthy of his more-or-less undivided critical attention:

A lot of readers probably assume that the chief LA Times critic reviews or at least sees most of the better LA shows. But it ain’t necessarily so. I looked up the record of what McNulty wrote about in 2011, courtesy of one of the databases at the LA Public Library. I found 52 reviews of individual theater productions within LA and Orange counties (plus one review at Long Beach Opera and a RADAR L.A. commentary that included brief comments on several shows)...

McNulty also spent time in the major San Diego theaters, reviewing five shows at La Jolla Playhouse and four at the Old Globe (plus one at San Diego Rep, which he later re-reviewed when it came to LA)...

He didn’t write about any of the four 2011 shows that won the top production honors at last year’s Ovation Awards ceremony (A Raisin in the Sun, Kiss Me Kate, Small Engine Repair, Jerry Springer: the Opera), nor has he ever written (in his six years at the Times) about Troubadour Theater Company, which won the “best season” Ovation for the second time in three years.

He reviewed no 2011 shows at most of the companies that make up the middle tier of Equity-contracted LA theaters – the Colony, International City Theatre, East West Players, Theatricum Botanicum, Independent Shakespeare, the Falcon, Ebony Rep, Theatre West, Native Voices – nor did he write about anything at the larger musicals-only companies such as Musical Theatre West.

And so on. It's no secret that McNulty and his editors consider his beat to be major theaters in Southern California and in New York, with the latter city still providing the center of critical gravity in much of his writing (and, it must be said, in much of the Times' coverage). As I've mentioned before, McNulty's not the only critic racking up frequent-flier miles for Gotham check-ins: Chris Jones at the Chicago Trib and Peter Marks at WaPo each review a goodly number of major New York premieres (just as the NY Times' Ben Brantley makes regular trips to London and his colleague Charles Isherwood similarly treks with some frequency to Chicago). And it would obviously be insane for me, who works at a national theater magazine whose whole raison d'etre is to cover theater all across the country, to believe that readers only want to read about plays they can buy a ticket to see tonight.

That said, theater is inherently a local medium, and it seems reasonable to expect the theater critic at your local paper to cover your area's theater as his primary beat, and to expect that when he compiles a year-end "best of" list (a flawed exercise for slow news weeks, admittedly) or writes a think piece about the state of theater, he'll be considering primarily the theater in his coverage area. And what do you know: Here's Chris Jones' Chicago-only list for 2011, here's Peter Marks' all-D.C. list...and here is McNulty's: six Southland productions (Shirley, using a much more stringent standard, counts just two "L.A.-originated" works), plus two in London and three in New York. McNulty also offers this thoughtful essay pointing out other, smaller-theater favorites, though not quite in a list form. And the Times did offer this L.A.-only best-of list from its stringers.

The message sent by McNulty's uniquely divided focus seems clear: that theater in Southern California just isn't good enough to fill the local critic's top-11 list. Corollary: Sure, there are signs of promise (there are always those to be found), but stage work in a film town can't possibly provide a yardstick to be judged on its own terms. In my experience, artists in Los Angeles create bodies of work no less than artists in Chicago or New York or Louisville, and together and separately those artists create a larger corpus of work that's worth considering as a whole, even if the honest verdict after consideration is: It's all over the map. That's better than nowhere.

As someone who spent formative theatergoing years in L.A. (supplemented, I hasten to add, by theater tourism in New York, London, and Ashland) and then moved East, I can't expect someone who made the reverse journey, and who has infinitely more scholarship and experience than I (as David Cote points out here, McNulty has that edge on most of us), to see things exactly the way I did back when I loved (and hated, but with the passion of one who cared) L.A. theater. A critic's own often-lonely pursuit of his own honest opinions is as crucial and subjective as an artist's muse, so I can't question what seems to be McNulty's honest impression, after logging time (mostly) in L.A., that L.A.'s theater culture, though perhaps more substantial than Seattle's, is not ready for prime time. I don't even disagree with him that the region's larger theaters are mostly adrift, though I have to say that New York's large nonprofits hardly fare much better on the vision front.

The best backhanded compliment I can offer is this: McNulty has shown himself such an astute, thoughtful, and sensitive critic, with interesting, deeply informed, and often provocative things to say about the art form he covers, that it strikes me as a lost opportunity every time he applies those critical faculties to productions and trends miles away from his adopted hometown. If he wanted to correct course, he could do worse than to start with the Troubies.

Quick Hits Out of the Gate

2012-01-03T17:50:00.002-05:00

The year is but three days old, and I'm already slammed with deadlines, so a link list is the best I can do at the moment...

Charles McNulty (sort of) longs for the well-made play.
Claudia La Rocco's otherwise sharp takedown of Rebeck's Seminar strikes me as a case of the all-too-familiar p.i.e. (portraying is endorsing) fallacy.
Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space doesn't work, it's true, but it's hardly a symptomatic case of all that's wrong with contemporary playwriting, and it's not even the town's preeminent bad Ruhl imitation (that would be The Mountaintop).
For what it's worth, Scott Walters' latest modest proposal literally ruined my sleep over the holidays.

Red-State Albee

2011-12-29T15:57:00.004-05:00

A block away from my sister's house in Valparaiso, Indiana, where, alas, I'll be just through the New Year. Otherwise I'd so be there.

Non-Comfort Food

2011-12-27T12:38:00.006-05:00

Econo-blogger Tyler Cowen is a truly odd duck, and as such he says some intriguing things almost as often as he says deeply strange things. His weirdly contrarian TED anti-talk about his suspicion of storytelling is a great example. (Transcript here.) A fair amount of it strikes me as rhetorical water-treading around a very basic idea with big implications—essentially, that narrative is a false comfort we can ill afford in a complex world—but this quote jumped out at me:

As a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more.

He's talking about Occupy Wall Street as much as he is, say, Tolkien. What's interesting to me is about the time I read this, I was making my way, at long last, through R. Crumb's amazing Book of Genesis comic (light holiday reading, you know). And though I don't want to put too fine a point on this realization or make any special claims about scripture, I was struck by how knotted and complicated the moral scheme of the Hebrew and Christian Bible really is, if you take it straight and take it (more or less) seriously. Sure, there's plenty of talk about good and evil, about faithful followers of God and covenants and those who are unlucky enough to be outside that favor, but these are outweighed by the sheer mass of story after story of complicated misalliances, misunderstandings, and half-measures.

The story of the Fall in Eden, in other words, feels much less like the Biblical template than the one that follows it immediately: that of Cain slaying Abel, then getting a more-or-less free pass to set up his family and lineage. Yes, I know, the writers take pains to show how Adam and Eve's next son, Seth, replaced Abel and sired the "good" line that would survive the Flood etc. But Cain, the repentant murderer, feels a lot more like the spiritual ancestor to the likes of Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, and Solomon.

Reading this stuff with clear eyes, as David Plotz memorably did, might be many things—frustrating, maddening, sobering, revelatory, fascinating—but it seems to me very far from reductive or Manichean.

Happy Holidays

2011-12-23T12:04:00.002-05:00

Can't explain why, but this Flanders and Swann's riff on Mozart's fourth horn concerto sounds like Christmas to me. And with that I sign off the Wicked Stage for a spell, until something stirs or strikes me.

The Only Hitch

2011-12-16T10:06:00.005-05:00

These things aren't supposed to mean anything, but that Christopher Hitchens' thoroughly examined life ended on the same day as the misbegotten Iraq war for which he was the most vociferous—and, speaking for myself, most persuasive—advocate seems cruelly poetic. For it was he, more than Kenneth Pollack or Tom Friedman or Paul Berman or George Packer, who convinced me for longer than I care to admit that invading Iraq was, if never quite a wise idea, then a morally defensible one. (My shame-faced feelings about the war since have mostly closely tracked Packer's.)

It is an odd fate for Hitchens, whose overarching cause was anti-theism, to be linked forever with a disastrous invasion that has vanishingly little to do with the religious/secular battle he felt awakened to (with his famous "feeling of exhilaration") by 9/11. The best I can say in retrospect about the folly of this otherwise fiercely bright, clear-eyed man's case for war was that I, for one, never saw it as cynical or career-minded. Like his disgusting Clinton/Blumenthal betrayal years before, it was yet another sign of his thoroughgoing intellectual mischievousness and unreliability. That which made him a compelling figure also, on regular occasions, made him repulsive. As with his longtime colleague and compatriot Andrew Sullivan, you could neither really trust the man nor entirely dismiss him.

He was ultimately a kind of dead-serious literary/political entertainer, and even as I gladly wash my hands of much of what he stood for, I find myself still dazzled by his vigor and volubility. And I cherish this entirely typical quote, from the closing remarks of one of his jillion God-vs.-no-God debates, addressed in particular to young evangelicals:

For me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I urge you to look at those of you that tell you (at your age) that that you are dead until you believe as they do. (What a terrible thing to be telling to children.) And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside no matter how tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

That's evangelism I can endorse.

Merry Xmas, Eighth Avenue Style

2011-12-15T07:58:00.001-05:00

Nothing says Christmas like a Rent-a-Rat.

Seconding Coates

2011-12-14T13:09:00.005-05:00

An extraordinary post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, urging us to take account of our own ordinariness when contemplating moral quandaries, happens to include a resonant illustration from my area of consideration:

Some weeks ago I met a student who was specializing in economy and theater. She said that what she loved about both fields was that she had to presume a kind of rationality in studying her actors. She had to surrender herself--her sense of what she would like to think she would do--and think more of what she might actually do given all the perils of the character's environs. It would not be enough to consider slavery, for instance, when claiming "If I was a slave I'd rebel." One would have to consider, for instance, family left behind to bear the wrath of those one would seek to rebel against. In other words, one would have to assume that for the vast majority of slaves rebellion made no sense. And then instead of declaration ("I would do..."), one would be forced into a question ("Why wouldn't I?").

That, in a nutshell, strikes me as both a description of, and a mission statement for, an ideal social theater--one which confronts us with our humanity even, or especially, in extremity, and asks us, without the promise of easy comfort or catharsis, not only what we would do in a given situation but why we wouldn't do otherwise, or why we think we'd do much better than the characters we're invested in. That's the moral force behind the best Brecht productions I've seen, for one, but it's also not very far from the surface of any play that's moved me or gotten under my skin, from Shakespeare to Sondheim, from Albee to Nottage.

Leftover Quote File, Cont'd

2011-12-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

A favorite I couldn't include in my piece on Maple and Vine, from playwright Jordan Harrison in answer to the question of when he fell in love with theater:

In third grade, I was in this musicalizaton of Johnny Apleseed—very avant-garde, I’m sure. My role was the class nerd, and I was the class nerd—but when I played the class nerd onstage, everyone who ragged on me in life was slapping me on the shoulder, as if there was something heroic about doing the same thing onstage that I did in everyday life. That was a kind of 'Huh' moment for me. That’s the beginning.

Leftover Quote File, Race Edition

2011-12-09T14:23:00.003-05:00

Apropos my thoughts on Stick Fly, I recalled this (unused) quote from Lynn Nottage, from when I talked to her about By the Way, Meet Vera Stark:

One of my constant frustrations is that there aren’t more critics and writers about theater who are people of color. I feel that if a black female critic comes to Vera Stark, she’s going to have a completely different experience. At some point it really hurts my feelings and bothers me that the arbiters of taste and the gateways to the public remain by and large white men, which means that our work is not going to be 100 percent understood, because they don’t bring the whole context.

To my knowledge, in New York there's just James Hannaham at the Voice and Hilton Als at The New Yorker. Can anyone name any others? And any female writers of color? Whatever happened to Margo Jefferson?

To clarify: I don't take Lynn's quote to be an essentialist throwdown; I don't think she's saying that black folks have a special insight into her work or an exclusive authority over its interpretation. But for those voices to be entirely absent from the dialogue is self-evidently a deficit.

On a Clear Day, You Can Seethe Forever

2011-12-09T12:22:00.003-05:00

Is the New York Post on some kind of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever jihad? First there was Riedel's vulture-circling notice, and now a preemptive slam from Jonathan Podhoretz, conservative pundit and sometime theater critic (though pointedly not the Post's actual full-time critic, Elisabeth Vincentelli). Though the show—which reimagines the quirky Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner musical about a shrink and reincarnation—opens Sunday night, but that didn't stop J-Pod from posting a story titled "New musical an abject failure":

Most really terrible pieces of popular culture are utterly uninteresting. On a Clear Day (which is in its last week of previews — I bought tickets at full price, so I’m violating no reviewing embargo) is both really terrible and interesting in spite of itself...When shows go as wrong as this one, everything goes wrong, and from the first minute. Watching the simpering florist flouncing limp-wristedly around the stage at the beginning serenading his flowers with the words “hey buds below, up is where to grow” might, in another context, cause ACT-UP to reconstitute itself, storm the theater and throw blood on him.

Stay classy, Post.

Mind the Soap

2011-12-09T10:20:00.004-05:00

I don't want to rehash my thoughts from my last post, about the way I think we often condescend to our own enjoyment of plays that entertain us, but it was on my mind even moreso with Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly, which I saw a few nights ago. I'd read the play for my profile of Diamond, so nothing in its plot was a surprise, yet I still felt I didn't know where the play was going to go emotionally. I didn't warm immediately to one of the performances (Dule Hill's, if you must know); Kenny Leon's direction is oddly sloppy in a few places, as are a few of Diamond's transitions. Other than that, my playwright companion and I had a great time, and had plenty to talk about afterwards.

My favorite thing about the play, among many, is that it doesn't privilege any one character's experience over another, at least not finally; every one is revealed to be as much of a mess, and as likely to flare up into meanness or pettiness, as any other. My friend had a great analogy which I'll steal: He compared the play's game of class and racial dynamics to rock, paper, scissors. Indeed, so much is going on in any particular scene it felt almost symphonic to me, and the wrenching climax, a scene of father-daughter projection that even the characters acknowledge as a kind of high-stakes drama therapy, seemed totally apt and entirely earned.

What didn't occur to me and my companion was that any of this rich, rangy material was like a soap opera (well, no more than Other Desert Cities, which is admittedly much slicker and, to my mind, an ultimately hollow exercise). Yes, black folks in the audience respond audibly to the story's big twists and reveals; is that what has cued white critics to make Tyler Perry analogies?

I have to agree with my colleague Linda Winer that while this season has been so-so on musicals, it's new American plays that are setting the tone on Broadway (actually, her piece is a year-long wrapup, but the observation holds). Though I find The Mountaintop silly and Other Desert Cities overrated, add these two to Seminar and Stick Fly and you have a quartet of more-or-less meaty American plays worth seeing and talking about. When's the last time that was the case? UPDATE: Though I haven't yet seen them, by most accounts Chinglish and Venus in Fur would fit into this trend, as well. So make that a sextet of new non-British non-musicals on Broadway—a moment worth celebrating (and not only because not all of them will survive the year, most likely).

Entertainment and Its Uses

2011-12-07T13:55:00.003-05:00

I've been wondering for a while whether StageGrade ruins my theatergoing experiences. When I saw War Horse, for instance, I had just read every review and was thus familiar with what purported wonders were in store, as well as with the lines of criticism advanced by a number of even its admirers; I found the wonders (the horse puppets) pretty wonderful but the show itself as trite and over-earnest as some critics had warned.

With Seminar, which I saw last week, I feared a similar fate. Even the good reviews, of which there were enough to give it a B+ median on StageGrade, made me fear that I would be more likely to agree with critics who found it glib, contrived, brittle. Rather than ponder too deeply what that expectation says about me, or dwell overly on the fact that I've been underwhelmed by Theresa Rebeck's work in the past, I can report that I thoroughly relished Seminar as a crisp, smart, thoughtful, and very funny piece of entertainment. Lest that sound like faint praise, it's not (or, at least, I'll get to why I don't think it should be faint praise); the play is so tightly constructed and directed, and the cast is so definitive and committed (really, no one is coasting on their type or their tricks here, least of all Alan Rickman—another unjustified fear I had going in), that it fully rewards one's attention for its 90 minutes or so, and spurs plenty of post-show buzz, conversation, and reflection, if not of the earth-shaking kind. (My wife, a fiction writer and a veteran of many writing groups and seminars, particularly enjoyed it, which strikes me as an important bona fide—she didn't even have a problem with the tendency of the characters to assess each other's writing after glancing at a mere page or two, a recurring complaint among some critics.)

But why do I feel the need to go further than to say it's entertaining and leave it at that? I agree with one of the more astute critics I read, David Barbour, that the play does have more to say than may meet the eye—for one, there's that extraordinary monologue, delivered by Alan Rickman, at maybe the two-thirds-point, which anatomizes a writer's dissipation in terms at once hilarious, acrid, and finally existential. But how much does a play that entertains us this well in the moment need to also satisfy our sense that it's also deeply valuable on some world-historical level, and/or that it will "survive" and somehow measure up beyond this production, i.e., without the first-rate cast and director it has now? (It's not unlike the dilemma I outlined in my thoughts about Jerusalem.)

It has a lot to do with what we mean when we say we're entertained—with what parts of us a play tickles, flatters, stimulates. We feel cheap if it's just pumping us for laughs, flattered if we're allowed space to think for ourselves about what we're watching, stimulated if we're surprised or teased into thinking about something more than what we're watching (other than the grocery list). But are a tickle, a tease, and a release of laughter enough?

You might call this as a tension between theater as performance and theater as literature. But if you see a play, as I do, as a kind of literary performance which, at bare minimum, must arrest our attention and hold it for the moment we spend with it, then I'd say that what Seminar accomplishes is enough—enough to be called a good play that's worth your time. Whether it's great in that larger, lasting sense, I can't be absolutely sure. (Can anyone? Though my hunch, and this surprises even me, is that it might be—that its insights about aspiration, literary and otherwise, about gender relations, ambition, and the perils of sensitivity, may speak to us in interesting ways in, say, 50 years.) For now, I honestly don't think that judgment needs to be called; what I do think is that Rebeck and co. are offering a first-class literary performance at the Golden Theatre that is worth catching while it's there.

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Stick Fly's Slow Build

2011-12-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

Kendrick Brown and Estella Henderson in the Houston's Ensemble Theatre production of Stick Fly (photo by Nathan Lindstrom for the Houston Chronicle)

I've seen Lydia Diamond around TCG over the past few years (she's on the board), and she led a great breakout at the conference in Chicago last year, but I hadn't met her till I sat down with her recently to talk about the long-overdue arrival of her play Stick Fly on Broadway for this Time Out piece.

Like Diamond, who's had just one previous New York production, the play's reputation precedes it, as I noted before; in researching the piece, I counted as many as eight professional productions at theaters small and large, black-identified and otherwise, since it debuted in 2005 (here's its original Time Out Chicago review, a mixed-positive notice). That production history is roughly the reverse of many new plays, which seem to need Broadway to give its validating stamp before regionals will look at them; Stick Fly's slow build may be a heartening sign that that tendency is weakening (another sign would be this), though now the next question is: If Stick Fly is a success on Broadway, will that lead to still more regional runs?

A Gallant Nod to the Gauls

2011-12-06T10:47:00.003-05:00

Anthony Lane's pans can be a joy to read, though I think they leave him open to the common charge of shallowness and snark. I much prefer his raves and appreciations, because they require him to apply his formidable linguistic and descriptive skills to the film or artist at hand in a way his pans don't; I suppose one could argue that, from his point of view, the films and artists he dislikes are less worthy of his consideration, and so why not make the review more about his performance than about the work he surveys? (Off the top of my head, I recall relishing this review and this one, which my wife has actually used in an NYU writing class.)

And catching up with recent New Yorkers, I came across Lane's rave for Michel Hazanavicius' new black-and-white silent film, The Artist. Not only are the film's cinematic allusions in expert hands with Lane, whom I once heard deliver a delicious if supererogative encomium to Ava Gardner, but I was extra-gratified to find, at the end of his review, a spot-on summary of a national trait I've come to admire myself, and in a people not typically lauded by those of Lane's own sceptered isle:

What Hazanavicius has wrought is damnably clever, but not cute; less like an arch conceit and more like the needle-sharp recollection of a dream. It is, above all, a Gallic specialty—the intellectual caprice that applies a surprising emotional jolt.

And almost as quickly as I could think, "Ravel!", Lane goes there:

One finds the same mixture in Cocteau’s Orphée, which transmitted Greek myths as if in a live broadcast, and in Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” which sought not so much to mimic Baroque musical form as to uncover a vitalizing force within the act of homage. When challenged over the seeming levity of the piece, Ravel replied, “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence,” and that will stand as a motto for The Artist—a spry monochrome comedy that is tinted with regret for the rackety noise and color, as far as we can hope to imagine them, of lost time. Make way for the old!

Guess I have to try to see that movie, but more important for the moment is to celebrate what criticism passes by.