Yearly Archives: 2011

The Normal Heart

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Seeing the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s landmark AIDS play, The Normal Heart, prompted me to think again about activist theatre and how it might effectively communicate its consciousness-changing intent in popular mainstream forums. First performed at the Public Theatre in 1985, when the AIDS crisis was just beginning, the play’s furious indictment of government and community inaction when intervention could have made a difference sounds just as relevant 25 years later.

Much has changed since Kramer first pilloried closeted gay men and indifferent government officials for their refusal to publicize the disease and early transmission theories to the community who could have most benefited. The cocktail of protease inhibitors now makes HIV, for some people, a chronic, rather than an absolutely fatal virus. Clear information about how it’s transmitted has made safe sex practices the lingua franca of most western sexual cultures since the 1990s.

But much still remains the same vis-à-vis the pandemic, which lends Kramer’s play its continued relevance. Federal government officials still short-change HIV/AIDS research; the medications that effectively forestall the virus’s progress remain prohibitively expensive; and homophobes who agitate against LGBT civil rights in the U.S. continue to spread lies about HIV/AIDS as divine retribution for a morally corrupt society.

The Normal Heart’s directors Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe have crafted a crystal clear rendering of Kramer’s play, with a talented cast whose performances are empathetic, careful, and emotionally powerful. Grey and Wolfe focus on the interactions among the characters rather than creating spectacle, suggesting locales with simple set pieces and props that specify the historical moment without distracting from the narrative’s momentum or import.

Inside the proscenium’s frame, scenic designer David Rockwell creates a slightly askew white box set, the walls of which, if you look closely, are imprinted with white-on-white dates of newspaper articles, the names of hospitals, and other locations and facts. This information ghosts the scene, grounding the production in a stark historical reality.

Grey and Wolfe adopt a documentary-style approach throughout, projecting location titles above the proscenium as the scenes shift from place to place: Ned Week’s apartment; the headquarters of what becomes the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC); the mayor’s office and other locales.

Scenes in Dr. Emma Brookner’s office, for example, are staged with one rolling gurney to represent her examination table; in the GMHC office, a white board and the flyers the men fold signal their activist labor. In Ned’s apartment, where he lives with his lover, Felix, the two men share ice cream and their thoughts sitting downstage center on large floor pillows, isolated in a pool of light that creates an intimate mood.

The schematic setting and evocative set pieces subtly suggest that the play’s themes span generations. Disco music plays as the first scene opens (Donna Summer’s 1979 hit “Bad Girls”) and the costumes (by designer Martin Pakledinaz) are cut in a generally ‘80s style. But the production feels and looks intentionally timeless, even though it details a specific historical moment.

Ned Weeks (played with power and insight by Joe Mantello) stands in for Kramer in this autobiographical story, as a gay man whose community is suddenly decimated by a disease no one can name or explain. With a writer’s desire for knowledge and redress, Weeks forms an activist collective that seeks information and widespread mobilization.

Weeks meets Dr. Brookner (beautifully played by Ellen Barkin), a physician who’s among the first to suspect how the virus is transmitted among her gay male patients. When Brookner insists that gay men should stop having sex to arrest the course of the disease, Weeks is the only one willing to act on her injunction. At a time when gay male culture celebrated the creative sexual expression of its community, being told to stop having sex was like being told to return to pre-Stonewall repression.

But Weeks persists, alienating even his fellow activists with his anti-sex screed and his confrontational style. He creates a complex political calculus in which he enjoins his community to stop the practices that in many ways define them while he inveighs against gay men in positions of power who refuse to be open about their sexual identity.

The production tautly illustrates the costs of activists’ fear and government inaction. Grey and Wolfe and the actors adopt neo-Brechtian performance strategies gilded with the emotion of psychological realism to deliver their powerfully instructive history lesson. For instance, partway through the production, the actors who aren’t performing in a scene stand or sit around the stage’s half-lit perimeter and look on as silent witnesses to the other characters and their collective history.

And in between scenes, the names of the dead are projected in a list that increases exponentially as the story continues. The names grow from 20 or so to long lines of columns that extend around the white walls of the stage and spill into the house. The device offers a moving reminder of how a disease turned into a pandemic, and serves as a metaphor for the cost of inaction and inattention from those who might have stopped its spread.

The wall of names is reminiscent of other memorial projects, including the Names Project—a traveling display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt composed of panels stitched memory of those who died of HIV/AIDS—and even Maya Lin’s Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Like these, the production’s projections of names of the dead is a simple, powerful remembrance of the absent presence of people no longer able to represent themselves, but whose deaths must be enumerated so that they aren’t in vain.

In addition to this piercing, presentational theatrical style and its political commentary, The Normal Heart is filled with fiery anger and more subtle, desperate emotional concern and caring.The cast plays to spectators’ emotions alongside our intellect, never letting us forget that the people whose activism or inaction we’re witnessing lived and (many) died for this cause.

Joe Mantello is astonishing as Weeks, the intellectual Jewish Yale graduate who at first bemoans his inability to maintain a close relationship. When his friends start dying of a mysterious syndrome, he springs into action, forming an activist group that will become Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and presses city officials to communicate word of the disease to New York’s vulnerable gay male population.

When Ned and his friends meet with closeted administrators and politicians, Weeks’s incendiary accusations and bitter recriminations horrify his friends and alienate the people best positioned to help. But Weeks won’t back down. Mantello plays him as spitting mad, with a consuming, furious commitment to an urgent cause.

Ned also urges gay men at the Times to write about what’s happening to their community, and flies into rages when the paltry news coverage appears buried in the paper. He meets Felix Turner (John Benjamin Hickey), a closeted gay Times style journalist, with whom Ned spars as he agitates for coverage and attention, then eventually begins an intimate relationship.

Ned’s relationship with Felix is cut short when Felix contracts HIV. Ned’s crusade becomes that much more personal, as Felix is the first man with whom Weeks has been able to sustain an emotional, as well as intellectual and physical, connection.

Hickey is lovely as the quieter, more measured Felix. Mantello and Hickey’s scenes together establish the complicated stakes of being a gay man at a time when American culture was much less liberal and accepting, when private homes or public baths were the only places in which you could express a love that was still largely forbidden.

Felix meets Ned’s wealthy, straight, lawyer brother, Ben (a sober Mark Harelik), for the first time when he visits Ben to see about his will, just before Felix’s death from AIDS. Ben’s fear of handling the piece of paper Felix gives him outlining the distribution of his estate palpably reminds us that not so long ago, people’s ignorance about how the virus is transmitted made gay men public pariahs.

Kramer’s play recalls that in the mid-‘80s, gay men were still considered pathological in American society, despite nearly two decades of post-Stonewall political advocacy. Ben tries to be sympathetic, but it’s clear that he struggles to accept Ned’s gay identity. And once AIDS seeps into public consciousness, like other straight people at the time, Ben’s fear of contagion, though it embarrasses him, makes him afraid of physical contact.

As Felix deteriorates from the virus, Hickey illustrates his wasting by pulling his cheeks together into a gaunt visage, using nothing but physical transformation to convey the disease’s ravages.Emma, who’s cared for both of them, marries Ned and Felix at Felix’s hospital bed. She declares indignantly that since the hospital is “hers,” she has the power to give them this final blessing in the face of an unsparing disease that’s robbed Felix of his dignity and finally, his life. Her flouting of conservative public policy rings with meaning, now that LGBT activism has moved from HIV/AIDS to same-sex marriage as its most visible cause.

As Emma leads Ned and Felix through their marriage vows, black screens descend over the set’s otherwise white walls. Hickey and Mantello stand beside Barkin, who sits in Emma’s wheelchair.Grey and Wolfe direct the scene as though Felix is lying in his hospital bed and Ned hovers beside him, although both actors stand. After Felix says “I do” with his dying breath, Hickey’s head drops back to indicate his character’s demise. Mantello screams Ned’s “I do” into Hickey’s ear, desperate for Felix to know that he sealed their union.

The wrenching scene illustrates the defiance of those furious at gay men’s fatal disenfranchisement.Playing it vertically in a more presentational style lets spectators feel the scene’s grief and visually empowers Felix and Ned, despite the loss that floods the moment. Hickey stands with his head laid back through the rest of the scene, a physical testament to the needless death of his character and so many like him.

Barkin is remarkable as Emma, transforming herself from the sylph-like angst-ridden woman of much of her film work to a fierce, crusading physician who’s among the first to recognize the prevalence of what was then called GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency—in her patients. She incites Ned to action, insisting that the only way to stop the virus is to prevent men from having sex.Barkin’s exacting compassion plays beautifully into Mantello’s fury and rage.

Emma has survived her own virus, the polio that’s left her using an electric wheelchair. Her chair is outfitted with a pouch in which she holds her charts and stethoscope. She wheels in and out of her scenes to examine her patients, then backs up to watch the others from the sidelines.

Emma becomes the female face of medical activism, never succumbing to pity but always insisting that Ned and his friends fight, even as she counts more and more of her patients among the dead.With a New York accent and a blazing countenance, Barkin makes Emma a compact, forceful presence.

Along with the medical establishment and the government, Kramer indicts his fellow activists, who chose polite, accommodationist rhetoric instead of Ned’s/Kramer’s accusatory tactics. The handsome, straight-acting Bruce Niles (Lee Pace) becomes GMHC’s president once Ben helps them incorporate as a non-profit. But Bruce refuses to adopt Ned’s confrontational style and finally supports Ned’s ouster from the board.

When Bruce reads to Ned the statement severing him from the organization Ned helped found, the searing moment is a Brechtian gestus of history, in which a more liberal political path was chosen over the more radical. Bruce’s antipathy for Weeks appears, in retrospect, as internalized homophobia. But The Normal Heart finds sympathy for Bruce and his compatriots even as Ned vilifies them. The production clarifies that the choice between a liberal practice of working from within established channels and a radical proselytizing from outside was already stark at the pandemic’s beginning.

Grey and Wolfe craft each scene with care and compassion. The clarity and simplicity of their direction leaves room for Ned’s oceanic emotion, which Mantello plays with agonizing power. His fearless, full-hearted performance communicates the frustration of looking for information in an era of fear and ignorance while it signals a contemporary understanding of the cost of inaction.Mantello’s performance is a requiem, an elegy to all those who died before knowledge could save them.

The directors also keep the scenes moving, pacing the evening so that the play’s heightened emotions don’t exhaust spectators prematurely. The production’s movement also evokes the speed with which history happens to the characters; the audience can feel their palpable shock at how fast they lose their friends and lovers.

The supporting cast forms a deeply-felt community of men whipped about by events they can neither understand nor stop. Jim Parsons (of television’s The Big Bang Theory) is lovely as Tommy Boatwright, his southern twang bringing special warmth to his expressions of support and love for friends who are mysteriously dying faster than he can fathom. Luke MacFarlane (the out actor who plays Scotty on television’s Brothers and Sisters) is wonderful as Craig Donner, one of the first of this circle of friends to die of the disease.

Patrick Breen (Next Fall) as Mickey Marcus and Lee Pace (television’s Pushing Daisies) as Bruce, are both pitch-perfect in roles that require them to demonstrate fear, resilience, and an unwillingness to be as radical as Weeks insists.

The play’s moving power comes from what we now know about HIV/AIDS and its progress, and how our knowledge lets us share Weeks’s frustration and fury over the refusal of city officials to help. Although they’re never spoken here, the ACT-UP watchwords “Silence = Death” resound through The Normal Heart. The play and the production illustrate why those words so powerfully describe the wages of inaction and the consequences of being afraid to clamor for life.

Mounting this revival in 2011, when more people are living with HIV/AIDS instead of dying from it—if they’re privileged enough to afford the medications that prolong one’s life—makes The Normal Heart that much more poignant and meaningful as a slice of recent past in which the gay male community wasn’t so lucky. For those in the audience who didn’t live through the earliest days of the pandemic, the production beautifully illuminates what it meant to be an activist when lives were literally hanging in the balance.

Mantello as Ned provides a portrait of an activist rarely seen on mainstream stages. He completely evokes the anger of those who chose not to be nice and complacent and who refused to play a political game whose rules placed the dying at a distinct disadvantage. Weeks wouldn’t play by anyone’s rules, but his ad hominem attacks and enormous fury make him a difficult hero.

It’s hard to empathize with a man who makes himself so unlikable to advance his cause. But Mantello finds the layers in Weeks. He creates a human being instead of a strident mouthpiece and embodies Ned’s humanity and vulnerability alongside his strength.

Mantello and Hickey are the cast’s elder statesmen. Both performed in iconic gay American plays of the 90s. Ned Weeks could be an early prototype for Angels in America’s Louis Ironson, the other verbal, emotionally conflicted, smart Jewish gay man Mantello played on Broadway. But 20 years later, in a play that’s more a political placard than a gay fantasia, Mantello’s performance feels more personal, more emotional, and if it’s possible, even more compelling.

When he undresses to be examined by Dr. Brookner early in the play, it’s clear that Mantello’s middle-aged body has fleshed out from the wiry exclamation point that drew Louis’s energy inAngels. The presence of the actor’s body, ghosted by its own stage history, is very moving in The Normal Heart.

Likewise, Hickey, who performed as one of the central characters in the 1995 Broadway premiere of Terrence McNally’s landmark gay drama Love! Valour! Compassion!—which Mantello directed—is older now. But the history of his own performance in a significant gay American drama haunts his presence here, too.

Playing lovers, Hickey and Mantello (who are both openly gay—although I wonder why I feel compelled to even mention that) have chemistry that adds depth and emotion to their relationship and makes Felix’s death unspeakably painful.

The play seems personal for the supporting actors, too, as they shift between performing in role and witnessing from the sidelines as the action continues. They each provide an empathetic, real, and moving presence that mirrors the audience’s involvement and that builds a sense of community that extends from the stage far into the theatre.

Kramer’s autobiographical narrative clearly reaches contemporary audiences. I saw the production with an audience predominated by those who looked like white gay men, mixed with obviously straight couples, women, people of color, and people whose ages seemed to span generations. Much of the audience sobbed openly through the play.

The Normal Heart might be mainstream political theatre—yes, Broadway tickets aren’t cheap; indeed, casting familiar television and film actors ensures audience attention; and sure, the number of Tony Award nominations the production has received (five) gives it credibility in ways that community-based political theatre struggles to achieve. (The Normal Heart is nominated for Best Revival of a Play; Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, for Mantello; Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play, for Hickey; Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured role in a Play, for Barkin; and Best Direction of a Play, for Grey and Wolfe.)

But this production’s extensive media coverage also refocuses attention on HIV/AIDS. And Kramer’s activism outside the theatre hammers home the on-going crisis and the virus’s real effects not just on the gay male community but on those vulnerable to and suffering from the pandemic world-wide.

Continuing his storied attempt to inspire people to action and not just to feel emotion, Kramer stood outside the theatre during the production’s first performances, handing spectators a personal letter titled “Please Know.” Although Kramer wasn’t present the evening I saw the play, a young man with a stack of the letters handed them out as fast as people would take them.

Kramer’s letter reminds audiences that the play’s events actually happened. He relates that many of the actual people he wrote as characters have died of AIDS, and that many of the actors in the original production have also passed away from the virus. He reminds us that no cure exists for HIV/AIDS; that the “amount of money being spent to find a cure is still miniscule, still almost invisible”; that AIDS is a worldwide plague; and that “no country in the world . . . has ever . . . dealt with it as a plague.”

Kramer’s letter denounces pharmaceutical companies as “evil and greedy”; accuses American presidents since the 1980s of not saying or doing anything to address the pandemic; and decries the 35 million (to date) needless deaths that he attributes to political inaction and corporate avarice.

Distributing this letter after performances is savvy activism, since the powerful production inspires in spectators a desire to know more. Our emotions raw from what we’ve witnessed, our hearts (hopefully) opened to the suffering we’ve just seen, we leave the theatre sharing Kramer’s outrage.

Kramer’s letter and his play remind us of the devastation HIV/AIDS continues to wreak and urges us to protest inaction against the pandemic at all levels of political life.

The Feminist Spectator

The Normal Heart, The Golden Theatre, Broadway, May 8, 2011.

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The Tony Awards, 2011

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The Tony Awards season confirms what anyone concerned about the status of women in the arts has long come to expect: plays by women are excluded from the nominations once again. When will entertainment power brokers realize that until work by women is produced and recognized, Americans will continue to hear only one side of the stories of our lives?

Women’s unheard stories represent a gold-mine of narrative intrigue and revelation. But of the four plays nominated as the best of Broadway this year, none are written by women and three are almost exclusively about men: Nick Stafford’s War Horse (a gloriously theatrical British import that tells a basic boy-meets-horse, boy-loses-horse, boy-finds-horse tale); Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem(another British import about a character the Variety review calls a “wild man,” a “once noble animal gone to seed”); and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat, whose macho title can’t even be fully printed in most newspapers.

Only Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People is even about a woman, the salty, working-class Margie from South Boston, played with sharp dignity and empathy by Frances McDormand. (I posted a blog on the production on 4-25-11.)

Margie’s life story as fashioned by Lindsay-Abaire in fact hasn’t been heard regularly on Broadway.How often do we see smart and insightful leading female characters struggling to make ends meet?Margie’s childhood friend Mike escapes the economic constraints of his background through a scholarship and a medical school education. He lands in the luxurious comfort of Chestnut Hill with his African American lawyer wife, far from his poor, racist past.

Margie and Mike’s sharply contrasting stories tell us something about how gender, as well as class and race, influence our aspirations and organize our fates.

But it’s not a coincidence that Margie’s story is delivered by male playwright. Lindsay-Abaire grew up in South Boston; I’m not discounting his insights into a life like Margie’s. But how would her story be told differently if it were written by, for instance, Paula Vogel, another Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose work has never been produced on Broadway?

Maureen Dowd reported this week in the Times that Kathryn Bigelow, the only woman ever to win an Academy Award for directing, is now at work on a film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.Screenwriter Mark Boal, with whom she collaborated on The Hurt Locker—which nabbed Bigelow her Oscar—told Dowd that since their film suddenly has an ending, once wary financiers are approaching them eagerly.

No one I know misses the irony that Bigelow won the Oscar for directing a film exclusively about men and war. Wouldn’t the story of Bin Laden’s capture be fascinating if she and Boal focused their film on Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, Bin Laden’s 29-year-old Yemeni wife, who was so determined to be martyred beside her husband that she was shot in the leg attacking the Navy Seals who came to capture him? If Bigelow told Ahmed al-Sada’s story, and Bin Laden’s from his fifth wife’s perspective, that’s a movie I’d be eager to see.

Dowd jokes that someone is probably now pitching Bravo on “The Real Housewives of Abbottabad.”While we think we might know all about the real housewives of New Jersey, let alone the fabricated ones of Wisteria Lane, I, for one, would like to hear much more about Bin Laden’s wives. The stories of women in the Middle East aren’t often told in Hollywood movies, certainly not with Bigelow’s keen eye for dramatic tension and telling detail. What would we learn about Bin Laden if women told his story?

Instead, Bigelow will tell another male-centered military story for Hollywood while Lindsay-Abaire tells a working-class woman’s story on Broadway.

Meanwhile, Julie Taymor, one of the first women to ever win a Tony for Best Director (for The Lion King in 1997), was fired from Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark for reasons that look to me like gender trouble. Taymor’s desire to balance the comic book hero’s righteous quest with a chorus of women and a villainess based on the Arachne myth was considered tangential to the real (read “male”) story of the musical.

I’m not suggesting that only women should tell women’s stories (men have of course told men’s stories for millennia). Lindsay-Abaire’s Margie is a welcome addition to the canon of American drama. And Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a powerful, empathetic story of men’s valor and arrogance.

But Taymor tried to tell the story of a male superhero against the backdrop of female mythology. And now, she’s out of a job.

Since 2000, of the 48 titles nominated for Best Play, only six have been written by women, and only one has won—God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, in 2009. In other words, no American woman playwright has won Best Play since the turn of the 21st century and only 12% of those nominated have been written by women.

What stories might we hear if women playwrights and filmmakers were produced in the same numbers as men? What new things might we learn about both men and women? What possibilities might be opened for how we imagine our lives—past, present, and future—if the boy in War Horsewere a girl who decides to pass as a boy so that she could fight in World War I and find her beloved horse? (History is full of women passing as men to join war efforts.) What if the wild animal gone to seed in Jerusalem were a middle-aged woman instead of the character Mark Rylance plays so well? What if the motherfucker with the hat were a woman?

Those are stories I, for one, would love to hear. They describe a world of possibility in which we learn something about ourselves we don’t already know.

The Feminist Spectator

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Good People

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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People offers a compelling, if liberal, view of race, class, and gender relations in contemporary Boston. The Broadway production, directed with subtle clarity by Daniel Sullivan, boasts a top-notch cast, who bring to their roles a kind of fruitful empathy that still doesn’t shy away from delving into the complications of people whose lives might not be entirely blameless or completely praiseworthy. Good People’s essential question addresses in fact what makes a person “good,” and debates whether personal choice or social circumstance determines who can claim that moral and emotional category.

Lindsay-Abaire begins his story in the dollar store where Margaret (who’s called Margie and is played with fearless intelligence by Frances McDormand) is quickly fired by her boss, Stevie (Patrick Carroll), for her chronic lateness. The two argue by the dumpster outside the store’s back door, since even as manager, Stevie has no office in which to conduct the unpleasant, necessary business of letting go his employee. Their personal relationship complicates their exchange— Stevie’s mother was Margie’s childhood friend. But against her excuses and objections, Stevie explains that he’s caught in the maw of corporate practices, supervised himself by a district manager who checks the employee’s punch cards. If Stevie doesn’t fire Margie, he’ll be dismissed himself.

Margie begs Stevie to keep her on, offering to take a pay cut and accusing him of favoring the “Chinese” cashier who started after she did. She knows that corporate management willingly hires new, lower-paid employees over loyalty to workers who’ve been with the store long enough to qualify for benefits and pay increases.

But Margie’s inability to get to work on time is inescapable. She’s the single mother of a severely disabled adult daughter and her childcare options are spotty and unreliable. The daughter is never seen—in fact, a whole host of offstage characters populate Lindsay-Abaire’s play—but her presence is determining for Margie, who feels keenly her responsibility to her only child. When she loses her job, she’s thrown into dire economic straits that affect them both.

Margie lives in South Boston, or “Southie,” the Irish, working-class section of Boston. She’s a scrappy veteran of a hard scrabble neighborhood, someone who’s clear-sighted about her few prospects for class mobility. Her boyfriend—her daughter’s presumptive father—departed long ago, leaving her to fend for herself in a world populated by women. One of the pleasures of Good Peopleand its performances, in fact, is the company of tough, determined, implicitly self-supporting women who provide Margie’s emotional support and foundation. Margie’s sympathetic friend, Jean (Becky Ann Baker), has known her forever; Margie’s landlady, Dottie (Estelle Parsons), is a salty woman who needs Margie’s rent to survive, but who pitches in to babysit for her daughter and clearly likes her renters’ company.

All three women and Stevie are played with broad accents that locate them in a specific milieu. The characters’ costumes (designed by David Zinn) are second-hand store eclectic. Parsons wears Dottie’s heavy aqua eye-shadow and her mismatched clothing with a rather bohemian pride.Margie’s apartment and the bingo hall the women and Stevie frequent are designed (by John Lee Beatty) to emphasize the shabby circumstances in which people without means are forced to create warm community.

Through a series of coincidences, Margie reconnects with Mike (Tate Donavan), one of her few childhood friends to leave the neighborhood and his birth class. Mike is now a doctor, who conducts research on endocrinology. In their awkward reunion in his office, where his white coat, starched shirt, and fancy tie establish his now upper-class bona fides, the two dance around the intimacies of their past, trying without much success to establish common cause in the present.

Margie, in fact, has sought Mike out hoping he’ll employee her. When he demurs, she takes umbrage, and assumes that he’s pushing her away rather than telling her the truth about openings on his staff. Of course, Margie’s skills don’t completely fit a doctor’s office needs, and even though she insists that she can file and do other clerical tasks, her protestations only extend the distance—professional and personal—between the two.

In a surge of guilt, generosity, or sentiment, Mike invites Margie to a party at his house in Chestnut Hill, an address to which he admits sheepishly, given how far it is socially and geographically from his old neighborhood. Although he expects Margie to decline, she boldly agrees to come, nearly taunting Mike with her insistence on reconnecting. When he later calls to tell her his child is sick and the party has been cancelled, Margie assumes he’s creating a ruse to keep her out of his new life. She takes a public bus and travels to Chestnut Hill anyway.

The second act’s confrontation between Mike and Margie, witnessed and complicated by the presence of Mike’s wife, Kate (Renee Elise Goldsberry), is a model of tightly written—if predictable—realist dramaturgy. The scene’s “reveal” is that Mike’s wife is African American, demonstrating another deviation from Mike’s origins, since South Boston has a history of white pride, if not racism. Lindsay-Abaire torques the race-class stereotypes in their relationship, since Kate is an upper-class, Georgetown bred lawyer, whose background couldn’t be more different from her husband’s. Mike’s determination to pass into her world and to erase his own working-class upbringing doesn’t always pan out. The scene opens on a discussion of the couple’s marital tensions and whether they should continue seeing a counselor.

Margie’s abrupt arrival underlines Mike and Kate’s differences even more starkly, as the strong wind of the past that blows into their Chestnut Hill house along with her unexpected visit further roils the surface of an already turbulent relationship. Kate tries to be generous with Mike’s friend, especially after Margie explains that she’s out of work and needs a job. Kate even suggests that Margie might babysit for their child, explaining that their current sitter is a neighborhood girl who doesn’t really need the money—after all, she drives a “Beemer.” (And, rather unfortunately, has an obviously Jewish surname.) The $15/hour the girl makes to watch their baby is far more than Margie collected at the dollar store. But even as Kate tries to be helpful, she only underlines the privilege in which she and Mike operate and her own ignorance about what it means to be poor.

[Spoiler alert.] Margie is torn about whether or not to make Mike responsible for her economic welfare and tests the waters by telling him that her daughter is actually his, the offspring of their brief affair one summer before he left. But when he reacts badly, she back-pedals, pretending she was just trying to manipulate him. Her presence in his home, though, will clearly have a lasting effect on his relationship with Kate. (One of the second act’s nuances is that Margie and Kate form a gender alliance over Mike’s recalcitrant maleness, despite the women’s stark class differences.)

Margie reminds Mike of the time he and some neighborhood boys went out of their way to beat up a black kid who’d intruded on their territory from the other side of town. Margie insists that if Mike’s father, who regularly watched for him out of the window of their home, hadn’t come to break it up, the boy might have been killed. Although she might not leave their moneyed Chestnut Hill living room with her financial future secured, Margie does succeed in reminding Mike and schooling Kate about his less than liberal past.

At the same time, the story she tells about the fight means multiple things. That Mike was racist suggests that he was a product of his childhood environment; that he subsequently married an African American women, though, indicates that people aren’t necessarily stuck where they begin.The three characters joke about whether you can take the “Southie” out of someone, even if you take them out of “Southie.” But Lindsay-Abaire finds that the truth in that debate is idiosyncratic, rather than general. Mike has escaped his past. He might try to white-wash who he was, but he’s changed. Margie, living her adult life in the same neighborhood with the same friends, is still the same.

Given Mike’s opportunities, though, Margie could be different. But she explains that desire isn’t enough to make escape possible. Mike accuses Margie of choosing badly. He blames her for being stuck in Southie and judges her for her inability to make of her own life the economic and professional success he’s made of his. But she reminds him that she didn’t have any choices. No one watched out the window for her; she was left to struggle on her own and wasn’t counseled about scholarships and routes out.

Margie also knows her fate isn’t about her abilities. She reminds Mike that she might be “ignorant” but she’s not “stupid.” Her world might be small but she’s not unintelligent. Her life is circumscribed by economic hardship; one of the character’s most striking speeches is Margie’s litany of where her money goes every month, a sad spiral of the proverbial robbing Peter to pay Paul.She lists the dentist, a towed car, babysitting money, unexpected expenses, and so on, illustrating the domino effect of poverty on non-existent finances.

Margie leaves Mike and Kate’s home on the ethical high ground. In the play’s final scene, Margie and her women friends sit with Stevie at the bingo hall, hoping to win as they make their crosses on their cards out of a desultory kind of habit. But Dottie tells Margie that her month’s rent has been paid, giving her a reprieve as she looks for work. Margie and the women debate whether Kate or Mike sent the money to Dottie, but Stevie finally admits that he paid Margie’s rent with the money he won at bingo. That the rich couple hasn’t reached out to Margie, whether or not her daughter is Mike’s, is their final bit of self-absorbed negligence.

Who, then, are the “good people” here, Lindsay-Abaire makes us wonder. Should Margie risk her daughter’s welfare by not asking her biological father for support? Did she do Mike a favor by abetting his escape from a neighborhood from which so few of their friends could find their way out? Should people who succeed look back and lend a hand to those less lucky? Or do people only take care of their own, repudiating their pasts when they leave?

Good People doesn’t answer any of these questions definitively, but leaves them in the air with enough ambiguity and ambivalence to make the play stick. The expository first act seems to wander, and contains what seems gratuitous racism about the cashier Margie insists is Chinese, though Stevie says she’s not, and some unnecessary gay-baiting over Stevie’s unmarried status. The second act helps the play’s beginning make sense, although I spent the intermission bemused and a bit irritated.

In the end, Lindsay-Abaire crafts a good, conventional realist play. McDormand is terrific as Margie, bringing the character both dignity and compassion (and the suggestion that in the end, she truly is good people), along with a sense of humor that carries much of the playwright’s wry class critique. Donovan provides a strong foil as Mike, unable to get out of his own way when he’s befuddled by his shame at the past Margie represents. Goldsberry brings nuance and agency to Kate, who could become a stick (or stock) figure, the upper-class African American who in less able hands might only serve as a plot device.

Likewise, that Margie’s daughter, who was born prematurely, is severely disabled—although we’re never told exactly how—seems contrived, too. That she cares single-handedly for a disabled child is supposed to make Margie that much more of a martyr. Rather than having a presence of her own, the daughter is only conceived to illustrate Margie’s character.

Parsons, Baker, and Carroll generate the weariness of those who struggle to make ends meet, alongside the decency of people who care about their community and their common survival. They truly are the good people.

In a discussion with the full cast and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s education director after the matinee performance I saw, the actors were articulate about their characters’ situations and the complexities of their gender, race, and class affiliations. McDormand described growing up working class, and how Lindsay-Abaire’s play touched her own experience of being someone who left her birth community and sometimes finds it awkward to return. Donovan told the audience how Lindsay-Abaire, who’s from South Boston, worked with the cast on their accents as well as their characters. While the moderator kept the conversation short, the cast clearly could have talked for much longer, so committed were they to the project of the play.

That, perhaps, is part of realism’s political potential—that by believing in characters as people who could, somewhere, be real, spectators have a chance to learn something they might not have known. And actors willing to open their hearts and their minds, and to bring dignity and intelligence to their work, become conduits for audiences willing to do the same. Not a bad thing at all.

The Feminist Spectator

Good People, Manhattan Theatre Club, Broadway, April 9, 2011.

Link to original post on Blogspot. 

Precious Little

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This very smart play presents a conundrum of ideas and feelings which, happily, it refuses to sort out in any complete or resolved way. Part of playwright Madeleine George’s point is to suggest that even when we think we’ve got it all figured out, life becomes more ambiguous and ambivalent for reasons far out of our control. The protagonist here is Brodie (Kelly McAndrew), a lesbian linguist. After many years working in obscure language communities out in the field, she’s achieved tenure at her university. The obvious next step for a woman of her generation and means is to have a baby. With characteristic deliberateness, she finds a suitable sperm donor and becomes pregnant.

One of the play’s many pleasures is that Brodie is an independent woman completely capable of being on her own, who’s decided to have a child because she wants to, not because she thinks she has to for her life to be meaningful or complete. The play opens with Brodie speaking with an obsequious, condescending young birth technology counselor (played by Theo Allyn, virtuosic in multiple roles), who tries to prepare her for the results of her upcoming amniocentesis.

Brodie is over 40, and knows that her age means that her pregnancy could go awry in myriad ways. But the jolt in her life’s narrative comes when the test does indeed show a potential abnormality, and Brodie responds with uncharacteristic uncertainty about which path to choose. Should she abort the baby or carry it to term, gambling on the possibility that her daughter (she knows its sex because the inept counselor accidentally slips and tells her) will be, as she imagines, “broken”?

George isn’t sanguine about a middle-age lesbian’s life choices. But at the same time, she suggests that for strong, sure women who’ve spent their lives making good decisions, it’s still possible to be surprised and unprepared when a curve ball comes flying at you. In fact, one of the play’s many ruminations centers on the unpredictability of our lives, regardless how intelligent, controlled, and well-meant our plans.

Brodie is a linguistic anthropologist, whose interest in language doesn’t necessarily guarantee that she’s an excellent communicator. For each of the play’s multiple characters, the ability to access language provides the key to a deeper level of feeling.

The play opens with a caged gorilla living with great equanimity behind her bars, speaking her inner thoughts in short, declarative sentences. Played with simple, suggestive physicality by Laurie Klatscher, the animal is fully present to her environment, noticing the angle and quantity of light has it floods her home and the smell of the air on her fur. The animal describes her own activities in the present tense, luxuriating in the pleasure of cataloguing her life as it happens.

A parade of visitors roam past what Brodie and her graduate student, Rhiannon (Allyn), call the animal’s “enclosure” instead of its “cage,” using politically correct language to mask the fact of the ape’s captivity, just as we all use euphemisms to soften the sting of difficult realities.

Allyn also plays a collection of people called “the zoo goers,” who stand outside the ape’s cage looking in, their words and responses blurring into one another much the way the animal might hear them. As George writes their stream-of-consciousness impressions, it’s evident that most people just want to consume their superficial experience of the animal, rather than really trying to connect with it meaningfully before they move on to the next exhibit. They barely notice her soulful presence before they’re begging to see the giraffes.

Dragged to the zoo against her will because Rhiannon, her young graduate student lover, wants to do something other than have furtive sex in her office, Brodie does in fact connect with the ape. Although the animal supposedly has 30 or so words at her disposal, their appeal to one another is mostly mute. Brodie understands something of the animal’s presentness, her ability to simply be in the moment in ways that Brodie’s life precludes.

The animal becomes a kind of ego ideal, as Brodie comes to realize that she, too, will have to be staunchly in her life instead of second-guessing whatever choice she makes.As Dorothy (Klatscher), an older, wiser counselor at the birth clinic suggests as Brody debates her baby’s fate, she’ll make a decision and then she’ll live in it, regardless of how her life changes.

One of Brodie’s research informants is Cleva (Klatscher, poignant in the third of her multiple roles), a woman who speaks the dying Slavic language Brodie studies. When Cleva emigrated to the States, she adopted English to separate herself from a politically violent past. As she works with Brodie, who gives her words to record in the university’s sound booth, Cleva reconnects to her history through her original tongue and seems to slip from the present, which irritates her emotionally parsimonious daughter no end.

For Cleva, language is a gift, even though it describes a traumatic past. For the ape, language allows her to describe and revel in her local environment, however compromised. Brodie’s challenge is to figure out how to use language to capture a future she can’t quite imagine. When, in the play’s final moment, the ape grips Brodie in a fervent embrace, Brodie’s great relief seems to be the solace she derives from simply being in that moment without the necessity that it be resolved or vocalized.

The play is beautifully directed by Tracy Brigden, who moves the three actors around a simple, evocative set through vignettes of Brodie’s emotional and philosophical quandary, accumulating anaffective nuance as the play goes forward. Each of the performers offer precise, carefully drawn portraits of the women whose lives intersect with Brodie’s. McAndrew presents a straightforward, likable Brodie, whose existential debate proceeds along a steady trajectory.

Precious Little isn’t interested in a voyeuristic study of the emotional angst of a difficult, life-altering decision, but instead, presents a character for whom deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy provides an opportunity for useful growth. To see a woman academic onstage who’s not punished for her intelligence by a fatal disease (see Wit and even the recent The How and the Why), and who isn’t belittled or presented as somehow castrating, makes Precious Little a notable contribution to dramatic literature in which female professors are more routinely made to suffer for their competencies.

It’s also refreshing to see a play in which a lesbian isn’t eager to form a conventional domestic couple. Brodie enjoys Rhiannon, but when the younger woman’s opinion about Brodie’s pregnancy sounds too glib and thoughtless, Brodie doesn’t hesitate to end the relationship.

At the same time, Rhiannon is clear about the pitfalls of sleeping with a professor, anticipating the day when Brodie will not so subtly pass her off to a colleague and withdraw her support. Separating the personal from the professional, George suggests, is impossible, since women who’ve achieved the success Brodie boasts often find their emotional support and sexual pleasure among those with whom they connect intellectually.

Brigden and the actors capture this dynamic nicely. It’s clear that although she’s guarded about their relationship, Rhiannon has real affection for her professor, while Brodie is just a bit too distracted to really notice the young woman’s attentions. We’re not invited to witness the formation of a couple, but to observe how even the most intimate relationships develop through a series of hits and misses, through sentences that sometimes don’t really finish the thought they mean to convey. When Brodie breaks off their affair, she says vaguely that “this isn’t working out.” Rhiannon knowingly retorts that it’d be kinder, in the long run, for Brodie to say exactly what she means.

But in Precious Little, even the most precise language can’t quite convey anything with real certainty because in the end, life’s just not that simple. Living in it, with all its immutable contradictions and confusions, with magnanimity and generosity, might be the best we can do.

The Feminist Spectator

Precious Little, City Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA, April 3, 2011.

Link to original post on Blogspot.

Kin

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Bathsheba Doran’s lovely new play is a meditation on community and the unlikely ways in which it forms and dissolves across time. With a light touch and moving, smart insights, Doran paints a series of vignettes that illustrate how despite the fundamental ambivalence with which we make our collective way through our lives, our sometimes unlikely connections with one another can be real and sustaining.

Anna (Kristen Bush) glues together a disparate group of quirky characters. At the play’s opening, she’s a grad student in English at Columbia working on a thesis about punctuation in Keats. She sits silently, withstanding the harangue of Simon (Matthew Rauch), a male professor with whom she’s had what appears to have been a casual affair. He’s breaking it off with all the pompous ego-centricity of an over-educated, over-privileged, too-cool white man. (Doran did her MFA at Columbia, and observes the peculiarities of academic practices with droll humor throughout Kin.)

In Anna’s next scene, she moves from Simon to Helena (played by the galvanizing, terrific Laura Heisler), her oldest friend, a mostly out of work actor who’s devastated by the death of her dog, with whom she’s clearly had her longest, most important emotional relationship. The two women bury the poor animal together at night in the park, even though Helena knows that the city forbids such interments. The scene is both funny and poignant, and sets the dual tone on which Doran balancesKin’s emotional quotient throughout.

In a parallel universe that soon connects with Anna’s, Sean (Patch Darragh), an Ireland-born personal trainer, speaks by phone to his mother, Linda (played by the wonderful Suzanne Bertish), back home. He’s broken up with a girlfriend who turned out to be a drug addict, and Linda is house-bound, agoraphobic because she was raped many years ago by the murky figure she calls the “man in the mist,” who’s never been identified or prosecuted.

Matched up by an on-line service, Anna and Sean begin to date, and Doran intertwines their very different lives in surprising, never predictable ways. Each character is drawn with confident, clear, and compelling attributes but with little elaborate psychology. Doran provides some back-story—Anna’s mother died of cancer when she was a teenager; her father, Adam (Cotter Smith), is a military man with professional and personal secrets that keep him and his daughter estranged; neurotic Helena’s mother is a psychiatrist. But we learn these details by accretion rather than through exposition, because what motivates Doran’s characters isn’t as important as the choices they make in the play’s present.

All of the characters change across the arc of the play in ways that seem hopeful without being facile or trite, and although Anna is central to the group’s relationships, her trajectory is ultimately one among many. Sean thinks Helena is crazy, then begins to feel real affection for her; Anna finds her dead mother’s diary and realizes that her parents were never happy; Sean wonders if he loves Anna and remains emotionally preoccupied with Rachel (Molly Ward), his drug-addicted ex.

When he first finds out about his daughter’s relationship, Adam scoffs to Kay (Kit Flanagan), his secret lover, that Sean will never amount to anything. But he comes to respect Sean, to see his goodness, and to understand what the young man brings to his daughter. Anna never meets Kay, who sees Anna’s picture for the first time on the cover of her book, even though Kay has mothered Anna, unacknowledged and unknown, from a distance for most of Anna’s life.

Adam’s secret relationship with Kay stands in for the wealth of what we don’t know about one another. Relationships, Kin suggests, are risks we take based on the tiny bits of knowledge we’re able to gather, confronted with how finally unfathomable we are to one another, yet how inevitably tied. Our connections are tenuous and attenuated, but they persist.

Helena, to whom Doran assigns the funniest lines and the most outrageous traits, seems poised on the brink of disaster throughout the play. She cries frequently and easily, sometimes for cause, sometimes not, and her career as an actor is minor at best. She dreams of a ward of children who’ve tried to commit suicide, and sees herself among them. But instead of ending her life, Helena begins it again by moving to North Carolina, where a confrontation with another animal provides the epiphany she needs to reboot her emotions.

Doran and director Sam Gold provide a hysterical spin on The Winter’s Tale’s famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” in a scene that provokes not only laughter, but admiration for Doran’s ability to craft a scene with such delicious theatricality and such moving sensitivity.

No prefabricated, falsely cataclysmic pathways open for these characters. Instead, Doran observes them making ambivalent but sustaining and transforming choices that change them by accretion, over time. On a very simple set that uses moveable pieces to frame the action, the most salient décor is the clocks that actors place on the walls, not to tell the time, but to remind us that time is the element in which we act. Time passes, as it does in Kin, in ways that we’re surprised to mark, in ways that bring us closer together and draw us apart less by agency than by the simple accumulation of hours, days, and years.

As Kin progresses (in under two hours with no intermission), Anna gets her PhD, writes a book, and gets tenure, but none of these events are as determining as what she learns about herself in relationship to the others. That self-knowledge isn’t delivered in big scenes with long, self-explanatory monologues, but in the way Doran and Gold establish the simple on-going project of her life. The play’s events are crafted through the characters’ commitment to one another, despite the essential, hovering doubt that infuses their interactions, much like the mist that obscures Sean and Anna’s wedding on the cliffs in Ireland at the play’s end.

For example, schooled by more conventional realism, we expect that Linda will undergo some profound catharsis that will exorcise the trauma of her rape. She finally does move outside to sit on the stoop of her house with Anna, and in the end, walks to the very cliffs where the rape took place to attend her son’s wedding.

But when Linda finally ends her self-imprisonment, Doran doesn’t herald the moment as a blaring triumph. The playwright presents it instead as an understated, simple movement forward. Linda’s liberation comes from the Xanax Anna supplies, and from the supportive arm Adam offers when it comes time to attend to the wedding ceremony. Doran suggests that great emotional revelations aren’t as important as the simple ways in which we help one another get through—with a pill or an arm that makes unexpected progress possible.

That the story culminates in a (heterosexual) marriage should make it seem conservative, but instead, the event seems less about the couple and more about the fragile but committed community that surrounds them. All the principals gather upstage, in a terrifically executed rainfall and cold mist that billows out into the first rows of the audience. As rain drenches the dearly beloved, Helena officiates, shouting against the weather that she’s not present in a religious capacity, but as a witness.

Linda stands beside Adam, revisiting for the first time the site of her own rape to observe her son’s marriage. Despite how momentous her presence is, Doran doesn’t focus the scene on Linda. But her attendance at the wedding underlines that change is fundamentally possible, that we can return to the scene of a crime and revise what that place means, that we can stand in it differently and reorient ourselves to our pasts and our futures.

Sean and Anna’s wedding isn’t inevitable in Kin. Both characters wonder if they should leave the relationship. Sean visits Rachel to see if the emotions he imagines still exist, and finds her already married, sober, and rather empty, unable to recall any of what must have been their old feeling.Anna confides in Helena that she feels alone even when she’s beside Sean, and thinks about leaving him.

Yet they do marry, not because they’re settling for less, but because Kin suggests that though doubt is a fundamental condition of our lives, it doesn’t prevent us from living. All the characters endure some sort of emotional damage that complicates their responses and relationships, but in Doran’s hands, their baggage isn’t predictive or fundamental, but only emotions that they carry along and move through, as time passes.

Kin is structured around two- or three-character exchanges until the very end, when the assembled community gathers for the wedding. The intimate style of those small scenes demonstrates Doran’s facility with language, her ear for how people talk to one another, garnished with a poet’s sense of how the content of what we say draws on a well of feeling that’s often expressed indirectly, metaphorically.

Gold directed Circle Mirror Transformation and Aliens, both written by Annie Baker, whose plays resemble Doran’s in their attention to tiny human interactions and the threads of relationships that make up lives and emotional communities. He directs Kin with a strong but simple visual style and deep emotional understanding. This is an actor’s play, which Gold and designers Paul Steinberg (set) and Jane Cox (lights) frame gracefully to highlight the characters’ connections.

Occasionally, when a scene ends, the actors who just performed remain on the set in a half-light to watch the next scene. Doran and Gold offer these moments of silent witnessing, of characters (or actors) just being there for one another, watching their lives unfold across time, perhaps to illustrate the wordless support we bring to our relationships just by staying connected.

Gold’s exquisite direction trusts the ensemble of talented actors to convey the script’s nuances. The set, which the actors move into its various configurations, shows us as if through a picture frame how we capture, if not memorialize, moments in our lives. The set’s predominating clocks seem to underline our passage onward and our sometimes perplexing faith that simply moving through time and space will lead us somewhere, however unexpected, however surprising.

Life, Kin tells us, is never perfect, but can be very good. After their wedding, Sean unexpectedly exclaims to Anna, “I hope we don’t die,” and she says, gently, “We won’t, not for a very long time.”The simple exchange crystalizes our continual surprise at the preciousness and fragility of our lives.The play ends on a note of hope, with a warm faith that by extending our kinship, we sustain ourselves.

The Feminist Spectator

Kin, by Bathsheba Doran, directed by Sam Gold, Playwrights Horizons, March 18, 2011.