And now, for a little cross-posting . . .
The good folks at Imagining America have begun a new journal called Public: Arts, Design, Humanities.
It’ll be another terrific online forum for writing and thinking about the arts and public engagements.
I have a short essay in the inaugural issue on critical generosity (see link).
The Feminist Spectator
Classic Stage’s production of Shakespeare’s love story competes with the high visibility of Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad performing on Broadway in a rendering that got respectful though not rapturous reviews. I’m a fan of Elizabeth Olsen’s screen work (she was devastating in Martha Marcy May Marlene and smart and appealing in Liberal Arts). And because the Class Stage Company regularly turns in compelling versions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Sondheim, and more, I opted for the downtown version, eager to see what director Tea Alagic (who mounted the exciting production of Elfriede Jelenick’s Jackie for the Women’s Project last season) would do with the play.
The stunning opening promised a lot, as one by one, to discordant electronic music, each character appeared on the nearly empty blond wood stage floor, taking their places beside one another in a line across the back wall. Capulets and Montagues moved into their places, stonily looking into the audience. As the cast filed in, a neon red line bisected the stage wall behind them, painting in one bold image the divisions that would doom them all.
Would that the production had continued with that clarity and force. Alagic’s post-modern interpretation has potential, but perhaps it’s just not there yet. (I saw a preview performance October 5th; the production opens October 16th.) From that bold metaphorical beginning, the actors proceeded to wander through the language and meander around that nicely empty stage. While they all cut bold figures, in contemporary clothing that hints at its Elizabethan referents—the men’s pants, for instance, cling tight and often hang below the crotch—Alagic’s concept quickly fizzles.
The young actors playing Romeo’s buds make a compelling visual group. Benvolio is solidly played by McKinley Belcher III, and Mercutio by T.R. Knight (though sadly, I saw an understudy), both as guys from the hood who have Romeo’s back. Romeo, the melancholic but quickly love-lorn and hopeful young man, is played by the slight but romantic Julian Cihi (recently graduated from NYU), a Japanese-American with an interesting face and long curly hair pulled back around his ears. The three men get the affection and determination of their crew, but they falter with the language, which sounds under-rehearsed and as a result, meaningless.
Olsen also falters with the dialogue. She plays Juliet as young and naive, constantly fingering the hem of her dress and her sweater (her virginal youth is signaled always and only by white costumes). She looks the part, with her open face and her long blond hair, but her talents seem better suited for the more subtle expressions of film acting than they are for the stage (or at least, for Shakespeare). Olsen’s voice sounds thin and untrained. She interprets Juliet’s most famous lines through contemporary cadences, rushing through the words, tossing them off as though she’s saying “whatever” with a shoulder shrug and an eye roll. Instead of making the speeches modern and relevant, this choice just makes her lines rushed and vague.
Alagic conceives the Capulets unevenly. The patriarch (David Garrison) is cruel and capricious, wearing a red robe that evokes kingliness. Lady Capulet (Kathryn Meisle) is played as an adulterer who’s in love with the quickly dispatched Tybalt; Lord Capulet’s determination to see Juliet quickly married to Paris (Stan Demidoff) is motivated by his jealousy over his wife’s affair. Meisle plays Lady Capulet in the highest of heels, wearing tight pink slacks, a leopard-patterned shirt, and a long blonde wig. Her too-chic, faux sexy bearing signals a narcissistic wealthy matron, a woman who can’t take be bothered to care for her teenage daughter.
Daphne Rubin-Vega (Streetcar Named Desire) plays the Nurse as a Latina spitfire much in the vein of Sofia Vergara’s Gloria on Modern Family. Even some of Rubin-Vega’s inflections and cadences sound familiar from Vergara’s Colombian stereotype. Wearing five-inch platform shoes that require her to totter about the stage, and black bolero pants with a white silk shirt that make her look like a dashing matador, Rubin-Vega plays the Nurse for laughs. She and Olsen work up little affection or compassion for one another. When they’re onstage with Lady Capulet, all three women’s performances seem flat and unattractive. They’re visual jokes, rather than pillars of narrative or meaning.
Finally, what is Romeo and Juliet without the fire of the young lovers’ passion? Well, it’s a pretty dull slog to a familiar ending, with none of the pathos or wistfulness or sorrow that should accompany this most iconic of stories. Olsen and Cihi seemed to be acting past one another when I saw the production, rather than igniting the surprising fire of first-sight love. Their climactic death scene is rather quiet here, even nonchalant. As they slump on the floor, the Friar expresses his regret, the lights go down, the curtain call is comported, and off we go into the night, perplexed, weary, and unsatisfied.
The production appears to have been plagued with casting changes. Finn Wittrock (Death of a Salesman) was originally announced to play Romeo, and William Hurt was first listed as Friar Laurence. With these two more seasoned actors in those key roles, and perhaps with T.R. Knight onstage as Mercutio, the production might have had more heft. As is, it’s a surprising and disappointing miscalculation for the usually solid and compelling Classic Stage Company.
The Feminist Spectator
Romeo and Juliet, Classic Stage Company, opens October 16, extended through November 10, 2013.
John Tiffany’s brilliant production of Williams’s classic boasts acting so precise and full and rich I sometimes found myself raised above the play, marveling at the skill and talent instead of feeling my emotions caught by those expressed onstage. As even Ben Brantley rhapsodized in the Times, the production is devastating from start to finish. Those of us who know how acting works know how rarely even the best performers are able to make that complicated transfer of molecules from themselves to their characters, and between their characters and the others they’re working with. When we see it, as at this performance, we can’t help but reserve part of our own emotional labor for empathizing not just with the characters but with Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto as Tom, Celia Keenan-Bolger as Laura, and Brian J. Smith as Jim, the gentleman caller.
These actors make these characters’ lives look both real and abstracted, through John Tiffany’s signature anti-realist moments that grace the production. Bob Crowley’s gorgeous schematic set design, gilded with nearly mystical lighting by designer Natasha Katz, emblematizes the family’s isolation and displacement with two connected platforms floating on an inky, watery lake into which Tom and Laura gaze and sometimes almost fall. Above the family’s cramped St. Louis apartment extends a fire escape, with metal stairs that zigzag up into the flies, becoming smaller and smaller until the trick of perspective makes them seem to disappear into the heavens. The space of performance, in this elegant, elegiac production, makes palpable the play’s content and form; Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and Tiffany’s production gives it all the ghostly remove and fleshy warmth of regretful remembrance.
Most striking about these virtuoso performances are the new insights they bring to characters who’ve long been part of high school and college literature syllabi and acting classes. Amanda, Tom, and Laura can easily be clichés, haunted by spectators’ memories of too-young women in amateur productions reaching for Amanda’s long view of her own embellished memories, or of similar women equally ill-equipped to inhabit Laura’s debilitating shyness and introversion. That Tiffany’s ensemble finds so many new colors within these characters, singularly and together, is the production’s real marvel.
Amanda, Tom, and Laura create a family of three, haunted by their collective memory of the husband and father who worked the telephone lines and one day just decided to up and follow those wires elsewhere. His desertion sometimes creates a vacuum not just in the characters’ lives but in productions of Menagerie, as mother, son, and daughter circle around the absent, destructive figure without whom they don’t quite know how to structure their lives. Amanda’s husband was a drunk, a man hardly worthy of the southern aristocracy she imagines as her origins. But for Tom, his father’s choice to flee represents a freedom whose sweet bitterness he, too, is beginning to taste.
Within the crushing burden of their mother’s florid memories and Laura’s impossible disabilities and Tom’s latent but pressing homosexuality, Tiffany and his actors find improbable, hopeful love. Tom and Laura might cut their eyes at one another and mimic Amanda’s long-rehearsed speeches about her days as a debutante, but it’s clear here that her children adore her nonetheless. And who couldn’t? Jones’s Amanda is a tour-de-force, a vivid, loving portrait of a woman who might be deluded about her past but is clear-sighted and determined about securing a future for her compromised daughter. Jones is Mama Rose without the music of Gypsy and without that stage mother’s cruelty and bitterness; when she sits on the family’s battered old couch with Laura, Jones’s Amanda caresses the girl’s face and beams at her with real love and devotion. Jones’s Amanda isn’t the flibbertigibbet other performers often create; she’s a battle ax of emotional fortitude and pragmatism. How else could she ensure her limited daughter’s future but by finding a gentleman caller to rescue her?
Jim’s second-act appearance cracks open the fault lines among the family’s threesome. Smith plays him beautifully, as a formerly formidable physical and artistic specimen who’s lost his own footing against the shadow of his spectacular past. As he begins to realize the weight of Amanda, Tom, and Laura’s expectations for him, and the inevitability that he’ll disappoint them, Smith delicately lowers the boom of his prior commitments, guiding the family gently into a future he can’t fix. Smith and Keenan-Bolger play their crucially two-handed scene with nuance and affection, which makes the impossibility of Jim’s saving Laura that much more poignant. The play becomes a sustained ache, made painful and profound by the depth of the characters’ tangled feelings not just for themselves, but for one another.
As he did in Once, the musical adaptation of the indie Irish film, director Tiffany gently reminds his audience that they’re watching a play. Quinto and Keenan-Bolger, placed precariously on the edge of the floating set, perform grace notes of movement, gesturing out into the water that magically reflects their actions and mirrors the set’s height in what seems to be the pool’s immeasurable depth. These abstracted movements (created by Steven Hoggett, who also choreographed Once and the equally impressive Peter and the Starcatcher) could be pretentious embellishments. Instead, because they’re simple and only lightly symbolic, they read as moments of sad revelation, gestures toward emotions that even Williams’s words can’t express. They don’t break the fourth wall as much as they bring a heightened vocabulary to a play and a production already soaked in sentiment (though not sentimentality).
Jones is always a revelation on stage. She’s a terrific television and film actor, but the stage lets her expand her gestures and her presence. She’s an actor with such a big, beaming heart, with such abundant love for the moment of performance, she has to be seen live to truly appreciate her intelligent, capacious talent. Quinto—making his Broadway debut—meets Jones more than halfway with his own smart, liquid portrait of a man choked by his own inexpressible need for more than a mid-century, mid-West, Middle America life can afford. Quinto’s deep-set eyes enhance Tom’s watchful intensity, but he matches Jones’s loose-limbed charisma to make Tom a sexy presence full of potential impossible to squelch.
Keenan-Bolger, too, makes Laura an anchor point on the characters’ triangle, down-playing the girl’s famous limp and enmeshing her instead in a tangle of loyalties and confusions that somatize not just her own but her mother’s and brother’s anxieties and longings. And Smith is equally accomplished and heart-breaking as the man brought to save them, who can’t even save himself.
Williams’s women have been much in evidence lately, with Emily Mann’s production of Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway two seasons ago, and Woody Allen’s borrowing of Blanche for Cate Blanchett’s character in Blue Jasmine last summer. Cherry Jones finds the steely strength in Williams’s Amanda, but breaks our hearts with the depth of her love.
The Feminist Spectator
The Glass Menagerie, at the Booth Theatre, Broadway.
The 2013 Emmy Awards deserve only brief mention here. What a tone-deaf show! What a shame that of several of the evening’s surprising upsets, Kerry Washington didn’t take home an award for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her terrific turn on Scandal. Watching the elegant, graceful, intelligent, self-possessed Washington present with the doyenne Diahann Carroll in one of the evening’s few blissfully shtick-free moments, I could only mourn that Emmy voters couldn’t follow through on Washington’s historic nomination by giving her the award she deserved.
Not that Claire Danes didn’t deserve to win. She’s terrific on Homeland and I’m looking forward to the show’s return this season. But Danes’s win demonstrates one of the problems with the Emmys. The repetition compulsion, which rewards the same actors and shows time and again, makes the whole process dull and predictable.
I’m not a fan of The Newsroom, and Jeff Daniels might have taken his chewing gum out of his mouth before he accepted his award, but at least his upset in the Best Actor in a Drama Series made for an interesting moment. I admire out actor Jim Parsons, who won Best Actor in a Comedy Series for the third time for The Big Bang Theory, but wouldn’t it have been interesting to see Don Cheadle win instead for his wild turn as the Machiavellian management consultant on House of Lies? In which, by the way, the wry direct addresses to the camera were used seasons before Kevin Spacey’s Shakespearean asides on House of Cards wowed viewers.
Likewise, Modern Family is such a safe (and redundant) choice for Best Comedy series. I watch it occasionally; I laugh. But is the best comedy, several years running, really one in which a gay male couple plays out silly stereotypes, or in which the white woman is hapless (and beautiful), and the Latina woman is heavily accented, heavy-breasted, and arch but also hapless? I know that Modern Family‘s comedy comes from how hapless, in fact, most of the characters are meant to be. But on a roster that includes much smarter shows–Veep, Louie, 30 Rock, and Girls, among them–why keep rewarding the same old same old?
At least Merritt Wever won for Nurse Jackie, a well-deserved recognition for her comic chops and empathetic, carefully constructed performance as the irrepressible nurse, Zoe. Wever is a masterful comic but also a terrific actor. Her Emmy acceptance speech was terrifically short, sweet, and appropriate.
Behind the Candelabra won for best mini-series or TV movie. I disagreed with many queer viewers who saw director Soderbergh’s film as only campy and ridiculous. I found the film unsettling in its portrait of Liberace’s excesses, his narcissism, his desire for ever-younger men, and at the same time, his consistent and irresistible showmanship. Douglas deserved his Emmy, as he managed to inhabit and humanize a man who fame had somehow separated from his own humanity. Matt Damon was even better as his young lover, who’s taken in by Lee’s performative love and devotion, and doesn’t recognize until much too late that he’s only part of Liberace’s predictable cycle of lust and loathing. Damon is wrenching as he comes to understand that he’s literally changed his face for a man who’ll discard him as he has every other lover.
I was also a Political Animals fan, and glad to see Ellen Burstyn win for a show that should have had more staying power. Likewise, I admired Laura Linney on The Big C, as she played a woman with terminal cancer with gumption and grace, even when the show’s writing took weirdly trite and inchoate plot turns. But Elisabeth Moss, as a damaged but dignified detective on Jane Campion’s atmospheric and masterful Top of the Lake, should have won as Best Actress in a Mini-Series or TV movie. Stream that show–it’s a beautiful, gripping, feminist drama set in a small, incestuous, mysterious town in New Zealand.
Finally, poor Neil Patrick Harris. He’s wonderful on the Tony Awards show, where his Broadway-style hoofing and charisma has often carried the day. But as the Times commentators noted this morning, his self-referential musical numbers and all the puerile jokes about his over-hosting syndrome were boring and irrelevant to the achievements supposed being honored last night. It’s not his fault, exactly–poorly conceived by the show’s producers, the evening was off from the moment it began. Giving award winners only seconds to give their speeches while letting silly skits and song-and-dance moments go on forever is a very peculiar choice.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Emmys were all about the speeches, instead of fabricated razzmatazz and flat attempts at humor and lowest-common-denominator entertainment? Wouldn’t it be nice if award-winners had to take a few minutes not just to reel off lists of agents and managers and family members, but were required to share their thoughts on what television means to American culture? I regret Kerry Washington didn’t win not just because she deserved to, but because I know she would have given a gracious, smart, culturally engaged acceptance speech.
Would that were the norm instead of the exception.
The Feminist Spectator
Anne Washburn’s terrific new play, in an elegant, understated production directed by Steve Cosson at Playwrights Horizons, addresses a near-future dystopia in which American civilization has been laid to waste by some sort of nuclear disaster. The details are less important than their impact; in the play’s moving, compelling first scene, we learn only by accretion what has happened, and why this ragtag group of survivors is assembled in this place and in this way, without ever receiving a full account of the world-changing cataclysm that’s left the tiny community to rebuild itself without electricity.
On a set (perfectly designed by Neil Patel) that evokes an outdoor space whose borders are warily guarded but that can be permeated at any time from any direction, a few men and women pass their time reminiscing not about the families or friends they’ve lost (that comes later, only briefly), but about the elaborate plot points of an episode of The Simpsons called “Cape Feare.” In Washburn’s elegiac vision, community is rebuilt by remembering together a cartoon series in which the episode being reviewed is itself a multi-layered, post-modern reference to older movies and their newer re-makings, loaded with in-jokes and obscure allusions. By recalling the rich episode together and jointly acting parts of it out, these folks begin to re-knit themselves once more into something that might be called a society.
That popular culture—and a televised cartoon, no less—would become the common reference point through which to rebuild sociality is a deft philosophical and political suggestion. Washburn proposes that rather than discreet ethnic, racial, sexual, or gender identities or nationalities (though everyone here seems to be nominally “American”), people will find their way back into a re-imagined social fabric through the memory of a popular culture that called on their hermeneutic insights to make it meaningful and pleasurable.
By setting the play in the future, Washburn points back to the now, in which, indeed, popular culture like The Simpsons is already working to form communities across what were once more rigidly defined identity positions. The playwright suggests, in fact, that popular culture is already—and perhaps will become even more so in a straitened future—our cultural capital, and will gain more and more exchange value as other forms of currency and commerce becoming meaningless in a post-nuclear disaster world. The pleasure of remembering narrative—as arcane and irrelevant as The Simpsons episode at first seems—becomes as valuable and luxurious as listening to jazz or classical musical, as watching Shakespeare or seeing a film is now.
Part of the play’s pleasure is how it foils your narrative expectations while the characters enjoy reveling in their narrative reconstructions. That is, the dystopian genre would suggest at least a stab at new political theorizing, at declamations about how society might reorder itself and its remaining people. Instead, the outside world impinges on this new community only rarely, and only to stake its claims on the currency of memory. The new borders have less to do with political theory than they do with shoring up the ensembles that spring up to perform their own memories of The Simpsons episode. Remembered lines become closely guarded and fought for across these performance troupes, as survivors protect their repertoire of recalled dialogue and scenes and character attributes and inhabit their memories through performance. Over its three acts (but only one intermission), the play crescendos into economically poor but affectively rich theatricality. The play’s final performance-within-the-performance implies that the new society has become a simulacrum of the memories it’s reconstructed to constitute its present.
That might sound heady. There is indeed something philosophical about Washburn’s take on the future and her proposal about how the world might be rebuilt. But her intensely theatrical vision translates beautifully in Cosson’s production. The actors, to a person, play from intense naturalism; the play was in fact first improvised with The Civilians, the troupe to which Washburn, Cosson, and many of the performers belong. Their attempts to recall The Simpsons episode evince the kind of memory-making in which a sudden flash is gleefully announced and happily built upon by the assembled. Their recollections begin to take shape as a collective image of an imagined past that only ever lived in their individual minds’ eyes.
But those detailed reminiscences become affecting and infectious. I never watched The Simpsons (although I did screen the “Cape Feare” episode in preparation for Mr. Burns) but even I felt a great deal of pleasure in the cast’s recitations. Because none of these people knew one another before the apocalypse, but are wanderers thrown together when they escape from towns incinerated by nuclear fallout, they have little in common but their love for popular culture. That it becomes enough to rejoin them into a semblance of human community—through theatre and performance, no less—is conceptually moving.
The one interaction that actualizes the devastation happens when Gibson (Gibson Frazier; all the actors are called by their real names, and then assume rotating roles from The Simpsons episode) falls across the little group on his way south from Boston. These chance meetings, it seems, require a ritual. The new arrival is asked if he’s seen friends or loved ones, whose names the group recalls from notebooks in which they’ve written their names. Gibson, too, has a book, where he’s listed names of survivors he’s passed along the way. The rules, though, require that each person share only ten names—someone in fact suggests they heard the sharing has been limited to eight.
As the group runs through their lists, Gibson thinks hard, believes he recognizes one or two, and then shakes his head negatively. In that simple, sad scene, we see the history of old forms of human fellowship constrained and then dissolving, as we understand that none of these people will be reunited with those they lost. The hope, in Washburn’s hands, comes from how they re-make communities through memory—and through theatre.
In the first act, the actors’ recall of the episode is narrated, as we watch especially Matt (Matthew Maher, as terrific here as he was in Annie Baker’s The Flick in Playwrights’ last season) throw himself into dazzling feats of remembrance. By the second act, a make-shift theatre is constructed, as their much reduced living place now has corrugated walls within which a jerry-rigged proscenium has been erected. The second act is pure rehearsal, as stagehands and costumers work with the actors to prepare their performances and the community is threatened by marauders who want to steal their lines. In the third act, the performances are so intact there’s very little outside of them—the enactment of a memory of popular culture has become the day’s lingua franca, the way in which they inhabit their lives.
Washburn’s insight into the pull of memory, of popular culture, and of the embodiments of theatre and the necessity of performance is elegant and persuasive. Somehow, she and Cosson and the cast (aided by Michael Friedman’s wonderful score and especially Nedra McClyde’s gorgeous third-act singing) avoid the imperious irony that might undermine how affecting the play and production turn out to be. That is, The Simpsons, as I understand the show, often plays with political and postmodernist irony that would keep audiences at an emotional remove.
But in Mr. Burns, audiences are invited to empathize with the situation and the commitment of a band of players arrayed to communicate with one another through memory and pleasure and a strange, inarticulate but present kind of love. We know little about any of the “characters”—in fact, in the first act, one of the women is withdrawn and tense, and although the others seem worried about her, the audience never learns what’s wrong. In the second act, she’s become the troupe’s director—she’s articulate, strong, and present. No backstory explains this transformation; social rules, as well as theatrical and narrative rules, are rewritten in Washburn’s talented hands.
The cast is uniformly excellent. Along with the enormously affecting Maher, the sober Frazier, and the musical McClyde, Quincy Tyler Bernstein, Susannah Flood, Jennifer R. Morris, Colleen Werthmann, and Sam Breslin Wright work beautifully together, creating a very specifically real emotional and physical world without any of the tricks of conventional theatre. You see them working together as actors—the actors in this play–Mr. Burns–and as the actors they play in The Simpson episodes they reconstruct. That labor, Washburn suggests, and that commitment to embodiment, reenactment, and memory, creates a common future, one in which the audience is emotionally invited to take part.
The production and the play are a tour-de-force, an original, smart, moving illustration of possibility, a hopeful reading of a dystopia that could be a nightmare and which, in Washburn’s hands, turns out instead to be life as a dream.
The Feminist Spectator
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, at Playwrights Horizons through October 20th.