I’m not really knowledgeable enough about opera to say anything much about the City Opera production of La Traviata that opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend. But I had the privilege of seeing a full dress rehearsal last week, and the final act had me in tears. Unsophisticated tears they may have been, but no less salty for that.
Check it out.
A “War Horse” in theatrical parlance is a show that is broadly familiar and broadly popular, one that you can always trot out to reasonable success without having to think too much about it. There’s a joke that you can always tell when a Shakespeare company has had a bad season, because the next year they’ll programMacbethandA Midsummer Night’s Dream, two of Shakespeare’s most reliable war horses (thoughMacbethis actually quite tricky to do well).
War Horse, now showing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre and at theatres around the English-speaking world has already proven itself to have a prophetic title; this is a show that, no doubt, will run forever, and if it weren’t so complex to stage it would play everywhere.
But if we think of conceptual building-blocks of productions as “war horses” in their own right - familiar and popular signifiers - then I have to wonder about the use of the Great War in theatre today. World War I is no longer a living memory, and neither is the civilization that was ended by that war. When we use the war onstage today, it’s not to make a direct political point about the meaning of that conflict. It is a signifier, for us, of “the pity of war” - of war not as the crucible of nobility but as an ignoble meat grinder into which we fools dump the most noble among us. It is, in other words, the signifier of the sentimental mentality behind the phrase, “I’m against the war, but I support the troops.”
This is a mentality that we badly need get away from in the English-speaking world. War is a part of our world - a routine part. The United States has ongoing military operations around the world, and the United Kingdom and Canada frequently operate alongside or in support of American forces. The pace of operations may accelerate or moderate; the engagements may be more or less ferocious, and more or less foolish, but there are no signs that we will be at “peace” any time in the foreseeable future. Our theatre doesn’t have to condemn this reality, nor does it have to applaud it - indeed, the strongest art doesn’t generally take as its starting point a kind of ideological “take” of this sort, Brecht’s theories notwithstanding. But our theatre has to reckon with it.
Shows likeWar Horsemake us feel good. We love the horse, and we love the boy who loves him. We fear for their safety, and we hate the forces that put them into danger. We are relieved when they survive - and if they died we would be outraged. But neither emotion - relief or outrage - is productive of any kind of understanding of our world, our life. We feel like we’ve gone through a dramatic experience, but it’s a pseudo experience because we do not know something at the end that we did not know at the beginning.
There’s some dispute about whether Aristotle’s “catharsis” was supposed to apply to the protagonist or to the audience - whether it is the protagonist who is to be “purged” or “cleansed” by the experience of the tragedy and the knowledge that comes with it, or whether it is we, in the audience, who are supposed to have that experience. But I think this is ultimately a dispute about nothing, because Aristotle’s conception of theatre is notcritical- we’re not alienated from the experience taking place onstage, but carried along with it. But we’re carried along for a purpose. If the protagonist undergoes catharsis, we undergo it along with him.
There is no catharsis in a show likeWar Horse. It’s a spectacle, and as such it’s marvelous - witty, charming, breathtaking, terrifying. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. It’s better thanCats.
But theatrical experiences like these, far from expanding our emotional horizons, broadening our empathy, do the opposite. Precisely because they flatter us with the most comforting experiences, they encourage us in our aversion to theatrical experiences that are less-comfortable.
That’s not really a knock on War Horse. It is what it is, and it really is stunning to behold. It’s a knock, if anything, on the use of War Horse-esque signification in more serious theatrical productions. Using, for example, a World War I-era setting for a classical play to “signify” a certain relationship between war and nobility. Once an event has become as thoroughly sentimentalized as World War I has, continued use of that event as a signifier will give access only to sentimentalized emotion, not to the real thing. What you think you’re doing to bring the audience in is actually keeping them at a safe and comfortable distance.
We took my son, when he was not yet six years old, to see Hamlet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. His one-sentence review after the show?
“Hamlet talks too much when nobody is listening.”
Hamlet is the most renowned of Shakespeare’s über-soliloquizers, but he’s not the first. That title properly belongs to Richard of Gloucester, the white boar - Richard III.
Richard begins in soliloquy, complaining that he no longer has anything to do, now that peace is at hand and his elder brother Edward placed securely on the throne - telling us that now, the winter of “our” discontent (Richard is not king; he’s not using the “royal we”) made “glorious summer,” and excluding himself from the promise of this peace. But why is he telling us this? Who is he talking to?
In Olivier’s film version, Richard is telling us as, effectively, the narrator. By arrogating to himself this role, making himself not merely a participant in but also our guide to the action, Olivier asserts his Richard’s utter dominance over the other actors on the stage; he’s not just the most cunning and ruthless of them all; he’s actually outside the drama entirely. This meta-dramatic move doesn’t have a distancing effect; it draws us in, and draws us to him. But this is, of course, only an illusion, one of Richard’s stratagems, a way of seducing us to his side as he seduces so many others in the play. If he were really outside the drama, he wouldn’t end the show with his corpse impaled and Richmond on the throne. (Or would he?)
In Ian McKellen’s film version, after a prologue that brings us up to speed on the history (defeat and death of Henry VI, Edward and his wife - and her relatives - moving into the royal residence), Richard’s opening soliloquy is split in two. It begins as a formal speech Richard gives at a ball in honor of his brother’s coronation, the opening lines about melting discontent and spreading, welcome peace delivered apparently without irony. And then we follow Richard into the men’s lavatory to hear the rest of the speech, delivered to himself (apparently), about how he has no place in this new peace, and will therefore plot to undermine it to advance himself. And then, McKellen looks at us - into a mirror, actually, but not at himself; the camera is set at an angle, so that he’s looking at us. This implicates us differently. We are not eavesdropping. Richard knows we are watching him. He wants us to know what he’s thinking. Why? Who are we?
I’ve seen a few stage Richards as well, and each has taken a different approach to the crucial opening soliloquy: languidly malevolent, coldly calculating. Kevin Spacey, now playing the role at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, starts off exceptionally hot, flustered even. The seething cauldron of Richard’s resentment and self-loathing is right at the surface, right from the start. It’s a choice that has profound risks. The two big risks are: a foreshortening of the main character arc (if Richard is in touch with his self-loathing from the beginning, then what is the revelation in his eve-of-battle revelation: “I hate myself”) and the weakening of audience implication in Richard’s crimes. The latter requires some explanation. Richard’s opening soliloquy can be powerfully seductive of the audience, if we come to believe that Richard, though a villain, is smarter than and, more to the point, more penetrating in his intelligence than the rest of these characters. Nearly everyone in the play is a ruthless Machiavel out for personal gain; Richard is the only one who is undeluded about this fact, and willing to take it to its logical end. Think of how we identify with the cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in “The Silence of the Lambs.” But Spacey’s Richard isn’t seducing us. He’s confiding in us. And, confiding, he reveals to us not only that he loathes himself, but that he knows he loathes himself, from the beginning.
But who are we? If we are the audience, then Richard is pleading for our sympathy, saying, in effect, don’t hate me for being a monster - I was born this way. And that, I think, is a bad way to go with this play, one that reduces it. But, strangely enough, if the audience resists offering that sympathy - which I did - then Spacey’s choice becomes more effective. For all that Richard won’t stop talking to us, after all, from the perspective of the drama we’re not there. We are figments of Richard’s imagination. And if we refuse to pity him, then our resistance and his increasingly frenetic efforts to get our attention become an effective enactment of the dialogue taking place inside Richard’s head. We are the unpitying chorus that Richard hears when he talks to himself.
The dividends of this approach are paid almost immediately, in the wooing scene with Lady Anne. This is a scandalously impossible scene - Richard successfully winning the hand of the woman whose husband and father-in-law he slew, while the body of her father-in-law literally bleeds in front of them. As is unfortunately too typical of productions I’ve seen, Annabel Scholey makes an unconvincing Anne. The problem isn’t that she’s shallow - Anne has to be shallow; if she had any depth at all, Richard wouldn’t make any headway. But just as still waters run deep, waves crest higher over the shallows; her shallowness should manifest as violently changeable - but convincing - emotion, and this conviction was lacking. Spacey’s Richard, on the other hand, was magnificent in this scene, and here was where the dividends were first paid for that opening scene. Precisely because we had seen the violence of Richard’s emotions about himself from the first, we see that he is putting these emotions to work in his scene with Anne, transmuting his self-loathing into a passionate feeling: you, Anne, only you can save me from myself. It’s a pitch that, with the right woman, just might work; I believed it, because it had conviction. It wasn’t manipulation; it was method acting - not on Spacey’s part, but on Richard’s. And then, when Anne departs, Spacey’s Richard appears to turn on a dime, eviscerating her for her shallowness and changeability. And then he does something surprising, and turns the knife on himself:
And will she yet debase her eyes on me,
That cropp’d the golden prime of this sweet prince,
And made her widow to a woful bed?
On me, whose all not equals Edward’s moiety?
On me, that halt and am unshapen thus?
In Ian McKellen’s movie, this is the introduction to a momentary reevaluation by Richard of himself. This is the moment when Richard realizes that, on some level, his opening monologue was wrong, he’s not Alberich, he doesn’t have to renounce love, and McKellen dances up the stairs joking about watching his shadow as he passes. Spacey does exactly the opposite. The prospect of being loved, of having actually wooed a woman, forces him to confront himself again; when he says that “she finds, although I cannot,/ Myself to be a marvellous proper man” his voice breaks. Her affection hasn’t altered his opinion of himself, but reminded him of it; indeed, he wants a glass not to marvel that she could love his misshapen but to remind himself that he is misshapen, to strengthen himself in his self-hatred, and turn that hatred outward on the world. It’s a wonderful performance.
The only other moment that rises to similar heights is the late confrontation between Richard and Queen Elizabeth, when he tries to woo her daughter through her, and thereby secure his hold on the throne. Haydn Gwynne seemed to me to be a rather subdued Elizabeth for much of the play, but in this scene it became clear that she was husbanding her strength, and she convinces as the only person willing to stare Richard down. Spacey’s Richard rages at her, but there’s a petulance to the rage - it’s not that he can’t imagine being opposed, it’s that “it cannot be avoided but by this” - that “it” springs from somewhere deeper than the reasons of state that Richard avers; it’s not a threat, but a cry of desperation.
By this point, I was fully won over to Spacey’s portrayal of Richard, and perforce hence to this production, which, in contradistinction to the last Richard III I saw, is overwhelmingly about Richard qua Richard, a psychological portrait rather than a social or theologico-historical one. I say “perforce” because there is precious little else in the production that I can say anything good about. At this point, I’m pretty settled in my opinions of Sam Mendes as a director: I don’t like him. I keep seeing his productions because BAM is my local theatre and because he works with some amazing actors, but I cannot think of a plainly directorial choice - as opposed to one by his actors - that either at the time or in retrospect I found served the play.
A brief catalog of the bizarre directorial choices in this production of Richard III would include:
He has two grown women play the princes in the tower, so that we are relatively less-moved by their deaths than usual. He dispatches Richard’s victims by having their executioner wave his hand over their eyes, making their deaths as bloodless and serene as possible. It sometimes felt to me like he was deliberately sabotaging everybody else onstage but Spacey.
And finally, when and where is this play set? The opening curtain read, “Now.” Okay, then. Why is Richard dressed in pseudo-fascist garb? Why does the play open with ancient newsreel footage? Why are the telephones and other office equipment on display at Richard’s HQ as he prepares for battle with Richmond all of World War II-vintage? Apart from Buckingham’s elegant suit and Richard’s remote control, is there anything at all in this production that says, “Now?” If not, what is that word doing there on the curtain?
I don’t demand that plays be set in a recognizable place and time. I recall with great affection a production of Henry IV part 1 in which the Prince and his wingman, Poins, were dressed in modern jeans and leather, his father and the court generally dressed in Edwardian garb, and Falstaff and the rest of the Eastcheap crowd in costumes from Merrie Olde England. Well and good: the signifiers all lined up with something intended to be signified, and the world was, from the perspective of Hal, emotionally consistent. But if you say, “this play is set now” then it should be set now, not in some cracked version of 1939.
The feeling I get most often from Mendes’s productions is simply one of laziness. He chooses the most obvious path to eliciting an emotion from the audience, and doesn’t really seem to care whether it works or not, either on its own terms or in terms of the larger production. He wants to show us that Hastings is a lech, so he gives us a naked woman in his bed. But he doesn’t bother to figure out what her presence is doing to the scene, so he ignores her once he’s done with her. He wants us to know that Richard III is evil, so he dresses him as a fascist - the easiest signifier of evil available. But he also wants us to think Richard is present among us, so he says that his play is set “now” and throws in the occasional trapping of the present to justify that claim. And he doesn’t worry that these two choices undermine each other.
Spacey gives us a compelling and interesting Richard, not the always-in-control Machiavel but the method actor using his own pain and self-loathing to win, of all things, the pity of those he will destroy. It would be fantastic to see a production that embedded this character in a recognizable world with a recognizable politics, that showed us just what the threat is from this character “now.” But Mendes seems more interested in using what we already know to save himself some effort than in telling us what we most urgently need to know to save ourselves from the Richards among us.
In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous story, “When Shlemiel Went To Warsaw,” a man from Chelm - an idiot, a shlemiel named, appropriately enough, “Shlemiel” - goes on a journey to see far off Warsaw. He doesn’t get far before he tires and lies down for a nap, leaving his boots pointing in the direction he was going so he would know where to go when he waked. A mischief maker turns his boots around while Shlemiel sleeps, so when Shlemiel wakes he walks back the way he came instead of continuing to Warsaw. Arriving in the next town, Shlemiel is puzzled by the striking similarities to his own hometown of Chelm - same name, houses, same people, even a wife and children who look exactly like his living in a house identical to his own. But, of course, this can’t be his own Chelm - it must be a second, identical Chelm, with its own Shlemiel who must himself be on a journey.
Although he wishes to continue on his way, he is prevailed upon by the town’s elders to remain until the other Shlemiel returns, and to live in the other Shlemiel’s wife’s house as a caretaker for her children until her husband returns. And so he does. The husband, of course, never does return, and though Shlemiel himself is happier with his new wife and family than he had been with the ones he left behind, he concludes that journeying is fruitless when the whole world is the same all over, all just one big Chelm.
Singer adapted this story, combined with elements from other stories in his Chelm cycle, into a straight play, Shlemiel the First, which, in turn, Robert Brustein adapted into a musical, which just completed a revival run at the Skirball Center at NYU. The result, while pleasant and basically enjoyable, is so smothered in schmaltz that you can only barely still taste the sharpness of Singer’s wit.
Part of the problem is the production. Shlemiel is played as a sweet naif rather than a lazy fool. His wife has obvious affection for him from the first; because she doesn’t start out as a harridan, we don’t see a profound change when he comes back convinced he’s not her husband. Gronam Ox is a transparent buffoon rather than an arrogant bully. And everybody mugs and mugs and mugs. The only character this pays off for is the rich man, who comes to Gronam Ox to come up with a way he can avoid dying (he’s not only rich but punctilious in his observance - why should he die like all those fools who didn’t save their pennies and resist temptation as he did?), who gets a marvelously direct song about his conviction that he deserves immortality. For everyone else, all this mugging is a way of soothing us, making sure we know that nobody threatening or disturbing, and nothing actually serious is going on in this town. Which, if the audience agrees, is a surefire way to lose their interest.
And part of the problem is that the musical sentimentalizes what the stories satirizes. This is particularly the case when it comes to food. The Shlemiel of the stories fantasizes about being king of Chelm and receiving, in lieu of taxes, a jar of strawberry jam. That tells us something about Shlemiel’s relationship to food, and to money - and to his own imagination. These are poor people dreaming of what they imagine riches would be. When Brustein’s Chelmnites sing about blintzes, though, they are playing on the audience’s nostalgia for “old country” foods. They are ribbing us about that nostalgia, yes, but it’s still all about us, not about them. They are not creating a different world and inviting us to enter, which is what theatre should do.
And part of the problem, the most inexplicable part, to me, is the insane impulse to change the ending that afflicts so many adaptations of literature for stage and screen. In the short story that forms the main basis for the musical, Shlemiel never gets over his conviction that he is living in a bizarre duplicate of his old home town. He muses, for the rest of his days, about what his adventures have taught him about the nature of the world, without coming to any clear conclusion. The ending is marvelous and quite funny.
The musical actually improves on the story by elaborating on the Shlemiel family’s domestic arrangements when he returns. Since Shlemiel is married to another woman, and Mrs. Shlemiel is married to another Shlemiel, he can’t legally or morally cohabit with Mrs. Shlemiel. But he’s supposed to live in her house, and there’s no other bedroom to give him. So they set up a curtain between his bed and hers. But of course, the “walls of Jericho” don’t stay up long. This is all quite funny and also smart satire - of the traditional practice of niddah in particular. And then, just as the couple have concluded that they love each other more than either ever loved their original spouses, they discover that they are each other’s original spouses. The mystery is unraveled, Shlemiel knows who he really is - and we are denied Shlemiel’s sense of wonder at the nature of the universe that graces the end of Singer’s story in favor of a trite moral about there being no place like home. Feh.
Singer has become assimilated to the Jewish kitsch borg, which he would probably find funny but which I find deplorable. Philip Roth has long been despised in certain Jewish quarters for airing dirty laundry in public. But Singer, who is more universally loved, is similarly despised in certain deep Yiddish quarters for saying that the laundry didn’t get dirty here in the treifa medina, but was already dirty back in the old country. His comedy grows from the soil on that laundry. Clean it up, and it isn’t funny anymore. So I wish people would keep the detergent away and let him be his smelly self.
Speaking of Beckett, two other theatrical highlights of December for me were a pair of productions of his short works: Krapp’s Last Tape, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring John Hurt and directed by Michael Colgan, and a collection of really short works assembled by directors Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne into an evening called Fragments, presented by Theatre For a New Audience at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.
Krapp shows us a man, on his 69th birthday, recording his reflections on his life to this point, as he has done annually for decades. But there isn’t much to the recording he makes; he has precious little to say. Mostly he listens to a recording he made thirty years earlier, when he was still relatively young (though he already felt as though life as such had passed him by, and that what was left, what still animated him, was the urge to record his thoughts and feelings, on tape and on paper, and thereby turn his experience, even especially his experience of disappointment, into art.
It’s a pretty terrifying work for a blogger to confront, for obvious reasons. This was my second confrontation, though, and as always when one confronts a classic repeatedly different aspects come to the surface. The Beckett estate’s controlling attitude toward how his works are performed paradoxically makes the small differences from one production to the next stand out more sharply, which I suppose is a backhanded argument in favor of our overly-broad construction of copyright. My first encounter with Krapp starred Brian Dennehy, than whom a more different actor than John Hurt can barely be imagined. What struck me immediately about Hurt was how much he looked like Beckett himself; what struck me next was, in contradiction to my first impression, how English he seemed, and how strange that Englishness felt in Beckett. But I warmed to him very quickly, and I think he got think he got Beckett’s whimsy - the whole business with the bananas - more than Dennehy did. His anger was more despairing, less self-lacerating than Dennehy’s was; Dennehy’s Krapp, I think, came to him via O’Neill, more via O’Neill the writer himself than via any of his characters, a raging darkness of self-hatred, where Hurt raged more against the dying of the light.
What struck me about the text itself, this time, was how conventionally poetic the 39-year-old Krapp’s tape was. This text, after all, was written by Beckett. But it doesn’t sound like Beckett, not the Beckett of drama and not the Beckett of the novels either. A Beckett who might-have-been, perhaps, had he not taken his literary vows of poverty and silence. Which led me to reflect on Krapp as a meditation on that very choice. Beckett’s renunciations, so central to his achievement, left him in the position of the elder Krapp, listening mockingly to the sound of someone still foolish enough to wish to speak.
Which is an even scarier thought than thinking of Krapp as a blogger.
Fragments was an international production of continental sensibility, which felt much more at home, to me, in Beckett, but the five short pieces, though great fun, were less revelatory than Krapp, which I suppose is what I expected. The pieces are vaudevilles, basically: a blind man and a wheelchair-bound man struggle against each other for supremacy as they struggle together for survival (Rough For Theatre I); two men, of pessimistic and optimistic temperament, respectively, take turns waking, going about their daily routines, and retiring for the night (Act Without Words, II); three women take turns gossiping in pairs while the third stands apart to be gossiped about (Come and Go). What struck me about them all together was the degree to which Beckett depends on performers and directors who understand his humor. He wrote these routines for clowns, essentially, and reading a script intended for a clown can’t be terribly funny.
Finally catching up with the remaining shows from 2011, and I’ll start with one of the best of the year: Classic Stage’s production of The Cherry Orchard, which, if you can believe it, is actually still running; you could see it this weekend if you could only score a ticket.
The Cherry Orchard is the most experimental of Chekhov’s major plays. Indeed, it feels to me like the essential forerunner of Beckett - in this production in particular, possibly because I’d seen John Turturro (who plays Lopakhin) and Alvin Epstein (who plays Fiers) in a production of Endgame at the Brooklyn Academy of Music not long ago. First, this is a play in which, essentially, nothing happens. I suppose that’s not literally true - the cherry orchard is sold, after all, though that feels more like inevitable fate than an action; if Lopakhin hadn’t bought it and chopped it down, someone else would have. The mood of people passing the time at the end of (their) world, of starting little routines that don’t go anywhere - the character Charlotta, the magician, what she’s doing in this circus God only knows - never settles quite the same way until Godot. But second, and more essentially, Chekhov’s characters in this play are more essentially isolated, more essentially alone than in any of his prior work, in very much the way that, for example, the characters in Endgame, though they are trapped together, are not, in any real sense, with each other. (And then, of course, there’s Fiers’s own endgame, forgotten and abandoned.)
This production undertakes a few experiments of its own, some involving the translation, which was commissioned for this production and which is strikingly different in tone from the colloquial (and effective, but different) Three Sisters translation CSC used last year, but also avoids the dusty quality of out-of-date Chekhov translations - it seemed to be aiming for timelessness via a very plain and direct style, and admirably achieved its aim. The big experiment, though, was breaking the fourth wall, having characters address the audience and even, a couple of times, enter and involve the audience. This has nothing to do with Chekhov, and little to do with Beckett; it’s more Elizabethan than anything else - and yet, while it brought us closer to the characters themselves, it underlined their isolation from each other. They might talk to us more readily than they’d talk to each other; they might, in fact, talk to us, not so much in soliloquy but in confidence, because we’re the only ones listening. It works marvelously precisely because although as a matter of theatrical style it’s alien to the text, it achieves a theatrical objective that is very much in harmony with it. Which is exactly what a creative experiment should strive for.
The spine of the story is about real estate: the disposition of the family estate, and the “famous” cherry orchard thereon. Mme. Ranevskaya comes back home, knowing that “something” has to be done if the estate is to be saved; she does nothing; the estate is not saved, but is bought by Lopakhin; she, and her family, leave. This all feels so symbolic, and the play lends itself to symbolic interpretations heavy on class - Mme. Ranevskaya and her brother, Gayev, representing the fading aristocracy; Lopakhin, the former serf turned successful business tycoon, representing the rising middle class; Trofimov representing the left-wing intelligentsia that would play a crucial role in both the failed revolution of 1905 (less than two years after the premier of the play) and the successful revolution of 1917. The last production of the play that I saw before this one, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Simon Russell Beale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, leaned very much on this kind of symbolic interpretation, with surly, disgruntled workers lurking about the stage, waiting for their opportunity to rise against this decadent dithering, and while, as I say, the play lends itself to that kind of interpretation, I don’t think such an approach serves the play at all.
To my mind, the class background is just that: background, the scene upon which the drama is played. This isn’t a play about the rising middle class and the fading aristocracy, the transition from feudal to commercial values. It’s a play that’s set at a time of class and values transition. To the extent that the play calls attention to these values - either those that are fading or those that are rising - it’s to satirize them. That’s patently the point of Gayev’s absurd speech to the cabinet in the nursery, but deeper and darker, it’s also the point of Lopakhin’s antipathy toward Varya. Varya, it must be admitted, isn’t a very appealing character; she spends almost the entire play shouting at people. But all she’s trying to do is save the family from destitution which, if we are to believe Lopakhin, is all he wants as well. Why, then, is he so patently hostile to her, not even showing her the bland affection that, say Kulygin shows for his sister-in-law Olga (who he knows would have been a better match for him)?
This production did a great service to the story in casting the exceptionally lovely Juliet Rylance as Varya, thereby removing from consideration the possibility that Lopakhin is so hostile to the idea of marrying Varya because he doesn’t find her physically attractive. What he sees in her, rather, is a cramped quality of soul, a meanness. A meanness that, no doubt, she had to learn simply to survive, given the impossibility of her position, and we’re meant to sense that there’s a good person down there underneath it, but that person is pretty deeply buried by the time the play begins. She shows herself, briefly, in the failed proposal scene - which is played to wonderful comic effect by Turturro and Rylance in this production, Turturro’s Lopakhin trying, earnestly, to make himself say the words he really doesn’t want to say, Rylance’s Varya waiting for them, patiently, trying to urge him on with her eyes, her smile (a smile we’ve never seen shine so warmly in her earlier scenes). It’s a comic scene because it’s not a scene about embarrassment; it’s not that Lopakhin can’t bring himself to propose to Varya because he’s afraid to propose, but that he is horrified by the idea of spending his life with her, but he’s too decent a man to admit that, even to himself.
Why does he detest that idea so much? Presumably because he sees enough meanness in himself that he doesn’t want to be around it. Turturro does a splendid job with the scenes where Lopakhin recalls his past as a slave (before the serfs were freed); two generations of impoverished Italian immigrants seemed to speak through him. But those speeches are the character background that explains his antipathy toward Varya. I don’t get any sense from Lopakhin that he has class ambitions - he has no interest in marrying into the aristocracy. If he wanted to set himself up as an aristocrat, he’d have bought the estate and lived on it. Rather, he senses a quality of soul in Mme. Ranevskaya that he wants to be associated with. He knows what it took to become what he is, how much work, how much discipline, how much indifference - he brags about it to Trofimov, after all, and, more vulgarly, in his drunkenness, to Mme. Ranevskaya herself, after he returns from the auction. He loves her precisely for the quality of extreme open-handedness that he knows has led her to her doom. Which means, of course, that all his speeches about how they could save themselves by cutting down the orchard and putting up cottages are in bad faith, though he surely doesn’t know that. If they did what he advised, he’d hate them for it, just as he hates Varya. Instead, he’ll buy the estate, cut down the orchard himself, and content himself with hating himself.
But what is it about Mme. Ranevskaya? Does he see something that we see, or does he only see something that is meaningful to him? This is the first production, and Diane Wiest the first Ranevskaya, that made me think that maybe, maybe, he sees something real rather than just something that he wants to see. I’ve always had a bit of contempt for Mme. Ranevskaya; she’s a very silly person, who, it always seemed to me, needed somebody to give her a good shake and a talking to. Her brother Gayev obviously wasn’t going to do the job; and the tragedy, such as it is, always seemed to me to be that she was too much of a snob to see that Lopakhin was exactly what she needed. Which is a pretty shallow tragedy, when it comes right down to it. Well, maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, and maybe it’s Wiest’s performance, most likely both, but I get it now. Because Wiest’s Ranevskaya is an absolute darling. Any man who didn’t just want to hold her and protect her, just as she is, well, that fellow’s suffering from a dangerous deficiency of sentimental affection. But she’s a clever girl, under all that, in matters of the heart. Look at her speech to Trofimov about love. Wiest delivers it without guile - she’s quite serious, which is precisely what makes it both powerful and funny. (And how anyone can take Trofimov seriously as the hero of the piece - the vanguard of the revolution - after this confrontation, I don’t know.) This is the closest we come to a creedal declaration from Mme. Ranevskaya; love is what she believes. And she lives what she believes. (I like to think that if Marylin Monroe had lived another twenty years, this would have been a good part for her - a part that would prove to the world once and for all that she was an actress, not just a movie star.)
And she doesn’t love Lopakhin. She’s embarrassed, repulsed by the very idea, and it’s not a class thing, it’s not snobbery, not purely or primarily. She sees that he is trying to save himself by saving her, and that if she lets him save her it will destroy her. She sees that, even though she probably doesn’t know precisely what she sees. She’s right: Varya is a good match for him. That’s why he can’t bear the thought of marrying her. That’s why it’s so painful for Varya that he won’t think marrying her, why she hasn’t long since moved on to some other prospect.
All this heartache, I should stress, is handled with great tenderness by this production. I’ve talked a lot about meanness, but Turturro’s Lopakhin is very gentle, actually, very sweet, and Rylance’s Varya so obviously wants to be loved, and to be a tender caretaker to someone who she can love, and not just worry about all the time. The play is very funny - everyone’s comic timing is super-sharp, but I particularly have to call out Alvin Epstein for a bravura performance as Fiers. It’s striking to see an old man play an old man, but to do it acting, playing a different old man than he actually is, as opposed to seeing a younger actor play “old” or an older actor play “the kind of old guy I play.” The play funny the way Beckett is funny; funny because people are absurd, and we have to laugh to keep from crying. Chekhov is second only to Shakespeare among dramatists for the depth and breadth of his imaginative sympathy, and I give all credit to the director, Andrei Belgrader, the translator, John Christopher Jones, and the entire company, who worked collaboratively with both the director and the translator all through the process, for engaging their own imaginative sympathy, and thereby bringing these funny, lonely people back to life.
Why do we tell stories - really?
James X, a one-man show from Ireland that I saw last week in a downtown Manhattan theatre space, appears to be a story about cruelty, suffering and shame - and to whom shame properly belongs. It’s an indictment of the Irish social welfare and juvenile justice system - of a state and a church and a society that collaborated to perpetrate terrible cruelties on young children placed in its purported care, and then further collaborated to hide those cruelties from society. The form of the play is a monologue - by James, a character waiting to testify at a hearing about his abuse as a child. Before he goes into the hearing, he tells us his story.
And it’s an at least somewhat familiar Irish tale of the hard life - shiftless father, raging mother, too many children, not enough food, lousy schools, beatings, imprisonment - told in a familiar style of grandiose self-pitying humor. And I sat there listening to this, and thinking: really? Didn’t Flann O’Brien take the piss out of this sort of thing decades ago? And I’ll admit, I got restless in my seat.
We wander through the character’s adulthood - failure to find steady work, brief shot at fame as a rock singer, then descent into drink, another collection of Irish cliches - until we come back to the present.
And then the character stops, turns to us, and tells us that what he’s been telling us - the entire show to this point - was just so much chin music. Just a “story” he tells, part of his armor to shield himself from a direct confrontation with what happened to him.
And then he unfolds a piece of paper - his testimony - and reads it to us. Reads about being raped by the first priest he met upon arrival at the Christian Brothers’ school he was shipped off to in Connemara to “straighten him out” at the age of ten. Reads about subsequent rapes at the school, and about a beating so bad that he wound up in the hospital and required multiple surgeries to save his life. Reads about further horrific brutalities in prison - all delivered in a plain, affectless style. Just the facts. No blarney. Even knowing this was coming - since the framing at the opening of the show lets us know we’re going to hear a story about child abuse - the testimony comes as a shock.
The play is supposed to be an indictment of the Irish state and society, and it is that. But it is also, and perhaps more effectively, an indictment of Irish culture, and of much of Irish literature, an indictment of a distinctly Irish way of talking about suffering, a way that was, perhaps, a reasonable coping mechanism, but has also proved to be a screen that prevents people from seeing when suffering is inflicted, and by whom, and taking action to respond.
I saw two plays recently, both contemporary, one of which I liked (Nicky Silver’s The Lyons now playing at the Vineyard Theatre with Linda Lavin in the lead) and one of which I didn’t (Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling, recently mounted by the Atlantic Theatre Company at the Classic Stage space, with Christine Lahti in the lead), but both of which set me to ruminating on the question of when they were supposed to be set.
Both are comic family dramas apparently set in the present. Silver’s play features a hilariously overbearing, opinionated, sexually aggressive and critical mother, eagerly awaiting the death of her terminally ill husband, and two over-the-top dysfunctional offspring, the daughter a divorced recovering alcoholic, the son a creepy gay recluse and failed writer who substitutes fantasies of relationships with people he sees from his window for actual human connection. Oh, yes, and a “magic negro” character in the person of the nurse who attends first on the dying paterfamilias and then on the son, who is hospitalized after being brutally beaten by one of his fantasy objects, who he’s been stalking; the falsest note in the play is the close, when the hospitalized son tries to connect emotionally with the nurse, and she reciprocates.
Rapp’s play, by contrast, features a hilariously overbearing, opinionated, sexually aggressive and critical mother, eager to do away with her mousily ineffectual husband and run off with their friend and neighbor (who appears no less mousily ineffectual than her husband is), and two over-the-top dysfunctional offspring: the daughter a creepy recluse and failed artist, and the neighbor’s son, recently released from a psychiatric hospital after a failed suicide attempt, who substitutes a fantasy online relationship with an Iraqi boy (presumably actually an adult masquerading as same) for actual human connection. Oh, yes, and there’s also a black servant who Lahti requires to wear a French maid’s outfit and speak in French who putters about, serving and clearing and being accidentally pulled onto the dining room table by the neighbor’s son while he’s having sex with the daughter on said table.
There are important differences between the plays. Silver’s is funny, for one. Also, his dysfunctional family is Jewish. Also, Adam Rapp’s play features a variety of dead animals. But what they have in common is a kind of out-of-time quality.
Silver’s play, to me, strongly recalled the work of Christopher Durang, whose most important work was created in the 1980s. And the two central characters of the play - the mother, a wife of forty years who decides to live for herself now that her husband has finally died, and the reclusive and emotionally unconnected gay son whose father tried to turn him straight when he was a kid - in particular seem like characters from that era. I kept trying to figure it out: the mother is supposed to have been married for forty years. The son is the younger kid. So, assuming she got pregnant relatively soon but not immediately after marrying, and assuming she spaced the kids out a bit, he’s probably 35. It’s now 2011. That means he was born in 1976. Which means he entered college in 1994. Obviously, life for gay teens and young adults is really different now than it was in the 1990s - but it was also really different in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s or 1970s. And the mother married in 1971. Assuming she married young (the average age at first marriage for women in 1971 was 21) she was born in the late 1940s - an early baby boomer - and, in the present, is in her early 60s. She’s probably younger than Hillary Clinton.
Now, again, don’t get me wrong - there are plenty of Jewish matrons in their early ’60s who the mother figure is reminiscent of. But they are throwbacks. The characters in The Heidi Chronicles are the same generation as the parents in The Lyons. But there is no indication, from the way these characters look and behave, that they lived through the same history.
The play, rather, feels displaced in time - displaced, specifically, from the era of Nicky Silver’s first achievement, the 1990s. The parents look older than they would have been then - because those characters have aged fifteen years since then - but they are nominally the same age they were then (Lavin is a 74-year-old, and as I saw her on stage she’s playing a 74-year-old, but if the character she’s playing is actually 74 then she married at age 34, which makes her regret for having missed out on life and her need to finally live for herself quixotic to say the least; it makes much more sense to think of this character as a 62-year-old who married at 22). The kids are also older than they were then - implausibly old, if you really look at the calendar - but more to the point, they are living lives that make more sense in the context of that era. (The reclusive son, for example, shows no signs of having heard of the internet, which is pretty much inconceivable for a contemporary recluse but entirely appropriate for a mid-1990s recluse.)
The Rapp play is more obviously displaced, so much so that I have to assume the displacement was deliberate. He’s situated his drama in the suburban Connecticut of Edward Albee’s imagination, a place that hasn’t changed since 1965. The most obviously displaced element is the plot (such as it is): the Christine Lahti character wants to do away with her husband and run off with her neighbor. Why doesn’t she just get a divorce, he asks her? “Oh, that would take forever,” she replies. Which gets a nice laugh. But what kind of an answer is that? It doesn’t actually make any sense at all as an answer. I got the sense that Rapp knew that his plot had a problem: that what might have been socially plausible (murder is the only way out of this marriage) in an era when divorce was relatively rare - or at least plausible enough to be an amusing conceit - had become utterly implausible. But he still wanted to organize the action of his play around this idea. So he just … pointed to the problem, and got a laugh. But since the problem remains, I have no idea how to take the action of the play.
The black maid presents a similar problem. In Hal Ashby’s debut feature, “The Landlord,” which is all about race and class at a particular point in time, there are several powerful scenes involving characters - black and white - being dressed up in period costume: a scene where a black servant in livery gets a tureen of soup dumped over his head; a scene where a white character shows up at a party in blackface and eighteenth-century costume; a scene where a white character imagines herself as a southern plantation owner with mulatto grandchildren at her feet; etc. But that film was from 1970, and it was very clear what the director was doing with those scenes. I have no idea, by contrast, what Rapp is doing with the black servant character in this play. I had to assume that he was saying something about how things haven’t changed, or about how these particular characters want to behave as if things haven’t changed, or something. Except that I simply didn’t believe that a young black woman today would participate quietly in this particular farce - in fact, I would expect the job to go not to an African-American woman but to an immigrant (possibly from the Caribbean, so she might well be of African descent - but she also might well already speak French).
As I keep saying, I have to assume that the displacement, in this case, is deliberate. That Rapp is trying to write an Albee play, and therefore these out-of-time elements are really archetypes from Rapp’s version of Albee’s box of tricks. But … to what purpose? That’s what’s never clear to me. If you choose to mount an Albee play, you have to figure out how to connect that work to the present while being true to the time in which it was written and set. If you choose to write an Albee play, it’s all the more important to be able to answer the question: why? Why now? What am I saying to this audience today by depicting a social world that is a parody of a world decades past? Unfortunately, at the end of the play, I didn’t have much of an answer to that question.
What carries both plays is the acting. Lahti is a pleasure to watch and listen to even if I don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing, and Reed Birney does a fine, understated job as her husband. In Silver’s play, Lavin’s performance is a tour-de-force, but Michael Esper is affecting as the son, Dick Latessa persuasive as the husband, and Gregory Wooddell brings a surprising amount of life to his one scene, as the object of Michael Esper’s stalking (though I didn’t really believe in the violence with which that scene climaxes). Silver’s play rises well above Rapp’s because I believed in his characters emotionally, which I never really did with Rapp’s; they both get their laughs, but Silver’s come from inside, and that makes all the difference to the actors as well as to the audience.
But I remain troubled about this question of displacement in time. The theatre is distinguished among the arts for its immediacy; whenever it is happening in terms of the world of the show, it’s happening now. To my mind, that only increases the urgency that a play make us feel that we are there now. Which doesn’t mean setting things in the present - it means letting us know where and when we are. Even if you’re doing a production of Endgame, and where you are is nowhere and when you are is the end of never - it should be a specific nowhere, at the end of a particular vision of never. Because if we don’t know where we’re going, odds are we’ll never get there.
On THE man from Stratford:
There’s quotation that appears on the Shakespeare Oxford Society’s website that seems to me to inadvertently undermine the very claim it intends to make. It says this:
“Those who believe de Vere was Shakespeare must accept an improbable hoax, a conspiracy of silence involving, among others, Queen Elizabeth herself. Those who side with the Stratford man must believe in miracles.”
Well, okay. If that’s what it takes, then yes, I believe in miracles.
Thanks, Antoni. Read the rest of the speech here.
My other very-overdue review from Chicago is of Steppenwolf’s impressive production of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. In a nutshell, Norris’s play is A Raisin in the Sun told from the white perspective. I don’t think that’s how Norris himself would put it, exactly, and I don’t think that’s exactly what he intended. But I think that’s roughly what he achieved, and the play should make audiences - white audiences, in particular - uncomfortable in ways that are rather different from those articulated by the reviews I’ve read.
The play is a diptych. Act I is set in 1959, in the house that the Youngers have purchased in Lorraine Hansberry’s play, as the white owners are packing up to leave for the suburbs. The surface action of Act I is about the effort by Karl Lindner, head of the Clybourne Park Improvement Assocation and the only character to overlap between Clybourne Park and Raisin in the Sun, to convince Russ, the male half of the departing white couple, not to sell to a black family (since, per Hansberry’s plot, he’s already failed to pay the Youngers off not to move in). And there’s a great deal of cringe-inducing dialogue among the white characters (much of it delivered in front of a black maid and her husband) about the need to preserve the “character” of the neighborhood and about how “those” people wouldn’t be happy there anyway.
But this is only what’s happening on the surface. What’s happening below the surface is that, from the perspective of Russ, the most potent character in the whole play, played with subtle authority by John Judd, this “community” that Lindner is trying to preserve is a fraud. Russ has suffered the loss of his son, not in war in Korea (he made it through that conflict intact in body if not in mind), but to suicide when, upon his return, he is unable to reintegrate himself into civilian life. From Russ’s perspective, the “community” turned their back on his son’s suffering, and drove him to suicide; and since his death, the “community” has done nothing to actually support him and his wife in their grief. This is a “community” of self-congratulation, in which happiness is asserted to be collective but suffering is privatized. And he wants no part of it. If his suffering is to be privatized, by God he’ll privatize his happiness as well, and move to the suburbs, and to heck with the “community” he’s leaving behind.
The 1959 set so perfectly evokes the era and the locale, that I actually gasped at the opening of Act II when I saw the ruins of this house, windows knocked out, graffiti scrawled across the walls. (People talk about theatrical effects, but that’s the best kind of effect, when a static set shocks you awake just by being revealed.)
You see, the second half of the play is set fifty years later. In the intervening years, Karl Lindner’s worst fears came to pass: the Youngers apparently did initiate a cycle of decline, with middle-class whites moving out to the suburbs, the neighborhood becoming overwhelmingly black and then predominantly poor. And now, after decades of urban renaissance, Clybourne Park is on the target list for gentrification. The house has been sold to a conventionally liberal white couple, who have come in with their own plans to privatize their happiness: to knock down the house the Youngers bought and build a McManstrosity. And Karl Linder’s modern counterparts - members of the local community organization, including a middle-class black couple armed with rulings about the “historic character” of the neighborhood - aim to stop them.
It was delightful to spot the lines of continuity between each actor’s performance in the first and second acts: Kirsten Fitzgerald’s flibbertygibbet 50s matron becomes a hilariously contemporary flibbertygibbet real estate agent; her powerfully-drawn husband from the first act becomes the genially wry observer of a construction worker in the second, exhuming the chest of secrets that “he” buried fifty years ago. Particularly powerful was the “evolution” of the black couple, played feelingly by Karen Aldridge and with fine economy by James Vincent Meredith, from a maid and her working-class husband to a middle-class couple, from people who have to keep a tight hold on any expression of feeling around the white folks to people who know the rules of decorum but know, also, that the new rules protect them as well, and who are willing to break them when they see their honor at stake. The black characters in both acts have their lives off-stage - this is a white couple’s house in both. But they come off as no less real for that - in Act I, they are overshadowed by the central white drama, but you get glimpses of their own drama happening on some other stage, while in Act II the white characters are so shallow that even their sketchily drawn-in personae seem more real.
The white couple - particularly the husband, played twitchingly by Cliff Chamberlain, the same actor who played Karl Lindner - assert about half-way through the act that the opposition is all about race, after which the discussion descends into an exchange of racist jokes; and, on one level, he’s right: while one could imagine opposition to a wealthy black family with similar architectural ambitions, there’s no way the level of tension in the room would be anything like what it is without the racial element. But on another level, he’s wrong. This isn’t about race, really. It’s about a community. The black couple have a sentimental attachment to place because they have memories of a community that struggled to preserve itself in the face of extraordinary adversity - a collapsing tax base, soaring crime, the crack epidemic. Now that this community has clawed its way back to prosperity, they don’t want to see that happiness privatized.
From the perspective of the Lindners of the world, all that adversity is the fault of the Youngers: if they hadn’t moved in back in 1959, the neighborhood wouldn’t have gone to pot. From the perspective of a contemporary liberal, all that adversity is the fault of the Lindners of the world: if they hadn’t fled when the Youngers moved in, the neighborhood wouldn’t have gone to pot. But to me, this debate is less interesting than the question: what actually makes a community?
Norris’s play is substantially about language, about how we talk about things we aren’t supposed to talk about. In Act I, what we’re not supposed to talk about is private suffering - the black characters can’t talk about almost anything for fear of revealing their own feelings to a white community who don’t want to hear about them, and the white characters can’t talk about the dead boy who lost his soul in Korea, and this silence tears their community apart. In Act II, what we’re not supposed to talk about is whether, in fact, we are members of a single community. “Race” is one way to put it, but nobody in Act II is actually talking about specific racial prejudices, and nobody is actually taking the position that they want to exclude somebody from the community on racial grounds. The language in Act II has been infected by politics, the kind of language you use across communal boundaries; and the descent into crude jokes is an empty sort of catharsis: hate, at least, is a feeling.
What should make us uncomfortable is the realization that, while our highly political language has made it possible for the Youngers to buy a house where they like, it has created new barriers to the formation of a single community, where a good measure of our happiness and our suffering is shared rather than privatized. But, and this should make us even more uncomfortable, that language is probably necessary. Because the easiest way to form a community is in opposition to some other community. That knowledge is what unites the execrable Karl Lindner with the righteous Lena, the black woman who makes the case for the importance of the historic character of the community of Clybourne Park. But of course, playing the game that way is how we - America - got into this mess in the first place.
The play ends by bringing us back to the ghost of the Russ’s dead son. I felt ambivalent about this choice in the theatre. After all, if Karl Lindner and his community had been kinder to the boy, or even to his grieving father, then the Youngers might never have had a chance to buy their house. If the white community had proven itself to be a true community, of shared suffering as well as shared happiness, then they might have successfully resisted racial integration. So what does it mean to bring back his ghost at the end? The hope, I suppose, is that a community that could share that boy’s grief, or even his father’s, could not have closed its doors on the Youngers when they sought to join. Myself, I’m not so sure.
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