The Villa Borghese

"Paul" at the Gamm Theatre

2011-04-07T20:46:00.021-04:00

“Paul,” the 2005 play by Howard Brenton about the conversion, missionary work, and final days of the early Christian apostle of the play’s title, is enjoying a spirited but specious North American premier at the Gamm Theatre. The play radically revises the story of Saul of Tarsus, the infamous persecutor of Jesus’ early followers who converted to Christianity and changed his name on the road to Damascus after he was blinded by a miraculous vision of the resurrected Jesus. Brenton undermines this foundational legend – in a way that would be unprofessional to reveal, except perhaps by noting that fans of “Scooby Doo” should be thrilled – to challenge the basis of spiritual identity and religious authority. The show is representative of the contemporary “atheist chic,” which is a sort of reverse loom that spins faith into straw. So the play clatters furiously and in the end we find ourselves amid a scattering of dried-out debris. Think about this for a moment. The author and countless well-meaning and under-compensated theatre professionals have sweated over a work that leaves the audience considering nothing more than a pile of psychological and spiritual detritus. One can almost picture Brenton slinking away from the mess he’s made, whistling through a prankster’s smirk. But the audience has paid, with currency and emotional involvement, for something more rigorous and complex than “Punk’d.” So much for putting an end to childish ways.

The play begins with Paul (Alexander Platt) in a Roman prison, and shows, in flashback, his conversion and his wide travels around the Middle East, often accompanied by his close friend Barnabas (the affable Anthony Goes). He meets James (Marc Dante Mancini), Jesus’ jealous brother; Peter (Jim O’Brien), the ambivalent disciple; and Mary (Karen Carpenter), Jesus’ wife, a diseased and disillusioned prostitute. Paul wants to disseminate the story of Jesus’ life and death; they want to guard and control it. In the end, imprisoned for their evangelism and interrogated by no less an authority than the emperor, Nero (the terrifically lascivious Kelby T. Akin), Peter and Paul are forced to reckon with the squalid and all-too-human circumstances of Paul’s conversion and fervor.

The play ends here, exactly where it should begin – his miraculous encounter exposed as a fraud, Paul starts life anew. But Brenton is too committed to his ironic deconstruction of the Paul conversion story to chart anything original in the terror of self-discovery. That Paul’s understanding dawns only in his last day is evidence that Brenton is unsure of its real consequences. The play is just a mischievous and self-fascinated hypothetical - a diverting parlor game.

It is hard to distinguish the qualities of this production from the shortcomings of the written work. Alexander Platt, who was so vivid as Hedwig in last spring’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at Perishable Theatre, is an engaging Paul, but not dangerous. His performance is more gestural than internal, more mannered than felt. Indeed, this same criticism could apply to nearly all the actors, who seem to think that the somnambulant script might be awakened by very loud shouting. Only Anthony Goes, whose Barnabas is well-meaning but limited, and Kelby Akin, powdered and eerily prescient as Nero, modulate the stage volume and action. Cedric Lilly makes a fine Jesus, but the character is such a cipher. That's the problem with Brenton’s characters, who have no inner worlds to access. Brenton’s writing lacks poetry, spark, and fear – “Brentonion” will never join “Pauline” as a literary adjective of distinction – so his characters are taxidermic: dead on the stage, they move only when pushed. If we learn nothing else from “Paul,” it’s that the dead never walk on their own.

The Gamm Theatre: "A Night at the Fights"

2011-03-06T13:44:00.010-05:00

The tagline for the new show mounted by the Gamm Theatre in the vast, ark-like space in the Pawtucket Armory Drill Hall and featuring three experts in on-stage physicality is "Tricks of the trade revealed!" but don't let this spoiler alert dissuade you: some revelations ruin things; others enrich them. The few tricks that are really revealed in this snappy, and, ultimately, secretive show about the tools and techniques of stage combat will give you a new appreciation for the role of physicality in stage productions: for the thought that goes into its development and the energy and precision that go into its execution. Starting with fist-fights, and moving on to sword, staff, gun, and dagger fights, professional fight master Normand Beauregard and his colleagues Jim Beauregard and Paul Kochanek lead us on a sort of aerial tour of the stage-fight landscape. The audience sees a lot, and much of what we see is dazzling, but there seem to be plenty of unexplored depths left at show's end. As Norman Beauregard explains at the beginning of the show, there's more to stage physicality than can be taught over a four-year college course, let along a two-hour introduction. But, through demonstration and elucidation, he gets pretty far.

The show has enough slapstick to enthrall very young children - a couple of five- or six-year- olds at the performance I saw were doubled over with manic glee during some of the fights - and, I suspect, enough seductive theatre talk to engage curious adolescents. The audience ought to hearten even the most stolid cynic; those who weren't actually children certainly felt like them by show's end. I was hypnotized. The fights are fascinating, and no amount of explanatory talk can diminish their magic, which doesn't emanate from the weapons selected or the specific punch chosen for just that angle to the audience, but from the inches of air between the fist and the face. Still, for all the virtuosity on display here, I left hoping that if the Gamm makes a series of the "tricks of the trade" imprint, the next show is even more elemental: How do actors take the written word and make it song? Less explosive than a punch, that's still the real mystery of the theatre.

*** "A Night at the Fights" is, well, all about fighting. There are goofy flips and punches, but there are also slightly scary swordfights and a gunshot (though no victim). It's all in good fun, but it might also be upsetting to some viewers.

"The Crucible" at Trinity Rep

2011-02-27T13:48:00.020-05:00

One desperately wishes that the current production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at Trinity Rep had not been given such royal treatment. The play is stooped and abashed under the heavy crown – and the errant expectations – placed on it by director Brian McEleney and his cast. Certainly, “The Crucible” is no model of modesty: it is full of declamation and self-righteousness. But it should be allowed to retain its rusticity, its squalor, and its urgency – the elements that make it a human tragedy and not a mere metaphor. McEleney sets it on a throne, from which it issues a series of ungrounded and untestable edicts, before which the audience is cowed like subjects or students. When the audience stands wearily at show’s end, it is as if to acknowledge Miller’s perceived prophetic infallibility rather than the production’s ingenuity. This reflexive display is, of course, anathema to the play’s celebration of the individual.

The premise of this production is that Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, which he wrote as a way to understand and illuminate the farcical anti-communist hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is relevant today because of our own febrile and delusional political discourse. It is a metaphor twice removed and, as such, it makes a better thought experiment than theatre experience. But the first proposition of the Theatre of the Sincere is that even the least articulated thought experiment makes a good play. This is a diminishment of theatre and should be a disappointment to audiences. It suggests that the best that plays can do is edify, and that the most audiences can hope for from a night at the theatre is a sound education, or at least an equivalency certificate. It seems as though Trinity has ceded terror to other media, which is as much to give up on theatre, because it is also a surrender of pleasure. Terror is not merely horror – although in a play about witches in an encroaching geographical and spiritual wilderness, horror ought to loom. (It doesn’t, here.) It is also an aspect of empathy: the fear, aroused through the use of sound, space, and performance, that the fate of the characters onstage is as real, consequential, and undetermined as one’s own. The current Trinity production does not work for this feeling of disorientation; instead, it meets us on our terms, as though only our story mattered. The play itself can practically be discarded as long as its relevance is asserted and our own contemporary condition is spelled out.

Crudely put, “The Crucible” does not tell our story but the story of the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which nineteen women and men were hanged because of the wild accusations of pre-adolescent girls. Or, rather, it tells the part of the story that involves the flawed hero-figure John Proctor, a paragon of masculinity and morality whose lone slip is a doozy: while his wife was sick, he had an affair with his teenaged servant, Abigail. From Abigail, Proctor learns that the girls’ accusations are baseless charges issued out of spite, vengeance, and fear – but in order to expose their fraudulence he has to publicly admit to his indiscretion with her. There are at least three stories entwined here: the hysteria of power enjoyed by the accusing girls; the angry convulsions of the besieged moral authority in Salem; and the degradation of John Proctor, who is not a witch but who, to survive this ordeal as the man he thought he was, must confess to some other transgression. We can’t forget that Miller’s work is not a general indictment of society but a sensitive scanning of community dynamics.

The text takes place in 1692; the action in McEleney’s production is set on the recreated steps of Providence City Hall, built in 1878. The house and stage lights are barely differentiated, so the drama appears to play out in the glare of the light of day. In an interview with Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, McEleney said the production was meant to conjure “guerilla street theater,” immediate and confrontational, but what it conjures instead is community theater, earnest and reassuring. Sure, the production is dyspeptic, but in utterly predictable and uncontroversial ways. The actors, looking adrift on the vast set and, occasionally, along the house aisles, recite their lines as though into a strong wind. They are serious and determined, but their performances feel projected rather than inhabited. The show has all the spontaneity and humor of a Puritan sermon; indeed, it is as dull and deliberate as an exegesis. It cries out for the fury and fervor of a revival.

This is not to say that the production lacks all feeling. The long second scene (the second act in Miller’s script) between John Proctor (Stephen Thorne) and his wife, Elizabeth (Angela Brazil), runs hot with the fuel of feeling: Proctor’s guilt, for having betrayed his wife with their young servant, mixed in equal parts with Elizabeth’s insecurity in her husband’s affection. Both know that Proctor must denounce Abigail, and both realize that he will have to confess his transgression to the community to be credible. Their relationship is real – it is no symbol – and McEleney gives it room to expand. Thorne trembles with troubled conscience and slowly budding resolve, while Brazil coolly controls her feelings. “Cool” and “control” are not qualities I have ever ascribed to Ms. Brazil’s acting, but they are apt descriptors here; she is the wonderful surprise of this show.

Other performances don’t fare as well. Reverend Samuel Parris is played by Bob Berky, who, the night I saw the show, was as rigid as a Puritan pew; his cadence was wooden, his posture uncomfortable. Fred Sullivan, Jr., as Thomas Putnam and, even more as Deputy Governor Danforth, was enigmatic. True to form, he has followed his authentic and awesome performance in “Absurd Person Singular” with a performance of exactly equal indifference. (I have only been watching for four years, but I wonder if one might follow this sinusoidal phenomenon throughout his career.) In “The Crucible,” he is fierce and inexplicable, like a summer squall. His instrument, his wonderful voice, is as sure and seductive as ever, but it is really just spit and wind. His Danforth is not fearful or paranoid or vulnerable or vengeful: he is just loud. Olivia D’Ambrosio plays Abigail; and I think “plays” is the right word for what she does with the role. She seems nearly to toy with it, an approach that usually pays off because, of course, Abigail herself is a kind of player. One senses her mastery, and, with her high cheekbones, vulpine eyes, and confident contralto, one can also understand John Proctor’s error. But the role calls for helplessness too, and D’Ambrosio is reluctant to surrender her power. When Abigail must pretend to be possessed by Mary Warren (Rachael Warren) in court in order to sustain the girls’ charade, D’Ambrosio can’t quite summon the necessary girlishness. It is an unconvincing performance within a performance.

D’Ambrosio, of course, is not to blame for the play’s failure, but her inability to access the spiritual anarchy of that historical moment is emblematic of the entire production, which is too measured and controlled. McEleney presents the play as a conclusion rather than an exploration, draining it of contingency and excitement: since we all know what it's about, anyway, there's no reason to evoke a specific time, place, or mood. He leans heavily on the play’s stature and keeps the audience at a long arm’s length. It is an allegory, too refined and remote to be mistaken for a yarn. McEleney has a mission, and “The Crucible” serves his ends. “You will not use me!” John Proctor shouts, in the the play’s climactic scene. In this production, at least, his insistence goes unheeded.

Final Weekend: "Absurd Person Singular" at Trinity Rep

2010-11-20T12:54:00.003-05:00

Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular is unmistakably a comedy, but it is suffused with a Chekhovian melancholy, a sensitivity, as the title suggests, to the world’s absurdity, and a yearning for its elusive satisfactions. The same inarticulate want that simultaneously energizes and oppresses the characters in Uncle Vanya or The Three Sisters exercises its insidious control on Ayckbourn’s bankers, builders, and buffoons. For them, the party is, quite literally, always in the other room – but they’re stuck in the kitchen.

Absurd Person Singular follows three couples in three separate kitchens on three consecutive Christmas Eves in the early 1970s. I have tried several times to summarize the play, which is episodic and elliptical, and have found the results messy and unrevealing; so I won’t confuse or bore you with any of those details here. The first act concerns a social-climber’s attempt to host a party for a banker and an architect he hopes to impress; in the second act, the architect’s wife tries repeatedly to kill herself but is foiled by her obtuse and oblivious house-guests; and in the third act, the banker and his wife have fallen on hard times, but the morbidity of their lives is relieved – even as it is thrown into relief – by an unexpected visit from the social-climbing couple from the first act. The comedy is as often fast-paced and frenetic as it is verbal and a little cruel. Ayckbourn is an equal-opportunity satirist: he ridicules with equivalent relish the obnoxious social climber in the first act and the crestfallen banker in the third. To Ayckbourn, these characters are more alike than they are different. They are all, in the end, materialists: questions of the soul stump them, when they choose to even acknowledge them.

The performances are all lively, though some burn more brightly and more vividly than others - in particular, Phyllis Kaye’s as the architect’s suicidal wife. She is marvelously acidic as a contemptuous party guest in the first act; almost entirely mute as she contemplates her suicide throughout the second; and chastened but resolved in the third. Kaye, so vulnerable in last year’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone and so vicious in The Secret Rapture, is on a roll. Fred Sullivan, Jr., who plays her husband, is also a treat – though one would not confuse his performance for a full meal. Sullivan has a long bravura moment in the second act, and is floppy and funny elsewhere, but his acting, I think, elicits more admiration than emotion in the audience. His phrasing and diction are so precise, one wishes they were employed in the service of more generous feeling. Nevertheless, one can’t help being awed by his prowess and control. And Timothy Crowe gives another in a string of memorable and moving performances, this time as the banker who ends the play too poor to heat his own home. More conspicuously than the other actors, Crowe gives the play its Chekhovian dissipation; he embodies its sense of squandered spirit and baffled protest.

Perishable Theatre: "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"

2010-04-26T22:27:00.021-04:00

For all of its cultish qualities and contemporary concerns, the rock monologue Hedwig and the Angry Inch (now playing at Perishable Theatre) has a simple, almost archetypal, agenda. It is an inquiry into origins. What has so galvanized audiences over the years, one realizes, is not its radicalism but its urgency; the quest of self-discovery and re-creation has rarely felt so perilous. Sure, the story is about an East German boy who has sexual reassignment surgery in order to marry an American G.I. and escape from his stifling life, only to find that the surgery has been sloppily performed - she is left with a closed incision instead of a vagina, and an "angry inch" of flesh - and that the liberated life to which she has fled is in a Junction City, Kansas trailer park. But the show, structured around a series of divisions and reunions, is about the possibility of transcendence rather than the thrust of transgression. Abandoned by her G.I., unsatisfied in her new life, a mere spectator to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hedwig forms a rock band of (presumably disaffected) Korean army wives: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She falls in love with an earnest Christian teenager, Tommy Speck, and cultivates his blossoming religiosity and his musical talent. But when Tommy discovers Hedwig's unassigned sexuality, he leaves her and takes the songs they co-wrote on the road. Hedwig follows him, playing the dumpy dives in the shadows of his sold-out arenas - hence her performance at Perishable, a stone's throw from the Dunk. The show ends with a suggestion of reconciliation - not of Hedwig with Tommy, exactly, but of Hedwig with herself.

Perishable's production, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian in a creatively reconfigured space and on a spare set by Sara Ossana, is unforgivingly immediate. From the moment Alexander Platt makes his gloriously androgynous entrance as Hedwig, to well after he takes his even more ambivalent and triumphant exit, the audience is in a state of alert excitement. Platt's charged performance - erotic, self-effacing, spontaneous, and utterly compelling - is every match for the script's ebullient lyricism; his voice, incredibly, is very nearly a match for the songs' extravagant dynamism; his wanton physicality is certainly a match for Hedwig's desperation and ambivalence. He is, in short, fearless. He is buffeted and buttressed by a volcanic back-up band and, in Elizabeth Gotauco, who plays Hedwig's long-suffering transvestite husband Yitzhak, a superb co-star and scintillating singer. Her top-range vocalizations - all "ooohs" and "aaaahs" of thrilling clarity - are so perfectly tuned and adroitly performed they stun the heart. Somehow, in the sonic mass of guitars and drums and keyboards and voices, she finds her note each time and draws it out like a silver thread.

Trinity Rep: An Unbalanced "Odd Couple"

2010-04-24T13:26:00.013-04:00

The first act of The Odd Couple, showing at Trinity Rep through May 9, is the funniest show that I have seen at any theatre this season. Until this past week, during which Perishable opened Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the Brown/Trinity Consortium put on Uncle Vanya, competitors for the title included Elemental Theatre’s Amadeus, the Gamm Theatre’s 4:48 Psychosis, and Trinity’s own crepuscular Cabaret, but this is not meant as faint praise. (To be fair, all of our local theatres have essayed other comic plays, but the ones I have seen were empurpled with mordancy or melancholy; The Odd Couple is the only unmitigated comedy I’ve been to.) It is a pleasure to laugh at Neil Simon’s jokes because they are funny and not merely because they are certified with an appropriately goofy cadence or broad gesture. Actually, the first act of the show is too funny; it is as tightly acted and well staged as the second act should be. The second act is markedly less amusing; having established Simon’s dynamic early on, the cast have left nowhere for themselves to go. This is not to say that the performers lose energy, but rather that they work furiously for diminishing – or, at the very least, familiar – returns. This is comedy as gold-mining: it’s easy to get started, nearly impossible to sustain.

Of course, Oscar Madison’s slovenly shoulders and Felix Unger’s fastidious fury have kept the show popular and profitable for four and a half decades. A certain type of comedy – brusque but affectionate; masculine but not macho – is realized in this play. Simon’s vision, x-ray but not x-rated, revealed to audiences the stunted stubbornness of the male psyche. There is nothing romantic – or Romantic – about these men. Indeed, their feelings about marriage are pragmatic rather than poetic: it may not be a lot of fun, but, hey, everyone needs a companion.

The play has a shallow enough plot and a deep enough penetration into our culture to obviate summary. Still. Disheveled bachelor Oscar Madison (Fred Sullivan, Jr.), a sportswriter and poker-night host, takes his thoroughly domesticated friend Felix Unger (Brian McEleney) into his home when Felix’s wife leaves him. It turns out that they are completely incompatible: camaraderie recapitulates matrimony. Oscar sullies reflexively; Felix tidies (and cooks, and carps) obsessively. After three weeks of this antagonistic arrangement, Oscar plans a double date for Felix and himself with the Pigeon sisters (Phyllis Kaye and Nance Williamson), two English divorcées from upstairs. Felix eventually relents, but commits to having a miserable time. During the course of the evening, Felix has a guilty, gaudy breakdown about his ex-wife and children, and the Pigeons, as pigeons will, eat it up. Consoling him with coos and caresses, they forget all about Oscar, frustrating his hopes for a lascivious – pardon the pun – lark. The tenuous relationship permanently fractured by this betrayal, Oscar sends Felix packing, but we don’t worry about him: when we see him last, he is heading up to the Pigeons’ place, where we are certain he will be taken under wing.

Director Curt Columbus handles the script and the staging deftly. The actors’ timing is perfect – Joe Wilson, Jr., playing against type as a meekly uxorious pal of Oscar’s, is especially funny, even in a minor role – and their movement around Eugene Lee’s large stage is purposeful and precise. What the play doesn’t convey is a sense of deepening crisis: the actors, like the poker players they depict, seem to be playing for small stakes. The screws of comic dread are never tightened, and the problems of the play’s second act are those of its first. Fred Sullivan, Jr., a wily and winning actor, doesn’t depict Oscar’s affection for Felix curdling into aggression; instead, he begins the show aggressively, his gruffness not merely skin-deep but intrinsic. The comic payoff is immediate and gratifying, but it doesn’t accrue. Brian McEleney plays Felix Ungar as the direct descendant of his Malvolio from Twelfth Night – impacted and imperious – but he seems not to trust Ungar’s innocent energy, and so hangs his characterization on strings: he performs with all the spontaneity and selflessness of a marionette. His work is always either reactive or provocative; it is, either way, over-executed. Ungar does not need to be nuanced or internal, but he ought to be oblivious. McEleney is too clued-in to the comic potential of his cluelessness, so his performance is asphyxiated by self-awareness. The same reflexivity that made his Richard III (way back in 2008) so menacing inhibits his comic characterization.

As the bird-brained and like-minded Pigeon sisters, Phyllis Kaye and Nance Williamson are both wonderfully animated. But the Pigeons aren’t really characters; they’re more like holograms of women, transparent and distorted, projected from a skewed imagination –whether that imagination is Simon’s or his male characters’, I’m not sure – so even as we laugh at Kaye’s and Williamson’s portrayals, we puzzle over their purpose in the play. Are we meant to be laughing at them for their giggling disregard for social convention or at Oscar for his bald lust? That this question remains unanswered is, perhaps, the disappointment of the entire second act. The play’s comic potential has already been mined, its gold revealed. What’s left but to sift through the loose dirt of goofy cadence and broad gesture?

The Gamm Theatre: "The Glass Menagerie"

2010-03-20T10:30:00.011-04:00

My review of Tennessee Williams's breakthrough family drama, The Glass Menagerie (at the Gamm Theatre through April 4), is in this week's Motif (available in cafés around town and as a downloadable PDF at http://motifmagazine.net). Critical sentiment around this show is pretty much uniform: it's terrific (here, here, here, and here).

Amanda Wingfield, played by Wendy Overly at her most solicitous, flutters and fusses around the stage, forcing on her children the regurgitated detritus of her unmetabolized past. But they see her stories for what they are: pablum. Laura, crippled and shy, retreats from her mother's exhortations into a world of make-believe. Tom, the sympathetic center of the show, is graced with more resource: he turns his visions of escape into reality and joins the Merchant Marines. Of course, running away and breaking free are different things, and it is clear from the play - which is narrated by a much older Tom, who is played with well-lubricated charm by Sam Babbitt - that, as far as Tom has traveled, he has not managed to rid himself of his past. The play is a gesture of reconciliation for him (and, we imagine, for Williams himself): with his sister, his mother, and his younger, more impulsive, self.

Laura is played by Diana Biurski, who has proved her talent on the local stage in her performances with the Brown/Trinity Consortium and with the Gamm. With her wide eyes and long limbs, she is naturally expressive. She comes into her own in this play in the second act, when Laura enjoys the attention and encouragement of Jim O'Connor (the compelling and charismatic Kelby T. Akin), a go-getter whom Tom has brought home from his work at the shoe warehouse to satisfy his mother's dreams of gentleman callers for her lonely daughter. During this extended scene, which ripens and swells with feeling, Laura's eyes glow with admiration, and her body shakes with anxiety and anticipation. It is a long moment of suspense: like Laura, our bodies bend - achingly, warily, perilously - towards the suggestion of a fuller future. As Jim urges Laura to step beyond her perceived limits, so does Williams demand the audience do the same; he enlists our empathy in a wonderful and foolhardy enterprise. Biurski makes this a risk worth taking.

Oskar Eustis Profiled in the New Yorker

2010-03-18T08:01:00.013-04:00

Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of Trinity Rep from 1994 to 2005 and currently Artistic Director of New York's Public Theatre, is profiled in this week's New Yorker by staff writer Rebecca Mead (abstract here.) Searching for "Oskar Eustis" on the magazine's website turns up a list of references, including to John Lahr's review of the Public Theatre's Hamlet from the summer of 2008, which is summarized thus: "Under the unfortunate direction of Oskar Eustis, Hamlet is currently presiding over the Public Theatre as a melodramatic fool." Lahr's scalding review expresses the paradox of Eustis's career suggested in Mead's profile: he's done great stuff for Theatre over the years, but, it would seem, little great work at any single theater. Mead quotes Rocco Landeman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, on the Public Theatre: "'It is always a mix of the compelling, the interesting, and the dreadful. And you have to be willing to do the dreadful.'" As an artistic director, he appears to understand his role as more organizer than aesthete: his vision, one feels, is for what a theatre can do, not just each production. Mead really has composed a wonderful profile. Although she is curiously indifferent towards the texture and temperature of his productions, she does capture Eustis's incorrigible energy - his vitality, brio, and fervor. Eustis comes across like a saint of lost causes: to Communism and to contemporary, serious New York theatre. Two more doomed, disappointed allegiances would be hard to imagine.

(I would love to hear about Eustis's years at Trinity. If you remember a particularly challenging, confrontational, or tendentious show of his, please don't hesitate to describe it in the comments section.)

"Dead Man's Cell Phone" at Trinity Rep

2010-03-15T19:46:00.003-04:00

Despite the morbidity of its premise, which is tidily summed up in its title, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl (showing at Trinity Rep through March 28), is essentially comic. At the beginning of the play, a woman, Jean, is writing notes at a small café table, when she is disturbed by the incessant ringing of a nearby cell phone. Exasperated, she confronts the negligent owner of the phone, but he is strangely unresponsive. She answers his phone and conducts a conversation with someone who clearly assumes she is the man’s mistress. She prods the man, whose name she now knows is Gordon, and discovers the reason for his inaction: he is dead. The phone rings again. She answers it.

This impulsive impropriety changes everything in her life, deepening, stretching, and, ultimately, enriching her. She keeps the phone and continues to answer it on Gordon’s behalf, eventually fleshing out a saintly version of the dead man that reassures the grieving and consoles the lovelorn. Because of the phone, she meets Gordon’s family and falls in love with Gordon’s recessive brother, Dwight. But she also meets Gordon himself, and confronts her irrational love for him. The show, putatively plaintive, is actually resolutely playful: it literally flirts with death. This mixing of moods—the comic with the tragic, the cynical with the ingenuous, the mundane with the sublime—is the play’s alchemical act; but one senses that Ruhl is not as interested in gold as she is in weirdly-shaped gold things. She is as much a curator as a chemist.

It is her curiosity and obsession that give the play its distinctive energy. Dead Man’s Cell Phone is wildly far-ranging, exuberantly excursive. Jean travels to South Africa to meet with a sinister organ-trader (a former colleague of Gordon’s) and to a strangely banal heaven after a bizarre airport brawl. The show is about cellular technology, but the title, as obvious as Shakespeare naming Hamlet “Yorick’s Skull” instead, is a kind of red herring. The dead man’s cell phone is both synecdochal – it stands in for Gordon and for the world of which Gordon was a part and from which Jean feels fundamentally estranged – and talismanic: it possesses magical capabilities. The phone gives Jean the opportunity to conjure a man, to speak him into existence in the idealized image of the people who loved him. Like Prospero’s staff in The Tempest, the cell phone bestows a power too great to endure; and Jean, like Prospero, frees herself from the imperatives of that power by destroying their agent. One wonders if Jean – again, like Prospero – is meant as an authorial stand-in: her power to create mimics and amplifies Ruhl’s.

But if the script is full of adventure and allusion, it is also marked by certain trivializing preoccupations: like a traveler unable to shake her home country’s customs, Ruhl visits places and ideas with one foot in her own living room. She is as avid and sincere, and as transient, as a tourist. In retrospect, the show feels like an armchair anecdote, an embellished recounting of a pleasant visit to a faraway place. Ruhl is not inattentive to cruelty and venality there, but she remarks on it with a detachment that belies its urgency. The play’s tone – its moon-bounce mood – precludes any moral seriousness. Mrs. Gottlieb, eulogizing her son at his funeral service, is interrupted by a ringing cell phone and asks, testily, “Could someone please turn their fucking cell phone off. There are only one or two sacred places left in the world today. Where there is no ringing. The theater, the church, and the toilet.” Surely, Ruhl has seen the ample evidence in the news that the theater and the church are no longer considered sacred, unassailable places; that evidence sounds a hell of a lot louder, and has more terrible consequences, than the ringing of a cell phone. Yet the play never reproaches Mrs. Gottlieb for her parochialism – for her meanness, yes, but not for her privileged isolation. Later, Gordon, during his tour-de-force monologue that opens the second act of the show, opines, “Airports and subway stations are very similar to hell. People are vulnerable – disembodied – they’re looking around for their souls while they’re getting their shoes shined. That’s when you bomb them. In transit.” This glancing reference to the world of violence and consequence is disorienting. Not only is it utterly sophistic – Is Gordon suggesting that people in airports are so busy looking for their souls they forget to watch out for terrorists? Or that terrorists only bomb people without souls? – but it is also inane. The show has nothing to say about brutality. Even Gordon’s vocation is treated as a quirk of character: he sells organs, but he is never held to account for it. “Is he punished?” Mrs. Gottlieb asks Jean after she returns from Gordon’s afterlife. “Not really,” Jean replies.

Of course, Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a fantasy; but what is its relationship with the real world beyond the stage? Ruhl is concerned with talk, but not with the possibility that the government might overhear your talk, or that the international community might not hear your talk. Talk in Dead Man’s Cell Phone is intimate and private, not agitated and public. It is not a weapon, just a nuisance; it doesn’t shake us from our foundational beliefs, but only interrupts our reverie, our precious quiet. Talk is an assault not on our politics but only on our ears. Indeed, there are no politics in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, though there are contesting ethics. Mostly what there are in the play are dozens of different ideas, zipping brightly and briefly across the stage. The show is constantly disappearing in the bright glare of the ever-new moment onstage. Janice Duclos is a dazzled and naïve Jean; her innocence is matched by Richard Donnelly’s oily charisma as the sophisticated but solipsistic Gordon. Donnelly also plays Dwight, the meek paper-store owner who falls in love with Jean. As Gordon’s wounded wife, Hermia (more Shakespeare!) Phyllis Kay is mesmerizing; in a long, drunken scene with Jean, Kay is both despairing and defiant. And Rachael Warren plays Gordon’s unnamed colleague and lover with a fantastic sneer, a gelatinous accent – now Scottish, now Ukrainian – and an ungraspable physicality.

In a way, she is the perfect emblem of the show: protean and evasive; funny and just a little sinister; familiar, at times, but also completely foreign. Welcome to the world according to Sarah Ruhl.

There's Something About Olivia

2010-02-04T22:34:00.028-05:00

Trinity Rep's Twelfth Night is set at the end of the festival of Epiphany, but its real dispensation is pagan, not Christian. Its spirit predates Christianity and rebels against its manichaeism, offering, instead of a linear model of conflict and consummation, a cyclical reenactment of release and renewal. Beginning with death and dolor, it concludes with matrimony and the promise of regeneration - neither of which could have occurred without the frenzy of mischief and misinterpretation in between. Still, we end the play with an unmistakable feeling of stasis: despite all the action, nothing seems to have changed for its characters. This is exactly the point. All the disguises, schemes, plots, and ploys unreeled in Illyria are meant to preclude rupture and transformation. What looks like mayhem, then, is actually a calibrated practice of purification. When all is done, and the thirteenth day dawns, it is not just the idea of order that has been restored, as in all Shakespeare comedies: it is the exact same order that prevailed before the action of the play began. In Twelfth Night, role-play does not lead to revelation or self-discovery (as it does in Much Ado About Nothing, for example) but to a hardening of assigned social roles.

When the play begins, Orsino, Duke of Illyria (Joe Wilson Jr.), is lamenting his unrequited love for Olivia (Anne Worden), a countess in grieving for her dead father and brother. Even as he laments, however, Orsino revels: his unsatisfied desire gives him direction and distinction. It is performative rather than productive. His fanciful affections, and Olivia's indifference to them (which Shakespeare scholar Jean Howard calls "the real threat to the hierarchical gender system" established in the play, as opposed to the putative threat of cross-dressing), represent a seam in the fabric of Illyrian society. Onto this compromised surface stumbles the shipwrecked Viola (Cherie Corinne Rice), only briefly disquieted by the loss of her twin brother to the storm that nearly killed her; disguised as a young man named Cesario, she gains employment as Orsino's attendant. She falls in love with Orsino but spends her days delivering his entreaties to the implacable Olivia, who herself falls in love with Cesario/Viola the first time they meet. Her mourning is as meretricious and mercurial as Orsino's love. Meanwhile, Olivia's drunken uncle, Toby Belch (Fred Sullivan Jr.), is hosting the wealthy but witless Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Stephen Thorne), who ineptly woos Olivia as well, while joining Sir Toby in a vindictive reprisal against Olivia's Puritanical attendant Malvolio (director Brian McEleney), who - oh, yes - also loves Olivia. One might wonder what Olivia has done to inspire such fervor in the men around her; the only celibate is Feste (Stephen Berenson), Olivia's fool, who is too smart to be ensnared.

This show is epitomized, anyway, not by intelligence but by the eruptive energy of Belch. Played with dizzying vigor by Fred Sullivan Jr., Sir Toby is an ebullient figure of inversion and destruction: for him, boundaries of class and etiquette aren't merely to be ignored, but gleefully obliterated. His anarchism is an affront to Malvolio, who runs Olivia's house with humorless tyranny; they are mirrored images of each other, even to the end of the play, when Malvolio, "much abused," leaves town in pouting disgrace, and Toby, bloodied in misapprehended battle, takes comfort in the companionship of the hapless Aguecheek. In Twelfth Night, the blurring - the eradication - of difference is not a symptom of disorder but a strategy of restoration: the extreme opposites of Belch and Malvolio confront each other, and each leaves the stage in shame; Viola models herself after her brother, presumed dead, and is later, and confusingly, reunited with him; a countess comes out of mourning to woo a woman dressed as a man and ends up engaged to a man who is the woman's twin. This extreme confusion is inherently terminal; it cannot hold. The force that tightens the knot of absurdity is lust; it is the mirrored image of hysteria, which simultaneously unravels.

The production at Trinity Rep, directed by Brian McEleney and starring half of the actors in Providence, is like a bottle of Dionysian vitality: shaken, agitated, and opened, finally, with a gratifying fizz. McEleney has captured the play's sense of controlled anarchy; the show is effervescent, and gently intoxicating. But something has escaped from his alembic: the play's connection to itself. The show seems timeless and placeless. It has plenty of movement, but too little choreography; speed, but no rhythm. It forgoes the deep emotional for the high fantastical. Still, where it succeeds - in antic, ataxic comedy - it succeeds thrillingly. Anne Worden, a third-year in the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, is a terrific Olivia, swinging wickedly between lust and self-possession. As Aguecheek, Stephen Thorne is agile and perfectly pitiful. Joe Wilson Jr.'s orotund Orisno is a little forceful - his humor gets lost in his dire elocution - but Cherie Corinne Rice nearly floats as Viola (and is a spry and convincing Sebastian, to boot).

What this production lacks is coherence, or completion. The play seems to be set (by master designer Eugene Lee) in Victorian sumptuousness - far stage left is a cluttered library, with more books than shelves and more picture frames than pictures; at stage right is a dry fountain, littered with dried branches and leaves - but, for all of its fastidiousness, the set feels like a prop and never a place. It is not lived in, just tripped over. The library is unvisited - like most of us today, nobody in Illyria has the time or inclination to read - and the fountain is as redolent as a husk. McEleney's production does not suggest a life - or death - outside of the script. For all of its impudence and irreverence, the show is literal rather than metaphysical. It has a wonderful spirit of playfulness, but no sense of purpose. What is the life from which the excitements of Twelfth Night are a reprieve? Who are the books for? How does the fountain sound when it is on? McEleney marvelously exposes the urgent ritualism of the play but leaves us with a disconcerting question: Who are all these people behind their masks?

Elemental Theatre and the Holy Go.Go

2010-01-30T11:14:00.005-05:00

I cannot say enough about the Elemental Theatre Company, whose "Father, Son, and the Holy Go.Go," the most recent iteration of their extremely popular, annual "Go-Go" plays, is showing at Perishable Theatre for one more weekend. Their work brings a rich humanity to the stage; a fineness of vision; and terrific sense of humor. I can't review the plays - there are three; like the trinity from which the work borrows its name, they somehow cohere in a single entity - but I can strongly urge you to see them. They will reassure you that people of great heart, dedication, and talent are still writing for the stage.

Catch them tonight at 8:00 and tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:00.

"4:48 Psychosis" Review Round-Up

2010-01-26T22:42:00.009-05:00

The reviews of Gamm Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's "4:48 Psychosis" are in, and they are, superficially at least, unanimously positive; but they are also, it appears, deeply ambivalent.

My own review, in Motif, is short and timid. I acknowledged Kane's sense of purpose and the performers' persuasive powers, but I did not ask, "To what end?" What does "4:48 Psychosis" try to do? It has tremendous intensity (you'll see that word a lot in discussion of Kane's work) but little direction; it feels furtive. And of what do the performers intend to persuade us? That depression is a terrifying tribulation? After seeing the play, I believed it - but I didn't feel it. I had been persuaded, not convinced.

Channing Gray, in the ProJo, serves up a backhanded assessment of the script - "It reads as a long rambling poem" - before concluding that the show itself is "likely to linger in the memory for a long time." I agree, but I also wonder what sort of appraisal that is. It's safe, in that it's value-free; a lot of things linger in the memory for a long time. The comment's neutrality makes me think that Gray had reservations about the production that he didn't explore.

Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, calls it "so intense. Strident." He goes on

Drama is about maintaining the tension of conflicting needs or desires. And what could be more fraught than the either-or, no-middle-ground question of suicide? Yet, by all rights audiences could be expected to withdraw from empathy soon after entering this woman's ranting display of pain and suffering. Compassion fatigue is not a challenge dramatists often face. But thanks to the playwright's canny structure, director Tony Estrella's well-timed easing of the anguish, and Kim's every-moment focus, the center does hold, at least for us as witnesses, as the terrified woman's internal anarchy is loosed upon her world.

What does this mean? Rodriguez's frayed and tangled language seems borne of uncertainty: he doesn't know himself what he's trying to say.

The standard that Susan McDonald of the Attleboro Sun-Chronicle invokes to gauge the experience of watching "4:48 Psychosis" is comfort:

To say it pushes past the comfortable boundaries of the modern theater is an understatement. It obliterates them. It is not a comfortable show to watch but it is a compelling show, an educational show, an absolutely breath-taking hour and 12 minutes.

One wonders if the boundary through which Kane bursts isn't just comfort but pleasantness. A lot of modern theatre is intimate and cathartic; but not all modern theatre so strains the sympathy of its audience.

Dan Aucoin, in the Boston Globe, has the guts to note the clumsiness of Kane's script; "It should be said that there are some stretches of bad writing in '4:48 Psychosis,' wince-inducing lines like 'love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears,' when Kane was clearly straining to poeticize her suffering." He credits Casey Seymour Kim's performance with "astonishing intensity" and authenticity.

But he also reveals the submissiveness only euphemistically expressed by the other reviewers: he describes the audience leaving the theatre "after watching - or should that be surviving? - '4:48 Psychosis,'" as though endurance in the face of aggressive art - no matter how middling - were something to be proud of. A Theatre of Cruelty needs an Audience of Masochists. Tony Estrella, the Artistic Director of the Gamm, should be heartened to know that the audience is out there, demanding to be educated through punishment. Art about suffering does not have to make its audience suffer, too; but these practical times call for educational theatre, and there is not better educator than experience. So we suffer, but only for the sake of accuracy - or so we're brazenly told. Through her main character, Woman, Kane observes, "Some will call this self-indulgence (they are lucky not to know its truth)." What is most true, of course, may not be what makes good art; any of us can tell the truth, but the artist tells the most truthful lies. For Kane, in her last play, the truth was enough. When we are convinced that accuracy is the sole measure of artistic accomplishment, we get the theatre we deserve: authentic, I suppose, but dull.

Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium's "Woyzeck"

2009-12-19T10:46:00.002-05:00

Last year Christopher Windom, now a third-year MFA candidate in directing at the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, staged a powerful production of The Tempest at the Pell Chaffee Theatre. That show was about growing up and growing old; its characters left behind the realm of desire—a hermetic, if comfortable, place—to join the world of experience. Windom returns this year with Georg Büchner’s 19^th-century proto-naturalistic Woyzeck; its cruel determinism would be enough to send Miranda back to her father and Ariel back into spritely servitude. Two more different plays would be hard to imagine. But if Windom’s range is admirable, his accuracy is imperfect. While The Tempest was a great swirl of language, movement, and music, his Woyzeck is strangely inert. Aiming, I think, for a kind of pointed social commentary, Windom has just missed his mark—the play is an elusive target—and presents instead an amusing but toothless satire.

Woyzeck is a study in degradation; its voice is, sometimes maddeningly, the passive. Franz Woyzeck, a low-ranking soldier in the army, is being cheated on by his wife, experimented on by his doctor, bossed around by his superiors, and pissed on by his peers. He hears voices in his head and has apocalyptic visions. And in this version, which is set in America after World War II, he has the most damning affliction of them all: he is black. All of this amounts to a lot for the audience to take in; the unarticulated wave of abuses visited on Woyzeck swamps us, too. When Windom tries to differentiate among Woyzeck’s torturers, as he must to give the show texture and substance, he resorts to caricature rather than nuance.

Caricature, despite its boardwalk connotations, is not necessarily a clumsy or anti-dramatic technique; it can be used skillfully to represent the extreme range of characters’ subjective experiences. Here, however, it depicts only the director’s biases. In Woyzeck, the doctor, known as The Doctor, is manic and self-infatuated; the army captain, called The Captain, bloviates tirelessly in reflective sunglasses; Woyzeck’s wife’s lover, the Drum Major, is gigantic without being threatening; and Woyzeck’s peers are lecherous hicks. These exaggerations tell us more about Windom’s sense of stagecraft than Woyzeck’s sense of terror. In this Woyzeck, the forces that loom over Woyzeck are laughable—The Doctor is a klutz, The Captain a self-parody—so his desperate response to them is inexplicable. His dread, obviated by Windom’s goofy representations of his oppressors, is preposterous. By revealing these authorities as frauds—by shining a light through the veil of power—Windom reduces Woyzeck to a comic punchline: only a rube would let himself be dominated by such transparent impostors. For the play to be tragic, power must remain opaque. We must be able to see both the banal ferocity and inscrutable fakery of the society that crushes Woyzeck. Caricature is an apt tool for this task if it is used ironically to depict Woyzeck’s distorted perspective; as it is, his mounting madness has no traction. He is reacting to characters that exist only as semaphore from director to audience.

Will Shaw, who plays the hapless Woyzeck, does his best, but he seems to be in a different play than the actors around him. He has a rich, stentorian voice that is a good match for his feelings of estrangement and doom, though it does not seem to be the voice of someone beaten by authority: it is sometimes prophetic, but it is never persecuted. Shaw’s physical mannerisms are reactive. His default posture is a sort of electro-shocked tautness, his face pulled back in a wide-eyed grimace, his arms stiff down to his fingertips. Shaw has improved immeasurably in his time in the Consortium—he is not only more confident onstage, he is also more compelling—but we still get the sense, when watching him, of an actor hard at work. Rebecca Gibel as his wife, Marie, is tender and troubled; she defends Woyzeck in public but betrays him privately. It’s a wonderful and challenging role, and Gibel revels in drawing out its unresolved ambivalence. Karl Gregory, whose sustained and controlled hysteria as the self-justifying writer Heiner Muller in Charles Mees’s Full Circle was one of the real pleasures of last year’s theater season, is hysterical again here as The Doctor. He has the unfortunate condition of being extremely likeable onstage; projecting menace will, one suspects, be an enduring difficulty for him. But his natural charm and physical fluidity, when soundly harnessed to subsumed sinister intentions, will make his evil that much more grotesque. He need only look to Patrick Mulryan’s performance as the amber-voiced Nazi Youth from Trinity Rep’s recent Cabaret for an example of dewy duplicity. In Woyzeck, Mulryan plays The Captain, whose gnomic pronouncements on virtue, issued in a clipped bark, both puzzle and diminish Woyzeck. Mulryan is enjoyable in the role, but his characterization seems twice removed from its source: it is a play on a parody.

At least he appears to be having fun in a production that feels cautious, even dutiful. Windom, I think, is still searching for meaning in the play. It was his directorial confidence that buoyed The Tempest last year and that was missing in the performance of Woyzeck that I saw last week. His choices feel explanatory, as though compensating for the show’s difficulty. One wants to encourage him, to say, there is nothing to explain; just a story to unfold.

A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep

2009-12-03T19:25:00.012-05:00

A Christmas Carol, now at Trinity Rep, begins with a solitary chair onstage and ends with an ensemble easily outnumbering the available seats and, anyway, too boisterous to even think about sitting down. One would feel like--well, like a Scrooge, for not joining them in smiles and song. But this holiday cheer, like much holiday cheer, feels clinical: it is just as carefully calculated as any of mean old Scrooge's accounting sheets. Is ersatz magnanimity really any better than genuine irascibility? As silly and dispensable as this Christmas tradition might feel, it can still summon our deeper, richer feelings if it aspires to any sort of authenticity--that is, if its own feeling is deep and rich. But this production shows Scrooge transforming from sourpuss, right past sweetheart, to pure sap. Scrooge, in his final, viscous incarnation, is cloying and unpalatable. This is a real shame. As played by Timothy Crowe (whom we last saw onstage swaying like a deeply rooted but fatally weakened tree as the lone character of conscience in The Receptionist), the Scrooge of the first quarter of the play is a virtuosic misanthrope, bilious and bullying. His mastery of mockery makes him a pleasure to watch: we can't wait to hear what outrageous affront he'll come up with next. As the show moves along, however, we begin to lose him. Crowe concedes too much. Instead of insisting on Scrooge's reprehensibility, he relents. His Scrooge is not such a tough guy, after all. He is neither, it turns out, such a nice guy, even after his putative transformation. Doubtless he has been transformed, but the process has been more chemical than spiritual, and he spends the last quarter of the play oozing around the stage like a sugary paste. This caricature of sweetness is almost horrifying; it is certainly less recognizably human than the earlier caricature of bitterness.

The Baltimore writer Stephen Dixon has a story, "Change," in which a man resolves to end his cynicism and condescension and open himself up to possibility in the world. He goes too far, of course, and one of the strangers on the street whom he accosts with kindness challenges him: "'People hear you like this they won't take to it. I don't know what you conceive of as new changes, but if this is supposed to be one for the better, I hate to think of what you were like before.'" If only Scrooge were offered such objective criticism.

Fear and Loathing in "Amadeus"

2009-11-14T21:34:00.007-05:00

To judge by the plays now showing on Rhode Island stages, all we need is love. The Gamm Theatre is presenting a romantic doubleheader, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet (love splits the series), while Providence College has just finished its own Romeo and Juliet and Trinity Rep gives us the midlife melancholy of Shooting Star. Each of these plays is fine in its own right, and some are even excellent, but, en masse, they suggest a stolid, sincere uniformity of theatrical subject. In the Age of Aquarius, each new loving couple has all the sparkle of a much-handled coin. Thank goodness, then, for the fear and loathing of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which is being staged with fervid feeling and sharp, dark humor by the Elemental Theatre Collective in Beneficent Church. By producing the play in a church, director Alexander Platt has embraced certain aspects of the show—its awe before genius and its terror before God—while downplaying others, especially its heavily psychologized second act. He is also suggesting that the story of Salieri and Mozart has the moral universality and narrative elegance to compete, as it were, with the ritual played out in church every week. I think he gives the play too much credit; but, in doing so, he gives the audience a vigorous and satisfying theatre. There may be a generally applicable lesson here: that, in theatre at least, it is best to overshoot your mark. We leave the church pale from the show’s moral chill; it is a response, if not quite a rebuke, to the warm-heartedness prevailing on our local proscenia.

Amadeus tells the story of Antonio Salieri, the Kappellmeister of the Austrian empire, whose mediocrity is revealed and envy aroused when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, having toured Europe and dazzled audiences as a young prodigy under his father’s oppressive influence, arrives in Vienna and aspires to a position at the court himself. I should say, rather, that Salieri tells the story of Salieri: the play’s galvanizing emotion is jealousy; its preferred medium, alloquy. There is no Amadeus without Salieri’s hypnotic narration. Indeed, he is one of the great storytellers in theatre: utterly honest and completely untrustworthy. When we first see him, he is an old man, crumpled and obscure, his only claim to distinction the rumors whispered in town that he is Mozart’s murderer—rumors that he is more than happy to confirm. Thus the play, which takes the form of a confession, begins.

Salieri starts with his conversion, which is not so much religious as musical. As a young boy in church, Salieri observes the power, the near-divinity, of the choirmaster, and is weakened by the sound issuing like unction from the choir. He resolves, in a fit of fresh conviction, to abjure earthly pursuits if God will grant him this one desire: to become a renowned composer. At first, Salieri believes that God has committed to this exchange; his musical gifts impress Emperor Joseph II, and he is advanced to the top of the musical hierarchy at the court. But when he meets Mozart, and hears his extraordinary compositions, the mere adequacy of his own talents is harshly exposed. As if Mozart’s genius were not dispiriting enough, his vulgarity and impiety are an actual affront to Salieri, whose life has been a symphony of self-abnegation. With the same determination that he had once applied to his devotion to God, Salieri turns to the destruction of Mozart. He attempts to seduce Mozart’s wife, Constanze; he bedevils Mozart with specious encouragement, which he directly contravenes to court officials; and, finally, as the young composer withers in illness and isolation, he terrorizes him by impersonating a black-clad figure from Mozart’s nightmares and nightly demanding a requiem mass. Detached but demanding, Salieri reenacts Mozart’s father’s imperiousness. In this disguise, Salieri transgresses the limits of human power: he is not only Mozart’s father, but also his God, and his death.

Shaffer, on the other hand, violates only the rules of compelling drama; the overt psychologizing of Salieri’s revenge against God is drama’s antithesis. For Shaffer, both Salieri and Mozart are products of exacting and implacable fathers whose deeply imprinted influence must be exorcised. Salieri completes his renunciation of God by assuming His power; he simultaneously completes his destruction of Mozart. We last see Mozart, reduced to mewling dependence, in his wife’s arms. But she has been transformed into his mother; the scene is a pieta. This Oedipal twist represents a contraction, rather than an expansion, of the first act’s premise. Salieri begins as a dervish of despair and ends as a methodological proto-Freudian. The energy and urgency of the show follows this narrative diminishment.

It is up to the actors to enliven the show’s second act, but it is clear that they are more at home with anguish—the dominant tone of the first act—than with evil. The play makes special demands on the actor who plays Salieri and who must sustain the story. Max Vogler is a credit to the role. His performance, part leer and part lecture, is sinister and dangerously seductive. However, though he demonstrates something like virtuosity in the first act, he can’t summon a necessary vengeful vitality later in the show. He has Salieri’s apologetic bewilderment down, but not the malevolence that would warrant it. Salieri’s conversion from victim to agent—from servant to executor—might be more powerful if it were more stark, but Vogler and Platt are sympathetic rather than judgmental. Even as he persecutes Mozart with an alienated indifferent, he retains his humanity. Their interpretation is intelligent and compassionate, but it dulls the sharp edge of Salieri's madness. Bryan Kimmelman is given the thankless task of playing Mozart, who was portrayed with famous impertinence by Tom Hulce in the 1984 movie version of the play. Kimmelman’s vocal characterization is fine, but his body is disengaged. He looks a little scrawled, like shorthand, so we can never quite make out what he’s trying to depict. Worse, his abstracted representation of conducting, composing, and performing is distractingly silly; Mozart himself is silly, of course, but when he is robed in his music he should, I think, achieve a certain heightened dignity. D’Arcy Dersham plays Constanze Mozart with terrific poise, capturing her toughness and fragility with equal credibility, and Tanya Anderson is frequently hilarious as the curt and condescending Emperor Joseph.

For sheer spectacle, nothing I have seen on stage this year matches Amadeus. The production is intimate, the subject terrible, and the performers full of passion and belief. We might wish that Shaffer had given them something more to believe in, but in these parsimonious times, we should take what we can get. Alex Platt and the ensemble have spun something fine from the sometimes rough fibers of Shaffer’s play. Their next challenge will be to perform a sublime version of a Salieri opera; I don't doubt that they could do it.

Shooting Star at Trinity Rep

2009-10-24T07:36:00.015-04:00

It is a shame, or a terrific irony, that a play as imaginative and credible as Shooting Star should have such an inane and insistent title. Indeed, the title is one of the few missteps in this modest and graceful show. The story of two former lovers who reunite serendipitously in a snowed-in airport, it seems, at first, to be a non-threatening riff on the contemporary fantasy of "closure." But over the short course of the play, skepticism gives way to recognition and, finally, to admiration. Author Steven Dietz has crafted a work both archetypal and specific; he grounds the yearning of our lives in the particular experiences of his characters'. Dietz knows that as characters come into focus--as they acquire histories and secrets and desires--they become more, not less, familiar to the audience. Our imaginations are nourished with detail. The show begins in the thin atmosphere of cliché--Reed McAllister is a frustrated husband and father whose job in sales is on the line; Elena Carson does yoga, listens to NPR, and has dated a string of drummers--before descending to a more salubrious altitude. That light-headed feeling you have early on in the play, caused by a surfeit of jokes about Canada, "red" and "blue" politics, and cell phones, is replaced by a piercing clarity of feeling. Kurt Rhoads gives Reed a weatherman's smugness, leavened by a dose of quiet desperation; Nance Williamson, as Elena, is vulnerable but resilient. The script is too scripty--it is contained and centered: we never feel the rush of risk as characters edge out to some new, untested perspective or proposition--but its emotions are just right. The show is pregnant with an exquisite ache.

Trinity Rep's "Cabaret"

2009-09-29T20:54:00.005-04:00

Cabaret, now showing at Trinity Rep, takes place at the sobering close of the dizzy, dithyrambic decade following World War I. The show, set in Berlin, begins as the 20s give way to the 30s and the extravagance of the Weimar Republic recedes before the moral stringency of the National Socialists—the Nazis. The party is still raging—its epicenter is the Kit Kat Club, its avatar the dissipated singer Sally Bowles—even as the clean-up crew starts to sweep in from the edges. Written in 1966 and based on the play I Am a Camera, itself based on Goodbye to Berlin, a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood published in 1939, Cabaret leans heavily on the audience's knowledge of what happened next: in 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, a position he quickly leveraged to realize the totalitarian vision he had articulated in Mein Kampf. For the characters in the show, then, time is short. If our familiarity with history tightens the show’s tension, it also cheapens its achievement: we leave the theater not so much grieving a paradise lost as pitying the characters who have so underestimated the hell to come. The prelapsarian context charges Cabaret with moral seriousness while absolving its authors of the rigors of narrative, character, and setting. A story that ends in genocide has built-in pathos; what, besides music, can Cabaret contribute to it?

The answer to this is short and simple: Sally Bowles. Bowles is an English ex-pat who has become a star attraction at the Kit Kat Club, a bastion of frivolity in a city increasingly consumed by angst. As portrayed by Trinity firecracker Rachael Warren, Bowles is a marvel of a character, a cataclysm of opposing, or complementary, impulses: to babble and to obfuscate; to perform and to conceal; to connect and to go it alone. On stage she’s plucky and inscrutable; off, she’s fidgety and vulnerable. The central question around Sally Bowles is whether she is indomitable or merely elusive: is her power to captivate or to ingratiate? In a scene that culminates with Nazi Youth breaking into a triumphant performance of the patriotic anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” our eyes turn to Sally, who is watching them with rapt fascination: their politics may be ugly, but their music is terrific. For the deracinated Sally Bowles, whose only home is in a song, this may be too much to resist. By the end of the show, when Germany’s grim future has been amply foreshadowed, Bowles has returned to the Kit Kat Club. She has lost a lover, aborted her pregnancy, and resolved to live in a doomed country; her final song, “Life is a Cabaret,” is a surrender phrased in the language of defiance. Warren, her voice loud, lusty, and lovely, achingly expresses this ambivalence. It is a thrilling moment of theater because it is a perfect crystallization of a complex character.

If only anything else in the show were as refractive as Sally Bowles; instead, we get dull-edged characterization and rubbed-smooth sentiment. The show is about Clifford Bradshaw (Mauro Hantman), an American writer who comes to Berlin for inspiration but who ends up, prosaically, giving English lessons instead. (Writers tend to make bad main characters: as stand-ins for the authors of shows, who wish to be neither self-aggrandizing nor self-incriminating, they are usually saddled with insipid goodness and passive natures. So it is with Bradshaw: he is a blank, but crisp, sheet of paper.) His lover is (inexplicably) Sally Bowles; his pupil is a Nazi named Ernst (Stephen Thorne); his landlady, the starchy Fraulein Schneider (Phyllis Kay), has a soft spot for his neighbor, a timid Jewish grocer named Herr Shultz (Stephen Berenson); another neighbor, Fraulein Kost (Janice DeClos), entertains young sailors in her apartment. It is not clear what world these characters are supposed to represent, except that of the Musical. Certainly there is nothing in this production to evoke the cultural schizophrenia of the era, the competing voices of trauma and arousal, the physical and spiritual disfigurement that made places like the Kit Kat Club necessary palliatives.

Berlin, I imagine, was a seething, pustular city—hence the makeup and make-believe at the cabaret. But Trinity’s Berlin has been treated with an antiseptic: sure, it’s a little wan, but you’d never know how sick it really was. Only Sally Bowles has the desperate vitality of the plague victim. Without a clearer picture of the city’s disease, the Kit Kat Club is just another saloon, its Emcee just another cross-dresser (although, to be fair, Joe Wilson, Jr. makes a hell of a cross-dresser). Director Curt Columbus has brought a cottony humanism to all of this work with Trinity, but that might not be the right texture for Cabaret, which cries out for a telling less merciful. The show is not without its delights; what it needs is more degradation.

Cool Nights; Drying Leaves; Theater Resumes...

2009-09-12T08:44:00.006-04:00

...it's Fall in Providence.

I didn't see much theater this summer--just Hugging the Shoulder (presented by Theater of Thought) and Noises Off (present by Contemporary Theater Company). As I wrote in Motif, Hugging the Shoulder is a crude show, both vulgar and unsophisticated, though not, by extension, unenjoyable. The performance by ToT, in a crumbling parking lot behind Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket, treated the subject of infection and decay with a violent current, a sort of moral cautery. But the show, and our reaction to it, was all reflex and no reflection. Theater of Thought should be commended for bringing contemporary and unsettling theater to Providence and for keeping audiences on their toes through strident staging. They have great energy (which is not meant to be euphemistic: energy matters); now they need great scripts.

Striving for a completely different breed of theater experience, the Contemporary Theater Company brought Nosies Off, the riotous farce about theater, to URI's Kingston campus in late July. The show is not particularly contemporary (certainly not compared with Hugging the Shoulder, which was first produced at the NYC Fringe Festival in 2006) but the performance was immediate and gratifying.

This weekend brings previews to both Trinity Rep and Gamm Theatre. Trinity is showing Cabaret; Gamm is starting its season with Much Ado About Nothing, which they will perform in repertory with another play you may have heard of, Romeo and Juliet (opening September 22). Second Story begins its season later this month with the one-man show I Am My Own Wife. And Elemental Theatre Collective opens Amadeus on November 5.

Final Weekend at Trinity Rep: Shapeshifter

2009-05-28T23:38:00.005-04:00

With the world premiere of Shapeshifter, Trinity Rep’s 2008-2009 season comes to an end. Actually, one feels on leaving the theatre that it has come to the edge of a bending horizon and disappeared only from sight: the play, and the season, end wistfully, with the promise of further adventures bunched and blurred like a distant and indistinct silhouette. But the prospect of a fulfilling future is no match, as drama at least, for the realization of something meaningful and passionate now, and what Shapeshifter lacks is a moment, a present, in which life is frozen and shown in exultant detail. This is not to say that there are no great moments in the play—there are—but that the play itself only describes, and does not evoke, a long moment of crisis, and so the decision with which it ends is noisy but spurious. More interested in surfaces than depths, in action than in introspection, the show has a shape but no spirit.

It is not for lack of trying. Laura Schellhardt wrote her play around the perplexing and life-long question of identity—which, really, is what most art is about—and she has set it in a magical milieu: the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, which are nestled in mist and enthralled by the inscrutable behavior of shapeshifters, supernatural beings who can assume animal and human form. Midge, a young girl whose erratic behavior since her mother’s death worries her father (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) and her caretakers, the loving and gently teasing Fierson (Brian McEleney) and Maude (Anne Scurria), has a strong connection to the water and its spirits—and, somehow, we know, to the shapeshifters as well. She senses her difference from the others in her small fishing village but cannot express it. Fierson nurtures her incipient awareness of who she is in the dark loam of the stories he tells her about shapeshifters and transformation and love and sacrifice; to Maude, however, these tales are just arid fantasy: life is a series of practical challenges, like keeping one’s house clean and family fed.

But Midge is not the only one in the village transfixed by the power of the shapeshifters: her caretakers’ son, Tom (Stephen Thorne), rescues one from the ocean, falls in love with her, and marries her—all this in spite of her inability to speak English, though her whale is quite good—while other villagers have their own encounters with members of this mystical species. (Rachael Warren plays all of the shapeshifters, finding distinguishing physical mannerisms in each.) These scenes, episodic and elliptical, are animated not by the breath of character but by the machinery of caricature. Douglas (Joe Wilson, Jr.), for example, captures a shapeshifter, imprisons her, and tries to force her to marry him. What accounts for his ugly rapacity we never learn; his prehensile lust is merely a cynical contrast to Tom’s innocent affection. It’s not that the story needs more exposition or supposed psychological realism, but that its emotions need more mass. They are colorful and large, but they are hollow. Douglas is not a compelling character if he simply hates shapeshifters: what is his real quarrel with himself or with the world? What wrong does he mean to avenge, what imbalance does he mean to right, by dominating and demoralizing this shapeshifter? The audience learns as much about him as we might about a neighbor whose windows we walk past in the evening.

The play’s perfunctory characterization may be a function of its debt to the oral storytelling tradition. Plaited through the show is a fantastical story that Midge co-authors with Fierson and that changes direction as Midge herself changes. To reinforce this connection between Midge and the story she tells, Schellhardt has her watching action onstage even when she is not a part of it. These scenes, unfortunately, replicate the play’s problem: it all feels diffused and distorted, as though observed through the murky medium of a child’s avid and unrefined curiosity. There’s nothing recognizable in any of the characters—except for what we recognize from other plays and movies we’ve seen. Like Midge, who thinks that she can find the perfect name for someone by asking what he loves and what he hates, Schellhardt seems to believe that personality can be determined by two-question survey. So: Fierson is sweet-natured and imaginative but casually dismissive of his wife. Maude seems at first merely long-suffering and hard-headed, until she shows Midge a box containing artifacts from her youth—the skin she changed out of, but could not discard, when she married Fierson. Tom is love-struck and naïve, and Douglas is an unrepentant brute. Even Midge, the sympathetic center of the show, is a cipher, although she is rendered excitedly by Miriam Silverman.

Schellhardt thinks that shapeshifters can act as an illuminating metaphor for the story of any person’s maturation, which is a process of expansion and compromise, of fluidity and assertion, but she has worked backwards from this thesis to a play. As evidentiary drama, as Theatre of the Sincere, Shapeshifter is perfectly crafted; it presents its ideas efficiently, persuasively, even attractively. But it should not be mistaken for a show about actual people.

Trinity Rep's "The Secret Rapture"

2009-02-28T17:44:00.015-05:00

In contemporary usage, rapture has come to refer to an ecstasy, to a joy, often sexual or sacred, beyond words; but its Latin root is raptus, the past participle of the verb rapere—to seize, to take away—which has multiplied over the centuries into rapt, and raptor, and rape. Rapture, then, is not just speechless happiness, but a sensation before which one is powerless: it steals you from the moment, the self, and, in religious tradition, the world. It is, in short, a joy to fear. David Hare’s The Secret Rapture, now at Trinity Rep, has plenty of feeling, but little fear and joy; its characters believe themselves more pragmatic than that. The play begins and ends with death, and the life illustrated in between is profoundly mitigated by it. Which is not to say that there is no levity or lightness at all in the show—just that it feels more like a tenuous reprieve than a state of rest. What’s natural, Hare suggests, is for us to drift toward jealousy and conflict: even silence, however introverted, however rapt, is a sign of guilt or reproach. Who can be bothered with rapture, whatever it is—awe or terror or transformation or consummation—when life, with all of its mortification, is hard enough?

If this were all that The Secret Rapture were about, we might expect it to feel circular, its ending determined by its beginning and its meaning neatly enclosed within. But the play’s final line includes both a valediction and a summons—“We’re just beginning”—that prevents us from drawing simple conclusions. That line is uttered by Marion (Phyllis Kay), a Junior Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government, who has seemed pathologically incapable of sympathy; her sister, Isobel, by contrast, suffers from the gift of too much feeling. The impetus of the play is the death of their father, but its drama begins when Marion takes back the ring she had given him while he was still alive. Isobel (Rachael Warren), who had assumed care-taking responsibilities and was with their father when he died, watches silently as Marion reclaims the ring from a bedside table, a transgression she justifies too vehemently by insisting that their opportunistic stepmother, Katherine (Anne Scurria), would have taken it herself and sold it for vodka. Marion’s husband, Tom (Fred Sullivan, Jr.), a born-again Christian entrepreneur, bumbles into the scene and proves comically indifferent to moral struggles—the assurance of Christ’s custody has given him a chipper insouciance—and Marion, shamed by Isobel’s equanimity, storms out. The pieces of the show, if not their jigsaw relationships, are suggested immediately: inward calm and furtive busy-ness; the terrible power of silence to rebuke; the possibility of salvation through another person.

The play’s course is tragic; we can, from that first scene, foresee Isobel’s indignities rising like distant mountains. Katherine, a self-loathing and fractious alcoholic, has nowhere to go after her husband’s death, so Isobel takes her on at her small design firm in London. But her disruptive and destructive impulsiveness is too much for Isobel’s colleague and boyfriend, Irwin (Stephen Thorne), who, failing to persuade Isobel to fire her, demands that she leave himself. Isobel runs after her and hires her back. Later, Marion and Tom offer to buy Isobel’s firm, move it to a more comfortable and spacious office, and run it like an investment—with an eye ever on profit. This arrangement, which Isobel never wanted but which she is unable to prevent, proves toxic to her: her relationship with Irwin sickens, her business dries up, and she herself withers. It is hard to convey the ineluctable tectonic movement of the show, which results in the subduction of Isobel’s personality—“No one can remember now, but the big joke is, by temperament, I’m actually an extremely cheerful girl,” she says to Irwin in the second act—and which generates so much heat. If we are horrified by Marion’s, Tom’s, and Katherine’s power to manipulate Isobel, we are also exasperated by her own misguided sense of responsibility that makes her so malleable. Her capacity to empathize—which Marion later calls the effort “to understand everything”—is tested, exploited, and turned against her by those who are supposed to love her the most. The play ends in a setting we know well—Marion’s and Isobel’s father’s house—but its tone is newly desperate. Isobel’s search for peace has itself become a kind of poison: it has made Irwin mad with grief; Marion simply mad; and Tom almost agnostic. Only Katherine, we think, remains unmoved by it.

The Secret Rapture is a steely work, forged in the unforgiving language and the awful silences of the day-to-day. For all of the script’s toughness, the acting is often quite fine. At the tragic center of the show, and subject to all of its unrelenting pressures, is Rachael Warren, who finds Isobel’s familiar qualities—her reluctance to embarrass anyone else, her eagerness to please, her tendency to self-dramatize—and rescues them from bathos or banality. Isobel is a strange character, too: she’s wise enough to recognize the connivance of her family, but not canny enough to resist it. I suppose this is what idealism is, after all, and Warren gives Isobel’s a quality of practicality rather than perfection. She is like a real person, only more so, and we cringe with recognition. Phyllis Kay gives conservatism a bad name (or, rather, an even worse one) as the coldly calculative Marion. To be fair, Marion doesn’t plot Isobel’s downfall; as in the best tragedy, she is only an instrument of a much larger force. Kay’s performance is pitched just right for a politician: she disgusts us not with the extravagance of her nihilism but with the poverty of her affection. And Anne Scurria, who has single-handedly made several Trinity Rep shows worth seeing, is as energetic and believable as ever.

There are problems with the show’s casting, however. The first is that Fred Sullivan, Jr., plays Tom, a sincere evangelist, with a decorative and distracting irony. The script is clear about Isobel’s and Marion’s distrust of religious fervor, but we have to believe that Tom believes himself. As it is, his growing doubt about the efficacy of God’s planning doesn’t touch or sadden us, because Sullivan has played him all along as though in on a joke with the audience. We should be discomfited by Tom’s religious interruptions, not merely amused by them; if we laugh at him, it is at our own peril. Then there is the problem of the characters’ ages. The script calls for Marion and Tom to be in their late thirties, and for Isobel and Katherine to be in their early thirties: Marion is older than her stepmother. Despite impressive performances from Kay, Scurria, and Warren, this tension in their relationship cannot be stretched: Scurria has tremendous youthful vitality, but she is not the same age as Rachael Warren. The casting of older actors bleaches the play of some of its strangeness and energy. When Scurria, as Katherine, worries that she has nowhere to go after the death of her husband, we don’t think twice about it; her concern seems as credible as anyone’s on entering a job market cornered by the young, the unbowed, and the technologically savvy. Imagine a woman hardly older than a child, but already so fatalistic and defeated: to be young and desperate, though still untouched by the fires of experience, is to represent a raw sort of danger. Part of the shame here is that, in Angela Brazil, Trinity may have just the actress for Katherine’s childish impertinence. I can’t help wondering what Brazil’s exuberance would look like, dulled by drink and soured with envy. It might, in fact, be rapturous.

Notes on Trinity Rep's "The Secret Rapture"

2009-02-26T22:18:00.005-05:00

We saw David Hare's The Secret Rapture at Trinity Rep Wednesday night. It is about a father's death and a family's splintering: it is also about the death of an idea, or an ideal, and our efforts to outgrow it or grow into it. The play works on its audience subtly, only gradually revealing the terms of its tragedy. What makes it so rich, I think, is that its rapture is a secret not only to its characters but also to us--and even, I suspect, to Hare himself: despite its building momentum and urgency, the play never feels prescribed. It does feel patiently observed, and it is out of the equivocations and epiphanies of the everyday that Hare builds his drama. There is silence there, too, which acts as mortar or magma, depending on the temperature of the scene. The show is, for the most part, honestly acted--the three female leads are terrific; only Fred Sullivan, Jr., as an evangelical entrepreneur, feels like shorthand--and it is directed with real conviction and sincerity by Trinity Rep Artistic Director Curt Columbus. If conviction and sincerity sound like measures of faith rather than tragedy, it's because the show is about conflicts of belief--in politics, in God, in decency--which is the secret we can't help sharing.

I'll have a review posted soon.

Perishable Theatre's "Bad Money"

2009-02-25T07:53:00.007-05:00

I don’t want to be presumptuous, but it seems likely that Bad Money, currently enjoying its world premiere at Perishable Theatre, is the funniest play about currency depreciation you will see all year. In a dissipated former Soviet state, the local currency, known simply as the Purple, might best be understood as a vast ocean, swelling and receding in response to invisible, indomitable forces; Agnetta, our hero, not only floats on these waves but can also predict them. Blessed, or cursed, with a nose for monetary fluctuation, Agnetta returns to her Motherland after several years away—called, perhaps, by the strange scent of the Purple. She has, in fact, returned as an investment banker, and her first client is Mansur, a “small-time potatoes” restaurateur who hopes to buy a vast oil field with his identical twin cousins (from different sides of the family), Magsud and Mahmud. Agnetta’s colleague Joe, as charming and steadfast as a balsa wood bridge, scoots around the office on his three-wheeled chair and neglects to give Agnetta flowers for Women’s Day—even though he has given the surly secretary, Gulnara, a flamboyant bouquet. And drifting at the play’s periphery like a ghost is Agnetta’s Auntie, who has not forgiven a terrible treachery perpetrated by an unwitting Agnetta decades before and which she threatens to replicate as an adult.

Bad Money is by Meg Miroshnik, who has a winningly whimsical take on post-Communism: think of it as Agnetta in Wonderland. Avarice has not produced violent gangs, and old resentments have not been channeled into neo-Stalinism; instead, greed has created extravagant rascals—Mansur, in orange-tinted sunglasses and a matching leather jacket, throws his arms back and exclaims, “I am ambition!”—and the cultural divide is not between apparatchik and dissidents but between those who get it and those who don’t. So there is a melancholy to the play but no real menace. Contributing to the moon-bounce mood of the show is Sara Ossana’s set, which is simple and ingenious: a single backdrop of blown-up bills, printed on a huge wall of foam board into which are cut doors and windows. What this lacks in impact—doors closed violently shut with an emasculating breeze—it makes up for in depth and adaptability. It’s a constant reminder of the characters' obsession with cash, but it also works practically: one never wonders why an investment banking office, a chain restaurant called Fat Belly’s, and an old widow’s apartment should all have money-themed wallpaper. That this set works is one of the mysteries of theatre.

If the show’s set and staging, which is equally fluid and flexible, operate subliminally, the acting is decidedly supraliminal. Beth Alianiello is drier than day-old rye bread as a number of characters in the service industry, Jo-án Peralta, as both Magsud and Mahmud (distinguished only by the inverted crescent of their mustaches), is limber and ludicrous, and Josh Short plays Joe with a brittle charm and perfect timing. But it is Alexander Platt as Mansur and Patricia Thomas as Aunti who steal the show. Platt’s Mansur is all brio and Borat, and Thomas’s Auntie, addled but resilient, evokes the play’s only real human feeling. It is feeling, real or otherwise, that is missing from Nicole Soras’s portrayal of Agnetta. As she follows her nose through the stink of oil fields and rotting money, we hope for something more from her: a sign of anguish, or rapacity; some kind of heightened emotional state; or something like irony. We lose interest in the show when Auntie and Mansur are offstage, because Agnetta, as written or performed, seems so vaporous. She is the chaste center of the show, so she needs to attract or repel the audience, but in the end, we don’t know if we are supposed to fear or pity her. I left with a vague sense of affinity, but I also left wanting to know more about the further adventures of Auntie and Mansur.

Weekend Theatre

2009-02-20T07:49:00.015-05:00

Once again you find yourself at the edge of a weekend. You wonder, What can I do in the next two days that will supplant the week's indignities in my memory? You say, Why don't I go to a show? There must be a show in town.

There is.

At the Black Rep, catch Charles Mulekwa's A Time of Fire, starring the ever-pyretic Raidge as a tremulous thief, Cedric Lily (from last Fall's Bug) as a thuggish soldier, and Jonathan Dent as a devout student; they meet in the middle of a civil war in an unnamed African country. It's Saturday night at 7, and Sunday--which is a pay-what-you-can matinee--at 3pm.

Trinity Rep's A Raisin in the Sun has garnered some of the highest praise of any recent show in Providence; it is all deserved. See it Friday and Saturday night at 7:30, and Sunday at 2pm and 7:30.

Trinity is also beginning previews of David Hare's The Secret Rapture. The play may be a distorted reflection of Margaret Thatcher's England, but it is also a clear-eyed and contemporary look at money and morality. Hare fits this epic subject to the scale of the quotidian--an inherited house, a small graphic design firm, a bureaucrat's ambition--and scores it with intelligent, though exquisitely imperfect, language. Performances are Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday at 7:30pm.

Perishable Theatre is hosting the world premiere of Bad Money; previews are Saturday night at 8:00 and Sunday at 3:00, and opening night is Monday the 23rd.

Meanwhile, 2nd Story Theatre's The Front Page is sold out but I suspect you can call the box office for availability. And the Gamm is quiet for the next couple of weeks before opening Grace for previews on March 12th. Its run is short--only four weekends, including previews--so get your tickets now.

Also, you can go to the movies. Cable Car's French Film Festival is in full flower this weekend.

Trinity Rep's A Raisin in the Sun

2009-02-11T19:27:00.006-05:00

What happens to a play preserved? Does it soak and swell in the anxieties of the generations it outlasts? Or does it rush like the Heraclitean river in which we submerge ourselves occasionally, both our changing bodies and the rushing waters encountering each other for the first time, each time? Does it soften and rot, or does it harden into a mask of its fine qualities? (And, in any case, which is the worse fate: to decay or to petrify?) Or does the play preserve us? Does a historical play, a social play, keep our aspirations alive through decades of frustration or complacency? We call productions of old plays “revivals” because we believe we are waking something from sleep, or death; but is it also the actors and the audience who, touched by the play, walk again? I don’t know. I don’t know how theatre works—how a company that performs only new works might have a different relationship to its audience than a company that, like Trinity Rep, performs contemporary, original, and classic works; or how plays, actors, and audiences collaborate nightly in the secular miracle of insurrection, each raising the other up against the claims of indifference. But I do know that despite my skepticism, and despite my persistent reservations, Trinity Rep’s production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun does work some kind of miracle. This miracle, I think, is not specifically related to the realization of equality in a crudely hierarchical country, or to a so-perfect production of the play that it sends us into the world, changed forever. It is rather the insistence that art itself can be enough—that water need not be turned to wine, that a dream deferred is better than no dream at all.

When A Raisin in the Sun opens, the Younger family, a working-class black family on Chicago's South Side, is beginning a new day—except that they’re not: it’s the same day they have been living for generations. While her mother-in-law sleeps, Ruth Younger (Lynette Freeman) rouses her son, Travis, for school, and, with equal difficulty, her husband, Walter (Joe Wilson, Jr.), for work. Even after Walter wakes up, dreams still rattle around in his head; his first substantive line—about the life insurance check the Youngers are waiting for after the death of Walter’s father—shows that he lives in a world of fantastic expectation. Walter, a chauffeur, hopes to use the $10,000 dollar check to purchase part of a liquor store with his friends Bobo and Willy. Ruth disapproves of these friends but doesn’t know how to replace their callow encouragement with her own form of succor; his mother, Mama (Barbara Meek), disapproves of the liquor store, but hasn’t yet determined how the money should be spent. When the check arrives and Mama puts a down payment on a house with it, Walter twists into a tighter knot of fury; a tangle of dreams and deprecations, Walter all but disappears to his family and the world. How he comes back suggests that the play is not so much about waking up to the real world as sorting out which dreams are worth chasing and which dreams, perhaps, can wait.

Walter’s inarticulate, impatient rage is set off against his sister Beneatha’s intellectualized sense of grievance. She is in college, studying to be a doctor, but she has also been politicized by her experiences on campus. If Walter’s distinction is his headlong rush into an uncertain future—“a big looming blank space—full of nothing”—Beneatha’s is her idealization of her African roots, which she discusses with her Nigerian suitor, Asagai. Underyling her buzzwords is a deep insecurity, a spectacular naïveté: she holds her tempestuous brother beneath contempt—“there is nothing left to love,” she bristles—but her own yearnings are just as impulsive and subjective. It is to Lorraine Hansberry’s credit that A Raisin in the Sun is not a contest but a collage of ideas. She clearly condemns our avaricious culture, but doesn’t ridicule Walter for wanting to be a part of it. And if Hansberry seems generous in her sympathy towards Beneatha, she also burdens her with lines too serious for any audience to take entirely seriously. This is not to say that the play is indecisive or compromising, but rather that its conclusion is almost radically modest. The Langston Hughes poem from which Hansberry took her title asks if a dream deferred explodes; her answer, it seems, is that all dreams are deferred, so we approach the elusive good life asymptotically. The play begins with a waking up and ends wistfully: “We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors,” Walter says in the last scene, hopeful that life can be a series of smaller and smaller dreams.

Hansberry maps the path to this hope through a nightmare; she follows Walter as he drives himself mad with insatiable want. Walter dreams big, and with all the nuance of a child. He is a bundle of contradictions: a self-destructive dynamo. Joe Wilson, Jr.’s performance is a sometimes shocking evocation of this suicidal energy. It is, in short, annihilating. Wilson, who said in an interview with the Boston Globe that he spent less time developing this role before rehearsals than he usually does, seems to be still prodding and stretching his characterization as we watch. He must show us the depths to which Walter sinks before rising up again, and he has decided to do this without reserving any special dignity, any performative pride, for himself. Walter has no stoic strength, no particular, ennobling resolve: so Wilson gives us a performance that trembles with weakness and sputters impotently. He does not merely act pathetic, but shows the audience what a desperate man can be reduced to. He risks us rejecting his performance, which is an act of almost incredible vulnerability. Wilson gives us Walter’s debasement through the surrender of his own agency: as if mirroring, and not just impersonating, Walter's self-hatred, Wilson challenges us to judge him. Acting like this is brave, but we don’t recognize it as such until the show is over. Simply put, we don’t envy Walter's humiliation. To an audience, vivid depredation has a faintly glowing beauty—it is suffering for our sins—but Joe Wilson wrings the light out of his performance. He, like Walter, suffers in a darkness of his own making.

But he does not do this alone. His fellow actors comprise one of the most impressive ensembles you will see on a Rhode Island stage this year. Barbara Meek as Mama, shaken but still strong, is the show’s empathetic center. Meek suffuses Mama’s bewilderment at the world’s corrosive meanness and her own children’s dissolution with determination and yearning. Mama’s daughter-in-law, Ruth, meets the world’s challenges with pragmatic resignation; if Walter overestimates his abilities and aptitudes, Ruth underestimates hers. Hansberry’s depiction of Ruth is strangely reductive—Walter accuses her of smallness, and the script doesn’t do much to disprove him—but Lynette Freeman gives her size and depth by exploring the limits of her affection and disappointment. And Angela Thomas makes a strident and stubborn—but not humorless—Beneatha. We think we know how their story ends—dream realized; happiness abundant—but we don’t; and they don’t either. It’s not a sad ending, but it’s not exactly victorious either. Our country has been through a nightmare, but perhaps now, in an era lit by the bright words change and hope, we are finally ready, all of us, to try to be good neighbors.

Notes on Trinity Rep's Rasin in the Sun

2009-02-04T23:06:00.009-05:00

Last night we went to Trinity Rep to see Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, which runs through March 8th. The show is not flawless--director Brian McEleney repeatedly interrupts its flow and undermines its realism by having characters address their monologues, like closing statements, to the audience--but its cumulative effect is adamantine. On the page, the play feels expansive, full of stirring rhetorical gestures; in performance, lead actors Joe Wilson, Jr., Lynette Freeman, Barbara Meek, and Angela Thomas, rein in Hansberry's more precious, precocious moments: they have found the personal in the poetical. Credit for the show's success must go to the entire cast--indeed, they set a standard for ensemble acting that other local stages will be hard-pressed to match--but Joe Wilson, Jr.'s, depiction of Walter Younger, a man chasing himself to exhaustion, is so athletic, so fierce, and so volatile, that it leaves us dazed.

I'll have a review posted soon.

Dreams Deferred

2009-01-31T13:48:00.004-05:00

Trinity Rep brings Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun back to the stage this February. It's in previews until Wednesday, when it opens officially; we'll see if the play is an old chestnut, a raisin, or some other organic edible. But if there's any doubt about the show's vintage--about the power and range of its emotion--take a look at Mark Turek's production photo above, in which Joe Wilson, Jr., appears to have aged fifteen years from the last time we saw him as the lead in a show, and, in the back, Barbara Meek looks as though she's practically holding on to the kitchen counter to project durability and dignity. Wilson's Walter, storm-tossed and vacant, looks desperately offstage for somewhere to plant his idea of a dream. Ms. Meek has been acting in Providence for a long time--practically since A Raisin in the Sun's New York debut in 1959--so it's fitting that she is playing Mama, a woman as enduring and capacious as an oak.

Looking Ahead: Theatre in the Week to Come

2009-01-28T07:09:00.003-05:00

Even as the economy cools, local theatre continues to cook:

Elemental Theatre Collective's Deca-Go-Go returns to Perishable Theatre tomorrow evening at 8:00PM. It runs through Sunday afternoon.

Gamm Theatre's Awake and Sing! begins its second full week tonight.

At 2nd Story Theatre, catch Ben Hecht's Front Page Thursday through Sunday.

Finally, Trinity Rep opens A Raisin in the Sun for preview this Friday night (January 30th). It runs through the weekend and opens officially next Wednesday.

And that Thursday (February 5th), the Providence Black Rep begins previews of the U.S. premiere of Charles Mulekwa's A Time of Fire.

All This Can Be Filed Under: Only the Gold Remains

2009-01-24T11:03:00.010-05:00

Check out my write-up of Elemental Theatre Collective's Deca-Go-Go, an energetic and implausibly emotional show at Perishable Theatre this weekend and next, on the IndieArtsRI blog.

This "write-up" is not a review. I see IndieArts as a promotional, rather than critical, organ, and I make no claims to objectivity in my pieces for it; that said, I never expect to deceive. Everything I wrote, for example, about Brown/Trinity's Full Circle felt true; it just wasn't the complete truth. I put as much work into my (sporadic) writing for IndieArts as I do here, but I pass it through something like a prospector's seived basin: only the gold (Or is it pyrite?) remains. I have no moral inhibitions about doing this; we all need a little help from our friends.

Sometimes I will promote on IndieArts and critique here, but this isn't one of those times. I'm friends with people attached to Elemental Theatre and I'm not interested in negotiating the dangerous zone between helpful feedback and objective observation; I choose unencumbered friendship every time. In a way it's a shame, because reviewing theatre like that created by the ETC ought to be one of the pleasures of being engaged with local arts, not to mention that the meaningfulness of one's praise is proportional to the integrity of one's criticism--pointing out a show's flaws confirms that it is worth thinking about, which is the highest praise. But it was fun going to a show knowing that I only had to enjoy it--that I was free to nurture, and not vet, my first impressions--and I hope that Messrs. Platt and Rabinow, the cast and crew of Deca-Go-Go, and the potential theatre-goers of Providence, know that this show is at least as good as I said it was.

Trinty Rep at the Oscars

2009-01-22T09:17:00.002-05:00

Former Trinity Rep actor and artistic director Richard Jenkins has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Visitor. It's a great choice by, um, whoever makes it. My review is here, but don't take my word for it; just google the movie to read the unanimously admiring consideration of the movie and Jenkins's performance in it. And then, if you didn't catch it at the Avon, rent it.

(While we're on the subject, make plans now to catch possible future Academy Award-winning actors and actresses in the upcoming Trinity performance of A Raisin in the Sun. Previews start Friday, January 30th and the show opens Wednesday, February 4th.)

Notes on Gamm Theatre's "Awake and Sing!"

2009-01-18T23:32:00.038-05:00

In 1935 Clifford Odets wrote Awake and Sing!, which is about the fissures that split the Berger family as they cope with the turmoil of the Great Depression; it was a tremendous success in times not so unlike our own, but Odets's star has fallen in the decades since. On Sunday night we went to the Gamm Theatre to watch a revival of the show, considered by many to be his best work. It is a fascinating piece, demonstrating at once a virtuosic command of language and a servitude to ideology. The play reaches awesome peaks of intensity, sometimes despite itself, thanks to the cool guidance of director Fred Sullivan, Jr. and the brute muscle of the cast, especially veteran Sam Babbitt and recent Brown/Trinity Consortium alumna Diana Buirski. Babbitt plays Jacob, a rimy but resilient radical now living with his daughter and son-in-law, and their two nearly grown children, in a small New York apartment. Buirski plays his granddaughter Hennie, who is alternately feckless and fierce; her swings between resignation and rage provide the play's most interesting weather. Between one and the other, we melt or freeze. Her brother, Ralph (Marc Dante Mancini) can barely conceal his contempt for his mild father, and bridles under his mother's sanctimony and small dreams. This sort of dysfunction may be a hallmark of the American family drama, but I suspect that many audience members left, as I did, wanting to have felt more than emotional extremes; we missed the gradual hardening of resolve, the slow thaw of forgiveness, that mark the path to self-realization. What we get instead is event. The whole feels less than the sum of its parts--which is an awkward conclusion to draw from a play that ends with such pro-union fervor.

Awake and Sing! is grounded in prophecy--its title is from the Book of Isaiah, but its real energy is from Das Kapital--and Odets seems to have adopted his antecedents' priorities: like them, he is more impressed by forces than by people. Or, perhaps, he is interested in individuals only insofar as they constitute, or are swept up by, forces larger than themselves. The problem with watching Awake and Sing! today is that it is not clear what these forces are. Odets, writing in the thick of the Great Depression and just fifteen years after Eugene Debs earned over six percent of the popular vote as the Socialist candidate for President, did not have to describe the vitiating pressures of capitalism or the putative restorative powers of socialism. The evidence of the one and faith in the other were abundant. Today we have the first but we lack the second; our indignation is, or has been, directed towards unscrupulous individuals and unregulated industries, not the operating ethics of capitalism itself. We are skeptical of revolution in this country, even in a winter of discontent.

It is not beyond Odets's power to awaken in us a revolutionary anger, but a whisper directly in our ear might make a better alarm than a clarion song. As it is, much of Awake and Sing! vibrates violently and at unfamiliar frequencies. The play begins loudly and gets louder, even while the menace of the world outside the Berger's apartment remains abstract. The audience, I think, needs to be welcomed into the 1930s more warmly; we have to be seduced, or lured, with character, into a trap of conscience. There is much to admire about the play, and much to enjoy in this interpretation of it, but I hope its exclamatory title does not continually lead it towards the intemperate, or the hyperventilative. What the show needs is not to be modernized but merely modulated; the actors must stir bewilderment into their boiling anger, in part because that is what we are feeling now, about our own times (What does this mean? we ask; How long can it go on?), in part because the audience will feel more comfortable with the show's conclusion when it seems contingent (i.e., the result of personal inquiry) rather than foreordained. (We might also hear more of Odets's idiosyncratic language, which must itself feel personal rather than inevitable; Odets unleashed an irreversible force on the American stage: urban, Jewish idiom.) The struggle to reproduce the breathlessness of the 1930s is a losing one--we know too well how the rush to form a Marxist state ends; the struggle to understand the tenor of those times and the dramatic expression of their energies might be more rewarding. The performance on Sunday was just a preview, and I'm sure as the show develops through its run a different music will emerge from it. But as long as Mr. Babbitt does not lose his wistful good humor, and Ms. Buirski does not lose her inarticulate intensity, the show has a ruminative melody and a discordant descant. This counterpoint alone makes the song worth hearing.

Shows-A-Go-Go

2009-01-18T08:12:00.011-05:00

It's another busy week of theater in and around Providence:

Today at the Gamm at 5:00, Susan Quinn, author of Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times, will be talking about the Federal Theatre Project, which, from 1935 to 1939, funded plays across the country to keep actors, directors, writers, and stage-crews busy. If the project galvanized visionary theatre--its propitious climate gave rise to literary giant Arthur Miller and just plain giant Orson Welles--it also provided a stage for Manichean melodrama: Congress, outraged by the leftist slant of the works funded by the FTP, voted to terminate funding in June 1939. (Apparently, 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose plays were revived and funded by the FTP, was a Communist.) In short, the dinosaurs won this round, but the small mammals, forced to scrape by on the periphery, adapted and survived. Quinn's talk, which itself is bound to be fascinating, precedes a preview of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! The Gamm website says this evening's show is sold out, but it also encourages you to call the box offce (723-4266) to check for availability.

On Thursday of this week, Elemental Theatre brings Deca-Go-Go to Perishable Theatre. I'm not sure what to say about this, even--or especially--after looking at the show's website. If the play is as anarchically ridiculous as the promotional materials, it'll be a well-spent $15.

And next weekend, the Manton Avenue Project brings There's A Couple'A Ways This Could End: A Conflict Resolution Play to The Media Arts Center at Met Public. Written by seven kid playwrights, shaped for the stage by seven dramaturgues, and performed by nearly two dozen local actors, the show is collaborative at every level: it is the result of a partnership between MAP and The Institute for the Study and Practice of Non-Violence, and is, appropriately, about the escalation and defusing of violence. (For more information, check out the January issue of Providence Monthly; Molly Lederer's article is a great read because she sees the playwrighting experience through the wide-open eyes of one of the project participants.)

Also next week, Gamm and 2nd Story officially open their first plays of 2009. Gamm, as noted already, is putting on a Depression-era classic; 2nd Story is showing Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page. Visit their websites and purchase your tickets.

Back from the Brink

2009-01-14T23:33:00.007-05:00

Theater at the Black Rep is back. After a vigorous, ad hoc fund-raising effort over the autumn of 2008, the theater has raised enough money to proceed with its two-show spring season. It starts on February 5th with the U.S. premiere of Brown graduate student Charles Mulekwa's A Time of Fire. The show may be new to audiences here, but Mulekwa himself is no novice; he has written over ten plays, many about political and social issues in his native Uganda, and has received considerable international recognition. The text of A Time of Fire is online here. Its language snaps at irregular angles and charts strange trajectories; it is also nervously, desperately funny. There is more biographical information available here and here.

Blacktop Sky at Black Rep

2009-01-12T23:11:00.016-05:00

Last night, at the Black Rep, four actors performed a public reading of Christina Anderson's new play, Blacktop Sky. It was the first reading I had ever attended, and I was relieved that the experience did nothing to undermine the thrill of theater; it is not, in short, like seeing a magician practice his tricks. It was humbling to be reminded that most plays are born on the page, nursed in readings, ushered through childhood in rehearsal, and unveiled in something like maturity on opening night. Blacktop Sky, like its protagonist, Ida, is somewhere in its adolescence still--dreamy and passionate, but unresolved. It is full of feeling and purpose but uncertain of its direction.

Ida longs to escape the projects where she lives but her boyfriend, Wynn, ten years her senior, offers her only a bourgeois vision of freedom. She is intrigued by Klass, a young homeless man who sets up his stuff in the projects' courtyard and, like the pigeons whom he is said to resemble in his over-sized coat, occasionally rises above the grasping shadows of his orphan, urban life. Ida and Klass share a comfort with silence and a hope in transcendence that threaten Wynn. The complicated affection among these three--the idea of a "love triangle" seems too comic for relationships as tentative and inarticulate as these--is the orbiting action of the play; there is not much else.

Indeed, the universe of the projects is a sort of vacuum. The only other characters we meet are themselves characters in anecdotes, whispered or disputed, until the cops, who are hardly characters at all, show up at the end to deal with Klass. This means that Ida, Wynn, and Klass make the story their own, but it also means that the terms--the limits and the pressures--of their lives are unclear. What is it like to live in the projects? Why does Ida want so desperately to get out, and why do Wynn's assurances that he can help her escape feel so specious? (Are the projects different from Siddartha Gautama's palace, or Mick Kelly's Georgia town?) What does Klass offer Ida that Wynn doesn't? How is Klass a threat to Wynn? How is Klass-or-Wynn even a choice, and what is it a choice between? Why doesn't it feel like a terrible choosing by play's end? What has all this meant, not symbolically, but actually? What has it done to Ida? What could it mean? I hope that Ms. Anderson continues to develop Ida further, not by thrusting a more detailed back-story on her but by letting her speak for herself: we need her, as an insider and an outsider--an exile, in other words--to judge the projects. We need her to show us why Klass is so compelling. We need her to hold our gaze; and then we need her to tell us where, and how, to look.

(Christina Anderson's new play, Inked Baby, will receive its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in March.)

Next Week in Preview

2009-01-09T12:44:00.008-05:00

Theater in this town is like water simmering: there it is, whispering and bubbling, until you turn away and it comes to a vigorous boil. Here is what a city's theater looks like when it's over a hot flame:

This Sunday, at 2:00PM, Perishable Theatre hosts LaVoce: Theatre That Speaks, a new company "that gives voice to works that promote social change by creating dialogue." Their first show in Providence is Madeleine George's The Most Massive Woman Wins. (This video is particularly engaging, in part for the sensitive interpretation of the lines, in part for the eerily numinous glow of the actresses in the scene's background, in part for the obvious efforts of the cinematographer not to cry.) George's biography reads like a bildungsroman in progress; it should embolden even the most reluctant theatre-goer or--better still--the most trepidant would-be writer.

On Monday the 12th, at 7:00PM, Megan Sandberg-Zakian directs a reading of Christina Anderson's new play Blacktop Sky, at the Black Rep. This is exciting for several reasons. First, it's a reading of a new play by a young artist who seems primed (not destined, but fully prepared) for something great. Second, tickets are just 5 freakin bucks--though, if you're feeling flush, you can always donate more. And third, it's a sign of the Black Rep theater's resilience. Reports of its demise were, we hope, greatly exaggerated.

Next week both 2nd Story Theatre and the Gamm Theatre begin previews for their first shows of 2009. 2nd Story is showing Ben Hecht's screwball comedy The Front Page, a scheduling change after recent events sort of took all the irreverent fun out of Death of a Salesman. (It's an artistic decision that provokes the question, When is relevant too relevant?) Previews are next Friday and Saturday evening at 8:00, and the show runs Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through February 15th.

Gamm is going ahead with Clifford Odets's depression-era classic, Awake and Sing! Odets is known as a strident voice for the underdog, but his work is also idiosyncratic and humane. Gamm previews the show next weekend (January 15th, 16th, and 17th at 8:00; Sunday, January 18th at 7:00.) and opens it officially on Thursday the 22nd. Here's the calendar of performances.

Two Tens Gets You Tickets to Trinity

2009-01-05T14:22:00.022-05:00

This from the Trinity Rep:

Trinity Repertory Company is pleased to announce that it plans to continue its tradition of making a night at the theater affordable for all by making 5,000 $20 tickets available for the rest of its 2008-2009 season. These $20 tickets will be available for select seats in every performance of every show – from classics like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to newer works like The Secret Rapture by David Hare and the world premiere of Shapeshifter by Laura Schellhard.

(More information here.)

I know that many of us have been wondering how Trinity would respond to the "economic crisis," especially given that, like lobster or a second yacht, theater seems distinctly like a luxury these days. But theater is only a luxury in proportion to its triviality, and this spring season is anything but trivial. Let me clarify that: for all of my animadversion, the fall season was itself no lightweight. Curt Columbus and the actors at Trinity Rep have tried to give Providence a theater that is both accessible and subversive; I appreciate that recent shows, though far from flawless, were presented as sincere challenges to complacency and compartmentalization. Does it make a difference that I thought these imperfect plays were nobly motivated? Are they better plays because they have the weight of principle behind them? In short, the plays may not be better but the experience of seeing them, now, is. That is what the theater is for: to be seen, now.

So I am excited about Trinity trying to be more affordable: the conversation that it hopes to provoke will be livelier because it will involve more, and perhaps more different, people. Kudos to Trinity and congratulations to all the theater-goers who might otherwise, but for the responsiveness of Trinity Rep, have missed a slate of really terrific shows. If you have wanted to go to Trinity but have been intimidated by the (presumptive) austerity of the experience or dissuaded by the price, now's your chance.

The Receptionist, Reconsidered

2008-12-18T17:56:00.015-05:00

An early draft of my review of Trinity Rep's The Receptionist began conditionally--you may or may not like the show, I thought, depending on what you think theater is best at, or good for--but a friend of mine discouraged me from equivocating. "You didn't like it," she said. "Don't try to be nice." She was right that a reviewer shouldn't try to be nice, but I was wrong, I believe, to retreat from this position, as feeble and impractical as it may seem. I didn't like the show because it was not exciting to watch; it didn't use dramatic form or language to advance a perspective, a concern. But I have thought about it nearly constantly since last week, and if you think that theater--or any art--works better as nourishment than emetic, then it may be that this thinking, that goes on for days after a show, justifies it.

Also, what I wrote? It was wrong. Kind of.

Adam Bock was not suggesting that theater contorts language and theatrical language obscures real problems, but that people who fail to think theatrically--who do not converse in textured, supple language with themselves--will also fail to make moral decisions. The rigorous consideration that is a part of serious theater, that is, the tortured inquiry of the monologue, is also a part of being a moral human. The one character in Bock's play who is given a monologue, Mr. Raymond, is also the closest to distinguishing between the simulacrum and the real--this monologue, which I thought that the play undermined, is actually its own scene and honored by preeminence. Unlike any other character in the show, Mr. Raymond can communicate with himself; he demonstrates what Hannah Arendt called "a root-striking process of thinking." Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil," itself rendered a limp, if not evil, banality by time and overuse, has already been invoked by critics to describe, and inadvertently simplify, The Receptionist's theme; but none has talked about her notion of solitude, thinking, and speaking: To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and actualized in the processes of thought, and every thought process is an activity in which I speak to myself about whatever happens to concern me. Thinking is the conversation between the talker and the talked-to; thinking is a monologue. This thinking, which is, after all, only speaking, proscribes extreme evil. There are no other monologues in The Receptionist because there are no other thinking characters. They have no relationship, no conversation, with the people their actions have turned them into, or the people they once were.

One can fault Bock for failing to find the dramatic in his schematic--it addresses the brain rather than the heart, or, better still, the body. Theater can make us tremble; it ought to be tectonic. The Receptionist is a drama in retrospect--it's like finding out from the news that the vague unease you felt the night before was because of a mild earthquake. That phenomenon is explained, but the problem of having a home on a fault line remains unexamined.

One can also, incidentally, fault Bock for giving the male character this heroic insight and for writing the receptionist, Bev, as the quintessential work-drone. Mr. Raymond's crisis may find him unrepentant, but at least he suffers a crisis at all: it is better, Arendt quotes, to suffer wrong than to do wrong. The worst thing about Bev is that she has no sense of what "wrong" or "suffering" are; she is blissfully oblivious to her own responsibility for her fate.

Trinity Rep's The Receptionist

2008-12-15T14:34:00.012-05:00

The Receptionist is a new play by Adam Bock, and Trinity Rep should be commended for performing its New England premier—they have taken a chance with an unfamiliar playwright's untested play, and it has been directed creatively and performed adroitly. I only wish I liked it more. The show gleams with novelty and timeliness, and has the gloss of relevance, but one wonders if it is really a jewel or just carefully polished glass. This turns out to be the central question of the play itself: after all, don’t we prefer the fake when the price of the real is too high? I don't want to give away the nature of the awful reality concealed by the brisk professionalism of receptionist Beverly Wilkins (Janice DuClos) and the vapid temporizing of office-worker Lorraine Taylor (Angela Brazil); suffice it to say, the business conducted by the Northeast Office, darkly adumbrated by Edward Raymond (Timothy Crowe) in his opening monologue, is repugnant. This monologue, addressed to an unseen character onstage but directed towards the audience, ends with his ambiguous and sinister professional courtesy, "Let's get you set up." He seems to speak for Bock himself, who has structured his play as a prolonged, elaborate, and occasionally very funny set-up; the problem is that it is also dramatically inert. If satire is an instrument for revealing truth, The Receptionist's mild humor is a crucible with no flame. Only in the second half does Bock apply heat, but by then it may be too late.

The strength of the play is Bock’s language, which splices the theatrical to the vernacular. He has obviously read David Mamet and has most likely enjoyed his share of Monty Python sketches—like them, his writing exaggerates the absurdity of most of our conversations—but his subject doesn't seem worthy of these antecedents or his own formidable talent; it is too easy. Bev chats on the phone with her profligate friend Cheryl Lynn while putting professional calls indifferently through to her bosses' voicemail; Lorraine races in late, a story about her bus spilling preemptively and guiltily out of her; they talk about Lorraine's unenviable love life, which has stalled with Glen, a certified narcissist; handsome Martin Dart (Timothy John Smith) arrives from the Central Office, hoping to meet with Mr. Raymond, who is, unusually, running late as well; Lorraine is smitten by Mr. Dart and finds, to her surprise, that her feelings are—or appear to be—reciprocated; Dart accosts Mr. Raymond when he finally arrives, and tells him he’s needed at the Central Office—a visit, we understand, that is to be censorious rather than congratulatory.

Ricocheting across this banal surface are some terrific (and some inane) jokes and arch observations about office life, all angled playfully and expertly by the cast. Janice DuClos, one of the bright stars of Providence theater, is, as always, powerful. She can be funny, officious, affectionate, and wounded; she always seems so alive on the stage, sensitive to the melody of language and, though she is sitting for most of the show, vulnerable to the force of the world’s pleasures and frustrations. Timothy John Smith, who glowered magnificently as the hulking boxer Le Mec in last spring’s Paris By Night, is given a chance to prove he also knows how to speak. His Dart isn’t nearly so pointed as the name suggests; although he is cunning, he is more lubricious than sharp. I cannot help feeling that Angela Brazil is being used reductively by Trinity these days: for the third consecutive show, she is asked to convulse like a box of jumping beans, and by the end, you wonder which of you is more exhausted. I suppose her hysterics are actually the worm of anxiety shifting inside her—that is, they are effect rather than mere affect, and proof of actorly commitment, but the performance left me reeling. Timothy Crowe, as the boss of the office, also left me unsettled, but because his performance is so quiet, so faltering. His Mr. Raymond sees through the artifice of his life but lacks the temerity to finally renounce it; he stands uncertainly at the intersection of bleak disappointment and pragmatic self-deception.

And so we come back to the problem of the play, which is that it’s a scam, a diversion. The show’s punch is of the sucker variety, not the emotional—though it will knock the breath out of you just the same, because it is delivered suddenly and subtly by Ms. DucClos and Ms. Brazil (whose second-half performance is much more interesting than her first). This punch comes in the form of a revelation that suggests depths to the world of the play that are not tested, or even suggested, by what comes before it. What’s missing from this world is conflict. What’s missing is discovery, which is not the same as shock. What’s missing is the sense that character and language and gesture are tools, or weapons, in the negotiation of principles; that theater is emissary; that drama is revanchist; that words are to be are fought over, persuaded, recruited, and deployed; and something, be it power, or love, or dignity, is to be won back. In The Receptionist’s clever language, there is no plot being forwarded, no loss being measured, no triumph being planned. To Bock, language is merely fun: it is not part of the problem or the solution. So the idiom, the indiscriminate likes and I was all and he was alls, the jokes about Flom, Minnesota--are these all just to show how trivial we become when the alternative is to face hell? Speech, like theater itself, is brought into the public arena and shown to be comically impotent, or at least distracting; the play is about acting, and acting, to Bock, is avoidance. This may, indeed, be true—Bock’s play posits a problem beyond language, although language is certainly contorted to accommodate it—but it cheapens the theater-going experience. We have spent the night laughing with characters whom we are meant to recognize from our own lives and who, it turns out, are merely actors themselves. Theater, then, is all about the audience: Look at what you are, Bock says. He is silent on why we prefer the ersatz to the authentic, or what it is like to choose the one over the other, or what it does to the soul to live with this decision; he sends us out into the world, clutching a bauble--a jewel, or cut glass?--of indeterminate value and vague purpose.

The Week That Will Be...

2008-12-10T08:24:00.009-05:00

Trinity Rep finished previews of Adam Bock's The Receptionist last night and opens the show officially this evening. By the puckered look on audience-members' faces after the show, one suspects that it is an antidote to the plague of holiday cheer that threatens to lift our spirits and distract our thoughts from the sourness of life. I have looked at the script--briefly and superficially--and can't wait to hear Trinity's actors interpret its rich, repetitious language. (At Trinity Repertory Theater through January 11th.)

In the same neighborhood, the Brown/Trinity Consortium is performing Charles Mee's Full Circle, a re-imagining of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, which itself re-imagined an interpretation of the 14th-century Chinese play Circle of Chalk, by Li Xingdao. Mee contributes this economy of ideas by making all of his scripts available, for pleasure and for plunder, on his website. Take a look, and then see the show (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30; Saturday at 2:00 & 7:30; Sunday at 2:00 and 7:30; Monday at 6:00).

2nd Story Theatre had intended to wrap The Miracle Worker this weekend but, one hopes because of universally positive reviews, has instead extended its run through next weekend.

For something less cerebral, I suspect, but provocative in its own way, try the Gamm Theatre, where Casey Seymour Kim, savage in last season's Boston Marriage and irrepressible in the recent An Ideal Husband, stars in Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!!, an original one-woman play. Interestingly, Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!! is not based on Caucasian Chalk Circle.

"Disposable Men" at Perishable Theatre

2008-11-20T23:50:00.021-05:00

Disposable Men (at Perishable Theatre through Sunday), created by, written by, and starring James Scruggs, is a one-man show, but it is inhabited by multitudes. Dedicated to the dozens of black men shot by police in New York City since 1989 and given context by the hundreds of horror movie clips projected on screens behind Scruggs, the show sings with the voice of a ghostly chorus. Through Scruggs himself, soloists emerge: the "audience nigger," a live video feed on a television draped in a prophet's burlap and dreadlock wig, who comments acerbically on images of black characters being bloodily dispatched in movies projected on-stage; the "lynch nigger" at Supremacy, a hot new theme restaurant where patrons pay to enact racist fantasies, and for the ribs, which look excellent; Cleophus Washington, who has the "bad blood" but, thank goodness, a diligent and good-hearted doctor to take care of him and his afflicted wife; Eddie the Watch, the innovative Bar Mitzvah dancer now keeping time in prison; a recruiter for a prison fraternity called Con Kappa Con (or is that Kan Kappa Kan?); and, finally, terribly, Amadou Diallo, the young, unarmed immigrant shot 41 times by New York City police officers in the winter of 1999. Like Frankenstein, like the Wolf Man, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, like Dracula, no ordinary means sufficed to take him down; it took, as it always does in the old movies, a village.

The play is immersive and disturbing, in part because its tone is so varied; its shifts in time and space and attitude shake us awake. Sometimes, however, its sense of adventure threatens to steer it towards obscurity. That there is a connection between the film clips and Scruggs's characters is clear, but it borders on the academic: is the play about film, or are the films about the play? That is, is the play about representation, or do filmic representations of monsters create an apt metaphor for the play's characters? And what about horror movie monsters is "disposable?" There are moments of sublime correspondence between film and stage, but just as often their relationship is nebulous and elusive. (I admit that I was distracted by trying to identify the various clips, many of which were taken from my favorite movies.) What makes Disposable Men work so well is not its digital media, but the human medium of Scrugg's voice--both authorial and oratorical--which is ironic, irreverent, reflective, baffled, and angry. Above all it is persuasive, and we follow it everywhere: to Supremacy, to a street corner where a mother sells her son for a sandwich or three, to a battle royal staged for the entertainment of prison guards. The play is kaleidoscopic rather than panoptic: through a single instrument we see distinct and vivid arrangements of the same elements. Even as Scruggs himself splinters and fragments, the play loses neither intensity nor purpose. Maybe atomization is the wrong analogy for this show; maybe, for all of its messy inquiry and bloody deconstruction, the play is actually about restoration. Scruggs isn't breaking himself down into discrete parts; he's documenting the making of an indivisible man.

Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" at the Gamm

2008-11-20T11:39:00.009-05:00

In the world according to Oscar Wilde, life is a catalogue of afflictions: power corrupts, education curdles, wealth distracts, charm spoils, marriage entraps, facts disappoint, politics bore. In short, all the world’s a plague. This position, ostensibly harrowing, is actually comic, in the sense that misfortune distributed universally and indiscriminately loses its ability to shock or injure; tragedy is what happens when your life is worse than your neighbor’s. This worldview may also feel a little Socialist—which Wilde was, and which was anyway a less scurrilous thing to be accused of in the 1890s than it is today—in its faith that only a level playing field will allow for the most artful exercise of an individual’s freedom. Appropriately, in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband there is no calamity worse than privilege. The best that can be said about the show (at the Gamm Theatre through December 7th) is that, through it, Wilde was able to develop one of his favorite themes—the resilience of authenticity in a world clotted with fraudulence. The worst is that the play can feel not just rigged but contrived, even authoritarian—which is the antithesis of Wilde’s personal and political ideals--because it is about moral decision but plotted to circumvent moments of real consequence. The challenge for any cast performing it is to somehow communicate the very moral seriousness that Wilde ironizes, and to make Wilde’s irony seem not just freshly discovered but appropriate to the moment; his characters have to come by it honestly and express it provisionally, or the audience will feel not so much like co-conspirators in a clever subversion as subjects to an ideologue. We must sense the play’s dark undercurrent of grief and disillusionment even as we revel in the froth and babble of its humor.

Sir Robert Chiltern (Jim O’Brien) seems to have it made—he’s in parliament and pegged for great success, admired and influential beyond his dreams, and married to the loving Lady Chiltern (Casey Seymour Kim)—but there’s a problem with his ideal life: it’s built on a lie. More than twenty years before the start of the play, he had sold a state secret to a speculator; the fortune he made from this deal is the fragile foundation of his entire political career since. The funny thing about the past is that, though it never disappears, neither does it stay the same. For Chiltern, the callow behavior of his early years in politics has been justified and mollified by the good he has done since then: it has been transformed from a pitfall to a step up. An Ideal Husband begins with Chiltern being shown the quick way back down. Mrs. Cheveley (the long-limbed and caramel-voiced Jeanine Kane), a socialite-cum-adventuress living in Vienna, has returned to London with only a hook and some bait. She wants Chiltern to suppress a Cabinet report on the poor prospects of an Argentine canal so that the government will buy shares in it and her heavy investment will turn into considerable profit; should he refuse, she explains, she is prepared to go public with a note proving his involvement in the scheme of two decades before. Chiltern cannot suppress the canal report—his career in Parliament has been a model of probity and honor—but he cannot issue it either: to do so would invite public disgrace and private collapse. He would lose the public’s trust, and, even worse, his wife’s adoration. What’s an ideal husband to do?

In this case, he turns to Lord Goring (Tony Estrella), his unemployed and unambitious friend. Thank goodness for the idle rich, who, untroubled by the demands of real jobs, are available for freelance work. Goring is good-hearted and eloquent, so we don’t hold his aimlessness against him; in fact, his indifference to the blandishments of professional or societal advancement seems to have preserved his moral sensitivity. He advises Lord Chiltern to confess his indiscretion to his wife before she finds out about it from Mrs. Cheveley, and admonishes Lady Chiltern to forgive her husband’s fallibility; she must surrender her claim to an ideal and learn to love the real. (Goring, it has been noted, bears a striking resemblance to Wilde himself: both men had accomplished fathers; both had a sartorial obsession; both claimed to be two years younger than they really were; and both believed that the only virtue worth practicing is honesty. That Goring is the show’s hero, then, should not come as a surprise.) Meanwhile, Goring devises a plan to get the damning letter from Mrs. Cheveley, which would obviate the need for confession and forgiveness. There are a number of misunderstandings and a long scene in which Goring must prevent guests in his house from discovering each other behind closed doors, but in the end, and with true comedic pessimism, one marriage is restored and another begun.

An Ideal Husband is a pessimistic comedy, after all, because it concludes that the world is unchangeable; the only way to survive it is to change ourselves. For Wilde, the apotheosis of human development is the ironist, who engages in the world but recognizes the ridiculousness of his or her own commitments and pursuits. This is what both Sir and Lady Chiltern become: by the end of the play they are sadder and wiser, thus happier and more reckless. The triumph of this production is that, in spite of Wilde’s conclusion, the play does not feel detached or aloof; indeed, the performers, particularly Casey Seymour Kim as Lady Chiltern, ensure that the show is alive to, and in touch with, the real world. Kim navigates its difficult moral and emotional landscape nimbly; with her open face and a body that wheels orbitlessly about the stage—she is a tireless physical actor—she is, as she ought to be, simultaneously tragic and comic. Her performance continually reminds us that, in another play, the Chilterns’ dilemma would end very differently. What I mean is that, in some way, her performance exemplifies the very humanist irony that is Wilde’s prescription for the world’s maladies. Tony Estrella and Jim O’Brien are funny—Estrella, in particular, has a great time playing Goring’s loving and exasperated relationship with his father—but their performances are not selfless and utterly knowing, as I think Kim’s is. It does not pretend that the world is not a serious place; but it also does not pretend that we can do anything about it other than laugh.

The Black Rep: Bitten by the Economic Bug

2008-11-11T02:14:00.006-05:00

The Black Rep has cut five jobs and suspended the two plays planned for Winter and Spring '09. Don't worry: the Xxodus Café will remain open, educational programs will still be offered, and the Providence Sound Session is expected to go on as scheduled. Read it here at the ProJo and here on the Black Rep homepage.

Round Two

2008-11-09T15:18:00.010-05:00

Now that the theatrics of the election season are over--or at least the dignified, ennobling part; the sordid coda, a dull comedy played out by a shadowy chorus of McCain aids and the spurned Sarah Palin, continues--it's time to get ready for round two of Providence's stage season.

The Gamm Theatre ends previews of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband tonight and opens the show officially Thursday night at 8:00 PM.

That same night, at 7:30, the Brown/Trinity Consortium opens Hamlet at the Pell Chaffee Theater on Empire Street. The show runs through the weekend.

And next Friday, 2nd Story Theatre begins previews of The Miracle Worker, William Gibson's dramatization of Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life. It opens officially on Thursday, November 20th at 8:00...

...the night before Trinity Rep's A Christmas Carol begins. From November 21st through New Year's Eve, there will be a Christmas Carol starting every 52 minutes. In three years of attending Trinity Shows I haven't seen this mainstay; this could be the year.

Inspired by Hilton Als's review of Peter Brook's production of The Grand Inquisitor in the Nov. 10th New Yorker and my own chance encounter with the theories of Antonin Artaud in the Brown Bookstore this weekend, I'm watching the Royal Shakespeare Company film of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade on YouTube today. Fun!

Greetings from the Other Side of the World

2008-10-25T00:14:00.003-04:00

Autumn in New England is beautiful; autumn in Sri Lanka is pretty neat, too, though for brilliant foliage you're better off in Vermont. I'll be back next week, in time to admire the artistry of some of the greatest distance runners in the world competing in the New York City Marathon, and in time, of course, to vote for eloquence, sincerity, prudence, and--what's that word? oh, right--change.

Bug at the Black Rep

2008-10-17T15:13:00.003-04:00

This weekend is your last opportunity to see Tracy Letts’s Bug at the Black Rep. Of the seasoning-opening plays I’ve seen this fall, Bug is the most auspicious, because it is the bloodiest, the most profane, the funniest, and the most unsettling; topping it will be a great challenge for the theater. Bug is about what happens to us when the stories we tell ourselves about out lives stop making sense: its main characters, having each come to the end of an unknotted narrative thread, begin weaving something new from whatever strands they can grasp. If this sounds theoretical and arcane, it isn’t; for Letts, reinvention is a kind of violence. The show ends with a literal bang that feels more like a figurative whimper, but it otherwise communicates a sense of displaced emergency and furtive, misspent energy with millennial zeal.

In a motel room in small-town Oklahoma, R.C. introduces her friend Agnes to Peter, a nervous, recessive intellectual. Agnes has just received word that her abusive husband Jerry has been released from prison, so when she grudgingly falls for Peter it is with the implicit and feeble hope that he can provide some protection for her. But Peter is no better for Agnes than Jerry was; his volatility—he is a paranoid Gulf War veteran who believes that aphids have been planted under his skin by Army doctors—is simply more insidious. The play is about narcotics and has the feel of a worsening trip. Forget Rodgers and Hammerstein; this is Oklahoma, OD’ed.

The performances are all terrific, especially from the male leads. Raidge plays Jerry Goss with almost painful perfection; he is a combination of horrible menace and childlike charm. And Cedric Lilly somehow make’s Peter’s concavity not a vacuum but a physical presence. It must be difficult to act out looking in, but Lilly makes us believe that something is happening there. Jackie Davis, as Agnes, is smart and sympathetic, but her southern/western accent, while not distracting in itself, is sometimes so disaffected that it becomes robotic and unemotional. Agnes spends much of the play not talking, however, and Davis, stooped and scared, carries it on her quiet shoulders.

The Relevance of Antigone

2008-10-07T13:37:00.005-04:00

Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, begins his panegyric to Antigone with this indefensible and contradictory paragraph:

The problem with Greek tragedies is that they tend to be Greek to us. Losing too much in translation isn't a problem with the intelligent and relevant The Dreams of Antigone, now in its world premiere at Trinity Repertory Company (through October 26).

I have nothing against presumption--indeed, criticism is considered presumption--but I resent being implicated, as a fellow theater-goer and as a reader, in Rodriguez's vapid generality. I don't know that this is "the problem" with Greek tragedy. I didn't know Greek tragedy had a problem in the first place. And actually, I'm not sure now that I know what he means. Does he mean that many of us don't speak ancient Greek? Or that clumsy translation confuses us (which would mean, paradoxically, that translated Greek is Greek to us)? Or that we don't know much about the ancient Greeks themselves, so we fail to detect the dynamic range and the music in their tragedies? I don't get it. Perhaps the problem with Greek tragedy is that we assume it has a problem: we're all doctors prescribing pills and recommending surgery to an aged but perfectly healthy patient. Being old is not a disorder, we know, and youth is not synonymous with vitality; last season's Blithe Spirit was written during World War II, and in English, but it felt brittle and barbed, like broken bone. Maybe if critics and artistic directors stopped insisting that the old is also the onerous, the rest of us would stop believing it.

More Antigone

2008-10-01T22:41:00.001-04:00

A phone message from a friend:

I saw the show [The Dreams of Antigone, at Trinity Rep] this afternoon, and I don’t think I share your opinion of it…I think that I agree with you if I go at it from the perspective of, “This is Antigone,” but I think that I like it better if I say, “This is not Antigone, this is just a different show with a variation on the same theme.” I walked into the show wanting to be bitter...about it, and when I left I actually felt like it was a really great show, and that kind of says a lot.

My friend is far from alone in this opinion; I'm in a position to hear some of the near-unanimous praise that The Dreams of Antigone is receiving from its audience, who seem to leave the theater at once exhilarated and troubled. The reviews have been quite good, too. Channing Gray, in the ProJo, called it "both old and fresh," and thought that the set was, actually, one of the nicest things about the evening. The BoGlo's Louise Kennedy noted that, though the writing doesn't have Sophocles's economy, the show's ideas are seriously considered and well developed. Chris Verleger, writing for EDGE Providence, summarizes the show briskly and recognizes the accomplishments of all the actors--especially, and deservedly, Rachel Warren as Antigone, Stephen Thorne as her husband, Haemon, and Fred Sullivan, Jr., as Creon.

The conversation, started at Trinity, continues outside of it. I'm still thinking about the show and hoping, if they'll let me, to see it again this week.

Trinity Rep's "The Dreams of Antigone"

2008-09-27T13:52:00.020-04:00

In 1981, during the long, gray evening of the Leonid Brezhnev years, Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze began writing a movie about the death of a small-town dictator named Varlam Aravidze. The problem is that Varlam doesn't stay buried: the daughter of an artist whom he had persecuted exhumes his body and props it up against a nearby wall. When authorities re-bury him, she digs him up again and leans him against his own family’s house. She knows her dissent is illegal and she welcomes the trouble that follows; she chooses a proper reckoning over intentional forgetting. With her defiance, Abuladze was making a case for iconoclasm and confrontation in a society conditioned by years of totalitarianism to idolatry and meek acquiescence. He was also calling on ancient tragedy; Repentance, as the film was called when it was finally released in the Soviet political thaw of the late 1980s, inverts Sophocles's Antigone, in which the act of burial is a statement of principled rebellion. Repentance evokes Greek tragedy without naming it, so, if it endures, it will endure not only as a reflection on the timelessness of the conflict between the prerogative of the state and the moral responsibilities of the individual but also as a record of its specific time and place. Curt Columbus and his collaborators, the cast of Trinity Repertory Theater, have taken on Antigone as well; the result of their revision, The Dreams of Antigone, is an interpretation, a modernization, and a meditation, and, unsurprisingly, its effect is diffuse. They have maintained the plot (more or less) and the setting of Sophocles's tragedy, but they have ceded the territory of the Greek mind without convincingly charting the landscape of our own modern paranoia, anger, and hope. The show feels neither as foreign and transportive as a traditional performance, nor as immediate and urgent—as dangerous, really—as a more radical revision. It is, in the words of another great tragedian, to double business bound: too committed to Sophocles’s framework to shock us, and too intent on proving its relevance to challenge our imaginations.

Antigone itself is an elegant and spare play, distinguished from its predecessors in the so-called Theban trilogy by its brisk determinism: it dispenses with the self-discovery of Oedipus the King, and abandons the philosophical paradoxes that animate Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone is about people who have already discovered themselves and who have settled their moral and existential questions. Creon, ruler of Thebes after a civil war and the simultaneous killing, each by the other’s hand, of the two sons of Oedipus and rightful heirs to the throne, decrees that one son, Eteocles, will receive a hero’s funeral, while the other, Polyneices, who had tried to take over the city himself, will be left unburied and dishonored. Anyone who buries the treacherous Polyneices will himself be killed. Antigone, his sister and Creon’s niece, defies the order and her own sister’s admonition and buries Polyneices; Creon, determined to restore order after years of bloody battle, insists that she must suffer the established penalty. He condemns her to death in a sealed cave, but is persuaded to spare her by Haemon, his son and Antigone’s wife. His clemency comes too late: a messenger—Greek tragedies bustle with the comings and goings of messengers—brings news that Antigone has hanged herself in her cell. In his grief, Haemon kills himself; to complete the cosmic punishment, Creon’s wife Eurydice kills herself as well. The violence and chaos that was supposed to be curtailed by the restoration of legal order has simply been forced inward. As much as Aristotle, Sophocles understood that establishing peace within a city’s walls is more difficult than defeating the enemies outside of them.

Antigone is not merely a study in civics, of course, and Sophocles was not only a philosopher or moralist; he wanted his audiences to feel the tremors that emanate from the collision of strong wills. Indeed, Antigone and Creon appear to be will alone, removed from a sense of caution or contingency, which accounts for the austerity, the glacial impenetrability, of their drama. Still, there is terrible beauty and frightening resolve in their lines. When Antigone’s sister, Ismene, confesses in the play’s first scene that she is not interested in following Antigone’s terminal path, Antigone retorts, “I wouldn’t urge it. And now if you wished to act, you wouldn’t please me as a partner.” The scene goes on:

ISMENE: I shall do no dishonor. But to act against the citizens. I cannot.
ANTIGONE: That’s your protection. Now I go, to pile the burial-mound for him, my dearest brother.
ISMENE: Oh, my poor sister! How I fear for you!
ANTIGONE: For me, don’t borrow trouble. Clear your fate.
ISMENE: At least give no one warning of this act; you keep it hidden, and I’ll do the same.
ANTIGONE: Dear God! Denounce me. I shall hate you more if silent, not proclaiming this to all.

Antigone is as single-minded and intractable as Creon; even if we find ourselves sympathetic to her notion of compassion, we must concede that her sense of justice is as arbitrary and remorseless as his. As a dramatic motive, Antigone’s conviction is so strong as to be alien to most of us: Sophocles has given us a model as impossible to resist as she is to understand or to emulate.

This is where Dreams of Antigone departs from its source material. Columbus’s Antigone is sensitive, empathetic—she apologies to her servants for not honoring their husbands and sons killed in the war—and insistently human. In Sophocles, Antigone’s life may be cursed and wretched, but it is, at the last, hers. Her victory, and her tragedy, is in renouncing the Theban community; she is, she boasts, “not ashamed to think alone.” This is independence but it is also foolish obduracy. It is also not entirely true, for she believes that, by burying Polyneices, she is doing what the gods wish. But Columbus has exorcised the gods from his version, as though their disapprobation or advocacy were purely metaphorical to Sophocles and thus incidental to the play. (The gods are not jealous and meddling characters in Antigone, but a solemn and severe presence.) If we understand that their vigilance was more real to Creon than his subjects’ and their judgment more important to Antigone than her sister’s—that the gods represent universal order in a way that abstract talk about “the rules” cannot—then we realize that their exile from Dreams of Antigone mollifies the play’s despair and foreshortens its tragic dimensions. Antigone, in presuming to know the gods’ wishes, aspires to godliness herself: without the gods, there is no measure of Antigone’s hubris; without her hubris, there is no tragedy. Dreams of Antigone is so fascinated by its own central, intellectual conceit—that, to this day, well-meaning individuals clash fatally with self-justified governments—that it neglects the existential thrill of Sophocles’s particular vision: there is real terror not only in Creon’s intransigence but also in Antigone’s presumption. The show abrogates one of the theater’s unique responsibilities: to force an audience to imagine, if only briefly, the world as it appears to someone else. Instead, Dreams of Antigone tells us that we understand the past only as much as it can be made to resemble the present.

So gone are the gods, gone is Tierisias, the blind seer whose counsel Creon brashly ignores in Antigone, and gone is the Chorus—or, rather, gone is the Chorus as a poetic, metaphorical entity. Here, the Chorus explicates and demystifies; it is didactic when it could be suggestive, and obvious when it should be oblique. The Dreams of Antigone opens with an antiphonal recital of the preamble to the U.S. constitution, and is interrupted halfway through by a meditation on the nature of heroism. But this is what the play is about! Antigone is performed because it addresses, better than an essay and as acidly as any play since, the isolation of the moral individual and the perilously sharp edge of hubristic heroism; the story gains nothing by the addition of ruminative diversions. If Antigone is a straight line between points, direct and irreducible, The Dreams of Antigone is curved, tentative and provisional. The Dreams of Antigone must not be confused with Antigone, I am sure to be reminded—then what is it for? As a remark on contemporary anxiety it is elliptical, and as a performance of Sophocles it is timid. It appeals when it ought to offend; flatters when it should scold; and, at the very end, folds, when by rights it should burst. Antigone, I think, would have liked that.

Thursday Arts Spectacular

2008-09-25T23:19:00.008-04:00

This afternoon, José Rafael Moneo, the architect of the new Chace Center--which will serve as gallery, storage, classroom, administrative, and commercial space for RISD--spoke, with his associate, to RISD students in the Metcalf Auditorium. The house was packed; and Moneo did not disappoint. I didn't take notes so I have no documentation of his brilliance, which is generous and exacting at the same time. The building, which opens officially in an all-day celebration on Saturday, is evidence enough.

I just got back home from seeing the Gamm Theatre's Don Carlos, which, as everyone who pays attention to local theater knows by now, is a loosely adapted and severely abridged version of Friedrich Schiller's six-hour call to revolution. The play is not subtle--one doesn't think of "subtle" and Schiller in the same room--but it is surprisingly swift, and its two and a half hours pass, if not quite nimbly, than at least determinedly. That dogged adverb is appropriate, and signifies the play's only real problem: its plot is all plot and I found myself, too often, untangling its strands instead of enjoying its artistry. Credit must go to artistic director Tony Estrella for having the vision to imagine Don Carlos onstage and for respecting Schiller and his audience enough to leave its relevance to our own era implied, and to the actors for weaving something so fine and precise from material that is, for all of its processing, still rough.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On Sunday I saw a preview of Trinity Rep's Dreams of Antigone, in several ways the sibling project of Gamm's Don Carlos. Like D.C., it is a liberally interpreted version of a formidable classic with surprising parallels to our contemporary political scene; but Dreams of Antigone (abbreviated, unfortunately, D.O.A.) has been made longer and less incisive than its source material, and the lines that connect its political reality to our own have been traced over with a dark pen. I left feeling that I had been subjected to a book report rather than a tragedy. I'll have a longer review posted soon.

Seeing Stars

2008-09-19T10:47:00.010-04:00

Last night the Canadian indie-pop band Stars played at Lupo's. I went to the show more out of curiosity than conviction: I enjoyed 2004's Set Yourself on Fire, but not enough to call myself a fan or to buy their full-length follow-up, In Our Bedroom After the War, and I wanted to see if I was missing anything. (Plus, I was invited.) The short answer is "sort of." I still enjoyed the songs from Set Yourself, and I liked the newer material enough, but I'm not sure what it adds up to. What is Stars' music about? This would be an unfair and ridiculous question if lead singer Torquil Campbell weren't so serious and if many of Stars' songs didn't feel so portentous--but he is, and they do, so it's only reasonable to ask why.

Campbell seems to have a political conscience--he repeatedly reminded his audience that there was a sort of important election coming up in our country--but his lyrics tend to skirt, or merely suggest, his political sentiments; the sentiments he is best at expressing are the sentimental, the untestable, ones. "What can't be decided--/In the morning it will bring itself to you," he sings in a really beautiful duet with Amy Millan; "Calendar Girl, who's in love with the world, stay alive," he sings later. These are perfectly fine lines for the brooding melancholia that is Stars' specialty, but they shouldn't be confused with poetry, politics, or with anything to feel much about. Where does Campbell's political energy go when he sits down to write songs? Filtered and diffused, it becomes a soft gray glow--pleasant but unilluminating. The abstraction of his lyrics makes the histrionics of his performance wonderfully surreal: when he sings, he looks like he's finding the notes stuck like something between his molars, and you wonder what all the effort is for. It's as though the song that Campbell thinks he wrote is much more profound and trenchant than the one he's actually singing: he thinks it's blood back there but it's really just grape seeds. Actually, it's really Morrisey--Campbell's voice, when he rears back and tenses up, takes on that familiar throaty warble. (Stars covered "This Charming Man" on Nightsongs (2001) but Campbell whisper-sang his way through Set Yourself and you would never know from that album's restraint that he had such a big voice.)

Which reminds me that the music itself remains very good. Drummer Patrick McGee, who loomed like Roger Rabbit's Judge Doom and kept time with the mechanical proficiency of T-1000, hit snappy 16th beats throughout the show; Evan Cranley played a terrific bass, and proved that Stars' rhythm section keeps the inflated songs from simply floating away. Singer/guitarist Amy Millan has a delicate, fragile voice that seems perched on the uneasy edge of whatever key she's in. Her best song, "Window Bird," was one of the highlights of the night. Keyboardist Chris Seligman made a lot of noise. It seems like half of every Stars song is noise--distorted strings, mostly, scratched and tremulous--and I'm not sure if it's a tool or a crutch. Whatever it is, it fills in for the catharsis missing in Campbell's lyrics; it reifies the symbolic quality of his anger or resentment or regret and it makes your stomach shake. It's this reverbration that I took out into the night when the concert was over. "Take Me to the Riot" exemplifies Stars' technique of alternating confidential intimacy with obliterating noise, and it worked beautifully, as did "Soft Revolution," for the same reason. That song ends with a koan-like coda: "After changing everything, they couldn't tell, we couldn't sing." Does this mean more or less the longer you think about it? To answer this question is, I think, to gauge how much you'll ever be able to really like Stars.

IndieArts Fest: Amazing

2008-07-20T08:10:00.008-04:00

Tim O'Keefe (IndieArts Fest organizer) prepares his set.

Triangle Forest plays music.

The Agenda avidly endorsed.

2nd Story Theatre's "The Beaux' Stratagem"

2008-07-09T22:04:00.006-04:00

We went to George Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem at 2nd Story Theatre this past weekend looking for a restful evening of theater; we left two hours later, breathless and dazed. Farquhar wrote the play towards the end of his short life (he died when was just thirty years old) and by the crepuscular light of the artistically permissive English Restoration: appropriately, the show has a sort of terminal urgency. It is, as the title suggests, all plot, and is as chaotic as a footrace and as brazen as any last, desperate gesture. Disenfranchised rogues Aimwell and Archer, masquerading as a lord and his footman, arrive in a small English town hoping to marry a wealthy woman before being discovered. Archer flirts with the experienced but unsatisfied Mrs. Sullen, whose boorish husband neglects her, while Aimwell deviates from the plan by actually falling in love with Sullen’s naïve sister-in-law, Dorinda. It is hardly worthwhile, by which I mean exceedingly difficult, to summarize the play any further; it is madcap and desultory, and Farquhar deploys his plots with a hustler’s avidity rather than a magician’s elegance. The Beaux’ Stratagem is about speed, not grace. How much, we wonder, will Aimwell and Archer get away with before their ruse is exposed?

The challenge for any cast is finding the sense in the play’s speed and silliness, and, for the most part, 2nd Story’s is up to the task. After a rough start—Farquhar’s language seemed to intimidate the actors; they rushed through their lines as though racing the words themselves—the show settled into a coherent, even rhythm. Tom Bentley and Ara Boghigian, as Aimwell and Archer, portray their characters’ camaraderie as a partnership forged by necessity and intensified by rivalry; their scenes have a terrific push and pull, though Boghigian appeared relieved to make it, uninjured, through some of Archer’s rockier lines. The show’s meter is set by Joanne Fayan, whose Mrs. Sullen is alternately impulsive and recessive. Mrs. Sullen has the play’s few overtly political lines, so her character has traction; but she also has the play’s only moral conflict, so she has real substance, too. Fayan is a graceful actress: she commits unreservedly to her character’s lusts but never resorts to caricature, and interprets Farquhar’s political commentary with as little didacticism as possible. In other words, she finds what makes Mrs. Sullen human: her imagination, bridled by realism and restraint. Ryan Maxwell, as her gap-toothed servant-of-all-duties Scrub, throws restraint to the wind and then delivers his lines as though the squall is still blowing. It’s a manic performance that reminds us that masters and servants live not only in different parts of the house but in different worlds altogether. Maxwell’s dynamism is a startling contrast to Fayan’s composure, and it works; we believe that a paranoid like this, having dispatched his day’s duties, could find some quiet place in the house to stew in his own utterly unbridled imagination. Thank goodness for plots like this; without them, Scrub might simply explode. Mark Gentsch’s splenetic Squire Sullen, on the other hand, is more likely to nod off than to blow up; he despises his wife, but he also enjoys her wealth and can’t summon the will, or spare enough time from his drinking, to get a divorce. Gentsch is dry, understated, and perfect in the role.

In an epilogue appended to some versions of the play, Farquhar’s contemporary, the poet Edmund Smith, asked for the audience’s understanding on behalf of the dying playwright; “Forbear, you Fair, on his last Scene to frown; / but his true Exit with a Plaudit crown.” The play was written under duress, he says, and might be noticeably worse for it; but the life lived under duress, and ended nevertheless in triumph, deserves our praise. It seems unlikely that The Beaux’ Stratagem is about mortality per se, but it is about finitude: by the end of the show, the characters find their plots concluded and their illusions dispelled. Lives, like plots, can only last so long; we trust, like Aimwell and Archer, that we have planned well enough to accomplish all that we intended and that, when the ruse is up, we can take our leave with joy. We can only hope that Farquhar’s “true Exit”—the one that concluded all of his plotting and dispelled all of his illusions—was as satisfying, and perhaps as mirthful, as his characters’ final scene.

(The Beaux' Stratagem is at Warren's 2nd Story Theatre through Saturday, July 26th. Performances are at 8:00 PM, Wednesday through Saturday.)

Film Review: Mongol

2008-06-25T16:31:00.007-04:00

Mongol reminds us that it is possible for a movie to be big and slight at the same time. Like the thunder and lightening that constitute its symbolic and narrative pivot, Mongol is all portent; if the title forecasts an apocalyptic storm, the film delivers only scattered showers. (Indeed, the final scenes are humid with the threat of a sequel.) The problem, I think, is that director Sergei Bodrov has little feeling for his main character, which is not surprising, given that his main character is Genghis Khan (née Temudgin) the charismatic leader of the nomadic tribes that would, ultimately, conquer nearly all of Eurasia. Telling his story is like narrating the destruction of Pompeii from the volcano’s point of view: it’s hard to imagine the inner life of a force of nature. Of course, Genghis Khan was a human being—though not, as one reviewer has suggested, one subject to typical standards of plausibility, which is what makes him most compelling and enigmatic: in the process of our approach, we have no purchase. There are no firsthand accounts of his life, and the paradox of his nascent empire—it was broadened through ruthless violence but sustained with relative tolerance—meant that life, for many of his subjects, continued as it had been before their subjugation. Genghis Khan himself was a mystery to them, and has remained so to us; the centuries since his death have only clouded our perception, as successive generations have scratched their fears and aspirations on the palimpsest of his legacy. Think of Bodrov’s work, then, not as a daring revision—Genghis Khan’s life has been under constant revision since his death—but as a modernization. In the process of making him accessible to contemporary audiences, however, Bodrov has domesticated and diminished him: if the final subtitles didn’t insist on it, we might not recognize our stoic hero as Ghengis Khan at all.

The film stutters to a start and never really rights itself. Temudgin, the soft-cheeked child of a stern nomadic leader, goes with his father to choose a bride for himself. The girl who ends up choosing him instead is Borte; we know from her preternatural self-assurance, and from the precocious nature of their conversation, that she and Temudgin will be a good match. This match—the film’s only propitious event not aided by Tengri, the god who seems particularly invested in Temudgin’s survival and success—will have to wait several years for its consummation. In the meantime, Temudgin witnesses his father’s ignominious murder, survives the disintegration of his clan and the murderous intentions of its new leaders, flees captivity, falls into and is rescued from a frozen-over lake, sanctifies his relationship with his blood-brother Jamukha, is re-captured by the pretenders to power from his old clan, and escapes again. The film’s epigraph about the young cub growing into the brutal tiger has prepared us for this story of nine lives, but it nonetheless feels preposterous, and, worse, arrhythmic. After forty minutes, the movie has re-started three times and we know no more about Temudgin than we did at the opening credits.

Indeed, the entire movie feels like exposition, and not just because the first half or so is a flashback; Bodrov is an obdurate director, and he cuts away from important scenes when more sustained attention might give us real insight. Instead of palpable hardship, suffering, or moral stubbornness, we get plot. Why show us Temudgin’s two escapes from his rivals’ camp when neither one demonstrates his ruthlessness or endurance? We see him escape, but not with any particular difficulty. When we see him again a new day has dawned. His hands are still bound at neck level, but his composure is implacable, his body unscarred: Did he spend his night breathing through reeds at the bottom of a creek-bed, or in a motel? All we need to know is that he made it and he’s angry. Bodrov’s narrative is artless, and reflects his deterministic view of history: to him, Genghis Khan’s life is a tapestry—static, two-dimensional, and fixed. The camera takes it in simply by panning to the right. Bodrov is faithful to sequence but indifferent towards causation; events happen, but they seem linked only by their order. There’s no urgency or irony here, no sense that things could have turned out differently. The possibility of departure and the acknowledgement of contingency are what make historical fiction exciting, but Bodrov isn’t interested in what might have been. Mongol has plenty of blood, but no life of its own.

It’s this fundamental conservatism that gives Mongol the pallid taste of propaganda. Aided by Tengri, Temudgin’s growth and his empire’s metastasis are inevitable. We never see the arduous and mysterious work of coalition-building, which might answer the question, What could Temudgin offer the Mongols that no one else could? Whatever this is, it’s the keystone of the world’s largest empire and would give this movie the density that it needs. But Mongol is all surface and no center. The prolific Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano gives Temudgin a credible cunning and resolve—his eyes shine like a card sharp’s from behind his beard and heavy fur hat—but not a voice or a vision. Bodrov himself is fascinated by violence—when blood is shed it tumbles like rubies from an overturned chest—but confounded by war and utterly unaroused by statesmanship. He casually adumbrates Temudgin’s politics, as though worried that viewers, still traumatized by too-long games of Risk years ago, might begin to twitch anxiously, and rushes us to another gruesome battlefield. Battles are shot in graphic close-up, which only emphasizes the irrelevance of their political justification—and the incoherence of their choreography. Still, audience members gasped appreciatively when one of Temudgin’s unfortunate victims was thrown backwards by the spear that perforated him and then stuck him, like a note, to a tree. All in a day’s work for a nation-builder. But what about for a film director? Mongol’s romance is tepid, its action vivid but pedestrian. One concludes that the only reason for its existence is to suggest that the central Asian autocracies enjoying a modern-day political revival have a terrifying historical precedent. They may be the real tigers-to-be of the film's epigraph.

Revisiting the Lost Ark

2008-06-20T08:48:00.011-04:00

Last night, we saw Raiders of the Lost Ark (not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark) on Westminster Street. Along with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Jaws, and The Muppet Movie, all of which my dad had taped on Betamax from the TV--often with entire commercial blocks intact--Raiders was one of the cinematic staples of my childhood. Sick days home from school consisted of eating toast with strawberry jam, drinking ginger ale, and watching one of those movies. Naturally, after the depredations of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which left me feeling more enervated than any flu, I took in Raiders like a panacea.

On the whole, I found its remedial powers to be intact--diminished, perhaps, by time and successful imitation, but not effaced. I still reveled in the scene in which the two government officials--from the Department of Laurel and Hardy Look-Alikes--meet with Indiana Jones and Marcus Brody to recruit them to go after the Ark. The meeting, which is, we understand, to be in the strictest confidence, is held in what might be the most reverberative room on the campus; amid the sibilant echoes of the gothic revival architecture, the characters churn through layers and layers of exposition, but the scene never gets bogged down in it. There are more words in this single scene than in all of Crystal Skull, but they feel necessary and interesting in their own right; dialogue in Crystal Skull merely describes, like captions, what is already apparent on screen. "I thought it was closer," Jones mutters to no one after falling just short of a jeep he had leaped towards; "Throw me the skull!" shouts another character, later, during a frenetic scene involving the throwing of a skull. "Get me the hell out of here!" sulks one theater-goer to his date.

If language in Raiders has a reality outside of the film's visuals--if it has an echo that suggests its physicality--action does too. That is, we spend much of the movie straining, along with the camera, to catch moments of extreme and brisk confrontation. When Indy slides beneath the Nazi jeep, comes out the other side, and then pulls himself up from the back, we wince sympathetically with the pain of road-burn. It's not real, but it feels real: the camera shakes and bounces and suggests that the reason we're seeing this at all is that we're on a jeep a few feet away. Compare this with the digital effects of Crytal Skull, which exist solely because the camera shows them: nothing, really, is happening. This ethereal quality makes the movie less fun, not more, because it lowers the stakes.

Still, Raiders has aged. It's not nearly as funny as I thought it was, but it is much more racist. Natives of a country are always inscrutable, malleable, and disposable, and they live loud lives that end bloodily. Indeed, Indiana Jones is as good at creating carnage as he is at exhuming its aftermath. Future archeologists, digging up the remains of a strange city called "Cairo," will wonder what war took place circa 1936 that left a small army of Egyptians dead, next to their scimitars and fruit stalls.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I took the photo at the top of this post last night with my new digital camera, which was a wonderful birthday present. Wonderful for me, that is; incredibly irritating for everybody else.

Indiana Jones and the New Indiana Jones Movie

2008-06-16T10:20:00.011-04:00

There is a moment about halfway through Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that unwittingly characterizes the entire movie: Jones, strapped to a chair in a Peruvian jungle, is forced to stare into the deeply concave eye sockets of the titular skull, through which, apparently, ancient forces communicate. Jones, old and getting older, meets the vacant gaze of his--and our--future; the Communists who have ensnared him wait eagerly; the skull glows like a convection burner; a motionless wind begins to howl; it is the sound of the movie talking, and we feel nothing. For Steven Spielberg, sentiment and spectacle are inseparable: his movies, big and broad-stroked, are perfectly engineered to match the scope and to focus the ambition of his ideas, which tend to be deeply felt if dimly outlined. His best movies, like brass instruments, turn bluster into music. Crystal Skull lacks the artistry of precision—the miniature detailing—that governs Spielberg’s other efforts and makes them sing: the film's energy is tempestuous but its interior is so empty—and its landscape so arid—that nothing is stirred up. The movie, like the skull, is shiny but dumb. When Spielberg blows, all we hear is a breeze.

Spielberg was lucky to have an actor as dexterous and game as Harrison Ford in the first three Indiana Jones movies, because they were as complicated and inscrutably rigged as the temples who are their inevitable stars. Ford admirably handled the Jones-esque challenge of navigating the tenuous structure of these films: by making the right moves, and, primarily, by being limber enough to straddle the chasm between Spielberg’s irony and sincerity, he ensured that they did not crumble. But we sense in Crystal Skull that age has finally caught up to him, and that he has lost the ability, or the inspiration, to cling to both sides of a widening fissure. He looks rather resigned to falling. Indeed, for most of the movie, he appears retracted and dazed, as though awaiting a clearer directive from the gnomic skull, or, better still, from Spielberg himself. His face expresses the weariness of asking When will I be blown up? again and again, and then actually being blown up, or at least having the tar beaten out of him by a Russian heavy.

These moments, violent and lurid and incoherent, are supposed to be among the movie’s pleasures, and it skips from one to the next like a child fording a stream on raised rocks. Everything in between is perfunctory and nervously efficient. Crystal Skull begins with an atomic blast and ends with the apocalyptic destruction of an Amazonian temple by a whirling spacecraft. So much for lyricism. Jones escapes from the nuclear test but not from the scrutiny of the FBI, who have linked him to known Communist George “Mac” McHale (Ray Winstone). He is forced out of his position, Professor of Whatever—so much for tenure—at a prestigious “New Britain” university, but is stopped from leaving town by young “Mutt” Williams (Shia LaBoeuf), who claims to be the son of recently-vanished archeologist Harold “Ox” Oxley (John Hurt). For those inclined to keep track, that makes four improbable nicknames, three of them utterly gratuitous, which is not only a dubious distinction for a movie not exclusively about the military but also further evidence of George Lucas’s shortcomings as a writer. In Crystal Skull, the nickname is a dependable substitute for character, exposition, and the barest pretense of recognizable human interaction. But who needs human interaction when there are computer animations that can do nearly the same thing, and twice as loudly?

“Ox,” it turns out, has been kidnapped while searching the Amazon for a crystal skull that has something to do with El Dorado, the city of gold, and something to do with power. It has also made him insane. Already a little crazy is Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a Soviet military archeologist whose specialty is psychological warfare: she scours the globe looking for artifacts possessed of the sorts of powers that will enable the Soviets to control the world. It is never clear just what the power of the crystal skull is; worse, the movie never posits a theory, so the film’s architecture feels just as ersatz as its effects. What gave the previous Indiana Jones movies their parlous fun was Jones’s moral ambiguity; his adventures were more than a little self-interested and had a sinister edge. Here, he doesn’t seem so much corruptible as vacuous. We never sense that the reason he wants to beat the Commies to the crystal skull is that he wants it for himself: he just wants to do the right thing.

In fact, doing the right thing is the movie’s real guiding principle; if it hadn’t already been taken, it would have made an apt title. Crystal Skull is about atonement, commitment, maturation, family, education (but not too much knowledge—that’s a bad thing), following one’s real calling, and carnivorous red ants devouring an unconscious Soviet thug in their underground tunnels. (I’m not sure if this counts as irony, but it sure was nifty.) The movie is as dull and tendentious as it sounds, and all the swordfights, explosions, and trips down waterfalls in the computer-generated Amazon can’t change it. In the end, our impulse to care about what happens next is thwarted; nothing is at stake in a world of digital effects and the gauzy edges of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s soft focus. The movie has exchanged Spielberg’s sense of wonder and humor for Lucas’s sense of grandeur. Their next movie, I suspect, will be one long chase, unpunctuated until the final exclamation point. So much for story.

You will leap to name it

2008-06-08T08:07:00.010-04:00

Yesterday, in Warren, we sat in chairs outside the Coffee Depot and read. M. had the New York Times; I had Mary Oliver's American Primitive. I had forgotten about Mary Oliver until I saw her entire oeuvre on the bookshelf of one of our friends in central Massachusetts; I am glad to have been reminded. There is something miraculous about her writing--about its depths and density, belied by the slimness of the volume itself. In her poems we go down, down, down: from the clouds to the ground; from the branches of trees; from our own eyes. No poet I can think of has made me so aware of the earthward course of poetry, its down-turned gaze and its rooted, gnarled ecstasy. "Moles" is a two sentence poem, the first a line-by-line excavation of itself: we descend with Oliver and with her moles through the earth's strata, and turn over each layer in our mouths, carefully.

Under the leaves, under
the first loose
levels of earth
they're there--quick
as beetles, blind
as bats, shy
as hares but seen
less than these--
traveling
among the pale girders
of appleroot,
rockshelf, nests
of insects and black
pastures of bulbs
peppery and packed full
of the sweetest food:
spring flowers.

Oliver's alliteration not only moves us through geologic layers, but also helps us feel the earth in our mouths. So when the second sentence--and the poem--ends with the word "delicious" we almost have to agree. We have tasted it, too.

The poems in American Primitive make me think of my own experience of Ohio, though Oliver's Ohio is rougher, provisional, and always nearly swallowed by the land around it. Still, they evoke vernal pools and voluble toads and the coming to life of a liminal town in the spring; they give us a way to watch that we don't have in the city.

Film Review: Then She Found Me

2008-06-06T14:26:00.003-04:00

Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me is a modest, innocuous movie; indeed, it has already been formatted to fit your TV screen. This really is not such a terrible criticism: there is plenty on television that is worth watching, and some of it is even better than what comes out in theaters. But it is, for the most part, scaled differently than film, and designed to meet audiences in their family rooms; it tends to be polite, even deferential, like any houseguest. Then She Found Me has been conceived with this same sense of decorum, and what we notice as we watch is that it makes few demands on us, other than our time. Its scenes are short, rhythmic, and conservatively choreographed, as if to keep from confusing us; it is more interested in action than in introspection, in the spectacle of crisis than in its traumas and resolutions; it is also heavily self-mediated. The film is ostensibly about faith, but we come away distrusting anything not verified on a screen. It is a movie that not only meets us where we live but tells us what a great place we’ve got.

Helen Hunt, who directed—from a screenplay that she co-wrote, and re-co-wrote for about ten years, based on Elinor Lipman’s debut novel—stars as April Epner, a 39-year old teacher jilted by her neotenic husband, Ben, played by Matthew Broderick. Imagine if Ferris Bueller had not been impossibly precocious and supremely confident—in other words, if he had been anything like an actual teenager—and you might picture someone like Ben; at thirty-something, he’s much more adolescent than Bueller ever was. He is, anyway, a poor match for April, who is not only ready for marriage but desperate to have a child. Her story—she was given up for adoption when she was a baby and was raised, albeit lovingly, by the Epners—must explain some of her avidity; the rest is genetic, or instinctive. A weaker woman might, in these same circumstances, question the whole idea of motherhood, but April’s conviction is unshakable, even axiomatic: she really, really wants to have a baby. Does her fierce desire come from an impulse to atone for her birth-mother’s sin, or to redeem her? Is it a form of vengeance? Then She Found Me doesn’t address these thorny questions; what’s worse is that it doesn’t even acknowledge their legitimacy. It reflexively ridicules questions about April’s maternal delinquency, but this—the question of her growth—strikes me as the movie’s real penumbra. Instead we get a primer on faith. Indeed, the movie’s philosophical curiosity begins and ends, it seems, as the movie itself begins and ends: with a “Jewish story” (we are told) about a boy on the stairs and the father who tells him to jump. If the story is meant to consider whether God’s unconditional gift is a safety net or our own resilience, the movie itself seems to have no trouble concluding, feebly, that God is actually just “difficult.” We get it: all parents are the same, complex and unknowable. This is very nice to believe but its facileness—or its sophistry: we don’t understand God, therefore God is difficult—is symptomatic of the entire movie.

The problem with Then She Found Me is of conviction: it doesn’t know what it is, or it doesn’t believe it is what it says it is. Lacking faith in its own intentions, it’s either naïve or calculating. It’s not only about April’s Pentateuchal long-suffering; it’s also about her nascent romantic relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), the divorced father of one of her students; and Bernice Graves (Bette Midler), her birth-mother and a morning TV talk show host, who decides, for no discernible reason, to contact her. Then She Found Me is an issue movie, a romantic comedy, and an indie drama (Complete with zany mother!) but none of it coheres, or sticks with us. Frank’s courtship is charming and rumpled in the way that only Colin Firth can make it, but it’s also pretty dull—or would be, if April didn’t routinely go out of her way, and out of character, I think, to make him look foolish. It’s a plot sustained willfully and complicated gratuitously. Too uncomplicated, on the other hand, is Bernice Graves, her name shortened and reduced from the book’s more literary and inauspicious “Graverman” and her character, we imagine, purged similarly. Bernice lies to April with a pathological eagerness, but the movie never confirms what we sense: that, her own life a catalogue of near-successes and half-accomplishments, she lies to reinvent herself. It appears that her life really is, as April puts it, “fabulous”; it needs no justification or biographical revisionism. We want Bernice to be as duplicitous and disingenuous as she seems to be—the latest in an enduring literary tradition of gleefully treacherous parent-figures—but it turns out that she’s not so awfully bad. Then She Found Me, like Firth’s Frank when he’s seized by shame or fury, turns and walks away when it should boil over.

But confrontation is not really in Helen Hunt’s repertoire. Perhaps flummoxed by the weird dynamics and utter absence of melody in two early scenes of rupture and reconciliation—Ben’s explanation that he wants a separation is a single, pallid shot, and, later, Bernice’s supplication for April’s forgiveness is played, clumsily, for laughs—Hunt cops out and has what ought to be the film’s two most powerful revelations shown on a screen. The first, a picture of a fetus on a sonogram, gives credence to the second, Bernice confessing a secret on her TV show. It’s not even live: April rewinds the videotape again and again as if to saturate herself with it, which in this movie passes for dramatic action. In its blatant self-justification, this scene reads like one of Bernice’s own tall tales. Really, who insists these days that something is true because she saw it on TV? But Then She Found Me, as though afraid of the rough and unruly lives that people muddle through, with or without a difficult God, reduces its characters, its conflicts, and its own scope, to the size of a small screen. Forget that pesky still and soft voice: only TV has the answers.

(Then She Found Me may still be in theaters somewhere. But you may only be able to catch it on TV, where it will strike you as being several rungs above whatever show preceded it and whatever show comes after.)

Thursday Notes

2008-06-05T15:31:00.007-04:00

Baghead at 5:00 at Cable Car. It's part of the geographically expanded Newport Film Festival. (Not yet consumed by Dunkin Donuts and its rapacious, protean font.) Here's an article from the NYT about the film's unorthodox release schedule.

Outdoor movies on Westminster start this evening with Breakfast at Tiffany's. The show begins at dusk, weather permitting.

Also, music on the hill at 7:00 at the First Baptist Church. Tickets are $15.

Two ways of looking at a blockbuster

2008-06-04T16:12:00.004-04:00

One. It never happened.

Two. Or did it? Explain.

Film Review: The Visitor

2008-06-03T14:24:00.014-04:00

In Iron Man, Tony Stark prepares himself for battle against the world’s dark armies by forging an industrial-strength metal suit; the trade-off for his heroic near-invincibility is the forfeiture of his humanity. The Visitor charts an inverted course to heroism: its main character, self-contained economics professor Walter Vale, becomes more heroic as he becomes more human—more vulnerable to the world’s meanness, more awed by its luster. But that’s how these stories have always gone, right? Either you take up the sword and fight like a god or you take a deep breath and die on a cross. Walter’s story lacks the awesome spectacle of sacrifice and the grim satisfaction of material victory—Thomas McCarthy’s script is too grounded to permit these airy, allusive extravagances—but it offers the smaller, subtler pleasure of watching a man learn how to live.

Despite obvious, if unexceptional, success in the respiratory and cardiovascular departments, Walter (Richard Jenkins) hardly registers as sentient; he’s more like a machine adequately programmed. He haltingly performs his rote professorial functions—and even these just barely—and his eyes show neither sympathy nor comprehension when a student explains that his paper is late because of “personal issues.” No matter what you may think of the mettle of today’s college students—and I’m glad that this wasn’t the issue for McCarthy—you would expect at least a flicker of recognition or regret to cross Walter’s eyes. But there’s nothing. Jenkins has a great face for the part: craterous and indifferent, it’s a mask that suggests how far away Walter is from the rest of the world. It isn’t just at school that he feels like an interloper; he putters around his own house, two stories in suburbia, with a stranger’s exaggerated fastidiousness, and plays his grand piano like it’s the control panel for a nuclear reactor. Quiet desperation may not go far enough to describe Walter: try spiritual asphyxiation.

When his colleague Charles requests that he go down to a New York City conference to present a paper of which he is a putative co-author, we can read Walter’s revulsion on his taut lips and in his unqualified refusal: the prospect of visiting the pungent world really is that unsavory. But Charles prevails; Walter resignedly concedes, and drives down to the East Village where he has kept a small apartment for two decades. It turns out that the place hasn’t just been gathering dust: two immigrants, believing that the apartment belonged to someone named Ivan, have been living there for the past several months. Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), from Syria, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal, have made the place their home, and Walter, after initially throwing them out, relents, and invites them to stay while they look for another place. Tarek and Zainab accept, and then Tarek reciprocates: he invites Walter to re-enter the world. Slowly, through lessons on the djembe, evenings out at jazz clubs, and performances in drum circles, Tarek introduces Walter to the rhythms of an articulated life; he reminds Walter of the sturdy pulse of his own heart, and of the gathering complexity—like the drums’ polyrhythmic patterns—of who he is.

This resuscitation is wonderful to watch but we know that the good times can’t go on indefinitely. One evening, after an ebullient session with a Washington Park drum circle, Tarek is arrested for sneaking through a subway turnstile. We know he didn’t do it, and Walter knows he didn’t do it, but the officers who caught him are determined: from their perspective, he looks like a criminal. Even so, the fear we see in Tarek’s eyes as he is taken into custody seems disproportionate; our system guarantees that an innocent man with a witness can make his case. When Walter returns to the apartment to explain Tarek’s bad luck to Zainab, we learn the reason for his terror: they are both illegals, and Tarek, she confirms, will surely be sent to a detention center. The movie doesn’t exactly pick up speed here, but it acquires something like inertia. The veil removed from his eyes, the carapace of self-pity shed, the name-tag from the academic conference (now almost forgotten) discarded, Walter is ready to act--to defend and free his new friend, no matter the cost. In a beautiful reversal, Charles, the university colleague, calls Walter to ask him where he is; Walter assures him that he will explain everything as soon as he returns to campus. He doesn’t say as much, but we know what he’s talking about: personal issues. Personal issues are not the stuff of pyrotechnic conflict or even extrusive, demonstrative acting, and Jenkins and Sleiman, during Walter’s visits to the windowless detention center, play against each other with terrific restraint and sensitively modulated understatement: if they are strengthened by their certitude about the justice of their case, they are both overwhelmed by a system callously uninterested in things like perspicuity, equal representation, and human dignity.

When Tarek’s mother Mouna (Haim Abbas, with incredible posture and conviction) arrives in town, stricken because she hasn’t heard from her son in almost a week, the movie doesn’t feel overburdened or implausible; it feels necessarily expanded. The film, in a sense, has been building to this encounter: Walter, newly dropped in the current of living, is helpless to stop its onrush. What began as an inexplicable and irrational gesture of hospitality brings Walter into close, even intimate, contact with strangers and awakens his own sense of love and responsibility. One might take issue with the low-burning romance that seems to flare up between Walter and Mouna (Even though it is never, crassly speaking, consummated, its tensions strain our credulity; and why are movies so obsessed with a certain kind of love, anyway?) and with the film’s de facto exoticism of Tarek, whose dignified self-actualization is yet more evidence from Hollywood that the surest path to enlightenment is the one that leads farthest away from the American university system, but there’s no denying the plain power of these relationships. And anyway, the movie doesn’t promise to make things right—it’s too honest for such blandishments—just to help us see things anew.

(The Visitor is at the Avon on Thayer St. through Thursday evening.)

Monday Sundries

2008-06-02T08:19:00.005-04:00

I saw Then She Found Me at the Avon last week; I'll have a review posted soon.

Last night, we went to see The Visitor, also at the Avon. Like Then She Found Me, it's a small movie; but where TSFM feels cloistered and insular, The Visitor is capacious and reverberative. Adoption, in The Visitor, isn't a consolation and a last scene in a long drama, the way it seems to be in TSFM, but a privilege: it's a way to connect with one other person in an exploding world, and a means to one's own revival.

Also, the film's last shot is one of my favorites from any movie not by Ang Lee.

Thursday Sundries

2008-05-22T15:34:00.006-04:00

My brother thinks I overstate the daring of Trinity's Paris By Night. He says our popular culture has moved beyond the tragic era of homosexual life and love, or at least that our movies and TV shows are no longer governed by its expectations. I think he's mostly right. Perhaps it's PBN's modesty that I find so powerful, and that I think represents a real contribution to the work of opening the popular arts to more sexualities and broader audiences. Just as we're never really made to fear that Sam and Buck's lives are destined for tragedy, we're never asked to rally around them in heart-warming celebration. There is no scene in which all the straight characters smile gregariously and congratulate the recently coupled Sam and Buck (and, of course, themselves, for just being so incredibly supportive), even though this scene would also reward its (straight) audience. Indeed, the only time a character pleads for acceptance it's Buck, early in the show, hoping that Sam will be his friend even though he himself is not "that way": there is no sanctimonious straight world to which Sam appeals for validation. In a sense, straight audience members are never invited to the party; Columbus has assumed that they don't need to be invited, that they don't need the blandishments of ceremony and struggle, that his show's decency and innocence are engaging enough. The object of the play's inquiry is not political but existential; it is concerned not with justice, per se, but with doing right; its tone, then, is not strident but sincere.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We went to Cable Car last night for the last Magic Lantern of the season. It was the "India Show." Even though I really didn't understand a lot of what I saw--not only were the shorts typically abstruse but the DVD on which they were compiled was damaged and played stutteringly--I enjoyed the evening. What I appreciate about everything I've seen at Magic Lantern shows is that the works are specifically, exclusively, stubbornly filmic: they are not theatrical, and they are never literary. Which is not to say that they're illiterate; just that they are untranslatable to any other medium. It's really refreshing to see film being used for things that only film can do.

Trinity Rep's Paris By Night

2008-05-15T08:34:00.008-04:00

In his program notes, writer Curt Columbus explains that Paris By Night (at Trinity Rep through June 1st) is the realization of two dreams: an old dream, of writing a musical set in Paris; and a more recent dream, of writing a musical about two men falling in love. Even in a pop culture replete with examples of gay characters and ever-more comfortable with gay romance, this project still has something adventurous about it. The familiar love story, in which a man falls in love with a women, or vice versa, is still prevalent, though it has been supplemented, and even buttressed, by a new one—a man might fall in love with another man, but he will most likely die from it. In other words, sexuality is destiny: heterosexuality promises abundance and satisfaction; homosexuality is a sentence. What makes Paris By Night exciting and resonant is that it dares to show two men not only falling in love but living, we are encouraged to imagine, happily ever after. The terminal trajectory of gay life, its tragic arc as traced by countless movies, novels, and plays, is inverted: in Curt Columbus’s Paris, it tends upward and opens outward.

For all of its sanguinity and approachability, Paris By Night has at its center a disquieting question: Can we ever become anyone other than who we think we are? Or, to put it another way, is who we think we are who we really are? Sam (Joe Wilson, Jr.), an expatriate tattoo artist living in Paris, thinks he is a rose: most dangerous because he is treacherous. Having attracted and betrayed a lover in San Francisco, he has fled to Paris to live quietly in his self-abnegation. He practices his craft—a craft, after all, of the arm’s length and the skin-deep—and lives in a sort of suspended maturation, knowing that he can never go back to San Francisco but too wary of his own perfidy to move on. Into his studio, which, we understand, is also his refuge, stammers Buck (James Royce Edwards), an America G.I. stationed in Germany and on leave in France. Buck is inveterately open to the world: his guileless wonder is an antidote to Sam’s weary, practiced cynicism. For Sam, the world is dark with occluded possibilities, the OPEN sign of his parlor the brightest thing in it. Buck believes that somewhere on his life’s periphery glow the warm lights of a home; he just doesn’t know what home looks like, or which road will lead him there. He explains to Sam that boxing will be his path to self-hood—he has come for a tattoo that will identify him in the ring—but his innate sweetness would seem to undercut the toughness needed for that sport. Indeed, Columbus has given him a charm as powerful as a left hook, and for which Sam has no defense. He reluctantly agrees to house him and show him around town during his short stay.

Perhaps a show as strenuously apolitical as this feels a particular obligation to demonstrate its awareness of bigotry and irrational distrust. In that corner stands Frank (Mauro Hantman), one of Buck’s fellow G.I.s. His intention is not to savor Paris but to conquer it: having already won the heart of good-natured chanteuse Marie (Rachael Warren, whose voice has a new confidence and luster), he nevertheless indulges his appetites with the many ladies who linger around the sleazy hotel where he and the other G.I.s—like romantic underdog, Patrick (the rubbery and winning Stephen Thorne)—are staying. Aside from casual misogyny, Frank displays an overt homophobia and a thinly veiled racism: he is this show’s ugly American. Hantman plays him with a slow swagger and an unkempt accent—vowels settle only gradually into place, and all of his sentences have a downward cadence—so his menace takes on the quality of shorthand: we know what these symbols are supposed to mean. I don’t mean to say that Frank is a weak character, but that his role in the show feels dimly realized. When Sam and Frank finally do confront each other, their collision is both inevitable and enervated. Sam gets to demonstrate his formidable power, but over what?

The real power of this show is in its evocation of different kinds of love. The friendship between Sam and Buck that blossoms into a vibrant love; the long-standing, unspeakably close bond between Sam and his old mentor and benefactor, Harry (beautifully played by Stephen Berenson); the unnourished, wasted romance between Frank and Marie; and Patrick’s febrile infatuation with Marie that may, with time, be reciprocated. People may not be immutably flowers or thorns, but love is, by nature, aculeate. Without belaboring the point, Paris By Night reminds us that love has always been a hazardous enterprise, and that neither the sexual revolution nor HIV/AIDS despoiled an erotic Eden. The only mention of sexually transmittable disease is Patrick’s comic rejection of a prostitute’s come-on: “Je ne veux pas…le syphillus!” He blurts. No orientation has a monopoly on love’s potential to scar. Paris By Night is studiously not about gay love in a straight world, or straight love as an oppressive, otiose institution; it is about the risk that all of us take when we acknowledge who we are and who we want to be ourselves with.

Anchoring the play to this serious uncertainty are Joe Wilson, Jr. and James Royce Edwards. Wilson gives Sam’s resignation a realistic willfulness; like anyone stuck in a torpor, he is alert to the possibility of being jarred from it. The performance, then, has a terrific dynamism. Wilson can convey gravity and impishness in sequential gestures—though, when asked to express wonder or awe, he occasionally confuses his gifts and offers us something more like impartial judgment. (It is strange being told that Paris is beautiful in a way that suggests that disagreement would be imprudent.) Just as sensitive and enthralling as Wilson is Edwards, who was brought to Trinity specifically for this role. His Buck is full of yearning and confusion, but steadied by an inarticulate moral sense, a basic decency. Columbus’s writing has a tendency towards exposition but Edwards finds the energy that animates it; the words come out of him like dammed-up waters released. In fact, the grace of release is at the heart of Paris By Night. Tattoos, though permanent, can take on new meanings; roads home thought straight can swerve.

My Blueberry Ni--oh, forget about it

2008-05-07T08:22:00.012-04:00

You have two more evenings to see Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights at the Cable Car. But if you can just hold out long enough, it'll go away and you'll miss it; Canvas, starring Joe Pantoliano and Marcia Gay Harden, starts on Friday. I had never heard of Canvas before checking out Cable Car's website and I can't quite put a face to either of its two stars' names, but I'm sure that as a statement on the human condition and as the product of actual vision and discernible effort, it represents a significant improvement over the film currently gracing Cable Car's screen. (At least at 9:00--the 7:00 show, Under the Same Moon, looks touching and sincere.) I'm not even sure I can justify a review of Blueberry Nights: it's a garish and cheap-looking movie, with garish and cheap performances and a story so lazily sketched that calling it cheap would be doubling its value. It's not an ode to loneliness: loneliness has weight; it's not a song of America: in Blueberry Nights, there is no there anywhere; it's not a meditation on the passing of time and space: without any real ache or change, we don't believe that anything has happened. Maybe the film's strangeness--its weird inhumanity and its seemingly arbitrary technique--is the traumatic result of the many cuts made after its indifferent debut at Cannes. If so, it would seem these cuts were not simply cosmetic but extirpative: something vital was removed in the process. It's easier to believe that the movie was made without a heart, or wherever conscience and sympathy originate, in the first place.

Norah Jones plays Elizabeth, who discovers through café-owner Jeremy (Jude Law) that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. She decides she has to get away--New York City being famous for its suffocating intimacy--and ends up working at a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. We are told, at least, that it is Memphis; neither the accents of its alcoholic policeman and his ex-wife (David Strathiarn and Rachael Weisz), nor the blurry outside shots by cinematographer Darius Khondji, suggest as much. She leaves Memphis--for no other reason than that the movie makes her--and meets a cocky gambler (Natalie Portman) in a small casino town in Texas. They drive to Las Vegas together, and then Elizabeth ends up driving all--the--way--back--to--New--York--City. And, still, there's Jeremy, the pie-baking Penelope, staying open late, turning away all advances, and saving a plate and a fork for the prodigal pastry-eater.

The movie sounds trivial because it is. It has no agenda or interests, no eloquence or insight. It respects neither the particular natures of its characters, nor the generalizable myths of travel and redemption in the American West. My Blueberry Nights suggests no hierarchy of emotions or values, so the story is not so much Picaresque as clumsily democratic: all plots and philosophies are created equal. There's no menace, and there's no promise of transcendence. Elizabeth, we learn, discovers who she is during the course of her travels, but Wong Kar Wai doesn't trust her enough to truly test her: she is too brittle a creation, too feeble a character, to sustain a real existential confrontation. When she returns to New York City, she informs Jeremy that she's changed. And though we've been with her through most of her adventure, it comes as news to us as well.

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5-08-08. Elizabeth isn't brittle; she's vaporous. When confronted by the world's hardness she disperses and immediately reassembles. The point, I guess, is that her boyfriend's betrayal has reduced her to spectral transparency: having defined herself through him, she disappears when he does. But the film's plot is so indiscriminate, its script so aphoristic, its acting so gestural, and its cinematography so vitiating, that we simply don't care. We can't wait to return to the world we know--complex, manic, and colorful.

Paris by Night Review Round-Up

2008-05-05T08:27:00.005-04:00

Sandy MacDonald's astringent review for TheaterMania.com is unapologetically negative. PBN is a "watery pastiche," its musical mode "reductive," and its characters "hackneyed." It wears its musical and narrative influences too obviously on its sleeve and is "a tedious, if earnest, slog." Her writing is bracingly saline.

Louise Kennedy at the Boston Globe recognizes the same influences but evaluates the show on its own merits. It's "an old song in a new key." Her review is lively and admiring.

James Merolla at the Sun Chronicle gushes but can't quite get over the gay love story. He calls it "controversial" (there's no better way to provoke controversy) and asserts, broadly and blandly, that one's response to the show "depends completely on [one's] liberal or conservative bent." Merolla is so liberal that he can't contain himself: his review is a wonderful collage of extravagant adjectives.

Channing Gray rebuts Louise Kennedy: PBN is an old song in an old key. His is a dull-edged piece with some legitimate questions--what does the lovely and urbane singer Marie see in the troglodytic and duplicitous Frank?--but, as always, it's strangely vacant. Gray seems to have no interest in human nature or in expressive language; reading him is like reading joyless notes, carelessly scrawled, casually disposed.

Channing Gray: This is Not the Show You're Looking For

2008-05-02T09:41:00.013-04:00

Channing Gray is back with a review of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night that is as inoffensive as it is indifferent. That is, until the penultimate paragraph, when he unwraps this jewel of a reassurance. It glitters with tactlessness and curiosity:

And for those who are not big on guy-on-guy relations, not to worry. This is not a racy show. There’s very little face-to-face contact, and nothing like simulated sex or hard-core leather-bar action.

(Thank God, the doyens of the East Side exhale; if I have to sit through one more hard-core leather-bar musical at Trinity I'm just gonna puke.)

I love how this paragraph builds to an erotic climax, gratuitous and trivial. Don't worry about this show, he says; I'll give you something to get all bunched up about. From "guy-on-guy relations" to "leather-bar action," the paragraph swells with its own heated concupiscence. There are so many honest, discrete ways to say what he's trying to say, but Gray has an irrepressibly carbonated imagination. So it's not enough to write--as though even this were necessary--that the show is basically PG-rated; he has to vividly describe the salacious show from which Providence would have to be protected by his warning. But in the process of approving the show's character he actually impugns its provenance and genre: he limits the show by association. I suspect Gray was trying to allay theater-goers' concerns, but his effort is leering and disingenuous.

Therefore, as a service to the people of Providence, I offer a comprehensive, alphabatized list of all the other things that are not in this show: avacados, bears, cars, data, everything not related to the love story between Sam and Buck, flocks of geese, Gary Hart, Heart, imprisonment (except for the metaphysical, symbolic kind), Jell-O, karate, lassos, maps indicating Paris's numerous leather-bars, narcotics, origami, parakeets, quintuplets, Reaganomics, severed heads (!!!), terrorists, underpants, verandas, whipping of hot hot men with a cat o' nine tails and then tying them to a bed and going CRAZY on them all night, xeroxing of data, yogurt, zebras (duh).

These things were also not in such plays as Antigone, Much Ado About Nothing, and Death of a Salesman. (Oklahoma! did have lassos and, possibly, underpants, so it's not on this list.) Now you can decide if Paris By Night is really the show for you.

More Travel Writing

2008-04-28T16:21:00.007-04:00

Embedded early in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is one of my favorite disclaimers in literature:

Then there was another thing. He [Robert Cohn] had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and reread "The Purple Land." "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books.

(Incidentally, not everyone recognizes the serious literary aspirations evinced by this meta-fictional gesture, or by the irony of the comma-less descriptors "splendid imaginary amorous." For them, Hemingway will always be about bulls and boats.)

I first had Hemingway administered to me by a simian hiking companion in Pennsylvania; he read to us from the last third of The Sun Also Rises--from Jake's and Bill's and Cohn's and Mike's and Brett's not-so-splendid quasi-amorous sort-of-imaginary adventures in Pamplona. I had never known that inebriation could be so literary.

But the part of TSAR that I return to most often now is Jake and Bill's fishing trip to the Irati River:

The road came out from the shadow of the woods into the hot sun. Ahead was the river-valley. Beyond the river was a steep hill. There was a field of buckwheat on the hill. We saw a white house under some trees on the hillside. It was very hot and we stopped under some trees beside a dam that crossed the river.

The land here is at once an empty page and a restorative balm; it is the only geography fit for the realization of a certain kind of relationship. Evoking both Don Quixote (see again the passage about the purple land) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway honors and undermines literary and military traditions of male camaraderie. (The entire section, which is not delineated by chapter headings, is about thirty pages.) Jake and Bill walk to river, fish, drink, make mock toasts, read, nap, and walk home. In the evenings they play three-handed bridge with an Englishman named Harris. It really is a lovely idyll between long descriptions of frenzied misunderstanding, manipulation, rupture, and release.

Paris By Night Preview

2008-04-27T18:25:00.006-04:00

I saw the open dress rehearsal of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night Friday evening. It's unwise and unfair to comment on a dress rehearsal--I've heard since then that the writer and the cast have collaborated on nearly twenty minutes of cuts, including at least one entire first-act song--but I don't think it's imprudent to say that the show is immensely enjoyable. I'll post a review when I see a more-finished version.

The poetry of motion

2008-04-22T08:24:00.011-04:00

"Rat, who was in the stern of the boat while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

'It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. 'So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

'Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,' he said presently. 'O, Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping. Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.'"

I came across TWitW as a senior in high school and made it a vernal ritual for the next four years. If there is a better articulation of the call of the unknown--the voice from around the bend in the road--I haven't read it.

The heady pastoralism of The Wind in the Willows does not make for gripping reading, and you don't find abstractions like "the music and the call" in contemporary young adult fiction. Wizardry is okay; mysticism is not. Maybe the distinction is between action and awe--between acting and being acted on. There's plenty of action in TWitW but the most important--the awakening of Mole's dormant liveliness--is subcutaneous.

a lovely word and one that probably means heaven

2008-04-19T08:30:00.008-04:00

Do you remember when you were in high school and spring came and the flowers bloomed with an impossible flamboyance and you sat in the back of the library, your body as sensitive and symbolic as the palm of a hand, and, when you were supposed to be drafting an essay for Expository Writing due in thirty minutes, you were instead reading these words--

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I had split up--

and when you got to these words--

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty--

you went right back to those first words again and went all the way through, and then later, you were reading those same words, all of them, and they meant nothing, as though they were instructions for a gadget you'd never owned?

The copy of On the Road I read four times my junior year of high school was singularly anodyne: pink, white, and cerulean-striped, like a faded French flag (and with the same ideals, no less). But it had a laminated cover and prairie-sized margins; it was a book for reading. The copy I got later, after I had already out-grown the book, was the Penguin Beat Classics version (introduction by Ann Charters) with Kerouac and Neal Cassady grinning and boyish and a little in love on the cover. Although I hated the paper and the font and the margins, I knew the cover was just right; this love is why boys read On the Road.

The copy I have now is borrowed. It's a small Signet paperback, a "back-pocket" book. The title is hand-written, the dangerous teaser--The riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs, by the drop-out who started it all...--sloppily scrawled beneath. CraZy! The illustration is childishly flat and reductive. A heterosexual couple kneels barefoot on the hood of a flat-tired convertible, a jug of wine perilously close to the edge of the car. The lovers' faces are lost in her hair, their pelvises flush against each other. Strangely, or conveniently, the girl's long hair is the same yellow as the rest of the book's cover; but so are her (and his) feet, his arms, and the part of his neck we can see around her grip. If we imagine them making out, then the whole thing can only be considered kitsch; but it we think of them desperately, greedily, holding onto each other--not kissing but praying; each is the other's saint--the picture makes a little more sense.

I still can't do more than skim it; there's a lot of boring stuff in On the Road that my adolescent porousness didn't strain out. But it's been fun skimming, nevertheless.

Anyway, it's spring: time to head out somewhere. I don't know if it's true that the ice cream gets creamier and the pie slices get bigger as you head west on 70. When I did it all I discovered is that the nights do get lonelier and the dawns do come slower. In the spirit of adventure--the real young man's fancy, before even love--I'll be revisiting my favorite travel books this month.

Film Review: The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)

2008-04-16T13:06:00.009-04:00

From 1942 until the end of World War II, the German government, hoping to destabilize the Allies’ economies, engineered the largest counterfeiting operation in the world. Using Jewish artisans culled from the prisoners of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, Operation Bernhard produced over £134 million during its three-year existence and was beginning to generate American dollars when imminent Allied victory forced its relocation from Sachsenhausen to Mauthausen-Gusen, effectively halting production. Details of the scheme were revealed in the memoirs of Adolf Burger, a Slovakian printer who was discovered in 1942 printing forged baptismal certificates for Jews, interned, and enlisted among the counterfeiters. He is still alive and was shown every draft of the script for The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher, at the Avon through Thursday), the Austrian movie based on his story. I have not read the memoirs—I’m not sure that they have been translated into English—so I don’t know how lively they are, or how honest their sentiments; but the film has a fugitive’s avidity, as if unsure of its right to be where it is and to do what it’s doing. This, certainly, is the feeling of the counterfeiters themselves, who have been rescued from hard labor and gas chambers so that they can work in professional comfort while producing the financial means for eventual German victory, and it seems to have infiltrated the ranks of the filmmakers. Perhaps they are aware that a movie about counterfeit—something that looks enough like the real thing to pass for it—risks becoming counterfeit, or exposing its own tricks through its subject. And so The Counterfeiters is full of distractions—an insistent, ironic soundtrack; a jittery, jumpy camera; and three unfinished plots crammed into less than one hundred minutes—meant to keep us from observing its fakery.

Director Stefan Ruzowitzky seems unable to decide what story to tell; we learn a little about prewar Berlin’s master counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics, playing a composite based on Salomon Smolianoff), a little about the mechanics of Operation Bernhard, and a little about the question of how to endure persecution: is it better to resist oppression and risk death, or to acquiesce to its demands and, perhaps, survive? Burger, we understand, is committed to resistance and to his own martyrdom: his world is an expression of principles, without which it is an uninhabitable void. Sorowitsch, whose solipsism and cynicism appear modeled on Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine (even if he looks more like a banged-up Bing Crosby), is a member of Berlin’s sensual, sophisticated class; for him, principles are a matter of practicality and utility: existence precedes essence. When they are thrown together as counterfeiters, their philosophies conflict. Burger wants to sabotage the project, and thus the Nazi enterprise, by producing flawed etchings of the dollar, while Sorowitsch simply wants to survive—survival being the only triumph that matters. The Counterfeiters is about making money but it is also about selling out: what does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul? Well, he gains the world.

But Ruzowitzky, his script and camera tightly trained on Sorowitsch and Burger, fails to envision the world that Fascists would make and Sorowitsch, should he survive, would gain. Indeed, the violent reality of Nazi rule that intrudes on the counterfeiters’ cloistered life is too abstracted for us to sympathize with Burger’s position; although we glimpse the camp's brutality, we remember Berlin’s nightlife from the film’s early scenes and believe that beyond the gray skies and barbed wire of the concentration camp those parties are still pulsing, or are at least only in remission. The incessant soundtrack—all tango, all the time—reinforces this misapprehension; only in rare moments of silence do we tremble.

In a word, the film is too particularized. Benedict Neuenfels’s camera is an agitated, anxious narrator: it translates personal terror but forfeits any claims to objectivity and moral authority. The existential menace of Fascism is reduced to the personal threat of capricious and barbaric camp guards—and no, no one is prepared to die just to spite his boss. But this isn’t the point. A wider lens and a steadier eye might be able to show us the thing that Burger really fears: a world that isn’t worth living in. What we get instead of a movie about horror is a horror movie. Since we know, thanks to the film’s framing device, that Sorowitsch will survive; and we know, thanks to the film’s subtitles, that the main action of the movie begins not long before the war’s conclusion, we spend our time counting the days and hoping everyone survives. It's a concentration camp as haunted house. The film’s irony saps its philosophical, and mortal, urgency.

The Counterfeiters was meant to be a fine movie, as precise and dangerous as an etcher’s tool—its specificity and subjectivity were supposed to distinguish it from lumberingly didactic movies about persecution—but it ends up being slight. We were meant to feel trapped with the counterfeiters in their untenable plight, and caught with Burger and Sorowitsch in fierce philosophical conviction. But Ruzowitzky lacks the filmic and philosophical vocabulary to make this immediacy mean anything. While a tango blares and the camera shakes, Burger and Sorowitsch spar furtively around an elusive moral center, the terms of their combat inarticulate and equivocal.

Boston Marriage

2008-04-11T16:40:00.004-04:00

Last night we went to the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket to see David Mamet’s Boston Marriage. The stage is small and no seat is very far from its edge; in dimension and intimacy it’s like a racquetball court, which is the perfect size, and a good metaphor, for this show. Mamet’s relentless verbal deconstructions privilege the well-angled over the hard-hit and the long volley over the slammed winner, and for the most part the actors play them right. The end of the play sags a little from depletion—whether it’s Mamet’s or the actors’ I’m not sure—but since it’s a three-character show with no out-of-bounds and just one intermission the onset of fatigue is easy to understand. I hope to have a real review posted before Sunday evening, which is your last opportunity to see the show.

Paranoid Park: Alex in Wonderland

2008-04-10T09:43:00.008-04:00

Positioned at opposite ends of the small Midwestern town where I went to college were two very different structures—to the north, a small, skeletal power facility; to the south, a large grocery store. During the day they were innocuous enough, but at night both hummed and pulsed with mysterious currents. One spring night, I remember, I happened to find my way south, to the grocery store, where I was paralyzed by a sudden recognition: they were connected after all; there was only one current. This connection, clarified by the night’s darkness and by the incandescence of the grocery store lights and by the throat-sung buzz of the ATM in the parking lot, seemed to confirm the connection of everything to all other things. I didn’t feel a reassuring sensation of oneness with the universe, like the climax of a Tolstoy novel, but an unsettling reverberation of the world’s coded and murmured conversations. If the power facility was connected to the grocery store by forces I only vaguely understood—if things thought discrete were actually inscrutably linked—then what peculiar powers might bind me to which distant strangers?

This discomfiting sense of atomization, of the world’s prevailing randomness, is the dominant tone of Gus Van Sant’s eerie and elegiac Paranoid Park, the latest in a line of movies of which Terrence Malick’s Badlands might be the first and which includes Killer of Sheep; Blue Velvet; George Washington; and Me, You, and Everyone We Know. In those movies, children, adrift in semi-urban areas, explore the porous boundary between the innocent and the sinister, the premeditated and the accidental, the home as a place where they have to take you in and the house as a place where other people lived before you and still more will live after you. Our claims to the world, these movies suggest, are contingent and tenuous: to borrow from Deborah Eisenberg, the thing we think is going on is not what’s going on at all; there’s a top thing and a bottom thing and “sometimes the thing on the bottom just pops out…Into the top thing.” Or, like Alice adventuring in Wonderland, sometimes the top thing pops out into the bottom thing.

In Paranoid Park, Alex, a novice skateboarder, discovers this convergence at an elaborate skate park under a Portland, Oregon highway. (The movie’s first scene—an elastically tethered, slow-motion skateboard ballet shot in grainy Super-8 and scored with a narcotic musical collage—establishes Paranoid Park as Alex’s Wonderland.) Befriended by some older skaters during a night when he is content to simply watch the action, Alex finds himself drawn into the nocturnal world of adult motivations, activities, and consequences: while hopping a train with one of his new acquaintances, he accidentally kills a zealous night watchman by pushing him away and into the path of a train on a parallel track. The banality of the events that bring Alex to the skate park; the unpredictability of his encounter with the older skaters; the instinctiveness of his self-defense—none of these seemed ineluctably destined for tragedy. But for Van Sant, Alex isn’t the sum of his intentions but the product of his actions: he is, however accidentally, a murderer.

The film’s narrative is framed by Alex’s effort to write down the events of that night, its fractured discontinuities and revisions the result of his hazy memory and his shattered identity. Van Sant follows while Alex navigates his world as someone fundamentally estranged from it, and if friends and family are suddenly unfamiliar to him, it is because he has become a stranger to himself. Writing, then, becomes a form of mapping: perhaps, after he has documented the blurred borders of his new self, he will be able to venture beyond them again. The movie’s major flaw is that we have never seen Alex at home anywhere. He is never completely at ease with his family or his social networks—even the high school skateboarders maintain that they’re not really a community, that they hardly know each other. This means that Alex’s severance feels more like expatiation than expulsion, and the murder more symbolic than tragic. It’s hard to know how to feel about a character who doesn’t know how to feel about himself.

Paranoid Park’s other distraction—and the flip-side of its success—is its generous deployment of slow-motion photography. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who filmed most of the movie, frames his simple shots elegantly and lingers patiently on his subjects; and Rain Kathy Li shoots the extra-narrative skateboarding sequences, like the opening scene in Paranoid Park, with a startling and exciting intimacy. But there’s something palliative about slow motion: it reduces whatever and whomever it slows to a purely aesthetic phenomenon. So skateboarding is emptied of its political, social, and even transportational subversion in the same way that the ruination of the small Southern town in George Washington, filmed with near-fetishistic attention, is deprived of its historical context. Slow motion forces us to look longer at a world we acknowledge typically with glancing consideration, but it also changes this world. The music hums and whispers and careers and sighs—it’s the sound of dislocation and evanescence, the sound of a connection that makes us feel farther away from ourselves, the sound of buzzing lights and radios in passing cars and a small-town power plant; it’s the sound of us, listening—and the thing we’re looking at looks back at us. Maybe this is what art is for, after all: to lock us in a gaze with what we’re all too eager to ignore in our more real lives.

(Paranoid Park is showing this evening at 9:fifteen at Cable Car. You really should go.)

Monday Sundries

2008-04-07T16:23:00.004-04:00

First, please take a look at my amendment to Friday's review of Blithe Spirit. Reviewing is provisional, and I think no judgment, no matter how certain its dispatch, should ever be considered irrevocable.

Also, I saw Gus Van Sant's beautiful Paranoid Park last night at the Cable Car. I'm still working on how to say something--anything--about it. Support Cable Car and support strange cinema: see it.

Blithe Spirit Review Round-Up

2008-04-05T10:59:00.009-04:00

Channing Gray loved Blithe Spirit. It's not the usual "humdrum, nose-in-the-air Noël Coward," he says; this production takes us on a "dazzling romp into the world of martinis and cucumber sandwiches." Martinis and cucumber sandwiches? That's right: you're in Coward Country now.

Louise Kennedy at The Boston Globe writes rapturously about it as well.

James Merolla at The Sun Chronicle was less impressed. He sees 67 years of movies about ghosts and spouses draining the "zing" from the experience of seeing Blithe Spirit.

However, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, the presumptive ace in this hand, thought it was just terrific. The show, he concludes in contrast with a South Pacific revival, is "enduringly fresh." His review, brief and brisk, is a fun read.

Trinity Rep's Blithe Spirit

2008-04-04T14:58:00.016-04:00

Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, written at a sprinter’s pace over five days in 1941 and performed with Phidippidal perseverance for the next several years, is a product of, and an homage to, times made conditional by war. Ostensibly a comedy about the exasperating and disruptive return of a writer’s dead wife, it is also about the plastic nature of time itself: years pass, people change, histories are re-remembered, and what seems like just yesterday may really be an adumbration of tomorrow. Perhaps in the eschatological mood of the early 1940s—when civilization itself seemed singularly intent on suicide and each day was provisional—stories about the indeterminacy of the future and the fungibility of the past were not mere luxuries but cultural consolations. Countering the high-pitched sentiments of patriotism, destiny, and sacrifice that resonate through a nation at war, Coward’s play suggests that since death is not only pleasant but negotiable—it’s more a nuisance than a menace—survivor’s guilt is a poetic extravagance rather than a ritual necessity. This may be an important message in fatuous and fearful times: it just isn’t very funny. The refusal to take tragic ages tragically (per D. H. Lawrence) is a particular hallmark of the British disposition, and there’s something strained in the translation of Blithe Spirit to an American stage even in our own tragic times. The show begins as a drawing-room comedy, develops into a satire of the British fascination with the occult, and then regresses into a misogynistic farce. The trajectory of my own impressions, charting along these changes in tone, started with mild engagement, drifted towards enjoyment, and then plummeted into disappointment. I have never eaten the famous boiled beef of the British Isles but I imagine the experience is similar.

In the opening scene, writer Charles Condomine and his second wife, Ruth, are preparing themselves for a séance that evening—“preparing” being a euphemism for inebriating—during which Charles will collect information for a new book he’s planning about a fraudulent clairvoyant. Coward portrays without judgment the trivial lives of his main characters: the Condomines drink several martinis, scold their nervous new servant, Edith—but only gently—and trade barbs about Charles’s first wife and the nature of love. Their guests, Dr. and Mrs. Bradman, arrive with a flourish, Dr. Bradman’s taxidermal akwardness a stark contrast to his wife’s dynamitic presence. Finally Madame Arcati, the local medium, makes the scene. She has ridden a bicycle to the house.

The séance itself, which Charles has anticipated with a skeptic’s zeal, proves that Madame Arcati is no phony. The spirit she summons is that of Charles’s first wife, Elvira, who is visible and audible only to Charles. Elvira’s not particularly divine presence—it’s full of physical yearning and a genteel profanity—is a terrific jab at the seriousness of the British occult tradition. Indeed, the source of the play’s friction is that Elvira, having been called to this realm, is unable to make her way back; she’s like a commuter stymied by public transportation’s fickle schedule. So much for spectral powers. As her return goes on “indefinitely,” her honeymooner’s enthusiasm sours to shrewish querulousness and she and Charles resume the sort of petty fighting that marked their relationship when she was still alive. While this narrative twist spikes our clichés about death, dying, and the art of living—for an elaboration on those, see Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—it also stinks of hackneyed misogyny. We have been given no evidence of Charles’s venality and vanity, explicit or implied, so Elvira’s excoriation of his character feels unjustified and simply vindictive. This sort of meanness does not seem to me particularly funny: it reinforces dull and desiccated stereotypes about controlling wives and vengeful husbands. The surprise of seeing our reductive ideas of death’s finality and memory’s sanctity overturned is nullified by Coward’s confirmation of our lazy ideas about marriage.

The performances are as varied as the show’s tone. Phyllis Kay, whose Queen Elizabeth in Richard III was a steely obstacle to Richard’s bloody rise to power, gives her characterization of Elvira a devilishly conspiratorial quality, but she also suffuses it with sympathy. Hers is easily the richest, most engaging performance of the evening. Angela Brazil, playing the confused and frustrated Ruth, is charming—in the way that Lucille Ball was charming. The part is physically and vocally stressful and her strident, convulsive performance may be a solution to the problem of space. If she had had fewer square feet to wheel around in, and fewer seats in the dark distance of the theater—where I was sitting—to throw her voice to, she might have been able to relax into a more naturally scaled performance. Sadly, there is nothing strange, sinister, or supernatural in Barbara Meek’s Madame Arcati: it is too carefully crafted. She doesn’t bring with her the pungent smell of patchouli and potions, or an unexpected and comic professionalism; her performance is nice and distinctly unmodulated. As Charles, Fred Sullivan, Jr. is as dry as the martinis his character makes. He really does have a certain tongue-bitten humor down to a science. Cynthia Strickland works hard for her laughs as the batty, babblative Mrs. Bradman. Dressed like a frosted cupcake, she coos and fusses over Madame Arcati and saves her severity for her overmatched husband, who is very much a cipher in William Damkoehler’s hands.

I had hoped Curt Columbus would present something spry after Trinity’s turgid Richard III and the disappointing Some Things Are Private, and though the show is not terrible it is somehow uninspired. I can’t help thinking that, perhaps, this Spirit does not transcend the era in which it was written, even under the guidance of such an expert medium as Columbus.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

4.7.08--I want to revisit this last paragraph but I also want to keep the original version up as a testament to a kind of dishonesty. To wit, what on earth does "the show is not terrible [but] it is somehow uninspired" really mean? And is it the conclusion to which the review genuinely tends? The answers here are "nothing" and "no."

I used the word "uninspired" to describe the show because I couldn't resist the silly pun, spirit and inspire having in common the Latin root spirare, meaning to breathe. But it is not breath that this production is short of; indeed, as a respiratory (there's that root!) demonstration it's tremendously successful. What the show lacks is coherence: there's no real world around which the script or the characters congeal. Blithe Spirit has all the conviction and consequence of a sitcom, in which considerations of characters' integrity or dignity are secondary to the convenience of a good joke. The jokes are very clever and exceedingly well delivered, but they seem to come from nothing and disappear into nowhere. Or, to put it another way, they seem to be addressed by, and to, Mr. Noël Coward; there are no characters in the play, just vehicles designed for prompt and precise delivery. If Curt Columbus and the cast of Trinity Rep, for all of their energy and exhalation (expiration being a poor choice of words for the act of breathing out), can't quite animate the show, it's because there's no show there. It fulfills the first half of the escapist fantasy: we certainly leave our homes and our own problems for two hours; but it betrays the second: who can tell where we escaped to?

(Blithe Spirit is at Trinity Repertory Theater through April 27th.)

Blog Spirit

2008-04-02T23:54:00.006-04:00

I saw Blithe Spirit at Trinity Rep this evening; I'll have a review up in a day or two. My first impression is that the show is clever and jaunty enough to be fun but not smart enough to provoke--it's sharp but it has no traction.

Here's Channing Gray's review of 2nd Story's Orpheus Descending. We agree in our appraisal of the show--a tough play well acted--but not in how to write about art.

2nd Story Theatre's Orpheus Descending

2008-04-01T15:22:00.010-04:00

It’s been a good season for late Tennessee Williams plays in Providence. First, in the fall, the Brown/Trinity Consortium put on a big, uninhibited Camino Real; now, Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre is showing Orpheus Descending. The play has an inauspicious history: it flopped first when it was debuted in 1940 (as Battle of Angels) and then again after Williams revised it and had it produced in 1957. Its cool reception must have been in part due to its busy-ness. Though it deals with the familiar themes of Williams’s major works and the pillars of his bleak existentialism—isolation, alienation, captivity—it lacks the narrative purity and poetic discipline of The Glass Menagerie or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In those plays, the family, its bonds covalent and confining, is the fundamental social and dramatic unit; the outside world is a cruel force to unite against rather than a physical space to navigate and understand. If Williams’s characters are trapped by secrets and delusions, it is because they have chosen those comforts over the world’s callous indifference. The problem is that Orpheus Descending has this indifferent world as its subject rather than its nebulous antagonist, but Williams has not taken in this wider view with a proportionately refined philosophical lens. The small southern town in which Lady Torrance and Carol Cutrere vie for the attentions and energy of outsider Valentine Xavier is hell because, ipso facto, the world is hell. This is not much of a conclusion and makes for pretty timid—which is to say safe, not quiet—drama. Indeed, the show bursts with the motion of characters and ideas, as if stirring pabulum might make it any more nutritive. Credit must go to the fine cast, then, for making the show as robust as it is.

The elements of Southern Gothic are laid out for us in the first scene. In the main room of a small-town general store, Dolly Hamma (Sandra Slonim) and Beulah Binnings (Susie B. Powers) are setting up a potluck buffet celebrating the return of shop-owner Jabe Torrance from a medical check-up in New Orleans. While they gossip about his long-term prospects, taking no small pleasure in their own health, Carol Cutrere, a “fallen” daughter of a local plantation-owner, stumbles drunkenly into the shop: her profligate behavior has gotten her kicked out of town and she needs to use the shop’s phone to tell a friend to expect her that night. Lurching in after she’s done is local pariah Uncle Pleasant, a mutely benign Choctaw Indian who disgusts the delicate Dolly and Beulah but fascinates young Carol. Into this combustible mix come Vee Talbott (Lynne Collinson), a visionary painter, and her young ward, Valentine Xavier (Kyle Maddock). Talbott, an inveterate do-gooder, hopes to secure a job at the shop for Val, an itinerant guitarist; for his part, Val seems only to want to stay out of trouble. His best intentions are thwarted when Carol recognizes him from his days as a Don Juan and a small-time hustler and invites him to go out “jooking” with her that evening. Eventually, to the sardonic chagrin of Greek chorus-girls Dolly and Beulah, he submits, and the two run out into the southern night. Gossips, tramps, noble savages, mystics, handsome loners—this over-burdened scene is a gallery of clichés, shrill and graceless. Williams never finds the particular in the general: gossips are just gossips, tramps are never really just tramps, and the guy with the guitar actually might have the power to save.

The show is energized when Val gets a job from the shop’s temporary manager, Lady (Rae Mancini), Jabe Torrance’s wife. Like Val, whose authenticity and artistry have forced him to the margins of society, Lady lives on the social fringe; her Italian father had been killed by a gang of racist thugs, and her heritage is a liability in the parochial small town. But she makes no compromises: she refuses to repudiate her past or to renounce her instinctive sympathy for outcasts. Still, there is the feeling that she is defined and limited by her oppositional attitude. Val’s virility—with his guitar and his snakeskin jacket he is both creator and tempter—arouses her desire to love, not just live, and to engage, rather than judge. The tension between these two is terrific, the parlous urgency of their scenes both sexual and philosophical. Lady believes that humans can share their freedom; Val is certain that the best they can do is to be trapped and alone together.

Their scenes are full of the sort of portentous symbolism that we expect from Williams and that renders many of his lines totally inert, but Maddock and Mancini find the right pitch for their character’s tendentious monologues. Although much is made about Val’s naturally warm body temperature, it is Lady’s avian febrility that we feel; Mancini portrays Lady’s yearnings with a wonderful fragility, though her heavily accented speech is occasionally arrhythmic and hesitant. Over the run of the show, she will surely master the demands of the script and the cadences of her accent. Kyle Maddock, who in profile resembles the playwright and actor Sam Shepard, reads (or at least transmits) Val’s heat as coolness, and gives it a convincing honesty and sexual allure. Val and Lady are the real center of a play rigged with plot contrivances and caricature.

We know that the hopes these two have for their freedom will be crushed—this is Tennessee Williams, after all—and that the futures they plan for will remain nothing more than a dream. But when tragedy finally arrives it’s in the form of melodrama: Lady is pregnant! Jabe has a decades-old secret! Vee, the visionary painter, goes blind! It’s Holy Saturday! If even Williams’s best plays walk the edge of respectability, this one trips right over it. Maudlin in its sentiments, obvious in its symbolism, inelegant in its language, and generic in its observations, Orpheus Descending is compelling only for the opportunities it gives to actors to redeem it. It’s a pleasure watching 2nd Story’s cast do just that.

(Orpheus Descending is showing Thursday-Saturday at 8:00 pm for the next three weeks; Sunday matinées are at 3:00.)

"I don't believe you, you're a liar."

2008-03-27T14:40:00.011-04:00

We saw Kaki King in San Francisco's Great American Music Hall on Wednesday night. My fandom, while fervid, is pretty half-baked--I have only one of her albums, 2004's incredible Legs to Make Us Longer--but I was nevertheless excited to finally see her perform. I wanted to see her hands dance like their own animals up and down the neck of her guitar; I wanted to be fooled by her magic to confirm that it wasn't the studio's; I wanted to believe, as I had after seeing Crooked Fingers and Iron & Wine, that I could be as good as that. And for the first three minutes or so, they did; and I was; and I did. Then the band started up.

Kaki King is beautiful. Her hair is cut short now and her physique is slight. Like a lot of instrumental musicians, when she starts to play she seems simultaneously larger and smaller. (It's like watching anyone enjoy the promise of a serious relationship, in which certain behaviors are occluded but others are given ample room for exercise.) If she seems happy enough to be performing, she also seems indifferent to performative clichés. Her body is nearly completely still; her face is turned down and shadowed. The effect of this stillness and concavity is vespertine: in the darkness she creates we follow her fluttering hands to wherever we're supposed to go. While her right hand establishes the tempo of our journey, her left imagines and describes a world around us.

I can't help thinking that if Kaki King's band comprised three women instead of three--there's no better word here than "dudes"--the strange mystery of her music would remain intact. Women might better understand the spirit seething in the quietude she creates. Her band discovers this spirit but misunderstands its essential, numinal quality; for them it's a brain, not a soul, and thus can be transplanted to any clumsy, lumbering body. The drummer beats 4/4 time; the guy on keyboards hits a button and the arena synth from "Welcome to the Machine" swirls inconsequentially into the ether; the guitarist riffs dully but loudly above the fray--all of which is to say, "It's alive!" As if it were moribund, rather than simply nocturnal, to begin with. The guys have come over to the party with flashlights and liquor not to share a sacrament but to amplify and distort it. It's funny that electrification only tames this music: Kaki King is much more feral and frightening on her own. In the harsh glare of amps and drums, it turns out that the ritual of fire in the night is just another boozy party in the backyard; and the unsettling darkness beyond the reach of music and reason, well, that's just the far wall of the room you're in.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I realize I sound like a Dylan fan when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival, or blasted the audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall Concert. (His response to the accusation, "Judas!", provides the title for this post.) I know that all those guys who felt betrayed then look petty and recidivist now. I've laughed at them in documentaries. I'm excited about Kaki King's new album, which sounds great on her MySpace page. And I'm excited by artistic experiment. But that doesn't mean that I can't mourn the loss (or the transformation) of something I thought was wonderful and unique. Or that there really isn't something sinister about these three dudes crashing the party.

Rubby Tuesday

2008-03-18T08:18:00.003-04:00

I don't even know what that means.

Buddy at Brown tonight, perhaps for a discussion of one of Providence's native arts: corruption.

In Bruges at Cable Car.

The Band's Visit at the Avon. See Janusonis's tepid review here. He thinks it's too whimsical; Dr. Seuss's whimsy, however, is an asset in the hyperventilating Horton Hears a Who. Caramel comes next week; it looks like it'll taste good but make you feel bad a little later. Yeah, kinda like some sort of gooey, saccharine candy, I don't know which. Then, finally, the much-anticipated Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-Winning Film in a Foreign Language The Counterfeiters. I think.

AS220's flirtation with banjos ended last week. Tonight, after life-drawing, there's some free jazz. It sounds, in the best sense, like two instruments entangled in each other's half-nelson.

Brother from Another Mother

2008-03-12T23:18:00.010-04:00

Villa Borghese is a Montreal-based '80s-influenced indie-pop band.
Give 'em a chance; their number one friend on MySpace is Henry Miller. (Yes, that Henry Miller. I didn't know he was on MySpace, either.) Plus, they write the kind of spry, hooky pop that makes you think on the second listen that you've known their stuff for years. It's a little Ben Gibbard-meets-Joe Jackson-meets-Cheap Trick, but there have surely been more horrible unions.

Molly and I are heading up to Montreal this spring so perhaps we'll see them while we're there.

Wednesday Art Notes

2008-03-12T21:12:00.017-04:00

Brown University alum and Trinity Rep-certified playwright Sarah Ruhl is profiled in this week's New Yorker:

The turning point for Ruhl came in 1997, at a production of “Passion Play,” her first full-length work, which [Brown professor and playwright Paula] Vogel had arranged at Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, Rhode Island. Kathleen [Ruhl, Sarah Ruhl's mother] drove herself and Sarah to the event. They had an accident, and Sarah was briefly knocked unconscious. Nonetheless, she managed to see her play. “At a visceral level, watching the play, I thought, This is it,” she said. “Some people stood. What whorish playwright wouldn’t be excited about that? It was momentous and strange.”

It's not like Alex Ross's profile of the Community MusicWorks (abstract here) but it's still pretty neat.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

2008-03-12T12:57:00.008-04:00

As a condemnation of the meanness of everyday life in Romania under the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, Cristian Mungui’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an extraordinary document. The film is certainly political—Gabriela, a timid college student in Bucharest, is pregnant and elects to have an abortion, even though the procedure is illegal and punishable by years in prison—but it is, even more, intensely personal, and it is as a personal record that the film will register with most viewers. The movie isn’t about Gabriela’s decision to have an abortion, and it isn’t even about the procedure itself; rather, it is about her roommate and friend, Otilia, who attends to Gabriela’s basic needs and absorbs, herself, the emotional blow of the process. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days doesn't describe the corruption of political life, but the elemental nature of our personal lives. Heated in the crucible of crisis, friendship is reduced to something hard, inarticulate, and ultimately inscrutable.

We first see Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu), known as Gabita, and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in their college dormitory, where they are packing their bags as if for a weekend away. Gabita has the face and the initiative of a porcelain doll; she relies on Otilia to take care of even the simplest elements of their excursion. Otilia manages the cash that they plan on taking, discourages Gabita from bringing school notes for studying, makes last-second purchases from the dorm’s black markets, and feeds powdered milk to sibling kittens found in the boiler room. If Gabita is the ideal victim of the Communist state’s vitiating enterprise, Otilia is its nemesis. She has maintained the autonomy and humanity that have been indoctrinated right out of Gabita—though, to be fair, it’s easy to imagine surrendering one’s identity in a world as dyspeptic as that described by Oleg Mutu’s cinematography: all Spartan rooms and long dark corridors and flickering neon lights. When Otilia leaves the dorm to finalize the arrangements for their weekend, Gabita is back on the edge of her bed, wondering still if she should take her notes.

Gabita’s indifference to her life and plight extends even to the moment of the abortion, which takes place in a tawdry hotel room and is performed by the ironically named Mr. Bebe. Bebe explains that he needs to know how long she’s been pregnant, but Gabita is unable to give him a precise answer. She’s not just listless—she’s lifeless. Still, through her obfuscatory ignorance and naïveté, some cunning shines: her denial is so elliptical that we wonder if she really subscribes to her own deceptions, or if her only hope for survival is to play dead.

Bebe is one of the great characters of this year’s films: we sense that beneath his measured exterior is an animal aggression, but we don’t anticipate its sudden, violent release or its quiet withdrawal. (He calls to mind Daniel Plainview rather than Vera Drake.) Vlad Ivanov’s performance, like Vasiliu’s, is an exercise in ambiguity. Is Bebe Evil dressed in a cable sweater? Or is he, possibly, a corrupted, dissipated product of the totalitarian machine? If his etiolated disposition suggests the latter, his mercenary brutality confirms the former. There’s no excusing or rationalizing the payment he demands from Gabriela and Otilia, but there’s also no denying the care—it lacks the erotic charge of fetish—with which he prepares for and performs the abortion.

The rest of the movie charts Otilia’s exploration of unfamiliar emotional, and urban, terrain. Otilia leaves Gabita at the hotel room—she had told her boyfriend that she would attend his mother’s birthday party—and promises to come back as soon as she can. In a long, painful scene at the party, Otilia endures the frivolous chatter of professional doctors and housewives; the camera, trained on her face from a mid-distance, captures her impatience and anxiety as the conversation drifts from Easter eggs to the younger generation’s impertinence. The power of this scene is that, though it is about nothing, it tells us everything. Otilia is seated in the middle of all the guests, but her mind is still in the hotel room with Gabita. It’s as though her instinctive commitment to Gabita has nullified her contractual agreement with the rest of society. She has changed fundamentally; she returns to the hotel and Gabita through Bucharest’s dark streets not as the poised college student we saw earlier in the film but as something feral, or pre-lingual. Fittingly, the movie ends in silence. Otilia has discarded the fetus, and the Romanian night rages on. If Otilia is unsure of what the future holds, she knows that what Bebe told her when they first met is true: it’s too late to start over.

Janusonis On My Mind...

2008-03-10T18:15:00.010-04:00

Here's Michael Janusonis on 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days, playing this week at the Avon.

Although 4 Months won the Cannes Festival’s highest award and is sometimes dramatically riveting, there also are too many moments when the film rambles. It’s very European. It takes a long time to get started. It’s well into the middle of the film before 4 Months begins to take hold. Director Cristian Mungiu often just sets up his widescreen camera and lets it run. No cutting between actors in a scene. Just long takes which sometimes seem to go on forever as the characters jabber back and forth. It’s like watching a play.

What's funny is that the very lines that Mr. Janusonis means most critically (snap!) are the ones that make me most excited to see the movie tonight. I love very European movies, especially if they're made in Europe where, let's be honest, all the very best European movies seem to come from these days. They just have a knack over there.

And I love scenes that just seem to go on forever and ever, and where the characters just jabber, jabber, jabber about almost nothing except that you're supposed to feel like something really important is being discussed, like the sort of thing that might be discussed in a play or maybe even in someone else's real life, and it looks like nothing is going to blow up and no one's crotch is going to be "accidentally" kicked by Queen Latifah the whole movie.

That was for you, Mr. Janusonis.

Saturday's Goings-On

2008-03-08T10:10:00.003-05:00

If it's raining and miserable in Providence, it must be Saturday. Hang in there.

The Avon has Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (Saturday matinée at 12:30 and 5:00; evening shows at 7:15 and 9:35) and No Country for Old Men (this afternoon at 2:40 and again tonight at midnight).

AS220's indoor farmers' market is still kickin' it in the afternoons. Let the good times, rural and rough-edged, keep on going with a show of fiddlers, pluckers, and tremulous crooners at 9:pm.

It's your last chance to see the Trinity Consortium's Figaro. It's so good you should see it twice: at 2:pm and again at 8:.

Cable Car's website hasn't been updated recently, but the Phoenix has them showing The Trials of Henry Kissinger at 7:15 and The Pianist at 9:35 tonight and tomorrow.

The Black Rep is in its final weekend of The Bluest Eye.

Persepolis

2008-03-07T13:16:00.006-05:00

Take a look at my review of Persepolis at janera.com; and while you're there, explore the rest of the site. There's some great stuff up right now.

Also, I'm embarrassed as hell. Chris Monti is on tonight at White Electric. You see, my wristwatch skipped right over February 29th so it's been a day ahead all week. Things like this happen, right? Well, they do when we lose or gain an hour in the fall and spring; losing a whole day and not adjusting until an entire week has passed is just ridiculous. Sorry to all.

Tonight at AS220: Callers. They really are terrific and their newish stuff on myspace sounds great.

Makaela Pollock's Figaro? Totally awesome. The review has been tough to write so it's not done yet but do yourself a favor, accept this crappy truncated review ("The show was fun and I had fun.") and go, Go, GO!

More Relevance

2008-03-06T10:00:00.008-05:00

I can't believe it. Days after I wrote about relevance on this site, the NYT has an article on Esquire's attempt to energize fiction by commissioning hybrid fiction/non-fiction pieces. The latest? An "account" of Heath Ledger's last days--as imagined, and written as if by Ledger in his diary, by Lisa Taddeo.

“It’s an earnest effort,” [chief editor David Granger] said, adding that the magazine has tried to tackle fiction using a nonfiction playbook before. “We’ve been trying to assign fiction,” he said, “to make it topical, relevant. To go to writers with a headline or an idea.”
The first project in this vein was published in October 2006 during the baseball playoffs and called “The Death of Derek Jeter ,” an extended meditation on sports, celebrity and mortality written from the perspective of Mr. Jeter, the Yankees shortstop.
“We’ve been doing these things to try to make fiction as current and lively as we can,” Mr. Granger said, “to make it as urgent as nonfiction.”

In an early draft of my entry from Sunday, March 2nd, I had written about the American obsession with nonfiction. It seemed pompous to me, so I erased it and went with a shorter piece; now, of course, it seems prescient.

Fiction is, or can be, as "urgent as nonfiction." It doesn't need steroidal injections of "Reportage" to compete with books by Mark Bowden or Carl Woodward. Rather, nonfiction has to compete with the ideal narrative tropes of fiction. "Raj, Bohemian," Hari Kunru's short story in the March 10 New Yorker, is brilliant and suggestive: it hints at the re-saleability of our private lives (see Nue Propriété and Some Things Are Private) but is not a polemic against the menace of super-capitalism. (It reminds me of T. Coraghessan Boyle before he forgot plot and character; also of Paul Auster's existentialism, with hipster accoutrements replacing books as the buffer between us and the void.) It feels at once trenchant and utterly, wonderfully trivial; familiar and yet strangely foreign. David Granger wants to pasteurize the strange right out of fiction. It's as though very simple people, overpowered by Michael Chabon's or Ian Mcewan's or Kazuo Ishiguro's or Don DeLillo's gestures towards timeliness, determined that what makes these authors great is not their characters and their poetry but their relevance. Granger forgets, or doesn't care, that fiction commissioned as a mere genetic recapitulation of its time rarely outlives it.

For an example of competent imaginative reporting--reporting that acknowledges the lure and limits of imagination in the engineering of a piece of nonfiction--see New York's Heath Ledger article.

Wednesday's what-to-do

2008-03-05T09:39:00.003-05:00

Okay...

My next full post will be a review of the Brown/Trinity Consortium's Figaro, which I'm seeing tomorrow evening, so check back Friday afternoon. In the meantime:

Here's Channing Grey's vaporous recollection of the show. And here's a summary: "The show was fun and I had fun." There's nothing wrong with having fun with art, but there is something fundamentally dishonorable about such intellectual flaccidity. Critics honor the works they review with their rigor; they excite possible audiences by sounding a show's (or album's, or movie's, or book's) depths and suggesting ways to explore them. I would hate to see the world of art the way Channing Gray does: all hard surface, frozen and impenetrable.

Tonight at AS220: pop.

Chris Monti at White Electric tomorrow evening, 7:thirty. I've been stopping by much less frequently since Seven Stars opened up, but shows like this remind me that WE is involved with its neighborhood in a way that few other places are and it deserves its reputation and our support. Visit Monti's MySpace page: the music is dusty and transportive.

"41" at Cable Car

2008-03-03T14:01:00.008-05:00

41, a documentary about Nicholas O'Neill, an 18-year-old who died in the Station nightclub fire on February 20, 2003, will be showing tonight at the Cable Car at 9:30. It's the beginning of an open engagement and the first step of a national release process.

Believe it or not, Michael Janusonis's preview isn't dumb.

The YouTube trailer looks incredible but I don't think I have the toughness to watch the whole movie. Best of luck to co-directors Christian de Rezendes and Christian O'Neill (Nicholas's older brother).

Hollywood, RI

2008-03-03T08:49:00.005-05:00

A great article in the ProJo on the state's tax credits for film, tv, and commercial productions.

The issue at stake is whether tax credits extended to film and TV production companies really are good for RI. The article challenges the assumption that these credits encourage enough spending within the state to justify them. (The article also takes some shots at the quality of the films being made here: the Wesley Snipes/Cybill Shepherd vehicle Hard Luck went straight to video, Katherine Gregg writes, and Hard Luck Productions has since dissolved.) The problem is that much of the production cost of the films, TV shows, and commercials filmed in RI has been spent outside of RI.

New England states are so small--Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut have a combined population of about 14.5 million people and just one city with over half a million people--that one wonders if each state alone has the resources to fulfill a major production company's needs. Perhaps a NE revenue-sharing agreement would be a good idea.

All this talk really makes me want to see Underdog.

On Relevance

2008-03-02T08:31:00.018-05:00

Wow. Here's Lou Diamond Phillips on Camelot, now playing at the Providence Performing Arts Center (PPAC).

“People say King Arthur, how does that apply to anything that’s happening today?” said Phillips. “But we are on the verge of an election. We are going to pick a new leader. And Arthur created the Round Table to bring peace to the land and bring about a better society.

“There is so much in the play that speaks to that. Audiences have heard it and responded. We stop the show on occasion with applause based on some of the things Arthur has to say.”

Measuring relevance must be about the least interesting or useful way to consider a work of art--especially in terms as bizarre and incongruous as [Diamond] Phillips's, or as glabrous as the estimable Channing Gray's.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Trinity Consortium's Figaro on Thursday. I hope it's utterly irrelevant.