Last week I read David Hare's amazing collection of lectures (that's right, lectures), Obedience, Struggle & Revolt.
I'm not usually the kind of person to copy things out of books, but this collection had me reaching for pen and paper every few pages.
I definitely, and unfortunately, recognized myself in this:
To an extent the theater will always be a magnet for hobbyists, people who are drawn like trainspotters or matchbox fans to compare different performances of Hamlet. They form, if you like, a core audience, who survive over the years. Their overriding interest is in the maintenance and improvement of their collections, and so they will direct their attention not so much at what is said, as to the skills which are being used to say it.
When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with women’s tennis. I use the word “obsessed” advisedly. I barely thought of anything else, and I did quite a lot of thinking back then. In 1979 and 1980, I went to about 10 tournaments per year (including three-quarters of the Grand Slam in ’80)—and I would go for the duration of the tournaments, not a cameo for the finals. (Those weren’t my only years of tournament-hopping, just my heyday.)
By 1980, I’d gotten to know several players—very superficially, I hasten to add—and even played soccer with a bunch of obscure players (and a rather more well-known striver whom I’ll call Martina N.) at the pre-pre-Wimbledon warm-up in Chichester (the game was taken up again a week later in Eastbourne, but I stayed off the pitch that time).
There were many occasions where I was the only person watching “my” players (I tended to like the smart ones, regardless of their skills/success), and then at Wimbledon, one of them was on the verge of a major doubles upset, and I couldn’t get anywhere near the court. Wimbledon’s always hideously and randomly crowded, but usually you could figure out some sneaky way through the bottleneck. Not this time—every trick I attempted failed, so I missed my pal’s big triumph.
I mention all this because today I was trying to figure out if I should try to finagle tickets to Three Days of Rain, Julia Roberts’ big Broadway adventure. (Tickets are on sale, but only to AmEx card holders; though they’re also showing up on eBay and on ticket brokers’ sites.)
Now, there’s no comparison between my youthful obsession with women’s tennis and my affection for the theater—I am an enthusiastic playgoer, but there’s a lot I don’t know and frankly don’t care about. I don’t feel a need to see everything, nor can I afford to. I have no interest in seeing a lot of the Broadway productions, so I don’t mind that shows like Spamalot or The Odd Couple are out of bounds. But Three Days of Rain is off-Broadway. It’s by Richard Greenberg, whose plays I almost always see (and mostly like). Even though it’s irrational, I feel swizzed that I’m probably not going to be able to go to the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre to gaze upon a Hollywood star, a former Friends second-stringer, and a guy whose TV sitcom was canceled by Fox after only a few episodes.
Eh, I’ll either figure it out or get over it. I did buy tickets for Borderline at the Royal Court.
Update, Dec. 30, 2006: Of course, the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is a Broadway house. Just ignore that bit!
Years ago, when I worked at a feminist magazine in D.C.—and later in the same circumstances in London—I was often entreated to attend feminist theater performances. I can’t remember seeing anything bad, but I also don’t remember being knocked out; in fact, I don’t really remember anything about any of the productions. The only concrete thing I remember about all those trips to the theater is embarrassing myself by asking for a kir royale at the bar of a London theater when the publicist offered me a drink and then having to admit that I didn’t really know what it was when the bar worker wasn’t sure how to make one.
(I should say that I was reluctant to review the pieces because the magazines I worked at were aimed at a national audience, so most of our readers wouldn’t care how good the local production of Franca Rama’s latest was. The publicists never really took that for an answer, though, and it was easier to say you’d go. This situation seems much more attractive in retrospect than it was at the time.)
It was always so tricky to write about the plays. You knew the producers weren’t inviting you to their shows for your artistic edification; they wanted reviews to generate ticket sales and to excerpt in their ads or, more likely, grant applications. If you appreciated their underpaid, underappreciated efforts, as I did, you didn’t want to pee on their parade—and I really would’ve preferred potential theater-goers to see a feminist play rather than a “mainstream” show, so I wanted to help encourage that. But now I feel like the manager who doesn’t confront an underperforming report and thus does nothing to get the worker to self-actualize. (As someone who had to be jolted into making an effort at the age of 35, let me tell you, it’s a good thing, but the boss has to take a chance on someone in whom they see potential and then has to be willing to be a bitch to get that person to really try.) Most of the time, I either didn’t write a review (I hope I wrote about that London play after I made them open a bottle of champagne for me), or I was kind.
Now I feel bad, because those “kind” critiques undermine the credibility of the many fine reviews of In the Continuum (and probably explain all those reviewers’ preambles about how appalling political theater usually is). Yes, it’s a play with a purpose—to make audiences think about the effect of HIV/AIDS on women around the world—but it’s good; really good, not “gosh, I really wish you’d go see this instead of the more mainstream, well-funded piece of entertainment a few blocks uptown” good.
The play, written and performed by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter consists of two parallel stories—Gurira tells the story of Abigail, an upper-middle-class Zimbabwean who has a catch of a husband (handsome, well-bred, and employed), a son, and a job as a newsreader on ZBC; while Salter focuses on Nia, a creative Los Angeles teenager who lives in a shelter, works at Nordstrom, and has a high-school basketball star for a boyfriend. Within 90 minutes they both learn that they’ve been deceived, realize that they’ve deceived themselves, and try to stand up and change things. The parallel structure is very tight—the whole thing is incredibly mature for two such young artists.
What’s most impressive is the subtlety of both the writing and the performances—Gurira does a great job of establishing the class signifiers that are so important to Abigail, and Salter is amazing at conjuring Nia’s circle—a social worker, her cold mother, a cousin, her boyfriend’s mother—with the slightest changes of “look” (essentially the refolding of a bandana) and a change of attitude/accent. Now, I’m looking forward to seeing Bridge & Tunnel, but judging from the Web, Sarah Jones makes use of quite a few costume props—and it’s relatively easy to distinguish between a Pakistani cab driver and a Jewish grandmother—signaling to the audience that she’s no longer the teenager, but her mother (or her cousin, or whatever) is much more of a challenge. And I was never confused.
I’m sure other people have written about this, but what’s with the dueling Florence Foster Jenkins plays? Souvenir, by Stephen Temperley, is on Broadway, and Glorious, starring the divine Maureen Lipman, is at London’s Duchess Theatre. Now, I yield to no one in my admiration of Maureen Lipman, but unlike Judy Kaye, the star of Souvenir, as far as I know, she has no particular gift for singing. Well, neither did FFJ, true, but having seen Judy Kaye on Theater Talk, I now think you have to be able to sing well in order to sing badly.
My love of Lipman will no doubt take me to the Duchess when we’re in London next month, so now I can’t decide whether I should see Souvenir before it closes this weekend to provide a comparison. We’re going to the theater on Saturday (following Webloge’s advice and seeing Christine Jorgensen Reveals), so chances are laziness will overcome curiosity and Maureen Lipman will be my one and only Florence Foster Jenkins. But I think one is probably enough for me.
On New Year’s Day R and I went to see Edward Albee’s Seascape (I wonder which is nicer, the Pulitzers, the Tonys, or having your name before the play title on the Playbill) at the Booth Theater.
My motivations for seeing the play were a bit iffy—a process-of-elimination (I’ve seen that, I won’t be able to get into that; I can’t be bothered to go down there, and this one’s run ends next Sunday). So (join in with me please …) my expectations were pretty low, and thus I had a wonderful time.
This is the play where a seventysomething couple, Nancy and George (played in this production by Frances “Bunny” Sternhagen and George Grizzard), are on a beach, lovingly bickering about their future, when two huge lizards, Sarah and Leslie (Elizabeth Marvel and Frederick Weller, who, I learned from the program has achieved the Law & Order trifecta—in so many ways, it’s great that Trial by Jury’s run was so short, since it makes the four-peat a real achievement) crawl over the dunes.
I think I may only have seen The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from Albee’s big bag of plays, but even with those two in my head, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the wit of the dialogue. Sternhagen was great, but Grizzard stood out because he was the nay-sayer—it’s easy for Nancy to seem interesting, she’s adventurous and creative; George is a former depressive who just wants to sit in the sun doing crosswords, but the actor made it work. George wasn’t a bore or a whiner, he was a tired realist. And once the lizards appeared, George reckoned the liver-paste sandwiches had done them in, and anyone who blames the liver paste is by definition sympathetic. Casting actors who are themselves in their 70s really made a difference—I am way too nervous about actors and sets generally (especially when large and not terribly mobile opera singers are scrambling on steeply banked sets), but I really worried for their hips every time someone got a foot tangled on the unruly corner of the beach blanket.
And talking lizards? Amazingly un-gimmicky. The focus was on their reactions to the newness of what the humans had to tell them about the world, not on the fact that they were talking lizards.
In these days when evolution is embattled (in schools and textbooks at least), the final images of Nancy and George imploring Sarah and Leslie not to give into to their instinctual desire to return to the sea was especially moving.
My favorite books of 2005, in no particular order:
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, by John Mortimer I’ve been reading Rumpole since I was skiving off school more than 30 years ago. In the early—it now seems glory—days of British daytime television, they mostly ran old films, nostalgic TV shows that might appeal to old folks (Sam, World at War, that kind of thing) and mysteries—including the fabulous Crown Court and Rumpole of the Bailey. Even though Leo McKern has left the Bailey, when I’m reading these books, I still see his crumpled old one-eyed face in Rumpole’s, the second Hilda, and the haughty Patricia Hodge as Phyllida Erskine-Brown, “the Portia of our chambers.” What’s the sports cliché—we shouldn’t have gotten this far, so the rest is just gravy. But such tasty gravy! (On another note—I was shocked to learn recently that Emily Mortimer, one of my favorite actresses, is John Mortimer’s daughter. And that he had a son with Wendy Craig of Butterflies fame!)
The Strange Death of Tory England, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The very beginning is rather hard going, but once he’s established his theme, it’s terribly readable and extremely interesting. Wheatcroft sure has a way with a sentence. I still can’t really tell where his sympathies lie—which is a good thing, I suppose.
Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, by Sarah Schulman This book had been sitting on my shelves for years, and as the movie version of Rent neared, I thought I’d better read it for research purposes. What an amazing exposé of homophobia in culture and commerce. Utterly convincing and utterly devastating.
Popco, by Scarlett Thomas Popco started off wonderfully—full of ideas about the way girls play and learn, codes, parenting, work, etc.—and buckled under the weight of too many ideas/plot strands about halfway through. That first half was really exciting, though!
Incendiary, by Chris Cleave Incendiary got a bad rap (but a lot of attention) because of timing—it’s a book about terrorism (a woman who has lost her husband and son in a terrorist attack writes a letter to Osama Bin Laden), and its pub date was July 7, the day of the London subway and bus bombings. The publicity campaign (complete with posters in the Underground) got canceled, the New York Timescalled the book “a case of simple tastelessness,” but I really enjoyed it. At first I was suspicious—it’s a book by a man (and my guess is a middle-class man) in the voice of a working-class woman. I’m not sure that American readers will get the cultural references—OK, the class references—but the book’s publisher told the Guardian that more than half of the 25,000 copies sold have been to the export market, which “perhaps confirms that distance has enabled people to read this brilliant debut novel on its own terms."
Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel Another series that has become part of my life. This is the 11th installment in a series that I hope will go on forever. Mo, c’est moi, even if we have less and less in common, at least politically. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to go Log Cabin, but my views on the Iraq war have little in common with Mo’s.) I love all the little details and jokes in the drawings—you have to read each panel at least five times to experience the five stages of DTWOF appreciation.
The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters Shockingly, perhaps, this is the first Sarah Waters novel I’ve read. It’s a story about World War II, more or less, and it’s told backward, in three sections set in 1947, 1944, and 1942, respectively. Waters is clearly a fantastic writer, and she was able to make me think about a well-trod subject, the war, in new ways. My only frustration is that about three-quarters of the way through, you realize that you’re never going to know how the various characters resolved their lives—you’ll be able to explain their behavior in 1947, but not how they’re going to move on. It’s funny how much messing with the traditional conflict/resolution arc frustrates a reader (this one, anyway).
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer The first draft of history, only this one’s almost perfect. Packer is tremendously thoughtful, a remarkable reporter, and a beautiful writer. A fantastic portrait of what the administration did in Iraq after the war “ended.”
"I Didn't Do It for You": How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, by Michela Wrong I hate the title of this book—it doesn’t even mention Eritrea, the small nation under discussion, but I loved the content. After you read this book, it’s tempting to look at every news event and wonder how exactly Eritrea is going to be dragged into it—because history suggests it eventually will.
And one I didn’t like at all:
A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game, by Selena Roberts It’s really too bad Roberts used the word “necessary” in the title, because that’s the last thing this book is. Its publication is inexplicable to me—there’s no anniversary, there’s no new insight into the match, into women’s tennis, and certainly not into Billie Jean King. If there’s one person I’d like to read a good biography of—one that really explains her personality and motivations, it’s BJK, but this book provides absolutely nothing that we haven’t known for decades.
The complete list. Breakdown: Fiction 11; Nonfiction 13; Comic 2; Play 1; Hybrid (the utterly misbegotten Hotel Babylon) 1.
Before I move on to my best-of other media, a few words about one play/performance that I did not enjoy:
Abigail’s Party was a great disappointment—as it was almost certainly destined to be; I spent a good deal of the sixth form “doing” the dialogue with my classmates, one of whom was named Ange (though she was nothing like either Mousy Ange or Take-Charge Ange—I believe she lives with a formerly drug-addicted Britpop star these days), so there was a lot of “Like Feliciano, Ange? Good, inne? Sexy!” Jennifer Jason Leigh was physically perfect for the role of Beverly (it’s no doubt telling that I originally typed “Alison” there), but her voice was just awful. What accent was that supposed to be? Either way, it was all wrong in terms of class and social signifiers—the only thing it had in common with Alison Steadman’s perfect pitch was that it was hard on the ears. Jennifer, sweetie, there’s more to it than just sounding obnoxious. Without any social/class context, the play meant absolutely nothing. Still, it was just extended for the second time.
I gave a C to the preview version of Sarah Schulman’s Manic Flight Reaction, which now feels rather unfair—it was a preview after all (when I saw it for real a few weeks later, it was clear to me that the lead actress hadn’t really known her lines in that second performance of the run!). I really admire Sarah, and I like her work very much indeed, but some parts of the play seemed just too broad—there was nothing to redeem the “character” of the tabloid journalist, and I didn’t care for the flashback with the main character, Marge’s, mother—but I loved the intention of the play, I really enjoyed the relationship between the mother and daughter at the center of the work, and I loved the scene in which Marge reconnects with Cookie, the woman who “opened [her] up sexually” (as Annie Hall might’ve put it), now the Republican-cliché-spouting wife of a Republican presidential nominee. There were an enormous number of things that I liked about the play (and to a lesser extent about the production), but there were also a lot of elements that I didn’t like at all. There were about 10 times more ideas in Manic Flight Reaction as there are in most American plays—but it would probably have been a better work with only four times as many as the norm.
Since I left the ratings that I gave to the plays/operas I saw in 2005 on the list I posted, in theory this is the easiest group from which to extract my favorites. Of the 29 productions I saw last year, the following received a B+ or higher. They’re in the order I saw them.
The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, seen on Broadway An amazing piece of work—but is it really a play? Despite fantastic staging and great acting, including some fine performances from actors more known for their work on the big screen (Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum), this struck me as more of a staged horror story than a play. For distressingly common reasons (specifically, a deaf audience member sitting on the front row of the balcony getting into a loud argument with the folks sitting next to him—I mention his deafness because it meant he was unwittingly loud in his remonstrations; so loud I was afraid the actors might stop the performance, as they did when I saw Copenhagen in London), a layer of the “real world” prevented me from fully engaging with the play, especially in the first act, but given the grotesqueries, perhaps I should’ve been glad for the unwanted distance. I always get the sense that even more than for most actors, Jeff Goldblum’s acting style is determined by his height—his physical presence seems to drive all his choices, from the way he controls his voice to the way he sits, the way he walks. In this play, his default state was a great fit for his role—he had to be a man who conveyed a sense of barely restrained power, both physical and bureaucratic, that the poor sap on the receiving end had to be very careful not to set off.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, by David Yazbek/Jeffrey Lane, seen on Broadway Ah, the joy of low expectations. I’d never been very fond of musicals—I can probably count how many I’ve seen before moving to New York on the fingers of both hands, and the ones I’ve been impressed by on one—and we got tickets for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels for the sake of an out-of-town visitor. What fun! A cool set, genuinely funny lines, good acting (we went to the pre-Tony show, and you could really tell that everyone was pleasantly nervous, especially Norbert Leo Butz, who was heavily favored to win—and did), and singing that amazed me (I just couldn’t believe the quality of Sherie Rene Scott’s voice).
Hecuba, by Euripides, adapted by Tony Harrison, seen at BAM There was just one reason I got these tickets—Vanessa Redgrave. I’ve seen her in comedies, dramas, and tragedies, and she’s never let me down. The most striking thing about this production was technique—it really is what separates British actors, especially in the classical repertoire. The performance was unamplified, and even thought it was staged in the BAM Opera House, it was a little difficult to catch some of the dialogue, or should I say declamations. I stupidly bought tickets in the cheap seats, and BAM management annoyingly allowed people to enter up to 45 minutes into the performance, which meant the spell kept getting broken, but even with the heavy-handed Iraq symbolism, I enjoyed it immensely.
Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires, by Staceyann Chin, seen off-Broadway The biggest problem with one-person shows is what the actor does with him- or herself while they’re speaking—even an actor of Antony Sher’s caliber didn’t quite succeed in overcoming dangling-arm syndrome (in this sense it helps to if your character’s an alcoholic so you can keep a glass in your hand at all times). Staceyann Chin’s performance in her autobiographical show was particularly impressive for what she did with her body—tremendous energy used in the service of her words (it didn’t hurt that she stripped down to bra and panties a couple of times, either). And as moronic as it makes me seem to say this, the fact that I only realized toward the end of the show that she was reciting poetry rather than performing a script seemed like a good thing.
Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung, by Richard Wagner, seen at Seattle Opera My third complete Ring cycle (all at Seattle), and I can’t imagine a more amazing live "show." The special effects of the movies (swimming Rheinmaidens, fire-belching dragons, sometimes flying horses), the compelling story of a really high-quality elemental soap opera, amazing music, wonderful singers, and the required immersion of a "properly" mounted cycle—four operas performed over the space of six nights—there’s absolutely nothing to compare. Alan Woodrow as Seigfried couldn’t act for toffee, but his voice was just right, and Jane Eaglen was magnificent (I can’t believe I was worried after Walkure, when she’d seemed to be holding back to a worrying degree—she’s done this before and knew what she needed to do to keep the voice going for the later operas that she needed to carry). Greer Grimsley, who I’d seen several times before and thought so-so on was the best Wotan I’ve seen—clearly he’s found his perfect role.
Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley, seen on Broadway Cherry Jones is such a goddess—an unparalleled actress and an out lesbian (LOVE the smooch at the Tonys), I wanted so much to like it that I was afraid I’d be disappointed. No worries. A beautifully spare throwback to the days of well-made plays and yet with themes that are absolutely contemporary. I must say I’m a little shock that Eileen Atkins, that is, Dame Eileen Atkins, is taking over next week when Cherry Jones moves on—she seems shockingly overqualified to be a replacement, but I guess it’s a testament to the appeal of the role.
Sweeney Todd, by Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler, seen in preview on Broadway This had so many strikes against it—a musical (and Sondheim to boot, I remember years ago accompanying a Sondheim queen to a performance of Sunday in the Park With George on the West End and his being absolutely exasperated that I wasn’t transported by its genius), a novelty staging (I’d just seen Rent—strictly for research purposes—the week before and was exasperated by all the faffing around with the set), a high concept, and all that buzz about Patti LuPone (who I mostly know as a minor player on Oz) and her tuba. I thought it magnificent—the conceit really worked for me, I couldn’t believe how well the cast performed musically (playing sans score, of course), the songs were great. I loved it. In the couple of months before I’d seen several shows that I really liked but that were critically panned (for example, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way), but I had absolutely no doubt that this would be a hit.
4:48 Psychose, by Sarah Kane, performed in French at BAM Talk about forebodings of doom—a month or so after I bought tickets for this, a letter came from BAM basically warning the audience-to-be that this was going to be a difficult play, performed by Isabelle Huppert in French with very limited subtitles. Maybe I did what the director, Claude Régy (I don’t know for sure that the letter was his doing, but I strongly suspect it) intended and came to the play prepared. I bought the script in advance, I read up on Sarah Kane’s life and work; I can’t say that I did anything about my very rusty French, but I at least thought about it. When we arrived at the theater, it was, as one of the ushers put it, “under heavy manners”—constant warnings that there’d be no late seating, forceful reminders that there’d be no re-entry if audience-members left, even rather motherly inquiries from the ushers if we’d been to the bathroom. All theaters should do this (save, perhaps, for the toilet police)—before the play began, there was a palpable sense that something mysterious and amazing was about to happen. I’ll never forget the look of “what the hell’s going on” on the faces of the ushers when, even before the lights went down, the audience went into a profound anticipatory silence as if by consensus. Régy’s direction and Huppert’s performance were peculiar to say the least—she effectively stood absolutely immobile (other than very occasional random-seeming hand spasms) speaking and shouting her lines amid long pauses. I was absolutely haunted by it—for days after I thought about the play, I re-read it, I attended the “chat” with Régy a couple of days later. Unfortunately, it seems that toward the end of the run they relaxed the heavy manners and completely lost the magic. A colleague who went on the last day told me that they were allowing late entries more than halfway into the performance, which made it impossible to connect with the work. If it hadn’t been for the Ring, this would be my favorite theatrical experience of 2005.
