Millennial Stages: Essays and Reviews 2001-2005 9780300135367

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Positions and Polemics
No Time for Comedy
The New Relevance
Does Theatre Matter?
Maiming the Messenger
Words on Fire
The Rebirth of Political Theatre: The God of Hell; Democracy
When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth
Red and Blue States of Mind: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; Terrorism
Part Two: Plays and Productions
Varieties of Histrionic Experience: Medea; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Mind Over Material: The Invention of Love; Mnemonic
The Jew Who Buried Hitler: The Producers
The Harrowing of Hell: In the Penal Colony; Hamlet; and Hamlet
Angels in Afghanistan: Homebody/Kabul
Goat Song: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
Comedy Is Harder: Private Lives; The Underpants
Prescient Plays: Far Away; A Number
Clever Ladies: Imaginary Friends; Adult Entertainment
Creations: Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night; Take Me Out; Our Lady of 121st Street
Dysfunctional Families, Dysgenic Dynasties: Salome; Gypsy; Long Day’s Journey into Night
Smelly Orthodoxies: A Bad Friend; I Am My Own Wife
Shotover’s Apocalypse: Omnium Gatherum; Anna in the Tropics
Palace and Garden: Maria Stuart; House and Garden
The Political Power of Puns: Caroline, or Change; The Beard of Avon
A King and Two Queens: King Lear; Valhalla
Homeboy Godot: Topdog/ Underdog; Fortune’s Fool
Pyrotechnics and Ice: Jumpers; Frozen
The Past Revisited: The Frogs; After the Fall
In the Jungle: Rose Rage; Hedda Gabler
Impersonations: Monty Python’s Spamalot; Orson’s Shadow; Julius Caesar
Prosecution Plays: Doubt; Romance; The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; The Pillowman; Thom Pain (Based on Nothing); The Light in the Piazza
Theatre of the Mushy Tushy: Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées)
Lear’s Lendings: King Lear
Part Three: People and Places
Marlon Brando: Contempt for Acting
Requiem for Jan Kott
Pieter-Dirk Uys: The Good Hope of the Cape
Theatre in Australia: The Cultural Cringe
Theatre in South Africa: Fronting
MASS MoCa: A Boom in the Boonies
Hallie Flanagan Davis and the Federal Theatre: Hallie’s Comet
Suzan-Lori Parks: Does Race Matter?
Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook: The Cavalier and the Roundhead
Shakespeare in Bloom: The Two Noble Kinsmen; Henry IV; As You Like It
George S. Kaufman: Keeping Company with Kaufman
Shakespeare’s Geography
Primo Levi: The Saved and the Damned
The Death of Arthur Miller
Richard Gilman: Prisoner on the Aisle
Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan: The Peer and the Pariah
Index

Citation preview

Millennial Stages

Other Works by Robert Brustein  The Theatre of Revolt Seasons of Discontent The Third Theatre Revolution as Theatre The Culture Watch Critical Moments Making Scenes Who Needs Theatre Reimagining American Theatre Dumbocracy in America Cultural Calisthenics The Siege of the Arts Letters to a Young Actor The Plays and Prose of Strindberg (editor)

  Demons Celebrities Anonymous Nobody Dies on Friday The Face Lift Spring Forward, Fall Back The English Channel

 Shlemiel the First (Singer) Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello) Tonight We Improvise (Pirandello) Right You Are (If You Think You Are) (Pirandello) Enrico IV (Pirandello) The Sea Gull (Chekhov) The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) Three Farces and a Funeral (Chekhov) Ghosts (Ibsen) The Wild Duck (Ibsen) The Master Builder (Ibsen) When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen) The Father (Strindberg)

Millennial Stages Essays and Reviews 2001– 2005

Robert Brustein

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of , Yale College. Copyright ©  by Robert Brustein. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections  and  of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Adobe Garamond types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brustein, Robert Sanford, – Millennial stages : essays and reviews, – / Robert Brustein. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-: ---- (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-: --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Theater—United States. . Theater—United States—Reviews. . Drama—History and criticism. I. Title. PN..B  .—dc  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.          

To Doreen The leading lady in the theatre of my heart

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Part One. Positions and Polemics

1

No Time for Comedy  The New Relevance  Does Theatre Matter?  Maiming the Messenger  Words on Fire  The Rebirth of Political Theatre: The God of Hell; Democracy  When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth  Red and Blue States of Mind: The th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; Terrorism  Part Two. Plays and Productions

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Varieties of Histrionic Experience: Medea; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 

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Mind Over Material: The Invention of Love; Mnemonic  The Jew Who Buried Hitler: The Producers  The Harrowing of Hell: In the Penal Colony; Hamlet; and Hamlet  Angels in Afghanistan: Homebody/Kabul  Goat Song: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?  Comedy Is Harder: Private Lives; The Underpants  Prescient Plays: Far Away; A Number  Clever Ladies: Imaginary Friends; Adult Entertainment  Creations: Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night; Take Me Out; Our Lady of st Street  Dysfunctional Families, Dysgenic Dynasties: Salome; Gypsy; Long Day’s Journey into Night  Smelly Orthodoxies: A Bad Friend; I Am My Own Wife  Shotover’s Apocalypse: Omnium Gatherum; Anna in the Tropics  Palace and Garden: Maria Stuart; House and Garden  The Political Power of Puns: Caroline, or Change; The Beard of Avon  A King and Two Queens: King Lear; Valhalla  Homeboy Godot: Topdog/Underdog; Fortune’s Fool  Pyrotechnics and Ice: Jumpers; Frozen  The Past Revisited: The Frogs; After the Fall  In the Jungle: Rose Rage; Hedda Gabler  Impersonations: Monty Python’s Spamalot; Orson’s Shadow; Julius Caesar  Prosecution Plays: Doubt; Romance; The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; The Pillowman; Thom Pain; The Light in the Piazza  Theatre of the Mushy Tushy: Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées)  Lear’s Lendings: King Lear  Part Three. People and Places

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Marlon Brando: Contempt for Acting  Requiem for Jan Kott  Pieter-Dirk Uys: The Good Hope of the Cape  Theatre in Australia: The Cultural Cringe  Theatre in South Africa: Fronting 

Contents

 MoCa: A Boom in the Boonies  Hallie Flanagan Davis and the Federal Theatre: Hallie’s Comet  Suzan-Lori Parks: Does Race Matter?  Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook: The Cavalier and the Roundhead  Shakespeare in Bloom: The Two Noble Kinsmen; Henry IV; As You Like It  George S. Kaufman: Keeping Company with Kaufman  Shakespeare’s Geography  Primo Levi: The Saved and the Damned  The Death of Arthur Miller  Richard Gilman: Prisoner on the Aisle  Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan: The Peer and the Pariah  Index 

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Acknowledgments

Most of the reviews and essays in this book, some of them slightly altered for this edition, were written for The New Republic, where I owe significant debts to the editorial wisdom of Ruth Franklin, Deborah Friedell, and Leon Wieseltier. Does Theatre Matter was a speech presented at a symposium sponsored by Columbia University’s now sadly defunct National Arts Journalism Program, when I was a Fellow there at the invitation of Michael Janeway and Andras Szanto; that program also commissioned my article “When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth.” “Words on Fire” was my introduction to a series of symposia on proscribed art organized for the New Center for Arts and Culture. “Theatre in Australia” was written for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. My piece on Hallie Flanagan Davis served as the introduction to a book called Voices from the Federal Theatre. “Shakespeare’s Geography” was published in Jonathan Kalb’s online magazine, hotreviews.com, and “Lear’s Lendings” was written for the Wall Street Journal.

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I also have to thank John Kulka at Yale University Press for his unfailing good nature and sound advice and copy editor Nancy Moore Hulnick for her close and helpful reading of the manuscript. These editors, sponsors, and friends have caught many errors and infelicities in my prose. Those that remain are my own.

Introduction

In an ominous coincidence, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place around the beginning of the second millennium, a time traditionally associated with apocalypse. In a slightly less apocalyptic synchronism, September th also coincides with the beginning of every new theatre season. Rather than acknowledge the fears and fevers of our time, not to mention the terror that now enshrouds our lives, the commercial stage has been conscientiously devoted to manufacturing escapism and obscurantism, through witless entertainments and irrelevant revivals. In September  alone, with the war in Iraq in its third year and Hurricane Katrina continuing to dominate the headlines, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section announced new musicals “about white trash singing show tunes” (The Great American Trailer Park ), “about a single guy looking for sex” (Slut), “about a romance between a musician with Tourette’s syndrome and a journalist with an obsessive-compulsive disorder” (In My Life), about “a love triangle involving Alfred Kinsey, his wife, and his lab assistant” (Dr. Sex), plus another edition of Elaine Stritch’s favorite show tunes. Revivals of The Fantasticks, The Odd xiii

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Couple, The Pajama Game, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, Carrie, and Peter Pan, choice tidbits from our show biz past, are among the anodynes promised in future. I am as fond of nostalgia and escapism as the next guy, and I shouldn’t prejudge shows that haven’t yet opened. But it’s a pity that the commercial stage is failing its opportunity to provide some understanding of our present predicament. You would think, for example, that Broadway could have stirred itself over the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina more vigorously than having stars ask patrons for disaster relief during those obligatory curtain speeches. I admit it’s still too recent for a full-scale play on the subject, which needs time in order to filter into metaphor. But as an example of how deftly theatre can adapt itself to current events, I refer you to a recent revival of Two Gentlemen of Verona (the musical version in Central Park) where John Guare, changing only twenty-nine words of the Duke’s “Bring All the Boys Back Home” number, transformed it into a rousing commentary on Bush’s military and economic failures (“If we didn’t have a war / Then where / Would we spend our money / Where / Welfare, Clean Air, Child Care”). The very same failures poisoned the flotsam in the flooded streets of New Orleans. Since the theatre is a barometer of how people behave and feel at any given moment in history, I suppose even mindless entertainment can inform us about how the events of September th, the Iraq war, and now the disasters in Louisiana and Mississippi have altered the American mind. What it says is that when Bush comes to shove, we want to bury our heads in warm sand. It is often noted that the modern stage is out of touch with the deeper concerns and impulses of the society. Even our theatre’s “serious” themes, notably sexual, ethnic, and racial identity, are of less immediate concern to the theatregoing public (those in blue states included) than to people who work in the profession. Even our theatre’s “serious” themes, notably sexual, ethnic, and racial identity, usually expressed in one-person shows, are of less immediate concern to the theatregoing public. They are an extension of our theatre’s narcissism. This disconnect between stage and audience may help to explain why public interest in the stage is dwindling. At the same time that Broadway, when not recycling popular movies in musical form (The Lion King, The Producers, Monty Python’s Spamalot), is busy pondering the tribulations of gay baseball players and teenage spelling bee nerds, the rest of the country is worrying about the environment, global warming, nuclear proliferation, poverty, the mismanagement of the economy, homeland security, the futility of the Iraq war, and all the other pressing issues neglected by Bush.

Introduction

Luckily, there is a world elsewhere, namely not-for-profit theatre venues. These are proving somewhat more hospitable to new plays examining significant national themes. And we should be encouraged by a detectable rise in the quality, ambition, and, yes, relevance of the American theatre during the time of our greatest traumas. It is true that the resident theatre movement, once the great hope for a more adventurous alternative to the commercial stage, has lost some of its original spunk since the evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts caused a precipitous dropoff in public and private funding. It is also true that too often off-Broadway, instead of discovering exciting new talent, seems to be looking for ways to move safe products to the Great White Way. On the other hand, over these last five years as many intelligent and gifted artists were writing for the stage as ever before in our history: Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Craig Lucas, Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Richard Nelson, Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, Charles L. Mee Jr., John Patrick Shanley, Rebecca Gilman, Doug Wright, Richard Greenberg, Sara Ruhl, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Nilo Cruz, Paul Rudnick, Adam Rapp, Tracy Letts— this is a partial list. And they were fashioning plays that were not just limited domestic dramas, but sometimes deep probes into the social and political cankers of the time. It was also a period when American directors, led by Robert Wilson, Andrei Serban, Anne Bogart, Elizabeth LaCompte, Robert Woodruff, and many others—following in the footsteps of the great European auteurs like Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman—were continuing their audacious investigations of classical and modern drama. But, sadly, it was also a time when we lost some of our most valued artists, notably Arthur Miller in playwriting; Marlon Brando in acting; Susan Sontag, who both directed and wrote for the stage; Arnold Weinstein, a great librettist and lyricist—and, most recently, August Wilson, who, after finishing his epic ten-play cycle about blacks in America, succumbed to liver cancer. It is often said that the Al Qaeda attacks on September , , created a national trauma as profound as any event in our history. The last four years of American theatre have directly or indirectly exposed that psychic wound through its choice of themes, characters, and mood. Unlike Pearl Harbor, which unified the country and stimulated an outburst of anti-Axis sentiment, / is an event that most American playwrights have been slow to confront. In the s all our leading Broadway dramatists—Robert Sherwood (There Shall Be No Night), Lillian Hellman (Watch on the Rhine), Maxwell Anderson (The Eve of St. Mark ), S. N. Behrman (No Time for Comedy), among others—were

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rushing to compose patriotic plays in support of the war effort. And there were, of course, innumerable Hollywood movies promoting it as well, usually starring John Wayne and Ronald Reagan (The Sands of Iwo Jima, Back to Bataan, Desperate Journey). The Al Qaeda attacks produced a lot of bumper stickers and the Patriot Act. But although they initially unified the nation, those events did not produce a lasting or universal form of patriotism, largely because of growing doubts about the credibility of our military actions and our motives in Iraq. As for the American theatre, in an echo of Vietnam War resistance, this traditionally liberal arena has remained deeply suspicious of the present administration and its propaganda apparatus, especially after it became clear that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or any links with Al Qaeda (that is, until the invasion turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terror). Perhaps it is for that reason that the theatre did not show much interest in the conduct of the Iraq war. As for Hollywood, it has produced nothing yet about the present conflict as cogent as, say, David O. Russell’s  movie Three Kings, which dramatized the tragic results of America’s broken promises to the Shia during our first invasion of Iraq. Where the war gets most attention is on the television comedy shows, particularly in the monologues of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Lewis Black. On the other hand, if playwrights are not dealing directly with the war, a handful are just now beginning to examine the effects of September th on our national psyches. Tony Kushner, prescient as always, wrote a play called Homeboy/Kabul before the / attacks took place (though it was produced after the event itself ) that evoked the sense of rootlessness and displacement in Afghanistan. Another prescient work, Terrorism, by two Siberians called the Presnyakov Brothers, which also preceded the attacks on New York, extended the metaphor of terror to our daily lives. Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros was the first play to focus on the victims of the World Trade Center attack, through the agency of an infernal dinner party, where the dead debate the motives behind / and even invite a terrorist to join them. And it was not long before other playwrights were taking the political temperature of the United States following our incursion into Iraq and the torture of those interned in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell, in particular, was a powerful indictment of how our mistreatment of prisoners abroad was influencing government behavior at home, with its potential to turn us into a totalitarian state. (The British also weighed in with such entries as David Hare’s Stuff Happens, and Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.) In short, after a long period when American politi-

Introduction

cal theatre was primarily devoted to necessary issues of social injustice and unequal opportunities regarding women, gays and lesbians, blacks, Latinos, and other minorities, it is now beginning to look outwards as well, examining our responsibilities towards the world. It is probable, in other words, that the catastrophes on our native soil have encouraged us once again to think globally rather than locally. After September th, we lost a lot of our innocence, not to mention our belief in American invincibility. After Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we lost most of our moral authority, along with our certitude about the righteousness of our cause. After Hurricane Katrina, in a terrifying example of how bad policies can reinforce natural calamities, we lost whatever faith was left in our government. The American theatre is perfectly positioned to chronicle this national unease. A play that provokes pity and terror is not incompatible with a night on the town. This book is basically a collection of discrete pieces about the theatre and about some of the people contributing to the performing arts. But I hope it is also a record of the various issues roiling the national soul, as well as my own soul, over the past five years. That is the only unifying claim I can make for it, other than the fact that lurking behind many of the reviews and essays, as well as behind the plays and people they evaluate, has been the specter of /. I have arranged these pieces into three sections: Positions and Polemics, which includes general essays on social, political, and religious issues, Plays and Productions, which are essentially drama reviews, and People and Places, which contains my views on the public personalities and the geographical locations responsible for various forms of theatre. My perspective remains the prism of dramatic literature and theatre production, and it is from that perspective that I continue to regard our society. Which leads me to an issue for which I have sometimes been criticized—my double role as critic and practitioner. Since in the course of a long career I have trained, employed, and befriended a number of theatre people, my reviewing them sometimes raises suspicions of favoritism. And since (on rare occasions) I have written about works that originated at my theatre, there have also been rumblings about my conflicts of interest. I hear these murmurs, but they have not discouraged me yet from writing or practicing. Shaw did not cease to do so, nor did Harold Clurman, and neither did Kenneth Tynan. Conflict of interest implies some financial gain resulting from a double role. But I have never profited from productions performed at either my theatre or other venues, except for a small royalty on one of my own adaptations staged elsewhere (I didn’t review it). Or perhaps the phrase suggests that by reviewing these plays in other

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venues I am trying to affirm a reputation for good taste, by which reasoning no competitive critic should ever be able to criticize another’s opinions. I think a dispassionate look at my reviews and those of other critics who practice would show that we do not fudge our judgments out of affection for people we know. Cherry Jones, for example, is a much-admired former company member, but I do not hesitate to say when I think she has accepted a part in an inferior play or not fully realized a performance. And if I express admiration for the artistry of Robert Wilson, it is not because he mounted productions at the American Repertory Theatre. I invited him to mount those productions because I admire his artistry. As for reviewing plays I helped originate—The Frogs is the one example in this collection—I have not been uncritical of those scripts, and often preferred the production under review to my own. Perhaps now that I am no longer heading a theatre, these charges will diminish, but I continue to be puzzled by this unease with critic-practitioners. Tynan thought it was generated by hidden feelings of inadequacy. Reviewing a book of criticism by Harold Clurman, Tynan wrote: “Let us agree to bury the popular notion, fostered in self-defense by generations of reviewers, that backstage expertise is at best irrelevant and at worst inimical to good criticism.” Can we also bury the notion that backstage expertise inevitably generates conflict of interest? It may be that over my years as a practitioner, I have become somewhat less vituperative as a critic. I leave it to the reader to judge if this be a virtue or a vice.

Part One Positions and Polemics

No Time for Comedy

I was hoping to do a review today of the late summer London theatre season, but like everyone else in America following the events of September th, I had to change my plans. Writing drama criticism seems like very trivial labor after you’ve been watching the herculean efforts of police, firemen, and city workers to retrieve the remains of victims buried under the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How does one continue to evaluate plays in the face of all that heroism and all that rubble? It’s being said that among the many things destroyed forever by the Muslim terrorists was our innocence. They may also have killed, I assume temporarily, our craving for art and entertainment. When, for example, will any of us be able to watch a disaster movie again? The spectacle of hundreds of terrified people running down city streets pursued by clouds of smoke and debris was already so familiar to us from epics like Rodan and Godzilla that on that fateful Tuesday it was almost impossible to separate fiction from reality. Were they authentic human beings or crowds of Hollywood extras fleeing towards the camera as those two giant buildings imploded behind them? No wonder the studios have announced that they are cancelling 3

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all their forthcoming disaster films—notably an Arnold Schwarzenegger epic about a man whose family is killed in a terrorist attack—and replacing them with patriotic stories, family dramas, and escapist fare. The impact on the theatre has been just as daunting. The show is famously supposed to go on regardless of internal problems or external catastrophes (London’s Windmill Theatre boasted “We Never Closed” even during the darkest days of the Blitz). But this plucky thumbs-up attitude in the face of adversity did not characterize the mood of theatre people after September th. For three or four days, all Broadway shows, The Producers included, were cancelled. New openings were delayed for a week or more. The Roundabout revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins was postponed until further notice because, as the director, Joe Mantello, observed, it is a musical “which asks audiences to think critically about various aspects of the American experience,” and in light of the murderous assault on our nation, “this is not an appropriate time to present a show which makes such a demand.” Especially when the musical is about the assassination of American presidents. In the early forties, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, S. N. Behrman wrote a play called No Time for Comedy. Sixty years later, we again find ourselves in a situation where there may be no appetite for comedy, not to mention critical thought of any nature. For the last week, it would seem that the only fully accepted public activities have been church-going, prayer-saying, and flagwaving (in the days following September th, we are told, Walmart and Kmart between them sold , American flags). In short, the terrorists accomplished in one brief morning what before seemed almost inconceivable after three decades of identity politics. They managed to unify the country into a nation of patriots, turning multiculturally diverse factions into a people with a common cause. But at what cost? During the divided days of Vietnam, artists had more freedom to criticize their government than at any time since the th century .., when Aristophanes satirized Pericles’ conduct of the Peloponnesian wars. But this nation is now more united behind its government than at any time since . As we again consider risking American lives abroad in order to annihilate an enemy, critical voices may become as objectionable to the polity as they were during World War II. The war fever has already resulted in the murder of some Muslim Americans and the violation of their mosques. I pray it doesn’t soon have an impact on everybody’s civil liberties, not to mention on artistic and intellectual freedom. During World War II, the entertainment industry was entirely devoted to producing patriotic and escapist fare. Should this become a protracted general war

No Time for Comedy

and not just a focussed police action, it is entirely possible we may again start living in a climate of officially approved art. The Fall season at my theatre in Cambridge was intended to be a festival celebrating the Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo. It consisted of Johan Padan and the Discovery of America, Fo’s satiric comedy about the adventures of an anti-hero fleeing the religious fanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition by joining Columbus in America. Our theatre elected to cancel the Tuesday performance of Johan Padan. Fo and Rame cancelled their participation in the tour. “We do not feel capable,” they wrote to me, “of performing ironic and grotesque shows, which deal among other things with sex and eroticism, in such a grave state of national mourning. ‘The show must go on’ and the clown crying behind his mask are stereotypes that we do not wish to perpetuate.” In other words, no time for comedy. In a speech to the audience on the night we reopened Johan Padan (that very same night our sister theatre, the Huntington, was opening the unfortunately titled The Dead !), I did my best to argue that comedy—like all forms of art—has the capacity to humanize us in the midst of inhuman events. But to tell the truth my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t feel much like being humanized one day after those planes rammed into those buildings, engulfed them in fireballs, and toppled them to the ground, killing all those innocents. I wanted revenge. Some of my theatre students were eager to know what America had done to make “those people” so angry at us, indeed why we were so roundly hated throughout much of the world. “You just don’t want to believe in evil,” I stormed, comparing this question to trying to “understand” why Hitler hated the Jews. I was out of patience at that moment with the way the liberal mind always picks at its own scabs. Against the background of those bodies catapulting out of the top floor windows of the World Trade Center, the self-hatred of American political correctness never seemed more incongruous. (Actually, PC is probably dead as a doornail now, another casualty of the terrorists’ flight plan, in the same grave as the Peace Now movement after being blown to smithereens by Palestinian suicide bombers.) A few days later, my thirst for vengeance abating somewhat, I began to feel ashamed. One of my anxious students, a woman, wrote to me that she had been a prison guard in Israel and had watched herself grow so “callous and punitive” over the way her ratty charges berated her, smelling of urine and perspiration, that she was forced to request a transfer. She understood full well, she said, the origins of hatred and revenge. I was even more ashamed, however, when Jerry Falwell, with Pat Robertson concurring, blamed the whole catastrophe on secular America. “I really be-

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lieve,” he fulminated, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’” This was almost enough to make one embrace political correctness. (Far from being the result of secularism, of course, the terrorist attack was the work of fanatical religious fundamentalists who shared the revulsion of our own fundamentalists against America’s “moral corruption” and “secularism.”) My student ended her letter by saying she was “blessed to be able to work in the theatre” because of the opportunity it gave her to “criticize and rebuild my conscience” rather than “simplify issues into good and evil.” That was my blessing, too, and I was grateful for being reminded, in my current state of anger and confusion, of the obligations of art in a bad time, of why literature and drama continued to remain relevant despite our horrifying glimpses into the darkness of the human heart. Or maybe the arts remain relevant because of those glimpses. They help us to understand, not to excuse, the motives behind evil actions—just as Shakespeare was able to suggest, not condone, the reasons for Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, and Dostoevsky was able to examine, not exonerate, the political ideas that led Raskolnikov to plunge an axe into the skull of his landlady. It is one of the functions of art to help us see how the hatred and viciousness of our enemies can begin to infect the brains of relatively normal people like ourselves. It can also help us understand the origins of that infection. I want to go back to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, perhaps the first account of state terrorism in literature. And I want to reread The Possessed where Dostoevsky examines the anarchism and nihilism and despair that make a sane man into a criminal killer of innocent bystanders. I also need to refresh my memory about such bracing critiques of our own military establishment as Catch  and Doctor Strangelove because the greatest danger of the moment, with  percent of the country in favor of strong military action against the Taliban (an opinion I share), but apparently willing, according to a recent Times poll, to sacrifice thousands of innocent civilians in the process, is a military blank check that could make the punishment even more appalling than the crime. As Genet once wrote in The Balcony, if we behave like the other side, then we are the other side. If only for that reason, it is necessary to look past the waved flags and bent knees and silent moments of prayer, and try to keep the arts in focus. By lighting up the dark places in every human heart, literature, drama, music, and

No Time for Comedy

painting could help temper our righteous demand for vengeance with a humanizing restraint. The American theatre presently stands like Estragon and Vladimir under that leafless tree in Beckett’s blasted plain. The show can’t go on. It must go on. There is no time when there’s no time for comedy.  

7

The New Relevance

One of the clichés of current culture chat is that September th has forced us to look at the arts in a completely different way. There’s been a slew of newspaper and magazine articles lately devoted to detailing how the terrorist attacks have affected what poets are writing, what people are reading, what theatres are producing. During the heady days of the sixties and seventies, there was a word to describe this sort of thing. We called it “relevance,” an epithet wielded as an implicit rebuke to any work of art that didn’t condemn the Vietnam War. Today, in a time of revived patriotism, there are signs that anything that fails to glorify the war in Afghanistan or at least reflect our current predicament might be deemed “irrelevant” as well. Some artists, such as Don DeLillo (who predicted a reign of terrorism in Mao II ), today seem not only relevant but prophetic. Others, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, who regarded the events of September th (“the biggest work of art”) purely as an aesthetic experience and had his concerts cancelled as a result, are being treated as dangerously out of touch with the real world. I agree with those who think artists should be allowed to say what8

The New Relevance

ever they like, no matter how lamebrained. And yet it’s hard to deny that recent events have profoundly affected the way we look at the world and think about the arts. My first reaction, based on the escapist cultural fare of World War II, was that we were condemned to a future of Doris Day movies. I was wrong. It is impossible to look at any form of art or entertainment these days without relating it to our present fears and anxieties. My theatre, for example, is currently preparing a production of Othello. I found myself listening to the first reading with entirely new ears. The hero is a Moor, therefore from Morocco, very possibly a Muslim. What if his savage treatment of Desdemona, generally considered an uncharacteristic fit of jealousy induced by Iago’s cunning insinuations, were also motivated by Islamic convictions about women’s place in society? What would be the effect on the audience if Desdemona, greeted by Cassio as she disembarked in Cyprus, were to be wearing a chador? And how about Iago, the incarnation of absolute evil, who massacres the innocent and rejoices in their suffering? Is he a prototype for Osama bin Laden? Bin Laden tells us there are motives behind Al Qaeda’s hatred of America—the suffering of the Third World, the presence of infidel troops on holy soil, U.S. support for Israel. David Letterman proposed another one—“They don’t have cable.” Flippant as it sounds, the remark contains a truism, that underneath the Muslim fundamentalist hatred of Western corruption there lies Muslim fundamentalist envy of Western technology. Iago suffers from envy, too. Although Coleridge called him a “motiveless malignity,” he has a host of reasons for hating Othello—he was passed over for promotion by Cassio, he suspects his general of sleeping with his wife, he is probably a racist. At the end, when finally apprehended, Iago feels no remorse and will go to his death without a word— so will Bin Laden, I suspect. Two evil martyrs anticipating the embrace of hundreds of virgins with liquid black eyes. I also began to look for new meaning in Aristotle’s Poetics, especially the section on tragedy where he famously defines the form as “an imitation of an action of high importance . . . by means of pity and terror affecting a catharsis of these emotions.” That a need for purging terror should assume such high definition in his theory suggests that Aristotle may have been something of a prophet too. One can certainly find precedents, and perhaps some solace, for the massacre of the innocent at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the choruses of such tragedies as Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women and Euripides’ The Trojan Women. In Portrait of the Artist, James Joyce suggests that Aristotle never defined pity

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or terror. “I have,” says his arrogant stand-in, Stephen Dedalus: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” Hm, human sufferings. Was he anticipating our whole century? Hm, “secret cause.” Was he prophesying Al Qaeda? As a matter of fact, Aristotle did define his terms, in the thirteenth chapter of his Poetics: “Pity is induced by undeserved misfortune, and terror by the misfortunes of normal people,” which pretty well sums up our feelings about the victims of September th and our fears about our own future. 

Does Theatre Matter?

Does theatre matter any more? We’ve been asking ourselves this question ever since the first couch potato decided to watch I Love Lucy rather than wrangle with a nasty box office manager and navigate the treacherous shoals of Broadway streets. We’ve been asking ourselves this question for at least four decades of rising ticket prices and declining attendance. Every playwright, actor, director, designer, dramaturg, administrator, and theatre technician at some point asks this question, wondering whether anyone still has any passion for the theatre aside from those who work in it. I started asking this question at least thirty years ago, and even published an essay called “Who Needs Theatre.” Besides trying to run a theatre company, I was writing for a magazine most of whose readers hadn’t seen a play in decades, and I was wondering just who in hell I was talking to every week. If I may quote some lines from that essay: “The liberal, well-educated, book- and magazine-reading public, once the solid nuclear core of intelligent theatergoers, seems to have surrendered its theatrical constituency in recent years, turned off by the various vexations of 11

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Positions and Polemics

playgoing—the high price of tickets, and stronger pulls of books, movies, and television, and, most significant of all in my opinion, the increasing insularity of American life.” The insularity I was referring to was a result of our highly touted technology. The same pinpoint inventiveness that can target the hairs in Saddam’s moustache had given us the capacity to turn our living rooms into multiple entertainment parlors. We are now wired to bring films, literature, games, sports events, even our banking and shopping transactions, onto gigantic screens, digitally processed and equipped with quadraphonic sensesurround speakers. With amenities like this, who needs theatre? Why leave the house at all, except to go to the office? Why go to the office when you can conduct all your business at home through the programs on your laptop? Who needs theatre. Does theatre matter. In the past, such questions would have seemed absurd. Theatre mattered a lot to the citizens of Periclean Athens who went to see plays the way Christians go to churches and Muslims go to mosques, for spiritual sustenance through sustaining myths. It mattered a lot in medieval Europe whose church services included a theatrical Quem Quaeritis trope that evolved into adaptations of the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels called Miracle and Morality plays, and then evolved into Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It mattered enormously to Londoners of all classes in Elizabethan England, who followed the fortunes of Falstaff from play to play the way people today follow the fortunes of Tony Soprano from episode to episode. It mattered enough to the Puritans and Anabaptists that in  they shut down the playhouses the moment they had cut off the head of the English king. It mattered in Golden Age Spain, and in France during the reign of Louis XIV, when people of all classes would no more think of missing a new play by Lope or Molière than skipping their evening meal. What happened to vitiate that passion for the stage? Well, for one thing, in the th century, serious theatre began to develop an adversary role in regard to its audience—something I discussed in a book called The Theatre of Revolt. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht—none of these could any longer be called “popular” playwrights devoted to providing the audience with consoling myths. They were often messianic, provocative, bleak. After seeing Waiting for Godot, Walter Kerr charged Samuel Beckett with being out of touch with “the hearts and minds of the folks out front.” The title of one of Peter Handke’s plays, Offending the Audience, pretty much summed up the tensions that had grown between the stage and the auditorium. As a result, the feelings of communion and fellowship associated with traditional theatre began to evaporate. Yes, people were still prepared to go to musicals

Does Theatre Matter?

and light comedies for entertainment and escape, but that was precisely the source of the theatre’s growing vulnerability and weakness. Other forms of entertainment could provide those satisfactions with much more ease and comfort. What these competing forms can’t provide very often is ) a sense of community, and ) a penetrating spiritual experience. My essay “Who Needs Theatre” purposely omitted the question mark. I wasn’t saying “Who Needs Theatre?” with a shrug of the shoulders. I was talking about those who were in need of theatre, whether they knew it or not, namely all of us. All of us, because we can’t find its equivalent anywhere else. I love movies as much as the next guy—I teethed on double features as a kid—but I went to movies because I wanted to be alone with my fantasies. Moviegoing is a highly personal experience. If someone comes and sits next to you, you feel crowded. If there are empty seats in the theatre, you wonder what’s wrong with the play. That is why the stage has proved so resistible to the lures of pornography, that most private of performances, whereas film, video, and cable TV are much better equipped to provide it with dark corners and empty rooms. In short, while moviegoing is a solitary activity, theatregoing is a communal one. It is among a very few kinds of activities—churchgoing, concerts, sports events—that still bring Americans into contact with each other, one of the last shreds of evidence that we are a people and not just an isolated mass of fantasists, barricaded in our homes, seeking safety from a sinister and threatening world through canned and recorded images, whether on tape, disc, or celluloid. I realize the actual subject of these notes is whether theatre matters after /. I haven’t addressed it because it seems to me such a rhetorical question. Two years ago, America forever lost its innocence through an act of absolute evil. The radical change in our consciousness as a result of that act has yet to be measured either onstage or off. We are still waiting for that clarifying work of art or intellect. But surely no one is suggesting that this has made the theatre profession irrelevant to the spiritual needs of the times. Nothing could be more absurd, especially on the birth date of a theatre man (Shakespeare) who charted better than anyone in history the passages through the heart of darkness. In characters like Macbeth, Iago, and Edmund, Shakespeare traced the depths to which humans can fall in pursuit of the absolute, not to mention, in characters like Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, the heights they can reach by resisting their fate. In short, for a full understanding of the extremes of our condition, dramatic art still matters. Not movies, not television, but plays. 

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Maiming the Messenger

There is a famous moment in the second act of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra that has obviously not escaped the attention of the Bush administration. A Messenger has come to Cleopatra’s court to announce not the “fruitful tidings” she wants rammed in her ear, but rather that Antony has, for purely political reasons, married the sister of his rival, Octavius Caesar. The Messenger is not only blamed, he is maimed; his reward for telling the truth is to be punched, whipped, and dragged up and down by his hair. “Gracious madam,” he screeches, “I that do bring the news made not the match.” Cleopatra reminds him that “it is never good to bring bad news,” adding, “Hadst thou Narcissus in thy face, to me / Thou wouldst appear most ugly.” A number of Messengers, who have recently been bringing bad news to the White House, are in process of being smeared with the same kind of tarbrush. First Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV is rewarded for his testimony that there was no yellow cake in Niger and no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by having his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a covert CIA agent. Next Richard Clarke, having revealed that there was no link between September  and Saddam Hus14

Maiming the Messenger

sein, and having asserted that Bush dropped the ball after /, is accused of revenging himself on the administration because he hadn’t been promoted, and of mangling the facts in order to sell copies of his book. Then, Senator John Kerry, having dared to question the official justification for the quagmire in Iraq, is accused of lying about his service in Vietnam, when he is not being denounced for “flipflopping” or sitting on the far left (liberal) side of the Senate. In debate, Kerry says that the war against terror should have been conducted in Afghanistan, not in Iraq; Bush replies that he is unfit to be commander in chief. If you can’t dispute the message, stain the character of the messenger. As further evidence that someone in the Republican camp has been reading his Shakespeare, consider the similarity between the way Iago labels Desdemona a whore, and how the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have been calling Kerry a traitor and a coward. Iago tells Othello that Cassio has been sleeping with his wife. Othello demands “ocular proof,” and Iago trumps up evidence in the form of a purloined handkerchief. The Republicans provide “ocular proof” of Kerry’s “treachery” in the form of doctored photographs which practically show him in bed with Jane Fonda. I’m not suggesting that the democratic candidate is as pure as Desdemona, but he is certainly suffering from the same kind of half-truths, innuendoes, and insinuations regarding his virtue. Of course, this is nothing new. Republican strategists found a way to defame Clinton and Gore in previous elections for bringing messages they didn’t like. But this time, their ingenuity has been consummate. Joseph Goebbels, who invented the art of propaganda, knew that if you repeated a lie often enough it was established as a fact. An earlier student of Iago, he has given the Bush administration a highly workable model for its policy of ignoring the message and maiming the messenger. 

15

Words on Fire

This year represents the th anniversary of the burning of the books in Nazi Germany in . Since that unspeakable assault on language, thought, imagination, and free expression, there have been a large number of similar bookburnings in the world, both real and metaphorical. The worst by far was the treatment of dissenting literary figures and heretical works in the Soviet bloc starting in the twenties and lasting until the time of Glasnost in the eighties. Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin had the good sense to beat it out of Russia right after the revolution. But under Stalin’s regime alone, Isaac Babel died in a concentration camp, Meyerhold was executed, Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide, Anna Akmatova was denounced and expelled from the Union of Writers, Sinyavsky and Daniel languished in the Gulag, Josef Brodsky and Alexander Solzhenitzyn were forced into exile, Boris Pasternak was stifled so completely that he wasn’t even allowed to pick up his Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. This pattern of artistic repression spread well beyond Russian borders to the entire Soviet

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Words on Fire

bloc where it was responsible, among others, for the exile of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera and the suicide of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski. It goes without saying that the mind of totalitarianism is unable to tolerate any deviation from prevailing articles of faith or dominant ideologies, whether political, sexual, or religious. The Ayatollah Khomeini put a price on the head of Salman Rushdie for what he presumed to be irreverent remarks about the Prophet Mohammed in The Satanic Verses. And the Chinese Communist government regularly imprisoned dissident thinkers and artists while running tanks over the bodies of students protesting the regime in Tiananmen Square. There is a sense in which this suppression of dissidents by totalitarian regimes is a living testimony to the importance of the creative gift and the critical intellect. In democratic countries, such as our own, which are relatively open societies, it is often said that freedom of speech is a sign of its insignificance. Philip Roth once remarked that in totalitarian countries, nothing is permitted and everything matters, whereas in the United States, everything is permitted and nothing matters. He said that about twenty-five years ago. Since that time, to judge by the outrage being provoked, it would seem that a lot of things have begun to matter. We haven’t seen suicides, exiles, or bookburnings yet in this country, but it is not hard to imagine conditions under which similar things might happen. (Legislation like the Patriot Act is potentially one of those conditions.) Of course, American religious fundamentalism has always been a potential breeding ground for censorship. The works of Darwin, to take the most obvious example, have been a red flag to Creationists ever since The Origin of Species was published in . During the celebrated Scopes trial in the twenties, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan locked horns over a high school teacher’s right to teach evolution in the classroom, and even today that right has not been fully established. Indeed, we finally have a president in the White House who actually believes that the world was created in six days—possibly because he now has the means to end it in one. There is no question that countless works of art and thought have become victims of the moral certitudes of the religious right, and any number of books have been proscribed in any number of classrooms. Clearly, free speech has not been a universal privilege or luxury extended to every group in America. Those most notably excluded were black slaves in the th century South, whose verbal and literary expression was forced into furtive corridors under the conditions of captivity. A hundred years later, Communists, fellow travellers, and

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left-leaning liberals were hauled up for interrogation before the birdbrained inquisitors of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, fired, blackballed, and even imprisoned for the sin of writing bad screenplays with progressive content. “UnAmerican.” The very word suggests a violation of rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Ironically, some of the very same groups discriminated against in the past have recently begun to practice their own kind of constraint on freedom of speech. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, was originally designed to be a watchdog agency monitoring any sign of prejudice against the Jewish people. But for all its positive value, the ADL began to put limits not just on hateful actions but on what was construed to be hateful speech, thus becoming the prototype for many racial, sexual, and ethnic groups eager to expose prejudice in the hearts of the general populace. Inevitably, those with easily wounded sensibilities were going to see intolerance and bigotry where perhaps it didn’t exist. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, arguably the greatest work of American literature, is still an object of controversy excluded from many classrooms, primarily because the book features a racial epithet no longer utterable except by black people themselves. Today, many great works by white American and European males have been removed from high school and college reading lists to make way for works that are more politically correct in their racial, sexual, and ethnic contexts. One famous example is William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. While the book was not actually suppressed or censored, it was vigorously assailed by radical black and Communist critics, with Styron himself exposed to abuse whenever he appeared in public. Some were offended by a homosexual incident in the book, some objected that a black hero had become the fictional property of a white man. But the result was that while Styron’s book was no longer to be found on college reading lists, the essays attacking the book (Ten Black Writers Respond ) were often required reading. The impulse to burn or bury books, then, is not exclusive to either the political left or the political right. It may be a province of politics itself, the tyranny of the majority against the dissenting individual expressed through trying to muzzle what is troubling or provocative. If literature and ideas have sometimes been suppressed or inhibited, dramatic literature has perhaps been even more vulnerable to the muzzling impulse. Playwrights have traditionally run into trouble with a variety of authorities because of their political, religious, sexual, or racial subject matter. By way of contrast, in Periclean Athens, the first great age of drama, Aristophanes was

Words on Fire

able to satirize his country’s conduct of the Peleponnesian Wars without being punished or censored (Lysistrata is only the most famous example of this freedom of dissent). That may very well have been the last time such license was permitted during wartime, with the notable exception of our own country in the s when American playwrights engaged in savage, sometimes irresponsible, criticism of Lyndon Johnson (MacBird ), Richard Nixon (Watergate Classics), and the Vietnam War (Viet Rock) without risk of serious reprisals. After the theatre was thrown out of the precincts of the church in the middle ages, it frequently became the object of scorn and abuse for its heretical or subversive content. Shakespeare’s work was a notable exception. Once, when the Earl of Essex commissioned a production of Richard II in order to provoke a rebellion against the Crown, Shakespeare had to prove himself innocent of conspiracy. But aside from that, Shakespeare always managed to survive political intimidation by flattering those in power, especially Queen Elizabeth and King James. Indeed, in Macbeth, he even endorsed James’s nitwit belief in witchcraft (the king had written a book about it), despite most enlightened opinion to the contrary. More typically, playwrights had to toe a very narrow line. Shakespeare’s great contemporary, Ben Jonson, for example, along with two collaborators, almost had his thumbs cut off and was obliged to walk to Scotland for penance, just for making some vague satirical references about King James in Eastward Ho. But the most powerful threat to playwrights has always come not from the Crown but from the Church. An obvious example was the Puritan movement in England. English Puritans objected to many things in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Stuart playhouse, but especially the way boys were dressed up to play women’s parts. This not only suggested sexual transgression but was a direct violation of biblical injunctions against transvestism. When the Puritans took control of England in , their first official act was to close the theatres. Following the Restoration of the monarchy in , the Puritans fled to America, founded Boston, and contented themselves with banning books and plays here instead. The Catholic Church has been just as censorious. In the famous Tartuffe controversy, Molière escaped imprisonment for his attack on false piety only through the intervention of King Louis XIV. That was in the th century. Just a few years ago, when Terence McNally wrote a play called Corpus Christi featuring a gay Jesus and his gay disciples, some of the more feverish members of the Church threatened to blow up the Manhattan Theatre Club and kill its leaders, Lynne Meadows and Barry Grove. Martin Scorsese was threatened

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with a similar fate for suggesting, in his movie The Last Temptation of Christ, that Jesus might have been having an affair with Mary Magdalene. And, of course, Christopher Durang’s delicious Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You is still considered the locus classicus on how to enrage the Catholic Church. To cite just a few examples of modern censorship, Chekhov was forced to rewrite sections of Uncle Vanya because his characterization of the fake and windy academic Professor Serebryakov offended a lot of fake and windy Russian academics. Strindberg felt obliged to leave Sweden for a while because his misogynistic short stories were being prosecuted for blasphemy. Ibsen, to his eternal chagrin, had to rewrite the ending of A Doll’s House because a German actress objected that, unlike her character Nora Helmer, she would never leave her husband and children. O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings was banned in a number of cities because it showed a black man married to a white woman, while his Strange Interlude was banned in Boston because it suggested men and women occasionally like to make love to each other. The Federal Theatre’s production of Mark Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock in Orson Welles’ production was prohibited from opening on Broadway by the federal government because of its political content. And in a more recent related display of government intervention in the arts, the National Endowment was forced to impose content restrictions on applicant organizations because some congressmen objected to the political, sexual, or religious postures of some of the grantees (notably Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano). These are just a few examples from a long and shameful list of the way various orthodoxies have managed to suppress works of theatrical art. We have not reached the end of it. Nor will we in our lifetimes. 

The Rebirth of Political Theatre: The God of Hell; Democracy

It is a truth, universally admitted, that as a nation’s politics grow more regressive, its arts tend to become more rebellious. This is especially true in the theatre. At the same time that the newly reelected Bush administration is eliminating all traces of opposition from its cabinet and its agencies, the volume of dissent is being turned up again on the American stage. Let us savor this precious privilege—for as long as it lasts. An administration so eager for conformity in its inner circles will eventually try to impose it on the culture and the citizenry at large. (Watch out for the increasing invocation of mantras like “loyalty,” “patriotism,” and “moral values.”) Today, as a result of what many believe to be a misguided and deepening morass in Iraq, our theatre is becoming political again. This season alone, New York stages have featured Guantanamo, a British play about the rights abuses of Muslim detainees in Cuba; Nine Parts of Desire, Heather Raffo’s intermittently powerful one-woman show about the plight of a variety of Iraqi women during the American occupation; Dirty Tricks, another one-woman show written by John Jeter about Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Nixon’s smarmy 21

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attorney general; Trying, Joanna McClelland Glass’ recollection of her experience as secretary to Roosevelt’s former attorney general, the aging Francis Biddle (portrayed with admirable crankiness by Fritz Weaver); and Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s shaded study of an Irish-Catholic priest who is suspected, perhaps falsely, of sexually abusing a young African-American student, and is relentlessly pursued by a tightly wimpled, tightly wound-up nun (Cherry Jones in a commanding performance meticulously directed by Doug Hughes). Still to arrive is David Hare’s Stuff Happens, reportedly a seething indictment of our president and secretary of defense. Not all of these plays are about Iraq, but almost all of them are about abuses of power. And Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell, which opened recently for a brief run under the auspices of the Actors Studio Drama School at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, is the first strong account of the rightward drift of our country and the potential for repression under George W. Bush. Shepard, usually preoccupied with family dramas such as Buried Child, The Curse of the Starving Class, and his most recent work, The Late Henry Moss, has been galvanized by recent events to write his most overtly political play since States of Shock (). Like States of Shock, an implicit attack on the first Bush administration during the Persian Gulf War, The God of Hell is a metaphor for a whole nation on the cusp of cultural implosion. Shepard seems to be taking our temperature at the very hour we have developed a fever. Indeed, The God of War is not only of the moment, it is the moment. It seems to have been written, in a white heat, the day before yesterday. That timeliness accounts both for the play’s strengths and for its deficiencies. At best, which is to say throughout most of its length, The God of Hell is an extremely potent piece of surrealist paranoia about a nation dominated by moralism, patriotism, and secrecy. At its most hurried, which is to say as the action moves towards its climax, an imaginative metaphor degenerates into a familiar photograph, and what was implicit and suggestive becomes explicit and manifest. Nevertheless, despite this failing, I believe The God of Hell to be one of Shepard’s most effective plays in years and, thanks to a very gifted cast working under the unobtrusive direction of Lou Jacob, one of his best-acted. The action is located in the Red State of Wisconsin, the dairy capital of America. The setting is one of those Midwestern farmhouses familiar to us from True West and A Fool for Love, with its obligatory industrial shades, calico curtains, and shabby muslin drapes barely covering unwashed windows. Seated near the wood stove and the flowerpots, oiling his shoes, is Frank (Randy Quaid), a behemoth of a farmer who breeds heifers. Bustling in the kitchen is

The Rebirth of Political Theatre

his wife Emma ( J. Cameron-Smith)—overfrying the bacon and overwatering the plants while she probes her husband about the unidentified friend who is staying in the basement. This mystery man turns out to be Haynes (Frank Wood), a frightened, vaguely lobotomized milquetoast who is later revealed to be an employee on the run from some initialized government agency (“DMDS” or “SSCI” . . . “Something like that”). Eventually, Haynes admits to having been contaminated by plutonium in a nuclear accident (hence the title, after Pluto the Roman God of Hell), and proves it by leaving a luminous trail and emitting blue electric fizzes whenever he is touched. Haynes describes his condition as “static shock,” which makes him dazed, panicked, and electrified, a walking open socket. The catalyst of the drama is Welch (Tim Roth), a sinister figure with teeth like a shark and a smile that bites, who enters the house wearing a black suit and red-white-and-blue lapel pin, carrying an attache case. He is pretending to be a salesman, and the product he is peddling is patriotic tchotchkes, including cookies cut and colored in the image of American flags, and Pat Boone’s recording of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Before long, having revealed his identity as a federal agent in pursuit of Haynes, whom he identifies as a “leftleaning” fugitive from a nuclear lab in Rocky Buttes, Welch is stapling plastic American flags over every door, window, and cupboard in the house. Countering Haynes’ assertions that Colorado is about “to be blown off the map,” he concedes only “some minor leakage,” adding “We’re in absolute command now. We don’t have to answer to a soul.” The way Welch takes over the house, turning it into a “Think Tank” for the government, is the spine of the play. He pulls Haynes up from the cellar, by an electrical cord tied to his penis, like Pozzo yanking Lucky around by a rope in Waiting for Godot, a black hood covering Haynes’ face. Frank, having already undergone his own penile torture, reappears in the same black suit and lapel pin worn by Welch. Before long, all three are in identical clothes, marching out the door in unison, knocking over plants, while Emma, a poignant figure of despair against a background of fizzing static shocks, desperately rings the cow bell to summon her husband back. And to summon the nation to share in her alarm. The play would have been more subtle without those palpable references to Abu Ghraib, and some of its language (“You didn’t think you were going to get a free ride on the back of Democracy forever, did you?”) sounds excessively declarative. But Shepard is apparently willing to sacrifice perfection of his art for the immediacy of his parable, and The God of Hell provides a genuine catharsis

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at a time when we can really use one. Dramatically, the sense of resident evil lurking in this Wisconsin house is worthy of the best of Pinter, and the Chaplinesque performance of Tim Roth, ominously cheerful, menacingly unctuous, every element of his body in slithering, rubbery motion, is a major lesson in the art of the stage. Let us pray the play is not an accurate prophecy of what is lurking in the wings. If The God of Hell was written by a dramatic poet, Democracy (now playing at the Brooks Atkinson) is the work of a very accomplished journalist. Sam Shepard’s play is a deep well, Michael Frayn’s is a wide crater. Frayn’s title suggests his ambition, which is to chronicle the tribulations of German democracy, between  and , under the charismatic Socialist chancellor, the former mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt. As Frayn proved earlier with Noises Off (a farce as perfectly timed as a Tiffany watch), he can be a master craftsman; as he proved later with Copenhagen (an extended dialogue between the physicists Nils Bohr and Walter Heisenberg), he has a gift for staging what would appear to be essentially undramatic material. The price he pays in Democracy for cutting such a wide swath of history is a certain clunkiness. Characters are identified like trains coming into the station (“Dr. Reinhard Wilke. My immediate superior. The dragon guarding Willy’s door.” “Genscher, Minister of the Interior. He’s the one who’s got to control the demonstrations”). And the play’s announcer, Gunter Guillaume, a Communist sleeper in Willy’s government, is continually swivelling his head between his colleagues in Bonn and his espionage contact in East Germany, as if he were broadcasting a game of tennis instead of keeping his eye on the political ball. As befits such an overtly public play, Frayn creates a highly official atmosphere in which the various politicians spend most of the time facing the audience and delivering speeches in a telegraphic style. There are no women around to open up their private side, just a number of invisible female admirers who service Willy during his train trips. For a man who adapted Chekhov, Frayn has put surprisingly little emotional subtext into his script, at least in the first act, nor does he show that much interest in human motivation. Nevertheless, the playwright has managed to draw at least two compelling characters: the endearing Willy Brandt, whose Ostpolitik policy of reconciling West and East Germany alternates with his Don Juanish efforts to swell Leperello’s list; and the deceptive Gunter Guillaume, who rose to become his personal assistant at the same time that he was betraying him to the East German Ministry of State Security. Guillaume is Frayn’s most complicated creation, a man who genuinely ad-

The Rebirth of Political Theatre

mired Brandt and had no desire to bring him down. Unlike Frayn’s take on Brandt—as an occasionally withdrawn, intermittently depressed man with a true social mission—Guillaume is split by conflicting motives, and seems to have no dominating ideology. He is a little like Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a functionary who causes serious damage to another through spying and informing, but who is not above feelings of compassion for his victim. Frayn has written a lengthy postscript to the published play (writing prefaces and postscripts is a habit he learned from one of his models, Bernard Shaw— from his other model, Frederick Schiller, he learned to write history plays). In it, the playwright speaks of Brandt as a complex individual, both strong and weak, friendly and aloof, modest and vain. His layered character is explained by the fact that he assumed a number of identities before turning to politics, “Willy Brandt” being only one of his pseudonyms (he was born Herbert Ernst Frahm). Imagine what Pirandello would have done with that! But while Willy talks about his several skins, we never see him wear them. Clearly, such personal complexities do not seem to interest Frayn as much as his hero’s public persona. Willy’s most memorable moments in the play are his silent kneel at the Holocaust memorial in Warsaw, and his success at achieving the rapprochement he envisioned with the East German government. Frayn is very deft at depicting the various intrigues driving Brandt’s coalition government, often dependent for its survival on Christian Democrats and Liberals with entirely different political agendas. And his play works both as a spy thriller in the tradition of John le Carré, with the net closing on Guillaume, and as a history lesson based on prodigious research. Perhaps it is the historical aspect that makes Democracy sometimes sound like a well-written public lecture delivered by department store mannequins all wearing the same dark suits. Or perhaps it is Michael Blakemore’s current Broadway production. On a striking set by Peter J. Davison, consisting of two levels of white squares, decorated with a variegated array of colored files, Blakemore has assembled a gifted group of American actors who somehow rarely break through the crust into areas of authenticity or surprise. Some of the supporting actors, notably Richard Masur as Horst Ehmke and Robert Prosky as Herbert Wehner, contribute adroit characterizations of world-weary politicians. But Richard Thomas as Guillaume, his tenor delivery largely unmodulated, hasn’t quite shed his old role as John Boy in The Waltons. And James Naughton, who brought such galvanic charm to the materialistic lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago, is a little too hamstrung by his leading-man looks, nimble grace, and mellifluous voice to fully enter the rather rumpled, chunky figure of Willy Brandt. He

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makes a gallant try, though, and he has some effective moments, particularly in repose, when the full force of his depression becomes manifest. Towards the end of the play, after Brandt’s government has fallen, and Guillaume has been imprisoned, when both men are fatally ill, the inseparability of the two characters is poignantly suggested (Guillaume: “And wherever he goes, my shadow goes with him. Together still”). It is the best-written and most touching thing in a play that remains mostly on the surface of public events. But the director almost manages to ruin even this moment with a clumsy coup de théâtre by having all the colored files fall out of their cabinets onto the floor. Democracy, despite my various cavils, is a substantial piece of work that is well worth a visit, if only to remind us of a time when political leaders were driven by humanitarian concerns, rather than moral, military, and religious obsessions, and when the Left was energized by the courage of its convictions. That time, like this play, is history. 

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

Once upon a time in America, theatre criticism was a popular and universal practice. Every newspaper and mass magazine had regular drama critics, and most little magazines and scholarly journals devoted significant space to what was happening in New York. This was in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Four major newspapers were being published in the city, each with an influential reviewer. Not as many, it is true, as in previous decades, when seven newspaper critics were presiding over Broadway hits and flops. But even the shrinking of the newspaper world didn’t mitigate its fascination with the stage. The pages that today the New York Times calls “Arts and Leisure” were then known simply as the “Theatre Section,” devoted primarily to features on plays and interviews with playwrights (today the same section is largely devoted to previews of action movies and reports on warring rap stars). During that time, The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek were growing almost as influential as the dailies; George Jean Nathan was still holding forth in Esquire, collecting his criticism annually into books; Claudia Cassidy in Chicago and Elliot Norton in Boston were reigning over the fate of pre-Broadway tryouts 27

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and road tours; and even the little magazines were beginning to have some impact. Before I began reviewing for The New Republic in , Stark Young and Eric Bentley had been its well-respected theatre critics, Mary McCarthy was scorching theatrical earth for Partisan Review, Richard Hayes was composing very stylish columns for Commonweal, Harold Clurman was moonlighting from his directorial duties to write criticism for The Nation, and Kenneth Tynan was just beginning his legendary tenure at The New Yorker, bringing cosmopolitanism, passion, and wit to that magazine’s rather empty urbanity. In addition to regular reviews, articles on the theatre were frequently featured in such publications as Harper’s and The Atlantic, Life magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Village Voice. And there was also Theatre Arts, a relatively high circulation magazine totally devoted to stories about the American theatre. The beginning of my time at The New Republic corresponded with a resurgence of highbrow criticism in a field that most intellectuals had previously scorned. It was a time when young Turks at smaller publications were agitating for a whole new kind of theatre—engaged, experimental, impudent, irreverent, and smart. Broadway was suffering from tired blood. Whereas once its obsession with musical megahits had been leavened with tolerance for more serious work, it was now being wholly driven by the box office. If there was any art or intellect to be found in New York theatre, you had to look off Broadway. I came to The New Republic very much under the influence of my predecessor, Eric Bentley, who had stunned academics and intellectuals alike in  by suggesting that the playwright might be a “thinker.” When I added my two cents in  on the subject with a piece called “The Theatre Is Losing Its Minds,” some wit questioned whether it ever had any. I had been writing analytical pieces on the current Broadway scene for Commentary and Harper’s, pleading for higher theatrical standards and greater dramatic complexity. At The New Republic, I now had a visible weekly platform, right next to Stanley Kauffmann’s film column, from which to fulminate against the vulgarity and greed of the commercial stage. My very first review, written in September of , was of an event that proved to be a beacon of the off-Broadway movement, the Living Theatre’s production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection. All of the major newspaper critics had panned this Beckett-inspired play about the narcotic haze of drug addiction. But along with a number of other small circulation critics, I found it to be a breakthrough in its extra-naturalist staging and writing, as well as a gauntlet thrown in the face of the entire theatre establishment. It was the very opposite

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

of a well-made Broadway artifact, which, Pirandello-like, invaded the audience’s space, not only breaking through the fourth wall, but following you into the lobby and out of the theatre. Between my piece in The New Republic, a strong notice in The Nation, and Donald Malcolm’s review in The New Yorker (encouraged by Kenneth Tynan, an enthusiast of the play who was not allowed to cover off Broadway), The Connection managed to capture an audience—perhaps the first time that small circulation critics had been able to overturn an unfavorable mainstream decision. During the early sixties the most influential drama critic was writing not for the Times but for the Herald-Tribune, namely Walter Kerr. Kerr was an intelligent man whose eloquent prose style disguised decidedly Philistine views, restricted further by his strict Catholic upbringing. Always ready to praise some escapist musical or domestic comedy, he persistently panned anything by the great modernists, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Pirandello, totally missed the boat on Marat/Sade, and famously declared after seeing Waiting for Godot that Samuel Beckett was “out of touch with the hearts and minds of the folks out front.” In short, Kerr was a perfect foil for us young Turks. And our ranks were definitely swelling. The scholar-critic Richard Gilman took over Richard Hayes’ position at Commonweal, and then left that post (replaced by Wilfrid Sheed) to become the drama critic for Newsweek—one of the first examples, since Stark Young’s brief stint with the Times in the twenties, of an intellectual covering theatre for a mass magazine. Gilman soon left his Newsweek job to join the faculty of the Yale Drama School. The lively universalist Jack Kroll assumed his place and maintained Newsweek’s literate posture, blending Gilman’s intellectual weight with his own populist energies. John Simon began writing serious and scholarly theatre reviews for The Hudson Review before joining New York magazine and transforming into the Transylvanian menace who liked to sink his eyeteeth into the necks of unsuspecting actors and playwrights. Meanwhile, a new periodical called The New York Review of Books had appeared during the newspaper strike of –, begun primarily in revolt against the Times Book Review section. The noted literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick became the regular biweekly theatre critic for The New York Review of Books, writing tough-minded articles that, if somewhat short on theatre knowledge, at least treated the stage as a place that was failing a great opportunity. Susan Sontag replaced Mary McCarthy as the resident theatre scold of Partisan Review. The scholar-translator Albert Bermel began to review for The New Leader. All shared a pronounced disaffection from

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the profit-driven products of Broadway and a desire to spur the American theatre towards the quality it had traditionally enjoyed in Europe. We were making the same kind of demands on plays that literary critics were making on books and intellectuals on the general culture, questioning the reputations of the enshrined (as Dwight Macdonald had done with James Gould Cozzens’ overrated By Love Possessed ), proselytizing for underestimated new talent. We were feeling our oats and beginning to share them with a much wider public. At the same time, artists and intellectuals alike were getting annoyed with the stranglehold on the arts being held by the New York Times, which was maintaining its influence on the common reader and the common spectator despite Walter Kerr’s greater reputation with theatre insiders. Brooks Atkinson’s successor at the Times, Howard Taubman, was proving even more tone-deaf than Kerr to the exciting new things that were happening on the New York stage. An impudent new mood was stimulating the culture, symbolized by Joe Heller’s Catch , Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, the comedy team of Nichols and May, and Paul Sills’ Second City troupe. But it was apparently below the threshold of the daily reviewers. A long advertisement in the Times, instigated by Philip Roth among others, called for a radical change in the quality of that paper’s cultural writing, and to everybody’s surprise the editors seemed to take notice. At least that was how I interpreted a moment in  when I was approached by Clifton Daniels, the Times’ managing editor, who inquired whether I might be interested in becoming its theatre critic. Flattered as I was by the proposal, daily reviewing was clearly not in my future. In those days, theatre notices had to be completed between the falling of the curtain and the rising of the sun, and I was technically unable to write a review in two hours. More importantly, though I had no hesitation about speaking my mind from a seat of relative powerlessness, it was quite another thing to be responsible for the potential unemployment of so many theatre workers or the mental health of so many sensitive artists. I turned it down and recommended Stanley Kauffmann for the job. It was a favor for which Stanley may never forgive me. After irritating Broadway with his unconventional taste, not to mention his insistence that critics be allowed to review previews instead of opening nights, he lasted for little more than a season. Responding to a lot of flack from Broadway producers, the Times replaced him with Walter Kerr of the Herald-Tribune. The revolt was over. A few years later, the Times would consolidate its return to traditionalism when Kerr moved to the Sunday section and its dance critic, Clive Barnes, took over the daily post.

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

The sixties was also the decade when the resident theatre movement was moving into full gear with the financial aid of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, not to mention the budding National Endowment for the Arts. Barricades were being built between the small circulation critics and the non-profit theatre on the one hand, and the majority critics and the commercial stage on the other. A typical confrontation occurred between Walter Kerr and me over Jonathan Miller’s production of Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre. Kerr dismissed it out of hand. I found it one of the finest stage achievements of the year, an occasion for rejoicing that a major American poet was now writing for the stage. My review concluded with a mock challenge to Kerr. I offered to stop covering Broadway musicals if he would agree to stop reviewing serious off-Broadway works. Kerr treated my proposal with the disdainful silence that it probably deserved. And he was even more lofty when, after abandoning my critic’s job for the next thirteen years, I moved to New Haven to start the Yale Repertory Theatre. Kerr wanted to come up to review some of our productions. I wrote to him that these were essentially workshop projects of a developing company that should not be subjected to the hit-flop standards of the commercial theatre. Would he kindly stay away? Kerr replied, “I will respect your wishes. I wish I could respect your manners.” Ouch. A few years later, pressured by the funding climate to depend more and more on the New York press, I would be humbly begging Kerr to come. He complied, writing reviews that were rarely more than mildly patronizing. As for the local reviewers in cities supporting resident theatres, they were mostly would-be Walter Kerrs who had cut their teeth on pre-Broadway tryouts and Broadway tours, hungry for hits, mad about stars. For a while, the Yale Drama School tried to help develop critics with learning, scholarship, style, and knowledge of theatre process through a DFA program in Drama Criticism. Most of our students couldn’t find newspaper jobs when they graduated (one exception being Michael Feingold, who found a regular reviewing post at the Village Voice). The editors probably didn’t want to publish anyone more learned than their readers. As a result, we finally had to admit defeat and let Yale’s Criticism program devolve into a program in Dramaturgy and Literary Management. The critics I most wanted to evaluate our work—and that of the non-profit companies growing throughout the country—were my former colleagues in the small circulation press. But when America was finally developing the kind of theatres they had been calling for—dedicated to art, not profit, to works of

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high literary sensibility rather than mere entertainments—the critics capable of doing the work of evaluation were headed elsewhere. Hardwick, Gilman, Sheed, and others went back to book reviewing and general critical essays, Sontag became a novelist, Bentley occupied himself with writing plays. Jack Kroll was a constant visitor, and an intelligent analyst of the resident theatre, though even Kroll was not allowed to review whenever he wanted. William Henry III, a gadfly of the Yale Rep when he was undergraduate theatre critic for the Yale Daily News, later developed into a very cogent critic of plays outside New York for Time magazine. John Simon would have come more often if we provided him with a limousine, but we knew he would annihilate any classical production that deviated from the traditional model he kept in his head. The others showed very little interest in our work or that of the other resident theatres. As I said, by this point, they had mostly stopped reviewing. It is hard to say why the highbrow critics abandoned the theatre at the very moment when it was in the process of reform. One reason, surely, was the collapse of Broadway. It is one thing to write screeds about the meretriciousness and vulgarity of a powerful cultural behemoth. It is quite another to watch it begin buckling at the knees, and tumbling to the ground. For years Broadway had been synonymous with American theatre and huge audiences. Now it was being felled by escalating ticket costs and diminishing creative excitement. Box office sales had fallen off precipitously. The flops were far outnumbering the hits. The commercial theatre was ceasing to attract or create the major stars whose names could keep the box office humming. And even Broadway’s leading playwrights—Miller, Williams, and Albee—were finding it hard to attract commercial producers. If they finally did get a play produced on Broadway, it was usually panned—not by Broadway’s old antagonists, the minority reviewers, but by the New York Times itself. Indeed, when I returned to The New Republic in  after a thirteen year hiatus, I felt compelled to defend the same playwrights I had once criticized against the dismissive way they were being treated by Frank Rich, who had developed unprecedented power as the new critic for the Times. Combining Atkinson’s gravitas with Kerr’s show biz savvy, and combining a middlebrow intellectuality with Simon’s vituperativeness, Rich added a new title to his role as New York Times theatre critic, that of “Butcher of Broadway.” There had always been something vaguely parasitical about our critical feeding on big Broadway reputations. We needed them not just to exercise our vocabulary of scorn but also to provide us with our negative standards. We also

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

basked a little in their reflected glamour. (In an article called “Ann-Margret and the Critics,” Rocco Landesman, a theatre intellectual before he became a Broadway producer, shrewdly analyzed the motives of minority critics, saying that we were secretly as starstruck as anyone else.) I was probably naive to believe that the new resident theatre movement could attract the kind of critical minds that would understand its mission. First of all, could periodicals like Partisan Review afford the travel money to send these New York critics to Minneapolis, Louisville, San Francisco, or any of the other remote places producing the new theatre? From time to time, my own companies—first the Yale Repertory Theatre and then the American Repertory Theatre—invented pretexts to get intelligent writers to come see our work, though rarely in their capacity as critics. We invited such people as Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Bentley, Harold Clurman, Dwight Macdonald, and Susan Sontag to Yale and Harvard to teach, lecture, and even on occasion to write and stage plays (Sontag staged Milos Kundera’s Jacques and His Master, and we staged her Alice in Bed ). Michael Feingold, Richard Gilman, Albert Bermel, and Stanley Kauffmann spent time with us in Cambridge as adapters or translators or panelists. None of these bright people ever wrote about our productions or, to my knowledge, those of any other out-of-town company. Instead, theatres like ours throughout the nation were being reviewed by the local media, who were applying the same standards to Brecht and Beckett as to the commercial fare being shuttled to and from a greatly weakened Broadway. In an article called “Where Are the Repertory Critics?” I called for a new kind of critical mind capable of recognizing that a resident theatre is not a show shop manufacturing hits and flops but rather a living organism of artists developing alongside audiences. I begged for a critic who could recognize that the actor he was praising in Waiting for Godot may have been the same one he had panned the previous week in Twelfth Night, that there are links between plays and performances capable of being appreciated by discerning audiences with a little critical help. Most of the local reviewers I spoke to about this issue complained that they lacked the space, or the editorial support, to offer anything other than snap judgments and a synopsis of the plot. A last effort to change the intellectual climate around plays took place in  when the American Repertory Theatre ran a symposium on Critics and Criticism. On a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we invited scholars and intellectuals not normally associated with theatre to write reviews of A.R.T. productions in our newsletter, with no holds barred. And although this met with

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loud protestations from a few directors and actors who objected to being criticized in the pages of their own theatre journal, it did manage to raise for a while the level of local discourse. The Mellon grant also underwrote a weekend symposium, co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, intended as an opportunity for a number of theatre reviewers to sit on panels with theatre artists and, through discussions about the whole nature of American drama criticism, to air their disagreements. Following an amiable keynote address by Benedict Nightingale, former Sunday critic for the New York Times, the blood began to flow. Frank Rich had been invited but declined—no doubt wisely since he was to be one of the major targets. There was, for example, a backstage feud going on between him and Jack Kroll (after Rich had anointed him with the title “Jack-theHype”), which Kroll took the opportunity to air in public. Jules Feiffer took bitter exception to John Simon’s exceptional bitterness, and both engaged in the kind of rough-and-tumble rarely displayed outside of gladiatorial combats. Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe, perhaps because he hadn’t been invited, would reserve his own comments for future reviews of our work. Looking back, though, I believe this was a very healthy act of catharsis which, without actually changing any minds, exposed the public to the fact that there were alternatives to the prevailing system of reviewing (including their own opinions). It also demonstrated that if there was dissatisfaction with the state of the American theatre, there was also considerable dissatisfaction with the state of its criticism. Did anyone care? Certainly, to judge by the dwindling amount of space being devoted to plays in newspapers and magazines, the theatre was becoming of marginal interest to the general public. Time and Newsweek had virtually dropped their regular drama coverage. The last theatre article I can remember being published in Harper’s was a screed appropriately called Theaterophobia by the movie critic David Denby. After Frank Rich abandoned daily theatre criticism to become an Op Ed writer, the Times lost much of its interest in the theatre, as well as some of its power, and at present seems to have given up its Sunday theatre critic’s column as well. The New Yorker continued to cover theatre in desultory fashion, mainly when John Lahr, who spends half his year in London, got a chance to praise some English import. Even the Village Voice drastically reduced its once populous reviewing staff. As for the book trade, virtually every major house stopped publishing books on theatre or collections of theatre criticism, leaving that task to university presses or the smaller, more risk-taking publishers like Ivan R. Dee, Applause, and Smith and Kraus. The heyday of American theatre criticism was officially over.

When Dramaturgs Ruled the Earth

I’m not foolish enough to ring death knells over the American theatre or American theatre criticism. Somehow, people of genuine talent—whether playwrights, directors, actors, composers, designers—continue to work against the odds in this continuously languishing art. And there are still people of intellect writing for internet organs like HotReview (Jonathan Kalb) or for cheeky journals like the Boston Phoenix (Carolyn Clay) or occasionally even for mass circulation dailies like Newsday (Linda Winer) who are responsive to the more adventurous expressions of the form. In the academic journals, Elinor Fuchs and Arthur Holmberg are always worth reading for their scholarship and wit. Whether these people will ever enjoy the kind of influence critics had in the old days is doubtful. But if there is one thing we have learned from the past, it is that theatre criticism cannot simply be the shrill expression of a disgruntled voice railing in the wilderness. It has to recognize, endorse, and advance the possibilities of renewal. Without this, criticism becomes simply another mode of performance, and the critic just another actor gesticulating in the void. 

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Red and Blue States of Mind: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; Terrorism

In a political version of the color wars we used to wage in summer camp, our country has been divided among red states and blue states ever since the  election. So, I fear, is our culture. I mean this in a psychological rather than a geographical sense. I am talking about red and blue states of mind. This kind of culture clash is nothing new. It is an extension of that age-old American conflict between the puritan and the artist—the most recent version, dating from the  NEA flap over Mapplethorpe and Serrano, being the continuing moral backlash against real or alleged obscene and irreligious art. What is new is the intensity of the conflict, and the fervor with which religious prejudices are being channelled through judgments of taste. Much has been written about the growing power of the evangelical right, whose tentacles reach into the executive office, the legislature, the military, the judiciary, even the local schoolhouse. In publishing, movies, museums, and the print and broadcast media, these zealots have been proceeding to counteract, and sometimes suppress, whatever is considered transgressive or “liberal” in the culture. The attempt by Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broad36

Red and Blue States of Mind

casting, to tilt the funds of PBS and NPR towards more conservative programming because of “liberal bias” is only the most recent example. The attack on “liberal bias,” of course, is a revival of a traditional American crusade against controversial thought and radical art, a condition previously dramatized in the Scopes trial, personified in Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and the “boobocracy” of H. L. Mencken, and precipitated in the voluntary expatriation of so many American artists and writers during the nineteen twenties. (In the McCarthyite fifties, it was recapitulated in the involuntary exile and even imprisonment of many Hollywood people following the HUAC investigations.) But the rightwing perception that the culture is controlled by liberals or radicals does have some basis in fact. Despite the recurrent dominance of red state politics, the blue state of mind has ruled artists and intellectuals for at least a hundred years. True, it intensified during the sixties and seventies as a result of the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, but its newly unbuttoned spirit had found an outlet even earlier in the upstart standup of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, in the satiric literature of Philip Roth and Joe Heller, in the gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson and Norman Mailer, and in the anarchic comedy of movies like Doctor Strangelove. Explosive sexual and political themes came somewhat later to the theatre, in such off-Broadway provocations as Macbird and Dionysus in , before finding their way to Broadway in erotic revues like O Calcutta! And once out of the bottle, the genie was bound to display its privates. Audiences in the thirties may have been shocked to see James Barton turn upstage to pretend to urinate in Tobacco Road, but today’s audiences witness full-frontal pissing in Adam Rapp’s Fine Noble Gases and watch a half dozen naked men taking showers in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out. Simulated and sometimes actual sex, both oral and genital, has become a commonplace of our stage, along with often ferocious satire on America’s most cherished religious pieties and political convictions—the kind of behavior designed to drive the red state of mind into a frenzy. Whatever you think of this sort of thing, and it can grow excessive, by the turn of the twenty-first century the theatre had come a long way from its old role as an entertainment parlor accustomed to “telling in polite whispers its tales of small triangular love stories in small rectangular settings” (as Hallie Flanagan Davis described Broadway in the thirties). It was as if our citizenry were at last beginning to accept the sexual nature of their bodies, if not a degree of intellectual and artistic maturity, and embrace a culture designed for adults rather than children.

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September th threatened to change all that. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shattered not just our complacency but our very concept of security, it became the intensified purpose of the red state mindset to reestablish the public’s lost certainty by whatever means possible. This it did by reaffirming established conventions, moral orthodoxy, and patriotic gestures—the equivalent of lapel flags and religious icons. The same development no doubt accounts for the introduction of “intelligent design” into many schools alongside the theory of evolution, and the growing presence of Patriot Act watchdogs in so many aspects of our lives. It is easy to understand why American pews are full while European congregations are thinning. Religion gives us what secular humanism cannot, namely fixed codes of conduct, traditional patterns of behavior, clear moral boundaries. It provides guidance through life in an uneasy world and hope for life in the next. Religion can also be used to justify the taking of life. It has been cited to support capital punishment and violence against abortion clinics, not to mention the homicidal attacks of suicidal terrorists, always accompanied by chants that “God is great!” It is hard to imagine a more appropriate leader in such a godly time than a born-again president who believes in absolute good and absolute evil, who needs no evidence to support his pretexts for preemptive wars, whose ear is directly tuned to the voice of his Creator. September th may also have influenced the conduct of the cultural left, which has been known to display its own brand of intolerance and consensualism in pursuit of certainty. In the past, that agency was Stalinism. Today, it is “political correctness,” a catchphrase for the way that some people imprint a red state mentality on blue state issues—whether affirmative action, multiculturalism, racial justice, female equality, or gay and lesbian rights. This mindset has been particularly noticeable in the theatre. Until the last twenty-five years, you could count the number of prominent black and female playwrights on the fingers of a mutilated hand, and most gay playwrights (notably Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee) were undisposed to write about gay characters. What was once a minority has now become a majority, and our stage is largely preoccupied with homosexual, racial, and gender themes. It is not that these themes are unimportant. Clearly, full rights for minorities will remain a great domestic challenge well into the twenty-first century— along with better income distribution, improved health care, global warming, the environment, and all the other blue state issues rarely noticed by our playwrights. The problem is that, in theatrical form, these themes are often lacking an essential quality of art—namely, ambiguity and mystery—since the left

Red and Blue States of Mind

holds its liberal views with the same ideological fervor as the most rightwing Creationists. The best blue-state minds have always been open to debate and dialogue, and a capacity to qualify their most deeply held opinions. Today, a mindless dogmatism has overwhelmed this healthy skepticism, along with a numbing predictability. There are a few exceptions to the general sectarianism—Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, Paul Rudnick, Paula Vogel, to name a few—who bring varying degrees of complexity to their political exercises. But for the most part, both our political right and the political left are deeply red in their desire for unconditional certitude. Under such circumstances, what values can the theatre continue to provide? At best, a dialogue, not pat answers but painful questions, posed, one would hope, in satisfying aesthetic form. This, of course, implies an admittedly unappealing alternative, namely the persistence of uncertainty. It is surprising and a little heartening, therefore, that the most highly awarded play of the year was actually entitled Doubt. It is John Patrick Shanley’s account of sexual abuse among the clergy. Most of us had probably already made up our minds about this issue. In the case of Shanley’s priest, however, the abuse may or may not have been committed. The fact that only the author knows the answer (the characters and the audience are left in the dark) is beside the point. Clearly, Shanley is trying to provide a theatrical antidote for a time when doubt has become something of an un-American activity. Two recent productions stimulated my thinking on this issue. One reinforced an impression that Broadway was still resisting full adulthood, clearly a red state condition. The th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is the heir to last year’s Avenue Q: both of these award-winning musicals feature grownup actors behaving like kids in order to induce nostalgia for childhood. Audiences love these shows, and I feel like something of a sourpuss to criticize experiences that are giving a lot of people a lot of pleasure. But for all its blue state posturing, Spelling Bee is at heart a red state musical in the sense that it serves no purpose other than to allow escape into a more innocent world. James Lapine is an extremely accomplished director, second only to Mike Nichols in his capacity to connect with an audience. Here, connect is an understatement—I haven’t seen so much audience groping since the old Living Theatre love-ins. We not only get free candy, thrown at us by an actor walking the aisles, we are continually being fondled, stroked, and even encouraged to go on stage and perform. Joining the six professional contestants in the cast each night are a few audience members pulled from the house to answer softball questions until the moment they are sent back to their seats with an impossible

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Positions and Polemics

spelling challenge. The problem with this device is that the slightly embarrassed good nature of the spectators is in unaffected contrast to the artfully cute behavior of the characters. These characters include a cross section of contemporary archetypes: an Asian girl with visions of Jesus, a lesbian who runs the gay-straight alliance and wants to know why they scheduled Father’s Day and Gay Pride Week within seven days of each other, a gangly redhead who can’t control his erections, a shy teenager with parent problems, a heavy-set nerd who spells out words with his “magic” foot, and a good-natured black felon doing community service. All are played by appealing actors. William Finn’s music is sprightly and his lyrics are sophisticated. The choreography is commendable. Why did I feel like such an outsider? Because The th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee represents an America that exists only in the minds of people weaned on Sesame Street and The Wizard of Oz. Terrorism, on the other hand, a play by the Presnyakov Brothers, Oleg and Vladimir, who are young Siberians, struck me as a genuine work of the imagination, with the metaphorical overtones of dramatic poetry. Produced by the New Group and the Play Company at the Harold Clurman Theatre, Terrorism made no concessions to its auditors whatsoever, and, as a result, didn’t attract too many. The title was enough to keep people away, though the play was actually written before September th. It begins in an airport lounge piled high with luggage. A number of flights have been delayed because of a bomb threat. This causes various degrees of depression, frustration, and rage among the passengers, not to mention the usual insecurity. “You don’t feel safe anywhere, only at home.” One doesn’t even feel safe at home. In the next scene, the wife of one of the frustrated passengers is getting more than she bargained for from a lover. He not only ties her to the bed, as she requested, but refuses to release her after making love, stuffing her mouth with a gag, and falling asleep. Subsequent scenes take place in an office, where one of the workers has hanged herself in another room; on a park bench where two elderly women, debating the way the “ethnics” are taking other people’s jobs, end up plotting murder; in the changing room of a police base, where some officers examine a photograph of a mutilated woman whose only remains are a pair of hands and feet tied to a bed; and finally in the first-class cabin of an airplane where the passenger from scene one imagines all the engines are on fire. It appears he had walked in on his wife and her lover, turned on the gas taps, and then left for the airport in the expec-

Red and Blue States of Mind

tation that something would trigger an explosion (something did—a kid ringing the doorbell). All of these dots eventually connect into a coherent line of action. The play is written in a low-key, vaguely lobotomized style featuring a circular structure borrowed from Schnitzler’s Round Dance (Reigen) and invoking a brutalized atmosphere redolent of Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Clearly, the play’s title describes not only those big world events that are disturbing our peace, but also the petty events of our everyday domestic lives. As directed by Will Frears (Omnium Gatherum), the production is a bit understated, but nevertheless includes a truly powerful performance from Elizabeth Marvel as the woman in the bed, who proves once again her wonderful command of the stage. The fact that the sparse audience responded so tepidly to this production, which closed soon after I saw it, suggests that even our theatre is now subject to cultural divisions—shall we say between blue state plays and red state audiences? But this is a color war that has been going on a long, long time. 

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Part Two Plays and Productions

Varieties of Histrionic Experience: Medea; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Theater has many objectives. It can be a source of instruction and amusement. It can serve as a catalyst for painful emotions. It can operate as a criticism of life and society. It can create a link between the individual and the world. It can build a temporary community among strangers. And, not least, it can provide great roles for strong actors. This season has begun with two examples of this last objective, which illustrates most of the previous ones: Al Pacino’s Arturo Ui and Fiona Shaw’s Medea. Pacino first played the role of Arturo Ui about thirty years ago in a Theater Company of Boston production directed by David Wheeler. After capturing Hollywood’s attention in a Public Theater production of The Indian Wants the Bronx, he did most of his later stage work with Wheeler’s group. Pacino has always considered it an obligation of the serious-theater-trained movie star to return home periodically to hone his craft. He also has the good actor’s understanding that you never finish working on a role. His obsession with the part of Richard Crookback, for example—which he also played first with Wheeler’s company in the s, and was still examining as late as  in his 45

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Plays and Productions

movie Looking for Richard—has proved valuable in preparing him for his work on Arturo Ui, a play partly based on a number of Shakespeare’s works, Richard III included. Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui as a cautionary tale in three weeks in , possibly under the influence of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. He revised the play on and off for the next fifteen years, but he never really got it right. Structurally, Arturo Ui is a clumsy elephant that Brecht tries to pull around by its whiskers. The plot wanders aimlessly up imaginary Chicago streets according to the author’s whims and his reading material at the time. Among his satiric plunders are the wooing scene from Richard III, Banquo’s death scene from Macbeth, and Marc Antony’s oration from Julius Caesar, as well as the garden scene from Goethe’s Faust. Brecht, moreover, is overly infatuated with his basic gimmick: namely, how Hitler and his goons resemble Chicago gangsters, such as Al Capone, or their Hollywood equivalents. This leads him to interpret Nazism as a product of economic materialism, a protection racket manipulated by greedy thugs, rather than as an ideology of world dominion driven by racialist criminals. (He also entirely ignores Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.) Furthermore, the relentless parallels between Ui’s methods in taking over the cauliflower cartel, on the one hand and, on the other, Hitler’s alliance with Hindenberg, the Reichstag fire, the murder of Ernst Roehm, the suppression of the Brown shirts, and the Anschluss, grow a little tiresome. Still, in the late s and s the play provided the Berliner Ensemble with one of its most enduring repertory staples and gave the company’s leading actor, Ekkehard Schaal, one of his greatest roles (in a typical acrobatic moment, Schaal leaped onto a chair, toppled over the back of it, and landed on his feet, giving the Nazi salute). Although Pacino lacks the same athleticism, he is on his way to matching that legendary performance. So are the rest of this splendid cast. Next time, maybe. The production, when I saw it halfway through the run, was still a bit rough and unfocussed, which may explain why the press was discouraged from reviewing it. (There was no official opening night and press seats were at a minimum.) Using a slightly gussied-up version of George Tabori’s colloquial translation, the splendid Simon McBurney has conceived an unashamedly theatrical miseen-scène for the National Actors Company production (in association with McBurney’s Theatre de Complicité in London). It fixes the action in a s no-man’s land between stylized agit-prop theater and gritty Warner Brothers gangster movies. Conspicuously footlighted, punctuated by ominous stings

Varieties of Histrionic Experience

and visual aids, with a sound score of tinny Depression hits such as “We’re in the Money,” McBurney’s staging alters the perspective of the action at every opportunity. (“Let’s look at this thing another way,” says Ui, a cue for the entire cast to get up and change positions.) Although the poor acoustics of the Pace University Theater force everyone to be a little shouty, the cast is a dazzling assemblage of mostly male movie character actors (and of the wondrous Linda Emond, star of Homebody/Kabul, in one of the few female roles). To see Steve Buscemi, Chazz Palminteri, Billy Crudup, Paul Giamatti, Charles Durning, John Goodman, Robert Stanton, Jack Willis, Dominic Chianese, and Tony Randall all on stage together—often unidentifiable, some playing small supporting roles as Ui’s rogue’s gallery of scum—is to have one’s confidence in the acting profession restored. A few of the older actors occasionally have some trouble remembering lines. That is one of the liabilities of too much time spent before a camera. But they all give gallant and sometimes penetrating performances. Randall, the company’s founder and artistic director, is especially memorable as an aging lank-haired Shakespearean actor laddie in a decaying velvet smoking jacket who teaches Arturo how to goosestep, cross his hands over his genitalia, and rant. This scene is always the highlight of the play because it reduces Hitler to a tenth-rate ham in the same pinpoint way that Chaplin shrank him to a self-besotted maniac bouncing a balloon globe off his buttocks. (It is only a short step from here to Mel Brooks and the show-business Hitler of The Producers.) Also very effective are Goodman as Giri (Goering) in an outsize striped suit and two-tone shoes and Buscemi as Givola (Goebbels) with his gravelly voice and clumsy club foot. What is lacking in the acting is the feeling of cohesion that marks a true acting company. An all-star team is unlikely to defeat even a second division club that has been together long enough to learn each other’s moves. Pacino, however, is a company in himself. His transformation from derelict hood into master criminal is virtually a lesson in the art of acting. On first appearance, he is down-at-heels and morbidly unhappy, his hair tousled, his teeth snaggled, his head stuck forward like a buzzard. No matter how this “simple son of the Bronx” prospers and dominates, he never loses that air of sallow melancholiac penury, suggested by the way his ratty tee shirt continues to show beneath his expensive leather coat. When Ui finally wrestles the seat of power from Old Dogsborough (Hindenberg), Pacino slumps into the comfortable leather armchair that doubles as a throne like a disgruntled mutt on his master’s furniture. In the extravagant style of some of his recent movie characters, Pa-

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cino’s Ui can throw a good tantrum when the occasion warrants, climbing over characters, shaking chairs, rolling on the floor. But he is generally more clownish than dangerous, even when wooing Mrs. Dullfeet with his wheedling tenor or threatening his enemies (“Nobody yields to force—unless he’s forced to”) with his self-serving chop logic. By the end, having warned that “Who is not for me is against me,” Ui announces that everyone is free to vote. A citizen who declares against him is summarily shot, and Ui is elected by a reasonable majority—not quite as huge as Saddam Hussein’s, but driven by a similar contortion of democracy. Unctuous and oily in his victory, Pacino’s Ui accepts the people’s “gratitude with pride,” then (in an epilogue that Brecht wrote later) removes his moustache to inform the audience that while Hitler may be dead, “the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” She is indeed. And bearing litters everywhere. Deborah Warner, who once set Brecht’s Chinese fable The Good Woman of Setzuan in the East End of London, has transferred Euripides’ Medea to the construction site of what looks like an unfinished health club—raw brick walls, bundles of wooden planking, loose cinder blocks, and a small swimming pool that reflects a shimmering light on translucent sliding-glass doors. Toys are strewn around the area, little boats float on the pool, a child’s medical kit and stethoscope lie on the ground. The chorus speaks in a variety of provincial accents—Cockney, Midlands, Northern, Irish, or Scottish. Medea’s nurse is a young au pair neatening up the kids’ furry animals and toy soldiers. For all the talk of Crete and Athens, we are obviously in contemporary England, listening to female gossip at the laundromat. Medea’s two boys run around in toy helmets, brandishing wooden swords. The Messenger carries a walkie-talkie. Jason is a sleek stud in a tee shirt, Reeboks, and jeans, who dumps Medea in order to marry Kreon’s daughter because he wants “security, prosperity.” His treatment of his wife alternates between impatience with her jealousy and a residual sexual need that makes him grope her behind like Stanley Kowalski pawing Stella. Warner’s purpose, in this Abbey Theatre production, is to remove the masks and cothurni of classical characters in order to endow them with a less distancing form of heroism. This effort is only moderately successful. The endless nattering of the multi-regional Chorus can get on your nerves, and one is never certain whether the narcissism of Jonathan Cake’s Jason belongs to the character or the actor. But the idea works beautifully in the performance of Warner’s creative partner, Fiona Shaw. In contrast to past approaches to the part—Judith Anderson’s brooding sorceress, Diana Rigg’s insinuating vamp—Shaw plays Medea like a

Varieties of Histrionic Experience

British housewife betrayed by a philandering husband, whom she calls “vomit.” Angular, gaunt, intense (Shaw often looks like a painting from Picasso’s Blue period), she makes her first entrance in a flowered skirt and a cardigan sweater, wearing sunglasses over her tear-puffed eyes. Speaking the colloquial translation of Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, she excavates the mordant comedy that comes from a pit of festering hatred, surgically slicing everything away from her character except the sinews, bones, and nerves. It makes for an extremely naturalistic performance, but when this Medea finally shows her fury she is volcanic in the extreme, punching her stomach in rage and self-contempt. Shaw displays the bewilderment, shock, and anger of the abandoned wife and the displaced immigrant. She will take her revenge against the king who deported her, the husband who jilted her, and the woman who replaced her: “I’ve got one day to make all three chopped meat,” she mutters between bites of a pie. Preparing to murder her children, she strips down to black undies and returns with a small suitcase, brandishing a kitchen knife and wearing a white smock. The Messenger arrives to describe how Kreon and his daughter have died from Medea’s poisonous presents (“her body stuck to him, his flesh tore from aging bone”). And to the accompaniment of deafening noise and blinding light, Medea proceeds to chase down her children with that murderous knife. It is one of the most harrowing scenes I have ever witnessed in the theater. The children run, screaming. She captures one and a splash of blood washes over the glass doors; she snares another and a stain of blood dyes her white smock. Some members of the Chorus retch; one does a demented Scottish jig. A broken Jason rushes in for vengeance. Medea lets him see his slaughtered children, one boy lying on her lap like a bloodied Pietá. In Warner’s most radical departure from Euripides’ text, Medea does not triumphantly ascend in a chariot, leaving Jason alone to cope with his tragedy. Rather, she stays, like a scrupulous housekeeper, to wash the blood off her hands and her smock, meanwhile probing her husband’s psychic wounds (“You thought you could kick me from your bed and laugh at me”) with vindictive scorn. It is the only unconvincing moment in the production. If Medea were so physically accessible, surely Jason would have finished her off. Instead he holds his wife’s head under the water of the pool for a few moments and then, unaccountably, lets her go. But the choice allows for a brilliant final moment—Medea flicking water at her prostrate husband, he dissolved in grief, she half smiling, half mad, almost flirtatious. 

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Mind Over Material: The Invention of Love; Mnemonic

The one thing Tom Stoppard can’t be faulted for is lacking a mind. Indeed, some might think his cerebral disputations are the answer to a thinking man’s prayers. Hasn’t he managed to rekindle the lamps of enlightenment in a form benighted since the death of Bernard Shaw? How many modern playwrights have done enough reading to discourse on Lenin, Joyce, Tristan Tzara, A. J. Ayer, Byron, Hobbes, Newton, Fermat, and the Hermit of Sidley Park, not to mention such abstruse subjects as quantum physics, higher mathematics, theoretical philosophy, and landscape gardening? But what the theatre really needs is not a flamboyant display of scholarship and erudition, or intellectual fireworks, but true intelligence, which is an extension of the educated heart. The Invention of Love, a play that has opened to great critical acclaim at the Lyceum Theatre under the sponsorship of Lincoln Center, may very well be the showiest of all of Stoppard’s intellectual exercises. In fact, I thought George Kelly should have loaned the author one of his play titles (The Showoff ). Stoppard has never been known to wear his learning lightly; he always seems to be proving he’s the 50

Mind Over Material

smartest kid in class. But compared to The Invention of Love even such a pyrotechnical work as Travesties () looks under-researched. Every day this author has spent in the British Museum or the Bodleian Library investigating the life of A. E. Houseman and his Oxford teachers and companions has been distilled into the three hours of commentary. There is not enough plot here for twenty minutes of action, but there is enough erudition for a fortnight. Yeats speaks of the will doing the work of the imagination. With Stoppard, that work is done by research. If the major challenge of writing about dons is to avoid donnishness, it is a challenge to which Stoppard has failed to rise. The Invention of Love has essentially one scene with the potential to hoist it out of the category of dramatized lecture. It is the moment in which Houseman is asked by Moses Jackson, the appealing if philistine Adonis he secretly adores, whether or not he is (as Jackson’s girlfriend believes) “sweet” on him. Houseman’s reluctant confession (“Oh, if only you hadn’t said anything! We could have carried on the same!”) gets him expelled from his roommate’s digs and his intimacy. But the scene is buried under so many literary references—the friendship of Theseus and Pirithous, whether English or Latin is better for poetry, and so on—that even a surefire moment of unrequited love somehow manages to lose its poignance. Indeed, it is remarkable that a play about the passions of the heart can be so lacking in genuine feeling. Stoppard has nicely worked out a schema in which Houseman, a classicist, examines how the idea of love was invented in the bisexual poems of certain classical Latin poets, Catullus and Propertius, while at the same time suffering emotional starvation himself—first as a student at Balliol, then as a clerk in His Majesty’s patent office, and finally as an Oxford don. The problem is that so much of the play is devoted to showing off Houseman’s (or Stoppard’s) genius for textual criticism that there is virtually no room left for human dynamics. Literally pages of the text are taken up with discourses on Latin literature and language, including the importance of comma placement in Catullus, how many “necs” precede the “sed” in a Horace ode, or whether a later commentator interpolated an “et” for an “aut” in a poem by Propertius. It is interesting for a while to watch the passing academic parade of Stoppard’s notables—John Ruskin trying to wed classical sophistication to th-century morality, Walter Pater arguing for a more liberated form of Aestheticism, Benjamin Jowett fulminating against “beastliness” and “boy-love” in Greek literature, Oscar Wilde, both in his Gilbert and Sullivan incarnation as Bunthorne in Patience and in his own purple velvet persona, boasting about how he has made his life into art. But like every celebrity party this one eventu-

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Plays and Productions

ally gets tedious, without a single drink or canapé to distract you from an admittedly witty and learned conversationalist who won’t stop biting your ear. What Stoppard really wants to establish, aside from his own cleverness, is how gay men suffered under a repressive sexual regime. The Invention of Love is very much a male play, featuring only one female character (Houseman’s sister), and it is a play that is very much concerned with male love (even the program cover features a painting of a nude boy). Much of the text is a discourse on narrow Victorian views of what was coming to be called “homosexuality” (a verbal barbarity to Houseman, the word being “half Greek and half Latin”), with Houseman and Wilde functioning as two of the age’s chief victims. But the play tells us a good deal less about Wilde than we can glean from his own writings (or from Moisés Kaufman’s play Gross Indecency, which chronicled Wilde’s trials and convictions on charges of sodomy and pederasty), and it is so buttoneddown regarding Houseman that we rarely feel engaged sympathetically with his lonely life. Although Stoppard throws us a few quotes from A Shropshire Lad, he is so much more preoccupied with Houseman the pedantic classical scholar than with Houseman the homely lyric poet that it is hard to know where the rueful plainness underlying an elegy such as “The Land of Lost Content” could have come from. Jack O’Brien’s task in directing this dramatized doctoral dissertation—indeed the task of the entire cast—is to make such talk active. They are more successful than not. Bob Crowley helps out a lot with another of his masterly settings in which, say, the Houses of Parliament can be instantly transformed into an eating table at an English club, and his costumes lend a nice outré touch to the natural elegance of the period. As for the acting, it is generally very energized, with the strongest impressions made by Robert Sean Leonard, who endows the younger Houseman with a shy tenderness that the writing sometimes lacks; Michael Stuhlbarg as Houseman’s goofy roommate Alfred Pollard; Mark Nelson as his gay office mate; and Jeff Weiss as Charon the Ferryman in the guise of an antic tourist guide. In the older roles, Richard Easton as the seventyseven-year-old AEH repeats his splenetic explosions a little too often for my taste, just as Byron Jennings barks exactly the same way playing both the academic Benjamin Jowett and the journalist Henry Labouchere. But caveats aside, these are all gifted actors in an evenly matched cast. In his usual fashion, Stoppard has juxtaposed two different historical periods in The Invention of Love, the young Alfred Houseman’s university days and the passage of his defunct older self across the river Styx. The third and perhaps most important time period in the play is the age of the Imperial Roman poets.

Mind Over Material

I learned a lot more about all of these writers than I knew before I came, and I am grateful to the author for that knowledge. But one does not go to the theatre for continuing-education courses, no matter how wittily taught. The Invention of Love comes off like a post-production symposium rather than an evening of drama, with Stoppard taking the parts of all the principal speakers. The Theatre de Complicité’s production of Mnemonic (at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice) is much closer than the Stoppard play to the kind of thing I like in cerebral theatre. It is very intelligent, even intellectual, but also imaginative, mystical, haunting, and poetic. To my shame, this is the first piece I have ever seen by this celebrated company of actors. It reveals them to be the most cosmopolitan and least insular of any English troupe now performing. Mnemonic also begins as a lecture—a lecture on memory by the company’s leader, director, and co-writer, Simon McBurney. McBurney, who trained with the noted French acting teacher Jacques Lecoq, is a manic, energized performer with considerable stand-up capacities. Addressing the audience in a crumpled blue suit, he gives a talk on brain cells, synapses, and neuron connections that begins to develop the comic intensity of an intellectual Goon Show. Each of the seats is equipped with a sleeping mask that the spectators are asked to wear, and a fig leaf they are asked to feel (the idea is to imagine ourselves back in the time of our common ancestors). McBurney drones on, giving instructions, and when we remove our masks, we discover that his voice has morphed into a recording and that McBurney has become a character in the play (Virgil) who talks to his girlfriend (Alice) about a guy (McBurney) who came out and started to talk about memory. This is the first of a number of Pirandellian tricks that occur in the evening. For this is a piece about transformation as well as memory. Even more, it is a piece about the common links in the human chain. There are two strands of action in Mnemonic. One concerns the discovery in the Italian Alps of a frozen corpse, over five thousand years old and perfectly preserved, called the Iceman. The other is about Alice, exquisitely performed by Katrin Cartlidge, who, following her mother’s death, embarks on a journey to find her long-lost father. Through a series of scientific and archaelogical investigations, we learn more and more about the Iceman—that he suffered from arthritis and rheumatism, that he lay on his left side because his ribs were broken, that he was engaged in flight from “a danger, a disaster which had provoked him to risk his own life.” Through similar investigation, Alice, travelling through Central Europe, also learns a lot about her father—that the scarf in her possession is a tallis, that

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he was Jewish and played the piano, that he was in flight from a similar kind of danger and disaster. Just as, following the discovery of the Iceman, archaeologists discovered a Neolithic settlement containing a mass grave of murdered bodies lying on their bellies, so thousands of years later the Allied forces were to stumble on the hellholes of Belsen and Buchenwald, and the evidence of the atrocities committed there. Eventually, Alice ends up in Italy, in the very village where the Iceman is on display, after having found her father sleeping in a field (and deciding oddly not to waken him). The Iceman had been carrying a tassel, so much like the tallis of her father. At the end, each of the actors, one by one, lies down in place of the Iceman, rolling off the table to allow the next person to take his or her place, “just as generation succeeds generation in a never-ending cycle.” I’m not sure why the memory theme is made so central to a play that seems to be more about the inter-relationship of humans through the ages in the face of persecution, murder, and subsequent migration. Perhaps it is because the actors’ memories have contributed so much to the development of the play (McBurney’s father was an archaeologist, Cartlidge is half-Jewish, and so on). But the company inspired so much confidence that you know your questions must have an answer. The performance also impresses with its sheer theatrical wizardry—the way the entire company contributes its experiences and insights to create a unified artwork in the style of Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina troupe; the way that video is used, reminiscent of the techniques of an experimental company named Squat, for projections on the bodies of live actors; the way, recalling the puppetry of Julie Taymor, a broken chair becomes the broken body of the Iceman. Mnemonic combines intelligence and scholarship with ambiguity and mystery to become a genuine work of theatre poetry. Instead of separating audiences into an educational caste system, like The Invention of Love, it shows how we can use our minds to explore experiences common to us all. 

The Jew Who Buried Hitler: The Producers

The cover of a recent issue of The New Yorker depicts a lone spectator scowling in the midst of a theater audience rocking with laughter. The unhappy dissenter is Adolf Hitler, and the audience, of course, is watching The Producers (St. James Theatre), Mel Brooks’s musical remake of his classic  movie. Everyone is familiar with the premise of The Producers: how the failed producer, Max Bialystock, gets the notion from his nerdy accountant, Leopold Bloom, that by oversubscribing a flop he can make more money than by producing a hit. Bialystock and Bloom finally discover the play “that will close on page four,” namely an epic by the neo-Nazi Franz Leibkind (Brad Oscar) designed “to show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler with a song in his heart.” When the play turns out to be an unexpected and undesired success, Bialystock is convicted of larceny, despite his heartrending defense (“I know I’m a back-stabbing despicable crook—but I had no choice. I’m a Broadway producer”). After a few months of hesitation on a tropical isle, Bloom elects to join Max in jail, though both are soon released to bring their new convict musical, Prisoner of Love, to Broadway. It is a hit—an intentional hit, at last. 55

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Obviously there are some people—other than Hitler and his skinhead neoNazi following—who would frown at The Producers. Letters to the New York Times are already charging Brooks with insensitivity to the Holocaust. Let’s concede that insensitivity and bad taste are inseparable from the production; indeed, they are practically its organizing principles. Let’s also concede that Brooks’s willingness to give offense is the primary reason why this event is so exhilarating. And the exhilaration is palpable. Never in my long theatergoing life have I been part of such an ecstatic audience. I don’t mean people desperate, at $ a throw, to applaud their expenditure. I mean a really happy audience— wreathed in smiles before, during, and after the performance. Despite some early misgivings, I had a pretty good time myself. Admittedly, Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock, while unquestionably droll, still suffers from his compulsive eagerness to please. In his second attempt to play a role originated by Zero Mostel (Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was the first), Lane again shows how much he lacks Zero’s subversive ferocity, his manic marginality. In a black slouch hat and red velvet jacket, he is also much more soi-disant than the seedy Zero—no strands of hair pasted over his forehead or rolls of fat falling over his belt. And although Matthew Broderick is a priceless nerd as Leopold Bloom, carrying his remnant of a security blanket like a tattered flag, he can’t quite scale the heights of uncontrollable hysteria that made Gene Wilder such a terrified wreck in the part. It is also true that the movie had a tougher satiric edge than does the show. (A younger Mel Brooks, for example, would never had tolerated the musical’s courtroom climax, with its soggy reconciliations and unconvincing character reversals.) But the musical of The Producers is a more lighthearted creation than the movie, almost a different species, with its own special conventions and demands, for which Lane and Broderick may be more appropriate casting. What it sacrifices in savagery it gains in form, enjoying a tighter, more coherent structure than the somewhat ungainly film. Thomas Meehan, who collaborated on the book, has managed to curb some of Brooks’s excesses as a writer, and Susan Stroman, who wittily staged and brilliantly choreographed the show, has avoided some of his overkill as a director. To be sure, excess and overkill are Brooks’s trademarks, the qualities responsible for his wildest comic flights—for examples, the extended farting scene in Blazing Saddles; the priceless lovemaking episode in Young Frankenstein where, being shtupped by the Frankenstein monster, Madeline Kahn screeches, “Ah, sweet mystery of life!”; the production number in the same movie when, in top hat and tails, the monster and his maker tap dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz”;

The Jew Who Buried Hitler

Brooks as Louis XIV, in The History of the World: Part I, surrounded by pulchritude, confiding to the movie audience that “It’s good to be king.” But we have occasionally suffered the defects of these virtues, too, in such clinkers as Life Stinks (so did the movie) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (whose best joke was its title). Brooks’s unwieldy sense of form may have been eliminated from the musicalized Producers, but thankfully his irrepressible good nature and fecund imagination are preserved. The evening is virtually an homage to a great comic artist, with dozens of quotes from his past movies. Indeed, his voice is everywhere, even on tape, lip-synced by an actor singing: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party.” Rather than look for holes in the fabric, then, I think we ought to embrace this new old-fashioned musical comedy. It is a real tonic after decades of moral instruction from Rodgers and Hammerstein, and urban neurosis from Stephen Sondheim, and melodious angst from “new wave” musicals like Falsettoes and Rent. As John Lahr observed in The New Yorker, The Producers recalls the good old days of musicals driven by comedians schooled in vaudeville and burlesque. Lahr’s father, Bert, was one of the linchpins of this movement (his goofy innocence seems to inform the pained mischievousness of Nathan Lane in the current production). So was Bobby Clark, Jimmy Savo, Ed Wynn, and Jimmy Durante—and later Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and Zero Mostel. A number of these comics were Jewish, including Bert Lahr, though they rarely played Jews on stage. It took Mel Brooks to tap the inexhaustible oil well of satiric deflation in the depths of the Jewish experience. This mother lode he pumped to a fare-theewell as “The Two Thousand Year Old Man,” that aging Yiddish kvetch who claims to have been a participant in all recorded history. (“Did you know Joan of Arc?” “I went with her, dummy, I went with her.”) The same ironic contrast between loftiness and lowliness permeates The Producers. It informs the very theater posters on the walls of Max’s office—This Too Shall Pass, The Kidney Stone, The Breaking Wind, A Streetcar Named Murray, She Shtups to Conquer, Katz, High Button Jews—deflating Broadway’s most sanctified commodities with sharp flicks of a scalpel. Of course, Brooks was hardly the first to ridicule Hitler. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin, doubling as a Jewish barber, satirized him as a pompous egotist, famously bouncing a globe of the world off his behind and vying with Mussolini over whose barber chair could be leveraged higher. Brecht turned Der Fuehrer into a self-regarding actor in Arturo Ui. Even the Three Stooges did a turn on him with their crude brand of thumb-in-the-eye slapstick. Still, no-

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body can touch Brooks in puncturing the balloons of evil icons, generally by exposing how much they owe to histrionics (look what he did to Tomás de Torquemada, the leading man of the Spanish Inquisition). Here he turns gauleiters and storm troopers into chorus boys, ripping the last shred of dignity from Hitler by making him a Judy Garland wannabe, mouthing “I love you” to the audience. Outraged letters to the editor notwithstanding, it is a lot easier now to treat the Nazi movement as an extension of show business than it was forty years ago. That supreme moment in the film, when the audience sits in paralyzed silence watching the opening number of “Springtime for Hitler” before bursting into applause, would be hard to replicate today. For one thing, we’re half a century away from the event; for another, we’re too familiar with the movie. In the musical Producers, therefore, the “gay romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarten” is performed before a live applauding audience—not so much a play-within-aplay as a hit-within-a-hit. In short, the satire on Nazism is the easy part. The Producers is also designed “to offend people of all races, creeds, and religions”—not a difficult task in an age of paper-thin skins. Show biz gays get the worst (or best) of it. There is a rich scene in the apartment of the stage director Roger de Bris, whom Bialystock and Bloom are trying to sign for their would-be flop, featuring a flamboyant staircase entrance by this flaming queen in a huge wig and sequined dress. It also features four or five rich entrances by the director’s entirely gay production team, including his “common-law assistant” Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart). Like Jews, blacks, and other minorities adept at self-satire, some gays have found insulting, coming from an outsider, the same kind of humor they turn on themselves. De Bris ends up playing Hitler after Franz Leibkind, the Nazi who wrote the musical, literally breaks a leg on opening night. (The musical wisely drops the movie’s outdated hippie characterization by Dick Shawn.) Leibkind’s assistant promises De Bris, “You’re going out there a silly, hysterical screaming queen, and you’re coming back a passing-for-straight great big Broadway star!” As camped by the incomparable Gary Beach, De Bris’s first entrance as Adolf “Elizabeth” Hitler (“descended from a long line of English Queens”) is enough to guarantee his Tony. Glowering at the audience, his hands guarding his crotch, he suddenly crumples into Carol Channing, lifting his arm above his head and displaying a gleaming set of teeth. Radical feminists won’t like this show much either. It signals the renaissance of woman as sex object—that long-legged, scantily dressed wiggling showgirl

The Jew Who Buried Hitler

from revues and burlesque. The show’s dress parades are almost invariably used for comic purposes, notably in the climactic Third Reich production number when a bevy of chorines descends the stairs in abbreviated Bavarian costumes, wearing a collection of sausages, pretzels, and German eagles as head-dresses. The director-choreographer concludes the sequence with a Busby Berkeley– inspired extravaganza involving goose-stepping storm trooper puppets against a mirrored back wall first used in A Chorus Line (she also includes a dancing chorus of homing pigeons). And as if enough constituencies had not been offended, people in Florida retirement homes have been writing angry letters, too, protesting that handicapped old ladies are being mistreated in this show. It is true that Max raises capital by servicing wealthy old widows, each with her own suggestive nickname (“Hold-me, Touch-me,” “Lick-me, Bite-me,” “Kiss-me, Feel-me”). It is also true that, as a form of foreplay, all of them propose suggestive games to Max (the exhausted Bialystock replies, “Let’s play a game where there’s absolutely no sex—the Jewish princess and her husband”). And among a number of rousing production numbers is one (“Little Old Lady Land”) in which these aging women (some played by men) dance on walkers. But only in America could the erotic feelings of aging women be a source of complaint. Also borrowed from a more Aristophanic, less censorial theatrical period is the buxom sidekick, often a nurse, here a secretary—a Swedish beauty with a hyphenated name so long it takes a court stenographer three minutes to record it. As played by Cady Huffman, Ulla (to use the shortened form) is a willing object of Bialystock’s and Bloom’s lust, especially after arousing them with a particularly lubricious song and dance (“Even though we’re sitting down, we’re giving you a standing ovation”). It is nice to be reminded that, once upon a time in the theater, men and women were allowed to be sexually attracted to each other. The quality of performance and production is at a consistently high level. Matthew Broderick plays Bloom with hunched modesty and adenoidal shyness, performing (particularly in “I Wanna Be a Producer”) with surprising musical comedy assurance. Despite my reservations about Nathan Lane, he has never been more disciplined than here under Stroman’s watchful direction, though I dread to think what he’ll be doing with the part three months hence. All of the aforementioned actors, and the well-drilled ensemble that supports them, add energy and gaiety. William Ivy Long’s costumes are a canvas of splashy wit, and Robin Wagner’s sets are sumptuous re-creations of a glorious Broadway past. But the real hero of the evening is Mel Brooks. Over the mar-

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quee of one of Bialystock’s flops is the credit: “Entire production conceived, devised, thought up and supervised by Max Bialystock.” Brooks, who in addition to all his other duties is a producer of The Producers, might claim the same credits. His music, a decent approximation of Broadway show tunes, is somewhat derivative, but his book and his lyrics are nonpareil, and so is the animating idea of the show. A Jew who finally buried Hitler, Mel Brooks, né Melvin Kaminsky, has demonstrated that comedy is not only capable of exposing stupidity and pretension. At times, it can also exorcise and neutralize evil—not as lastingly but a lot more divertingly than a hundred Sherman tanks, a thousand B-s, or a million GIs. 

The Harrowing of Hell: In the Penal Colony; Hamlet; and Hamlet

The composer Philip Glass, who (along with his former wife and frequent collaborator JoAnne Akalaitis) helped found the experimental theater company Mabou Mines, has worked in a large variety of musical forms. But to me he has always seemed happiest as a composer for dance and theater. Indeed, despite all the warm ink that is usually poured over the achievements of Stephen Sondheim, I suspect posterity may determine that it was the more critically abused Glass who created the more important American music-theater works of the late twentieth century. Sondheim writes musicals that sometimes (Sweeney Todd and Passion) aspire to be grand opera. Glass writes operas that look more like pieces for the legitimate theater—never musicals, to be sure, but musical works that are inseparably linked to the instrumentalities of the stage. In Einstein on the Beach (), Satyagraha (), The Photographer (), the CIVIL warS (), The Juniper Tree (written with Robert Moran in ), Akhnaten (), The Fall of the House of Usher (), and his Cocteau trilogy—the stage opera Orphée (), the film opera La Belle et la Bête (), and the dance opera Les Enfants 61

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Terribles ()—Glass has experimented with a number of theater forms and ambitious texts in collaboration with some of the most accomplished theater artists of our time. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that some of these collaborations have taken place at my theater, so you are free to question the disinterestedness of my opinions. Braving this, I would argue that, in the company of Robert Wilson, Andrei Serban, Richard Foreman, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Robert Israel, Francesca Zambello, and others, Philip Glass has fashioned stage works that have helped to transform American musical theater. His “pocket opera” In the Penal Colony, based on Kafka’s novella of the same name, will probably rank among the more powerful of these, though it makes no particularly new musical departures. That Glass repeats himself often is an often-repeated charge, one he vigorously denies. (“They say my music never changes,” goes his usual mantra. “It’s always changing.”) Glass’s defense may seem disingenuous, considering how often, by design, the same thematic and harmonic patterns recur within the same piece, and sometimes even travel from one piece to another. But Glass defines change in terms of the infinitesimal variations common to Eastern music, and that kind of change may be too subtle for our untrained Western ears. On the other hand, it may not be important that each Glass piece be written in a different style or even carry different rhythms and melodies. This would seem to be especially true for Glass’s theater music, since its purpose is to build an emotional, sometimes hypnotic foundation for the texts, and this function is actually reinforced through repetition. In the Penal Colony certainly sounds a lot like some of Glass’s more recent compositions. What is unusual about it is the instrumentation. This is the first Glass opera, to my knowledge, to be played by a classical string quintet (two violins, a viola, a cello, and a bass), and the combination of Glass’s music and the traditional instrumentation sounds like Schubert stoned on bhang. But most of the responsibility for the hallucinatory nature of the evening belongs to Franz Kafka, the Czech-Jewish writer whose various works constitute a single metaphor of persecution (perhaps the reason they hold such fascination for American Jews, notably Philip Roth). Rudolph Wurlitzer—a novelist (Nog), playwright (Waiting Hexagram), screenwriter (Two-Lane Blacktop), and non-fiction writer (Hard Travel to Sacred Places)—has deftly transformed Kafka’s narrative into a strong libretto, while Akalaitis, Glass’s director, has inserted the presence of Kafka himself, who reads from his diaries and sometimes copies the behavior of the condemned man in the prison as if he were his double. The actor Jesse J.

The Harrowing of Hell

Perez plays Kafka as a kind of wizened and spastic child in the throes of what appears to be an advanced case of Parkinson’s disease. It is the black-suited body of the author on a bed of pain that the audience first sees upon entering the theater of the Classic Stage Company. Kafka is talking to himself in muted undertones. “I write out of despair over my body and my future in my body,” he mutters, bemoaning “the terrible uncertainty of my inner existence.” In John Conklin’s imaginative low-tech setting, the floor is covered with scrawled lines from Kafka’s writings. And as his bizarre tale unfolds, the story of a prisoner condemned to be executed by means of a particularly gruesome piece of machinery, Kafka begins to lose control of his right hand, which twitches with a life of its own, like the character in the Sherwood Anderson story “Hands.” “Strindberg is tremendous,” Kafka remarks at one point, a testimonial Akalaitis endorses through her directorial style: the entire performance is staged like a Strindberg chamber play for the Intimate Theater. Indeed, much of it is enacted less than three feet from the audience, so that we, too, are in the penal colony. When the Condemned Man (Steven Rishard) is dragged onstage by a rope, shackled, and manacled, the female cellist nearly weeps for him, like the Daughter of Indra in A Dream Play. When the Officer begins to describe the monstrous infernal machine that will execute the Condemned Man, Kafka first draws it, then tears up his sketch and eats it. In short, this is a phantasmagoric world of dreams and nightmares at the center of which is the “apparatus”—a harrow with two sets of needles, one designed to write on a man’s body, the other to wash away the blood, until the coup de grâce is delivered with a spike through the head. This process is described at length by the Officer (played by the basso Herbert Perry on the night that I saw it) to a Visitor from a foreign country (played by the tenor Tony Boutté on the same night). Although he has been charged with insubordination, the Condemned Man does not know his sentence: “He will experience it on his body,” the Officer explains. The process is not designed to kill the prisoner right away—it will take twelve hours for him to “achieve enlightenment.” This is literally prose (as opposed to poetic) justice, and it is administered in much the same mechanical way as a set of needles transcribes the results of an EKG test, only the medium here is not a paper chart but a man’s flesh. The Officer is eager to enlist the Visitor’s support for this traditional system of justice, since the new Commander opposes his predecessor’s methods. But

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the Visitor clearly disapproves of it as a vestige of an old, barbaric regime. For a moment, there is a question about whether he will express his disapproval or withdraw into liberal neutrality. When he decides for the former, the Officer frees the Condemned Man, orders his own uniform to be stripped from him, and takes his place on the harrow, where the words “Be Thou Just” are inscribed on his body before he dies. The Officer’s execution is a spectacular sound-andlight show designed by Jennifer Tipton on Conklin’s apparatus of gears and wheels, after which Kafka puts on his bowler, grabs his umbrella, and leaves the Visitor with the words “Have faith and abide.” The intimacy of the space, the thrust of the narrative, the shimmering arpeggios of the score, and the power of the performances are the only qualities that sustain the faith of the audience, which would be otherwise shattered by this myth of infinite cruelty and despair. In the Penal Colony was written in , the same year that Kafka began The Trial. It is now abundantly clear that the author’s ideas about inhumane prison systems and torture machines, about irrational legal procedures and implacable bureaucracies, and (in the case of Metamorphosis) about the possibility of human mutation—ideas that some at the time considered paranoid fantasies— were remarkably prescient, even omniscient, predictions of the future. Not only did Kafka foretell the inhumanity of Nazi medical experimentation and extermination camps, he even told us something about the barbaric American rite of capital punishment. (By chance, I saw this production two days before the execution of Timothy McVeigh.) Whenever you see it, In the Penal Colony will, as Horatio says to Hamlet about the Ghost of his father, harrow you with fear and wonder. Speaking of Hamlet, a word about the two vastly different productions of the play recently imported to these shores by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the last dueling Hamlet s I can remember in New York were in the late s, when John Gielgud and Leslie Howard simultaneously played the part on Broadway). It is telling that one of these Hamlet s is identified with its director, Peter Brook, and the other with its lead actor, Simon Russell Beale—which reflects the fact that one is driven primarily by concept, the other by performance. Peter Brook’s version, with the fine actor Adrian Lester in the lead, is— though far superior to the competition—something of a disappointment. Brook is continuing to explore how to distill theater down to its essentials. With Fortinbras and Norway on the cutting-room floor, the play has been reduced to about two-and-a-half hours (with no intermission—Brook still expects his audiences to suffer a little for his sins). It is performed on an orange

The Harrowing of Hell

carpet decked out with pillows, accompanied by bells, horns, and whistles, Asian-style. This is appropriate, since about half the members of the multinational cast are from the Indian subcontinent. When not in the scene (i.e., acting on the carpet), they sit around the stage, watching and meditating. Brook’s approach achieves intimacy, clarity, and simplicity, though it begins to seem a bit self-conscious after a while. Moreover, the mixture of styles and nationalities does not always blend with perfect consistency. Jeffrey Kissoon (doubling as the Ghost) plays Claudius like an Eastern potentate, but Natasha Parry’s Gertrude is a well-mannered London matron who would have been more at home in the Simon Russell Beale production. As for Lester’s Hamlet, it is always engaging, if not always very deep. “I have of late . . . lost all my mirth,” Hamlet says, but there is no mirth lost in Lester’s continually waggish and spry performance. This Hamlet is very good at poking fun at himself, particularly after revealing some emotion in a soliloquy. He even dies with a smile on his face, finding real amusement in the line “The rest is silence.” The play has obviously been reinterpreted from the ground up, with every word examined anew. Some of Brook’s ideas are questionable, such as moving the “To be or not to be” soliloquy to a later point in the play, after Hamlet has already determined to kill the king. Others, such as the erotic treatment of Ophelia’s madness in which she obsesses on the phrase “by cock,” are more effective. The play ends where it began, with all the dead getting up to look at “the morn in russet mantle clad,” and a guard crying: “Who’s there?” These are good, not great, actors, rethinking a hallowed play. The Simon Russell Beale version (directed by John Caird with the Royal National Theatre Company) also gets rid of Fortinbras and Norway, though it still clocks in at almost three hours and a half. I saw the production at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, where it was much admired before being enshrined later at BAM. For me, it was like watching a historical reenactment of nineteenthcentury actor-manager Shakespeare, where the star upstages the supporting actors and never lets the audience out of his eyesight or earshot. With a few exceptions, Beale’s supporting cast was execrable: almost all of the actors sounded like BBC announcers or gay Oxford dons, including the women. And the setting, consisting of trunks and luggage piled around the back of the stage as if it were the waiting room at Paddington, suggested that the only concept behind this production was the idea of touring it. While always clear-spoken and intelligent, Beale is obviously too portly for the role (yes, Gertrude mentions that Hamlet is “fat and scant of breath,” but

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this is ridiculous). He is also too short, too middle-aged, and too epicene to be the scholar, soldier, and courtier that Ophelia admires—well, maybe he could pass for a courtier and double as Osric. It is true that a good actor can make you forget about his physical appearance. What Beale never lets you forget is his superior sense of scornfulness, as if he were confusing his character with the caustic Addison de Witt in All About Eve. Underneath the upper-class disdain, however, you can just perceive a credit-card-carrying member of the consumer classes. As a result, while Beale captures the cuttingly ironic and quotidian aspects of the role, he never touches its tragic side. In this, he is well-matched by the well-bred Cathryn Bradshaw, whose Ophelia, always clutching her pocketbook even in the mad scenes, resembles a chubby debutante driven around the bend by the frustrations of a bad permanent, a bad diet, and too much time spent in department stores. As for sex appeal, there is not a corpuscle of chemistry between them, and I cannot say that it is all Beale’s fault. (He seems more attracted to Sara Kestelman, who plays Gertrude like a near relative of Edna May Oliver.) If the purpose of acting, as Hamlet says, is to show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” to judge by this production our time is afflicted with considerable sexual uncertainty and a lot of class pretension. 

Angels in Afghanistan: Homebody/Kabul

Tony Kushner may be the luckiest and unluckiest dramatist in town. Having had the foresight to write a play about Afghanistan before the September th attacks, he opened it last December just when America’s presence in the area was dominating the front pages—that was the lucky part. It was also the unlucky part. The destruction of the World Trade Center and America’s subsequent pursuit of the Taliban and Al Qaeda had radically altered our consciousness about the area in a way that no prophet could have possibly foreseen. As a result, Homebody/Kabul (The New York Theatre Workshop) is a schizophrenic entity, at the same time relevant to the point of prescience, and woefully out of date. Most of the play takes place in Kabul in , and includes references to “another U.S. bombing” (of the terrorist camp at Khost) and how it missed Osama bin Laden and killed a number of innocents (little seems to have changed in that respect). But Kushner’s account of a British father and daughter searching for a family member who had disappeared after a tourist trip to Kabul seems particularly inconsequential against the background of the larger political events that have since transpired. 67

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I saw the play twice, having attended a preview too early in the run to be allowed to review it. When I returned a few weeks later, after it had been exposed to the public and the critics, I could detect no major changes, aside from the deepening of some performances. The problem is that the play was virtually crying out for revision after September th. Although the action takes place three years earlier, it is now impossible to imagine these Western characters circulating among the Taliban without thinking of abductions, corpses, bomb craters, and detention camps. On second thought, instead of trying to update his play, Kushner might have better employed his creative energies trying to find some unity for it, or at least settling on what it was supposed to be about in the first place. I say this with profound respect for his talents. He is one of the very few dramatists now writing whose works are contributions to literature as well as to theatre (Stoppard is only a pretender to that crown). What he lacks at present are not substance, depth, eloquence, intelligence, or emotional power—he has those qualities in abundance, along with the Orwellian gift of being able to take the spiritual temperature of a people with a political thermometer. Where he falls short is in his formal control. Distracted by too many subjects at once, he is not always able to find a focus. Beginning with the epic Angels in America, Kushner’s plays have tended to be sprawling extravaganzas that suffer not so much from a deficit of sensibility as from a surplus of it. They display the literary equivalent of overacting—overwriting (Homebody/Kabul is almost four hours long). Kushner is one of the few playwrights who publicly acknowledge, even seem to advertise, a need for a dramaturg (the current production boasts two). His material is still in serious need of dramaturgical attention, however. As its odd title suggests, this is a bifurcated work in which the second part bears only a tangential relation to the first. What links them is a character—the Homebody—though, by the time we get to Kabul, she is just a hovering memory, having disappeared into the city after being brutally murdered and dismembered between the acts . . . perhaps. (Kushner leaves us in some doubt about this.) Fully realized in the monologue that begins the play, she becomes only a subject for regret and remorse in the longer section that ends it, which is far more preoccupied with a disintegrating family (widowed father and raging daughter) in a strange exotic country, losing their innocence among con men, junkies, fanatics, poets, and brutal despots. This makes the opening monologue a bit of a tease—rather like the killing off of Janet Leigh in Psycho twenty minutes into the movie. Finishing off the

Angels in Afghanistan

Homebody takes somewhat longer (her monologue lasts about an hour). But as long as she is with us, she is an entirely winning presence. I suspect this inveterate tourist was largely inspired by Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, though there are echoes of the ruminating matrons of Virginia Woolf and perhaps the loquacious Violet Venable of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. A bit dotty, as infatuated with travel as she is intoxicated with language, the Homebody addresses us directly from a chair in her London home, using her guidebook to Afghanistan as the basis for an exhaustive investigation into the history, mores, and geography of this blighted land. The Homebody’s fascination with Afghanistan allows Kushner not only to turn his own exhaustive research into a theatrical metaphor, but also to make her compulsive nattering (“unregenerate chatterer that I am”) into a medium for his own logorrhea. It is exhilarating to be engaged with this character’s appetite for adventure, her embrace of life (“Oh I love the world! I love love love love the world!”), though she has lost all feeling for a husband who is repelled by the very things about her that attract us most: “My husband cannot bear my—the sound of me and has threatened to leave on this account and so I rarely speak to him any more.” It is not surprising to learn that both are on anti-depressants. What is most engaging about the Homebody is her intellectual curiosity. Her wandering mind has the capacity to go from the abstract and eternal to the specific and quotidian. A discourse on Third World hats (“abbreviated fezlike pillboxy attenuated yarmulkite millinarisms, um, hats”) turns into a discourse on human history, on guilt and causality. And just as swiftly, it becomes the occasion for an account of a real or imagined affair with a Muslim hatmaker in London after she bought one of his Afghan products. Her diction is pitch perfect, and so is her self-understanding: “Where stands the homebody, safe in her kitchen, on her culpable shore, suffering uselessly watching others perishing in the sea, wringing her plump little maternal hands, oh, oh” (that selfdenigrating “oh, oh” is particularly nice). This monologue, a major feat of memory and persistence, is delivered with force and grace by Linda Emond. It represents the most nuanced writing and acting of the season. The bridge to the second, less effective part of this play is a Frank Sinatra tune, “It’s nice to go trav’ling.” The Homebody’s passion for Sinatra (“such an awful man, such perfect perfect music”) combined with her love of travel have proven to be fatal. One of the few remaining relics of her existence are her headphones (the others being three hats and her guidebook). She was presumably murdered because of “this impious music which is an affront to Islam” and because she wasn’t wearing a burkha when she was listening to it.

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The next three hours of this long long play are taken up with the consequences of this clash of cultures. Gathered in a hotel room in Kabul as if at a wake are the Homebody’s husband Milton, her daughter Priscilla, a British aid man called Quango Twistleton, a Mullah, and a Muslim doctor. They are discussing the fate of the Homebody in gruesome detail, before Priscilla, like Isis preparing to piece together the pieces of her mutilated brother Osiris, goes off on a quest for her missing remains (she ends up finding the putative grave of Cain). The suspense of the play lies in the question of whether her mother is dead or whether she has eloped with a Muslim. For all intents and purposes, this question is never fully resolved, though the people who press for the second option are obviously conning the family. But it is not plot that is absorbing the playwright’s attention. Kushner seems more interested in examining the impact of Afghanistan’s competing customs on the innocent Western consciousness. His other interest is the impact of Afghanistan on the mental health of his central characters. Milton, an electronics engineer, grows increasingly under the influence of Quango, whose mind has been blown by the country and by the extremely cheap drugs he can acquire there (“why else would I be here?— Afghanistan supplies the world”). He and Milton will share an opium pipe and heroin before the evening is over. The obscene, angry, vaguely suicidal Priscilla, on the other hand—“a virago dedicated to punishing everyone she’s indebted to”—falls under the influence of an Esperanto poet named Khwaja, who is probably using her to smuggle anti-Taliban codes out of the country. Much incident follows, without ever adding up to a coherent story, climaxed by the most dramatic scene in the play—when Priscilla is apprehended by Taliban police for carrying military information (the poems in Esperanto) out of the country for the Northern Alliance, and when the Kabuli woman she has agreed to take with her is almost shot. The final scene takes place in London, with the woman living in the family’s home, sleeping with Milton, and tending to the garden that the Homebody neglected, having replaced her in every possible way. With the exception of the Homebody, all of the Western characters are singularly unappealing (the occasional anti-Western sentiments we overhear suggest that this is deliberate). Milton (Dylan Baker) is a sour drudge; Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson) is a whining bore; and Quango (Bill Camp) is a druggedout sexual opportunist, although, under the pinpoint direction of Declan Donnellan, almost all the parts are filled by very good actors, not only those mentioned but also Joseph Kamal, Yusef Bulos, and Rita Wolf. (The exception

Angels in Afghanistan

is Miss Hutchinson who, unable to find any variety for her role, not surprisingly given its one-dimensional character, settles for undifferentiated screeching.) Nick Ormerod’s set, a decaying pile of bricks and rubble, makes excellent use of the New York Theatre Workshop stage in handling the multiple locations. Indeed, the entire production seems to have been fashioned by first-rate professionals. But Homebody/Kabul, alas, is an errant and wandering play. I can think of no other writer who could have handled this difficult subject in such an intelligent manner. And it is encouraging to see that Kushner has subjects on his mind other than the homoerotic (there isn’t a single gay character in the play, and its single sexual event, between Quango and Priscilla, is essentially a business transaction). But it is maddening to find Kushner’s large talents being dissipated in a work that never quite seems to know where it is going. Thanks to the Homebody, we leave the theatre having learned a lot more about Afghanistan than when we came. But it is knowledge that has not been sufficiently imparted either to the human events of the play or to the events of recent history. 

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Goat Song: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (John Golden Theatre) may be another episode in Edward Albee’s collection of shaggy dog (or shaggy goat) stories. Or maybe, on the other hand, not. I found it possible to have a number of quite contradictory responses to this play in the course of its one-and-a-half-hour intermissionless length, all of them cunningly machined by the playwright in his most mischievous mood. Albee is famous for his theatrical sleight of hand (the gun that turns into an umbrella in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, the baby who proves to be an illusion in The Play About the Baby). The Goat may be the first Albee play in which the very structure of the work is an act of prestidigitation. With the dramatist pulling one theatrical trick after the other out of his conjuring hat, you leave the theatre uncertain whether you’ve seen a conventional Broadway adultery drama, a sex comedy on the subject of bestiality, or a Nietzschean attempt to transvaluate our values about what constitutes “normal” behavior. Whatever way you approach this theatrical object, however, it is prepared to resist any easy classification or snap judgment. The elusiveness begins with the opening scene. When the lights 72

Goat Song

come up on a typical late Albee set by John Arnone (interior-decorated living room, Eames chairs, African sculptures, tiers of bookshelves, geometric fractured ceiling jutting into the house), Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl) is arranging flowers in a bowl. She is greeted by star applause. So is Bill Pullman, the actor playing her husband Martin, after he makes his first absentminded entrance and proceeds to mumble harmless small talk about his failing memory. The dialogue, the scenery, the circumstances, the stars, and especially the obligatory applause are all comforting indications that nothing in this evening is going to mar your enjoyment of a traditional domestic comedy. Ruehl and Pullman, two extremely well-poised actors, proceed to reinforce this illusion with well-timed exchanges, by turns loving and acerbic, compassionate and witty. Not only is Martin’s short-term memory prematurely going (he’s just turned ); all of his senses seem to be failing. A Pritzker Prize–winning architect, Martin is about to conduct a retrospective interview with Ross (Stephen Rowe), a television journalist. The fact that Martin’s interviewer is coincidentally his oldest friend and closest confidant is another way of reassuring us that no unruly breezes are going to muss this carefully arranged Broadway pompadour. (That Ross himself sets up the television camera for his program, “People Who Matter,” and saves the producer an additional Equity salary, might be another commercial indicator.) “Let them think they’re seeing Mary, Mary,” Albee once said to the cast of Everything in the Garden, an earlier attempt to subvert the moral and aesthetic assumptions of his audience. And for the first twenty minutes of The Goat, we seem to be watching, if not Mary, Mary then certainly its contemporary equivalent in vacuousness. It is not long, however, before the evening transgresses into Joe Orton territory, building its humor on the infinite varieties of sexual misbehavior. One of the conventions of this genre is that the audience must always be one step ahead of the characters. And the majority of people with tickets to The Goat surely come to the theatre aware (though Ross is still unaware) of the secret that drives the action—namely, that Martin has fallen madly in love with a goat who, we eventually learn, is just as wild about him. (She looks at Martin with her wet eyes and nuzzles his face with her snout.) This animal is called Sylvia, the name of Valentine’s love in Two Gentlemen of Verona. The subtitle is only one of many references to Shakespeare’s fourth act song to her (“Who is Sylvia, what is she,/ That all our swains commend her?”), except that in this play the “what” is more important than the “who” and the swain is from a different species. It eventually dawns on you that the crucial question of the play is not who or

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what is Sylvia, but who or what is the actual goat. It may be us. Albee certainly spends a good deal of energy upending theatrical expectations and conventions, partly through cross references and self-references. It is typical that the play mentions a big girl named Alice—“Large Alice?” asks one of the characters, nodding towards one of the author’s most famous titles. (By morbid coincidence, Irene Worth, the extraordinary actress who originated the part of Tiny Alice, died on the night The Goat opened.) Ross eventually wangles Martin’s secret from him, that this immaculately faithful husband has been having an affair. But not until the double entendres about Sylvia’s identity have been allowed to accumulate exponentially does he learn who “she” is. Martin hands Ross a photograph of the creature that has captured his heart, leading to the blackout line of the first scene, “This is a goat . . . you’re fucking a goat!” The same line is Stevie’s opening salvo in the second scene of the play. Ross has blown the whistle on Martin to his wife who, along with her gay son, Billie (played by Jeffrey Carlson), must now begin to process the information that her husband, “a decent right-thinking liberal generous man . . . right now appears to be fucking a goat.” Albee is not the first to dramatize this kind of ovine relationship. In Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Gene Wilder has a thing for a sheep which he keeps in a hotel room, dressed in garter belt and panties, until his wife storms in with a photographer. But this was a single episode in a movie. The Goat is a full length play, and the witticisms Albee proceeds to squeeze from the same idea are numerous enough to be tedious. For example, Stevie is told it was best to hear about Martin’s bestiality from a dear friend. “As opposed to what?,” she asks, “The ASPCA?” She admits to failure in that “I am a human being. I have two breasts. I walk upright. I give milk only on special occasions.” She detects an odd smell on her husband—“your mistress’s perfume?” She concedes she has “never had an affair. Not even with a cat.” When Martin confesses that his passion for Sylvia sent him into a therapy group, Stevie inquires whether it was called “Goatfuckers Anonymous.” As her husband hangs his head in shame, Mercedes Ruehl fires off a series of verbal fusillades so forcefully and explosively that she seems to be staking out the part of Martha (a part she’s already played) in the next revival of Virginia Woolf. Indeed, the way Ruehl begins to smash every priceless object in the house after each of Martin’s incriminating revelations is itself a masterly course for actors in how to time stage business and handle stage props. Once again demonstrating that he is at his most eloquent speaking through

Goat Song

the mouth of an angry woman, Albee seems to have settled in for an evening of linguistic pyrotechnics, making the play an occasion for Stevie to vent her rage and express his wit. Having begun with a preposterous premise, Albee appears to get carried away in an endless stream of invective about how preposterous it actually is. But just when you are beginning to wiggle impatiently in your seat, Albee surreptitiously, subtly, slyly manages to shift The Goat from a sex comedy about bestiality into a wrenching examination of what Lionel Trilling once called “passion love.” It was in the course of analyzing Nabokov’s Lolita (a novel Albee adapted to the stage) that Trilling observed how amorous emotions directed towards a forbidden sex object can often be more powerful than “normal” feelings among consenting adults. Martin’s unbridled passion for a goat, like Humbert Humbert’s uncontrollable lust for an underage girl, begins to take on the dimension of a grande amour. It represents the spiritual bond, though sexual in nature, that exists between animal and man. That theme is implicit in this exchange: “It isn’t about fucking” (Martin). “Yes, it is . . . It’s about you being an animal” (Stevie). “I thought we all were” (Martin). Completing her demolition of every plate and art object in the house, Stevie bangs out of the house, shouting: “You have brought me down, you goatfucker, you love of my life.” I believe that Albee is attempting to make tragedy out of what is usually treated (by him as well) as a dirty joke. In the final scene he almost succeeds. Talking to his gay son, with whom he has not been communicating very well, Martin admits that he has been in love only twice in his life—“with your mother and Sylvia.” After he confesses his fears that he and his wife have killed each other, the father and son hug. The son kisses his father on the lips. Martin recoils, but later reveals to Ross, who saw them kissing, that he once had an erection holding his baby son on his lap. The conventionally minded Ross is appalled (“Is there anything you people don’t get off on?”). But in failing to see that forbidden erotic longings can be described but not circumscribed by moral judgments, Ross turns out to be the villain, the Judas, of the price. In a shocking entrance, Stevie returns, dragging a corpse behind her in a sheet. It is the body of Sylvia whom she has killed “because she loved you.” Martin is in deep grief. All he can say is “I’m sorry.” And the remarkable thing is that we are sorry too, some of us anyway, to see this limp prop on stage, this mockup of a beloved dead animal. After all the double entendres and domestic raillerie and broken crockery and contrived plotting, Albee has managed to squeeze some tragic emotions out of the love of a man for a goat.

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I think this play reaches the reverse Miltonic goal that Albee failed to achieve in The Man with Three Arms. It manages to justify the ways of “deviant” man to God. Racine did a similar thing in Phèdre when he set out to evoke sympathy, and generate pity and terror, out of a passionate woman’s “criminal” love for her stepson. That Albee realizes this through the agency of a smoothly produced and (by David Esbjornson) sharply directed Broadway wit comedy makes his achievement all the more impressive. The Goat is far from a great play. But it is a play that sneaks up on you, shakes you by the shoulders, and demands your reluctant respect. 

Comedy Is Harder: Private Lives; The Underpants

There is an old story about a dying vaudevillian whose family is gathered around his bed while the old man wheezes and gasps for his last breath. “Poor Dad, poor Dad, dying is hard,” says his son. “Yes,” replies the vaudevillian, “Dying is hard. Comedy is harder.” Noel Coward’s career was dedicated to making comedy look easy, even facile, a kind of dry verbal concoction that coated the tongue like sour patch candy. Private Lives, in its current rehabilitation at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, is the most accomplished of these bittersweet confections. It is also Coward’s most gossamer play, and the one most likely to evaporate in the process of performance. John Lahr, the critic whose Coward the Playwright is the locus classicus of Coward scholarship, quotes another admiring Coward critic prophesying that “within a few years, the student of drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of Private Lives wondering what on earth those fellows in  saw in so flimsy a trifle.” And yet here we are, more than seven decades later in post–September th America, being entertained by a comic soufflé with no plot, no characters, no theme, and no apparent purpose other than to consolidate its author’s reputation for witty sangfroid. 77

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You can see why the morally earnest, socially conscious, politically engaged radicals of the thirties found Coward’s characters to be the very essence of callous sophistication and heartless aestheticism. There is a typical moment in Private Lives when Amanda and Elyot, pursuing a kind of metaphysical chic, discuss the possibility of life after death: : Don’t you believe in—? (He nods upwards) : No, do you?  (Shaking his head ): No. What about—? (Points downwards) : Oh dear no. : Don’t you believe in anything? : Oh yes, I believe in being kind to everybody, and giving money to old beggar-women, and being as gay as possible.

This is so shallow that it is almost profound. Such passages made Coward an extremely easy mark for impassioned rhetoric about the political purblindness of the upper classes. On the first night of their twin honeymoons, Elyot and Amanda blow off their newly married spouses with as much indifference to their feelings as they show to their own responsibilities. Aside from pitching pennies at the needy and “being kind to everybody,” they are endowed with no purpose in life whatsoever. We do not know how they got their money or how they kill their time, except for honeymoons on the beaches of the French Riviera or ski trips down the slopes of St. Moritz while formulating epigrams. Lahr characterizes this sort of thing as the very embodiment of Camp, of life as a game or a charade; but it is actually the flip side of a deep sentimentality. The same Coward who imagined people lounging in silk dressing gowns, or sipping cocktails on the patios of posh beach hotels while chattering about the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, was capable of the most saccharine expressions of patriotism. In wartime films such as In Which We Serve, he combined swelling Hail Britannia speeches with the most tremulous tributes to the noble qualities of the English lower classes (usually played by John Mills). Having discharged my own responsibilities to the importance of being earnest, let me now admit that we probably have no choice but to enjoy Private Lives on its own terms—as a play that exults in its total lack of a public dimension. Coward’s acerbic wit, his submerged sensibility, and his clipped semantics actually had a profound influence on the styles of virtually all the English dramatists who followed him, including Pinter and Osborne, Stoppard and Frayn. He was the one stylist who linked the past and the future of English drama.

Comedy Is Harder

Indeed, if one can ignore the really stunning scope of its superficiality, even Private Lives takes on a certain historical dimension. It is the culmination of a whole genre of love comedy, beginning with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, continuing through Congreve’s The Way of the World, and climaxing with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. In all those plays, the objective of the central characters is to find some way to express their romantic feelings without losing their reputations as wits. Like Benedict and Beatrice, or Mirabel and Millamant, or Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, Amanda and Elyot are so clearly meant for each other that it takes a tremendous amount of authorial ingenuity to keep them apart until the final curtain. Coward’s hero and heroine are divorced, but (in a familiar example of the coincidences that drive this play) they meet again on the balconies of adjoining hotel suites where they are honeymooning with the twits they married. It is evident within minutes that they will abandon their new spouses and renew their old relationship. Coward fills the interstices with reenactments of the epic battles that separated them in the first place, alternating with a few tender reprises of his cocktail hour song, “Somewhere I’ll Find You.” (“Change partners and dance” might have been more appropriate theme music.) Noel Coward wrote this play for himself and Gertrude Lawrence. The current replacements pay homage to their predecessors without the deference of imitation. For Coward’s raised eyebrow, Alan Rickman substitutes a deeply curled lip; for Lawrence’s slightly dotty insouciance, Lindsay Duncan provides a peaches-and-cream sophistication. These two accomplished English actors were last seen on our stage being equally unfaithful to each other and other lovers in Liaisons Dangereuses (also directed by Howard Davies). Since then, they have ripened into a couple with the finesse of experienced dancers in a play that resembles a ballet even more than it does a drama. Rickman’s film roles, which include a variety of cosmopolitan villains, have exposed an edge of menace the comic side of which he hones here. His legato baritone, issuing from interior regions without any apparent sign of articulation by his lips, is a splendid instrument for Coward one-liners like “Certain women should be struck regularly—like a gong” (matching his response to Amanda’s “Whose yacht is that? . . . I wish I were on it”—“I wish you were too”). Duncan brings to the stage some of the wry helpless wisdom that made Madeleine Carroll so appealing in The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is she who carries the more dangerous stuff of the play—namely its sincerity, an excess of which

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can be death to this kind of comedy. Emma Fielding and Adam Godley as Sibyll and Victor, the underwritten stick figures of the evening, perform with heroic commitment to the physical and intellectual stiffness of their characters. At some point, Amanda says: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” The same tribute can be paid to the potency of superficial wit comedies. If comedy is hard, farce is even harder, so it is pleasant to report that the Classic Stage Company is doing a lovely job with Steve Martin’s adaptation of Carl Sternheim’s early twentieth-century work The Underpants. The Underpants belongs to a farcical genre that draws explosive consequences out of a single crashingly trivial event, a process suggested by the titles of such plays as Scribe’s A Glass of Water and Sardou’s A Scrap of Paper. Another famous example of the genre is Eugene Labiche’s classic The Italian Straw Hat where massive social confusion (similar to the mere mention of a “bald soprano” in Ionesco’s play) is caused by a horse having eaten a lady’s hat. In Sternheim’s comedy, the engine of the plot is that the heroine, Louise Maske, inadvertently spent two seconds in broad daylight with her underpants around her ankles in public view of a lot of people, including “His Royal Highness.” (This gaffe is foreshadowed, in Scott Pask’s charming Bedermeier set, by an act curtain composed of white, pink, and beige women’s lingerie that, to the accompaniment of the overture to Lohengrin, drops to the floor at the beginning of the action.) Louise’s pompous husband Theo, a remarkably straitlaced bourgeois, is convinced that he will be blamed for the shame that has befallen his family. Although Louise believes that nobody noticed, the parade of suitors who come to lease the room the couple have up for rent suggests otherwise (“Never underestimate the power of a glimpse of lingerie,” her frantic husband shouts). Among these amorous Sternheim swains—most of them rebaptized by the adaptor with whimsical names—are the Byronic poet Versati (elegantly played in the manner of the young Olivier by Christian Camargo); a self-protective Jew (Lee Wilkof ) who spells Cohen with a K and “kosher” with a C while amending his “oys” to “ays”; and an old man Steve Martin has named Klinglehoff (William Duell) who tells everyone that he suffers from constipation (“but that’s my business”). And in the midst of all this farcical derring-do, Louise is experiencing something of a sexual awakening. As played with exquisite Chinadoll delicacy by Cheryl Lynn Bowers, always looking up at the ceiling with her fingers extended as if to catch some bird on the wing, Louise has the precarious innocence of a Restoration country wife. By the end of the play, it (her innocence) will be surrendered to the King and all the others who are sharing her

Comedy Is Harder

rented room. Byron Jennings as Theo Maske, a German burgher whose plastered hair gives him some resemblance to Hitler, finally settles into subtlety after a beginning that is a little too aggressive and loud for the size of the house. That is to say, Jennings finally begins to play the farce rather than simply demonstrate it. (Kristine Nielsen as Louise’s upstairs friend sometimes suffers from the same problem before making a nice recovery into reality.) Farce requires an absolute if exaggerated commitment to truth, which is why it is such a maddeningly difficult form. In a production that represents Barry Edelstein’s best work thus far as a director, the version of the play by Steve Martin is a classic lesson in adaptation. Like Woody Allen, Martin likes to drop the names of philosophers and intellectuals (as he did in Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which featured Pablo Picasso in colloquy with Albert Einstein, later joined by Elvis Presley). Here he makes occasional references to Nietzsche, Wagner, and even Carl Sternheim (returning from one of his plays, a character says, “Very funny; it needs to be adapted”) which lend a piquant concreteness to this classical farce. Add to the mix his generous helpings of hilarious sexual innuendo and you have an evening that works on you like a tonic. In such accomplished hands, only dying seems hard. 

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Prescient Plays: Far Away; A Number

There ought to be a category for dramatic works—let’s call them prescient plays—that foretell significant changes, whether in society, or in social philosophy, or merely in theatre itself. Ibsen’s A Doll House, to take the obvious example, prophesied a future of emancipated womanhood through a new form of domestic realism; Strindberg’s The Father used a powerful mix of classicism and naturalism in order to forecast the debilitating effects of female liberation on male identity; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, through his innovative technique of indirect action, predicted the Russian revolution of , perhaps even the Bolshevik revolution of ; Pirandello’s Right You Are dramatized a breakdown in the boundaries between illusion and reality, in a theatrical foreshadowing of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Even such ancient plays as Euripides’ Bacchae and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore can be interpreted as harbingers of the counterculture and the sexual revolution, which is why both works were so popular on American stages during the sixties and seventies. A fine example of the prescient play is Caryl Churchill’s Far Away at the New York Theatre Workshop (in association with the Royal 82

Prescient Plays

Court). Churchill has been writing this kind of prophecy for at least three decades. I first came upon her work thirty years ago while reviewing theatre for the London Observer—a piece called Owners about the usurious rack rents being gouged out of the poor by London landlords. Conventional enough on the surface, Owners had something fierce and incendiary boiling in its gut. In fact, the writing impressed me enough to request a meeting with the young dramatist where I tried to cheer her up over the rather tepid reviews she had been getting in the other newspapers. In the intervening years, Churchill has emerged, to my mind, as the most plastic English playwright of her generation—more versatile than the minimalist Harold Pinter, more profound than the intellectual skywriter Tom Stoppard, more unpredictable than the locked liberal David Hare. If she is less appreciated, that may be because she is not so easy to identify, being always ahead of the game in her style and subject matter: the arbitrariness of women in power throughout the centuries (Top Girls); the inequities of the English class system and the rigidity of conventional sexual roles (Cloud Nine); the rapacity of the London Stock Exchange (Serious Money), dramatized in Elizabethan blank verse. Lately she has grown more interested in formal experimentation, not always to the best effect (her recent effort at modern myth-making, The Skriker, for example, struck me as almost completely inert and incomprehensible). Far Away is another experiment in form, surely one of her most oblique and enigmatic works, yet also one of her most tantalizing. The drop curtain—a cartoon countryside with a moon—promises an idyllic fable, and so does the voice singing “Far far away, there is a happy land,” which, along with the sound of lapping water, accompanies the rise of the curtain. On stage sitting in an armchair is a middle-aged woman named Harper (Frances McDormand), cutting out pages from a magazine. Soon she is joined by Joan, a sweet little girl in a white nightgown (Gina Rose, alternating performances with Alexa Eisenstein). Joan is convinced that she is hearing night noises. Half illuminated by shafts of Rick Fisher’s eerie painterly lighting, Joan could be a figure from a domestic play, say Member of the Wedding, begging her mother for a bedtime story, say Goodnight Moon. Harper, who turns out to be not her mother but her aunt, tries to find ways to comfort the little girl (“It’s always odd in a new place”). But their brief terse exchanges reveal that the woman and the girl have radically different views of what is happening outside. As Joan confesses more and more of what she has heard (“It was a man screaming”) and what she has witnessed (“I saw my uncle pushing someone in the shed”), Harper’s consolations are gradually shown to

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be shams and coverups. People are being loaded out of a lorry, some, including a child, are being hit with a stick, there is blood in the backyard—each revelation contradicts Harper’s trumped-up explanation (“He was putting a sack in the shed,” “Your uncle is helping these people,” “That’s where the dog got run over”). At the end Harper can only say, “You’re part of a big movement now to make things better.” In the succeeding scenes, Joan, grown into a mature woman, is working in a hat workshop, beside another worker named Todd. The creations she molds, blocks, and dyes (strikingly conceived by the costume designer, Catherine Zuber) become increasingly fantastical as the scenes riffle by, until that moment when the purpose of all this creative millinery is made manifest. In an extraordinary coup de théâtre, what seems like an endless parade of men, women, and children, chained at the legs with numbers on their grey convict uniforms, march down a flight of stairs in groups of five to the accompaniment of deafening band music. Above them, a group of note-taking judges evaluates the quality of the hats the departing convicts are wearing over their bowed heads. In the next scene, we learn that Joan has won the competition. We also learn that all of the hats have been incinerated (“You make beauty and it disappears”), along with all of the convicts who had been wearing them. “It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies,” remarks Joan, to which Todd answers, “No, that’s the joy of it. The hats are ephemeral. It’s like a metaphor for something or other.” It is, indeed, a metaphor for something or other, and that something or other grows increasingly monstrous and threatening in the phantasmagoric final scene. We are back in Harper’s living room. Water is dripping into a bucket. Harper, now an old woman, tells Todd, now Joan’s husband, “You were right to poison the wasps.” Wasps are the enemies of their allies, the horses, and butterflies may be involved too. Cats have come in on the side of the French and are killing babies in China. On the other hand, crocodiles are a subject of dispute. Harper knows they are evil, and accuses Todd of being on “the other side” when he disagrees. Both conclude that although deer were once hateful (“they burst out of parks and storm down from mountains and terrorize shopping malls”), they have now come over to the right side, their natural goodness shining through their soft brown eyes. When Joan comes in, she reports that the weather is on the side of the Japanese. Gravity, pins, heroin, chainsaws, grass are all on the wrong side. Maybe even the river. Everything on the planet, whether animate or inanimate, has divided into sides in a war that has literally grown worldwide.

Prescient Plays

Churchill wrote this play two years ago, probably thinking of Bosnia and Serbia. Today the play inspires thoughts of Islamic fundamentalists and their war on the West, of George Bush and his “evil axis,” of the Tutsis and the Hutus, the Pakistanis and the Hindus, the Palestinians and the Israelis, indeed of the way the entire globe is dividing up into Us and The Other. Churchill’s fifty-minute play, mostly well-acted under Stephen Daldry’s meticulous direction, may be the ultimate paranoid fantasy. But like so many paranoid fantasies it is quickly becoming a deadly accurate description of modern life on this planet. 

Caryl Churchill’s A Number (at the New York Theatre Workshop) is another prescient play, a haunting new work that takes you around the moral universe in eighty minutes. Churchill’s theatrical purpose has always been essentially political and polemical on the surface, human and poetic at the core. Her new play is about the cloning of human beings, but instead of rehearsing the ethical debates of artificial replication, she manages to make this explosive subject into a moving domestic tragedy. What emerges out of a series of impressionistic telegraphic exchanges between a father and his three sons, only one of them born of woman, is a profound examination of human frailty and loss. Salter (Sam Shepard), dissatisfied with the twisted nature of his four-year-old son Bernard  (Dallas Roberts), sends him away “into care” to be replaced in his affections by Bernard  (Dallas Roberts), a genetic duplicate. Unbeknownst to Salter, the doctors have generated “a number” of these “things,” and Salter is thinking of suing the hospital for a large sum of money. A repressed, lonely, and deeply duplicitous individual, Salter has been living a lie with Bernard  for thirty-five years. The first scene of the play brings the crucial revelation, after the son’s visit to the cloning hospital, that he is not Salter’s natural child, indeed that there were nineteen others “in the batch.” Unconsciously parodying Arthur Miller, Bernard  tells his father: “They’re all your sons” (Bernard happens to be a name that also appears in Death of a Salesman). But Salter can only think about how much in damages his lawyer will ask the hospital for stealing his son’s genetic material. In the second scene, Salter sees the first Bernard again, after an absence of thirty-five years, and one begins to understand why he wanted to replace him with a clone. Bernard  is a sullen, angry, and vindictive individual (though it is

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a weakness in the play to assume that Salter would already have regarded a fouryear-old child as “a disgusting little thing” ready to be discarded). Are Bernard’s violent qualities the result of a genetic inheritance or of his mother’s suicide under a subway train and his father’s cruelty in locking him up in a closet whenever he shouted? How much do we owe to nature and how much to nurture? For me, the play explores the Ibsenite issue of how the past impacts upon the present, and to what extent our actions are determined by our genes. Considering the contrast between the gentle Bernard  and the merciless Bernard , who ends up murdering him, there is little question where the author stands on this complex subject of individual identity. The play ends with a visit by Michael Black (Dallas Roberts again), yet another clone of Bernard , who by now has killed himself as well. To Salter, this cheery new figure, married with three children, is a total stranger who nevertheless bears his DNA. The poignant last scene finds Salter, having lost two sons, desperately trying to find a path into his relationship with another child. But there is nothing between them, not even any shared bitterness over the replication (cloning makes Michael feel he belongs), and Salter is left, a tragic, abandoned figure, lost in a vacuum of his own making, mourning both the replicant and the true son: “I miss him so much. I miss them both.” Eugene Lee’s minimal set turns the entire auditorium into a medical theatre where we sit watching Churchill and her actors dissect their subject. The director, James Macdonald, gets an intense performance out of Sam Shepard, his lined, forlorn Gary Cooper features clenched in an attitude of bafflement and remorse, and out of Dallas Roberts, playing all the sons with the kind of variety that suggests even clones have value, that whatever our genetic inheritance, we are all of us discrete and unknowable individuals. 

Clever Ladies: Imaginary Friends; Adult Entertainment

Nora Ephron, a clever lady writer, has used a famous dispute between two other clever lady writers, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, to compose an exercise in female war games called Imaginary Friends (Ethel Barrymore Theater). Staged by Jack O’Brien, who gave us Hairspray, and featuring songs by Marvin Hamlisch, who gave us A Chorus Line, Imaginary Friends must have seemed like a surefire Broadway biopic about artistic rivalry—a kind of contemporary Vincent or Amadeus, studded with song and dance. But a lot more than hijinks and high kicks are needed to explain why these two women found themselves locked in such an implacable public display of hairpulling. In her witty and touching novel Heartburn, Ephron wrote about the pain of an adulterous marriage from the perspective of personal experience. Here she is reconstructing a notorious literary scrap mostly on the basis of hearsay and homework. Stuffed in the program is a “Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy Timeline,” which sketches the key events in the lives of her two heroines. The play merely recapitulates those events without theatricalizing them, substituting external87

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ized history for thematic coherence or character insight. This makes Imaginary Friends a pastiche of imaginary dialogues and selected quotations from two literary women who have written about themselves far more cogently than the playwright who has conjured them on stage, and without resorting to gratuitous musical and choreographic routines. I knew both these women in the last decades of their lives, Lillian better than Mary. Ephron’s characters bear no more than a surface resemblance to the originals. The same is true of the women who play them, though this is hardly the fault of Swoosie Kurtz (Lillian) or Cherry Jones (Mary), both gifted performers. The playwright has simply not provided her actors with sufficient surgical tools to penetrate the outer skins of their characters. From their first appearance on stage smoking cigarettes while posing back-to-back in identical checked suits, it is clear that something essential has been lost in translation to the stage. Like previous Hellman impersonators—Zoe Caldwell, Elaine Stritch, Linda Lavin—Kurtz wears a teased bouffant wig (Lillian’s public trademark, along with her chain-smoking and her Blackgama mink), while Jones sports McCarthy’s patented dark-lady bangs. But missing from Kurtz’s confident strut and theatrical poise is the fake apologetics that always preceded Lillian’s vituperative monologues. (“Forgive me, but . . .” she would say before spraying some hapless victim with vitriol.) Nor is there any sense of how she became more acid and bitter as she grew more blind and feeble. Similarly, one can detect little of McCarthy’s feral bite under Jones’s charming smile (Mary shared that toothy grin with her actor brother Kevin). More serious, despite generous citations from the literary works of both women, Ephron gives us little sense of their style or intellect. Lillian has anger, Mary has honesty. Lillian is a liar, Mary is a bitch. Lillian is a Stalinist, Mary is a Trotskyite. They first meet at Sarah Lawrence College. Many years later, Mary famously questions Lillian’s veracity on the Dick Cavett show (“Everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”). Lillian sues, but dies before she can collect damages. Mary dies soon after. End of story. What fill the interstices between these skeletal events are essentially three kinds of stuffing: perfunctory Broadway show numbers, literary name-dropping, and unconvincing psycho-history. When we are taken to New Orleans to witness scenes from Hellman’s childhood (drawn from her memoir An Unfinished Woman), we tap our feet to the “Bay Street Rag,” performed by a quartet of ragtime singers and dancers. When we travel to Seattle to empathize with Mary’s orphaned past (drawn from her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood ), the nostalgic period music is interrupted for scenes of family abuse. Childhood

Clever Ladies

events, in fact, are presented as the psychological keys to the whole course of the women’s later lives, perhaps even as explanations of their later quarrels. Mary’s uncle beats her brother over the presumed theft of a Cracker Jack toy, thus inflicting psychic harm on his sister. Lillian is so distressed overhearing her father making love to another woman that she falls out of a tree on her nose. (What drops from the tree, actually, is a life-size puppet, an inappropriate and overused Bunraku device.) Soon we are whisked to a New York café, where, to the tune of a number called “A Smoke, a Drink, and You” (sung and danced by barkeeps), we are introduced to the local literati. “The usual, Mr. Hammett?” queries a bartender, highlighting Dash’s drunken relationship with Lillian. Edmund Wilson pops by, to give us a taste of his abusive marriage to Mary. Another former McCarthy lover, Philip Rahv, employing a comic Russian accent that bears no resemblance to the incoherent growl of a critic whom Saul Bellow once likened to “a frog on a log,” is overheard dropping the names of Marx, Freud, and Einstein. The rest of the lockstep parade follows—James T. Farrell, Stephen Spender, Harold Taylor, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal, among others—all identified in the same desultory manner as movie stars at the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, the play keeps circling around the same key events, around the same liar/bitch charges, and finally climaxes with the identification of “Julia,” the wartime heroine whom Lillian claims to have helped in her heroic exploits (Anne Pitoniak in a quiet cameo). She is a psychoanalyst who never met Hellman in her life. Following a damp coda during which Mary and Lillian reflect on how they might have been real rather than imaginary friends (imagined by Efron), they kiss, hug, and pass into the soggy Broadway night. The fact is that these women could never have been close friends because one, despite some stylish memoirs, was essentially a middlebrow playwright, while the other, despite some Mandarin fiction, was essentially a highbrow critic. These cultural differences were reinforced by profound political and personal differences. Mary was beautiful; Lillian only thought she was. Lillian became an American feminist icon, despite her dislike for feminism; Mary, who spent much of her life abroad, was relatively unappreciated beyond a small intellectual circle. Lillian never quite threw off the illusion that the Soviet Union represented the future of human society, while Mary believed it to be one of the greatest tyrannies in human history. In one thing, however, they were alike. Neither would have appreciated the reductive way their essentially divergent lives have been forced into symbiosis on the commercial stage. Elaine May is not just another clever lady, she is an extremely witty one, who

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also has a play running in New York. It is called Adult Entertainment (Variety Arts) and, until losing its steam towards the end of the first act, this satiric reply to Boogie Nights is a genuinely funny show. May’s conceit is to imagine a resident movie company formed out of a bunch of porn stars and fluffers, directed by a regional theater graduate of the Yale Drama School. Gerry DiMarco (Brandon Demery) will oversee the artistic development of these sexual contortionists by exposing them to the highlights of his dramatic literature syllabus. And the company will save production money “by only working with each other and not having to get tested every two weeks.” These performers—veterans of such epics as “Between Her Legs” and “Saving Ryan’s Privates” and “Hanna Bell Licked Her” (say that one aloud)—include Frosty Moons, played by May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin in a narcotic daze; Heidi-the-Ho, the voluptuous hostess of a public-access porno talk show, played by Linda Halaska; Guy Akens, the brother of a recently dead director of erotic movies, played by Danny Aiello in a deadpan glowering rage; Vixen Fox, who has had an artistic breakthrough as a result of her “willingness to go anal,” played by Mary Birdsong; and Jimbo J, the generously endowed star of Jumbo, recently nominated for Best Group and Best Anal, played by Eric Elice with a coral necklace and a perpetual erection. Gerry, the Yale director, gives the cast daily assignments in Marlowe, Wilder, Flaubert, and Yeats (“Don’t read Harold Bloom or Wittgenstein until I tell you,” he warns), hoping to make them behave like artists in “a Merchant and Ivory porn movie.” Before long, they have assimilated Our Town into the working script (“They embrace and blah blah blah until Tina goes down on him”) and are soon dreaming of picking up prizes in Cannes. What this amounts to is a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch. Unfortunately, May needs to keep the customers seated past the commercials, so she adds a plot about how Jimbo attempts suicide because he can’t bear the fact that Emily (in Our Town) is dead. Gerry talks Jimbo down from the open window, after which the entire cast, most of them on poppers, pull themselves together to enact the myth of Daedalus in revealing and removable Greek costumes, no doubt in hopes of winning the Palme d’Or. Adult Entertainment is written, acted, and directed (by Stanley Donen, the genius responsible for Anchors Aweigh and Singin’ in the Rain) with style and verve. But it’s disappointing that a tasty fifteen-minute canape about the artistic pretensions of porn stars has been bloated into a ninety-minute meal about show biz kids getting the curtain up against all odds. 

Creations: Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night; Take Me Out; Our Lady of 121st Street

Theatre is a series of creations, but so are the reputations of theatre artists—and making these reputations has traditionally been the charge of theatre critics. Consider the case of Simon Russell Beale, recently anointed as England’s greatest living actor. That reputation was wholly created by the New York Times’s Ben Brantley. Having now seen Beale in five major roles, all of them (except his Hamlet) directed by Sam Mendes, I must express some puzzlement over his exalted place in the theatrical pantheon. Beale is a technically proficient actor with the emotional range of, say, Peter Ustinov, whom he somewhat resembles. Like Ustinov’s, his comic talents are considerable, but even in a time when the English stage has grown so impoverished, does Beale really deserve the crown of England’s greatest living actor? Are his measurements ample enough to wear the Marlovian cape of Anthony Sher? Can his Hamlet seriously be compared with that of Ralph Fiennes? Who has the greater heart for challenging the heavens in King Lear—Beale or (my own choice for England’s greatest living actor) Michael Gambon? Never, to my mind, has an actor been so consistently miscast in so many major roles. 91

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Beale is miscast again as the title character in Uncle Vanya (Brooklyn Academy of Music), playing the part with all the depth of a Kensington Court couturier blowing fits over his window display. He whines, he snivels, he raises his eyes to the heavens—in mourning the loss of his ancestral estate, he could be lamenting a misplaced cufflink. Beale’s performance would have been more suitable to a play by Alan Ayckbourne, which is exactly what Vanya’s Brian Friel, who wrote this adaptation, was apparently trying to accomplish. His breezy “improvements” tend to bury Chekhov’s comic melancholy under a shower of interpolated witticisms (Vanya: “What’s that word?” Sonya: “Stirrup.” Vanya: “Looks like strumpet.”). Elena seems to be played not by an actress but by a very large hat; Sonya is so interior as to be inaudible; Astrov is a dapper, balding Lothario too vain to hate his moustache; Waffles is more preoccupied with his guitar than with his financial condition, and so forth. In the elegant companion production Twelfth Night, everyone seems on firmer ground. Beale’s Malvolio is a solid impersonation of a snooty self-loving English butler; Emily Watson is a touching Viola; the estimable David Bradley delivers a deliciously goofy Sir Andrew; Paul Jesson as an eructating Sir Toby Belch gives raucous significance to his last name; and Anthony O’Donnell brings strong musical gifts to the part of Feste. This pair of productions is obviously an effort to make the classics “accessible” and “natural.” But in Vanya Mendes has achieved this theoretically laudable goal at the cost of Chekhov’s dark and muscular lyricism. Like so many other British directors of Chekhov, Mendes colonializes Uncla Vanya as totally as Cecil Rhodes colonialized South Africa and Zimbabwe, converting a Russian tragi-comedy into an English comedy of manners. The British may have lost their Empire, but they still like to Anglicize other cultures—with the connivance of Yankee critics who have not yet thrown off the colonial yoke. I used to think Richard Greenberg’s reputation (“the American playwright of the decade”) had been wholly created by Donald Lyons and Frank Rich. Certainly, watching such overpraised gay comedies as Eastern Standard and The Dazzle made me feel that I was not just marching to a different drummer but dancing to a different tambourine. After seeing Take Me Out, however, I must blushingly concede that there is more to this writer than I realized. Anyway, his new play (a transfer from the Public Theatre to the Walter Kerr) is both amusing and engrossing—also pretty cheeky in the way it satirizes aggressive racial and sexual identities, including—and here Greenberg resembles Paul Rudnick—his own gay world. As its waggish title suggests, Take Me Out is about a homosexual baseball star

Creations

trying to function in a relentlessly heterosexual sport. The half-black, halfwhite home-run king Darren Lemming (Daniel Sunjata) has publicly admitted that he is gay—right after signing one of the most lucrative contracts in baseball history. This inevitably triggers a number of conflicting reactions in his teammates, from sympathy to alarm to downright hostility. One of the hostiles is a totally inarticulate redneck pitcher named Shane Mungitt, scarifyingly performed by Frederick Weller as a chinless wonder with an even more shrunken brain. Shane, a foundling unsure whether he hails from Tennessee or Arkansas or Mississippi, proceeds in a TV interview not only to insult his black and Latino teammates but to fulminate over having to take a shower every night with a “faggot.” That onstage locker room shower, complete with hot and cold running water, is featured not once but twice in this production where the audience gets the opportunity to compare a large variety of wet male members ranging from modest to mammoth. (Scouts from Vivid Videos will no doubt be stampeding the box office for weeks to come.) When a player drops a bar of soap the tension in the steamy air is palpable. The lofty Darren, on the other hand, seems to have no sexual interest in his teammates, or anyone else for that matter, until he meets a wispy financial advisor named Mason Marzac who worships his godlike client as much as the game he represents. In his growing appreciation for baseball, Mason functions as the author’s philosophical surrogate, calling it “the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society,” because in recognizing that someone has to lose, it restores our tragic sense of life. Mason is not only blessed with a Tocquevillian intelligence, he is performed with a heroic sense of brave and lonely despair by an actor named Denis O’Hare. O’Hare knows as well as anyone on stage today how to increase the pith of a juicy phrase with an offhand gesture or a self-deprecating look. Indeed, the entire cast, under Joe Mantello’s smart, nuanced, empathetic direction, is exemplary. But Mason is the one character who manages to show consistent intelligence, apart from the self-abnegating if overly loquacious narrator Kippy Sunderstrom (Neal Huff ), and Darrin’s best friend Davey Battle (Kevin Carroll), a black evangelist from a rival team. (Greenberg draws a lot of easy laughs out of the drained brain wattage of the average ballplayer.) But Davey is too zealous about his religious purity, and Kippy too bemused about his dimwitted teammates—and too disdainful of “people of pallor” (including himself )—to take center stage. (Kippy does have a nice moment translating the anguished utterances of a Japanese pitcher, without knowing a word of the language.) Mason, on the other hand, deserves a play to himself—the

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sissy always chosen last for the Little League team, picking the grass in the outfield while secretly worshipping the more muscular kids. Greenberg’s impeccable ear and wry sense of character make Take Me Out continuously engaging until he is forced to conclude the play with an unconvincing series of plot turns. The racist Shane overhears Darrin, infuriated by Davey’s moralism, tell his friend to “drop dead,” so, claiming “You told me to,” he throws Davey a bean ball that kills him. Such implausibility shakes one’s confidence in Greenberg’s control of his play, though he recovers after a strong scene in Shane’s prison cell where the pitcher, spewing hatred, is dragged out yelling, “I just want to throw.” In the final moments, Mason returns in a baseball uniform to receive Darrin’s World Series ring along with promises of a future relationship. Looking nostalgically around the empty field, like a major leaguer ready to decamp for Florida, he asks the classic post-season question: “What will we do till spring?” In Take Me Out, America’s national sport is being viewed through gay binoculars by a playwright devoted both to extolling baseball and to subverting its conventional notions of masculinity. It is not a great play, but it is a very entertaining one, and it is receiving a production that renews one’s faith in American ensemble acting. So, by the way, does another powerful play in a potent production, Our Lady of st Street by Stephen Adly Guirgis. None of the people associated with this venture is familiar to me, with the exception of the director Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom I know primarily as an excellent actor. But the company of players, directors, designers, and producers that calls itself the LAByrinth Theatre Company is already the equal of the best existing small urban theatres— Steppenwolf, say, or the Atlantic Theatre Company—with the difference that LAByrinth is composed of a splendid array of Latino, black, gay, and white actors, perhaps the first major multicultural permanent ensemble in the United States. As for the playwright, I am tempted to use the same hyperbole I have been criticizing. Guirgis has the potential to become one of our most powerful writers for the stage, providing he’s not wasted doing scripts for NYPD Blue or Law and Order. Of Irish/Egyptian descent, Guirgis has an uncanny ear for the rhythms and idioms of all kinds of urban speech, whether black, Latino, gay, or ethnic. And while he credits John Patrick Shanley as an influence, he owes his gift for obscene poetry to David Mamet, along with his approach to form (the stacatto two-character scene structure of Our Lady seems to me influenced by Glengarry Glen Ross). More importantly, in his capacity to paint a large

Creations

canvas of underclass life, Guirgis displays some of the emotional range and Catholicism-soaked vision that O’Neill displayed in The Iceman Cometh. These are admittedly big models with which to compare a fledgling playwright, but he obviously has large ambitions, and he may be positioned to fulfill them. Our Lady is a play that gradually, subtly, inexorably investigates the consequences of a world without faith. The scene is the waiting room of a funeral parlor in lower Harlem, an institutional set designed by Narelle Sessions that somehow reminds one of Harry Hope’s saloon. A number of mourners have come to pay their respects to Sister Rose, a teaching nun who, despite her alcoholism, had a powerful spiritual impact on her students. But in the first scene we learn that her corpse has been stolen along with the trousers of one of the mourners. The search for this body takes on something of the quest for the Holy Grail (the corpse, or at least half of it, eventually turns up in the East River). But until it is found, the various characters, forced to examine the painful gap between their early hopes and what they have settled for, must come to terms with the limitations of their lives. These characters include, among others, a building superintendant totally devoted to his brain-damaged brother, a black woman whose philandering former husband has ruined their marriage, a cokehead Latina eaten up with rage, an overtly gay white actor and his covertly gay black lover, and a black detective who once failed to prevent his little boy from being raped and killed. These characters are all somehow connected together through degrees of separation. But the nexus of the play is two confessional scenes in which “Rooftop,” a black talk show host from L.A. (Ron Cephas Jones) eventually connects with Father Lux (Mark Hammer), a legless priest frightened by black people. While Rooftop is busy getting high in the confessional booth, the priest, impatient that this amiable hipster is confusing a “confessional” with a “conversational,” is trying to get rid of him. Rooftop’s relationship to the Catholic faith is marginal at best—“it’s not like you’ve got the most alluring marketing campaign going on these days either,” he observes. But the moment when the repentant Father Lux leads Rooftop through a silent Lord’s Prayer proves the most resonant scene in the play, and the most redemptive. Did I mention that Our Lady of st Street is very funny as well as very moving? There is no better medicine for an ailing theatre than a potent new talent engaged in an act of genuine artistic renewal. 

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Dysfunctional Families, Dysgenic Dynasties: Salome; Gypsy; Long Day’s Journey into Night

No doubt there are healthy families in the world but, outside of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, how often do you see them on the stage? Consider Oscar Wilde’s Salome. This overheated biblical tale, originally composed in French by a wit normally associated with epigrammatic comedies, could have been the model for Albee’s The Goat in the way it tries to revise our notions of “normal” sexuality. King Herod lusts after his stepdaughter, who in turn has the hots for John the Baptist (here called Jokanaan). When the prophet refuses to kiss her, Salome performs for Herod what may be the first striptease in recorded history, demanding for payment the decapitated head of the man who rejected her. Herod reluctantly agrees to her request, and she then spends an inordinate amount of time kissing Jokanaan’s bloody mouth and caressing his severed pate. Disgusted by the girl’s “monstrous” behavior, Herod has his soldiers smother Salome beneath their shields (“Kill that woman!”). In the current staged reading of the play at the Ethel Barrymore, a company from the Actors Studio, guided by its current artistic direc96

Dysfunctional Families

tor Estelle Parsons, has launched a performance that would have given Lee Strasberg a serious nosebleed. Ever since Parsons’ famous screaming fit in Bonnie and Clyde, it was clear that here was an actor willing to take that extra leap beyond conventional realism into the outer limits of behavior. Directing Salome, she brings the whole cast with her into this uncharted territory, offering no excuses for an essentially ludicrous play, but rather making a virtue of all of its excesses. Consider, for example, Al Pacino’s characterization of Herod the Tetrarch. After his minimalist work in The Godfather, Pacino first demonstrated in Scarface that he could also be an actor of almost Byzantine extravagance. Both his stage and movie performances have become increasingly operatic ever since. As Herod, Pacino suggests that his acting is not so much a search for new characters as it is a pastiche of highlights from past performances, not unlike a literary palimpsest or an artistic pentimento. Costumed in a tuxedo jacket, a Turkish vest, and a black silk shirt, Pacino’s Herod is certainly a recycled version of many recent roles, particularly Richard III and Richard’s modern counterpart, Arturo Ui. His hair tousled, his eyes asquint, his eyebrows raised, the Tetrarch Herod occupies his throne the way the mobster Arturo slouched in his chair—disheveled, derelict, edgy, nervous, fidgeting on his perch. Pacino has the capacity to appear very small on a piece of furniture, and the way he uses his long fingers to scratch his arms or grope his knees made me think that a primate, perhaps a chimpanzee, was a primary image for the role. Turning the act of sitting almost into an art unto itself, Pacino delivers Wilde’s Yellow Book prose in a manner that transforms awkward archaisms into divine comedy (“He raises the dead? I do not wish him to do that!”). Marisa Tomei as Salome exposes her navel and her urban accent—I looked in vain for her tattoo and cell phone. This is a girl who was obviously brought up in a New York borough, combining the petulance of an overindulged princess with the hauteur of an over-privileged debutante. She is also pretty crackers from her very first entrance. Still, Tomei, performing the dance of the seven veils with frenetic intensity, contributes a totally committed performance, one that, like Pacino’s, has the courage of its own absurdity. As for David Straitharn, stern and dignified as Jokanaan, and Diane Weist, smiling her Mona Lisa smile as the vindictive Herodias, both have the good sense to underplay in the face of Pacino and Tomei’s Sturm und Drang. The production is billed as a reading, and, apart from Salome’s wild dance, most of the cast does sit down throughout the evening, turning pages on a mu-

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sic stand. Since the show has been in rehearsal for several months, cynics might conclude this proves movie stars are unable to remember their lines. They would be wrong. While the actors do turn the pages, they rarely look at their scripts, and (mirabile dictu) none of the major performers mentions a single movie credit in the bio. All in all, this Salome is a worthy enterprise by actors committed to the stage and not afraid to look foolish on it. I came away admiring their grit, their courage, and their lunacy. Gypsy (at the Shubert Theatre) is one of those remakes that are dominating Time after Time Square these days. Some critics are calling it the ultimate Broadway musical, possibly because it so self-referential, show business regarding itself in a mirror. Gypsy brings us another of those dysfunctional families so dear to the stage, with the difference that this one is born on the stage. Basing his book on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, Arthur Laurents has turned her rags to G-string story into that of the ugly duckling who turns into a swanky swan. Mother Rose is determined to make Baby June a star of the vaudeville circuit (June, a.k.a. June Havoc, actually did become a star and later wrote a memoir too). “I had a dream,” Rose sings, unconscious of the gap between her ambitions and those of Martin Luther King, “a wonderful dream, Papa.” But after June runs off with one of the hoofers, her dream turns sour, and Mama is forced to turn her beady eyes on Louise. Showing little talent for vaudeville, Louise (later Gypsy Rose Lee) nevertheless manages to become the Salome of the burlesque circuit, albeit one who prefers not to drop the final veil. (Lying about my age, I was privileged to see this sophisticated, langorous stripper perform at Minsky’s when I was fourteen.) Laurents’ unsparing portrait of a ruthless stage mother, along with Jule Styne’s brassy score and Stephen Sondheim’s acid lyrics, are what raise this musical above the level of the usual Broadway kitsch, though it is not quite the masterpiece people have been told to expect. (On the night I saw it, the audience cheered Marvin Laird conducting the Gypsy overture as if he were Beethoven conducting the Leonora Overture ). Sam Mendes, the director, has staged the show with his customary theatrical efficiency, aided by an effective design team and the original choreography of Jerome Robbins. The action takes place in an empty backstage area full of discarded props and flats with their ribs showing (a lot of money has been spent to make the Shubert stage look empty). The geography is changed to the accompaniment of vaudeville placards, while June and Louise (whose act keeps them permanently fixed at the age of ten) change into adults to the accompaniment of whirring strobe lights, as per the original Robbins choreography.

Dysfunctional Families

From our first glimpse of a red striped show curtain we know we are in show biz heaven. Everything has been staged within an inch of its life, with enough sequins and spangles to decorate a thousand burlesque brassieres. Mendes, who has a talent for anatomizing flawed women, handles the hardbitten female characters with authority, especially Bernadette Peters, whose frayed singing voice was pretty unmodulated on the night I saw the show, but who acts Rose with a kind of stubborn unblinking power. She is also mighty good at catching Rose’s unapologetic provincialism (Herbie: “Don’t you know there’s a Depression?” Rose: “Of course I know; I read Variety! ”). Tammy Blanchard as Louise, moving from timidity to authority, is also persuasive, especially when she discovers with surprise that “I’m pretty, Mama.” And the three strippers (Heather Lee, Kate Buddeke, and Julie Halston), though purposely lacking in erotic appeal, nevertheless wring all the comedy out of the classic “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” Among the men, John Dossett has breezy charm as Rose’s preternaturally patient beau, Herbie, though he is forced to enact the most unconvincing plot twist in the evening—leaving Rose because she let Louise become a stripper. Ultimately, what distinguishes Laurents’ book, and what most moves the audience, is the complex mother-daughter relationship, climaxing in Rose’s realization that “Mama’s gotta let go.” By explaining Rose’s vicarious behavior as the act of someone who “just wanted to be noticed,” Laurents has managed to elicit sympathy for that most caricatured of women, the American stage mother. But too much of this musical is about show business feeling nostalgic about show business. Perhaps the ultimate dysfunctional family, if we discount those in Oedipus and Hamlet, are the four Tyrones in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. O’Neill knew them well since they were surrogates for his own family, and the painful composition of a play that was “written in tears and blood” was his way of exorcising family ghosts. O’Neill had been trying to write Greek tragedy for years. He finally succeeded with Long Day’s Journey because at last he had come to understand the nature of Destiny, how the past is linked to the present, not to mention the future too. As a result of this understanding, Long Day’s Journey may be the most relentlessly causal play ever written. A twitch in one character causes a spasm in the other; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If Tyrone hires a cheap doctor, Mary acquires a morphine addiction. If Edmund has literary gifts, Jamie feels like a failure and resents his brother. In the first act, the Tyrones seem to be a normal happy family. By the time day turns to fog-shrouded night,

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they have all unearthed each other’s secrets and proven Sartre’s conviction that “hell is other people.” There is a curse on the house of the Tyrones, whose origin lies elsewhere, with existence itself. The family is chained together by guilt, resentment, recrimination, and love. This kind of symbiosis obviously requires ensemble acting of the highest order and for three of its four acts the Goodman Theatre production (at the Plymouth Theatre) largely achieves it. Within Santo Loquasto’s cavernous Richardson-type set, lighted with chiaroscuro luminosity by Brian MacDevitt, Robert Falls directs a company that is unusually at ease with one another, even if they don’t always seem like members of the same tribe. Indeed, the mother of the family, Mary Tyrone, rarely even looks at the others. As played by the English actress Vanessa Redgrave, she is the most isolated character on stage, as well as the magnet of the evening. Grey-haired, wraith-like, and angular, her arthritically gnarled hands continually playing around her mouth, Redgrave gives a brilliant demonstration of the effects of drug addiction on a gentle soul, as well as of the extraordinary lengths a person will go to conceal it. The utter loneliness of the character is heartbreaking. And so is the latent anger she reveals when either nerves or memories turn her into a wild raging animal. The trouble is that having started at this high pitch, Redgrave has nowhere to go. The climactic “Ophelia’s mad scene,” when Mary descends the stairs holding her ancient wedding dress, wearing pigtails and talking like a very young girl, seems to be a replay of moments we have already seen, with the result that perhaps the most harrowing moment in the entire play leaves us dryeyed and unsatisfied. With the possible exception of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jamie, in fact, none of the cast manages to conquer the last act, which is constructed of four long excavations of pain. Although Brian Dennehy rarely persuades us that James Tyrone was once a great matinee idol, the actor (who grows with each of his stage roles) displays an engaging naturalistic lilt and considerable Irish charm. He is a pleasure to watch on stage as he snarfs out the humor of the play like a pig finding truffles. What he misses are the depths of the character, plumbed through drink and remorse over his compromised career (“What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder”). Nor does Robert Sean Leonard, as O’Neill’s surrogate Edmund, get a grasp on his elegaic fourth act speech, a sense memory of what it was like on shipboard, a feeling of walking on the bottom of the sea, in which O’Neill achieves the condition of poetry for the first time. Instead of reaching inside himself for the memories, Leonard reads the speech from a book as if it were something Edmund had already written for some future play.

Dysfunctional Families

Hoffman’s Jamie is, to my mind, the most completely realized performance of the lot. Looking a lot like an embryonic Willy Loman, which is to say very much Brian Dennehy’s son, Hoffman also shows us the seamy side of a downat-heels song and dance man. And he truly understands the ambivalence of Jamie’s character, how he can simultaneously love and hate his own brother, how he can ridicule the condition of the mother he adores. He also makes a fine roaring drunk whose story of his night with Fat Violet is one of the highlights of the evening. All in all, this is a perfectly presentable production of a masterpiece, acted and directed with considerable integrity, which, like the other plays under review in this column, demonstrates how hard it would be for drama to survive without unreconciled mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. Long live dysfunctional families and dysgenic dynasties! 

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Smelly Orthodoxies: A Bad Friend; I Am My Own Wife

Except for Tony Kushner’s socially charged plays, American political drama has been in a deep sleep, if not a hopeless coma, for a number of years now. (I don’t count our ritual theatrical nods in the direction of multiculturalism.) However, I’ve just seen two works on two successive evenings that indicate this somnolent theatrical genre may be stretching, yawning, and preparing to stand on its feet again. Don’t worry about a repeat of the awkward “theatre-is-a-weapon” sermonizing of the nineteen thirties. Both these new plays are highly complicated creations—critical not just of easy targets like Fascism or McCarthyism, but of all “the smelly little orthodoxies that are nowadays contending for our souls.” This is George Orwell’s famous phrase, and the two ideologies that most offended his nostrils, Communism and Nazism, have obviously lost most of their odor in recent years. But as Jules Feiffer’s new play, A Bad Friend (Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse), makes abundantly clear, old ideologies never die, they just change their stench. A self-righteous Stalinist mindset, for example, has kept its hold on some members of the intelligentsia to the present day, just 102

Smelly Orthodoxies

as Fascistic impulses continue to motivate white supremacists, skinheads, survivalists, anti-abortionists, and fanatical religious sects. Even the ghost of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee is still able to haunt us, as suggested by recent legislation. For if patriotism, according to Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of scoundrels, the Patriot Act is their last referendum. At first glance, A Bad Friend looks like an out-of-date reprise of plays like Eric Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been and movies like Walter Bernstein’s and Martin Ritt’s The Front. Written in the punchy declarative style of Clifford Odets, the play is another indictment of all those desperate Hollywood types, Odets included, who named names before HUAC. (Feiffer signals his debt to this compromised Group Theater icon in many ways, even naming one of his characters after Uncle Morty of Awake and Sing ). The actor who played the original Uncle Morty and whose memorial is mentioned in the play, namely J. Edward Bromberg, was one of the many victims of those informers, having suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after being exposed to the committee as a Party member. (John Garfield’s fatal heart attack may have been caused by similar stresses.) On the other hand, A Bad Friend shows even less patience with those American Communists, among them a number of Jews, who, while protesting the Rosenberg executions as the anti-semitic actions of a warmongering police state, were also apologizing for all of Stalin’s excesses, including the Soviet-Nazi pact and the “Jewish Doctors Plot.” To make this double point, Feiffer sets his play among a “progressive” Jewish family living in Brooklyn Heights in the early nineteen fifties. While the father (Shelly) and mother (Naomi, a character partly based on Feiffer’s sister) are rigid Party members, Naomi’s brother, Uncle Morty, has been radicalized, as he says, by MGM and RKO—notably by movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Now this studio slave (sleekly performed by Mark Feuerstein with a Malibu tan and two-toned shoes) writes Hollywood Westerns. The trajectory of Morty’s career from fiery idealist to guilty sellout to friendly witness, makes him seem like a composite portrait of Odets and Kazan, indeed of all those sputtering firebrands who preserved their own careers by damaging the careers of others. By the end of the play, Morty has named his own sister as the person who brought him into the party, though he later tries to redeem himself by dedicating his Academy Award to her. The observer of all these events is Rose, Naomi and Shelly’s eighteen-yearold daughter and “the only one in the family not in love with Stalin.” Rose has

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serious doubts that everything will be perfect in a socialist state when “a socialist state will be run by people like our parents.” She is, in other words, in mortal danger of becoming a liberal, a person defined by her father as one “who has her feet firmly planted in midair.” Rose’s lack of ideological certitude may be the reason she is simultaneously befriended by an FBI agent, eager to get the goods on her Hollywood uncle, and by a mysterious older man, a painter named Emil, played with patient melancholy by Larry Bryggman, who later turns out to be the notorious Soviet spy Colonel Rudolph Abel. Perhaps because she is intended as a surrogate for the author, Rose emerges as the most politically sophisticated character in the play. Unfortunately, she is also the least convincing, at least in the unmodulated performance of Kala Savage, who, despite sensible shoes, frumpy clothes, and bad hair, still seems to be rooted in teenage sitcom. Rose is a character always in process of being educated. Uncle Morty teaches her the political implications of movies like High Noon (not a leftwing Western, as the FBI thinks, but a disguised attack on fainthearted studio heads who collapsed under blacklist pressure). And Emil introduces her to Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, a gesture that, for reasons that escaped me, leads to his unmasking as a Communist spy. The climax of the play, and its best-written scene, occurs when Shelly suggests to Naomi that Stalin was planning a pogrom. “I could bring you up on charges,” she shrieks, “take it back”—and Shelly meekly obeys. By the end of the evening, Shelly (ruefully played by Jonathan Hadary) has died, disillusioned over the unpredictability of history, and Naomi (Jan Maxwell, embodying the sharp angularity of a Käthe Kollwitz drawing) sits on stage, numb and dazed, sadly shaking her head. Jerry Zaks has devised a strong production, where scenes change to the accompaniment of old Woody Guthrie songs and Union anthems, within a simple but eloquent set by Doug Stein. Time and place are signified mainly by filmed sequences and projections—principally a letterbox rendering of the New York skyline viewed from the Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights. Zaks begins the show, alarmingly, at the breakneck speed of farce, but soon lets it settle into a serious study of a period and its discontents. Indeed, the only lighthearted moment in the evening comes when Feiffer (nodding towards his Fred Astaire–inspired series, “The Dancer”) gets Morty and Naomi foxtrotting to the rhythms of “Cheek to Cheek.” Despite such occasional touches of charm and wit, A Bad Friend shows Feiffer working to restrain his distinctive satiric gifts in order to delineate character and evoke a sense of actuality. For all the strengths of the play, he does not

Smelly Orthodoxies

entirely succeed. I hope my old friend will not consider me a bad friend if I suggest that he needs to make his dialogue less quotable and his characters less defined by their politics if he wants to capture the flowing, stammering, unpredictable quality of life. In all other respects, this effort to re-create politically conscious theatre is cause for celebration. And so is Feiffer’s long-delayed return to the stage. At Playwrights Horizon, Doug Wright (the author of Quills), Jefferson Mays (an actor trained with Ann Bogart’s SITI Company), and Moisés Kaufman (the director of Gross Indecency and The Laramie Project) have collaborated on a most remarkable piece of political theatre called I Am My Own Wife. Based on the life of an actual German transvestite living in East Berlin named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde), the play and performance are an extraordinary stroke of theatrical transformation, unquestionably one of the most mesmerizing events of recent seasons. All that appear at first on Derek McLane’s kaleidoscopic set are a grey wooden floor, a facade decorated with tasteless wallpaper, a table, and a wooden chest. A woman enters, wearing a nondescript black dress, orthopedic shoes, and beaded necklace, smiles, begins to speak, disappears, and returns toting an old RCA Victor gramophone. She then starts to deliver, in a thick German accent, a learned account of Thomas Alva Edison and His Master’s Voice (“the most famous trademark in the world”) as she places a wax cylinder on the machine and lets it graze the record, producing tinny strains of s jazz. This woman is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, and Wright’s dialogue is drawn from a number of interviews and letter exchanges the author had with her from the summer of  until her death in . Indeed, Wright, the author, soon makes an appearance on stage, a very gay Southerner also played by Jefferson Mays, who impersonates about  characters in all—adults and children, men and women, gays, straights, and neutrals—not to mention such sound effects as an audiotape rewinding. The sense that the play is being written and researched the moment it is being performed lends a certain Pirandellian urgency to the evening. And its political and historical power is provided by a trip through German history in the second half of the th century, as Charlotte endures the dangers and humiliations of a transvestite under both Nazism and Communism. She and the rest of the gay community, like European Jews, are the natural victims of rightwing and leftwing German totalitarianism. And the play, in part, is an account of how she “navigated between the two most repressive regimes the world has ever known.” But this is not just an exercise in victimol-

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ogy. After a childhood in which she comes under the influence of a lesbian aunt, and later confronts, and possibly murders her brutal father with a rolling pin, Charlotte ends up as a custodian of antique furniture and gimcracks such as old gramophones, grandfather clocks, and miniature armoires, a symphony of junk beautifully played on McClane’s artfully littered set. “She doesn’t run a museum,” remarks the author’s macho friend, John Marks, “she is a museum.” And before long, it is clear that all of recent German history resides in this retiring figure. Brecht and Dietrich sat at her table. Most of East Berlin’s homosexuals, hounded by the police, found community in her house. And when the Berlin Wall finally falls, she is awarded the Medal of Honor by a grateful nation. But Charlotte’s past is not without stain. She was an informer for the Stasi, and was probably responsible for the imprisonment of another collector, a male homosexual named Alfred Kirshner. (In defense, Charlotte claims that Kirshner urged her to name his name since he was doomed to be caught anyway.) Her credibility under question, threatened now by skinheads rather than by Nazis or Communists (“I have met you before,” she murmurs), Charlotte ends her days “in a garden of gramophone horns.” The last message Wright receives from her is a photograph of a ten-year-old boy, Charlotte as a child, flanked by two lion cubs poised either to lick or eat their human companion (a blowup of the photo is in the lobby when the audience descends). As an acting performance, the evening is an electrifying tour de force, its direction is stagecraft of the most exemplary and seamless kind, its writing is spare, elusive, and highly literate. The author can sometimes sound a little frivolous (“Hi, I’m Doug Wright and I’m wearing lace panties”). But like Tony Kushner, he has found a way to use his gay identity as a universal criticism of life. Kushner, Wright, and Feiffer are reviving our hopes for a mature political theatre. 

Shotover’s Apocalypse: Omnium Gatherum; Anna in the Tropics

Hard on the heels of Jules Feiffer’s A Bad Friend and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife comes another strong piece of political theatre— this one inspired by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, called Omnium Gatherum. The joint work of Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, Omnium Gatherum is what Shaw would have called a “disquisitory play” in that the characters are not so much specific individuals as personifications of representative classes and estates, randomly gathered together to debate recent events and the issues that may have caused them. Indeed, Omnium Gatherum seems to have been deeply influenced by Shaw’s World War I play, Heartbreak House, though the celebrity dinner party setting may also owe something to Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. The play has received a bad rap from Frank Rich, who dismissed it as “Tom Wolfe for dummies,” congratulating “a complacent audience on its moral superiority to the nattering nabobs onstage.” That’s a smart way to describe a lot of “serious” plays of recent vintage—but not this one. Quite the contrary, Omnium Gatherum struck me as a surprisingly intelligent, generally equitable attempt to give voice to 107

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the whole spectrum of reactions to the World Trade Center attack, though it must be admitted that the hyperkinetic production values imposed by the director (Will Frears) sometimes made the characters, and the accomplished cast, seem more shallow than intended. Rather than exculpating the audience, in fact, the play is a strong indictment of the unthinking hedonism of a consumer society in which, as one character observes, “our spiritual response to any catastrophe should be to go out and shop.” The dialogue, moreover, is a reasonable facsimile of the kind of table talk one often hears these days, where softliners and hardliners engage each other, often at high decibel level, over whether September  was the result of American indifference to the suffering of the oppressed or whether it was an act of absolute evil by a demented religious sect. Let us grant the unlikelihood of this particular group of people breaking (pita) bread together on the same night and at the same table. The authors nevertheless manage to turn a gourmet dinner party—consumed against the background of a starving third world—into a metaphor for the spiritual bankruptcy of an increasingly corpulent culture. At the same time, the characters, functioning as both satirical commentators and objects of satire, are usually permitted to state their positions without looking like foolish stick figures or brainless mouthpieces. In the text, an omnium gatherum is defined as “a collection of peculiar souls.” Arranged behind a long dinner table like panelists at a symposium, savoring the exotic cuisine of a giddy, energized, eager-to-please hostess named Suzie (Kristine Nielsen) are six of these “peculiar souls,” later joined by an improbable seventh. Suzie, formerly a caterer, now running a totally accessorized household, is probably a likeness of Martha Stewart before her indictment, cheerily trotting out the appetizers, salads, confits, and Italian wines while her guests are abusing and insulting each other. Indeed, part of the fun of the evening comes from identifying the actual people on which this drame à clef is based. The play’s Boss Mangan (Shaw’s vulgar capitalist) is a rightwing loudmouth resembling Tom Clancy, once the favorite novelist of Ronald Reagan (“Now he doesn’t know who the fuck I am”). As trumpeted by Philip Clark, Roger is typical of those blustering, swaggering, hectoring males (add “rowdy” and “groping” in the case of the musclebound new governor of California) who have begun to dominate the Republican party. Still, his arguments are far from foolish. He calls for a strong response to terrorism by what he calls “the Military Industrial Entertainment Complex,” and argues a cogent case for Israel that could have been written for him by Alan Dershowitz. Then there is Terence (Dean Nolen), a leftwing wine-soaked Englishman, partly based on Christopher Hitchens. At

Shotover’s Apocalypse

times this half-Jewish gadfly blames the state of Israel for the Muslim hatred of the United States; at times he blames human nature, proclaiming that “all of human history is a bloodbath—killing each other is what we do!” Then there is Khalid, the Arab academic (Edward A. Hajj), a benign portrait of the late Edward Said, who died on the morning of the play’s opening (coincidentally, Hitchens wrote Said’s obituary for Slate). Khalid, who believes in a more generous distribution of the world’s wealth, blames religious fundamentalism on the inability of the West, after the collapse of socialism, to create an effective ideological alternative to unrestrained corporate greed, and on its failure to check those who regard the universe, in the words of Shaw, as “a machine for greasing their bristles and filling their snouts.” And then there are characters with no real prototypes I could identify, probably based on more generic figures—Julia, a black woman writer on community subjects played by Melanna Gray, more frightened of a bad notice in the New York Times than of a terrorist attack (she wouldn’t mind bombing the paper herself); Lydia, played by the estimable Jennie Bacon, a self-righteous feminist, vegan, and PETA member (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), who refuses to eat anything that has a face; and a laconic fireman named Jeff (Joseph Lyle Taylor) who sits quietly throughout most of the play, scarfing down the food. Much of the writing takes the form of surgical incisions into a culture that has grown fat and self-absorbed. Suzie, who thinks cigarettes “destabilize the atmosphere,” who has her air flown in from overseas, and who cultivates a hydroponic garden, is the most telling example of the nitwit faddism of the new capitalism. But for all the abuse she takes over how little she pays her employees, there isn’t a maid or bartender in sight. (For reasons that will later become clear, she serves the guests herself.) Lydia makes a weak appeal for more government support of the arts (“Grow up,” retorts Roger). And Julia, who sometimes feels like the only black person in the room (perhaps because she is) is prevailed upon to entertain the guests with a Whitney Houston number, though her singing voice is abysmal. Later descending into a pit that houses the opulent bathroom and its endless mirrored walls, Julia feels she has entered a “shrine to our own shit.” Shaw’s Captain Shotover keeps dynamite in his cellar for the purpose of blowing up the human race if it goes too far. It would seem that this might be a good time to use it, for, like the characters in Heartbreak House, this omnium gatherum is composed of people who are “useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.” Joining the dinner party towards the end is a figure programmed to bring about this apocalypse, a terrorist named Mohammed (Atta?) played by Amir

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Arison. Suzie, in a sudden rush of radical chic, has invited him as “tonight’s mystery guest.” She expects Mohammed to spice up the party and he doesn’t disappoint her, grabbing a knife and attempting to stab the dinner guests. Upon being subdued, Mohammed barks out fundamentalist boilerplate about the Palestinian occupation, American trade embargos, and the way we dropped the atom bomb on innocent civilians. But in the most telling confrontation of the play, Khalid assails Mohammed for his brutal theocratic delusions (“Can you kill and slaughter your way into heaven?”). His world disintegrating, desperately trying to find some purpose in the void, Khalid warns that there will be a compassionate universe or none at all. But Mohammed is already dead. And so is the fireman. Both are buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center. And so, very probably, are all the guests at the table. Gradually, imperceptibly, this noisy dinner party has turned into a ghost supper, literally a dinner party from hell. The occasional whirring of a chopper overhead is replaced by the thundering of a large jet plane, while distant explosions edge closer and closer. To the strains of Sinatra singing “I Got the World on a String,” the play ends with a shattering blast, bits of paper filtering down on the stage, as the characters freeze into images of catatonic silence. In Shaw, the bombs miss Heartbreak House and only a burglar and the greedy capitalist, Boss Mangan, are killed. In the less forgiving Omnium Gatherum, Shotover’s vision of apocalypse finds its total consummation. In Princeton, at the new Roger S. Berlind Theatre, Anna in the Tropics by the Cuban-American writer Nilo Cruz is receiving a pre-Broadway production at the hands of the McCarter Theatre Center, under the capable direction of Emily Mann. Originally commissioned by the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, the play won the Pulitzer Prize last year on the basis of its text alone since few if any of the judges had seen it staged. The current production, which moves to the Royale Theatre in November, vindicates their judgment. I am ashamed to say this is the only work of the prolific Cruz that I have read or seen. If it is typical of his talent, let us welcome another gifted playwright to the post-/ theatre Renaissance. Cruz seems to be that rare thing, a writer of force and intelligence who nevertheless manages to leaven his insights with innocence, decency, and humanity. His capacity to invest simple declarative prose with bursts of imagery reminds me of Garcia Lorca (one of Cruz’s plays is actually called Lorca in a Green Dress), and he also displays Lorca’s capacity to restrain his own sophistication in order to enter the minds of simple people. (One speech about the dream-like quality of life seems to have been influenced by Calderon.)

Shotover’s Apocalypse

Anna in the Tropics is set in  at the Flor Del Cielo Tampa—a cigar factory in a small village of Florida called Ybor City. (Robert Brill’s rough wood set has the look of a cigar box.) A number of Cubans have brought their cigar-rolling skills from Havana to Tampa along with their native language, their spells and superstitions, and such ancient traditions as betting on cockfights and burying women’s hair under trees to help plants and fruits to grow. They are now in process of reestablishing another tradition by importing a new “lector,” a person who, at a time when radio was still in its infancy, was expected to keep the workers distracted at their leaf-laying labors by reading aloud from books. When the lector, Juan Julian, arrives, he brings with him a copy of Anna Karenina. The arc of the play is the reenactment of the love affair between Anna and Vronsky by Juan Julian and Conchita, who is the wife of Palomo, another cigar worker. Having been unfaithful himself, Palomo is now forced to play the part of Anna’s cuckolded husband. There are other parallels with the novel as well—as one character notes, “Everybody’s in love with this book.” Conchita’s father, the bibulous but warmhearted Santiago (Victor Argo), who owns the factory, for example, identifies with the farmer Levin. But essentially the play is about the humanizing power of great literature, and its capacity to offer alternatives to the materialistic ambitions of the poor, as well as consolations for the harsh disappointments of everyday life. Unfortunately, another lector has run off with the wife of a worker named Cheche, Santiago’s half-Cuban half-brother, and when the obligatory moment of vengeance arrives, it comes not from Conchita’s husband but from him. Cheche has been trying to modernize the tobacco factory, urging Santiago to get rid of the lectors, to use machinery instead of manual labor. Although he knows his business will fail as a result, Santiago refuses. Machines may improve the bottom line but they substitute the “quick smoke” for the leisure and relaxation of a hand-rolled cigar. This represents a compacted historical transition like the cutting down of the trees to make way for track housing in The Cherry Orchard, or, in the climax of Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons, like the hero being run over by one of those new-fangled driving machines. Those who try to resist the modern juggernaut to preserve an old way of life are destined to be trampled by it. Anna in the Tropics is a refreshingly old-fashioned play about the power of love, and it is the love story between Juan Julian and Conchita that the director handles best. Played by Jimmy Smits in a white suit and with gentle pastel charm, Juan Julian at first resists the inevitable, then yields to it. As for Conchita, played by Daphne Rubin-Vega as a seductive Carmen whose face is

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frozen in discontent, she reminds one less of Tolstoy’s Anna than of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary or Synge’s Pegeen Mike, a woman spoiled by literature and seduced by the sound of words. The passionate and ominous ending of the first act, where the lovers come together for the first time, with Palomo watching in the shadows, is an indelible theatre moment. Emily Mann’s production is steeped in local color and cigar smoke. The play ends a bit melodramatically, with Cheche gunning down the hapless Juan Julian onstage. But the elegy that follows provides a note of hope. Palomo offers to finish the book, “reading the story in his honor, so he doesn’t feel his job is undone.” The five cigar rollers, working in silence at their desks, hold back their tears and look to the future, recalling the elegy of Vanya and Sonia at the end of Uncle Vanya. Anna in the Tropics is a truly sweet play, warmly acted by an excellent cast, notable for the way it restores some of the humanity that has lately been missing from our lives. 

Palace and Garden: Maria Stuart; House and Garden

Maria Stuart may not seem like the perfect project for Ingmar Bergman’s biannual exploration of classical texts. Written in  some years after its author, Friedrich von Schiller, had completed The Robbers and Don Carlos, it is a typical product of German Sturm und Drang —like most of the plays in that genre more workable perhaps as an opera libretto than as a dramatic text. Maria Stuart has a lot of strong scenes, particularly the confrontation between the two rival Queens, and the Machiavellian conniving of the treacherous courtiers. Indeed, it is not only Schiller’s most powerful play. It may be the best imitation extant of Shakespearean tragedy. That could be construed as faint praise but it’s not. Shakespeare was imitated so much that the proprietary Germans of Schiller’s generation used to refer to him as unserer (our) Shakespeare. Schiller taught himself Shakespeare’s knack for probing the nasty psychological motives beneath the courtly gambits and heroic attitudes of political life. But Maria Stuart also displays some of the limitations of German Bardolotry, namely a style that oscillates wildly between soaring poetry and heavy declamation, between psychological intimacy and starchy posturing, 113

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where the plot is driven largely by the interception of a few incriminating letters. Like so many playwrights drawn to this subject (Maxwell Anderson was another), Schiller was no doubt mesmerized by its two female roles. So, apparently, is Ingmar Bergman. Two queens from the same family line, one Protestant, the other Catholic, one an aging spinster, the other a sensual inamorata, one a guilt-ridden executioner, the other a defiant victim—what tasty meat for hungry classical actresses! The current production certainly gives Bergman regulars Pernilla August (Mary) and Lena Andre (Elizabeth) a splendid opportunity to stalk each other like two ravenous jaguars. In fact, the production by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, which recently had a four day run in the Opera House of BAM, is filled with striking scenes and strong performances (I was particularly moved to see the great Bergman stalwart, Erland Josephson, playing the minor part of Mary’s counsellor, Melvil). But what kept me most engaged during the opening formalities was trying to guess how the director could make this sometimes stuffy heroic masterpiece conform to his obsessions with political brutality and unbridled sexual appetite. I was remembering Bergman’s unforgettable Hamlet, where Claudius took Gertrude from behind in full view of the court, as well as his Peer Gynt, in which the horny hero competed with the lubricious trolls for Satyr of the Week. In Bergman’s theatrical world, there are no humanitarians or idealists, only vandals and lechers driven by resentment, vengeance, and insatiable lust—a world view that begins to seem prophetic after /. The director certainly manages to keep the play active and moving from its earliest, most ceremonial moments. Goran Wassberg’s setting is a platform stage decorated with a huge emblem of England in front of which English courtiers dressed in Charles Koroly’s crimson costumes enter with a courtly bow. The scrim behind the setting will change color according to the moods of the play and the whims of the director. But the physical and psychological muscles of the production are flexed for one inexorable purpose: the eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Although Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart probably never met, in Schiller they share a single powerful scene. In Bergman’s production, on the other hand, the two women are almost never out of each other’s earshot. Bergman created a similar sense of ubiquity in Hamlet where, even after her suicide, Ophelia continued to be a ghostly on-stage character. Here, sharing the same platform stage, Elizabeth is listening to counsellors while Mary Stuart is

Palace and Garden

meeting with her advisors and lovers, and Mary is hearing the voices of the court while Elizabeth is deciding her fate. That fate is foreordained. Mary Stuart represents a dire political threat to Elizabeth, especially since the queen has no issue. It is not simply that, in league with the Earl of Bothwell, Mary had her husband Darnley murdered. More threatening than Mary’s homicidal past is her Roman Catholicism which has the potential to revolutionize Protestant England. Despite all Elizabeth’s efforts, the Stuarts do eventually assume the throne of England, first James I, and then his son Charles I, who loses his head to Oliver Cromwell over the same religious differences. In contrast with the thrice-married Mary, Elizabeth’s “wish has always been to die unwed.” Nevertheless, in her scene with Leicester, this red-headed Virgin Queen mounts her prone lover while discussing affairs of state, after which he rips open her bodice and she strokes his crotch. (Leicester, by the way, aside from conducting simultaneous affairs with the two queens, is busy grabbing the behind of every available waiting woman.) Some critics have bridled at Bergman’s sexual interpolations. But he is simply trying to expose the private reality behind the public facade (he also lets Elizabeth enjoy an occasional cigar). In short, every Bergman production is another tile in his mosaic of revisionist history. When Mary, preparing for death, takes off her dark gown to display a red dress and crucifix, then removes her black wig to reveal a shock of white hair, and then kisses Leicester fiercely on her way to the block, we realize that with Bergman we are in the presence of an eighty-three-year-old theatre artist at the height of his creative powers. Currently playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club are the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden. Both plays are based on a stunt that has attracted a lot of press attention—namely, that the same characters (and actors) appear in both plays simultaneously. You’ve probably read a lot of stories about how the actors are required to shuttle between City Center Stage I and City Center Stage II, and back again for each scene, in order to make their entrances on time, including consecutive curtain calls. What occupied me most during this interminable evening of theatre was trying to figure out some way to walk out on both plays simultaneously. That being physically impossible, I resolved to endure a complete performance of Garden on a Saturday evening and then give House a big skip on the Sunday matinee. Each of these plays takes two and a half hours to perform (by a slowly ticking clock). To see both Ayckbourn plays back to back is to spend a total of five hours with pretty insufferable people. This is an hour longer than

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O’Neill asks us to spend with the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey into Night — and that’s an interesting family. Now I know what Horace meant when he said that life is short and art is long. Having been privy only to what happened in the garden I can only imagine what’s been going on in the house. But given the limitations of this kind of writing, it’s not hard to guess. Ayckbourn makes a gesture towards telling a story in the Mayfair tradition but the plots of these plays are purely incidental. What they are actually about is how the same actors can play the same roles in two different plays and places, which is the story of a stunt. In this Upstairs, Downstairs world, most of the upper-class characters are slinking about having affairs, hiding behind rose bushes, and jumping into pools, while the lower orders earn their wages expressing disapproval. The housekeeper spouts Richard Sheridan–inspired malapropisms like “The beef will be indelible” or “If she misbehaves today, she’ll feel my restitution” or “I’ve been held up and humidified” while the Gardener spends a lot of time chewing his tongue disdainfully, like Barry Fitzgerald in Bringing Up Baby. Actors are perpetually making metronomic entrances and exits, obviously in order to get upstairs on time to the next theatre, so that a reviewer becomes less concerned about evaluating their performances than worrying about their blood pressure. As a result, I can’t tell you what I thought of the performances except that the British accents were managed okay, and the best thing I can say about John Tillinger’s direction is that, like Mussolini, he made the trains run on time. Garden (and one may assume House as well) is written in the style of a considerably funnier farce called Noises Off. It is a genre in which the gimmick is forced to do the work of the imagination. Writing such as this puts the British theatre in a time warp, back to the world of such immortals as Ben Travers and Benn Levy and Frederick Lonsdale, all of whose plays seemed to be set in Barkshire and revolve around the same nerveless characters. It was a period when nothing more serious broke across the brows of the theatregoing public than whether the breakfast eggs had been sufficiently coddled or whether the serving maid had showed up late for lunch with her knickers missing. In , my colleague Kenneth Tynan wrote a piece lamenting “The Lost Art of Bad Drama.” He was thinking of a whole genre of successful bad plays whose elements he thus described: “At no point may the plot or characters make more than superficial contact with reality. Characters earning less than £ pounds a year should be restricted to small parts or exaggerated into types so patently farcical that no member of the audience could possibly identify himself with

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such absurd esurience. Rhythm in dialogue is achieved by means either of vocatives (‘That, my dear Hilary, is a moot point’) or of qualifying clauses (‘What, if you’ll pardon the interruption, is going on here?’); and irony is confined to having an irate male character shout: ‘I am perfectly calm!’ . . . Women . . . should declare themselves by running the palm of one hand up their victim’s lapel and saying, when it reaches the neck: ‘Let’s face it, Arthur, you’re not exactly indifferent to me.’” Tynan was premature in writing his requiem for the thoroughly bad play. With Alan Ayckbourn’s Garden (and presumably with his House as well) it is enjoying a splendid renaissance. 

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The Political Power of Puns: Caroline, or Change; The Beard of Avon

Tony Kushner’s new play, Caroline, or Change at the New York Public Theater, is a formal anomaly. It has been hailed as a breakthrough musical created by a confident professional collaborative—a vigorous score by Jeanine Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie), lively choreography by Hope Clarke (Spunk), and dynamic staging by George C. Wolfe (Jelly’s Last Jam). It is actually a social-political verse play in couplets and quatrains that might have been better understood had it appeared alone without musical credentials. Playing on the pun in the title, which alternately refers to the small change left in a child’s pocket and the concept of social progress or reform, Kushner has set out to dramatize the changes in race relations that were occurring in the South, notably Lake Charles, Louisiana, around the time of the Kennedy assassination in . Like his other plays, Caroline, or Change affects to tell a political story through the agency of a personal anecdote, presumably autobiographical—in this case, a conflict over money between an angry black maid and a spoiled, precocious eight-year-old Jewish boy. In addition to its verse form, the play is something of a departure 118

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for the man who wrote Angels in America, Perestroika, and Homebody/Kabul. For one thing, there is not a single gay reference in the entire evening. For another, Kushner has buried his theatrical sophistication inside a simple nostalgic style more appropriate for dramatizing the end of childhood innocence. The story of Noah Gellman, the child, and Caroline Thibodeaux, the maid, occurs against the background of a time when blacks and Jews essentially stopped being allies in the war against racism and—divided by the growing influence of Black Power—started exploring their resentments instead. Kushner has chosen a tone for this story that is deliberately naive and derivative. He has anthromorphized the laundry room where Caroline works in the manner of children’s stories like The Little Engine That Could and Goodnight Moon. Objects such as the Washing Machine, the Dryer, the Bus, and the Moon are played by a variety of black characters, while the Radio is embodied by a Motown trio in teased bouffant hairstyles associated with the Supremes (or, more probably, their Dreamgirl equivalents). Noah’s mother has died prematurely, and his stricken father has taken refuge in his clarinet. As a result, Noah’s perception of the world seems to be washed in the same kind of aching wonderment found in the works of James Agee, particularly his lovely tone poem, “Knoxville: Summer of .” Set to music, Agee’s piece had the advantage of an exquisite score by Samuel Barber that captured all of the longing and loneliness of a Southern childhood. Would that Caroline, or Change came similarly equipped. It is not that Jeanine Tesori’s Blues/Broadway/Klezmer music is unlistenable. Some of it, notably the Motown trios, is quite galvanic. The problem is that it is much too inescapable. Like so many musicals today—most recently, the terminally cute Avenue Q —it has wall-to-wall scoring (only one line in the play is spoken). But unlike, say, Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, which is also completely sung, it lacks the operatic depth and texture that might justify all that sound surround. Sondheim, moreover, designed his text for Passion as a libretto. Whatever Kushner’s original intention with Caroline, or Change, it is clearly the work of a dramatist rather than a lyricist or book writer. As a result, much of its literary subtlety and coherence are lost in the musical wrappings. Consider the following passage, a lament sung by a Bus that arrives late because of the assassination of President Kennedy: The earth the earth has bled! Woe-singing wind down the neighborhood. He is gone now! Gone for good!

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Deluge flood ice water rise. Tear your hair your clothes your eyes. Sisters shed tears of blood. The earth has bled! Now come the flood. Apologies for being late making everybody wait. . . . I am the Orphan Ship of State.

This is not great poetry, but it is certainly a legitimate stab at the Whitmanesque, and like Kushman’s comic doggerel (“Chanukah Oh Chanakuh, / oh Dreydl and Menorah! / We celebrate it even though / it isn’t in the Torah!”), it has more emotional weight falling on the ear as spoken language (or perhaps as a dreydl song) than as a show tune driven by a pit orchestra. I emphasize this because such creative mismatching may have helped to spark some critical misunderstanding. The New Republic’s television critic, Lee Siegal, for example, taking a moment off from his prosecution of all the hapless felons responsible for the HBO Angels in America, remarks in an aside that Caroline, or Change represents Kushner’s “typical brand” of “sentimental, historical carpetbagging.” There may be a bit of self-satisfaction in this semi-fictionalized piece of history about race relations in the South. But it is too closely experienced to be dismissed as “carpetbagging,” unless Siegel is suggesting that whites have no business writing plays about blacks. I would like to think he is not, despite his reference to “a Jewish playwright mindlessly exploiting the black experience.” As for sentimentality, if there are traces of that in the score, there are none in the text. And I see no evidence either of the “condescension” that Siegel fulminates about, based on his (erroneous) assumption that “there is not a single black character in Caroline who is not a mammy, a pickaninny, a shvartze, or an entertainer with lots of rhythm.” Actually, at least two of the characters in the play are black activists. And unlike the kindly black chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy, the black maid Caroline is no long-suffering martyr to imperious Jewish employers. She is “always mad . . . sad and angry all the time,” less one of Faulkner’s “enduring” black saints than a cranky injustice collector. Noah’s officious stepmother, Rose, who hails from the North, seems to have the typical liberal delusion that the way to redress economic inequity is not through radical reform but rather through acts of individual charity. Indeed, it is her mistaken idea that Caroline should keep

The Political Power of Puns

any money she finds in Noah’s pockets in order to augment her salary that leads to the big explosion in the play. Noah has forgotten to remove his Chanukah gelt from his dirty pants—a twenty dollar bill from his Marxist grandfather—and Caroline, who has hitherto refused to take smaller sums from a babe, pockets it for her family. In frustration, Noah tells Caroline that President Johnson has built a bomb especially designed to kill all Negroes, and Caroline replies that “Hell’s where Jews go when they die.” This climactic scene leads to Caroline’s temporary departure from the family, during which time Noah reflects on his guilt (“I did it. I killed her”) and Caroline on her rage (“Don’t let my sorrow / Make evil of me”). “Will we be friends then?” Noah wistfully asks after her return. “Weren’t never friends,” says Caroline. The play ends with Caroline’s daughter Emmie, the politically engaged descendant of a politically indifferent maid, reflecting on the change to come. This material is hardly “sentimental.” Yes, it may be driven too much by Kushner’s patented Jewish guilt (recalling Louis Ironson and his betrayal of Prior Walter). But it seems to me an eminently hardheaded view of the tragic breach between two American ethnic groups that once shared common ground. As for the production, it is extremely well-designed by Riccardo Hernandez (sets), Paul Tazewell (costumes), and Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (lights); well-acted by the entire cast, especially Tonya Pinkins as the stoical Caroline and Harrison Chad as the precocious Noah; and strongly directed by George C. Wolfe, who has staged at least one genuine showstopper, a scene of recrimination and remorse called “Lot’s Wife.” But if some Victorian children should be seen not heard, some modern musicals should be spoken rather than sung. I went to see Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon (New York Theatre Workshop) with trepidation. I imagined from its title that the play was another contribution to Shakespeare Authorship Denial, that cottage industry of the educated upper class who believe that creative genius can be bestowed only on patricians with a Ph.D. or a peerage. I guess I’m losing patience with people who ransack the arcane in order to avoid the obvious—Baconians and Oxfordians, for example, never bother to explain why Ben Jonson, the most envious playwright of his time, not only loved the man called Shakespeare “this side idolatry,” but never expressed a single doubt about his colleague’s creative identity. Instead of being faux scholarship, The Beard of Avon proves a lusty antidote to all forms of Bardolatry, including the perverse benighted kind that considers the Bard a beard. Instead of assigning the works to this lord or that intellectual,

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Freed assumes that everyone wrote Shakespeare’s plays, including the Stratford man himself, who added touches of “heart” and “humanity” to plots he didn’t have the gift to invent. An extended satiric sketch worthy of Monty Python, The Beard of Avon is a genuine hoot, performed by a splendid company and directed by Doug Hughes with a cheeky energy that makes it the best-staged production of the season. Freed treats Elizabethan theatre history with a lot of poetic license—or shall we say poetic licentiousness? She imagines Richard Burbage as a ham who keeps pulling a sausage out of his tights and pretending it’s a penis. She turns Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and the editors of his First Folio, into theatre managers who would drive tragic authors to suicide rather than sacrifice a raunchy bit of business. She imagines an Elizabethan culture more indebted to the Greeks than to the Romans. She invents spectacles like “The Conquest of Alexandrio” more appropriate to the heroic drama of the next (Restoration) age. And she creates a kind of period dialogue (“How ist doth amuse thyself this day? . . . How ist doth pass the time ’twixt now and then?”) that sometimes fails to pass the test of grammar or scansion. On the other hand, her understanding of theatrical egotism is priceless and her gift for comic anachronism is unmatched. The wanton, amoral, bisexual, bored, and heartless Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere) writes in a form he believes to be beneath him, but insists on total control of casting and unlimited house seats. In the act of seducing Shakespeare’s wife, Anne, he reminds this “maid who can’t say nay” that “an goodly man is hard to find.” Oxford and Shakespeare collaborate on Titus Andronicus, the Sonnets, and Venus and Adonis, a narrative poem about the pursuit of a younger man by an older woman assumed by the court to be an allegory of Elizabeth and Oxford (James Joyce believed it to be a disguised account of Shakespeare’s seduction by Anne Hathaway). After Shakespeare writes Richard III for Oxford (“I see a hunchback. You flesh it out”), he becomes virtually a brand name, which is to say “a writer most enormously hot.” Everyone at court begins submitting plays under his name, including Bacon (Three Merry Whoresons), Lady Lettice (a Lear that consists entirely of an endless reading of the will), the Earl of Derby (Any Way You Want It), and Regina Dentata, the Queen herself, who writes a version of Taming of the Shrew. In a hilarious reenactment, Will rewrites her work and almost loses his head (“Thou art in water most enormously hot”). But all’s well that ends well, when she chooses instead to bask in the play’s success. Oxford, before he dies of

The Political Power of Puns

the plague, says it doesn’t matter who wrote the plays: “It’s really all about the work.” Obviously, this kind of low backstage comedy is not to everyone’s taste. But I left the theatre deeply gratified, and grateful too—particularly to Doug Hughes’ remarkably detailed and exuberant direction, the colorful environment of the brilliant design staff (settings by Neil Patel, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Michael Chybowski), the courageous choices of the sensational actors (Mark Harelik’s dashingly depraved Oxford, Tim Blake Nelson’s perpetually surprised Shakespeare, Kate Jennings Grant’s lubricious Anne Hathaway, Mary Louise Wilson’s uproariously starched Queen Elizabeth), and, above all, the bold and bawdy playwriting of Amy Freed. Or whoever wrote the play under her name. 

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A King and Two Queens: King Lear; Valhalla

About twenty years ago, Jonathan Miller and I discussed doing a Lear together. When I asked the British director who he wanted for the title role, he replied: “Jack Lemmon.” Noting my somewhat dazed expression, he explained that he saw the work not as a cosmic tragedy, but as a family play with comic overtones. (Having begun his theatrical career as one of the four wits in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, Miller has his roots in comedy.) A few years later, Miller got his chance to work with Jack Lemmon—mercifully not in Lear, but in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Miscast as James Tyrone, Lemmon sailed through this brooding drama with such an excess of nervous high spirits, in a production driven by Miller’s pell-mell pacing, that the normally four-hour play lasted just over two. Miller is the smartest person I know—he may very well be the most brilliant talker in the Western world—and so even his more harebrained ideas deserve to be respected. Nonetheless, I am relieved to say that his current production of King Lear at Lincoln Center, imported from Canada’s Stratford Festival, is not being played as comedy or farce, and that an experienced classical actor, Christopher Plum124

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mer, is in the leading role. While the acting is brisk, it is hardly rushed (the play lasts a full three hours and forty minutes). But neither is this King Lear a tragedy. No heroes or villains stalk the stage of the Vivian Beaumont, only a bestiary of domestic animals. Peter Brook’s celebrated Lear in the mid-sixties was also relatively restrained, but it took place in an existential void. Miller’s Lear, on the other hand, is very much of the world, an engrossing family drama about a cranky old man who hands his property over to the kids before consulting a reputable estate planner and signing an irrevocable trust. The production has thunderous sound effects in the storm scene, but there’s not much thunder in the performances. In his effort to avoid the heroic histrionics of the thespian knighthood (Wolfit, Gielgud, Olivier, Redgrave, and Richardson), the director has settled for a modest, domestic style. This approach may neglect the emotional heights and depths of this monumental work, but it delivers its verbal meat and intellectual substance in a crisp, clear, and compelling fashion. Miller’s productions are usually inspired by Renaissance paintings. This one, thanks to Clare Mitchell’s costuming, seems to be set in the seventeenth-century world of Rembrandt and Hals. Lear’s retinue, dressed in ruffs, puffed sleeves, hip boots, slouchy hats, and long wigs, have the look of Dutch masters posing for their portraits. Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan, their hair shooting stiffly from the sides of their heads like daggers, are more like characters out of fairy tale, perhaps Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters. (Claire Jullien’s Cordelia, a bland guileless blonde, could be Cinderella herself.) The one link with Shakespeare’s time, Ralph Funicello’s set, is a handsome approximation of an Elizabethan stage (more accurately, of the Canadian Stratford stage), complete with wooden stairs leading to a balcony above and a few sticks of furniture. Just a few years shy of Lear’s ripe age myself, I’ve had the opportunity to watch a lot of actors in this part. Louis Calhern played him like a noble wreck, Morris Carnovsky like a Yiddish patriarch with ungrateful kinder who never come to visit, Paul Scofield like a Prussian Junker reduced in rank to a Beckett bench-sitter, Laurence Olivier like a retired pensioner with Parkinson’s disease, Robert Stephens like a recovering drunk, Ian Holm like a furious vagrant, and F. Murray Abraham like a homeless Bowery derelict. Of all these, Christopher Plummer has perhaps the best physical resources for the part, with his regal bearing, frizzy white hair, bald pate, and spiky beard. It doesn’t hurt, either, that he has a high intelligence, a deep sonorous voice, and a delivery capable of considerable irony, scorn, and sarcasm. In his first scene, Plummer’s Lear is already experiencing senior moments—he can’t seem to remember the name of one of

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Cordelia’s suitors. But unlike many actors who perform the part in their golden years, Plummer still has remarkable energy, so it’s a shame that Miller prevents him from howling at the storm or scaling the impossible peaks of the heath. Plummer’s best scenes are with the Fool, played by Barry MacGregor as a bored, pasty-faced busker in a trailing greatcoat, too bemused to return Lear’s affection for him. Indeed, the most moving moment of the production comes when, in growing fury and frustration, Lear delivers the line “Oh Fool, I shall go mad” in six sharp syllables, punctuating them with hammered blows on the Fool’s chest. (In his harrowing indictment of Goneril—“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child”—he drives the last two words as if he were pounding nails into her skull.) But for the most part Plummer is not surrounded by a particularly strong cast. The actress playing Goneril nonchalantly brushes away Lear’s appalling curse of eternal sterility, as if it were a piece of lint on her costume. (In the Brook production, Irene Worth’s Goneril was literally crippled by Lear’s malediction, and never quite recovered from it.) Indeed, both Goneril and Regan come across less like heartless tigers than like Renaissance Mrs. Craigs, irritated by the way Lear’s retainers are messing up the living-room carpet with their muddy boots. And for some reason Edgar, in his disguise as Poor Tom, is naked except for a loincloth and a crown of thorns, as if he were auditioning for the lead part in Mel Gibson’s The Passion. What comes through Miller’s production most strongly is not so much Lear’s quarrel with the universe as his growing understanding of how, surrounded by courtiers, courtesies, and accommodations, he has been blinded to the needs of the “poor naked wretches” that populate his kingdom. George W. Bush might do well to read Lear’s speech about his neglect of the poor (“I have ta’en too little care of this”) the next time he contemplates more tax cuts for the rich and more revisions in Social Security and Medicare. But this is not just a play about social injustice. It is about a naturalistic universe abandoned by the gods, where creatures prey upon each other like monsters from the deep. Miller’s lack of interest in the metaphysical dimension causes him to hesitate before the play’s awesome, bleak, and nihilistic depths. This is not always true of his leading actor. Plummer’s majestic performance, however restrained, distinguishes a production that, however clear and engrossing, otherwise resolutely refuses to achieve transcendence. And it is Plummer who provides whatever poignancy the evening possesses. Having peered into the abyss, this broken man is left with one last hope: that far from the fripperies of the court, he might find comfort with his beloved daughter in

A King and Two Queens

prison—a king of infinite space, like Hamlet, though bounded in an eggshell. When she is hanged, even that consolation is denied him. But how can he—or any of us—forfeit a final illusion? Plummer’s Lear, believing his daughter still alive, dies with a look of beatitude on his face. Like Gloucester’s upon learning his son is alive, his heart bursts smilingly. Paul Rudnick has written a play about an entirely different sort of monarch: Ludwig, the mad king of Bavaria. His Valhalla, at the enterprising New York Theatre Workshop, is his most ambitious and, I believe, his strongest work yet, carrying the irreverent tomfoolery of Jeffrey and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told to lunatic extremes. Valhalla features two parallel characters from different periods of history: King Ludwig (Peter Frechette), who ruled over Bavaria until , and James Avery (Sean Dugan), an amoral and larcenous scoundrel whose story takes place in Texas during the s and s. Their narratives alternate, collide, and finally intersect over time in a manner already familiar to us from plays such as Arcadia and movies such as The Hours. Both characters are essentially gay men with a gay aesthetic, both are distracted from their true homoerotic interests by unusual young women, and both are afflicted by a dominating mother—played by the hilarious Candy Buckley monitoring their posture (“Shoulders back!”) and pinching their cheeks (“Is that a face?”). At the age of twelve, James conceives a passion for the virtuous all-American Henry Lee, whom he introduces to erotic literature and mutual masturbation. And he introduces himself (“I’m a cocksucker”) to the class beauty, Sally Mortimer (“I’m a Baptist”), who eventually bears James’s child. Years later, when Henry is about to marry Sally, James steals her wedding dress, puts on a veil, and goes through the wedding ceremony himself. Stealing is James’s passion, and he is not above setting fire to houses (“I redecorated”). As a result, he spends a good deal of time in reform school and prison, and, finally, in the army during World War II, never losing his good humor except when Henry, his friend and lover, is killed by a Nazi whose life James had spared (a small plot theft from Saving Private Ryan). When we first see James and Ludwig, they are both in love with swans, which may be why both like to aestheticize life. (“God wants the world to be beautiful. But it isn’t,” Ludwig notes). James finds Texas ugly; Ludwig can’t stand ugly people. James disguises himself as a bride; Ludwig dresses as a nun. Sally Mortimer distracts James from his homoerotic disposition; the hunchback Princess Sophie does the same for Ludwig, allowing him to touch her hump and stimulating Rudnick’s weakness for wonderfully tasteless infirmity jokes. Like most kings, however, Ludwig has the power to make life conform to his own ideal

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image of it by altering the landscape, as Louis XIV did with Versailles. And, wildly passionate about Wagner (“the tragedy of Lohengrin,” he says, “is that he never got to see Lohengrin”), he builds a kitsch storybook castle called Valhalla that will later become the model for the Magic Kingdom in Disney world. (“It’s like nature . . . if God was gay.”) By the end of the play, Ludwig has been declared insane—an aide compares him to opera which is “music that has gone mad”—and James has had a breakdown. Ludwig commits suicide, and James dies of cancer. In an imaginary and quite touching scene, the two dead men brush each other across the centuries, while James’s daughter, Annie, obtains a reliquary that Ludwig designed to house his heart. It now houses James’s glass swan. The director, Christopher Ashley, achieves exactly the right balance of comedy and subtle pathos, and his cast, virtually all of whom double as Bavarians and Texans, transforms superbly. Rudnick may have a weakness for one-liners, and the scene involving a female Jewish tour guide from Long Island welcoming her constituency to Temple Beth Shalom’s Whirlwind Adventure Castles of Bavaria (“Donald Trump, eat shit and die”) may be a bit too Borscht Belt. But this play is a real advance for a playwright with a fertile comic imagination and a lot of theatrical chutzpah, who knows how to transform absurdities into truisms and non sequiturs into insights. 

Homeboy Godot: Topdog/ Underdog; Fortune’s Fool

I was on the committee that gave the Pulitzer Prize to Suzan-Lori Parks for Topdog/Underdog. It was not my first choice for the award. The play is far from her most ambitious writing. But as an admirer of Parks’ previous work I was content to endorse the decision of the majority. Prizes often go to the lesser achievements of good playwrights whose better stuff has been ignored. Visiting the production a few weeks later, I was glad I had read the script first. Watching it cold might have given me second thoughts about the appropriateness of the award. It’s not that George C. Wolfe’s production—a transfer from the downtown Public Theater to the Ambassador Theatre on Broadway—is lacking in power or imagination. It has a lot of both, plus a syncopated dissonant style that is the theatrical equivalent of the modern jazz Wolfe uses for scenic transitions. What the evening often lacks is comprehensibility. One of Wolfe’s two actors, Jeffrey Wright, is giving a truly brilliant performance—subtle, focussed, and truthful. His vis-à-vis, the hip-hop artist Mos Def, on the other hand, I found to be unintelligible. This might just be my problem (I also find hip-hop unintelligible). The 129

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largely black audience laughed uproariously every time he opened his mouth. But aside from his unmodulated acting and shuffling movement, Def’s voice was undifferentiated at the decibel level he chose for delivering his lines, and I was seated too far to the side of the auditorium to be able to read his lips. For me Def lacked an essential quality of a stage actor, the capacity to measure the acoustical volume and pitch of a house, so trying to follow the development of his character or even the action of the play was often a very frustrating task. This frustration drove me back to the text again, regretting that I had not seen the estimable Don Cheadle originate the part downtown. I was glad to find that the text improved with further reading, largely because the author’s diction has the kind of perfect pitch that the actor’s diction lacked. The story of two brothers whose parents mischievously and inexplicably named them Lincoln and Booth, Topdog/Underdog extends the ambiguous fascination with the Great Emancipator that Parks first displayed in The America Play. Parks’ Lincoln, who began his mature life shaking money from suckers in a three card monte scam, eventually gave up the hustler’s life in order to take a legitimate job in a boardwalk arcade. There he plays his namesake in earnest, wearing a top hat and a false beard, while letting patrons take turns at assassinating him with a popgun. He does this turn in white face, thus reversing the conventions of the minstrel show (“I’m a brother playing Lincoln—that’s a stretch for anyone’s imagination.”), and also underlining the African-American ambivalence towards the man who both freed the slaves and, in the minds of some black commentators, patronized them as well. His brother Booth, on the other hand, who lets Lincoln share his dingy oneroom apartment, never did a legitimate day’s work in his life. He has remained a petty thief and shoplifter whose great dream is to learn the techniques that Lincoln perfected during his career as a card shark (a career to which Lincoln seems destined to return, since his employers are preparing to replace him with a dummy). Much of Parks’ essentially actionless play, perhaps too much, is taken up with demonstrations of this skin game, as Lincoln flips the cards around the table, daring his brother to identify the two of spades, in a display that is at the same time pedagogical and provocative. Shards of the plot are revealed in the interstices of the card displays. That the parents of these two men were unfaithful to each other, and didn’t care much for their children. That both brothers have been rejected by their women— Lincoln by his wife Cookie, Booth by his girlfriend Grace, who, in a poignant scene, fails to show up for the dinner he has prepared for her. That Cookie cuckolded Lincoln with his own brother, Booth, recapitulating a childhood mem-

Homeboy Godot

ory in which Booth watched his mother betray his father with her “Thursday man.” And that, in the ultimate revelation, Booth “popped” his girlfriend Grace with the automatic he always keeps by his side. That weapon figures both at the beginning of the play and at the end, proving Chekhov’s rule that if a gun is displayed on stage in the first act it is bound to go off in the last. In the final scene, after Booth has put up his mother’s inheritance ($ wrapped in a silk stocking) in order to prove his superiority at Lincoln’s game, and after Lincoln has relieved him of his money, Booth pops his brother too, in a climax that does not seem sufficiently prepared for, at least as realistic motivation. On its metaphorical level, of course, it reenacts the fratricidal drama of Cain and Abel, as well as the murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, an event Stephen Sondheim had previously brought to Broadway, complete with music, in Assassins. Parks has written this play in the style of a black vaudeville, the homeboy equivalent of Waiting for Godot. Like her previous work, it is a non-didactic theatricalization of the American black condition. Well-educated in a good liberal arts college, Parks is highly conversant with the th century avant-garde lit-crit syllabus—especially Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett—and she has never been afraid to use experimental techniques in order to glance at racial issues. In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, in The America Play, and in Venus, these explorations were performed in a highly charged imagistic language that kept the poetic content higher than the sociological substance. In her last play, In the Blood, a black version of The Scarlet Letter about a homeless woman, her writing began to get more accessible, if less reverberant, through her increasingly naturalistic language and domestic themes. Topdog/Underdog, which the playwright describes as being “about family wounds and healing,” continues in this vein. Instead of breaking out into fresh uncharted territory, Parks seems content to settle for a modest if seedily furnished room in town. Jeffrey Wright fully inhabits this room in a performance as strong as anything currently to be seen on stage. An alcoholic who treats his bourbon bottle like an extension of his right arm, Wright stumbles and shambles around the stage like a wounded lion, pissing into a cup, then drinking the contents. Looking and acting like a young James Earl Jones, Wright has a remarkable range (among his roles was the gay hospital attendant Belize in Angels in America). He creates the play’s most engrossing moment at the end of the second scene. Whiskey-soaked, he puts on his Lincoln costume, falls into a recliner, turns solemn and silent, his face twisting in pain, then begins laughing uproariously

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until he shouts “bang” and falls down dead. He repeats this once more, wiping away tears. Fortune’s Fool (Music Box) is a Mike Poulton adaptation of a Turgenyev play in a production directed by Arthur Penn, starring Alan Bates and Frank Langella. When the curtain opens on John Arnone’s set with its birch trees and credenzas, with Russian servants bustling around in Jane Greenwood’s period costumes, you feel yourself settling down for a fairly conventional evening of Slavic theatrics. Everyone is awaiting the return of the lady of the house, Olga Petrovna, after nine years’ absence from her country estate, and when she arrives, saying “Dear enchanted old house—my magical home—after nine years,” you might feel you are watching an early draft of The Cherry Orchard. Actually, Chekhov borrowed a lot from Turgenyev (especially the convention of the interrupted love scene which was transferred intact from A Month in the Country to Uncle Vanya). But one of the things these two playwrights had most in common was a powerful humanity. An odd almost forgotten strain of sympathy and compassion permeates this play like a sachet drenched in scent. And it is perfectly realized through the delicacy of Penn’s direction and the acting genius of Alan Bates. The play revolves around a gentleman in disrepair named Vassily Semyonitch Kuzovkin (Bates) who has been living off the estate for twenty-five or thirty years. Olga is newly married now and it is likely her husband will not allow the indigent Vassily to stay. When a fatuous and foppish neighbor named Tropatchov (ferociously played by Frank Langella) arrives for lunch, he plies Vassily with alcohol and encourages him to tell the other luncheon guests a long-winded story about a legal case, as endless as Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House, to recover his own estate. With the cruel goading of Tropatchov, the legal narrative becomes more and more incoherent after each glass of champagne until the deeply humiliated Vassily, staggering around the table and crumpling into a chair, having lost the last shred of his dignity, blurts out that he is the real father of Olga. How this works itself out in the second part, with Olga’s husband trying to bribe Vassily into silence, Vassily trying to deny what he said, Olga trying to determine the truth about her parentage, and Tropatchov trying to eavesdrop on all of them, is what keeps the play so delicately poised as a humane endeavor. The dramaturgy turns creaky at times. There are occasional lapses into Victorian melodrama (“You can’t buy me,” shouts Vassily, “I am not made of saleable stuff”) and Dickensian sentimentality (“I must ask you to forget me completely”), especially at the conclusion when Vassily and Olga embrace each

Homeboy Godot

other just before her father, forced to accept a bribe in order to protect his daughter’s reputation, leaves her forever. But Alan Bates, looking like Ulysses S. Grant in a huge beard and second-hand black frock coat, is so affecting as Vassily that I wept shamelessly, and left the theatre wondering whatever happened to plays with narrative and heart. 

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Pyrotechnics and Ice: Jumpers; Frozen

I first saw Tom Stoppard’s metaphysical comedy, Jumpers, when I was serving as guest drama critic for the London Observer in . It starred Michael Holdern as a dotty professor of philosophy and the splendid Diana Rigg as his musical comedy actress wife. The production was created under the auspices of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, then in residence at the Old Vic. Stoppard, who had attracted considerable attention nine years earlier with his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was immediately established as the most literate of the younger playwrights being wooed to the National by Olivier’s literary manager, Kenneth Tynan. Literate is an understatement. Stoppard, who completed only two years of high school before starting work as a journalist and later as a drama critic for various newspapers (under the pseudonym William Boot), is perhaps one of the most extraordinary autodidacts in literary history. He is also one of the most belletristic of playwrights. His works generally lift off from some literary or historical launching pad: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for example, is famously a theatrical gloss on two of Shakespeare’s minor characters examined 134

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through the bifocals of Samuel Beckett; Travesties revolves around, among others, Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara in Trieste; Arcadia is a pastoral wit comedy inspired by Oscar Wilde and Thomas Love Peacock, featuring characters based on Lord Byron and F. R. Leavis; The Invention of Love chronicles the hopeless love of the Oxford poet A. E. Houseman for Moses Jackson; and Shakespeare in Love, the charming movie Stoppard co-wrote with Marc Norman (perhaps his most feeling work), imagines Shakespeare in a bootless love affair that might have inspired Romeo and Juliet. Like Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard has always been an omnivorous reader, who has never been reluctant to share his scholarship with his audiences. If I still can’t get as excited about his playwriting as my fellow critics (and my Harvard undergraduates), this is because his wit and erudition have always seemed to be more on display than his capacity to penetrate the skin of human consciousness. Jumpers (at the Brooks Atkinson) is an early example of this intellectual showboating. Its central metaphor is embodied in the eponymous gymnasts who act as the play’s chorus, performing calisthenics throughout the evening for no apparent reason—except insofar as their physical gyrations reflect the cerebral acrobatics of their author. In Jumpers, Stoppard is eager to impress us with his readings in the philosophy of logical positivism, particularly that of A. J. Ayer, on which his absentminded central character, George Moore, seems to be based. (For some reason, it is his wife, Dorothy, who is known as “Dottie.”) I don’t mind being instructed in the rudiments of such First Causes as whether God exists, in the anthropological roots of cannibalism, in the nature of altruism, and in the paradox of Zeno’s arrow. In fact, the philosophical content of Jumpers, dictated by George in long-winded speeches to his silent secretary, is a reasonable substitute for a short course in moral philosophy and epistemology. And yes, the idea of contrasting the sterile logorrhea of an academic fuddyduddy with the emotional breakdown of his glamorous wife (“from the metaphysical to the physical”) is not without theatrical value. The fact that Dottie, who doesn’t even know where the kitchen is, is cuckolding him with the vice chancellor of the university (Sir Archibald Jumper) also holds some promise for drollery. Intriguing as well is the hint of a political theme. The “Radical-Liberals” have scored a victory that may or may not be a coup d’état, and the acrobats, or jumpers, are celebrating the event at a victory party at which Dorothy is shakily trying to perform. That one of them is murdered in mid-calisthenic is obviously intended as an important plot motif, but like so much else in this play the

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crime is shrouded in mystery and irrelevance. We are told that the dead jumper is also a professor of philosophy whose discrediting of absolute values, such as beauty and goodness, George (in an endless peroration) is trying to dispute. But the dead man’s role in the play remains maddeningly peripheral. A detective called Bones—on loan from Joe Orton—comes on stage to help solve the mystery. But like everyone else he is too smitten with Dorothy’s charms to bother to weigh the evidence. Dottie is the prime suspect. Indeed, the corpse is discovered hanging in her bedroom closet before being removed in a plastic bag by the other gymnasts. But the flaw in Jumpers, and I’m afraid it is a near fatal flaw, is that the play’s style bears no relation to its story. The murder serves mainly as a stimulus for the sangfroid of Sir Archie, the star worship of Bones, and the confusion of George, and although the real culprit is perfunctorily identified by the end, the crime really has little function other than as a stimulus for Stoppard’s wit. As for Dorothy, she is a woefully underwritten character who largely serves as a blonde sexual magnet for all the males. She has a smattering of philosophy herself, having been a student in George’s class, but otherwise her head is as empty as the lunar landscape that occasionally appears, for no apparent reason, on a grainy television screen. Oh yes, in a background plot, the British have landed on the moon, and one of the astronauts has apparently killed his subordinate. But this, too, is largely decorative story detail. Indeed, the play is so full of pointless plot stuffing that the only thing that keeps it afloat is its buoyant, whimsical tone. Whimsey is humor at its most precious, and preciosity is intellect at its most self-conscious. That may be why Jumpers leaves me feeling so empty and so unsatisfied. The philosophical references begin to sound like intellectual namedropping, and the question of whether or not God exists assumes as much importance as who killed Cock Robin. One way to characterize this play is to say that it is like the marriage of Dottie and George—show business splash mismatched with arid academicism. David Leveaux’s vaudevillian production tries to inject some of the emotional juice that Stoppard himself fails to squeeze, partly through the use of sentimental pop songs. Vicki Mortimer’s set is too garish for my taste, and it changes much too often. But Leveaux has supervised some strong performances, notably from Essie Davis as a vacant despairing Dottie, perched on a pockmarked crescent moon against a background of stars; from Nicky Henson as a stonefaced Sir Archibald, alternately Dottie’s lover, gynecologist, and defense attorney; and from Simon Russell Beale as George. Dressed in a green

Pyrotechnics and Ice

cardigan and suspenders and sporting a pixie grin, Beale is the actor who best demonstrates Stoppard’s debt to Oscar Wilde in the way he takes serious things frivolously and frivolous things seriously. Often miscast as heroic characters, he creates here an engaging fuddy-duddy lost in thought. Like Stoppard, Beale draws on a tradition of British wit comedy that began with The Man of Mode and climaxed in The Importance of Being Earnest. Some day, I would like to see him play Sir Fopling Flutter or Algernon Montcrieff. And some day I would like to see Tom Stoppard suspend his genius for literary impersonation for a moment in order to explore the secret corridors of the human heart. Frozen, by another English dramatist, Byrony Lavery, might serve as an excellent model for such an exploration. Written in the terse, stacatto style of Edward Bond, the play is a study of serial child murder, and its appalling effect on the mother of one of the victims. Frozen (produced by MCC Theater at Circle in the Square) has been written with virtually no decorative flourishes or verbal imagery. Its only metaphor is the title, which characterizes the nature of the killer’s brain, the state of the mother’s heart, the content of her dreams, and even the background of the American criminologist who comes to investigate the case (her family comes from Iceland). The metaphor is extended visually in the icy blue tones of Hugh Landwehr’s setting. The only flaw in this otherwise painfully honest play, in fact, is its overworking of the Arctic imagery. Otherwise, there is not a line of dialogue or element of character that does not seem tempered in the crucible of truth. The central sufferer is Nancy Shirley (Swoosie Kurtz), whose daughter Rhona, abducted at the age of ten, has been missing for twenty years. As a result, Nancy has joined an organization called FLAME, dedicated to consoling parents with similar heartaches. And now at last, her daughter’s killer has been identified and imprisoned. But Frozen is not the sociological treatise it could so easily have become. Indeed, the play is devoted to testing the social theories of the American criminologist, Agnetha (Laila Robins), against the recalcitrant nature of a truly heartless criminal named Ralph (Brian F. O’Byrne). Agnetha, examining “the Arctic frozen sea of the criminal brain,” has come to believe that there is a distinction between what she calls “crimes of evil and crimes of illness,” the one being a “sin” and the other a “symptom.” Like most liberal Americans, in other words, Agnetha cannot tolerate the concept of evil. Rape and murder for her are the result of early physiological or psychological damage in a criminal who is as much a victim as his quarry. As a result, she believes that even the most heinous crimes, like those committed by the totally unrepentant Ralph, can be causally

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explained. “Serial Killing . . . A Forgivable Act?” is the provocative title of her thesis. Nancy’s daughter, who shares similar beliefs, pleads with her mother to “let go of her anger” and forgive her daughter’s murderer. And the arc of the play is Nancy’s journey from blistering hatred (“I’m taking a gun, blow his brains all over the wall, I’m taking a knife, slice his thing off, stick the blade through his eye”) to the point where she is willing to visit Ralph in jail. That visitation is the powerful climax of the play. In previous interviews with Agnetha, Ralph has confessed that the only thing he regrets about the rape-murder of little girls is that it isn’t legal. Blustering, whining, fuming, proudly displaying his tattoes, Ralph finally reveals some history of child abuse himself, as Agnetha expected. But it is Nancy’s visit, when she makes him realize that the pain he experienced from his father’s blows was similar to the way he hurt and frightened her little girl, that finally penetrates his crustacean soul. In a mortal blow, she even forgives him. (The misery this causes him reminds me of the way Shaw’s wife-beater Bill Sykes was tormented by Major Barbara’s merciless compassion.) After trying to compose a letter expressing his guilt, Ralph hangs himself in prison. The author doesn’t say whether or not this outcome was precisely Nancy’s intention. Ms. Lavery’s symphony of sorrow and revenge is conducted without a single maudlin or overwrought note, and it is performed with the same ruthless searing honesty as it is written. Doug Hughes has staged a production, punctuated by stings of light and sound, that in its precision and depth once again indicates that he is presently unmatched as a director of new work. Laila Robins, as Agnetha, is required to do a lot of blubbering over a love affair that is not sufficiently fleshed out by the author. But she manages well the difficult task of attracting sympathy to a character who lives by theoretical constructs. Brian O’Byrne’s Ralph is a mean, lowering thug apparently without a single redeeming quality; yet, the actor manages to reveal a shaft of redemptive light beneath the slime. And Swoosie Kurtz as Nancy, her large eyes blazing with anger, her wide mouth compressed with hate, provides what may be the most nuanced and powerful performance of the year. The moment when she examines her daughter’s skull and finds it beautiful—“I can feel her head, its shape and texture and . . . resilience, and I’m flooded with Joy!!!”—is a radiant stroke of writing and acting in a relentlessly truthful, remorselessly bleak play. 

The Past Revisited: The Frogs; After the Fall

Two recent productions were like trips into the past, one of them into my own past. The new version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs at the Vivian Beaumont is a revision of a show I originally commissioned from Burt Shevelove in , as an after-season fundraising lark, staged in the Yale swimming pool. As the press has noticed somewhat obsessively, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and the playwright Christopher Durang were in the original cast. But the show was a product of the Yale Repertory Theatre, not, as has been mistakenly alleged, of the School, and these worthies were drama students at the time doing very small choral roles. The central actors, actually, were Larry Blyden, who played Dionysos shortly before his premature death in a car accident; Michael (“Time to make the donuts”) Vale as his slave, Xanthias; Jeremy Geidt and Anthony Holland as Shakespeare and Shaw (whom Shevelove substituted for Aeschylus and Euripides in the original text), and a chorus of eighteen undergraduates from the Yale swimming team as the frogs. The moment these aquatics dove into the Payne Whitney pool, accompanied by Stephen Sondheim’s title tune “We’re the frogs, we’re 139

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the frogs,” was the highlight of the evening. It may have been the only highlight. I had originally hoped The Frogs would be another A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, this time without music. Shevelove insisted on working with Stephen Sondheim, who had time to write and rehearse only six songs. The addition of occasional music confused the identity of the piece, so that it emerged neither as a refreshed classical revival nor as a Broadway musical, neither fish nor frog. Nevertheless, Shevelove’s Yale production of thirty years ago has achieved almost legendary status, while the present expanded version, “even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane,” has been almost universally condemned. The reaction baffles me. While I am hardly reluctant to praise my own productions, the present one, though far from perfect, is superior to ours in almost every possible way. First of all, it knows what it is—a Broadway musical that departs even more radically from the original play than Shevelove’s adaptation. And while the tone wobbles rather unevenly between burlesque gags and political pieties, it is a professional piece of work with a first-rate cast, imaginative direction, an improved and expanded Sondheim score, and a book that provides some genuine belly laughs. This is not something I would have expected from Nathan Lane. In the past, admittedly, he has played the kind of roles that used to belong to Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr, and Sam Levene (Lane is the most Jewish of non-Jewish comedians). But except for his Max Bialystock in The Producers, inferior to Zero’s but not totally eclipsed by it, his performances have never really impressed me as equal to theirs in scope or wildness. For one thing, his love affair with the folks out front (and they with him) has been a little too promiscuous to sustain that hardboiled, brazen independence of style necessary for great clowning. There was always a hint of sentiment bubbling on the edges of his quavering tenor that threatened to weaken the tensile strength required for farce. That soft quality is not entirely absent from his acting or from his writing in The Frogs. But, in collaboration with the director Susan Stroman, he has delivered at least an act and a half of satisfying entertainment. Stroman demonstrates once again, as in her production of The Producers, that she is not only an accomplished choreographer, she is also a fine farce director. She has a real affinity with the (politically incorrect) traditions associated with Minsky burlesque and Catskill vaudeville. She recognizes that this kind of comedy issues out of the incompatibility between erotic desire and social mores, that you can’t have pratfalls without showgirls, or showgirls without male lust. So did Aristophanes, and that is why his male actors always wore erect phalluses.

The Past Revisited

In the same tradition, Nathan Lane’s dialogue is full of outrageous puns and top banana gags (Hercules: “I go to clean the Augean stables.” Dionysos: “No shit!”). I suspect that is why so many critics have panned the show—like that barroom character in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, they “damn anything that’s low.” Many years ago, in a review of One Touch of Venus, Eric Bentley observed how, whenever Broadway adapts Greek or Roman classics, it inevitably turns them into middlebrow commodities. Lane has opted for the lowbrow, looking for the modern equivalent of Aristophanic bawdry, recognizing that the wise adapter will violate the letter of the original in order to better observe its spirit. Unfortunately, there are times when he violates the spirit as well. Aristophanes displayed a powerful pacifist consciousness in plays like Peace and Lysistrata—but not in The Frogs. Lane’s attempt to insert anti-war asides into the play accounts for occasional shots at the Bush administration (“Have you listened to our leaders? Words seem to fail them—even the simplest words”), at the cost of a consistent tone. In Aristophanes, Dionysos, god of drama, goes down to Hades to find a genuine dramatic poet and bring him back to earth in order to end a theatrical drought. He chooses Aeschylus over Euripides (always a comic butt for Aristophanes), after the two men weigh their verses on a scale, and those of Aeschylus prove heavier. Although the theatre is still in trouble in the Lane adaptation (“a little wine will get you through a lot of drama”), his Dionysos is now more driven by political considerations; he seeks a playwright who will write about “a war we shouldn’t even be in.” In Hades, he finds Shakespeare and Shaw, and after a rather feeble debate, based on dialogue from their plays, Dionysos chooses Shakespeare to return with him. Why the often jingoist Shakespeare would function as a fiercer critic of the Iraq war than the pacifist Shaw is not explained. Another interpolation, where Dionysos, mourning his dead wife, finds her in Hades, is another miscalculation (so is her name, Ariadne, who helped Theseus through the Labyrinth, not Dionysos through an identity crisis). This relationship encourages Lane’s biggest weakness, sentimentality. But the hell with it. He has worked up enough good comic scenes to compensate. One revolves around Dionysos, Xanthias, and a giant Hercules (Burke Moses), involving a huge studded club and a lion skin with a will of its own. Another is the journey of Dionysos and Xanthias down the river Styx in company with Charon the ferryman (a delicious John Byner), full of vaudeville shtik and even a few comic thrills when Xanthias is attacked by a giant amphibian (“I think we’re going to need a bigger boat”). And a third is the first entrance of the frogs,

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brekekekexing, leapfrogging, and bunjee jumping, a genuine coup de théâtre, powered by Sondheim’s stirring music reinforced by Jonathan Tunick’s rousing orchestration. What works best is the chemistry between Lane’s Dionysos and the Xanthias of Roger Bart. Bart was a late replacement, but his vaguely bemused, slightly effeminate slave act is very winning (he does his least convincing acting when the script requires him to make love to a buxom showgirl). Bart played the flaming queen Carmen Ghia in The Producers, and, reunited here with Lane, the two display the ease of an old vaudeville team. Sondheim’s score is still uneven (the dirge-like “It’s Only a Play” belongs in a more melancholy production), but has a lot of felicities. William Ivy Long’s reptilian costumes are a blast of color, and Giles Cadle’s set is always appropriately in motion, particularly in the debate scene, where all the auditors in Hades seem to be seated in the Beaumont theatre (an unfortunate analogy for Hell). The Frogs, for all its deficiencies, is giving a lot of pleasure to its audiences. It deserves much kinder treatment than it got at the hands of my humor-impaired brethren. Michael Mayer has set his Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Arthur Miller’s  play, After the Fall, in the departure lounge of an airport terminal. This may be because the production is being housed in the American Airlines Theatre. But this plane never takes off. I once wanted to write a play about life in Hell, where damnation consisted of being shunted from one airline counter to another, as your flight was ticketed, delayed, cancelled, reticketed, rescheduled, redelayed, and recancelled for all eternity. This is it. Miller has cut about an hour out of the original version, which was performed at Lincoln Center in a production directed by Elia Kazan. It still seems like eternity. What is fatally wrong with this work is that Miller never found the objective correlative through which to purge his feelings regarding a series of traumatic personal experiences. He has continuously claimed, disingenuously, that the play is not autobiographical. But when the hero has an older brother, a bankrupt father, and a hysterical mother, all of whom speak in cadences out of Death of a Salesman (“Kid, the woman was his right hand”); when he has written a “majestic brief ” that brings him great fame (“Your whole career will change with this”); when his closest buddy and professional mentor names names to the Committee, leading to the suicide of a mutual friend; when his three wives are a morose, fabissene neurotic, an uneducated, suicidal sex queen, and a gentle Viennese woman who guides him through German extermination camps, then you have exact and unequivocal analogies. Miller has not even made much effort to change the names of the wives (Marilyn is Maggie, Inge is

The Past Revisited

Holga). It is as if, at the same time that he is denying parallels, he is feeding material to future biographers. I regret my initial review of this play, which was unnecessarily cruel. But seeing the work forty years later, I had the same feelings of entrapment that provoked my previous irritability. One sits there waiting for just one flash of spontaneity, just one glimmer of authenticity. Quentin, as Miller calls himself in this play, doesn’t really want to communicate with other dramatic characters. He may share a Saarinen lounge chair or bench with them, but he is generally facing us. It is the audience he wants to talk to (or at), it is the audience he wants to persuade. Instead of telling a story, Miller prefers to pour out guilt and evacuate feelings, through a character who is nevertheless more sinned against than sinning. The result is a seemingly endless stream of self-justification. As the title suggests, it was around the time of this play that the progressive Arthur Miller discovered original sin (there is some suggestion that Auschwitz may have been a factor, too). “Remember the time,” he says, “when there were good people and bad people, and how easy it was to tell?” And again, “If all of us are innocent, where does all this evil come from?” And again, the final revelation, “that we are very dangerous.” But beware the man who discovers the moral satisfactions of personal guilt. He will never give you another quiet moment. In the current production, the play no longer possesses the Pirandellian frisson of being directed by one of the characters whom it stigmatizes, namely Elia Kazan (a.k.a. the name-naming Mickey). That may be why Michael Mayer has persuaded his designer, Richard Hoover, to set the action of the play not in the “mind, thought, and memory” of his protagonist, as Miller indicated, but in an airport, and pass it off as Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal. This device only reminds us of how seriously the production needs Tom Hanks. As Quentin, the saturnine Peter Krause cannot succeed where even the great Jason Robards failed—in bringing this prolix, grandiloquent, self-pitying bore to life. The redhaired Carla Gugino is superior to the blonde Barbara Loden, the original Maggie, particularly in managing the abrupt transition between adoring kitten and roaring virago. But most of the cast has been pushed into hysterical climaxes, and it doesn’t help that whenever someone starts to overact, Mayer has a jet plane take off. Come to think of it, if Miller has not found the objective correlative for this play, maybe his director has—it is the satisfaction of departure, which I shared with most of the audience at the end of the evening. 

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In the Jungle: Rose Rage; Hedda Gabler

Last year, Barbara Gaines, artistic director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, invited Edward Hall to restage his marathon Shakespeare cycle, Rose Rage, with her young company. The production has now opened in New York at The Duke on nd Street, where it proves a perfect union of director, actors, concept, and location. I say location because the entire action of this four-hour conflation of the three parts of Henry VI (five and a half hours if you include dinner) is set in an abattoir, and Chicago has a well-documented history of stockyards. Upton Sinclair famously fastened the nation’s attention on these unsanitary slaughterhouses in The Jungle, after which Bertolt Brecht satirized the ruthlessness of greedy Chicago meat packers in St. Joan of the Stockyards. The fact that Hall’s production was first performed in England (Bagnor and London) with an entirely English cast doesn’t matter. He may very well have been thinking of Chicago when he conceived it, if not of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, since the juicy parts carved out of this bloody carcass seem especially processed for this prime company. (After a trope like this, I am disqualified from complaining about the awkward pun in Hall’s title.) 144

In the Jungle

In Rose Rage, the slaughterhouse becomes an image for the inhumanity of man to man, and war becomes an extension of butchery by other means. The metallic set, fitted together with numbered metal lockers, is an environment where pounding the inner organs of animals seems a natural activity. Admittedly, this grisly device sometimes runs a little thin or, shall we say, a little thick. To watch a chorus, costumed in butchers’ smocks and paint masks, sharpening their long knives, then hacking away at dozens of bloody animal hearts, livers, spleens, and intestines every time some poor grunt gets punctured on the battlefield, or hung from a hook, is enough to make one swear off meat. (Vegetables too, since human heads are represented by purple cabbages, sliced on tables or skewered on spikes.) But the slaughterhouse metaphor grows in power as a gory symbol of carnage and warfare. Edward Hall’s father, Sir Peter, directed a similar reduction of those plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company over forty years ago called The Wars of the Roses. The son manages even better than the father in locating a comprehensible thread of narrative in the tangled skein of all these royal intrigues among competing interests for the throne. His adaptation, written with Roger Warren, omits the Joan La Pucelle plot, in which a xenophobic Shakespeare treats the Maid of Orleans as no better than a whore—a “foul fiend of France,” consorting with “lustful paramours.” I missed the impassioned capers of this wild virago, but her absence helped clarify the plot line. As written, the three parts of Henry VI, are largely a long string of arguments between a group of relatively undifferentiated and faceless characters (“historical cartoons,” as Harold Bloom describes them, “declaiming heroic bombast”). The only issue is who has a better right to the English throne. Virtually everybody claims it. Henry V having died, England is in a state of near anarchy. The crown has passed to his ineffectual son, the child Henry VI, who becomes the pawn of competing factions of nobles. The Houses of York and Lancaster initiate their war, at the same time trying to prevent uprisings in Ireland and the loss of English holdings in France. (The belligerent fustian issuing from the mouths of the French royalty no doubt inspired the French Taunter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) But although scholars regard the plays largely as a laboratory in which Shakespeare is testing his craft, the engaging thing about the Edward Hall production is how clear the storytelling has become, with the aid of clean, brisk, edgy performances by the actors. In the fashion of current English practice, Rose Rage is an all-male production—though, with only three women in the cast, this cut version of Henry VI is practically an all-male play anyway. The

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Frenchwoman Margaret, whom Suffolk takes as his mistress before marrying her off to the innocent King Henry, is played by the young Chicago actor Scott Parkinson in a persuasive female impersonation. Shakespeare uses animal imagery to describe this feral queen—“the she-wolf of France,” “a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” (Robert Greene, a contemporary, ungenerously characterized Shakespeare around this time as “a tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”). Parkinson plays Margaret as a virulent, red-lipped predator in a perfumed boa, callous, relentless, ruthless, with no tenderness for anyone but her illegitimate child. I said that the characters in this trilogy were undifferentiated, but each play has at least one exception. In Part I, it is Joan La Pucelle. In Part II, it is Jack Cade, the populist pretender, one among an army of claimants to the crown. He and his proletarian army enter chanting reformation hip-hop (“Down with the government, down with the gentry”), banging drums and smashing bats on the metallic floor in rhythm with their raucous shouts. As written by Shakespeare, and as played by the dynamic Joe Forbrich, who turns this truculent anti-elitist into a Midwestern blue collar ruffian, Cade bears an uncanny resemblance to a French Revolutionary Jacobin, spouting hatred for anyone educated (“Thou hast traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm by erecting a grammar school”) or skilled (“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”). Like Harpo Marx tearing a book to pieces in Animal Crackers, he gets angry because he can’t read. He sends a justice to the gallows, simply for speaking Latin. People who know French he calls traitors (presaging the Republican spin on John Kerry). Inevitably, Cade, like his th-century descendant Robespierre, gets his own head cut off, as the leaves of one more cabbage scatter in the dust. Part III features the emergence of the most fascinating character in the play—Shakespeare’s first well-crafted villain, Richard Crookback. This hedgehog, born with a full set of teeth, is a man destined “to bite the world.” As played by Jay Whittaker, he not only brandishes a straight razor, he is a straight razor—just to touch him is to draw blood. Anticipating his intent to murder Edward’s two sons in the tower, he licks the faces of the kids with his viperish tongue. Glowering, sneering, a tuft of beard beneath his lower lip, a rakish black homburg on his head, Whittaker provides as blistering and cruel and witty a Richard as I’ve seen—and I’ve seen some good ones, including Olivier, McKellen, and Branagh. Carmen Lacivita emphasizes the Christ-like qualities of young King Henry as he evolves from innocent boy into remorseful witness of the evil he has unwittingly created (“Pardon me God,” he says, before he dies, “for I know not

In the Jungle

what I did”). Pushing the parallel with the crucified Jesus even further, the director suspends him from iron rings at the moment of his demise. Although she is indifferent to the fate of her husband, Queen Margaret wants to die, too, having witnessed the murder of her son. The butchers sharpen their knives. But “misshapen Dick” spares her to become one of the three wailing women in Richard III. To single out individual actors is to disregard the general excellence of this remarkable company. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has been in existence now for eighteen years, and I am ashamed to say that Rose Rage is the first time I have seen it in performance. If this production is typical of the work, then it is clearly among the most electric theatres in the country. Don’t worry about the length of the evening. You won’t regret a bloody minute of it. The innovative Dutch director, Ivo van Hove, has returned to the New York Theatre Workshop with a new production—Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in Christopher Hampton’s terse adaptation. His previous work here included controversial deconstructions of Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions, and Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed. The current production does not quite meet those standards. But nothing this director creates is ever less than engrossing, and if not entirely successful, his Hedda is an occasion for some riveting performances. Jan Versweyveld’s set is an unfinished room with dry walls that extend along the sides of the entire theatre. Built into one of these walls are three metal panels, marked “kitchen,” “attic,” and “coat room,” where the maid stows suitcases and outerwear and refrigerated items. Flowers in pots and paint cans are scattered on the floor. When the audience enters the house, a woman in a bathrobe is sitting at a piano, her fingers roaming idly over the keys. The piano is the major prop on stage, and Hedda (Elizabeth Marvel) seems as drawn to it as Blanche Dubois (a part Marvel also played) was to the bathtub in van Hove’s production of Streetcar. Marvel’s neurotic Hedda is obviously in an advanced state of depression from her first moment on stage. She shrieks at her servant, Berta (the mournful Elzbieta Czyzewska), but then so does everybody. Van Hove’s reimagining of this minor character is typical of the way he approaches each of the others. Sitting in a chair near a surveillance screen, announcing visitors, smoking cigarettes, absorbing insults, Berta is a victim of serious servant abuse. As for the conventional Aunt Julia (Mary Beth Peil), she has become an elegant Park Avenue matron with a tart tongue. The long-suffering Thea Elvsted (Ana Reeder) has turned into a spirited flapper who gives as well as she gets. The timid aca-

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demic George Tesman (Jason Butler Harner) is recharacterized as something of a spoiled brat, while the pseudo-Dionysian Eilert Lovborg (Glenn Fitzgerald) emerges as a bit of a nebbish. As for the wily, magisterial Judge Brack (John Douglas Thompson), he has become an insinuating, whimsical, seductive, and ultimately sadistic stud. In each case, van Hove takes some latent quality in a character and makes it dominant. This is particularly true of Hedda. The conditions that lead to her suicide at the end are perfectly apparent from the start. Wearing a scanty pink shift throughout most of the play, she displays no desire to get dressed or to leave the house or even to put on a pair of panties. She is by turns bored, frantic, flirtatious, subject to childish tantrums. She receives everyone in the same state of irritated rage that she shows towards her servant (“Will you show him in, !!!”). She exposes her legs to Judge Brack. She throws her shoes at Lovberg (he throws books back at her). She turns violent with Thea, pulling her hair. Everyone in the play displays some temperament. Marvel raises temperament to the level of pathological breakdown. Van Hove’s usual method is to provide an X-ray of a play that exposes its hidden bones. In Hedda, his radiographs are cloudy, and more than a few of his interpolations are clumsy or perverse. The house Tesman has bought is described as marvelous and luxurious. This dump is so unfinished Hedda has no hesitation stapling flowers to the drywall. The constant tinkling of the piano grows annoying. When Hedda burns Lovberg’s manuscript, she first has to uncover a gas grill on the floor and then ignite it. And it is a serious omission that no portrait of General Gabler hangs in this house. Hedda’s father is a crucial if invisible character in the play, the martial image of masculinity and confidence against which the daughter measures all other men (and finds them wanting). But the final scene, when Brack returns to report Lovberg’s death to Hedda, almost redeems the other lapses. Earlier, Hedda had persuaded Lovberg to shoot himself in the head with one of her father’s pistols, and thus restore her belief that heroic action can survive domestic ennui. Brack reveals that Lovborg has shot himself “somewhat lower,” by accident, and in a house of prostitution. “Everything I touch turns into something ludicrous and disgusting,” remarks Hedda. As if to illustrate this, Brack takes the can of tomato juice she has been drinking and pours it over her head and down her chest, then forces her face into the liquid that has spilled on the floor. It is a repellent act of subjugation and humiliation, recalling the way Stanley held Blanche’s head underwater in von Hove’s bathtub Streetcar. That act pushed Blanche into madness. This one drives Hedda to suicide, with no alternative but to shoot herself with her fa-

In the Jungle

ther’s remaining pistol. In her death throes, she wriggles across the back of the stage, as Brack casually whispers the famous concluding line: “My God, people don’t do things like that.” It is an astonishing and daring scene, performed by two splendid actors— Marvel, who is indeed a marvel, reaffirming her place as one of the powerful artists of her generation, and Thompson, on his way to joining her in the pantheon. As for van Hove, he has made Hedda Gabler, a play that has begun to creak a little, into a compelling post-modern construction, with a fully recognizable neurasthenic contemporary at the center. The price of this achievement is some loss in thematic clarity, but how many times a year do we get a chance to see Ibsen alive and kicking on the stage? 

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Impersonations: Monty Python’s Spamalot; Orson’s Shadow; Julius Caesar

Infatuated with Rousseau’s Romantic notion that the identifying mark of genius is the refusal to imitate, we sometimes fail to appreciate the crucial relationship between art and impersonation. Aristotle certainly understood it. Instead of insisting that the road to inspiration is paved with originality, he famously described tragedy as “the imitation of an action.” And while the Poetics doesn’t say much about actors impersonating characters, Aristotle certainly believed in some form of histrionic imitation as the root of the dramatic event. The best performers, however, are not duplicating machines or celebrity impressionists, turning out convincing likenesses of someone else’s voice, gait, and gestures. At their best, they reproduce the essence of another human being in order to capture an interior underlying spirit. Three new productions either benefit or suffer from their approaches to impersonation. Monty Python’s Spamalot, the latest Broadway mega-hit, is, like that other long-running blockbuster The Producers, a musical impersonation of a cult movie. The central copyist of the musicalized Producers was its Hollywood auteur, Mel Brooks, who provided book, lyrics, music, and inspiration for the Broadway show. 150

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In the case of Spamalot (a lumpish pun not worthy of the Python wit), the responsibilities are split—rather like the style of the musical itself. Eric Idle is listed as chief begetter, but there is no question that Spamalot’s director, Mike Nichols, deserves a goodly share of auteur honors. Idle, who wrote the book and the lyrics, is the only authentic Python in the project, though John Cleese gets a chance on tape to simulate the Voice of God, and the show’s composer, John Du Prez, once wrote additional music for another Python movie, The Life of Brian. In fact, the most memorable song in the show is lifted from that movie—the oft-reprised “Let’s All Look on the Bright Side,” originally sung by two cheerful thieves during their crucifixion on Calvary. As you may have heard, the audience is so familiar with Spamalot’s film source—Monty Python and the Holy Grail, of course—that howls of glee arise at the appearance of characters such as the French Taunter (“I fart in thy general direction”). The same tumultuous response greets the “Bring Out Your Dead” episode (where plague victims are piled onto a cart before they have actually expired) and that precious moment when the nasal “Knights of Ni” materialize on stage, squeaking for a “shrubbery.” This Python hysteria is a relatively recent phenomenon. When the aerialists of the Flying Circus brought an anthology to the New York stage about thirty years ago, they couldn’t even fill the City Center for a revue that included such classics as “The Parrot,” “The Argument,” and “The Lumberjack Song.” Today, the Sam S. Shubert is sold out until virtually the next millennium. Given the contemporary audience’s familiarity with every Python tic and inflection, the cast of Spamalot should be cited for bravery just for daring to step into the now legendary footwear of Palin, Chapman, Idle, Cleese, Jones, and Gilliam. But except in cases where costume, makeup, and accents can be easily replicated, the actors have the good sense not to attempt to imitate the inimitable. Tim Curry, for example, who played the simpering Mozart in the original Broadway production of Amadeus, takes over Graham Chapman’s role of King Arthur and plays it with a sleepy look and vaguely bemused spirit. Like Chapman, he rides an imaginary horse throughout the show, to the accompaniment of coconut clops provided by his squire Patsy (Michael McGrath, impersonating Terry Gilliam), but what he evokes is more a memory than a simulacrum. Curry is one of the few cast members who doesn’t double as another character. Hank Azaria (who also plays the French Taunter and a Knight of Ni) is delightful in Cleese’s old role of Sir Lancelot, especially when his chain-mail armor is ripped from his body to reveal that underneath this manly exterior lies the soul of a transvestite queen. David Hyde Pierce, whose very name might be

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a Python invention, is quite becoming as the cowardly Sir Robin, a part originally played by Idle himself; Christopher Sieber relishes Michael Palin’s Sir Dennis Galahad (though no one can match Palin’s po-faced brand of offended innocence); and Steve Rosen is amusing as “the strangely flatulent” Sir Bedevere (originally played by Terry Jones). Let it also be noted that Tim Hatley’s scene and costume designs owe a considerable debt to the visual genius of the American-born Python, Terry Gilliam, who designed all the troupe’s surrealistic graphics. (God’s huge animated hand and foot, for example, are lifted intact from the original TV show.) Halfway through the show, the quest for the Holy Grail draws to an end when the actors find the bloody cup, and God sends them on a new quest. They are to wend their way a thousand years into the future to a land that has yet to be discovered, namely Broadway. Broadway is “a very special place with people who can sing and dance, often at the same time.” The only problem is that you can’t have show business without Jews, and none of the medieval knights will admit that they are circumcised (“It’s not the sort of thing you say to a heavily armed Christian”). Before too long, however, the cast is donning Stars of David and doing a kazatzka from Fiddler on the Roof. This is the moment when Monty Python’s wink-wink nudge-nudge humor bows out and Mike Nichols’s broader burlesque kicks in, with the star attraction of Spamalot emerging in the person of Sara Ramirez. An amply endowed Julliard graduate with an outsize voice, Ramirez plays the Lady of the Lake, who bestows Excalibur on Arthur before transforming into Lady Guinevere, who bestows herself on him as his wife. Ramirez has a talent for caricaturing virtually every loudmouth who ever belted along the Great White Way, especially those imported from the United Kingdom by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Sarah Brightman comes in for particular mockery, though Liza Minnelli, Patti Lupone, and Jennifer Holliday get some hits as well). It is Ramirez, usually surrounded by a bevy of nubile American showgirls, who re-routes Spamalot from an anarchic Monty Python romp into a show-biz satire not unlike Forbidden Broadway. We have an early hint of the schizoid nature of the production when a bespectacled professor parts the curtains to describe medieval England and the lights go up on a full set of Finland instead, followed by an entire production number of Finno-Ugric peasant dances—a good laugh, but one expensive enough to fund another Broadway show. When, later, the Round Table transforms into a roulette wheel, it is clear that Nichols has stopped cantering along the road to Camelot and started speeding over the Interstate to Vegas. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the whole Strip repre-

Impersonations

sented on stage, including a brand-new hotel next to the Luxor and the Venetian called the Shtetl, with Hasidic croupiers presiding over gaming tables devoted to pinochle, hearts, and gin rummy. But hell, the whole thing is hugely entertaining, and there’s enough great stuff left over from the original movie— the fantastic duel between Arthur and the Black Knight who refuses to admit defeat even when all his limbs have been chopped off (“It’s just a scratch”), the attack of the killer rabbit on Arthur’s terrified knights—to make Spamalot a hilarious if circuitous nostalgia trip, cushioned by its frequent shocks of recognition. Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow is another act of impersonation, and a highly engrossing one indeed. Set in , when Orson Welles was performing at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, it begins on a darkened stage illuminated only by a ghost light, where the stammering, celebrity-mad British theater critic Kenneth Tynan comes to visit the failing artist he still considers the great hope of the stage. Welles, at that time playing Falstaff in his own Chimes at Midnight (an adaptation of Henry IV that left out most of the history), is in the process of trying to equal the fat knight in obesity and appetite, at the same time chewing up his once illustrious career. In the hope of resurrecting Welles, Tynan would like him to direct Laurence Olivier in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court. Tynan hasn’t yet mentioned this idea to Olivier, nor has he informed the future director of the National Theatre about his ambition to be its literary director. That sets the scene for the second act, on the empty, darkened stage of the Royal Court. Tynan’s chances of becoming Olivier’s associate are not enhanced by his brutal reviews of Vivien Leigh’s performances, particularly opposite her husband in Antony and Cleopatra. And although Olivier is in the process of leaving the promiscuous, tubercular, half-mad Leigh for his new love, Joan Plowright, he is still smarting over Tynan’s treatment of the woman who inspired his most romantic performance (notably Lord Nelson in That Hamilton Woman). If all this sounds like higher theatrical gossip, it is. But Orson’s Shadow is written with such wit and sympathy and performed with such warm insights into the anatomy of the actor’s ego that it makes for a funny, illuminating, and ultimately very touching evening. The play also chronicles an important transition in English theater history—when Olivier, prodded by Plowright and the Royal Court, was in a state of artistic evolution. Accused by critics such as Tynan of turning Henry V into a scoutmaster pageant and Hamlet into a Joan Crawford movie, Olivier is now being nudged by the younger generation toward the new theater of the English Angries and the French Absurdists. He has already tri-

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umphed in The Entertainer. Now it is Welles’s troublesome job to direct him in Rhinoceros. Pendleton has done a lot of research on the period, though there is some question over how he has used his facts. One could quarrel with the author’s assertion that Tynan liked to be spanked by beautiful women (actually, Tynan did all the spanking), and the emphysema test we see administered to this chain smoker by a stagehand at the Royal Court was actually conducted one summer in the Martha’s Vineyard home of William Styron. But these are small quibbles about a well-evoked series of episodes in theatrical history. Pendleton also has the advantage of a cast, under David Cromer’s direction, that has the capacity to impersonate without slavish imitation. Jeff Still wisely stays in shadow for most of his performance as El Monstro (as the great filmmaker was called); when he emerges, he looks less like Orson Welles than Raymond Burr, but he suggests some of his oracular presence, wry humor, and outsize appetites. As for the Kenneth Tynan played by Tracy Letts (an actor who is also the gifted author of Killer Joe and Bug ), he resembles Michael Caine a lot more than the purple-shirted dandy of Mayfair. But if Letts doesn’t capture Tynan’s mischievous spirit, he certainly catches his curious combination of malice, innocence, and fandom. And the scene between him and Vivien Leigh, two warring characters with badly infected chests sharing a cigarette, says everything about the relationship between nicotine and self-destruction. Playing Olivier is no job for an ordinary mortal, so John Judd’s Larry can be forgiven for being a little less elegant than his peerless model (his seedy costuming doesn’t help much either). But Susan Bennett’s dynamic Joan and Lee Roy Rogers’s distraught Vivien bring such eerie reality to their parts that they almost reincarnate the age. Rogers, her odd cowboy-star name notwithstanding, bears an uncanny resemblance in looks, voice, and transparency to the delicately poised feline charmer she is playing. Watching her enact the “manic” phase of her madness, first dancing with a stagehand while humming the waltz from Gone with the Wind, then demanding to fuck him with her husband in the next room, is like seeing someone preparing to enter the first circle of shocktreatment hell. This is impersonation of a very high order, and so is Austin Pendleton’s play. Julius Caesar at the Belasco suffers from the fact that virtually nobody in the cast knows how to impersonate. Most of them come from the world of television and the movies, where actors prosper mainly by playing themselves. The one exception perhaps is the director, Daniel Sullivan, who seems to be replicating Orson Welles’s anti-fascist jackboot version of the play for the Mercury

Impersonations

Theatre in . The cast is led by the estimable Denzel Washington as Brutus, whose return to the stage seems to be the motivating—perhaps the only—reason for reviving the play on Broadway. Welles used modern dress to raise consciousness about Mussolini. Sullivan uses modern dress to lower consciousness about Shakespeare. In this production, you rarely know where you are or how you got there. The Soothsayer is a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. The Romans are usually in business suits, being checked for weapons at the Senate door by security (Brutus sneaks the knives through the metal detector in a briefcase). After the assassination, they wage war in berets and fatigues, brandishing pistols and automatic weapons but committing suicide with their knives. To repeat, where are we and what are we doing here? The only time the production seems located is when the director is cooking up a storm, since thunder and lightning know no chronology. You want to applaud Washington’s return to the stage, but he doesn’t find much to play in Brutus except his furrowed-brow decency. The part may not be active enough for an actor who, in the movies, rarely makes a bad decision— too much thinking, too much hesitation, too many wrong choices. And he doesn’t know what to do with his soliloquies except rattle them off while looking vacantly at the sky (a less naturalistic actor would have had a conversation with the audience). The one time Washington smiles his charismatic smile, you forgive him everything. But he should have played Marc Antony, whose dialogue remains imprisoned in the clenched throat of an actor from HBO’s Oz named Eamonn Walker. William Sadler approaches Caesar less like he’s running a government invading Gaul than a syndicate taking over the Roman waste-disposal industry. Kelly AuCoin’s Octavius Caesar discusses military strategy with a wad of gum in his mouth. And Jessica Hecht’s highly neurasthenic Portia seems to be bent on suicide the moment she walks on stage. There are some solid repertory-trained veterans around, such as Colm Feore playing an edgy Cassius, Jack Willis as a laconic Casca, and John Douglas Thompson as a fiery Flavius. But most of this huge cast of thrown-together strangers seem to have come not so much from another world as from another medium. Alas, it is a medium that doesn’t care a lot about impersonation. 

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Prosecution Plays: Doubt; Romance; The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; The Pillowman; Thom Pain (Based on Nothing); The Light in the Piazza

Contrary to received opinion, the American theatre is currently hosting as many good playwrights, as many strong plays, as ever before. Although virtually none of these dramas originates on Broadway, a handful eventually enter the mainstream through the channels of resident, off-Broadway, and London theatres. What follows is a brief roundup of six new works, submitted with my apologies. Not all of them are noteworthy, but most deserve more attention than I can provide here. If I had to generalize about the direction of recent drama from these examples, I would say it seems to be informed by an interrogatory spirit and a courtroom style. By some curious coincidence, four of these plays are driven by prosecutions. After a long career of journeyman writing for the stage (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story) and screen (Moonstruck, Joe versus the Volcano), John Patrick Shanley has finally caught the larger public’s attention with Doubt (Walter Kerr Theatre). The play has already won a Pulitzer Prize and the Outer Critics Circle Award, and will be a strong contender for the Tony as well. While Shanley’s style remains relatively conventional, it is his considerable achievement to have taken a 156

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subject about which everyone has formed an opinion—sexual abuse among the Catholic clergy—and dramatized it without prejudice or preconception. Something has transpired between Father Flynn (Brian F. O’Byrne) and a young black student at St. Nicholas School that Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones) firmly believes to have been transgressive. In her remorseless prosecution of the case, and interrogation of the priest, she systematically destroys his reputation, not to mention his love of teaching and perhaps of the Church. By the end, too late, she is finally developing some incertitude. Shanley may leave the audience in doubt about the guilt of Father Flynn, but there is no doubt about the power of the production—big theatrical performances, directed with precision and confidence by Doug Hughes. O’Byrne’s warm interpretation of the harried priest is in impressive contrast to the cold serial killer he played in Frozen, and Cherry Jones is giving the performance of her career as the female Javert who pursues him. This is the strongest play about the Catholic clergy since Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, which also featured a splendid characterization (by Elizabeth Franz) of a less than charitable nun. Shanley’s respect for the “negative capability”—which Keats defined as the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—may sometimes be expressed a bit too positively and unambiguously, but the play is a significant advance for him, and for the Manhattan Theatre Club that produced it. Romance (Atlantic Theater Company) is David Mamet’s latest departure from the stacatto realism for which he became famous, an older style currently on display in the Broadway revival of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, Romance is a legal farce in the tradition of the Marx Brothers (A Day in the Courthouse? A Night in the Pokey?). Appearing before an exasperated and slightly looney pillpopping judge—a character inspired I would guess by Liam Dunn’s frazzled magistrate in the movie What’s Up, Doc—a Jewish chiropractor named George Bernstein has been indicted for an unspecified crime. He is being defended by a gentile lawyer (“It’s like going to a straight hairdresser”), and questioned by a gay prosecutor. With everyone in a continuous state of fury, the subsequent exchanges produce some ferocious, unbuttoned, politically incorrect racial and religious slurs, delivered while the Bailiff doggedly tries to take orders for lunch. (Jewish defendant: “You brain-dead white socks, country club, plaid pants, Campbell’s soup fucken sheigetz Goy . . . with your wives named Marge”; Gentile defense attorney: “You Rug Merchant, Greasy, Hooknosed, no-dick, Christkilling, son of a bitch . . . You people can’t order a cheese sandwich . . .

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without mentioning the Holocaust”). Even the Judge is anti-semitic, until he confesses that he’s “a sheeny” too, with a secretly Jewish father. All this takes place against the background of a peace conference between the Israelis and Palestinians. And the court proceedings come to a halt when the Jewish chiropractor announces he has discovered a way to bring peace to the Middle East (by realigning the subdural areas on the necks of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders). The farce goes on a bit too long, and it wanders off track when the prosecutor’s boyfriend enters the court to discover that the Jewish defendant is a long-lost lover. But Romance is never less than an engaging jeu d’esprit, directed in lively Mamet style by Neil Pepe, and acted with alacrity and relish by a spirited cast. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (LAByrinth Theatre) is another courtroom vaudeville, this one by Stephen Adley Guirgis. My report is based on the highly readable script, since the production closed before I got a chance to see it. But I think the play confirms Guirgis’ place as one of our most electric young dramatists. After watching this playwright’s Our Lady of st Street, I suggested he might be an heir to O’Neill. His Judas play reveals he has a much sharper sense of humor. As in Romance, the courtroom scenes feature an angry Judge out of movie farces (“When I come to court dressed as Ethel Merman in a one-piece bathing suit,” he barks, “that’ll be my signal to you that I want your opinion”), while most of the other characters speak in the street language of urban blacks and homeless derelicts. Guirgis is familiar with both testaments of the bible, and while the defense attorney is a winged female philosopher and the prosecutor a Muslim who fawns on the Judge while thirsting for the blood of the defendant, the witnesses for and against Judas include figures from the gospels, such as Satan, Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and Saint Thomas, not to mention Sigmund Freud, Mother Teresa, and Saint Monica (the mother of Augustine, and the namesake of a Hollywood suburb). The play does not exonerate Judas so much as humanize him, and in the end he is embraced by Jesus, who washes his feet and begs him for love. Judas cannot give it. The climax is unsatisfactory, but how do you conclude such an enterprise? Merely to undertake it is an act of considerable courage and audacity. And slapstick skill. The Pillowman (Booth Theatre) is the last in our string of prosecution plays, and a major departure for Martin McDonagh. Set in the interrogation rooms of a prison in an unidentified totalitarian state, it does not rely, like the playwright’s two previous Irish trilogies, on local color or provincial Irish speech.

Prosecution Plays

Though hardly perfect in form, The Pillowman represents a real growth spurt for this extraordinary dramatist, an exponential leap in his imaginative powers. Much of the work is (perhaps by design) extremely derivative. It starts off in a Kafkaesque manner, reinforced by similarities to Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Havel’s Interview, and Beckett’s Catastrophe. A writer of mostly unpublished children’s stories is being questioned by a volatile cop named Ariel (Zeljko Ivanek) and a self-possessed detective named Tupolski (Jeff Goldblum) concerning a crime whose nature is not at first entirely clear. The name of the writer (Billy Crudup) is Katurian Katurian Katurian, familiarly known as Katurian, and before long Ariel has stuck a pen in his ear as a prelude to further torture. Katurian’s brain-damaged brother (Michael Stuhlbarg) is in another room, ostensibly being tortured as well. And as the plot develops, we learn that Katurian’s stories about the murder and mutilation of little children have been acted out in reality, unbeknownst to him, by his next of kin. Brothers figure as prominently in McDonagh’s plays as they do in those of Sam Shepard. But the relationship between Katurian and Michal (“Tell us a story, Katurian”) is almost identical with the bond between George and the feebleminded Lennie (“Tell me about the rabbits, George”) in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And when Katurian learns that Michal has murdered three children in the identical manner as his stories, he treats his brother the same way George treated Lennie after he killed Curley’s wife: He ends his life as an act of mercy. That event concludes the first act, and at the blackout I thought it should have ended the play. But it is in the second act that McDonagh’s real, and less derivative, theme emerges—whether or not violent art stimulates violent behavior. This issue has been debated endlessly by sociologists, psychologists, legal theorists, and philosophers (starting with Aristotle’s theory of catharsis), but never, to my knowledge, has it been treated so well by a dramatist. In Katurian’s case, we learn that the reverse is true: his life has influenced his art in that his parents’ vicious treatment of his brother has inspired his grotesque stories, which in turn have influenced his brother’s crimes. As it turns out, Katurian, with his own history of violence, accepts his execution, caring a lot less about his own survival than about the survival of his writing, regardless of its effect on others. And the ending, oddly triumphant for such a “downbeat” story, reaffirms the stubborn will of the creative spirit. The production has been staged in high Grand Guignol style by John Crowley, featuring startling Victorian tableaux of Katurian’s childhood in upstage

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scenic boxes. Crowley has also elicited superb performances from his cast— particularly from Jeff Goldblum, who has shed his annoying mannerisms to develop a very funny sangfroid and minimalist menace, and from Zeljko Ivanek, whose explosive sadistic exterior conceals a basically decent and fairminded individual. Billy Crudup, though perhaps a bit too clean-cut for the role, is a passionate Katurian, and Michael Stuhlbarg, a shambling wreck of an overweight halfwit, with a grey spot in his hair like a stigma, both charms and repels as Michal. The last two works under review this week are not prosecution plays, except in the sense that they invite prosecution, the one for affectation in the third degree, the other for conspiracy to commit tedium. Thom Pain (Based on Nothing ) at the D.R.  Theatre is an “existential stand-up” by Will Eno that irritated me with its pretentious prolix prattle. The content of this monologue, as intoned by James Urbaniak, is accurately summed up in the parenthetical subtitle. The play is indeed based on nothing, and, as Lear once reminded us, nothing will come of nothing. As for Eno’s titular pun on the author of Common Sense, it is fairly typical of the playwright’s wit, and bears as much relevance to the proceedings as Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, who, when mentioned, causes acute embarrassment. I was less embarrassed than wearied by this stream of consciousness palaver that boasts of putting us “face to face with the modern mind.” (Gee, I haven’t been face to face with a modern mind since The Man with Two Brains.) The playwright’s other profound reflections are delivered in telegraphic style, alternately cajoling and insulting the audience, at the same time that he is bestowing his ineffable wisdom on us. “We’re on planet Earth, a planet in a solar system, one of a trillion solar systems in our galaxy, which is one of a billion galaxies in the Universe. And you think you’re pretty special. Math. There’s a lot of zeroes out there,” etc. If you can endure this kind of bloat for more than five minutes without your eyes crossing, I’d be happy to buy you two tickets to Will Eno’s next work. The Light in the Piazza (Vivian Beaumont Theatre) is based on a novel by Elizabeth Spencer that seemed dated when it was adapted into a movie forty years ago starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux, and Rossano Brazzi. It was one of those Hollywood anecdotes (another was A Little Romance with Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane) inspired by the contrasts in Henry James and Edith Wharton between American innocence and European cosmopolitanism, a theme not exactly pulsing with originality, or even accuracy, today. Craig Lucas, who adapted the book for the musical, is a fine playwright who

Prosecution Plays

ought to be more careful about the commissions he accepts, while Adam Guettel, who wrote the music and lyrics, is a gifted Sondheim-influenced composer who should stop stifling his gift for melodic line. As for the plot, it is unravelled very very slowly, under Bartlett Sher’s deliberate direction, accompanied by frequent changes of Michael Yeargan’s architectural settings and Catherine Zuber’s sumptuous costumes. The plot is also rather preposterous. Margaret, a Southern matron (played by Victoria Clark as an alternately forbidding and compassionate soprano), and her daughter, Clara (a fresh ingenue turn by Kelli O’Hara), have come to Florence on holiday. A young Italian from a good business family named Fabrizio (the very engaging Matthew Morrison) falls in love with her at first sight, and after fumbling past a lot of language barriers, the couple plan to get married. The hidden obstacle on the path of true love is that, when Clara was a young girl, she got kicked in the head by a pony. As a result, although only her parents seem to recognize this, she is now intellectually and emotionally retarded. The audience is admitted to the secret through small bursts of plot, like the moment when she strokes the penis of a nude statue, or when she throws some wine on the dress of her future sister-in-law after the woman has kissed her fiancé on his lips. Apart from these relatively insignificant lapses, Clara behaves no more strangely than any other glandular American girl, so the apprehension expressed by her irate father and anxious mother seems entirely misplaced, if not bewildering. As for Fabrizio’s father, his only concern is about Clara’s age—the match is almost called off when he discovers she is six years older than his son. By show’s end, Fabrizio and Clara join hands in marriage, and love conquers all mental handicaps, real or imagined. But whether or not Clara will ever display any true signs of her condition is a fact that remains shrouded in mystery. The greater mystery is why the Beaumont has expended such extravagant resources on such old-fashioned material. The prosecution rests. Does the defense wish to cross-examine? 

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Theatre of the Mushy Tushy: Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées)

The moment the audience is solemnly ushered into that improvised tent in Damrosch Park provided by Lincoln Center Festival  for Ariane Mnouchkine’s latest Theatre du Soleil epic, it is clear that we are being prepared for martyrdom. Today, there is a whole branch of theatre devoted to making you feel not just emotionally responsible for the universal inhumanity of man to man but physically uncomfortable as well. Mnouchkine, always an intrepid theatre artist, provides us with the latest example. Even her title—Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées)—tortures the tongue. One popular way to torment your audience is by means of that theatre equivalent of the medieval rack, first dreamed up by Peter Brook, called the straight-back bench. (Mnouchkine has designed her own version of these cramped bleachers and imported them all the way from Paris.) Spending long hours sitting on this Iron Maiden, generally in theatre spaces distressed at great expense in order to make them appear impoverished, is virtually guaranteed to induce sciatica, slipped discs, and spinal stenosis—a treatment devised, I suspect, for the purpose of retaliating against bourgeois audiences for their elitist 162

Theatre of the Mushy Tushy

privileges. Another form of punishment is to charge astronomical prices ($ a ticket in this instance) for the opportunity to balance yourself for hours on one buttock without falling off the bench. We’ve had Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Grotesque, Theatre of the Absurd, Theatre of the Ridiculous, Poor Theatre, and the like. Now we’ve got Theatre of the Mushy Tushy. A related form of torture is the intolerable length of the performances. Long ago I imagined that the theatre of the future would either last an hour-and-ahalf or a week-and-a-half. I hate it when my prophesies actually come true. A few of these stage marathons, of course, have been well worth the long sit, such as Peter Brook’s ten-hour Mahabarrata, Robert Lepage’s eight-hour Seven Streams of the River Ota, and Robert Wilson’s five-evening the CIVIL warS (relatively succinct compared to his seven-day Ka MOUNTain and GARDenia Terrace ). Others can make you feel like an enlisted man on a extended tour of duty with all your leave privileges cancelled. By comparison with the longest journeys, Ariane Mnouchkine’s latest epic is fairly brief (only six-and-a-half hours with a short break for dinner). It just seemed very long. Wilson, Brook, and Lepage have recently been working in more economical forms, generally with written texts. So should Mnouchkine or risk losing her audience. I don’t wish to appear heartless or frivolous regarding the subject of Mnouchkine’s latest epic: the plight of immigrants from fundamentalist Muslim societies (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iran, Iraq, etc.), and their efforts to find refuge in countries that will accept them (New Zealand, France, and England), and in those that won’t (Australia and Indonesia). Immigration is obviously on many people’s minds today, and not just that of the refugees. It has attracted the attention of many solicitous theatre directors as well. For example, Peter Sellars’ 2003 version of Euripides’ The Children of Herakles at the American Repertory Theatre featured real immigrant children on stage, who were also directed to walk through the audience with outstretched hands, while ethnic food was served during intermission. Following the show, Christopher Lydon did interviews with Cambodian refugees who had fled the Khmer Rouge genocide (followed by a chorus of “That’s Entertainment”). At least since the Royal Shakespeare Company version of Nicholas Nickleby, theatre people have been using emotional strategems to make prosperous audiences feel guilty over the plight of the less fortunate. But apart from raising consciousness (and inducing guilt) over the wretched of the earth, these affairs have no apparent practical function. What are audiences actually supposed to do? Storm the INS? Sponsor visas for maids and gardeners? Adopt an immigrant family?

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To be fair, Mnouchkine handles this complicated subject with a minimum of self-righteousness. And she has taken a problematic ethnic group—not the innocent victims of Darfur or Sarajevo, not the massacred Tutsis or starving Ethiopians, but the subjugated women and children of the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists, many of the characters shrouded under body-length burkhas or weighted with sternum-long beards that rob them of much individuality. Even before the London bombings, Mnouchkine was perfectly aware of Western suspicions regarding male Islamic immigrants. She has been quoted as saying that a nation has an obvious right to protect itself against an influx of refugees that might include terrorists, though she also criticizes the hypocrisy of Westerners accepting the oil of “unacceptable regimes” while refusing their human jetsam. The politics of this event, in short, is not simplistic or unpersuasive. What it lacks is a reasonable aesthetic, a sense of economy and form, and an overarching unity. What it needs, in other words, is a dramatist. Ariana Mnouchkine is a supremely gifted auteur director, but an auteur is not an author. Like Peter Brook, she is at her best working with an inspired text, as in her Shakespeare cycle (Richard II, Twelfth Night, Henry IV ) and her Greek epic (Les Atrides). When she and her company (often as many as seventy-five actors) improvise their own texts, the work comes off as chaotic and confused. Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées), or LDCO (I promise this is the last time I will make you read the whole polysyllabic title), is based on letters from displaced persons seeking asylum in foreign lands. Some of these testimonies are moving and poignant, but the piece is just a series of fragments, lacking a guiding hand to unify them into a coherent whole. (Mnouchkine takes credit only for originating “le proposition” which, if true, suggests that collective democracy is not the best system for formulating theatrical works of art.) Mnouchkine’s thirty-six member commune has been preparing this material through workshopped improvisations for a number of years. The research is prodigious and the results sometimes startling. This is a collective rightfully proud of its accomplishments and confident in itself, whether making up in full view of the audience as you enter, or hugging each other in the last of their carefully choreographed curtain calls. But for all their community feeling, the company makes only a minimal effort at communication with audiences. Spoken in at least ten languages (including Farsi, Afghan, and Russian), often in tones beneath the level of audibility, LDCO desperately needs a readable libretto. What it provides instead are mostly illegible supertitles in a variety of

Theatre of the Mushy Tushy

unreadable types, projected onto any available surface, even stage moldings, under lighting conditions that often render them indecipherable. As a result, your back strain is often aggravated by eye strain. The piece has one unifying idea, though, suggested in its subtitle. LDCO is a modern Odyssey not about militarily exhausted people trying to return home after a war, but about religiously oppressed people trying to leave home after a revolution. As in The Odyssey, the most exciting events occur during storms at sea. Mnouchkine has devised at least two stunning episodes, both featuring fragile boats on a boiling ocean, that leave you with your heart in your mouth, even though the tumult is only simulated, Asian-style, by means of billowing silken cloths, roaring noises, and flimsy props (the designer, Guy-Claude Francois, is one of the creative heroes of the evening). Wooden crafts are hoisted up on top of huge waves, their passengers peeping out from two separate decks, tossed back and forth. One falls over the side and is deposited back on the boat, all to the accompaniment of rousing recorded music, created by Jean-Jacques Lemetre, a white-bearded maestro whose rapport with the audience is signified by a bemused glance at us on each of his many entrances. This is pure spectacle, the sort of thing at which the company excels. Most of the other scenes occur in three dimensional boxes that are pushed on and off the stage (so are the characters, who are rolled in on trolleys—no one in this continually restless production seems to walk). There are innumerable episodes regarding the unsuccessful efforts of some Chechnyans to jump on top of a moving Eurorail train, having paid their dues to a particularly brutal and venal overseer. There is a scene involving a woman accused of having premarital sex, lashed by the puritanical Taliban, who later hang her by the neck in a crimson dress. One young Afghan enjoys watching videos, so he is summarily shot in his own living room. Another pair of scenes take place in a Melbourne Appeals Court where a Muslim refugee, appearing on a TV screen, is coldly informed that “Australia does not accept you.” And the final scene of the play concerns a reunion on the cliffs of Dover of a large Muslim family, both religious and secular, sharing a picnic while birds squeal, a foghorn wails, and a sitar plays. It is perhaps the only serene, peaceful episode in the entire evening, a rare instance of communion when a refugee family collects together without fear or persecution. There are hundreds of similar characters in the play. That is the problem, from a formalistic point of view. This is not the Odyssey but a series of Odyssées, featuring not one Odysseus but a hundred, not a single person’s encounter with

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a Cyclops or a Siren, but the tribulations of multitudes. In short, the individual in this work is engulfed by history. But as Stalin once cruelly remarked, while one man’s death is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. That is the reason I admired and respected this production and was, at the same time, so dissatisfied with and annoyed by it. Mnouchkine’s stagecraft is dazzling, and she has not been niggardly about the amount of human misery she is willing to show us on stage. But am I alone in sensing something condescending about the way this material has been collected and presented to Western audiences? One of the vestiges of a lost colonialism is the belief that great wrongs can be righted without the power of jurisdiction. This leads to the expression of sympathy without responsibility, the exercise of conscience without hope of remedy. It leads, in short, to theatre as a form of therapy. But art is not designed to do the work of politics. It is impotent to eradicate great suffering; the best it can do is describe that suffering artfully so that we may share its pity and terror. But this needs the skeptical, ruthless, penetrating control of a great imaginative artist capable of ordering these parts into a coherent whole. Too often in recent years stage invention has been made to substitute for creative imagination, resulting in something that may be at the same time superbly theatricalized and insufficiently dramatized. Which is another way of saying that perhaps it is time for gifted auteurs like Mnouchkine to reunite with inspired authors. 

Lear’s Lendings: King Lear

King Lear is not only Shakespeare’s crowning masterpiece, it may very well be the greatest play ever written. Performed for over  years in an “improved” happy-ending version by the th-century playwright Nahum Tate (where Lear returns to life, and Cordelia survives to marry Edgar), the work has often seemed much too painful for audiences. Yet, it has been embraced by some of our greatest actors—Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, F. Murray Abraham, Robert Stephens, Michael Gambon, and Christopher Plummer among them. All have created wonderful moments; few have succeeded in achieving the full magnitude and grandeur of the role. The reason may be found in Olivier’s remark that when you have the strength to play Lear you’re too young, and when you’re old enough to play him, you don’t have the strength. The climactic storm scene alone, with Lear raging at the heavens about filial ingratitude, is often shouted over earsplitting thunder that makes vocal projection impossible. Theoretically, Lear should be able to overcome, or at least match, the storm. Usually, he is drowned out by the sound effects. Compared with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, King Lear is a rather 167

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untidy play. But it is a remarkably audacious one, the work of a writer exploring a whole new ghastly metaphysics. Shakespeare’s other tragedies, however full of misfortune, at least assume an ordered universe. Lear seems to take place on a cold and friendless planet revolving around a third-rate star. It’s not that Shakespeare isn’t drawn to Christian-Humanist values; he just can’t seem to believe in them anymore. The universe has lost both intelligence and design. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,” remarks Gloucester, “They kill us for their sport.” Indeed, unless there is some sign of heavenly intervention in this world, as Albany warns Goneril, “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep.” But the heavens remain silent, and the predators prevail. Goodness gutters like a candle before being snuffed out. The play is a glimpse into the depths of some monstrous abyss. What saves this world from absolute evil are a handful of decent characters—Cordelia, Edgar, Kent, Gloucester, the unnamed servant who tries to prevent Cornwall from blinding Gloucester. Decent is perhaps the wrong adjective for Lear, at least in the opening scenes, where he is the incarnation of pride and narcissism, hungry for flattery, intoxicated by false illusions. But his slow development into self-awareness is the journey of a very mighty spirit. That he occupies the center of the action, resisting the malevolence that poisons it, still makes King Lear a humanist play, albeit a sputtering, flickering humanism, about to be extinguished. The irony is that the evil engines of the play are set in motion by Lear himself. His first action—banishing Cordelia when she refuses to declare her love for him in public—is in effect his only action. But his subsequent decision to divide his kingdom between Goneril and Regan brings on all the ensuing horrors. After that, things happen to him, a man “more sinned against than sinning.” Lear only slenderly knows himself because he is blinded by ceremony. He cannot grow into self-knowledge until divested of his royal trappings. Just as Gloucester, in a parallel plot, is able to “see” only after being blinded (“I stumbled when I saw”), so Lear will begin to understand the nature of justice only after he has plunged to the bottom and exposed himself “to feel what wretches feel.” The key term in this process is accommodations (after the Latin accommodo, meaning to adapt, to put on). It is the word Lear uses to refer to his hundred knights. But his accommodations are also his clothing, his language, his trappings of kingship, all those civilized “borrowings” gradually claimed back from him by nature, including his very sanity. And when Lear sheds his clothes (“Off off you lendings”), and trembles on the brink of madness, he has been re-

Lear’s Lendings

duced to “unaccommodated man,” as he calls Edgar the feigned madman, “a poor, bare, forked animal,” indeed “the thing itself.” Without the lendings of civilization, human beings are reduced to a state of nature, whom the villainous bastard Edmund declares his goddess. She is a goddess who doesn’t bear much resemblance to that rational entity later enshrined by the French Revolution. She is more like Hobbes’s blind and brutish animalism or Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” characterized by disintegration, cracking, splitting asunder, spilling seeds. Seeing with absolute lucidity in his madness, Lear perceives that brute nature and human justice are the same. The judge is as corrupt as the thief, the punitive beadle lusts after the whore he whips, “Robes and furr’d gowns” (or accommodations) “hide all.” What ultimately redeems Lear is his deep love for Cordelia. Reunited with her, he could be confined to a prison or bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. But she is hanged, and Lear’s little world implodes. The plentiful negatives studding the play are capped by Lear’s “She’ll never come again. Never, never, never, never, never.” The last spark of hope is extinguished, leaving Lear without hope or redemption, regardless of the perfunctory reordering of the kingdom at the end. No wonder he dies in the illusion that Cordelia is still alive. King Lear is a great symphony of sorrow played by hoarse bassoons and dissonant brass, which, for all its doleful music, tells us as much about the tragedy and triumph of being human as anything in literature. 

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Part Three People and Places

Marlon Brando: Contempt for Acting

Under the general editorship of James Atlas, Lipper/Viking has been publishing brief Penguin Lives of such major figures as Mozart, Proust, Joyce, Melville, Simone Weill, and (in a particularly informative study by R. W. B. Lewis) Dante Aligheri. Now comes a book by Patricia Bosworth on the subject of Marlon Brando. Its inclusion in this series may be an occasion for raised eyebrows. It certainly lifted mine and not just because the book reads like a celebrity bio by a Brando groupie (Bosworth, a cultural reporter who has previously rhapsodized over Montgomery Clift, almost loses her breath when she describes, in an epilogue, how “this singular artist” once touched her shoulder). It’s not that the entire Penguin list is devoted to high cultural figures. A book on Crazy Horse is included, and so is a projected work on Elvis Presley. No, if Brando seems misplaced in this company, it is because, though unquestionably an acting genius, he has so often cheapened and abused his prodigious talent. Profoundly scornful of his profession, indifferent towards his artistry, repelled by his own character, he is, in fact, so uninterested in his public self that he refused to be interviewed for this book (something Bos173

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worth mentioned almost proudly in her pre-publication New York Times piece). Stella Adler liked to speak about the “nobility” of the acting profession. Uta Hagen wrote a book called Respect for Acting. For Brando, by contrast, acting has always triggered his deepest contempt. The reasons for this have something to do with the man and something to do with the Hollywood culture that spawned and exploited him. Bosworth’s most valuable contributions to a large Brando biography industry (twelve books to date plus the actor’s own autobiography) are her speculations about the social and psychological conditions that sparked his apparent self-loathing. Brando himself suggested a few reasons in his  autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, which he wrote primarily in order to snag a four million dollar advance from Random House (hard cash has always been a major factor in his creative decisions). Describing Brando’s book, Bosworth characterizes a man “who will not admit even to being a good actor. . . . He seems to want to be thought of as an operator, a prankster, a liar, and a con man.” The origins of these feelings she finds in his early history. The Midwestern product of a doting alcoholic mother with stage ambitions and an abusive philandering father who felt his son would never amount to much, Brando seemed to have doubts about himself from the very beginning. He also expressed early indifference to an acting career, though there was very little else he was prepared to do. A highschool dropout once expelled from military school for going AWOL, he studied with Stella Adler in New York, before finding mentors among other graduates of the Group Theatre such as Harold Clurman, Bobby Lewis, Clifford Odets, and especially Elia Kazan, who was responsible for his earliest stage and film triumphs. (Contrary to popular legend, Brando was not trained by Lee Strasberg, who always claimed credit for his success, though Brando disliked him intensely.) Brando’s stunning performance in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire literally changed the whole iconography of American acting, making vocal mumbling and physical shambling the instruments of a new naturalism, and torn tee shirts a leading item of male fashion. According to Camille Paglia, as quoted by Bosworth, his primary achievement was to liberate “theatrical emotion from its enslavement by words,” his wild, sexy rebellious persona prefiguring “the great art form of the Sixties generation: rock and roll.” In a  article of my own, called “America’s New Culture Hero,” I took the opposite position—namely, that the inarticulate rebel invented by Brando and imitated by so many Actors Studio wannabes was an undesirable break not only

Marlon Brando

with traditional classical heroes but also with the eloquent proletarians of Clifford Odets. Whatever the case, Brando’s disregard for written speeches, for which he substituted his improvisatory genius, was partly due to an indifference to text and partly to an effort to wrest his own performances from the control of directors and screenwriters. Occasionally, this resulted in some remarkable cinematic moments (notably the “I could have been a contender” taxicab scene in On the Waterfront). But it had the effect of depreciating the power of language in American theatre and film, though Brando was perfectly capable of playing a part like Marc Antony in the film of Julius Caesar without a single improvisation. Perhaps because the theatre, unlike film, is a medium of language, Brando, following the extraordinary success of Streetcar, abandoned the American stage for good. Bosworth quotes him as saying, years later, “It’s been said I sold out. Maybe that’s true—but I knew what I was doing. I’ve never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for greed, avarice, phoniness, crassness—but when you act in a movie, you act for three months and then you can do what you want for the rest of the year.” This was an unfortunate decision, because Brando was poised to become one of the truly great stage actors of the century, in a class with Olivier, Gielgud, Ian Holm, Barrymore, and Frederic March. But his professional laziness was not expressed in lolling near the pool of his house on Mulholland Drive or lying on the sands of his Polynesian atoll, where he built a hotel after filming Mutiny on the Bounty. He wanted time between films to occupy himself with political causes. Although he admired the transformational genius of a character actor like Paul Muni, he wasn’t sure acting was a profession worthy of a man. That may be why he became such a royal pain in the ass on stage and movie sets, feuding with Jessica Tandy in A Streetcar Named Desire and Anthony Quinn in Viva Zapata!, chewing garlic during his love scenes with Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads, demanding a shorter workday so he could pay daily visits to his therapist, infuriating such dedicated directors as Carol Reed, Bertolucci, Pontecorvo, and Coppola with his intrusive tactics, using cue cards and hearing aids as devices to receive the lines he refused to memorize, gorging himself to the point of bursting on steaks, Brie cheese, and ice cream until he could be photographed only in shadows in Apocalypse Now, demanding huge amounts of money for very little work (indeed, asking so much to repeat his part in Godfather II that he was written out of the script). He was at constant war with studio heads, and by , already overweight and depressed, was considered unemployable even by permissive Hollywood

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standards. For a while, he tried to control his acting fate by starting his own production company, Pennebaker Inc., in order to make movies that, in Brando’s modest view, “had social value and would improve the world.” With its finances mismanaged by his father and its products mismanaged by Brando, the enterprise went bankrupt and the world was forced to wait a little longer for improvement. The always discerning Harold Clurman provided the deepest insights into Brando’s lax attitude towards his craft: “Yes,” he wrote, “there is something in Marlon that resents acting, yet he cannot help but be an actor. He thinks acting ‘sickly.’ He’d rather ‘do something for the world.’ . . . However, his innermost core, secret even to himself, can find an outlet only through acting. And it is precisely because his acting has its source in suffering, the display of which he unwittingly resists, that it acquires its enormous power.” Brando’s efforts to “improve the world” were even less successful than his independent film ventures. In his various, continuously changing political allegiances he became the embodiment of the guilty self-lacerating white man. After appearing in the pro-Israeli play A Flag Is Born, he declared himself a passionate advocate for a Jewish state. A few years later, he enthusiastically embraced the Palestinian cause. He became so deeply engaged in the Civil Rights movement that he decided to give up acting and devote himself to raising money for CORE and Martin Luther King, until James Farmer rejected him as another knee-jerk liberal. Then for a short time he joined the ranks of the radical chic by supporting Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers, financing rallies and making racially self-abasing speeches (“You’ve been listening to white people for four hundred years, and they haven’t done a thing. Now I’m going to begin right now informing white people what they don’t know”). Soon after learning something about the Panthers that he didn’t know, he extricated himself from the movement when Eldridge Cleaver began exhorting his followers to kill their parents. Not that Brando didn’t have fantasies about killing his own father (a lovehate relationship Bosworth identifies as “the central drama in the actor’s life”). “I used to think,” he said after Marlon Senior died, “‘God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds . . . because I want to break his jaw.’ I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him . . .” Apparently his passion for universal peace and justice did not extend to his closest relatives. When offered an Academy Award for his brilliant performance in The Godfather, he famously refused to accept the Oscar, sending Princess Sacheen Little-

Marlon Brando

feather up to the podium to read a fifteen-page speech (only two minutes of it televised to a booing crowd) protesting the way the film industry treated the American Indian. Later putting his money where her mouth was, he poured a lot of his vast movie fees into AIM (the American Indian Movement) until some Indians, suspicious of his motives, repudiated him as a mere publicity seeker. His career, in short, is virtually a history of fellow travelling with a wide range of post-war radical activist movements, his momentary enthusiasms quickly followed by fatigue and disillusionment. As for his countless sexual relationships, they were usually short-lived multicultural entanglements. “Most of the women in my life,” he boasted, “have been women of color.” Or at least that was his intention. He produced nine legitimate children (and uncounted illegitimate ones) with a number of wives and mistresses bearing exotic names like Movita and Tarita. But although his first wife, Anna Kashfi, professed to be a Darjeeling Buddhist of East Indian heritage, she later turned out to be Irish. Indeed, just about the only consistent relationship in his life was his friendship with a fellow Nebraskan, Wally (“Mr. Peepers”) Cox. Brando’s penchant for misadventure and his vulnerability to hucksterism are admittedly the stuff of comedy, but they also had their tragic consequences, particularly on his family. Circumstances of divorce and career made it difficult for Brando to spend much time with his children, though he was so opposed to their becoming actors that he cheered when one became a masseur (another served for a while as bodyguard for Michael Jackson). Yet, Christian, the child he loved most (named for the character he played in Mutiny on the Bounty) served a term in prison for having killed the lover of his sister Cheyenne (named for his favorite Indian tribe). Cheyenne’s fate was even more depressing. She bore her murdered lover’s posthumous son, who proved to be drugaddicted at birth, then hanged herself after being denied custody. Thus Brando experienced the worst pain a parent can suffer—which is to outlive your own child. He did not, on the other hand, outlive his own acting gifts, though he certainly continued to abuse them. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared himself a poor caretaker of his talents. Brando was a slobbish caretaker of his, not even bothering to mow the lawn or lock the door. “A movie star is nothing important,” he once told Time magazine. “Freud, Ghandi, Marx—these people are important. Movie acting is just dull, boring, childish work. Everybody acts—when we want something, when we want someone to do something; we act all the time.” Considering this attitude, it is a wonder that Brando was able to create so many

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memorable movie performances—notably in Streetcar, Viva Zapata!, On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris, and, preeminently, The Godfather, where, using a triangular mouthpiece to push out his cheeks, a latex mask of lines and wrinkles, and a rasping voice that suggested he’d once been shot in the throat, he proved that he was not just a compelling screen icon but a great transforming actor in the tradition of his idol, Paul Muni. But the sadness of Brando’s career is that he matured in the age of the Actors Studio, with its emphasis on personality acting and movie star ambitions, and not in the time of the Group Theatre, which, for nine years in the thirties, was devoted to bringing artistic dignity to the tawdry American stage. This committed permanent acting company, whose icons were Stanislavsky and Marx, managed to wed a passionate theatrical aesthetic to a passionate social idealism. Under the leadership of Harold Clurman, actors such as Stella and Luther Adler, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Franchot Tone, Frances Farmer, and others were able to subordinate their own career drives for a while to the ongoing development of an art theatre. By the time, Brando appeared on the theatre screen, that noble effort to develop a committed ensemble of actors and directors had failed, and its members had been absorbed into a world they all despised. Unable to resist the pressures of the culture, most of them (Clurman included for a while) ended up in Hollywood. Although Brando continued to seek his mentors among the graduates of the Group Theatre, that shining ephemeral moment of artistic idealism had already passed. The Group Theatre’s Stalinist God had failed as well. The people Brando had most admired, notably Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, were currently naming names to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in order to keep their Hollywood jobs, and a community of artists who, despite their aesthetic quarrels, were once a tight-knit band, were now turning on each other in rage. (Brando later resented the fact that he had been used through the character he played in On the Waterfront to justify Kazan’s finking on his friends.) If Brando failed to respect acting, it was partly because he lived in a society that only respected stardom. In America actors are not rewarded with knighthoods from the Queen or rosettes from the Academie Francaise. The best thing they can hope for is a shiny metal statuette whose sexless appearance contrasts with the abundance of semi-naked meat on display at the Academy Awards. On the other hand, actors bear some responsibility for the direction of their careers. The best of them in this country still recognize their obligation to the art they serve. They do this either by continuing to work with resident compa-

Marlon Brando

nies, often at significant sacrifice of money and fame, or by returning intermittently to the stage between movie assignments. Brando, who had the capacity to revolutionize the American theatre, kept his theatrical mutinies confined to the Bounty, preferring to pour his great talents not into great repertory roles but into a series of mostly trivial films. Somewhere, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says, “He who forfeits his calling forfeits his right to live.” This is admittedly a very harsh thing to say in a culture of worldly seductions and material rewards. Marlon Brando didn’t forfeit his calling so much as neglect and insult it. That he did so partly to make room for altruistic activities makes the outcome no less saddening. 

179

Requiem for Jan Kott

Jan Kott, a seminal critical mind of the twentieth century and one of the last of its mighty theatre intellectuals, has died at age . I mourn his passing as a friend and colleague. It is now almost half a century since this Polish expatriate first published Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a book that exploded our thinking about how Shakespeare could be produced on stage. It was Kott’s habit to urge contemporary parallels on the classics, not through specious updating so much as through lived experience—in his case, a life under the Nazi occupation and later under Communism. Kott thus opened up new possibilities for hundreds of classical directors, first with his insights into Shakespeare and then with his subsequent work on the Greeks and the French classical dramatists. To him, every great playwright was our contemporary, and it was the obligation of the theatre to make their plays as startling and unpredictable as on the day they were written. Artaud’s battle cry, “No More Masterpieces,” might very well have been Kott’s. But whereas Artaud wanted to return the theatre to a ritual of blood and instinct, Kott continually tried to rejuvenate great drama through deeper imagina180

Requiem for Jan Kott

tive probes, fresher intelligence, and more vital scholarship animated by genuine experience. We have all been the beneficiaries of his incisive, profound, original thinking. To speak personally, Kott had an immense influence on our work at Yale during the year he was in residence there in the mid-sixties. His heavily accented voice with its comically rising inflections was sometimes parodied, but it was the medium of extraordinary insights, both in the classroom and on the stage. His inspiration continued not only at the Yale Repertory Theatre but later at the American Repertory Theatre, and everywhere that classical theatre was practiced. There are scores of European, American, and Irish directors— Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Robert Woodruff, JoAnne Akalaitis, Marco Martinelli, Charles Marowitz, Declan Donnellan, Ariane Mnouchkine, Yuri Yuremin, Elizabeth LeCompte, Des MacAnuff, Adrian Hall, Bob McGrath, Francois Rochaix, Marcus Stern (the list is too long to be completed here)— who owe a creative debt to Kott’s unique work. The twentieth century has often been called the century of the director. What is often overlooked is that it was also the century of the classical playwright, in that a host of neglected or overlooked plays of the past were brought to public attention by interpretive artists under Kott’s influence. All those interested in a more penetrating, more serious, more daring theatre art owe a debt to Jan Kott. He was a special man of the theatre and he will be sorely missed. 

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Pieter-Dirk Uys: The Good Hope of the Cape

During the dark and brutal days of apartheid, the theatrical conscience of South Africa was the earnest protest writer Athol Fugard. During the decline of the Nationalist Government and upon the coming to power of the African National Congress (ANC), the cultural spotlight of the nation has focussed on a short, balding political satirist and female impersonator named Pieter-Dirk Uys. The offspring of an Afrikaner father and a German-Jewish mother, this fearless picador has been goading the apartheid bull for over thirty years, having begun his professional life as a columnist in Johannesburg. It was in those newspaper columns that Uys invented the character of the racist Afrikaner dowager Evita Bezuidenhout, conceiving her as the widow of a Nationalist MP and a former Ambassador to a mythical land called Bapetikosweti. Evita was later to leap off the page and onto the stage as a theatrical character when Uys began to perform her in drag. Indeed, she soon emerged as the very embodiment of postapartheid South Africa, an inveterate reactionary who opportunistically joined the ANC after the liberation. Her political afterlife consisted in doling out homilies and recipes, doting over her three black 182

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grandchildren, and dispensing latent racist sentiments with generous helpings of liberal hypocrisy. I missed seeing Uys when he visited these shores. But being in South Africa recently, I had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to Uys’s compound in Darling, an isolated little village about forty-five minutes from Cape Town. To get there, you drive north along the R , passing the desolate expanses of forlorn dunes that dot the western Cape, until you enter an unexpected cluster of habitation. It is even more unexpected to find a restaurant-theatre in the area, called Evita Se Perron (an Afrikaans pun which confuses the name of the Argentine Queen of the People with that of the local railroad station). There the customers eat their sandwiches and sip their drinks while Evita, exuding feminine charm and political duplicity, entertains them with eighteen different programs in a combination of English, Afrikaans, and occasional Yiddish. Evita has not only become an influential theatrical figure. She has also entered literature through a memoir Uys wrote under her name called A Part Hate, A Part Love. The epigraph to that book is Uys’s oft-repeated mantra: “The future of South Africa is certain. It is the past that is unpredictable.” And what makes the past so difficult to predict is the failing memories of those who practiced apartheid. Aided by an impeccable ear for accented speech, Uys has recreated a number of these Afrikaners, most (unlike Evita) based on real people with similar memory failures. Their voices can be heard in a CD Uys recorded called “Truth” where he parades a number of these miscreants before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “at last ready to tell the truth, so help me Mandela.” But the truth has disappeared into a vast historical vacuum, and “the former racists, the former fascists, the former terrorists are now all members of Parliament.” P. W. Botha, for example, refusing to apologize to the commission, remarks that “we don’t have to practice apartheid, we have it down to a fine art. . . . We are right, we are white, and the world can go fly a kite.” The coloreds, represented by Alan Boesak, find comfort in the fact that they don’t have to mix with blacks. As for the blacks, Uys’s satire on them may be milder but is still pretty pungent. Archbishop Desmond Tutu appears as a benevolent “Truth Fairy,” giggling and burbling about how South Africans are the rainbow people (though the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has been stolen). Other ANC party members continue to express great reverence for Winnie Mandela— “Beloved mother of the nation and sister to the Virgin Mary”—even though she has a lot of skeletons in her closet, “some of them very small” (an allusion to the adolescent soccer player Winnie was alleged to have had murdered).

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Perhaps Uys’s most envenomed satire is reserved for the former foreign minister, Roelof F. Botha, also known as Pik. Conceding that Jesus Christ, because of his non-European origins, would not have been allowed to live in South Africa, Pik adds magnanimously: “Let me say this—by saying that—that the government of South Africa is willing to make an exception as far as Jesus Christ is concerned—he’ll be an honorary white.” Uys’s characters are generic as well as specific. A white soldier recalls the days when he was asked to shoot stone-throwing kids who might have been the children of his own maid. And, in what is perhaps his most telling impersonation, a suburban “kugel” (“kugel” being the South African equivalent of a Jewish American Princess) pretends to oppose apartheid while secretly voting Nat in order to protect her investments. “I don’t need amnesty,” she drawls in a broad Constantia accent, “I already got alimony. . . . I said to my maid, Dora help me, Comrade Madame has got to go to the Truth Commission.” But Comrade Madame, being the victim of another kind of stereotyping, is hardly reluctant to defend herself against charges of Eurocentricity. To those who find her insufficiently African, she replies, “Well then, why don’t you give back the Mercedes Benz you stole last week? Give back your Armani suit, your Gucci shoes. Okay, I’m Eurocentric. I’m going back to Europe but I’m taking my electricity with me.” Contrasted with those South African Jews who failed to oppose apartheid, on the other hand, are heroines like Helen Suzman who risked position, money, and reputation to further the struggle for liberation. (“And where is Helen Suzman’s portrait now,” P. W. Botha asks grimly. “Lying in the rubble heap along with my portrait. There is no memory.”) It is through the character of Evita that Uys succeeds best in keeping the historical memory alive. “In spite of all you may have heard about my involvement in apartheid,” she says, “my conscience is clear because I never used it.” Sashaying onto a stage decorated with kitsch prints of South African landscapes, Evita appears dressed like a black woman MP, in a long costume with flounce sleeves, large round earrings, sunglasses, and a huge headdress that would have seemed extravagant on Carmen Miranda. With flamboyant flourishes of her polished nails, she is ready to give us lessons on how to bake “cooksisters” (an Afrikaner cake), and how to prepare authentic South African cookery (“I’ll bring you the pot, you bring me the missionary”). Before long she is distracted by the diners whom she begins to interrogate about their national origins. (“Are you on holiday from Sheffield? Do you still have your wallet?”). Archbishop Tutu is in the house that afternoon with his wife and grandchild. Evita invites him up on stage to give him a cake and a kiss, and to dance the toyi-toyi with him.

Pieter-Dirk Uys

Evita is a member of that vast world of theatrical transvestites—Dame Edna, Quentin Crisp, and the like—who populate one-person shows these days. But whereas most transvestite fare is satire on social and sexual mores, Evita’s is almost exclusively political. In the show I saw, Tannie Evita’s Cooksisters, Evita seemed largely preoccupied with the crime pervading the country today: “Our South Africans are so polite—always opening the door. Sometimes taking the door with them.” “Don’t drive so fast. There are children playing in the streets—waiting to break into houses.” She is just as concerned with grand larceny, which is to say government corruption, as with petty theft: “We are devaluing the Rand so when a South African politician steals R, what can he get for that in Switzerland? Nothing!” On the subject of AIDS, she offers her nephew’s opinion that the disease will allow Afrikaners to rule South Africa again—by annihilating the blacks. It is an opinion that is more truth than travesty, considering Tabo Mbeki’s disturbing theories about the disease and the appalling decision of his government to fight a court ruling that pregnant women with AIDS should receive medication. As proof of her dedication to the continuation of the African races, Evita brings on stage her three black grandchildren. “My daughter married a black man,” she explains cheerfully, then sobs, “I don’t mind.” Alternately blessed and shamed, she looks at them with grandmotherly pride as they sweetly warble a ditty a capella. In this brief domestic moment, all the confusions, contradictions, dangers, and possibilities of post-apartheid South Africa come into clear focus. Evita’s embrace of multiculturalism despite her lingering racism, the way she adapts to the new imperatives without sacrificing her old privileges—these are the kind of conflicts that occupy this fascinating country in its painful struggle towards full nationhood for all. 

185

Theatre in Australia: The Cultural Cringe

Despite being located on opposite ends of the globe, Australia and the United States share a similar history and aesthetic. Both nations were originally colonies of the British crown. Both were settled in part by convicts and outlaws. Both expanded their land holdings by displacing and often slaughtering indigenous peoples. Both speak the mother tongue with idiosyncratic accents. And both have suffered from excessive deference towards British culture at the expense of their own. In Australia, this is referred to as “the cultural cringe.” And, as I recently learned after giving the keynote address at the Brisbane National Performance Conference and attending a number of Australian theatre events, it is not the least of the complexes we share with our cousins down under. My three-week visit included talks in four cities (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide) with professionals, students, and government functionaries involved with the arts. All of them assured me that what I thought were unique problems afflicting American culture are also the subjects of intense debate in Australia. My keynote address was about the future of art in a democratic society, especially the difficulties facing not-for-profit theatres in an age 186

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of greying audiences, defecting actors, declining taste, second-rate theatre criticism, impoverished school arts programs, inadequate philanthropic support, moral and political correctness—yes, and the cringing assumption that anything arriving from London bears a superior cultural imprint. That Australian theatre has not slowed to an Australian crawl in the face of similar problems is a tribute to the dedicated if sometimes discouraged people who work in it. Another important factor may be Australia’s still relatively generous, albeit declining, level of fiscal support. In contrast with the National Endowment for the Arts, whose profile in the arts community has faded to invisibility, the Australian state exchequers account for anywhere from ten to twenty percent of a theatre’s operating budget, while corporations such as Optus and Energex often pay considerable sums to see their names attached to theatre buildings or theatre events. As a result, corporate and state sponsored cultural festivals have been established in virtually every major city in the country, supporting a wide assortment of fare in a variety of natural settings. The Brisbane International Festival of the Arts, for example, takes place in a large performance complex on the banks of the lovely Brisbane River (you reach it by CityCat ferry, the city’s main source of urban transportation). This year the festival featured forty-seven theatre, ballet, dance, art, and music events over the space of less than a month. The dance highlight of that period was Chunky Moves’Wanted, a satire on the kind of bland product choreographers might produce when driven by such market research questions as “What kind of dance do taxpayers want?” And the theatre highlight (if you discount guest appearances by Betty Buckley and Michael Feinstein in back-to-back evenings of Broadway show tunes) was an epic if stylistically confused adaptation of Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, largely distinguished by the acting of Helen Morse, Genevieve Picot, and especially Julia Blake, whose performance was virtually a primer in the way actors can transform. While many of the nation’s stars—Nicole Kidman, Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, for example—have achieved celebrity in Hollywood and London, only Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) and maybe Mel Gibson are still identified as Australians. Only in recent years have native stage actors been permitted to speak in regional voices (rather than with Oxbridge accents). But just as, in the fifties, British plays such as Look Back in Anger opened the doors to such British working-class provincial actors as Albert Finney, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Haigh, and Robert Stephens, the capacity to use one’s native voice has given new confidence to legions of good actors currently appearing in, or being trained for, theatre in Australia.

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One of these is Kym Gyngell, who shuttles between political satire on TV and performing on stage. I caught him playing a mordant detective in an interesting two-hander by the poet Michael Gurr called The Simple Truth at Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre. The play consisted of the interrogation of a young woman, who may or may not have killed her husband, by a police lieutenant who sometimes seems more prone to confession than she is. Gyngell’s ability to leap back and forth between his official and unofficial selves was nimble, but also praiseworthy was the playwright’s elliptical language and his almost Cubist approach to reality. A normally conventional investigation cuts “the simple truth” into a prism of contradictory reflections. Neither the more internationally inclined Melbourne Festival nor the more avant-garde Adelaide Festival had opened by the time I left Australia, though Melbourne was announcing sixty-three events, including a trilogy of Wallace Shawn plays, Pinter’s adaptation of Remembrances of Things Past, and a number of new works by Australian and Aboriginal writers. In Adelaide, whose festival also takes place on a lovely urban river, this one populated with large-billed pelicans and black swans, the major presentation while I was there was a four-hour stage adaptation of Great Expectations. It was performed in the tradition of the RSC Nicholas Nickleby with some fine local actor laddies exercising both their transformational gifts and their British accents. But what was still exercising the town was the abrupt departure (in November ) of the Adelaide Festival’s visiting artistic director, Peter Sellars, the enfant terrible of international opera and film, who had been planning an explosion of Aboriginal, Asian, hip-hop, “trance,” and street culture exhibits, employing nine artistic directors and over two thousand participating artists, many of them from the Asian archipelago. Although for financial reasons virtually none of these events took place, there was still considerable debate about the potential impact of Sellars’ aborted festival on the nation’s culture—not to mention on its immigration policy, which remains the nation’s most urgent issue. It was not a festival, however, but a single institution that left me most exhilarated about the future of Australian theatre. This was the Sydney Theatre Company, under the artistic direction of Robyn Nevin, a sharp-witted, sharpeyed actor with tireless energy and strong leadership capacities. Nevin took over the STC in , just before the death of its founding director, Richard Wherrett (a man who, in the last stages of AIDS, chose to galvanize the theatre community with a blistering attack on Australian theatre criticism). When I met Nevin and her managing director over a meal at STC’s Wharf Theatre,

Theatre in Australia

which enjoys exquisite views of the Sydney Harbor, she was just back from rehearsing the role of Amanda in a forthcoming production of Glass Menagerie, and was on her way to announce her  season at a fund-raiser. She had also recently finished directing Andrew Upton’s The Hanging Man as well as supervising a stunning production of Calderon’s Life Is a Dream directed by Benedict Andrews. Though widely contrasted, each of these productions fulfilled the mission of the STC, which is to produce new plays, preferably Australian, and to reinterpret the classics. The Hanging Man, a first play by the adapter/translater Andrew Upton (Cate Blanchett’s husband, as it happens), was directed by Nevin in a deceptively artless style, marked by overlapping dialogue, while Andrews’ production of Life Is a Dream was a mesmerizing classical reinterpretation that, like those of Ingmar Bergman or Robert Wilson, has the potential to make you change your mind about a play you think you know well. The Hanging Man was performed on a neutral, almost antiseptic set, representing the home of a celebrated, recently deceased Australian painter. Now his wife has also died, and gathered in the living room preparing the funeral arrangements are three brothers, only two of whom are her sons. Her death is causing a crisis because she has named the youngest son (not hers by birth) as executor and because her will assigns the artist’s “Barbarian” series (including “The Hanging Man”) to the state. This is doubly wounding to Thomas, the eldest son, who is broke and in process of trying to sell the painting to a Nicole Kidman–type Australian actress living in Hollywood. The conflict is negotiated from a whiskey-soaked perspective by the third brother, Scott, as the playwright deftly extends these family dynamics into a comment on the damaged state of the nation. The playwright has the Chekhovian capacity to deflect attention from a huge crisis to a seemingly commonplace event. And all of the actors are strong, especially Tiriel Mora as the mordant Scott, and Steve Jacobs, playing Thomas as if he had just visited the interior of hell. Benedict Andrews is the resident director of the STC where, in collaboration with the brilliant poet/adaptor Beatrix Christian, and the designers Justin Kurzel (sets) and Fiona Crombie (costumes), he has been bringing his radical vision to a number of new and classical plays, including Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Marivaux’s La Dispute. He has now turned his gaze on Life Is a Dream, Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s metaphysical masterpiece about how the intrinsically barbaric nature of humankind can be softened only through spiritual transcendence. Life Is a Dream, being performed in the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera

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House, appears to reflect the shimmering lights of the Sydney Harbor with a breathtakingly beautiful mise-en-scène. Andrews, who like many innovative classical directors has been accused of distorting the text for his own purposes, delivers here a crystal-clear, ritualized reading of the play. He is abetted by uniformly fine acting, stunning visual effects, and a lyrical and shortened adaptation (performed in a swooping hour-and-a-half without intermission). Staged within a long, almost cinemascopic space, sharply lit by Mark Truebridge, the action is set in some legendary time, neither classical nor modern but a provocative blending of the two. The hammered gold rectangular set, festooned with a metallic air vent, gives off an atmosphere of antiquity and industrialization—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis transferred to th-century Poland. Clarion, the clown (here played by a woman with a broad Aussie accent), wears a tutu, and Rosaura, the disguised heroine, is dressed in a black Armani suit (Paula Arundell plays the part with a thrilling reverberant voice that seems to issue from a deep cave). Some characters wear paint masks, others appear strapped to oxygen machines. The violent overthrow of the kingdom (“Men never tire of finding new ways to kill each other”) is accomplished by urban guerillas. At one moment, a stageful of tennis balls falls from the flies to the accompaniment of electronic music. Andrews has staged the play like a dream ballet, where the unexpected happenings and modernistic elements somehow reinforce the theme rather than obscure it. Prince Segismundo has been imprisoned since birth because it was written that he would overthrow his father, Basilio. Thus, the king unwittingly fulfills the prophecy, reducing his son to a brute state of nature. Upon being released, Segismundo, bare to the waist, his hair shorn, terrorizes the servants, murders a courtier, tries to rape Rosaura, and threatens his father (“You are a ghost of history”). Chloroformed, Segismundo is reimprisoned, where he begins to reflect on the illusory nature of existence. Following his discovery of life’s evanescent mortality, a revolution brings him to the throne. But by now the Frankenstein monster has been humanized, civilized, transformed into a philosopher. A slow black curtain descends on the living and the dead. I saw this play before the Bali blast of October th, Australia’s first real glimpse into the black heart of terrorism, which left  Australians dead and  wounded. As a study of the brute nature of man, Life Is a Dream now seems even more relevant in retrospect. Among the many similarities Australia shares with America, there has been one striking difference—a comparative freedom from stress. Only twenty million people live on a continent the size of our own where (outside of Sydney) four cars on a bridge constitute a traffic jam. This

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may account, in part, for the legendary good nature and kindly disposition of most Australians. Although these qualities are about to be tested, Australian theatre should cringe no more. It is vigorous, imaginative, and daring, and, like the national character, will help sustain the nation in whatever lies ahead. 

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Theatre in South Africa: Fronting

Revisiting Cape Town after an interval of a year, one is struck anew by the proliferation of delapidated shanties on the way to and from the airport—visible evidence that Thabo Mbeki’s government has been building South Africa’s financial credibility at the expense of the poor (also at the expense of an effective AIDS program for the millions who have been infected). Like the wealthy in the United States, South Africa’s black corporate elite is receiving special privileges that haven’t yet trickled down to the hungry and the sick. Mbeki’s “black empowerment” policies have brought real opportunities to a number of smart black executives, sometimes partnering in white businesses, sometimes fronting for them (“fronting” is a strategem used by some white South African firms in order to dodge government demands for affirmative action). Mbeki’s policies seem to be having a more visible impact on the culture than on the economy. In past years, black and colored performing artists could usually be seen enacting Western works under white auspices (the plays of Fugard, Maynardsville, Shakespeare, the all-black La Bohème set in

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Soweto). This year the balance has tilted. I found more emphasis on African cultural traditions than I did in the past, along with fewer European-style productions. Granted that the Christmas season is not the best time to get a general sense of a country’s theatre, the three dramatic works I visited nevertheless all seemed to share a common native braggadoccio. Although primarily designed for tourists, they were first and foremost declarations of racial and ethnic identity. Indeed, the characters, settings, style, and themes of the shows were all African, with white collaborators working mostly behind the scenes, as writers, directors, composers, choreographers, or technicians. Ashraf Johaardien’s Salaam Stories, which I saw at the Amphitheatre on the Spier wine estate, is in a sense the purest of the three, owing the least, in fact virtually nothing, to white influences. (Well, the narrative technique may owe something to Story Theatre.) A generally good-natured celebration of the Malay way of life, Salaam Stories is what Peter Brook would celebrate as “poor theatre.” I, less charitable, would call it “schmatta theatre.” The stories are performed in a crude presentational acting style on a bare stage decorated with tattered Persian carpets, shreds of muslin, and a broken fluted column. Dressed in simple costumes (head scarves for the women, fezes for the men), three female and two male actors recite tales of colored life in South Africa. These include accounts of how, three hundred years ago, the Malays were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company and brought to Cape Town from their homes in Bombay, Goa, Bengal, and Sumatra (“They capture my blood, my blood flows from the East”). Despite their diverse origins, all the Cape colored spoke Malay. They also began to speak, and even helped to invent, Afrikaans, a language commonly attributed to the Dutch settlers (and commemorated by them in a soaring mountaintop monument on the way to Cape Town from the East). Selfcommemoration and ethnic pride also seem to be the generating impulses of Salaam Stories, intended to work as instruction for the audience and therapy for the participants. As the director-designer Neville Engelbrecht writes in a program note, he and the actors achieved a “sense of history, memory, and identity” while rehearsing the show for production. That identity may have become a little delicate since September . One actor speaks of Muslims being targeted and attacked simply because of their religion (“people are scared and the enemy wears my face”). Another hints darkly that perhaps some other ethnic entity might have been responsible for the col-

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lapse of the World Trade Center. This supposition doesn’t seem to square with the behavior of still another actor who, after having built two towers on stage out of blocks, knocks them down abruptly with a flick of her hand. While the evening is largely an expression of Muslim pride, it also has its exotic charms. One love story, in which Farouk comes to regard the farts of his girlfriend Fatima as a “great breakthrough in our relationship,” has an engaging comic flavor. And there is another whimsical tale, surprisingly tolerant considering Islam’s take on homosexuals, in which the storyteller discovers that his uncle’s lady friend is actually a transvestite named Sean. But the primitiveness of Salaam Tales is ultimately a little wearing and its glorification of Muslim customs eventually grows old. One actor tells us he now wears a fez not just to pray but “as a symbol of who I am.” Another insists that Islam is “an all-embracing way of life” and that “Allah gives, Allah takes, Allah makes no mistakes.” Maybe Allah makes no mistakes, but one can hardly say the same of some of his followers. Until the Muslim majority is willing to condemn Islamic jihads that slaughter the innocent in his name, the “salaam alekheims” with which the evening concludes, however gently spoken, will still have a warlike ring. District Six, which I saw at the University of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Center, is also about the Cape coloreds, but it constitutes a much more vigorous and tough-minded evening of theatre. First produced in , the show has been continuously rewritten and redirected by David Kramer, who has now honed its edges to a sharpness verging on the slick. The dynamic music has been composed by Taliep Petersen—responsible with Kramer for another recent musical about District Six (it had a brief New York run), The Kat and the Kings. The neighborhood that generated these lyrical tributes was an extremely animated area of coloreds, blacks, Jews, and gays at the city’s edge that was bulldozed to the ground in the sixties. The occasion was the Group Areas Act of , an atrocious piece of apartheid legislation responsible for removing . million non-whites to areas where they would no longer contaminate the ruling elite. Those in District Six were taken from their homes and deposited near the airport on the Cape Flats, a displacement similar to the way the U.S. relocated Native Americans, the Australians uprooted Aborigines, and the Germans removed Jews, by means of either expatriation or extermination. Most of the area remains bare and uninhabited to this day, except for a few forlorn buildings and

Theatre in South Africa

a museum dedicated to the time when District Six was a thriving interracial community. Now the district is mostly an occasion for musicals vibrating with regret and nostalgia—regret for a past era, nostalgia for a past style. Whereas The Kat and the Kings looks longingly towards a genre of fifties rock shows like Grease, District Six is more in the style of Rent, which also uses a polyglot ethnic neighborhood (the East Village) as a setting. Both shows feature a heterosexual love story and a gay underplot, the rousing numbers overamplified through head mikes that make the actors look like telephone operators. What saves District Six from being just another musical commodity is a wonderful chorus of “skollies” (colored mobsters) led by the incomparable Jody Abrahams playing a partly menacing, partly huggable gangster named Nines. This Brechtian ménage gives the show most of its color and vigor. The evening also features a splendid performance from Yshamano Sebe as a blind black beggar who doubles as a kind of ghetto Tiresias prophesying doom. The actual fate of District Six, illustrated on stage by the collapse of a few pillars and a palm tree, makes Kramer’s love plot look a little irrelevant. In the midst of all this demolition, who cares whether the hero marries the local colored girl or the Jewish girl from London? And while the flamboyant gay bistro owner gets the chance to model a number of flouncy gowns, we’ve seen female impersonation done better by Harvey Fierstein, not to mention South Africa’s own Pieter-Dirk Uys. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see a musical with some stronger social motive than the entertainment of corporate clients on Broadway. The third show I saw (at Artscape, formerly the whites-only Nico Malan) is the one most destined for commercial success: Richard Loring’s African Footprints. Staged against a huge logo of Africa shaped like the bottom of a foot, this powerhouse of song, dance, and narrative performed by thirty brilliantly trained dancers from a variety of black townships (the cast also includes a scattering of whites and coloreds) could probably play for five years at the Winter Garden. That African Footprints hasn’t yet been seen in New York is an accident of history—its American tour had to bypass the city as a result of September . Presented as “a cultural and historical impression of Africa’s past, present, and future,” the show has been accused of being “curio art” that plays into overseas notions of Africanness. It is true that African Footprints does sometimes remind one of those little mahogany elephants you buy in the markets. But it also deserves praise as a product of genuine multiculturalism, with an English

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creator-director (Loring), a white and a black choreographer (Debbie Rakusin and David Matamela), a white composer (Dave Pollecutt), a black author responsible for the “poetry” (Don Mattera), and a wholly white design team. This collaboration suggests that South Africa currently enjoys very relaxed inter-racial relationships in the arts community. But the mixture does tend to make the show look a little inauthentic. To watch a group of tribally dressed Zulus and Xhosas chanting “Our footprints shaped the landscape, tamed the buffalo. We rode the wind, silenced the hurricane. Look at us, we have been here before,” or to witness a sinuous, squealing, and athletic dancer announcing “I am Africa,” with complicated laser beams piercing through the stage smoke, is to wonder whether you’ve landed in Africa or an American theme park. And it doesn’t help when a scantily clad blonde, reminiscent of Fay Wray in King Kong, sashays on stage to play white goddess to the stomping natives. Indeed, the most annoying thing about the show is its nativism. You can learn more about South African tribal customs just by reading the first ten pages of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom than you can after a whole evening of African Footprints. The dancers look more than a little uncomfortable costumed as fierce warriors in headdresses and tooth necklaces, carrying spears and shields. And they don’t seem happy intoning heavy rhetoric like “I am the Quest—my spirit moved the chanting tribes,” or claiming “We were in Egypt, making love to Nefertete” (not altogether convincing when you’re wearing one of those head mikes). When the portentous “poetry” stops for a while, the performers break into a thrilling stick dance, accompanied by wild handsprings and tomtoms. Not only does this provide the evening with a pulse, it makes us realize we are in the hands of extremely accomplished professionals. Indeed, African Footprints becomes even more confident after we leave tribal Africa in a sudden historical leap and enter Sofiatown, a vibrant black township. The set is composed of shanties, the costumes include red caps, striped shirts, and two-tone shoes, the musicians trade their tomtoms for a bass, a snare drum, a tenor sax, and guitars, and the basic dance step evolves into tap. “Sofiatown Tap,” performed with tin cans that are twirled, thrown, and juggled, may be the highlight of the evening. And while it could also be criticized as a display of happy black people demonstrating a sense of rhythm, the number does suggest how music and dance may have been among the few consolations of a truly oppressive existence. Certainly, when Ronell Kater and Thuli Mdlalose engage in a stirring blues duet (“We know what it is to be women”)

Theatre in South Africa

regarding an imprisoned man they both love, the evening stretches beyond its show biz origins to become a paean of hope. Another showstopper is “Duelling Footprints,” during which two teams, one dressed in white, the other in red, compete over who can perform the best physical stunts, those wearing shoes or those wearing boots. It comes off like a duel of cultures between, say, the tap dancing of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the modern dance of Alvin Ailey, and it gets the audience’s hearts pumping. Finally, dressed in the colors of competing soccer teams, the whole cast begins running in place, chanting “Look at us, we are the future.” The evening ends on the same note of chauvinism with which it began, as the company sings “We are proud to call Africa home—and we’re proud and we’re home—we are African children.” That repetition of the name of the continent reminded me a little of how actors in the Yiddish theatre used to gain favor with the audience through the number of times they could utter the word “Jew.” But if African Footprints doesn’t exactly fulfill its promise to “build together our promised land,” it is often a stirring expression of African pride, brilliantly choreographed and performed, and destined to make a lot of money for someone once it reaches our shores. African Footprints and District Six are still, I suppose, a form of “fronting” insofar as, regardless of the ethnic and racial focus, whites are involved with, and may even still control, the means of production. The African-American playwright August Wilson would no doubt call this practice “cultural imperialism,” and he is partly right. But these collaborations also suggest the kind of racial brotherhood and trust that are growing in South Africa—a development not only heartening in itself but one that could be a shining model for our own more separatist culture.  Returning to South Africa after a year, it appeared obvious that the country’s ugly problems remained in disturbing contrast to its lovely landscape and gracious population. / (afflicting more than six million people at present) is by any measure the largest and most contentious issue confronting South Africa today. Instead of being brought under control by the new drug advances, the disease is being accelerated by transmission from mother to infant. The ANC government has been famously sluggish in making use of medicines currently available to reduce infant mortality or to arrest the illness in adults. The

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country’s chief political satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys (aka Evita Bezuidenhout, the Afrikaner dowager) has made mock of President Thabo Mbeki’s  policies, claiming that they have killed more blacks than the prior Apartheid regime. Nor has Uys’s involvement with this issue been confined to the safety of the stage. Paying regular visits to the townships, he has been lecturing African schoolkids on the importance of wearing condoms, a more appealing item to them when dyed black, he suggests in his splendid new show, Foreign Aids. (“Man, this is so pretty, I’d wear it on the outside.”) Following close upon the obscenity of  is the unholy trinity of poverty, crime, and unemployment. The shacks that began to proliferate near the Cape Town airport some years ago now stretch as far as Somerset West, thirty miles to the east along the N highway, virtually constituting a city of their own. And black-on-white assaults, rapes, and burglaries have replaced the white-on-black oppression of the Apartheid years, though crime at least in the Western Cape appears to have dropped considerably this year (the ANC government still refuses to publish actual crime statistics). Yet, the South African economy is getting stronger. Real estate prices are going through the roof. Tourism is growing exponentially. Restaurants and public arenas are not entirely integrated. Interracial marriages and adoptions are common. And although black-equity ownership remains at only  percent after ten years of political liberation, white businesses increasingly include some form of black partnership or black managerial representation. South Africa today is a relative model of racial harmony, not surprising after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings demonstrated that unheard-of thing, a governing process founded on Christian principles of forgiveness and atonement. Still, the disparity between the richest and the poorest black people is even wider today than that between blacks and whites in the past. The issue of racial inequality has clearly not been truly addressed. Visual proof of this income gap is embedded in the architecture. The living accommodations of South Africa’s predominant races remind one of the way the Three Little Pigs built their homes to resist the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf. The black underclass lives in corrugated shanties (straw), the lower-middle-class coloreds in neat stucco cottages (wood), and the privileged whites in Cape Dutch mansions and seaside villas (brick). The greatest fear at the moment is that Thabo Mbeki will be replaced by some Big Bad Wolf (resembling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe) who, in the act of seizing white property, will blow the brick houses down.

Theatre in South Africa

Today, South African theatre is largely preoccupied with questions of racial identity, just as under Apartheid it was concerned with questions of racial oppression. But unlike our own theatre, where such subjects are usually steeped in resentment, victimization, or liberal guilt, on issues of color differences the South African stage is remarkably honest and good-natured. Take Say Cheese with Marc Lottering, currently playing at the Baxter Theatre on the grounds of the University of Cape Town. Lottering is a colored (or mixed race) satirist in his mid-thirties, performing monologues in the tradition of a late-night comedian. Speaking mostly in English, but partly in his native Afrikaans, he enjoys his own wit as much as does his largely colored middleclass audience who treat him almost like a family member. Jigging on stage from one end to the other in a large black Afro with a spot of grey, he has the grace and nimbleness of a younger Michael Jackson. Like Jackson, he has had his problems with the law. A few days before I saw his show, Lottering was arrested for drunken driving in an accident involving three cars. Instead of expressing defensive outrage or fake remorse about this charge, Lottering good-naturedly incorporated it into his monologue. Making a barefoot entrance holding the steering wheel of a car, he jumped into the audience with a broad smile on his face, shook a number of hands, and, after remarking, “Don’t know how your January kicked off—mine began with a big bang,” added, “I’m going to need a lift home.” Everybody was prepared to give him one. He’s an enormously popular and likeable figure, even though the primary subject of his satire is the upwardly mobile pretensions of his own people in their eagerness to imitate the whites. Lottering’s medium in this piece is a Kodak carousel which he uses to project “say cheese” moments of his youth in Cape Flats. There are fading Kodachrome slides of his family who always like to be photographed holding onto tree branches or leaning on somebody else’s car. There are shots of his Khoikhoi (Bushmen) ancestors: “Absolute rubbish, we’re German.” And there are numerous photographs of a colored wedding, with its pregnant bride and its obligatory table of white people (“they get their food first”), where the alcoholics always manage to find each other, and where the flower girl (“this little bitch from hell”) is determined to screw up the whole affair. Lottering concludes with pictures of a funeral, featuring the customary howlers and screamers (“Why? Why? Why? Take me! Take me”), before sending us on our way with the warning, “Whatever you do—do not drink and drive!” The Maynardville Open-Air Theatre, now staging Macbeth, reminded me a lot of the New York Shakespeare Festival. For one thing, it started performing

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outdoor Shakespeare in the fifties, the same decade that Joe Papp founded Shakespeare in Central Park. For another, its company is completely multiracial. But whereas the New York Shakespeare Festival actors usually managed to blend into a unified ensemble, this South African company appeared to be as tribal as the country itself, including a few members to whom English is not a native language. Macbeth was played by Kurt Wurstman, an apparently British-trained actor with a sandpaper voice who not only chewed the scenery, he swallowed, digested, and excreted it. Lady Macbeth was in the hands of a thin neurasthenic Anglo named Claire Watling, who unwittingly demonstrated that the character was less in quest of a crown than a shrink. As for King Duncan, he was enacted by a dignified Xhosa native (Joko Scott) with an accent thicker than that of Nelson Mandela (his son Malcolm was a handsome colored lad named David Johnson). Macbeth’s servant Seton (Duminsane-Sizwe Mbebe) appeared to be a Zulu. And the numerous thanes, attendants, and murderers, representing virtually all the racial groups in the country, used such a great variety of dialects that it was hard to believe these characters inhabited the same hemisphere, much less the same play. This approach had its charms but it created a sense of considerable geographical displacement, further enhanced by the fact that all the Scottish thanes wore Native-American Mohawk haircuts. As for the weird sisters, those “black and midnight hags,” they were enacted by a chanting tribal trio of men, joined by four athletic witch boys. With the witches stirring their cauldron, and the witch boys hanging from the rafters like bats, writhing to the rhythms of Tony Madikane’s jungle tomtoms, the only element that seemed to be missing was T. S. Eliot’s “nice little white little missionary stew.” The actors playing Banquo (Mark Eiderkin) and Macduff (Milton Schorr) had some tender moments of paternal love and grief. But Macduff’s two boys were such hyperactive brats that one almost cheered when they were dispatched by Macbeth’s assassins. Lacy Macduff was pregnant at the time of her own murder, and so for some reason was Lady Macbeth when she appeared for her nightly sleepwalk. Perhaps the director (Geoffrey Hyland) was trying to make some comment on third trimester abortion. The portly actress playing Lady Macduff also doubled as a Messenger and as the drunken Porter, playing the one with uncontrollable giggles, and the other with such deliberate scatology (wiggling her behind, bouncing her boobs, squatting on stage to urinate) that one couldn’t wait for her Lady Macduff to be taken off, too, pregnant or not.

Theatre in South Africa

There were some lovely lighting effects, especially on the baobab trees, and the balmy breezes wafting through the park made it a sensual pleasure to be there. But this Macbeth was more a culturally unifying experience than an aesthetically satisfying one. The major acting problem was Wurstman’s compulsion to croak and glower throughout the evening, apparently in an effort to indicate the baleful nature of his character. But Macbeth doesn’t begin as a murderous villain. He is a natural man who becomes habituated to unnatural acts, an essentially decent apple into which evil eats like a worm. If the actor seemed unable to understand this process, I imagined, it was because his essentially benevolent nation doesn’t provide many models of malevolent leaders (I don’t count the pervasive financial corruption). That’s why it was interesting to compare South African theatre today with that of a time when the country lived under a really brutal regime. I’m referring to a particular play of the Apartheid period, namely Paul Slabolepszy’s Saturday Night at the Palace, written in  and recently revived at the Baxter. The title suggests a musical, but the piece is actually a hardhitting drama, in the tradition of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys, about the humiliation of a black man by a representative of the ruling white race. The play also shows the influence of American realism, especially in the character of Vince (Neil Sandilands), a brutal redneck in leather jacket and tee shirt who, in the way he instantly segues from calm to rage, reminds one of all those inarticulate movie heroes of the fifties, Ben Gazzara, James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One (Vince’s milder friend Hendrik, played by Grant Swanby, rides the obligatory motorbike). The action takes place in front of Rocco’s Burger Palace, a fast food joint off the highway, supervised by a Zulu “bossboy” named September (Sizwe Msutu). The volatile Vince, who dreams of being a football star, has recently lost his job and been kicked out of his digs. These and other frustrations, especially a sense of being on the bottom of the social ladder in a country based on white supremacy (“My old man told me not to let a kaffir get the better of you. . . . They’re taking over our jobs”), eventually compel him to goad and insult September in a manner that robs him of his dignity. First, Vince expropriates the keys of the shop, demanding to be served a meal before he returns them. Then, after September goes after him with his tribal staff, he handcuffs the black man to Hendrik’s motorbike, smashes his windows, and steals his cash box. Other humiliations follow, including tearing up September’s family photos and smearing food over his face. Meanwhile, his

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mate Hendrik has been trying to moderate Vince’s behavior towards the black man. But after the two friends start fighting over a girl and Hendrik knifes Vince, he is instantly ready to blame the killing on the hapless September. While it shows its age a bit, the play retains a lot of punch and even some prophetic power. And it is strongly directed by Bobby Heaney, and exceedingly well-acted by the three protagonists, especially Neil Sandilands in the pivotal role of Vince. That plays such as Saturday Night at the Palace could have been produced in , with a mixed cast, suggests not that the Apartheid regime was more tolerant than has been assumed, but that it didn’t consider the theatre very important. Unlike the popular sports arena, from which blacks were strictly excluded, an occasional African on stage was not believed much of a threat to white supremacy. Yet, it was plays of this kind that helped to change the regime and bring about the impressively integrated theatre that South Africa enjoys today. 

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MoCa: A Boom

in the Boonies

To get there from the East, you drive from Greenfield along Route , otherwise known as the Mohawk Trail, a well-travelled tourist region whose primary products are leather moccasins and maple syrup, and whose principal art would seem to be gigantic statues of Mohawk warriors. Negotiating the hairpin turns of the Berkshire Mountains after winding along the Deerfield River, you will finally descend into North Adams, an apparently depressed industrial town dotted with its fair share of Americana, such as the omnipresent McDonald’s hamburger joint and Cumberland Farms convenience store. Almost as grim and abandoned as Fall River, North Adams would seem to be a most unlikely area to support the largest center for visual and performing arts in the United States. Yet, this small town is the site for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, otherwise known as  MoCa, one of the most fearless and adventurous cultural initiatives of the past decade (it opened its doors to the public in , following the stimulus of a huge grant from the state under Mike Dukakis).  MoCa sounds like a drink you might order at Starbucks. But there are no such 203

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restaurant chains to be found on this campus of twenty-seven buildings perched on thirteen central acres of the town. The brick mill structures that house the museum were originally used to print textiles, then to produce electrical capacitators. Now they contain some extremely advanced art, not to mention hundreds of thousands of visitors who come throughout the year to enjoy, debate, and puzzle over it. I travelled there last week to see a giant Robert Wilson installation called “ Stations” and a Lee Breuer opera-in-progress called Red Beads. A museum that features such avant-garde wizards as Wilson and Breuer on the same campus obviously has a strong theatrical identity, and under Museum Director Joseph Thompson and Director for Performing Arts Jonathan Secor,  MoCA is letting the Berkshires know that there may be more to theatre than commercially oriented middlebrow summer entertainment travelling from or to New York. What is even more encouraging is the fact that  MoCa receives most of its financial support not from government, private foundations, or wealthy patrons but rather from the local populace and transient visitors. Their small donations constitute the major contributions to the museum. Wilson’s “ Stations” was originally commissioned by the Oberammergau Festival, whose once famously anti-semitic Passion Play, presented every ten years, has been a feature of the Easter holidays since . It is based on the traditional Via Crucis or Way of the Cross, which describes the journey of Jesus from trial and condemnation through his crucifixion and resurrection. Wilson’s idiosyncratic version of the Passion, reflecting his customary approach to opera or theatrical text, has nothing to say about the Jews or, for that matter, about Catholicism. In a program note, Wilson calls it a “mental landscape”— “if you don’t know anything about Christianity, it’s OK, but if you know something about it, you’ll see it in a different context.” Actually, one would be hard put to find any trace of traditional Christian imagery or iconography in these tableaux vivant. Yet, the exhibition is deeply spiritual, reverberating with the kind of reverence and mystery you sometimes feel in Wilson’s finest work. All fourteen stations are juxtapositions of images, sounds, video, and lighting effects. And all but the first (twenty hanging lightbulbs above a gurgling aluminum well) and the last (a stiff plastic figure, representing the Resurrection, hanging upside down within a triangular thatched hut over a blue bed) are lodged inside wooden geometric cabins. All of these cabins are numbered; all are painted in different colors; and all are based on the architecture of Shaker houses. One features a large boulder, pierced by a shiny pipe, revolving above two tiny naked (if sexless) human fig-

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MoCa

ures. Another shows a huge, expressionless Shaker woman, holding an ancient iron, as an internal explosion alternates with the sound of water filtering down a drain. Still another is a floor-installed video of a naked man, covered in chalk from head to toe, crawling over grass, to the accompaniment of strange cackling and gurgling sounds, resembling those of the Jupiterians watching Keir Dullea eat his dinner in Kubrick’s . Six Shaker women wearing black dresses, white caps, and slight smiles sit in wooden chairs wielding long darning needles. Five red-painted wolves, with matching black tongues and nails, their white teeth menacingly bared, strain against a backdrop of the Rockies. Thirteen black-and-white gulls are suspended in flight over a floor composed of countless glass medical vials. Although none of these images can be explained or interpreted, they leave a peculiarly resonant impression on the porches of your mind, much in the manner of Cocteau’s surrealist movies (Blood of a Poet, Orphée, Beauty and the Beast). And they demonstrate why so many of Wilson’s commissions now come from the Germans. They obviously appreciate his total commitment to Teutonic precision. This commitment is further demonstrated in the other two Wilson exhibits being featured at  MoCa, his sculptured chairs and theatre drawings, and the video he drew from his play Deafman Glance. By Wilson standards, the latter work, which he created in , is brevity itself, lasting only twenty-eight minutes, but it nevertheless displays the langorous stateliness and clockwork exactitude that are the Wilson trademarks. The video follows the domestic odyssey of a black woman (Sheryl Sutton) in a black Victorian dress with puffed shoulders, as she oh-so-slowly washes dishes and pours milk, then ascends and descends two flights of stairs, with the deliberateness of an anaesthetised zombie, first to nourish her two little children, then to murder them with a huge carving knife that might have been lifted from the prop table of Psycho. The total lack of affect in these transactions curiously underlines the mysterious link between nurture and aggression, love and hate, in the lives of some families. Wilson’s final image shows us the woman looking out of the kitchen window in front of a naked incandescent lightbulb as we focus on the back of her head. There were other installations on display the day I visited  MoCA including “Maya,” a pyramid built out of , action figures, and an exhibit of the latest stuff from Austria (whose artists seem to be abnormally obsessed with fat pink people and fat pink cars). But the event that drew the largest audience was the Mabou Mines “Illuminated Text” called Red Beads.

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Breuer has been working on this multidisciplinary piece for some time now, in collaboration with the Puppet director-designer Basil Twist and the composer–musical director Ushio Torikai. Although the opera is far from finished (it included, for example, a yet-to-be-staged twenty-minute-long “Recitative” which lost a quarter of the audience), it is shaping up to be a major work. Red Beads is based on a Siberian folktale that Breuer turned into a poem some years ago and included in his collection, Sister Suzie’s Cinema. It concerns a girl turning thirteen who has been promised her ailing mother’s beads as a birthday present. From the beginning, those red beads are identified with drops of blood and a lurking mortality. First her dog dies, then her kitten. And on the day she turns thirteen and receives her present, her sickly pale mother strangles her with the beads and steals her identity (“The child must first go to the grave. / You’ll die and I’ll become the child again, while you become love’s slave.”) At the end, the father reveals that the mother was a witch to whom he was in thrall. He takes the now pale girl by the hand to try to find the “lost” parent. The fable is pulsing with ominous arguries, like Schubert’s Erlkonig, and familial reverberations, like Grimm’s Juniper Tree. These include parent-child rivalries, coming-of-age fantasies induced by ripening sexuality, and incestuous longings. All of the themes are reinforced by the family nature of the casting. Clove Galilee, daughter of Breuer and Ruth Maleczech (who narrates and plays the mother), plays the young girl, and David Neumann, son of Mabou Mines veteran (and second narrator) Frederick Neumann, plays the father. But the thing that gives the evening its special distinction is what the program calls its “vertical choreography.” Breuer and puppet-master Twist have devised some truly stunning aerial calisthenics in which the father and the girl (with the help of “flying by Foy”) sail around the stage like demented wraiths, trailing fabric that has been artfully lighted by Andrew Hill. Indeed, the evening is full of coups de théâtre. A huge white cloth billows and shimmers like the ocean. The father walks up a vertical screen, on which is projected supertitles from the poem, then disappears through a hole in the floor. Apparitions of flying muslin materialize above the stage. The child flies with her bed on her back, its sheets flowing behind her. The father removes his frock coat to reveal long ragged sleeves that trail to the stage. The father and the child merge into one in the air, becoming a floating white rag to the squeals of violins. Red paper lanterns descend from the flies as snow falls to the ground. Still in the workshop phase, Red Beads is far from perfect. Torakai’s dissonant music, though filled with theatrical effects, doesn’t seem terribly distinguished as a score (hence the walkouts during the “Recitative”), and the aerial effects,

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while always stunning, can grow to be a little repetitive. But as a surreal dreamscape the piece is potentially as powerful as Wilson’s “ Stations.”  MoCa should be commended for importing the one and helping to develop the other. Both offerings demonstrate that the American theatrical avant-garde can boast some of the most innovative artists in the world, and in  MoCa the kind of institution that will foster and nourish them. That alone is grounds for encouragement and enthusiasm, especially at a time when serious culture seems to have disappeared from the continent like that Delaware-size ice shelf that recently broke off from Antarctica and floated out to sea. 

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Hallie Flanagan Davis and the Federal Theatre: Hallie’s Comet

The glorious, totally improbable, and ultimately ill-fated adventure known as the Federal Theatre Project lasted from  to . It was killed by an act of Congress in an atmosphere of Red-baiting and political hysteria. Yet, in four short years this visionary organization not only created a host of successful Federal Theatre productions, it helped to revolutionize our notions of the geography and purpose of the American stage. Conceived in the middle of the Great Depression as a plan to find jobs for an estimated , to , out-of-work actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and stagehands, the Federal Theatre at its height eventually employed , theatre artists in thirty-one states. The relief agency known as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), under the enlightened leadership of FDR’s deputy Harry Hopkins, had come to realize that among the more than one-third of the nation that were ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed were a number of indigent artists. Hopkins thereupon proceeded to organize a series of Arts Projects, including one for the theatre, and began looking around for an appropriate leader. Hopkins found his ideal national director in Hal208

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lie Flanagan Davis, a forty-five-year-old professor of drama at Vassar, who possessed boundless energy, irrepressible optimism, untiring zeal, and no administrative experience whatsoever. Hopkins knew instinctively that the project had to be run by a non-commercial theatre person, and Hallie had caught his eye through the experimental work she had been doing at Vassar. He was soon to learn that she was not only an extraordinary theatre visionary, but an individual of unusual character, integrity, and drive—qualities that, in combination, made her one of the greatest leaders in the history of American theatre. Rather than feeling her way into her new job, Hallie began with very clear ideas about what was expected of a Federal Theatre. She was convinced that such a project, though conceived as a source of economic relief, was also obliged to establish and maintain high artistic standards. A subsidized Federal Theatre would have to be an alternative to the commercial stage, not a competitor with it, keeping ticket prices within the reach of all. It would also need to be a decentralized theatre—indeed, the seed of a national theatre movement—creating productions not just in New York but in every major city and region of the country. And (perhaps her most controversial idea) its mission would be to produce plays that were not mere entertainments but artworks relevant to the social and political problems of the day. Each of these decisions was destined to extend the boundaries of the American stage and each was destined to land the Federal Theatre in a lot of hot water. The attempt to combine relief and art, for example, was full of potential conflict, particularly because of the differing goals of social work and artistic achievement. Was the Federal Theatre to be a source of great plays and productions or rather an agency designed to better the lives of the unemployed? How could the Federal Theatre pursue the goals of excellence when the best American theatre artists were not among the unemployed, indeed when Broadway producers sometimes wanted those artists, at substantially higher wages, for their commercial shows? Many of the same producers were criticizing the Federal Theatre’s subsidized ticket prices (sometimes as low as  cents) as unfair competition for the higherpriced Broadway stage. But this was only one of Hallie’s headaches. Her effort to decentralize the Federal Theatre, a highly successful move when measured by the number of new theatres being formed around the country in a very brief time, did not always produce work of the highest professional quality. Moreover, the effort sometimes stimulated narrow regional prejudices and chauvinisms. Most dangerous of all, the social and political tub-thumping of the Federal Theatre made it continually vulnerable to government censorship.

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Harry Hopkins had promised Hallie a theatre that was “free, adult, uncensored.” Too often, he was unable to keep that pledge. This should not surprise us. There are few patrons of the arts, least of all the government, who have been able to refrain from meddling in the conduct of the artists they support, especially when their work has a high political profile. And there is no question that Federal Theatre artists, with Hallie’s blessings, did not hesitate to embroil her in controversy. Hallie was never opposed to using the theatre for propaganda purposes, if that meant exposing political corruption or unjust social conditions. But although she was often accused of promoting Communism, and even of being a Communist herself, she never consciously allowed the Federal Theatre to be used for the purpose of endorsing political parties or advancing political aims. Indeed, she did not hesitate to cancel plays that seemed to her overtly partisan. As she wrote in a note chastizing one of her more radical producers, “I will not have the Federal Theatre used politically. I will not have it used to further the ends of the Democratic party, the Republican party, or the Communist party.” The occasion was a production called Injunction Granted, a play about duped workers and rapacious capitalists that Hallie called “bad journalism and hysterical theatre” because it used government funds “as a party tool.” It may have been disingenuous of her to believe that her goal of “a relevant theatre with regional roots,” devoted to dramatizing social problems like homelessness and electrical power, would not be exploited for narrow political purposes. It may have been even more naive to assume that the agency that subsidized these productions would refrain from suppressing or censoring them if they threatened government interests. The first government collision arose over a play called Ethiopa when the WPA banned the appearance on stage of such heads of state as Benito Mussolini and Haile Selassie (Robert Schnitzer’s Delaware production of Julius Caesar was also castigated for insulting Il Duce). This move led to the resignation of Elmer Rice as director of the New York Project. There would be even more consternation when Federal Theatre productions criticized or ridiculed American political figures, an irresistible temptation considering the low level of mind in Congress at the time, not to mention now. Hallie began by dividing her empire into five large units: ) the Living Newspaper, ) popular price theatre, with Yiddish, Spanish, and other ethnic companies, ) experimental theatre, ) Negro theatre, under the directorship of John Houseman and Rose McClendon, and ) tryout theatre. Hallie’s Living

Hallie Flanagan Davis

Newspapers were always destined to be the most inflammatory things she produced. An effort to dramatize the news (“something like the March of Time in the movies,” Harry Hopkins explained to a belligerent congressman), the Living Newspaper was a spinoff of the epic techniques of Brecht and Piscator. Using confrontational devices and polemical themes, it was meant to be an antidote to a commercial theatre that, in Hallie’s words, “continues to tell in polite whispers its tales of small triangular love stories in small rectangular settings.” The Living Newspaper settings, as designed by scenic artists like Howard Bay and Mordecai Gorelik, making good use of George Izenour’s new remote control switchboard, were imaginative and various. They substituted light and projections for the “cumbersome scenery” that Hallie and other theatre visionaries were now finding obsolete, mainly because “the cinema,” as she added prophetically, “had beaten realism at its own game.” More importantly, the stories told in these openly propagandistic pieces concerned the big issues of the time. In the first of the Living Theatre successes, Triple A Plowed Under, the Federal Theatre enjoined the farmer and the consumer to unite for higher wages and healthier food. It ran for eighty-five performances in New York and was later produced in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee (though not in Texas where a WPA administrator exhorted Hallie to do “old plays” that didn’t draw hostile criticism). That Texan bureaucrat might have had the same complaint about Power, a call for public ownership of utilities, and Spirochete, a history of syphilis climaxing with a call for mandatory blood tests, and (unquestionably the Federal Theatre’s greatest success) One Third of a Nation, which exposed the existence of poor housing conditions in the nation’s largest cities. The audience’s appetite for “old plays,” however, would seem to have been satisfied by the Federal Theatre unit under the direction of John Houseman and Orson Welles. But even classical production was not to be free of controversy. These early efforts to deconstruct classics by making them more “relevant” to the contemporary world (a process later employed by such modern directors as Andrei Serban, Peter Brook, and Peter Sellars), successful as some of them were, still managed to raise hackles. Houseman had hired Welles, at the tender age of twenty, to direct Macbeth with his Negro unit. Setting the play in Haiti, Welles turned the witches into voodoo witch doctors and treated the central character as if he were “Emperor Jones gone beautifully mad,” thereby creating a triumph that played New York and toured the country to great acclaim. The success of this Voodoo Macbeth encouraged Negro units throughout

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the country to stage black versions of other European classics such as The Swing Mikado and Lysistrata, though the latter was eventually shut down by the WPA for being too “risqué.” Following Macbeth, which was staged at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, Houseman and Welles took over the Maxine Elliot Theatre on Broadway to produce two more scintillating versions of classic plays: Horse Eats Hat, a wild adaptation of a th-century Labiche farce featuring the young Joseph Cotten, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, directed by and starring Welles in the title role (his first leading part in New York). Faustus was by all accounts a mesmerizing reinterpretation of a great classical play, with Jack Carter (the black actor who played Macbeth) turning Mephistopheles into a dignified, bemused portrait of evil, and with Welles indulging his weakness for heavy makeup along with his lifelong passion for magic in the way he staged the episode involving the Seven Deadly Sins. The Federal Theatre was now on a roll. Critics were calling it the “greatest producer of hits” in New York. The best dramatists of the day, such as Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill, were letting the project do their plays for a royalty of $ a week or less, delighted to get produced in regions that would normally never be exposed to their work. Similarly, novelists like Sinclair Lewis were only too happy to accept Hallie’s invitation to adapt their novels into plays. Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, about the coming of Fascism to America, though a poor piece of dramatic writing, had twenty-two productions opening simultaneously in eighteen cities, and played to nearly five hundred thousand people. Inevitably, the play was interpreted as campaign propaganda for the New Deal. Despite its accumulating successes, however, the Federal Theatre suffered a grievous loss in authority and personnel when Marc Blitzstein’s Brechtian satire The Cradle Will Rock was cancelled by the WPA administration, on the eve of its opening, under the pretext of budget cutting. The story of the opera’s clandestine resurrection is now too well known to require extensive retelling (that episode would later become the centerpiece of Tim Robbins’  film, also called The Cradle Will Rock, with Cherry Jones playing Hallie Flanagan). In brief, Welles and Houseman walked their opening-night audience twenty blocks uptown from the Maxine Elliot to the empty Venice Theatre; Blitzstein played the entire score from his piano; and the actors, cleverly skirting a union injunction, sang their parts from the house, all to thunderous applause. But it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Federal Theatre. Welles and Houseman left the project soon after to form their own Mercury Theatre, where they produced a groundbreaking Julius Caesar in black shirt and a mesmerizing Heart-

Hallie Flanagan Davis

break House that found the twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles once again demonstrating his passion for excessive makeup as the octogenarian Captain Shotover. But although Hallie professed to be happy whenever her artists found work in the commercial theatre, the Houseman-Welles defection left her without her two most dynamic figures and valuable assets. She was also losing her greatest supporter in the Roosevelt administration, Harry Hopkins, who, ill with cancer, was beginning to let less informed assistants make his decisions for him. (The quality of those decisions can be assessed by the opinion of one of them, a California bureaucrat, who called a good theatre project “anything that keeps out of the papers.”) In his second term, Roosevelt had cut government spending in order to avoid inflation and give business a leg up and, as usual, the first area to suffer was the arts. Around this time, Hallie remained resolutely focussed on her mandate to create a truly national theatre, making tireless tours of the country in an effort to ensure that all the regional units were running well and maintaining high standards. Wherever she went, she encountered gratitude from artists and audiences alike, but also hostility from some of the press and abuse from some of the politicians. There was the usual criticism growing in Congress that too much money was being spent in New York by Bolshevik sympathizers. The Washington Post called for an end of the Federal Theatre and its “frilly artistic projects.” Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner carried a headline demanding “Federal Theatre Communist Trend Must Be Eradicated.” One congressional investigator was appalled that, in some Federal Theatre shows, blacks and whites shared the same stage and even “danced together.” Even the titles of harmless Federal Theatre stock farces—The Bishop Misbehaves, Up in Mabel’s Room, Lend Me Your Husband—were being denounced as lewd and salacious by congressmen who never bothered to see the plays. It must be admitted that the Workers Alliance, a socialist organization said to be a nursery for the Communist party, was recruiting a lot of Federal Theatre employees. And it is also true that some of the project’s later work, notably the children’s play Revolt of the Beavers, was sufficiently slanted to provoke the Times’s Brooks Atkinson to say it was Karl Marx disguised as Mother Goose, and the Saturday Evening Post to charge the Federal Theatre with teaching poor children to murder rich ones (actually, kids of all income brackets loved the show as a story of good guys versus bad guys). Hallie often replied, with a zealousness that knew no fear, that only a free people could create a Federal Theatre, that it was a democratic answer to both Communism and Fascism. But no one seemed to be listening. The Federal Theatre, lacking any genuine grass

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roots support, was being convicted without defense in the court of public opinion. Eventually, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee under the chairmanship of the notorious Martin Dies of Texas, saw the political controversy engulfing the Federal Theatre as an excellent opportunity to attack the Roosevelt administration. Dies’ fellow committeeman from New Jersey, J. Parnell Thomas—both of them would soon turn their attention in the direction of “Reds” in Hollywood—identified the Federal Theatre not just as a “link in the vast and unparallelled New Deal propaganda machine,” but as an arm of the Communist party. In the words of Jane De Hart Matthews (The Federal Theatre,  –), “Hereafter, Hallie Flanagan would find her time and attention devoted increasingly to defense of the Federal Theatre, rather than to its expansion.” Hallie’s preoccupation with defending the reputation of her enterprise would also occupy the attention of the best commentators on the subject—not only Ms. De Hart’s but, as she admitted in her poignant and powerful memoir Arena, that of Hallie herself. As a drama with its own heroes and villains, this conflict between strong-arm politics and defenseless art was a natural for press attention, but its outcome was foreordained. Not only would the Democratic administration fail to put through its projected plan for a new governmental Department of Art, providing subsidized theatrical, musical, and art activities in twenty-five to one hundred cities. It would be enjoined from supporting any art at all, most especially the art of the theatre. What was deeply frustrating about this encounter is that for many months the eloquent Hallie Flanagan was prevented by the WPA administration from releasing any statements to the press in her own defense. She had to remain silent in the face not only of criticism of her own politics but of the Federal Theatre’s artistic achievements. Witness after witness testified to how the Federal Theatre was dominated by Communists and fellow travellers, after which Representative Clifton Woodrum of Virginia informed the House that “[The Federal Theatre] has produced nothing of merit as far as national productions are concerned,” adding with smug pride, “We are going out of the theatre business.” Finally, Hallie was allowed to submit a brief before the Dies Committee, after a large number of unfriendly witnesses had sufficiently tarnished the reputation of her endeavor. The brief was never read or published, but some of it was covered in her testimony. She began by defending the patriotism of her

Hallie Flanagan Davis

project (“Since August , , I have been . . . combatting UnAmerican activity”) and herself against charges that, because she had once visited Russia and written favorably about Russian theatre, she was a Red. It is disheartening to find this dignified human being forced to say “that I am not and never have been a Communist; that I am a registered Democrat . . . that I had planned and directed Federal Theatre from the first as an American enterprise.” Words of a similar nature would echo and reecho throughout congressional chambers for many years to come. Hallie was willing to concede that many of her productions were forms of propaganda, but insisted that propaganda was a form of education for democracy rather than a tool for advancing Communist doctrine. In a moment that summed up the nature of this investigation, she was asked by Representative Joseph Starnes about an ominous figure named Christopher Marlowe. “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?” “Put in the record,” Hallie replied, “that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare.” It was a blunder on a level with the committee charge some years later that the eightyear-old Shirley Temple was a Communist for dancing with Bill Robinson, and it was a blunder that would end up in Starnes’ obituary, though unfortunately not on his tombstone. But Hallie could make no impact on a committee determined to extinguish the Federal Theatre from the face of the earth. With Chairman Dies raising his gavel to end the hearings for lunch, Hallie asked to be allowed to make a final statement. Dies said he would consider it, but she never got her chance to be heard again, nor was her testimony ever distributed. “We don’t want you back,” declared Congressman Thomas. “You’re a tough customer and we’re all worn out.” As a direct result of these hearings, the House eventually passed, by a vote of  to , the Relief Bill for – calling for sweeping changes in the WPA program, including drastic cuts in arts funding and the imposition of loyalty oaths designed to get rid of radicals. It also called for an end to the Federal Theatre. Hallie learned about this development from a newspaper someone handed her, shocked that Congress had decided on what she called “outright execution rather than slow strangulation.” There would be rallies on behalf of the Federal Theatre. Critics would speak of its great achievements. Orson Welles would offer to debate hostile politicians on radio. Telegrams would pour in from far and wide. And the Senate, charmed by Tallulah Bankhead, daughter of one of its members, would briefly consider keeping the Federal Theatre alive for a few

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more years. But the effort failed because the Senate was reluctant to put other artists out of work in order to save funds for the theatre, and, for the same reason, Roosevelt sadly signed the bill. Despite Hallie’s brave cries of “Do not give up,” and the thunderous support of the entire theatre industry and thousands of supporters, all efforts to save the Federal Theatre proved of no avail. This first attempt in history to subsidize serious American theatre with federal funds was treated by Congress with the same hostility, malice, and fear that were later to surround the National Endowment for the Arts, and a great idea, one that brought fine theatre to a new audience of millions of Americans, fell victim to narrow and bigoted minds. “Thus Federal Theatre ended as it began,” wrote Hallie in Arena, “with fearless presentation of problems touching American life. If this first government theatre in our country had been less alive it might have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious, and political intolerance. It strove for a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces of our life today; it fought for a free theatre as one of the many expressions of a civilized, informed, and vigorous life.” Hallie not only lost her job, she lost her second husband, Philip H. Davis, who died soon after the demise of the Federal Theatre. She went back to academic life in , accepting a position at Smith College as dean and as professor of drama. It was there that I first met her, as a student at Amherst when one of my Smith friends was playing in a Living Newspaper piece called E  MC Squared about the splitting of the atom. Four years later, she developed the illness that seems to afflict so many theatre artists, Parkinson’s disease, and retired to her old haunts in Poughkeepsie near Vassar, where she died in  at the age of seventy-nine. The voices of the Federal Theatre, some of them growing a little hoarse and parched with age, all testify to the vigor, the energy, the controversy, and the fearlessness that characterized this project and its leader. Reflecting the ephemeral nature of the theatre itself, nothing remains of the productions except some faded photographs and some yellowing scripts. But just as other federal arts projects produced such giants as John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright in the Writers program, and Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Philip Guston, and Jack Levine in the Art project, the Theatre program provided a home for some of the most brilliant actors, directors, designers, and dancers of the period (only the Group Theatre can boast as many gifted alumni): Orson Welles and John Houseman, Norman Lloyd, Arthur Kennedy,

Hallie Flanagan Davis

Katherine Dunham, Helen Tamiris, Jack Carter, Canada Lee, Ian Keith, Joseph Cotten, Burt Lancaster, Sidney Lumet, E. G. Marshall, Alvin Childress, Will Geer, Paula Lawrence, John Randolph, Jules Dassin, Jose Limon—the list is formidable. And this, in the face of the fact that the Federal Theatre was mandated to hire not reigning stars but primarily the unemployed. But let the last words be those of the great woman who saw this project through those four exhilarating, demoralizing, incomparable years: “The President of the United States in writing to me of his regret at the closing of the Federal Theatre referred to it as a pioneering job. This it was, gutsy, lusty, bad and good, sad and funny, superbly worth more wit, wisdom and imagination than we could give it. Its significance lies in pointing to the future. The ten thousand anonymous men and women—the et ceteras and the and-so-forths who did the work, the nobodies who were everybody, the somebodies who believed it— their dreams and deeds were not the end. They were the beginning of a people’s theatre in a country whose greatest plays are still to come.” Many working today in the serious American theatre have built on the back of this brave enterprise, and in the shadow of the unconquerable figure who led it. May her spirit rest, unperturbed and proud. 

217

Suzan-Lori Parks: Does Race Matter?

I first came upon the rich, audacious, and singular talent of SuzanLori Parks in  when I went up to Yale to see a production of a work with the marquee-swollen title, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. This was actually her third in a series of plays with equally mind-boggling names like Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and Betting on the Dust Commander. These titles didn’t quite match the length of Peter Weiss’ The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade or even Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Put You in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad. But like all her plays, The Death of the Last Black Man suggested she had more in common with Kopit’s avant-garde mischievousness and Weiss’ supertheatricalism than with the formal and thematic conventions associated with contemporary American realism. In those days, Suzan-Lori herself was eager to distinguish her work, in style, from the more familiar domestic conventions of, say, Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and, in content, from what she memorably called the “I’m gonna-get-you plays” of the seventies—those se218

Suzan-Lori Parks

quels to the “I’m gonna get your mamma” plays of the sixties. Maybe that was because her teacher at Mt. Holyoke was James Baldwin, the author of an essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which criticized the same sort of ideological approach in some black writing. Whatever the case, her drama has always been as much a product of Western postmodernism as of African-American consciousness and the black experience. In this, she had a literary prototype in Adrienne Kennedy, one of the earliest African-American woman writers with more on her mind than race. “It’s insulting,” Suzan-Lori once said at a public symposium, “when people say my plays are about what it’s about to be black—as if that’s all we think about, as if our life is about that. My life is not about race. It’s about being alive.” She added: “Why does everyone think white artists make art and black artists make statements? Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me about form?” If they did, people would have gotten an earful because Parks has been carefully schooled in the formalist breakthroughs of the postmodern school. Like other members of that movement, Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans and James Joyce in Finnegans Wake for examples, she is very preoccupied with deconstructing the English language. And like the author of The Blacks, Jean Genet, one of the earliest writers to explore the way skin color influences consciousness, she is deeply concerned with identity, and how the presence of the Other helps to both define and obscure that identity. At the same time, her work has been influenced a lot by music, both jazz and classical, from which she derives her concept of “Repetition and Revision,” that is to say, revisiting and revising the same phrases over and over again. But despite her joyous encounter with music and language, it cannot be denied that Suzan-Lori is also writing plays about race. The Last Black Man, for example, is partly an effort to exalt black English into a kind of poetic code, and to adapt English words to the black experience. As the play moves the audience through a kind of Expressionist history of America, a character named “Before Columbus” reflects on a time when the earth was flat, while another insists that the earth was “roun” until Columbus made it “round” with a “d.” In short, Parks deconstructs language as a means of establishing the place of blacks in recorded history. “You will write it down because if you don’t write it down then we will come along and tell the future that we did not exist. You will write it down and carve it out of rock.” In the introduction to one of her collections, she adds, quite beautifully, “one of my tasks as a playwright is to . . . locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.” This, I would suggest, is her way of endorsing Milan

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Kundera’s definition of art as “a struggle of memory against forgetting.” Her plays may sometimes be about oppression, but she never limits herself to writing about oppression. As she says, to define “Black Drama” solely as “the presentation of the Black as oppressed” is “bullshit.” After The Death of the Last Black Man came two transitional works, The America Play and Venus. The America Play was her first stab at the Cain-andAbel relationship between Abe Lincoln (here called The Foundling Father) and his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. Topdog/Underdog was her second treatment of the subject. In both works, the central figure is a black man trained to reenact, over and over again, Lincoln’s murder at the hands of Booth at Ford’s Theatre during a production of Our American Cousin. Venus, on the other hand, is about the celebrated Venus Hottentot, as she was then called, abducted from her South African home in the early nineteenth century to become a phenomenon of English freak shows because of her gargantuan buttocks and breasts. Despite obvious temptations, however, Venus is not a victim play and never pushes sympathy buttons. Parks’ Venus is hugely exploited but always retains an aristocratic dignity and sangfroid, laced with a gentle irony. She is exhibited, manhandled, sexually violated, infected with the clap, anatomized, and finally autopsied by physicians who think they have found the missing link. Yet, the play is an indictment not only of white racism but of European smugness and insularity as well. In short, it is less a victim play than a powerful dissent from European concepts of female beauty. Like The America Play, Venus was a transitional work in the sense that Parks began to subordinate her linguistic experimentation in order to concentrate more on theme and character. This had the result of making her work more and more accessible, until with In the Blood, a contemporary version of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter about a homeless black woman and the black preacher who seduces and abandons her, she finally produced a popular play. Her next work, Topdog/Underdog, even enjoyed a short run on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize. But just as that work covered the same material as The America Play, her most recent work, Fucking A, was a second look at the Hester Prynne story she adapted in In the Blood with the heroine wearing the scarlet A for being an abortionist. Parks’s style was undergoing changes as well. In her previous plays, her explorations were performed in a highly charged imagistic language that kept the poetic content higher than the sociological substance. In her recent, more accessible if less reverberant plays, she uses increasingly naturalistic language and domestic themes. As in Topdog/Underdog, she is more concerned “about family

Suzan-Lori Parks

wounds and healing” than with big historical flourishes. That may be why, instead of experimental artists like Marcus Stern, Liz Diamond, and Richard Foreman, directors associated with her earlier work, her plays are now being staged by mainstream artists like George C. Wolfe and Michael Greif. No one can predict where this unpredictable dramatist will go next, whether she will break out into fresh uncharted territory, or remain content with a modest if seedily furnished room in town. But she is definitely an artist whose future work one awaits with great anticipation. 

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Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook: The Cavalier and the Roundhead

Recent books about a pair of notable English stage figures not only provide insights into two contrasting theatre personalities but also help to highlight opposing strains of European theatre during the last half of the twentieth century. Dominic Shellard’s Kenneth Tynan: A Life is essentially an intellectual biography of the impish English critic, dramaturge, and dandy who died in Santa Monica in  at age . Margaret Croyden’s Conversations with Peter Brook: – is a series of interviews with a director celebrated for his almost puritanical dedication to process and experiment. Vastly different in purpose and temperament, each of these men helped to instigate significant changes in the quality and kind of contemporary Western theatre. You might think Shellard’s new biography to be superfluous considering the extensive Tynan material already in print—not only books by his wives (Kathleen Tynan’s The Life of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy’s Life Itself ?), but also Tynan’s own confessional diaries and letters. The publishing world has certainly displayed an omnivorous appetite for information about someone whose actual writings 222

Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook

are all out of print, suggesting that whatever may interest them about this cultural icon, it is not his prose. None of the previous biographical material, as Shellard notes, has investigated the development of Tynan’s critical thinking or dealt much with his impact on contemporary drama. The author, a reader in English literature at Sheffield University who quotes generously from Tynan’s reviews and profiles, does a worthy job of filling in the interstices. His biography is a useful chronicle of a bygone time when drama critics had the potential to help shape the cultural life of a nation. No doubt, Tynan’s revelations regarding his passion for spanking female bottoms with a headmaster’s cane, not to mention his fascination with pornography in public and such erotic pageants as Oh! Calcutta!, have tended to overshadow his very considerable critical achievements. No writer in English since Bernard Shaw has captured so vividly the immediacy of a stage performance, or written with such a balance of clarity and levity, of passion and wit. Most of Shellard’s book is a chronicle of Tynan’s career as drama critic and profile writer for The English Standard, The Observer, and The New Yorker, not to mention his checkered employment as literary manager of Olivier’s National Theatre. The biographer does not scant such tabloid tidbits as Tynan’s mistreatment of his wives (he gave Elaine two black eyes and a broken nose, and was conscientiously unfaithful to her and Kathleen) or his more sensational public shennanigans (he was the first to write “fuck” in a newspaper and pronounce it on the BBC). But the book generally manages to emphasize ideas rather than sensationalism or gossip, concentrating on Tynan the intellect rather than Tynan the leftwing voluptuary. As all his biographers attest, Kenneth Tynan was riddled with contradictions. A firm believer in ensemble theatre companies, he was nonetheless incorrigibly celebrity-struck, and, while ruefully admitting he never found men sexually attractive, had a lifelong crush on Sir Laurence Olivier. He was opposed to capital punishment, but possessed an appetite for witnessing and (in Bull Fever) writing about the death of bulls. He fought for critical independence, yet tried to get hostile reviewers barred from Oh! Calcutta! A confirmed Marxist after seeing Brecht’s Mother Courage in East Berlin, he was devoted to the high life, dressing in doeskin suits and purple ties while debating equal income distribution in expensive restaurants. And though he professed to be a pacifist, he had a passionate and lifelong devotion to sado-masochistic sex. (He once defined a humanist as a man who “remembers the faces of the people he spanks,” and conceded that he didn’t much enjoy flogging black women because “it conflicts with my belief in civil liberties”). Tynan was perhaps the quintessential limou-

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sine liberal and sedan chair socialist, though he was often wont to emerge from his privileged circumstances to sign petitions, challenge the Lord Chamberlain over censorship, and defy congressional investigating committees. And there is no question that his continual attacks on the artificialities of the “Loamshire” play, and on the way the English stage was controlled by stodgy conservative managements, helped bring about that breakthrough in theatre consciousness associated with the anti-Establishment John Osborne and a host of working-class playwrights, among them John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and Edward Bond. While Harold Hobson was championing French theatre and the genteel upper-class drama of Noel Coward, Christopher Fry, and Terence Rattigan, Tynan was calling for a theatre free of censorship, engaged with the urgent social issues of the time, and more at home with regional and lower-class speech patterns than could be gleaned from “conversations held through panes of glass with London taxi-drivers.” Smitten with Miller, Williams, and the American Method (he also loved American musicals), Tynan called for an English drama that was revolutionary (i.e., leftwing) in content, while conventional (i.e., realistic) in form. With Osborne’s Look Back at Anger, produced by George Devine’s intrepid English Stage Company at the Royal Court, he found his perfect hybrid and wrote an encomium that may be one of the most passionate pieces of theatre criticism ever penned (“I doubt if I could love anyone,” he thundered, “who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger”). While he later developed a grudging respect for Samuel Beckett, he had little use for Absurdist theatre because of its posture of existential despair. He criticized early Pinter for much the same reasons. And he dismissed the imaginative explorations of Jean Louis Barrault as being “out of touch with life.” Almost all of the plays he championed (arguably including Look Back in Anger) now seem rather shopworn and dog-eared, and when he was finally in a position, as literary manager for the National Theatre, to help stage his own favorites, the majority of his choices (Black Comedy, A Bond Honored, The National Health, The Party, etc.) proved to have relatively little value as artistic objects, whatever their ideological appeal. Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers was typical. The play defamed Winston Churchill as complicit in the assassination of the Polish General Sikorski on the basis of little more than what the author called “sworn statements from secret informants” locked in a Swiss bank that could not be opened up for fifty years. Tynan nevertheless recommended this dubious object to Olivier as “one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to British theatre in my lifetime.” When the play was unsurprisingly rejected by the National Theatre board chairman, Tynan went on to produce it

Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook

under commercial auspices, and was hit with a libel suit costing him , pounds in damages. Still, this flouter of public opinion and scourge of censorship was not always constant in supporting other artists in the face of external pressures. He hassled George Devine because his production of Beckett’s Play was designed to please the author rather than the audience, and also because it might provoke the ire of the National Theatre board. He later redeemed what Devine called his lack of “guts” when he defied the board chairman over Soldiers. He lost his job as a result, calling Olivier “an obtuse lickspittle” for failing to support him. Among Shellard’s previous books is a life of Harold Hobson, Tynan’s rival on London’s Sunday Times, with whom his current subject is sometimes invidiously compared. As the biographer wryly notes, the opinions of this much maligned critic were usually more dependable than Tynan’s, and he was besides a much more gracious human being, offering to befriend Tynan even after having been patronized and insulted by him (“the beserk H. Hobson, now in the twilight of his loony reign”). Still, we must remember that the track record of Bernard Shaw was often inferior to that of his more sober contemporary William Archer. Like Shaw’s, Tynan’s prose still seems fresh when that of his more correct colleagues has turned to mold and mildew. “What counts,” he wrote about critics, “is not their opinion, but the art with which it is expressed.” At the end, dying from emphysema, gasping for breath, and virtually alone, he reflected, “I have alienated my traditionalist friends by left-wing politics and my left-wing friends by my love of pleasure.” Shellard has found the one area of agreement among the aesthetes and the revolutionaries—respect for Tynan’s eloquence, wit, passion, and style. Tynan once referred to Olivier’s National Theatre as Cavaliers and Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company as Roundheads, distinguishing between the eclectic pleasures of the first and the more single-minded dedication of the second. The same distinction could be made between Tynan and Hall’s former associate director, Peter Brook. After a brief stint in the commercial theatre, staging such trifles as The Little Hut, Brook had a brilliant run of triumphs at the RSC, most famously a gymnastic Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Beckett-like King Lear, and a hallucinatory Marat /Sade. But at the RSC he also staged a fiercely anti–Vietnam War (and anti-American) piece called US that was one of his earliest non-classical ensemble efforts, ending with the actors entering the audience and staring at an audience assumed to be guiltily complicit in the war. “Are we keeping you waiting, or are you keeping us?” quipped Tynan, who not long before, in a Living Theatre pro-

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duction, had threatened to apply a match to the bare soles of the half-naked actors clambering over his lap. Soon after, in , Brook started his own International Center of Research in Paris at the Les Bouffes du Nord, characteristically ripping out the comfortable seats and putting in wooden bleachers. This signalled a radical shift from classical reinterpretations featuring English actors to ensemble-driven projects with an international company, in an exploration of the possibilities of multiculturalism long before it was fashionable. Croyden’s Converations with Peter Brook is made up of a series of interviews concerning each of his productions, held over thirty years in a great variety of places, for the purpose of defining Brook’s evolving aesthetic. The word Brook uses most often in these interviews is “research.” Clearly, it is preparation and rehearsal that interest him most, not the results or the accompanying fame or money or career: “I have no sense whatever of pride or achievements,” he tells Croyden, “I never look back.” Spartan in his lifestyle and monastic in his work habits, he is less concerned with product than with process, more engaged with primitive audiences than with sophisticated intellectuals or theorizing academics. He spent months doing exercises with actors on a single letter like K or O. Sometimes he worked with sticks, other times with cardboard boxes. This suggests why he finds most Western production to be “deadly theatre.” It is based on literary and verbal constructs and dominated by text (even Shakespeare, he believes, has no reality until staged by actors in front of an audience). Some might detect a really gargantuan ego operating under this show of modesty and simplicity, especially in Brook’s need to create his own material (and sometimes his own language) rather than work with gifted writers. Moreover, his fascination with playing before primitive audiences (“fifty thousand people throbbing together—like the Greeks”) and his attraction to actors of mixed backgrounds and languages, sometimes performing in incomprehensible accents, occasionally sounds like a form of highbrow tourism or Left Bank imperialism. Brook is aware of the danger in making his company “a little United Nations.” But, as Croyden remarks, “Some people have come to think of you as . . . a colonialist trying to contact the natives.” Brook shrugs off such comments, as he repudiates any link with Western artists of his time. Like most Romantics, he refuses to acknowledge prior influences—not Stanislavsky, not Brecht, not Artaud, not even Grotowski. A pilgrim on a continuous journey, a “searcher” rather than a “follower,” he admits

Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook

only to being hypnotized by the writings of the mystic Gurdjieff, who inspired a Brook film called Meetings with Remarkable Men. Claiming that “.% of universal experience is outside one’s understanding,” Brook emerges as a card-carrying mystic himself, though he would probably deny even that particular category. When Croyden, interviewing him about The Ik, says that the production sounds like Zen, Brook replies, “That’s for you to say, not me.” There is only one theme that truly interests him— “how to live.” Often, Brook clams up about his purpose (“there are no answers”). At other times, he can talk for pages about the meaning of art and life and “the great eternal question”: “What is destiny? And what isn’t destiny,” sounding uncomfortably like the guru who claimed that Life is a fountain and, when challenged, replied “All right, it’s not a fountain.” While Croyden sometimes gushes like a fountain herself, her Boswellian pursuit of Brook pursuing his aesthetic is not entirely adulatory. She challenges him often on his more goofy notions, such as his bizarre claim, in the course of justifying Oberon’s treatment of Titania, that a husband’s “truest act of love” is to have his wife “screwed by the largest truck driver he can find.” But generally Croyden is an admiring observer of Brook’s most celebrated productions, particularly the nine-hour Mahabharata in , based on the longest poem in literature (fifteen times the length of the Bible), which she describes with almost awestruck reverence. The jury is still out on whether any of these works in exile are the equal of Brook’s Shakespeare work with the RSC or his Marat /Sade. Kenneth Tynan lived mostly in English-speaking lands trying to improve the quality of playwriting; Peter Brook abandoned his own country and his own traditions in an effort to shape an international art. Tynan was a wordsmith admiring others who used the English language well; Brook is more interested in a theatre of sounds and gestures, laboring to rediscover the primitive ur-text common to all people. Tynan squandered his gifts, concluding “I have no active professional identity at all”; Brook remains passionately dedicated to squeezing the last drop of possibility out of his research into the art of theatre. The Cavalier Tynan was a man of epic self-indulgence, the Roundhead Brook of conspicuous self-sacrifice. Neither was without personal or artistic blemishes, but I am stirred by a profession that could have produced them both. 

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Shakespeare in Bloom: The Two Noble Kinsmen; Henry IV; As You Like It

Harold Bloom is enjoying a vogue these days, and so is his favorite author. In the last few weeks, five or six new Shakespeare productions have opened that are in some way indebted to this inveterate Bardolator. Like Samuel Johnson, his rotund critical forbear, Harold Bloom believes that Shakespeare is a “mortal god” to whom we owe everything, including our notions of what constitutes the human. If in previous ages theatre labored under the shadow of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare (in America at least) has lately been laboring under the shadow of Harold Bloom. Congenial as it is to Shakespearean interpretation, Bloom’s large shadow sometimes threatens to eclipse Shakespearean production. Although he acknowledges that the plays were written to be performed, Bloom (like many scholar-critics) seems to prefer his Shakespeare on the page to Shakespeare on the stage. It is true that he will occasionally honor the odd Shakespeare performance providing it is traditional enough. He is, for example, full of praise for the way John Gielgud warbled the Bard’s native woodnotes, especially in Hamlet, and he is not reluctant to admit that Ralph Richardson’s celebrated Falstaff (in 228

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) changed his life. But those performances are more than half a century old. The two watershed Midsummer Night’s Dreams of the last few decades— notably Peter Brook’s trapeze version with the RSC, and Alvin Epstein’s amalgam of the text with Purcell’s Faerie Queene for the YRT—left him colder than Hamlet’s ghost. In his compendious  study—Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human—Bloom is hardly the best guide to acting and directing the plays, if indeed these professions hold any interest for him at all. For Bloom, the stage is full of impurities and the best theatre is in his head. “I have never seen a performance,” he writes about The Two Noble Kinsmen, “and don’t particularly want to, since Shakespeare’s contributions to the play are scarcely dramatic.” It is true that this is hardly Shakespeare’s finest writing. It is also true that no more than two-fifths of the work have been attributed to him. The rest belongs to his contemporary John Fletcher, whose regular collaborator was Francis Beaumont. Fletcher was celebrated for having invented a new middle genre he identified as “tragi-comedy”—“not so-called,” he wrote, “in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.” The Two Noble Kinsmen not only brings one of its characters near death, it pushes him over the edge in a plot-resolving accident. But otherwise, like most of Shakespeare’s late romances, the play has all the far-fetched qualities of a tragic-comic fairy tale. Based on Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” The Two Noble Kinsmen weaves an intriguing story without much depth of character, using verse that is often bland and lacking in imagery. In the last act, where Shakespeare’s hand is most evident (very likely the last words he ever wrote for the stage), the poetry intensifies. The plot, on the other hand, which is almost certainly provided by Fletcher, is virtually a grab bag of Shakespearean characters and motifs. At the New York Public Theater, in a staging by Darko Tresnjak, these characters and motifs are presented with a minimum of embroidery. Laid in a court presided over by the same Theseus and Hippolyta who presided over Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play tells the story of two Theban cousins, Arcite and Palamon, who swear eternal friendship, rather like Proteus and Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, only to fall out in a similar way over love of the same woman. Captured in war, they treat their imprisonment as a form of penitential purification, in the manner of Lear; but it is not long before they are baiting each other, much like Hal and Hotspur, in preparation for battle over Hippolyta’s sister, Emilia. There are borrowings from Cymbeline and Timon as well, not to mention the theft of a whole character from Hamlet. A

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Jailer’s Daughter, who goes mad for love of Palamon, could be Ophelia’s double. Fletcher even gives her the opportunity to sing sad songs in a watery location (among them Desdemona’s “Willow, willow, willow”) and later has her distribute posies and make lewd jokes. One suspects that Fletcher enlisted Shakespeare in this project not so much to exploit his poetic genius as to ensure against being accused of theft. Unlike Bloom, I was happy to have the opportunity to see this rarely produced play because the story holds your attention, and because the director and his cast are able to tell it without much more in the way of stage effects than a triangular cage to represent the prison and primary color lights to underline emotional changes. Not all of the acting is memorable, but I was particularly touched by three repertory-trained veterans—Sam Tsoutsouvas as Theseus, Jonathan Fried as the Jailer, and Candy Buckley in a variety of roles—as well as by David Harbour and Graham Hamilton playing Arcite and Palamon, and Doan Ly as Emilia. Let me suggest another reason for seeing this play. It contains sexual ambiguities—Emilia’s speech about “the true love between maid and maid” and Arcite’s remark to Palamon about how “We are one another’s wife”—that could have been referenced in recent court decisions regarding gay marriage. Falstaff is Bloom’s favorite character, the one with whom he identifies most closely. He has spilled a lot of ink trying to rescue the reputation of the fat knight from the moral disapproval of what he calls “academic puritans and professorial power freaks.” This may have led him to overestimate Falstaff’s virtues (“A comic Socrates . . . neither moral nor amoral but of another nature”), and the current production of Henry IV at the Vivian Beaumont, a long article in the Sunday New York Times tells us, is partly an effort to redress the balance. The director, Jack O’Brien, has set out to show the darker side of a character who, rather than being Bloom’s “embodiment of human freedom,” has serious flaws. I agree with both arguments in this age-old debate. It is highly probable, as some commentators have noted, that Shakespeare originally intended Falstaff to be a Vice figure seducing the prodigal son Prince Hal from his true path, with characters such as the Lord Chief Justice trying to show him the way of righteousness. It is also true that Falstaff escaped from this projected Morality Play to become the full-blooded vitalist that Bloom and the rest of us so admire, while Hal emerged as a bit of a prig exhibiting some of his brother Lancaster’s Machiavellian genes. But however interesting the controversy, it has virtually nothing to do with what is happening on the stage of the Beaumont. There that good actor Kevin

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Kline, tricked out with body padding and the traditional full white beard, is giving an intelligent reading of the role, but not one that captures more than its physical definition. There is little that is unexpected in his playing, no element of risk that would expose the dangerous side of the man. This is a character out of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, the roly-poly knight of the Victorian imagination. Discovered asleep against a beam on his first appearance, Kline needs a lot of help to rise to his feet. He clearly has a hell of a hangover. And his voice rumbles with authority. The actor is giving an excellent impersonation in every exterior way, but he’s essentially an impostor, hidden behind his whiskers, like the domesticated Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor. I had the opportunity not long ago to see Bloom interpret the character himself in a staged reading held with my company under the direction of Karin Coonrod. Obviously not an actor, Bloom nevertheless managed to essentialize Falstaff’s intelligence, his wit, and particularly his depression and fatigue, using very little in the way of acting technique or interpretation. With his hooded eyes and melancholy voice, he gave one of the saddest readings of the part I ever heard. And that’s precisely what’s missing from Kline’s performance—the tragic side of the character. Without that, you can’t really find the comic side either. Neither do his companions in Eastcheap, least of all Pistol, whose fustian Marlovian pretension has been reduced to a feeble apostrophe. The tavern scenes have neither punch nor pathos, the sublime induction scene has been sadly emasculated, and there’s not much fun even in the exposure of Falstaff’s cowardice. Kline is smart enough to know the character is not entirely secure in the affections of Prince Hal. He has a lovely moment in the rejection scene, when Hal throws him to the ground and he gives the impression of shrinking into insignificance. But his reactions are often too perfunctory. The great line that signifies Falstaff’s consciousness of a dismal future (“Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound”) is almost a throwaway. The rest of this lavish production, in an adaptation by Dakin Matthews that conflates the two parts of Henry IV into an evening lasting less than four hours, is full of dazzling stagecraft, particularly in the thunderous battle scenes, punctuated by smoke, fire, and Mark Bennett’s explosive sounds. What it lacks is much evidence of a creative imagination. There is no sign whatever, except for Ethan Hawke’s punk rocker performance as Hotspur—butch-cut, barechested, pounding his fist against his palm—that this play is being produced in the opening years of the twenty-first century (and I’m not asking for updating). Ralph Funicello’s scaffolded set is geometric and functional, while Jess Gold-

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stein’s period costumes are right out of fifteenth-century paintings. As for the cast, few of them have been allowed to prove Hamlet’s conviction that they are “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” The performance with the most pith and relevance, in my opinion, is that given by Michael Hayden, a late replacement for Billy Crudup as Prince Hal. He manages the difficult transition from truant prince to true king with admirable strength. I was also impressed by Richard Easton’s crabbed aging Bolinbroke, Byron Jennings’ saucey Worcester, Jeff Weiss’ doddering Justice Shallow, and Anastasia Barzee’s velvet-voiced Lady Mortimer. Indeed, there is hardly a weak performance in the evening, with the exception of an over-thetop Mistress Quickly by the usually dependable Dana Ivey. But there is too little of Shakespeare’s divine comedy, depth, and imagination, and too much pageantry, stage effect, and spectacle to satisfy my taste or, I would guess, that of Harold Bloom. I saw another traditionalist production recently, at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, namely Peter Hall’s As You Like It. It features Hall’s daughter, Rebecca, in the role of Rosalind, a tall, willowy beauty reminiscent of Emma Thompson. No doubt, in a few years, she will develop substantial acting weight. But those with memories of Katharine Hepburn or Vanessa Redgrave or even Gwyneth Paltrow in the role might find her a little undernourished at present. Playing a character whom Bloom believes most fully represents “Shakespeare’s own stance towards human nature,” Ms. Hall is winsome, flirtatious, and engaging. Disguised in a slouch fedora hat and man’s open shirt, she towers over Rebecca Callard’s diminutive Celia like an Elizabethan Mutt and Jeff. Her charm is undeniable, though her affected East End speech sometimes makes her sound like she’s eating mashed potatoes (when Orlando observes “Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling,” he can’t be listening). She is someone to be carefully watched, not prematurely lionized, as she already has been. This As You Like It is a sober minimalist affair, clearly the work of a director who wants to achieve his effects with the least effort, as he did so masterfully in The Homecoming when the male characters pulled their cigars away from a single lighted match like a flower opening its petals. Hall’s As You Like It doesn’t possess the same energy or strength. John Gunter’s setting for the Forest of Arden consists of exquisitely lighted trees against a bosky scrim. But the atmosphere is too somber and oppressive to convey the pastoral sweetness I remember from the Hepburn production when Ernest Thesiger spoke The Seven Ages of Man over a crackling fire that decades later I can still smell.

Shakespeare in Bloom

All of the performances are professional without being penetrating, confident without being electrifying, with the possible exception of David Yelland, doing an impressive doubling job as the raging usurper Duke Frederick and his gentle banished brother. But the show is tired. I spent a lot of this three-hour evening feeling a little bored, a trifle impatient, my mind wandering over such idle questions as why the great majority of Shakespeare’s characters have only one name. I think I can guess why Harold Bloom would say Sir John Falstaff remains a prime exception. 

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George S. Kaufman: Keeping Company with Kaufman

The Library of America publication of Kaufman & Co. is a selection of nine Broadway plays written, between  and , by George S. Kaufman in partnership with four of his several collaborators—Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, Ring Lardner, and Morrie Ryskind. (A philanderer in marriage, Kaufman was equally faithless with his writing partners, though he remained true to one producer, Sam Harris.) If the canonizing volume is not exactly a publishing event equivalent in magnitude to the collected novels of Melville or the complete plays of O’Neill, it is nevertheless a valuable compendium of the wit of a bygone age. “Wit” is perhaps too delicate a word to describe the verbal acrobatics of this German-descended, Pittsburgh-born, Broadway-trained Jew. Kaufman was one of the regulars at the Algonquin Round Table, whose resident sophisticates included Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, among others. But whereas these notables could properly be described as authentic wits, Kaufman was, rather, a master of that peculiarly American semantic known as the “wisecrack.” (This form he may have practiced in the newsroom dur234

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ing his years as drama editor for the New York Times.) Typical of Kaufman’s wisecracks was his rejoinder to Irving Berlin after hearing him sing “Always”: “Always is a long time. Shouldn’t it be called ‘I’ll be loving you Thursday?’” The composer of “God Bless America” was not amused. If this sounds Groucho Marxist, that is because Kaufman was to comic writing what Groucho was to comic acting—a hardnosed commentator on romantic conventions, with no more than half an ounce of sentiment in his emaciated body. Aside from the impatient antagonism they shared towards the stupid and the square, the two men had the same knack for insult humor, the same insolent insouciance, even the same bushy eyebrows and frizzy hair. Indeed, Kaufman was personally responsible for a number of the puns, word quibbles, and wisecracks that poured deadpan out of Groucho’s throat. He had a hand in such Marx Brothers farces as A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, and he had two hands and a foot in the early escapades that brought them to Hollywood—Coconuts and Animal Crackers. Only the stage version of Animal Crackers is included here, published for the first time in a text based on a typescript Groucho left to the Library of Congress. Those of us who believe Animal Crackers to be the purest of the Marx Brothers movies will be grateful to have the full-length play, written in  in collaboration with Morrie Ryskind. (Ryskind went on to adapt the movie without Kaufman’s help.) And while both versions revolve around Groucho’s Captain Spalding, the African explorer (“Did someone call me schnorrer?”), and both feature his continuing mistreatment of the imperturbable dowager, Mrs. Rittenhouse (played on stage and screen by the magnificent Margaret Dumont), and the fate of a purloined painting, on screen a number of the play’s characters have been cut or renamed (such as Mrs. Rittenhouse’s butler “Hives”) or combined (Doucet the French art dealer is conflated with the newspaper magnate Roscoe W. Chandler a.k.a. Abie the Fish Peddler). A lot of this tailoring improves the work. Kaufman was hardly a master of construction. Surely, the movie is better off without the play’s tiresome climactic interlude set in Versailles and featuring Groucho as Louis XV. But whereas Ryskind had a stronger grasp of form than Kaufman, a superior sense of visual humor, and a more anarchic imagination (he probably wrote those surrealist exchanges between Chico as Ravelli and Harpo as the Professor that inspired Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano), he was also a lot more commercialminded. When he adapted the Ferber-Kaufman play Stage Door for the movies, Ryskind turned a passionate defense of stage performance, as opposed to the “piecework” of movie acting, into a saccharine opportunity for Katharine Hep-

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burn to throb over how “the calla lillies are in bloom.” (I’m still trying to figure out the relationship between Ryskind’s half-manic, half-sentimental style and his improbable evolution later into one of the neo-conservative founders of The National Review.) Kaufman refused to work on the movie adaptation of Stage Door. Indeed, his attitude towards Hollywood was always laced with contempt. He spent some time at MGM, lured there by Irving Thalberg. But like his character Laurence Vail, who has a breakdown from “underwork” in Once in a Lifetime (a part he directed himself in on Broadway), Kaufman resented being the studio’s forgotten man and felt that the “whole business was in the hands of incompetents.” By contrast, his love of the theatre was unconditional. Those who sold out to Hollywood for fame or money—like the message-bearing playwright Keith Burgess in Stage Door (a character transparently based on Clifford Odets)— earned his unqualified contempt. Burgess may pretend to serve the “Masses” when he ends a play with “Strike! Strike! Strike!” but as soon as this Hollywood Marxist begins drawing a big studio paycheck the “Masses” get redefined as the “eighty million people” who buy tickets to his movies. Kaufman got nothing out of Hollywood outside of his own paychecks, unless you count a prolonged affair with the movie actress Mary Astor, and the privilege of being named as a correspondent in her divorce. Instead, he returned to Broadway where he continued to exercise his acerbic tongue (something he might have defined as the principal language of Yugoslavia). Even though Kaufman famously described satire as “what closes on Saturday night,” his principal form was satirical comedies, most of which lasted at least until Thursday. I’m kidding. A lot of them were considerable successes, and Of Thee I Sing ran for a record  performances. If Ryskind invented farcical ideas for Animal Crackers and Of Thee I Sing, and Ring Lardner contributed the workingclass story and some idiomatic (“You know me, Al”) dialogue for June Moon, and Edna Ferber helped with plot lines and character development for The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door, and Moss Hart provided the humanizing structures for Once in a Lifetime, You Can’t Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner, Kaufman was usually the one responsible for identifying the satiric object and nailing it to the door like a coonskin cap. In The Royal Family ( –), the satire is on show business royalty, notably dynasties such as the Barrymores, on whom the Cavendishes are closely based (Ethel Barrymore, asked to play herself in the production, responded by threatening legal action). The flamboyant Tony Cavendish, in his dashing fur coat and rakish felt fedora, is modelled on John Barrymore, a great compro-

George S. Kaufman

mised actor who seemed to have obsessed Kaufman—he is referred to often in his plays and shows up again as the alcoholic movie star Larry Renault, “The Great Profile” of Dinner at Eight. (Unlike Ethel, John had no compunction about playing even an unflattering version of himself when that show was turned into a movie). Like so many Kaufman plays, The Royal Family establishes a contrast and a conflict between free-living Bohemians and the straitlaced, stiff-necked, shareowning pillars of society. Typical of these is Gil (a stock character usually played in the movies by Ralph Bellamy), who deeply disapproves of what he calls “insubstantial show people.” Kaufman finds a lot to ridicule in them as well, but by the end, he has exalted the Cavendishes into enduring icons of strength and unconventionality. Indeed, the only time he ever seems to turn soft is when he is writing about the stage. In June Moon (), perhaps the most dated play in the collection, Kaufman is satirizing the songwriting industry, hardly a serious menace to society. The play is noteworthy mainly as the first of a number of his plots, perhaps autobiographical, in which a hero, blinded by success, betrays his true love. In Once in a Lifetime (), Kaufman does another number on Hollywood, characterized as a land of chauffeurs and wolfhounds. In this prophetic work about the “talkies” revolution, the squares are the movie folk and the sophisticates are from Broadway. Glogauer, the vulgar Hollywood producer, is an enemy of good writing whose overriding objective is to protect himself from talent (“Everywhere I go, they act at me!”). A businessman interested only in grosses, Glogauer can easily fall for a dimwit advisor like George Lewis, even when he spends a fortune on making the wrong movie. It turns out to be a hit, proving that the more stupid the advice, the more successful the product. Once in a Lifetime recalls an ancient time when movies were adapted from what used to be called “the legitimate theatre” as opposed to the present when Broadway musicals are based on Hollywood movies, a time when film producers stole talent from the stage instead of vice versa, a time when showmen considered themselves shamans, and could condescend to lowbrow studio philistines. Today, it is not so easy to determine which is the more compromised art. Of Thee I Sing () is a satire on politics, with a rousing score by Ira and George Gershwin (both shamefully excluded from the show’s Pulitzer Prize). In this one, the same boobs who are buying tickets to the movies are electing politicians, and the hucksters are once again suckering the innocent. John P. Wintergreen runs for president on a love platform which gives hundreds of women the opportunity to compete in a beauty contest for First Lady. When he

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secretly marries a non-contestant, the contest winner, a Louisiana woman with a French name, sues him for breach of promise. France thereupon threatens war in the same comic-operetta way Sylvania challenges Freedonia in Duck Soup. The true comic character of the play, however, is the vice president, Alexander Throttlebottom, who nobody knows or recognizes, a kind of Laurence Vail of the White House, cooling his heels outside the executive office. Not a part tailored to the talents of Dick Cheney. Dinner at Eight () is Kaufman’s most serious play, an early Upstairs, Downstairs satire on the social pretensions of the wealthy classes. It is also his cruelest work, with virtually no redeeming characters. Millicent Jordan, who condescends to the obligatory colored maid, believes she has snared a brace of British royalty for dinner, and now is in process of compiling a distinguished guest list. Most of the invitees, starting with the Brits, fall out on her for one reason or another, and the play ends up looking very much like the third act of The Cherry Orchard where only the postal clerk and the stationmaster show up for the festivities. It is an uncharacteristically bleak play which the suicide of the penniless, drunken has-been Laurence Renault makes even darker. Stage Door () is another anti-Hollywood play, about a girl’s dormitory full of theatre hopefuls, some of whom end up as “camera fodder,” while others remain steadfastly loyal to the theatre regardless of the sacrifices. “The theater may be slow and heartbreaking,” the stagestruck heroine is told at the climax, “but if you build solidly you’ve got something at the end of seven years, and seventeen years, and twenty-seven . . . And what’s John Barrymore got? A yacht!” It is Kaufman’s most unabashed paean to the Broadway stage. You Can’t Take It with You () and The Man Who Came to Dinner () are the Kaufman plays that are most often revived, usually in summer stock. The first is another tribute to the Bohemian lifestyle, featuring a somewhat relentlessly eccentric family named Vanderhof, among them Grandpa, who doesn’t pay his taxes, Paul who experiments with fireworks in the basement, Penelope who writes and paints, Ed who prints subversive pamphlets, and two kittens named Groucho and Harpo. The complication is provided by the stuffy, easily shocked bourgeois parents of the boy who wants to marry their daughter, whose work ethic is challenged by the fun ethic of the Vanderhofs. It is a family conflict in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet as channelled through Abie’s Irish Rose. But The Man Who Came to Dinner is clearly Kaufman’s masterpiece. In the bullying intellectual snob Sheridan Whiteside, “critic, lecturer, wit, radio actor,” Kaufman had found his greatest opportunity since Animal Crackers for ex-

George S. Kaufman

ercising his insult muscles, even displaying an underused capacity for genuine wit. Based on Alexander Woollcott (who refused to play the part for personal reasons), Whiteside was embodied on stage and screen by Yale drama professor Monte Woolley, and sixty-odd years later I can still hear him growling “I may vomit” and hissing the word “Peachy” through his yellow teeth and Santa Claus beard. Whiteside became the personification of what would later be called “elite” attitudes towards middle-class values, and Kaufman made no effort to curb his waspish tongue or unpleasant manner—well, maybe a little, in the contrived if hilarious ending that has a character based on Noel Coward disposing of a character based on Gertrude Lawrence in order to unite the true lovers. And in the character of Banjo, obviously modelled on Harpo Marx (though played in the movie by Jimmy Durante), the playwright reprises some of the anarchic humor with which his career began: “Come to my room in half an hour,” mutters Banjo to a female prey, “and bring some rye bread.” Though the editor’s references are occasionally incomplete (he fails, for example, to identify who staged most of the plays), this collection has been compiled with love and care by Laurence Maslon. But I wish Maslon had been a little less modest, and collected his informative back-of-the-book notes into an extended introduction. Read together, these nine plays provide an authoritative if incomplete sociology of American manners, culture, and politics in the s and s. (There are surprisingly few references to Prohibition, and even fewer to the Great Depression.) It was clearly a time when issues were clearer, conflicts sharper, and characters better defined. Dying of heart failure in , Kaufman never got to experience the period known as the s. Too bad. We could have used his jaundiced perspective on that problematic decade. Not to mention the thuggish one we’re going through now. 

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Shakespeare’s Geography

For eleven days last month, right before an election that caused more anger and heartache than any in memory, I was sailing blithely through the Mediterranean. The occasion was one of those universitysponsored voyages that function less as holidays from thought than as continuing education courses. This journey was my first exposure to such cultural cruises. And although prepared to scoff, I came away impressed by the genuine hunger for learning displayed by most of the passengers. It was the kind of university event (this one sponsored by Harvard) where alumni and their wives, most of them elderly, are dispatched on luxury ships to ports of historical and literary interest. On board between stopovers, they digest talks by experts in a specific field, along with three-course meals—passing timelines, broadening mindlines, expanding waistlines. The subject of this particular trip was “Shakespeare in the Mediterranean,” the ports of visitation suggested by the settings of Shakespeare’s plots. The noted classicist Alan Shapiro of Johns Hopkins lectured on the art and archaeology of the historical locations; I spoke about the plays. 240

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The irony, of course, was that while Shakespeare placed twenty-one of his thirty-eight plays in Mediterranean locations, he probably never set his foot in that part of the world (though he may have spent a few months in the Netherlands). What he wrote about Rome and Egypt in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra was borrowed from Plutarch’s Lives and Samuel Daniels’ Cleopatra; his notions of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice were probably gleaned from Italian sources, travel books, or novels like Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller; his idea of Troy in Troilus and Cressida was drawn from George Chapman’s translation of The Iliad; his references to Ephesus and Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors were taken from his Roman model, Plautus’ Twin Menaechmi. Shakespeare may have floated on his imagination to ports in the Aegean, the Adriatic, and the Ionian seas, but physically he remained in London, earning a living as an actor, playwright, and occasional moneylender. This made the geographical aspect of my lectures a bit of a stretch. Our ship, the Clelia II, sailed to Kusadasi through the Dardenelles, visiting the ruins of Troy where Cressida proved faithless to Troilus, and we entered the waters near Prevezzo to observe where Antony was betrayed at sea by Cleopatra in the Bay of Actium, a pretty tight area to support such huge fleets. We went to Odunluk in Turkey and Naplion in Greece. We took bus tours, climbed broken steps and jagged hills, took promenades along the waterfronts, and swam from stony beaches in the clear blue Mediterranean. But the fact is there wasn’t a genuine Shakespearean relic in sight. Nor were there any signs of Shakespeare in our stopovers in Athens (the site for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, and The Two Noble Kinsmen) or Messina (the location of Much Ado About Nothing). The Illyria of Twelfth Night was hardly the arcadian, bucolic court where Orsino mooned about music and love or Sir Toby consumed his cakes and ale, but rather a third world town in Albania named Saranda, filled with scores of uncompleted concrete condos, and, inexplicably, lots of Mercedes cars and trucks navigating narrow dirt roads. It was hard to imagine a shipwrecked Gwyneth Paltrow approaching these broken shores as she waded towards Illyria at the conclusion of Shakespeare in Love. The major sites of interest in most of these places were Greek and Roman ruins, but there was also an ancient Sephardic synagogue in Dubrovnik (the oldest in that part of Europe), and an imposing palace built by the 3rd century Roman Tetrarch Diocletian in Split, Croatia, its basements perfectly preserved as a result of the garbage that sixteen centuries earlier had been deposited there and petrified. The most habitual tourist stops were Greek and Roman theatres, especially intriguing to those who had never visited Epidaurus or Ephesus or

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Syracuse. And the classicist Alan Shapiro was eloquent in describing how the orchestra where the Greek chorus sang and danced around an altar was gradually absorbed into a space where more secular Roman spectators were seated. Some of the more jaded passengers, bored by seeing so many performance spaces, began to substitute JABT (“Just another boring theatre”) for the proverbial JABC (“Just another boring church”), especially since these outdoor ruins had so little to do with Shakespeare. But to tell the truth, geography was never Shakespeare’s strongest subject. For example, he tacked a seacoast onto landlocked Bohemia in A Winter’s Tale. His idea of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a composite of an ethereal court, out of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and a real English countryside, similar to the Forest of Arden owned by his mother, and featured in As You Like It. Midsummer’s Theseus and Hippolyta, who also rule Athens in The Two Noble Kinsmen, are Elizabethan versions of the legendary Athenian philanderer and his Amazon bride. But Puck (a.k.a. Robin Goodfellow) is an early sketch for an English hobbit, and Shakespeare’s pastoral imagery (“I know a bank where the wild thyme grows”) derives from direct observation of Stratford horticulture. One can almost sniff the eglantine and the woodbine. At least one of his contemporaries, Ben Jonson, was bothered by Shakespeare’s contextual inconsistencies. Although he professed to love Shakespeare “this side idolatry,” he never missed an opportunity to strut his own learning, often at Shakespeare’s expense. Jonson famously charged that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” and hinted that he was a careless writer (when informed, incorrectly, that Shakespeare rarely blotted a line, Jonson snorted, “Would he had blotted a thousand”). Actually, as Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates in his wonderfully informative biography, Will in the World, Shakespeare’s classical education in the public schools of Stratford was really quite intensive. True, he often mixes up his periods and his cultures. In Midsummer, for example, he mentions the Roman deities Diana and Cupid in the same breath as the Greek God Phoebus Apollo and the Greek hero Leander (Pyramus’ “Phibbus” and Thisbe’s “Limander”). He marries Titania, the Roman poet Ovid’s name for Diana, to a fairy out of Celtic romance named Oberon (both are now reunited as moons of Uranus). And he even makes reference to Saint Valentine, an early Christian martyr. But Theseus and Hippolyta come out of classical Greek myth, and so does that army of mistresses (Phyllida, Perigenia, Aegles, Antiope, and Ariadne) whom Oberon accuses Titania of procuring for Theseus. (He also accuses his wife of sleeping with this Athenian Don Juan herself.) Unlike most of Shake-

Shakespeare’s Geography

speare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has no known source. But it is the product of a lot of classical homework. If the play’s references are more Roman than Greek, that may be because the English Renaissance was essentially a Latin phenomenon. Despite our trip to the Bay of Actium, it was hard to talk about Antony and Cleopatra without a visit to either Cairo or Rome. True, Cleopatra is not really Egyptian. Despite vaguely racist references in the play to her “tawny front” and “gypsy lust,” she was actually of Macedonian, which is to say Greek, descent. Yet, in no other work does Shakespeare make such a clear distinction between two cultures—the hard Machiavellian world of Roman politics versus the sensual exotic world of Egyptian enchantment. If the play draws a contrast between public and private behavior, between duty and passion, between love and honor, it is also a study of an aging hero trapped in a passion he cannot control (Antony was  at the time of the action, while Cleopatra was ). When Dryden rewrote the play some decades later and called it All for Love, he was much more judgmental towards Antony and what he called his “crimes of love.” He was also closer to Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch, who wrote about Antony: “The love for Cleopatra which now entered his life came as the final and crowning mischief which could befall him. It excited to the point of madness many passions which had hitherto lain concealed, or at least dormant, and it stifled or corrupted all those redeeming qualities in him which were still capable of resisting temptation.” Shakespeare is considerably more tolerant of Antony’s autumnal passion for Cleopatra, even though he also sees it as emasculating. (Antony complains that “she robs me of my sword,” while a soldier notes, “The god Hercules whom Antony loved now leaves him”). The coldhearted Puritan Octavius, who obviously doesn’t like girlie men, may complain that Antony “fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel,” but Shakespeare seems as irresistibly drawn to the Egyptian Queen as Antony is. Thanks to his readings in Plutarch, Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most authentically foreign plays Shakespeare ever wrote. But even here, his geography is occasionally inconsistent. When Cleopatra realizes that she will be led in triumph through Rome, Shakespeare, in a metatheatrical moment, translates this into a projection of how she will be depicted on the English stage in plays like his own, exposed to “mechanic slaves” in “greasy aprons,” enacted by some “squeaky Cleopatra boy.” It is her prevision of being turned into a character in some future Shakespeare play rather than her loss of Antony that drives her to her suicide.

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Regarding Othello, the real revelation of the trip, for me, was discovering just how powerful a part Venice had played in the various parts of the world we visited. After its conquest of Byzantium in , this northern Italian city became the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean, subduing many Adriatic nations to its will. The huge fortifications in Dubrovnik, for example, like those in other nearby Mediterranean cities, were erected by Italians to repel the Turkish invaders. And this tangible evidence of invasion from the sea made the mission of Othello, under orders of the Duke of Venice, suddenly take on new reality for me. It is true that this particular campaign does not play a very large part in the play. Despite the “mighty preparation” with which the Turks are making towards Cyprus, their entire fleet is destroyed between the acts by a sudden tempest. It is a storm that somehow leaves Othello’s forces untouched, but it frees Shakespeare to concentrate on the Moor’s domestic problems rather than his military campaigns. And it allows the playwright to cram the whole action of his play into a period that doesn’t seem much longer than twenty-four hours (it is a real question whether Desdemona, despite her urgent entreaties, ever manages to get her husband into bed). But in the context of our cruise, that Turkish disaster took on a new reality. Sailing to Venice (retracing, in reverse, Othello’s route to Cyprus), the winds blew up with such a vengeance that the ship started creaking. I couldn’t help thinking of The Tempest ’s opening scene (“We split, we split”), and the irony of sailing to Venice from a town called Split. We eventually weathered the storm and disembarked in a city whose streets were totally underwater, then flew back to the United States—just in time to submit an entirely futile ballot. It was a rude return to reality, where we would henceforth be contemplating not the ruins of ancient civilizations, but the potential undoing of our own. 

Primo Levi: The Saved and the Damned

Primo Levi, the great Jewish-Italian writer, chemist, and witness to the Holocaust, took his own life in . In January , which marked the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Sir Anthony Sher vividly resurrected him. Having first researched Primo for the Royal National Theatre in London, in collaboration with the director Richard Wilson, who joined him on his tours of the death camp, Sher has now transferred this one-man show to the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, where the actor was born and raised. Primo is Sher’s own hour-and-a-half adaptation of Levi’s first book, Se questo e un uomo, variously rendered as If This Is a Man and Survival in Auschwitz, the author’s lacerating account of his year in Monowitz (or Auschwitz III), and unquestionably his most powerful work. The play’s program notes include a photograph of Sher lifting a pair of spectacles above his forehead, leaving a round shadow of the lens above his left eye. This is in imitation of the signature portrait of the bearded Levi squinting through that black oval like an owl through a magnifying glass. But Sher does not characterize the shy author so 245

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much as “stage his testimony,” as he says, in the manner of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. There is little physical resemblance between the two men, and Sher, conscious of being a free, well-fed actor and not a human skeleton, does not attempt much in the way of impersonation, apart from his modest, scholarly demeanor and hesitant gait. This restraint is admirable considering the actor’s usual flamboyant acting style (vide his Tamburlaine and Cyrano de Bergerac). Not a trace of fustian enters this narrative. And rather than wear what Levi calls the “comic beret” and “longstriped overcoat” of the Auschwitz prisoner, Sher, taking small uncertain steps as if confined, appears in a cardigan, shirt, and tie. The Arbeitslager, or work camp, is rendered by the designer Hildegard Bechtler as a bare gray setting, consisting of geometric walls and decorated with a single chair. In the intimate space of the Baxter, Levi’s story is told to each of us individually as if it were our suffering as well. Philip Roth, perhaps the most astute commentator on Levi’s work, has written (in Shop Talk) about how “this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.” Unlike most other Holocaust memoirists, Levi assumes the manner of a reporter rather than a judge. He writes about the death camps not in order to formulate new accusations, but rather, using what he is later to call “the calm sober language of the witness,” to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.” In other words, Levi is applying the scientific method in which he was trained as a chemist to create an anatomy of human behavior. His purpose is to examine how people could do such things to other human beings; how an SS guard or a Kapo could hit another man without anger; how prosperous Jewish “Prominents” could turn into ravening thieves and bullies in order to survive; how in the face of such horror the social instincts can be rendered silent; how individuals can be reduced to numbers tattooed on their forearms, to “pieces” selected for extermination on the basis of age or illness, and sent off to the chimneys. Of course, Levi’s analysis is hardly detached. How could it be when he is among those “for whom history had stopped”? His prose occasionally erupts out of its measured, quasi-analytical style into an explosion of outrage and anger—like that moment when, referring to the German doctor who stares through him as if he were a fish in an aquarium, he remarks, “That look explains the great insanity of Germany.” As for the sadistic assistant who wipes his greasy hands on Levi’s shoulder, he thunders: “I judge him and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.” (Sher ad-

Primo Levi

justs this line to the more immediate “I judge you,” staring into the void like some wounded animal, his eyes blazing with hate.) At the same time that he catalogues the inexorable pain and cruelty of the death camp, Levi documents acts of human kindness that inexplicably appear in the midst of the brutishness—as when the Italian bricklayer Lorenzo, who knew Levi’s relatives, brought him food rations every day (which Levi shared with another Italian Jew) out of “pure and uncontaminated” humanity. This “civilian” did more than feed him; he saved his life by reminding him that he was still a man, that there was “a just world outside our own.” And, remarkably, he writes in a later book (La trequa, translated as The Reawakening or The Truce) that, while he will not forgive the Germans, he does not hate them, because to hate another ethnic group is to imitate the Nazis. He is even willing to forgive those few Nazis who display genuine remorse—because “an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.” This expiatory Christian sentiment is one very rarely expressed in Christian nations these days, the notable exception being Nelson Mandela’s South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Process. Levi claims that Se questo e un uomo was not written with any particular structure in mind, but rather as a loose collection of anecdotes of decay and ruin. His account, based on “haphazardly scribbled” notes he took in the Lager, provides experiences of a horror that grows increasingly more inhuman. His mordant comments on the abominable motto of the camp—Arbeit Macht Frei—encapsulate the euphemistic genius of a people who could describe the extermination of an entire race as a “final solution.” But he also provides shrewd characterizations of his fellow prisoners which demonstrate deeply sympathetic powers of observation and a wonderful irony regarding human behavior. Despite its desultory nature, the book, like the play, does have something of a structure. First, the entrance to the camp, followed by the process separating the healthy from the infirm, the parents from the children; second, Levi’s period in Ka-Be, the ghastly infirmary where he is hospitalized first with a swollen, suppurating foot and later with scarlet fever; third, the chemistry examination he takes in order to establish that in addition to being a Stinkjude he is a professional who can do useful work in the laboratory; and fourth, the selection process that leads to the extermination of so many prisoners—all against the background of the smoking chimneys of Birkenau. Sher narrates Levi’s vivid accounts of what it means to be a prisoner in Auschwitz—sleeping on a single straw mattress with a bony man who shoves his feet into Levi’s face;

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holding his food bowl under his chin so as not to lose a single bread crumb; feeling the rare satisfaction of having enough soup to eat (“for a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men”); witnessing the hanging of other prisoners; being saved from the final death march by an illness that normally would have sent him to the crematorium. Yet Levi’s major interest in the experience of the Lager is not physical but metaphysical. He wants to know how the soul survives in conditions that normally would extinguish all hope. He is aware that he does not have the will to resist: “I am too civilized, I think too much.” And in a predictive moment of ominous reflection he becomes convinced that “I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.” Nevertheless, he survives the camp, knowing that the reason for his survival is not because of any special dispensation from God, but rather because of his fortuitous training as a chemist. He develops a theory (which will be the title of his last book) about “the drowned and the saved,” the only opposites appropriate to a condition in which the survival of the fittest takes on a terrible new meaning. A secular Jew, Levi knows that being saved has nothing to do with being specially blessed, and when he sees a religious Jew named Kuhn davening and thanking God for not being chosen for the gas chamber, he is filled with revulsion: “Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiary prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.” In the recent tsunami it was not God but blind Nature that did the spitting, yet the orthodox continued to find religious justifications for why such abominations occur and why some survive them (a few rabbis even suggested that the tsunami was God’s vengeance on those who did not recognize Israel). What moves Levi in the case of the Holocaust is not God’s dispensatory powers but his absence. Later told by a friend that his survival had to be the work of special providence, that even though he was a non-believer he had been touched by grace, he experiences disgust at the thought that he might be alive in the place of another. As he writes in his final book, the ones most likely to survive were “the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the grey zones, the spies. . . . The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.” It is typical of Levi’s modesty that this virtuous man would include himself among the “worst.” Having escaped death, then, “by sheer good luck,” Levi takes a long and circuitous route (described in The Truce) back through Eastern Europe, wander-

Primo Levi

ing like Ulysses through a post-war landscape. He returns to his hometown of Turin, where, miraculously, he finds his entire family still alive. He marries, has two children, finds work as a chemist, produces more books, and then, at the age of sixty-eight, inexplicably ends his life by falling down a staircase. Was this a case of survivor’s guilt over being one of the saved instead of one of the drowned? Was it a result of the clinical depression that he shared with so many gifted writers of our time? Was it, as some have suggested, an accident? Assigning any single cause to this decision would simplify Levi’s extraordinary character and devalue his discriminating mind. All we know for certain are the facts that he wanted recorded on his gravestone: his name, his dates of birth and death, and the number tattooed on his forearm—,. In Levi’s books, in his life, and in Sher’s adaptation, that number becomes not a dehumanizing statistic but the identifying mark of a great soul. 

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The Death of Arthur Miller

M. H. Abrams has noted in his study The Mirror and the Lamp that there is a difference between visionary artists who light up new pathways, and analytical artists who reflect an existing reality. The recent death of Arthur Miller at  cements his position as one of the prominent members of the second species. Although not a prophetic playwright, he was a powerful example of the playwright as witness, particularly to the Great Depression that generated much of his art. All My Sons indicted profiteering war contractors. Death of a Salesman criticized a society that discarded working people “like an old shoe” after they had ceased to be useful. A View from the Bridge, aside from being an attack on political informers, was a study of illegal immigration. The American Clock followed the downward spiral of a middleclass family after the stock market crash. These plays, and most of his plays that followed, were powered by the indignant energies of a previous age. One of the few clear voices of the theatrical left, Miller never grew hoarse protesting injustice, inequality, and hypocrisy. But because he lacked any formal ideology through which to confront these wrongs, he tended to duck the issue 250

The Death of Arthur Miller

of social or political responsibility. It is significant that one of Miller’s most oftquoted lines—“Attention must be paid”—does not have a subject. Who should pay attention? Me, you, the U.S. president, Dudley Do-Right? Whatever the reason, Miller eventually began to lose his credibility with the majority of American critics, though his name continued to be synonymous with—indeed inseparable from—twentieth-century American drama. Miller often expressed regret over the way his own country had ignored or rejected his later work, the numerous awards and tributes bestowed on his earlier plays notwithstanding. “When I looked back,” he wrote in his painfully honest memoir Timebends, “it was obvious that aside from Death of a Salesman every one of my plays had originally met with a majority of bad, indifferent, or sneering notices. . . . I exist as a playwright without a major reviewer in my corner. . . . Only abroad and in some American places outside New York has criticism embraced my plays.” Up until the powerful Broadway revival of Salesman by the Goodman Theatre in , that statement had been regrettably true. While his later plays were regularly dismissed by the major media critics, who generally prefer writers they have discovered themselves, the name of Arthur Miller remained a talisman in Great Britain, where he was respected as one of that country’s highestpraised dramatists. Bernard Shaw once remarked that England and America are two nations divided by a common tongue. With Miller, we are two nations divided by a common playwright. In the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that up until this mainstream backlash I was among those miscreants who failed to stand in Arthur Miller’s corner. As a minority reviewer for The New Republic, a magazine with virtually no impact on the box office, I saw no reason to pull my punches regarding such inflated Miller ideas as “the common man as tragic hero,” especially when it led to the popular conviction that there was an unbroken line between Agamemnon in his chariot and Willy Loman in his Chevy. (One popular theater anthology was called From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller.) To me, the line was more direct between Death of a Salesman and Yiddish family drama as drawn through the plays of Clifford Odets. As the Goodman Theatre revival of Death of a Salesman made clear, the overwhelming power of Miller’s masterpiece was a result of his uncanny understanding not of tragic theory so much as of family dynamics. But when the majority reviewers also began to turn on Miller, as well as on Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, I was appalled, and not a little contrite. It was one thing for a few of us fringe apostates to nip at the heels of the great.

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But if our three major playwrights couldn’t receive the respect they deserved from mainstream American reviewers, then there was something a little rotten in the state of criticism, and someone had to defend them. This may sound like sheer perversity, or some crazy form of territoriality. But it was a lesson that Miller already knew in his bones—that there were only two saleable stories for the mainstream press, success and failure. Or, to paraphrase an ancient Greek maxim, “Those whom the media would destroy, they first make famous.” I am relieved that, before his death, Miller was able to regain his rightful place at the height of his profession. I am also relieved that before he died, I had the opportunity to recant some of my harsher criticisms, most publicly in an introduction I made to his Massie Lecture at Harvard in . I still have problems with Miller’s often ungainly prose style, but then O’Neill was no Demosthenes either. And if Miller had the polemicist’s weakness for similes rather than the poet’s capacity for metaphors, it is impossible not to respect his consuming dramatic power, as well as his profound influence on later American dramatists, notably David Mamet (exploring the jungle habitat of salesmen), Tony Kushner (studying the virulent results of red-baiting, particularly on Ethel Rosenberg), and Donald Margulies (paying tribute to Miller’s family conflicts and urban themes in the very title of his The Loman Family Picnic and in his later play, Brooklyn Boy). A public intellectual as well as a private artist, Arthur Miller played a pivotal role in most of the cultural and political dramas of our time. Particularly in his role as former president of PEN, he forcefully represented the interests of persecuted literary people throughout the world. He was the American theater’s elder statesman, who best embodied our dramatic image both at home and abroad. His death leaves yet another vacant lot in an increasingly derelict neighborhood. 

Richard Gilman: Prisoner on the Aisle

For F. Scott Fitzgerald, the dark night of the soul was always four o’clock in the morning. For Richard Gilman, it was usually eight o’clock at night—the hour when the curtain rose on a new production. Gilman’s savage indignation over the shoddy quality of the American stage permeates his valuable new volume of collected criticism, The Drama Is Coming Now. A passionate advocate for the European modernists, deeply committed to the literature of the theatrical avant-garde, Gilman reveals an equally strong dislike for most American playwriting, acting, directing, and theatre reviewing during his thirty years, from  to , as an itinerant drama critic. Gilman was first drawn to the theatre through the example of Samuel Beckett and Eric Bentley. If Waiting for Godot taught him that a play can be just as experimental as a painting or a novel, The Playwright as Thinker persuaded him that a great dramatist is also “a great mind,” and that serious critics have to be primarily concerned with analyzing intelligence. If this sounds somewhat somber and cerebral, an example of the highbrow intellectual trying to cast the elusive artist in his own image, it was an important corrective to a theatre that did 253

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not have much in the way of brain, only a feverish set of nerves and spasms masking a deep sentimentality. Previously, Gilman, like many thinkers and academics, had ignored the stage, preferring his Shakespeare in the study and his Chekhov on the page. Still, a number of smart people in the late s and the s, largely under Bentley’s influence, began to develop an interest in theatre criticism (among them Wilfrid Sheed, Susan Sontag, Richard Hayes, Albert Bermel, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kauffmann, Gordon Rogoff, and John Simon). And when the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal asked Gilman to join the staff, he reluctantly backed into a career that was to occupy him for the next three decades. Following his early Commonweal years, he accepted a job at Newsweek, becoming the first minority critic of that period to operate within the orbit of the mass media. He left that magazine after three unhappy years, impatient with having to stuff a large vision into a little space, and replaced me at The New Republic for another two years, after I had decamped for Yale. (Stints with Partisan Review and The Nation completed his critical odyssey.) In , I invited Gilman to join the faculty at the Yale Drama School, where he proved a remarkable teacher not only of dramatic literature, but also of dramatic writing. Among his playwriting students were such lively artists as Robert Auletta, Albert Innaurato, Christopher Durang, Lonnie Carter, Jeff Wanshel, Wendy Wasserstein, David Epstein, Ted Talley, William Hauptman, and Harry Kondoleon, all of whom benefited from his influence. (He also mentored such future critics as Michael Feingold, Alisa Solomon, Eileen Blumenthal, and Jonathan Kalb.) During the same period, Gilman spent some time as a dramaturg with the Open Theatre, where he developed a warm relationship with Joseph Chaikin and directed a few projects. He also did a couple of directing assignments for us at Yale—a triple bill of student plays in , and then Rocco Landesman’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps in . If Gilman was not a particularly inspired practitioner, as a playwriting mentor he had no peer. Writers would arrive at Yale as conventional realists, reliving their family conflicts in imitation of Miller, Williams, and Inge, and leave as fabulists, absurdists, and surrealists, which is to say, as converts to Gilman’s aesthetic. He demanded that the drama keep pace with the latest technical advances in art and literature (particularly the nouvelle vague). He deplored the disjunction between “thought and activity” in our theatre, and criticized the “mindless” plays of our leading dramatists (not to mention their lesser Broadway acolytes). Pointing to the Europeans, he insisted that theatre be treated not

Richard Gilman

as a depository for evacuated emotions, but “as a way of knowing,” a path that could be reached only by abandoning plot and character. An anti-Aristotelean rejecting both catharsis and mimesis, Gilman demanded that the playwright be not just a thinker, but even a philosopher and metaphysician. Most of these positions are succinctly stated in the title essay of his book The Drama Is Coming Now (the words are Pirandello’s, in Six Characters in Search of an Author). And if Gilman sometimes sounds there like Sir Philip Sidney berating drama for being a poor stepsister of the arts, he nevertheless makes a noble effort to bring this shabby orphan into the wider creative family. Clearly, he has more affinity with the literary members of that family—among them, Barthelme, Gass, Updike, Mailer, and Sontag, the subjects of an earlier book called A Confusion of Realms—than with the prodigal children of the American theatre. Like Chekhov, another of his heroes, Gilman embraced literature as his wife, while treating the theatre as his mistress. Judging by The Drama Is Coming Now, the theatre proved a very slovenly mistress indeed. The wanton jade is continually being dressed down for infidelity to his standards and indifference to his precepts. Gilman admires the technical prowess of the English stage; he is overwhelmed by the ensemble power of the Berliner Ensemble; he is wowed by Grotowski. But when it comes to the American theatre, all Gilman can usually see is “ineptitude”—a word that he uses over and over in its several variants. However brilliant and eloquent on the subject of dramatic literature, Gilman has a curiously limited vocabulary when it comes to describing process and performance. True, he has cogent things to say about the “terrifying righteousness” and “verbal ineptitude” of the Living Theatre upon its return to America, but his judgments on acting and directing otherwise often seem bald and unsupported. Actually, they often sound like irritable opinionating: “David Fulford’s staging . . . is so inept and destructive as to constitute an act of embalming”; Mike Nichols’ Uncle Vanya is an “artistically criminal work”; “One [actor playing Peer Gynt] is shockingly inept, another totally nondescript, the third has some talent and a bit of stage presence”; and so on. Instead of evoking the living presence of a performance, as Kenneth Tynan did preeminently, Gilman is content to rail against it—“a cultural disaster” (The Changeling ), “the worst production of a contemporary since Blood Wedding ” (Hop Signor), “the evening was unendurable” (the APA Seagull ), “Ralph Waite is not an actor” (The Father), and so forth. One can understand Gilman’s rage against shoddy theatre; but while the typical American stage product can sometimes drive one to tearing programs and chewing ticket stubs, what distinguishes a

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critic from an opinionator is the capacity to describe what one sees, and possibly suggest a better alternative. Gilman is much less general about his dislikes in an essay that he wrote for the New York Times in  called “How the New Theatrical Directors are Upstaging the Playwrights.” There he castigates such avant-garde heroes as Andrei Serban, Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Andre Gregory, and Robert Wilson for “directorial arrogance” in making themselves “stars” of the show. (Eric Bentley has also expressed considerable unhappiness with the auteur stage director.) Given Gilman’s predilection for the new, it is odd to find him criticizing directors for the same creative daring that he urges on playwrights, especially when he so admires Peter Brook’s stripped-down King Lear and Jerzy Grotowski’s radically reworked The Constant Prince (not to mention the plays of Brecht, which are often freewheeling directorial adaptations of earlier classics by such as Shakespeare, Gay, and Marlowe). Was it not Artaud, another of Gilman’s idols, who first opened the floodgates with his barbaric yawp, “No More Masterpieces”? While exhorting playwrights to be “great minds,” Gilman expects directors to be mindless servants. He scorns their impulse to seek fresh insights into familiar classical texts; he rejects their notion that “every production has to have an ‘idea’ behind it, that texts have to be interpreted, or reinterpreted ”; he insists that a classic be “simply placed literally, faithfully on the stage.” This is a prescription for deadly theatre. In the act of revisiting a play, the stage director is merely claiming the same intellectual privileges as the scholar-critic. Each new classical production is as much a dispute with a previous interpretation as, say, Harold Bloom, the textualist, arguing with Stephen Greenblatt, the New Historicist, over Shakespeare, or my disagreement with Gilman over “definitive” productions. No one can deny that some of these classical reinterpretations have been abysmal exercises in ego. But nothing in the theatre is written in stone. The next stab at the play can always be a corrective. I think Gilman is conflating his dislike of particular productions—chiefly, Serban’s legendary Cherry Orchard, which he describes as “dragooned animation” and “arty capers”—into a shaky general principle. (He chides Serban for adding “a note of menacing industrialism when Chekhov implies no such thing”—incorrectly, since Chekhov clearly hints at this in his second act stage direction: “In the distance a row of telegraph poles, and, far away on the horizon, the dim outlines of a big town”). And although Gilman is right to say that updating a classical text is usually a superficial way to make it “relevant,” it is not “always the wrong way” to do Shakespeare (for example, Ingmar Bergman’s

Richard Gilman

jackboot Hamlet and Jonathan Miller’s Victorian Merchant of Venice, following the tradition of Orson Welles’ black shirt Julius Caesar, have greatly increased our understanding of those plays). However traditional the usually unconventional Gilman may seem in persecuting adventurous directors, he is nowhere more deeply engaged with the practice of theatre than in this essay, which makes it a pleasure to argue with him. Where he is most comfortable, however, is in his treatment of playwrights, as he already demonstrated in The Making of Modern Drama, his groundbreaking study of eight European dramatists. Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco remain his holy trinity, but he is also able to welcome into the sacred circle Jack Gelber, Jean Claude van Itallie, and Sam Shepard in the United States; Franz Xaver Kroetz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany; and Harold Pinter, John Arden, and Caryl Churchill (reservedly, though she is the best of them) in England. These writers, rather than any comedy comperes or musical comedy maestros or tragedy troglodytes (certainly not O’Neill or Miller or Albee), are who he celebrates in his theatre notices. But the playwrights he admires most—namely, the classic modern European dramatists— are those given the most extended treatment in his book reviews and in the section that Gilman calls “Profiles and Legacies.” There he says much that is fresh and illuminating on the theme of Ibsen’s contradictory spirit. He is wise on the issue of Brecht’s ambiguous Marxism. He is knowing about the style, the language, and the erotics of Tennessee Williams, a playwright he reluctantly admires, despite falling short in “the clarity of his thought or the depth of his philosophy.” He is illuminating regarding the relationship between the homoerotic and the aesthetic in the plays of Jean Genet. And he is remorseless, in his review of the autobiographical Timebends, on the subject of Arthur Miller’s bad writing (“Time and again language fails him, metaphors go awry, clots form in the prose”). Some of us, pitying Miller’s fall from critical favor, had relented in our attacks on him in later years, preferring to celebrate his role as moral witness; but while we were busy praising his integrity, Gilman was watching his prose. We were more charitable. Gilman was more honest. On the other hand, Gilman is unusually warm, collegial, and non-competitive in evaluating other critics (this writer included, whose Theatre of Revolt receives a cordial review). He is admiring of George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy, despite his failure to appreciate modern drama. He proves how Lionel Abel is often “interestingly wrong” rather than “dully right” in Metatheatre. He is aware that Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd makes all postmodern drama

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seem as if it were written by the same person. He is capable of praising Herbert Blau’s “clumsily written” Impossible Theatre for its “devastating honesty.” And he is reverent towards Eric Bentley’s The Life of the Theatre for its insights into the several forms of dramatic composition. The Drama Is Coming Now is divided under a number of headings, according to nationality and genre, each covering the whole period of Gilman’s career. Although this schematic span sometimes makes the book’s nine sections look as if they are beginning and ending in the same place, it does give a sense of the breadth of Gilman’s interests and the depth of his mind. Not as genial as Shaw or as original as Bentley or as witty as Tynan, Richard Gilman is nevertheless always a pleasure to read, both for his supple, unadorned, and resonant prose, and for the uncompromising nature of his aesthetic. And also for those personal qualities that Gordon Rogoff aptly describes in his preface as “a sense of balance and sheer common decency”—qualities he resolutely maintained throughout his thirty-year sentence as a prisoner on the aisle. 

Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan: The Peer and the Pariah

Recent biographies by Terry Coleman (Olivier ) and Richard Schickel (Elia Kazan: A Biography) provide an interesting contrast between the aesthetic values and the political attitudes of two important British and American cultural figures. They also reveal a few unexpected similarities between these icons of twentieth-century film and theatre. The resemblances can be glimpsed in the way their lives unfolded. Born within two years of each other, Olivier and Kazan seem to have led overlapping, sometimes intersecting careers, without ever having actually worked or socialized together. For one thing, they shared an interest in the plays of Arthur Miller, Kazan’s closest friend until their famous political breach. Olivier directed The Crucible at the National Theatre, after Jed Harris had mauled it on Broadway. Miller expressed gratitude that for once a director had paid attention to his language. And it was probably inevitable that Olivier, Kazan, and Miller would all find common enemies in Lee and Paula Strasberg, the Central Park West Svengalis who exercised such a powerful influence over American acting throughout much of the last century. Another intersecting point was the Strasbergs’ celebrity meal ticket, 259

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Marilyn Monroe. Show business is a tight little island, but it is still a curious coincidence that Monroe should have been successively one of Kazan’s occasional bedfellows, Miller’s second wife, Olivier’s detested co-star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and the model for the character of Maggie in Miller’s After the Fall. That unfortunate play, the first Kazan directed following their reconciliation, was dogged by even more crisscrossing connections. Miller, Schickel observes, “had chosen to write about the very events that had sundered [Kazan’s and his] relationship and about the very woman they had once shared. Beyond that, Miller had based one of his characters on Kazan. Who, in turn, had cast his current mistress in the role of their formerly shared lover.” By this point, everyone seems to be scrambling under the sheets of the same four-poster. The two men’s formative years, reflecting their class and national differences, were totally dissimilar: Olivier was the son of a Hampshire clergyman, Kazan the son of an Anatolian rug dealer. Yet each served an apprenticeship with an idealistic theatre company that henceforth would influence the nature of his artistic choices and the direction of his career. After becoming a major Hollywood heartthrob in the late s, playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Maxim De Winter in Rebecca, and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, all within two short years, Olivier interrupted his rising film career to return to the Old Vic for a few seasons of classics. Joining Ralph Richardson, Joyce Redman, and other aspiring repertory actors in order to play such ambitious roles as Oedipus, Hotspur, Richard III, and Astrov, Olivier took a significant dip in income and celebrity to indulge his love of the stage, even embarking on an eightmonth tour of Australia and New Zealand. Kazan’s stint with the Group Theater, first as an apprentice, then as an actor primarily cast as gangsters, preceded his auspicious movie career. And although he absorbed the passionate idealism of Harold Clurman and other members of the Group, he was not particularly known for subordinating his own ambitions to a larger purpose. The one area in which he briefly practiced some selfdiscipline was politics, having joined the communist cell of the Group. Kazan proved too independent to remain long in the grip of that clenched fist, though he claimed to be a critic of capitalism throughout his life. Indeed, he liked to call the opening night of Waiting for Lefty, when the actors incited the audience to join them in calling for an imaginary taxi strike, his most memorable moment in theatre. It was, significantly, a moment of political rabble-rousing, not of artistic transcendence. But those years at the Group had an impact on Kazan’s life equivalent to Olivier’s years at the Old Vic, forging artistic friend-

Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan

ships and instilling the kind of values by which he measured all his future compromises. Neither Kazan nor Olivier could separate his personal relationships from his work. Nor could Arthur Miller. All were married three times, all their unions describing a similar trajectory. Each man’s first wife was sexually remote, the second psychologically unstable, and the third a warmhearted mother figure providing more domestic than erotic satisfactions. If Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh, Miller’s to Marilyn Monroe, and (to a lesser extent) Kazan’s to Barbara Loden proved to be the most troublesome of the three, that was because they were seriously troubled women. All were frequently unfaithful to their husbands (who were hardly monogamous themselves). Leigh even kept an open ménage à trois. “Well, which of you is coming to bed with me tonight?” she once asked Olivier and Peter Finch. While Monroe and Loden were highly neurotic, Leigh often trembled on the edge of psychosis. That was no doubt one reason why Kazan cast her as Blanche Dubois in his film of A Streetcar Named Desire (she had already played the role in London under Olivier’s direction). Employing a technique of psychic calibration that always served the director well, Kazan manipulated Leigh’s manic-depressive state to heighten the neurosis of Williams’s delicately poised heroine. The method worked, bringing Leigh close to breakdown. A few years later, in one of those moments when life imitates art, a nurse came to the house to take Leigh to a mental institution. Kazan manipulated playwrights as well. His direction of plays by Miller, Williams, and Inge amounted almost to co-authorship (Eric Bentley once called such productions “Essays of Elia”). Responding to the censors, Kazan had Stella walk out on Stanley at the end of Streetcar. And he famously changed the ending of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof so as to make the hopeless relationship between Brick and Maggie seem more positive. (The pliant Williams stormed out of the theatre shouting, “I don’t care what you do. I want a hit.”) Kazan was more circumspect with Miller, though he wanted to turn Willy’s flashbacks in Death of a Salesman into more consecutive chronology. He no doubt greatly influenced all the plays and screenplays he directed. Olivier, too, though always respectful of the plays he did on stage, was not above cutting Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras out of his movie of Hamlet, along with one of the play’s most celebrated soliloquies, in order to obey a producer’s order to keep it under two and a half hours. Both men were responsible for some very impressive movies—Kazan’s finest

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being A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, and On the Waterfront, Olivier’s being Henry V and Richard III. Neither, for lack of financial backing, directed the movie he most wanted to make—for Kazan a sequel to America, America, for Olivier Macbeth. More significantly, both capped their careers by forming new theatre companies, Kazan at Lincoln Center, in partnership with the Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, and Olivier at the National Theatre, assisted by John Dexter and William Gaskill as associate directors and Kenneth Tynan as dramaturg. Finally, both directors were fired by their boards, Kazan after two seasons, Olivier after ten, two years before the opening of the building on the South Bank housing a theatre that bears his name. These highly publicized dismissals deserve closer scrutiny, not just for the way they were handled, but for the reasons behind them. According to Terry Coleman, Olivier’s difficulties with his board were largely the result of his loyalty to Tynan, a man the biographer clearly detests. The newly radicalized Tynan, having been converted to Marxism after seeing Mother Courage, was forcing some dubious play choices on the more conservative Olivier. The most damaging of these was Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, which charged Churchill with the murder of the wartime Polish leader Sikorksy, on cooked-up evidence the playwright claimed was locked in a Swiss vault and couldn’t be examined for fifty years. When the board vetoed the choice, Tynan produced Soldiers on the West End, further inflaming board chairman Lord Chandos. Indeed, Tynan, who was always trying to assume powers beyond his function, managed to irritate the bejesus out of everybody at the National, including Olivier’s two associate directors; he was rewarded for his efforts by having his status reduced from “literary director” to “literary consultant” and finally to literary civilian when he was fired without severance pay. Olivier had tired of defending him. And when Tynan eventually died of emphysema in Mexico, his former defender coldly remarked, “Well, he was no more use to me.” Olivier didn’t last much longer. His previous devotion to Tynan, so curious considering how consistently that critic had trashed his wife’s acting, was even less comprehensible in the light of Olivier’s conservative politics and tastes. By comparison with the tremulous warbling of Shakespearean opera singers like John Gielgud and Maurice Evans, Olivier’s Shakespeare had the ring of real speech. But compared to the vigorous new theatre being practiced at George Devine’s Royal Court and Joan Littlefield’s Theatre Royal, he must have seemed like a crustacean. It is to the man’s enduring credit that, prodded by Tynan, Olivier made an effort to embrace the works of newer playwrights (most notably playing Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer) when his own aes-

Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan

thetic was obviously much closer to that of the old actor laddies of the Old Vic. The board rewarded his adventurousness by negotiating behind his back with Peter Hall to take over the National. It broke Olivier’s heart. A similar fate overtook Kazan at Lincoln Center, though for very different reasons. Kazan, as I wrote perhaps too insistently at the time, was clearly an odd choice to create a not-for-profit resident theatre company in America, precisely because his roots were so firmly planted in the commercial system. (Even the anti-commercial Group was obliged to perform in a Broadway house under the pressures of the box office.) No doubt for that reason, his play choices during the first Lincoln Center season—Miller’s After the Fall, O’Neill’s Marco Millions, and S. N. Behrman’s But for Whom Charlie—were not much different from those of a Broadway management. And when he finally undertook his first classic, The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley—perhaps at the instigation of those who, like myself, believed he owed a debt to a broader repertory—the result proved to be an embarrassment. (Coincidentally, Olivier was also brought down partly because of a badly produced play from the same period, John Ford’s The Broken Heart, at the instigation of Tynan.) Richard Schickel seems to have some problem with Kazan’s Lincoln Center critics, dismissing the quarrels over the repertory as essentially academic, and calling me “an envious scold of Broadway,” possibly because I shared some of the “cranky standards” of my predecessor at The New Republic, Eric Bentley. Envious, no. A scold, perhaps. Cranky, no doubt. And I agree that Kazan should have been allowed more time to develop his program and his company. But given Kazan’s limited theatrical tastes, so different from Olivier’s devotion to world theatre, the ending was foreordained. As for The Changeling, the trouble, Schickel concludes, was not that the play was done badly but that it was done at all, since it was a “minor and hard to stage work, kept alive mainly in the survey anthologies inflicted on drama students.” This kind of mildly philistine aside pervades and mars what is otherwise an engrossing book. Actually, The Changeling is a masterpiece, a psychological study of love between two monsters as subtle as any in the language, and difficult to produce only if you’ve never before directed a classical play. (Kazan, following in the footsteps of the Group Theater, which did only contemporary American works, had never staged the Greeks, the Elizabethans, Molière, Ibsen, or even Chekhov.) It is not necessary to establish your modernist credentials by obliterating the past. But Schickel is much more interesting (and better qualified to write) on the

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subject of Kazan’s movie career than about his work on Broadway. A film critic for the Luce publications, he sometimes patronizes the theatre in the same way that theatre people used to patronize the movies. (One of those scoffers was Olivier, who once called the movies an “anemic little medium”—to which the director William Wyler replied that it was “the best medium ever invented.”) Like Kazan, Olivier worked brilliantly in both theatre and film, and it is possible to appreciate their work in both. A more important question is which system allowed its artists the greater freedom. Schickel clearly believes that theatre is a dog that has had its day, and that its artifacts are not worth the study. “Simply put, film history is now a bustling subculture,” he writes. “Theatrical history is, in contrast, a backwater.” Elsewhere he remarks: “Maybe the world has moved on past the repertory dream.” Well, perhaps it has, but if so, then the world has moved past the dream of a serious theatre culture, and the lives of a lot of dedicated people, past and present, have been wasted. Including that of Laurence Olivier. Schickel’s dismissive attitude toward what he identifies as “the avant-garde and the exotic” is based on what Olivier used to call “mediocracy,” in which the quality of art is measured by its mass appeal, and genius by its accumulated awards. It marks the return of populism, disguised as “anti-elitism,” a form of dumbocracy that has been insinuating itself into the discourse of the middleclass laity and their periodicals over the past twenty years, unchallenged by the defunct little magazines or the pistol-packing intellectuals who used to write for them. Terry Coleman’s treatment of Olivier has none of these populist overtones, possibly because the author is a bit of a Tory snob, though more about celebrity than class (“anyone who was anyone was there,” he typically writes of a Beverly Hills party). Coleman knows even less about theatre than Schickel does. He reduces Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, for example, to a play “in which all the cast turn into animals,” and complains that Olivier had only a “small part” in Peer Gynt, when he played the important cameo role of the Button Moulder. Coleman lacks either the interest or the ability to make vivid Olivier’s theatre performances or the content of his films. What really seems to interest him is gossip—whether Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye (he didn’t), how much he deducted for tax expenses, how many brand-name gowns Leigh bought on a given day. And although a lot of this is juicy, the biographer is a little too eager to pounce pedantically on small factual errors in Olivier’s infinitely more colorful accounts of himself (Confessions of an Actor and On Acting). Coleman’s best

Laurence Olivier and Elia Kazan

writing is about Olivier’s last decades, his twenty-year decline, when the actor had become the victim of multiple diseases, surviving on forty-eight pills a day. Like Coleman, Schickel has some difficulty finding new facts about a man who has already confessed all (in A Life). What he contributes is an impassioned defense of Kazan’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, surely as much a formative experience for him as the war was for Olivier. This is a brave thing for Schickel to do, playing Daniel to the left-wing lions, and he almost pulls it off by contextualizing the whole squabble against the background of Cold War debates. Beginning and ending his book with Kazan’s reception of a controversial honorary Academy Award in  at the age of ninety-two, when some of those present kept their seats during a standing ovation, Schickel correctly argues that communist spies like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were a much more serious threat to American life than Stalinoids in the entertainment industry were willing then (or now) to admit. On the other hand, it is highly questionable whether Hollywood scriptwriters were the dangerous subversives that HUAC believed them to be, or that back-lot westerns and creaky war movies, however imbued with left-wing sloganeering, were capable of bringing down the republic. Schickel is less successful in discrediting the common belief that Kazan named names not out of patriotic duty, as he affirmed in an unfortunate paid advertisement in the New York Times, but rather out of creative opportunism. After all, no matter how ominous the “dangerous alien conspiracy” Kazan described in his ad, it was hardly necessary to inform on old friends and associates when he had the option of taking the Fifth and continuing to make a reasonable living in the theatre. The actions of Arthur Miller, who refused to inform and received a (later suspended) sentence for contempt of Congress, were much more exemplary. There is little doubt that Kazan’s testimony was designed to support his filmmaking habit. Harold Clurman once said of Clifford Odets that “he liked to run with the hares and ride with the hounds.” He could have been speaking of Elia Kazan. For all his scorn of the bosses, for all his embrace of the working class, he chose to remain in the pocket of a ruthless corporate entity, massaging his conscience from time to time with damp liberal movies such as Gentleman’s Agreement and Pinky. He paid a steep price for ensuring his continued association with the Hollywood studio system in ostracism, scorn, and the loss of his closest friends. But it is hard to get too upset about Kazan’s failure to receive a standing O at the Academy Awards. Perhaps this unpleasant affair suggests a

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People and Places

reason why actors and directors in England are still so respected in comparison with their low standing here. A life in the theatre made (Lord) Olivier into a peer of the realm. It led Kazan, for all his Oscars and Tonys, to be treated like a pipsqueak. The two photographs on the covers of these books say a lot about their subjects: Olivier in his prime, before the onset of illness glazed his hooded eyes, broadened his aquiline nose, and flattened his cleft chin, gazing moodily to his left as if preparing to rouse the troops at Agincourt or flutter the Volscians in Corioli; Kazan staring off to his right, probably on location, a bit scruffy in a white sweater, beige chinos, and sneakers, his finger to his lips, perhaps contemplating his next shot. If the books were placed side by side, the two men might be gazing at each other, the heroic English knight and the Greek-American dynamo, both with a world of accomplishment behind them, and ahead a world of woe. 

Index

Abel, Lionel,  Abraham, F. Murray, ,  Abrahams, Jody,  Abrams, M. H.,  Abu Ghraib, xvi, xvii,  Actors Studio,  Adelaide Festival,  Adler, Luther,  Adler, Stella, ,  Aeschylus, ; The Suppliant Women,  Afghanistan, xvi, , , – Agee, James,  AIDS, , , – Aiello, Danny,  Ailey, Alvin,  AIM (American Indian Movement),  Akalaitis, JoAnne, , , , ,  Akmatova, Anna,  Albee, Edward, , , , ; Everything in the Garden, ; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, –, ; The Man with Three Arms, ; Mary, Mary, ; The Play About

the Baby, ; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, ,  Allen, Woody, ,  Al Qaeda, xvi, ,  America, America,  American Place Theatre,  American Repertory Theatre, xviii, , , – ,  Anderson, Judith,  Anderson, Maxwell, xv,  Anderson, Sherwood,  Andre, Lena,  Andrews, Benedict, – Animal Crackers, , , ,  Apocalypse Now,  Archer, William,  Arden, John, ,  Argo, Victor,  Arison, Amir, – Aristophanes, ,  –, ; The Frogs, xviii,  –; Lysistrata, , , ; Peace,  Aristotle, –, , ; Poetics, , , 

267

268

Index

Arnone, John, ,  Artaud, Antonin, , ,  Artistic freedom,  Artistic repression,  – Arundell, Paula,  Ashley, Christopher,  Astor, Mary,  Atkinson, Brooks, , ,  Atlantic, The,  AuCoin, Kelly,  August, Pernilla,  Auletta, Robert,  Australia,  – Avenue Q, ,  Ayckbourne, Alan, ; Garden, –; House,  – Ayer, A. J.,  Azaria, Hank,  Babel, Isaac,  Bacon, Jennie,  Baker, Dylan,  Baldwin, James,  Bankhead, Tallulah, ,  Barber, Samuel,  Barnes, Clive,  Barrault, Jean Louis,  Barrymore, Ethel,  Barrymore, John, , – Bart, Roger, ,  Barthelme, Donald,  Barton, James,  Barzee, Anastasia,  Bates, Alan, ,  Bay, Howard,  Beach, Gary,  Beale, Simon Russell, , –, –, – Beaumont, Francis,  Bechtler, Hildegard,  Beckett, Samuel: and Gelber, ; and Gilman, , ; and McDonagh, ; and Stoppard, ; and Tynan, , ; Catastrophe, ; Play, ; Waiting for Godot, , , , ,  Behrman, S. N.: But for Whom Charlie, ; No Time for Comedy, xv,  Bellamy, Ralph,  Bellow, Saul,  Benchley, Robert, 

Bennett, Mark,  Bennett, Susan,  Bentley, Eric: as critic, , ; and Gilman, , , , ; and Kazan, , ; as playwright, , ; and Yale Repertory Theatre, ; Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,  Bergman, Ingmar, xv, , –, ,  –  Berle, Milton,  Berlin, Irving,  Berlin, Jeannie,  Berliner Ensemble, ,  Bermel, Albert, , ,  Bernstein, Walter,  Bertolucci, Bernardo,  Biddle, Francis,  Bin Laden, Osama,  Birdsong, Mary,  Black, Lewis, xvi Black Panthers,  Blake, Julia,  Blakemore, Michael,  Blanchard, Tammy,  Blanchett, Cate, ,  Blau, Herbert,  Blazing Saddles,  Blitzstein, Marc, The Cradle Will Rock, ,  Bloom, Harold, ,  –,  Blumenthal, Eileen,  Blyden, Larry,  Boesak, Alan,  Bohr, Nils,  Bond, Edward, ,  Boone, Pat,  Borowski, Tadeusz,  Bosworth, Patricia,  –, ,  Botha, P. W., ,  Botha, Roelof F.,  Boutté, Tony,  Bowers, Cheryl Lynn, – Bradley, David,  Bradshaw, Cathryn,  Branagh, Kenneth,  Brando, Cheyenne,  Brando, Christian,  Brando, Marlon, xv,  – Brandt, Willy, – Brantley, Ben, 

Index

Brazzi, Rossano,  Brecht, Bertolt: and adversary role of theatre, ; and Brook, ; and Gilman, , ; and Living Newspaper, ; The Good Woman of Setzuan, ; Mother Courage, , ; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, –, ; St. Joan of the Stockyards,  Breuer, Lee, ; Red Beads, ,  –; Sister Suzie’s Cinema,  Brightman, Sarah,  Brill, Robert,  Bringing Up Baby,  Brisbane International Festival of the Arts,  Broadway: and Federal Theatre Project, ; and new works, –; resistance to adulthood, ; and theatre criticism, , , , –. See also Commercial stage Broderick, Matthew, ,  Brodsky, Josef,  Bromberg, J. Edward,  Brook, Peter: as auteur, xv; biography of, ,  –; and classics, ; and Gilman, ; and Kott, ; Mnouchkine compared to, , ; and poor theatre, ; and Shakespeare productions, – , , , , , , , ; and straight-back bench,  Brooks, Mel, ,  –,  Bruce, Lenny,  Brustein, Robert: The Theatre of Revolt, , ; “Who Needs Theatre,”  Bryan, William Jennings,  Bryggman, Larry,  Buckley, Betty,  Buckley, Candy, ,  Buddeke, Kate,  Bulos, Yusef,  Bunin, Ivan,  Buscemi, Steve,  Bush, George W., xiv, , , , ,  Bush administration, –, ,  Byner, John,  Byron, Lord,  Cadle, Giles,  Caesar, Sid,  Caird, John,  Cake, Jonathan, 

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, Life Is a Dream, – Caldwell, Zoe,  Calhern, Louis,  Callard, Rebecca,  Camargo, Christian,  Cameron-Smith, J.,  Camp, Bill,  Capital punishment,  Capone, Al,  Carlin, George,  Carlson, Jeffrey,  Carnovsky, Morris,  Carroll, Kevin,  Carroll, Madeleine,  Carter, Jack, ,  Carter, Lonnie,  Cartlidge, Katrin, ,  Cassidy, Claudia,  Catholic Church, – Censorship: and book burnings, , ; of dramatic literature,  – Chad, Harrison,  Chaikin, Joseph,  Chaplin, Charlie, , , ,  Chapman, George,  Chapman, Graham,  Chaucer, Geoffrey, “Knight’s Tale,”  Cheadle, Don,  Cheever, John,  Chekhov, Anton: and adversary role of theatre, ; and Frayn, ; and gun on stage rule, ; and Kerr, ; The Cherry Orchard, , , , , ; Three Sisters, ; Uncle Vanya, , , ,  Chianese, Dominic,  Childress, Alvin,  Christian, Beatrix,  Churchill, Caryl, – , ; Cloud Nine, ; Far Away, – ; A Number,  – ; Owners, ; Serious Money, ; The Skriker, ; Top Girls, ,  Churchill, Winston,  Chybowski, Michael,  Civil liberties,  Civil rights movement,  Clancy, Tom,  Clark, Bobby,  Clark, Victoria,  Clarke, Hope, 

269

270

Index

Clarke, Richard, – Clay, Carolyn,  Cleaver, Eldridge,  Cleese, John,  Clinton, Bill,  Clurman, Harold, xvii, xviii, , , , , , ,  Cobb, Lee J.,  Cocteau, Jean,  Coleman, Terry, , ,  – Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,  Comedy, , , , , – , – Commentary,  Commercial stage: and Brook, ; collapse of, ; and escapism, xiii–xiv; and Federal Theatre Project, , ; resident theatre movement as alternative to, xv, ; and theatre criticism, , . See also Broadway Commonweal, , ,  Communism, –, , ,  –, , , – Congreve, William, The Way of the World,  Conklin, John, ,  Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent,  Coonrod, Karin,  Coppola, Francis Ford,  Corporation for Public Broadcasting, – Cotten, Joseph, ,  Coward, Noel, , ; Private Lives, –  Cox, Wally,  Cozzens, James Gould, By Love Possessed,  Cradle Will Rock, The (film),  Creationists, ,  Crombie, Fiona,  Cromer, David,  Crowley, Bob,  Crowley, John,  – Croyden, Margaret, , ,  Crudup, Billy, , , ,  Cruz, Nilo, xv, –; Anna in the Tropics, –; Lorca in a Green Dress,  Culture clash, and red state/blue state division,  – Curry, Tim,  Czyzewska, Elzbieta,  Daldry, Stephen,  Daniel, Yuli, 

Daniels, Clifton,  Daniels, Samuel,  Darrow, Clarence,  Darwin, Charles,  Dassin, Jules,  Davies, Howard,  Davis, Essie,  Davis, Hallie Flanagan, ,  – Davis, Judy,  Davis, Philip H.,  Davison, Peter J.,  Dedalus, Stephen,  Def, Mos,  – De Hart Matthews, Jane,  De Havilland, Olivia,  De Kooning, Willem,  Delaney, Shelagh,  DeLillo, Don, Mao II,  Demery, Brandon,  Denby, David,  Dennehy, Brian, ,  Dershowitz, Alan,  De Vere, Edward,  Devine, George, , ,  Dexter, John,  Diamond, Liz,  Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations, ; Nicholas Nickleby, ,  Dies, Martin, ,  Dionysus in 69,  District Six, , ,  Doctor Strangelove, , ,  Donen, Stanley,  Donnellan, Declan, ,  Dossett, John,  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Possessed,  Dramatic literature: censorship of,  –; and Gilman, ; and not-for-profit theatre venues, – ; perspective of, xvii Dreiser, Theodore, An American Tragedy,  Driving Miss Daisy,  Dryden, John,  Duell, William,  Dugan, Sean,  Dukakis, Mike,  Dumont, Margaret,  Duncan, Lindsay,  –  Dundy, Elaine, ,  Dunham, Katherine, 

Index

Du Prez, John,  Durang, Christopher, xv, , ; Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You, ,  Durante, Jimmy, ,  Durning, Charles,  Eagle Has Two Heads, The,  Easton, Richard, ,  Economic materialism,  Edelstein, Barry,  Eiderkin, Mark,  Eisenhauer, Peggy,  Eisenstein, Alexa,  Elice, Eric,  Eliot, T. S.,  Elizabeth I (queen of England),  Elizabethan England,  Ellison, Ralph,  Emond, Linda, ,  Engelbrecht, Neville,  Eno, Will, Thom Pain (Based on Nothing ),  Ephron, Nora: Heartburn, ; Imaginary Friends, –  Epstein, Alvin,  Epstein, David,  Esbjornson, David,  Escapism, xiii, , , ,  Esquire,  Esslin, Martin, – Ethiopia,  Ethnic identity, xiv, xvii, , ,  Euripides, ,  –, , , ; Bacchae, ; The Children of Herakles, ; Medea,  –; The Trojan Women,  Evangelical right,  Evans, Maurice,  Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),  Evolution theory,  Falls, Robert,  Falsettoes,  Falwell, Jerry, – Farmer, Frances,  Farmer, James,  Fassbinder, Rainer Werner,  Federal Theatre Project, ,  –

Feiffer, Jules, , –, , ; A Bad Friend, –,  Feingold, Michael, , ,  Feinstein, Michael,  Feminists, , ,  –  Feore, Colm,  Ferber, Edna, , –; Stage Door, – ,  Feuerstein, Mark,  Fielding, Emma,  Fiennes, Ralph,  Fierstein, Harvey,  Finch, Peter,  Finley, Karen,  Finn, William,  Finney, Albert,  Fisher, Jules,  Fisher, Rick,  Fitzgerald, F. Scott, ,  Fitzgerald, Glenn,  Flag is Born, A,  Fletcher, John,  – Fo, Dario, Johan Padan and the Discovery of America,  Fonda, Jane,  Forbidden Broadway,  Forbrich, Joe,  Ford, John: The Broken Heart, ; ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,  Ford Foundation,  Foreman, Richard, , ,  Francois, Guy-Claude,  Franz, Elizabeth,  Frayn, Michael, ; Copenhagen, ; Democracy, –; Noises Off, ,  Frears, Will, ,  Frechette, Peter,  Freed, Amy, The Beard of Avon, – Freedom of speech, – Fried, Jonathan,  Friel, Brian,  Front, The,  Fronting, in South Africa, –,  Fry, Christopher,  Fuchs, Elinor,  Fugard, Athol, ; Master Harold and the Boys,  Fulford, David,  Funicello, Ralph, , 

271

272

Index

Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A,  Gaines, Barbara,  Galilee, Clove,  Gambon, Michael, ,  Garcia Lorca, Federico,  Garfield, John, ,  Gaskill, William,  Gass, William H.,  Gays: and Brooks, ; and Catholic Church, ; and Falwell, ; and Greenberg, –; and one-person shows, xiv; and political theatre, xvii, –; red state/blue state issues, , ; and Rudnick, –; and Stoppard,  Geer, Will,  Geidt, Jeremy,  Gelber, Jack, ; The Connection,  – Genet, Jean, , ; The Balcony, ; The Blacks,  Gentleman’s Agreement,  Gershwin, George,  Gershwin, Ira,  Gersten-Vassilaros, Alexandra, Omnium Gatherum, xvi, – Giamatti, Paul,  Gibson, Mel,  Gielgud, John, , , ,  Gilliam, Terry,  Gilman, Rebecca, xv Gilman, Richard, , , , –; A Confusion of Realms, ; The Drama Is Coming Now, , ; The Making of Modern Drama,  Ginsberg, Allen,  Glass, Joanna McClelland, Trying,  Glass, Philip, – ; In the Penal Colony, – Godfather, The, , ,  Godfather II,  Godley, Adam,  Goebbels, Joseph,  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust,  Goldblum, Jeff, ,  Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops to Conquer,  Goldstein, Jess, – Goodman, John, 

Gore, Al,  Gorelik, Mordecai,  Grant, Kate Jennings,  Gray, Melanna,  Great Dictator, The, ,  Green, Robert,  Greenberg, Richard, xv; Take Me Out, , –  Greenblatt, Stephen, ,  Greenwood, Jane,  Gregory, Andre,  Greif, Michael,  Grotowski, Jerzy, , ,  Group Theatre, , , –,  Grove, Barry,  Guantanamo, xvi, xvii Guare, John, xiv Guettel, Adam,  Gugino, Carla,  Guirgis, Stephen Adly, xv; Last Days of Judas Iscariot, ; Our Lady of 121st Street,  – ,  Gunter, John,  Gurdjieff, G. I.,  Gurr, Michael, The Simple Truth,  Guston, Philip,  Gyngell, Kym,  Hadary, Jonathan,  Hagen, Uta,  Haigh, Kenneth,  Hajj, Edward A.,  Halaska, Linda,  Hall, Adrian,  Hall, Edward, Rose Rage,  – Hall, Peter, , , ,  Hall, Rebecca,  Halston, Julie,  Hamilton, Graham,  Hamlet (film, ),  Hamlisch, Marvin,  Hammer, Mark,  Hammett, Dashiel,  Hampton, Christopher,  Handke, Peter, Offending the Audience,  Hanks, Tom,  Hansberry, Lorraine, Raisin in the Sun,  Harbour, David,  Hardwick, Elizabeth, , , , 

Index

Hare, David, ; Guantanamo, xvi, ; Stuff Happens, xvi,  Harelik, Mark,  Harner, Jason Butler,  Harper’s, ,  Harper’s Bazaar,  Harris, Jed,  Harris, Sam,  Hart, Moss, ,  Hathaway, Anne,  Hatley, Tim,  Hauptman, William,  Havel, Václav, Interview,  Hawke, Ethan,  Hayden, Michael,  Hayes, Richard, , ,  Heaney, Bobby,  Hecht, Jessica,  Heisenberg, Walter, ,  Heller, Joe, ; Catch 22, ,  Hellman, Lillian, xv, – Henry, William, III,  Henson, Nicky,  Hepburn, Katharine, , – Hernandez, Riccardo,  High Noon,  Hill, Andrew,  Hiss, Alger,  History of the World: Part I,  Hitchens, Christopher, ,  Hitler, Adolf, , , , , , –,  Hobbes, Thomas,  Hobson, Harold, ,  Hochhuth, Rolf, Soldiers, ,  Hoffman, Philip Seymour, , ,  Hogan, Paul,  Holdern, Michael,  Holland, Anthony,  Holliday, Jennifer,  Holm, Ian, , ,  Holmberg, Arthur,  Holocaust,  – Homosexuality. See Gays; Lesbians Hoover, Richard,  Hopkins, Harry,  –,  HotReview,  Hours, The (film),  Houseman, A. E., , ,  Houseman, John, , , , , 

House Un-American Activities Committee, , , , ,  –,  Howard, Leslie,  Hudson Review, The,  Huff, Neal,  Huffman, Cady,  Hughes, Doug, , , , ,  Hurricane Katrina, xiii, xiv, xvii Hussein, Saddam, – Hutchinson, Kelly, ,  Hwang, David Henry,  Hyland, Geoffrey,  Ibsen, Henrik, , , , ; Doll’s House, , ; Hedda Gabler, –; Peer Gynt, ,  Identity politics,  Idle, Eric, ,  Ik, The,  Inge, William,  Injunction Granted,  Innaurato, Albert,  Insularity of American life,  Intellectual freedom,  Intelligent design,  International Center of Research,  In Which We Serve,  Ionesco, Eugène, , ; Rhinoceros, , ,  Iraq war, xiii, xiv, xvi, , – Israel, Robert,  Ivanek, Zeljko, ,  Ivey, Dana,  Izenour, George,  Jacob, Lou,  Jacobs, Steve,  James, Henry,  James I (king of England),  Jennings, Byron, , ,  Jesson, Paul,  Jeter, John, Dirty Tricks, – Joe versus the Volcano,  Johaardien, Ashraf, Salaam Stories,  –  Johnson, Lyndon,  Johnson, Samuel, ,  Jones, Cherry, xviii, , , ,  Jones, James Earl, 

273

274

Index

Jones, Ron Cephas,  Jones, Terry, ,  Jonson, Ben, , , ; Eastward Ho,  Josephson, Erland,  Jowett, Benjamin,  Joyce, James, , , ; Finnegans Wake, ; Portrait of the Artist, – Judd, John,  Julius Caesar (film),  Jullien, Claire,  Kafka, Franz, – ; The Trial,  Kahn, Madeline,  Kalb, Jonathan, ,  Kamal, Joseph,  Kane, Sarah, Blasted,  Kashfi, Anna,  Kat and the Kings, The, ,  Kater, Ronell,  Kauffmann, Stanley, , , ,  Kaufman, George S., –; Dinner at Eight, , , ; June Moon, , ; The Man Who Came to Dinner, ,  – ; Of Thee I Sing, , –; Once in a Lifetime, , ; The Royal Family, –; Stage Door, –, ; You Can’t Take It with You, ,  Kaufman, Moisés, ; Gross Indecency,  Kaye, Danny,  Kazan, Elia, , , , , , – Keats, John,  Keith, Ian,  Kelly, George,  Kelly, Kevin,  Kennedy, Adrienne,  Kennedy, Arthur,  Kerr, Walter, , , , ,  Kerry, John, ,  Kestelman, Sara,  Khomeini, Ayatollah,  Kidman, Nicole,  Kierkegaard, Søren,  King, Martin Luther, Jr.,  Kissoon, Jeffrey,  Kline, Kevin, – Kondoleon, Harry,  Kopt, Arthur,  Koroly, Charles,  Kosinski, Jerzy, Steps, 

Kott, Jan,  –; Shakespeare Our Contemporary,  Kramer, David,  Krause, Peter,  Kroetz, Franz Xaver,  Kroll, Jack, , ,  Kubrick, Stanley,  Kundera, Milan, , – Kundera, Milos, Jacques and His Master,  Kurtz, Swoosie, , ,  Kurzel, Justin,  Kushner, Tony: and Miller, ; as playwright, xv; and political theatre, , , , –; Angels in America, , , , ; Caroline, or Change, –; Homeboy/Kabul, xvi, –, ; Perestroika,  Labiche, Eugène: Horse Eats Hat, ; The Italian Straw Hat,  Lacivita, Carmen,  – LaCompte, Elizabeth, xv Lahr, Bert, ,  Lahr, John, , , ,  Laird, Marvin,  Lamb, Charles, Tales of Shakespeare,  Lancaster, Burt,  Landesman, Rocco, ,  Landwehr, Hugh,  Lane, Diane,  Lane, Nathan, , , , – Lang, Fritz,  Langella, Frank,  Lanzmann, Claude,  Lapine, James,  Lardner, Ring, ,  Last Tango in Paris,  Laurents, Arthur, Gypsy,  –  Lavery, Byrony, Frozen, –,  Lavin, Linda,  Lawrence, Gertrude, ,  Lawrence, Paula,  Leavis, F. R.,  Le Carré, John,  LeCompte, Elizabeth,  Lecoq, Jacques,  Lee, Canada,  Lee, Eugene,  Lee, Gypsy Rose, 

Index

Lee, Heather,  Left: cultural left, –; left-leaning liberals, ; and liberal bias, ; and political theatre,  Leigh, Janet,  Leigh, Vivien, , , ,  Lemetre, Jean-Jacques,  Lemmon, Jack,  Lenin, Vladimir,  Leonard, Robert Sean, ,  Lepage, Robert, ; Seven Streams of the River Ota,  Lesbians, xiv, xvii, , , , . See also Gays Lessing, Doris,  Lester, Adrian, –  Letterman, David,  Letts, Tracy, xv,  Leveaux, David,  Levene, Sam,  Levi, Primo: Se questo e un uomo, –; La trequa, ; The Truce,  – Levine, Jack,  Levy, Benn,  Lewis, Bobby,  Lewis, Sinclair, ; It Can’t Happen Here,  Liaisons Dangereuses,  Life magazine,  Life of Brian, The,  Life Stinks,  Limon, Jose,  Littlefeather, Sacheen, – Littlefield, Joan,  Little Romance, A,  Living Newspapers, –,  Living Theatre, , , ,  Lloyd, Norman,  Loden, Barbara, ,  London bombings,  Long, William Ivy, ,  Lonsdale, Frederick,  Looking for Richard,  Loquasto, Santo,  Loring, Richard, African Footprints,  – Lottering, Marc, Say Cheese with Marc Lottering,  Louis XIV (king of France), , ,  Lowell, Robert, The Old Glory,  Lucas, Craig, xv,  –

Lumet, Sidney,  Lupone, Patti,  Ly, Doan,  Lydon, Christopher,  Lyons, Donald,  Mabou Mines,  MacAnuff, Des,  Macbird, ,  MacDevitt, Brian,  Macdonald, Dwight, ,  Macdonald, James,  MacGregor, Barry,  Madikane, Tony,  Magnificent Ambersons,  Mahabharata, ,  Maher, Bill, xvi Mailer, Norman, ,  Malcolm, Donald,  Maleczech, Ruth,  Mamet, David, , –, ; Glengarry Glen Ross, , ; Romance, – Mandela, Nelson, , ,  Mandela, Winnie,  Mann, Emily, ,  Mantello, Joe, ,  Mapplethorpe, Robert, ,  March, Frederic,  Margulies, Donald,  Marivaux, Pierre de, La Dispute,  Marlowe, Christopher, ; Doctor Faustus, ,  Marowitz, Charles,  Marshall, E. G.,  Martin, Steve, , ; Picasso at the Lapin Agile,  Martinelli, Marco,  Marvel, Elizabeth, , , ,  Marx, Groucho,  Marx, Harpo, ,  Marx, Karl, ,  Marx Brothers, ,  Maslon, Laurence,  MASS MoCa (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art),  – Masur, Richard,  Matamela, David,  Mattera, Don,  Matthews, Dakin, 

275

276

Index

Maxwell, Jan,  May, Elaine, –; Adult Entertainment,  Mayakovsky, Vladimir,  Mayer, Michael, – Mays, Jefferson,  Mbebe, Duminsane-Sizwe,  Mbeki, Tabo, , ,  McBurney, Simon, –, ,  McCarthy, Mary, , , – McClendon, Rose,  McDonagh, Martin, The Pillowman,  –  McDormand, Frances,  McGrath, Bob,  McGrath, Michael,  McKellen, Ian,  McLane, Derek, ,  McLeish, Kenneth,  McNally, Terence, Corpus Christi,  Mdlalose, Thuli,  Meadows, Lynne,  Medieval Europe,  Mee, Charles L., Jr., xv Meehan, Thomas,  Meetings with Remarkable Men,  Melbourne Festival,  Mellon Foundation, , ,  Mencken, H. L.,  Mendes, Sam, , , – Metropolis,  Meyerhold, Vsevolod,  Middleton, Thomas, The Changeling, ,  Miller, Arthur: and commercial theatre, ; death of, xv, –; and Gilman, ; and House Un-American Activities Committee, ; and Kazan, , , ; and Monroe, , ; and Olivier, , ; and Tynan, ; After the Fall, –, , ; All My Sons, ; The American Clock, ; The Crucible, ; Death of a Salesman, , , , , ; A View from the Bridge,  Miller, Jonathan, , –,  Mills, John,  Mimieux, Yvette,  Mind: and experience, –; and intellectualism, – 

Minnelli, Liza,  Miracle plays,  Mitchell, Clare,  Mitchell, Martha, – Mnemonic, –  Mnouchkine, Ariane, ; Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées), – Molière, ; Tartuffe,  Monroe, Marilyn, ,  Monty Python and the Holy Grail, ,  Monty Python’s Spamalot,  – Moonstruck,  Mora, Tiriel,  Morality: and Bush administration, ; moral authority, xvii; moral backlash, ; moral boundaries, ; and moral instruction, ; and religious right,  Morality plays,  Morrison, Matthew,  Morse, Helen,  Mortimer, Vicki,  Moses, Burke,  Mostel, Zero, , ,  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,  Msutu, Sizwe,  Mugabe, Robert,  Muni, Paul, ,  Muslim Americans,  Muslim fundamentalism,  Mussolini, Benito, ,  Mutiny on the Bounty, ,  Nabokov, Vladimir, ,  Narcissism, of theatre, xiv Nashe, Thomas,  Nathan, George Jean,  Nation, The, , ,  National Actors Company,  –  National Endowment for the Arts, xv, , , , ,  National themes: addressing of, xvi–xvii; and not-for-profit theatre venues, xv Naughton, James,  – Nazi Germany, , , , , , – Nelson, Mark,  Nelson, Richard, xv Nelson, Tim Blake,  Neumann, David, 

Index

Neumann, Frederick,  Nevin, Robyn,  – New Leader, The,  New Republic, The, –, , , ,  Newsday,  Newsweek, , , ,  New Yorker, The, , , , , , ,  New York magazine,  New York Review of Books, The,  New York Times, , , , , , , ,  Nichols, Mike, , , –,  Nichols and May,  Nielsen, Kristine, ,  Nightingale, Benedict,  Nixon, Richard, ,  Nolen, Dean,  Norman, Marc,  Norton, Elliot,  Not-for-profit theatre venues: difficulties facing, –; and Kazan, ; and national themes, xv; and theatre criticism, –  O’Brien, Jack, , ,  Obscurantism, xiii O’Byrne, Brian F., , ,  Odets, Clifford, , , , , , , ; Waiting for Lefty,  O’Donnell, Anthony,  Off-Broadway movement,  O’Hara, Kelli,  O’Hare, Denis,  Oh! Calcutta!, ,  Olivier, Laurence: Brando compared to, ; Kazan compared to, , –, ,  –; and A Little Romance, ; and Monroe, ; and National Theatre, , –; and Shakespeare, , , , , ; and Tynan, , , , , , , ; and Welles, – O’Neill, Eugene: and Federal Theatre Project, ; and Gilman, ; and Guirgis, , ; Miller compared to, ; All God’s Chillun Got Wings, ; The Iceman Cometh, ; Long Day’s Journey into Night, –, , ; Marco Millions, ; More Stately Mansions, ; Strange Interlude, 

One Third of a Nation,  One Touch of Venus,  On the Waterfront, , ,  Ormerod, Nick,  Orton, Joe,  Orwell, George, ,  Osborne, John, ; The Entertainer, , ; Look Back in Anger, ,  Pacino, Al, – ,  Paglia, Camille,  Palin, Michael, ,  Palminteri, Chazz,  Paltrow, Gwyneth, ,  Papp, Joe,  Parker, Dorothy,  Parkinson, Scott,  Parks, Suzan-Lori, xv, ,  –,  –; The America Play, , , ; Betting on the Dust Commander, ; Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The, , ,  –; Fucking A, ; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, ; In the Blood, , ; Topdog/Underdog, –,  –; Venus, ,  Parry, Natasha,  Parsons, Estelle,  Partisan Review, , , ,  Pask, Scott,  Pasternak, Boris,  Patel, Neil,  Pater, Walter,  Patriot Act, xvi, , ,  Patriotism: and Bush administration, ; and Coward, ; and Davis, –; and Johnson, ; and political theatre, , ; and terrorist attacks of September th, xvi, , ,  Peacock, Thomas Love,  Pearl Harbor,  Peil, Mary Beth,  Peleponnesian Wars, ,  Pendleton, Austin, Orson’s Shadow,  –  Penn, Arthur,  Pepe, Neil,  Perez, Jesse J., –  Pericles, , , 

277

278

Index

Perry, Herbert,  Persian Gulf War,  Peters, Bernadette,  Petersen, Taliep,  Phoenix,  Picot, Genevieve,  Pierce, David Hyde, – Pinkins, Tonya,  Pinky,  Pinter, Harold, , , , , , , ; The Birthday Party, ; The Homecoming,  Pirandello, Luigi, , , , , , , , ; Right You Are,  Piscator, Erwin,  Pitoniak, Anne,  Plame, Valerie,  Plautus,  Plowright, Joan, ,  Plummer, Christopher,  –,  Plutarch, ,  Political correctness, , , ,  Political theatre: and Bush administration, ; and censorship, ; and cultural left,  –; and Federal Theatre Project, , , ; and Group Theater, ; maturing of, –; rebirth of, –; and red state/blue state division, –; and Shakespeare, ; and social progress, – ; and terrorist attacks of September th, xvi–xvii, –; and Tynan,  Pollecutt, Dave,  Pollock, Jackson,  Pontecorvo, Gillo,  Pornography,  Poulton, Mike, – Power,  Prejudice,  Presnyakov Brothers, Terrorism, xvi, –  Pride and Prejudice (film, ),  Prince and the Showgirl, The,  Producers, The, , – , ,  Producers, The (film, ), ,  Prosky, Robert,  Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past,  Pullman, Bill,  Purcell, Henry, Faerie Queene,  Puritans, , 

Quaid, Randy,  Quem Quaeritis trope,  Quinn, Anthony,  Racial identity, xiv, xvii, , , – , , ,  – Racine, Jean, Phèdre,  Raffo, Heather, Nine Parts of Desire,  Rahv, Philip,  Rakusin, Debbie,  Ramirez, Sara,  Randall, Tony,  Randolph, John,  Raphael, Frederic,  Rapp, Adam, xv; Fine Noble Gases,  Rattigan, Terence,  Reagan, Ronald, xvi,  Rebecca,  Rebeck, Theresa, Omnium Gatherum, xvi, – Redgrave, Vanessa, ,  Redman, Joyce,  Red state/blue state division,  –  Reed, Carol,  Reeder, Ana,  Religion: and censorship, ; and moral boundaries, ; religious fundamentalism, ; religious prejudices, ; and theatre,  Rent, ,  Republican Party,  Resident theatre movement, xv, – ,  Restoration,  Revivals, xiii–xiv Revolt of the Beavers,  Rice, Elmer,  Rich, Frank, , , ,  Richardson, Ralph,  –,  Rickman, Alan,  Rigg, Diana, ,  Rishard, Steven,  Ritt, Martin,  Robards, Jason,  Robbins, Jerome,  Robbins, Tim,  Roberts, Dallas, ,  Robertson, Pat, – Robin Hood: Men in Tights,  Robins, Laila, , 

Index

Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” ,  Rochaix, Francois,  Rockefeller Foundation,  Rodger and Hammerstein, ,  Rogers, Lee Roy,  Rogoff, Gordon, ,  Roosevelt, Franklin D., ,  Rose, Gina,  Rosen, Steven,  Rosenberg executions,  Roth, Philip, , , , ,  Roth, Tim, ,  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,  Roussin, Andre, The Little Hut,  Rowe, Stephen,  Rowley, William, The Changeling, ,  Rubin-Vega, Daphne, – Rudnick, Paul, xv, , ; Jeffery, ; The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, ; Valhalla, – Ruehl, Mercedes, ,  Ruhl, Sara, xv Rush, Geoffrey,  Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses,  Ruskin, John,  Russell, David O., xvi Ryskind, Morrie, , – Sadler, William,  Said, Edward,  Sandilands, Neil, ,  Savage, Kala,  Saving Private Ryan,  Savo, Jimmy,  Scarface,  Schaal, Ekkehard,  Schickel, Richard, , , –,  Schiller, Friedrich von, ; Maria Stuart, – Schnitzer, Robert,  Schnitzler, Arthur, Round Dance (Reigen),  Schorr, Milton,  Schwarzenegger, Arnold,  Scofield, Paul, ,  Scopes trial, ,  Scorsese, Martin,  – Scott, Joko,  Seale, Bobby,  Sebe, Yshamano, 

Second City troupe,  Secor, Jonathan,  Secular humanism,  Selassie, Haile,  Sellars, Peter, , ,  Serban, Andrei, xv, , , ,  Serrano, Andres, ,  Sessions, Narelle,  Sexual identity, xiv, xvii, , , – ,  Shakespeare, William: and Albee, ; and Bloom,  –; and Brecht, ; and Brook, – , , , , , , , ; and character of Lear, –; and Coward, ; and Freed, –; and Gilman,  –; and Hall, –; and Kott, ; and Jonathan Miller,  – ; and Mnouchkine, ; and motives behind evil actions, ; and Olivier, , , , , ; and political intimidation, ; and relevance of theatre, ; and Schiller, ; and Schnitzer, ; settings of plots, –; and Shevelove, , ; South African productions of, – ; and Stoppard, –; and Sullivan, –; and Welles, , , ; Antony and Cleopatra, , , , ; As You Like It, –, ; The Comedy of Errors, ; Cymbeline, ; Hamlet, – , , , , , , ; Henry IV, –; Henry V, ; Henry VI, , –; Julius Caesar, , –, , , , ; King Lear,  –, – , , ; Macbeth, , , , – , , , ; The Merchant of Venice, , ; The Merry Wives of Windsor, ; Midsummer Night’s Dream, , , , –; Much Ado About Nothing, , ; Othello, , , , ; Richard II, ; Richard III, , , ; The Tempest, ; Timon of Athens, ; Troilus and Cressida, ; Twelfth Night, , ; Two Gentlemen of Verona, xiv, , ; The Two Noble Kinsmen, , , ; A Winter’s Tale,  Shakespeare in Love, ,  Shanley, John Patrick, xv, ; Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, ; Dirty Story, ; Doubt, , , – Shapiro, Alan, , 

279

280

Index

Shaw, Bernard: and Archer, ; as critic/ practitioner, xvii; and England and America, ; and Federal Theatre Project, ; and Frayn, ; and Gilman, ; and Lavery, ; and Rebeck and GerstenVassilaros, –; and Shevelove, , ; and Stoppard, , ; Tynan compared to, ; Heartbreak House, , , , – Shaw, Fiona, ,  – Shaw, Wallace,  Shawn, Dick,  Sheed, Wilfrid, , ,  Shellard, Dominic, –,  Shepard, Sam, , , , ; Buried Child, ; The Curse of the Starving Class, ; A Fool for Love, ; The God of Hell, xvi, – ; The Late Henry Moss, ; States of Shock, ; True West,  Sher, Anthony, ; Primo, – Sher, Bartlett,  Sheridan, Richard,  Sherwood, Robert, xv Shevelove, Burt, ,  Shoah,  Sidney, Philip,  Sieber, Christopher,  Siegal, Lee,  Sills, Paul,  Silvers, Phil, ,  Simon, John, , , ,  Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle,  Sinyavsky, Andrey,  Slabolepszy, Paul, Saturday Night at the Palace, – Slavery,  Smits, Jimmy,  Social injustice, xvii Solomon, Alisa,  Solzhenitzyn, Alexander,  Sondheim, Stephen: and Aristophanes,  – , ; Glass compared to, ; lyrics of, ; and urban neurosis, ; Assassins, , ; Passion, , ; Sweeney Todd,  Sontag, Susan, xv, , , , , , ; Alice in Bed, ,  South Africa, –, –,  Soviet Union, –,  Spencer, Elizabeth, The Light in the Piazza,  –

Spenser, Edmund, Faerie Queene,  Spielberg, Steven,  Spirochete,  Stalin, Joseph, , , , ,  Stanislavsky, Konstantin, ,  Stanton, Robert,  Starnes, Joseph,  Stein, Doug,  Stein, Gertrude, ; The Making of Americans,  Steinbeck, John, Of Mice and Men,  Steiner, George,  Stephens, Robert, , ,  Stern, Marcus, ,  Sternheim, Carl, The Underpants, –  Stewart, Jon, xvi Stewart, Martha,  Still, Jeff,  Stockhausen, Karlheinz,  Stoppard, Tom, , , ; Arcadia, , ; The Invention of Love, – , ; Jumpers, –; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, –; Travesties, ,  Straitharn, David,  Strasberg, Lee, , , – Strasberg, Paula, – Streep, Meryl,  Streetcar Named Desire (film), ,  Strindberg, August, , , , , ; A Dream Play, ; The Father,  Stritch, Elaine,  Stroman, Susan, , ,  Stuhlbarg, Michael, , ,  Styne, Jule,  Styron, William, ; Confessions of Nat Turner,  Sullivan, Daniel, – Sunjata, Daniel,  Sutton, Sheryl,  Suzman, Helen,  Swanby, Grant,  Swing Mikado, The,  Sydney Theatre Company,  – Tabori, George,  Taliban, ,  Talley, Ted,  Tamiris, Helen,  Tandy, Jessica, 

Index

Tate, Nahum,  Taubman, Howard,  Taylor, Joseph Lyle,  Taymor, Julie,  Tazewell, Paul,  Technology, ,  Temple, Shirley,  Ten Black Writers Respond,  Tennyson, Alfred,  Terminal, The,  Terrorist attacks of September th: and Aristotle’s defining of terror, –; and Bergman, ; and commercial stage, xiv; and concept of security, ; and critical writing, , ; and disaster movies, – ; and Falwell, –; impact on theatre, , , , ; and Kushner, xvi, , ; as national trauma, xv; and political theatre, xvi– xvii, –; and relevance of theatre, , ; and role of arts, –, , ; and South Africa,  –; and theatre season, xiii Tesori, Jeanine, ,  Thalberg, Irving,  That Hamilton Woman,  Theatre: adversary role with audience, – ; in Australia,  –; as communal experience, , ; disconnect with audience, xiv, , , ; and histrionic experience, –; impact of terrorist attacks of September th, , , , ; and impersonations,  –; and new works, –; objectives of, ; prescient plays, xvi, , –; and prosecution plays, –; relevance of, xv, , –, , , –; role of, ; in South Africa, –. See also Commercial stage; Political theatre Theatre Arts,  Theatre criticism: in Australia, ; critic/ practitioner role, xvii–xviii; and Federal Theatre Project, ; and Gilman, , , , –; history of, –; and Miller, –; and reputation of theatre artists, , ; and resident theatre movement, – , ; and terrorist attacks of September th, – ; and Tynan, , ,  Thesiger, Ernest,  Thirty-Nine Steps, The,  Thomas, J. Parnell, ,  Thomas, Richard,  Thompson, Emma, 

Thompson, Hunter,  Thompson, John Douglas, , ,  Thompson, Joseph,  Three Kings, xvi Tiananmen Square,  Tillinger, John,  Time, , ,  Tipton, Jennifer,  Tomei, Marisa,  Tomlinson, Kenneth,  –  Tone, Franchot,  Torikai, Ushio, – Totalitarian countries, ,  Travers, Ben,  Tresnjak, Darko,  Trilling, Lionel,  Triple A Plowed Under,  Truebridge, Mark,  Tsoutsouvas, Sam,  Tsunami,  Tunick, Jonathan,  Turgenyev, Ivan, –; Fortune’s Fool, – ; A Month in the Country,  Tutu, Desmond, ,  Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn,  25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The, –  Twist, Basil,  Tynan, Kathleen, ,  Tynan, Kenneth: and bad drama, –; biography of, , –, ; as critic/ practitioner, xvii, xviii; and Gilman, ; and Olivier, , , , , , , ; and theatre criticism, , ,  Tzara, Tristan,  Uncertainty,  Updike, John,  Upton, Andrew, The Hanging Man,  Urbaniak, James,  US,  Ustinov, Peter,  Uys, Pieter-Dirk, –, , ; Foreign Aids,  Vale, Michael,  Van Hove, Ivo, – Van Itallie, Jean Claude,  Versweyveld, Jan,  Vietnam War, xvi, , , , , 

281

282

Index

Village Voice, , ,  Viva Zapata!, , ,  Vogel, Paula, xv,  Von Mahlsdorf, Charlotte,  Wagner, Robin,  Waite, Ralph,  Walker, Eamonn,  Wanshel, Jeff,  Warner, Deborah, ,  Warren, Roger,  Wars of the Roses, The,  Washington, Denzel,  Wassberg, Goran,  Wasserstein, Wendy, xv,  Watling, Claire,  Watson, Emily,  Wayne, John, xvi Weaver, Fritz,  Weaver, Sigourney,  Webber, Andrew Lloyd,  Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi,  Weinstein, Arnold, xv Weiss, Jeff, ,  Weiss, Peter, ; Marat/Sade, , ,  Weist, Diane,  Weller, Frederick,  Welles, Orson, , ,  –, , –, , , ; Chimes at Midnight,  Wesker, Arnold,  Wharton, Edith,  What’s Up Doc,  Wheeler, David, – Wherrett, Richard,  White, Patrick, The Aunt’s Story,  Whitehead, Robert,  Whittaker, Jay,  Wilde, Oscar, , , ; Importance of Being Earnest, , ; Salome, –  Wilder, Gene, ,  Wilder, Thornton, Our Town,  Wilkof, Lee,  Williams, Tennessee: and commercial theatre, ; as gay playwright, ; and Gilman, ; and Kazan, , ; and theatre criticism, ; and Tynan, ; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, ; Glass Menagerie, ; Streetcar Named Desire, , , , , , , ; Suddenly Last Summer, 

Willis, Jack, ,  Wilson, August, xv,  Wilson, Edmund,  Wilson, Joseph C., IV,  Wilson, Mary Louise,  Wilson, Richard,  Wilson, Robert, xv, xviii, , , ; the CIVIL warS, , ; Deafman Glance, ; “ Stations,” –, ; GARDenia Terrace, ; Ka MOUNTain,  Windmill Theatre,  Winer, Linda,  Wolf, Rita,  Wolfe, George C., , , ,  Wood, Frank,  Woodruff, Robert, xv,  Woodrum, Clifton,  Woolf, Virginia,  Woollcott, Alexander, ,  Woolley, Monte,  Workers Alliance,  Works Progress Administration (WPA), , ,  World War II, xv–xvi, ,  Worth, Irene, ,  Wright, Doug, xv; I Am My Own Wife, – ,  Wright, Jeffrey,  – Wright, Richard,  Wurlitzer, Rudolph,  Wurstman, Kurt, ,  Wuthering Heights,  Wyler, William,  Wynn, Ed,  Yale Drama School, , ,  Yale Repertory Theatre, – , , ,  Yeargan, Michael,  Yeats, William Butler,  Yelland, David,  Young, Stark, ,  Young Frankenstein, –  Yuremin, Yuri,  Zaks, Jerry,  Zambello, Francesca,  Zuber, Catherine, , , 