A Punch in Nottingham

James Graham's new play Punch, which closes this weekend at Manhattan Theatre Club, takes place in the English midland city of Nottingham, and Nottingham itself could almost be a character in the piece.

I visited Nottingham in 2019 when I attended a conference by the British Association for Romantic Studies at the University of Nottingham. The famous Nottingham Castle was closed, but I walked around it, and I attended services at the Victorian Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of the city.

Nottingham is known as a working-class city, with a long history of rebelliousness, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when it was helping to remake the world into what we know it today. With the de-industrialization of Britain that occurred after World War II, the progress of the city's working class was stymied, as Graham's play makes clear.

Much of the action takes place in a housing project built in the 1970s that is described as inside out: all the residences face one another with their backs to the street. It was the type of utopian planning that flourished in the '60s and '70s and usually went horribly wrong. In this case, what was meant to be a bastion of community ended up making residents feel cut off from the rest of society.

As crime in the project increased, more and more security cameras were added, but this just led to young people figuring out how to take circuitous paths that avoided all of the cameras. The main character in the play, Jacob (performed by Will Harrison in his Broadway debut), likens taking the dodging path to being in a real-life video game. Everything, in fact, seems like a bit of a game to him, from picking fights at cricket matches to making pocket money by selling drugs.

All of this turns sour when he steps in to help out a friend in an argument with a stranger. He throws one punch--that's it--and the stranger falls back, hits his head, and subsequently dies. That stranger, as always is the case, had his own life. He was a paramedic. He had two loving parents. He had a bright future ahead of him. All of that was brought to an end by a single punch. (Though it didn't help that the doctors at the hospital dismissed him as a drunk and sent him home with a brain hemorrhage rather than giving him immediate care.)

Punch is based on a true story, and comes with all of the conventional tropes one would expect from a "real life" drama. Jacob puts on a tough facade, does a laughably short amount of time in prison after a murder charge is reduced to manslaughter, and then struggles to get his life back after incarceration. He gets a job packing boxes (since logistics has replaced making things in the post-industrial era), goes back to school, and renews a courtship with a young lady named "Clare without an 'i'" (Camila Canó-Flaviá).

More surprisingly, he agrees to meet with the parents of James, the young man he killed. All three of them are looking for answers, and they form an unlikely bond as they attempt to move on from a tragic and unnecessary death. The parents, Joan and David (played by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards), naturally attract our sympathy, but so does Jacob as he struggles to make some sort of atonement for what he's done.

One interesting plot thread involves Raf (played by Cody Kostro), who also bears responsibility for the tragic events but escapes legal if not moral consequences. The entire ensemble is deftly directed by Adam Penford. If you want to see the show, you'll have to catch it soon, though, as its final performance is on Sunday.

Sweet Bird of Youth

Tennessee Williams was good at making monsters. In his 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth, the movie star Alexandra Del Lago says to Chance Wayne, the man she's using while he uses her, "When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BE ME."

Sweet Bird of Youth fascinates due to the drama of monster meeting monster. Arguably, every character in the play is a monster to one degree or another. Certainly Del Lago, who is traveling under the name of Princess Kosmonopolis, is one. Aged past her prime and having given up on any chance of a comeback, she ends up in a hotel in St. Cloud, Florida, as reasonable an approximation of Hell as anywhere.

Chance Wayne is a monster, too. He grew up in St. Cloud, so of all people, he should know better than to return. (Williams's St. Cloud is on the Gulf, by the way, while the actually town of St. Cloud is right in the middle of the state, far from the coast.) His plan is to reunite with Heavenly, a young woman he loved as a teenager, though now both are falling apart physically as well as mentally.

Disease and surgery have rendered Heavenly a bit of a monster, though she's nothing compared to her father, the politician Boss Finley. Williams writes in a stage direction that Boss Finley's attitude toward his daughter should not be related "in terms of crudely conscious incestuous feeling" though the fact that Williams wrote that implies a certain level of incest to the desire.

The greatest monster in the play seems to be time, though, which ticks away relentlessly at each character. At the end of the final act, Chance doesn't ask for pity, or even understanding, but just for the recognition of time as the enemy of us all. The title, Sweet Bird of Youth, is after all painfully ironic.

Williams wrote the play for the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in a tryout production in Coral Gables, Florida. When the piece opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck, though, it had Geraldine Page in the role of Princess (Del Lago). Paul Newman played Chance Wayne. Both returned for the film version of the piece, which was released in 1962.

The play, by the way, is referenced in the film Death Becomes Her (later turned into a stage musical) in which Meryl Streep's character stars in a musical version of Sweet Bird of Youth called Songbird! I can only imagine what that might have been like...

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!

It been a spooky season, and I've been watching a lot of spooky films. Last night, I saw The Phantom Carriage, directed by Victor Sjöström, who also plays the protagonist in the 1921 silent.

The film uses double exposure to create haunting images, and seems strongly influenced by A Christmas Carol. By the 20th century, I imagine that not only Charles Dickens's novella but several stage versions of it had become widely known in Sweden, where the film was made. The movie's plot revolves around not Christmas but New Year's, which makes the film also reminiscent of another supernatural piece by Dickens, The Chimes.

Recently, I was curious to learn of a dark Tennessee Williams film adaptation, The Fugitive Kind. It's based on Orpheus Descending, which reworked a previous Williams play, Battle of Angels. I had to look the film up after I found out it was directed by Sidney Lumet with a host of great actors, including Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Joanne Woodward, and Maureen Stapleton. Brando was paid a million dollars to be in the film, which was unheard of in 1960 when the movie was released.

In spite of Brando's star appeal, the film lost money. It did better than Battle of Angels, though, which closed during tryouts in Boston. The reworked version, Orpheus Descending, did much better, running for 68 performances at the Martin Beck on Broadway. Stapleton played the female leading role of Lady on stage, but was replaced with Magnani in the film, taking on instead the substantial but smaller role of Vee. The story, in all of its iterations, is a Southern Gothic tale of lust, revenge, and murder.

This evening, I watched another spooky movie, Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Like A Christmas Carol, that novel has been adapted for the stage over and over again. In fact, next weekend I'll be seeing a new stage version at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Monsters, figurative or literal, tend to do well on stage, especially this time of year.

No Emperors

Yesterday there were "No Kings" protests throughout the United States, and at the Joyce Theater in New York City the anti-monarchal ballet The Emperor Jones by the Limón Dance Company.

I went due to the connection of the dance piece with its source material, the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The play, with its extensive stage directions and overwhelming focus on a central character whose internal fears are made manifest around him, seemed already halfway to being ballet when José Limón first adapted it to dance in 1956.

O'Neill wrote the play in 1920, and the Provincetown Players premiered it at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, starring Charles Sidney Gilpin. The show was a hit and had to be moved to a larger theatre to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to see it. It then toured the United States, providing many people in the U.S. with their first contact with Expressionism on stage.

When the play was revived on Broadway in 1925, it starred the previously unknown actor Paul Robeson, who went on to star in it in London and then on film in the 1933 movie version. The piece was thus already famous when Limón turned it into a showpiece for his own virtuosic dancing, taking on the role of Brutus Jones, who after rising to become emperor over a Caribbean island, disintegrates psychologically and is ultimately killed by a silver billet.

O'Neill's stage directions indicate that "Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest." The Little Formless Fears danced excellently in this production, though the forest was transformed into an urban jungle of skyscrapers. The company's revival kept Limón's original choreography, but adapted the costumes and sets to turn it into a parable about capitalism. They also allowed women to dance some of the roles, though Limón originally envisioned an all-male cast.

The piece was suitably creepy, though, which set the mood for the show I saw in the evening, Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, which he performed at Poe Cottage in the Bronx. Seeing Smith perform virtually every word of "The Black Cat" and "The Raven" in the house where Poe once lived was a real treat.

If you missed him, don't worry! He plans to be back with more Poe stories next October!

Licensing

Getting plays produced is hard. Getting them licensed for amateur performance can be even harder. That's why I'm glad to announce that Keep On Walkin', the musical I wrote together with Lavell Blackwell and Joshua H. Cohen, is now available to be performed by schools and community theatres.

The musical's licensing agreements are being handled by Plays for New Audiences, a division of Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. The company has done a lot of fine work over the years, and it would be a shame to see original work developed there not continue to have a life elsewhere. Keep On Walkin' wasn't developed there, but they are helping other works for young audiences connect to schools and children's theatres looking for material.

Keep On Walkin' weaves together history, humanity, and hope to tell the unforgettable story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott through the eyes of two teenage pen pals. One, May, lives on Staten Island, and the other, June, is in Montgomery. As their letters cross regional and racial divides, both girls come of age against the backdrop of one of the most pivotal movements in American history. The play was performed at schools on Staten Island and later won the Anna Zornio Memorial Children's Theatre Playwriting Award.

This is the first time a musical I worked on has been licensed, though a number of my plays are published and licensed for production. In fact, I recently received a check from Brooklyn Publishers for royalties for my play The New Mrs. Jones. Given that royalty rates for amateur and educational productions haven't gone up much in the past fifty years, no playwright in America can make a living this way, but it's nice when someone acknowledges that your work has value.

Escapists

 If you love comic books and you love opera, then the Metropolitan Opera's production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a must-see event.

Based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, the opera tells the story of two Jewish men in 1930s and '40s New York trying to raise money to get relatives out of Europe. Sam Clay can't draw well, but he loves telling stories, and his recently arrived cousin Josef (now Joe) Kavalier is an art-school graduate looking for a job. Together, they invent a comic book character, the Escapist, who comes to rival Superman and Batman.

The first act of the opera is brilliant. Joe (Andrzej Filonczyk) tries to get his sister Sarah (Lauren Snouffer) to New York on a ship called the Ark of Miriam, which has been arranged by the activist Rosa Saks (Sun-Ly Pierce). Fortunately, he has more than enough money to do this once the Escapist becomes a hit not just in comic books but also in a radio program starring the actor Tracy Bacon (Edward Nelson). Romantic sparks start to fly not just between Joe and Rosa, but unexpectedly between Tracy and Sam (Miles Mykkanen).

Librettist Gene Scheer did a wonderful job adapting Moby-Dick as an opera, tweaking the iconic novel in a way that paid homage to the original without having to follow it in every detail. He manages to navigate the adaptation of Chabon's novel well in the first act, but then departs so dramatically from the book in the second act that the audience is left with mood pieces inspired by Chabon rather than the innovative storytelling of the novel.

While I was familiar with the music of Moby-Dick's composer, Jake Heggie, I did not know much about Mason Bates, the composer of Kavalier & Clay. Apparently, Bates is famous for introducing electronic music into orchestras, which might not work for most stories set in the '30s and '40s, but since this opera deals with the fantasy world of comic books, electronic sounds actually fit in rather well.

The sets and projections by 59 Studio aren't quite as impressive as those used in Moby-Dick, but they are still amazing, particularly when comic book panels pop up on the wall behind the live actors. The entire production is staged lavishly by Bartlett Sher.

This production is playing until October 11th. Last night's performance appeared to be sold out, so get your tickets while you can! You won't want this opportunity to escape.

The Wild Duck

Last night, I saw Theatre for a New Audience's production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. If you haven't seen it yet, the show is definitely worth checking out before it closes on Sunday.

Pettersen, the old hand at the Werle mansion, is the character who introduces us to the action, and is usually played by a man. In this production, directed by Simon Godwin, the role is played by Katie Broad as one of the maids in the household, which makes perfect sense.

In the original play, the hired waiter Jensen appears to be there just to get Pettersen talking, so it would normally be thrown away on a performer like Alexander Sovronsky, who has composed music for a host of shows, including the excellent Mother of the Maid. Fortunately, Sovronsky sticks around for the rest of the show, periodically providing live violin music as the action advances.

After the first act melts away, the posh Werle home is replaced by the humbler abode of the Ekdal family, nominally headed by Hjalmer (Nick Westrate). The household is really run, though, by his wife Gina (Melanie Field) and teenage daughter Hedvig (Maaike Laanstra-Corn). Hjalmer instead spends his time in a fantasy-land upstairs in the loft where he and his father (David Patrick Kelly) keep a number of animals, including the titular wild duck.

To call the duck a metaphor is insufficient, since much of the action of the play hinges on Mr. Werle's estranged son Gregers (Alexander Hurt) speaking about the duck metaphorically. Hedvig, who loves the duck more than anything else, catches on to the notion that the duck might be a metaphor, taking the idea even further than Gregers intends. This, as they say, has consequences.

If the world of the loft is a sort of fantasy heaven, the downstairs apartment could be a hell. It is occupied by the cynical Dr. Relling, played by Matthew Saldivar who memorably portrayed Alphonse Mucha in Bernhardt/Hamlet. Relling's roommate, the demonic Molvik, never appears in this adaptation of the play penned by David Eldridge.

Toward the end of the play last night, the actors skipped right over one of the greatest lines in the piece, though I'm not sure if that was Eldridge's doing or an actor's flub. In any case, it was the only false note in what was otherwise a splendid production.