The Cruelest Month

The burning of the roof off of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris seems like only the latest sign that the world around us is coming undone. Perhaps that's why it seemed fitting for Fiona Shaw to show up in Madison Square Park last week to recite T.S. Eliot's bleak poem The Waste Land.

Saturday morning I was at a meeting of the 36th Street Writers Block, when Jessica Vera told me about Shaw's imminent appearance. She had recited the poem the previous day, no doubt to the surprise of people randomly walking through the park, and was scheduled to appear again at 6:00 without much publicity fanfare. Of course, I had to come.

Eliot's poem, which he acknowledged to be indebted to Jessie Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, deals with the spiritual waste land created by the First World War. As recited by Shaw in and around the empty fountain at the north end of the park, it became supremely relevant, "mixing / Memory and desire" as it were. Though "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow," it was time for us to wake up again.

I had forgotten how sexual some parts of the poem are, but Shaw wouldn't let us forget. The second part of Eliot's poem--"A Game of Chess"--conjures up images of Philomel, who in mythology was transformed into a nightingale after being raped by King Tereus. Shaw's recitation of "Jug Jug" was indeed meant for "dirty ears." Then in the next part--"The Fire Sermon"--she emphasized the bedroom scene of the typist and "the young man carbuncular" which Eliot describes like this:

     The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
     The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
     Endeavors to engage her in caresses
     Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
     Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
     Exploring hands encounter no defense;
     His vanity requires no response,
     And makes a welcome of indifference.

Yikes. And all of that is recalled by Tiresias, who has "foresuffered all" and sees the same scene enacted on Philomel repeated again and again and again, down to the present day.

That evening, as it so happened, I had tickets to see Lucas Hnath's new play Hillary and Clinton, which interestingly enough also deals with the idea of the same events being enacted over and over. Laurie Metcalf plays someone who happens to be named Hillary Clinton, and who happens to be married to someone named Bill Clinton, played by John Lithgow. The fact that the actors don't really look like their characters' namesakes is part of the point. The details may be different, but the essence is the same.

As was the case with his previous play, A Doll's House, Part 2, Hnath doesn't come up with any speculations that couldn't have been dreamed up by anyone else. The speculations are not the point. Rather, we're watching skilled performances of actors re-trodding well-known material with slight but interesting variations.

Word on the street is that the production of King Lear with Glenda Jackson pulls off the same trick. I haven't seen it yet, but have my ticket for later this month. Yes, April is shaping up to be just as grim as Eliot's poem claims.

Next month, on the other hand, seems to be looking up, but that will be the subject of another blog post.

Top Plays of 2018

Each December, I compile a list of the top plays I saw that opened that year in New York City. Last year, Sweeney Todd, HOME/SICK, and Julius Caesar topped the list.

This year both Roundabout Theatre Company and the Public Theater have multiple shows on my list. Playwrights William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw get multiple nods as well.

So without further ado, here’s my list:

10. Romeo and Juliet – Each year, New York Classical Theatre Company puts on free productions in the city’s parks. This summer’s production of Shakespeare’s classic tale about star-crossed lovers used innovative doubling to tell a familiar story in a memorable new way.

9. Heartbreak House – Gingold Theatrical Group makes the list this year with another innovative adaptation of a classic. This re-imagining of Shaw’s chestnut about Europe during World War I was reset as a play-within-a-play during the London Blitz, which worked quite well.

8. Love’s Labour’s Lost – This Shake & Bake production combines the Bard’s romantic comedy with a five-course tasting menu. The actors do a wonderful job creating magical moments in a pared-down production in the Meatpacking District. The food is tasty, but it’s the acting that is truly delicious.

7. Stories by Heart – So, what is this thing? That’s what John Lithgow quipped at the beginning of his one-man show about the stories his father read to him as a child. Ordinarily, I don’t go in for one person plays, but Lithgow’s mixture of personal memoir with classic storytelling won me over in the end.

6. Othello – Not everyone loved the Public Theatre’s production of Othello this summer at the Delacorte, but I found Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s direction to be superb. The relationship between Iago and Rodrigo was particularly fascinating to me, and Chukwudi Iwuji did a great job playing the title role.

5. Mother of the Maid – The Public Theatre scored another hit with Jane Anderson’s new play Mother of the Maid about the family of Joan of Arc. The piece was marketed as a vehicle for Glenn Close, who played Isabelle Arc, but Anderson’s play tells the story from an interesting perspective, and would be worth seeing even without Close’s star power.

4. Bernhardt/Hamlet – As a fan of both Sarah Bernhardt and William Shakespeare, I knew I had to see this show. This is probably Theresa Rebeck’s best play to date, and the cast was superb. Janet McTeer was deservedly praised as Bernhardt, but Dylan Baker was also wonderful as the legendary French actor Constant Coquelin, and Jason Butler gave a memorable portrayal of the playwright Edmond Rostand.

3. Pygmalion – Bedlam theatre company’s productions are sometimes hit-or-miss, but they are generally memorable even when they don’t entirely succeed. This year’s re-imagining of Shaw’s most popular play definitely qualifies as a hit, though. The immersive first act led into an exploration of not just class, but also race, ethnicity, and assimilation, all in the frantic Bedlam style in which performers play multiple characters to hilarious effect.

2. Twelfth Night – What happened to musicals this year? All of my top ten picks were straight plays this year, with the exception of Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which she co-created with director Kwame Kwei-Armah as part of the Public Works program, but came back in a new production this summer as a part of the regular Shakespeare in the Park season. Taub’s songs are inspired by Shakespeare’s text, but not usually direct settings of his poetry, in spite of the fact that Twelfth Night already contains multiple songs. Her lyrics fit in with the Bard’s play beautifully, and her performance as Feste was equally delightful.

1. Travesties – To me, the most delightful production this year, however, was Roundabout’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. As a playwright, I’ve always admired Stoppard’s skill in weaving together the stories of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara into a rollicking farce that also makes us think and feel in new ways. Perhaps because this production was directed by a fellow playwright, Patrick Marber, it was able to encompass both the profundity and goofiness of Stoppard’s writing. A cast that included Tom Hollander, Scarlett Strallen, and Sara Topham also seemed exceptionally sympathetic to Stoppard’s ambitious vision.

So that’s my list. Here’s to an even better year of New York theatre in 2019!

Stories By Heart

Last night, I had the pleasure to see John Lithgow's one-man show Stories By Heart. Toward the beginning of the piece, he turned to the audience and said, "So, what the heck is this?"

It's a question many of us were wondering ourselves. The website for the Roundabout Theatre Company calls the play "a singularly intimate evening" containing "equal measures of humor and heart" that "evokes memories of family, explores and expands the limits of the actor's craft, and masterfully conjures a cast of indelible characters from classic short stories by Ring Lardner and PG Wodehouse."

Well, yes, it is all of that, but what does that really mean? It means you're going to hear Lithgow both tell stories and talk about stories, how important they are to him personally, how they shaped his family, and what they mean to the theatre and to humanity in general. As usual, they play becomes more universal the more particular it gets. Rather than musing on human nature, Lithgow spends more time talking about his own family, and in particular about his father, who started a string of Shakespeare festivals across Ohio, but never himself performed on a Broadway stage.

After introducing us to his family and the big book of short stories his father would read to them when Lithgow was a child, he performs Lardner's most famous piece, "Haircut." We get to see his virtuosic acting as Lithgow inhabits the story's famously unreliable narrator and gives a shave and haircut to an invisible barber-shop patron. After an intermission, Lithgow returns to reminiscences about his father, but as an old man rather than a young, energetic parent. He then performs what his family called "the funny one," P.G. Wodehouse's 1935 short story "Uncle Fred Flits By."

I must admit, I'm not a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, but "Uncle Fred Flits By" is legitimately funny, and all the more funny when Lithgow inhabits all of the different characters, including (most outrageously) the parrot. If you get a chance to catch Stories By Heart, it's well worth seeing.

Lear in the Park

Last night, I had the good fortune of seeing The Public Theater's production of King Lear at the Delacorte in Central Park.

Watching the play, I was struck by how the politics of King Lear oddly parallel post-Bush America. Lear, like the American people, was taken in by a couple of smooth talkers, and then proceeded to turn on anyone who tried to offer sound advice. His disowning of Cordelia is no more irrational than the ire poured out on politicians who didn't wear flag lapel pins, or the venom unleashed on France (whose king also makes an appearance in Lear) when that country declined to endorse a fool-hardy invasion of Iraq.

Kent is banished for his sound advice, accused of not just of being un-patriotic, but of committing treason (one of Ann Coulter's favorite terms). The only person allowed to speak the truth is the fool, an entertainer who--like Janeane Garofalo--must stand up and state the plain simple facts, because if he doesn't, no one else will.

Could the plethora of Lear productions of late come from a new, more sympathetic understanding of the title character? Perhaps, have rushed headlong into a disaster many people warned us against, after having thrown off our friends with irrational hatred (Freedom Fries?), we are more likely to feel for an old fool who did the same thing.

But enough with political musings. How was the show?

Great. As I sat down and looked at the bizarrely textured back wall of the set, designed by John Lee Beatty, I had my doubts. However, the way that wall was lit by lighting designer Jeff Croiter, with projections by video designer Tal Yarden, was nothing less than amazing. Moving bridges, live torches, and huge, sheet-like percussion instruments also come together to create a performance space that is perfect for director Daniel Sullivan's production.

John Lithgow is wonderful as Lear, convincingly appearing frail and infirm, in spite of a marathon performance that proves the actor to be far from either. And yes, this is a marathon. Clocking in at nearly three and a half hours, the production is considerably longer than the "two hours' traffic" the play would have been in Shakespeare's time. (For some reasons why modern productions tend to be longer, see my previous post on the construction of composite texts.)

Lithgow is at his best when he portrays Lear's slow recovery from madness. He plays the king as if he were someone we might know and love, but who is suffering from dementia. He knows he isn't in his right mind, and that he has wronged those who loved him most, but there is now nothing he can do other than to apologize for his state and to beg for forgiveness, something the king does pitifully.

Annette Bening, in reality only twelve years younger than Lithgow, plays Goneril with youth and vigor. I preferred Jessica Hecht, as Regan, though. Every move her body makes, every tremble of her voice, conveys a personality that's just a little unbalanced. She doesn't appear crazy, but just a little off--enough, however that when she starts screaming sadistically for men to be put into stocks or for eyes to be gouged out, we aren't at all surprised she's capable of such things.

Christopher Innvar gives a surprisingly good performance as Regan's husband Albany. For the nerds out there who care about such things, this production tends to follow the quarto text, which gives Albany considerably more emphasis than the folio text does. (Again, you can go here if you're interested in the differences.) Albany even gets the last lines of the play, though almost every director tends to follow the folio in giving them to Edgar.

Chukwudi Iwuji is the actor who plays Edgar, and he is quite compelling when he feigns madness, taking on the disguise of Tom o' Bedlam. His scenes with his father, played by Clarke Peters, are also affecting, and Sullivan manages to stage the Dover cliff scene so it's actually believable. Public regular Jay O. Sanders is delightful as the honest Kent, and Steven Boyer is both disturbing and funny as the fool.

In spite of its excessive length, this production is definitely worth seeing, so grab a sleeping bag and wait in line, or try your luck at the with the Virtual Ticketing Lottery. Go soon, though, as more and more people will be trying to see it as word spreads.