Reality Affects

Bonnie Nadzam's recent essay at Literary Hub, "What Should Fiction Do?", is well worth reading, despite the title. (The only accurate answer to the question in the title [which may not be Nadzam's] is: "Lots of stuff, including what it hasn't done yet...") What resonates for me in the essay is Nadzam's attention to the ways reality effects intersect with questions of identity — indeed, with the ways that fictional texts produce ideas about identity and reality. I especially loved Nadzam's discussion of how she teaches writing with such ideas in mind.

Nadzam starts right off with a bang:

An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice. I’m not talking about rejecting memoir or characters “based on me.” What I mean is I don’t have the stomach for art that purports to “hold up a mirror to nature,” or for what this implies, philosophically, about selfhood and the world in which we live.

This is a statement that avant-gardes have been making since at least the beginning of the 20th century — it is the anti-mimetic school of art, a school at which I have long been a happy pupil. Ronald Sukenick, whose purposes are somewhat different to Nadzam's, wrote in Narralogues that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation" and "it is the mutability of consciousness through time rather than representation that is the essential element of fiction." Sukenick proposes that all fiction, whether opaquely innovative or blockbuster entertainment, "raises issues, examines situations, meditates solutions, reflects on outcomes" and so is a sort of reasoning and reflection. "The question," he writes, "is only whether a story reflects thoughtfully, or robotically reflects the status quo with no illuminating angle of vision of its own."

Recent Reading

Blogging always slows to a crawl during the second half of a semester, but I was surprised to see that it's been almost a month since I last posted here. Egads. I've hardly had a moment to breathe, though.

For now, I just want to capture a few moments of reading from the recent weeks.

Picked by Christopher Shinn

When I saw Christopher Shinn's new play, Picked, in New York last week, I had no intention of writing about it. Chris and I were at NYU together for a couple years, we've stayed in touch a bit over the last decade, and I've enjoyed following his career. I don't like writing about friends' work, because anything short of "It's the most perfect and brilliant piece of writing since the invention of the alphabet," feels in some way like a betrayal.

But most of the reviews for the play have been so shallow and superficial that I just want to line up the New York theatre reviewers and whack them all upside the head. Maybe not all -- Ben Brantley's review in The Times is thoughtful and intelligent. Beyond that review, though, it's thin pickings.

I'm not looking for positive reviews -- sure, I liked the play, I like Chris, I would like the world to agree with me on both points. But I'll take a thoughtful and insightful negative review over a vapid positive review any day. Most of the reviews I read of the show were vaguely negative, sort of middling. But the reasons they offered for their vague negativity and their middling were banal, suggesting the reviewer didn't really pay a whole lot of attention. And the positive reviews weren't really much better. (No, I'm not going to link to them; they were too enervating to make me want to seek them out again. You, too, can use Google if you're curious.)

I didn't take notes and I didn't go in thinking I'd write about the show, so this is just a collection of remembered impressions after one viewing, not a review. I feel compelled to say something to acknowledge the complexity of the play, and the complexity of my response to it (both good and bad), because I haven't seen enough other people do so yet.

Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away

The good people at Tor.com asked me to contribute a post about the playwright Caryl Churchill for Dystopia Week, and I was thrilled to be able to oblige them with "Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away".

Here's a taste:

Most people don’t often think of playwrights as science fiction and fantasy writers, and SF doesn’t really exist as a genre in the theatre world in the same way it does in the world of print and cinema. Yet from its earliest incarnations, theatre has reveled in the fantastic, and many of the greatest plays of all time have eschewed pure realism. Something about the relationship between performers and audiences lends itself to fantasy.

The British playwright Caryl Churchill has written a great number of extraordinary plays, many of them enlivened by impossible events. Churchill is a staunchly political writer, a writer who seeks to challenge audiences’ complacencies about the real life of the real world, but flights of imagination give resonance to her unblinking view of reality’s horrors, using the unreal to probe the deep grammar of reality.

Continue reading...

How to Defeat These Thoughts: The Questions of Wallace Shawn

[This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2009/2010 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books. The Winter 2010/2011 issue has been published, so I'm now free to reprint this essay, and I'll also recommend the new issue to you, because in addition to the wide-ranging reviews of books, there are also good interviews with William Gibson and Lewis Hyde.]

ANDRE: Well, Wally, how do you think it affects an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can't reach each other, and their lives are obsessive and driven and desperate?  Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events and violence and terror?  Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? 

—Wallace Shawn & Andr矇 Gregory, My Dinner with Andr矇

1.
Wallace Shawn's most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, is a dream and a provocation and a conundrum, but most of all, it is a culmination: if all of Shawn's previous plays were to sit down and write an autobiography, this is what it might look like.

Theater of War

I began watching Theater of War with low expectations.  Documentaries about the making of plays usually disappoint me for a variety of reasons, not the least being that what works well on stage seldom works well on film -- in so many ways, the art forms are the opposite of each other.  The process of making plays is also not inherently dramatic -- it's generally slow and repetitive, often frustrating, and the best rehearsal processes, at least in my experience, are ones all about doing as much wrong as possible in order to find, through experiment and elimination, what's right.

I often found Theatre of War gripping, however.  Partly, this is because I'm interested in the people involved -- Tony Kushner, George C. Wolfe, Meryl Streep, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht.  The film uses the opportunity of chronicling the 2006 production of Mother Courage and Her Children put on by the Public Theater in Central Park to chronicle much more than that -- to explore Brecht's life and work, and to meditate on essential questions of art and politics.

The Public's production starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, was directed by George C. Wolfe, and the translation/adaptation was by Tony Kushner, with music by Jeanine Tesori.  Great actors, a tremendously creative director, and a script by one of the greatest playwrights of the last century translated/adapted by one of the greatest American playwrights of the last twenty-five years.  As ingredients for productions go, that's a pretty marvelous mix, and part of my interest in the film was in seeing how all of those people worked together.

I don't know if the production was artistically successful -- I am inclined to trust Michael Feingold's judgment on things when it comes to Brecht, and he had only the barest praise for it.  That doesn't really matter for the movie, though, because the film can sift and sort, showing us only the most interesting moments of the many hours filmed.  Mostly, director/editor John Walter decided to focus on Meryl Streep's performance, and the judgment seems to have been a good one, because it lets us glimpse some of the development of the role.

All of that is fine and good, especially for someone like me, who prefers rehearsals to performances.  But you don't have to be a theatre geek to get a lot from this film, because Walter opens things out effectively, bringing in discussions of Marxism, politics, culture, and history.  It's not obvious why the filmmakers settled on having Tufts University professor and writer Jay Cantor talk about Marxism and Brecht, but the choice turns out to have been inspired -- Cantor is both insightful and funny, with good screen presence, and I sometimes found myself thinking, "Forget Streep and Kline -- let's get back to Jay Cantor and the labor theory of value!"

For me, though, the most exciting material was about Brecht, Helene Weigel, and the Berliner Ensemble.  I could listen to Carl Weber reminisce about Brecht for hours, and Barbara Brecht-Schall's reminiscences of life with her parents were fascinating, though all too brief.  (If only they'd been able to add Eric Bentley!)  I doubt some of these sections would be as compelling to someone who was not particularly interested in Brecht.  I spent much time during my undergraduate years in a love-hate relationship with his work; have, over the last fifteen years, read the majority of his plays, poems, and essays; and have seen quite a few productions, especially of Mother Courage.  Brecht remains a writer I wrestle with more than embrace, but that in some ways makes him a writer of more interest to me than most others (indeed, among playwrights, I would rank him second only to Beckett in the 20th century).  John Walter skilfully weaves together ideas and information that would have proved daunting to many other filmmakers.

Ultimately, there is too much information and too many idea for the film to really cohere, but that didn't bother me too much  -- because I'd gone in with low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the movie was interesting, and then I was willing to follow wherever it wanted to go.  Any of its five sections could have been expanded into a film unto itself, but I was okay with that.  Theater of War got me thinking about Brecht again, about art and politics, about fame and history and humanity.  Most movies accomplish far less.

Dhalgren on Stage

Here's a nice birthday present:

On April 1 — [Samuel R.] Delany’s 68th birthday — the Kitchen will begin staging an adaptation [of Dhalgren] called Bellona, Destroyer of Cities. Its director and writer is Jay Scheib, an MIT professor and rising theater-world star who’s been obsessed with Dhalgren for years. He once devoted an MIT course to the book, and has even adapted it into a play in German.

That news comes from a good, basic overview of Delany and Dhalgren in New York Magazine. I thought the description of the novel as "like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome" was pretty amusing. (It made me want to see a picture of Gertrude Stein with Tina Turner hair.)

The play is not strictly an adaptation of the novel, it seems:

The Kitchen adaptation aims to be the next cycle of Dhalgren: It begins where the novel ends, with a new character—a woman instead of a man—entering Bellona. "In the novel," Scheib says, "when the narrator shows up, he has sex with a woman who turns into a tree. And then he has sex with a guy, and then with a girl. Then another guy. Then a guy and a girl. So we try to keep that spirit alive."

Bellona, Destroyer of Cities runs April 1-10, and there will be a post-show discussion with Chip on April 3. I would love to be there, but it's not possible. If anybody attends the show, I'd love to hear what you think of it!

Wallace Shawn at The Quarterly Conversation

I'm happy whenever one of my favorite playwrights, Wallace Shawn, gets some attention.  Andrew Ervin has written an interesting personal essay at The Quarterly Conversation about Shawn and white privilege, his thoughts sparked by Shawn's latest publications, Essays and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

I wrote about those two books and Shawn's whole career as a writer for the most recent print issue of Rain Taxi.  While you'll have to get your hands on the dead tree magazine itself to read it all (for now), here are three paragraphs from it to whet your appetite...

Radio Play: The Designated Mourner

First, obviously, I ate the cake. And then I grabbed some matches which sat nearby me, and I glanced around, and I lit the bit of paper. "I am the designated mourner," I said.

The bit of paper wasn't very big, but it burned rather slowly, because of the cake crumbs. I thought I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floor -- plummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell. He name, once said by so many to be "immortal," would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting: forgetting his name, forgetting him, and forgetting all the ones who remembered him.

I'm working on an essay for Rain Taxi about the plays and essays of Wallace Shawn (in my opinion, one of the great writers of our time), and via a link in this profile/interview, I discovered that WNYC produced an uncensored radio version of Shawn's greatest play, The Designated Mourner, in 2002, and that that radio version is available as streaming audio here on the intertubes.

And we're not talking just any radio version -- this one is done under the direction of Andre Gregory using the cast of his 2000 production: Wallace Shawn, Shawn's longtime companion Deborah Eisenberg (herself among the greatest short story writers alive), and the excellent Larry Pine (best known to me for his magnificent performance as Dr. Astrov in Gregory's Uncle Vanya, filmed by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street, in which Shawn played Vanya). The Gregory production of the play is, in some circles at least, legendary, especially since it seemed impossible to get tickets if you were mortal (yes, I tried, and, being mortal, failed). Tickets were especially difficult to get because the play was performed for an intimate audience -- I've heard there were chairs for about 30 people -- and the run was not particularly long.

So huge kudos to WNYC for the radio version. It's different in tone and rhythm from the original 1996 production, directed and later filmed by David Hare, and Shawn is not as varied and compelling a performer as Mike Nichols was in the lead role of Jack, but Eisenberg gives a vastly more interesting performance than Miranda Richardson and Pine is different from but at least the equal to David de Keyser. The voices and deliveries of Shawn, Eisenberg, and Pine are more noticeably balanced in Gregory's version of the plan than in Hare's -- Shawn performs the lines with stagy deliberation in his famous syrupy, high-pitched voice; Eisenberg's voice is more ethereal, distanced, portentous, like a voice in a memory or a dream; Pine is the only one who sounds at least marginally ordinary and human, which is particularly ironic given how Jack portrays Howard as such a disconnected elitist. It's a more coherent and equitable production than Hare's (the film, at least), where Mike Nichols gave such an astounding performance that the other actors struggled to keep up with him.

Shawn's plays from Aunt Dan & Lemon on have contained more monologues than dialogue (and The Fever is entirely a monologue), and none rely on complex sets, so they are well served as radio plays. The Designated Mourner especially so; it burrows into your mind and imagination.

By the way, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn's new play -- his first since The Designated Mourner -- is strange and fascinating, in many ways a culmination of the themes and motifs he's been playing with for his entire career. It begins as a kind of science fiction story about a man whose invention ruins the food supply of the world, then it becomes an explicitly sexual, utterly surreal, and pretty dark riff on fairy tales (especially "The White Cat") before ending up as an enigmatic and oddly affecting amalgam of both. If Robert Aickman and K.W. Jeter got together to write a play, it might have turned out something like this.

NH Theatre Events

Posting here has been light because at the moment I'm in rehearsals for The Winter's Tale in Sandwich, New Hampshire. It's the realization of a lifelong dream -- I am getting to play the King of Bohemia! (Otherwise known as Polixenes, but I insist everyone refer to me as the King of Bohemia. I rule over many caf矇s and have my own line of designer liberal guilt.) For anyone who happens to be nearby, the show runs August 11-16 at the outdoor stage of the Sandwich Fairgrounds at 2pm, rain or shine.

Also, I haven't yet had a chance to write about my experience as a participant in the first of the Write On Golden Pond playwrighting/screenwriting workshops offered by Whitebridge Farm Productions here in central NH. I've known workshop leader Ernest Thompson (winner of one of them Oscar thingies for writing an obscure indie flick called On Golden Pond) for longer than either of us would care to admit, and for five or six years I participated in an informal playwrighting group he led, so I more or less knew what I was getting myself into, but the workshop exceeded all my expectations -- easily one of the best I've participated in, and having been a playwrighting major at NYU for three years, I've been in a lot of workshops.

A second writing workshop is coming up in two weeks, and I can honestly and enthusiastically recommend it for anybody interested in dramatic writing. It's an intense, immensely fulfilling experience. Also, I'm told financial aid is available. And New Hampshire in the summer is beautiful. (Well, when it's not raining. But even the rain is beautiful!)

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

Harold Pinter has died.

Here are the last words from one of his last plays, Celebration:

Silence.

The WAITER stands alone.

WAITER

When I was a boy my grandfather used to take me to the edge of the cliffs and we'd look out to sea. He bought me a telescope. I don't think they have telescopes anymore. I used to look through this telescope and sometimes I'd see a boat. The boat would grow bigger through the telescopic lens. Sometimes I'd see people on the boat. A man, sometimes, and a woman, or sometimes two men. The sea glistened.

My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back.

He got that absolutely right.

And I'd like to make one further interjection.

He stands still.

Slow fade.

Slings & Arrows

It took a few recommendations (including Kelley Eskridge mentioning it and Abigail Nussbaum writing a comprehensive review), but I recently watched all 18 episodes of the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows, a smart and tremendously entertaining show about a theatre festival very similar to the Stratford Festival, where many of the actors in the series have appeared.

Stratford is a place of magic for me -- I have only been there once, in the mid-90s, but it was among the greatest theatre experiences of my life. Or, rather, two productions were among the greatest theatre experiences of my life: productions of Amadeus and The Merry Wives of Windsor (we also saw Macbeth and The Gondoliers -- the former was, I thought then and expect I would think now, dull and awful; the latter was well done, but it's not among my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan shows, so while I appreciated it, I didn't feel much passion for it). I have long lost the program from that summer, but two actors so impressed me that their names have stuck with me ever since: Stephen Ouimette and William Hutt.

Ouimette played Mozart in Amadeus to Brian Bedford's Salieri. He gave the role a range I had never imagined it could possess, making the character into something entirely different from what Tom Hulce did in the movie. Ouimette was also in Merry Wives, and one of the things I most remember is that I didn't realize it was the same person for quite a while. Here was an actor playing utterly different characters in repertory, something I had never experienced before, and which opened my eyes to what real acting can be: the challenge, the fun, the beauty of it. But the real revelation was Hutt as Falstaff. I had just finished high school, and up to that point had not seen any truly great performances of Shakespeare, and few performances of his comedies at all. They never seemed very funny to me on the page, and reading them was much more of a chore than reading the tragedies and histories. But I laughed throughout this production of Merry Wives, and most especially at Hutt's performance.

Stephen Ouimette was one of the stars of Slings & Arrows, and William Hutt was a guest star in the third season, giving a tremendously moving performance as an elderly actor who wants to play Lear before he dies (Hutt himself would die at age 87 in June 2007, less than a year after the end of Slings & Arrows). The presence of these two actors alone was enough to ensure my interest, but what held that interest was the intelligence of the writing and the impressively high quality of the acting from the first episode to the last.

From early on, Slings & Arrows was conceived as a three-season show, with each season following the ups and downs of putting on a particular production -- Hamlet in the first season, Macbeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. The events in the lives of the characters often parallel or echo the events within the plays, and the show deliberately explores ideas of youth in season one, middle age (and ambition) in season two, and old age (and mortality) in season three. It doesn't all work -- the second season is somewhat weaker than the first and third; I never bought the motivation for Paul Gross's character's insanity; the third season suggests an answer to the question of whether Ouimette's character is really a ghost or a figment of Gross's character's imagination, a question that should never have been answered, etc. -- but there are no episodes that felt like clunkers, and remarkably few episodes that didn't feel tightly conceived and cleverly executed.

One of the smart choices made by the writers of the show (Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney primarily -- Coyne and McKinney also play recurring characters) was to treat Shakespeare's works seriously and respectfully, but to make the series itself a comedy. All the characters are basically stereotypes, with a generally predictable range of personality and emotion, though the main characters do develop over the course of the three seasons (I would call the musical theatre actors in the third season caricatures if I hadn't lived with such people). But most of the real moments of vivid, multidimensional acting occur in the scenes from Shakespeare's plays -- not just because Shakespeare could write brilliantly complex characters, but because Shakespeare's plays offer us insight into what is going on within these character's lives. The characters don't become fully real, fully human until they are performing. Which is utterly appropriate to a show that is primarily about actors.

Because it is a comedy, there is very little about the arc of each season of Slings & Arrows that is a surprise. We know each show will be a huge hit (artistically if not financially) and that the main characters will all triumph in the end, just as we know that everybody will get married at the end of a Shakespearean comedy. Suspense about the end result is not what holds our interest -- what keeps us engaged is wondering how we will get to that end, and the marvelous individual scenes along the way. The Slings & Arrows writers loved symmetry, and they had great fun pairing characters and situations, creating subplots to comment on the main plots, etc., and the show's directors and editors took advantage of every such moment, particularly as they used the progress of one production at the festival to comment on another.

The overall vision of the show is a sentimental, idealistic, and simplistic one, a vision that very much celebrates the mystical, Romantic idea of actors as magicians and holy fools. In a documentary about the world of the theatre, such a vision would be infuriating; in Slings & Arrows it is charming. It charms us into believing -- at least for the hours we are watching the show -- that the lines between art and commerce can be clearly drawn, that art can heal wounds and make peace, that everyone has a great performance somewhere inside them, that sincerity matters more than anything else. Though its characters have their cynical moments, the show itself isn't the least bit cynical. If it weren't so funny, and if scene by scene it weren't so well written, the Pollyanna approach to life that is at the show's core would be insufferable. Instead, Slings & Arrows presents us with a fantasy world we all might want to live in. It's certainly one I was in no hurry to leave, perhaps because after years of disillusioning experiences with theatre at all levels, I still have enough of an idealist buried somewhere inside me to believe that maybe it isn't entirely a fantasy world.

Meanwhile, up at Stratford they're doing Taming of the Shrew, and so am I right now. They're also doing Romeo & Juliet, which I taught for the first time this past school year (badly, I must say, but so it goes). The company that produces our Shrew, Advice to the Players, also runs a camp for kids, and a bunch of those kids (from this year and past ones) decided to put on their own production of R&J, directed by and starring them, the day after Shrew closes. Because they thought it would be fun. Because there's something about Shakespeare and about the theatre that they love. Idealists and lunatics, magicians and holy fools! And it gives my heart great joy!

The Sound and the Fury (April 7th, 1928)

I was surprised that some people left at intermission. After all, it was the final performance of Elevator Repair Service's production of The Sound and the Fury (April 7th, 1928) at New York Theatre Workshop, it was an extended run, and if you'd been exposed to any of the reviews or publicity, you would know that the script of this play was the actual, pretty much complete text of the first section of William Faulkner's novel, with the various characters recited or portrayed by multiple actors. If you want South Pacific, that's playing uptown.

Nonetheless, there was audience attrition. I sometimes forget that bewildering joys and joyful bewilderments are an esoteric taste. But I am deeply grateful to the ever-intrepid Liz G. for having the foresight to get tickets, and the great generosity to offer me one. (I should note here that NYTW has a great program called CheapTix Sundays, where tickets can be bought in advance for only $20. When the average Off-Broadway ticket these days tends to go for at least $55, it's great to have such programs helping to keep audiences at least somewhat diverse.)

The play began with the cast frozen on the set, distant sounds seeping from the radio upstage center, and some basic information about the main characters projected at the top of the stage. Then the first words, projected and then spoken: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."

As anyone familiar with the novel knows, the I is Benjy, the mentally-handicapped "idiot", and April 7th, 1928 is his 33rd birthday. Benjy has no conception of time, and so his memories float through his present reality with little to indicate deep-past or near-past.

It's was difficult at first to make much sense of what was going on on-stage. Before the first words, actually, came clog dancing. Then Benjy's narration. A copy of the book was on stage, and sometimes actors read from it, but often -- particularly with dialogue -- they worked from memory. Sometimes they said their own speech tags, sometimes the speech tags were uttered sotto voce by another actor. The technique soon became mesmerizing, but it was also essential to our understanding who was who -- just because an actor was the black female servant Dilsey at one moment didn't mean that same actor could not soon become the white male Jason.

For all its weirdness, the ERS production was less bewildering on a first encounter than Faulkner's text itself, because the various time shifts were delineated with changes of actors, lighting, and/or sound. This may not have been obvious at first, but once the text started returning to certain scenes, it got much easier to comprehend.

The acting ranged over various styles, sometimes realistic, oftentimes not (at times, the play felt like The Three Stooges Meet Robert Duvall). The cast was extraordinarily versatile and precise, though -- particularly Susie Sokol, who only plays Benjy. She was like a great silent movie comedian who has been transported to the present day: her performance brilliantly physical, transfixing, every gesture and every glance efficient, controlled, and richly communicative. Though Benjy is the narrator of Faulkner's text, Sokol spoke less than most of the other actors, an effect both strangely intimate and unsettlingly distant -- though his thoughts and experiences were presented to us, Benjy himself remained a fascinating cipher.

It's been more than a week now since I saw the show, and it has remained vivid in my mind, a rare example of a play doing what, really, only a play could do -- the book is an entirely different experience, and a movie of the production would be different still (and, unless a brilliant director discovered a form that could extend the production's discoveries into the new medium, a film of the production would be a vastly lesser entity). This is what keeps theatre vital -- not productions that attempt to be sit-coms or movies-of-the-week, but productions that try to exploit the particular experiences that can be created by live actors in front of an audience.

Of Sunday and Macbeth

My yearnings for theatre were sated last week when, through luck and happenstance, I got to accompany friends to two of the most talked-about shows in New York at the moment: Sunday in the Park with George at the Roundabout Theatre and Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As events and opportunities to spend time with friends, both were completely pleasurable. As aesthetic artifacts, both were disappointing.

The better of the shows in terms of script is the lesser of the shows in terms of production: Macbeth. The central problems are that the play is a hodgepodge of ideas and techniques and that Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth gives a one-note performance in the key of overwrought. (Patrick Stewart's performance is, like the whole show, occasionally extraordinary and generally competent, but lacking coherence.) The director, Rupert Goold, has chosen to put the play in quasi-Stalinist dress and on a single set: a white-tiled hospital ward-asylum-torture chamber, augmented with projected imagery when necessary. It's an effective choice, giving the play a sense of unity and menace, particularly in conjunction with the choice to make the witches into three nurses. The opening scene with the bloody soldier is hilarious at first, because the actor playing the soldier performs like an epileptic animatron, but the segue into the next scene, when the witches wonder when they'll meet again, is marvelously creepy.

Indeed, many of my favorite moments in the play were the scene transitions. Talking with other people who have seen the show, many of whom liked it far more than I, the banquet scene gets mentioned as a high point, and for me it was so, but not as much for the scene itself as for the movement from the scene of Banquo's murder (on a train, staged clumsily) to the banquet -- there is a puzzling shift to the entire cast singing something as if they've briefly been beamed in from Sweeney Todd, but just because it's puzzling doesn't mean it's not effective (I'm a sucker for sudden choral impulses), and then the chorus becomes the banquet. It's a lovely bit of choreography. Banquo gets to charge in, face and chest drenched in gore, and jump on the table, and then comes the intermission (or "interval" as the announcement at BAM said -- apparently they even imported the house manager from England). The scene is repeated when the second half of the play begins, this time sans Banquo and gore, so we get to see that Macbeth is -- shock of shocks -- delusional! It's one of the dubious choices that gives this production of Shakespeare's shortest play a running time closer to that of your average production of Hamlet.

Ultimately, my favorite performances were those of actors in smaller roles, particularly Christopher Patrick Nolan as the porter, portrayed with such diabolical menace that the character seems to have little to do with Shakespeare's original, but is nonetheless captivating to behold -- many of the other actors strain for similarly overblown effects, but produce characters that are less compelling, less nuanced, more like a reanimated bag of tics and tricks than a person.

Nonetheless, this is absolutely the best production of Macbeth I've ever seen. That is faint praise, though, because for some reason, though Macbeth is the Shakespeare play I have seen most often (yes, even more than A Midsummer Night's Dream, but that's probably because I've vowed never to see that one ever again lest it reach levels of fatal toxicity in my system), I have nonetheless had the bad luck to see nothing but truly atrocious productions of it, including an utterly lifeless version at the 1995 Stratford Festival in Ontario.

(I should note that Rick Bowes said the only reason I didn't like Kate Fleetwood's performance was that I couldn't adjust to the nontraditional casting of a woman in the role.)

Sunday in the Park is an altogether better production, one with strong and thoughtful performances throughout, and a coherent style and vision. My primary complaint was with the orchestra -- well, band, really. The production began at a tiny British theatre (yes, this is another import, a fact Michael Feingold has complained about) and despite moving to very modern and expansive digs here in the U.S., the band has not been expanded, and the lack is painful to anyone who knows the original soundtrack -- excruciatingly painful at a couple of key moments, in fact. Plenty of musicals can survive just with a piano -- I once saw a perfectly good Sweeney Todd performed that way -- but the orchestrations of Sunday in the Park provide a level of meaning to the show that is simply not available without at least a few more instruments (preferably some brass) than the new production has. The final moments of Act I, with the song "Sunday", are breathtaking with an orchestra, and while they were still affecting at the Roundabout -- it's one of the best moments in all of Stephen Sondheim's work -- the emotional power was greatly reduced from what it could be.

Sunday in the Park provides a few gnarly problems to any production. First, there's the technical challenge: how do you assemble one of the most famous post-Impressionist paintings during the course of the first act, for instance? This production solves the technical challenges cleverly -- with projected animations. Even in these days of massive Broadway spectacles, the animations in Sunday in the Park are impressive because they make the stage itself into a blank piece of canvas, allowing quick and occasionally stunning transformations. Sometimes the animations are distracting, but more often they are magical, as props and set pieces that previously seemed solid evaporate into thin air.

The other problem with Sunday in the Park is the second act. Critics have, ever since the original production of 1983/84, complained about the second act, and its shallow satire of the 1980s art world has not aged well. This is, though, primarily a problem with one song, albeit a long one: "Putting It Together" (rewritten to somewhat better effect for the revue of that title, where it became about putting a show together) -- the rest of the act is, though a bit ethereal and certainly less impressive than the first act, not particularly painful. The new production does its best with "Putting It Together", but Daniel Evans makes George so unsympathetic, so much the stereotype of the bristling and bitter and whiny artist, that the emotional possibilities of the second act's conclusion are lost, and what remains feels forced and sour.

It is, though, a generally enjoyable production, though seldom transcendent in the way the material can be.

A Night Out

I hadn't been out to the theatre in a while, but the marvelous Liz G. had a spare ticket to Next to Normal at Second Stage Theatre, and so I took her up on her offer of a night out. I doubted I would care much for the play, but it's been a few months since I've seen a live stage production, and my addiction is deep enough that I was in severe withdrawal.

My problem when I see new plays is that I tend to blame all faults on the script. I first noticed this back in college when I was reviewing for NYU's Washington Square News, every new (and generally painfully awful) play seemed to me to suffer from atrociously cliched and/or banal and/or pretentious and/or halfbaked and/or insipid scripts. In a city where so many actors, designers, and directors go perpetually unemployed, it was rare to see a show that was particularly badly acted, directed, or designed. Or it may be that my own focus on playwrighting caused and causes me to locate faults in the area I know best.

In any case, once again, I thought most of the problems with the show were at the basic level of the script (well, libretto, lyrics, and music in this case). The actors didn't seem quite warmed up in the first ten minutes or so, but once they found their footing, they performed with real precision and intensity, which is what made the play bearable for me -- much as I liked the idea of a musical about a manic-depressive woman and her family, the story was so predictable and uninspired, so sentimental and cloyingly movie-of-the-week in its development that it's a wonder I found the experience of watching it basically painless and occasionally pleasurable. While certainly some of the pleasure did come from scripted moments -- if he can repress his schmaltzy tendencies, Brian Yorkey has the potential to be an extraordinary lyricist, since a few of the songs have clever and affecting lines -- most came from the sheer energy of the actors, all of whom throw themselves into the material with more gusto than it deserves.

The last play I saw directed by Michael Greif was Rent, a show I basically loathe (for many reasons), though the slickness of direction that bothered me so much with Rent works better here, with a story of upper-middle-class anxiety. The set is the sort of scaffolding thing that was new and interesting in the '60s, but it works well enough here, and is served particularly well by Kevin Adams's lighting. The costume design is contemporary, of course, and the characters go through an awful lot of outfits -- the actor in me was cringing at the amount of quick-changes.

As we were talking about the show, Liz and I started wondering about the audiences that producers of new musicals must be trying to reach. It's nice to see a musical where the characters sing lines with the sort of profanity that everybody uses casually these days, but it's strange that the music sounds like it was written in the late '70s -- really, many of the songs could easily pass themselves off as trunk tunes from Neil Diamond or Anne Murray. Meanwhile, the story is one that is probably dear to the hearts of suburbanites: family dysfunction, lots of pills, kids who are over-pressured to get into Yale and so end up doing lots of pills themselves, etc. From a producer's standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to put such a show on the boards, because the audience that is going to pay $80 for a ticket to a play in NY is the kind of audience that is likely to have good memories of Neil Diamond and Anne Murray songs and is worried about all the prescriptions in the medicine cabinet. Indeed, the audience at Next to Normal seemed to truly love the show, and quite a few people gave it a standing ovation. (I don't say this as a criticism, merely an observation. Some of my best friends have fond memories of Neil Diamond and Anne Murray songs and have way too many prescriptions in their medicine cabinets. They, too, deserve musicals.)

The sad effect of all this on the American theatre is that it makes something like Threepenny Opera, a play that will reach the 80th anniversary of its premiere this summer, seem breathtakingly radical still.

But it was good to get out to the theatre again, something I need to do more often. (I'm sad that Soho Rep's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted has been postponed to October -- I had been looking forward to seeing it this spring.)

Liz brought me goodies, too, which made me tremendously happy, including the manuscript of a new novel by a writer whose first book excited me quite a bit and copies of The SFWA European Hall of Fame and the late, great Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends, a book that is an utter delight and belongs in every household. Really.

Now I must head off to more peregrinations and intemperate thoughts, some of which I am certain I shall share. Until then...

Improv Everywhere

Always one to be behind the times, I'd not heard of Improv Everywhere until today, but a quick scan of the website explained an event I'd unwittingly witnessed a few weeks ago: No Pants 2k8, where hundreds of people in seven cities around the world took off their pants (that is, trousers -- in London I once made what I thought was an innocuous comment about "pants" and everybody thought I was making a ribald comment about underwear) and rode the subways. I'd ridden a train with one of these groups, and assumed they were participating in some sort of marathon. Or something. I don't know. You see weird stuff in NY all the time.

But the latest Improv Everywhere event is marvelous -- be sure to watch the video of Frozen Grand Central. Hilarious and beautiful. Long may they improvise!

A Few Quick Notes

It's likely there won't be much in the way of updates around here for at least a few days, but I have a few fragments of information and marginal bits of thought to share before I go...

• John Joseph Adams wrote a nice piece for SciFi Wire about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's guest editing of Best American Fantasy.
  
  
• Speaking of Best Americans, all the various ones from various publishers now seem to be out in stores. I stayed up much too late last night, utterly engrossed in The Best American Essays 2007, guest edited by David Foster Wallace. I always find a few essays in that book to be fascinating or impressive, but none of the other volumes I've read have so completely hooked me -- indeed, in all the other volumes I've encountered at least one essay that cured insomnia. That's not the case with this edition. I was reading the first essay, Jo Ann Beard's "Werner", last night at a pizza place across from Cooper Union, and I not only nearly missed the Jonathan Lethem event because the piece was so gripping, but it was a struggle not to burst into tears at the end of it. Breathtaking. As are so many of the other essays.
  
  
• I am doing everything I can not to run out and buy a copy of Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. The good people at McNally Robinson can attest to my immense powers of self-control. They watched as I struggled with the Mr. Hyde that kept pushing me toward it, toward it, toward it... People emailing to say how much they're enjoying it and how brilliant it is do not help the cause. I actually petted a friend's copy of it when we went out to see the play Have You Seen Steve Steven?. Even though it's a heavy book, she is addicted to it and carries it around with her wherever she goes. Actually, I think she does this to torture people like me, who lack the time to tackle a gazillion-page tome of brilliance right now. What else would explain her putting the book on the table at the bar we went to? In the middle of the table? Why why why do my friends insist on tormenting me?!?
  
  
• How was the play? Entertaining, generally well acted and directed, but the script (an amalgamation of Albee and Ionesco) falls apart in the last third, as if the writer didn't really know what to do with her set-up and threw her hands in the air and said, "Well, whatever!" I liked what was going on in the end more than what was going on in the beginning -- a bit too much of a familiar "aren't people in the mid-west funny?" and "isn't middle-class suburban life suffocating?" attempt at satire, despite some marvelous lines -- so it would have been nice if the script actually created a context for the absurdity of words divorced from meanings to be more, well, meaningful (the play becomes a game of ping-pong with free-floating signifiers). The end is amusing enough in its oddity, but there's no weight to it. It's strange, but not estranging. Nonetheless, watching the play was not at all a boring or tedious experience, and 13P is a really great venture, one I hope to continue to follow.
  
  
• Finally, as Woody Allen once said, "In summing up, I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don't. Would you take two negative messages?"

"Freely Flows the Blood of Those Who Moralize"

Too much blood?! What planet do Warner Bros. execs come from? (Planet of the Apes, clearly.) The New York Post reports:

Tim Burton has been told to tone down the gore in the screen version of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," starring Johnny Depp. The suits at Warner Bros. "became a tad squeamish when they viewed grisly footage of blood splashing across the set as Depp slits the throats of his customers," London's Daily Mail reports. In another scene that has the studio on edge, a 10-year-old boy feeds human body parts into a meat grinder to make meat pies. The movie, co-starring Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, opens in December.

Sweeney Todd is all about the blood -- it's grand guignol operetta! Blood and music, baby!

I'm certainly not the only person curious to see how the various actors handle the singing, particularly Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli. In terms of acting, a lot of the casting seems perfect and brilliant, but ... I've seen badly-sung productions of Sweeney Todd and they're exquisitely painful in all the wrong ways. I adore Sondheim, and Sweeney Todd in particular, but it's tough stuff, and the show is almost entirely sung.

But I shall reserve judgment, because Tim Burton has often surprised me in good ways, and Sondheim has given it all his blessing (so far), making this the upcoming movie I most look forward to seeing.

"Words Can Mean Anything"

EURYDICE
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.

If we were in a restaurant, sometimes I would get embarrassed because Orpheus looked sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.

But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Words can mean anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

(She looks at her father, embarrassed for revealing too much.)

Or maybe two or three things. But only one thing at a time.

--Sarah Ruhl,
Eurydice

A Number by Caryl Churchill

I love reading a script that makes me want to direct it, because the act of reading becomes so much more intense than it is when reading a script that is merely interesting because of its ideas, characters, structure, or story. Some of Caryl Churchill's plays, much as I find them intellectually engaging, don't appeal to my inner director, but some of her recent short plays, such as Far Away and A Number, are so spare and enigmatic that reading and (inevitably) rereading them provokes the imaginative concentration required when directing, and does so more than most other scripts I know.

A Number is a science fiction play, just as Far Away and the earlier Skriker are fantasy plays. Except in the theatre world there are only such things as plays, and nobody much bothers worrying about what to call them or their writers. (How odd it would be to hear someone describe Churchill, or anyone else, as "the famous sci-fi playwright"!)

Cloning is the ostensible subject of A Number, but it's also not, because the play is as full of silences and ambiguities as anything by Pinter or Beckett. There are no stage directions, barely any set description -- all we're told is the play takes place "where Salter lives", and all we know about Salter is that he's "a man in his early sixties" and that he has two sons named Bernard, the first one forty and the second thirty-five, and a son named Michael Black, who is also thirty-five. Churchill's plays are often hard to read because she writes dialogue with particular structures for each play. With some scripts she is very specific about how lines overlap. With The Skriker she created a dialect for the "shapeshifter and death portent" of the title that reads like something James Joyce might have tried to write for naughty children. Far Away employs a simple language of short sentences and vivid, nightmarish imagery ("The rats are bleeding out of their mouths and ears, which is good, and so were the girls by the side of the road").

A Number is more difficult to read than those plays, because the characters' words bleed into each other. Here's how it begins:

B2 [Bernard]: A number
SALTER: you mean
B2: a number of them, of us, a considerable
SALTER: say
B2: ten, twenty
SALTER: didn't you ask?
B2: I got the impression
SALTER: why didn't you ask?
B2: I didn't think of asking.

The play is designed for two actors: one plays Salter, the father, and one plays all the sons. There are five short scenes. Performances in London and New York reportedly ran between fifty and sixty-five minutes. Depending on the production, I expect A Number can feel either entirely inconsequential or vividly mysterious, a prod to the imagination. Churchill doesn't write a play "about" cloning, but rather a play that includes cloning, a play that couldn't exist without cloning. It touches briefly on various issues of identity and authenticity, of genetics and personality, but it does not explore or debate these ideas the way a typical play "ripped from the headlines" would. Handled with sensitivity by talented actors, I expect these ideas could gain gravity through implication, through seeing how they are played out in the immediate emotional existence of characters for whom they are not issues or ideas, but, rather, the problems of life.

In his latest collection of plays, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Jose Rivera includes a wonderful postscript called "36 Assumptions About Writing Plays", a few of which apply quite well to A Number:

Theatre is closer to poetry and music than it is to the novel.

Each line of dialogue is like a piece of DNA: potentially containing the entire play and its thesis; potentially telling us the beginning, middle, and end of the play.

Rhythm is the key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of language, the beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, nonsequiturs, foreign languages.

Action doesn't have to be overt. It can be the steady deepening of the dramatic situation...or your characters' steady emotional movements from one emotional/psychological condition to another: ignorance to enlightenment, weakness to strength, illness to wholeness.

Strive to be mysterious, not confusing.

A Number is deeply mysterious, but it does not have to be confusing, because the situation is laid out with a certain amount of clarity: Salter, years before the play takes place, paid a scientist to clone his son. He didn't realize the scientist made twenty clones instead of one, and so Salter is faced with having to tell one of his sons that he is not the original, and then gets to meet some of the others, each of whom responds quite differently to the news. Why Salter had one of his sons cloned is explained with a couple of different, contradictory reasons, and Salter may be lying. The past is not what's important, the reasons are not important: the facts must be dealt with in the present:

B2: Because there's this person who's identical to me
SALTER: he's not
B2: who's not identical, who's like
SALTER: not even very
B2: not very like but very something terrible which is exactly the same genetic person
SALTER: not the same person
B2: and I don't like it.

The only son who has his own name, and the only character with a first and last name, appears at the end. He has a life, and feels comfortable in himself, but Salter never feels that Michael truly has an identity -- the worrying has slipped from the sons to the father, who previously was most concerned with suing the scientist who made more clones than were agreed on. But Michael isn't particularly annoyed:

MICHAEL: I think it's funny, I think it's delightful
SALTER: delightful?
...
MICHAEL: We've got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We've got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We've got thirty percent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.

To Salter, the cloning is always a big deal, though in what way it's a big deal changes over the course of the play. To Michael, it's an amusing tidbit about himself, but it doesn't change who he is, his memories, his family, his friends. The play ends with the (to Salter horrifying) revelation that Michael likes his life.

Churchill's plays don't force emotion on the actors or audience, but they do leave wide possibilities for tremendous emotion -- I can imagine ways that Salter's slow devastation through the play could end up being complex and moving. The script is a blueprint, and a thrilling one to read, because it leaves so many possibilities open. Churchill is enough of a master to be able to skirt the edge of meaninglessness without sliding over; her recent plays are richly suggestive, and therefore can reward imaginative readers as much as a good production can.