Writing link – Wolf Hall in Playbill

The company of Wolf Hall boogie on Broadway
(photo: Johan Persson)

I've got a busy spring coming up, with lots of Shakespearean theater and related work to cover. To get started, I re-read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the exceedingly well-turned historical novel about Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn. Then I wrote a layman's guide to the relevant history for Playbill Online: 

http://playbill.com/news/article/tudor-mania-in-the-theatre-a-guide-to-the-royalty-of-wolf-hall-345663

Wolf Hall covers the same stretch of history as Henry the 8th, which Shakespeare collaborated on with his protege, John Fletcher. H8 is the only one of Will's plays that I've neither seen nor read. So I'm looking forward to reading that in the next week! I've also lined up Peter Sarsgaard as Hamlet (at CSC) and the first episode of the BBC's Wolf Hall with Mark Rylance.

Review: Romeo and Juliet (Broadway)

Aside from Orlando Bloom on the marquee, the most notable feature of the 2013 Broadway Romeo and Juliet—the one that you should know before you see it—is that director David Leveaux and his casting director (J.V. Mercanti) have cast black actors in the Capulet roles and white ones to play the Montagues. This addition of melanin to Shakespeare’s tragedy is clever, albeit in a juvenile way. It suggests that Leveaux wants to use Shakespearean drama at least partly to give perspective on current events. Presumably he’s thinking about the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the arrest of Cornel West, the stop-and-frisk policies of Mayor Bloomberg, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, and indeed the whole Republican Party’s stance towards President Obama.

His concept could work if it were rooted in a mythic approach to the play. In that case, the catharsis would serve as a promise of, or even just a plea for, a way forward from the turbulence of our current state of affairs. But Leveaux basically ignores the setting except as it affects the lovers’ selves and the basic mechanics of plot. This Verona is abstract, little more than atmosphere, and any specificity gets credited to Shakespeare. There’s no sense that the marriage of Juliet to Romeo might have healed the civil wound, nor that their double-suicide will purge the body politic.

In its defense, this R&J does involve
a mixed-race couple, which is still
taboo on many stages
(photo: Carol Rosegg)

Instead, Leveaux’s production is interested in how passion affects the two lovers. One of its strongest and best attributes is its sense of momentum: a heavily-edited script delivers the play in 150 minutes (plus intermission). Scenes follow one another without pause, actors enter on their colleagues’ heels. It’s especially striking how the action occurs within a week’s time, maybe as short as four days. Though Leveaux cuts plenty from the script, he (and maybe an uncredited dramaturg) retains its careful marking of day and night. In this version, the lovers see death as a means to gain eternity, to stop time.

But the hurried pace ends up serving the show poorly. Romeo opens the play mooning over another woman, applying the formulaic terms of love poetry. But in the role, Bloom delivers only the gist of the poetry. This means that his expressions of depth and grandeur sound little different from the verse he’d rattled off earlier. Similarly, Condola Rashad’s Juliet starts the play wide-eyed, writing “naïve” so broadly the balconies can read it. But she doesn’t show how her feelings grow more mature over the play’s passage. Rashad’s J is one who makes that choice because it’s what she’s read in books, not because she’s the embodiment of the tale. That’s a tragedy, but it’s not as rich or complex as the one Shakespeare wrote of a girl who becomes a woman and who chooses love over life knowingly. Leveaux and company hurry past any nuance, delivering a production that's accessible but shallow, pretty but unmoving.

Shakespeare notebook: Romeo & Juliet

A writer on Slate goes trolling today, claiming that Romeo & Juliet "hasn't aged well" and generally trashing Shakespeare's play. Alyssa Rosenberg is motivated by the announcement that Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad will play the tragic lovers on Broadway this fall. In fairness, Rosenberg does applaud the interracial casting. But she complains that the play is "horribly depressing." Putting aside the juvenile quality of that remark, her point is that R&J has an adolescent view of romance, "full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love."

Rosenberg's criticism might be valid if she executed a stronger reading of the play. To conclude "actors & actresses deserve richer roles than Romeo & Juliet" is to wear ignorance as a badge. Juliet, after all, is one of Shakespeare's richest female roles, maybe his first truly great role period. Romeo may be secondary to her in terms of depth, but he's got a vitality of his own. Mercutio and the Nurse are stupendous. Shakespeare's plotting may get iffy (see below) but his characterization is superlative.

Earlier, she comes off like a vapid producer or a bad dramaturg, complaining "Why are the families fighting? What's the inciting incident?" Her dull-minded complaints suggest that Rosenberg is approaching the play in a literal-minded fashion. She misses the sensibility of the setting. Blood is boiling in Verona. That's why the families are feuding & why the lovers embrace with such tragic haste. She also dismisses the themes rather than grappling with them. If passion has gripped Verona, then R&J's eruption of love is its embodiment. The whole world of the play is young, passionate, hot, sexy. From the beginning, the poetry confuses and conflates sex and death, eros & thanatos. Their suicides, in turn, purge the city of its condition. The tragedy is amplified by the missed chance to heal the city through marriage instead.

Death instead of sex: this is bush-league interpretation, Shakespeare 101, but Rosenberg doesn't even reach that level. Her criticism does have something worth noting, however. She argues that Romeo & Juliet isn't the play for our time. In Rosenberg's view, we live in an era of arrested development. So raising adolescent passion to mythic level, as Shakespeare does, isn't in our culture's best interests. It's the Platonic case against artists: R&J celebrates a bad worldview, so it deserves censure and shouldn't be staged.

The response—that R&J purges the juvenile from its setting, fictional and real—should be obvious. But Rosenberg also sets her reading up as a claim that audiences find the show "embarrassing and unsettling" because of its mythic passions and adolescent focus. She may have read Shakespeare's play but I suspect she hasn't watched it; her complaints fall apart in the face of the play's poetry, drama, and sheer momentum. R&J is one of Shakespeare's tightest plots; its only real flaw is the contrivance of the "missed letter", which would've informed Romeo that his beloved wasn't actually dead. It's also an extraordinary crowd-pleaser—audiences aren't embarrassed or unsettled, they're engaged and thrilled by Shakespeare's near-perfect dramaturgy. That fact leaves Rosenberg looking like a scold, wagging her finger at an audience for enjoying something they shouldn't.

I love Shakespeare this side of idolatry, so I'm anticipating this high-profile production with excitement. I'll point out a further pleasure: the Off-Broadway CSC's R&J, also in Fall '13. New Yorkers will have the pleasure of comparing approaches, not just as contrasts but as reflections of one another. See you there!

Broadway: An Enemy of the People

Only Michael Siberry (right), as decadent dad-in-law,
points the way to a new Ibsenesque,
an irrealism haunted by David Lynch hobgoblins 

An Enemy of the People

MTC at the Friedman Theater

written by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

directed by Doug Hughes

seen on September 28, 2012

A town's livelihood depends on its new spa, so it attacks a local doctor for proving that the cheap & dirty construction will spread disease, not cure it. Timed to coincide with the 2012 election, this revival of Ibsen's 1882 work finds its energy in condemning the know-nothing townspeople. Parallels to the Republican party draw themselves, of course. Adaptor Lenkiewicz polishes the play up with pithy dialogue and canny use of English idioms but she also cuts the protagonist's mulishness. Hughes follows her lead by directing a show that's light on subtext and heavy on rabble-rousing speechifying. Boyd Gaines, as the doctor, provides some depth, allowing himself to appear ridiculous by plumbing his middle-aged character's naïvety. MTC's impulse to stage Ibsen may be socially liberal but its aesthetics are too conservative to produce anything but easily-digestible melodrama. This Enemy's irony is that it's a safe crowd-pleaser about the wrongness of that approach in life, politics, and art.

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An Enemy of the People runs through November 11. Tickets?

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Broadway: Wit

photo credit: Joan Marcus

MTC at the Friedman Theater

written by Margaret Edson

directed by Lynne Meadow

January 27, 2012

Cynthia Nixon sheds the glamour of her Sex and the City fame in her latest Broadway appearance. For the sharp, gripping revival of Wit, Nixon has shaved her hair clean off—scalp, eyebrows, and all—and her sole costume is a hospital gown that shows off not svelte calves capped by Manolos but spindly legs and bare feet. Nixon has spent most of the last decade-plus onstage in safe, middlebrow respectability, epitomized by her Rabbit Hole turn as a grieving mother, a role that was pure award bait (it won her the '05 Tony and Nicole Kidman an Oscar nomination in '10). Wit, with its cancer-battle plot, would seem to be more of the same. But Nixon and director Lynne Meadow prove that Margaret Edson's drama deserves its Pulitzer; the show, in turn, pushes them to find new vigor, intelligence, and boldness in themselves

In treating a woman dying of cancer, Wit refuses to fall back on the emotional safety of melodrama. The central role lets a middle-aged actress display dry humor, rigorous intellect, and the independence of a woman who's foregone a family for her career and excelled without apology. Nixon relishes the part. Maybe it's out of respect for the subject, but she avoids probing the character's emotional wounds (her usual approach to stagework) until the play's final scenes, when the displays of feeling have been earned. Meadow also refrains from her typically maximal style of direction: instead, she presents a black stage with a few skeletally white pillars, an absence of sound effects, and a finely clipped pace. This last quality, plus the work's intellectual rigor, makes the 100-minute, intermissionless drama neither exhausting nor brooding. Wit confronts the fact of human suffering with strength and proves itself a substantial drama.

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Wit plays at the Friedman Theater, closing on March 11. Tickets?

Glenn Beck is Right! or, My Obligatory Spider-Man Post

Glenn Beck saw Spider-Man, twice, & it doesn't surprise me too much that he lurved it. He's so obviously into spectacle: think of his beloved blackboards! Whatever his flaws, the man knows that entertaining the crowd helps to get your message across. So yep, he digs opera and he enjoys splashy Broadway musicals like La Cage aux Folles.*

I don't watch or listen to Beck's shows, so this is my first real experience with his straw-man M.O. At one point, he adopts a snooty, vaguely French accent that's meant to be a New York theater critic. Beck-as-critic has never heard of Bono, disparages rock music, and looks down his nose at comic books. Now I'm existential proof that theater critics can enjoy rock music & comics.**

But I also partly agree with Beck's point. For one thing, yes, there are Broadway musicals that rock out. But the genre's stylistic mainstream is still bemoaning how the Beatles edged West Side Story off the Billboard charts. The fact that we still distinguish rock musicals from … what, “conventional musicals”? says something. So does the fact that it took thirty years for punk rock to go from CBGBs to the St. James. And the genre has made few attempts, such as In the Heights, to assimilate hip-hop into its idiom.

And another thing: conventional American drama is still beholden to realism. At its best (like Ruined) it's socially relevant, a throwback to Ibsen; more often, it's domestic dramas like August: Osage County and Rabbit Hole. There are few successful shows that couldn't be translated easily into a movie. In the context of popular American dramas & musicals, a sci-fi superhero work of fantasy like Spider-Man really is alien.

I'm also surprised and impressed at Beck's reading of Spider-Man. He notes the that Spider-Man's powers derive from an atheist scientist's government-funded experiment, then points out that the Daily Bugle's demagoguery supports the scientist & condemns the superhero. Is the show as politically conservative as that? Despite reading the handful of reviews & talking to attendees, I couldn't say. Anyhow, regardless of his accuracy, by putting the show's content into its cultural context, Beck does the job of a critic. That's work that none of the (debatably premature) critics have done; they've mostly just lambasted the show for its dramaturgical problems.

My point is, resistance to Spidey within the theater community is a lot more complex than schadenfreude at the hubris of moneyed producers & starry creators. I have read intelligent theater critic takes Spider-Man down, pointing out valid flaws in the hopes that the critique might change the system, its tastes, & its tendencies. But (apart from Glenn Beck, of all people!) I haven't read or seen anyone celebrating how unconventional Spider-Man is or analyzing its content as well as its style. The circus of money and injuries have distracted us from asking some basic critical questions about the show and its context in the world and community.

Finally, lest you think I've turned coat and become a Glenn Beck booster, here's a final point. The asshole checks his text messages during the show! Then he shows the text message to your wife, so she can cackle at a dramatically weighty moment?! That's some shabby, juvenile behavior.


* Surprised at this? Nah. The show's parody of gayness is broad enough that a conservative can laugh at it rather than with it.

 ** Here's hoping I can write off my comic book purchases as work-related research this fiscal year!

What B'way doesn't Desire

Partly because I'm planning my wedding & covering the awards season for Metromix, I've been lazy about blogging. Which is too bad: I've seen some great shows. Generally I'm bored by plays about suburbia, but Next to Normal hit me hard. I'm a sucker for stories about mental illness, & this one didn't compromise with a happy ending (unlike Distracted, whose flip finale undermined a funny look at ADHD). Normal also left Lady Hotspur in tears, & she's not easily moved.

But I especially want to take note of Desire Under the Elms, which closes this weekend. I'm not surprised at this news (Lady H. called it “the worst play I've ever seen on Broadway”), but I am disappointed. It's not arid or anodyne like most legit drama. Director Robert Falls has cut away about half of Eugene O'Neill's script & replaced it with bold theatrical gestures. It stumbles and it misfires, but it's not boring.

This show fits on a Broadway stage, which I can't say about most modern drama. A good show is conceived to a specific type of space, & O'Neill belongs on a huge stage like the St. James. Desire is bold melodrama: its personalities are fervent and its emotions are grandiose. Desire gets a lot of its energy from an Oedipal triangle, with a Yankee kid stealing the farm and third wife from his father. That young wife is a gorgon of sexual desire (thus the title--O'Neill, like Strindberg, finds women horrifying).

Desire is bizarre, which Falls accepts. That's why I like the show, and probably why it couldn't find an audience. Falls replaces O'Neill's elaborate & over-explicit dialogue with expressionistic dialogue-free scenes backed by raggedy Bob Dylan. Stars Pablo Schreiber and Carla Gugino, accustomed to realistic emotional arcs, look skittish or dumbstruck. Yeah, Falls should've coached them better, but they just don't have the acting skill set. And a Broadway crowd has the same problem: they don't know how to interpret such a strange, unconventional show.

O'Neill's lurid tale of adultery and infanticide sounds like he based it on a 19th-century newspaper clipping. It's from the era when rural folks visited the circus tent on Saturday and the revival tent Sunday, and the railroad line led straight to damnation. Robert Falls' Desire is set in that folktale America, a long ways from the clean crossroads of Times Square. I can't imagine a Broadway where this show could be a blockbuster, but it's a more interesting one than ours.

American Buffalo; or How I Didn't Mind the Bomb

playwright: David Mamet
director: Robert Falls
date attended: Nov. 15, 2008 (evening)
venue: Belasco Theatre

Having caught the Broadway production of American Buffalo, I was sad to read the caustic reviews of the show on Monday, & even more sad to hear that it's closing this Sunday. Closing a week after opening night is pretty much a bomb. But this show wasn't terrible (or phenomenal), it was just mediocre. But that's not good enough in this terrible economy, so American Buffalo joins the pile of Broadway dead.

It's too bad, because the show had good things going for it, starting with the casting. Not the cast (which was uneven) but the color-blind approach that the producers took. It updated the play invisibly, though it lost some of the specificity of the 1970s lower-class white Chicago setting. Other than the milieu itself, there's nothing intrinsically white about these characters. And by casting a Hispanic & an African-American in these roles, it underscores how American the play is. I hope that other producers follow Buffalo's lead: this production's casting seemed forward-looking, like Obama's victory.

In fact, I got a lot more from it than I did from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last summer. The script's a real classic, & like Shakespeare's plays, it can stand mediocrity (whereas Williams' drama could not). Cedric the Entertainer ("Don") was great, & he should do more stage work -- his deep, resonant voice fits well in a Broadway cavern. He lived his words, giving a seemingly-spontaneous performance. I can't say that about John Leguizamo ("Teacher") or young Haley Joel Osment ("Bobby"), neither of whom seemed wholly comfortable with the language -- & Mamet performances live or die in the delivery.

Really, the problem with this production American Buffalo (& few reviews said this) was that Robert Falls' direction was superficial. Mamet, who in this play waves his Pinter influence like a flag, is deeply ironic and ambiguous. But Falls was content to show the mere action, without a sense of dramatic irony. It felt like a simulation of Mamet's play, not a performance. Which is okay -- as I said, a great script can withstand a mediocre production -- except that these tickets cost more than a C-note. American Buffalo is one more victim of the economic downturn, an irony that Mamet might appreciate even if his characters probably couldn't.

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Photo from American Buffalo's website