On the Eve of the Pulitzer

(FYI, I'm trying a different format, to see how it affects my voice.)

(Update: the news from Columbia University, around the corner from my place: Ruined won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But my assessment stands: it deserves a Broadway run, & a Tony, but it's not a play for the ages. - A)

1.
I've never heard so much talk about the Pulitzer for Drama before -- at least, not before it's awarded. Most folks favor Lynn Nottage's Ruined to win. Also in the running are: Becky Shaw (Gina Gionfriddo), Our Enemies (Yussef el Guindi), The Good Negro (Tracey Scott Wilson), & fading fast, Reasons to Be Pretty (Neil LaBute).

2.
What kind of shows usually win the Pulitzer? Epics like Angels in America are rarer than you'd expect. For every thrilling piece of funky experimental drama like Topdog/Underdog, there are five works of realism seasoned with a touch of neurosis, academia, or morality (Rabbit Hole, Proof, Doubt).

3.
Pulitzer-winners are solid and heavy, like sturdy furniture made of walnut or oak. When they're adapted into prestige films, they're a little too stagy to sit quite right onscreen. They're almost invariably set in the US, & address grand themes like death and illness, American history, race or sex.

4.
So what about Ruined? I finally caught it at MTC last week. It's satisfying to see a show about Africa that avoids tourism & impotent hand-wringing. Unlike most critics, I find its universal themes more compelling than specifics like its African setting. It's undeniably strong & affecting.

5.
Ruined is a war story. Mama Nadi runs her bar/brothel as a DMZ in the Congolese civil war: all are welcome, leave guns & politics at the door. The war tests her philosophy, but so does her relationship to two young women she buys in the opening scene: Sophie, a victim of rape & mutilation, & Salima.

6.
Because of Sophie's mutilation, she's useless to Mama as a good-time girl, but, resourceful & literate, she balances the books and gains Mama's trust & sympathy. Salima, meanwhile, deals with pregnancy till she's tracked down by her one-time husband, now a soldier. All three roles are phenomenal.

7.
But if I hadn't heard the rumors, I wouldn't put Ruined in the running for a Pulitzer. For one thing, it doesn't fit the formula. Its subject is international, with no mention of how America fits into African civil war. But it also lacks the solid craftsmanship that a great realistic drama should have.

8.
This is a play that moves in jerks. The main characters have holes & caesuras in their arcs -- Sophie herself doesn't do much except work as a catalyst for Mama. Supporting characters, especially the men, tend to disappear for stretches & then return, as if out of a hat, to serve a plot function.

9.
Nottage relies on the machinery of old-fashioned melodrama: stupendous revelations of buried secrets, tragic coincidences of timing, a literal storm gathering as the war approaches Mama's bar. Rather than relying on complex psychology & social insight, Nottage falls back on manipulative sentiment.

10.
As a cynical operator, Mama N. is supposed to evoke Brecht's Mother Courage. But in spirit she's closer to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (“I stick my neck out for nobody.”). The problem is, her cynicism's all talk: from adopting Sophie forward, her every decision stems from sentiment, not pragmatism.

11.
So do I think Ruined will win the Pulitzer? Probably. It's realistic, it's noble-minded, it's international at a cultural moment that's repudiating US isolationism. And I think Nottage's Intimate Apparel deserved the award over Anna in the Tropics in 2003. But it's not the best American script of 2008.

12.
For all my quibbles, however, I echo the wish that MTC had placed Ruined on their Broadway stage. It's also a sad irony that the Goodman brought Ruined to MTC's City Center site but will move their starry Desire Under the Elms to the St. James. A Pulitzer for Ruined? Naw. But a Tony? Most def.

One Hundred Nights of Bardolotry

In 1990, fired up by an AP Lit class, I attended the Guthrie Theater's day-long bill of history plays: Richard 2, Henry 4, & Henry 5. The day literally changed my life by making me into a regular theatergoer and voracious consumer of Shakespeare. A few weeks ago, I saw Theatre for a New Audience's Hamlet, the hundredth production of Shakespeare that I've attended.

Yes, I've kept count.

Some highlights have been Peter Brook's Hamlet, Propeller's all-male Taming of the Shrew, the Globe's Measure for Measure, the Aquila Theatre's Much Ado, and the Red Bull's Pericles. The lowlight is probably the Central Park Twelfth Night in 2002, starring a dumbstruck Julia Stiles.

I've watched Lear in Japanese and Macbeth in Polish. A college girlfriend & I trekked through a subzero winter night to see As You Like It. I traveled to London just to see Michael Gambon play Falstaff. I've seen Hamlet deconstructed, reconstructed, cut to 90 minutes & played by a chubby 40-year-old.

Why do I love Shakespeare? What's he doing that I can't get enough of? And where does Shakespeare's dramaturgy end & mine begin? These are some of the questions rattling around my brain, & I'll try to answer in my next few posts.

In the meantime, you can read my review of Hamlet, and also check out a photo spread I produced & wrote for the Off-B'way production of The Toxic Avenger. Happy Passover!

Top pic: Richard 2, Guthrie Theater, 1990
Bottom pic: Hamlet, TFANA, 2009

Review: The Unseen

Metromix, my steady writing gig, has been laggard about posting my work. But here's my review of Guys & Dolls, a pretty good round-up of Broadway this spring, & an article on Off-B'way's spring that my editor cut so deeply, she took credit for the writing too! MIA: my review of Our Town & several weeks-in-review pieces.

I'm assured that those'll go up soon. But the following won't, cuz it's closing this weekend. So I offer it to you here instead: a review of Craig Wright's The Unseen, playing thru Saturday at the Cherry Lane Theater.

Update: my abashed editor fixed the writing credit here. It's still heavily edited though ("The theater nexus need not stay focus in Manhattan."?). Also, they've posted my review of an incredible Our Town.

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The aptest description of The Unseen, a three-hander written by Craig Wright, is “stock characters in a familiar scenario.” Over ninety minutes, two prisoners converse through the walls of their cells, playing memory games to maintain their sanity and elaborating on metaphors that the world as a prison. One holds tight to his rationalism; the other places his faith in intuition.

But every time an insight, phrase, or plot grabs your interest, it's drowned out by the echo of a prior artist. One character descibes the torture prison as “a machine that runs on human agony”, evoking Kafka's “In the Penal Colony”. Borges lurks in the descriptions of endless architecture and millennia-old conspiracies. The duo -- the tightly-wound Steven Pounders and the fussy, flighty Stan Denman -- even come to resemble Gary Sinese and John Malkovich.

There's little that's actively bad about the show (I'd quibble that the climax feels just a bit underwhelming). Pounders and Denman (husband to director Lisa) play their roles with conviction, and manage to deliver long rambling monologues as if their words were occurring to them at that moment. A third role uses gruesome imagery to show how torture harms the perpetrator as well as the victim (that is, psychologically). But The Unseen isn't much more than a series of influences, a shadow play.

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That's what I wrote for Metromix. But I want to think a little more about dead metaphors. In this case, Wright uses the theatrical idioms of mid-20th century existential surrealists, AKA the Theater of the Absurd. He strips away exposition; he focuses on two characters trapped by their situation; he alternates gallows humor with outright dread and horror. In fact, there's nothing in his dramaturgy that you couldn't have seen in 1960.

Wright's also grappling with some of the same subjects as absurd playwrights (like Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter), notably injustices like torture and an absence of habeus corpus. But the context has changed: Mutually Assured Destruction, the Nazi Holocaust, and Stalinism have given way to Terrorism, Zealotry, and an umbrella of Bush's policies (domestic surveillance, enhanced interrogation, etc.).

Actually, let me amend that: the context hasn't just changed. Wright explores contemporary themes, but he completely strips them of an urgent context. All that's left us a noble-minded play that, upon reflection, has little in particular to tell us. Instead, it merely apes a fifty-year-old style. That's why I say The Unseen simulates a drama rather than actually being one.

Shakespeare's portrait, Shakespeare's thoughts

Oh boy, a new pic of my boy Bill! Count me among the skeptics (maybe it's a painting of the Earl of Essex?). Time Out's Helen Shaw has some smart thoughts on the subject.

Anyhow, it dovetails with my most recent reading material: Shakespeare: The Thinker, AD Nuttall's 2007 study. It's fairly accessible, despite being aimed at scholars & dramaturgs rather than audiences, directors, & actors. Nuttall was an Oxford don: erudite, dry even in when witty, fascinated by how Shak uses language for its own sake, and fond of terms for poetic devices. But he avoids academic jargon, & while he's very smart, he's also welcoming.

Nuttall's gist is that Shak's began his dramaturgic journey by exploring the conflict betw. male camaraderie & hetero love.* Soliloquies in Richard 3 and Richard 2 see the protags internalize the fraternal bond to reflect on themselves. So Shak's revolutionary development is when Richard 2 asks for a mirror, which provides a concrete device & onstage metaphor for the doubled self.

However, Nuttall gives short shrift to Shak's women. Billy-boy established his dramatic rep with forceful femmes: Jeanne la Pucelle & Margaret in the Henry 6 plays, Kate in Shrew, Tamara in Titus, & esp. Juliet are the most vital original characters of his early career.** Nuttall could plausibly argue that the crossdressing of Breech Roles (Rosaline, Viola et al) create a dramaturgic mirror for female self-reflection, but he fails to do so.

Still, he pays close attention to the fraternal bond, a theme I'm fond of. Since Freud, it's been hard to read that theme as anything but homoerotic (& that's frequently justified in Shak's work). But male camaraderie can exist apart from sexuality, & Nuttall makes that a key to Shak's dramaturgy: the conflict in a man's movement from fraternal to romantic love.

This shift, I now see, is essential to The Winter's Tale. In the first half, Leontes becomes doubly jealous of his wife's bond with his comrade. In the second half, the rage of the King of Bohemia stems, at least partly, from being replaced by his son's beloved. And Nuttall's mirror is there too: Leontes notes that the young couple resemble his wife & his (former) friend.*** I wish Mendes & co. had played with these relationships, as well as delivering Beale & Hawke's perfs, which were great in themselves but stood out from the rest of the pretty good production.


* Nuttall actually digs how the fraternal bond withstands the attempt of one gentleman of Verona to rape his buddy's girlfriend!

** Richard Crookback & Aaron the Moor are Marlovian, not Shakespearean chars. Nuttall's focus is the playwright's sheer originality, so in this sense that pair is secondary: Bill could synthesize damned well, but it's his innovations we're focusing on. And I'm just plain ignoring Henry 6 & Mercutio.

*** “I lost a couple, that ’twixt heaven and earth | Might thus have stood begetting wonder as | You, gracious couple, do.” (5.1.164-6)

Race, stereotypes & archetypes

I've got a few posts up on Metromix this week: a round-up of this week's new shows, & my review (finally!) of The Winter's Tale at BAM. It's one of my favorite plays, & a pretty good production. The "I have eaten and seen the spider" bit sent shivers right through me.

Did anyone else read Patricia Cumper's broadside on the Guardian's Theatre blog this week?

Young black people are growing up in a society where they are frequently stereotyped and alienated. They respond in many dynamic and creative ways – but we don't hear much about that. What makes it into the newspapers and on to the stage is dysfunction, criminality and violence. And if programmers can't find enough of these things in the work of Roy Williams, Kwame Kwei-Armah or Debbie Tucker Green, they may import plays such as The Brothers Size and The Emperor Jones to keep the stereotypes going.

I don't deny that the range of black experiences depicted onstage is limited. And we can mistake stereotypes for archetypes just as easily in NYC as they do in London. This week, the Signature Theatre, in a season of work by the Negro Ensemble Company, started showing Zooman & the Sign, which is arguably another play "that assumes that black men are violent, profligate & oversexed" (as Cumper generalizes). Possibly the 1980 play helped establish the stereotype; possibly it transcends it. I'll be curious to see it in the light of this piece.

But there's a bit of slippage in Cumper's article. She speaks as an artistic director frustrated by audience's expectations & writers' shortcomings. So (as above) she critiques other companies for programming choices. But she refers only broadly to "programmers, artistic directors, marketeers & such", whereas she singles out objectionable playwrights by name, claiming that they do not represent the black experience.

I hope she doesn't see simple blaxploitation in Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen -- or several of August Wilson's plays like Seven Guitars & King Hedley II, for that matter. These are morally complex tales in a realist style with substantial characters. I also hope she doesn't see them as somehow insufficiently black when she asks, "how do black theatre practitioners put their own stories on the mainstage of those big theatres?"

I'm all for more provocative shows about race in theater, but also for more racial diversity generally in theater. I was happy to note black performers in Guys & Dolls. And that's one reason that, while I recognize the argument against casting Phylicia Rashad as the matriarch in August: Osage County, I think the benefit (a great performer in a juicy role) outweighs that. (And, parenthetically, I find the play's addressing of race half-assed & tacked on.) At any rate, she'll be playing against the hoary stereotype of the black earth mother (Cumper's phrase). I'm glad that the producers are thinking outside the box: proper casting be damned, let's see what Rashad does with the role!

NYC wildlife

A strange, wonderful thing just happened to me. Sitting at my desk, I was surprised by a falcon landing outside my window on my AC unit. It was large, powerful, and calm. It stayed just long enough for me to edge towards it with my camera & snap a pic.

I wonder what it augers?

Sam Mendes & the Transatlantic Style

Why did Sam Mendes choose The Cherry Orchard to debut his transatlantic theater company? Maybe I'm being too literal-minded, but I think he should've contrasted Shakespeare with an American playwright. The mission of “The Bridge Project” (a title that lacks poetry and wit) was born out of Mendes wish “for artists, collaborators, and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to experience one another's work, talent, and artistry…”

So why program a Russian drama – it's neutral ground? That doesn't seem likely. For one thing, Mendes partners the greatest Russian dramatist with the greatest English one, running The Cherry Orchard in repertory with Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. For another, this Cherry Orchard has British candences, care of adaptor Tom Stoppard. Also, the project was inspired by Mendes' double-bill of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night at BAM back in '02; his program note admits that he's trying to recreate that experience. And probably Mendes picked The Cherry Orchard just because he wanted to direct it.

Okay, the two shows are well-matched. Both are plays of life's middle age, in which an aging generation hopes that their failures can be repaired by the vivacity of the one that's coming of age.* They've got several substantial roles for a sizable company of British thesps and American actors. But you could argue the same about Angels in America, which echoes The Winter's Tale by bringing a statue to life (Central Park's Bethesda Fountain).

I love the idea of “The Bridge Project,” which is why I'm so frustrated. London, New York, and LA have cross-pollinated performers to such an extent that there's not much difference between American and British styles of acting. It would be great to have a high-profile, high-calibre company that explores the ramifications of a hybrid style together for a season or three. American actors, directors, writers, designers working with their British counterparts to discover an Atlantic Style. That's what Mendes claims he wants to do. But he's really just created a company of actors that'll put on whatever work he wants to direct.

* I'll note here that Mendes Cherry Orchard fails on many levels, one of which is casting 48-year-old Simon Russell Beale as the youngish hustler Trofimov. Together they give him a crush on Ranevskaya (60-year-old Sinead Cusack), against the script, where he shyly adores Varya (25-year-old Rebecca Hall).