Louisa May Alcott: The Heroine Builder

Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen.

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.”

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott was not quite the quaint homespun lady who wove utopian fables of blissful childhood dreams that her writings, or at least one segment of her complex literary persona, would have you believe. She was not afraid of storms, true enough, but that was mostly because she was a storm herself, albeit a secret storm. Unlike the writings of either Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, Alcott was not so very interested in what she defined as domestic fiction, a term she used to categorize, though not necessarily to critique, literary works that focus on family dynamics in contrast to the dynamics of female social perspectives, despite the fact that her most famous work, Little Women (1868), would appear to do just that, at least on the surface anyway. She even defined her own alternative literary position, as distinguished from the other writers mentioned, as having a preference for what she called “sensation stories and novels” as opposed to tales of domestic intrigue or turbulence. Some readers of Little Women, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), or Jo’s Boys (1886), might be especially surprised to hear her declare, albeit in a quiet voice, “I fancy lurid things.” and to acknowledge a literary debt to Johann Goethe’s turbulent Sorrows of Young Werther and his diabolically beautiful Faust drama. Active during one of the most tumultuous and horrific times in American history, when the nature and even existence of that country was in perilous question, Alcott started writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and upon the outbreak of the Civil War became an active nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. A fervent anti-slavery activist and advocate of complete equality and freedom in all its forms, she was so supportive of the Union cause that she enthusiastically rushed off to enlist in its army, only to be rebuffed, for what to her was that most inane of reasons: because the military did not accept female soldiers. This enraged her, not only as a devoted patriot but also as a avid supporter of the cause of suffrage and equality for women in every walk of life. To say that she was ahead of her time would be a drastic understatement. She was an unalloyed feminist, during a time when what she wanted, though simple enough to our modern eyes, was incomprehensible to not only the government but also to family and friends in her circle. Her dispatches were featured in the anti-slavery newspaper Commonwealth and her advanced thinking, often belied by the obvious charming quality of her fiction, propelled her to the forefront of a then gestating suffrage movement. This courageous dame had guts galore, not to mention the literary skill to captivate readers with her apparent coming-of-age stories, which cleverly concealed in their charms the author’s suggestions for improving our mutual existence.

Lesley Manville in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: An Actress Becomes a Legend

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Photo: Sarah Lee.)

It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched anti-heroes, Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, best of friends and former lovers who manipulate everyone around them for their amusement and to enact private revenge plots, were played by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. In the triumphant 1988 Stephen Frears movie, called Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close and John Malkovich took over the roles, a case of seeming miscasting that, as it turned out, worked brilliantly. (There have been two other film adaptations, a very amusing updated one from 1959 directed by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe and an unfortunate one called Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, released the year after Frears’s. And Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are featured in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which sets the story in a Manhattan prep school. It’s trashy but a sexy, funny diversion.)

Recent Plays: The Balusters, Fallen Angels, Top Hat and The Fear of 13

The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.

One of a Kind, Twice in a Row: Legacy and Legend

“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Everyone is an artist.”

--Joseph Beuys

The 20th century. Oh how I do miss that century these days. It was a virtual dynasty of dissonance and discontinuity, a breathtakingly radical realm of overturned assumptions and collapsing complacent expectations. Almost all the accepted truths, from science and religion to literature, music and visual art, were being overturned practically on a daily basis. And the two artists profiled in two new tomes from Princeton University Press were at the forefront of the mission to alter our perceptions of what art was and what it can be expected to do to and for us. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) pretty much invented what we now call conceptual art. But it didn’t really have a name back when they were blazing a trail through the exotic hinterland of aesthetic exploration. And these valuable books, one a collection of snappy quotations from the cheeky and provocative Duchamp, Duchampisms, edited by Larry Warsh, and the other a deeply revealing study, Joseph Beuys and History by Daniel Spaulding, each shed new light on the dazzling outer range of cultural possibility back in the daring century they so personally embodied.

Gershwin Redux: Crazy for You

The company of Goodspeed's Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Crazy for You is the second of three Broadway musicals – so far – to rework hit shows with fabulous scores by George and Ira Gershwin. The first was My One and Only (1983), which had begun life in 1927 as Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire with his first dance partner, his sister Adele. The most recent was Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), which is based loosely on the 1926 Oh, Kay! – best known as the musical in which the great, one-of-a-kind English performer Gertrude Lawrence introduced the beloved ballad “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

The Five Colours of White

Ink-and-Brush painting by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In the glass-and-concrete halls of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, Zhang Shuqi’s work bursts with an urgency that belies its age. Echoes of the Homeland is a retrospective of a Chinese painter long overshadowed in the West. A native of Zhejiang Province, Zhang Shuqi (or Chang Shu Chi, 1900–1957) was hailed as one of the “Three Masters of Jinling” along with Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Liu Zigu (1901–1986), pioneers who adapted traditional ink-and-brush to a modern world. Amid the fourth-floor galleries, his flowering branches and roiling flocks of fowl feel like a living ecosystem, each petal and plume pulsing with the tensions of war, exile, and cultural survival.

Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.