Toni Stone, Mother Play, Uncle Vanya: Deserting the Audience

Stanley Andrew Jackson and Jennifer Mogbock in Toni Stone. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The titular protagonist of Toni Stone, currently playing in the Huntington Theatre’s revered space in Boston’s Back Bay, is the first woman who played baseball regularly in a professional league. She played for three Negro leagues in the forties and fifties, culminating in a season with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League, where she replaced Hank Aaron, who had been picked up by the Milkwaukee Braves. It’s an appealing story for the stage and especially for contemporary audiences. But the playwright, Lydia R. Diamond, hasn’t worked out how to dramatize it.

Two Women: Promising Young Woman and I’m Your Woman

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. 

Promising Young Woman begins as a black comedy-horror picture about the revenge that Cassie (Carey Mulligan) takes on young men who see a single woman drunk off her ass in a bar as an opportunity to get laid. It turns out that she’s motivated by the suicide of her best friend Nina, who was raped at a med-school party and couldn’t get justice because of the callousness of their social group, the indifference of the administration and the brutality of the rapist’s expensive lawyer. The movie, which was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, is so single-minded – wasn’t there one woman who viewed the video the rapist’s best pal circulated of Nina’s humiliation who didn’t find it hilarious? – that its opportunistic manipulation of the audience in the #MeToo era might have been infuriating. But it’s such a wretched, inept piece of rabble-rousing that what it mostly demonstrates is how little you have to exert yourself, apparently, to get a rise out of viewers. Thelma and Louise looks sophisticated by comparison.

Neglected Gem: Enchanted April (1992)

Josie Lawrence and Joan Plowright in Enchanted April.

During World War I, two middle-aged women, fed up with their dreary marriages, answer an ad to rent a castle in the Italian countryside for a month; their lives – as well as the lives of two strangers who agree to share the rent – are magically altered. That’s the premise of Enchanted April. There have now been enough comedies of this forest-of-Arden variety to call it a genre – I Know Where I’m Going and Local Hero and High Season and, in a way, May Fools and Where the Heart Is (where the magic setting is a fantastical vision of New York). I’m not sure why, but this is one sort of movie that almost always seems to work: I loved all of those earlier pictures, and Enchanted April is a charmer. (The exception, ironically, is the 1935 movie version of the same material, a 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim). Part of the charm lies in the fact that it’s as different from the other movies as they are from each other. The screenwriter, English playwright Peter Barnes, has a quirky turn of phrase, and he keeps throwing in twists and devices (like voice-overs transcribing the characters’ thoughts) that you didn’t anticipate – and often, as in the case of the voice-overs, that you would likely have predicted, wrongly, wouldn’t work. The film isn’t fluid or polished; it skips around a bit, as if the director, Mike Newell, were feeling his way through it. This tentativeness enhances a viewer’s enjoyment; you experience the movie as a series of delightful small discoveries.

The Front Runner: Satire and Beyond

Hugh Jackman (centre) in The F.ront Runner.

Movie-wise, 2018 culminated in the lamest Christmas season in years; aside from Mary Poppins Returns, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, three of the six segments in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Peter Jackson’s extraordinary World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, I didn’t see a single film I could get behind. And the dim slate of Academy Award nominations for Best Picture confirm the widespread disgruntlement about the caliber of last year’s releases. Actually, it wasn’t quite as terrible a year for movies as the list of nominees indicates. It’s just that in 2018, even more radically than in most years, the majority of the interesting films were sidelined – they opened only briefly, and only in a few cities, and didn’t draw the attention they deserved. (Ironically, the other cadre of movies worth checking out resided at the other end of the spectrum: the franchise movies that saturated the cineplexes over the summer, most of which were immensely enjoyable.) This was the year of Blaze, Hearts Beat Loud, The Sisters Brothers, Paddington 2, Leave No Trace, Juliet, Naked, Christopher Robin, The Death of Stalin, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot and Journey’s End. And of The Front Runner, Jason Reitman’s movie about Gary Hart’s doomed bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 1988, which a friend helpfully steered me to a couple of weeks ago. It’s amazing that a movie as good as this one, by a respected director and with a major star (Hugh Jackman), released at the beginning of prestige-movie season (it came out Thanksgiving week), could have slipped by virtually unnoticed.

Issues: And No More Shall We Part and Wild

Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina in And No More Shall We Part. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

In And No More Shall We Part, the final show at Williamstown’s Nikos Stage this summer, Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina play a married couple, Pam and Don, struggling with her decision to commit suicide after her treatment has failed to halt the progress of her cancer. She is resolute, while he is reluctant, but against his better judgment he’s agreed to help her. The play begins on the night she has earmarked as her last and flashes back to the day she first broached the subject with him; their most volatile argument on the topic; and the special last dinner he’s arranged for her, when he learns that – against his express wishes – she’s cancelled the invitation to their grown-up kids (fearing that including them might make them legally liable for aiding her in taking her own life).

Molina and especially Kaczmarek give measured, intelligent performances under Anne Kauffman’s direction, but the drama itself, by the Australian playwright Tom Holloway, is painfully banal and uninspired. I’m sure Holloway is sincere and has deep feelings about the material, but he’s got nothing to contribute to the subjects of assisted suicide and the trauma of bidding farewell to a loved one except warmed-over sentiments. The two actors’ best efforts don’t produce much more in the way of character than Pam’s steadfastness and exhaustion, Don’s terror of abandonment and tendency to mask the brutality of the truth; Holloway doesn’t even provide a sense of what their various relationships with their two children might be like, since the kids, offstage presences, are merely a device. (The play doesn’t bother to tell us how the kids responded to the news of their mother’s decision, or what it might have been like for them – or for Pam – to say their ultimate goodbyes.) Since it’s a realist play, these pretty obvious omissions are a little bizarre. Moreover, the placement of the flashbacks feels random. The single moment in the play that’s truly poignant, i.e., poignant because of the way it’s been created and not because of the subject matter, is one where, after Pam, having taken the pills, persuades Don to leave her alone in bed to drift off over a book, and he camps outside the closed bedroom with his hand caressing the door. (The idea is that he won’t re-enter until the morning, when he can report truthfully that he simply came in and found her dead.) At this point, however, Holloway cuts to the flashback of their last meal together, which undercuts the emotional effectiveness of the image of Molina with his hand on the door and seems to have no dramatic logic.

What a Charlie Foxtrot: Tina Fey and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

“I’m starting to feel like this is normal. You know it isn’t, right?” says reporter Kim Baker (Tina Fey) to Scottish photographer Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman), reflecting on her three years as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan. From her subject position as a 40+ single New York copywriter, the statement is accurate. For the 30.5 million people who live in Afghanistan, however, “this,” a life marred by war, violence, unstable politics and pervasive patriarchy, is normal. Such is the irredeemable problem that can’t be, shouldn’t be, overlooked at the heart of a frustratingly enjoyable film.

Based on an assuredly less egregious memoir called The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by New York Times reporter Kim Barker, dramedy Whiskey Tango Foxtrot follows Tina Fey as Kim Baker (that pesky “r” omitted in the screenplay presumably to avoid confusing a fake woman with a real woman in Google searches), a bored, desk-bound writer who jumps at an offer to be an on-camera war journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan. Despite having zero experience in front of a camera, Baker is offered the position precisely because she is childless, unmarried, and over 40 – in others words, because she is “expendable” by North American standards. An eye roll worthy epiphany at the gym causes her to view her suggested shortcomings as an opportunity for change. Leaving a house key for her “mildly depressive” boyfriend (Josh Charles) so that he can water her plants, Kim ships out to Afghanistan for a brief stint that inevitably stretches into three years. 

On the Nose: TBS's Angie Tribeca

Hayes MacArthur, Rashida Jones,and Alfred Molina in Angie Tribeca, on TBS.

As you no doubt keep hearing, we live in a particularly crowded era of television. Every day, it seems, a new TV series premieres and another drops away. Television executives are bemoaning that even quality shows can't find the audiences they need to survive, and professional television critics have admitted that they can't keep up. What is a basic cable network to do? This past Sunday and Monday, TBS premiered the first season of Angie Tribeca ... all at once. From 9pm on Sunday to 10pm on Monday, TBS aired the show's first 10-episode season five times, back-to-back and commercial free, in an 'event' they (accurately) called a 25-Hour Binge-A-Thon. The show, prior to its premiere, has already been renewed for a second season. So, fun fact: if you weren't watching TBS last Monday, you are already a season behind on Angie Tribeca. I suppose now the only question is whether or not you should care…

Immigrants: Brooklyn and In Jackson Heights

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a sweetheart of a movie. Written by Nick Hornby and directed by John Crowley, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Colm Toíbín’s lyrical award-winning 2009 novel about the emigration of a young woman named Eilis (pronounced “Aylish”) Lacey from Ireland to Brooklyn in the early 1950s. In a still-depressed post-war Irish economy, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is stuck: her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) has a job as a bookkeeper, but Eilis can’t do better than land work at a small-scale grocery run by sour, stern-faced Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), who lectures customers who show up on Sunday to buy items she considers non-necessities. Enniscotty in County Wexford is a narrow, parochial community, but it’s all Eilis knows, so when Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), an Irish priest in Brooklyn with whom her mother (Jane Brennan) is in touch, arranges lodging and employment for Eilis, she leaves with trepidation. The movie is about how she adapts to her new surroundings and makes Brooklyn her home and how it alters her.

Actors Rule: The Last of Robin Hood and Love Is Strange

Dakota Fanning and Kevin Kline in The Last of Robin Hood.

In The Last of Robin Hood, Kevin Kline plays the swashbuckling movie star Errol Flynn in the last two years of his life, 1959-1961, when he fell for an aspiring L.A. actress named Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning). Beverly is only fifteen, but years of acting classes and singing and dancing training and auditions have given her physical confidence and a mature, working-woman comportment, and her mother Flo (Susan Sarandon) encourages her to dress like someone in her twenties. Flo has also secured a fake birth certificate for her, presumably so that she can do an end-run around the laws governing the hiring of minors. When the movie begins Bev is dancing in the chorus of a Gene Kelly movie. (The script doesn’t identify it, but it’s Marjorie Morningstar.) Flynn, a womanizer with a well-known penchant for young women, eyes her at the studio – he’s filming Too Much, Too Soon, the Diana Barrymore story, in which he plays John Barrymore – and sends his friend, the costume designer Orry Kelly (Bryan Batt, from the TV series Mad Men), over to the set of the Kelly picture to bring her over to meet him. On the pretext of having her audition for a Broadway play he’s signed to perform in, he invites her to his lodge for dinner and champagne and takes her to bed. He doesn’t find out she’s underage until his young assistant, Ronnie Sheldo (Matt Kane), realizes that the reason she looks so familiar to him is that she was several years behind him at Hollywood High. But by that time Flynn is smitten; though his lawyer, Melvin Belli (Ric Reitz), warns him he’s playing with fire, he won’t consider giving her up.

Playwrights: Benefactors, A Great Wilderness, The Normal Heart, A Little Night Music

Walton Wilson, David Adkins, and Barbara Sims in Benefactors (Photo by Emily Faulkner)

Eric Hill’s compelling production of Benefactors at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn space in Stockbridge provides audiences with an opportunity to become acquainted with an intelligent, intriguing text by Michael Frayn that doesn’t receive many revivals. (It won the Olivier Award for best new play in 1984.) The play, set between 1968 and 1970, is a four-hander about the relationship between David (David Adkins), an architect with a commitment to providing housing for the poor, and his wife Jane (Corinna May) and their neighbors across the road, Colin (Walton Wilson), a journalist, and Sheila (Barbara Sims). David and Colin have known each other since university, and when they find themselves living in close proximity the two couples and their children are constantly in and out of each other’s houses. Colin is a difficult man with a contrary temperament and a tendency to belittle his wife; self-effacing, easily intimidated, and somewhat in awe of David and Jane, Sheila barely opens her mouth at first when the quartet gets together for dinner. But she begins to spend more and more time hanging out with Jane during the day, and eventually confides her fears that Colin is going to leave her. To help her develop a life of her own, Jane encourages David to hire Sheila as a secretary – to take over the work Jane herself has been doing for him – and the shift ushers in a new phase of their lives.

How To Say Goodbye: Coming-of-Age in Friday Night Lights

For those who haven't watched Friday Night Lights, this piece contains some spoilers. Ed.

Episodes 5 and 6 of season four of Friday Night Lights, which aired in 2010, may be the best two hours of television I’ve ever seen. They’re certainly the most poignant, and I couldn’t keep them out of my head for weeks after I watched them. Almost everyone I know loves Friday Night Lights, Peter Berg’s imaginative expansion of the H.G. Bissinger non-fiction volume about high school football in a small Texas town, yet it stayed under the radar and never made it into the running for the big awards. A narrow but steady audience kept it on the air for five seasons, though every year its fans were on tenterhooks, waiting to see whether it would get renewed for another season. When it returned for its second go-round, in 2007, the writers seemed to be caving in to network pressure to make it more conventional by threading in overblown plot lines. But the level of the acting, the series’ most striking element, never fell, and by the third season the melodrama had vanished and the writing was more delicately observant than ever.

The first three seasons of Friday Night Lights focused on the fortunes of the Dillon High School football team, the Panthers, led by Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), and on the lives of the players and of their parents and significant others, citizens of a town where the Friday night games are the most important event of the week and where Monday-morning quarterbacking is not just a tradition but a civic duty. (Eric inevitably has to sweep up the For Sale signs that jokers, probably in their cups, scatter on his lawn during the night after the Panthers lose a game.) In these episodes the Taylors are a thoroughgoing Dillon H.S. family: Eric’s wife Tami (Connie Britton) begins as a guidance counselor and then (in season three) becomes principal, and their daughter Julie (Aimee Teagarden) dates retiring, deeply sensitive Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), whom Eric molds into an accomplished quarterback when the gifted, charismatic Jason Street (Scott Porter) is paralyzed in a football accident in the show’s opening hour. Jason loses his girl friend Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) – the daughter of Eric’s best friend, car salesman and Panther booster Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) – to his pal Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), a talented player whose ascension to adulthood has been hampered by alcoholic indolence, an ease at getting his way through sexual charm, a dearth of good male role models at home, and a deep-seated conviction that he’s essentially worthless. The other major teenage character is Tim’s ex-girl friend Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), a plain-spoken good ol’ girl whose tough act conceals a terror that she’s not good enough to make it into college and the wide world beyond Dillon. In season two she has a relationship with Matt’s nerdy, generous best friend Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons) and forges an unlikely friendship with Julie; the fact that both are A students suggests Tyra’s secret longing to be taken seriously. In the plausibly incestuous social landscape of the community, Buddy and his receptionist, Tyra’s mother Angela (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), have an affair that breaks up his marriage, while Tyra’s older sister Mindy (Stacey Oristano) winds up married to Tim’s brother Billy (Derek Phillips), who has been his unofficial and semi-competent guardian since their ne’er-do-well father deserted them.

Loosening the Stays: Enchanted April

Marla McLean as Lady Caroline Bramble in Enchanted April (photo by Emily Cooper)

Enchanted April, one of this Shaw Festival season’s audience pleasers, has a long and somewhat complicated lineage. This tale of four women whose lives turn around when they share an Italian castle for a month began in 1922 as a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim that became a play three years later and a (rather insipid) movie in 1935. Then the property was forgotten for more than half a century until, in 1991, Mike Newell remade it with Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence and Polly Walker as the ladies and Alfred Molina, Jim Broadbent and Michael Kitchen in the male roles. This graceful comedy about the regenerative powers of sunshine and leisure prompted a second stage version by Matthew Barber, which appeared briefly on Broadway in 2003 with Molly Ringwald and Jayne Atkinson. It didn’t get much respect but it was quite pleasurable, and the two stars, playing the repressed Rose and the impulsive, determined Lotty (the roles given to Richardson and Lawrence in the film) – who secure the vacation house, advertise for companions, and become fast friends – were splendid. Jackie Maxwell’s production at the Shaw, where (like Guys and Dolls and Lady Windermere’s Fan) it’s filling the spacious Festival Theatre, is also a success.

Carnage: Beneath the Veneer

Roman Polanski's Carnage.

The French playwright Yasmina Reza writes masterfully calibrated comedies of manners in which the central joke is the precariousness of the order carefully maintained by bright, complacent bourgeois; you wait for the moment when it flies off the track like a short-circuited toy train. Her brand of high comedy carries the influence of theatre of the absurd – it’s flavored with the acrid taste of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee – but she stays within the realm of realism. In Art, the play that put Reza on the map, the source of the tension in the friendship of three middle-aged male friends is an abstract expressionist painting that one of them pays an exorbitant amount for and displays proudly on the wall of his Paris apartment, while the others think it’s nonsense. The play is a comedy of menace, to use the critic Martin Esslin’s term for Pinter’s work: the rancor lies, coiled like a rattler, just beneath the jocular bantering. (In the hilarious 1998 Broadway production, Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina looked like they were having the time of their lives sparring with Reza’s glittering verbal arsenal.) God of Carnage is closer to Albee, specifically Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but with a much lighter touch. The set-up is irresistible. After one middle-school kid slams another with a hockey stick in response to an insult, effecting, considerable, though reparable, damage, their parents meet in an upper-West-Side Manhattan apartment to talk as reasonable adults. The reasonableness lasts barely half an hour. By the end of the play, all reason has been abandoned and all four psyches have been laid bare, along with the tattered seams of both marriages – and the stage is strewn with debris.

Rango: Brilliant and Adult

There’s been a recent fuss made by some parents’ groups about the fact that some of the characters in Gore Verbinksi’s brilliant new animated movie Rango are actually, shudder, smoking. They feel that the movie is setting a bad example in that regard and will entice their kids into taking up the deadly habit. I think their concerns are misguided as most of the small fry watching the film will be too busy enjoying the antics of the anthropomorphized creatures on the screen to pick up on that aspect of the movie. But I also feel that maybe, at heart, this isn’t really a children’s movie in the first place. Rango, despite the fact that it’s animated, is actually a really smart and decidedly grown-up send up and homage to classic westerns and other movie genres, one that is chock full of obscure movie in-jokes and adult references and situations. There’s even a mention of brothels in the Los Lobos song that plays over the closing credits of the film. In that light, I’d recommend that adults leave their kids at home or find another animated movie – there’s no shortage of them out there – to take their kids to instead. Leave Rango for us old folk who can best appreciate it.

I must confess I never thought I’d use the words brilliant and Gore Verbinski in the same blog. This is, after all, the director of the lame Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2003-2007) and the annoyingly shrill Mouse Hunt (1997). He also directed The Weather Man (2005), an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful Nicolas Cage drama. Thus, none of his previous credits prepared me for how flat out inventive, original and entertaining Rango actually is.

Waterlogged: Julie Taymor's The Tempest

Helen Mirren and Felicity Jones in The Tempest

In the Shakespearean canon, The Tempest, reportedly his last written play, stands out as one of his weakest works. It’s essentially a simple tale about Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, who’s been exiled to a deserted island for over a decade with his daughter, Miranda. As The Tempest opens, by use of magic, Prospero has stranded his enemies – who usurped his post – and some others, on various parts of the island. There, they endeavour to make their way back to civilization even as Prospero instructs his child on life and love, and commands the resentful half-man/half-monster Caliban and the loyal sprite Ariel to torment their reluctant guests. It all builds to, not a climax, exactly, but a mild confrontation between the parties concerned, and then a flat and dull happy ending. Slapdash, superficial and thin, The Tempest, even when staged well, as it was at Stratford this past summer (see my review here), cannot surmount its many failings and shortcomings. But when you let a talentless filmmaker like Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) tackle the project, the results are considerably worse.

Double Dose 'o Disney: A Christmas Carol (2009) and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)

Disney's marketing acumen has always been top-notch. Whether it was releasing a new animated film (as they just did with Tangled), or opening the vault to re-release (in an approximate 7-year cycle) one of their classic animated feature films (the recent Blu Ray of Fantasia, for example), Disney has always had a knack for keeping their name front and centre with, if nothing else, a new generation of children. So, the recent back-to-back releases of the DVDs of their A Christmas Carol (2009) and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) were equally timely.

Released last Christmas to generally iffy reviews, Robert Zemeckis's latest motion-capture (mo-cap) experiment, A Christmas Carol, was held back for its first DVD release until just last week, a year after its theatrical launch. This is generally not the way things happen anymore. Usually, a film is in the theatres and then three to five months later it comes to On Demand and DVD. But Disney isn't stupid. A DVD release of A Christmas Carol in April or May would have been just dumb. Nobody would have rented it, so Disney wisely bit the bullet, held it a year, and are now cashing in.

Whatever LoLa Wants: The New Face Of Law & Order

The familiar cha-chung sound is there to accompany the inter-titles that separate scenes, but Law & Order: Los Angeles, which premiered September 29 on NBC, seems to be a breed apart in the pantheon of creator Dick Wolf. This certainly is not a carbon copy of the groundbreaking original show -- just plain Law & Order -- now gone after 20 years on the same network. For one thing, composer Mike Post’s distinctive theme music over the opening credits is missing. Ditto for the ubiquitous verbal introduction. And the look of LoLa, as it has been dubbed, is almost shocking. Longtime fans of the Mother Ship, which is what everyone calls the now-defunct drama, and of the two New York City spin-offs, Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent, may need to wear shades. Tinseltown is a place of bright sunlight and spacious homes in fashionable hues unknown to the gritty five boroughs, where cramped apartments, dark alleyways, shadowy streets, vacant buildings and menacing parks have been a mainstay of all three prime time cops-and-courts series. Unlike the dingy digs in those L&Os, the LA squad room is disconcertingly sleek and modern.