Young Twits: Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles

In Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, playing an extended run at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, a young man named Leo (Gabriel Ebert) lands on the Manhattan doorstep of his eighty-something grandmother Vera (Mary Louise Wilson) in the middle of the night after biking across the country. He’s a hippie, she’s an old-style Jewish leftist, and they’ve always had a companionable relationship. At this juncture she’s trying to cope with the ravages of age and he’s hiding out, avoiding his parents in St. Paul, avoiding dealing with the death of his best friend Micah on the trip, and attempting to pretend that nothing’s changed in his romantic relationship with Bec (Zoë Winters), who’s furious at him for not showing up at Micah’s funeral.

Herzog wrote one of the few compelling new plays of the 2010-2011 season, After the Revolution, which was lucky enough to receive a fine production at the Williamstown Theater Festival that was repeated in New York at Playwrights Horizons. After the Revolution made good on a terrific idea. Set at the end of the millennium, it was about a young woman, a third-generation Jewish leftist, who graduates from law school and starts a foundation dedicated to defending members of marginalized groups. (Her first cause is an attempt to get a new trial for an incarcerated Black Panther.) She names the foundation after her late grandfather, a cult hero among American Communists, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Then a new history of the period comes out that furnishes evidence that he was actually a Soviet spy. Herzog examines the issue from the point of view of the young woman, whose idealism is shattered, and from the point of view of her father, her uncle and her grandfather’s widow, who stick to the loyalties they’ve grown up with – and she refuses to resolve it. The play ends with the widow telling her step-granddaughter that, in taking an ethical stand against her grandfather, she’s no different from the American right-wingers who oppressed liberals and leftists in the fifties, and Herzog refuses to hold out hope that these two women can ever reconcile.

Cinema Comes of Age: Two Books on the Early and Late Stages

 

“Filmmaking is more athletics than art and filmmaking comes from the thighs.” – Werner Herzog, 2011.

Yes, this is an art review, even though it’s about cinema, because although movies are magic, as Van Dyke Parks once sang, they are also the premier art form of the twentieth century. As a visual art critic, I often hasten to point out that from my perspective visual art, and the history of art writ large, must perforce contain not only the aesthetic by-products of the French invention of photography in about 1840 but also the captivating artifacts resulting from the invention of cinema roughly fifty years later. Joseph Niepce, and then later on the Lumière Brothers, who jointly ushered in a seismic shift in the radical creation and revolutionary distribution of images, were visionary frontiersmen inaugurating the dreamlike epoch of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Was it science, fashion novelty, documentary evidence, or artistic medium? Well, it was all of the above. The still camera and the movie camera are now of course considered among the most modern of all modernist devices, but in those early heady days it was unclear how to situate the new technology, what to call it or how to judge its artistic merits. Such questions have naturally fallen far by the wayside in the wake of remarkable photographic artists such as Stieglitz, Evans, Frank, Arbus, Callahan, and Winogrand (to name only a few) as well as the breathtakingly beautiful motion pictures of Keaton, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Godard, Tarkovsky and Herzog (to mention some of my own personal favourites). 

Authenticity: Mary Jane and Strategic Love Play

Rachel McAdams and Susan Pourfar in Mary Jane.

The title character in Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, currently on Broadway, is the single mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Alex who was born with cerebral palsy, lung disease and a number of attendant maladies including a paralyzed vocal cord. Mary Jane (a luminous performance by Rachel McAdams) balances a job as a real estate assistant with caring for Alex in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment – she sleeps on a pull-out couch in what looks to be the only other room – with the help of a series of nurses. Some fall asleep on their shift or complain that she doesn’t provide enough perks, but the one we meet, Sherry (April Mathis), is dedicated and has become a friend. Mary Jane, an outgoing, positive woman, has also made friends with the superintendent, Ruthie (Brenda Wehle), who is fixing the drain in the kitchen sink when the play opens; she likes the people whom she calls on for assistance to know how much she appreciates them. Mary Jane is also generous enough to advise and buck up new mothers who have found themselves on the same strange, terrifying road; we meet one, Brianne (Susan Pourfar), who is making a list under her guidance of the information she needs that the doctors may have neglected to supply, so that she doesn’t have to ferret it out for herself. About halfway through the play, which is performed without an intermission, Alex stops breathing and Mary Jane, Sherry and her college-age niece Amelia (Lily Santiago), a serious, straightforward young woman who turns out to be excellent in a crisis, have to tend to him while waiting for the paramedics to take him to the hospital. In the second half, the action shifts to that location, where everyone calls Mary Jane “Mom” and where Alex has been in residence for nearly two months. Here we meet four other women: Dr. Toros (Matthis), Kat (Santiago), who runs the hospital’s music therapy program; Tenkei (Wehle), a Buddhist chaplain; and Chaya (Pourfar), another mother with a desperately sick child at home.

Mary Jane avoids every trap that a play with this kind of narrative could fall into.  It contains no melodrama or sentimentality; in fact, not one scene looks or sounds like anything I’ve encountered in another play or movie or TV drama. Herzog has refused to shape the work as a parade of misery or as a triumph of the spirit, though it’s impossible to watch it without admiring the protagonist’s resilience and measured optimism. So you never feel you’re being told what to feel, which expands the play’s emotional scope because we feel so many things at the same time. Not just Mary Jane herself but all eight of the supporting characters as well are fully formed and completely distinctive; under Anne Kauffman’s fine direction, the four actresses differentiate them so precisely and sink so easily into them that they’re barely recognizable, if at all, when they show up in the second act in a new set of roles. Herzog based the play in part on her experience with her daughter Frances, who died at eleven of nemaline myopathy, and it has the freshness and the freedom, for lack of a better word, of lived experience. But though Herzog’s experience informs it, it’s her honesty and sensitivity and the sureness of her craft that make it so good.

We fall in love with Mary Jane, we also fall in love with Rachel McAdams, though in truth many of us who have been watching her work since Red Eye and the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows did so long ago. McAdams is a vivid, even vivacious, but her great gift is her profound normalcy; the characters she plays are always in a normal emotional range, even when they are in extremis, as Mary Jane is, or witnesses to extreme distress, like her Boston Globe reporter in Spotlight. Herzog didn’t write big scenes for the character because Mary Jane is the opposite of a scene maker, yet the performance is mesmerizing. The closest she comes to a big scene is part of her interaction with Kat, where Mary Jane finally verbalizes her frustration with the music therapy program. Because of Alex’s bodily issues and his inability to communicate, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s cognitively damaged, but she has always operated under the assumption that he is capable of understanding her. She keeps telling him that someone will be coming to play music for him, yet this is the first time Kat’s schedule or that of her colleague has happened to mesh with Alex’s, and Mary Jane believes that her broken promises to him are causing him disappointment – that rather than benefiting him, the program is in fact causing him harm. Her complaint (in a beautifully written speech) is her single moment of anger and defeat, and McAdams’s authenticity and understatement make it unforgettable.

Archie Backhouse and Letty Thomas in Strategic Love Play. (Photo: Pamela Raith)

Strategic Love Play, in the intimate Soho Theatre, is a two-hander about a young man, Adam (Archie Backhouse), and a young woman, Jenny (Letty Thomas), who meet on the internet and agree to have drinks at a pub. Adam recently broke up with his girlfriend, and the love of his life is his best friend, who is married to someone else; he has imperiled that friendship with a drunken phone call in which he confessed his romantic feelings for her and put down her husband. Jenny has been so embittered by a history of romantic failure and a self-destructive impulse that, true to form, she plants a series of land mines on this first date with Adam. He sticks around for a while out of politeness, but eventually he gives up and walks out, confirming her expectations. But then, unexpectedly, he comes back with two more pints and a package of crisps, and the playwright, Miriam Battye, a talented writer with a finely tuned ear for dialogue, works hard to provide a reason for the turnaround. The two actors are splendid, especially Backhouse, and there’s never a moment in the play’s ninety-minute running time when we aren’t engaged by their depiction of the two characters. But it can’t overcome our sense that when, instead of getting out of an unpleasant encounter with a woman who seems dangerously on the edge of either explosion or implosion while the getting is good, Adam elects to return for more, it has turned into some other play.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.

 

Shifting Gears: Private Philanthropy Versus Public Sponsorship in the Arts

The proposed new building for the Vancouver Art Gallery, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

“We used to build temples, but museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life.” – Alain De Botton

Even if a new gallery building design is elegant, aesthetically pleasing and curatorially sound, as the new former Vancouver Art Gallery conceived by Herzog & de Meuron definitely is, unless there is ample cash in the coffers it will never see shovels in the ground, remaining an abstraction or a pipe dream. The only question that remained for the VAG building, soon to be officially renamed The Chan Centre for the Visual Arts once it's in its new location site, was exactly whose coffers the cash came from. Now we know, and the answer is an enhanced relationship between the private and public sectors way too long in the formation, at least in my considered opinion. One important detail to clarify in this whole expansion and patronage support process: the building itself will have a new name, but the gallery inside will still retain its historical identity and name.  The Vancouver Art Gallery will be housed within the Chan Centre.

Double Solitaire: Creative Partnerships Made in Hell

William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950), written by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder, directed by Wilder.

“When two great saints meet it is a humbling experience." – Paul McCartney, 1968.

1. brackettandwilder

It was called the Golden Age of Hollywood for good reason. The early evolutionary phase of the film industry, which I personally designate as roughly being from 1929 to 1959, immediately established the stylistic devices, narrative techniques, creative content and future direction that cinema would take as both a visual art form and a commercial business enterprise. Most importantly, perhaps, the paradoxical fact that cinema could be both entertaining and profitable, as well as both philosophically challenging and emotionally comforting, was etched in celluloid almost from its beginnings at the turn of the century. Fine cinema is quite simply the best of both worlds.

Among the many screenwriters, producers and directors who blazed that ever-expanding trail, few would have quite the lasting impact on both comedy and tragedy as impressive and influential as the iconic achievements of the volatile collaborative partnership between writer-producer Charles Brackett and writer-director Billy Wilder.

Playwrights of Promise: Lucy Boyle and Mike Bartlett

Heather Lind & Blythe Danner in The Blue Deep

In The Blue Deep, which just concluded a two-week run at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Blythe Danner plays Grace, a recent widow whose daughter Lila (Heather Lind) comes for an unannounced visit to their country house in Sag Harbor after walking out on her boy friend in L.A. Grace, who runs an art gallery in Manhattan, is impatient with Lila’s tentative, waffling lifestyle – she hasn’t settled on a career – but the real conflict between them turns out to be over their responses to Lila’s father Bill’s cancer and eventual death. Throughout his illness Grace determined to remain upbeat, while Lila’s grief (in Grace’s opinion) paralyzed her and made her unhelpful, and now Lila insists on dwelling on her sadness rather than moving ahead. However, the truth is that the loss of her husband has so devastated Grace that she’s terrified to think about him; it’s a hole in the middle of her life that she keeps circling, pretending it isn’t there while she’s struggling to avoid being sucked into it. It’s the blue deep.

The Treasurer: Mother and Son

Peter Friedman and Deanna Dunagan in The Treasurer. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Max Posner’s The Treasurer, which is receiving a tip-top production by David Cromer for Playwrights Horizon (at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York City), is a lopsided comedy-drama that begins as an exploration of the guilt a middle-aged son (Peter Friedman) feels over his lack of affection for an aging mother (Deanna Dunagan). What I mean by “lopsided” is that Posner’s play doesn’t head at its theme directly; it keeps getting derailed and turned around. It’s absurdist in style, but acknowledging that fact doesn’t resolve its shaggy-dog quality. And by the end of its ninety-five minutes I realized that I didn’t want a resolution – that its meandering is part of its charm and also part of what makes it touching.

The Revisionist: Redgrave Plays Eisenberg

Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg in The Revisionist (All photos by Sandra Coudert)

Jesse Eisenberg is one lucky bastard: he managed to get Vanessa Redgrave, arguably the greatest living actress – certainly she’s in the top three or four – to star opposite him in his own play. The Revisionist, which is being produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a two-hander in which David, a young American writer who’s having trouble doing the revisions his publisher has requested on his second book, a sci-fi novel, visits Maria, his grandfather’s cousin and a Holocaust survivor, in Szczecin, Poland. She’s overjoyed to see him, eager to play host and show him around the city; he’s just hoping that some peace and quiet in a remote setting will propel him through his writer’s block. He’s the world’s worst house guest – not just a vegetarian (a fact he neglected to mention when he invited himself for a visit) but uninterested in food, so the dinner she’s prepared for him on his first night goes unappreciated. (He just wants to go to sleep.) He finds any kind of noise distracting; he’s caustic, impatient, judgmental and completely self-absorbed. And his treatment of her vodka-swigging taxi driver friend (and sometime lover) Zenon (Daniel Oreskes) – whom he finds washing her feet, a task Zenon apparently performed for the dead mother whose loss he still grieves – is condescending. Moreover, David is wound so tight that he keeps retreating to his room to pry open the window and sneak a few tokes from the stash of weed he managed to get through customs. Only when Maria alludes to her Holocaust experience – her entire family was murdered by the Nazis while her babysitter hid her until the end of the war – does David show any interest in her.

The Cinema of Stillness: Painting With Film

Above: some of the uncanny overlaps between frames from films by the Russian cinema poet Andrei Tarkovsky (left) and the great American realist painter Andrew Wyeth (right).

"What is art? . . . Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that reflects the true meaning of life – love and sacrifice."
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Recently, culture critic and film scholar Hava Aldouby illuminated a unique zone of viewing pleasure by reminding us that the great Federico Fellini professed a desire to create “an entire film made of immobile pictures.” For me, the most tantalizing of films are those that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir for their highly retinal and idiosyncratic visual imagery. David Lynch, for example, said he liked making “moving paintings.” Something like Goya in action.

Grandstanding: Other Desert Cities

Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach in Other Desert Cities (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Jon Robin Baitz’s critically acclaimed new Broadway play Other Desert Cities is an American family drama with an eleventh-hour revelation. Structurally and generically it harks back to the Victorian-era well-made plays that Ibsen and Chekhov each took a hand in sabotaging but that survived nonetheless into the twentieth century, where they furnished a model for American playwrights like Arthur Miller (who added a Freudian element) and later a blueprint for TV serials. Baitz must think he’s creating something new because he’s stocked his play with political content, but it’s a screechy, grandstanding melodrama in which every hinge creaks.

The setting is Palm Springs, where Polly and Lyman Wyeth’s two grown-up children have come out to spend Christmas with them. Lyman (Stacy Keach) is a retired ambassador and he and Polly are still conspicuously active in Republican circles. (Polly is played by Stockard Channing, but I saw her understudy, Lauren Klein.) Before they entered politics both Wyeths had Hollywood lives, Lyman as a handsome leading man while Polly and her sister Silda (Judith Light), transplanted Texas girls, wrote a series of popular detective movies. The team split up when the two sisters stopped getting along well enough to collaborate, and their animosity is more apparent than ever now that Silda, a recovering alcoholic, has moved in with Polly and Lyman. Their son Trip (Thomas Sadoski) produces a TV show called Jury of Your Peers in which the jury is made up of celebrities. Their daughter Brooke (Rachel Griffiths) is a journalist who has just completed a manuscript. When the family is assembled she announces that it’s a memoir about the family, centered on the tragedy they’ve never recovered from: during Vietnam their eldest, Henry, became involved with a radical anti-war group that bombed a recruitment center, killing a homeless man, and out of guilt and despair Henry drowned himself. Brooke has never forgiven her parents for turning their coming-apart son away when he sought their help after the bombing, nor has she recovered, after all these years, from the feeling that Henry, her hero, abandoned her when she was a little girl, not even leaving a note for her when he chose to take his life. This event which almost destroyed her family haunted her into her shaky adulthood – she’s had a breakdown and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. In researching the book she’s used her aunt as a resource. Silda has her own axe to grind: her fury that her sister and brother-in-law’s fervent loyalty to the GOP cause prompted them to see their own son, whom they struggled to bring up in their political image, as a traitor for defecting to the left wing.

Iconosphere: Cinema in the History of Art

William Holden, Sunset Boulevard, 1950.

“Movies are magic” – Van Dyke Parks

When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, growing up in the wasteland suburbs outside Toronto (Don Mills was, by the way, among the first such planned outliers in North America; it looked rather pleasant and was a splendid locale for experimenting with Aldous Huxley’s spiritual vitamins) and where I spent much of my time watching television like most of my fellow baby boomers, I was also treated to a rather unique experience that my fellow truants were not.

While whiling away the dreamy hours in front of that magic flickering box I would occasionally be taken aback by the sight of my own surname on the screen as the writer and producer of many a classic black-and-white film being screen on the new medium of TV.

There was, in those days, an almost total absence of the specifically programmed content we take for granted today, and instead the new-born networks would recycle movies from the early age of cinema for unsuspecting viewers such as myself. And when I asked them who this “Charles Brackett” was, their perhaps too-casual, somewhat innocent suburban response was something along the lines of “Oh ,yeah, I think he was part of the American branch of the family who had something to do with Hollywood.”

Something to do with Hollywood? He was, in fact, a member of Hollywood royalty, having also been a member of the Lost Generation in Europe along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald (both of whom he knew and nursed through their hangovers) before coming to New York and being a member of the Algonquin Room circle along with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley (more help with hangovers, Charlie being teetotal) while also serving as the drama critic for The New Yorker.

Like other talented writers (including of course, Fitzgerald and Faulkner) he was eventually financially lured to Hollywood, where he was teamed up by Paramount Studios with a recent émigré from Austria who barely spoke English, to write screenplays for the great Ernst Lubitsch.

The Camel Wore a Nightie: Appreciating the Artful Music of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart

Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart).

“Musical structure? I think it’s really a laugh. Frankly, I don’t see what you need all those sandbags for, just to keep your river in place . . . ”

– Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart)

Back when I was still living in Toronto, before moving to Vancouver, when we could still see more of each other, my good friend Kevin Courrier and I used to enjoy arguing about drastically different kinds of music and films. Though we also shared many favourites of the same genres, and though our arguments were only pretend in nature, we often enjoyed disputing the merits of films that told human stories in a narrative way viewers could relate to their own lives (his preference) versus films that were cold, antiseptic visual experiments of a photographic and philosophical nature (my preference).

Being a fine film critic, of course, he did embrace many highly demanding and experimental cinematic achievements, as long as they privileged the art (the tale) over the artist (the teller), whereas I was always more accepting of the morbidly self-indulgent and self-absorbed (even solipsistic) filmmakers who eschewed the audience altogether in favour of their own personal visions. I remember with great delight one disagreement about the way in which visual artist/directors such as Tarkovsky or Angelopolous, or Greenaway, say, would appear to set up their camera and simply walk away, allowing us to stare at a tree for what felt like a small eternity. I saw movies as a form of painting with film.

I recall once driving him crazy with the admittedly silly claim that, as far as I was concerned, it was perfectly okay for a clearly self-obsessed director such as Werner Herzog to cause the deaths of a few extras on the mountain while filming Fitzcarraldo (with fellow loony Kinksi) as long as it resulted in that amazing finished artifact. It was a remark delivered only half tongue-in-cheek but it proved very effective (to roil and rile up a close friend) at the time I intoned nit. I’ll admit that I’ve since softened my icy solipsistic tone and my apparent allegiance to works of art that are hyper-subjective and massively obsessive.

Bongo Fury by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, 1974.

Courrier, who along with his late friend David Churchill was one of the founders of Critics At Large, and I, perhaps best known as an art critic, also loved to pretend to clash over which side of the Frank Zappa canon should be taken more or most seriously. I would often elaborate a stern disdain for what I facetiously termed his “comedy music,” the satirical jibes at pop culture that he delivered so incisively, and I maintained a preference for his “serious music,” either the serious rock with less banter, or the serious neo-classical with no lyrics at all. So in a way, the same clash of friendly sentiments can also be identified in a collision of drastically acquired tastes such as Zappa and his frequently bonkers collaborator Don Van Vliet.

Haptic Happiness: Analog as Allegory

“Ever since Adam, who has really gotten the meaning of this great allegory—the world?”

– Herman Melville, 1851

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke, 1968

In “The Machine Stops,” a short story written by E.M. Forster in 1909, the famed novelist surprised the many lovers of his compelling but still conventional fiction, highly regarded tomes such as A Room With a View, A Passage to India, Maurice, and Howards End, by taking a radical detour into the kind of speculative fiction most often associated with science and its limits. He went on a similar jaunt in 1914 with his collection of stories called The Eternal Moment, which explored parallel science fiction themes and supernatural speculations. Throughout his lengthy writing career, during which he lived long enough to witness humans landing on the moon, he frequently alternated between entertaining social observation writing and the vividly imaginative ideas he explored in his wildly cerebral Celestial Omnibus. In fact, “The Machine Stops” was so utterly astonishing largely due to its surmise, nearly a century before the internet even existed as a concept, that we might eventually occupy, via technics (the original and official word for technology), a world where we are interconnected through a threshold-breaking mechanical means which starts out as a benevolent helper but invariably ends up virtually colonizing our very definition of reality.

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Döblin Meets Fassbinder Meets Lewis

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”
                        --Franz Kafka (to Max Brod)

Not so long ago I was discussing the compelling and distressing works of four Japanese novelists in terms of a special category I rashly called the scariest narratives ever written. And while it’s true that Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima are right up there in terms of writing seemingly elegant and restrained tales while secretly scraping off the thin psychological veneer of civilization to reveal the throbbing savagery beneath, now I might have to retract my assessment in light of recent re-readings of two novelists who are even more pertinent and sadly applicable to these harrowing times we’re all trying to live through. They were written historically close to each other, one by a German author, Alfred Döblin in 1929, when his country was witnessing the demise of the wistful Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, while the other was an American novelist in 1935, Sinclair Lewis, who was witnessing a threat to his own country’s democratic principles under the paranoid banner of white nationalism.