The Crooked Timber of Humanity: J.T. Rogers’ Oslo

Jennifer Ehle, T. Ryder Smith, Jefferson Mays and Henny Russell in Oslo. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

True political theatre – in which issues are dramatized rather than just personified by characters embodying contrasting views and the text explores a political subject rather than proselytizing - doesn’t come naturally to American playwrights. We tend to look to the Brits for this kind of writing, which is why J.T. Rogers’ Oslo, which recently completed a run in the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, in a gripping and poignant production staged with masterly resourcefulness by Bartlett Sher, feels like a particular triumph. (The play will transfer to Lincoln Center’s large space, the Vivian Beaumont, in the spring; the Beaumont is a Broadway house, so the play will be eligible for Tony Award nominations next season.) Rogers’ Rwanda play, The Overwhelming, is modest but effective, at least on the page (I haven’t seen it performed); its virtue lies in its restraint, its refusal to fall into melodrama, and to that end he places an American family transplanted to Rwanda in the center of the play and filters the horrors of the genocide through their response to it. Rogers has written two plays about Afghanistan; the one I’ve seen, Blood and Gifts, which Sher also directed at the Newhouse, is set between 1981 and 1991, and its historical focus is part of what makes it so unusual and intriguing. Rogers is clearly interested in boiling-point locations, but he’s a humanist, not a polemicist, and I think he keeps getting better as a playwright.

The Bridges of Madison County: Indistinct

Elena Shaddow and Steven Pasquale in The Bridges of Madison County

Last year the Williamstown Theatre Festival premiered a new musical based on Todd Haynes’s movie Far from Heaven – a perplexing choice, since the material (whatever one thinks of it) is so rarefied and dependent on cinematic reference points that transposing it could only alter the meaning, or at least reduce it to a series of social-problem-melodrama clichés. This year WTF mounted another new musical, based on Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County, and that’s puzzling too, though for a different reason. Waller’s novel about a short-lived affair between a married Iowa farm woman who’s an Italian émigré and an itinerant photographer is basically a Harlequin romance for the women’s-book-club set, with sufficiently self-conscious style to make readers believe that it should be taken seriously. It’s a suffocatingly bland volume, with characters who are barely more than ciphers, and the only thing that makes the 1995 movie version more distinctive is the miscasting of Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in the two principal roles. (Eastwood directed the picture.) So why bother turn this story into a musical?

Giant Missteps: Roma and If Beale Street Could Talk

Yalitza Aparicio in Roma.

During the credits of Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white memory picture about growing up in Mexico City in the early 1970s, an invisible hand splashes bucket after bucket of water on the tiles of a walled-in terrace attached to the home of a well-to-do family in a neighborhood known as Roma. After the second inundation, a rectangle of light, jagged at the top as if someone had carved a small hunk out of it, appears in the middle of the frame – presumably a piece of sky, as a tiny plane passes through it. It’s a remarkable shot, though Cuarón (who photographed the movie, as well as directing and writing and, with Adam Gough, co-editing it) never explains exactly what we’re seeing – is there a skylight up there? – and we can’t tell what it’s supposed to mean. This quote from the filmmaker from a Variety interview might help: “Borges talks about how memory is an opaque, shattered mirror, but I see it more as a crack in the wall. The crack is whatever pain happened in the past. We tend to put several coats of paint over it, trying to cover that crack. But it’s still there.” I said it might help: the liquid is water, not paint, and it reveals the crack rather than attempting to cover it up, and anyway whatever pain is associated with the past for Cuarón presumably resides inside that house, not in the sky above it. Anyway, why should we need to read an interview with him in order to guess how the hell we’re supposed to read this image, which he lingers on for the entire credits sequence? Sitting through Roma, we certainly know one thing: we’re supposed to believe we’re watching art. It’s meticulously made, without a single scene that feels like it wasn’t planned carefully beforehand. Man, what I wouldn’t have given for a spontaneous moment where you sense that one of the actors improvised a reaction and Cuarón kept it in the film because it surprised him or because he loved the performer. Roma doesn’t unfold, so we don’t get wrapped up in it; it presents itself to us and we’re there as witnesses to the artistry of its compositions. It’s deadly.

Golden Boy: Art vs. Commerce

Tony Shalhoub, Seth Numrich, Dagmara Dominczyk, and Michael Aronovin Golden Boy (Photo by Paul Kolnik)

 
When you read about the Group Theatre, the legendary company that introduced Stanislavskian acting to the American theatre in the 1930s, you can’t help wondering what their performances were really like. You can get some sense of this pioneering Method acting style when you watch John Garfield, the only one of the troupe who became a movie star, or Lee J. Cobb, who went on to play Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman on Broadway (and revisited the role years later on television) and the gangster Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront, or the few remnants Morris Carnovsky, the Group’s master actor, has left us of his work, in featured movie roles and TV appearances. But the first time I really got a feel for the Group Theatre style was when a PBS documentary about them included a clip I’d had no idea even existed: Luther Adler’s screen test from the mid-thirties, which replicated a scene that he and Phoebe Brand had played together on stage in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! (Adler and his sister Stella, the children of the celebrated Yiddish Theatre star Jacob Adler, were two of the Group’s leading actors; Brand, who married Carnovsky, came out of retirement to play Nanny in Vanya on 42nd Street.) The clip is maybe two minutes long, and you can’t even see Brand’s face, yet it’s a revelation. Certainly the acting is grounded by a rock-bound naturalism, but it’s more heightened than I’d imagined, more theatrical – in the best way. The scene is between Moe Axelrod and Hennie Berger, one-time lovers who are still desperate for each other but so resentful and defensive that they circle each other warily like nervous animals, every now and then reaching out a paw to swipe one another; and the two actors aren’t afraid to go for broke. You can hear the stage training in the broad vocal palette, in Brand’s free use of tremolo (a more old-fashioned choice than I would have guessed, but extremely effective here) to underscore her character’s woefulness and in the nobility in Adler’s stature and in the way he holds his face to the light.  (Among the Method actors of the next generation of Method actors, Ben Gazzara notably retained that quality.) You believe fully that you’re watching the characters, yet you don’t forget you’re watching actors. Perhaps no Method actor could make you forget that until Marlon Brando.

I thought of Adler’s screen test during Golden Boy, Bartlett Sher’s magnificent new Broadway production of the 1937 Odets play that was the Group’s biggest hit. (Adler played the title role, Carnovsky was his father, and Cobb, Garfield and Brand were all in the company, as well as the Hollywood actress Frances Farmer and two future directors, Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt.) Odets trained as an actor with the Group but early on he began to write plays for them; seven were produced during the Group’s decade-long existence (it finally collapsed in 1941), including Waiting for Lefty, Paradise Lost and of course Odets’s masterpiece, Awake and Sing! He was the closest they had to an official playwright-in-residence, and Golden Boy is his most personal play. Before he wrote it, and again afterwards, he spent time in Hollywood, where he knew his talents were being squandered, as Hollywood squandered the gifts of so many of the great east-coast writers in the thirties and forties, but which offered him a luxurious lifestyle that, like so many others, he found hard to resist. The battle between what you do for your soul and what you do to make a buck is at the heart of Golden Boy, in which Joe Bonaparte, the working-class son of Italian immigrants, a talented violinist, becomes a boxer, a choice that breaks his own heart as well as his father’s and imperils his soul.

Pete Postlethwaite: The Value of the Character Actor

The untimely death of British actor Pete Postlethwaite, at the age of 64 of cancer, was a loss for moviegoers, not least because Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Usual Suspects) was one of those skilled character actors, who often enliven dull or mediocre movies when they appear on screen.

William Demarest in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

It’s a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the talkies, when stalwarts like Edward Everett Horton (Trouble in Paradise, Top Hat, Shall We Dance), William Demarest, (best known as Uncle Charley on TV’s My Three Sons, but a delightful regular in most of Preston Sturges’s stellar comedies, including The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero) and Thelma Ritter (Pickup on South Street, Rear Window), amongst many others, often stole the film whenever they appeared on screen.

In more recent years, Dan Hedeya (Blood Simple, Clueless), Tony Shalhoub (Quick Change, Galaxy Quest), Hank Azaria (The Birdcage, Mystery Men), Oliver Platt (Pieces of April, Frost/Nixon), Richard Jenkins (Flirting with Disaster; Me, Myself & Irene) and Parker Posey (Kicking & Screaming, A Mighty Wind) have filled that bill nicely. Last summer, we also lost Maury Chaykin (War Games, Unstrung Heroes), one of the great character actors of all time.

The Visitor: Bland Stand

Ahmad Maksoud, David Hyde Pierce and ensemble in The Visitor. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film The Visitor is focused on Walter, a middle-aged economics professor (played memorably by Richard Jenkins), who has withdrawn dramatically since the death of his wife. He teaches material by rote to students whose lack of engagement doesn’t concern him, and his rare personal interactions with them are cold and unsympathetic. (He’s so unengaged in the one course he’s currently teaching that, in mid-semester, he still hasn’t distributed a syllabus.) He secured a course reduction so he can work on a book but the truth is that he’s not writing either. When the chair of his department requires him to deliver a paper at a conference in New York, where he and his wife had a pied-à-terre that he hasn’t used since her passing, he discovers that a seedy agent has rented the space to a young couple, a Syrian drummer named Tarek and a Senegalese craft artist named Zainab. Unexpectedly stirred by their situation and reluctant to send them into the streets, he invites them to stay. Tarek befriends him and teaches him how to play the djembe. When the young man is picked up in the subway on a bogus charge, he’s identified as undocumented and sent to a facility where only Walter can visit him. (Zainab is also an illegal immigrant so her freedom would be endangered if she tried to see him.)

Journalism on Stage: The Connector and Corruption

Sanjit De Silva and Toby Stephens in Corruption. (Photo: T Charles Erickson)

In his new play, Corruption, which opened last week at Lincoln Center, the excellent American political playwright J.T. Rogers dramatizes the scandal in Britain that brought down Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper News of the World when it was revealed that phone hacking and police bribery were commonplace procedures at the publication. Most of the targets were show-biz celebrities, politicians and members of the royal family, but the investigation showed that the phones of thousands of ordinary citizens had also been hacked, including those of a murdered schoolgirl and the relatives of victims of the 2005 London bombings. Rogers’s previous plays include The Overwhelming (about the Rwandan genocide), Blood and Gifts (about the war in Afghanistan) and the Tony Award-winning Oslo (about the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and Palestine). Corruption is based on Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, an account of the scandal co-written by two men who took major roles in illuminating it: Tom Watson, a Member of Parliament (and future Labour Party Deputy Leader) serving on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Martin Hickman, a journalist for The Independent.

Rogers has chosen Watson (played by Toby Stephens) as his protagonist, but he doesn’t attempt to whitewash him: as government whip during Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister, his assertiveness crossed the line into bullying and intimidation. When Watson attempts to enlist a fellow MP, Chris Bryant (K. Todd Freeman), in the uncovering of the News of the World debacle, Bryant’s initial reluctance is personal: he hasn’t forgiven Tom for homophobic slurs, and when he does join the fight he insists that their collaboration isn’t an indication of friendship. Still, the lines that separate the good guys from the bad guys in this drama are very clear. It’s an intelligent, well-acted production, exciting (especially in the second act), directed by Bartlett Sher (who staged both Oslo and Blood and Gifts) with his usual command of rhythm and tempo and his highly skillful choreographing of ensembles, and Michael Yeargan has designed a fine set, a halo of screens playing news clips that spins over the stage. But by definition agit-prop plays aren’t subtle. The English playwright James Graham, who wrote Ink (about Murdoch’s early career) and Dear England among others, tends to present rousing material in an entertaining fashion in the first act and then convince himself in the second that he’s making a profound statement; you end up feeling cheated. Rogers reaches farther in Blood and Gifts and certainly in Oslo, which is his best work; in Corruption he’s satisfied to let the material speak for itself. I don’t think that’s a failing; neither the play nor the production makes extravagant claims for itself, and the subject matter is undeniably compelling and infuriating. But his writing here has more punch than elegance.

Idealism and Identity: Camelot and Out of Character

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot. (Photo: Daniel Rader.)

Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, but that’s not because, over the six and a half decades since it opened on Broadway, it’s acquired a reputation for having unsolvable book problems. For last season’s production at Lincoln Center, Aaron Sorkin overhauled Lerner’s book – whether in an effort to rescue it or to make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience wasn’t clear, but Sorkin’s rewrite was disastrous. It was also unnecessary. I’ve known Camelot all my life and I think it has a script of remarkable depth and substance. As a little boy in love with theatre, I saw it on Broadway with the original cast and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and set in a magical version of medieval England, the musical is about the birth of idealism and the struggle to keep it alive in a world that defaults so easily to the embrace of human vices. It’s a hunk of a show, all right, but that’s because, like Fiddler on the Roof and Hamilton, it presents a layered, complex narrative with resonant themes embedded in it. And so it makes demands on directors, designers and actors that are perilously difficult to fulfill.

Delectable Samples: A 2017 Arts Roundup

Robert Lepage in 887.

Since I rarely write about the arts, I welcome the opportunity to briefly comment upon what I enjoyed most this year, even though several of the pieces below have been reviewed by colleagues at Critics At Large. Apart from, perhaps, television, my sampling from the arts scene is relatively small yet I did experience some wonderful aesthetic moments. – Bob Douglas

Two theatre productions I attended this year were outstanding. Auteur Robert Lepage’s one-man bravura performance in 887 unspools the interplay between the fragmented recollections of his family life and the perils of collective Quebec memory from the 1960s to the present. 887 was the number of the apartment building on Murray Avenue in Quebec City where Lepage spent his formative years. The staging is jaw-dropping: a revolving set showing the interior of his current apartment and the exterior of his childhood home that reveals a doll’s-house replica of that apartment complex, toy cars, puppets and hand shadows. The catalyst for these reveries occurred in 2010 when the organizers of a cultural anniversary invited Lepage to recite by heart a 1968 poem, “Speak White.” He found that he could not learn the lines until he had explored his family history, particularly his relationship with his absent father, and how the personal dynamics intersected with the larger world of nationalist politics.

The Good Fight, and The Old Guard

Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne in The Old Guard (2020), now streaming on Netflix.

This review contains spoilers.

Following up on the movie recommendations of friends during the pandemic has kept me merrily occupied, especially when art houses are offering such interesting streaming options (like the Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet movies on tap at Film Forum) and Met Opera digs into its archives for a different production every twenty-four hours. I urge those of you who have been enjoying these and other treasures to show your appreciation by making donations to help keep these vital institutions alive. That list should also include San Francisco Opera, which has shared some truly dazzling work; San Francisco Ballet, which streamed a short piece every week until the conclusion of its official season; and Mint Theatre Company. Manhattan’s repository for obscure American and English plays, which is currently running three of its recent revivals. My normal New York theatregoing excursions don’t include visits to the Mint; based on the quality of the productions I’ve streamed over this weekend, that’s a mistake I hope to rectify when live theatre has finally shaken free of the shackles of Covid-19.