Comedy at Its Highest Peak: The Big Bang Theory

The cast of The Big Bang Theory

Note: The following contains Spoilers

Two of the best American comedies on television, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family, come from very different sitcom traditions. But they also cross over in interesting ways. The Big Bang Theory (CBS), which begins its sixth season on Thursday, Sept. 27, features an old fashioned laugh track, uses two cameras, and is a studio shot comedy in the vein of The Honeymooners, All in the Family and Frasier. Modern Family (ABC), which heads into its fourth season on Wednesday September 26, and which I’ll write about next week, eschews the laugh track, is filmed on real locations and is more in the naturalistic vein of M*A*S*H and Mad About You. Yet The Big Bang Theory still boasts the kind of sharp wit and subtle jokes that makes it quite contemporary in tone; and Modern Family has a decided penchant for slapstick, spit takes and pratfalls. Both shows are very funny and, in their own ways, unique comedies.

When The Big Bang Theory debuted in 2007, it did seem like a long shot for ratings success, even though it was the creation of Chuck Lorre, who had already scored big with Two and a Half Men (a crass comedy decidedly inferior to The Big Bang Theory in every way). After all, who but a bunch of science fiction obsessed nerds would want to watch a show about people like that? But Lorre was onto something. He realized that thirty years after Star Wars, SF, fantasy and gaming had so penetrated the popular culture that there would be quite a lot of interest in its goings-on from the outside world. Not to mention, the series offered one strong female character that functioned as the fulcrum for the guys and their shtick and provided  a ‘normal’ counterpart to the male oriented geek brigade (There are now three women on the show.) Five years on, The Big Bang Theory is an enormous hit (some 16 million American viewers, up 23% from the year before) and a smooth running ensemble, with not a weak link among the cast.

Unhappy Birthday: The Boys in the Band

Jim Parsons, Robin de Jesus, Michael Benjamin Washington and Andrew Rannells in The Boys in the Band (2020), now streaming on Netflix.

 

The Boys in the Band, if you need reminding, is a landmark 1968 play by Mart Crowley about eight gay men at a birthday party: Michael, the host, full of venom and self-hatred; his bookish ex-lover Donald; gentle, self-possessed Bernard; flamboyantly effeminate Emory; promiscuous Larry and stable Hank, a volatile couple; a dumb hustler called Cowboy; and Harold, the figure skater, pothead, and supercool “32-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy” whose birthday it is. Emotional hostilities and histories emerge, with Michael finally forcing the others into a sadomasochistic truth-telling game which involves saying “I love you” to someone over the phone. The same actors—Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Frederick Combs as Donald, Reuben Greene as Bernard, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Keith Prentice as Larry, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Peter White as Alan, Robert LeTourneaux as Cowboy, and Leonard Frey as Harold—played these roles off-Broadway, in the West End, and in the first film version, from 1970, produced by Dominick Dunne and directed by William Friedkin. The play didn’t reach Broadway until 2018, its fiftieth anniversary, when it was directed by Joe Mantello, produced by Ryan Murphy, and played by an all-gay cast: Jim Parsons as Michael, Matt Bomer as Donald, Michael Benjamin Washington as Bernard, Robin de Jesús as Emory, Andrew Rannells as Larry, Tuc Watkins as Hank, Brian Hutchison as Alan, Charlie Carver as Cowboy, and Zachary Quinto as Harold. The same personnel return for a new film version, which began streaming on September 30 as part of Murphy’s multi-million-dollar deal with Netflix. 

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.

Hollywood: Ryan Murphy’s Woke Fantasyland

Jeremy Pope, Darren Criss, and Laura Harrier in Hollywood. now streaming on Netflix.

This review contains spoilers.

Ryan Murphy’s latest offering, the Netflix limited series Hollywood (co-created with Ian Brennan), is so flat-footed and dopey that you watch it with a sort of indolent fascination, as if you’d been brained with a frying pan just before turning on your television set. It should be a camp classic, but it isn’t quite; still, it’s too stupefying to be boring. Murphy has chosen Hollywood in 1947 as the locale for a woke fantasy – an alternate history in which people of color and women and gay men manage, in the course of just a few months, to liberate themselves and make Hollywood the forefront of a cultural revolution decades before America got around to it. Despite opposition from a crew of two-dimensional bigots, while the head of Ace Studios (Rob Reiner) is hovering near death after a heart attack his wife (Patti LuPone) takes over the reins and, stirred by the pleas of her friend Eleanor Roosevelt (Harriet Harris), lets a young director (Darren Criss) cast his African American girlfriend (Laura Harrier) in the lead of a movie called Meg written by a gay black writer (Jeremy Pope). The producer (Joe Mantello) invents wide distribution to get over the southern boycotts; the movie is an immediate hit and wins a raft of Oscars, including three for non-whites. At the ceremony the writer kisses his boyfriend – a young unknown named Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) – on the mouth before going up to accept his. Hollywood changes overnight. All it takes is a few courageous souls.

Look, Up in the Sky! It’s a Jurassic Park for Our Times

One friend liked to call me Bird Nerd. For another, the teasing term was Birdbrain. That was back when I first became interested in the little feathered creatures descended from dinosaurs. Though I never went on any far-flung birding adventures as the characters in The Big Year do, I bought a field guide and binoculars to spy on the chickadees, blue jays, sparrows and cardinals that visited my neighborhood. I even learned to recognize some distinctive avian songs, much like Brad Harris (Jack Black) does in the film – which takes its title from an annual competition to witness more species than anyone else. A regular among the throngs that race to every site where rare birds have been spotted, he also is a contender in this contest.

Brad’s top rivals are Stu Pleisser (Steve Martin) and Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson), a world-renowned champion in the sport who’ll stop at nothing to win. Even though a triumph brings only bragging rights, no prize money, male egos are at stake. For the better part of 365 days, the trio traipses through all kinds of weather to the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Gulf of Mexico, the Carolinas and beyond.

The Biggest Secret: Jake Arnott’s The House Of Rumour

The House of Rumour (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 448 pp.) is the seventh and most ambitious novel by Jake Arnott, an English writer of what some call “faction” – fiction constructed around real people and events, some famed, others obscure. Engrossing as pure story, the novel is also an education, as the broad outlines of World War II and the ensuing half-century are reconfigured in and by the voices of people whose split decisions nudged the levers of history, or whose visionary hunches foretold its outcomes. The blurbs draw comparisons with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (at the high end) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (at the low); reading the novel, I thought of Robert Anton Wilson (especially Masks of the Illuminati, which germinates from similar principles), James Ellroy (American Tabloid, in its interconnections and narrative density), Thomas Harris (canny prose incorporating deep research into language, history, art, science), and David Thomson (Suspects and Silver Light, novels built from the secret parts of familiar, albeit fictional, lives).

The House of Rumour begins and ends with Larry Zagorsky, a minor pulp science fiction writer, living in Los Angeles just before Pearl Harbor, who joins the Mañana Literary Society, described as “the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time.” The Society is unofficially chaired by future SF giant Robert Heinlein; among its members are Anthony Boucher, mystery writer and editor, and L. Ron Hubbard, another pulp workhorse, not yet the creator of Scientology. Also in the Society orbit is Jack Parsons, a charismatic genius researching solid fuel for the newly established CalTech Jet Propulsion Labs – as well as a practitioner of ritual magic and priest of the Ordo Templi Orientis cult. Parsons, like the Mañana Literary Society, actually existed; and if, like me, you hadn't known that, you have plenty to discover as the novel veers back and forth in time, its speculative web drawing in wartime spy capers and UFOs, gender and sexuality, prophecy and the occult, how James Bond was created, and why Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. 

The Weir: Ghost Stories

Stephanie Jean Lane, Philip Themio Stoddard, Harry Smith, Sean Bridgers and Joey Collins in The Weir. (Photo: David Dashiell)

Director Eric Hill, scenic designer Randall Parsons, lighting designer Matthew E. Adelson and a first-rate cast of five actors bring a hushed intimacy and a profound sense of place and community to the Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. The play, which premiered in London in 1997 and transferred to Broadway two years later, is set in a rural pub in County Leitrim where four locals share drinks with a young Dubliner, Valerie (Stephanie Jean Lane), who has just rented an old house in the area. Finbar (Harry Smith), a hotel proprietor who no longer lives in the countryside, is showing her around the town. The pub’s owner and bartender is Brendan (Philip Themio Stoddard); the other men in the room, Jack (Sean Bridgers) and Jim (Joey Collins), are older. Randomly the conversation turns to episodes that the tipplers have had, directly or indirectly, with fairies and ghosts.

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.

Blacks and Whites: Slave Play, Hansard, and Michael J. Pollard

James Cusati-Moyer and Ato Blankson-Wood in Slave Play. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

This review contains spoilers for Slave Play.
 
Slave Play, written by Jeremy O. Harris and directed for Broadway by Robert O’Hara (who also staged the professional premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop last season), begins with three broadly satirical vignettes about interracial couples copulating on pre-Civil War southern plantations: a white overseer with a black female slave, a black male slave with the white mistress of the house, and a black foreman with an indentured white male servant. The style is familiar, especially to anyone who lived through the downtown theatre of the sixties and seventies; only the gay content of the last sketch and the racial reversal, as well as a few outré details (like the huge black dildo the white woman useson the black buck and the fact that he serenades her with his violin after coition), seem fresh. But then two contemporary characters appear above the stage to halt the proceedings for a Brechtian effect and we wonder if we might be watching a rehearsal. They turn out to be not stage managers, however, but therapists, Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio), another interracial couple who are running a program called Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy – which, they assure their clients, has had tremendous benefits for their own relationship. Each of the pairs we have just seen performing in the sketches is a couple that has enrolled in the group because the black partner has been unable to respond sexually for some time. The idea of Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy is that the source of the problem – the reason these African Americans have closed down – is that any sexual connection with a white lover invariably evokes the legacy of slavery and these farcical re-enactments are intended to break through the block. The reason the two therapists stop the exercise is that it turns out to be so startlingly effective with Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) that he has an orgasm and then dissolves in tears, while his partner, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), not only is caught off guard but feels superfluous, even though he knows he’s supposed to be happy for Gary. The subsequent group discussion gives rise to turbulent emotions for all six of the participants.

Triggered Times: Remembering "Pearl"

An October 4 New York Times story revealed that Janis Joplin – gone at that point for exactly 40 years – is on the verge of a comeback. Although she has remained a music icon since overdosing on heroin in the fall of 1970, her family never groomed the singer’s legacy the way relatives of other rock stars have. But now a “professional estate manager,” who already has done wonders for the equally deceased Jim Morrison, Peter Tosh and Gram Parsons, intends to relaunch her image. There’ll be new books, vinyl collector editions of her albums, a line of Janis-like clothing and jewelry called Made for Pearl (her nickname and the title of her posthumous record). Plus, he’s planning a feature-length documentary that will include rarely seen footage shot by her road manager John Byrne Cooke.

Fireball Career: Peter L. Winkler's The Real James Dean

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant (1956).

Humphrey Bogart once said of James Dean that he “died at just the right time,” explaining that “If he had lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity." Bogart makes a cameo appearance in Peter L. Winkler’s The Real James Dean (Chicago Review Press, 2016), trying to “carry on a gentleman’s conversation” with the new kid in town while the shy, “starstruck” Dean stares at his feet and mumbles. According to Merv Griffin, Bogart finally grabbed Dean by the lapels and called him “a little punk” and a “two-bit nothing” for being so discourteous as not to look him in the eye when spoken to. Given the generational divide as well as the differences in personality between the two men, it’s possible that Bogart thought he was being patronized when he complimented Dean on his technique and got back the response, “Yeah? That’s okay by me.” Their mutual friend Joe Hyams points out that Bogart, having become Bogart by this point, kept his “insecurities” to himself, while Dean, the Method man, wore his on his sleeve, the better to keep them handy for when he needed them to fuel his work. The Real James Dean (subtitled “Intimate Memories from Those Who Knew Him Best”) makes two things very clear: Dean, however much he may have flirted with exhibitionism and self-indulgence onscreen and enjoyed the rewards of success and celebrity off it, was a heroically committed actor who saw himself as an artist, and that side of him is only part—maybe not even the biggest part—of the reason for the impact he made on the culture, and why it continues to reverberate. This isn’t a biography or a critical study but a smartly chosen selection of things written and said about Dean by those who knew him, worked with him, loved him, revered him, are still conflicted about him. It’s fascinating to take in Dean’s life and career through the eyes of so many people who knew him at different times in his life.