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March 12, 2004
TT: Good news, bad news
I'm back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday's Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas' Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee's Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.I loved the Lucas play, though I didn't expect to:
The good news is that Craig Lucas' characters never act like puppets on a better writer's string, nor is "Small Tragedy" a parasitical "commentary" on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability--one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his naïve American colleagues--but he invariably pulls the rug out from under your expectations, here and elsewhere. He even contrives to crack an Obligatory Republican Joke that's funny!
Not so Wintertime, which stinks on ice:
The embarrassee-in-chief is Marsha Mason, who for reasons known only to herself and Mr. Mee has been coaxed into playing the part of Marie, a blowsy Italian babe well past her sell-by date who is sleeping with François (Michael Cerveris), an overripe hunk of Eurotrash who wants to sleep with Ariel (Brienin Bryant), a starry-eyed little twerp who is sleeping with Jonathan (Christopher Denham), the son of Marie and her husband Frank (Nicholas Hormann). As for Frank, he's sleeping with Edmund (T. Scott Cunningham). I think that covers all the bases, except that the halfwits in question have converged on a summer house in mid-winter. (Did I mention that it's snowing inside the house?)
No link. Repeat, no link. Go buy the paper and make me proud of you. More later. Bed now.
Posted March 12, 2004 12:32 PM
