« TT: Almanac | Main | TT: R.I.P. »
July 5, 2006
TT: Time and again
Last Friday I lunched at the Fairway Café with a choreographer I know. Midway through our meal, he started to tell me about a ballet he'd seen last month, and suddenly he was on his feet, twisting himself into an arabesque, looking just like the ballerina whose pose he was describing. What made this so funny was that the choreographer in question is not only as unfeminine a creature as has ever set foot on the Upper West Side, but has a raspy tough-guy speaking voice produced by a lifetime of chain smoking. What made it funnier still was that no one in the restaurant gave him a second glance.After we finished eating, we walked through Central Park to the Whitney Museum of American Art to look at "Full House," the Whitney's new five-floor permanent-collection retrospective. Most of it left us cold, so to cleanse our palates, we went across the street to Hollis Taggart Galleries, where "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint" was closing after what I'm told has been a spectacular run. Apparently the column I wrote about the show had a lot to do with the unexpectedly large number of people who came to see it. That made me sinfully proud. I've been writing about Friedman for several years now, and it pleases me to think that my efforts might be bearing fruit at last. What could be more wonderful than to have played a small part in bringing long-overdue recognition to a chronically underappreciated artist?
I arose at four-thirty the next morning to start making my way to Atlanta. LaGuardia was jammed an hour later, it being the first day of a long holiday weekend, but the guards swept us through the security checkpoints with welcome efficiency. By ten-thirty I was looking for a parking place at the High Museum of Art, for which Renzo Piano designed three new buildings that put the museum in the news late last year. With 312,000 additional square feet of exhibition space, it's now one of the largest museums in the south. Alas, the new buildings are more interesting than the collection they house, though the High does its best by the smallish number of first-rate pieces it owns. Right now, for instance, it's putting on a very nice show of American works on paper to complement an excellent touring exhibit of American drawings and watercolors from the Princeton University Art Museum. As for Piano's new wing, it's gorgeous, but I couldn't help feeling that the museum got a bit too big for its britches when it built itself so spectacular a home.
It's worth mentioning that I was one of a mere handful of visitors to the High on Saturday morning, though I'm sure that had at least as much to do with the nearness of the Fourth of July. Apparently Atlanta empties out on holidays, no doubt because it's so hot in the summertime. It took an hour or so to cool my hotel room to a habitable temperature, and the restaurant recommended to me by the folks who run the Georgia Shakespeare Festival turned out to be closed for the whole weekend, forcing me to find a last-minute pre-theater substitute. (Don't ask.)
In due course I made my way to the suburban campus of Oglethorpe University, home to both Georgia Shakespeare and the International Time Capsule Society. A pleasing combination of shady trees and ye-olde architecture makes it a nice place to see Shakespeare on a hot summer evening, and as I settled into my seat to watch Twelfth Night, I thought of a conversation I had the other day with a friend of mine who is intelligent but not artsy. I mentioned to her that I'd be visiting seven Shakespeare festivals this summer, and she said, "I have to ask you something. I don't mean to sound stupid, but I really want to know the answer. You see a lot of Shakespeare plays, right? And you see most of them more than once, in different productions. So tell me--what do you get out of it? What's the point of seeing a whole bunch of Hamlets?"
I was nonplussed by her question, so much so that I couldn't give her a good answer on the spot. But as the familiar bait-and-switch plot of Twelfth Night unfolded yet again, the answer came to me: the point of seeing Shakespeare's plays repeatedly is that they are plays. Of course they're poetry, too, which means that much of their essence can be extracted from the private act of silent reading. Yet even the most imaginative and resourceful reader cannot envision the transformation that takes place each time a stageful of actors, be they good, fair, or indifferent, comes together to speak Shakespeare's words out loud in the presence of an audience.
In the three years I've spent as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I've seen more live performances of Shakespeare than I did in the forty-seven years that came before, and I've learned in the process that no matter how many times you may have read a Shakespeare play, you don't really know it until you've seen it on stage (though the very best Shakespeare films, of which there are a dozen or so, can go a long way toward plugging the gap). Outside of the sonnets and a few other verses, every surviving word that Shakespeare wrote was intended for public performance, and because he was himself an actor, he understood in the fullest possible sense the effect those words would have--and still have--when spoken from a stage in real time.
Moreover, that effect changes from production to production and performance to performance, sometimes subtly, more often not. Each time you see Twelfth Night or Hamlet or King Lear, you see it differently, and with each new way of seeing, you see further into the soul of the greatest of all English-speaking writers, the one who better than any other knew how to show us ourselves, furious and joyous, petty and great-hearted, desperate and blissful.
I wish I'd had the presence of mind to say all this to my friend, but like most writers, I'm better at my desk than on my feet. Perhaps Shakespeare was like that, too. I like to think of him stammering his way through a dinnertime conversation, then going home and scribbling down a monologue in which Macbeth said everything his tongue-tied creator had been thinking a few hours before.
Now I'm sitting at my desk in New York with my head full of Shakespeare, reflecting for the umpteenth time on how lucky I am to make my living doing what I do. I think about it whenever I'm standing in line at an airport, toting my carry-on bag and wondering whether I can possibly get away without taking off my belt before passing through the metal detector. Even when I have to hold up my pants, it's a small price to pay.
Posted July 5, 2006 12:00 PM
