Archives for June 2005

I just got back from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent three days at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That wasn’t all I did: I spent my mornings seeing such intriguing sights as Hank Williams’ grave and Martin Luther King’s church. I also paid a visit to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose holdings include Edward Hopper’s New York Office and two paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, and thanks to the timely intervention of a reader, I even managed to eat something approaching my fair share of really good barbecue. Nevertheless, I came to Montgomery to see plays, and I managed to work in five of them while I was in town, one on Thursday night (Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing) and two each on Friday (As You Like It and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) and Saturday (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus). It was the first time I’d ever seen live performances of two Shakespeare plays in a single day.

Am I tired? Am I ever. You can’t fly nonstop to Montgomery from New York, so I had to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and take a puddlejumper the rest of the way. Thursday was a long, long day, and Sunday wasn’t much shorter. The good news is that my flying phobia seems to have left me–I actually enjoyed it up there! I’m awfully glad to be home, though, and I think I’ve earned a good night’s sleep, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I have three appointments and a deadline on Monday, but that doesn’t mean I won’t blog some more. (Nor does it mean that I will.)

I just got back from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent three days at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That wasn’t all I did: I spent my mornings seeing such intriguing sights as Hank Williams’ grave and Martin Luther King’s church. I also paid a visit to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose holdings include Edward Hopper’s New York Office and two paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, and thanks to the timely intervention of a reader, I even managed to eat something approaching my fair share of really good barbecue. Nevertheless, I came to Montgomery to see plays, and I managed to work in five of them while I was in town, one on Thursday night (Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing) and two each on Friday (As You Like It and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) and Saturday (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus). It was the first time I’d ever seen live performances of two Shakespeare plays in a single day.

Am I tired? Am I ever. You can’t fly nonstop to Montgomery from New York, so I had to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and take a puddlejumper the rest of the way. Thursday was a long, long day, and Sunday wasn’t much shorter. The good news is that my flying phobia seems to have left me–I actually enjoyed it up there! I’m awfully glad to be home, though, and I think I’ve earned a good night’s sleep, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I have three appointments and a deadline on Monday, but that doesn’t mean I won’t blog some more. (Nor does it mean that I will.)

Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together,

And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,

And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,

And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,

And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,

Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together,

And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,

And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,

And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,

And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,

Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

I’m spending this weekend in Detroit, where spirits seem to be pretty high, considering. Further blogging will have to wait until I get back to Chicago Monday, but in the meantime I want to urge everyone in Chicago and environs to tune in Sunday morning for a very special installment of Chicago Public Radio’s weekly arts show “Hello Beautiful!”

This week’s show was taped last Wednesday evening in front of a live audience that

Friday again, and time for my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser (posted by the grace of Our Girl–I’m down in Alabama, sans computer). Allow me, if you will, to dangle in front of your nose tantalizingly brief excerpts from my reviews of three shows.

First, Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, now playing at 59E59 Theaters:

Mr. Ayckbourn’s entry in the “Brits Off Broadway” festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can’t come any closer to describing the effect of “Private Fears in Public Places” than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness…

Second, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Euripides’ Hecuba, playing through Sunday at Brooklyn’s BAM Opera House:

Tony Harrison, the translator, decided that Euripides’ ever-modern Trojan War tale of slavery and vengeance was in need of updating. I bet you can see the punch line coming: He’s set the whole thing in Iraq, jerking around the original Greek in order to make it more “relevant.” (Among other overbearingly vulgar touches, he’s rendered “the army of Hellas” as “the coalition force.”) The set consists of five tiers of olive-drab American-style tents, the enslaved Trojan women are dressed in Muslim-style garb and sing Arabic-style chants, the sound effects…oh, the hell with it.

Last but not least, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.:

If the actors would tighten up the screws a half-turn and knock five minutes off the running time, I wouldn’t have a single nit to pick. Dixie Carter is devastatingly sexy as Mrs. Erlynne, the Lady in Red whose deep, dark secret sets the plot in motion, and everyone else in the almost-all-American cast supports her with the utmost aplomb, flinging epigrams into the breeze like lit firecrackers….

Guess what? The Journal has posted a free link to this week’s column! It’s an experiment–the powers-that-be have decided to try making selected drama columns available from time to time and see what happens. To read the whole thing on line, go to the Online Journal’s Today’s Free Features page and click on the appropriate link (it’ll be obvious).

As always, you’re welcome to pick up a copy of today’s Journal at your corner newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. You’ll be glad you did.

UPDATE: Here’s a permalink to my review.

“Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe sort of cry, sincere maybe, for what it’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you don’t have grief.”

Tobias Wolff, Old School (courtesy of in the wings)

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Riddle of the Ivy”