Archives for June 2006

– Star Jones Reynolds

– The sixtieth anniversary of the bikini

– Superman’s politics

– Superman’s sexuality

– Rob Schneider’s fainting spell

Aren’t you relieved?

Friday is here, I’m back in New York, and it’s time once again for the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I wax enthusiastic in today’s paper about two new shows, Susan and God and Macbeth:

The most interesting thing about playgoing in New York isn’t Broadway–exciting though it can be–but the plethora of tiny Off Broadway troupes that make magic on the cheap. The Mint Theater Company, one of the best, specializes in neglected plays deserving of a second chance, which it performs in a coffin-shaped room on the third floor of a dingy office building in the theater district. The Mint’s productions are always worthy and often revelatory, never more so than in the case of Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” a long-lost Broadway smash from 1937 that wowed the critics, played to packed houses, was filmed by MGM, then sank from sight. This is its first New York revival since 1943, and it is a major event, a pitch-perfect production of a 69-year-old play whose subject matter is so modern in flavor that it could have been written last week….

I feared the worst when I opened the program to the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Macbeth” and found not one but two open letters in which Oskar Eustis, the company’s artistic director, assured me that the play I was about to see was “all too appropriate a choice” for a “divided and war-torn nation” engaged in a “vaguely defined war on terror.” Nor was I encouraged to learn that Mois

Upon returning to New York from Smalltown, U.S.A., I found in my waiting pile of incoming snail mail a contract for a five-hundred-word piece I recently wrote for an upcoming issue of a Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless. It consisted in the main of the usual you-agree-to-let-us-do-whatever-the-hell-we-want boilerplate, but the following paragraph was new to me:

8. You agree to use your best efforts to participate in the promotion and marketing of the Work and The Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless by making reference to the Work and The Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless in settings including, but not limited to, articles or books written by or about you or the Work, interviews, editorials, press conferences, press releases, television appearances, Internet Web sites maintained and operated by you, and any other media available for the promotion of the Work to which you have access.

My immediate impulse was to scrawl Screw you, buddy! across the face of the contract and send it back in the stamped, self-addressed envelope thoughtfully supplied by the Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless. After further consideration, though, I decided that it was more important to get paid than strike a pose, so I signed the contract–grudgingly–and dropped it in the mail.

The whole dismal exercise put me in mind of the following passage from Patrick O’Brian’s The Reverse of the Medal:

“As for Gibbon, now,” said Stephen when they were settled by the fire again, “I do remember the first lines. They ran

• I take the visible world at face value, experiencing it first of all as an abstract panorama of colors, shapes, and patterns. This makes it possible for me to gaze out the window of a train or an airplane for long stretches of time, wholly absorbed in the stream of images unfolding before my eyes. It also explains why my initial response to a figurative painting rarely has anything to do with its subject matter, to the point that I’m capable of overlooking the most obvious of representational details.

No doubt this quirk of mine arises from the fact that music, the most radically ambiguous of all art forms, was the one with which I first became closely acquainted. Perhaps as a result of my early musical training, I tend not to worry overmuch about what any work of art “means,” except when it insists on its “meaning” so aggressively that you can’t possibly overlook it, in which case I’m likely to find the results tiresome or irritating.

It’s my impression, however, that most people approach art in exactly the opposite way: they view a work of art as an act of symbolic communication whose “meaning” is fully knowable, and they become uncomfortable, even anxious, if they can’t figure it out more or less immediately.

Flannery O’Connor once said something highly relevant in this connection:

If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

• I dreamed last night that a friend of mine had a nervous breakdown after being bumped from a reality TV series. No part of this dream makes sense: I don’t watch that kind of show, and the friend in question doesn’t even own a TV set. To be sure, I don’t care for such reality TV as I’ve been unlucky enough to see. Back when the genre was new, I watched one episode apiece of Survivor, The Real World, and American Idol, and loathed them all. But that was the end of it: except for a short piece written for the New York Times in 2002 and later collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, I’ve had next to nothing to say about reality TV in or out of print, nor do I sit around my apartment at night thinking evil thoughts about Simon Cowell. So why did I dream so vividly about something that means so little to me?

• An old friend writes, apropos of my recent postings from Smalltown, U.S.A.:

I was just wondering…do you think you could ever be happy outside the big city again? I mean to live. Are the artistic offerings essential to your happiness? I read you appreciating your escapes but wonder how you would “be” if you were someplace quiet for very long.

I wonder. Having been a New Yorker for twenty-odd years, I can’t easily imagine living in a place that didn’t offer a like amount of artistic stimulation. On the other hand, I don’t spend nearly as much time on the town as I did before I fell ill last December, and even if I were to move elsewhere, I’d presumably take my books and CDs with me (not to mention the Teachout Museum).

My guess is that what I’d miss most about New York is not so much its “artistic offerings” as the regular face-to-face contact with artistically inclined people that living here makes so easy. I know art isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it’s the most important thing in my world, and in the absence of friends and colleagues with whom I can talk about it, I start to get restless.

It hasn’t escaped my attention, by the way, that this restlessness bespeaks a certain narrowness of mind on my part. Some of the nicest people I know don’t care about art.

“In Los Angeles, the theatre on the entertainment food chain falls somewhere between folk dancing and accordion playing. Basically, they feel you’re out of work.”

Nathan Lane (quoted in Acting: Working in the Theatre)

My mother and I packed a picnic lunch this morning and drove to Bollinger Mill, a flour mill built in 1868 next to a covered bridge of like vintage. It’s as pretty and peaceful as its picture, an oasis of quiet in what seems like the middle of nowhere, though in fact it’s only fifteen miles from Cape Girardeau, a good-sized college town. When we were finished eating, we sat by the creek and listened to the water rushing over the dam, then headed south to a favorite drive-in just outside of Benton (pop. 732), the county seat, where I had my annual chocolate malt. Later on we watched the 1962 film version of Requiem for a Heavyweight, and afterward we sat together on the porch swing and watched the moon rise.

Now I’m packing my bag and listening to Louis Armstrong singing “Blueberry Hill.” The shuttle bus will pick me up at six-thirty tomorrow morning to whisk me back to the St. Louis airport. I’ll spend two nights in New York, then fly down to the Georgia Shakespeare Festival to see Hamlet and Twelfth Night. I hope I enjoy them half as much as I enjoyed my visit to Smalltown, U.S.A.

I’ll check in with you again on Friday. Be well.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

– The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– Faith Healer* (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

– King Lear (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

“The sooner you learn that you’re a vessel, the quicker your fear goes away. Because when you’re younger, you sort of go out there thinking, Look at me! Watch me! But once you understand you’re a vessel for the playwright your fear disappears.”

Frank Langella (quoted in Acting: Working in the Theatre)

Nobody walks anywhere in a small town, except maybe next door or across the street. When I told my mother I was going to walk downtown to buy a belt, she boggled. It took me a good ten minutes to persuade her that I wasn’t kidding, and another five to talk her out of driving downtown to pick me up after I’d made my purchase.

It’s been years since I last took a long walk in Smalltown, U.S.A. Much has changed since then, though mostly only on the surface. I walked across a couple of dusty, weedy vacant lots that once held stores at which I shopped when young, and I saw quite a few buildings that had changed virtually beyond recognition in the thirty-two years since I went off to college. One of them used to be a fire station, the same one I visited on a first-grade field trip. Now it’s a schoolhouse, an Adult Basic Education Center. I wonder if the fire pole is still there.

Yet most of the sights I saw were as familiar-looking as my own name. I strolled by a white water tower with SMALLTOWN painted on the tank in big black letters. I passed half a dozen boxy brick churches whose outdoor signs bore inviting messages (“Where Friends Become Family”). I peered into the show window of Collins Piano, the store where my parents bought me the spinet on which I learned to play, and where I later purchased my very first album of modern classical music, an LP containing Isaac Stern’s performances of the Berg Violin Concerto and the Bartók Rhapsodies. How on earth did it get there? I’ve always wondered.

Not only did most things look the same, but they sounded and smelled the same. I heard the purr of air conditioners and the whine of lawnmowers. I smelled fried onions on the morning air and knew I was a block away from Kirby’s Sandwich Shop. I heard a loud roar far above me, looked up, and saw a twin-engine plane descending from the cloud-filled sky, headed for the Smalltown airport.

At length I arrived at Falkoff’s Men’s Shop, where I’ve been buying clothes for nearly forty years. David Friedman, the proprietor, greeted me with a smile, and smiled even more broadly when I told him that my old belt was two sizes too big for me now. He last saw me six months and forty pounds ago, and he was happy to see how well I looked.

It was two degrees hotter by the time I left for home, but a breeze was blowing, and most of the streets down which I walked were lined with tall, shady trees that made my return trip pleasant. Just as I was crossing Malone Street, I heard a familiar roar, looked up, and saw the same twin-engine plane that had landed a half-hour before climbing back into the sky, this time headed in the opposite direction.

An hour later my mother and I were eating potato soup at Vanessa’s Coffee Shop, the newest restaurant in Smalltown. “I can’t believe you walked all that way,” she told me.

“I needed the exercise,” I told her. “Besides, it was fun.”

“Did you see anyone you knew?”

“Not a soul. Except for two kids dribbling a basketball, I didn’t see anyone else on foot.”

My mother shook her head. “Nobody walks anywhere in Smalltown,” she said.

“Someone once defined to me craft–or technique as I’ve always thought of it–as being what you use when you don’t feel it anymore.”

Patrick Stewart (quoted in Acting: Working in the Theatre)