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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 11, 2006

TT: WASP nest

August 11, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I review two shows in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one in New York, one out of town, both favorably.


A.R. Gurney’s new play, Indian Blood, just opened off Broadway at Primary Stages:

Like most of Mr. Gurney’s plays, “Indian Blood” is peopled with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who are variously conscious of their loss of cultural ascendancy. Here as in “Ancestral Voices,” the 1999 play to which it is a companion piece, the WASPs in question are actual members of the Gurney family, and the story is a wry semi-autobiographical vignette in which Eddie (Charles Socarides), the youthful narrator, draws a dirty picture, passes it around to his classmates, and promptly runs afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences when a priggish relation (Jeremy Blackman) threatens to show it to his genteel grandmother (Pamela Payton-Wright).


Unlike “Ancestral Voices,” which began as a book and evolved into a staged reading, “Indian Blood” is a full-fledged play performed, like “Our Town,” without a set or props, a self-evident fact that the narrator (Charles Socarides) calls to our attention so often that it becomes annoying (once would have been more than enough). Save for this sole lapse of taste, it’s a sweet little tale with overtones of rue that recall the novels of John P. Marquand….

No less pleasing was my visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival:

When the thermometer closes in on the century mark, wise New Yorkers head north. I recommend a day trip to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to see Terrence O’Brien’s joyously dotty outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged in the style of “3rd Rock From the Sun,” complete with space invaders and a flying saucer. Mr. O’Brien, the festival’s founder and artistic director, isn’t overly concerned with thematic consistency, and his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” also contains such interpolations as a dance routine choreographed by Lisa Reinhart in which Titania (Nance Williamson) leads the cast in a frenzied mambo, lip-syncing to the music of Yma S

TT: Almanac

August 11, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“A kind of horror came over the master of Georgetown then, a sudden chilling intimation of the underlying ruthlessness of the native character. Ireland had all the cosy warmth of the reptile house in a zoo, he thought: you were lapped in blarney and butter until the moment your means of livelihood were seized or your father was shot.”


Honor Tracy, The First Day of Friday

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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