• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2007 / Archives for March 2007

Archives for March 2007

TT: The Joan Didion Show

March 30, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Today’s Wall Street Journal column is devoted in its entirety to my review of the new stage version of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I hated it:



It surprised when Joan Didion published “The Year of Magical Thinking,” for I identified her so completely with California in the ’60s that I’d almost forgotten she was still alive. Of course she continued to publish–a fat volume of her collected essays came out last fall–but somehow I had come to see her as a figure from the distant past, a chronicler of strange days for which I felt no nostalgia whatsoever. Then her daughter got sick and her husband died of a heart attack and she wrote a best-seller about it, and all at once she was back….


I found it hard to shake off the disquieting sensation that Ms. Didion, for all the obvious sincerity of her grief, was nonetheless functioning partly as a grieving widow and partly as a celebrity journalist who had chosen to treat the death of John Gregory Dunne as yet another piece of grist for her literary mill. All the familiar features of her style, hardened into slick, self-regarding mannerism after years of constant use, were locked into place and running smoothly, and I felt as though I were watching a piece of performance art, or reading a cover story in People: Joan Didion on Grief….


Would that the stage version of “The Year of Magical Thinking” were an improvement on the book, but it isn’t. In one way it’s much worse, for it starts off with a speech that has all the subtlety of the proverbial blunt object: “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” Why on earth did David Hare, the stage-savvy director, let Ms. Didion get away with so crude and undramatic a gesture? If the rest of the play doesn’t make that point, nothing will.


Nor did Mr. Hare insist that his debutante author (this is Ms. Didion’s first play) ram a theatrical spine down the back of her fugitive reflections on death and dying. As a seasoned playwright, he should have known better. “The Year of Magical Thinking” doesn’t go anywhere–it just goes and goes, inching from scene to scene, and when Ms. Didion finally gets around to telling us an hour and a half later what she learned from the loss of her husband and daughter, it turns out to be a string of portentously worded platitudes…


To read the rest, buy a copy of today’s Journal or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column, plus the rest of the paper’s extensive arts coverage.


UPDATE: The Journal has just posted a free link to this review. To read it, go here.

TT: Almanac

March 30, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Concerning Fitzgerald, there is a principle that can’t be taught in a creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it’s worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but we wouldn’t have those if he hadn’t been like that. Fitzgerald’s prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.”


Clive James, Cultural Amnesia

TT: The uses of second-rate art

March 30, 2007 by Terry Teachout

In this week’s “Sightings” column, which appears in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I report on a visit I paid to an exhibition of paintings by Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries, some of whom were influenced by him to the point of outright imitation. What did I learn from the experience? That second-rate art, however derivative, can sometimes teach you as much as first-rate art about the nature of greatness.


To find out more, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.

TT: Almanac

March 30, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Concerning Fitzgerald, there is a principle that can’t be taught in a creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it’s worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but we wouldn’t have those if he hadn’t been like that. Fitzgerald’s prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.”


Clive James, Cultural Amnesia

TT: So you want to see a show?

March 29, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Here

TT: Almanac

March 29, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“There is no surer sign of a great writer than when whole books could be made out of his passing remarks.”


Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, Aphorismen (quoted in Clive James, Cultural Amnesia)

TT: Still in the barrel

March 28, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I continue to joust with increasingly urgent deadlines, and for now I feel the need to spend such free time as I have (and there isn’t much of it) consuming art instead of writing about it. I will, however, pause to tell you about my recent reading and listening:


TT: Almanac

March 28, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Rather than reading a book in order to criticize it, I would rather criticize it because I have read it, thus paying attention to the subtle yet profound distinction Schopenhauer made between those who think in order to write and those who write because they have thought.”


Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos (quoted in Clive James, Cultural Amnesia)

Next Page »

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

March 2007
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in