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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 27, 2007

TT: Way up north (I)

August 27, 2007 by Terry Teachout

• AUGUST 2 To Lincoln, Massachusetts, home of Walden Pond (actually, it’s in Concord, just across the town line) and the Gropius House, about which I wrote in my last “Sightings” column:

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a tiny cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, lived there for two years, then published a book about it. “Most men,” he wrote, “appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.” A century later, a German architect in flight from the Nazis moved to a meadow a stone’s throw from Walden Pond, where he put up a small house that is as deeply considered a dwelling as has ever existed.

The Gropius House, built by Walter Gropius in 1938, is a simple two-story structure that still looks breathtakingly contemporary. Its clean, right-angled lines and uncluttered floor plan are the very essence of the architectural style now known to aficionados as midcentury modernism. I paid a visit to the Gropius House the other day, and as I pulled into the driveway, I thought, This house could have been built yesterday–except that in 2007, few people would be willing to build a home that looks so utterly unlike the ones in which their neighbors live….

Like the Louis Armstrong House in Queens and the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore (which is, alas, no longer open to the public), the Gropius House has been painstakingly restored to its original condition, and it looks as if its designer-owner had just stepped out for a walk. The walls are covered with very appropriate art, including a Hans Hofmann watercolor and a gorgeous lithograph by Toko Shinoda, an artist whom I now long to add to the Teachout Museum. In my experience, most midcentury-modern house-museums have superior tour guides, and this one was no exception: Joyce Bowden showed off its myriad marvels with informed and irresistible enthusiasm.

Next stop: Peterborough, New Hampshire, home of the MacDowell Colony, where Paul Moravec spent part of the summer writing the first three scenes of The Letter and Thornton Wilder wrote most of Our Town (which is widely thought to be a fictional portrayal of life in Peterborough). Dinner at Pearl Restaurant & Oyster Bar, an uncommonly fine Asian-fusion place incongruously located in a strip mall, followed by the Peterborough Players‘ splendid revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner (about which more here). Spent the night at the Benjamin Prescott Inn, built in 1853, whose proprietors are as nice as can be.

• AUGUST 3 To Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there to spend two days seeing the Seacoast Repertory Theatre‘s productions of Damn Yankees and West Side Story (about which more here and here). Dinner at Pesce Blue, recommended by the authors of Fodor’s New England, who nailed it in one. My seafood risotto was meltingly good.

• AUGUST 5 To Colby College in Waterville, Maine, alma mater of Linda Greenlaw, whose museum contains major collections of works by John Marin and Alex Katz, both prominently represented in the Teachout Museum. I went there on my first visit to Maine four years ago and have been dying to return ever since. The Marin galleries house the best selection of that great American artist’s work to be seen in any museum, not excluding my beloved Phillips Collection.

Next stop: Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula, there to spend the night at the Oakland House Seaside Inn, whose accommodations include an 1907 arts-and-crafts-style cottage with a gazebo on the water. I passed the afternoon in a rocking chair on the porch, lapping up the salt air and reading a moldering copy of Good Evening, Everybody, the autobiography of Lowell Thomas, which I found on a bookshelf in the cottage library, tucked away among the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Most people remember Thomas–if at all–as the mellifluous voice of Twentieth Century Fox’s Movietone newsreels and the man who “discovered” T.E. Lawrence. (Arthur Kennedy played him in Lawrence of Arabia.) In my parents’ day, though, he was also America’s best-known and best-loved radio newscaster. Lowell Thomas and the News went on the air in 1930 and ran until 1976, long enough for me to tune in his farewell broadcast. Thomas grew up in Cripple Creek, Colorado, the wildest of the gold-rush towns, and lived to tell his dwindling band of aging listeners about Watergate. Now, like the rest of the stars of golden-age network radio, he is forgotten save by nostalgia-crazed old-time radio buffs. Sic transit gloria mundi!

(To be continued)

TT: Reminder

August 27, 2007 by Terry Teachout

My recent appearance on XM Satellite Radio’s Downstage Center, the weekly program of the American Theatre Wing, is now archived on the ATW’s Web site. To listen in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player, go here.
Howard Sherman, co-host of Downstage Center, wrote the other day to point out some things about the show that I hadn’t realized:

So far as we know, Downstage Center is the only national, weekly radio program featuring sustained conversation about theatre, covering Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional work; commercial and not-for-profit; musicals and plays; and speaking not only with actors, writers and directors, but artistic directors, designers, producers and on occasion, critics (there are a bunch of shows about musicals on both broadcast and terrestrial radio, as well as podcasts). Your interview was our 165th since the show began in April 2004, without a single repeated guest, and every one is available online for free as streaming audio and podcast.

All the more reason to listen, either via the ATW archives or by subscribing to XM, of which I am a very big fan. You can do the latter by going here.

TT: Almanac

August 27, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Fame is a bee.
It has a song–
It has a sting–
Ah, too, it has a wing.


Emily Dickinson, “Fame Is a Bee”

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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