Archives for September 2007

Who knew? I went to Baltimore last Saturday to review a revival of a mossy old chestnut for today’s Wall Street Journal, and it turned out to be as fresh as tomorrow’s bread:

What’s so funny about mass murder? Nothing–unless you happen to be watching a performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” whose principal characters have piled up two dozen corpses between them, with No. 25 about to quaff a glass of elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide as the curtain falls.
The phenomenal durability of Joseph Kesselring’s only successful play is a matter of record. It opened on Broadway in 1941, ran for 1,444 performances, was filmed by Frank Capra, and has since become God’s gift–or, rather, Satan’s–to community theaters and amateur actors. But it tends not to get done by first-class companies nowadays, and so CenterStage’s crisp, well-cast revival is something of a revelation. I knew “Arsenic and Old Lace” was funny, but I didn’t know it was this funny. Anyone who doesn’t shatter a rib laughing at CenterStage’s production is…well, dead.

Also on my plate was the Keen Company‘s production of The Dining Room:

Of all A.R. Gurney’s studies of life among the WASPs of northeastern America, the best one might just be “The Dining Room,” whose Off Broadway premiere put him on the map. “The Dining Room” is celebrating its 25th birthday this season, and the Keen Company has marked the occasion with a very fine Theatre Row revival that makes the strongest possible case for a theatrical craftsman who doesn’t get nearly enough respect.
Inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” “The Dining Room” takes place, according to Mr. Gurney, in “a dining room–or, rather, many dining rooms.” The play consists of a series of cunningly dovetailed dramatic vignettes in which the author explores his preferred theme, the postwar erosion of upper-middle-class self-confidence, with the utmost skill and variety. The six actors in the cast play a total of 57 roles, so many that the “characters” in “The Dining Room” come across not so much as individuals as deftly sketched archetypes. Most of the playlets are comic, but the overall effect is intensely elegiac, in large part because of Mr. Gurney’s mixed feelings about the lost world that spawned him. He knows its limitations, but he also appreciates its virtues, and it is this honest ambiguity that makes “The Dining Room” so involving.

No free link, so to read the whole thing, follow the usual drill: either buy today’s paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and the rest of the Journal‘s arts section–on the spot. You know it’s a good deal. What are you waiting for? (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

Life to the lees.

Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING SATURDAY:

• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

I’ve been a fickle reader these past months, skipping around from book to book, only occasionally seeing one through. I did finish two by Kate Christensen, The Epicure’s Lament and In the Drink, as well as A Buyer’s Market (the second installment of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time) and the strictly confectionary Mergers and Acquisitions. I also swallowed a couple of Reginald Hill mysteries practically whole, but that’s just par for the course (until I run out of them, an eventuality I prefer not to contemplate). Otherwise, though, it’s been a few pages here, a chapter there, until a week or two ago, when I hit on just the thing that suits me just now. But more on that in a minute.

First, a word or two on In the Drink, Christensen’s first novel. It superficially resembles a certain kind of book wherein a hapless twenty-something, female, finds her hap. But Claudia, the protagonist of Christensen’s book, is less picturesquely hapless than your standard issue Bridget Jones type. Frequently drunk, sought by collection agents, and not above stealing from the dead, she’s actively self-destructive. She has a memorable foil in her employer, Jackie, whose socialite detective novels she ghostwrites for peanuts. And Christensen has an eye for a scene:

In the park, I sat on a wet bench. The river lay flat and sullen, a drenched, dark mineral gray-green. The banks of New Jersey hulked, beaten-down; the sky was several shades lighter than the water, but just as dense. The mastodonic roar of trucks along the West Side Highway was pierced by a bicycle bell on the path behind me, and the voices of children playing nearby on the paved walkway.

She’s especially good at capturing what things look like seen through a glaze of pain. Speaking of which, check out the unlikely loveliness of this description, from Henry Green, of an unpopular schoolboy’s fear of his classmates (I’m still dipping into and out of Green’s memoir Pack My Bag):

Until he went up to Cambridge I was sheltered and could always find sanctuary in [my brother’s] room which meant I had more time to read and that means literally, in the hunger for reading anything and everything which began about then, I had more time to give to what became a preoccupation. Also I was spared the terror I got to know afterwards when there was that thunder of feet down the corridor and one sat still as a rabbit wondering if they were coming for one. Later at Oxford, where I had rooms over cloisters paved in stone which echoed, they would tear screaming in by either of its entrances drunk like fiends about one in the morning and, unpopular as ever, I had again to face the fact they might be after me as five years previously they had been; different, desperate now, estranged.

As I wrote about this book before, it has an affecting urgency, apparently the result of Green’s conviction that World War II would be the end of him, and of his resulting desperation to get down in writing what life had felt like so far. Right now I’m in the middle of his chapter on discovering the opposite sex; on this fraught subject, especially, his candor and his commitment to capturing feeling and fleeting impressions are arresting.

But what I’m really reading at any given time, now that I am a commuter again, is what I’m reading on the train. And lately that’s not Green, which has been more of a living-room couch affair, to be picked up when I need a break from the burdens of work or television. Lately what I’m really reading is something most of you read as tykes, or perhaps had read to you: The Hobbit.

Nope, before this month I never read The Hobbit, or anything else by Tolkien. Now I’m about to finish it, and it’s held me rapt. More on that experience when I do finish it; in the meantime, what children’s classics did you first discover as an adult (Harry Potter doesn’t count), and how did it make you feel–old? young again? CAAF and Terry, consider yourselves asked, too.

Work apace, apace, apace, apace;

Honest labour bears a lovely face.

Thomas Dekker, The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell

• I see that Mr. Think Denk, about whom I blogged yesterday, has returned the compliment today.
One of the things that interested me about his posting was that he noted the presence on my bookshelves of Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, one of my favorite novels–but that he didn’t say anything about it to me at the time! I, too, make an invariable practice of checking out the shelves of the people whose homes I visit and drawing conclusions about them from what I find there, but I usually share those conclusions with my hosts.
It makes me wonder what else he noticed….
• Incidentally, readers of my recent book column about Mary McCarthy may be amused to learn that when you search for Pictures from an Institution at amazon.com, The Groves of Academe comes up on the same screen. That’s a good one, too–but Pictures from an Institution is much better, and contains a truly wicked pen portrait of McCarthy to boot.
• Readers who’ve been keeping up with the ceaseless controversy over the fate of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation by way of Mr. Modern Art Notes and Ms. CultureGrrl might want to take a look at this 2005 posting in which I reported on my first (and, I suspect, last) visit to that famously eccentric museum’s suburban headquarters.
Here’s the money quote:

I’m glad I waited so long to go to the Barnes for the first time. It’s not a place for the casual museumgoer. That’s why it will be a crime to move it elsewhere. I’m not talking about the complex legal and fiscal issues at stake in the planned move–I’m not competent to assess those. I’m talking about purely aesthetic matters. The Barnes isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s unique, and that’s the point of it….You can’t just drop by on the spur of the moment–you have to make a reservation in advance and go well out of your way to get there. That contributes enormously to its special quality. Once the Barnes pulls up stakes and moves downtown, this quality will be lost forever, even if the existing galleries are reproduced exactly in its new quarters (which I’ll believe when I see it).

I haven’t changed my mind.

• Amazing video podcasts of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on the ones titled “Gallery Explorer: –“, hope in vain for Dark Side of the Moon to start up. (Also available on iTunes.)
• Daily dose of tumult on the heath and in the snow: Revisit Vera Pavlova’s “Four Poems” from the New Yorker.
From a 2002 interview with Pavlova:

What are the main critical views of your work?
They go from one extreme to another! On the one hand, I’m regarded as a sort of male invention. On the other, I’m an earth mother, concerned with gynaecological matters and not metaphysics. Also there is the psychoanalytical view, which says my poems are a clear case of intersexuality.
What’s that?
All I could find in a dictionary was: “Intersex, an organism in which
there are no clear indications of male or female gender.”
So, a sexual zero! And what follows from that?
That there’s nothing especially female or male about poetry.