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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Little old serial killers

September 28, 2007 by Terry Teachout

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.)

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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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