Archives for October 2007

The score in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column: one rave, one pan. The good show is Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, the bad one Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius:

Horton Foote is one of those much-admired writers who has never quite gotten his due. Yes, he won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Young Man from Atlanta” and a pair of best-screenplay Oscars for “Tender Mercies” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but none of his 60-odd plays has had a decent Broadway run, and I know a not-inconsiderable number of otherwise avid playgoers to whom he is not much more than a name. To be sure, Signature Theatre Company’s 2005 revival of “The Trip to Bountiful” was so successful that it stirred up talk of a Broadway transfer, but no theaters were open that spring, so it disappeared into the memory hole.
Fortunately, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre is remounting Signature’s production of “The Trip to Bountiful” in March, while “Dividing the Estate,” which was first seen in Princeton in 1989 but never made it to New York, is now being performed Off Broadway by Primary Stages, a company that has a record of taking Mr. Foote’s work seriously. About time, too: “Dividing the Estate” is one of the best American plays to open on or off Broadway since I started covering theater for the Journal four years ago, and the fact that it is only just now receiving its New York premiere is downright scandalous.
Mr. Foote gets compared to Chekhov a lot, with good reason. His plays are bittersweet, loosely plotted snapshots of small-town southern life in which the comedy–of which there’s plenty–is flavored with the sharp aftertaste of regret. In “Dividing the Estate” the regret is shared by a family whose middle-aged members have squandered the best years of their lives feeding off the fast-shrinking bounty of Stella (Elizabeth Ashley), a land-rich, cash-poor Texas matriarch. Stella, it turns out, chose to continue living on her late husband’s farm instead of selling it off after his death and splitting the profits with her resentful children and grandchildren, whose souls have been soured by waiting too long to divvy up the spoils.
Part of what makes “Dividing the Estate” so effective is that Mr. Foote has shrewdly chosen to play this horrible situation for laughs, letting the underlying pain and suffering emerge between the lines. Nor does he make the mistake of turning his characters into gargoyles of greed. Even the shrewish Mary Jo (played to perfection by Hallie Foote, Mr. Foote’s daughter) is given her due as a human being…
Theresa Rebeck writes plays with glib, cute first acts that fall apart after intermission, so I suppose that “Mauritius,” her Broadway debut, could be said to be a step forward: It’s glib and cute all the way through….

No free link, so to read the whole thing, go buy the damn paper. Please. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will make it possible for you to read all of the Journal‘s arts coverage in the twinkling of an eye. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
UPDATE: To listen to or download an interview with Horton Foote on Downstage Center, the American Theatre Wing’s weekly satellite radio series, go here.

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship: If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.”
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

• Read Roxana Robinson’s introduction to the NYRB collection of Edith Wharton’s New York stories.
• As research for a project I’ve been dipping now and again into this early 1900’s account of New York. It’s oddly charming, with chapters that start like this: “Three o’clock is the hour when the heaped-up people in the lower city begin to move outward again.”

• Limey critics continue their hegemonic reign over American letters: Christopher Hitchens’ (very sharp) review of the new Philip Roth for The Atlantic, and James Wood makes his staff-writer debut at the New Yorker with some talk about God. As Lee Ann Womack sings, there’s more where that came from.
• Jezebel revisits Candace Bushnell’s old Sex & The City columns to see how well they’ve held up. Raising the question, who doesn’t love a man in a nice trilby hat?

A fun writing class last night. I felt cruddy on the drive over — it’s my week to turn in pages, and I don’t like the creepy little story I’ve been working on — but class cheered me back up.
A lot of the discussion was generated by Andrew Furman’s piece on “the creative nonfiction crisis” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers (not available online), the article dovetailing with questions like, when describing a real-life event, where’s the line between artistic license versus the deliberately misleading: Recreated dialogue? Compression of events?
Several of my classmates are writing personal essays or memoir so these are real, worrying issues for them; for me, they’re happily abstract. When I got home I went looking for an old Mary Karr interview where she recounts giving the manuscript of The Liars’ Club to her mother to read. I haven’t found that particular interview yet but I did come across this snippet:

The task [of writing Liars’ Club] was searing: “When I started unpacking my memory and sitting in the middle of it all day, I had the most bizarre experiences–I’d write an hour and a half or two hours and then lie down on the floor of my study and sleep the sleep of the dead.” Taped above her computer was a letter from [Tobias] Wolff offering her this advice: “Take no care for your dignity. Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed.” Karr’s mother, on the other hand, put it more bluntly. “Hell, get it off your chest,” she counseled.

I like Wolff’s advice, which seems equally applicable whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

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 SOON:

• The Dining Room (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 20)

CLOSING SUNDAY:

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here)

“‘Marriage’: this I call the will that moves two to create the one which is more than those who created it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

• George Saunders gives a reading in Pittsburgh and discusses his writing and revising process. (Today I’m taking particular comfort in the quote, “What comes out in a first draft isn’t really you.”)
• “Light,” a new short story by Kelly Link which appears in the “Fantastic Women” issue of Tin House, is available online. That said, the entire issue looks worth seeking out, with stories by Judy Buditz, Shelley Jackson, Rikki Ducornet and others.
• Susan Cooper hints at what you already suspected after seeing the trailers: That the movie adaptation of Dark Is Rising is going to suck eggs.
(Latter two links via Gwenda, beloved sponsor of today’s ALN.)