Archives for November 2007

In my weekly book review for “Contentions,” Commentary‘s group blog, I discuss a new collection called Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. If you didn’t read past the jump, you won’t have seen the following:

Capote makes the following nostalgic claim in a 1959 essay about Louis Armstrong: “I met him when I was four, that would be around 1928, and he, a hard-plump and belligerently happy brown Buddha, was playing aboard a pleasure steamer that paddled between New Orleans and St. Louis….The Satch, he was good to me, he told me I had talent, that I ought to be in vaudeville; he gave me a bamboo cane and a straw boater with a peppermint headband; and every night from the stand announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now we’re going to present you one of America’s nice kids, he’s going to do a little tap dance.’ Afterward I passed among the passengers, collecting in my hat nickels and dimes.”
As the Brits say, no doubt this is true, but the fact is that “the Satch” stopped playing on New Orleans excursion boats in 1921, three years before Capote was born. It seems that the author of In Cold Blood was fabricating material long before the reliability of his most successful and admired book was challenged by those in a position to know. William Shawn wouldn’t have liked that one bit.

I might stick that into my Armstrong biography as a footnote, but just in case I don’t, I wanted to pass it on. It is, of course, no secret that Truman Capote was a near-chronic fabulist. Even so, I didn’t expect to encounter so unabashed and outrageous an example of Capote’s penchant for rolling his own.
* * *
Speaking of now-deceased New Yorker editors, I hear from Supermaud that the Library of America will be bringing out a William Maxwell collection called Early Novels & Stories on January 10. I regret to say that I’ve never written a word about Maxwell, though he’s popped up more than once in this space. He happens, however, to be one of my favorite American writers, and I hope that the publication of this volume (which contains, among other things, the exquisite 1945 novel The Folded Leaf) will bring him some of the posthumous recognition he deserves.
If I had to guess, though, I’d say that Maxwell fits into much the same category as Elaine Dundy. As I wrote in my introduction to the recent paperback reissue of Dundy’s The Dud Avocado,

It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon–Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001–but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.

What is it about some artists and works of art that keeps them from winning wider recognition, intelligible and accessible though they may be? I posted on this subject back in 2004, but I invite further speculation, since the question is of permanent interest.
Maud? OGIC? Carrie? Anyone?

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

Last week I mentioned that Samuel Menashe had read me a poem over breakfast whose subject was the close resemblance between the sound of a plucked bass string and the croaking of a bullfrog. This poem, alas, turned out not to have been included in the collection of his verse published by the Library of America.

Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when I opened my mailbox on Friday and found a letter from Menashe containing a handwritten copy of the poem, which is called “Night Music (pizzicato).” I hope you like it as much as I do!

Why am I so fond

of the double bass

of bull frogs

(Or do I hear the prongs

Of a tuning fork,

Not a bull fiddle)

Responding

In perfect accord

To one another

Across the pond–

How does each frog know

He is not his brother

Which frog to follow

Who was his mother

(Or is it a jew’s harp

I hear in the dark?)

Speaking as a bass player who on more than one occasion has sat on a screened-in porch and listened to the sound of bullfrogs in chorus on a summer night, I can assure you that Menashe got it exactly right.

It looks as though Broadway may be shuttered for some time to come–but if you read my Wall Street Journal drama column, you know that’s not likely to faze me. I’m the only New York-based drama critic who routinely covers productions all over America. In addition to covering Broadway and off-Broadway openings, I either reviewed or am planning to review three dozen other companies located in thirteen states and the District of Columbia during 2007. I expect to range even more widely next year.

As I wrote in my “Sightings” column a year and a half ago:

The time has come for American playgoers–and, no less important, arts editors–to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don’t know what’s hot in “the stix,” you don’t know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

Suppose you run a regional company I haven’t visited? How might you get me to come see you now that I’ve got some extra time on my hands? Here’s an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see–along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don’t review dinner theater, and it’s unusual (though not unprecedented) for me to visit children’s theaters. I’m somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I’m strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season… That doesn’t apply to summer festivals, but it’s rare for me to cover a festival that doesn’t put on at least two shows a season.

• …and most of them have to be serious. I won’t put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if you specialize in such regional-theater staples as The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word “magnolias” in the title, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven’t yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as the Journal‘s drama critic. Right now Florida, Ohio, and Texas loom largest–I hope to hit all three states next season and/or this summer–but if you’re doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or North Dakota, I’d be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won’t visit an out-of-town company I’ve never seen to review a play by an author of whom I’ve never heard. What I look for is an imaginative, wide-ranging mix of revivals of major plays–definitely including comedies–and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I’ve admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Amy Freed, Brian Friel, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Austin Pendleton, Harold Pinter, Oren Safdie, John Patrick Shanley, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older plays I’d like to review that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). I’ve been able to check a couple of them off the list since you last heard from me, but if you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Loot, Man and Superman, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, or anything by Jean Anouilh, S.N. Behrman, Noël Coward, John Van Druten, or Terence Rattigan, please drop me a line.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two–especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Blackbird or All That I Will Ever Be are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you’re not already reading my Journal column, you probably ought to start.)

• I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a three- or four-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city.) If you’re the publicist of the Podunk Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Seagull, your best bet is to point out that TheaterPodunk just happens to be doing Hedda Gabler that same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to Minneapolis instead.

• Web sites matter–a lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you’re doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I’ll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can’t spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn’t mean I won’t consider reviewing you–I know appearances can be deceiving–but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the home page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates (including the date of the press opening)

(2) A link to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions

(3) A CONTACT US link that leads directly to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses–starting with the address of your press representative)

(4) A link to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map

(5) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!)

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don’t want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the kudzu of random press releases. I get a lot of spam at my “About Last Night” mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal.

Finally:

• Mention this posting. The last time I ran a version of this posting on “About Last Night,” I got an e-mail the same day from a sharp-eyed publicist in Maryland–and I reviewed the very show she was flacking a couple of months later. Go thou and do likewise.

“Work is an essential part of being alive. Your work is your identity. It tells you who you are. It’s gotten so abstract. People don’t work for the sake of working. They’re working for a car, a new house, or a vacation. It’s not the work itself that’s important to them. There’s such a joy in doing work well.”
Kay Stepkin (quoted in Studs Terkel, Working)

If you read the New York papers, you know that most of Broadway has been shut down by a stagehands’ strike. Eight shows remain open, two of which, Pygmalion and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, were praised by me in my Wall Street Journal drama column. (Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is still in previews–I won’t see it for another couple of weeks.)
Shows playing off Broadway are unaffected by the strike, though The Fantasticks is the only one to which I’ve given a favorable notice. I plan to see two new off-Broadway shows later this week and review them in Friday’s Journal. On Saturday I’ll be flying out to Chicago to look at a pair of interesting-sounding productions, a revival of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and a new play by Nilo Cruz called A Park in Our House, about which I’ll be reporting next week.
How long will the strike last? Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll let you know what I know when I know it. In the meantime, though, keep in mind that at any given moment, most of the good shows in America are playing way off Broadway. In recent weeks I’ve praised productions I saw in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. You don’t have to go to New York City–or anywhere near it–to spend an unforgettable night at the theater. What are you waiting for?
UPDATE: If you bought an advance ticket to a Broadway show that’s been closed by the strike and want to know how to get a refund, go here.

“You look troubled,” my houseguest told me.

“I have an appointment with the cardiologist,” I replied. “I don’t have any reason to think I’m not all right, but I know that he could tell me something bad.”

And so he could–though so far he never has. Still, no day goes by that I fail to recall the fact that I, like you, am working without a contract, and that my continued tenure in the land of the living is subject to termination without notice. In my case, of course, this arrangement ceased to be mere theory two years ago next month, and since then I’ve looked upon my cardiologist in somewhat the same way that the fighter pilots in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff look upon flight surgeons:

As a result all fighter jocks began looking upon doctors as their natural enemies. Going to see a flight surgeon was a no-gain proposition; a pilot could only hold his own or lose in the doctor’s office. To be grounded for a medical reason was no humiliation, looked at objectively. But it was a humiliation, nonetheless!–for it meant you no longer had that indefinable, unutterable, integral stuff. (It could blow at any seam.)

Kindly don’t bother to point out how irrational this attitude is. I know that should my doctor ever have reason to warn me that my heart is exhibiting symptoms that might (as he puts it) impact on my longevity, he will doubtless also tell me to do certain things that will have a equal and opposite impact. Or maybe not. Because sooner or later, the right stuff that keeps us all flying is destined to blow at one seam or another, and when that happens…well, you can only take so many pills.

I wish I were able to look upon the prospect of my ultimate demise with the same jaunty equanimity that Frank Skeffington, the septuagenarian hero of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, succeeded in preserving throughout his latter days. At one point in the novel, Skeffington lights up an expensive cigar, turns to his nephew, and says, “One over the limit. A happy shortcut to the Dark Encounter.” I sometimes affect a similar jauntiness, but I’m just kidding. The truth is that I love my life, more so since the arrival of Mrs. T than ever before, and I am absolutely not prepared to give it up, or even see it significantly diminished by ill health. Which is why my thrice-yearly visits to the doctor always make me feel prospectively nervous–even when I have no objective reason to be anything other than confident.

Not to worry, by the way: I got my usual thumbs-up report from Dr. Minutillo, the East Side specialist who keeps track of my ticker. I expected good news, and this time I just about took it for granted. It was different when I learned last year that my 2005 brush with death had left my heart unscarred. That time the news that I’d dodged the bullet left me feeling briefly disoriented: “Two minutes later I was standing on East End Avenue, basking in the bright blue sunshine and hailing a cab. My mind was unexpectedly empty. Thank you, I kept saying to myself over and over again. Thank you, thank you.”

I’m no less thankful this year, but somehow it doesn’t seem as urgent–which is a good thing. Only a fool goes around constantly muttering to himself, I’m not dead yet–better make the most of this day. Yes, the sentiment is right and proper, but the more time you spend thinking about it, the less time you have to think about other things. I’m alive and well and happy to be both, and (as Dr. Johnson said in a very different context) “there’s an end on’t.” The point of life is living, so on to the next play, the next painting, the next lunch with a friend, the next trip to a place I’ve never been–and, come March, the next visit to East End Avenue.

In between these (mostly) happy occurrences, though, I expect I’ll spend a fair amount of time thinking about the Dark Encounter, and that, too, is right and proper, and even productive, up to a point. Not long after I got the good news from my doctor last year, I had occasion to reread Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, in which a character makes the following remark:

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

I still think that’s good advice–in moderation.

“The time in which a person lives gives him the opportunity of knowing himself as a moral being, engaged in the search for the truth; yet this gift which man has in his hands is at once delectable and bitter. And life is no more than the period allotted to him, and in which he may, indeed must, fashion his spirit in accordance with his own understanding of the aim of human existence. The rigid frame into which it is thrust, however, makes our responsibility to ourselves and others all the more starkly obvious. The human conscience is dependent upon time for its existence.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema