Archives for 2007

Chicago is hot! Read all about it in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion and Strawdog Theatre Company’s revival of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats:

Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” gains immeasurably from being performed not in the company’s grand Elizabethan-style theater but in its upstairs house, a black-box performing space that has been set up for this production in a compact three-quarter-round seating arrangement. Taking his cue from the space, Gary Griffin, the Chicago director best known to New York audiences for his work on “The Color Purple,” has reconceived “Passion” as a chamber piece accompanied by five instrumentalists, with results as illuminating as were John Doyle’s similarly scaled productions of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company.”
Part of what makes “Passion” so well suited to such treatment is that it its scale is already modest–though the emotions it portrays are unabashedly operatic. One way to approach this 1994 Sondheim-James Lapine collaboration is as a trope on a couplet by W.H. Auden: “If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.” Here the unequal partner is the sickly, unattractive Fosca (Ana Gasteyer), who becomes obsessed with Giorgio (Adam Brazier), a handsome soldier who is having an affair with Clara (Kathy Voytko), a beautiful but unhappy bride who cannot live with Giorgio save at the cost of losing her child. Fosca’s passion is so violent and all-consuming that it threatens her life. It also proves seductive to Giorgio, who has never known the disorienting sensation of being loved without limit: “Loving you/Is not a choice/And not much reason/To rejoice,/But it gives me purpose,/Gives me voice,/To say to the world:/This is why I live.”
Nothing in Ms. Gasteyer’s oddly miscellaneous resume–among other things, she spent six years on “Saturday Night Live”–prepared me for her anguished performance as Fosca, a notoriously difficult role which she interprets as memorably as did Donna Murphy and Patti LuPone before her….
If you think Chicago Shakespeare’s upstairs theater is snug, wait till you see the headquarters of Strawdog Theatre Company, an L-shaped black box in a dingy storefront walkup. Yet that company, which is celebrating its 20th season, has a reputation that lured me to its production of “Aristocrats,” Brian Friel’s great 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholics who have sunk from upper-middle-class comfort into desperately shabby gentility. Rarely have my expectations been more satisfyingly surpassed. Strawdog’s “Aristocrats” is one of those revivals so excellent as to leave a critic with nothing much to do but order you to drop everything and go see it at once–and its excellence, like that of “Passion,” is deeply rooted in its clarifying smallness of scale. I saw it from the front row of the theater, sitting within arm’s length of a cast whose acting was so direct and unmannered that I felt as though I were dining with them….

No free link. Do it. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

“Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.”
Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New

I finally made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I found in my e-mailbox this communication from a woman who works in the permissions department of W.W. Norton:

I am writing in regards to a permission granted by you for use of your material in The Norton Reader, 12th Edition. The book has recently been published and I am attempting to pay permissions fees. Before our accounting department can issue a check, they require that we have a W-9 tax form on file for your organization. I have attached the form to this letter. If you would be so kind as to fill the form out and then either fax, email, or mail it to my attention, I will be able to mail your check.

Not only had I forgotten that one of my pieces was picked for the new edition of The Norton Reader, but I couldn’t remember which one it was, and I spent ten minutes rooting around on the Web before I finally found a list of the book’s contents. (It comes out in December.) It seems that I’m to be in fast company: The Beatles Now, an essay I published in Commentary last year, will appear alongside Aaron Copland’s “How We Listen,” William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers,” John Henry Newman’s “Knowledge and Virtue,” George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” James Thurber’s “University Days,” Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings,” E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Virginia Woolf’s “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” and–wait for it–the Gettysburg Address.

This is, as it happens, my first appearance in a textbook, and though I confess to never having heard of The Norton Reader prior to being asked to give my permission to appear in it, the publishers describe the volume in impressive-sounding terms:

Read by millions of students since it was first published in 1965, The Norton Reader is the bestselling collection of its kind. With readings in a wide variety of genres, subjects, and styles, it offers the largest and most thoughtfully chosen collection of essays for composition students today. The Twelfth Edition has been carefully revised, with 25 percent of its readings new.

Alas, a closer look at the contents of the new edition reveals that some of the company I’m keeping isn’t quite as fast as I’d like. Indeed, the more recent selections are so sharply skewed in a philosophical direction far removed from the one to which I incline that I wonder whether I might possibly have been included for purposes of tokenism. That, too, is a new experience, one I can’t say I much care for, any more than I get all warm and fuzzy at the thought of snuggling up next to Garrison Keillor, Molly Ivins, and Alice Walker.

Nor am I altogether pleased to be represented by “The Beatles Now,” Yes, it’s a solid piece of work, and I stand by its contents, but had I been asked to pick an essay of mine for inclusion in a college textbook, it wouldn’t have been that one. Of the various pieces I included in A Terry Teachout Reader, the ones I like best are “The Land of No Context,” “Stephen Sondheim’s Unsettled Scores,” “That Nice Elvis Boy,” “What Randolph Scott Knew,” and (of the more explicitly personal essays) “Close to Home” and “The Importance of Being Less Earnest,” all of which seem to me to be more representative of the way I write and think than “The Beatles Now.”

Be that as it may, I don’t mind admitting that it’s kind of cool to be in a book whose previous editions have been “read by millions of students,” voluntarily or otherwise. I wonder, too, if anybody is actually going to teach me. Needless to say, I’ve assigned pieces of mine in classes that I’ve taught, but so far as I know, no one else has ever done so. I’m trying to imagine what a teacher might say about me–or, better yet, a test question based on my work. Which of the following phrases does Terry Teachout overuse in his writing? (A) “Be that as it may.” (B) “Needless to say.” (C) “As it happens.” (D) All of the above.

So yes, it’s an honor–of sorts–to be in The Norton Reader. The trouble is that it also makes me feel less like a person and more like a personage, the same way I feel when someone goes out of his way to call me “Mister Teachout,” or recognizes me in an elevator from having seen the (awful) picture that accompanies my Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing I find more disorienting is to be written about, however enthusiastically, by a total stranger. Who is this guy? I always ask myself when it happens–and I’m not talking about the person who’s writing about me, either.

I’d like to meet this semi-public figure who looks just like me but (judging by what I read about him on occasion) doesn’t always think what I think. I bet he gets tired of saying “T-E-A-C-H-O-U-T–just like it sounds” to operators, or telling earnest young things not to call him mister, for God’s sake. I’d like to know who wrote his Wikipedia entry, and how he got into the twelfth edition of The Norton Reader. I bet it’s a good story. Or maybe not.

To quote from another of my pieces:

I suppose it’s possible for a playwright to write a good play about a writer, but the temptation to sink into a nice warm bath of self-serving self-indulgence is apparently too great for ordinary mortals to overcome. Harold Ross knew this so well that he turned it into an iron rule for contributors to the New Yorker: “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.”

That means you, Mister Teachout.

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)

• Pygmalion (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, 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 SUNDAY:

• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one’s own.”
Moss Hart, Act One

My latest videoblog for The Horizon, Commentary‘s artblog, has just been posted. In it I talk about Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Pygmalion, two new books about postmodern architecture and the life of Shakespeare, the most memorable thing that happened at my wedding ceremony, and the latest addition to what I’m now calling the Teachouts’ Museum, a lithograph by Toko Shinoda.
To view it, go here.

I love teaching, and one of the few things I dislike about my professional life is that it keeps me too busy for part-time classroom stints. Once a year, though, I work off some of my frustration by leading a hands-on seminar in journalistic criticism at the NEA’s Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, which is where I was yesterday morning. I spent three very intense hours working with six very smart critics, and enjoyed myself enormously. The only problem was that I had to get up early to write the first half of my Wall Street Journal drama column, then rush home after the seminar to finish it up and send it off to my editor.
Now I’m in Minneapolis, where I’ll be seeing Brian Friel’s new play this afternoon, then flying down to St. Louis immediately after the show and driving from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., to spend a couple of days telling my mother all about the Big Event. On Saturday I return to New York, and the next day I’ll be seeing Kevin Kline in the Broadway revival of Cyrano de Bergerac.
I could stand a day off, or even two. More important, though, I haven’t seen Mrs. T for a week and a half, and I miss her sorely. She was supposed to be accompanying me on my latest sprint through the hinterlands, but illness intervened, so I’ll be seeing The Home Place by myself, and listening to the car radio as I make my way from St. Louis to Smalltown instead of chatting happily about nothing in particular. It’s funny how fast you get used to not being alone.
Of course I still have the best job in the world–I can’t believe I’m getting paid to see two Brian Friel plays and a Stephen Sondheim musical in one week–but as Joni Mitchell once put it, The bed’s too big/The frying pan’s too wide. I’ll be glad when both are full again.

“A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else’s business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don’t know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.”
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View