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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Getting crazy in Milwaukee

January 4, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a review of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. Here’s a sample.
* * *
Conquest_197.jpgAlan Ayckbourn, the most prolific and successful playwright since Shakespeare, has written 71 plays, only six of which have been seen on Broadway. Why is he so popular in Great Britain and so comparatively little known over here? Part of the problem is that most of his plays are more serious than they look. He uses the dizzy language of farce to say dark things about the sorrows and disappointments of middle-class life, and the harder you laugh at his hapless characters, the more your heart goes out to them.
The good news is that many of Mr. Ayckbourn’s plays are seen with fair frequency both Off Broadway and in regional theaters. Alas, the latter fact has not yet come to the attention of Variety, which ran a piece last month saying that he was “unrecognized in the U.S.” without adding that one of his most ambitious and masterly efforts, “The Norman Conquests,” is now being performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater–for the second time in that company’s history. London’s Old Vic is reviving “The Norman Conquests” next fall, but the Rep, to the best of my knowledge, is the only professional theater company in America to have done so since it ran on Broadway 32 years ago. I’m happy to report that their new production is an uproariously funny, wholly successful piece of work.
Mr. Ayckbourn’s method can be seen at its maddest in the 1973 triptych that established him as England’s number-one hitmaker. The three plays that make up “The Norman Conquests” feature the same six characters and take place during the same weekend, but are set in three different parts of the same country house, the dining room (“Table Manners”), the sitting room (“Living Together”) and the garden (“Round and Round the Garden”). While the plays are written so that each one makes sense when viewed individually, you learn in the course of watching all three that the title character (played by Gerard Neugent) is not only carrying on extramarital dalliances with a youngish woman named Annie (Finnerty Steeves) and Sarah, her bossy sister-in-law (Laura Gordon), but also canoodling with his estranged wife Ruth (Deborah Staples), Annie’s older sister.
In addition to letting us see the action from a variety of perspectives, this brilliantly ingenious conceit makes it possible for Mr. Ayckbourn to turn up the comic heat on his characters all the way to the boiling point….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

January 4, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly on those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.”

Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

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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