• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2008 / December / Archives for 12th

Archives for December 12, 2008

TT: Touched with fire

December 12, 2008 by Terry Teachout

I review two off-Broadway plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Friendly Fire’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet and the Playwrights Horizons premiere of Craig Lucas’ Prayer for My Enemy. The first is masterly, the second awful. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Poet190.jpgEugene O’Neill is the most frustrating of major playwrights, for his output was so uneven and his craft so unsure that even the best of his plays can be made to look amateurish by a weak staging. I was fooled, for instance, by the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2005 revival of “A Touch of the Poet,” which was so far off the mark that I mistakenly thought the play itself was at fault. Unlike that over-fancy production, Friendly Fire’s Off-Broadway staging is a bargain-basement affair acted on the plainest of sets by a cast consisting mostly of near-unknowns–but it packs the punch of a bullet in the belly.
Daniel J. Travanti, to be sure, isn’t exactly unknown: He was the star of “Hill Street Blues,” one of the most admired TV series of the ’80s. My guess, though, is that his name will be unfamiliar to younger readers, since he’s spent the past couple of decades working in regional theater and appearing in forgettable made-for-TV movies. His 2007 Off-Broadway performance in Oren Safdie’s “The Last Word…” was the first time he’d acted on a New York stage, and this is the second. Yet Mr. Travanti is galvanically powerful as Con Melody, a drunken tavernkeeper who once was an officer and a gentleman and hates the lesser man he has become. On paper Mr. Travanti is miscast–he’s 68, nearly a quarter-century older than the character he’s playing–and his ferocious performance is devoid of the decayed Irish charm that O’Neill seems to have had in mind. Instead he gives us an angry failure who is teetering on the far edge of madness, an interpretation that may well be “wrong” (whatever that means) but is still tremendously exciting. If Con had lived as long as Mr. Travanti, I feel sure that this is what he would have become….
Craig Lucas has written good plays–I very much liked “Small Tragedy”–but “Prayer for My Enemy” is a mess, a mishmash of mawkish clichés that tries frantically to sound profound.
In order of appearance, Mr. Lucas gives us:
• Billy, who joined the Army to prove that he was a real man. Yes, he got sent to Iraq. Yes, he got wounded there. Yes, he’s against the war (“It’s bad because it was bad before we got there and now it’s bad in a new way”). Yes, he’s gay. Yes, he’s in denial about it.
• Tad, a bisexual slacker who slept with Billy in high school and wants to do it again.
• Dolores, a motor-mouthed neurotic.
• Marianne, Billy’s unhappy older sister, whom Tad impregnates and marries even though he still has the hots for Billy. Yes, she’s been divorced. Yes, she has a child by her first husband. Yes, her son is autistic….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

December 12, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“The time to make up your mind about people, is never.”
Philip Barry, The Philadelphia Story

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

December 2008
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Nov   Jan »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Lookback: on joining the National Counncil on the Arts
  • Almanac: Thornton Wilder on hope
  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man
  • Almanac: Gore Vidal on the will to power
  • Verbal virtuosity

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in