Archives for January 30, 2009

The bit of description that follows below has been in my head all week, since hearing about John Updike’s death. It’s from Witches of Eastwick, which I re-read a couple months ago and which, if I’m honest, is the novel of his that I feel the greatest true affection for. (Who knows where, once all the sifting & shaking is done, Witches will stand in the Updike canon; but I hope it doesn’t get struck for all the more Important Ones.)
This sentence stuck because its construction so resembles a really marvelous, elaborate marble run, and it seemed like on this week, even while we pay tribute to Updike’s Zeus-ian stature (first among writers, 60+ books, with enough good ones and bad ones in there to fuel a dozen mortal careers), it’s also nice to stop and appreciate him at this, a sentence level:

Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street, its trendy shops with their perfumed candles and stained-glass shade-pulls aimed at the summer tourists and its old-style aluminum diner next to a bakery and its barber’s next to a framer’s and its little clattering newspaper office and long dark hardware store run by Armenians, was intertwined with saltwater as it slipped and slapped and slopped against the culverts and pilings the street in part was built upon, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-wheat bread and filtered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette.

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A few tributes I’ve enjoyed:
• Lorrie Moore’s appreciation in today’s New York Times, which contains a beautiful, just-right description of Updike’s criticism as “part rose, part snake.”
• Martin Amis in The Guardian; it’s interesting to read this one, with its observation about Updike’s love for James Joyce, back to back with a story like “A&P“.
• Joseph O’Neill for Granta. (Via TEV.)

I just flew back to the East Coast from one of the most exciting reviewing trips in my six-year-long career as The Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic. I saw Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie and Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Macbeth, and both were extraordinary. Here’s an excerpt.
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The greatest of all American plays has received a production worthy of its beauty and truth. Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” one of the immortal masterpieces of 20th-century theater, is currently being performed by Kansas City Repertory Theater in a staging by David Cromer, whose Writers’ Theatre revival of “Picnic” was the best show I saw last year, not just in Chicago (where Mr. Cromer and most of his production team are based) but anywhere in America. His “Glass Menagerie” is fully as impressive. Mr. Cromer has the uncanny ability to take a too-familiar script and make it seem entirely new–yet it is his special gift to serve the plays that he stages, rather than twisting them into unrecognizable and irrelevant shapes. Such is the essence of recreative genius.
So what has Mr. Cromer done with “The Glass Menagerie”? To begin with, he has collaborated closely with his designers to create a visual environment for Williams’ play that looks nothing like any “Glass Menagerie” I’ve ever seen, even though it is fundamentally faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the text. At the center of Collette Pollard’s set is a cramped, shabby tenement apartment identical to the one described in Williams’ stage directions–except that the walls of the living room have been ripped away and are hanging askew in mid-air. Throughout the evening a stream of images related to the play is projected on these walls: words and phrases plucked from the script, “home movies” of the characters as seen in their youth, live close-ups of the actors that are shot by video cameras concealed on the set.
Radical though it sounds, all this is no more than a modern-day elaboration of what Williams had in mind for the original production of “The Glass Menagerie,” in which he called for “magic-lantern” slides to be projected on one wall of the set. The images on the slides, he explained in his production notes, were meant to “give accent to certain values in each scene.” The slides were omitted from the 1945 Broadway staging, but various attempts have been made since then to do something resembling what Williams had in mind.
Kansas City Rep’s projections, designed by Jeffrey Cady, are astonishingly effective, not least because they are so tightly woven into Mr. Cromer’s conception of the play, in which the acting is as naturalistic as the setting is surreal. Nowadays many productions of “The Glass Menagerie” run to quasi-operatic exaggeration, but the four actors whom Mr. Cromer has cast in Williams’ tale of a St. Louis family teetering on the far edge of despair have opted instead for simple understatement. Their characterizations are all fresh and unexpected….
Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare’s artistic director, has given us a modern-dress “Macbeth” set in a glossy world of press conferences, cocktail parties and departure lounges. Macbeth and his wife (Ben Carlson and Karen Aldridge) are an up-to-the-minute power couple, a crisply plain-spoken soldier married to a coarse, slutty trophy wife. Such devices may seem trendy in the telling, but Ms. Gaines and her first-class cast have instead used them as the building blocks of a dead-serious “Macbeth” that has the immediacy of a fast car shrieking down a long, straight stretch of road….
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Read the whole thing here.
Here is a video clip from Kansas City Rep’s Glass Menagerie:

David Stern, the Israeli Opera‘s new music director, announced the other day that he won’t be programming the operas of Richard Wagner in Tel Aviv. The resulting news story may have come as a surprise to American readers who are unaware that Wagner’s music is not played in Israel’s opera houses or concert halls. This informal ban, which has been in force since the founding in 1948 of the state of Israel, is the subject of my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. (It was originally scheduled to run two weeks ago but was replaced by a column about Andrew Wyeth.)
The ban, needless to say, was and is a response to Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Is it still justified? Was it ever? Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal to see what I have to say.
You might also want to take a look at Alex Ross’ The Unforgiven: Wagner and Hitler, originally published in The New Yorker in 1998, which is very much worth reading in this connection.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims