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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 5, 2009

CAAF: The Poet is dead in me

March 5, 2009 by cfrye

Our household is in a sad, squalorous state. Last Saturday I met a significant, if arbitrary, deadline for my book and it was a very productive week — tired and raw at times, but also immersive and good. After I got everything mailed off I said to Lowell, “I feel married to the book now.” But Sunday I rested, and Monday I didn’t write well, and Tuesday either, and now it’s Thursday and I have nothing but a couple notebook pages and I’ve reached that hard, jangling mood that — in flashes of self-awareness — I realize is making me act like the cokehead at the party who no one wants to talk to because he/she is an ***hole. It is one of the most bewildering things about writing (I find), how one can be in the book one week, and then expelled from it the next.
Lowell is under a programming deadline and keeps talking about nervous breakdown. He needs a haircut. There’s a heating bill on the counter that’s been there for a month like a significant presence in the house, and everyone everywhere seems to be ahead of us in getting their taxes started. We’re out of groceries but Lowell can’t go because he’s legitimately working and I can’t go because I need to stay near my computer not writing. This morning a small but pivotal piece of the coffee-maker broke off and our mutual consternation was astounding. Lowell got out a flashlight and was shining it up into the interior of the machine to see if he could re-attach the small, pivotal piece. He couldn’t but found, shining the light up in there, that the interior of the machine is laced with dog hair. Neither of us knows how this happened — the dog generally isn’t allowed up on the kitchen counters. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the cat has had an upset stomach all week and keeps walking to the back door, catching my eye, and throwing up.
(It has taken me two paragraphs to describe this. Yesterday, on Twitter, Hit Song linked to this clip that summarizes the entire domestic mood in just :18 seconds.)
Terry and OGIC have their own terrible deadlines, and so this morning I was thinking I would have to put up a post today that said in effect, “Sorry, I am too busy NOT WRITING to write anything here.” And that reminded me of all of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great writing about not writing, which is incredibly artful and beautiful and often funny, even when the source was painful.
One painful source, of course, was the rupture with Wordsworth, and the letter I’m going to quote was written shortly after it occurred. (If you’re not up on your early Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge originally were to produce Lyrical Ballads together. But then Wordsworth limited Coleridge’s influence on the first edition, refusing to allow “Christabel” to appear in it, and then further boxed him out of the second. All of this sounds comic and arcane as one types it up for the Internet in 2009 but when you read about this period of Coleridge’s life in the Richard Holmes biography, it is like seeing someone get lopped off at the knees or taking some other terrible blow.) Coleridge entirely lost his confidence, and (as Holmes observes — this isn’t my insight) stopped for a time being able to write about anything but not writing. But even these submerged bits of creativity are masterpieces, and here is one:

In my long Illness I had compelled into hours of Delight many a sleepless, painful hour of Darkness by chasing down metaphysical Game — and since then I have continued the Hunt, till I found myself unaware at the Root of Pure Mathematics — and up that tall smooth Tree, whose few poor branches are all at its very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs — still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. — You would not know me — ! all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme — I look at the Mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows) I look at the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I behold them, form themselves into Triangles — and my hands are scarred with scratches from a Cat, whose back I was rubbing in the Dark in order to see whether the sparks were refrangible by a Prism. The Poet is dead in me — my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with Flame. That is past by! — I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy — but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat & square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

TT: Horton Foote, R.I.P.

March 5, 2009 by Terry Teachout

43718049.jpgOne of America’s greatest playwrights has died at the age of ninety-two, mere months after scoring his first full-fledged Broadway success. Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate transferred to Broadway last November, having previously received rave reviews when it first opened off Broadway in 2007. I wrote about it with the utmost enthusiasm on both occasions, and am greatly pleased to report that Connecticut’s Hartford Stage will be remounting that same production in May.
Three years ago I reviewed the Signature Theatre Company’s exquisite revival of Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. This is part of what I wrote about it for The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Foote’s great gift is his ability to drain the sentimentality out of potentially mawkish situations (the way he did in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Tender Mercies). The Trip to Bountiful could easily have degenerated into heart-tugging manipulation, but it never does. The tears it evokes–and I heard quite a lot of crying from the audience at the end of last Sunday night’s performance–are earned, not jerked….

I was sitting directly in front of Foote at that performance, and when it was over I wanted to tell him what it had meant to me. Alas, I was one of the many members of the audience who’d been moved to tears, and I was too choked up to say anything. Now I very much wish I had.
* * *
The New York Times obituary is here.
This is the trailer for the 1985 film version of The Trip to Bountiful:

TT: So you want to see a show?

March 5, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 20, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

DAVID%20CROMER.jpg• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS:

• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac (fourth in a week-long series)

March 5, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Though it is entirely proper to speak of the art of films, I find very little art in films except when artists make them–and they are exceedingly rare. I view most films–especially the American–as documentaries. They tell us more of the time and place in which we dwell than any of the other media. As fiction, drama, or art, they lie.”
Harold Clurman, “Reflections on Movies” (Harper’s, May 1971, reprinted in The Collected Works of Harold Clurman)

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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