Archives for October 2009

“Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.”
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Mrs. T and I got married two years ago this Wednesday. We’ve decided to celebrate the occasion by flying the coop and spending a few days at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, the country retreat where we spent the first part of our honeymoon. The snapshot on the right was taken by a friend on the morning after the ceremony in a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few hours before Hilary and I departed for Ecce. We were both sick at the time–she came down with pneumonia a couple of weeks later–but that didn’t matter in the slightest. Neither of us had ever been happier, and we’re even happier today than we were then.

The photo on the left is the view from the hammock in the backyard of Ecce, which overlooks the Upper Delaware River. Some pictures lie, but this one tells the plain truth: Ecce is really that pretty, and that serene. I can’t think of a nicer place to be, or a better person with whom to be than my beloved Mrs. T. In a life that has been full to the brim of good fortune, she is by far the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Except for the usual almanac entries, Wednesday video, and theater-related postings, I plan to be absent from this space all week.

See you Monday.

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
Mark Twain, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve”

Much has been written about Roman Polanski since his arrest in Zurich last week, but one aspect of the story that has struck me forcibly in the last couple of days is the widening fissure between Hollywood celebrities, most of whom have lined up more or less solidly behind Polanski, and the public at large, which appears unwilling to cut him any slack at all. Moreover, a growing number of decidedly unusual subjects, including Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, are choosing to break cultural ranks and condemn Polanski.
What triggered this split, and what is its significance? I’ll be talking about these questions–and supplying a bit of historical perspective–in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

I’m back on Broadway after a long absence, but you wouldn’t know it by this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I rave (albeit with some judicious reservations) about two new plays, A Steady Rain and Superior Donuts, that both originated in Chicago. Here’s an excerpt.
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Chicago has come to Broadway–with a great big bang. Two new plays by Chicago-based writers, Keith Huff’s “A Steady Rain” and Tracy Letts’ “Superior Donuts,” opened across the street from one another this week. Not only are both shows set to become box-office hits, but both are characteristic of Chicagoland theater at its gritty, no-nonsense best. The difference is that while “Superior Donuts” is a straight Chicago-to-New-York transfer of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, “A Steady Rain” is a made-for-Broadway remounting that features two movie stars, Daniel Craig (“Casino Royale”) and Hugh Jackman (“X-Men”), whose real-life accents are unmistakably un-American.
Why does this matter? Because Messrs. Craig and Jackman are playing a pair of beat cops from the south side of Chicago, the first slightly bent and the second crooked as a twice-bought pol, who talk the spiky talk of the streets where they grew up (“I known the guy since kinnygarten”). In a two-man play, especially one written by a sharp-eared Chicago author whose father-in-law and brother-in-law were policemen, American audiences have a right to expect the actors to sound like the characters they’re playing. Mr. Craig, a British actor with classical training and a wide variety of stage experience, manages this tricky task with cool aplomb, tunnelling so far inside his part that it’s easy to forget who’s playing it. Mr. Jackman does his damnedest to keep up, but Australian vowels occasionally peep through the nasal snarl of his ersatz Chicago accent, and though he gives a strong, satisfying performance, you’re always aware that it is a performance.
Not that this diminishes the gut-level impact of “A Steady Rain,” an irresistibly forceful exercise in noir-style tandem storytelling in which the hushed audience watches Mr. Jackman’s character hurtle headlong toward the abyss of self-destruction…
If “A Steady Rain” is the theatrical equivalent of a Scott Turow novel, then “Superior Donuts” is “You Can’t Take It With You” rewritten by David Mamet, a dark comedy about a workplace “family” of charmingly wacky characters who suddenly find themselves caught in the deadly undertow of reality. The setting is a rundown six-stool donut shop in uptown Chicago whose proprietor, Arthur Przybyszewski (played to perfection by Michael McKean), is a burnt-out hippie whose hard shell of cynicism is cracked open by a young black man (Jon Michael Hill) who fast-talks his way into a job behind the counter. Much of what happens thereafter is obvious, but not all–the audience at the preview I saw gasped twice, both times loudly, at a surprising plot twist–and Mr. Letts, who is best known on Broadway as the author of “August: Osage County,” takes scrupulous care to balance laughter and sorrow in exactly the right proportions….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Indefinitiveness is an element of true music–I mean of true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision–imbue it with any very determinate tone–and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

• “Samba Triste,” performed by a young Baden Powell.
• Karen Russell’s “Vampires In The Lemon Grove“: Originally appeared in Zoetrope and is included in Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. Worth searching out.
• Two nonfiction books: Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust, and Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, the latter recommended by Steph. Neither are about topics I’d have thought I’d find interesting — and yet they’re both fascinating. Both definitely of the fox, not hedgehog school.
• Summer Will Show, of course.
• Werner Herzog: My new thing is to watch a Herzog double feature on the weekends, Werner Herzog Sundays!, a ritual I plan to keep up for at least a few more weeks. The first weekend was My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski and Grizzly Man, which worked well back to back as character studies. Next were the Les Blank-directed documentaries about Herzog: Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. I’ll be away this weekend, but the one after will be Fitzcarraldo and I don’t know what. Maybe filling out an application for Herzog’s Rogue Film School.