Archives for 2009

It’s been a decade since I last set foot in any part of Texas other than an airport. I’ve been wanting to review theater there for the past few years, but until this week I was never able to find a sufficiently compact stretch of time when I could catch more than one worthy-looking show.

Even this trip, short as it was, took some doing. I had to fly from Washington, D.C., to Houston on Saturday, see Main Street Theater’s revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! on Sunday afternoon, drive from Houston to Dallas that same night so that I could attend the opening of Theatre Three’s production of Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars on Monday, then fly to Kansas City on Tuesday morning for a preview of A Flea in Her Ear. I hate cramming so many shows into so brief a span of time, but there was no way to get around it–the schedules of the three companies that I wanted to see locked together in only one way that fit into the rest of my itinerary–so I made my plans and resigned myself to scurrying.

I spent twenty-one hours in Houston, not nearly long enough to get more than the flimsiest of impressions of a city that I remember only vaguely from my previous trip. It felt sprawling and sleepy on Saturday night, but I have no doubt that appearances were deceiving (especially given the fact that I was sleepy, too). Brazos Bookstore, an independently owned shop to which I made a happy pilgrimage the next morning, is an unmistakable sign of intellectual life, an egghead’s paradise of well-stocked shelves and comfy chairs that left nothing to be desired save for being located in Houston instead of on the Upper West Side of New York.

Since I only had time to visit one other cultural landmark before heading for the theater on Sunday, I decided to return to the Rothko Chapel, which I saw for the first time when I went to Houston in 1998 to interview Francesca Zambello for Time. It struck me then as bleak and forbidding, a monochrome monument to everything that is least inviting about modernism, and I can’t say I felt all that different the second time around.

Misleading though it can be to read an artist’s life into his work, I’m not greatly surprised that the Rothko Chapel was created by a man who committed suicide a year before it opened. I say this as one who loves Mark Rothko’s paintings of the late Forties and early Fifties passionately. In those days he was full of life, spilling over with the bold, high-key colors that he first saw in the work of Pierre Bonnard. But something seems to have gone badly wrong by the time he got around to painting the Rothko Chapel murals (though there are plenty of critics and scholars who beg to differ).

To be sure, the chapel bills itself as “a place alive with religious ceremonies of all faiths,” and countless religious and quasi-religious groups use it for their various purposes. A delegation from Yoga for Peace was setting up shop when I arrived on Sunday morning. But the black-on-black panels in whose fathomless darkness they labored seemed to mock their smiling certitude, and I could all but hear Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” in the middle distance as I watched them make ready to glorify Krishna.

It was a relief to escape from the spiritual chill of the chapel to the furious warmth of the quarreling Jewish family that Clifford Odets portrayed in Awake and Sing! As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal apropos of the 2006 Broadway revival of Odets’ greatest play:

“Awake and Sing!” is the original Jewish-mom kitchen-sink family drama, complete with stock characters, a creaky plot and a happy ending that reeks of socialist realism–none of which matters in the least. The point of the play is the dialogue, which crackles with the near-stenographic exactitude of an artist who had an exquisitely precise ear for the speech of the lost world into which he was born: “I can’t take a bite in my mouth no more.” “You’ll excuse my expression, you’re bughouse.” “Don’t yell in my ears. I hear.” In Odets’ hands everyday talk becomes musical, and you hang breathlessly on each line. It’s as if Anton Chekhov had paid a visit to the Lower East Side.

From the Lower East Side to the wastelands of Texas: the highway between Houston and Dallas is flat and tedious, and no one drives it who doesn’t have to. I suppose I could have flown, but it was somewhat more convenient to rent a car at the Houston airport and drop it off in Dallas, so I hit the road again as soon as Awake and Sing! was over, driving for the better part of five hours and pausing only to dine on chicken-fried steak and sweet tea at Sam’s Restaurant, a no-nonsense oasis just past the middle of nowhere.

It should have been a painfully boring trip, but I ended up enjoying most of it. Barreling down a long, straight stretch of road at eighty miles an hour is one of the most mentally restful activities I know, especially when you’ve been spending too much time juggling too many responsibilities. I only wish I’d thought to bring along some suitable music: Bob Wills and Ray Price would have been ideal, but the car radio offered only Christian rock and hip-hop, so I opted for incongruity and popped The John Kirby Sextet: Complete Columbia and RCA Victor Recordings into the CD player as I made my way to Dallas.

(To be continued)

Lester Young plays “Pennies from Heaven” in 1950:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

GUILDENSTERN: You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying–
ROSENCRANTZ: Saucy–
GUILDENSTERN: –Suicidal–hm? Maidens aspiring to godheads–
ROSENCRANTZ: And vice versa–
GUILDENSTERN: Your kind of thing, is it?
PLAYER KING: Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
GUILDENSTERN: Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
PLAYER KING: They’re hardly divisible, sir–well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory–they’re all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

On Friday Mrs. T and I drove down to Staunton, Virginia, where we lunched on Superburgers at Wright’s Dairy-Rite, a drive-in that has been doing business in the same building since 1952, and saw another Tom Stoppard play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in another Elizabethan-style theater, the Blackfriars Playhouse, which I visited for the first time in 2006:

In theater, seeing is believing, and the best way to learn about 17th-century theatrical performance practices is to watch a Shakespeare play acted on a modern re-creation of an Elizabethan-style stage….The U.S. is home to a half-dozen such houses, including the indoor theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the open-air theaters that I saw earlier this year at the Oregon Shakespeare and Utah Shakespearean Festivals. Most of the American replicas, however, are variously modernized structures that incorporate such anachronistic devices as theatrical lighting. If you want to see the real thing–and to see it used in a convincing way–the place to go is Staunton, home of the American Shakespeare Center, whose performances are given in a dazzlingly exact re-creation of the Blackfriars Playhouse, originally built in London in 1596….
To pass through the lobby doors into the 300-seat auditorium is like jumping into Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and setting the controls for 1600, with some allowances made for fire safety. Actors and audience are lit by the same electric chandeliers–there are no spotlights–and if you’re fortunate enough to hold a ticket for one of the 12 “Lord’s Chairs” placed on either side of the stage, you’ll be close enough to the players to reach out and touch them.

The opportunity to review two Stoppard plays performed on consecutive nights in two different Elizabethan-style theaters was, of course, irresistible, and I didn’t even consider resisting it, even though I knew it would involve a fair-sized chunk of long-distance driving, there being no practical way to get from Washington to Staunton other than in a car. The next morning I took Mrs. T back to Union Station, from whence she departed for Connecticut. I then drove to Dulles International Airport and flew to Houston, Texas, by way of Charlotte, North Carolina, to begin the second leg of my cross-country regional-theater pilgrimage.
Too much travel in one day makes my head spin–I woke up an hour ahead of my wake-up call in Staunton–and it wasn’t until I landed in Houston that I started to calm down. All told, I spent thirteen hours on the move last Saturday, including a twenty-minute jog from one end of the Charlotte airport to the other (for once, the word literally is applicable). As soon as I picked up my rental car in Houston, I drove straight to La Mexicana, a neighborhood joint recommended by Michael Stern, and dined on fish tacos laced with fresh cilantro and lime. Then I found my hotel, ascended to the twenty-third floor, called Mrs. T and my mother, and fell into bed.
(To be continued)

I asked about this without effect back in January, so allow me to repeat myself: I’m curious about the current whereabouts of two people whom I knew in college three decades ago, a violinist named Laura Gutsch and an oboe player named Michelle Rock. Both lived in the Kansas City area. Laura married and moved away, but I know nothing more about Michelle, who may or may not still be in Kansas City.
If anyone out there knows either of these women, would you be so kind as to send them a link to this posting?

“I always think of melodrama as the thing we are all capable of that’s swept under the rug.”
Sidney Lumet (quoted on imdb.com)

On Wednesday Mrs. T and I took the Acela Express to Washington, D.C., picked up a rental car at the train station, and drove to Arlington, Virginia, to see Signature Theatre’s production of Giant, the new Michael John LaChiusa-Sybille Pearson musical version of Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel. My Wall Street Journal review, unlike most of the others that I’ve seen to date, was strongly positive. I think Giant is a show of the first importance, and I wish I’d had time to see it twice, something I almost never get to do.
The next day we strolled from our hotel to the Phillips Collection to see Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life, an exhibition of sixty paintings and etchings to which I’ve been looking forward ever since it was announced last year. (The Phillips, not incidentally, happens to own one of my favorite Morandis, a 1953 still life that is one of the finest pieces in the show, which is up through May 24.) I’ve written a fair amount about Morandi in this space, most recently in connection with the Metropolitan Museum’s 2008 retrospective, a once-in-a-lifetime event that nonetheless disappointed me, not because the paintings weren’t beautiful but because they were presented in a way that I found problematic. Not so the Phillips show, which gets everything right. The size of the show is ideal–large enough to suggest Morandi’s range without blunting your perception of the individual pieces–and though the galleries were fairly full of spectators, everyone was properly quiet and attentive.
Afterward we had dinner at the home of Megan McArdle, who bills herself as “the world’s tallest female econoblogger,” and her boyfriend Peter Suderman, a comparably classy writer. I love to eat out on the road, but it’s always nicer to dine in a friend’s backyard garden, and Megan, in addition to being very tall and very smart, is also a terrific cook, so a good time was had by all.
The four of us then went to the Folger Theatre to see Aaron Posner’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play that is close to my heart. My review hasn’t run yet, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I thought of the production (Peter Marks of the Washington Post gave it a hat-in-the-air rave). Instead, I’ll reprint part of what I wrote about Arcadia when I last saw it performed by Chicago’s Court Theatre two seasons ago:

In theory Arcadia, a highbrow whodunit whose plot charges back and forth between 1809 and the present, ought to be hard to unravel. On stage it plays like a high-speed boulevard comedy heavily salted with wicked punchlines. Yet for all its fizzing fun, Arcadia is also a deeply serious meditation on what it means to live in the shadow of modernity, and the climactic scene, in which a fey child prodigy and her tutor reflect on man’s fate, is hauntingly hopeful: “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.” “Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?”

I wish I’d written that.
(To be continued)
* * *
Here’s a video about “Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life”:

“The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.”
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead