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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Not in my front yard

May 17, 2010 by Terry Teachout

In the New York edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review The Bilbao Effect, Oren Safdie’s new play about the splendors and miseries of postmodern starchitecture. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Architecture is the only art form about which everybody has an opinion–because everybody has to live with it. Some buildings, however, are harder to live with than others, and in recent years a growing number of them have been the work of big-name “starchitects” who appear at times to be more interested in making a splash than ensuring the day-to-day livability of their buildings. Enter Oren Safdie, the son of the famous modernist architect Moshe Safdie, who in 2003 wrote a witty and knowing play called “Private Jokes, Public Places” in which he ran a sharp skewer through the pretensions of a generation of starchitects who give the impression of having forgotten that human beings live in and near the buildings they design….
NY-AF552_TEACHO_D_20100516171933.jpgNow Mr. Safdie is back at the Center for Architecture with a sequel, “The Bilbao Effect,” in which the principal characters from “Private Jokes, Public Places” return to the stage to conduct a furiously farcical debate over the wholly serious subject of the architect’s responsibility to the people whose lives he touches.
The play’s title is, of course, a nod to Frank Gehry’s 1997 branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, an avant-garde building so self-consciously spectacular that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Its success persuading other institutions to undertake the construction of equally over-the-top structures in the hopes of drawing visitors whose spending will galvanize the local economy and enhance their own bottom lines. In “The Bilbao Effect,” Mr. Safdie imagines that Staten Island’s city fathers have succumbed to a similar case of architectural hubris and allowed the egomaniacal Erhardt Shlaminger (Joris Stuyck) of “Private Jokes, Public Places” to build a Gehry-like urban-renewal project in the middle of town….
Good plays of ideas allow the audience to make up its own mind about the relative merits of the characters’ arguments. One of the best things about “Private Jokes, Public Places” was Mr. Safdie’s willingness to let everyone look stupid at one time or another, whereas in “The Bilbao Effect” Schlaminger and his smug lawyer (John Bolton) are too obviously the villains of the piece.
All this notwithstanding, “The Bilbao Effect” is both funny and cruelly smart in its portrayal of the lunatic excesses of the more extreme varieties of starchitecture. Perhaps the shrewdest of Mr. Safdie’s touches is the way in which he conceives of the debate over such architecture as a class war…
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Read the whole thing here.

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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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