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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 8, 2011

TT: The way we were (and weren’t)

March 8, 2011 by ldemanski

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the first Broadway revival of Jason Miller’s That Championship Season, which is awful (the play, that is, not the production). Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Good or bad, every work of art is a time capsule, and sometimes it’s the worst ones that contain the most information about what the world was like when they were new. In the ’70s American playgoers rushed to embrace Jason Miller’s “That Championship Season” as a masterpiece of hard-hitting truth-telling. It ran for 944 performances, won a Pulitzer and was turned into a movie that starred Robert Mitchum. Today “That Championship Season,” which is now being revived on Broadway for the first time, looks like what it is, a quasi-political cartoon whose smugness stinks like dime-store perfume. Even so, I doubt that any other play that opened on Broadway in 1972 has more to tell us about the self-satisfied attitudes of the generation that made it a hit.
3.159702.jpgMiller, an actor-turned-playwright who is remembered (if at all) for having played the priest in “The Exorcist,” apparently wrote “That Championship Season” to exorcise what he regarded as the collective sins of those Americans who, like him, grew up in the benighted Age of Eisenhower. The play’s five characters are residents of a city indistinguishable from Scranton, the medium-sized Pennsylvania town where Mr. Miller grew up. In youth four of them played together on a high-school basketball team whose coach (Brian Cox) is hosting a reunion dinner at his home. The men seem friendly, but appearances are deceiving, for Phil (Chris Noth) has had an affair with the wife of George (Jim Gaffigan), the mayor of the town where the play is set, and is secretly planning to throw his financial support behind another candidate in the next election….
I won’t say that a better playwright might not have been able to make something watchable out of this clichéd scenario, but what Mr. Miller made out of it in 1972 was pretty much what you’d have expected from a second-rate writer born in 1939 who had drunk deep from the well of the ’60s and now proposed to inform his audiences that their parents’ values were comprehensively corrupt. Hence the coach, a boorish, ill-educated stage-Irish blowhard who proudly displays pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Fightin’ Joe McCarthy on his mantelpiece and salts his small talk with good old-fashioned ethnic slurs of the highest possible voltage, thereby alerting the audience to his lack of enlightenment….
Were there really people like the coach? Certainly, and plenty of them, too–but the ludicrous lack of subtlety with which Miller portrays this one kills “That Championship Season” stone dead. Every five pages or so, the action, such as it is, comes to a halt so that he can deliver a sermonette crammed full of his personal prejudices…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

March 8, 2011 by ldemanski

“Poets tend to be poor lyricists because their verse has its own inner music and doesn’t make allowance for the real thing.”
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat

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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