Archives for September 2011

On Thursday Mrs. T and I returned home from a month-long stretch on the road. Most of it was pretty wonderful, especially our two-day visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage, at which I snapped this candid photo of Mrs. T sleeping on the couch. Not so the travel, which was grueling from start to finish, in part because there was so damned much of it, including two unplanned trips to Smalltown, U.S.A., to see my ailing mother (who is much improved, thank you).

In addition to the Peterson Cottage, the shows we saw, and the (frequently) fabulous meals we ate along the way, we stumbled across a brand-new independent bookstore-café that’s equally deserving of high praise. Arcadia Books is located in Spring Green, the small Wisconsin town that is home to American Players Theatre and Taliesin. It’s owned by James Bohnen, a stage director whose work I admire, and it’s the kind of shop of which serious readers dream. The space is handsome and the choice of books imaginative (I bought a copy of the New York Review Books edition of Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time there). The food is good, too!

I’m tickled to report, by the way, that my own Pops was on display next to Rosanne Cash’s Composed, a book of which I think highly. It was nice to be in such good company.
When you’re gone for a month, you’ve got a month’s worth of snail mail to open, and that’s what I spent Thursday night and Friday morning doing. Most of it was publicity-type stuff, most of which was a notch up from junk. I did, however, receive a package from the University of Chicago Press that delighted me, containing as it did my copies of Richard Stark’s Flashfire and Firebreak, to which I contributed an introduction of which I’m exceedingly proud.

If you haven’t yet jumped on the Stark/Parker bandwagon, I have good news, which is that the University of Chicago Press is giving away free copies of the e-book version of The Score, the fifth novel in the Parker series, throughout the month of September. You can download your copy by going to the U of C Parker page, and you can also order it directly from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (If the $0 price hasn’t shown up yet on these sites, come back later today or tomorrow.)

Incidentally, Flashfire is about to be turned into a movie called Parker that will star Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, and Nick Nolte. Some of the Parker movies have been much better than others, so I’m hoping that this one, which will be directed by Taylor Hackford, is an improvement on its most recent predecessor.

In addition to Flashfire and Firebreak, I also received an envelope from my theatrical agent that contained a check—the first money I’ve ever earned as a playwright. It was the advance payment for the premiere production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which opens next Thursday in Orlando, Florida. It isn’t a big check, but it still means a lot to me. Not only is it a symbol of an achievement that I never envisioned, but I’m allowing myself to think of it as—maybe, just maybe—a down payment on the future. Here’s hoping, anyway….

The trailer for Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited second film, out September 30 from Fox Searchlight:

“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I’m taking the day off, having labored excessively for the past month. See you tomorrow.

Fred Allen, who had taken a leave from the panel of What’s My Line? because of illness, returns as the show’s surprise mystery guest on July 17, 1955:

“Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion. When a radio comedian’s program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesterday’s happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.”
Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion

I just got back from a month on the road, and in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two of the shows I saw there, American Players Theatre’s The Critic and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s August: Osage County. Here’s an excerpt.
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It isn’t quite right to say that nobody does “The Critic” nowadays, but Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, written in 1779, is far less familiar to American audiences than “The School for Scandal” and “The Rivals,” the works of his that remain perennially popular. The current revival by Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre appears to be the first professional production of any consequence to be mounted in this country in the past decade. Yet “The Critic” is one of the best comedies ever written, a backstage farce that offers infinite opportunity to a resourceful director and a cast of virtuoso farceurs. Fortunately, APT has both at its disposal, and William Brown has whipped up a staging whose full-tilt frenzy is strong enough to knock down a building or two.
Mr. Puff (Jim DeVita), the play’s central character, is an unashamedly venal press agent who introduces himself as “a practititioner in panegyric, or—to speak more plainly—a professor of the art of puffing, at your service, or anybody else’s.” He also fancies himself a playwright, and approaches the well-heeled Mr. Dangle (Darragh Kennan) and the waspish Mr. Sneer (Jonathan Smoots), a pair of opinionated connoisseurs, in the hopes of enlisting their support for his latest effort…
Mr. Brown has covered Sheridan’s witty cake with a thick and tasty frosting of slapstick so elaborate as to defy any attempt at accurate description. All I can tell you is that I’ve never laughed so hard in my life…
Sometimes a play that makes a strong first impression fails to hold up on repeat acquaintance. Not having seen “August: Osage County” since it opened on Broadway, I was eager to find out whether it was as powerful as I remembered, so I made a point of catching the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s version. I’m happy to report that it looks as good—maybe even better—the second time around, in part because Christopher Liam Moore’s staging is so satisfying but mostly because the play itself is a wonderfully sound piece of work, a group portrait of collective self-loathing that is all the more devastating for using humor to make its points.
Though the original production was more than funny enough, Mr. Moore and his cast have opted for a more broadly comic portrayal of what one of the members of Mr. Letts’ fictional clan describes as “the creepy character of the Midwest.” If you saw Steppenwolf’s version of the play, you may find this approach to be disconcerting at first, but OSF’s resident ensemble never stoops to caricature, and the results are every bit as effective in their own way….
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Read the whole thing here.