Archives for February 15, 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review two off-Broadway shows, Primary Stages’ revival of All in the Timing and the New Group’s premiere of Clive. One is sublime, the other hopeless. Here’s an excerpt.
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Twenty years ago, Primary Stages put on a bill of six one-act comedies by a near-unknown playwright named David Ives. One-act plays are an appallingly hard box-office sell, but “All in the Timing” ran for more than 600 performances and established Mr. Ives as one of the top theatrical talents of his generation. Now Primary Stages is marking the 20th anniversary of the premiere by giving “All in the Timing” its first major New York revival. While I didn’t see the 1993 production, I can’t imagine how it could have been better than this glittering version, staged by John Rando, Mr. Ives’ frequent collaborator, and acted with colossal éclat by five young actors who fit together like the pieces of a platinum-plated jigsaw puzzle….
What made the popular success of “All in the Timing” so noteworthy is that Mr. Ives’ brand of humor is anything but simple. Indeed, it has far more in common with conceptual art–or alternate-reality science fiction–than sketch comedy….
Mr. Ives’ hapless characters are all trying to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, usually in the most circuitous of ways. In “The Universal Language,” for instance, a sad, mousy young woman with a stammer answers an ad for a school that purports to teach an Esperanto-like language called Unamunda in which the word for the woman’s problem is “tonguestoppard.” Not only is she the school’s first and only pupil, but the teacher turns out to be…and I’ll leave it at that. Suffice it to say that teacher and pupil are looking for the same thing–surcease from what a less pretentious playwright might call existential loneliness–and that, against all odds, they find it.
It’s hard to do “All in the Timing” badly, which explains why it became one of the most frequently produced American plays of the 20th century. To do it well, however, requires a combination of preternaturally exact directorial timing and a cast whose members are alert to the underlying pathos of Mr. Ives’ bizarrely skewed comic situations. Mr. Rando has got the first point covered–he’s one of this country’s finest directors of comedy–and his cast self-evidently understands what makes all six plays tick….
You’d think that a play starring Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio and Zoe Kazan would be worth seeing, but if you’ve seen “Clive,” Jonathan Marc Sherman’s modernized version of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal,” you now know better. Except for the acting, “Clive” is perfectly awful, a monstrously self-indulgent show about a monster of self-indulgence in which Mr. Hawke plays a booze-and-dope-sodden downtown songwriter who destroys everything he touches, ending with himself, though not soon enough….
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss an aspect of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln that has been overlooked by its critics. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you Google “Lincoln” and “talky,” you’ll get two million matches, very few of which are referring to the Gettysburg Address. Whether they liked it or not, pretty much everybody who’s seen Steven Spielberg’s biopic seems to think that it’s…well, kind of wordy. In an age when the average length of time between explosions in big-budget Hollywood movies has been officially computed (by me, anyway) to be 26.4 seconds, that’s an attribute sufficiently surprising to inspire near-universal comment.
For those of us who see more plays than films, though, it’s no surprise at all. The script of “Lincoln” is by Tony Kushner, the author of “Angels in America,” who is not a screenwriter by trade but a playwright. Plays are talky by definition, and Mr. Kushner’s plays are really talky, right down to the titles….
The only thing that surprised me about “Lincoln” is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that “Lincoln” is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay. Yes, Mr. Spielberg tarted it up with “Gone With the Wind”-style crowd scenes and snippets of “Saving Private Ryan”-type carnage, but for the most part he seems to have taken what Mr. Kushner gave him and run with it. John Podhoretz, who reviewed “Lincoln” for the Weekly Standard, a political journal, called it “a drawing-room political drama.” That’s right on the nose, since virtually everything of consequence that happens in “Lincoln” could just as easily have happened on a stage. In scene after scene, the characters sit in a room talking politics, and no attempt is made to leaven their conversations with action of any kind.
What’s more, the talk is essential, since the subject of the film, the congressional debate over the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery in America, will be all but unintelligible to viewers who don’t know the history of the Civil War going in. But Messrs. Spielberg and Kushner operated on the assumption that what Lincoln and his colleagues have to say is so inherently interesting that the audience will listen to it–and their assumption was correct.
While I’ve been skeptical about most of Mr. Kushner’s plays, I’m delighted that he and his famous collaborator have succeeded in persuading large numbers of Americans to sit still and listen to a movie. The contemporary notion that it’s somehow inherently bad for a film to be “talky” has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn