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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: The guillotine of history

June 14, 2013 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a new off-Broadway play, John Guare’s 3 Kinds of Exile, and two out-of-town revivals, Present Laughter in Red Bank, New Jersey, and The Real Thing in Washington, D.C. Here’s an excerpt.
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The twin tyrannies of Communism and Nazism killed so many Europeans that it’s temptingly easy to think only of the mountains of corpses that were their monument. But totalitarianism also did damage to countless other people by forcing them into unsought exile. Some who fled to America and elsewhere were able to start anew, but many others soon found that the guillotine of history had cut their lives in two. In “3 Kinds of Exile,” John Guare dramatizes the sufferings of a trio of European émigrés whose existence was turned inside out when they left home….
Mr. Guare, as is his wont, tells these varied tales with surging energy and an infectious sense of the absurd, and the three parts of “3 Kinds of Exile” add up to an “entertainment” that is at once excitingly lively and unsettlingly macabre….
Present-Laughter-press-1-305x230.jpgMichael Cumpsty was born to play Garry Essendine, the self-absorbed anti-hero of “Present Laughter,” Noël Coward’s comedy about a flamboyant matinée idol who bears a far-more-than-coincidental resemblance to the author himself. Mr. Cumpsty, the star of Two River Theater Company’s new production of Coward’s best play, knows that Essendine is at bottom a spoiled child who is scared of the dark, and he combines stiletto-sharp wit with high-camp poutiness to endlessly exhilarating effect. His performance would be worth seeing all by itself…
Studio Theatre has a strong track record with the plays of Tom Stoppard, and the company’s in-the-round revival of “The Real Thing,” Stoppard’s most heartfelt play, is for the most part a sound piece of work. Annie Purcell, who plays the woman who teaches Henry (Teagle F. Bougere), Stoppard’s own fictional alter ego, a painful lesson in the meaning of love, gives a really lovely performance, sincere and winsome in just the right proportions, and Caroline Bootle Pendergast is pointed and ironic as Charlotte, Henry’s first wife and the mother of his only child (very well played by Barrett Doss). Mr. Bougere, alas, is the weak link, not because he isn’t a good actor but because he lacks the lightness of touch necessary to bring Henry to convincing life….
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Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

June 14, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“For my own Part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look upon myself as conferring Favours, but as paying Debts. In my Travels, and since my Settlement, I have received much Kindness from Men, to whom I shall never have any Opportunity of making the least direct Return. And numberless Mercies from God, who is infinitely above being benefited by our Services. Those Kindnesses from Men, I can therefore only Return on their Fellow Men; and I can only shew my Gratitude for these mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other Children and my Brethren. For I do not think that Thanks and Compliments, tho’ repeated weekly, can discharge our real Obligations to each other, and much less those to our Creator.”
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Joseph Huey (June 6, 1753)

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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