Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
From 2005:
Would we all be happier if we were capable of always enjoying to the fullest whatever we’re doing at the moment we’re doing it? Probably–but then we wouldn’t be quite human, would we? Such contentment is not in our natures: we keep one eye on the horizon, and sometimes both, which leaves neither free to see the moments that pass before us in review, each one crying out, Look at me! Aren’t I pretty?…
Read the whole thing here.
“Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors.”
Pauline Kael, “Potency”
I drove last Monday from Spring Green, a village in southwest Wisconsin, to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, from which I flew back to the East Coast and Mrs. T. This wasn’t a great idea–it was Labor Day and highway traffic was brutally slow–but I didn’t have any serious alternative. Fortunately, my trusty GPS decided early on that it would be foolish for me to try to get to O’Hare via I-90, and moments later I found myself in the middle of Janesville, Wisconsin (pop. 63,575). I briefly thought that my GPS had gone mad, especially when I came within two left turns of being stopped dead in my tracks by the local Labor Day parade. I managed to extract myself without incident, however, and a few minutes later I was cruising unharassed down a peaceful country lane.
Rural Wisconsin, it turns out, looks a lot like the part of southeast Missouri where I grew up. As I made my way through the middle of nowhere, I saw any number of things that I might just have easily seen in and around Smalltown, U.S.A. I laughed out loud when I drove past a giant ear of corn that proclaimed the coming of an annual event known as Darien Cornfest, not because I found it funny but because it felt so familiar. Then I said to myself, I wish I could call Mom and tell her where I am and what I’m doing.
After my father died in 1998, I took to calling up my mother regularly. Within a year or so I’d fallen into the habit of speaking to her on the phone two or three times a week. It never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about this practice until I told other people about it and found that most grown children don’t call their parents nearly so often. To me it was nothing more than a stopgap: I wasn’t able to visit my mother more than once or twice a year, and my calls made her feel as though I were still a part of her daily life.
All told, I suppose I must have called her a couple of thousand times between 1998 and her death fourteen years later. I confess that I can’t recall more than a half-dozen of those calls with any specificity, since we never talked about anything in particular: I told her what I’d done that day, trying in the process to make her laugh, and she in turn told me about her own day. I liked to call her from the cab when I was en route to Broadway, knowing that it would please her to hear that I would soon be seeing an actor of whom she’d heard. (I do remember how thrilled she was when I told her that I was about to see Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!) When the news was good I shared it with her, and when it was bad I kept it from her. My job was to make her happy, and since I couldn’t do it in person anymore, I did it on the phone. It was as simple as that.
In the last years of her life my mother liked nothing more than to be taken for long country drives on sunny afternoons, and I did so whenever I visited Smalltown, however briefly. That’s what made me think of her as I made my circuitous way from Spring Green to O’Hare on the back roads of Wisconsin and Illinois: I could easily imagine her smiling at the notion of her city-dwelling son getting caught up in a small-town Labor Day parade.
Calling my mother eventually became a sad and painful chore. For a year or so her memory was failing, and even after anti-dementia drugs reversed her mental decline, I dialed her number with undiminished anxiety, wondering what fresh horror awaited me. In time she grew so weak and fragile that she could do nothing more than whisper hello, forcing me to grapple anew each evening with the agonizing task of chattering brightly and pointlessly for a few endless minutes. Yet I always thought as I hung up the phone, A time will come when you’d give anything to be able to do this again.
Sure enough, it has. I wouldn’t want to repeat any part of the last year of my mother’s life–but there isn’t much that I wouldn’t give to be able to call her up and tell her that I just saw a giant ear of corn.
Mrs. T are en route to Maine today. I’ll be somewhat out of touch until later in the week, but “About Last Night,” as always, will continue uninterrupted.
Till soon.
A 1984 Cinéma Cinémas interview with Elisha Cook, Jr. The interview segment and clips are in English with French subtitles:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The October issue of Essence, now on newsstands, contains a very nice review of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington–the first to appear in a mainstream media publication.
Here’s the gist:
A thoroughly researched homage to this complex genius….Teachout exhaustively explores Ellington’s influence as one of the greatest composers in any genre. Like a detective, The Wall Street Journal critic pieces together clues to discover the private Duke. Given Ellington’s enigmatic persona, this is no easy feat. However, Teachout delivers a Duke unlike any we’ve seen in previous biographies. Here Ellington is both loyal and self-centered. He has conflicted relationsips with women. At last, Teachout affirms that music was Ellington’s greatest mistress–and to her, the composer was unrelentingly loyal.
Yay!
Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is the second of two reports from Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, in which I review productions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet (performed by the same cast) and a rare revival of Somerset Maugham’s Too Many Husbands. Here’s an excerpt.
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Rare is the opportunity to see “Hamlet” played in repertory–and by the same cast–as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” Tom Stoppard’s 1966 pendant to Shakespeare’s tragedy, in which we find out (in a manner of speaking) what the faithless friends of the melancholy Dane are up to when they’re offstage. The problem is that the major roles in “Hamlet” are minor roles in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” thus making it hard for both shows to be mounted simultaneously other than by a permanent ensemble or in a festival setting. Fortunately, American Players Theatre fills the bill on both counts…
James Bohnen’s trickery-free “R & G” (as Mr. Stoppard’s play is known among theater people) is a text-driven staging in which the bewitchingly clever script is always to the fore, with Ryan Imhoff and Steve Haggard playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a genial pair of youthful indie-flick types who don’t know why they’ve been summoned to Elsinore, then are left to stand around and wait for…what? We, of course, know what they don’t, We, of course, know what they don’t, which is that King Claudius (Jim DeVita) has nefarious reasons for wanting them to spy on Hamlet (Matt Schwader), who has his own reasons for not wanting to be spied upon….
John Langs’ “Hamlet” is a purposefully, unabashedly prosy version enacted with vitalizing speed and physicality (the climactic swordfight is positively scary). The costumes are traditional but the feel is contemporary, with Cristina Panfilio giving us a giggly Ophelia who has no notion of the black horrors that await her. Powerful cross-currents of dramatic tension are regularly relieved by laughter that never stoops to cheap irony. I wish that Mr. Schwader’s Hamlet were a bit more alert to the rhythms of Shakespeare’s verse, much of which comes off sounding like straight dialogue, but he fits into Mr. Langs’ potent staging like a blade sliding into its scabbard…
The Shaw Festival’s revival of “Our Betters,” about which I recently raved, left me wondering why Somerset Maugham’s plays aren’t better known. After seeing APT’s champagne-like production of his “Too Many Husbands,” my puzzlement has grown deeper still. Known in England as “Home and Beauty,” this 1919 comedy, staged with lapidary timing by David Frank, is a raucously funny comedy about a high-society fluffhead (Deborah Staples) who marries her husband’s best friend (Marcus Truschinski) after Husband No. 1 (James Ridge) is killed in the Great War. The catch is that he’s not dead–and when he shows up in London a couple of weeks after the armistice, things get out of hand with dizzying rapidity….
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Read the whole thing here.