Archives for September 2014

“Most great actors, certainly most serious actors, can’t really play comedy well. Audiences applaud their efforts, but the applause is a form of pity, the good sport award for their being jolly good fellows who generously give their pants permission to fall down.”

Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review important New York revivals of plays by two major American playwrights, Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth and A.R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn. Here’s an excerpt.

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Kenneth Lonergan has finally made it to Broadway—courtesy of a trio of millennial pop-culture idols whose stage experience ranges from modest to nonexistent. Don’t let that discourage you, though: “This Is Our Youth,” Mr. Lonergan’s career-making 1996 comedy about three disaffected Manhattan kids, couldn’t be better suited to the varied abilities of Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson, and Anna D. Shapiro’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, which has transferred here from Chicago, is a highly effective revival of one of the best American plays of the past quarter-century.

I call Mr. Lonergan’s first play a comedy because that’s what it says on the marquee. In truth, though, it’s a Chekhov-style “sad comedy” about the children of New York’s upper middle class. Warren (Mr. Cera), a clumsy, self-conscious 19-year-old, steals $15,000 from his father and brings it to Dennis (Mr. Culkin), his best friend, an arrogantly self-confident drug dealer. Dennis goads Warren into peeling off a fistful of cash and taking out Jessica (Ms. Gevinson), on whom he has what appears to be a hopeless crush. First things go well, then they don’t, and at length the two boys see one another—and themselves—in a new light.

Mr. Lonergan uses his flawlessly tuned ear (as well as, one suspects, his memory) to bring his three youngsters to life through what they say and how they say it. Every sentence that comes out of their mouths sounds as real as a confessed humiliation: “I’m sure you love me, man, and you’re totally like my personal hero, but I really don’t get the feeling that you are.” This exactitude is of enormous help to his three actors, especially Mr. Cera, who has done very little stage acting, and Ms. Gevinson, who has done none at all. They are unformed artists playing unformed personalities, and even if some of what they’re doing in “This Is Our Youth” perhaps can’t quite be called acting, it’s wholly engrossing on its own unmediated terms…

In “The Wayside Motor Inn,” first performed in 1977, A.R. Gurney borrowed a page from Alan Ayckbourn’s playbook, writing a ten-character script whose five unrelated plot lines are all enacted on the same anonymous-looking motel-room set—only simultaneously, in the manner of Mr. Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves.” In addition, the characters pair off to illustrate different points in the life cycle of the WASP: Phil and Sally (David McElwee and Ismenia Mendes), for instance, are a college-age couple who have come to the Wayside Motor Inn for a night of illicit love, while Ray (Quincy Dunn-Baker) is a traveling salesman who aims to make time with his room-service waitress (Jenn Lyon). Lila Neugebauer, the director, contrives without visible difficulty to maintain the spatial clarity of the separate-but-equal plot lines, and every member of the ensemble cast makes a bold impression…

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To read my review of This Is Our Youth, go here.

To read my review of The Wayside Motor Inn, go here.

Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin, and Tavi Gevinson talk about This Is Our Youth:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I pay tribute to the American poet L.E. Sissman. Here’s an excerpt.

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Now that the baby boomers, who are accustomed to talking in public about every aspect of their private lives, are approaching the end of their long run in the spotlight, it’s becoming more and more common to read first-person narratives by writers of all ages about what it feels like to suffer from a terminal illness. Not surprisingly, some people squirm at the thought of reading about such things, and a few actually seem to regard them as inappropriate for general consumption. Earlier this year, Emma Keller wrote a column for the Guardian in which she attacked Lisa Bonchek Adams, a blogger and mother of three who is also a stage-4 cancer patient, suggesting that her courageous postings and tweets were “a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies.” Bill Keller, Ms. Keller’s husband, backed up his spouse in a New York Times column that dismissed Ms. Adams as “the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer…that may raise false hopes.”

If, like me, you’re an admirer of the writings of such bloggers as Ms. Adams and D.G. Myers, a literary critic who is chronicling his own experiences with prostate cancer, you will doubtless find what the Kellers wrote to be—to put it very, very gently—insensitive. But in my own case, it also put me in mind of a near-forgotten American poet of great gifts whose subject matter included the prospect of his own fast-approaching death.

L.E. Sissman isn’t even a name to most modern-day readers, but a modest number of people can recall his brief vogue, which lasted for a bit more than a decade. Sissman, known to his friends as “Ed,” was an advertising man from Boston who in his spare time wrote poems, book reviews, and familiar essays that appeared regularly in the Atlantic and the New Yorker between 1964 and his death in 1976. He learned in 1965 that he had Hodgkin’s disease, and his first book of poems, “Dying: An Introduction,” which came out in 1968, is most striking—harrowing, in fact—when it deals with the illness that killed him at the unripe age of 48…

Cancer was discussed frankly in print far less often when the title poem of “Dying: An Introduction” appeared in the New Yorker in 1967, which is one reason why Sissman’s work was so widely noticed at the time. But his modest renown didn’t outlive his death, and not even the posthumous publication of “Night Music,” a collection of his poetry that came out in 1999, was able to restore it.

Yet Sissman’s poems are both stunning and disquieting. Their crisply rhyming iambs were a perfect embodiment of the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking. In “A Deathplace,” for instance, he envisioned his ultimate demise: “Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,/A booted man in black with a peaked cap/Will call for me and troll me down the hall/And slot me into his black car. That’s all.” That seems to me at least as good as Aubade, Philip Larkin’s 1977 poem about his fear of death, not to mention braver. Like all of Sissman’s best poems, it’s utterly free of sentimentality and (unlikely as it may sound) coolly witty in its unswerving acceptance of the inevitability of the dark encounter that awaits us all….

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Read the whole thing here.

To order a copy of Night Music, go here.

To hear Sissman read his poetry at Canada’s Sir George Williams University in 1972, go here.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”

Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address (2005)

Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, some performances sold out last week, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Arms and the Man (comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)
• The Sea (black comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)
• When We Are Married (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (serious comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 3, reviewed here)
• Travesties (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Seagull (drama, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 20, reviewed here)

“It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.”

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms

Elmore Leonard wasn’t a great writer, but he was, at his best and within his limits, quite exceptionally good. Moreover, he was never better than when writing about how men and women relate to one another, an area of life with which many, perhaps most male thriller writers are variously uncomfortable.

I’ve been rereading Unknown Man No. 89, one of the four novels reprinted in the Library of America’s first collection of Leonard’s work, and ran across this passage. It seems to me to describe just about perfectly what it feels like to be with a romantic partner whom you like very much but with whom you nonetheless can’t quite imagine spending the rest of your life:

She was all right. She tried a little too hard—like someone who didn’t have an ear or a sense of timing trying to be funny—but there was a lot of girl there in Rita.

That nails it, don’t you think?