Archives for September 2014

Apropos of this posting, I now ask a different but related question: what ten films have stayed with you? Not the ten “best” films or the ten “greatest” films—this is a purely personal inquiry, and so should be answered as quickly as possible in order to avoid, insofar as possible, any self-conscious oh-what-a-cineaste-am-I posturing.

Go:

• Roman Polanski’s Chinatown

• Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game

• Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

• Arthur Hiller’s The In-Laws

• Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year

• John Ford’s The Searchers

• Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me

• Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day

• Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane

• Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys

For the record, that list includes three comedies, three studio-system films, one Western, one film noir, one neo-noir film, the greatest movie ever made, and–somewhat to my retrospective surprise–nothing by Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock. So be it.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, the second of two reports from Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, I review Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and David Mamet’s American Buffalo. Here’s an excerpt.

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American Players Theatre made its name by performing Shakespeare and Shaw in a rural open-air hilltop amphitheatre. It still does the classics there, but in 2009 the company opened a handsome new indoor house, the 200-seat Touchstone Theatre, with the intention of gradually widening its traditional repertory to include challenging modern plays less well suited to large-scale outdoor performance in the 1,148-seat Up-the-Hill Theatre. Five years later, APT is now making the shrewdest possible use of its new space by performing Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” there. “Travesties” is that paradox of paradoxes, a genuinely difficult comedy that can also be a crowd-pleasing hit when staged with flair. William Brown has given it the deluxe treatment…

Written in 1974, “Travesties” is a dizzyingly virtuosic variation on Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in which Mr. Stoppard’s characters, who include Lenin (Eric Parks), James Joyce (Nate Burger) and Tristan Tzara (Matt Schwader), the inventor of Dada, are scrambled together in the senility-crazed memory of Henry Carr (Marcus Truschinski), an aged British diplomat who knew them all in Zurich in 1917. Occasionally sophomoric but more often ingenious beyond belief, “Travesties” is a fact-based fractured fairy tale full of Wilde-worthy epigrams with a modern edge…

To be sure, “Travesties” can be intimidatingly eggheady unless it’s done with unflagging comic flair, and it also runs the risk of bogging down in the slightly overlong second act. But Mr. Brown and his youthful cast skim gaily and effortlessly over the wordy bits, while Mr. Schwader, who plays Tzara with lunatic flamboyance, is more than good enough to recall Tim Curry, who played the same role on Broadway in 1975….

“American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s 1975 study of a trio of small-time Chicago thugs who can’t keep up with the competition, is the most perfect of his plays. Though its tungsten-hard tone and four-letter language don’t appear at first glance to have much in common with American Players Theatre’s more decorous classical repertory, it’s a classic in its own right, one of the most satisfying American shows of the postwar era. What’s more, it makes sense that a company that has done so well in the past by plays like “Richard III” should now be doing just as well by Mr. Mamet’s no less brutally honest portrait of a heartless America in which the only alternatives are “kickass or kissass.” James Ridge plays Teach, the central character, as a coked-up sleazebag who skitters around the stage like a demented Energizer Bunny….

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To read my review of Travesties, go here.

To read my review of American Buffalo, go here.

A scene from Michael Corrente’s 1996 film version of American Buffalo, with Dustin Hoffman as Teach and Dennis Franz as Donny. The screenplay is by Mamet:

“Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.”

François de la Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

I take pills—six daily, seven on Fridays—that keep me alive. They constitute the gentlest and least intrusive of medical regimens, for they have no obvious side effects, and I can skip them for days at a time without immediately dire consequences. It’s absurd of me to resent them. Yet I do, on occasion intensely so, and I know why: as King Lear said, they smell of mortality.

To be sure, I also know that I’m fifty-eight years old, and I don’t have a problem with that undeniable fact. (Well, not much of one.) But I do have a great big problem with the fact that I’m going to die sooner or later, and having to take pills three times a day is like driving down a highway of indeterminate length along which billboards reading MEMENTO MORI are posted at hundred-mile intervals. No matter how pretty the scenery is, you’re bound to wonder how much gas is left in the tank, or whether you’ll be driving off an unmarked cliff up around the next bend.

All that said, it’s childish of me to object to my thrice-daily reminder of the Dark Encounter, just as it was childish for me to be irked when, a number of years ago, my dentist had to pull one of my back molars. It was a relatively painless ordeal of blessedly brief duration, but when it was over, there was a hole in my head where none had been before. An invisible hole, mind you, and nobody needs to tell me that I’m the furthest thing from beautiful, much less perfect. Still, it was there, and I hated it for that, though I forgot about it soon enough.

About my pills, by contrast, there can be no forgetting, and nobody needs to tell me that the only proper attitude to take toward them is a thoroughly dignified stoicism. But while stoicism seems admirable at first glance—Tom Wolfe preached its virtues quite memorably in A Man in Full—it fails, like light multi-grain English muffins, to convince. At best it reduces to the “gentleman’s code” of which Johnny Mercer made mention in “One for My Baby,” and the ultimate inadequacy of such codes was painfully well known to the narrator of that desperate song. It’s also been the subject of no small amount of cruel fun, of which this line from Dogville is noteworthy: “I’m going to break two of your figurines first, and if you can demonstrate your knowledge of the doctrine of stoicism by holding back your tears, I’ll stop. Have you got that?”

Even more to the point is this insufficiently remembered exchange between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in The Mating Season:

“I was endeavouring to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: ‘Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.’”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

That he is—or He, if you prefer it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever and always juvenile to kick against the Big Prick of mortality, especially when you know people for whom the clock is ticking far faster than you. Taking pills three times a day beats the living hell out of chemotherapy, and though we have it on the very best of poetic authority that death is “no different whined at than withstood,” I know that nobody as lucky as I’ve been and (so far) continue to be has any business whining about anything at all, ever.

So shame on me for griping about the wholly unmixed blessing of being able to keep my hypertension under control without having to do anything more than take a modest handful of pills each week and see my doctor with reasonable regularity. You can consider this posting an act of public contrition, the postmodern equivalent of spending twenty minutes in the stocks, there to be pelted with rotten vegetables. Feel free to fling them enthusiastically and at will.

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Frank Sinatra sings “One for My Baby” on The Frank Sinatra Show in 1958:

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, nearly all performances sold out last week, 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, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, 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.:
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 3, reviewed here)
• The Seagull (drama, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• Things We Do for Love (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

“He’d been thinking about late middle age, the years which a generous God and good health now offered. They could be fruitful years before death knocked, or a sterile barren decay before the cold. It all depended on how you handled them. It was absurd, no doubt, to pretend to be young: after thirty years of desk work it would be ludicrous to start waving guns. Charles Russell didn’t intend to. What he intended was a calculated avoidance, the avoidance of too much discipline and of over-rigid habits. At sixty one wasn’t elastic still, one had one’s little drills for things and was fully entitled to do so. They made life simpler, they spun out leisure, but what was very dangerous was when the drill became its own reward, not the muddle avoided, the moment saved, but the deadly satisfaction of having completed some trifle efficiently. If that was the trap of old age, its threshold, then Russell had seen it and wouldn’t step over.”

William Haggard, The Hardliners

I’ve always had sharply mixed feelings about Tennessee Williams, and I explore them at length in the new issue of Commentary. The occasion is an essay about John Lahr’s important new biography of Williams:

When asked to name France’s greatest poet, André Gide quipped, “Victor Hugo, hélas!” Though John Lahr unequivocally describes Tennessee Williams as “America’s greatest playwright,” one comes away from his book wondering whether he, too, might have similar reservations about his subject’s ultimate stature, given the paucity of his accomplishments. Indeed, when Lahr remarks on the next-to-last page of Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh that Williams created “characters so large that they became part of American folklore,” the six whom he cites are all from The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

One need not create a large body of major work in order to crack the history books. But a prolific artist whose output is for the most part gravely flawed is by definition problematic, and few artists of stature have been more problematic than Williams….

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh ends with a chronology of Williams’s life whose final item, from 2011, is significant in this connection: “The Comédie-Française in Paris produces Un tramway nommé Désir, staged by American director Lee Breuer, the first play by a non-European playwright in the company’s 331-year history.” Of such tributes is immortality made. But the fact that Streetcar, Cat, and The Glass Menagerie are the only plays by Williams that have ever been successfully revived on Broadway says much about the likely survival of most of the rest of his output. For like most autobiographical artists, he had only one story to tell, and after he transformed its characters into archetypes and told it twice—literally in The Glass Menagerie, symbolically in Streetcar—he had little choice but to tell it again with increasingly predictable variations….

Read the whole thing here.

Willem de Kooning talks about the creation of his “Woman” paintings in an undated film interview from the Sixties:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)