Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
From 2004:
I’ve recently noticed some shifts in my own reading tastes that seem to signal nothing so much as that I’m getting older. For me, though, it seems a matter of wanting windows where I used to want mirrors. I’ve read enough novels about people like me having experiences like mine. Now I want to find out about the rest of the world….
Read the whole thing here.
“There are no great men, buster! There’s only men.”
Charles Schnee, screenplay for The Bad and the Beautiful
I miss the simplicity of my youth. That’s not to say I don’t also revel in the unprecedentedly huge menu of possibilities that are available to me in middle age. But when other people make many of your choices for you, it leaves you with more time to think about the choices that you have to make—as well as folding into your life the delicious element of surprise that arises from placing yourself in someone else’s trusted hands.
I miss going on vacations that my father planned. I miss wondering what my mother will cook for dinner. I miss wandering through the smallish public library of the tiny town where I grew up, hoping against hope to find something new and exciting on the shelves. I miss waiting impatiently to hear a good song on the radio for the second time. I even miss living in a place that had no cable TV and only one movie theater with two screens.
All of which, I suppose, is on some level merely to say that I miss being a child. Part of that feeling doubtless has to do with the fact that I’m intensely and increasingly conscious, like most middle-aged people, of the fact that life is short. Nor would I be surprised if it had something to do with the extent to which I miss my parents, whom I loved very much.
At the same time, postmodern life is far more complicated than the world into which I was born, and there is no escaping its daily burden of ceaseless choice, any more than it’s possible for a responsible person to shrug off the demands of adulthood. To be sure, history didn’t demand that I bear arms for my country, and I decided willy-nilly not to be a father, but otherwise I’ve partaken fully of every part of the common dilemma, from paying the rent each month to shaving my face each morning.
Writing that last sentence has reminded me of a favorite quotation. It’s something that V.S. Pritchett said about the novels of Sir Walter Scott:
Yet, if we except this serious criticism for the moment, and measure Scott in the light of the full noon of life, we see that he belongs to that very small group of our novelists—Fielding and Jane Austen are the chief of them—who face life squarely. They are grown up. They do not cry for the moon. I do not mean that to be grown up is the first requirement of genius. To be grown up may be fatal to it. But short of the great illuminating madness, there is a power to sustain, assure and enlarge us in those novelists who are not driven back by life, who are not shattered by the discovery that it is a thing bounded by unsought limits, by interests as well as by hopes, and that it ripens under restriction. Such writers accept. They think that acceptance is the duty of a man.
He wrote those words during World War II, at a time when the common dilemma for him and his fellow Englishmen was vastly more painful and laborious than anything I’ve ever had to shoulder. Perhaps for that reason, I find that they sustain me now, just as Scott’s realism sustained Pritchett.
At the same time, though, I won’t deny that whenever Mrs. T asks me what I want for dinner, I’m more than likely to reply, “Whatever you feel like cooking, darling. Surprise me.” Sometimes—perhaps more often than is good for us—it’s the purest of pleasures to let somebody else make up your mind.
* * *
Neil Young sings “I Am a Child” in 1978:
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca in “A Streetcar Named ???,” originally telecast on Your Show of Shows in 1952:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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.
* * *
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….
* * *
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