Archives for 2014

“But I think he [H.G. Wells] thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

A friend writes:

I watched your last two embedded video clips together—Jonathan Winters and Louis Armstrong—and I was struck with the occasional unhappiness in both men’s faces. You could assemble a collage of momentary Armstrong stills that would look like rage, torture, you name it. Winters turned his unhappiness into comedy and blankness (the blankness was funny, of course, but I think it was also truly blank). Your man turned it into joy—much harder, much more worthy.

My friend is a veteran biographer, so I expect him to be shrewd about the niceties of personality, but even for him this was an acute observation. Winters, of course, was a man who could be fairly described as emotionally troubled, enough so that his once-great career more or less disintegrated, though he kept on working to the end of his life. And while Armstrong was a fundamentally sunny and optimistic person, his moodiness was sufficiently well known to his friends and colleagues that Time mentioned it in its 1949 cover story: “He has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage.”

In Winters’ case, his private sorrows were arguably characteristic of those drawn to his profession. It’s no secret that much comedy—maybe most of it—is driven by anger and aggression. When I reviewed Mad Cow Theatre’s 2013 revival of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, I was struck by the honesty with which Simon acknowledged that fact in what amounted to a roman à clef about the writers with whom he had worked in the Fifties on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows:

The excellence of this revival lies in the kill-or-be-killed ferocity with which the actors tear into the script, taking their cue from this exchange between Val (Tim Williams), the head writer, and Kenny (David Almeida), the show’s resident egghead: “A little aggression is good for writers. All humor is based on hostility, am I right, Kenny?” “Absolutely. That’s why World War II was so funny. Schmuck.” Everybody in the cast, especially Mr. Williams, throws their punches savagely hard, knowing that the Jewish humor in which Max’s writers specialize is rooted in anger–and honesty.

Jazz is (often) a different story, and Louis Armstrong a very different sort of artist. When I portrayed him on stage in Satchmo at the Waldorf, I made a point of showing his capacity for rage, since it’s an aspect of his personality of which most of his fans were and are unaware. But I also allowed my fictionalized Armstrong to describe what I believe to be the truth about his character, in words that are largely his own:

I don’t think folks wanna hear all that angry shit when they lay down that good money to come hear me play. They ain’t paying for me to make ’em feel bad. I’m just an old ham actor—blow a tune, tell a joke. I’m there in the cause of happiness. Like when I play the blues, maybe I’m thinking about one of them low-down moments, like when your woman don’t treat you right. Hell of a thing when a woman tell you, “I got me another mule in my stall.” But when I sing about it, I smile. Make you smile….To me, jazz got to be a happy music. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep—and that’s what makes it good.

Yes, there are other ways to turn life into art, and there were those who thought that his sunny-sided aesthetic was naïve. But Armstrong was no naïf: he was a man without illusions who had seen the worst that life has to offer. His commitment to hope was serious, just as all first-rate comedy is serious, and as I’ve said many times in this space and elsewhere, I believe deeply that comedy, with its honest acknowledgment of the unintended absurdities of human existence, is at bottom truer to life than tragedy. That’s what makes it good—and that’s what made Louis Armstrong great.

UPDATE: I wrote this posting before learning of Robin Williams’ suicide—an eerily appropriate coincidence, and not merely because he had been influenced by Jonathan Winters and worked with him on Mork and Mindy. I can’t say that it came as a surprise to me. I always found his manic brand of comedy to be disquieting, enough so that I actually wondered early in his career whether he might possibly have suffered from some form of mental illness, though there was never any question of his great gifts.

Seeing Williams play a creepily pitiful bad guy in One Hour Photo left me in no doubt that he had real talent as a dramatic actor, in part because he had immediate access to the feelings of rage and self-loathing that so clearly drove his comedy. Would that he had turned to legitimate theater (he only appeared in two straight plays in New York, Mike Nichols’ 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot and Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) instead of settling for what Hollywood had to offer an aging comedian. Perhaps stage acting, especially in dead-serious comedies like Godot, might have given his anger a cathartic outlet. Instead, it consumed him.

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Louis Armstrong and the All Stars play “Back o’ Town Blues” on the BBC in 1965:

Suzanne Farrell does twenty grand battements on an episode of Sesame Street:

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

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

Thornton Wilder (quoted in Time, Jan. 12, 1953)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a new play off Broadway, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy, and a revival in the Berkshires, Noël Coward’s Design for Living. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stephen McKinley Henderson is an actor’s actor, universally admired in the business but mostly unknown outside it. Why? Because he’s a character actor, not a leading-man type. He plays supporting roles, some of them quite small, though you never fail to notice him. A case in point was the recent Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” in which he was onstage for no more than five minutes yet still managed, as the saying goes, to eat everybody else’s lunch. That makes it all the more delightful to watch him strut his formidable stuff in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Between Riverside and Crazy,” of which he is, at long last, the undisputed star. Mr. Henderson, who spends most of the play sitting in a wheelchair, acts with such seeming effortlessness that you’ll have to look twice—maybe even three times—to catch him stealing every scene.

They’re worth stealing, too. Like “The Motherf**ker with the Hat,” Mr. Guirgis’ last play, “Between Riverside and Crazy” is a hard-headed kitchen-sink comedy, one that has serious things to say about lower-middle-class urban life, race relations and the corrosive effects of resentment on the human soul. Yet the playwright makes his points in an unfailingly unpredictable way, embedding them in the twisty tale of a retired, newly widowed cop (Mr. Henderson) who got shot off duty and is well on the way to wasting the rest of his life fuming about it….

“Design for Living,” Noël Coward’s fizzy 1933 comedy about two men in love with a woman who can’t choose between them, is the least frequently performed of his major plays, for two obvious reasons. The denouement, in which the three lovers accept their fate and form a ménage à trois, is so self-evident an apologia for Coward’s own unorthodox private life that he actually permits himself to get obtrusively preachy in the third act: “We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics.” Moreover, “Design for Living” calls for three sets and a budget-bending cast of 10. The last time I saw it staged, by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., it was done very expensively—and very, very well. But few regional theater companies are capable of mounting so elaborate a production these days, so “Design for Living,” fine though it is, typically gets overlooked by cheese-paring artistic directors.

Now for the good news: Tom Story, one of the stars of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2009 production, has directed a stylish revival of “Design for Living” in the Berkshire Theatre Group’s 122-seat Unicorn Theatre. The scale is intimate, the décor modest but attractive, and the three leads are played by Chris Geary, Tom Pecinka and Ariana Venturi, three talented graduate students from the Yale School of Drama who turn Otto, Leo and Gilda into a trio of bright but unsure young things who play at life in order to find themselves. It’s an engagingly fresh take…

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To read my review of Between Riverside and Crazy, go here.

To read my review of Design for Living, go here.

“I see opera as the supreme art form, not so much a representation of human life as a redemption of it. For dramatic music can rescue our feelings from their randomness, and vindicate our immortal longings in the face of chaos and decay.”

Roger Scruton, “Opera Is Not Just Our Most Expensive Noise” (Standpoint, July/August 2014)

“Sacred things are especially intolerable to those who no longer believe in them. An urge to desecrate is the inevitable successor to a lost habit of reverence.”

Roger Scruton, “Opera Is Not Just Our Most Expensive Noise” (Standpoint, July/August 2014)