Archives for 2014

In 1997 my brother and I celebrated our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary by planting a tree in their honor by the side of the road that runs through Smalltown’s Veterans’ Park. Ever since then, David has watched over that tree as though it were an adopted child, and he redoubled his vigilance when a terrible ice storm tore through southeast Missouri in 2009 and destroyed the maple tree that once stood in the front yard of our childhood home.

A few days ago he e-mailed me a snapshot of our parents’ tree, which is now a memorial to them. What started out as a scrawny little sapling has become something splendidly and spectacularly leafy, a tree whose best years are doubtless ahead of it but which already looks just the way it should. Magnificent it isn’t, not quite yet, but I’m willing to bet that it’ll be pretty imposing one of these days.

Both of my parents were on my mind this past weekend. Not only was Sunday Father’s Day, but Saturday—Flag Day—was my mother’s birthday. Alas, my father died mere months after we planted the tree, but my mother spent the last fifteen years of her life watching it grow. Even in its youth, she was immensely proud of “her” tree, and I took her to see it whenever I came to Smalltown. I can’t do that anymore, but I can still visit the tree in Veterans’ Park, and think about the man and woman whom it honors, and the unborn generations of men and women who, with a little bit of luck, will someday bask in its shade.

To plant a tree is by definition to invest in other people’s futures. Unless you do it when you’re very young, you almost certainly won’t live to see it reach full growth. You plant it as an act of love—and of faith. We planted that tree, and David looked after it, not merely to pay homage to our beloved parents but because both of us also love our home town, which was founded in 1860, a century and a half ago.

That’s a long time by human standards, but not by the infinite yardstick of history. As Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager observes in Our Town:

Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,—same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.

So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.

That’s what my parents’ tree is: a simple fact. And if Smalltown is still around in 2060, perhaps one of its future residents will read the plaque on the ground beneath the tree and ask, Who were Bert and Evelyn Teachout, anyway? Somebody must have cared very much about them, to have planted this beautiful tree all those years ago.

Somebody—two somebodies—did. And do.

From the 1987 Tony Awards telecast, James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance perform a scene from the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences:

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

“Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.”

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Ayckbourn Ensemble, a triple bill of Alan Ayckbourn plays currently running off Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.

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Ever since Alan Ayckbourn’s “Private Fears in Public Places” came to New York in 2005, 59E59 Theaters’ annual “Brits Off Broadway” festival has made Mr. Ayckbourn’s work a reasonably regular part of its bill of fare. Now the festival is presenting three of his plays in rotating repertory under the portmanteau title of “Ayckbourn Ensemble,” all of them directed by the playwright himself and performed by his own company, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. Two of the plays, “Arrivals & Departures” and “Farcicals,” are world premieres and the third, “Time of My Life,” is being seen in New York for the first time. That makes “Ayckbourn Ensemble” a major event by definition, since Mr. Ayckbourn, whom many critics on both sides of the Atlantic long dismissed as a prolific purveyor of flyweight farces, is now increasingly recognized as a playwright of real stature, one of the very best we have.

Mr. Ayckbourn’s genius lies in his ability to write what you might call “sad comedies,” uproariously funny farce-flavored plays that are at second glance deeply serious, at times despairing portraits of modern middle-class life and its discontents. On occasion, as in “Arrivals & Departures,” he puts the despair at center stage, and what results is a play that at bottom can no longer be called a comedy at all. The scene is a London train platform where a preposterously ineffectual trap is being laid for a terrorist. Enter a sullen young woman (Elizabeth Boag) and an amiable old duffer (Kim Wall) whose minds are elsewhere, and to whose vagrant memories the members of the audience are privy. As the dragnet tightens, we learn about the piercing sorrows of their little lives, and what began as a comedy of incompetent bureaucracy becomes a tragedy that ends in shocking blackness….

Even when the tone of an Ayckbourn play is unabashedly frothy, seriousness is never very far from the surface. “Farcicals,” for instance, is a double bill of brilliantly concise one-act farces about two suburban couples (played by Ms. Boag, Bill Champion, Sarah Stanley and Mr. Wall) whose marriages are frayed around the edges. The laughter is near-continuous, especially in “Chloë With Love,” in which Ms. Stanley plays a demoralized frump who dresses up as a sex-crazed vamp in order to excite her wayward spouse. But Mr. Ayckbourn never lets you forget that both marriages really are in trouble—and that it’s the men, as usual in his woman-centric plays, who deserve the bulk of the blame….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Arrivals & Departures:

“The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts

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:
• Bullets Over Broadway (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• A Raisin in the Sun (drama, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

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

IN CHICAGO:
• Juno (musical, PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• The Dance of Death (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)
• Days Like Today (musical, PG-13, closes July 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Casa Valentina (drama, PG-13, closes June 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Damn Yankees (musical, G, closes June 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:
• The Tempest (Shakespeare, G, closes June 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Act One (drama, G, too long for children, reviewed here)

“I have never been ambitious. I have found enjoyment step by step on the roadway of my life and have had no time to think of any sort of goal.”

Neville Cardus, Second Innings

I went to see the off-Broadway production of Satchmo at the Waldorf last Friday for the first time in a month. I’m going back again next week. I expect I’ll see it two or three more times before the final performance on June 29—and that I’ll enjoy it just as much each time.

Paul Hindemith, the least pretentious artist who ever lived, would doubtless have laughed himself silly at the very thought of a playwright going to see his own show over and over again. According to the mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel:

Hindemith, after he wrote a piece, wasn’t interested in it anymore. He never came to hear my Marienleben; although he knew I do it very well, he said he’s not interested to hear it—he’s written it.

Bernard Herrmann claimed that Alfred Hitchcock felt the same way about his films:

He runs them for people but he always leaves the room. When it says “The End” he comes back with a cigar. He says, “Why do I want to see it? I see all the things that are wrong with it. There’s nothing I can do now.”

Not me. I only got to see The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, performed three times by the Santa Fe Opera in 2009. I felt that I had to get back to my day job as a drama critic not long after The Letter opened, and I’ve regretted ever since not having taken another couple of weeks off and seeing it two or three more times.

But…why? What’s the point of seeing a show of your own repeatedly, unless you’re there to give notes to the cast and crew after the performance (which in my case scarcely ever happens) or planning to revise the script (which I don’t intend to do with Satchmo)? What do you get out of going back to see a play that you already know better than anyone else?

I won’t deny that part of the pleasure that I take in watching Satchmo at the Waldorf is simple pride of ownership. I made this! I sometimes say to myself when the house lights go down and John Douglas Thompson walks out on stage. It’s an exhilarating sensation, one completely unlike seeing a book that you wrote in a store or on a shelf, and it doesn’t get old, at least not for me.

But this sensation, gratifying though it is, doesn’t last for very long. What I now find most interesting about seeing Satchmo, by contrast, is the way in which John’s performance, and the audience’s response to it, change from night to night. He and I talked about this process, among other things, when Marc Myers interviewed us for The Wall Street Journal last week:

“At a critical moment toward the end of the play, Armstrong shrugs off an unfortunate event and says he’ll include it in his autobiography,” said Mr. Thompson. “When we started rehearsals, I said the line as ‘I guess I’ll have to put that in the book, too,’ almost as an afterthought. Then I took out ‘have to,’ so it was more direct and emotional: ‘I guess I’ll put that in the book, too.’ It’s a self-realization that the event is an inescapable part of his legacy. Now the line is, ‘Guess…I’ll put that…in the book…too.’ It’s a bit slower and weighted, and resigned to what he must do.”

The interview appears in today’s Journal, and you can read the whole thing here. If you’re interested in how actors, writers, and directors work together to bring a play to the stage—and how they respond to the “input” of live audiences—you might want to take a look.