Archives for January 2, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new off-Broadway plays, Pocatello and Every Brilliant Thing. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Originality is overrated. Even the most hackneyed-sounding plot can be made fresh by a writer who understands that life is always the same—and always new. That’s the secret of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Pocatello,” a 10-character drama about a pair of severely fractured families that covers its well-tilled ground in a way that is at once predictable and involving, not to mention poignant. To be sure, it’s also well acted and directed, but don’t be fooled by the high quality of Playwrights Horizons’ production: “Pocatello” is a fine play in its own right.

“Pocatello” takes place in the dining room of an Olive Garden-type Italian restaurant located in a small Idaho town that is growing smaller and seedier by the day. Eddie (T.R. Knight), the manager, is a gay singleton whose own family long ago gave up on getting along but who still dreams of bringing its estranged members together again, even though none of them shows any sign of wanting to be reunited. He also has a second workplace family that is closer and more sympathetic, but it, too, is in trouble, for the restaurant isn’t doing enough business to keep its doors open for much longer….

Mr. Hunter’s characters all sound like real people with real problems, the kind with which you yourself are currently wrestling or have very likely wrestled at some point in the not-too-distant past….

Duncan Macmillan’s “Every Brilliant Thing,” which has transferred to an off-Broadway house after successful runs in London and Edinburgh, is an hour-long one-man comedy about depression. The sweet-and-sour premise is that the narrator has drawn up a million-item list of “brilliant” things that he likes, loves, admires or appreciates (“321. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out of your nose”) in the hope of persuading his suicidal mother—and himself—that life is worth living.

The list itself is twee and greeting-cardy and the script as a whole is close enough in tone to Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” to make alert viewers squirm, but the show works, mostly because of the battering-ram energy of Jonny Donahoe, the British stand-up comedian who performs “Every Brilliant Thing” in the round on a toenail-sized stage and is also credited as its co-author….

* * *

To read my review of Pocatello, go here.

To read my review of Every Brilliant Thing, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I look at the long career of Horton Foote, who struggled in obscurity for decades before establishing himself as a major playwright. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Horton Foote’s “The Traveling Lady” opened on Broadway in October of 1954 and closed three weeks later. Forty-three years later, “The Young Man from Atlanta” made it to Broadway after having had a solid off-Broadway run and won the Pulitzer Prize. In between…nothing. Not only were none of Foote’s three dozen other plays produced on Broadway during that time, but none of them received major productions anywhere in America between 1954 and 1984. Yet by the time he died in 2009 at the august age of 92, he was recognized as one of this country’s greatest playwrights, and today everyone in the world of theater knows and esteems his work.

Last September, Marion Castleberry, a professor of theater arts at Baylor University, brought out “Blessed Assurance: The Life and Art of Horton Foote,” a richly comprehending biography that tells you everything you need to know about the author of “The Trip to Bountiful,” the 1952 play that first brought Foote’s name to the attention of the general public. But because “Blessed Assurance” was brought out by Georgia’s Mercer University Press, not a New York-based trade publisher, it failed to receive the recognition it deserved. As a result, few of Foote’s admirers know of its existence, much less that it answers a question that had long puzzled me: How did he stay afloat during the long, cruelly demoralizing years of obscurity? What kept him at work day after day, writing the plays that would secure his reputation as a great dramatic artist?

The answer is that Foote, for all his oft-remarked gentleness of manner, was an extraordinarily determined man who persisted in believing in his own talent when everyone else doubted it….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A rare kinescope of the Studio One version of Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady, starring Kim Stanley, directed by Robert Mulligan, and telecast on CBS in 1957:

“Skepticism like chastity should not be relinquished too readily. Indeed skepticism is the chastity of the intellect and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. There is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth until at last, when instinct and discretion have ripened, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity of outlook and for happiness.”

George Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy