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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Black, brown, and blue

August 21, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new plays, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Annie Baker’s John off Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Reading, the Pennsylvania city whose name has become a byword for Rust Belt poverty, is the subject of not one but two new plays this year, Douglas Carter Beane’s “Shows for Days” and Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat.” But while Mr. Beane gave us a frothy farce about how he fell in love with theater by joining a local drama troupe, Ms. Nottage has chosen instead to take a searching look at the workers who lost their jobs when the factories of Reading started shutting down.

It is Ms. Nottage’s special gift—I’m tempted to call it, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, her genius—to bring politically charged themes to dramatic life by embodying them in characters whom she portrays not as spokesmen for a cause but as ordinary people living ordinary lives. You can see how she does it in “Sweat,” whose theme is the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on America’s unionized working class. The play is set in a blue-collar bar, and its principal characters are a racially diverse group of men and women whose well-paying jobs (“I plan on retiring from the plant when I’m like 50 with a killer pension and money to burn”) are in the process of migrating to Mexico. What is at stake, it soon emerges, is not just their ability to pay the rent but the very meaning of their lives….

2015_Sweat_1_jg_0088-h_yqkojfNo, Ms. Nottage doesn’t have all the answers, or any of them. Her play is a one-sided shriek of pain, not a coolly reasoned position paper on macroeconomics, and some will doubtless dismiss it for that reason alone. They shouldn’t: “Sweat” is fully and illuminatingly alive to the moral complexities of the situation that it depicts. Among other things, Ms. Nottage doesn’t let us forget that the union now fighting for the jobs of its members once fought to keep blacks and Latinos out of the factories of Reading…

Annie Baker has followed the critical and commercial success of “The Flick,” her Pulitzer-winning dark comedy about a trio of lonely losers, with “John,” in which she approaches the same subject from a different angle. This time around we meet Elias and Jenny (Christopher Abbott and Hong Chau), an unhappy couple who seek to salvage their shaky relationship by paying a Christmastime visit to a too-quaint-for-words Gettysburg B&B. Their host (Georgia Engel, who seems not to have changed at all since she played Georgette in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) is a mousy older woman whose insipid manner masks an intense devotional life of which we see only suggestive flashes…

An exceedingly promising setup, in other words, and “John” is full of poetic, handsomely wrought scenes that ought to add up to more than they do. The problem, once again, is that Ms. Baker has drowned them in a sea of portentous pauses and protracted silences…

* * *

To read my review of Sweat, go here.

To read my review of John, go here.

The trailer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Sweat:

Replay: Henri Matisse at work in 1946

August 21, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERA“Henri Matisse,” the German-language version of a 1946 documentary directed by François Campaux in which Matisse is shown at work in his studio:

To read about the film and its contents, go here.

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

Almanac: Henri Matisse on the secret of staying young

August 21, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘Every day,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to get hold of something by the throat and strangle it. And that keeps me young.’”

Henri Matisse, in conversation with Edward G. Robinson (quoted in All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography, by Edward G. Robinson with Leonard Spigelgass)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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