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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Poet of the particular

October 6, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Brian FrielIn today’s Wall Street Journal I pay tribute to Brian Friel, about whose recent death I blogged. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which was posted on the Journal’s website last Friday.

* * *

Brian Friel, who died today at the age of 86, was universally regarded in Ireland, the land of his birth, as a master artist. Over here, by contrast, he was respected but not nearly so well known. Only two of his plays, “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964) and “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), had more than middling success on Broadway, and though both were also filmed, his genius was for the stage, not the screen. Were it not for the steadfast devotion of the Irish Repertory Theatre, which produces his plays off Broadway at regular intervals, he would be even less familiar to New York audiences.

It’s not hard to understand why Mr. Friel’s greatness is not as widely recognized in this country as it deserves to be. In common with Horton Foote, the American playwright who was in many ways his opposite number, he set virtually all of his plays in a single place, the imaginary town of Ballybeg, a not-quite-fictional canvas on which he painted his subtly colored pictures of the joys and disappointments of village life. Rarely did anything obviously exciting happen to his characters: They lived, loved and died, often without ever having left home for more than a day or two. But like Anton Chekhov, his revered master, Mr. Friel knew the priceless secret of how to use the most parochial of cultures, that of rural Ireland, as a stage on which to enact the wrenching story of world-wide change….

Nowadays an artist who shuns both the radical simplifications of political theater and spectacular pseudo-eventfulness of contemporary film is likely to get lost in the shuffle. Such has been Mr. Friel’s fate in recent years. Yet I cannot imagine that his American semi-obscurity will last, for his vision of human nature was too penetrating and profound to be long overlooked….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Lookback: on buying a portrait of an unknown woman

October 6, 2015 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2005:

I mentioned the other day that I’d bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love. What’s especially striking about this etching, at least from my point of view, is that it’s one of only three figurative works of art out of the two dozen pieces in the Teachout Museum, and the only one in which the subject’s face is fully visible. Milton Avery’s “March at a Table” is a portrait of March, the artist’s daughter, but her face is concealed, and in Pierre Bonnard’s “Femme assise dans sa bagnoire,” Marthe, the artist’s mistress, has turned her head away from the viewer. Since people who buy art normally buy what they like (unless they’re snobs or investment-oriented collectors), I always took it for granted that my unconscious avoidance of the human face said something significant about me. But I never did figure out what it was, and in any case my purchase of “Woman’s Head” presumably says something no less significant.

The woman in question, by the way, is a most interesting piece of work—pensive, not conventionally “beautiful” by any conventional definition of the word, and yet I can’t take my eyes off her….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Rainer Maria Rilke on the “task” of love

October 6, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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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