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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 19, 2016

Everyone is just about as racist—as you!

February 19, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two New York shows, Smart People and the Broadway transfer of The Humans. Here’s an excerpt.

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Lydia R. Diamond’s “Stick Fly,” which made it to Broadway in 2011, showed us a slice of American life, the black upper class, that is scarcely ever portrayed on stage. It didn’t quite work, but the best parts were so fine that I’ve been longing to see something else by Ms. Diamond ever since. Now Second Stage Theatre has mounted the New York premiere of “Smart People,” her latest play, and loud, long cheers are definitely in order: I have no doubt that it marks the decisive emergence of a distinctive voice in American theater.

smart-people“Smart People” is set in and around Harvard. The characters are Valerie (Tessa Thompson), a light-skinned black stage actor who would be struggling were she not the scion of a well-heeled family; Jackson (Mahershala Ali), a dark-skinned black surgical intern who runs an inner-city clinic on the side; Ginny (Anne Son) a Chinese-Japanese-American psychologist-professor who studies “race and identity among Asian-American women”; and Brian (Joshua Jackson), a white neuroscientist who believes he’s proved that white people are biologically predisposed to racism. All four are very smart, very attractive, very smug, very prickly, and competitively progressive, by which I mean that they preface every other sentence they utter by assuring you of the impeccability of their liberalism: “My politics are such that I can make that joke. With people who know me.” They are, in short, comfy inhabitants of the academic monoculture—but not nearly as comfy, or as pristinely free of prejudice, as they suppose themselves to be.

At bottom “Smart People” is a sharp-edged satire, and Ms. Diamond’s ear for the foibles of her subjects is so precisely tuned as to make “Clybourne Park” and “Disgraced” sound downright tone-deaf….

Stephen Karam’s “The Humans” stirred up a huge fuss when it ran off Broadway last year. Now that I’ve caught the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway transfer, I can’t quite figure out what all the shouting was about. It’s a kitchen-sink family drama about a Thanksgiving dinner gone wrong, the sort of play that appears to have been written according to an outdated version of what I think of as the Social Issues Checklist. (Dementia? Check. Middle-class unemployment? Check. 9/11? Check. Wait a minute—9/11?)

To be sure, “The Humans” is passably well made, or would be were it not for the way in which the author stirs up expectations of a spookily melodramatic coda on which he fails to deliver, but none of the characters says or does anything that isn’t perfectly obvious…

* * *

To read my review of Smart People, go here.

To read my review of The Humans, go here.

Lydia R. Diamond talks about the writing of Smart People:

Replay: George Hearn sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Epiphany”

February 19, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAGeorge Hearn sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Epiphany” in the 1982 telecast of the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, directed by Harold Prince and remounted in Los Angeles. Hearn had replaced Len Cariou in the title role on Broadway:

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

Almanac: Dr. Johnson on atheism

February 19, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish and precipices of horror.”

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 69 (November 13, 1750, courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

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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