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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Dude, I’m in mourning for my life

April 1, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an off-Broadway premiere, Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fu**kng Bird, and the new Broadway revival of The Crucible. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

It’s become fashionable of late to perform updated versions of the melancholy comedies of Anton Chekhov, which took place in a Czarist Russia that was teetering on the razor’s edge of modernity. Bedlam’s 2014 staging of “The Seagull,” for instance, was done in casually contemporary dress and made use of Anya Reiss’ purposefully colloquial English-language adaptation. “Stupid Fu**ing Bird,” Aaron Posner’s “sort of” adaptation (Mr. Posner’s phrase) of the same play, goes even further: It’s a top-to-bottom postmodern rewrite, complete with nudity, lots and lots of four-letter words and a setting best described as downtownish. Among other things, Mr. Posner has turned the unhappy Masha, who dresses in black because “I’m in mourning for my life,” into Mash, a ukulele-strumming singer-songwriter (“You’re hot, you rot, and then you’re done/So where’s the part of this that’s fun?”) who wears black, lipstick included, because “it’s slimming.”

25158053644_63f7f52d1a_c“Stupid Fu**ing Bird” has been making the regional rounds ever since it was first seen three years ago in Washington, D.C. Now the Pearl Theatre Company, which bills itself as “New York’s only classical resident company,” has given the play its local premiere, and I was—rather to my surprise—impressed. To be sure, the title is offputtingly dumb, and Mr. Posner sticks so closely to Chekhov’s familiar plot that it felt at first as though he were skating on the surface of a beloved masterpiece instead of breaking through the ice and going his own way. But it wasn’t long before I found my way onto his wavelength, and though the Pirandellian play-within-a-play trickery isn’t quite as clever (or up to date) as he seems to think, most of “Stupid Fu**ing Bird” is at once bluntly funny and, like “The Seagull,” unnervingly bleak.

Davis McCallum has given “Stupid Fu**ing Bird” a lively staging that underlines the comedy without undercutting the emotion…

It’s amazing how much damage Ivo van Hove, the most pretentious stage director of our time, can do to a good play when he puts his mind to it. He took a baseball bat to Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” last fall, and now he’s attacked “The Crucible” with a steamroller, turning Miller’s 1953 history play about the Salem witch trials into a slow-moving study in extreme tedium.

Directorial miscalculations abound, starting with the setting, a two-story-high classroom/prison designed by Jan Versweyveld in whose vast gray expanses the actors roam around ineffectually. The institutional lighting, also by Mr. Versweyveld, flattens out the acting, some of which was dull enough to begin with. Not all of it—Bill Camp, Sophie Okonedo and Brenda Wehle manage to make strong impressions in spite of everything—but Ciarán Hinds and Saoirse Ronan give Johnny-One-Note performances that are as paralyzingly minimal as Philip Glass’ incidental music….

* * *

To read my review of Stupid Fu**ing Bird, go here.

To read my review of The Crucible, go here.

Replay: Booker T. and the MGs on stage in 1970

April 1, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERABooker T. and the MGs perform “Time Is Tight” in concert in 1970. The members of Creedence Clearwater Revival are seen watching the performance from backstage:

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

Almanac: Ambrose Bierce on cynicism

April 1, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

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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