Archives for 2016

“Nevertheless, just as one of our young men had during these days in London found the air peopled with personal influences, the concussion of human atoms, so the other, though only asking to live without too many questions and work without too many disasters, to be glad and sorry in short on easy terms, had become aware of a certain social tightness, of the fact that life is crowded and passion is restless, accident frequent and community inevitable. Everybody with whom one had relations had other relations too, and even optimism was a mixture and peace an embroilment. The only chance was to let everything be embroiled but one’s temper and everything spoiled but one’s work.”

Henry James, The Tragic Muse (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review John Doyle’s Classic Stage Company revival of Peer Gynt. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

American stagings of “Peer Gynt” are scarce to the point of singularity. Mark Lamos directed it at Hartford Stage in 1989, but I’m not aware of any subsequent full-length regional productions, and “Peer Gynt” hasn’t been seen on Broadway in any form since 1960. John Doyle’s new Classic Stage Company revival would thus be of signal importance regardless of its quality—and in spite of the inescapable fact that Mr. Doyle, unlike Mr. Lamos, has given us not the real right thing but an intermission-free two-hour “adaptation” of Henrik Ibsen’s five-hour masterpiece, performed in modern dress on a bare platform by a cast of seven. Fortunately, his version is directed and acted with considerable imagination, but there’s no denying that it amounts to a “Peer Gynt” suite, a production that whets the appetite rather than sating it….

“Peer Gynt” would doubtless be far better known in this country if it were even somewhat more manageable in size and scale. Alas, it is all but impossible to produce in anything remotely resembling its original form save in a festival setting. Hence Mr. Doyle’s scaled-down, unsparingly cut production, performed in the round in his own prose adaptation of the original Dano-Norwegian text….

Nevertheless, a two-hour “Peer Gynt” is better than no “Peer Gynt” at all, and when a gifted director like Mr. Doyle turns his hand to such a venture, one cannot but profit from seeing how he goes about it. His English-language adaptation, for instance, contains any number of felicitous touches….

Mr. Doyle’s staging, by contrast, struck me as almost penitentially drab, denuded of much of the play’s humor and stripped of Edvard Grieg’s justly popular incidental music (which in this country is far better known than the play itself). Mr. Ebert is plausible enough as Peer Gynt, lively and blustery, but I didn’t find him compelling…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

John Doyle talks about his staging of Peer Gynt:

“Back of the Mike,” a promotional film about sound effects on radio produced by the Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet in 1938:

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

“If you attack stupidity, you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it.”

Robertson Davies, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I hold forth on the subject of books about art that are both thorough and opinionated. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Some books take a lifetime to write—and repay a lifetime’s reading. I’ve recently spent many happy hours with just such a book, William C. Agee’s newly published “Modern Art in America 1908-68.” It is that rarity of rarities, an opinionated but not eccentric scholarly history by a veteran museum curator whose every page crackles with original thinking and bears the stamp of a preternaturally sharp eye. It’s also impressively thorough: Even if you were to read nothing else about 20th-century American art, you’d still come away knowing most of what you needed to know about it.

I have a special liking for books on the arts that are, like “Modern Art in America 1908-68,” at once thorough and strongly personal. Not surprisingly, a fair number of biographies fill that bill. If you were going to read only one book about Beethoven, for instance, you couldn’t possibly do better than Lewis H. Lockwood’s “Beethoven: The Music and the Life,” just as W. Jackson Bate’s “Samuel Johnson,” published in 1977, remains to this day the best modern biography of the Great Panjandrum of English letters. But there are also plenty of other books which, like “Modern Art in America,” come close to telling you everything you want to know about a larger subject, and do it with flair.

Here are five of my favorites….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Eclipsed (drama, PG-13, Broadway remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 19, original production reviewed here)
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 31, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closing Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for bright children capable of enjoying a love story, many performances sold out last week, closes July 10, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN HOUSTON:
• Saint Joan (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 18, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BALTIMORE:
• Death of a Salesman (drama, PG-13, closes June 12, reviewed here)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, closes June 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BROOKLYN:
• The Judas Kiss (drama, R, closes June 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Tug of War: Foreign Fire (Shakespeare, PG-13, six-hour marathon staging of Edward III, Henry V, and Henry VI, Part One, closes June 12, reviewed here)

“Art lies in understanding some part of the dark forces and bringing them under the direction of reason.”

Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

In a popular culture, fame is cheap. That’s what Andy Warhol meant when he said that in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. (Remember JenniCam?) It’s also what I had in mind—part of it, anyway—when I wrote these words eleven years ago:

Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate—as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air.

I was talking about Harry Reasoner, but you don’t have to be, or have been, a TV star to know how fast stardom fades. I wonder whether Warhol ever thought about that: what happens when your fifteen minutes are up? Even more interesting, what happens when you outlive your fifteen minutes by…oh, fifty years?

What put these questions in my mind was the fate of James Simon Kunen, a celebrity of my youth whose name popped into my mind the other day for no particular reason. In 1969 he wrote a book called The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary in which he described his involvement in the Columbia University protests of 1968. I read Kunen’s book when I was in high school and found it smart and funny, a critical judgment that I rather doubt I would be equally inclined to render were I to re-read it today, judging by the following passage:

I, for one, strongly support trees (and, in the larger sense, forests), flowers, mountains, and hills, also valleys, the ocean, wiliness (when used for good), good, little children, people, tremendous record-setting snowstorms, hurricanes, swimming underwater, nice policemen, unicorns, extra-inning ball games up to twelve innings, pneumatic jack-hammers (when they’re not too close), the dunes in North Truro on Cape Cod, liberalized abortion laws, and Raggedy Ann dolls, among other things.

I do not like Texas, people who go to the Zoo to be arty. the Defense Department, the name “Defense Department,” the fly buzzing around me as I write this, protective tariffs, little snowstorms that turn to slush, the short days of winter, extra-inning ball games over twelve innings, calling people consumers, pneumatic jackhammers immediately next to the window, and G.I. Joe dolls. Also racism, poverty, and war. The latter three I’m trying to do something about.

Nevertheless, The Strawberry Statement made its author famous—briefly. In 1970 it was turned into a movie that sank without trace. Kunen then became a journalist, got a law degree, and worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C. He kept on writing books, but none of them drew much attention. His fifteen minutes were up. So he joined the staff of People and spent the next two decades in the employ of Time Inc., a development that I find especially poignant. Rightly or wrongly, I have a sneaking feeling that Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill, an erstwhile campus radical who now works for a People-like magazine, might possibly have been based on Kunen: “Where I work we only have one editorial rule. You can’t write anything longer than it takes your average person to take an average crap.”

And what happened to him in the end? Curious, I took to Google, and within a minute or two I was reading a story called “Older Job Seekers Find Ways to Avoid Age Bias” that was published last year in the New York Times as part of a weekly series called “Retiring.” The story makes no mention of The Strawberry Statement, or of Kunen’s youthful notoriety:

James S. Kunen, 66, teaches English as a second language at the Center for Immigrant Education and Training at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.

When he was let go as the director of corporate communications at Time Warner during a round of layoffs, Mr. Kunen confronted the core questions: What is it he could do? Where did his skills translate to a job, one that made him feel some sense of purpose? And who would hire him, given his age?…

Before he was laid off, Mr. Kunen volunteered to teach immigrant teenagers to speak better English, but concluded that if he was going to do it right, and get paid for it, he needed some kind of certification. So he enrolled in a 160-hour course to earn a certificate to teach English as a Second Language for Adults.

“When I initially sent out résumés to commercial language schools, the only school that responded was one run by a person as old as I was,” said Mr. Kunen, the author of “Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.” “And I was interviewed by 30-year-olds who totally didn’t ‘get’ me,” he said. “You can sense it immediately; it’s like being on a bad blind date.”

For Mr. Kunen, patience and persistence paid off. Today, he spends 16 hours a week in the classroom teaching two courses. “At this age and stage of my life, working with highly motivated immigrants gives me a sense of purpose and engagement with the world,” he said. “Going to work is spending time with friends. I feel appreciated.”

The linchpin: “It also gives me an income that makes a significant difference when added to my pension and Social Security.”…

I’m tempted to read Diary of a Company Man, but I have a feeling that I might find it too sad to bear, seeing as how I’m just eight years younger than Kunen. Ours, after all, was the generation that expected to live by the words of Pete Townshend: I hope I die before I get old. But Townshend didn’t, nor did James Simon Kunen, who now ekes out his pension and Social Security by teaching English to immigrant teenagers.

To be sure, I was, unlike Kunen, spared the dubious privilege of youthful fame (or any kind of fame, truth to tell). What’s more, I recently embarked on a professional adventure of a sort that sexagenarians are rarely lucky enough to experience. Nevertheless, I think I have at least some notion of how it might possibly feel to outlive your life as you’d previously understood it, and the fact that Kunen now seems by all accounts to be genuinely happy—which is, lest we forget, the most important thing about him—doesn’t make me feel any more at ease as I look down the road toward my own unknowable future.

A.E. Housman said it:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

I wonder what Andy Warhol thought of those lines—if he knew them. On the other hand, he died at the age of fifty-eight, thereby ensuring that we would always remember him (if, indeed, we do continue to remember him) as young, decadent, and way, way cool. Smart move, that.

* * *

The trailer for the film version of The Strawberry Statement: