Archives for January 2017

From 2007:

“God, I love this guy,” said the young man at the Barnes & Noble cash register from whom I purchased a couple of Elmore Leonard paperbacks the other day. “There’s nothing better to read on a plane.” Three days earlier I’d been sitting in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C., reading Unknown Man #89 as I ate my breakfast, when a balding, middle-aged businessman stopped at my table and said, “You’re going to love that one.”

I mention these two encounters because they’re the only times in recent memory that a stranger has spoken to me about a book I was reading—and both of the strangers in question happened to be men….

Read the whole thing here.

“As far as I in particular am concerned, reading in general belongs to my methods of recuperation; consequently it belongs to that which rids me of myself, to that which enables me to wander in strange sciences and strange souls—to that, in fact, about which I am no longer in earnest. Indeed, it is while reading that I recover from my earnestness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Sir Thomas Beecham leads the Chicago Symphony in a performance of Frederick Delius’ “By the River,” a movement from his Florida Suite. This performance was originally telecast on March 20, 1960. It is thought to be the only color videotape of a performance by Beecham:

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

“When one reads properly it is as if a third person is present.”

E.M. Forster, letter to William Plomer, December 12, 1957

I rejoice to announce that my second play, Billy and Me, will be premiered in December by Palm Beach Dramaworks, where I made my stage directing debut last year. It’s a three-hander about the relationship between Tennessee Williams and William Inge.

Here are some relevant excerpts from PBD’s press release about Billy and Me, which was posted on the company’s website this morning.

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Billy and Me, a new play by Terry Teachout, whose Satchmo at the Waldorf has been produced to great acclaim off Broadway and throughout the country, will receive its world premiere next season at Palm Beach Dramaworks. “A work of fiction freely based on fact,” the play speculates on the tempestuous friendship between playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge. PBD Producing Artistic Director William Hayes, who suggested the idea to Teachout, will direct the premiere, which runs from December 8, 2017 through January 7, 2018.

“Having made my directing debut at PBD last season, I know very well that it’s a great place to work, a gorgeous theatre full of first-class people,” said Teachout, who directed Satchmo at the Waldorf here. “I also know that Bill is a superb director and a perfect colleague—the kind of guy who works with you to make a show as good as it can possibly be. For all these reasons, I’m hugely excited to be premiering my second play at PBD. It couldn’t be in better hands.”…

Hayes came up with the notion of a piece about the two playwrights while directing Inge’s Picnic in 2015. When Teachout was in town for production meetings on Satchmo, the two men went to lunch and Hayes asked whether the idea had potential. Teachout was intrigued. Flying back to New York the next day, he wrote the scenario “in a frenzy” on the plane.

“I phoned Bill from the plane as soon as I landed and said, ‘I think I know what the play is!’” Teachout recalls. “Ever since I first saw Freud’s Last Session at PBD, I’d wanted to try writing a history play of my own that takes place in a kind of blank historical space, an undocumented moment during which you know almost nothing for sure about what actually happened to the real-life characters. We know that Inge and Williams were friends, but neither one of them ever spoke on record about their relationship in any detail. That gave me the elbow room I needed to imagine for myself what might possibly have taken place between them.”

Billy and Me is a memory play narrated by WIlliams. Act I is set at a bar in Chicago on December 31, 1944, immediately after a pre-Broadway tryout of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie—the play that inspired Inge to become a playwright. Act II takes place almost 15 years later in Inge’s Manhattan apartment, a few hours after the Broadway premiere of his first flop, A Loss of Roses.

“It’s a play about love, jealousy, and—not to put it too pompously—destiny,” said Teachout. “An artist is a person who can’t do anything else with his life. Art is his fate: it’s that or nothing. But he can’t become an artist until he accepts that fate and acknowledges his true nature. That’s a big part of what this play is about: the struggle of two great American playwrights to come to terms with who they really were.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

In an excerpt from Come Closer, I’ll Give You an Earful, her one-woman stage show, Agnes Moorehead speaks a monologue from Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. This performance was part of an episode of The Hollywood Palace, originally telecast by ABC on December 17, 1966. Moorehead is introduced by Eddie Fisher:

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

“Love at first sight does not deal with an object, but with a person. For those whom it strikes it is like a sudden illumination into a deep-rooted secret. They have been initiated.”

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about Fences and Manchester by the Sea, and what those two films teach us about the differences between writing for the stage and the screen. Here’s an excerpt.

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Denzel Washington’s “Fences” and Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea,” which both received best-picture Oscar nominations this week, have deep roots in live theater. “Fences,” of course, is the long-awaited screen version of August Wilson’s 1983 play. Not only did Wilson, who died almost 12 years ago, leave behind a draft of the script that has since been posthumously revised by Tony Kushner, but five cast members, including Mr. Washington (who doubled as the film’s director), Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson, starred together in the play’s 2010 Broadway revival. As for “Manchester by the Sea,” it was written and directed by Mr. Lonergan, whose “You Can Count on Me” and “Margaret” are among the finest films of the past quarter-century—yet Mr. Lonergan, like Wilson and Mr. Kushner, is also a playwright, one of the best we have.

None of this would have been stop-press news a generation ago. It used to be taken for granted that audiences across America would flock to big-screen versions of hit plays like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Odd Couple” that they weren’t able to see on stage. But times have changed, and while such major plays as “August: Osage County” and “Doubt” are still turned into films on occasion, it’s been years since any of them made more than a minor box-office splash.

Will “Fences” break that losing streak? Any director who seeks to turn a first-rate play into a movie of equal quality, after all, faces formidable obstacles going in, the biggest of which is that film, unlike live theater, is a fundamentally visual medium. A movie that is scrupulously faithful to the play on which it’s based can end up being visually unadventurous and stiff-jointed. If, on the other hand, the screenplay departs significantly from its source material, you may end up with a distortion, even a perversion, of what the playwright meant.

The problem with this argument is that many film critics wrongly elevate it to the status of an incontrovertible principle….

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Read the whole thing here.

James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance perform a scene from the first Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, directed by Lloyd Richards, on the 1987 Tony Awards telecast:

Denzel Washington and Chris Chalk perform the same scene from the 2010 Broadway revival of Fences, directed by Kenny Leon:

The trailer for the 2016 film version of Fences, which opens with an excerpt from the same scene. The role of Washington’s younger son is played by Jovan Adepo: