Archives for 2017

Mrs. T drove me up to Peterborough, New Hampshire, and dropped me off at the MacDowell Colony five years ago this past weekend. I spent the five weeks that followed working on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington and Satchmo at the Waldorf. During that time I saw no shows and wrote no pieces for The Wall Street Journal or any other publication, though I did attend a memorable concert of music by colonists past and present. Otherwise I did nothing but write, stroll idly through the woods, eat the famously tasty meals provided by the staff, and get to know my fellow colonists, with two of whom I formed friendships that have lasted to this day.

The studio in which I spent my mornings and afternoons, whose previous occupants include James Baldwin, Ruth Draper, and Spalding Gray, had no wi-fi, and I didn’t miss it after the first couple of days. I was overjoyed to be forced to pull the plug on the ceaseless hum and buzz of my everyday life, and concentrate instead on the work that had brought me there.

I arrived at MacDowell a bit more than a month after the death of my mother, an experience about which I had previously written a long posting. The colonists at MacDowell colonists are invited to “present” an example of their work during the stay, and I chose to read an excerpt from that piece, to which my listeners responded with sympathy and warmth. Not surprisingly, my mother was very much on my mind throughout my stay—but rarely during the day. Never before had I worked with such single-minded focus as I did at MacDowell, so much so that I was even able to put aside, if only for a time, my grief.

It was at MacDowell that I started to see myself for the first time not merely as a critic but as an artist as well. I wrote about this new self-understanding the day after I left:

Satchmo was premiered in Florida last fall, and a much-revised version of the play will soon be staged by two New England theater companies. Yet in spite of these undertakings, I continued to have difficulties seeing myself as anything other than a critic, a professional appreciator without creative powers of my own. Whenever I tried to tell people about the inexplicable thing that was happening to me, I felt obliged to resort to a grotesque metaphor. “It feels as if I’ve grown another arm,” I’d say.

Coming to the MacDowell Colony was a turning point in this process. Five weeks ago I withdrew from the world and drove to a secluded woodland retreat in New Hampshire, where I found myself in the company of some thirty-odd professional artists. I presented myself to them as a fellow artist and was accepted as one….My closest friends were a poet, a filmmaker, two installation artists, an avant-garde visual artist of ambiguous genre, and a dancer turned law professor. A couple of weeks ago I even acted (in a manner of speaking) in a reading of the first scene of an unfinished play by another colonist. My character, appropriately enough, was a failed actor d’un âge certain who had just written his first play.

Toward the end of my stay, I confessed my continuing uncertainties to one of my new friends. “I come from a small town, just like you, and for years I felt like it was a privilege to be an artist, like I didn’t really deserve it,” she told me. “That was how I was raised. Then I met a woman from Sweden who told me, ‘My dear, being an artist is your job.’ And I knew she was right.”

Five years later, Satchmo at the Waldorf has been produced off Broadway and throughout America. A year ago I made my professional debut as a stage director, and my second play, Billy and Me, will be premiered in West Palm Beach in December. Yes, I’m still a critic, and proud to be one—but I now know that I am also, beyond any possibility of doubt, an artist. I owe this miraculous transformation in part to my marriage to Mrs. T, who encouraged me to dig more out of myself than I had ever thought possible, and in part to the MacDowell Colony, which flung the door of possibility wider still and invited me to step through it. I bless the names of the men and women who saw fit to let me work there. They changed my life.

* * *

The New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble performs the original chamber version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, composed in part at the MacDowell Colony:

Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten perform excerpts from and talk about Schubert’s Winterreise in their music room in Aldeburgh on the BBC in 1968:

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

“Gee, if most things aren’t funny, Arn, then they’re only exactly what they are. Then it’s just one long dental appointment, interrupted occasionally by something exciting like waiting, or falling asleep.”

Herb Gardner, A Thousand Clowns

When I was a small boy, I worshipped my father. I was bedazzled by his deep voice, which he loved to raise in song on Sunday drives, and even more by his seeming ability to do, fix, or build anything to which he put his omnicompetent hand. “A thing worth doing, son, is worth doing right,” he would assure me time and again when trying to teach me how to work with tools, not realizing that our ideas of what was worth doing had already started to move in different directions.

Not long after he died, I wrote a poem inspired by my father’s miraculous mastery of the mysterious world of things, of which I inherited nary a trace, much to his puzzlement and dismay, though he did manage to pass it on to my similarly gifted brother:

When Dad was on the road alone
And dined, alone, at night,
He wanted everything to be
Not passable, but right:

“A perfect baked potato
Demands the utmost care.
The only way to order steak
Is medium, not rare.”

As I grew older, I started to view him in a less favorable light. He was moody, so much so that he could spoil a family gathering without apparent effort simply by emitting a wordless cloud of unexplained dissatisfaction. It never occurred to me at the time that his moodiness might be the outward manifestation of a deep-seated self-doubt, something that had been implanted in him by his imperious mother, for whom nothing he did was ever good enough. All I could see was his own mercurial surface, and I found his emotional vicissitudes to be maddening beyond belief. “The Mighty Teachout Art Players are performing tonight,” I would mutter to my brother whenever he was in a foul temper.

That my father loved us all, though, was never in question. He actually risked his own life to save me from drowning in the Current River one summer, a memory that would later come to mind whenever he did or said something exasperating, which was fairly frequently. In time I learned once more to appreciate him, and came to understand that beneath his surface bluster, he was painfully shy and self-conscious. I suspect—I fear, really—that he was at bottom a frustrated, unhappy man. He would have loved above all things to be rich and successful and to be able to give his children whatever they could possibly want. (As it was, he gave us far more than he could afford.) Instead he was a small-town hardware salesman, and though he did his job faithfully and well, I can’t think of a man less temperamentally suited to his chosen line of work, or one whose secret doubts were more precisely captured in the sad little eulogy that Charley Loman speaks over his own father’s grave in Death of a Salesman: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.”

Mrs. T, alas, never knew my father at all. To her, he is only a shadowy figure who turns up in family anecdotes, though she’s heard so much about him that she feels almost as if they’d met. As for me, the longer I live, the more I regret not having gotten to know him better. My brother, by contrast, knew him fairly well, unknowable though he ultimately was, and had a relationship with him that was both more stressful and, in the end, far more rewarding. I envy him that.

This is something I wrote a few years ago:

When I started playing piano, I taught myself how to pick out the introduction to Erroll Garner’s version of “Laura,” which I learned from $64,000 Jazz. “Laura,” as it happens, was my father’s favorite song. It would always please him to hear me play it, just as it pleases me that my best friend bears the name of the tune that he loved so much….

He was glad, of course, that I’d taken an interest in the music of his youth, and even more pleased when I started playing it professionally in college. I like to think that he would have been proud of me had he lived long enough to read Pops and Duke. But my father was a difficult man, uneasy in his own skin, and so the two of us never achieved anything remotely approaching intimacy. We simply didn’t have enough in common save for our love of music, though we did manage in the last years of his life to grow somewhat more comfortable with one another. I am—much to my surprise—more like him than I knew.

I cried at his funeral. Two decades later, I think of him nearly every day, and when I do, I remember his other favorite saying: “Too soon we grow old, too late we grow smart.” I wish I’d been smarter about my father sooner, but at least he knew—I hope—how much I loved him.

* * *

Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal perform Cash’s “Black Cadillac”:

Chet Atkins sings “I Still Can’t Say Goodbye,” by James Moore and Robert Blinn:

“Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

Aldous Huxley, “Vulgarity in Literature”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Massachusetts revival of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Amy Herzog stepped into the spotlight of theatrical notoriety when “4000 Miles,” the best play by an up-and-coming author that I’ve ever reviewed in this space, transferred to Lincoln Center Theater in 2012 after a brief off-Broadway run. It should by all rights have moved from there to Broadway, but “4000 Miles” was successful enough as is: It was taken up by regional theaters throughout America, and Ms. Herzog went on to establish herself as this country’s most gifted under-40 playwright. Now, a month after “Mary Jane,” her latest play, was premiered by the Yale Repertory Theatre, “4000 Miles” has been revived by Shakespeare & Company in a production at least as fine as the one that I saw and admired five years ago in New York….

Like her other plays, “4000 Miles” is a small-scale character study reminiscent of Chekhov in its emphasis on personality over plot. At its center is Vera (Annette Miller), a crusty 91-year-old Jewish grandmother who is teetering on the near edge of senility (the most frequently used word in her shrinking vocabulary is “whaddayacallit”) but has no intention of giving up without a fight. When Leo (Gregory Boover), her spacy 21-year-old grandson, stops in for a visit after a cross-country bicycle trip from Seattle to New York, Vera puts him up for a couple of weeks. That’s pretty much all that happens, though we also meet Bec (Emma Geer), Leo’s earnest ex-girlfriend, and Amanda (Zoë Laiz), a drunken young Chinese-American woman whom he picks up at a bar and with whom he doesn’t quite manage to have sex. For the most part, though, “4000 Miles” is all about the relationship between Vera, an unrepentant Communist, and Leo, a child of the therapeutic generation who thinks “Marx is cool” and utters sentences like “And I was like, first of all, who knows.” Separated by a yawning gulf of age and experience, they manage to meet somewhere in the middle…

This revival, staged with poignant, self-effacing delicacy by Nicole Ricciardi, is an ideal showcase for the talents of Ms. Miller, a Shakespeare & Company veteran who gives the kind of performance you’ll be talking about days after you see it. Her Vera is tough and unselfconsciously gallant, a woman whose mental powers are failing fast but who stares into the abyss with something not unlike glee. I’ve never seen a more vividly detailed stage portrayal of extreme old age—merely to see her get up from a couch is to receive an acting lesson…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the 2012 Lincoln Center Theater production of “4000 Miles,” starring Mary Louise Wilson and Gabriel Ebert:

A 1978 TV commercial for Aja, an album by Steely Dan. The voiceover is by Eartha Kitt:

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

“Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself—and, sometimes, doing so—is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.”

Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism”