Archives for June 2018

One problem with working at home and setting your own schedule, especially for writers, is that it can prove to be quite hard to shut the shop down and take time off. Even if a piece isn’t due, it often forces itself into your unwilling consciousness and insists on being written right now. I ran into this problem last Friday, a day on which I had no show to see and no deadlines to hit. Having spent far too much of the first part of the week driving from Connecticut to New York and back again in order to see a Broadway play, I had every intention of taking the whole day off. That worked pretty well for a couple of hours, but then I realized that I’d started writing the first paragraph of my review of the play in question in my head.

One might call this a Happy Person’s Problem: I know it’s churlish to complain about a life that I find so profoundly fulfilling. I remember what it was like to have a nine-to-five job, and I give thanks each and every day for no longer having to live that way. But it is not in man’s nature, I suspect, to rejoice evermore and give thanks without ceasing, Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians notwithstanding. We accept good fortune as quickly as we grow used to the taking of opiates, and no sooner do we do so than we seek to increase the dosage. Having written a successful play and directed it no less successfully, did I fall down on my knees in gratitude for being so implausibly lucky in my late middle age? No, I sat down at my desk and wrote another one, and now I grow restive because nobody has asked me to direct another show.

Inappropriate discontent is surely a fundamental part of human nature, a compulsion against which the wise person wars ceaselessly, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had much to do with how hard I find it to close my laptop, walk away from the writer’s life, and immerse myself in unprofitable pursuits. When I woke up this morning, I saw a stack of unread books by my bed, none of which is likely to issue in an essay, article, or review: I want to read them simply for my pleasure, and I fully expect to be pleased once I get around to doing so. So why have some of them been sitting there for a month or more? Why on earth, for that matter, am I writing this posting instead of diving headfirst into Jeffrey C. Stewart’s The New Negro or Christopher Bonanos’ Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous?

I know, I know: the solution to my problem is to solve it. I need to shut down my MacBook Air, do the dishes that I promised Mrs. T I’d do first thing this morning, shave and shower, and open up a book or put on a piece of music. Or both. But instead I sit here and write for no good reason, even though I finished writing this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column last night and needn’t step up to the plate again until Tuesday, and I have no better excuse than the one the scorpion gave to the frog after stinging him: it’s my nature.

The good news is that I’ve now finished saying what I meant to say, and that I need to get those dishes done at some point in the next half-hour, at which point Mrs. T is scheduled to emerge from her bedroom. And the bad news? I’ll get back to you on that.

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Diana Krall sings Nat Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” at the 1996 Montreal Jazz Festival:

“The Mellotron: A Keyboard with the Power of an Orchestra,” a 1965 British Pathé featurette featuring Eric Robinson and David Nixon. Invented in 1963, the mellotron was subsequently used by the Beatles, David Bowie, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Radiohead, and Tangerine Dream:

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

“But the great John Huston also helped enormously. He managed to consolidate my character for me in just one sentence. I’d been shooting for about two days and Huston said, ‘Cut! Michael,’ he said, ‘speak faster; he’s an honest man.’ Because I was speaking slowly, it seemed as though I was trying to figure out what effect I was making. Huston’s observation was spot on. Honest men speak fast because they don’t need time to calculate.”

Michael Caine, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making (courtesy of Quinn Sutherland)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Hartford Stage’s revival of Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes. Here’s an excerpt.

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Hartford Stage didn’t exactly need to be put on the map—it is one of New England’s most admired theater companies—but Darko Tresnjak’s seven-year run as its artistic director, during which he brought “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” and “Anastasia” from Connecticut to Broadway, has been most impressive. Since Mr. Tresnjak recently announced that he’ll be moving on at the end of the coming season, I thought it a good idea to take a look at his latest undertaking, a revival of Athol Fugard’s “A Lesson from Aloes.” Mr. Fugard is South Africa’s greatest playwright, but his plays are being produced less often now that his native land has turned its back on apartheid, whose ugly realities were the subject matter of most of his work. Those plays deserve a better fate, not least “A Lesson from Aloes,” a three-hander of high merit by which Mr. Tresnjak has done very, very well….

Mr. Tresnjak’s staging of “Aloes” is noteworthy for its poetic unity: Every element of the production is locks together into a seamless whole. From Tim Mackabee’s purposefully simple two-level set to the not-quite-naturalistic sound design of Jane Shaw, we are plunged into an alien land where nothing—not even the meticulously coached South African accents—is quite familiar. The cast is up to the challenge of filling this disorienting space, especially Andrus Nichols, who first came to my notice six years ago when she starred in the title role of Bedlam’s small-scale off-off-Broadway revival of “Saint Joan,” proving herself then and thereafter to be an actor of extraordinary force and focus. The impression that she made in Bedlam’s radically reconceived revivals of the classics was no fluke…

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Read the whole thing here.

Edward R. Murrow interviews and visits the home of Nat King Cole and his wife Maria on Person to Person. This segment was originally telecast by CBS on November 1, 1957:

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

“The rising unto place is laborious; and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities.”

Francis Bacon, “Of Great Place”