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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 23, 2018

It takes two

November 23, 2018 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T is still in the hospital in Connecticut, and I’m still visiting her there every day. Some of my visits, however, are easier than others. I got caught in a blizzard driving home from the hospital last week, and even now I get scared thinking about it. I’ve never driven through anything like it in my life—at one point I was sure I’d be spending the night in my car—and as I inched down the road, I found myself thinking, unlikely as it may sound, of Calvin and Hobbes.

I’d long since stopped reading the funny pages by 1985, the year in which Bill Watterson launched his now-defunct comic strip, and it wasn’t until February of 2016, when I stumbled across a Twitter feed devoted to old strips, that I became a belated fan. It happens that Calvin’s passion for snow is one of my favorite aspects of Calvin and Hobbes. I felt the same way as a child, perhaps because we didn’t get nearly as much snow in Smalltown, U.S.A., as I would have liked. As I explained in this space three years ago:

The word “snow” appears no more than a half-dozen times in the memoir of my childhood and youth that I wrote not long after moving to New York…It was in part because of their rareness that I treasured the days when enough snow fell on Smalltown that my brother and I could stay home from school and play in it. My parents, bless them, had the goodness not to tell us that such days were pleasurable only to children. How sad it would have been to know too soon that a time was to come when I would go to considerable trouble to flee them.

Now, though, I’m a man on the far shores of middle age who is married to a woman with a serious respiratory disease, and I find it hard to think of snow as anything other than a potentially lethal nuisance. I wouldn’t trade Mrs. T for all the snowmen in the world, and I miss being a snowbird in south Florida far more than I long for the white Christmases of my youth. Alas, we can’t go back to Sanibel Island until she gets a new pair of lungs. That’s why she’s in the hospital, doing battle with a stubborn staph infection, and why I’m spending two hours each day driving there and back until her doctors decide that she’s ready to go home.

As pleasant as Mrs. T’s room is, it’s still a hospital room, and she’s still eating hospital food. For this reason, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make sure that she had a proper Thanksgiving dinner. A kind friend told me that Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse in West Hartford, which is a ten-minute drive from UConn John Dempsey Hospital, was a first-class restaurant that served Thanksgiving dinners, and a phone call established that they’d be glad to pack one up for her. I drove to Fleming’s yesterday afternoon, collected a big brown paper bag full of carefully packed food, and brought it back to Mrs. T. She cleaned her plate.

The TV channels available to Mrs. T in her hospital room are severely limited, enough so that we were forced after dinner to resort to watching The Godfather on AMC in a censored version replete with commercials. But we also listened to two episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour, the delightfully eccentric and eclectic radio show that Bob Dylan hosted on Sirius XM from 2006 to 2009, on my MacBook Air, and considered ourselves well and truly entertained. (If you’ve never heard Theme Time Radio Hour, this column that I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2008 will tell you what you’ve been missing.)

This is no vacation, not for Mrs. T and not for me. I’ve already written a couple of columns in her hospital room, and expect to write a couple more there next week. Nor have I stopped going to shows: I’ll be driving from UConn to New York tonight to catch a Saturday matinée of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, then returning to the hospital after the show. I’m as eager for Mrs. T to return home as she is, but so long as she’s in the hospital, there’s nowhere else I want to be. It took us long enough to find one another, and now that we’re together, our plan is to spend as much time together as we can, even if I have to eat hospital food, watch movies with commercials, and drive through blizzards. As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to happiness, it takes two.

Goodness has everything to do with it

November 23, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Tom Stoppard is the George Bernard Shaw of our time. No English-speaking playwright, not even Shaw himself, has ever been more adept at taking complex questions about human nature and embedding them in witty dramas that are at once entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Now, after a decade-long hiatus, Mr. Stoppard has returned to the stage of Lincoln Center Theater with “The Hard Problem,” in which he grapples again with a question that in one form or another has preoccupied him throughout his career: Are the materialists right, or is there more to man than mere flesh? One might reasonably expect him, at 81, to have passed his prime, but judging by a first viewing, I’m inclined to rank “The Hard Problem” alongside “Arcadia” and “The Real Thing” as one of the best things he’s given us…

Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), the protagonist, is a youthful research psychologist-in-the-making who longs above all things to crack the hardest problem in her field, the conundrum of human consciousness: “Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra….We’re dealing in mind-stuff that doesn’t show up in a [brain] scan—accountability, duty, free will, language, all the stuff that makes behavior unpredictable.” For her, a computer that plays chess can only be conscious if it “minds losing,” and the problem of consciousness is directly related to the problem of morality…

What makes “The Hard Problem” more than just an undergraduate bull session writ large is that Hilary is, or at least seems to be, a genuinely good person who isn’t kidding in the least when she says that altruism “means being good for its own sake.” Moreover, she believes in God and prays every night—in part because, as we learn early on, she is the mother of an illegitimate daughter whom she gave up for adoption, and for whose welfare she now prays…

Out of this promising premise, Mr. Stoppard has spun a concise piece of storytelling (100 minutes, no intermission) full of thought-provoking twists…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Tom Stoppard talks about The Hard Problem:

A scene from the Court Theatre’s 2017 Chicago premiere of The Hard Problem:

Replay: newsreel coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy

November 23, 2018 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAUniversal-International Newsreel’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, narrated by Ed Herlihy:

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

Almanac: W.H. Auden on men and history

November 23, 2018 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.”

W.H. Auden, “D.H. Lawrence”

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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