Archives for April 2019

An hour-long radio adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, originally broadcast live by ABC on September 29, 1946 as an episode of Theatre Guild On the Air. Wilder plays the Stage Manager and Dorothy McGuire plays Emily. The play was adapted for radio by Erik Barnouw:

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

“The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.”

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

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The Kenneth C. Griffin Theater, the most conventional of The Shed’s performance spaces, is a nondescript-looking 500-seat multipurpose black-box theater on the sixth floor that can be set up and subdivided in an infinite number of ways. While such auditoriums are common enough nowadays—most colleges have one—they’re harder to find in midtown Manhattan, which is dominated by Broadway’s traditional proscenium-arch theaters. Whether this one will have any impact on the culture of theater in Manhattan, though, will likely depend more on what the Griffin Theater presents than how it’s presented. Judging by its inaugural offering, I’m skeptical in the extreme, for “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is an embarrassment, a show that I would never have considered reviewing had its premiere been given under any other circumstances.

As the title indicates, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is a mash-up, a verse play by Anne Carson loosely based on Euripides’ “Helen” in which the lives of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe are compressed into a single narrative, one in which Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Fritz Lang and Pearl Bailey also play prominent roles. The results occasionally reminded me of “The Mother of Us All,” Gertrude Stein’s 1947 opera about the life of Susan B. Anthony, in which historical fact is interwoven with fey fantasy: “Enter Norma Jean as Mr. Truman Capote./First choral song./Enter chorus./I am my own chorus.” Mostly, though, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is a bore, for Ms. Carson’s “verse” is flat-footed, clunkily colloquial and—needless to say—very political: “HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 6/In war, things go wrong. Blame Woman.”

“The Mother of Us All” works, of course, because Virgil Thomson, Stein’s collaborator, set it to a droll musical score full of deadpan parodies of what he affectionately described as “gospel hymns, darn-fool ditties, inspirational oratory and parades.” Not so “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which has been turned by Paul Clark into a humorless two-person “melologue,” a 90-minute-long play-with-singing. His score, a wall-to-wall carpet of synthesized drones and sound effects that could have been lifted from a ’70s happening, is wholly anonymous-sounding. Ben Whishaw, lately of “Mary Poppins Returns,” and Renée Fleming, who needs no introduction, play…well, I’m not sure who they play. At first he seems to be a screenwriter and she his mousy secretary, which might possibly make him Mr. Miller, but in due course Mr. Whishaw dons drag and becomes Mrs. Miller….

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“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—too soon before life itself.”

Joseph Conrad, Youth

From 2009:

Art’s near-magical power to work this mental miracle is the reason why we turn to it in times of stress–yet I’d be lying if I told you that my trip to the Met was the best thing about my day. As much as I love Bonnard, it was Central Park that truly refreshed me on Thursday, the same way it did in the weeks and months following my illness. I didn’t fully understand how much the grey weather of the past few weeks had blunted my ability to rejoice in life until it went away and I felt the sunshine on my face. No artist, not even Pierre Bonnard at his most ravishing, can hope to top that….