Archives for March 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a live-streamed version of American Conservatory Theater’s production of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone. Here’s an excerpt.

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Slowly but surely, theater in America is stumbling into the unknown country of the coronavirus. Yes, the doors of every major company are shut tight for the duration, but a handful of forward-looking troupes, some large and others microscopic, are starting to use the Web to reach out to playgoers from coast to coast who long for the incomparable relief of a show that they can view in the comfort—and safety—of their own homes….

San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater was about to open the West Coast premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s “Toni Stone,” directed by Pam MacKinnon, when the coronavirus forced the company to close down. Fortunately, A.C.T. was able to tape and edit a preview performance that is now available for online viewing. The results are hugely impressive, a model for other companies—not to mention Broadway producers—who aspire to putting their productions on the web….

“Toni Stone” is the story of the first black woman ever to play big-league pro baseball, told by an outstanding cast of one woman (very well played here by Dawn Ursula) and eight men, two of whom also appeared in the original production of the play. It was first performed by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company last spring in a small-scale off-Broadway production, also directed by Ms. MacKinnon, that I reviewed with the utmost enthusiasm, calling it “both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining…Ms. Diamond has given us a masterly play that will open your eyes to an insufficiently known chapter in American history.” I had no doubt that it would be taken up by regional theaters throughout the country, and this video version, a slightly modified remount of Ms. Mackinnon’s Roundabout staging, will undoubtedly hasten that process, for the play and production alike both come through with total clarity.  Yes, it’s better to see any play live, but I think you’ll be surprised—I know I was—by how wonderfully well this one comes off as a webcast….

Whenever you watch a sitcom filmed or taped in front of a live audience, you’re seeing a performance shot with three cameras, normally considered the minimum number necessary to produce a watchable program. Not so “Toni Stone”: The company had only two at its disposal. I didn’t know that until after I watched the webcast, edited by Beryl Baker, A.C.T.’s video content producer, and save for a few forgivable bobbles, the camerawork was so smooth and varied that I simply took it for granted that the show was shot with three cameras. Theater companies that are worried about the technical problems of capturing a live performance, as well as the resulting expense of shooting with three cameras, should thus take a close look at “Toni Stone.” They’ll be encouraged—and inspired….

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Read the whole thing here.

A montage of scenes from the original Roundabout Theater Company production of Toni Stone:

In order to divert those of you who, like me, are staying home these days, I’ve been posting images of some of the prints and paintings that hang on the walls of our Manhattan apartment—the “Teachout Museum,” as a friend calls it. My latest image is of a 2000 silkscreen by Helen Frankenthaler, the great American abstract-expressionist painter, called Grey Fireworks. It is by far the biggest and most spectacular piece that Mrs. T and I own, occupying most of a wall in our dining room.

I have always loved Frankenthaler’s delicate yet festive art, and when I started collecting fine-art prints in 2003, I knew I wanted to own something by her. She was a prolific, committed, and famously accomplished printmaker, so I did quite a bit of looking and thinking before settling on Grey Fireworks, which was still comparatively new when I bought it. Published by the Lincoln Center/List Poster and Print Program in a pencil-signed sixty-three-color limited edition of 108 copies, it is based, like many other notabe prints, on a preexisting painting of the same name that dates from 1982. According to Frankenthaler, she called it Grey Fireworks because it is “explosive. It’s not gray dismal—it’s gray celebrative.” 

The painting, which is privately owned, has been exhibited more than once, most notably as part of a 1989 retrospective of Frankenthaler’s work jointly mounted by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. This excerpt from E.A. Carmean, Jr.’s catalogue entry, which is based on an interview with the artist, describes it nicely:

Grey Fireworks began with a solidly colored surface, here a rich blue gray. Color washes of darker tones were then added, giving the picture its “real construction.” These were followed by the “clumps” of pink and white, distinct shapes set apart from the more diaphanous field, “accents in the shadowy ground,” as Frankenthaler calls them. “I was choosing what seemed like every conceivable color accent to play against gray. But it was important to place specific colors in exact positions to make it all successful.

Grey Fireworks was simultaneously published as a limited-edition print and as a poster. According to the dealer from which I bought it in 2004 at a startlingly reasonable price: 

Frankenthaler has done six screenprints for Lincoln Center, all large and all initially offered well below the market price for such a large piece. Each exists as both a signed and numbered Frankenthaler print without text and as an edition produced from the same screens as the hand-signed one on paper with a printed text to be used as a poster by Lincoln Center and to be sold (in an edition of about 500 impressions) for those who cannot purchase the signed and numbered edition. Each is based upon a painting Frankenthaler executed at about the same time and each is produced under her supervision and hand-signed by her. Frankenthaler’s 2000 screenprint for Lincoln Center, Grey Fireworks, produced a near-riot among Lincoln Center’s dealer network, with over eighty dealers left frustrated and printless.

Grey Fireworks hung above and directly behind the couch in the living room of the Upper West Side apartment that Mrs. T and I shared during the first years of our marriage. It was the only space in our tiny two-room home that was big enough to hold it, but it meant that I couldn’t see it while sitting on the couch, which was where I spent most of my time when not at my desk.

When we first saw the much bigger uptown apartment to which we moved in 2010 in preparation for her transplant, I opened the door, took one look inside, and said to Mrs. T, “I think we should hang the Frankenthaler right here—we’ll finally be able to see it from the couch.” So we did, and now I look at it with undiminished delight dozens of times each day. I don’t know whether it’s the piece in the Teachout Museum that I love best, but I think it might just be the one that I’m proudest to own, and Mrs. T feels the same way. We are privileged to live with it.

Gene Krupa performs and is interviewed on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show originally taped for telecast on March 8, 1965. Krupa’s quartet includes Carmen Leggio on tenor saxophone, Dick Wellstood on piano, and Eddie DeHaas on bass. Vic Damone is Douglas’ co-host:

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

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

From 2010:

This meme, started by Tyler Cowen and picked up by, among others, Jenny Davidson and Ross Douthat, has piqued my interest. Here goes:

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. It was this modern exemplar of the biographer’s art, not Boswell’s Life, that introduced me to the man who became and remained my hero. Not only did Dr. Johnson’s clear-eyed, cant-free view of human nature help me to see the world as it is, but I found his lifelong struggle against his own inborn defects of temperament to be powerfully inspiring….

Read the whole thing here.

“Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Thanks to a kind-hearted, quick-witted nurse in New York-Presbyterian’s cardio-thoracic ICU, I was able to see and speak to Mrs. T via Skype on Sunday night. That sentence really ought by all rights to end with an exclamation point, for it was the first time I’d laid eyes on her, virtually or in the flesh, since last weekend. The experience of seeing her face on the screen of my MacBook Air was overwhelming, so much so that I had to bite a good-sized hole in my tongue to keep from bursting out in tears (something of which she would have disapproved, Mrs. T being a bred-in-the-bone New England girl).

She didn’t talk back to me, of course: Mrs. T has two ventilator tubes in her nose and a tracheostomy in her neck. She did, however, blink “appropriately“ (that’s nurse-speak) when I asked if she could see and hear me. The nurse warned me that she becomes really tired at the end of the day, so I kept our “conversation“ short and to the point. I tried to tell her a bit about the coronavirus pandemic—she was in a medically induced coma from March 1 until last Friday—and explained that because of it, the hospital is now closed to all visitors, spouses included. I assured her that I was checking twice each day by phone on her condition and keeping her family and friends up to date on the latest developments, adding that thousands of people all over the world were pulling for her. I promised that we’d go back to Sanibel Island as soon as she was ready and told her that I loved her more than anything in the world, then hung up, drained and stunned and very, very happy.

Not only is Mrs. T well on her way toward full consciousness, but she’s making solid progress on all other fronts. All her vital signs are favorable. The nurses turned her ventilator down to the lowest possible setting this afternoon to give her a chance to exercise her new lungs, and she breathed more or less on her own for a half-hour. She looks pale, puffy, and wan—so would you—but to my eyes she was as beautiful as she was on the night when, fifteen years ago, I fell in love with her at first sight.

I wish I could have played some music for her. Had I been able to do so, I would have played Music, Awake!, the anthem for chorus and orchestra that Paul Moravec and I wrote four years ago to celebrate our good friend John Sinclair’s twenty-fifth anniversary as the artistic director of the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, Florida. By that time, Mrs. T’s doctors had grounded her, and she was unable to fly down to Winter Park for the premiere—the first of my premieres, though not the last, that she had to miss because of her illness. (It never did get any easier for either of us.)

Inspired by the climactic transformation scene of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, a play that Paul and I both love, Music, Awake! is an ode to the magical, life-changing power of music, though I also had Mrs. T’s own indomitable courage in mind when I wrote this stanza:

Teach us songs whose melodies
Inspire us to be brave,
Require us to be bold,
Command our souls.
Let every note ascend,
Let every phrase ring out
With certitude and power
In the darkest hour.

Mere days ago I feared that my brave companion might never awaken from her drugged sleep. But seeing and speaking to her has inspired me to try to be as brave, as all of us will need to be in the weeks and months that lie ahead of us. So long as she is awake and aware, I know I’ll be able to cope with whatever is to come.

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For previous reports on Mrs. T’s surgery and subsequent recovery, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

To learn more about her rare illness, go here.

To find out how to become an organ donor, go here.

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Music, Awake!, composed by Paul Moravec and performed by John Sinclair and the Bach Festival Society Chorus and Orchestra, with Amanda Pabyan, Margaret Lattimore, Robert Breault, and Kevin Deas. The text is by me: