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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 15, 2020

The agony of revelation

May 15, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Irish Repertory Theatre’s online webcast version of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.

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I’ve been eagerly waiting for a New York theater to mount a first-class online production of an indisputably major small-cast play, one that makes creative use of the qualities distinctive to webcasting instead of merely trying to duplicate the familiar effect of a staged production. That’s what St. Paul’s Park Square Theatre did with its radically innovative Zoom-based revival of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and it’s what New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre has now done with what it is billing as “a performance on screen” of “Molly Sweeney.” “Staged” by Charlotte Moore, the company’s artistic director, who directed the Irish Rep’s 2011 revival of Brian Friel’s great 1994 three-person play, this production is as memorable in its own special way as was Ms. Moore’s stage revival. It sets a new standard for what online theater can and should aspire to be.

Inspired by Oliver Sacks’ “To See or Not to See,” “Molly Sweeney” is the story of a middle-aged woman (played here as nine years ago by Geraldine Hughes) who undergoes surgery to regain the sight she lost as a baby. It is naturally suited to socially distanced online performance, consisting as it does of a sequence of interlocking monologues in which the characters directly address the audience but not one another, telling their Chekhov-like tale from their separate points of view….

What ensues is a small-town tragedy of false hope and brutal disappointment, one in which the willingness of men to use women to their own selfish ends is dramatized with quiet but overwhelming lucidity. Molly herself admits as much in a moment of agonizing candor on the night before the surgery: “Why am I going for this operation? None of this is my choosing. Then why is this happening to me? I am being used….And have I anything to gain?—anything?—anything?”…

Seeing Ms. Moore’s original revival of “Molly Sweeney” was one of the high-water marks of my playgoing life—yet this version, performed by a trio of theater artists at the peak of their collective powers, is at least as magnetically involving….

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Read the whole thing here.

A 2011 interview with Charlotte Moore, the director of Molly Sweeney:

Replay: Paul Scofield on the BBC

May 15, 2020 by Terry Teachout

A BBC “Arena” TV documentary about Paul Scofield, produced and directed by David Thompson and originally telecast on December 24, 2008:

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

Almanac: Nathaniel Hawthorne on happiness

May 15, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

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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