Archives for June 2020

The last play I saw on stage, Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, had a short off-Broadway run before New York’s theaters were closed down in mid-March. Earlier that same week, my wife Hilary had received what would prove all too soon to be an unsuccessful double-lung transplant. She died on the last night of March, after which I returned to our apartment, where I spent the next three months in grief-stricken, near-unbroken solitude. Something had to give, and it did: at long last, I finally rented a car and got out of town.

I just returned from a three-night stay at Bridgeton House on the Delaware, a riverside inn to which I have been going for fifteen years, first alone and then with Hilary, who loved it as much as I did and do. It was the first time I’d been out of New York, or driven a car, since January, and the sensation of putting Manhattan behind me, even for a short while, was near-ecstatic. I even got my hair cut for the first time since December! The innkeepers, for all their wonderful friendliness, have necessarily imposed a prudent regime of social distancing on their guests, but that was perfectly fine with me—I wasn’t there to meet new people—and my room, whose screened patio looks out on the Delaware River, was beautiful and comfortable. I spent my evenings sitting in a rocking chair, smelling the nearby hydrangeas and watching the sunset and the fireflies. It felt as though I’d come home again.

And how am I feeling now that I’m back in New York? That’s hard to say. I think I’m starting to find my way out of the bewildering maze of sorrow, for I no longer miss Hilary with the same round-the-clock intensity that came perilously close to sinking me in April. At the same time, though, her memory is never far from my mind, and I’m still as lonely as I ever was. And while I’ve kept myself busy writing about theater webcasts for The Wall Street Journal, I miss going to the theater in something not wholly unlike the way in which I miss my life’s companion.

What I wrote about summer movies in Saturday’s Journal is no less applicable to live theater:

Be it a big-budget blockbuster or a small-scale tale of summer love, there is no substitute for watching a movie, in the summer or at any other time of year, in the company of silent, enthralled people huddled together in a darkened room.

Even more than moviegoing, playgoing is a collective experience. While it’s true that the webcasts I now review have turned out to be satisfying substitutes for live performance, I would give a great deal—anything but my health, in fact—to have seen them in the theater. Therein, of course, lies the catch: I can’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would knowingly expose himself to the ravages of COVID-19 merely to be immersed for an evening in the sounds of laughter and applause. That’s why nearly every performing-arts organization has suspended live performances until January, and we who live for theater are simply going to have to tough it out for the duration, contenting ourselves with webcasts until the pandemic is under control.

Like everyone else “in the profession,” I can’t help but wonder what the world of theater will look like a year from now. I expect, though, that a fair number of drama companies, including a few of the best-known ones, have closed their doors for good, and I fear greatly for the futures of the actors, directors, designers, and crew members who are now trying to figure out how to piece together a living. At the same time, I also believe deeply that theater, fulfilling as it does a fundamental need in the human soul for the collective communion of face-to-face storytelling, will ultimately reassert its claim on audiences. Marvelous though they are, movies are not enough. We need live theater, too, and I have faith—I think that’s the right word—that we will get it back.

For my own part, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive the simultaneous losses of my beloved spouse and the art form to which I have devoted more than a decade and a half of my life. But I’m still here, and if Hilary’s death and the closing of America’s theaters didn’t kill me, then I figure I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you are, too.

From 2010:

Today’s episode of Fresh Air is all about the history of songs in Hollywood, and the producers invited those who follow the series on Twitter to vote for their favorite movie song. My snap response was to nominate “The Shadow of Your Smile,” but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that I could pick a single song, or even five, to represent the richness of the field. So I thought a little bit more, and came up with this list of my fifteen favorite songs that were written for use in Hollywood films….

Read the whole thing here.

“My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

John Steinbeck talks to the Voice of America about how America has changed since he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. This radio interview was originally broadcast on February 11, 1952:

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

“That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.”

Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 13, 1929)

I’ve written an essay for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the history of summer movies in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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Summer is here—but there are no movies to mark its coming. With Hollywood in deep-seated disarray and America’s movie theaters still trying to figure out whether they can reopen safely, it’ll likely be at least another year before the next summer movie comes along. But how will we know it when we see it? Exactly what is a summer movie? Can it be something other than a romcom? Must it take place on or near a beach? These questions are harder to answer than you might suppose.

The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote something that came to mind when I first started thinking about summer movies: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” That’s a great definition, one that emphasizes the proliferating eclecticism of American classical music. Is it possible, then, to take a similar tack in defining summer movies? Not unless you believe that “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters” and “Speed” qualify simply because they all came out in June. No matter when it’s released, a film must be unequivocally summer-themed to qualify as a summer movie—and even that alone isn’t enough. Does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” make the cut solely because it takes place during a big-city heat wave? Not really.

It’s more obviously tempting to say that summer movies are always comedies of one kind or another. This comes closer to the truth, though there is no shortage of exceptions….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Original Theater Company/59E59 Theaters webcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. Here’s an excerpt.

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Except for “The History Boys,” which had a solid run on Broadway in 2006 followed by several regional stagings, Alan Bennett’s plays aren’t widely performed in the U.S. He’s best known over here for “The Madness of George III,” the 1991 play whose 1994 film version, “The Madness of King George,” was a box-office hit. The play, however, never made it to Broadway, and neither did “The Habit of Art,” a dual theatrical portrait of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten that was first produced in 2009 by London’s National Theatre, then received its U.S. premiere at Washington’s Studio Theatre. I saw it there in 2011 and was surprised that it had no further success in this country: While not without flaw, “The Habit of Art” is both challenging and entertaining, and I assumed that someone in New York would get around to staging it sooner or later.

Hence my excitement when 59E59 Theaters announced that Original Theatre Company, a highly regarded English touring troupe, would be performing “The Habit of Art” as part of “Brits Off Broadway,” a summer festival of new plays that always has fine things to offer (in recent years, most of Alan Ayckbourn’s U.S. premieres have taken place there). No such luck—the pandemic put paid to this year’s festival—but the good news is that Original Theatre Company and 59E59 Theatres are streaming a previously taped version of “The Habit of Art” that is outstanding in every way….

Lovely though it would have been to see a live performance, I’m struck by how fully this webcast version of “The Habit of Art” conveys the total effect of a play that deserves to be staged in New York when such things become possible again….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Habit of Art:

Richard Burton talks about Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood in a BBC interview originally telecast on February 15, 1971:

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