“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, August 28, 1955

From 2008:

One of the minor pleasures of writing a biography is picking the photographs that will be used to illustrate it–so long as you can get permission to reproduce them. When you can’t, it’s pure hell….

Read the whole thing here.

“In the greatest fiction, the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it.”

Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”

No journalist can afford to live solely in the past, least of all a drama critic, who by definition spends his nights seeing new shows and his days writing about them. Nor have I ever wanted to do so: it’s always been important to me to stay connected to the present moment, which is one of the reasons why most of my friends are younger than I am. For the critic, nostalgia is dangerous stuff—it has a sneaky way of twisting your present-day perceptions—and so must be handled with the utmost care.

On the other hand, I’m a largely fortunate son who can’t easily imagine not wanting to think about the past, for which reason I find it both delightful and convenient to be married to a woman who is almost exactly my age. I don’t need to tell regular readers of this blog, though, that my beloved Mrs. T has just been through the wringer, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve been spending rather more time than usual engaged in private remembrance of things past, some trivial but all pleasing to think about.

Among other things, I have total recall for any number of ephemeral pop songs of the Fifties of which my father bought records and to which I took a shine when I was seven or eight. In many cases, of course, “ephemeral” is putting it mildly. Why on earth should Nelson Riddle’s Lisbon Antigua or Dean Martin’s Memories Are Made of This be taking up space in my head next to “West End Blues” and Op. 111? Because I played them over and over again on the portable phonograph in my bedroom, and so burned them into my memory, where they remain to this day.

I find this especially irksome now that I’ve reached an age when it’s normal to have trouble remembering names, something at which I used to be all but infallible. I had to work really hard last week to come up with Annette Bening’s name, yet my memory is crammed full of easily accessed snippets of catchy TV commercial jingles from the Sixties, not a few of which turn into unwanted earworms with dismaying frequency. In the course of the past half-century, for instance, few months have gone by without my hearing in my head the Latin-flavored score that accompanied a commercial for a long-defunct brand of chewing gum called Cinnamint. As usual, I recall these fragments with near-perfect clarity, something that I can usually check by consulting YouTube, as I did on Saturday when I found myself humming the Cinnamint theme for the gazillionth time. Sure enough, my memory of the music was close to exact:

I’ve also been thinking about the vacations my family took each summer, a subject brought to mind by Richard Ratay’s Don’t Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, a tender and funny book that I’ve been reading with great pleasure. Not surprisingly, Howard Johnson’s figures prominently therein, in addition to which Bob Greene recently wrote a touching column for The Wall Street Journal about the orange-roofed restaurants that used to dot America’s highways.

I mentioned on Twitter last week that Howard Johnson’s was on my mind, and heard within seconds from the indefatigable Lileks, who sent me a link to a web page he put up a few years ago that is devoted to his own memories of the Howard Johnson’s motel at which he and his family stayed on his first trip to Minneapolis in 1965. It was the first motel in which he’d ever stayed, and it was, he writes, “the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” in part because its architecture and décor were so strongly influenced by midcentury modernism.

I like what he says about his room:

I’ve stayed in many modern hotels, but none as modern as this. Modern is easy these days. It’s anything. This? This had no precedent. They had to make this up as they went along, creating a brand-new vernacular.

Strange indeed to think that for baby boomers like Lileks and me, the high modernism of our youth is now the stuff nostalgia is made of.

My father also favored Howard Johnson’s, both for eating and for sleeping, and our family spent many a summer night under its orange roofs. I loved the food served in the restaurants as much as the ultra-modern décor of the guest rooms, though I was never very adventurous when it came to exploring the 28 delicious flavors of ice cream that were Hojo’s trademark: I usually stuck to good old chocolate chip, and it never let me down.

I’m sure I wouldn’t be as easily sated today by such offerings as the Grilled-in-Butter Frankforts and Boston Baked Beans with Brown Bread that thrilled me when I was eight years old. I expect more out of food than the iron consistency that made Howard Johnson’s a byword a half-century ago. Wherever you went, you knew what you’d get and how it would taste. That was, however, the whole point of going—and for a child, I suspect that it was also part of the fun. Perhaps I already sensed that adults must spend their lives making choices, and that they very often are forced to choose between variously unsatisfactory alternatives. I have no doubt that part of what I miss about being a small boy was that my parents did the choosing, thereby relieving me of the responsibility for getting it right the first time. As I wrote in this space a few years ago:

I wouldn’t dream of denying that I miss the world of my youth, or that I think about it fairly often, perhaps more often than I should….What I really miss, I suppose, is the sheer simplicity of childhood, that precious time when other people make the decisions and all you have to do is be.

Speaking of vacations, my brother just sent me a package of goodies from the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen, a compulsory stop whenever my family vacationed in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. David and his wife continue to go there, but it’s been eleven long years since I was last in Gatlinburg. He knows how much I miss the old place—as well as the blissful family vacations for which it stands—and so he sends me a box of taffy whenever he and Kathy are in Gatlinburg. It is a comforting ritual, one of the many ways in which he and I like to remind each other of the joy we’ve shared through the years.

“Nostalgia is incommunicable,” I wrote in this space the last time I was in Gatlinburg. “Try as we might, we cannot share it with those who stand outside the magic circle of common memories.” What an uncovenanted blessing it is, then, to have such memories—as well as loved ones with whom to share them. That’s the right kind of nostalgia, the kind that has the power to heighten the savor of even the happiest of lives.

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Dean Martin sings “Memories Are Made of This” in an undated 1955 TV performance. He is accompanied by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller, who wrote the song:

A 1962 TV commercial for Howard Johnson’s restaurants:

Camille Saint-Saëns plays his “Valse mignonne.” The silent film footage, shot by Sacha Guitry in 1914, has been synchronized by Jack Gibbons with Saint-Saëns’ 1919 commercial recording of the same piece:

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

“To do distinguished criticism it is necessary to know how to appreciate what one does not like.”

Camille Saint-Saëns, letter to Gabriel Fauré (November 1904)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a New Jersey revival of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and the Broadway premiere of Richard Bean’s The Nap. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Home, Robert Frost said, is the place where, “when you go there, they have to take you in.” But what if they don’t remember who you are? That’s what happens, more or less, in “Buried Child,” the 1978 black comedy that won Sam Shepard a Pulitzer Prize and put him on the map of American theater. Shepard’s reputation has been in a semi-eclipse of late, no doubt owing in part to the long wasting illness (he suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease) that killed him last year. So it is a pleasure to see Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s splendid revival of “Buried Child” and thereby be reminded that at his best, he really was as good as everybody remembers….

At a moment when so many younger playwrights seem determined to beat their audiences over the head with whatever they want them to think, it is a further pleasure to spend an evening watching a play that is at one and the same time effective and elusive, so much so that it’s genuinely hard to describe. Imagine “You Can’t Take It With You” rewritten by Edward Albee or Samuel Beckett, though, and you’ll start to get a sense of what happens, or appears to happen, in “Buried Child,” in the course of which Vince (Paul Cooper) and Shelly, his girlfriend (Andrea Morales), pay a visit his grandparents’ Illinois farm for the first time in six years. No sooner do they knock on the front door than they discover to their surprise and horror what we’ve already learned, which is that the poisonously crotchety members of Vince’s extended family all seem to have gone mad, albeit comically so—at first….

“Buried Child” doesn’t exactly act itself, but it works best when done plainly and straightforwardly, and Paul Mullins’ staging, in which every member of the cast seems as real as a character in a nightmare, is devoid of any trace of trickery….

Why on earth did anyone think it a good idea to mount a Broadway production of a British farce about a transgender gangster named Waxy Bush who attempts to fix the Snooker World Tournament—especially one in which all of the characters speak in a largely unintelligible working-class dialect? Having squirmed without cease through the U.S. premiere of Richard Bean’s “The Nap,” I’m forced to the conclusion that a not-inconsiderable number of New York theatergoers get a thrill out of hearing the words “f—“ and “c—“ pronounced with a Yorkshire accent. I can’t think of another reason to do “The Nap,” especially given the fact that the latest play by the author of “One Man, Two Guvnors” is relentlessly, incapacitatingly unfunny…

* * *

To read my complete review of Buried Child, go here.

To read my complete review of The Nap, go here.

The trailer for Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s revival of Buried Child:

A scene from Writers Theatre’s 2018 Chicago-area revival of Buried Child, directed by Kimberly Senior:

The nineteenth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

After a longer-than-normal hiatus, the critics return just in time for the fall theatre season to kick up.
At the top of the episode, critics discuss the demise of Theatre Talk, the longtime talk show hosted by the City University of New York, recently cancelled. All three of the critics have been guests on Theatre Talk, and they reminisce about what they loved about it and what its loss means for New York theatre.

For the first interview of the season, the critics sit down with Eric Tucker, artistic director of Bedlam, “one of the most adventurous” theatre companies in New York City, according to Peter.

The critics close out with what they’re looking forward to this fall…

To listen, download the latest episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.