“Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.”

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

On December 5 I’ll be giving the keynote address at the annual Black Orchid Banquet of the Wolfe Pack, the New York-based society whose members are jointly and severally devoted to the mystery novels of Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I read my first Nero Wolfe mystery in 1969, when I was thirteen years old, and have been a fan of Stout’s work ever since. Hence I regard the invitation as a signal honor, especially since my predecessors include Isaac Asimov, Jacques Barzun, Elaine May, Stephen Schwartz, and Donald Westlake.

Paul Hindemith once called America “the land of limited impossibilities.” My own life has been a string of increasingly extreme improbabilities, and every once in a while something happens that cause me to stop dead in my tracks and reflect on just how improbable certain of them have been. I’m not talking about six-alarm spectaculars like the opening nights of The Letter and Satchmo at the Waldorf, but smaller flashes of sudden awareness that cause me to see myself in the moment and ask, What on earth am I doing here? I’ve been trying without much success to imagine how I would have felt if some obliging spirit had taken the trouble to inform my thirteen-year-old self that I’d be speaking to the Wolfe Pack forty-six years later—or that I’d be simultaneously celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of my move to New York City.

Not long after I became a New Yorker, I was invited to a Park Avenue dinner party at which I was seated next to John Simon. Today John is a semi-retired nonagenarian who scarcely ever inspires public fistfights, but back then he was America’s most controversial drama critic, a fixed star on the cultural horizon who was sufficiently well known to the public at large to have played himself on a 1975 episode of The Odd Couple. I’d been reading his work with close attention for years, and I found the prospect of making conversation with him to be…well, a bit intimidating. Truth to tell, I still do. (If memory serves, my opening gambit was to ask him why his first book had been set in sans serif type, a query that he evidently found unexpected enough not to spend the rest of the evening talking to the person on his right.)

Beyond that, though, I was flummoxed by the mere fact of my presence at the dinner table. What was I doing chatting with the critic whose public feuds with such heavyweight types as Norman Mailer were deemed worthy of coverage in the pages of Entertainment Weekly? It seemed as though I were having an out-of-body experience and was gazing down at myself, or somebody who looked like me, from somewhere in the vicinity of the chandelier.

An old friend recently wrote to ask how I was dealing with the prospect of turning sixty next February. It so happens that he was also present at the very same dinner party at which I met John Simon. What’s more, my friend (who was not yet a friend—we’d only just met) had taken me out to lunch a few weeks earlier. He described that meal in print long after the fact: “Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew.” That sounds about right, though my friend couldn’t have known what I was really feeling, which was that my presence at lunch that day was due solely to some gross breakdown in the arrangement of the celestial order.

I felt much the same way when, twenty-one years later, I went to the White House to watch Cyd Charisse receive the National Medal of Arts, having sat by her at dinner the night before and asked her what it was like to dance with Fred Astaire. I knew I was there, but I still couldn’t believe it, any more than I ever found it possible to believe that I knew Bob Brookmeyer well enough to call him a friend.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that people who grow up in small towns, as I did half a century ago, never quite manage to get used to such not-so-minor miracles, much less learn to take them for granted. I doubt I ever will, and I hope I never do.

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Bob Brookmeyer and John Scofield play “Moonlight in Vermont” on Dutch TV circa 1980:

Since last Tuesday I’ve seen three shows, one in Boston and two on Broadway, and written the following:

• Two 800-word Wall Street Journal piece that will run on Friday, one of them a review of the shows I saw and the other a “Sightings” column whose subject is the 1955 and 1956 telecasts of Jerome Robbins’ musical version of Peter Pan.

• A 2,500-word review-essay for Commentary on Frank Sinatra.

• A 1,600-word review-essay for National Review on Gore Vidal.

• A 4,000-word lecture called “The Future of Theater” that I’ll be delivering on Wednesday in Lubbock, Texas.

I’m used to working hard, but even for me this was pretty extreme. Fortunately, I don’t have any more copy due until next week, and I have no plans to write between now and then (in part because I have to fly to Texas to give a speech on Wednesday).

On Sunday I rested. I didn’t write a word. Instead I read a book, looked at the art on our walls, listened to Darius Milhaud and William Schuman, watched I Want to Live! and The Third Man, took a walk in the neighborhood, and sent out for sushi.

If you want anything from me this week…you can’t have it.

Fiona Apple sings “I Walk a Little Faster,” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh. This performance was taped at a Coleman tribute concert given in Los Angeles in 2009:

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

“From tragedy it is seldom but a step to memorabilia.”

Larry McMurtry, “A Return to Waco” (The New Republic, June 7, 1993)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the belated Broadway premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia and the U.S. premiere of a new stage version of Thérèse Raquin. Here’s an excerpt.

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Some first-class playwrights just can’t catch a break on Broadway. “Sylvia,” originally produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1995, is A.R. Gurney’s fifth try, and for all its success in previous incarnations off Broadway and across the country, the play is only now receiving its Broadway premiere. Will it finally lift Mr. Gurney’s jinx? Straight plays rarely draw crowds without a screen-certified cash magnet, and Annaleigh Ashford and Matthew Broderick don’t quite qualify. On the other hand, “Sylvia” is one of the very best small-cast comedies of the past quarter-century, and this revival, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is so funny that I can’t see how it could fail to ring the box-office gong.

The conceit of “Sylvia” is that the title character (Ms. Ashford) is a dog, a stray poodle-Labrador mix who talks, but only to Greg and Kate (Mr. Broderick and Julie White), her master and mistress, both of whom are middle-aged and feeling it. To us, of course, Sylvia looks like a sexy girl—the only giveaway is the nametag that she wears around her neck—but she acts like a dog and, insofar as it’s possible for a playwright to know, thinks like one, too. (Sylvia to Greg: “I love you. I really do. Even when you hit me, I love you. I think you’re God, if you want to know.”) This being a comedy and Greg being athwart the male menopause, he falls, sort of, for Sylvia, thereby triggering a five-alarm inter-species crisis.

I didn’t see Sarah Jessica Parker, who created the role of Sylvia in 1995, but I did catch the Florida Repertory Theatre’s superb 2011 revival, directed by Maureen Heffernan, in which Michelle Damato played the poodle perfectly. Unlike Ms. Heffernan, who saw that “Sylvia” is a serious comedy about marriage that is even funnier when played straight, Mr. Sullivan bangs on the punch lines: Ms. Ashford, who won a Tony last year for overacting in “You Can’t Take It With You,” nails the crotch-sniffing canine slapstick but is self-consciously cute…

Here we go again: Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin,” which by my admittedly approximate count has been turned into seven plays, five films, five TV movies, three mini-series, two musicals and two operas, is back on Broadway, this time as a sexed-up vehicle for Keira Knightley, the latest aging screen idol (for a female movie star, 30 is old) to succumb to the wiles of the Roundabout Theatre Company.

It stands to reason that the erstwhile heroine of “Pirates of the Caribbean” should be making her American stage debut as Zola’s desire-crazed murderess, since his 1867 novel, stripped of its police-report prose, plays like a Bette Davis movie, with Young Bette as Thérèse and Old Bette (Judith Light) as her mother-in-law. Any way you gnaw it, though, “Thérèse Raquin” is a dreary hambone that once was shocking but is now quaint, and Helen Edmundson, whose sole previous Broadway credit was the inept 2007 stage version of “Coram Boy,” has done no better by Zola. The pacing is arthritic—it takes a good 40 minutes for the plot to get rolling—and the dialogue is…well, like this: “Sometimes I think the water is a creature. A silent animal that pretends it doesn’t see me.” As for Ms. Knightley, she gives the kind of flat, underprojected performance you’d expect from an untrained Broadway debutante with limited stage experience…

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To read my review of Sylvia, go here.

To read my review of Thérèse Raquin, go here.

An excerpt from an interview with Arthur Miller originally telecast by the CBC in 1971:

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

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Cecil Dawkins, Dec. 9, 1958