About Last Night

Q. You speak of your early plays as being poetic. What caused the change?

A. When I first started writing plays I couldn’t write good dialogue because I didn’t respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. The important thing is not to censor them. What they are talking about may not seem to have anything to do with what you as a writer are writing about but it does. Let them talk and it will connect, because you as a writer will make it connect. The more my characters talk, the more I find out about them. So I encourage them. I tell them, “Tell me more.” I just write it down and it starts to make connections.

August Wilson, interview, Paris Review (Winter 1999)

Time Out New York has just published a multi-part feature called “Critiquing the Critics”
in which New York-based arts professionals (including publicists) were invited to grade the critics who cover them. The participants in the survey are identified by name, but their comments about specific critics are anonymous–with good reason, too, in more than a few cases.

This is, in theory, a nifty idea. I was going to comment on the methodology of the survey, which is (to put it mildly) problematic, but it seems that fellow blogger Apollinaire Scherr, the dance critic of Newsday, has already done it for me. As for the actual results, they’re both interesting and on occasion highly suggestive. If you’re curious, you can read what the panelists had to say about New York’s drama critics, myself included, by going here.

I should add, by the way, that I don’t quarrel with any of the specific comments that were made about me, which is–I suppose–a pleasant surprise.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)

– The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Vertical Hour* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)

– Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes Mar. 6)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)

OFF BROADWAY:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here, closes Jan. 14)

CLOSING SATURDAY:

– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

– Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

“There is, indeed, an art to being an aware and responsive audience. In recent years, we have fallen into a simple-minded equation of ‘participation’ with overt activity. But one participates more meaningfully in really seeing one great work than in turning out a hundred mediocrities.”

Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists

This year’s Grammy nominations
are even duller than usual, but there are some highlights among the dross. I was amazed and delighted, for instance, to see that Karrin Allyson’s Footprints, Nancy King’s Live at Jazz Standard with Fred Hersch, and Diana Krall’s From This Moment On were all nominated as Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Here are some other noteworthy nominations:

– BEST COUNTRY INSTRUMENTAL PERFORMANCE: Chris Thile, “The Eleventh Reel,” from How to Grow a Woman From the Ground (Sugar Hill)

– BEST JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM, INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP: Jack DeJohnette, Larry Goldings, and John Scofield, Trio Beyond–Saudades (ECM)

– BEST LARGE JAZZ ENSEMBLE ALBUM: Bob Brookmeyer and the New Art Orchestra, Spirit Music (ArtistShare)

– BEST SOUTHERN, COUNTRY, OR BLUEGRASS GOSPEL ALBUM: Del McCoury Band, The Promised Land (McCoury Music)

– BEST CONTEMPORARY FOLK/AMERICANA ALBUM: Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac (Capitol)

– BEST MUSICAL SHOW ALBUM: The original-cast albums of The Drowsy Chaperone (Ghostlight) and the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (Nonesuch)

– BEST ALBUM NOTES: Fats Waller, If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It! (Bluebird/Legacy, notes by Dan Morgenstern)

– BEST CLASSICAL VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Ian Bostridge, Britten Orchestral Song Cycles (EMI Classics)

Somehow I doubt that any of these folks will be seen on the Grammy telecast!

Speaking of niche marketing, I was fascinated to learn that in addition to such hair-splitting categories as Best Rap/Sung Collaboration and Best Surround Sound Album, there are now Grammies for the best albums in the following categories: Tropical Latin, Mexican/Mexican-American, Tejano, Norte

New York Review Books, which is doing some of the most interesting publishing today, has launched a blog that should be worth keeping an eye on: A Different Stripe. As it happens, the last book I finished was an NYRB Classic and a curious specimen. Here’s a review/reflection.

Caroline Blackwood’s taut, efficient Great Granny Webster (1977) is a novel with a void and a chill at the center. Autobiographical to an unknown degree, it is narrated by the great-granddaughter of the title character. About the narrator’s great-grandmother, grandmother, and aunt, we learn a great deal, none of it favorable. About the orphaned narrator herself we know little more than her appalled apprehension of her female forebears. The book is in some ways reminiscent of Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood–notably in the perspective it adopts of the preternaturally observant orphan imprisoned in a a secondhand family of unsympathetic relative strangers–but substitutes a vague air of disaffection for the young Mary’s sense of persecution and injustice. Unlike McCarthy’s book, it purports to be a novel, but reportedly lost the Booker Prize by the tiebreaking vote of Philip Larkin, who admired it but bestowed his favor elsewhere because he suspected Blackwood of having written nonfiction.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as unfurl, swish, swish, swish, in three rather static character studies followed by a brief coda that brings us graveside to descend into the vertiginous pitch-dark slapstick on which this odd reading experience ends. The first and dominant portrait is of Great Granny Webster herself, with whom the fourteen-year-old narrator is deposited to convalesce following an illness. In a great, grim house in a suburb of Brighton with a single servant, Great Granny Webster lives as a kind of carefully preserved monument to thrift and propriety, the embodied inverse of plenty and pleasure–“fiercely joyless,” the narrator calls her.

And yet–is Great Granny really altogether without her charms, however unintentional?

…sometimes after meals had been served she would wait for the crippled figure of Richards to go limping out of the room, and she would suddenly start to make a few bleak and deadpan statements without appearing to expect any answer. I had the feeling that if I had not been with her, she would still have made the same remarks aloud to herself.

“Now-a-days,” she would suddenly say, “people have been spoiled. They don’t want to be servants any more. It’s all the fault of the war. It’s this last beastly war that has given them all such a taste for working in munitions.”

She would take some saccharine from her silver sugar-bowl and drop it carefully into her tiny china coffee-cup and stir it slowly until it dissolved. She never took more than one frugal little tablet. She often told me she could not abide waste.”

“I know exactly how to answer them, when now-a-days they ask me how I would like to be their servant!”

She would pause dramatically, like an actress who expects to be clapped for her line. Her pursed little discontented mouth would give a twitch, the only movement it seemed able to make that faintly resembled a smile.

“Poor silly things! I know exactly how to answer that! If I ever had to be their servant–I would only be the most excellent servant!”

Something in this, and in other details about the matriarch Webster, I found oddly disarming. And at the end of the narrator’s eight-week stay at Hove, she startles the narrator at the train station by recalling her grandson, the narrator’s father, dead in the war, with real emotion. The narrator’s response: “Goodbye.” She’s fourteen, so this is understandable. What’s less so is how untouched by this show of feeling her mature, retrospective account of her great-grandmother is–so invested is it in the picturesque extremity of the bleakness it paints.

In their own distinct ways, the portraits that follow–of the narrator’s suicidal, fast-living aunt Lavinia and her unpicturesquely insane grandmother–are also sad descriptive tours de force. The sketch of the grandmother comes secondhand from the tales of an old school chum of the narrator’s father. While we hear almost nothing of her mother, her father is the painfully missing piece whose absence exacerbates all of the characters’ worst tendencies and miseries. He’s doubly a cipher, not only absent but mysterious to the narrator–specifically in the attachment he demonstrated to Great Granny Webster, who, in the explanatory narrative the narrator would like us to believe, is the ultimate agent of all the dysfunction besetting the family.

She doesn’t quite fit into that narrative, however, just as in the queasily comical horror of the final scene, she exceeds the space–in the ground and in the ceremony–allotted for her:

And then there seemed to be too much of Great Granny Webster to be emptied into the ground. There was something almost obscene in the sheer quantities in which she was emerging. I had expected that the clergyman would just take one handful of her ashes and throw them into the grave as a symbol. But instead he kept impatiently tipping the urn and his frozen face looked exasperated at the way that her white powdery substance would not stop flowing out.

Blackwood was a talent, no doubt, and Great Granny Webster is a bracing read in its chilly way: remorseless, fiendishly precise, generously larded with memorable scenes and characters, and frequently funny in an awful way (see especially the Lavinia chapter). The funeral scene on which it ends introduces into the mix lasting, intertwined notes of comedy and despair. By emphasizing the narrator’s undying dread of the woman being put to rest it raises the possibility that what seems the book’s cold climate belongs more precisely to the narrator.

“The great man who can only be succeeded by a

More blogging to come this evening, but for now here are some links to go with your cup of joe:

– I agree with Dan Green of the Reading Experience probably half the time, but I always read him. He can be counted on, for one thing, to seethe eloquently about what’s wrong with academic literary studies, as in his post today:

What now passes for literary criticism in the learned journals does less than nothing to encourage active reading, much less rereading. It wades around in the shallow waters of ideology and second-hand social analysis, leaving serious readers of literature to swim for themselves.

– I know, I know–some of you don’t want to hear about hockey! But far more estimable arts bloggers than your present interlocutor occasionally must need blog on such lesser matters. A new entry in the wide world of hockey blogs is A Theory of Ice. It’s turned my head with consistently elegant writing, and is particularly good on the culture of the game and its followers, as here on physicality as a two-sided coin and here on fandom and love.

– Mr. Quiet Bubble wasn’t bowled over by Borat. Can’t say I was either, though I giggled plenty. The Saunders link is well worth following. Part of the reason it’s been hard to blog lately is that so many of my recent literary and cinematic excursions have proven so blah. I crave a transformative art experience, but it turns out this doesn’t happen on demand. I do have a new lead or two, though, about which more soon.

See you tonight!