About Last Night

From 2005:

I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes….

Read the whole thing here.

“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, June 28, 1956

A five-year-old Flannery O’Connor appears in a rare 1932 Pathé newsreel segment about a chicken she taught to walk backwards:

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

“I think you probably collect most of your experience as a child—when you really had nothing else to do—and then transfer it to other situations when you write.

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Maryat Lee (February 24, 1947)

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Signature Theatre’s Simply Sondheim and the Mint Theater Company revival of Hazel Ellis’ Women Without Men. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Lovers of large-scale musicals have been feeling more than usually deprived by the Covid-19 pandemic. In theory, it shouldn’t be impossible to webcast a musical, but it’s technically very difficult—too many people, too much stuff going on—and the only one I’ve reviewed, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s wonderful revival of “Meet Me in St. Louis,” was a scaled-down version in which the actors “phoned in” their performances, taping them from their separate homes, after which they were edited together in the studio. So it is inspiring to report that Virginia’s Signature Theatre, one of the top American regional theaters that specialize in musicals, is webcasting “Simply Sondheim,” a fully-staged 33-song revue directed and choreographed by Matthew Gardiner and performed in the company’s empty 275-seat theater by 12 singers and a 15-player pit orchestra. No, it’s not “Sweeney Todd” on a Broadway-sized stage, but it is fabulously fine in its own right and comes across with irrepressible vitality on a small screen….

The Mint Theater Company continues its webcast series of broadcast-ready archival videos of its shows with Hazel Ellis’s “Women Without Men,” directed by Jenn Thompson and taped at a 2016 off-Broadway performance. It’s another of the Mint’s out-of-nowhere finds, a 1938 all-female ensemble piece by a prodigiously gifted Irish playwright who wrote two well-received dramas, then put down her pen. “Women Without Men,” the second of them, is a group portrait of the contentious teachers of a Protestant girls’ boarding school in Dublin, and as usual with the Mint, it is so stageworthy as to make you wonder why it vanished from sight eight decades ago….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Norm Lewis sings “Being Alive” in Simply Sondheim:

“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.”

Tennessee Williams (in conversation with Kenneth Tynan, 1955)

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I write about Patricia Highsmith. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The next time you watch a movie or TV series about a heartless serial killer, say a silent word of thanks to the novelist who made such plots possible. It was Patricia Highsmith, born a century ago last month, who flung open the doors of Hollywood and invited the crazies in.

Highsmith specialized in jolting tales of mentally disordered men and women who mirrored her own profound strangeness and motiveless malignity (she was a racist and anti-Semite). “If she hadn’t had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics’ home,” a friend claimed. She made her debut as a novelist in 1950 with “Strangers on a Train,” the story of a charming psychopath named Bruno who offers a deal to a man whom he meets by chance on a train: He will kill the man’s promiscuous wife in return for having the father he despises murdered, assuming that no one will connect the two killings and both men will get away scot-free. Bruno fulfills his end of the deal, but Guy, the other man, never took the pact seriously and refuses to cooperate, sending Bruno into a downward spiral of lunatic frenzy. When Alfred Hitchcock filmed “Strangers” in 1951, he cast Robert Walker, heretofore a boy-next-door type, as Bruno, and Walker gave a performance whose flamboyant panache is at once perversely appealing and truly terrifying….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the film version of Strangers on a Train, starring Robert Walker and Farley Granger:

A scene from the film version of Ripley’s Game, starring John Malkovich:

“I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.”

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh