About Last Night

From 2005:

I love New York, but I couldn’t even begin to pass for a native, even when I don my All-Black Outfit and venture south of Theatre Row, or put on a suit for an opening night. People with backgrounds like mine have been known to retreat into snobbery in order to conceal their origins, but I’m homemade and proud to be. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, which suggests that a snob might be someone who appreciates the prestige of everything and the beauty of nothing. That’s not me. I cry at the theater and buy prints because I like to look at them. I’m too enthusiastic to be cool and too shy to be clubbable….

Read the whole thing here.

“‘Why are you fascinated?’ she asked, and she spoke in that timid, husky voice of hers that men always liked.”

John P. Marquand, B.F.’s Daughter

I flew up from Florida to New York City late on Friday afternoon, mere hours after the blood stopped flowing in Paris. I had a brilliantly clear view of lower Manhattan after dark as our plane swung round toward LaGuardia Airport. It was impossible for me not to think of the terrible day fourteen years ago when I flew back to New York from my childhood home in a half-empty plane, stunned by the grotesque carnage that I had seen on my mother’s TV and transfixed by the plume of smoke and ash rising from Ground Zero, which was visible from my window seat.

My life has changed utterly since then, transformed beyond recognition by a happy marriage, the death of a parent, and the unforeseen advent of an creative urge that has made me over into a part-time artist. But the world in which I live today is in one important respect no different than it was in 2001: now as then, we are besieged by men with twisted souls who march in lockstep to a still small voice that tells them to hate the world as it is and to kill and kill until that world crumbles, even as the Twin Towers crumbled.

How shall we answer them? With blood and iron, of course, that being our only common language. But those whose privilege it is to make art also have a simultaneous duty to magnify the beauty of the world that the killers hate.

This is something that I talked about last year when I turned my Bradley Award lecture into an essay called “Confessions of an Aesthete”:

Yet art does indeed have a greater purpose, one suggested in this pithy line from an essay by the American painter and art critic Fairfield Porter: “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” That is the point of being an aesthete. If, like the Taliban, you hate the world, then it follows that you will hate art as well, or at least distrust it. But if you love the world, you will find in art a way of magnifying (in the religious sense of the word) its beauties.

It happens that one of the three dozen pieces of art that Mrs. T and I own is a lithograph by Pierre Bonnard, a 1942 study of a naked woman bathing herself. The first thing that I did when I got back to our apartment was turn on the lights and look at “Femme assise dans sa baignoire.” We would not be allowed to hang it if we lived in a land ruled by the Taliban or their monstrous confrères, for it violates every imaginable tenet of their life-denying faith. Hence the two of us are prouder than ever to display it on our walls today.

Classic Stage Company is mounting a rare American production of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country that I’ll be flying to New York to see at the end of January. Like most Russian writers, Turgenev is not widely known in this country, but Henry James knew and admired him and his work, and it was Turgenev who inspired this quintessentially Jamesian meditation on the duty of the aesthete:

Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.

For what it’s worth, I, too, have chosen to dedicate my life to the cause of “swelling the volume of consciousness.” Though I claim no great courage in doing so, I hope that I will prove worthy if a time should ever come when I must defend that choice against those who believe that art is something to be tamed—or destroyed.

On Saturday I saw two friends and two Broadway shows. I returned to LaGuardia the next morning, took off my belt and shoes, and submitted to being patted down by a guard. Behind him I saw a TSA poster hanging on the airport wall. NEVER FORGET 9/11/2001, it said. Don’t worry, I thought. Then I got on the plane that whisked me back to Sanibel Island and Mrs. T, far from Ground Zero and 10 Rue Nicholas-Appert but still part of the beautiful world that the evil ones long to burn.

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A scene from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight::

Peggy Lee sings “Fever” on TV in the late Sixties, accompanied by Max Bennett on bass and Jack Sperling on drums:

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

“It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.”

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on a Florida production of Lewis Black’s One Slight Hitch. Here’s an excerpt.

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It isn’t unusual for actors to try their hand at playwriting, and some of them, like Zoe Kazan, do it very well. But except for Woody Allen, I can’t recall any working comedians who’ve been particularly successful at writing for the legitimate stage. (Unlike Mr. Allen, Steve Martin didn’t start writing plays until after he stopped doing stand-up.) This makes sense, since stand-up comedians are short hitters who work with a company of one. Plays call for a larger canvas, as well as a grasp of dramatic structure that is alien to the smash-and-grab methods of even the most inspired comics.

Enter Lewis Black, who is best known for his appearances on “The Daily Show.” Mr. Black, who started out as a playwright but never had much luck at it, has taken another shot at bucking the odds with a two-act play called “One Slight Hitch” that’s been making the regional rounds and is now being performed by Florida Repertory Theatre, a top-notch company whose custom is to offer its audiences something light in January. On the surface, “One Slight Hitch,” a comedy about a wedding that goes haywire, fills the bill with ease—but Mr. Black’s play is more serious than it seems.

The first surprise about “One Slight Hitch” is that it’s not at all the kind of play you’d expect from a stand-up comedian. Instead of being a slurry of one-liners held together by an exiguous plot, it’s a solidly built piece of theatrical carpentry about a nuclear family in comic crisis. From “The Philadelphia Story” (to which “One Slight Hitch” bears a definite resemblance) in the ‘30s to “Never Too Late” in the ‘60s, such plays used to be Broadway’s commercial stock in trade, but they’ve pretty much died off in recent years. Hence it’s a nostalgic treat to watch Mr. Black ring the changes on the once-familiar, still-hummable theme of what happens to a seemingly happy, soon-to-be-wed couple (Rachel Moulton and Sid Solomon) when the ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend of the bride-to-be (Nate Washburn) shows up without warning at the front door of her horrified parents (Martin LaPlatney and Carrie Lund) on the morning of her great big wedding.

What gives “One Slight Hitch” its distinctive flavor is that Delia, the mother, is a member of the Greatest Generation who was forced to marry in haste and fear during World War II and has longed ever since to make up for it by putting together a super-wedding for one of her three daughters. Mr. Black’s brand of comedy has a strong political flavor, so it figures that Delia and her family should be staunchly Republican suburbanites. The twist is that Delia, as a shrink might put it, has insight into her condition, and expresses it with great poignancy…

That’s a tricky mix to manage, and “One Slight Hitch” doesn’t always jell, in part because the first act, which feels like the set-up for a four-doors-and-a-guy-in-drag farce, is too loosely written (Mr. Black could have trimmed 10 minutes out of it). But the laughs flow freely after intermission, and Ms. Lund, one of the mainstays of Florida Rep’s semi-permanent ensemble, is very much up to the challenging task of finding the emotional heart of Delia’s climactic monologue….

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Read the whole thing here.

“It is hard to see a friend rise socially without envy; and envy tends to disguise itself as moral disapproval.”

David Cecil, Max: A Biography of Max Beerbohm

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

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, all performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• The Elephant Man (drama, PG-13, contains partial nudity, all performances sold out last week, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• My Old Lady (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)