Archives for January 31, 2006

Wendy Wasserstein died yesterday morning. I met her several years ago when I interviewed her for a story in Time about Central Park, a trilogy of one-act operas to which she had contributed a libretto. I liked her enormously–everybody did–and I was always pleased to run into her at New York City Ballet, which she frequented once upon a time. Then she dropped out of sight, had a baby, and more or less vanished from the theater world. Her plays were no longer being performed in New York by the time I became a drama critic, and it wasn’t until last October that I had occasion to write about her in The Wall Street Journal.

Alas, her last play wasn’t any good, and I said so. I hated to give Third a bad review, not least because I knew Wasserstein was sick, though I didn’t know she was dying. (One of the characters in the play had cancer.) In fact, I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady. I fudged the point in my review, calling her “one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect.” All true, and none of it incompatible with the fact that I considered her to be a glib, punch-pulling lightweight, a kind of feminist Neil Simon who never cut too close to the knuckle.

Needless to say, you won’t find such heretical sentiments in any of today’s obituaries. Even John Simon wrote affectionately about Wasserstein, making it clear that he liked her both as a writer and as a person. Might my own feelings about her work have been softened had I gotten to know her more than casually? It’s quite possible. George Orwell once wrote a letter to Stephen Spender in 1938 in which he made this wholly characteristic confession:

You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you….Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.

It is partly for similar reasons that I don’t mix much in theatrical circles. In addition, The Wall Street Journal is extremely fussy about conflicts of interest (as it has to be, seeing as how it devotes so much of its space to financial affairs), so I mostly keep theater people at arm’s length. If I did otherwise, I’d be a different kind of critic–not better or worse, just different. There are many ways to be a critic. I write about theater as an interested spectator. I write about the visual arts as a connoisseur and collector. I write about music as an ex-practitioner. I write about writing as a working professional. It’s always me–everywhere you go, there you are–but it isn’t hard to tell which me has the floor at any given moment.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m feeling a little guilty about my review of Third, which is one of the risks an honest critic runs. It isn’t the first time I’ve felt that way, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Criticism is a morally dangerous profession, and those who practice it without ever feeling guilty are…well, not very nice. As I wrote early in the life of this blog:

You don’t review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That’s another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls “the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night.” It’s hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It’s scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like–of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up–then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.

That’s the hard part.

Hey, ALN pal and local public radio impresario Edward Lifson has a new blog! It’s called Teatro Lifson, is part of the website of his Sunday morning arts show Hello Beautiful!, and is off to a very auspicious beginning. Edward is a great arts polymath, though he’s especially passionate and knowledgeable about architecture and design. In fact, he was responsible for one of the great moments of Terry’s visit to Chicago last weekend. Following the Chris Thile-Mike Marshall mandolin concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music, we strolled with my friend David down Lincoln Avenue to indulge in what turned out to be one of the best cups of hot chocolate I ever have encountered. En route, we passed a striking storefront, but it wasn’t until we retraced our steps that I discovered it was none other than Louis Sullivan’s last building, the Krause Music Store. And the only reason that I, alone among us, knew of the significance of the Krause Music Store? Mr. Edward Lifson, natch.

Last summer Edward hosted a special live edition of HB! devoted to music and architecture, which I attended. I wrote about it only briefly here, holding back the best material as the show hadn’t aired yet. (It has now, and you can still listen.) Edward’s guest for that show, Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, ended the episode with a story about the symmetry of the ends of two great careers, Scott Joplin’s and Louis Sullivan’s. By the end of his life, each man had outlived the fame and fortune of his earlier career and, around the same time, each pursued what would be his last projects in relative obscurity. The last building Sullivan designed was the facade of the modest Krause shop; he needed the money, if you can believe that. Joplin’s last surviving composition was the luminous “Magnetic Rag.” That evening at the Cultural Center, Tim Samuelson had brought with him a player piano reel of “Magnetic Rag” that recorded Joplin’s own performance–his last known recording of his last surviving composition. We looked at slides of Sullivan’s building while listening to Joplin play. I don’t know when else I’ve been in an audience that was simultaneously so hushed and so electrified by a recording. It was an amazing thing to see and, especially, to hear. And that’s why it was so cool to run headlong into the Krause Music Store last weekend, even without the benefit of the proper soundtrack. And that’s one of the reasons we might kind of gush when we say, Hello Teatro!

Fame is intense but fleeting in a TV-driven culture, which is one of the many reasons why I love watching the old What’s My Line? kinescopes that air at three-thirty each morning on the Game Show Network. Most of the celebrities who appeared on the show between 1950 and 1967, when CBS cancelled it to make way for Mission: Impossible, are now dead, but a few are very much with us, though many of them are long forgotten. I saw an episode a couple of nights ago in which Mitch Miller was the mystery guest. The audience all but tore the roof off when he came on stage–yet who now remembers him save for pop-music historians and retired oboe players? On the other hand, Jerry Lewis, a guest panelist on another of last week’s episodes, is both alive and well remembered, so much so that I’m actually giving serious thought to reading his new book, unlikely as it may sound.

The difference, of course, is that Lewis was a movie star. As a rule, TV stars are remembered until their shows are cancelled, after which they fade away quickly. Sometimes they find work in the legitimate theater, but it’s been a long time since success on Broadway made anyone a household name. (Pop quiz for readers outside the New York area: who is Cherry Jones? Don’t peek.) Yet the producers of What’s My Line? regularly booked stage stars, confident that the show’s viewers would know who they were. Sic transit gloria Broadway!

Ben Gazzara, the mystery guest on a 1961 What’s My Line? that I saw recently, is a case in point. He created the role of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before relocating to Hollywood, where he appeared in a hit TV series, Run for Your Life, in 1965. Alas, he never quite managed to parlay his short-lived small-screen celebrity into bonafide big-screen stardom, though he’s worked steadily ever since and turns up from time to time in choice little roles (he’s in The Big Lebowski). Still, Gazzara is far from famous, and the fact that he starred in the original Broadway production of a celebrated American play is scarcely more than the tricky answer to a better-than-average trivia question, especially since some other fellow was tapped to play Brick in the movie.

It happens that Gazzara is returning to Broadway this spring: he’s been cast in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing, which opens April 17 at the Belasco Theatre. Odets, who died in 1963, is another one of those half-remembered names who used to be really, really big. In the Thirties he was one of the best-known American playwrights of his generation, a red-hot fellow traveler who palled around with all the big left-wing names (he commissioned Aaron Copland’s wonderful Piano Sonata, for instance). Then, like Ben Gazzara, he moved to Hollywood, and now he’s better known, if at all, for Sweet Smell of Success than Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, or even Waiting for Lefty.

It happens, too, that I’ve never seen a production of an Odets play, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing Awake and Sing, about which I first learned from reading “Clifford Odets: Poet of the Jewish Middle Class,” one of Robert Warshow’s finest essays (it’s collected in The Immediate Experience, an essential book to which I paid tribute in the Teachout Reader). I’ve never seen Ben Gazzara on stage, either, though I remember watching Run for Your Life as a child, and more recently was impressed by the videotaped snippet of his stage performance as Brick that Rick McKay included in Broadway: The Golden Age.

I’m not going anywhere with this: I’m just rambling. It’s the privilege of a blogger with a long memory who turns fifty next Monday. Believe it or not, I don’t live in the past. No working journalist does, especially one with so many young friends. Even so, I do enjoy rummaging around in my well-stocked memory, and I don’t mind admitting that there are times when I prefer communing with the increasingly distant past to grappling with the uncomfortably proximate present. Ben Gazzara, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Robert Warshow, even Jerry Lewis: today they all seem far more real to me than the pretty people I’d be reading about in Entertainment Weekly if I read Entertainment Weekly. No doubt this has something to do with my recent brush with mortality. To borrow a line from Patrick O’Brian, I’ve been a bar or two behind ever since I got out of the hospital, and though I’m sure I’ll catch up sooner or later, I find it oddly pleasant to linger among ghosts.

I reread Brideshead Revisited last week, and found that Evelyn Waugh had once again summed up my mood better than I could myself:

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life–for we possess nothing certainly except the past–were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, single, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.

I, too, am surrounded by pigeons this morning, and I’ll be sorry when the noon gun booms.

Against stupidity the very gods

Themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich von Schiller, The Maid of Orleans

Just read Maud.

UPDATE: Also Outer Life. Then you can have a snack.