Archives for May 2007

“The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness–drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die.”
David Solway, interview, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 9, 2007 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Here’s part of what I’ve been up to since returning from Chicago last week:

• On Thursday Apollinaire Scherr and I paid a visit to New York City Ballet, where we saw an all-Tchaikovsky program consisting of two masterpieces (George Balanchine’s Mozartiana and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, also known as Ballet Imperial) and an agreeable second-tier work (Jerome Robbins’ Piano Pieces). The dancing was only just good enough–I hear that the company put in so much time rehearsing Peter Martins’ new Romeo and Juliet ballet that the rest of the spring repertory was more or less ignored–and the orchestra sounded frightful. To be sure, one can never waste time looking at Ballet Imperial, or talking to Apollinaire about dance, but beyond that it was an unmemorable evening.

• On Friday I watched Alain Resnais’ film version of Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, a play about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal when it was first performed in America in the summer of 2005:

Mr. Ayckbourn’s entry in the “Brits Off Broadway” festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can’t come any closer to describing the effect of “Private Fears in Public Places” than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness, and when it’s over you won’t quite know how you feel, other than thoroughly entertained….

I can see how a superficial viewer might mistake it for a piece of commercial work. Don’t be deceived by the shiny surface of “Private Fears in Public Places,” though: it’s as serious as a broken heart.

Resnais’ film–whose French title, as it happens, is Coeurs–follows Ayckbourn’s play very closely, a fact that escaped the attention of most of its reviewers. (It’s surprising how few film critics are familiar with the literary sources of the films about which they write.) I don’t speak French and so can’t tell you how faithfully the dialogue has been translated, but the scene-by-scene structure of the film is more or less identical to that of the play. The big difference between the two is that Coeurs, unlike Private Fears, isn’t funny, and apparently wasn’t meant to be.

The most distinctive thing about Ayckbourn’s plays, as I observed in my Wall Street Journal review of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2005 revival of Absurd Person Singular, is the unsettling way in which they mix laughter and sorrow:

Ayckbourn is not infrequently mistaken for a commercial playwright. In fact, he’s a kind of poet, a craftsman of genius (he even wrote a book called “The Crafty Art of Playmaking”) whose riotously funny studies of the English middle class are streaked with melancholy and regret. In “Absurd Person Singular,” set in the kitchens of three different homes on three consecutive Christmases, you can see his method at its purest. Each act depicts a different phase in the lives of three newly acquainted married couples whose relationships are in flux. At the beginning of the evening, Jane and Sidney are trying desperately to impress their new friends, and at the end they’ve become the top dogs. In between is two hours’ worth of furious farce arising from the varied sorrows of the six characters. In the zaniest scene, Eva tries repeatedly but unsuccessfully to kill herself. You can’t help but laugh at her increasingly preposterous attempts–but you don’t forget for a moment that she’s not kidding.

Not so Coeurs. Perhaps it might seem funnier to a French-speaking viewer, but somehow I doubt it: Mark Snow’s score is unabashedly bittersweet, and the overall tone of the film is elegiac to a fault. It is, however, wholly convincing on its own dark terms, and I strongly recommend that you seek it out. (It’s currently playing on IFC’s on-demand channel in New York and will be released on DVD later this summer.)

• I also watched a kinescope of the original 1953 telecast of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Videotape was still in the cradle back in the Fifties, and all three networks ran weekly drama anthology series broadcast live from New York. Most of the scripts were mediocre and are rightly forgotten, but a few of the better teleplays of the period, among them N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, Rod Serling’s Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, and Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, were later adapted for Broadway and/or Hollywood and thus are still remembered.

Marty was filmed in 1955. It was the first low-budget indie flick to take Hollywood by surprise, winning the best-picture Oscar and grossing $5 million (it cost $340,000 to make). Alas, the film version, which starred Ernest Borgnine, wasn’t very good. Borgnine’s acting is likable but ordinary, while Chayefsky’s screenplay, to which he added a half-hour’s worth of additional scenes in order to make it long enough for theatrical release, is flabby. The original hour-long TV version, by contrast, is lean, direct, and characterful, and Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, who play a pair of painfully plain New Yorkers looking for love, are so natural and unaffected that they scarcely seem to be acting at all. It’s easy to see why Marty, though it only aired once on network TV, made a deep and long-lasting impression on all who saw it.

If you go in for trivia, by the way, you probably already know that a half-century after appearing in the best-remembered live TV drama of the Fifties, Marchand made a similarly powerful impression on postmodern viewers when she played Tony Soprano’s mother. I have decidedly mixed feelings about the so-called Golden Age of Television, but some of it was and is worth celebrating, and it’s nice to know that one of its most talented actors lived long enough to do equally unforgettable work in the true Golden Age of series TV.

To be continued….

I’m listening to unfamiliar music again after a travel-related hiatus. On Friday I listened to Frank Martin’s Ballade for Piano and Orchestra, composed in 1939 and recorded for Chandos by Roderick Elms, Matthias Bamert and the London Philharmonic in 1994.

“My appetite for power, and for money, was undeniable, as was the craving for glory (to give that beautiful and impassioned name to what is merely our itch to hear ourselves spoken of).”
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

My summer playgoing began last week with a visit to Chicago, where I saw performances by Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Court Theatre, and the House Theatre of Chicago. All are reviewed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Shakespeare never wrote a tougher play than “Troilus and Cressida.” Is it a comedy or a tragedy–or both? It all depends on how you direct it. When Barbara Gaines, the founder and artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, first produced this knotty tale of love and death in the Trojan War, she emphasized the romance. Now she’s wrapping up her company’s 20th anniversary season with an opulently violent “Troilus” staged with breathtaking speed and concentration and climaxing in the best battle scene I’ve ever seen on a stage.
This is a wartime “Troilus” with a hard political edge–the main set piece is a blood-soaked obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument–but Ms. Gaines has taken care not to wear her opinions on her sleeve. Instead, she lets Shakespeare do the talking: “And appetite, an universal wolf,/So doubly seconded with will and power,/Must make perforce an universal prey,/And last eat up himself.” You’re more than welcome to draw parallels with the war in Iraq if you wish, but it’s no less acceptable to approach Ms. Gaines’ “Troilus” as a broader parable of man’s monstrosity to man….
The phenomenal success of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” has made regional theater directors Stoppard-conscious. I plan to spend the next couple of months reporting on a string of American revivals of his plays, and I’m happy to say that the first show on my list, the Court Theatre’s blithe and incisive mounting of “Arcadia,” is an extraordinarily fine piece of work….
In addition to well-established companies like Chicago Shakespeare and the Court, the Windy City has no shortage of small troupes whose productions are comparable in quality to the best that Off Off Broadway has to offer. I sang the praises of Remy Bumppo Theater Company in this space last September, and this time around a theater-savvy local steered me to the House Theatre of Chicago, a gaggle of twentysomethings who put on shows in a converted garage across the street from a North Side viaduct. (The lobby contains a bar and a pool table!)
You can’t get much farther off the beaten path than that, but Ben Lobpries’ “Hope Springs Infernal” is more than worth the extra mileage….

No link, so do the usual: either buy the paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and other art-related stories. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“The art of the theater–notoriously an ‘impure’ art–seems to be as close to the art of politics as it is to poetry, painting or music. The theater artist, whether actor or playwright, depends on the interest and support of an audience, just as the politician depends upon his constituency. The politician cannot practice his art at all without a grant from his constituency; and so he must first of all woo it. And the theater artist cannot practice his art without real people assembled before a real stage; a theater without an audience is a contradiction in terms. That is why both politics and the theater are necessarily so close to the public mood and the public mind of their times.”
Francis Fergusson, The Human Image in Dramatic Literature