Archives for June 2007

I’m traveling today. See you tomorrow!

He served his God so faithfully and well

That now he sees him face to face, in hell.

Hilaire Belloc, “On a Puritan”

Writers spend much of their lives alone at a desk, and some of them take to it more easily than others. I’m a reasonably gregarious soul, but decades of silent, solitary labor have created in me a need for privacy that sits awkwardly alongside the conditions of my everyday life. Not only do I make my home on the Upper West Side of New York, a city known the world over for its ceaseless hum and buzz of cultural possibility, but most nights I can be found in a crowded theater, accompanied by a friend and surrounded by colleagues. Mind you, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Rarely does a day go by without my marveling at my good fortune. Still, there are times when it gets to be too much of a muchness–too much art, too many people, too much buzz–and all at once I find myself wishing I was anywhere but here.
Fortunately, my job provides an antidote to its own poison, for I cover regional theater in addition to reviewing plays on and off Broadway, and from time to time I make a point of arranging things so that my professional travels take me farther than usual from the better-beaten paths. Last Thursday, for instance, I flew to Washington, D.C., changed planes at Dulles for North Carolina, and ended up in Greensboro, a smallish city where I’d never been. The official reason for my presence there was to review Triad Stage‘s revival of Tobacco Road, which hasn’t been performed anywhere in America for the past quarter-century, but my secondary purpose in going to Greensboro was to get away from it all.
I didn’t travel much in the Eighties and Nineties–the mere act of moving to New York from the Midwest seemed for a time to have satisfied all my travel-related needs–but now I revel in it. I love planning complicated itineraries, packing my small wheeled bag, changing planes and renting cars and checking into hotels. Most of all, though, I love the delicious moment when I pull the plug on my iBook, turn off my cell phone, and head out the door, happily aware that for the next few hours, nobody in the world will know exactly where I am.
I’m sure the pleasure I derive from these temporary periods of inaccessibility has something to do with the fact that I work for a newspaper, meaning that I must live by the clock and calendar, hitting regular deadlines and checking in with my editors at more or less regular intervals. To be completely out of touch with them, even for the length of a single day, is a dish that never grows stale.
I spent most of last Thursday and Friday with the plug pulled. I picked up a rental car at the Greensboro airport, drove to my downtown hotel, and walked from there to 223 South Elm, a restaurant across the street from the theater, where I ate an exceptionally good dinner (crabcakes and collard greens, mmmmm) while listening to a local trumpeter and guitarist play “Ask Me Now” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” very well indeed. On the way to the restaurant, I strolled by a plaque honoring the inventor of Vicks VapoRub and looked with wonder at the old Woolworth store where, forty-seven years ago, four black students seated themselves at the whites-only lunch counter, asked to be served, and changed the world. At intermission I ran into a classmate whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years–the South is a small place–but otherwise I kept to myself.
The next morning I checked my e-mail and drove to Raleigh, where I had breakfast with Robert Weiss of Carolina Ballet. Then I spent five ecstatic hours heading east on Highway 64 with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up. Somewhere along the way I pulled off the road to eat at a cheerful little place called the Country Sunrise Grill and B-B-Q, operating on the assumption that it ought to be easy to find good barbecue, hushpuppies, and cole slaw in a town called Tarboro (pop. 11,138). I was right.
At afternoon’s end I crossed the long bridge that leads from the mainland to Roanoke Island, where the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site commemorates the 115 English colonists who sailed to America in 1587, made camp on the island, and were never seen again. I went there to review The Lost Colony, Paul Green’s 1937 outdoor drama about the colonists, and–just as important–to be utterly alone. I spent the night at Tranquil House Inn, a pleasant, well-kept place overlooking the waterfront, and after the show I sat on the balcony, gazed at the boats below me and the black, starry sky overhead, and felt myself unwind.
On Saturday, alas, I spent nine grisly hours making what was supposed to have been a six-hour-long drive from Roanoke Island to Washington, D.C., where I met Ms. Asymmetrical Information at the Shakespeare Theatre for a performance of Hamlet, having hit town too late to join her for dinner. (Traffic can really hang you up the most.) The next day, though, I went straight back to North Carolina, flying down to Asheville on a puddle-jumper to dine with Ms. Tingle Alley and her husband, after which I drove over to Cherokee, the tiny town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park where I spent the night. My planes were on time, my dinner companions delightful, my meal amazing. If anyone in Asheville ever invites you to dine at Salsa’s Mexican-Caribbean Restaurant, say yes instantly.
Today I plan to wander idly in Gatlinburg, the Tennessee tourist town where I summered as a child, and take in another outdoor drama, Unto These Hills. Tomorrow I return to Manhattan to write two pieces, see three shows, read my mail, and do my laundry. By then I’ll doubtless want to be home again and back in touch. For the moment, though, I’m still glad to be far from Manhattan, living out of an overstuffed carry-on bag and enjoying the uncomplicated pleasures of being on the road.

You write with ease, to shew your breeding;

But easy writing’s vile hard reading.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, “Clio’s Protest”

This week’s Wall Street Journal drama column is an off-Broadway affair. I review Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges and Neil LaBute’s In a Dark Dark House:

Alan Ayckbourn is a major artist disguised as a commercial playwright. In this country he is widely regarded as the English Neil Simon, an ultra-reliable purveyor of well-made comedies for suburbanites, and only a handful of his 70-odd plays have been produced on or near Broadway. But those who were lucky enough to see “Private Fears in Public Places” at the 2005 Brits Off Broadway festival, or the film that Alain Resnais made out of it last year, know that Mr. Ayckbourn’s “comedies” of middle-class life are deadly serious and, more often than not, darkly melancholy. Would that more of them were produced in New York! Fortunately, Brits Off Broadway is now bringing us the American premiere of “Intimate Exchanges,” a cycle of eight head-bangingly funny plays that leaves no possible doubt of Mr. Ayckbourn’s seriousness–or his ingenuity.
All eight plays draw on the same cast of 10 characters, all of whom are played by two actors (Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst). All of the plays start the same way, with a woman strolling into her garden on a sunny June day and trying to decide whether or not to smoke a cigarette. The best possible explanation of what happens next is Mr. Ayckbourn’s own, supplied in a letter he wrote to his agent in 1982: “Mathematically it works that after about five seconds after curtain up, we go into a choice of first scenes. These two first scenes lead in turn to a choice of four second scenes. These again lead to the interval and a choice of eight third scenes which start the second act. Finally, these eight scenes themselves divide for a series of 10-15 minute last scenes of which there are 16 in all.”
What sounds impossibly complicated on paper turns out to be perfectly transparent on stage. The six main characters are a trio of suburban couples (two married, one not) who have reached turning points in their increasingly unsatisfying lives. Mr. Ayckbourn sends them down a series of divergent plot paths that lead to 16 different endings, some happy and others not….
How long do you get to be promising? Neil LaBute has been writing a play a year since 2000, and “In a Dark Dark House,” the latest of his dramatic studies of men behaving badly, is no better or worse than most of its predecessors, with which it shares a now-familiar catalogue of virtues and vices….

No free link. Pick up a copy of today’s Journal to read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.”
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco, Balloons

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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here, closes July 7)
• Crazy Mary (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through June 26)