Archives for September 7, 2007

• Reading list from Lawrence Weschler’s Literary Nonfiction class at NYU.
• The online bookstore of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. (subject of Weschler’s excellent Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder).

• You write orgastic, I edit orgiastic: Fact-checking Fitzgerald. For more on Fitzgerald’s editing and revision process, see also.
• Reading list for Joseph Campbell’s mythology class at Sarah Lawrence.

It’s highly unusual for me to devote my entire Wall Street Journal drama column to a single production, but after seeing Hartford Stage’s new production of Our Town on Wednesday night, I didn’t hesitate to shoot the works:

If I were to pick a handful of works of art that, taken together, embody the American experience, one of them would be Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” That was Wilder’s purpose in writing his best-known play. “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying,” says the Stage Manager, the character who narrates his fictional chronicle of life in a small New England town not long after the turn of the 20th century. It is a claim that only the most self-assured of artists would dare to make–and one that “Our Town” satisfies to the fullest degree. So, too, does Hartford Stage’s revival of “Our Town,” in which the 82-year-old Hal Holbrook gives the performance of a long lifetime as the Stage Manager. This is the finest “Our Town” I have seen or hope to see, a production masterly in its self-effacing understatement and satisfying in every possible way….
Part of what makes a classic play classic is its ability to stand up to an infinite number of approaches and still remain recognizable. At the same time, few things are so compelling as a revival of a well-known play that offers you nothing more (or less) than the thing itself, unadorned and direct. This is the way that Gregory Boyd has treated “Our Town” in his Hartford Stage production, and the results are as illuminating in their own straightforward way as the most radical of reinterpretations. Not all of Wilder’s stage directions are taken literally–Mr. Holbrook’s Stage Manager doesn’t smoke a pipe–but at no time do you feel that Mr. Boyd and his actors are getting in the way of the text. Instead they revel in it, taking Grover’s Corners at face value and lettiing us draw our own conclusions about the plain people who live there.
Such an approach requires first-rate acting to make its effect, and Hal Holbrook is the man for the job. His Stage Manager is very much in the tradition of Frank Craven, who created the role on Broadway in 1938 and filmed it two years later in Hollywood. His accent is purest New England, his manner spare and flinty. You could, I suppose, call it conventional, but that would be missing the point: Like Mr. Boyd, Mr. Holbrook trusts the play, and is content to let it make its points without superimposing any of his own. The simplicity with which he delivers his oft-quoted curtain speech (“Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners….You get a good rest too”) is an object lesson in how to act without seeming to do so….

No free link, so go buy Friday’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent arts coverage–in the twinkling of an eye. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

The Wall Street Journal asked me to write about Luciano Pavarotti for Saturday’s paper. I responded with a column about the tenor at his best (the miraculous Bohème that he recorded with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1972) and worst (the public performances of his later years). It is candid, as I think all obituaries should be, and I’m sure some readers will find my frankness discomfiting. On the other hand, I covered Pavarotti’s New York performances for the Daily News throughout the Nineties and thus am in a position to speak with some authority about how he sounded toward the end of his career.
If you’re up for it, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read this column by going here.

“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice