Archives for March 2008

“You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.”
Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal I review two New York shows, the all-black Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the New York premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Here’s a sample.
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If you want to behold a great actor giving of his very best, the show to see is “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” James Earl Jones has turned his back on Broadway in recent years–his last appearance there since the 1987 premiere of “Fences” was in a short-lived 2005 revival of “On Golden Pond,” a synthetic weeper that was unworthy of his towering talent–and so it is a pleasure to welcome him back to town in a role that puts him to the test. Needless to say, Mr. Jones plays Big Daddy, the cancer-ridden plantation owner whose greedy children can barely wait to gobble up his estate, and watching him tear through that giant-sized part is like standing in the path of a cannonball. Alas, you’ll have to pay a high price for the privilege of seeing Mr. Jones strut his stuff, because much of the rest of this unfortunate production borders at times on the downright amateurish.
The amateur-in-chief is Terrence Howard, the erstwhile star of “Hustle & Flow,” who is making his stage debut–not his Broadway debut, mind you, but his stage debut–in the role of Brick, Big Daddy’s favorite son. Mr. Howard is the latest in a long line of inexperienced innocents from Hollywood who have been offered up as burnt sacrifices to the gods of the box office, and the best I can say about his vain attempt to make an impression is that he must have had a lot of nerve to think that he could get away with sharing a curtain call with Mr. Jones….
So far as I know, this is the first all-black professional production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and it’s easy to imagine how well such a concept might have worked had it been executed by a first-rate director. Instead we get Debbie Allen, whose experience at the helm of various sitcoms and musical comedies did not prepare her for the challenge of making sense out of a grossly overwritten melodrama whose verbal extravagance approaches the operatic. Ms. Allen’s way of putting a black spin on “Cat” runs more to such condescendingly on-the-nose directorial details as having a saxophonist wander across the stage at the start of each act, playing hot licks in order to reassure the audience that this production will be racially correct….
Sarah Ruhl writes whimsical, ironic plays about incredibly irritating people. They make me queasy, but her many fans evidently have stronger stomachs. Ms. Ruhl is American theater’s flavor-of-the-month, a playwright whose work is produced all over the country and reviewed with a hushed respect that I once found utterly inexplicable. Then I figured it out: Ms. Ruhl is an arrant sentimentalist who is embarrassed to admit it, so she covers up her old-fashioned tearjerking with a thick sauce of postmodern trickery and tweeness, thus making it palatable to would-be hipsters who are too cool to whip out their hankies….
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Read the whole thing here.

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

From Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting:

After they had been friends for six years, [Elizabeth] Bishop sent Moore a new poem, “Roosters”–“At four o’clock / in the gun-metal blue dark / we hear the first crow of the first cock.” Bishop described her roosters “marking out maps like Rand McNallys” with: “glass-headed pins, / oil-golds and copper greens, / anthracite blues, alizarins.” Marianne Moore and her mother were so upset by “Roosters” that they stayed up until three o’clock in the morning rewriting it, taking out everything that smacked of vulgarity, particularly a most objectionable reference to a “water-closet.” Bishop kept the poem as she had written it, but she and Moore remained close friends–testament to how loyal and sure they both were.

In his introduction to One Art, a collection of Bishop’s (amazing) letters, Robert Giroux observes that Moore (and her mother) even changed the title of “Roosters”, noting parenthetically, “their choice was ‘The Cock’.”
Rewriting of “Roosters” aside, Moore, it should be noted, was an early and important champion and mentor of Bishop’s. She also sat on a panel that awarded Sylvia Plath a first prize in a poetry contest while Plath was at Smith. Yet, a few years later, when Plath sent her a group of poems and requested a reference for the Saxton grant (Moore had previously written a reference for Plath’s husband Ted Hughes), Moore was less supportive. As Anne Stevenson writes in her biography of Plath, Bitter Fame:

In July, to Sylvia’s surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as “a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter… ‘Don’t be so grisly,'” she commented; “you are too unrelenting.'” And she added “certain pointed remarks about ‘typing being a bugbear.'” Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted’s work, she never warmed to Sylvia’s, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses — hallmarks of Sylvia’s gift.

I will forever love “Don’t be so grisly!” as a remark to Plath.
RELATED: Marianne Moore’s suggestions for the naming of a new model of Ford, submitted in 1955. Alas, the car company didn’t pick The Utopian Turtletop, The Mongoose Civique orThe Turcotingo, and went with the Edsel instead.

“Do
You still hang your words in air, ten years
Unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps,
Or empties for the unimaginable phrase–
Unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?”
Robert Lowell, “For Elizabeth Bishop 4”

Terry’s Almanac from this morning reminds me of this observation by John Ruskin about the Greeks, “… there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest.”
Jane Harrison uses that quote in Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, which was first published in 1903. In her introduction, Harrison argues that our understanding of Greek religion “is an affair mainly of mythology, and moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature.”
She continues:

This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial and fundamental error in method–an error which in England, where scholarship is mainly literary, is likely to die hard. For literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or–if we prefer so to call it–mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point, but a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost mechanical accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplishment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, sceptical and moribund already in its very perfection. The Olympians of Homer are no more primitive than his hexameters. Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious conceptions, ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or suppressed by Homer, but reappearing in later poets and notably in Aeschylus.

It’s a fascinating book, and even if I weren’t interested in her topic, Harrison’s writing style alone would make me swoon. If you’re at all interested in Greek mythology and haven’t read this one yet, it’s worth searching out (Google books has it). I first learned about it thanks to a comments thread here.

I’m still processing Brett Favre’s retirement*, which if you’re from Wisconsin is a little like experiencing a death in the family — you’re sad he’s gone but you feel joy in remembering your time together, etc., etc. — so in honor of the moment a couple literary items about death, dying, and staying forever young:
• From a review of Julian Barnes’s new memoir/treatise about death, Nothing to be Frightened Of: “The youngest in his family, nothing if not competitive, Julian who longed as a child to grow old enough to crack the whip himself has finally achieved a lonely and illusory autonomy: ‘Far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip myself … what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which can’t be shrugged or fought off.'”
• Vampire books never grow old:

And Columbia University comparative literature professor Jenny Davidson, 36, who is the author of a forthcoming paranormal YA book, The Explosionist, argued that vampire books going back to Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, often represent anxiety about modernity. “The Stoker novel really is a book about technology and modernity,” she told me. “It really is a book about telegraphs and letter-writing and wax cylinders that you might record madmen speaking onto. And that intersects with the idea that the vampire isn’t modern, the vampire is from the deep past. … The vampire seems to be a place for that intersection–very modern, but very much from the romantic past.”

* Earlier this week I was emailing with some friends from high school about the retirement. My friend K., who has two young sons, wrote, “The boys will be crushed. Sometimes when I say,’Hi Erik!’ first thing in the morning or getting in to the car with him, he’ll say, ‘I’m not Erik, I’m the children’s Brett Favre!'” For myself, I can say I know the exact moment that Brett decided to let go. It was during the playoff game against the Giants. The temperature at Lambeau was, you may remember, something like -200 degrees with wind chill, so that every time a player fell on the frozen field you thought their bones would just … shatter from the impact. Somewhere during that grueling overtime the camera panned in on Favre and I distinctly saw him think, “I am too old for this shit” And he threw an interception and went off the field.**
** Sorry to go on like this. I know this is an arts blog. But as long as we’re here celebrating Packer greatness, let’s also take a moment to remember Reggie White, who passed away a few years ago and who I don’t think gets talked about and remembered nearly as much as he should. Reggie, I remember!

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 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:

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 20 and reopens Apr. 29 at the Music Box Theatre for an open-ended run, reviewed here)

• 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)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The Homecoming (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, extended through June 16, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)

IN LOS ANGELES:

• Victory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 23, reviewed here)

ON TOUR:

• Moby-Dick–Rehearsed (drama, G, not suitable for children, touring the U.S. through May 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Mar. 23, reviewed here)

• Come Back, Little Sheba (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO:

• Blood Knot (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Is He Dead? (farce, G, reasonably family-friendly, reviewed here)

• Rock ‘n’ Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, reviewed here)