Archives for June 2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the last of my reports from Chicago, a review of Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Few theatrical debuts have been so startling as that of Shelagh Delaney, who wrote herself into the history of British drama with her very first play. Not only was “A Taste of Honey” a hit in London in 1959 and on Broadway a year later, but the equally successful 1961 film version is now considered to be a high point of what came to be known as the “New Wave” of British cinema. Not too shabby for a girl who was 19 years old when “A Taste of Honey” opened in the West End–but never again managed to write anything else of any consequence.
That Ms. Delaney was unable to follow up on the success of her first play undoubtedly explains why it is so much better known in England than in this country, where “A Taste of Honey” is rarely seen. The Roundabout Theatre Company brought it to Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer in the lead, but I don’t know of any major productions since then, and I’d never seen the play performed until I made a trip to Chicago the other day to catch Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival. Though I’d heard good things about the company, I feared that “A Taste of Honey” would be as dated as the angry-young-man plays of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. Not so: “A Taste of Honey” could have been written last week, and Shattered Globe’s marvelous staging has all the burning immediacy of a world premiere….
For American playgoers, “A Taste of Honey” will likely recall Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” another play about working-class urban life whose author had a pitch-perfect ear for the way plain people talk. Odets endowed the kitchen-table conversation of his Lower East Side characters with a sharp-toothed, strangely poetic quality. Ms. Delaney’s pungent dialogue has something of the same quality, only transposed into a different key: “Go and lay the table. Do something. Turn yourself into a bloody termite and crawl into the wall or something, but make yourself scarce.” But unlike Odets, she is unsentimental to the point of hardness, and at play’s end she leaves us in no doubt whatsoever that the rest of Jo’s life will be bleak and comfortless.
Helen Sadler, who plays Jo, is a find, an actress full of fire and wit who plays Jo with a gawky, angry energy that keeps you looking her way at all times. While everyone else in the ensemble is strong, my guess is that it’s Ms. Sadler whose performance you’ll be talking about on the way home. Jeremy Wechsler’s staging is as direct and unmannered as the play itself, and Kevin Hagan has designed a tenement set so seedy-looking that I briefly considered checking myself for fleas at intermission….
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Read the whole thing here.

“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

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

• August: Osage County * (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

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

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

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

REOPENED OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, performed in alternating repertory through July 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO

• The Comedy of Errors (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MONTGOMERY, ALA.:

• The Count of Monte Cristo/Romeo and Juliet (drama, G/PG-13, performed in alternating repertory through June 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

“An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.”
Iain Sinclair, “Riverside Opportunities”

As Lauren notes (see the July 23rd event), this summer marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Through sheer coincidence, I recently re-read the story for my book club, along with Jackson’s masterful last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.* If you can, it’s worth it to check out the Penguin edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which features a great, perceptive introduction by Jonathan Lethem (sadly not available online).
The precise anniversary of “The Lottery” is tomorrow, in fact. The story was originally published in the June 26th, 1948 issue of The New Yorker — a date that neatly coincides with the story’s first line — and, as Lethem notes in the introduction of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, its appearance caused a storm of controversy. Subscriptions were cancelled, and Jackson received bags of hate mail “denouncing the story as ‘nauseating,’ ‘perverted,’ and ‘vicious.'” (According to its Wikipedia page, the story was even banned in South Africa.)
1948 is also the same year The New Yorker published J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day For Bananafish,” another story that ends with a rather shocking, unexpected death. I’m sure some enterprising PhD thesis has already been done on the topic, but I’m curious about how both stories relate to the field of psychology as it stood in the late ’40s: Behaviorism ascendant, Freud and Jung still in the air and about to rise again. Like most of Salinger, “Bananafish” can be read as a flat rejection of psychology’s ability to ever explain the mysterious self, whereas Jackson seems to have embraced the field, as if she used its concepts and terminology as a jumping-off point for her art. Haunting Of Hill House, for example, reads like a hothouse catalog of Freudian concepts. (Interesting to note, though, that “The Lottery,” which could serve as a case study in the brutal pathology of group think, anticipated the Milgram experiment by about 13 years.)
As Lethem writes about Jackson’s work:

Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and her art (an early dust-flap biography called her “a practicing amateur witch,”** and she seems never to have shaken the effects of this debatable publicity strategy) Jackson’s great subject was precisely the opposite of paranormality. The relentless, undeniable core of her writing–her six complete novels and the twenty-odd fiercest of her stories–conveys a vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into pyscyhosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like Alfred Hitchock and Patricia Highsmith, Jackson’s keynotes were complicity and denial, and the strange fluidity of guilt as it passes from one person to another.

RELATED LINK: In “Monstrous Acts and Little Murders,” another, earlier piece by Lethem about Shirley Jackson, he talks about living in North Bennington, Vermont, which provided the setting for “The Lottery.” While the town held a grudge for a while, it seems to have forgiven Jackson her trespasses.
* About half our club had never read the story before, which surprised me. I thought no one escaped junior high without writing at least one five-paragraph essay on “The Lottery.”
** Speaking of witches and Shirley Jackson: My reading of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has set me off on a Jackson kick. In my library’s holdings I was surprised to come across a book written for children called The Witchcraft of Salem Village. I’m sure I must have read it as a kid — I was ghoulish and read everything I could about Salem, desperately hoping for illustrations of the hangings, pressings by stone, etc. — but I hadn’t connected its author as being that Shirley Jackson.

Jascha Heifetz plays Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in the 1939 film They Shall Have Music. The conductor is Alfred Newman:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“At your return visit our house; let our old acquaintance be renewed.”
William Shakespeare, Henry IV (part two)

Can it have been 15 years since Exile in Guyville came out? Yes, it can. The album is being re-released today, and in honor of the occasion I thought I’d share Phair’s setlist from one of her very first shows, when she appeared as part of a showcase put on by Matador Records at Irving Plaza on July 23, 1993.
I was living in Massachusetts then, working at the Golden Nozzle Carwash post-graduation, and drove into New York with some friends for the show. According to this New York Times review of the concert, Pavement, Moonshake and members of the Silver Jews also played, which I have absolutely no memory of. Alex Ross wrote the Times review, and he describes Phair as “a distinctive singer and songwriter disadvantaged by an overloud backing band.” As I remember she was also out of tune and visibly ill at ease on the stage, standing stiffly front and center for most of her set.
My friend Shana, who doesn’t remember Moonshake and Pavement playing either (where were we?), tore Phair’s setlist from the stage after she performed and was good enough to send along a photograph of it. We have a no-swearing policy here at “About Last Night,” which I try to honor when I don’t forget, and one of Liz’s song titles breaks it, so the photo appears after the jump.

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