Archives for June 2008

“Family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering this thing are remembering that family living living can go on existing. Very many are quite certain that family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering that they are quite certain that family living can go on existing.”
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

We returned last night from the Great Minneapolis Expedition. We made stops in Louisville, Chicago, Milwaukee and finally Minneapolis, and then motored through a long, fugue-like drive back to Asheville. 2,315 miles in seven days! It was my 37th birthday last week, and it was a present from Lowell to chauffeur me on a driving odyssey through the northern hinterlands near where I grew up, which was good of him. It’s not every man who is willing to spend a vacation staring down a cranberry bog. The trip was pretty perfect: We saw plays, we canoed, we played disc golf — and we saw lots of friends, old and new.*
As Terry reported, we met up with him, Mrs. Teachout and OGIC in Chicago to see Lion in Winter at the Writers’ Theatre, which I loved as much as Terry did. It was the same night as Game 6 of the Stanley Cup, so I got to meet OGIC in the full flush of her OGIC-ness — checking game scores at intermission, and then celebrating afterward at the Red Wings win. (My campaign to woo her to visit Asheville involves a map of North and South Carolina with pushpins where all the college and professional hockey teams are.) Afterward, we went to the only place open that late on a Wednesday in the suburbs, an old-school Chicago steakhouse, for chocolate mousse and coffee, and I got to razz Terry for a while for never having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and he got to razz me for never having seen Chinatown.
Lowell and I were lucky in the second play we saw too, a very funny, glittery production of Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Guthrie Theater. It was all satisfyingly over-the-top: Trapeze entrances, elaborate costumes, and big song-and-dance numbers for the fairy speeches (which do get a little adjectival so I understand the decision to put them to music even if some of the numbers got schmaltzy). It was my first time to the theater’s fab new building, and my first time seeing Shakespeare performed live. Which, as I told Terry and OGIC, seems strange as somehow I managed to see the Dirty Dancing tour but never a Shakespeare play before?
* If you’re a friend of mine from Wisconsin and I didn’t see you this trip, it’s because I’m hoping to see you on the next trip, in October or November, when we’ll hit Milwaukee again, maybe Madison, and Appleton.

Laurence Olivier delivers the St. Crispin’s Day speech in his 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V:

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

“Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

If you read the Friday The Wall Street Journal (or this blog) with any regularity, you probably know that I’m the only New York-based drama critic who routinely covers theatrical productions all over America. As I wrote in my “Sightings” column a couple of years ago:

The time has come for American playgoers–and, no less important, arts editors–to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don’t know what’s hot in “the stix,” you don’t know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

But suppose you run a company I haven’t visited? How might you get me to come see you? Now’s the time to start asking that question, because I’m already working on my reviewing calendar for the 2008-09 season. So here’s an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see–along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don’t review dinner theater, and it’s unusual for me to visit children’s theaters. I’m somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I’m strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season… That doesn’t apply to summer festivals, but it’s rare for me to cover a festival that doesn’t put on at least two shows a season.

• …and most of them have to be serious. I won’t put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if Barefoot in the Park is your idea of a daring revival, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven’t yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as the Journal‘s drama critic. Right now Florida, Ohio, and Texas loom largest, but if you’re doing something exciting in (say) Alaska or South Carolina, I’d be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won’t visit an out-of-town company I’ve never seen to review a play by an author of whom I’ve never heard. What I look for is an imaginative, wide-ranging mix of revivals of major plays–definitely including comedies–and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I’ve admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Brian Friel, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, John Patrick Shanley, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older plays I’d like to review that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). I’ve been able to check a couple of them off the list since you last heard from me, but if you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Deep Blue Sea, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Loot, Man and Superman, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit (the play, not the musical), or anything by Jean Anouilh, S.N. Behrman, William Inge, or John Van Druten, please drop me a line.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two–especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of The Little Dog Laughed or The Year of Magical Thinking are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you’re not already reading my Journal column, you probably ought to start.)

• I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a three- or four-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city.) If you’re the publicist of the Lower Slobbovia Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Glass Menagerie, your best bet is to point out that TheaterSlobbovia just happens to be doing All My Sons that same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to Minneapolis instead.

• Web sites matter–a lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you’re doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I’ll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can’t spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn’t mean I won’t consider reviewing you–I know appearances can be deceiving–but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the home page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates (including the date of the press opening)

(2) A SEASON button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions

(3) A CONTACT US button that leads directly to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses–starting with the address of your press representative)

(4) A link to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map

(5) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!)

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don’t want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the kudzu of random press releases. I get a lot of spam at my “About Last Night” mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal.

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I’ve come to see shows solely and only because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me. Go thou and do likewise.

• The Biographer’s Craft, the online newsletter, interviewed me about writing The Letter a couple of weeks ago:

On the whole, however, Teachout said the experience has been rewarding and fun. “No doubt I should have approached the task with proper trepidation, but I’ve always assumed that I could do pretty much anything I had a mind to do, so–as usual–I jumped in head first and never looked back,” he said.

Read the whole thing here.
• Speaking of The Letter, a blogfriend sent me a link to this spoof video featuring Tom Ford, our costume designer:

This promises to be a very interesting collaboration.

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
“In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”
Willa Cather, My Ántonia

On Wednesday I dined in suburban Chicago with Mrs. T, Our Girl, CAAF, and Mr. CAAF, after which we all saw the wonderful Writers’ Theatre production of The Lion in Winter that I reviewed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column. It wasn’t easy getting from downtown Chicago to Glencoe, and we barely arrived at the restaurant in time for a hasty meal, so the five of us went out after the show for dessert and conversation. To our collective amazement, we saw a De Lorean DMC-12 in the parking lot of Restaurant No. 2, and clustered around it like small children in the presence of Santa Claus.
Laura and Hilary (to call them by their real-world names) are old buddies. Not so OGIC and CAAF. Even though my co-bloggers have “known” one another for some time and have been sharing this space for nearly a year, they’d never met in person or spoken on the phone prior to last Wednesday. I’ll leave it to them to tell you how it felt to meet for the first time. Suffice it for now to say that I enjoyed watching their faces light up as each found out at last what the other looked and sounded like.
Carrie and her Lowell departed for points north the following morning, so I took Mrs. T to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was her first visit to that storied collection, and I regret to say that it was ill-timed, for the Art Institute is currently in the process of building a new wing to house its collection of modern art. No doubt it will be glorious, but a good-sized chunk of the permanent collection, including such favorites of mine as the museum’s superb group of Joseph Cornell boxes, has been put in storage until the modern wing opens its doors next spring. I’d also hoped to show Hilary my all-time favorite painting by John Singer Sargent, “Study from Life (Egyptian Girl),” but it, too, was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the Art Institute is big enough to be worth seeing even in the semi-chaotic state to which it has lately been reduced, and the curators have taken care to ensure that all of its most celebrated paintings, including Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884,” Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” can be found and viewed with comparative ease.
I was especially pleased to be able to lead Mrs. T straight to John Twachtman’s Icebound. I’ve mentioned Twachtman in this space on occasion–I own one of his etchings–but for the most part he is known only to connoisseurs of American impressionism, of which he was in my opinion the greatest and most individual exponent. “Icebound” is one of several wintertime landscapes by Twachtman, and it may well be the best one, though Winter Harmony is a close contender.
We saw two more plays with Our Girl, The Comedy of Errors at Chicago Shakespeare and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey at Shattered Globe Theatre. The second we saw at a disadvantage–the air conditioning was out of order–but the stalwart actors gave every sign of being unfazed by the soaring temperatures in the tiny, oven-like upstairs theater, and the three of us did our best to respond accordingly. (It wasn’t hard.) We also ate a smashing dinner at Osteria Via Stato, which might just be my favorite restaurant in Chicagoland, though Hot Doug’s comes pretty damn close.
On Sunday Mrs. T and I flew down to St. Louis and drove south from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., where we’ll be spending the next few days with my family. Don’t expect to hear much more from me until Friday, when we return to New York–briefly–before resuming our theater-related travels.
Till then, keep cool!