Archives for September 2008

Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, will be the recipient of the first Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, a $200,000 cash prize awarded by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust to “an American playwright whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theater.” Question: why? What’s the point of giving a six-figure prize whose purpose is to support “the growth and development of outstanding playwrights…and encourage them to remain in their chosen field” to a man who has already knocked down a Pulitzer, an Emmy, and two Tonys?
Yep, it’s “Sightings” time, and in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal you’ll find me in high dudgeon over what the Steinberg Trust hath wrought–but not because I don’t care for Tony Kushner’s plays, just as he doesn’t care for my reviews. I have better reasons, and you can find out what they are by picking up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turning to my column.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.”
Peter Shaffer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earh, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand in one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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)

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

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, 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:

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, extended through Oct. 26, reviewed here)

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

IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:

• To the Ladies (comedy, G, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN HARTFORD, CONN.:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (comedy, G, surprisingly child-friendly, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream/Widowers’ Houses (comedies, G, playing in repertory through Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:

• Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, reviewed here)

“The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn’t deserve it, give it to him anyhow.”
John Ciardi, “The Reviewer’s Duty to Damn”

David Foster Wallace appreciations, remembrances and re-prints abound right now. A few addenda you may have missed: The syllabus to a Literary Interpretations class he taught at Pomona (via Book Bench; via Crooked House); the text to the commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005 (if you’re at all interested in DFW you’ve probably already read this one but it merits a re-read); and an old interview he gave to Amherst College’s alumni magazine, where he talks about his five-draft method.
If you didn’t catch it at the time, I also urge you to go read author Erin Hogan’s fine piece on Wallace, which appeared in this space last Friday. Erin notes that DFW didn’t use footnotes to appear clever but “because they are the closest approximations in a literary form to the mass of nonlinear parenthetical thoughts that is the monkey brain of all of us doing its job,” an observation that made my monkey brain cough up these two footnoted thoughts:
1. It was strange, wasn’t it, how the layout of “The Host” in The Atlantic, in which the footnotes were color-coded and looked like molecular globules floating on the page, was an almost too-literal progression of this idea of diagramming thought on paper.
2. I’ve always thought DFW cold-mugged Wittgenstein’s Mistress for parts of Infinite Jest, particularly David Markson’s technique of having a character’s (seemingly) abandoned thoughts re-surface as non sequiturs in later pages. Very rhythmic, like a swimmer surfacing then disappearing then resurfacing again. If it hasn’t already been done, someone should write a paper on that.

Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes

Error a fault, and truth discourtesy.

George Herbert, “The Church-Porch”

Typewriters knew things. Long before the word-processor actually stored information, many writers felt that their Remingtons, or Smith-Coronas, or Adlers contained the sum of their knowledge of eastern Europe, or the plot of their novel. A typewriter was a friend and collaborator whose sickness was catastrophe.

It’s surprising to recall that in college, in the late 1980s, I still owned a typewriter, along with my standard-issue Mac Classic. I must have lugged it with me from dorm room to dorm room each year–and to and from different apartments each summer–but I can only remember using it in one context, a poetry writing course my junior year. Typing my poems made me feel more like part of an ongoing tradition (itself relatively recent, of course), and it called for a precision and a decisiveness in the act of composition that were bracing. It pleased my senses, and bolstered my sense of making something real and substantial, to see and hear the keys strike the page with a physical, really a violent impact. My longest poem ran only a page and a half, so I wasn’t exactly suffering for my art. Anything longer I wrote on the Mac, but it felt like a more evanescent affair.
Maybe I hang out with too many writer types, but it seems to me the memory of typewriters sends lots of us into giddy, almost moon-eyed reverie. This lovely obituary of typewriter whisperer Martin Tytell, in the Economist, is no exception. I love how it finds room amidst the extraordinary facts of Mr. Tytell’s life to wear its heart on its sleeve about the magnificent machine:

Anyone who had dealings with manual typewriters–the past tense, sadly, is necessary–knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell’s life.
Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.