Archives for May 2009

I went to Chicago last weekend and returned with a rave in my pocket: TimeLine Theatre Company’s production of The History Boys is a not-to-be-missed event. It’s reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, along with Propeller’s all-male staging of The Merchant of Venice in Brooklyn. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s rare for me to have such sharply mixed feelings about a play as I had about Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys” when I first saw it on Broadway in 2006–so mixed, in fact, that I came away not knowing whether I really liked what I’d seen, impressed though I was by Nicholas Hytner’s direction and the performances of Richard Griffiths and the ensemble cast. Ever since then I’ve been wanting to see “The History Boys” done by an American company (Mr. Hytner’s film version was made with the same all-British cast that I saw in New York). Would Mr. Bennett’s knowing tale of a class of self-consciously bright schoolboys and the teacher who loves them too well seem less slick the second time around?
The answer has come with the Chicago premiere of “The History Boys,” which is currently being performed by TimeLine Theatre Company, a highly regarded Windy City troupe that specializes in–logically enough–history plays. To say that TimeLine makes “The History Boys” work is to understate the case by a mile-wide margin. Nick Bowling’s staging is actually more effective in certain key ways than the original National Theatre production, and to my mind more moving as well. While I still have a few lingering doubts about “The History Boys,” I have none whatsoever about TimeLine’s production, which is one of the smartest shows I’ve seen all season long….
No small part of the potent effect of this production derives from Brian Sidney Bembridge’s ingenious environmental set, which envelops the audience (you enter the theater through the boys’ dorm rooms) and heightens the impression that you’re in the middle of the fray. Still, it’s Mr. Bowling and his top-drawer cast who are mainly responsible for changing my mind about “The History Boys.” While I still find Mr. Bennett’s here’s-what-happened-to-everybody ending to be neat to the point of outright patness, I bought into the rest of the play this time around and cared about its characters. So will you….
One of the surest pleasures of the season is the annual visit to Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater of Propeller, Edward Hall’s all-male Shakespeare troupe. This is true even when, as in the case of “The Merchant of Venice,” I question the underlying premise of the production. Mr. Hall has a weakness for rigidly schematic directorial concepts, and this “Merchant,” which is set in a present-day cell block full of shivs and punks, is a case in point. I get the symbolism–it’d be hard not to–but the interpretation rests atop the play like oil on water, and the one-dimensional results seem to be less a full-fledged performance of Shakespeare’s play than a clever commentary on it. On the other hand, Mr. Hall’s staging crackles with testosterone-charged life…
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Read the whole thing here.
To watch a scene from TimeLine Theatre Company’s production of The History Boys, go here.

“The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

I’m also reading Sarah Waters’s new novel, The Little Stranger, this week. I’m about midway through, and so far I’m in agreement with Laura Miller’s praise for the book. On the surface, the book is a creepy, highly readable Gothic ghost story set in post-WW II England. But of course, ghost stories are never just ghost stories, or at least the good ones aren’t, and Miller makes a great argument for what Waters has achieved with the novel, writing: “Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny. The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James’ ‘Turn of the Screw’ and Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House.’ … [With this novel] Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: “The Little Stranger” is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.”
The novel’s beautifully written too. Last night while reading, I came across this passage, which reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen in the acuteness of the psychological description. It takes place as the male narrator is leaving a dance with a younger female friend:

The gesture jarred with me. She had had that brandy early in the evening, and, after that, a glass or two of wine, and I’d been glad to see her–as I’d thought of it then–letting off steam. But where, for those first few dances, she’d been genuinely loose and tipsy in my arms, it seemed to me now that her giddiness had something just slightly forced about it. She said again, “Oh, isn’t it a shame we have to leave!”–but she said it too brightly. It was as if she wanted more from the night than the night had so far given her, and was broadening and hardening her strokes against it in an effort to make it pay up.

The last sentence is the one I think is so good; it seems like the perfect description of when the end of the night turns you brassy.

It has been raining in Asheville for the past couple weeks. All varieties: Light rain, heavy rain, rain accompanied by thunder, rain accompanied by tornadoes, dribbling rain, rain rain rain. Somewhere in there Lowell became convinced that the Weather Service knew that the rain was never going to stop but was only forecasting one to two days at a time so as to not “completely destroy the spirits of the people.” We’re lucky to work at home but this kind of weather can make you feel extra confined, as if the circumference of the world has been reduced to the computer and the window with the rain streaking down it. So on Tuesday we played hooky — went to 12 Bones for beef brisket, cornbread and grits, and then downtown to visit Malaprop’s and Captain’s Bookshelf . It was a really lovely outing, which of course I would say because I clearly got to commandeer the itinerary.
At Malaprop’s, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which looks marvelous. At Captain’s, I got two books I’ve had my eye on for a while, The Collected Poems of Roethke (I’ve had the library’s copy since December and they’d probably like it back) and the collected stories of Elizabeth Bowen. The latter is a very pleasing hardcover edition by Jonathan Cape; beautiful typesetting, pretty engravings by Joan Hassall. I’ve been visiting it for over a year — always looking it over, feeling desire, then returning it to the shelf and acting excessively virtuous about it. But Tuesday, the book fell open to one particular story and I knew I had to bring it home.
It’s the opening of “The Confidante,” one of Bowen’s early stories. The odd thing that day was I’d just spend the entire morning trying to describe a character in my book’s “secret preoccupation” and had finally given up on the paragraph before going out. And then there was Bowen, describing the same emotion so vividly yet economically:

“You are losing your imagination,” cried Maurice.
It was a bitter reproach. He stood over her, rumpling up his hair, and the wiry tufts sprang upright, quivering from his scalp.
Penelope gulped, then sat for a moment in a silence full of the consciousness of her brutality. She had never dreamed that her secret preoccupation would be so perceptible to Maurice. Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within them like a pent-up bee.
The room was dark with rain, and they heard the rip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden.

See? It had to come home.

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)

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (drama, PG-13, some adult subject matter, accessible to adolescents with mature attention spans, closes June 14, reviewed here)

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

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

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

• Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, extended through July 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

John King plays the prelude from Bach’s G Major Cello Suite on ukulele:

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

“Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.”
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail