Archives for September 17, 2010

Two strikes and I’m out: I don’t have much of anything good to say about the New York premiere of Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I or the world premiere of Lucy Thurber’s Bottom of the World in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s widely thought that Edward Albee is America’s greatest living playwright, and I think I’d go so far as to say that he’s the author of the greatest play by a living American playwright. But “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is the only one of Mr. Albee’s 30 plays to have made an enduring impression on the general public–indeed, it’s possible that “Virginia Woolf” could be the last American play of any kind to have made such an impression–and so much of his subsequent work has been so slight that I find it hard to see him as the major artist that his admirers take him to be. Nor will the New York premiere of “Me, Myself & I” add any luster to his reputation, for it is a tediously jokey piece of Surrealism Lite that wears out its welcome almost as soon as the curtain goes up.
Like many of Mr. Albee’s previous plays, “Me, Myself & I” is rigidly premise-driven: Two of the characters are identical twins, and both of them are named Otto. Otto the Loud (Zachary Booth), whose name is spelled “OTTO,” is a nasty troublemaker who loathes his horrible mother (Elizabeth Ashley). Otto the Soft (Preston Sadleir), whose name is spelled “otto,” is a quiet, likable fellow who is understandably taken aback when OTTO announces without warning that otto “doesn’t exist anymore.” This could, I suppose, serve as the basis for a moderately provocative play, but Mr. Albee has chosen instead to dish up an evening’s worth of feeble who’s-on-first comebacks and jokes that weren’t funny when they were new…
Lucy Thurber’s name is frequently to be found on promising-young-playwrights lists, but “Bottom of the World,” her latest effort, didn’t leave me longing to see more of her work. It’s a scattershot portrait of Abigail (Crystal A. Dickinson), whose sister (Jessica Love), a promising young novelist, has died unexpectedly. Devastated by her loss, Abigail obsessively reenacts scenes from her sister’s last novel in her mind while simultaneously trying to resume her love life. Not only is the audience treated along the way to jejune reflections on death and dying (“Some things get broken and never get fixed”), but Abigail’s sister, judging by the evidence presented in “Bottom of the World,” doesn’t seem to have been a very good writer….
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Read the whole thing here.

The management of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is grappling with a nine-million-dollar budget shortfall by proposing to cut musicians’ salaries by nearly thirty percent. The musicians have responded by voting to authorize a strike. It’s widely speculated that this could kill the orchestra altogether–but Detroit is a city in the most desperate economic straits imaginable, and it seems highly unlikely that anyone in town would be able or willing to bail the DSO out.
All of which has led me to write a “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which I ask the necessary but not-so-obvious question: is it even possible, much less desirable, for a city whose population has shrunk by fifty percent in the past half-century to try to support a world-class orchestra? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

If you should happen to be in or near Winter Park, Florida, on Sunday afternoon, I’m going to be talking about my latest project, a biography of Duke Ellington. My appearance is part of “The New Animated Magazine,” an elaborate and enticing program being put on by Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute, the campus-based think tank under whose auspices I’ll be speaking, teaching, and writing as a resident scholar during the first part of 2011.
The fun starts at 3:30 at Rollins’ Tiedke Concert Hall. Go here and here to read all about it.

“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men