Archives for 2010

In the New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a highly satisfactory off-Broadway show, the Mint Theater Company’s revival of Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine. Here’s an excerpt.
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On Broadway, you play it safe or lose your shirt. If you want to revive a straight play, you pick something very, very familiar and cast a movie star as your lead. Otherwise, disaster beckons. All the more reason, then, to praise the tiny Off-Broadway troupes that specialize in performing forgotten but eminently stageworthy plays of the past. At the top of the list is the Mint Theater Company, whose dagger-sharp revivals of Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game” and Harley Granville-Barker’s “The Madras House” rank high on my list of memorable nights on the aisle.
Even for so daring a company, the Mint’s latest venture would seem to be a stretch. If you’ve heard of “Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine,” you probably come from France, where Jules Romain’s most successful play is known to all educated citoyens, or England, where it’s been telecast twice by the BBC and revived on numerous occasions, most recently in 1994. In America, by contrast, the play is unknown save to especially well-informed specialists. Yet “Doctor Knock,” written in 1923, is a knockout, a saber-toothed satire of the medical profession that could scarcely be more timely now that health-care reform is No. 1 with a hashtag on the list of hot political topics….
The thing that sets Dr. Knock (Thomas M. Hammond) apart from his benighted colleagues is that he sees medicine less as an art than a business, one in which anyone who grasps the principles of modern marketing can make (so to speak) a killing. To this end he opens a free clinic, the purpose of which is to alert his new patients to the fact that they all appear to be suffering from hitherto unsuspected illnesses. (His slogan is “The healthy are merely closet invalids.”) The good people of St. Maurice have previously managed to squeak by on home remedies, but his methods are so effective that within three months the town hotel has been turned into an annex to his clinic and the bellboy is inserting thermometers into the hindquarters of dozens of happy hypochondriacs each day….
I’m not even slightly surprised to report that the Mint is performing “Doctor Knock” with consummate savoir-faire. Gus Kaikkonen, who runs New Hampshire’s Peterborough Players and previously directed “The Madras House” for the Mint, has polished the script (which is being performed in his own idiomatic translation) until it gleams like a dueling saber, and Mr. Hammond’s urbane performance is frighteningly believable….
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Read the whole thing here.

“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”
Anton Chekhov, “The Teacher of Literature”

Mrs. T and I met on Friday at O’Hare International Airport, made our way to a downtown hotel, met Our Girl shortly thereafter, and proceeded to the first of the five shows that we’ll be seeing in Chicagoland this week. The list includes Strawdog Theatre’s Good Soul of Szechuan, TimeLine Theater’s The Farnsworth Invention, Chicago Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Profiles Theatre’s Killer Joe, and Writers’ Theatre’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the last of which is directed by David Cromer, about whose gifts longtime readers of this blog will need no reminding. That strikes me as an appropriately wide-ranging list, and I have no doubt that it will keep the three of us hopping between now and week’s end, when Mrs. T and I fly back to New York.
This is my first full-scale theater-related road trip since February, and I’m glad to be on the move again after being stuck in New York for two near-solid months. I was no less pleased to be able to spend three days at home with my family, though I broke my glasses and watchband during my visit, subsequently discovering that neither object could be repaired or replaced in Smalltown, U.S.A. My brother, who is handy like Mozart was musical, did his best to glue my glasses back together but finally gave it up as a bad job, so I drove from Smalltown to Kansas City on Thursday without benefit of eyeware. I got there in one piece, didn’t kill or maim anyone along the way, and managed to read a lecture about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong out loud to a full and enthusiastic house at the Kansas City Public Library, thereby demonstrating the wisdom of my longstanding precautionary practice of printing out my speech texts in twenty-two-point Comic Sans MS Bold type, which may be totally unhip but is big and clear enough for me to read without glasses.
I have to write two columns for The Wall Street Journal during our stay in Chicago, so I won’t be blogging much while we’re here. I’ll be back at the old stand next Monday. In the meantime, make the most of the usual daily offerings, which will, as always, appear like clockwork.

“Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.”
Anton Chekhov, “Ward No. 6”

Today I wrap up the current theater season in New York by covering two revivals, Beth Henley’s Family Week and Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories. Neither did much for me, though the first is more interesting than the second. Here’s an excerpt.
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Many playwrights have only one memorable script in them, though they almost always keep on trying to hit the high C a second, third or fourth time. Such, it seems, is the case with Beth Henley, who in 1978 gave us “Crimes of the Heart,” which not only won a Pulitzer Prize but deserved it, and has since sought repeatedly and unsuccessfully to write something as good. Now she’s gone back to the drawing board. “Family Week,” first seen in New York in 2000, has been given an Off-Broadway revival directed by Jonathan Demme and performed this time around in a new version whose revisions, alas, fail to fix an interesting but unsuccessful piece of work….
“Family Week” appears at first glance to be satirizing the foibles of the therapeutic society: “Are you feeling anger towards me?” “I’m feeling distrust, disdain and revulsion.” “That would fall into the anger category.” But Ms. Henley–or Mr. Demme, who reportedly urged her to revise the play in order to make it more hopeful–proves in the end to be a true believer in the virtues of psychotherapy, which is a perfectly admissible position but doesn’t make for compelling theater….
I don’t care for the plays of Donald Margulies, but I respect the neatness of his craft. He would never have dreamed of allowing a play as untidy as “Family Week” to make it to the stage–and that’s part of the problem with “Collected Stories,” which is so tidy as to be enervatingly devoid of surprise.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: An aging short-story writer who teaches on the side (Linda Lavin) takes a naïve young student (Sarah Paulson) under her wing. (Stop! Stop!) The teacher shows the protégé the ropes, and the protégé returns the compliment by becoming successful and betraying her mentor, who turns out to be dying of an unspecified disease that leaves her with just enough strength to deliver a furious curtain speech.
You are, perhaps, rolling your eyes? Join the club. Watching “Collected Stories,” which was first performed in 1996 and has now made it to Broadway courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club, made me feel like a damsel in distress who’d been tied to the tracks by Snidely Whiplash. I could see the train thundering towards me from miles off, but couldn’t get out of the way….
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Read the whole thing here.

“It is the immemorial dream of the talentless that a sufficient devotion to doctrine will produce art.”
David Mamet, Theatre

In case you haven’t heard, I’m on my way to downtown Kansas City today, where I’ll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Kansas City Public Library. The show starts at six-thirty sharp. Stop by and get your copy of Pops signed–and if you don’t own a copy yet, you can buy one there.
For more information, go here.