Archives for January 31, 2014

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar, starring Brían F. O’Byrne and Debra Messing. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nine years ago, John Patrick Shanley, a prolific playwright of a certain age who had yet to crack Broadway and was mainly known for having written the screenplay for “Moonstruck,” hit the Great Stage Jackpot at long last with “Doubt,” a savagely taut morality play about a charismatic priest who may or may not be a child molester. Mr. Shanley’s timing couldn’t have been better: “Doubt” transferred to Broadway, won the Pulitzer Prize, was turned into a Hollywood film and brought him to the attention of the public at large. Nothing that he’s written since then has been nearly as successful, but “Defiance” (2006) and “Storefront Church” (2012), the second and third panels of a trilogy called “Church and State” that started with “Doubt,” were very nearly as good, and it’s a mystery to me why they failed to go over with audiences.
Now Mr. Shanley is back on Broadway with “Outside Mullingar,” a romcom set in rural Ireland in which, for the first time in his playwriting life, he draws on his Irish family background. In doing so, he’s playing in the big leagues: Brian Friel works the same turf, and Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, born two generations after Mr. Friel, are coming up fast behind him. What all three men share is an iron determination to steer clear of the sickeningly winsome stereotypes that have long blighted stage and screen portrayals of the Emerald Isle.
As everyone who’s seen “Moonstruck” will recall, Mr. Shanley, unlike his colleagues, has a weakness for ethnic whimsy, one that he ruthlessly suppressed in “Doubt” and “Defiance” (a touch of it crept into “Storefront Church”). This time around, by contrast, he’s returned to the vein that he tapped in “Moonstruck,” but he never stoops to the usual faith-and-begorra clichés in doing so, nor is “Outside Mullingar” a straight replay of his earlier tale of romantic derring-do. The difference lies in the choice of ethnicity. Here as in “Moonstruck,” Mr. Shanley is telling a tale of inhibition overcome by love, but he’s translated it (so to speak) from Italian to Gaelic, and the results are both charming and dramatically persuasive….
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report on a recent tussle between a regional theater company and a major playwright–and the lesson it teaches. Here’s an excerpt.
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Two weeks ago, I was getting ready to go to Sarasota to see a revival by Florida’s Asolo Repertory Theatre of Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” Then I got an e-mail from the company’s marketing director telling me that the performance had been canceled. No explanation was proffered, but I assumed that one of the stars was sick, and went elsewhere to see another show.
A few days later I found out that I’d been dead wrong. Jay Handelman, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s theater critic, reported that Mr. Friel had abruptly withdrawn his permission for Asolo Rep to perform the play when he learned that Frank Galati, the director, had “cut three characters and eliminated two intermissions and some dialogue while adding a few Irish songs and a little dancing.” “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” is now being restaged as written, and will reopen next week.
I was staggered when I heard what Asolo Rep had done–not because they did it, but because they didn’t clear it first with Mr. Friel. He is, after all, one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” was the play that made him famous. When it was last performed in New York by the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2005, I judged it to be one of the best plays of the postwar era. I still feel that way. Is it unimprovably good? I think so, but that’s not the point. “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” was written in 1964 and remains under copyright. It cannot be performed, much less altered, without the author’s permission. End of story.
It was a very different story when Diane Paulus, Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray rewrote “Porgy and Bess” in 2011 for a revival that opened at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, then transferred successfully to Broadway. Their alterations, whose purpose was to modernize George Gershwin’s 1935 masterpiece and render it politically correct, were done at the behest and with the permission of the estates of George and Ira Gershwin. They were tasteless, but legal.
As these two contrasting anecdotes suggest, playwrights (and their estates) take sharply differing views of such matters….
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Read the whole thing here.

“A playwright must not think that he will extend his audience beyond that of the novel or poetry. It was a mistake to see the theatre as a popular art. It may have been fifty years ago, but new mediums have changed all that. The play must now be directed towards a specialised audience. That may well be the theatre’s salvation.”
John Whiting, At Ease in a Bright Red Tie: Writings on Theatre (courtesy of George Hunka)

“A playwright must not think that he will extend his audience beyond that of the novel or poetry. It was a mistake to see the theatre as a popular art. It may have been fifty years ago, but new mediums have changed all that. The play must now be directed towards a specialised audience. That may well be the theatre’s salvation.”
John Whiting, At Ease in a Bright Red Tie: Writings on Theatre (courtesy of George Hunka)