Archives for June 2017

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Massachusetts revival of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. Here’s an excerpt.

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Amy Herzog stepped into the spotlight of theatrical notoriety when “4000 Miles,” the best play by an up-and-coming author that I’ve ever reviewed in this space, transferred to Lincoln Center Theater in 2012 after a brief off-Broadway run. It should by all rights have moved from there to Broadway, but “4000 Miles” was successful enough as is: It was taken up by regional theaters throughout America, and Ms. Herzog went on to establish herself as this country’s most gifted under-40 playwright. Now, a month after “Mary Jane,” her latest play, was premiered by the Yale Repertory Theatre, “4000 Miles” has been revived by Shakespeare & Company in a production at least as fine as the one that I saw and admired five years ago in New York….

Like her other plays, “4000 Miles” is a small-scale character study reminiscent of Chekhov in its emphasis on personality over plot. At its center is Vera (Annette Miller), a crusty 91-year-old Jewish grandmother who is teetering on the near edge of senility (the most frequently used word in her shrinking vocabulary is “whaddayacallit”) but has no intention of giving up without a fight. When Leo (Gregory Boover), her spacy 21-year-old grandson, stops in for a visit after a cross-country bicycle trip from Seattle to New York, Vera puts him up for a couple of weeks. That’s pretty much all that happens, though we also meet Bec (Emma Geer), Leo’s earnest ex-girlfriend, and Amanda (Zoë Laiz), a drunken young Chinese-American woman whom he picks up at a bar and with whom he doesn’t quite manage to have sex. For the most part, though, “4000 Miles” is all about the relationship between Vera, an unrepentant Communist, and Leo, a child of the therapeutic generation who thinks “Marx is cool” and utters sentences like “And I was like, first of all, who knows.” Separated by a yawning gulf of age and experience, they manage to meet somewhere in the middle…

This revival, staged with poignant, self-effacing delicacy by Nicole Ricciardi, is an ideal showcase for the talents of Ms. Miller, a Shakespeare & Company veteran who gives the kind of performance you’ll be talking about days after you see it. Her Vera is tough and unselfconsciously gallant, a woman whose mental powers are failing fast but who stares into the abyss with something not unlike glee. I’ve never seen a more vividly detailed stage portrayal of extreme old age—merely to see her get up from a couch is to receive an acting lesson…

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the 2012 Lincoln Center Theater production of “4000 Miles,” starring Mary Louise Wilson and Gabriel Ebert:

A 1978 TV commercial for Aja, an album by Steely Dan. The voiceover is by Eartha Kitt:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself—and, sometimes, doing so—is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.”

Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism”

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.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, closes August 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes July 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, closes June 25, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Pacific Overtures (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”

Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

A.R. Gurney, universally known in the theater world as “Pete,” was that rarity of rarities, a WASP of country-club-Republican lineage who wrote witty, thoughtful plays, most of them about the fast-vanishing world of upper-middle-class privilege into which he was born eighty-six years ago. In 2003 I called him “the John P. Marquand of American theater,” which still seems to me wholly apt. Like all prolific artists, Marquand very much included, Gurney was uneven, but his best plays are eloquent and intensely elegiac portraits of a world that is on the edge of extinction, and at least one of them, The Dining Room, is by way of being a masterpiece.

As I wrote in my review of Mark Lamos’s Westport Country Playhouse 2013 revival of The Dining Room:

“The Dining Room” is a piece of virtuoso stagecraft, an extended one-act play in which six actors portray 57 characters, nearly all of whom are WASPs who live or have lived in the same old-fashioned house at various times between the 30’s and 70’s. We see them in youth and old age, joy and despair, assurance and confusion, but though they are almost always shown to us with a smile, we are never allowed to doubt that time has passed them by—and that it should have done so. It is that iron conviction which charges Mr. Gurney’s witty vignettes with the bite that keeps “The Dining Room” from dissolving into soft-centered charm.

The insularity of the community in which his characters live is nicely caught in this brief exchange: “I grew up here.” “Who didn’t?” But the play’s most telling lines are spoken by an outsider, a furniture repairman who inspects the underside of the now-rickety 1898 dining table that is the play’s visual centerpiece and describes it as follows: “It’s well made. It’s a solid, serviceable copy. Based on the English.” If you’re not listening closely, you might fail to notice that those lines have the chiseled ring of an epitaph…

Gurney never had any luck on Broadway, but his plays have long been off-Broadway and regional-theater staples, and I have no doubt that they will continue to be widely performed. While our paths never crossed, I had the good fortune to cover most of his New York premieres in the later years of his long life. I described him on one of the last of those occasions as “an American master, one of the best playwrights that we have.” I mourn his passing with all my heart.

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A.R. Gurney’s New York Times obituary is here.

Gurney talks about writing The Wayside Motor Inn in 1978:

Mrs. T and I are taking the next three days off. We’ll be hopping in the family car at midday and driving to an undisclosed location not far from the water’s edge. My Wall Street Journal assignments for the week are finished and there’s nothing I absolutely have to get done between now and the beginning of next week, so that’s my plan: to do as little as possible.

I’ve already uploaded my regular blog postings for the rest of the week, but if you should catch me on Twitter or Facebook, please be so kind as to remind me that I shouldn’t be there.

I’ll be back in business on Monday, when I plan to celebrate an important personal anniversary in this space. Till then…see you around.

It’s time once again for my annual appearance on Theater Talk, the weekly TV series hosted by Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel in which theatrical types talk about…theater. This week I’m part of a panel of drama critics discussing the spring season on Broadway. Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Linda Winer, and I hold forth on the latest hit shows with great good humor, considerable disagreement, and a fair amount of acerbity (none of it mutual).

If you live in the New York area, our episode will air on WNET at 1:30 a.m. on Friday (or, to be exact, Saturday morning) and 11:30 a.m. on Sunday. As always, it will also be televised on other channels, and you’ll be able to view the episode on line next month by going here.

For more information on air dates and times, go here.

One more thing: we had so much fun that further excerpts from our conversation will be telecast next week as well! Watch this space for details.