Archives for 2017

“The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”

W.H. Auden, “The Protestant Mystics”

Five years and three months ago, Shakespeare & Company produced Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, in Lenox, Massachusetts. An earlier version of Satchmo had previously been staged in Florida in 2011, but the Lenox production was the one that brought the play to the attention of a wider public and led in due course to its being produced off Broadway and throughout America.

I didn’t expect Satchmo to do nearly as well as it has—truth to tell, I never expected it to be produced at all—and I still can’t quite believe that it ended up being a commercial success. I’m proud of that, but I also think that I’ve been realistic about its unexpected success. Among other things, I took it for granted that I wouldn’t have the right to call myself a full-fledged playwright until and unless I managed to write another play that received at least one professional production. So it’s a very big deal for me that Billy and Me, my second play, goes into rehearsal tomorrow morning at Palm Beach Dramaworks, where it will open on December 8. As of this week, in other words, I am officially a playwright.

I’ll be flying down to West Palm Beach later today, and I’m in a state of what can best be described as nervous delight. Few things in the world are as much fun as rehearsing a show—so long as it’s going well. The good news is that I’m feeling optimistic about Billy and Me, at least for now. Bill Hayes, the director, has workshopped the play three times, in the course of which I saw more than enough of Nicholas Richberg and Tom Wahl, the stars, to know that they know what they’re doing and then some. I love Victor Becker’s set designs, and I’m sufficiently familiar with the work of the other members of the design team to expect that their contributions will be no less satisfying. As for Bill, he’s one of my favorite directors, and his plans for the staging sound completely convincing to me.

None of this means that Billy and Me is a sure thing. All I know is that the script is as good as I could make it going into the first rehearsal. Working on Satchmo at the Waldorf taught me that you don’t really know how well a play works until you get into the rehearsal room. That’s when you see for the first time exactly what you’ve got and start to figure out how much more work remains to be done. I wrote the character of Miles Davis into Satchmo after going home from the first rehearsal in Lenox. While I’m not expecting to do anything quite as drastic as that to Billy and Me before opening night, I’m also taking it for granted that we’re in for a day of surprises, some of which may prove to be less than happy. But that’s all right, too: I enjoy solving problems, and I work well under pressure.

Enough, then, with the waiting. It’s time to go into the rehearsal room, close the door behind us, and start playing for keeps. We have five weeks to turn the script of Billy and Me into a show. Ready or not, here we come.

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To order tickets to Billy and Me or for more information about the play and production, go here.

Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton, the Modernaires, the Nicholas Brothers, and Glenn Miller’s big band perform “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo” in Orchestra Wives, directed by Archie Mayo and released in 1942. The song is by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren. Jackie Gleason is briefly seen miming the bass part:

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

“A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.”

W.H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Lincoln Center Theater premieres of two new plays, Zoe Kazan’s After the Blast and Ayad Akhtar’s Junk. Here’s an excerpt.

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Zoe Kazan, one of New York’s finest under-40 actors, is also a playwright and screenwriter of uncommon talent. “Ruby Sparks,” her first screenplay, was a romcom with a feminist edge that had something exceedingly thoughtful to say about the tendency of men to idealize women instead of accepting them as they really are. “After the Blast,” Ms. Kazan’s fourth stage play, is as thoughtful and well-made as “Ruby Sparks,” and it pulls off the bedazzling feat of taking a hyper-politicized topic—climate change—and using it as the occasion for a taut, sermon-free drama whose true subject is, once again, the inability of men and women to see each other plain.

“After the Blast” is a science-fiction play, a dystopian fantasy set in “the near future” whose eight characters include a robot. The premise, which Ms. Kazan leaves suggestively vague, is that the surface of the earth has been laid waste by a nuclear exchange that punched more holes in the ozone layer, thus forcing a saving remnant of highly intelligent men and women to move underground while everyone else is left to starve. The male survivors, most of whom are scientists, then devote themselves to fixing the environment, while the women mostly look after them and bear their children—but only if the Council, a deceptively soft technological tyranny, decides that they should be allowed to reproduce….

Ms. Kazan introduces us to her principal characters, a married couple named Anna (Cristin Milioti) and Oliver (William Jackson Harper) who are, as he explains in the first scene, “still waiting to receive Fertility.” They have only one chance left to pass the test and become parents, for Anna suffers from a potentially disqualifying case of depression caused by her inability to cope with the stresses of underground life.

In order to coax Anna back to emotional health, Oliver brings home a “Helper,” a home-assistance robot that must, he tells her, be trained to interact with humans so that it can be placed in the homes of older people who are no longer capable of living alone. In the process of teaching the robot how to talk, Anna bonds with it…

Ayad Akhtar’s “Junk” is a parable of late capitalism whose villain-in-chief is a junk-bond salesman named, none too discreetly, “Robert Merkin” (Steven Pasquale). It’s performed at breakneck speed by a budget-busting cast of 23 actors, an ensemble so huge that it would have taken a Tom Stoppard—or a Shakespeare—to portray the individual characters as anything other than stick figures. Mr. Akhtar is talented, but not that talented…

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To read my review of After the Blast, go here.

To read my review of Junk, go here.

A montage of scenes from After the Blast:

A montage of scenes from Junk:

Herman Wouk, the author of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Fred Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on October 23, 1955:

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

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.”

Thomas Beecham (quoted in Harold Atkins and Archie Newman, Beecham Stories: Anecdotes, Sayings and Impressions of Sir Thomas Beecham)

“I think you’re in for a little surprise,” I told Mrs. T when she got up this morning. I’d posted this piece about her struggle with pulmonary hypertension on Wednesday. We expected it to draw a modest amount of attention, but nothing more than that. Boy, were we ever wrong. As of last night, “Ready to Begin Again” had received more than ten thousand hits—an extraordinarily high number for a posting that isn’t about politics or movie stars.

Not only are the hits still flooding in, but thousands of readers have responded directly via Twitter and Facebook, sending warm wishes and—even more important—assuring us that they’d signed up to be organ donors because of what I wrote about Mrs. T’s illness and her need for a pair of donor lungs. Many of these messages came from friends and colleagues, but most were from total strangers.

Both of us, needless to say, were and are touched to the heart by your kind words, of which this handful of tweets is entirely representative:

• “Terry, thank you for sharing. Sending love to you & Mrs. T. My good angels are also on your side.”

• “Sir, a great article and prayers for both of you. Also I just signed up as an organ donor, thanks to your article and your wife’s inspiration.”

• “Terry, all the best to you and Mrs. T. What a lousy hand to get, but your expression of love is inspiring. Wishing you hope and happiness.”

• “Good luck as you go through the stages of this process. A donated kidney keeps my best friend and wife ticking right along.”

• “If love counts for anything, you two will be warriors against all adversity. Continuing prayers for you & Mrs. T.”

• “Your story being shared around our rural Wisconsin hearth this evening. We hope you can feel the warmth. I see much incoming from many.”

• “To read your feed you’d never suspect anything but a great love story. Now we know it’s so much more. Thanks for sharing. Prayers up.”

• “Wishing you and Mrs. T all the very best of luck. I’d always intended to register as a donor, but never got round to it: I just did.”

• “Gosh, what a beautiful and heartrending story, Terry. All the best to you both.”

• “You and Mrs T have been having an amazing journey together. This will become another stop on what will continue to be a wonderful life. And as for becoming a donor: it may be scary to think about, but once you sign up you feel really good for having done so. I have and I do.”

• “I don’t know either of you except through Mr. Teachout’s writing and Twitter feed. I cried reading this. Blessings on you both.”

We cried, too.

Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s written. Your love buoys us up. And if I may, let me end this posting as I did its predecessor: if you haven’t signed up to be an organ donor, please do so now, and encourage your friends to do likewise. The life you save could be that of the woman I love.