Archives for 2017

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

From 2007:

My mother’s life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she’s never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR….

Read the whole thing here.

“The only safe thing is to take a chance.”

Elaine May (quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles)

Twelve years ago, as Hurricane Katrina was wreaking havoc on New Orleans, I briefly turned this blog into a homemade, manually updated aggregator of storm-related blogs and other websites—the first such page, so far as I know, ever to be created. It attracted wide attention and was viewed throughout the world.

To revisit that short-lived exercise in citizen journalism is, as I recalled last year, is a strange experience:

I sound like a whiskery old ham-radio operator reminiscing about the marvels of Morse code. It’s easy to forget that blogging was still revolutionary in the days of Katrina….Nowadays, of course, it would never have occurred to me to turn this site into a “stormblog.” Twitter and Facebook long ago superseded blogs as the medium of choice for snap responses to the news of the day.

I’m leaving Hurricane Irma to Twitter and to the professionals—but I’m paying even closer attention to what they have to say. The reason for my particular attention is that Mrs. T and I spend part of each winter in Florida and have good friends and colleagues who live in several of the cities about which you’ve been reading of late. Not only is Billy and Me, my new play, set to open on December 8 in West Palm Beach, where I spent a month last year directing Satchmo at the Waldorf, but I’ve come in recent years to think of Sanibel Island, to which Irma paid a visit on Sunday, as something of a second home. Mrs. T and I have spent countless hours strolling up and down its shelly beaches, eating in its cozy restaurants, and sitting on the back porch of the beach bungalow that we rent each January, gazing contentedly at the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder what that bungalow looks like today.

I can only begin to imagine the feelings of my Florida friends, some of whom toughed out Irma and the rest of whom fled her capricious wrath as best they could. I reached out to them by e-mail last week, and started hearing back from them last night. My heart aches for them all.

Mrs. T and I have been on the move since Saturday, seeing shows in New Jersey and Philadelphia. Nevertheless, we are much preoccupied with Florida, and I have no doubt that we will remain so for some time to come. It is, of course, too soon to say what effect, if any, the coming of Irma will have on the Palm Beach Dramaworks premiere of Billy and Me. I already know, however, that Hurricane Harvey has forced a change in the schedule for the Alley Theatre’s Houston production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which will open a week earlier than originally planned, on February 23. We hope to be there anyway, and come November we also expect to be down in West Palm Beach, rehearsing Billy and Me.

Where we’ll go from there remains to be seen. We were planning to spend Christmas on Sanibel, something we’ve never done before, then see shows in Coral Gables, Fort Myers, Jupiter, Miami, Naples, Orlando, and Sarasota. All that now rests in the hands of the gods, whose recent behavior reminds me of Gloucester’s terrible outburst in King Lear: As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods./They kill us for their sport. May they prove to have treated the people of Florida more mercifully than Gloucester and the willful king he loved and served.

To all our friends down there, Mrs. T and I send all the love we have in us. You are not far from our minds.

UPDATE: Bill Hayes, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ artistic director and the director of Billy and Me, tells me that the theater survived Hurricane Irma intact.

Sanibel Island also appears to have escaped significant damage. As for our bungalow, it got through the storm without a scratch.

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about where I was and what I did that day:

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age….

Read the whole thing here.

Valery Gergiev leads the National Youth Symphony in a performance of the scherzo from Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, composed in 1953. Shostakovich is said to have been portraying Stalin, who died earlier that year, in this movement:

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

“It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two more productions that I saw last month at Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, Pericles and The Maids. Here’s an excerpt.

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Eric Tucker is America’s best classical stage director, and American Players Theater is America’s best classical theater festival. It’s fitting, then, that APT has brought Mr. Tucker to Wisconsin to stage a Shakespeare play, and that the results, performed in the company’s outdoor amphitheater, should be so miraculously memorable. “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is rarely staged because of the near-insurmountable complexities of its plot, but Mr. Tucker has turned it into a crowd-pleaser. By turns earthy and fanciful, unabashedly absurd and divinely poetic, his production is a riotous explosion of pure joy.

Unlike Shakespeare’s better-loved plays, “Pericles” is—not to put too fine a point on it—more than a bit of a mess. A loose-knit skein of coincidence, it tells the increasingly implausible tale of a Phoenician prince who loses his wife and daughter at sea, then finds them again at the end of a string of adventures that occupy several decades and involve some 60-odd characters. What’s more, Mr. Tucker has mounted it in the crazy-quilt style of his own Bedlam Theatre Company, performing the play with 10 actors who switch without warning from part to part, changing accents as cheerfully as they change hats. But thanks mostly to his own shrewd direction and partly to the colorful, ingeniously designed costumes of Daniel Tyler Mathews, it’s not hard to stay abreast of the plot, and the occasional moments of near-chaos become part of the fun.

I use that last word advisedly, for the fundamental energy of Mr. Tucker’s “Pericles” is comic, a strategy that heightens the emotional potency of the serious passages…

Down the hill in the company’s 200-seat Touchstone Theatre, APT is presenting a revival of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” for which the word “fun” could hardly be less appropriate. First performed in 1947, “The Maids” is a claustrophobic portrait of the all-but-sadomasochistic relationship between a high-society Parisian woman known only as “Madame” (Rebecca Hurd) and her two servants (Andrea San Miguel and Melisa Pereyra), both of whom hate her—and themselves. You can interpret “The Maids” in any number of ways, but whatever it means, the play never fails to land with shattering dramatic force so long as it is paced in such a way as not to give the game away too soon. Ana Cristina (Gigi) Buffington, the director of this revival, understands the need to keep a tight rein on the proceedings, and her three actors give performances of a scalding yet controlled violence that is fearful and wonderful to behold….

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Read the whole thing here.

Eric Tucker talks about Pericles:

Ana Cristina (Gigi) Buffington talks about The Maids: