“We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth New Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.”
George Washington, letter to Phlip Schuyler, July 15, 1777, after the loss of Fort Ticonderoga
I noticed the other day that I’d stopped taking time off on weekends. No, it’s not that I’m in the vise-like grip of an obsession: it’s that my weekly routine gradually changed without my quite realizing it. Now that I’m a working drama critic, I usually see press previews of Broadway and off-Broadway shows on Saturday and Sunday, making it all but impossible for me to get out of town (save by complicated prior arrangement) or do much of anything else. Of course this doesn’t preclude my knocking off for a couple of days in the middle of the week, but since I’ve never in my life had a job that required me to work on weekends, I’m finding it hard to get used to thinking in terms of taking, say, Wednesdays and Thursdays off….
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
This week the critics talk to Jeremy Wein, producer and co-creator of Play-PerView, a new theatre initiative presenting livestreamed readings of plays by Tony-winning writers with all-star casts. Proceeds from Play-PerView’s events are directed to arts organizations impacted by the COVID-19 virus. Jeremy talks about the impact that Play-PerView is having on the theatre community, and the responses from both those who are embracing the new digital options and those who are more reluctant to embrace the form. The critics then discuss a mailbag question regarding when they personally will feel safe returning to the theatre, and then talk about their picks for the week, which include The Present at the Geffen Playhouse, Molly Sweeney at the Irish Rep, and Bill Irwin’s In-Zoom at the Old Globe.
To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.
In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.
Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin’s D-Sharp Minor Etude, Op. 8, No. 12, at Carnegie Hall in 1968. The video is from a concert telecast by CBS. The audio has been synchronized from a high-quality audio recording of the same performance:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
Winston Churchill, speech, Harrow School (October 29, 1941)
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Irish Repertory Theatre’s online webcast version of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.
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I’ve been eagerly waiting for a New York theater to mount a first-class online production of an indisputably major small-cast play, one that makes creative use of the qualities distinctive to webcasting instead of merely trying to duplicate the familiar effect of a staged production. That’s what St. Paul’s Park Square Theatre did with its radically innovative Zoom-based revival of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and it’s what New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre has now done with what it is billing as “a performance on screen” of “Molly Sweeney.” “Staged” by Charlotte Moore, the company’s artistic director, who directed the Irish Rep’s 2011 revival of Brian Friel’s great 1994 three-person play, this production is as memorable in its own special way as was Ms. Moore’s stage revival. It sets a new standard for what online theater can and should aspire to be.
Inspired by Oliver Sacks’ “To See or Not to See,” “Molly Sweeney” is the story of a middle-aged woman (played here as nine years ago by Geraldine Hughes) who undergoes surgery to regain the sight she lost as a baby. It is naturally suited to socially distanced online performance, consisting as it does of a sequence of interlocking monologues in which the characters directly address the audience but not one another, telling their Chekhov-like tale from their separate points of view….
What ensues is a small-town tragedy of false hope and brutal disappointment, one in which the willingness of men to use women to their own selfish ends is dramatized with quiet but overwhelming lucidity. Molly herself admits as much in a moment of agonizing candor on the night before the surgery: “Why am I going for this operation? None of this is my choosing. Then why is this happening to me? I am being used….And have I anything to gain?—anything?—anything?”…
Seeing Ms. Moore’s original revival of “Molly Sweeney” was one of the high-water marks of my playgoing life—yet this version, performed by a trio of theater artists at the peak of their collective powers, is at least as magnetically involving….
