I’ve just learned that the great Wayne Booth passed away last night. He was a formidable literary critic and simply a wonderful man. He was as responsible as anyone for my landing in Chicago. Generations of University of Chicago alumni who had the good fortune to be his students will feel this loss acutely. He was the kind of person who commanded enormous respect and just as much affection, and will be greatly missed.

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed three plays in this morning’s paper, two of which are off-Broadway productions, the Ma-Yi Theater Company’s No Foreigners Beyond This Point, a play by Warren Leight (he wrote Side Man), and the Mint Theater Company’s Walking Down Broadway, a previously unproduced 1931 play by Dawn Powell. The third is A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, Richard Greenberg’s new comedy:

“No Foreigners Beyond This Point” [is] a sharply pointed, similarly autobiographical play about Andrew and Paula (Ean Sheehy and Abby Royle), a pair of wide-eyed American liberals who move to China in 1980 to teach English and find themselves swept up in the wake of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution.

“No Foreigners” is the last show I ever expected to see at the Culture Project, a downtown redoubt of theatrical leftism. Though it starts out funny, it soon toughens up into a hard-edged portrait of two pink-diaper babies forced to face the dire implications of their parents’ political folly. Would that Mr. Leight had skipped the Neil LaBute-like what-it-all-means coda, but for the most part he lets his material speak for itself, never more eloquently than in the startling admission made to Paula by the toadying Vice Principal Huang (Francis Jue): “Curry favor. Always. Curry favor by betraying friends. I think at most, in China, everyone can have one or two friend. At most. Even those, you might not trust when times are rough.”…

“Walking Down Broadway” is a period piece, one from whose period we are now far removed, and as such oddly poignant in its effect. Considered solely as a hitherto-unknown piece of writing by America’s greatest comic novelist, it’s as uneven as you’d expect–you can all but hear Powell fishing for the right tone–but [Christine] Albright is wonderfully touching as Marge, whom Powell fans will recognize as a rough sketch for the plucky New York

– Payment made to George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart by Columbia Pictures in 1936 for film rights to the play You Can’t Take It With You: $200,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,693,644.73

(Source: Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies)

“Rejection kills, disappointment only maims.”

Audrey Wells, screenplay for The Truth About Cats & Dogs

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)

– Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here)

– Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

– Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Oct. 27)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Mother Courage (drama with songs, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

– Rudolf Serkin’s fee in 1938 for a piano recital: $1,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $12,871.50

(Source: Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”

Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

“If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).”

Malcolm Gladwell, “Getting In: The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions”