VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S “THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN”

Nabokov wrote THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN at 24

THE PLAY THAT SHOWS NABOKOV’S EARLY GENIUS

Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, THE TRAGEDY OF MR. MORN was written in the winter of 1923-24 in Prague when Nabokov was twenty-four. After completing the play in January, he wrote in a letter he felt like a house just emptied of its grand piano. And what a grand piano it is, full of music and wonder.

Two years later he wrote Mary, the first of nine novels written in Russian. Other Russian novels include King, Queen, Knave (1928), The Luzhin Defense (1930), Glory (1932), Laughter in the Dark (1933), Despair (1934), Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and The Gift (1938).

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee again in 1940 when he was forced to leave France for the United States. In the U.S. he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He began writing novels in English with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1941. He followed up with Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).

On the Modern Library list of best 100 novels written in English, Lolita is number four and Pale Fire is fifty-two. Vladimir and Vera Nabokov were married for over fifty years and they had one child, Dmitri. In 1961 the Nabokovs moved to Montreux, Switzerland where he lived until the end of his life in 1977.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) in a car window with pencil and note cards.

THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN is set in an imaginary country, part fairy-tale kingdom with an atmosphere like Shakespeare’s Verona or Venice, part post-revolutionary Russia. Before the action of the play begins, a mysterious and benevolent king has ruled anonymously, behind a black mask. Four years ago this king quelled a rebellion and has restored peace and prosperity to a troubled land. The leader of the revolution, Tremens, remains free though his friends “suffer in black exile” because the king views Tremens as a magnet for “the scattered needles, the revolutionary souls” who can be gathered up.

MOTHER ROLE IN “DAYS IN THE TREES” RIVALS LEAR

May 14, 2020 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Marguerite Duras, Author of DAYS IN THE TREE featured the strong role of Mother in her play — DAYS IN THE TREES Author Marguerite Duras created the role of Mother

A King Lear-like role for a mature woman exists. In DAYS IN THE TREES, by Marguerite Duras. A character referred to only as Mother is so domineering she authors a tragic role for herself that Shakespeare may have envied. Unlike Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children, DAYS IN THE TREES is seldom produced. This is woeful, an indictment of our stodgy regard for staging drama. Now that life has slowed down for many of us theatre folk on lockdown—consider this neglected play.

THE KEY FIGURE IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF DURAS

Marguerite Duras (1914-96) was born weeks before the outbreak of World War I. Her birthplace is Gia-Dinh near Saigon in what is now Southern Vietnam–then part of the French Colony Cochinchina. After her father died of amoebic dysentery, Marguerite was brought up with her two brothers by her mother. Her mother Marie Legrand decided to stay on in Indochina. She made a humble living as a teacher and by playing the piano for silent films. Later acquiring land on the Cambodian coast. The land turned out to be worthless. She went bankrupt trying in vain to build dams to protect her rice paddies against the yearly advance of the sea. Owing to this, the mother is the key figure in the life and work of Marguerite Duras.

As Jean-Louis Arnaud has written, “The mother figure in The Sea Wall (1950) can be found thirty years later in The Lover, always the same, plain-spoken, courageous and obstinate to the point of absurdity in her choices and her prejudices; loved and hated, respected and denigrated all at once.”

MANIAC: REFLECTIONS ON A TRIPPY TV SERIES

October 26, 2018 / think twice / 2 Comments / Sticky

Netflix Mini-Series MANIAC Poster, wtih Emma Stone and Jonah Hill

If you’re looking for a platonic tryst with a Netflix mini-series, try MANIAC. You may have already sampled it (since its premier on Sept. 21, 2018) and found it slow in the beginning episodes. This gradual unfolding is by design. From the get-go episode “The Chosen One,” MANIAC doesn’t seek to thrill, scare, or romance. The show just wants to be friends.

To use Aldous Huxley’s term, we are each “island universes.” And this state of disconnect with potential is early MANIAC in a nutshell. Friendships take time and the mini-series takes its time to establish an almost-reality setting, the tension of its disconnect / connect theme, and its complex central characters. The schizophrenic Owen Milgrim. The anti-social Annie Landsberg.

All said, this sci-fi drama-comedy is more satisfying than any TV I’ve seen in a while. I watched MANIAC twice through. And thought twice, even enjoyed the dense first episode much more the second time.

Created by Patrick Somerville and Cary Joji Fukunaga, the ten-episode series follows Annie (Emma Stone) and Owen (Jonah Hill). Miserable strangers until they meet through a high-risk experimental drug trial. Through the trial the protagonists experience a complex mixture of biographical and genre-hopping hallucinations.

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

June 26, 2018 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Robert Indiana’s HOPE sculpture and Chase (formerly Chemical) Bank in the Theatre District of New York City

HOPE, THE BANK, AND AMERICAN PYSCHO

There’s the hope of Emily Dickinson’s poem. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” And there’s HOPE. The work of the late pop-artist Robert Indiana on 7th Avenue and 53rd Street. The four letter sculpture with its two tiers. The “O” leaning forward.

Compared to LOVE (on 55th and 6th Avenue) HOPE is the wallflower emotion. Maybe hope is just too broad, too accommodating. One can hope to find love. But can one love to find hope? Sounds like madness. Like the theme of an under-rated recent Broadway musical that ran for just ten weeks.

If you’re a theatre aficionado with a dark side you saw the short-lived American Psycho (Spring 2016). Or as an intrepid fiction-reader you may have read Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel that the musical is based on.

If so, it must seem a wild coincidence to see the HOPE statue positioned on the corner near a Chase Manhattan branch. This especially if you were around in the eighties when Chemical Banks were ubiquitous in New York. Before Chemical acquired Chase Manhattan Bank in 1996 and adopted its name.

RETURNING TO REIMS

February 20, 2018 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

RETURNING TO REIMS, based on the memoir of Didier Eribon, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, featuring Nina Hoss

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE

A THINK TWICE DRAMA VIEW

As remarkable as RETURNING TO REIMS is for what it does, it is even more surprising for what it doesn’t.

RETURNING TO REIMS doesn’t entertain or pander to the consumer in us as commercial theatre does . . . Rather, it awakens our interest in our own lives.

It doesn’t attempt to transform its audience into a gratified mob satisfied that theatrical justice has been exacted . . . It appeals to each of us as individuals capable of taking actions beyond the stage that are divergent, positive, and necessary.

It doesn’t rely on standard plot progression and escalating conflict to hold our interest and to arrive at a payoff . . . It values discussion and agreement over conflict and story closure.

It doesn’t fall into a reassuring pattern of satire and vitriol against the present . . . It doesn’t vent at easy targets. It addresses the current state of global politics through reminding us of the recent past.

NEW HEART & FURY FROM ADRIENNE KENNEDY

January 24, 2018 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Adrienne Kennedy

A THINK TWICE DRAMA worth the wait:

HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX

The sad, aching thing about Adrienne Kennedy’s new play set in the Jim Crow South of 1941 is how relevant it is today to our divided nation. This disturbing and haunted one act–produced by Theatre for a New Audience–is the world premiere of the first new Adrienne Kennedy play in almost a decade.

HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX is a two-character dramatic recital as cerebral and deep as anything you may experience on the stage. Under the often sweet surface, HEART simmers with rage against the violence of segregation and abuse of power in wartime Montefiore, Georgia. And well beyond.

THINK TWICE REVIEW: PEOPLE PLACES & THINGS

October 27, 2017 / think twice / 6 Comments / Sticky

Irony of Irony: PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS at ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE

A Doctor tries to hand medication to the patient Emma in PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS

credit: Johan Persson

The American Premiere of Duncan Macmillan’s PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS at St. Ann’s Warehouse is a thought piece and a gutsy gorgeous thing to behold. It is also darkly comic. The play opens meta-theatrically, in mid-sentence.

And we aren’t the audience we thought we were. We find ourselves well within another play. Act IV, the concluding pages of Chekhov’s frequently-produced The Seagull.

The heroine/anti-heroine Emma of PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS is playing Chekhov’s actress Nina to harrowing and comic effect. This as we shift our expectations to accommodate an excerpt from this late 19th century work. It is clear that Emma (a magnificent Denise Gough) is drunk on stage. Her posture suggests a marionette with a couple of strings cut. Emma has hit rock bottom during this performance. As she fumbles to remember her lines, she begins to talk less in the character of Nina and more as herself. The modes of reality between the role and the performer begin to blur.

SUSAN LORI PARKS’ IN THE BLOOD, PART 2

September 25, 2017 / think twice / 5 Comments / Sticky

THE COMIC TRAGIC TONE OF SUSAN LORI PARKS’ IN THE BLOOD

Have you had the chance to see IN THE BLOOD by Susan Lori Parks? BLOOD is playing now at the Signature Theatre. If so, what did you think? Please click the comment button under the title. It would be great to hear what you think of the play.

After first seeing and then reading BLOOD, there is so much I admire in this production. Though the subject has been drawn from Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the tone of IN THE BLOOD is more complex than the novel’s relentlessly somber narrative.

It is well known that Hawthorne wrote the story of Hester Prynne, at least in part, to exorcise his guilt over the severity of the Puritan character in his seventeenth century ancestors in Salem. Some of whom participated in the Salem Witch Trials.

Inspiration for PARKS’ IN THE BLOOD: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

In reading excerpts of the novel it is discernable where Parks may have taken inspiration and reimagined the story’s components in modern terms. Before he introduces his readers to Hester Prynne, Hawthorne puts forward a representative of the law.

The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.

A policeman doesn’t appear in BLOOD. But one is described chasing after what turns out to be his stolen policeman’s club. Which has been stolen by her son Trouble. Hester’s oldest daughter Bully describes what has transpired.

He had a big stomach. Like he was pregnant. He was jiggling and running and yelling and red in the face.

What is ominous for its symbolic and punitive qualities in Hawthorne’s lawman translates for Parks into comic imagery. (One can picture Oliver Hardy in hot pursuit.) But there’s more than comedy at stake. Once Hester takes the billy club away from her thieving son Trouble, she becomes the holder of this moral instrument.

Parks' IN THE BLOOD baby picture and billy club

Hester played by Saycon Sengbloh of Parks’ IN THE BLOOD with baby picture and billy club (photo by Joan Marcus)

Moreover, Hester will brandish the club at emotional peaks in the drama. The use of the word “pregnant” in the context of a male authority figure reverberates through out the play. (The scenes with the Doctor, the Minister, and her First Boyfriend Chili.) The “big-stomached” policeman’s authoritative, yet futile anger is passed like a baton. To the angry mother of five who becomes increasingly desperate as the play goes.

What begins with slapstick imagery, reminiscent of silent films, is developed tragically as in the theater of Bertolt Brecht. Especially, as in Mother Courage and Her Children. Parks’ Hester La Negrita is not fighting for survival on the sidelines of an historic European war, but during ordinary times in modern America. The androgynous image of the pregnant-looking policeman chasing Hester’s bastard child Trouble is central to the play. The result of his losing his policeman’s stick to Hester resonants through out. It symbolizes the complicity of society, men and women, in evoking Hester’s tragedy.

Susan Lori Parks’ IN THE BLOOD: A THINK TWICE REVIEW

September 4, 2017 / think twice / 1 Comment / Sticky

Review of Signature’s IN THE BLOOD by Susan Lori Parks

Susan Lori Parks, IN THE BLOOD and FUCKING A are The Red Letter Plays, riffs on The Scarlet Letter

If you haven’t seen Susan Lori Parks’ IN THE BLOOD, it is time. To go. The Signature Theatre has launched a powerful and very timely revival of this important play. IN THE BLOOD is a riff on Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. It is that rare play that packs both an emotional and intellectual wallop. A motherly one. Somehow it comes off as both timeless and composed from today’s news.

IN THE BLOOD was written twenty years ago and first performed at the Public Theater in 1999. It is partly a conversation between authors from different eras. Parks today and Hawthorne in 1850. It is also a fierce indictment of an ageless problem. False morality that serves opportunism.

TINA HOWE & DRAMA OF THE UNINTELLIGIBLE PART 1

January 5, 2016 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

An Interview with Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson

In the “Language Issue” of The Dramatist (Jan/Feb 2016) Tina Howe interviews Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson. The subject is inventing languages. Both Washburn and Hutchinson have created and utilized imaginary languages in plays.

No stranger to make-believe idioms, Tina Howe leads a remarkable discussion. One that goes beyond an appreciation of what’s murky, unclear, and ambiguous in the theatre. As an interviewer she is articulate, manic, and uniquely qualified.

Tina Howe is best known for zany and irreverent plays that explore feminine terrain with Ionesco-like absurdity. During the interview the three women lapse into fluent playwright-speak, a language of its own, that is a pleasure to read. If you have the opportunity, read the interview in its entirety. It’s well worth it.

Howe ingeniously peppers the interviewees with questions, a half-dozen at a time. This strategy opens up a broad field of inquiry for Washburn and Hutchinson to respond to. One that fits the subject of order growing out of chaos. Quickly both of the interviewed playwrights hone in on what they want to say.

Tina Howe and Imaginary Languages in Drama (alain kementieva fantasy)

Germ Idea for a Play in Zurich

Anne Washburn describes the genesis of her play The Internationalist. The play grew out of an experience she had while visiting Zurich as a document manager for a Swiss re-insurance company. She recalls hearing a story told, in English for her benefit, by a Swiss colleague.

–about a woman who thinks her cat is being attacked by a fox and rushes out into the backyard to save it, and wrestles what she thinks is the cat away from the fox and then discovers that she is holding a weasel instead, and the fox is looking at her in astonishment, and the weasel is looking at her in astonishment, and then the weasel and the fox exchange a look. It’s just a wonderful story about communication and miscommunication.

Then another colleague follows up this story with one that begins in English but lapses into Swiss-German and never returns. This story puts Washburn into the position of guessing at its meaning sonically. Intuiting a hypothetical, personalized fictive meaning according to the rhythms and cadences of the story told in Swiss-German.

PLAYWRIGHT INTENT–CHINA DOLL PART 3

December 23, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Playwright and Reviewer Gap

For most plays there’s a gap between what the playwright intends and what the reviewer receives. For CHINA DOLL the gap between intent and reception has been unusually wide. Even though some reviewers cried “obvious,” they didn’t glean the less than obvious contributions toward the theme of Mamet’s play.

It seemed to many that CHINA DOLL is just a one-sided parlor drama in which David Mamet forgot to include other characters and wouldn’t let Al Pacino’s character get off the phone. They missed the machine-gun dialogue they’d come to expect from Mamet. They wished for the things ordinary Broadway plays have.

Maybe someone can answer this. Do reviewers really not understand the plays they don’t like? Or is it aggressive helplessness? Faux-floundering that condemns in the safest possible means? “I just didn’t get it.” Rather than debate a sociological theme or psychological insight that a play like CHINA DOLL has put forward, reviewer haplessness puts the blame squarely on the playwright.

If this is true, why? Maybe it’s because dismissing a play as horrible is easier, less dangerous and dirty, than debating. Attacking a play for its look and feel risk nothing. Posing an argument is dangerous for some, beneath the dignity of others. An argument reveals too much and no one in good taste reveals too much. Better to attack the surface, the “touchy feely” aspects, of the production. Many reviewers seem furious that CHINA DOLL isn’t pretty. Trouble with opinions is that when they appear in print they masquerade as facts. The reviews say CHINA DOLL is horrible, therefore it must be a fact. Jonathan Mandell of the DC Theatre Scene comments:

David Mamet’s CHINA DOLL involves two dramas. There’s the one on stage starring Al Pacino as an old billionaire in the something of a cynical primer on wealth and political ambition. Then there’s the pile-on against the show: The reviews have been the worst anything on Broadway has gotten this whole year. [. . .] With only a few exceptions, the reviewers have sounded hostile, one calling the play “garbage.”

MAMET & PACINO REDUX—CHINA DOLL Part 2

December 14, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

David Mamet, WHO is CHINA DOLL?

In the smart new Mamet play, who (or what) does the title refer to? A great question! Unless I’m mistaken, the words “china doll” are not spoken. I took it that the title refers to the girlfriend Francine Pearson. Or, more precisely, Mickey Ross’s perception of her. How Ms. Pearson “appears” in his psyche. How he has fashioned her in his mind.

In the first act of the play, Ross lays it out in simplistic terms. Francine didn’t marry him for looks or for youth. She married him for money. He never factors in that there are subtle factors for which a person might marry. He tells Carson that a beautiful woman will always be able to entertain many offers and she will simply choose the best offer. Ross beholds Francine as a beautiful and brittle object. She is a figurine needing his protection, a valuable chess piece for him to move around his psychic game board.

In Beckett’s important work Endgame, Hamm’s first words are “Me . . . to play.” In CHINA DOLL, Mamet dramatizes the final moves of Mickey Ross, the play’s Machiavellian anti-hero.

Shakespeare's King Lear, a mirror for Mamet and China Doll

Fool (Richard O’Callaghan) and Lear (Tim Pigott Smith in The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s KING LEAR. In CHINA DOLL by David Mamet, Ross is Lear-like for his rage and folly.

Characters in Endgame are inspiration for Ross and Carson in Mamet CHINA DOLL

Hamm (George Roth) and Clov (Terrence Cranendonk) in Endgame produced by the Cleveland Museum of Art (2011), photo by Peter Jennings. Beckett’s Endgame is the absurdist model for CHINA DOLL by David Mamet

Pacino and Denham in CHINA DOLL by David Mamet

Ross and Carson ( Al Pacino and Christopher Denham) in CHINA DOLL by David Mamet at the Schoenfeld Theater (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

AKA Ann Black, in this Mamet Play, Chess Piece? Conspirator? Spy?

And because his fiancé doesn’t appear in the play, we are invited to imagine her at the end of a phone call. An Aphrodite of our minds. Even there, her imagined presence offers more than Mickey’s picture. The false name that she uses in the hotel in Toronto, Ann Black, is telling. Miss Pearson is more than she appears.

“Black” may refer to her chess piece color and hint at darkness and subterfuge, a hidden agenda. She doesn’t explain why she used a false name when he asks her. Ross doesn’t press her for an answer even when it becomes clear that his legal problems may have nothing to do with tax evasion.

CHINA DOLL by MAMET: A THINK TWICE DRAMA REVIEW

December 9, 2015 / think twice / 10 Comments / Sticky

CHINA DOLL Passengers: We Are Experiencing Turbulence

It began with the announcement that Al Pacino would appear in CHINA DOLL, an original play by David Mamet on Broadway. Fans who will go see Pacino on the big stage no matter what, whether it’s Shake-speare’s Merchant of Venice or Mamet’s American Buffalo—snatched up tickets for the fifteen week run that began at the Schoenfeld Theater in October this year.

That was the pro-Pacino buzz.

And as if from some law of drama physics, a counter-buzz met the pro-buzz with comparable force. This buzz was generated by speculation that the legendary-but-aged Pacino (75) couldn’t remember his lines. Rumors fixated on technical prompting devices that gave his memory assistance. Deriders of CHINA DOLL didn’t have to see the play to form an opinion. They’d heard all they need to know. The anti-Pacino buzz.

Finally, after two months of previews, CHINA DOLL opened in early December. Finally we’ve gotten past the glare of the lead actor’s stardom and honed in on Mamet’s play. Finally we won’t have to listen anymore to the vultures and boo-birds who get off on rooting for someone to fail. The critics have considered the play and set things right. Right? Hmmm. Wrong.

FOOL FOR LOVE, THINK TWICE DRAMA REVIEW, PART 2

December 4, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Lassoing the Bedposts in FOOL FOR LOVE

You watch the stuntman Eddie in his cowboy duds lassoing the bedposts in the motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert. And you can go big picture or little picture. Big picture is Eddie’s indoor rodeo for his half-sister May is symbolic of the closing of the Great American West, a cowboy trapped in the Cracker Jacks box of modern life . . . Little picture, you agree with May: he’s just showing off, the way a boy tries to impress a girl. He’s a fool for love.

After all it’s “Eddie.” Not Ed or Edward.

Sam Rockwell brings a menacing yet boyish charm to the role in the current Broadway production of FOOL FOR LOVE. He told the New York Times that to prepare for the role he went to rodeos, hung out with wranglers, and studied roping. He practiced by lassoing trashcans in Tompkins Square Park. To steady his throws, he does a half hour of throws before the curtain goes up. About what drives his character, Rockwell said:

“Ultimately, the scene is not about roping; the scene is about two cosmically entwined lovers. The character is incredibly vulnerable. He brings a shotgun, a bottle of tequila—all this macho swagger, to cover up that fact that he’s afraid of being abandoned. And that’s what the play is about.”

As the play moves forward, the cowboy routine seems more and more the role-playing of a little kid. Eddie tells May he’s practicing. But more than practicing, it’s avoidance: the arrested development by a man traumatized by the sad end of his mother.

It’s the reverse of a child feigning at a glorious Tom Mix adulthood. It’s the traumatized adult pretending to be that child again. Eddie is so terrified of becoming his father, the source of the family tragedy, that he can’t put away the cowboy fantasy.

FOOL FOR LOVE’s Sam Rockwell as Eddie

His Face and Her Neck

Early in FOOL FOR LOVE, Eddie tells May he’s driven 2,480 miles to come see her and an odd–even for them–exchange follows. The stage directions instruct that Eddie is looking down as he speaks and sticking close to the wall.

EDDIE: I missed you. I did. I missed you more than anything I ever missed in my whole life. I kept thinkin’ about you the whole time I was driving. Kept seeing you. Sometimes just a part of you.

MAY: Which part?

EDDIE: Your neck.

MAY: My neck.

EDDIE: I missed all of you but your neck kept coming up for some reason. I kept crying about your neck.

MAY: Crying?

EDDIE: Yeah. Weeping. Like a little baby. Uncontrollable. It would just start up and stop and then start up all over again. For miles. I couldn’t stop it. Cars would pass me on the road. People would stare at me. My face was all twisted up. I couldn’t stop my face.

Here Eddie admits to missing May in a primal way, like a balling infant picked up and held, his face to his mother’s neck. A grown-up cowboy wouldn’t lose control of his face from missing a woman, or, at least, wouldn’t admit to it. This is the charm of Eddie, his crying game, the kid half-brother showing his vulnerability. This is Eddie’s all-out need for her as he tries to win May over one more time.

CHEKHOV TELLING TIME: Part 2

November 30, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Chekhov and Temporal Complexity in THE CHERRY ORCHARD

On July 2, 1904, Olga Knipper summoned a doctor to the hotel in the German spa of Badenweiler for her famous husband who was dying. After arriving, the doctor ordered champagne from room service for Chekhov. The champagne was to relieve his breathing. Olga reports that he sat up in bed and said in German, “Ich sterbe” [I’m dying]. . . “Then he picked up the glass, turned to me, smiled his wonderful smile and said: ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.’ He drank it all to the last drop, quietly lay on his left side and was soon silent forever.”

Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, 1901

Even with his last words, he was gauging the experience of drinking champagne in a larger context. A long time since. Chekhov was twenty-four when he first became aware of blood coming up from his throat. For twenty years slowly gave way to tuberculosis. During this time he steadfastly downplayed his condition to family and friends. He refused to be seen as a patient. As the author of THE CHERRY ORCHARD, his last completed play, Chekhov immersed the world in the temporal complexity that genius and a life long courting death had made possible.

Donald Rayfield in The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy has written that the subject of the play had a germination that goes back to Chekhov’s childhood. The author spent holidays in the Ukraine among a cherry orchard on a farm. Important too was the deforestation of Russia in the 1880s. And Chekhov himself owned a cherry orchard that was chopped down in 1899 by a timber dealer. Clearly the long-term biographical association of cherry orchards for Anton is important to the construction of his final play.

The Most Shocking Line in the Play

Lopakhin opens the play. It is he that provides the sense of urgency, who must convince the audience of the direness of the situation. He must do this even if Liubov Ranevskaya is unable to give the selling of the estate her full attention. The stage directions ask for him to check his watch frequently. He gives the terrible, impending date of the sale twice specifically (August 23). He refers to it more generally often: “Time will not stand still.” In this regard, Lopakhin is prepared to embrace the portentous future.

Yet, his personal shame at having come from peasantry (“Like a pig in a pastry shop”) and his unease with the advancing new political order indicate that he is stuck in the mud of his private history as much as the other characters are in their own. His hands hang at his sides as if they belong to someone else. By the end of the play when he fails to propose to Varya (fails to ask for her hand), even though this marriage proposal has long been anticipated by Varya and her mother Ranevskaya, we the audience understand that for Lopakhin the conundrum of love and marriage to the adopted daughter of an aristocratic family is as difficult to face as the sale of the cherry orchard has been for the others.

Still, it is Lopakhin that delivers the most shocking line in the play: “The cherry orchard is now mine!” It is a bald statement of a present fact that Chekhov jolts us with. This announcement is like no other statement for its power and immediacy. It leaps off the page. Chekhov has prepared for it by constructing a rich temporal world where talk of the past and future has dominated.

SHEPARD AND HIS LEGACY . . . FOOL FOR LOVE

November 21, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Eddie and May in Sam Shepard FOOL FOR LOVE

Roomful of Eddie and May in FOOL FOR LOVE by Sam Shepard

Shepard Staying Power

It was Halloween at the Samuel J Friedman Theater. A motley audience had gathered for the Manhattan Theatre Club production of FOOL FOR LOVE by Sam Shepard. We were there to witness a deadly dance to a song with a haunting rhythm that has played in our heads for more than thirty years.

The women might have worn red dresses, like May (Nina Arianda). The men might have dressed in the manqué of the Marlboro man, like Eddie (Sam Rockwell). But, apart from a few witches and zombies, we were there dressed as ourselves, commiserate fools. And that was enough.

FOOL FOR LOVE is about all of us. It’s that rare play that gets beyond the bickering of the central characters and digs deep into our emotional pants. Caring about some other more than yourself is at once spooky and rapturous, destructive, life-affirming, what we’ve all gone through and go it again with Eddie and May.

WONKY RULES OF DRAMA

November 12, 2015 / think twice / 5 Comments / Sticky

Wonky Rules, What We Talk About When . . .

Have you ever attended a talkback after viewing a new work (a staged reading or workshop production) and been shocked by the level of feedback? Maybe you wrote the play. Maybe you simply admired it. You thought it had a lot going for it. Then out they come. THE WONKY RULES OF DRAMA.

It’s as if the spirit of Agatha Trunchbull, the rule-mongering headmistress of MATILDA THE MUSICAL, is unleashed and what the play has going for it gets overwhelmed with a system of negativity that demands conformity.

Miss Trunchbull’s Wonky Rules

A play might be as remarkable as the young heroine Matilda . . . but never mind. There are the WONKY rules. Obey, obey, obey.

The trouble with rules, especially theatre art rules, . . . they come and go according to the taste of the times. They may be well-meaning and can be helpful in some instances. More often than not, they inhibit creativity. They are blind to originality. They dismiss. They do more harm than good when they inspire connect-the-dots, rule-book dramas.

Wonky Rules Make For Dramatic Rigor Mortis

“The moment we succeed in consciously patterning our theater,” Walter Kerr has written, “in making it do precisely what we think it ought to be doing, we are apt to paralyze it.” Kerr, a revered New York theater critic and intellectual force in the theatre for many years, won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978. As an instructor of playwriting, he mandated to his students that the purpose of the playwright is to entertain.

About rule-oriented theatre, he cites the neo-classical Italian theatre of the 16th century, the state-censored French theatre of the 17th century, and the moral British theater of the 18th century as eras of dramatic rigor mortis. “In each case, the deliberately shaped experience became an experience of boredom, and what had been outlawed as vulgar proved to be embarrassingly vital.”

Enemy of Wonky Rules Walter Kerr with Helen Hayes

Nemesis of Wonky Rules, Walter Kerr with Helen Hayes

If you think of plays as something constructed or wrought, that you are building a piece of furniture, then it is going to be different than it would be if you think writing a play is like composing or painting, an act of creation that involves the imagination.

BONOBOS AND DRAMA PART 2

October 27, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Bonobos in THE QUALMS by Bruce Norris

Bonobos are first mentioned more than halfway through THE QUALMS. Party host Gary says that humans are genetically engineered for warfare. His partner Teri says, “That’s not true. What about bonobos?” Gary continues, “—look at chimpanzees. Chimps conduct strategic attacks on rival tribes.” After the others protest, he adds, “—to protect their territory.” Then Teri says, “But Gary, Bonobos resolve conflict through sex instead of aggression and we’re genetically closer to bonobos.”

This déjà vu bonobo lesson got my attention. It was so similar to the bonobo and chimp parable in David Grieg’s THE EVENTS. [Bonobo Part 1: THE EVENTS] In this instance, however, there was cause to believe Bruce Norris would go further. And he does. His subject in THE QUALMS (Playwrights Horizons May 2015—July 2015) is closer to what has so intrigued us about bonobos, their use of sex to resolve conflict.

The play’s setting is a beach community condo owned by Gary and Teri where four couples have gathered, in theory, for erotic partner swapping. Newcomers Chris and Kristy struggle to fit into the “lifestyle.” Chris, in particular, can’t get past his hierarchal orientation.

The Kiss (Bonobo) by Gwenn Seemel

His insistence on class distinction is cleverly symbolized by his bringing an expensive bottle of cabernet to the party. Inevitably the red wine and associations with spilt red wine contribute to the crisis.

BONOBO AND CHIMP ZOO CHATTER

Bruce Norris is the author of a dozen or so unsettling, naturalistic comedies, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Claiborne Park. Many like THE QUALMS originated with Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

In his introduction (Playwrights Horizons Preview Editions), the playwright undersells THE QUALMS with a dry sociological account of the play exploring class competiveness. Sure, there’s that, but without question the eight characters interact as archetypal party animals. The audience is encouraged to view the beach condo scenario as a human zoo exhibition.

There is a frequent wonderful effect of five or six of the characters talking at the same time. In print these chatterings are formatted in short columns across the page. Each chattering marks a significant juncture in the group dynamic with a cascade of character views that advance the insecurity and tension.

TIME TELLING WITH CHEKHOV

October 17, 2015 / think twice / 2 Comments / Sticky

Time and The Mystery of the Broken String

One of the most important stage directions in theatre history appears in Anton Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD. It is the middle of Act II and the characters have assembled in an open space near an abandoned chapel. Madame Ranevskaya has delivered a revelatory monologue about her past, in which she recounts the punishments she has received for her sins—a fate that includes a husband who drank himself to death with champagne, then love on the rebound with a cruel younger man, and—most painfully—her little boy drowning in the river.

The former tutor of the lost child, Trofimov, counters with a speech about human progress. Lopakhin discusses his business, Yepikhodov strolls by playing his guitar, and Gayev gushes about the setting sun. “Oh wondrous nature, cast upon us your eternal rays, . . .” Varya and Anya plead with him to stop. Spoofing Gayev and his pool-playing references, Trofimov quips, “We’d rather have the yellow ball in the side pocket.” They all sit in silence, except for the mumbling old servant Firs.

And then . . .

Suddenly a distant sound seems to fall from the sky, a sad sound, like a harp string breaking. It dies away.

Much has been written about the symbolism of the broken string and how important it is to gaining access to Chekhov’s dramatic work. That the sound seems to fall from the sky, precipitation-like, a singular note of portent—gives credence to its cosmic relevance in the world of the play.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Madame Ranevskaya asks, “What was that?” and shivers and grows nervous. Lopakhin’s theory that the sound is an echo from a faraway mine shaft speaks to his bent to exploit nature for monetary gain. Gayev ventures that the sound came from “some kind of bird . . . like a heron” fixing it within a pastoral context. This is trumped by the eternal student Trofimov hearing it as the cry of another bird, the more intellectual owl. The elderly Firs chimes in and then adds scope. “It’s like just before the trouble started. They heard an owl screech, and the kettle wouldn’t stop whistling.” Gayev asks Firs, “Before what trouble?” and the old man answers: “The day we got our freedom back.”

Firs is referring to Czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 and the shift away from the feudal system. A view commonly held by scholars is that “broken string” results from the tension created by the older more-natural order (as symbolized by the setting sun, screeching owl, and Ranevskaya’s tragic river) and a newer more man-made order (yellow ball in the side pocket, whistling kettle, and the arrival and departure of Ranevskaya and Gayev by train that frames the story).

The tension between the infinite and the finite, between the natural and man-made order, begins in THE CHERRY ORCHARD with the play’s first line. Lopakhin’s opening words are: “The train’s finally in, thank God. What time is it?” From here Chekhov created a play of astounding temporal complexity. Four acts later he underscores his breaking-string effect by repeating it in the play’s conclusion, the final stage directions.

Ranevskaya’s estate has been sold. Firs discovers that he is locked out. The eighty-seven year old servant, a human timepiece and representative from a bygone era lies down on the front porch. He very possible dies. The distant sound occurs, in this instance, just before the quiet that precedes the sound of an ax cutting a cherry tree.

EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH

October 8, 2015 / think twice / 2 Comments / Sticky

Reconsidering Sheila Callaghan’s Fashion Play & EVERYTHING

A favorite Think Twice Drama, one that got me thinking about theatre blogging in the first place, is Sheila Callaghan’s EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH. Do you know this play? The work of Sheila Callaghan? If you don’t, you should . . . but proceed with your mind open and check your drama rules at the door.

This provocative and innovative author has written more than a dozen plays that have appeared in the best new-play theaters across the country. In EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH, she utilizes a breadth of poetic expression old and new, quantum leaps in plot, and a heartfelt examination of where the aesthetics of fashion beauty comes from and how it impacts the esteem of women and men.

BONOBOS & DRAMA PART 1: THE EVENTS

October 5, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

David Greig’s THE EVENTS

In 2015 while at the theatre, I twice caught wind of the bonobo. That is to say, two different plays, each from a contemporary playwright, mentioned this pacific chimpanzee-like species that resides in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both references seemed intended to shame the audience. We were supposed to feel dismayed, even chastised, by the realization that a rival species, this hippie or left-bank ape, as bonobos are called, is our non-violent moral better. The first bonobo mention was in David Greig’s THE EVENTS (performance on 3/6/15 at New York Theatre Workshop).

DRAMA THINK TWICE . . . WOWING BACK

September 23, 2015 / think twice / 3 Comments / Sticky

Playwright Intent, Think Twice Drama, Theatre Art Redux

Drama Hello! Hurray Theatre!

Have you ever attended a stage play and talked about it for hours afterward? Or wished you could? You traveled while sitting in your theatre seat. You lived to tell the tale. A piece of drama took you someplace emotionally and intellectually that you wouldn’t be able to get to by other means. You were smitten by a work of Theatre Art.

Did you have an “OH YEAH” moment the next day? Somehow that elusive insight or twist you didn’t catch popped into your head and that’s it. You were moved to read up on the play. You wanted to experience it again. You wondered what you might have missed the first time.

Do you like to just flat-out read plays?

THINK TWICE DRAMA is for playgoers and readers who like to ponder. It’s for delving into plays and authors and drama topics that stir us. For “getting,” not just forgetting. For cracking open that theatre history tome. For changing the lens of critical thought, for finding the hidden text, the order in chaos and chaos in order.

THE MANDALORIAN – A SCI-FI QUEST FOR INTIMACY

February 15, 2021 / think twice / 0 Comments

The Mandalorian on foot with blaster, forked rifle, and cargo

The first words of Mando – the armored bounty hunter in the Disney streaming series THE MANDALORIAN – offer a choice to one of his quarries. “I can bring you in warm or bring you in cold.” The words are delivered with the familiar tone and timber of Clint Eastwood. An arid statement of fact implying no preference from a speaker largely covered in metal. The knight-like visor reveals nothing of his face, not even eyes.

At the receiving end of the directive is Mythrol, an alien bail jumper. From his lagoon-creature face and blue pigment – he may be cold-blooded anyway.

Very cleverly, “warm or cold” recalls “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters of the Wild West. This opening reference is an auspicious set-up for an American Space Western television web series. During the eight manic episodes of Season One, there are numerous fight scenes and shoot outs in futuristic outer-world equivalents of cantinas.

More than once the action recalls the climatic scene of Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, with its commandeered machine gun spraying a circle of bullets. Mando even learns to ride a Blurrg on the desert planet Arvala-7, by showing tenderness and gaining the animal’s trust. Never mind that the Blurrg has a face more like the moon than a horse.

Space Western it is, firmly rooted in the Star Wars universe. And yet THE MANDALORIAN proves to be so much more.

To begin with, the protagonist Mando’s look is an aggregate of medieval knight, steppe warrior of the Genghis Khan era, and Marvel superhero Iron Man.

Show creator and screenwriter Jon Favreau – he of COWBOYS AND ALIENS, IRON MAN I & II and a remake of THE LION KING – gives us a Sci-Fi series with a gorgeous soundtrack by Ludvig Goransson and visual splendor that takes its cinematic cues from many seminal films.

Chapter 4 “Sanctuary” borrows its plot and look from one of the most influential films in movie history – the 1954 Akira Kurosawa classic SEVEN SAMURAI.

In Chapter 5 “The Gunslinger,” Mando and a novice bounty hunter ride anti-gravity speeder bikes through the Dune Sea on Tatooine – an excursion that recalls the chopper riding in biker movies like EASY RIDER.

The influences of THE MANDALORIAN are many. Yet the series seldom feels unfocussed or lacking in identity. (The exception is one of the episodes that Favreau didn’t write, Chapter 6 “The Prisoner.”)

What, then, holds this series together? What is it about the show that keeps the viewer curious moment by moment? Or, in other words, what is the true subject of THE MANDALORIAN?

For many, I think, it’s the slow movement toward intimacy within the protagonist. The emotional temperature of this Tin Man in search of a heart. “I can bring you in warm or I can bring you in cold.”

By the time we get to Chapter 5, the line is repeated with Mando on the receiving end. He has violated the code of the Bounty Hunter Guild on behalf of “The Child” and rescued a bounty – known to fans as Baby Yoda – from certain death at the hands of “The Client.” Continue reading

theatre art redux