The Feminist Spectator

Precious

2009-11-29T18:23:00.000-08:00

Gabourey Sidibe as Precious

Lee Daniels’ film Precious, based on the novel Push, by Sapphire, is by turns an exhausting and exhilarating mix of utter brutality and exemplary compassion. The whole film is marked by such binaries—Gabourey Sidibe, for instance, who plays the title character, sometimes appears so opaque that her features seem like a painting, frozen in a removed, indecipherable mask of a scowl. At other times, as Precious’s journey moves forward into what one can only hope will be a better future, that stolid countenance begins to crack, as Precious starts to trust people enough to let her emotions register more readily.

This indie film has already garnered a wealth of attention, including a New York Times Magazine cover story on the director and his star, and superlative reviews. I wonder if part of this hoopla signals the eternal voyeurism of a dominant culture that in some prurient way revels in the depravations of the marginal and much less privileged. Scenes of Precious’s home life with her mother, Mary (played by the comedienne Mo’Nique, whose role here couldn’t be farther from humor), reveal a viciousness rarely seen on screen, as routine as it most likely is in some people’s lives. Mary survives on welfare checks that let her hole up in her cave-like Harlem apartment like a hibernating bear. She does nothing but smoke, drink, and watch television day in and day out, while her anger about her daughter smolders and too often ignites.

Precious, we quickly learn, is now pregnant with her second child by her own father. Director Daniels quickly intercuts scenes of incestuous rape in flash-backs whose fragmented images communicate the older man’s intensity, strength, and refusal to take no for an answer. He throws his daughter violently onto the bed and mounts her, whispering meaningless assertions of love while he sinks deeper into his own desire. In one scene, Mary passes the bedroom door as her boyfriend rapes her daughter, witnessing but not intervening. She perverts her complicity with Precious’s degradation into jealousy that her own man would want Precious instead.

Mary’s bitterness curdles into a sour, palpable antipathy that emanates from the screen like a foul sulphurous cloud. She scowls at her daughter’s back while Precious cooks their dinner, ordering the young girl to serve her as though Precious were a menial and Mary royalty. On impulse, her anger gathers and she lashes out, throwing heavy objects at Precious’s head and viciously sweeping plates onto the floor.

Her sixteen-year-old daughter, adept at ducking and at self-preservation, absorbs with unemotional resolve the blows and the incessant insults about her weight and her stupidity that Mary metes out. Watching those horrific scenes, it’s clear why the young girl’s dark black moon-shaped face, its features crowded together by flesh, has cultivated a mask of indifference. Underneath what looks like passivity, her determination gathers and her instinct for self-protection strengthens.

A sympathetic, overworked white principal in her public school tells Precious she can no longer be a student because of her pregnancy. But the woman refers her to an “alternative school” that enrolls girls in complicated situations, and Precious doggedly pursues the lead, despite her mother’s withering scorn. She finds the school’s offices and puts her fate in the hands of a world-weary African American receptionist who registers Precious and moves her into the system that will ultimately redeem her.

To Daniels’ credit, the road to Precious’s salvation isn’t a foregone conclusion. The movie doesn’t reassure the spectator with the music cues that usually tell us there’s hope, or with predictable plot turns that allow us to follow the story comfortably, reassured that everything will work out in the end. The narrative, in fact, turns unpredictably, and every new character offers the potential to move Precious onto a different branch of her life’s path. Her new teacher—a beautiful, indeterminately ethnic, light-coffee-colored young woman named Blu Rain (Paula Patton)—offers Precious a version of tough love that she’s never felt before, and it takes Precious time to trust that her teacher’s overtures have no ulterior motive.

The other young women in her class are underprivileged but clearly haven’t experienced Precious’s level of degradation. One is a Jamaican immigrant; another is a Latina recovering drug addict; another is, presumably, an African American soft butch lesbian with a scar on her face; and another is an African American would-be fashion model whose own version of hope is so exaggerated and overblown that she manages to infect the other women with her refusal to be browbeaten into defeat. In this company, Precious feels her way, cautiously coming to believe in the safety and care she begins to feel.

Watching Sidibe break Precious open—to love, to literacy, to self-confidence—is one of the most astonishing, moving experiences I’ve ever had during a film. Sidibe handles her implicit empathy with her character’s impossible plight with command and grace, leading us carefully through Precious’s decisions and emotions so that spectators can understand her from the inside out. She privileges us with a view into the soul of a young woman whose size and countenance seems to refuse a common humanity, and lets us see Precious choose to throw in her lot with the rest by choosing to free herself from the hell of her home.

Although Precious knows she’s pregnant, her size masks how far along she is, so her unexpected labor pains make her teachers fearful enough to call an ambulance. At the hospital, where she delivers a healthy baby boy, Lenny Kravitz plays compassionate Nurse John, a man feminized by his profession and by his commitment to organic food, by his warm, level interactions, and by his quiet kind of care. His ministrations affect Precious; when he kisses her good-bye on her forehead, it’s clear she’s rarely experienced simple expressions of kindness or affection. Her school friends crowd her hospital room, flirting with Kravitz and behaving like the teenaged girls they actually are, instead of the jaded women their lives typically force them to perform.

Precious’s first baby by her father has Down syndrome and has been banished, by Mary, to live with Mary’s mother. Mary, who can’t stand the sight of her, calls the baby “Mongo,” short for “Mongoloid.” The sweet girl is friendly and affectionate, cheerful and placid. When Mary’s mother, wary and suspicious of her own daughter, brings the little girl to their Harlem apartment in anticipation of a city social worker’s visit, the three-year-old’s non-discriminating, innocent affect throws into even sharper relief the cruelty in which Precious lives.

Mary wears a wig and dresses up for the occasion, holding the baby on her lap while the clueless social worker spends five minutes in the apartment. When the official leaves, Mary rips off her wig and thrusts the baby out of her arms, her disgust and revulsion for her own family instantly reappearing in her face. But Precious loves her child, and in the simple, occasional narrative voice-overs in which she editorializes on her situation or shares her dreams, the girl admits that she’s determined that Mongo will live with her.

The narration, in fact, is used sparingly, as it provides the only evidence that Precious has a soul determined to survive despite her situation. To Daniels’ credit, he doesn’t rely on his source material for these voice-overs in a heavy-handed way; the film is less literary than it is a stunning visual record of inarticulate fear, longing, and hope, all recorded in the smallest movements of a facial muscle or the sheen of an eye.

[Spoiler alert.]

In one of the film’s most affecting scenes—and there are many—Mariah Carey, as Precious’s sympathetic new case worker, Ms. Weiss, the cruel Mary, and the wary Precious sit together in Ms. Weiss’s small cubicle, as Mary tries to persuade Precious to come home. Mo’Nique’s devastating performance in this scene shows Mary swinging frantically among her conflicting emotions: denial at the damage that’s been wrought on her daughter by Mary’s own boyfriend; anger that Precious has left her to fend for herself, so clearly was Mary dependent on the girl’s labor; fear at being left alone; and fury, still, that her man found her daughter—in her own perverse interpretation of his actions—more sexually desirable than he found her.

All three women sit in the claustrophobic public space, tears running down their cheeks, each crying for their own reasons. Ms. Weiss’s seem to be tears of disbelief, fury, and despair that people like Mary can sink so far into such degradation, and that she can do so little to help. Precious cries because she realizes her mother can never redeem herself, that she’ll never be more than a helpless batterer to whom Precious can never return. And Mary cries because she realizes at some point in her self-serving narrative that she’s not going to win this round; she’s going to walk away empty-handed, because try as she might, she can’t present herself as anything but the monster she is.

In a last ditch attempt to win Precious back, Mary disappears into the agency’s anteroom and returns with Mongo, Precious’s little daughter. Her mother thrusts the baby into Precious’s arms, and Precious finds her resolve. She tells Ms. Weiss that much as she appreciates what she’s done for her, and as much as Precious admits she likes Ms. Weiss (an admission of some consequence for such an emotionally guarded young girl), “you can’t handle me.” Standing to go, she tells Mary that she will never ever see her again. With Mongo’s hand in hers and her little boy on her shoulder, Precious leaves the agency, moving into a crowd of New Yorkers with gritty determination and utter faith in her ability, now, to survive.

Relating the plot makes Precious sound like a television-movie-of-the-week, but the film far exceeds that the stereotype. Daniels intercuts scenes of fantasy with Precious’s reality, especially when the brutality gets extreme and she needs to disassociate. In her parallel universe, she’s got a light-skinned boyfriend on her arm, and she swans through a celebrity’s life, enjoying the literal and figurative spotlight. She dances on a pedestal on a stage, watched by a theatre full of admiring fans; she works a line of screaming acolytes, signing autographs and posing for pictures; she wears satiny long dresses and her hair styled, her make-up sophisticated, a far cry from the worn-out t-shirts and jeans that compose her daily wardrobe.

Daniels films these fantasy sequences as though they’re in Technicolor, with a flat, brassy, two-dimensional color scheme and quick edits that keep the scenes fragmented and fantastical. The film never asks the spectator to reconcile these two versions of its central character. Daniels suggests these two different young women exist side-by-side in Precious’s psyche as near mirror images of one another.

In her real life, Precious is invisible; even Oprah Winfrey, who, with Tyler Perry, is one of the film’s producers, admitted that too often, she didn’t “see” girls like Precious, and vows never to make that mistake again. In the girl’s fantasies, she’s the center of adoring attention, fawned on by fans and doted on by her boyfriend, who always stands behind her, nuzzling her ear and respecting her power. Precious doesn’t really want celebrity, Daniels seems to suggest, but it’s the only image she can hang on to that represents to her what it means to be fully seen, heard, and loved.

Precious’s teachers and advocates truly do love her, as do her fellow students and Nurse John, who takes her under his wing at the hospital. When Precious wins an achievement in literacy award, her school throws a party to which all her newfound friends come. A kinship structure has grown up around Precious, and she’s buoyed and surprised by its warmth. Along with Ms. Weiss, her case worker at the agency, her teacher at the alternative school, Ms. Rain, has been quite affected by Precious. After her son is born, when it’s clear the young girl can’t return to her mother, Ms. Rain takes her home until more permanent temporary housing can be found for Precious and the baby. Ms. Rain lives in a Harlem brownstone with sophisticated ethnic appointments, including a prominently displayed poster of Ntozake Shange’s play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enough, which graces Precious with its symbolic weight during her visit.

Ms. Rain, as it happens, is a lesbian, and she and her lovely, warm partner regale Precious with stories that fade into a mélange of happy voices as Precious wonders, in her voiceover, at being taken in by “homos.” As the two women drink wine, touch one another lightly and affectionately, and coo over the little baby, Precious looks on in wonderment, as though this is the first time she’s been around people who actually love one another. The moment is moving and revealing, as it’s clear Precious has been influenced by her mother’s prejudices, but finds a grace and generosity of self that quickly helps her reject what she’s learned and embrace the possibility of difference, of kindness, and of love.

The film’s heroes and heroines—like Ms. Rain and her partner and Nurse John—are all light-skinned, complicating the politics of race in the film. In one scene, after Precious has come to trust Ms. Weiss, the case worker (Carey), she asks the woman “what color” she is. She can’t quite read her ethnicity, which, if her name is any indication, is Jewish. Precious is unsophisticated, but she sees something in this woman that reads as “not white” to her, even if it’s just a projection because Mrs. Weiss seems to empathize so strongly with her difference.

I can’t recall a film that’s illustrated such brutality and such compassion in nearly the same breadth. Nor can I recall a film in which the central character has been as complex and compelling as Precious. Watching Precious feels like witnessing a creative virtuosity—the director’s and each of the actors’—that’s tuned into something so real and somehow true, so horrible and somehow redemptive, that you can’t look away. And that, it seems, is the film’s plea: that we see girls like Precious, instead of seeing through them or refusing to look at all.

The Feminist Spectator

Circle Mirror Transformation

2009-11-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

Circle Mirror Transformation
(Photo by Joan Marcus)

Annie Baker’s play, in a wonderful production directed by Sam Gold at Playwrights Horizons, takes place in the familiar, anonymous sterility of an all-purpose room at a community center, the kind of room that so often doubles as a crucible for community theatre and other arts. Exercise equipment clutters the floor, alongside the detritus of other objects useful for other kinds of groups. All become extraneous to the do-it-yourself creativity and faux self-help spiritualism-cum-acting lessons offered by the well-meant but self-involved would-be theatre guru, Marty.

As the oblivious leader of the four-member class, the middle-aged woman (played with a perfect balance of empathy and tone-deaf self-involvement by Deirdre O’Connell) tries to inspire her tiny band of followers to explore their inner psychology as a prerequisite to emotionally honest acting. But as Lauren (Tracee Chimo), the socially maladroit but emotionally acute teenager who’s the youngest person in the mismatched group of players notes plaintively, it’s not at all clear how any of this is going to help anyone learn how to be an actor.

Still, for Marty, the self-exploration and pseudo-psychologizing that are her stock in trade provide their own reward. It’s not at all clear that Marty has ever acted professionally; she’s one of those so-called artists who hang out a shingle on the basis of a happy fantasy rather than real life experience. Clearly, she’s cajoled her husband, James (Peter Friedman), to be part of the group, and he tries his best to go with the flow until the psychobabble gets the better of him and he takes the trust exercises a bit too far.

Schultz, Marty’s other male student, is a hapless divorcee with pent-up anger issues. Schultz is still not over the fact that his wife has left him, but he falls hard for Theresa, the supposedly “real” actor who’s moved to this remote hamlet of Shirley, Vermont, to escape her own relationship issues, as well as her own failed career. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend, an older man who controlled her jealously, a rather masochistic involvement that Theresa seems to have enjoyed more than she’s willing to admit.

Marty hurls herself into grooming this ragtag group, putting them through the ridiculous emotional recall, storytelling, and trust exercises familiar to any one who’s taken a community acting class at their local high school or playhouse. She asks the students to interview one another and then perform the narratives they collect, stories that Baker uses to structure the play’s cumulative revelations. Telling personal stories borrowed from their partners in a first-person form provides a rather sweet, halting demonstration of how the students get to know one another.

Since it’s impossible for them to perform one another without the barest hint of editorializing, we come to know the characters through how they describe and observe one another’s flaws and discrepancies during their interviews. As the six weeks of the class tick by, announced by slides projected between each scene, the characters’ back-stories are filled in a bit more, in tales that the students eventually use against one another as the trust exercises back-fire.

Each of the characters becomes likable in their own slightly askew way, as Baker gradually reveals their humor, their pain, and their sorrow. Several times, they lie on their backs on the studio floor trying to count collectively but consecutively to ten without stepping on one another’s numbers. The exercise is meant to foster trust and good listening skills. That the small ensemble can’t actually get to ten until near the play’s end marks both their failure and, at last, the ways in which they have indeed grown closer, more attune to one another’s presences and habits, their desires and frustrations.

O’Connell, as Marty, does an excellent job creating the pseudo-sincere care and attention of the not very talented acting teacher. She carefully watches each improvised moment she sets up among her pupils, positioning herself for optimal observation in a contrived, “artistic” pose, never explaining why she’s putting them through these emotional paces and never articulating what exactly they’ve done well or poorly. That each of the students simply follows her lead, rarely questioning her motives or their acting education, rings too true. I could hear who among my fellow spectators had taken such a class by the knowing laughter we shared at those familiar moments.

Marty’s husband, James, tries hard to be supportive of his flaky artistic wife. Marty shares the story of their meeting, a romantic moment at a friend’s wedding that depends on the kind of kismet in which only an aging hippy bohemian could continue to invest. But it becomes clear over the course of the play that their happiness is frayed, the romance fading. Their daughter, Erin, has stopped speaking to her father because Marty revealed to her a meaningless indiscretion James committed during his first marriage. James is devastated by his daughter’s silence and her sudden allegiance with Marty against him.

Friedman conveys James’s perplexed confusion over these sudden turns in his life, finding emotional candor in a character without a whole lot to say. James’s vulnerability makes him prey to the sultry charms of Theresa, the failed New York actress who’s here in the middle of nowhere to heal her own emotional wounds, and winds up seducing both men (and the teenaged Lauren) with her comfort in her body and her apparently open, if facile, vulnerability.

The versatile Reed Birney (whose raw performance in Blasted at Soho Rep was one of last season’s best) is excellent here as the wounded Schultz, who quickly falls in love with Theresa and is just as quickly and violently devastated when their brief affair doesn’t last. His need is palpable, even before clueless Marty makes the unsuccessful couple act out a scene in which his need becomes his only dialogue. Birney plays Schultz’s mercurial mood swings convincingly; even his sudden, menacing aggression seems justified when his rage boils up out of nowhere in the midst of his “objective” exercise with Theresa.

The play’s humor keeps it entertaining and holds at bay what could be more maudlin moments. As the baleful Lauren, Chimo is superb at physical humor; her expressions, as she reacts to the sometimes peculiar interactions of the adults, are priceless. Chimo can raise an eyebrow, widen her eyes, clench her fists, or raise her shoulders and communicate an entire paragraph of response to the absurdities of what she sees. When in the penultimate scene Marty asks her students to write down, distribute anonymously, and then read out loud something about themselves that they’ve never told another soul, it’s obviously Lauren’s slip of paper that says she secretly believes she’s smarter than everybody else in the world.

Even though she’s been an awkward, comically withdrawn presence through much of the play, that personal secret is clearly true. Lauren knows that her parents aren’t happy; knows that Marty and James’s marriage is headed for its end; sees through Theresa’s seductions while she’s also attracted to them; and is the only character in the play who expresses well-founded doubt that Marty’s ministrations are really going to make them better actors.

The shared secrets—meant to open the students emotionally and bind them psychologically—also reveal (if the characters are telling the truth) that Schultz has a secret addiction to internet porn; that James is in love with Theresa; and that Marty thinks she was molested by her father. These carefully held truths, when shared, seem at once virtuous and pathetic, and set in motion the play’s final bittersweet revelations.

As the orchestrator of what become emotionally acute confessions, Marty is as devastated as the others at what she hears. But she persists, like the soulful artist she believes herself to be, and ends the six-week class by asking Lauren and Schultz to act out one final improvisation, in which they meet one another 10 years later and share news of their lives.

The scene is both hilarious and poignant, as Schultz takes the opportunity to say out loud how Theresa “messed with my mind,” and for Lauren to predict that Marty and James will divorce, along with her parents. While Schultz asks the probing questions, playwright Baker clarifies that it’s Lauren who’s been prescient and wise all along, as she sees clearly into their collective futures.

Lauren enrolled in the class because she wants to be an actress, but realizes as she improvises her view of the future that she’ll be better off as a veterinarian, and sees herself 10 years out happily mated with a boyfriend in the same field. She’s kept in touch with Marty, who it turns out really does care for the odd young woman, predicting that at least one of the relationships so cavalierly dissected by the acting class has been established “for real” and will last. That final moment is both sad and hopeful, as Lauren’s improvised vision brings each character to a rueful but useful understanding of who they really are.

Circle Mirror Transformation is a lovely evening of theatre: fun and funny, smart and knowing, and hugely generous about the imperfect characters Baker portrays so simply and clearly. The play might not change your life, but like the acting class Marty wants so much to offer, it does offer insights into what our lives are and might be about, and demonstrates that the artistic impulse to see something about the human condition really can be felt, even in those tired, empty, all purpose rooms.

The production's run has been extended to November 21.

The Feminist Spectator

Superior Donuts

2009-10-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Michael McKean and Jon Michael Hill
Photo by Robert J. Saferstein

I wasn’t a fan of Tracy Letts’s popular, Tony Award-winning August: Osage County, and his sophomore Broadway outing, Superior Donuts, has both more and less to offer. Crispy directed by Tina Landau, acted with empathy and precision, and designed with evocative realism (down to the chewing gum pressed underneath the donut shop tables and counter), the play is a squarely conventional story told without much theatrical innovation. Letts’s women characters aren’t the shrewish matriarchs of Osage, but neither are they three-dimensional people with the emotional heft and attractions of the two leading men.

Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean), who owns the donut shop in which the play takes place, arrives one morning which should be like any of the many others he’s spent in the place over his 50+ years to find the glass front door shattered and “PUSSY” written in dripping red paint across the wall behind the counter. Although the beat police who frequent Superior Donuts are on the scene even before Arthur, it becomes quickly clear that the crime has been perpetrated by a disgruntled former employee whom we never see. Instead, in the lightly comic banter that establishes both character and plot, the break-in provides the occasion for defining the racial politics of the neighborhood.

At this moment, apparently Russians, Polish people, and African Americans vie for social dominance in Chicago’s Uptown. Max Tarasov (Yasen Peyankov), the brusque, entrepreneurial, heavily accented middle-age Russian man who aggressively bids to buy the donut shop, automatically suspects the “black hoodlums” he sees as the root of the neighborhood’s decline. With each racial slur he pronounces in his comically mistaken syntax, he adds, “You should excuse the expression,” so that he won’t offend Officer James Bailey (James Vincent Meredith), the African American patrolman who examines the scene with his partner, Officer Randy Osteeen (Kate Buddeke). Bailey’s eye-rolls become increasingly pronounced as Max’s diatribe intensifies, until finally, he’s required to intimidate Max physically to get him to stop talking.

Their exchanges are funny in a pat, liberal, “isn’t race a bitch?” sort of way. But Max’s suspicions about the neighborhood’s “obvious,” “natural” criminals is allowed to stand, even when Letts establishes that the (presumably white) ex-employee broke down Arthur’s door and slurred his name. Max finally leaves, and James mutters something about Russians and Polish people being what’s wrong with the neighborhood. The supposedly affectionate tit-for-tat racism is supposed to defuse any lingering ill-will. But instead, that opening exchange actually haunts the story, as Arthur cautiously establishes a relationship with Franco Wicks (Jon Michael Hill), a young African American man who turns up looking for a job.

Arthur is an aging Hippy who’s stuck in the rut of making and selling donuts out of a shop his father founded a generation before him. In stilted monologues lit only by a strangely out of place white follow spot, Arthur periodically tells the audience about his life to date: his divorce, necessitated by Arthur’s inability to communicate emotionally or to shake off his taciturn nature; the loss of his daughter in the bargain, who drives off with his wife at 13-years-of-age and whom Arthur still hasn’t seen six years later; and his failure to meet his father’s expectations of what it means to be a man, since when he’s drafted, Arthur dodged his patriotic duty by leaving for Canada instead of serving his country as his father expected.

A generous reading would find Superior Donuts a warm, wistful, and wry investigation into white liberal masculinity, when the ideals of the 60s have long given way to new, less noble values. Arthur still wears Grateful Dead t-shirts, for which Franco teases him mercilessly, and his hair is pulled back a long gray pony-tail that doesn’t flatter his face or his figure (Franco quips that pony tails are for little girls and ponies). He’s immobilized in his life, unable to move forward or back, caught by the spotlight’s white glare in old family narratives that he can’t fix or escape.

Franco’s appearance begins to shake up Arthur’s hopeless, frozen complacency. Played by Hill with deft comic timing, fresh emotional openness, and a physical ease that fills the stage with the bounce of his spirit, Franco diagnoses Arthur’s problem in one glance and goes on to provide him a happy counter-example. Franco might be broke (the fact that he’s in debt to a loan shark for $16,000 of gambling debt is the plot’s most contrived point), but he’s got ambition and confidence, and easily talks the reluctant Arthur (whom he quickly dubs “Arthur P,” since he can’t pronounce his Polish last name) into hiring him. The men embark on a tentative friendship, with Arthur pulling back as Franco pushes forward, and eventually, vice versa.

Franco’s secret is that he’s written the “great American novel,” a manuscript called America Will Be, after a Langston Hughes poem. The pages of Franco’s book are collected in mismatched notebooks and notepads held together by bungee cords in an unwieldy package that Franco carries in his backpack. As he pulls it out proudly, he announces that this is his only copy, which he hasn’t “put it in a computer or anything.” According to the conventions of theatrical realism, such a remark can only signal that the manuscript isn’t long for this world. The facility (in both senses of the word) of Letts’s writing insures that we know the novel won’t make it to the play’s end; once Arthur reads it and pronounces it good, too much rides on the manuscript as the vehicle of Franco’s deliverance for it to actually fulfill its promise.

[Spoiler alert!]

Neither man knows how to get the manuscript to people who might be able to publish it, dooming what very well might be Franco’s unique voice to the violent vagaries of the loan sharks (Luther Flynn, played by Robert Maffia, and his henchman Kevin Magee, played by Cliff Chamberlain), who destroy the book when they exact their vengeance for Franco’s unpaid loan.

When, in the second act, Office Bailey tells Arthur that Franco’s been hurt—Luther and his boy cut off three of Franco’s fingers—and his book trashed, the audience the afternoon I saw the play (Saturday, October 17th) gasped collectively. As my theatre-going companion LB Clark asked, what is it about a play like this that can manipulate so many spectators into such a unison response, even when some of us could have written this predictable outcome ourselves?

That collective expression of spectatorial dismay could be because, to Letts’s credit, Superior Donuts has painted Franco as such a winning, likable character, the sudden dead-ending of his dreams through the destruction of his manuscript feels like a real emotional blow. Letts has persuaded us to like Franco, to believe in him and his ability to shift not just his own fortunes, but Arthur’s, too. Under Franco’s quick and cajoling care, Arthur starts to come out of his shell. He teaches Franco how to make the donuts, an implicit act of trust, while Franco teaches Arthur how to ask Randy, the lonely policewoman, out for a date. The boy’s wit and fluidity with language—he speaks in a mixture of hip hop cadences and “plain” English that’s the most lyrical, poetic part of Letts’s play—along with his emotional candor and optimism, begins to pry the lid off Arthur’s reticence.

Played with subtly and grace by Michal McKean, Arthur’s face gradually becomes more mobile, his expressions broader and more open, almost as if we’re watching his features crack open at the start of a long-awaited thaw. McKean’s body begins as a still, lethargic, practically absent presence on stage, and gradually, through his enlivening interactions with Franco, begins to be re-inhabited by a gentle, caring man with a sweet sense of humor and a beguiling manner. He gathers his courage to ask Randy for a date, an invitation that gets her happily out of her masculine police-wear into a frilly flowered dress in which she bustles around behind the counter in the second act, already settling into a wifely domestic role.

But unfortunately, the road to happiness for the play’s white characters is literally paved with the blood of the African American young man. The characters’ business at the top of the second act prepares for Franco’s homecoming after his “accident,” with everyone readying the donut shop as if for a victory party. But when Franco arrives, the once garrulous, sweet-talking young man has been rendered mute. He sports a bulky bandage on his right hand, and his stature seems literally reduced.

Franco barely speaks through the rest of the play. Instead, he cries silently, mourning his newly abridged future as Arthur tries to persuade him that America Will Be can still be, that he still has his story, even if his manuscript has been cruelly destroyed. The play’s end painfully illustrates how American drama still relies on shopworn racial conventions in its plotting. Even in a play that wants to be progressive, as does Superior Donuts, people of color continue to provide the vehicle for white people’s growth and self-discovery instead of their own.

Superior Donuts, as its name suggests, is essentially “culinary,” as Brecht might describe it, in that it provides audiences with an easily digestible evening of racial encounters (in a kind of low-fat cruller sort of way) that lets a white spectator go home satisfied that progress—for them, at least—is possible. The humor Letts employs helps establish that tone. Franco’s first act banter is wise and funny; he makes jokes at Arthur’s expense, but always with affection and respect. For instance, suggesting he remake his appearance, Franco tells Arthur that the Grateful Dead probably doesn’t need a new drummer.

The jokes—which appear to be at the white liberal’s expense—bring easy, even knowing laughs that set up the cheap manipulative pathos that follows. Arthur learns to laugh at himself and his outmoded ways, while Letts also establishes his liberal credentials: Franco lets him read his manuscript only when Arthur proves he can name ten African American poets.

But all of Arthur’s liberal generosity—including the fact that he pays off Franco’s loan—can’t keep the African American young man from being hobbled, physically or psychically. Arthur decides to sell the store to the over-eager Russian Max at the play’s end, which provides him the seed money for his new life. Franco, the articulate, smart, hopeful vehicle of Arthur’s redemption, is left fingerless and jobless, alone without an employer, a friend, or a manuscript.

Superior Donuts’s production—which transferred from Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago—is impeccable, although its slick values underline the injustice of its pat plot. Landau’s fluid, confident direction keeps the narrative moving—despite Arthur’s awkward, confessional, direct-address monologues that pepper the play’s first act—and the laughs well timed.

The performances bring nuance and depth to characters that could too easily be stereotypes, including the loan sharks and the large, non-English speaking Russian who Max brings to intimidate Luther and Kevin. Hill and McKean form a lovely camaraderie, playing off one another with appealing ease, humor, and good-will.

James Schuette’s beautiful set evokes a frozen Chicago winter. Outside the shop’s door and front windows, the audience can see the narrow street, a parked car, a parking meter, and various pedestrians hurrying by as snowflakes occasionally drift down from the flies. The donut shop’s dilapidated state feels real enough that you can practically smell the old fryer oil, the exhaust from which has marked the walls with grime. The masking tape on which Arthur (or his father) has penciled the names of the pastries peels around the edges, the letters fading.

By the evening’s end, all this investment of talent and energy—in the acting, design, direction, and writing—seems squandered on a plot that tells a story as old and used up as the last, stale donut of the day, the one far less edible than its fresh superiors. What a shame that that donut represents Letts’s play.

The Feminist Spectator

Let Me Down Easy

2009-10-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy
at Second Stage Theatre
(photo by Joan Marcus)

Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy represents a departure from the typical tone and trajectory of her “On the Road” cycle of monologues. Smith established her talent in the early ‘90s, after many years working in regional theatres, as an artist/anthropologist who interviews people in community settings and then performs their words verbatim. She argues that people’s language and their voices—their syntax, their inflections, the rhythm of their words and their cadence—reveal their character, and that through meticulously recreating their speech acts in the context of often vexed or conflictual community relations, something of the larger character of America is also revealed.

Smith’s first major success, Fires in the Mirror, for instance, addressed the civil strife between the African American and Chasidic communities of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after the chief rabbi’s motorcade inadvertently hit and killed a young black boy named Gavin Cato. Smith spent time in Crown Heights interviewing people about the incident, all of whom were involved to varying degrees and spoke from opposing points of view. She also interviewed people who simply shared a unique perspective on the tension, including Al Sharpton and Cornel West.

Smith channeled the voices of all the people she interviewed through her own body and vocal impersonations, editing the time she spent with each one into a meaningful bite of sound and then weaving them into a tapestry of character and viewpoints on the central conflict. Smith doesn’t presume to “become” any of these (real) characters. Conventional actors typically ask the audience to suspend its disbelief while they make interior emotional connections that allow them to identify psychologically with the fictional character. Smith works from the outside in, mimicking the complexity of individual language and voice as a way to reveal something human, surprising, and true about people we might suspect of being stereotypical and predictable.

In her second large-scale piece, Twilight, LA, Smith brought a similar anthropological outlook to the civil uprising in Los Angeles after local courts returned a “not guilty” verdict to the police officers accused of beating Rodney King for a traffic violation. For Twilight, Smith’s interviews ranged across and among an even larger community of people, as the Los Angeles uprising crossed community lines and included African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Asian Americans, and white people as subjects with keen perspectives on the events. In a nuanced reference, “Twilight” refers both to the liminal moment between day and night, the in-between time in which crisis perhaps gives rise to social change, and to the gang member whom Smith interviewed as part of the palate of citizens whose perspectives enlightened her and her audiences about the LA events.

Subsequent productions never quite gelled as much as these notable, groundbreaking earlier works. House Arrest, for which Smith interviewed various political players in Washington, DC, during the Clinton administration, felt like a demonstration of her own access to power more than it offered a trenchant view of the operative mentality of those running the nation.

Let Me Down Easy, though, breaks the mold of Smith’s work by foregoing her usual immersion in communities rife with conflict. No “us v. them” structures the play, and no sense of traditional dramatic agon pulls the show from crisis to resolution. Instead, the social crisis of the American medical establishment motivates Smith’s examination; as she notes in the program, the play began as a commission for the Yale School of Medicine. (See also the feature piece by Susan Dominus published in The New York Times Magazine Sunday, October 4, 2009--on the internet September 30, 2009--at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04smith-t.html?scp=2&sq=anna%20deavere%20smith&st=cse. I also wrote about an earlier version of this piece, presented at the Zach Scott Theatre in Austin, Texas, in The Feminist Spectator.)

But the people she interviews and impersonates demonstrate more subtle and complex perspectives in a social investigation that winds up addressing death, dying, and what we make of our lives before we get there more than it does the failing medical system that purports to give us care. The show, as a result, doesn’t ask the audience to take sides or to consider deeply opposing points of view, as did Fires and Twilight, but lets us muse together for 95 minutes on what defines us as human beings in the face of our inevitable demise.

The people Smith weaves together into this thoughtful human tapestry vary wildly not just by occupation and profession, geography and locale, or by their relative relationships to social power, but also in temperament and character, gender and race, class and accent, which makes each impersonation a pleasant surprise. The play’s theme doesn’t predict who Smith will consult for opinions, and the juxtapositions of speakers’ preoccupations and voices are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, and always fascinating and compelling.

In the first six portraits alone, Smith performs James Cone, a famous African American theologian who loves to think about language and what it means to his community and provides Smith with her show’s title; Elizabeth Streb, a white post-modern dancer who accidentally sets herself on fire while performing for her female partner’s birthday party, and finds in her trauma the astonished, boastful pride of a survivor; Lance Armstrong, who sees his body as a nearly mechanical balance of weight and power that demands the most minute calibrations; Sally Jenkins, a sports writer who describes how athletes are driven to burn themselves up in the effort of exertion they make look easy; Eve Ensler, the feminist theatre artist famous for writing the now ubiquitous Vagina Monologues and the V-Day activism that supports annual readings of the play, who shares with Smith her suspicion that anorexia is a plot to rob women and girls of their power, since, as she says, it’s difficult to get much done when you’re only eating a raisin a day; and Brent Williams, an Idaho rodeo rider who wears a cowboy hat and pulls on a beer while he tells Smith about his high threshold for pain.

These characters alone provide a rich collection of stories, insights, accents, and body types. In fact, thinking back, even though Smith is costumed (by Ann Hould-Ward) only with a striped sports jacket for one person, a couple of rings for another, or a hat of some sort for a third, I can see the bull rider’s lanky height, Armstrong’s arrogant muscular slouch, Ensler’s stolid feminist force, Streb’s physical euphoria, Cone’s expansive girth and gestures, and Jenkins’ firecracker countenance and humor as clearly as I remember Smith’s white shirt and black trousers, the neutral palette onto which all these people’s personalities are painted.

In Let Me Down Easy, even more than in her earlier virtuosic performances, Smith seems to have settled in to her informants’ stories and the possibilities of what they might mean, knit together into an evening. She seems to have less of an ax to grind here, ironically. In an historical moment when health care is debated on the front page of every newspaper, and the fractious debate over public options spouts from so many lips, this show doesn’t directly engage the terms of that dispute. As a result, Smith—who vehemently protests her objectivity in productions in which it’s impossible not to presume she doesn’t take one side or the other—appears even-handed and magnanimous with her characters. She seems to enjoy playing them, speaking as them, sharing their insights. The implicit—and sometimes overt—didacticism of Fires and Twilight is absent in Let Me Down Easy.

In fact, Smith’s performance seems filled with an outsized joy, which flatters her virtuosity by almost understating her talent. Each character’s name and the title of their monologue is projected as a superscript on the frame above the stage. Smith (directed by Leonard Foglia) moves fluidly among them, reaching the final comment of each monologue that usually punctuates and often titles the idea at hand. Then she takes off the character’s defining costume piece or prop, lifts the next from the hands of a nondescript female assistant who enters and exits the stage—barefoot, like Smith—delivering each object or bit of apparel, drapes herself in its spell and launches into the spirit she inhabits next. You can see Smith in the interstices between characters. She’s a thoughtful, purposeful, precise presence, the guiding spirit of the piece who’s moved by her appreciation of the people to whom she gives voice and embodies.

Let Me Down Easy is as trenchant a political commentary as any of Smith’s shows, but because she creates an “us” or a “we” instead of the binary of conflicting “thems,” the production feels generous and forgiving, its humor poignant instead of pedantic. Points of view accumulate onstage, rather than replacing one another. The costume pieces and props that index each person literally litter the stage by the play’s end, as each character is haunted by those preceding him or her. The collection of things points to a collectivity of people and perspectives that’s oddly comforting. The show is about death and dying, loss and grief, but also about how we live in the meantime. As each character Smith performs eats, drinks, smokes, and chats, we see people extremely different from one another nonetheless sustaining themselves in simple, basic ways that seem familiar and communal.

Smith had a head cold the afternoon I saw one of the last preview week performances (September 30, 2009). Because she removed the same blue hanky from her pocket to blow her nose as she performed several different characters, it seemed as though they all shared the same cold, an inadvertent but moving coincidence. The gesture also made it easy to remember Smith’s presence, although in this show, she doesn’t seem to want us to forget that she’s there, mediating these stories, providing the vehicle that drops each character into our lives and carries them too quickly back out.

The beautifully crafted production offers a lovely backdrop to Smith’s impersonations. The spare set (by Riccardo Hernandez) includes a modern white couch and coffee table stage right, offset by a white dinner table and chairs stage left, at which several characters take their meal. The warm, intimate setting is framed by five tall screens/mirrors that tilt from the top over the set, vaguely diffusing what spectators see reflected. Sometimes, Smith is seen live in the mirrors, although her image is swirled by some surface distortion; other times, Smith’s character is projected onto the surface as though he or she is looking into a camera. The woody, golden aura is sculpted by subtle, architectural light (by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer), and a soft soundscape textures the play’s aural mood.

The Wednesday matinee audience with whom I watched the play seemed to appreciate Smith’s observations and insights, and she spoke directly to them under the guise of character. Her impersonation of the now late, former governor of Texas, Ann Richards, who nonchalantly describes how she has to preserve her “chi” for herself is a memorable crowd-pleaser, but spectators also responded enthusiastically to the lesser-known characters. Ruth Katz, a patient at Yale New Haven Hospital whose file is lost through staff ineptitude, garnered particular appreciation, as did the plight of physician Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, describing how she waited to be rescued with her patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans after Katrina hit, and her dawning realization that no one really did care about the poor, elderly people of color for whom she cared.

Toward the play’s end, a few of the monologues seem superfluous, although thinking back, I can’t imagine Let Me Down Easy without any one of the stories. But the 95 minutes feel a bit long by the end, the stories a bit repetitive, even in their differences. Or maybe it’s that the string of tales makes your heart a bit too tender to bear the narratives for much longer.

The penultimate monologue, Trudy Howell’s story about a dying young girl in an orphanage in South Africa who packs her suitcase to go off to see her already deceased mother, leaves an indelible image. Likewise, Smith ends the play performing a Buddhist monk, who demonstrates how life finally runs out by overturning a full tea cup into his palm and letting the liquid pool on the stage floor as the lights around Smith turn green and deep blue.

Let Me Down Easy does justice to its title and to its audience, delivering us into the pointed grace of its ending.

The Feminist Spectator

“Women in Theatre: Issues for the 21st Century”

2009-09-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

Emily Mann's 20 year tenure as Artistic Director
of the McCarter Theatre Center will be
celebrated at the "Women in Theatre" conference
at Princeton University on September 26,
available streamed live on the internet.
(Photo of Emily Mann by Merri Cyr)

Much remains to be said about the status of women in theatre, a topic that’s seen its way into print once again lately, thanks to a number of synergistic events during the past year or so. First, playwrights Julia Jordan, Sarah Schulman, and their colleagues at New Dramatists got fed up with the lack of representation of women playwrights in Off Broadway theatres in New York, and invited a few artistic directors to come to a town hall-style forum to explain themselves. That gathering got a fair amount of press, and recalled attention to the perennial problem of discrimination against women in theatre.

Shortly after, the press jumped on research conducted by Emily Sands, a Princeton economics graduate who wrote her senior thesis last year on production inequities for women playwrights. Sands’ thesis was widely reported, although some of its findings were skewed to make it seem as though women artistic directors hire fewer women playwrights than male artistic directors, a misinterpretation gleefully touted by the mainstream press.

At the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) joint conference with the American Alliance of Theatre and Education (AATE) in New York in August, at least four or five panels were expressly devoted to feminism and the state of women in theatre. On one panel that I co-organized with Sara Warner, a past-president of ATHE’s Women and Theatre Program, a multi-generational panel of feminist theatre practitioners spoke about their work, its reception, and its relationship to the social movement as it’s changed over time. Deb Margolin (of Split Britches), Sue Perlgut (of It’s All Right to be a Woman Theatre, one of the first feminist theatre collectives in the country), Sharon Bridgforth (of The Austin Project), Roberta Sklar and Sondra Segal (of the influential Women’s Experimental Theatre), and Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano, of the WOW Cafe) discussed their work and to a large extent their lives as feminist theatre workers, and what that’s meant and what they’ve accomplished over the years. The large conference meeting room was packed with people eager to hear them speak.

On August 25th, The League of Professional Theatre Women, New Perspectives Theatre Company, and the Women’s Project sponsored a panel and working group event called “50/50 in 2020: Parity for Women Theatre Artists.” The lively panel and speakers’ astute comments and suggestions for continuing advocacy struck a chord in the large, responsive audience. Susan Jonas, Julie Crosby, Elizabeth Van Dyke, Linda Winer, Alexis Greene, Milly Barranger, and Natatia L. Griffith filled in the history of activism for women in professional theatre; discussed the realities of producing work by women; talked about the paucity of women first-string critics; addressed the importance of knowing the history of women in American theatre; and strategized about how to keep the conversation alive and moving forward.

The latest event to address women in theatre is scheduled to be held at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, on Saturday, September 26th from 9:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. The sold-out event (at 300+ attendees strong) will be streamed live on the internet. The conference web site—which includes a schedule for the day, speakers’ bios, and a wealth of information and links to other advocacy networks—has an icon through which you can connect to the streaming video 15 minutes prior to the event’s start. The welcome and first panel begins at 10:00 a.m. I encourage anyone interested to join us virtually for the event at www.princeton.edu/arts/wit.

I’m including here my welcome note as conference organizer, which is published in the event’s program. After the conference, I hope to blog in more detail about the Princeton meeting, the August 25th panel, and the general issue of advocacy for women in theatre.

Here’s my conference welcome:

I’m delighted to welcome you to Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts for “Women in Theatre: Issues for the 21st Century.” As a feminist critic and scholar whose work has focused on gender and performance, I’ve been invited to, participated in, and organized countless symposia, conferences, and panels over the years that address the too often sorry state of women in theatre. Although the numbers continue to look grim, today’s conversations are meant to accentuate the positive, by bringing together women who’ve achieved considerable success in American (and world) theatre. They’ve been asked to talk about the specifics of their work and their practices, to address what makes their artistry distinctive and exemplary, and to describe how their careers belie the evidence of discrimination that we all know persists. We mean these discussions to be probing, provocative, particular, and inspirational.

My own hope is that “Women in Theatre” will become an on-going conversation at Princeton, one that includes any and all women working in theatre in various ways and locations. Today’s speakers are centralized in regional theatres, Off-Broadway, and Broadway houses, which might be considered the apogee of the field, given its visibility and influence. Emily Mann’s career—and her 20-year tenure as Artistic Director at the McCarter Theatre Center, which we’re honoring and celebrating today—represents the consummate artistry of a woman successful as a writer, director, and administrator on the platform of the country’s largest stages.

Many women who’ve also inspired my own thinking over the years perform, direct, design, and write in “downtown,” experimental, or community-based theatres, where they work with smaller budgets and sometimes more specific audiences. Some of the women speaking today began in such theatres, and now find themselves addressing broader audiences in larger, better financed (although budgets are relative these days) venues.

I’m interested in all of these pathways through which women work in theatre, and all the different forms, styles, genres, contents, contexts, politics, and ideologies that influence our labor and creativity. Gender, of course, represents only one perspective through which to think about inequity. The categories often described as “identity politics” along with gender—race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and others— influence how theatre is created and produced, seen by spectators and reviewed by critics. But then again, style, preferences, habits, training, connections, and artistic commitments also have an impact on production and reception. What kinds of hierarchies persist, and how might we challenge them to facilitate an ever more thrilling diversity of theatre practice?

Our guests will address these issues today with vigorous energy, and will share creative ideas and articulate insights. I encourage everyone attending to lend your voices to the debates by speaking at the open mikes during session discussions and by affiliating with a networking table or two to continue the conversations over lunch. I also encourage you to visit the conference web site at www.princeton.edu/arts/wit, where a wealth of information and action ideas is posted, and where the conference proceedings will be archived. The web site also includes instructions for how to join the Women-in-Theatre listserve we’ve established here at Princeton to help circulate information and advocacy plans.

Most importantly, please strengthen your own commitment to this issue by buying tickets to see theatre by and about women, by teaching the plays, by writing about women directors, designers, artistic directors, dramaturgs, performers, and playwrights, supporting them, and promoting them as they generate the vital, necessary, inspiring art of the our collective present and future.

Thanks so much for joining us today.

Jill Dolan
Conference Organizer

Yours in struggle as always,
The Feminist Spectator

Glee

2009-09-21T18:45:00.001-07:00

Matthew Morrison (far right) as Will Schuester and
Cory Monteith (second from right) as Finn in Glee

Fox TV’s Glee began its formal run two weeks ago, after attracting a great deal of buzz from its summer premiere teaser. And rightly so. Produced by Ryan Murphy, the creator of the much racier but equally off beat and refreshingly bizarre series Nip/Tuck, Glee’s pleasures come from its characters’ slightly insane quirks and the actors’ fully committed, somehow fully tongue-in-cheek performances. The smart writing creates plausible but slightly skewed situations as, for only one instance, when Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), the African American diva/belter, (“Effie,” as in Dreamgirls, as a snide subsidiary character calls her) yearns to have a boyfriend and actually thinks she can hook up with Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), the obviously gay chorus boy. Their cross-purposed relationship quickly fails, but offers the kids (and Murphy) a chance to underline the series’ “I’m okay/you’re okay and it’s good to be different” message.

Somehow, the relatively obvious and insistently repeated moral of each episode so far doesn’t feel heavy-handed or get stale, in part because it, too, is delivered with just the right satirical touch, as though Murphy is poking open fun at all those movies in which the “believe in yourself and your dreams” motto is dragged out for the inspirational ending. Each episode of Glee trades in these platitudes satirically enough that you’re encouraged to respond both cynically and sincerely. Glee’s fun comes from its willingness to find earnestness endearing and necessary, rather than allowing the forces of skepticism and apathy to win out.

The narrative threads that develop these meanings are predictable, but always just wrong enough to point out how absurd they’ve always been, not just here in Glee but in any film or TV show that continues to want us to invest in the “follow your dreams” kind of truth. For instance, Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) the hunky but soft and vaguely feminine quarterback who sings like a dream and joins glee club despite his teammates’ fear for his masculinity, might easily remind viewers of the Zac Efron character in the High School Musical films.

Finn, though, is taller and has more bulk, which ironically makes his performances that much more fey. He anchors the club, which consists of a Bad News Bears-style assemblage of mis-matched singers and dancers. Along with the African American diva, Mercedes, and Kurt, the drama queen she thinks she can seduce, glee club includes Artie McAdams (Kevin McHale), a young man in a wheelchair, who rolls and does wheelies while others do their steps; Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz), an Asian-American young woman who stutters; and Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), a serious singer who’s in love with Finn and an outsider to the more popular cheerleader crowd that rules McKinley High where the series is set. Rachel, the character’s on-line bio notes, has two fathers.

In fact, Glee flaunts its incipient queerness quite happily. Stephen Tobolowsky performs in a recurring role as Sandy, a proudly swishy teacher who wears pastels and a sweater constantly tied around his shoulders. In the premiere, Sandy was fired for fraternizing with an under-aged male student, but in a recent episode, he returns to McKinley High, since the restraining order requires only that he stay 50 feet away from students. Sandy’s more flamboyant over-the-top middle-aged gayness contrasts nicely with Kurt’s teenage queer style. Although these two are the only explicitly queer characters, Glee addresses in many ways how masculinity is performed and what it means, and each character, happily, stretches the envelope of normativity.

The series’ tone is colored with wistfulness, since the glee club at McKinley High is lead by the tenacious and idealistic Spanish teacher, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), who was the club’s star back in his own high school days. Part of the first three episodes’ comedy come from Will’s insistence that his students replicate his early 80s successes by performing disco numbers. Will is clueless but sweet, and his faith in his ragtag band of performers gives them the courage to, of course, pursue their dreams. Will’s wife, Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig), who was his high school sweetheart, desperately wants a child, and concocts a fake pregnancy to pursue her own dream. Will, meanwhile, has an unarticulated crush on his colleague Emma (Jayma Mays), an OCD-plagued, germ-fearing teacher at McKinley who admires Will from not that afar enough for Terri, who notes their mutual affection and uses the fabricated pregnancy to keep Will close.

These adult relationships play out among those of beleaguered high school students fraught with all the typical hormonally-induced crises; among teachers confined by their routines, hoping for something more to grace their lives; and among administrators who suffer funding cuts and a lack of parent confidence that inspires bizarre conciliatory efforts. The school principal plays Moses in each episode, choosing between the conflicting desires of Will and his glee club and the evil Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) and her cheerleading squad, offering resources to whichever teacher seems most likely to endear him to the school’s parents.

Lynch plays one of her best roles outside of the Christopher Guest movies in which she’s a regular, demented ensemble member. As the scheming, megalomaniacal gym teacher, Lynch is costumed in matching Adidas track suits, which change only in color from episode to episode (or scene to scene). She works out on the elliptical machine behind her desk as she instructs her hench-girls—Quinn (Dianna Argon), who’s Finn’s plastic blond girlfriend, and Quinn’s look-alike sidekick—to infiltrate and destroy the glee club on her behalf. But when she climbs down from the machine with a towel thrown jauntily around her neck, it’s clear Sue hasn’t broken a sweat. She doesn’t want to work hard; she just wants herself and her cheering squad to be the center of the school’s attention.

Sue is jealous of any dollar the principal gives to the glee club, and will go to any lengths possible to see the club fail. Lynch’s dry one-liners are hysterical (“I haven’t seen performing that tasteless since I saw an elementary school performance of Hair,” she scoffs after the glee club students perform a sexually explicit dance to “Push It” for a school assembly to encourage more students to join). Lynch is expert at the droll remark, and at making outlandish characters like Sue seem logical and righteous despite their insanity. (That Sue is clearly a big ole dyke goes without saying.)

In last week’s episode, Victor Garber and Debra Monk, two veterans of the American musical theatre, showed up as Will’s loving parents. Garber plays his father as a schleppy would-be lawyer who never pursued his own dreams, and Monk does a perfect comic turn as Will’s sloppy, alcoholic mother. Terri’s pregnancy, which Will and his parents think is real, inspires some heart-to-heart between Will and his dad, as Garber tells Will that being a good dad is what makes a man a man. The two men’s masculinity couldn’t be more dubious, held up against conventional norms—Garber teaches Will about manhood while wearing a red bow tie, and Will embraces his dad fervently before running off to choreograph a number for the boy-group he’s formed. But under the terms of Glee, masculinity includes a love for music, for dancing, for community, and for family. There might be irony in the script and its delivery, but there’s earnestness in the characters’ interactions that’s sincere and even moving.

In last week’s episode, the glee club kids’ impatience with Will’s anachronistic music choices forces them to hire the director of a rival group to choreograph their numbers. Will, dejected, decides to start his own men’s group, which the four guys decide to call “Acafellas.” Turns out that Will, Finn, the gym teacher, and a maintenance man really know how to rock out when they perform their white boys’ hip-hop number for a school assembly. The fun of Glee is that it assumes even the most macho guys want to get up and sing. For instance, Puck (Mark Salling), Finn’s buff, gruff, and pushy teammate, can’t resist putting on a tux and crooning with the other guys. And his singing and dancing only make him sexier (in a hetero way), even when the flamboyant Sandy joins the act and gets the group a chance to open for Josh Groban. It’s as though the canvas of a musical act is capacious enough to let desire manifest itself along a continuum of sexual options.

Sandy botches the gig with Groban, who arrives backstage (playing himself) with his body guard to serve Sandy with still another restraining order. But Glee doesn’t consider Sandy pathetic—just overly romantic in his mis-directed desires. Groban hooks up with Will’s mom, insisting that although people think he’s got a cabal of teenaged girls following him around, Groban actually prefers blowsy middle-aged alcoholics. Monk’s character giggles wetly as they flirt to the episode’s end.

Meanwhile, the glee club kids realize that hiring a hot new director comes with costs too high to finance. The fascist, little-person director is so mean he makes kids at his home high school vomit with fear and dismay during rehearsals. But when he brings his cutting, derogatory style to McKinley’s glee club, the kids resist his derision. The new guy, of course, wants to kick out all the misfits, and doesn’t waste time before he dismisses Mercedes as an Effie-wannabe, Artie as “crippled,” Kurt as queer, and Rachel as needing a nose job.

But as they turn to leave, Rachel realizes that it’s the new director who should be fired instead, as he’ll never replace the liberal, democratic Will in the kids’ affections. Rachel is a Jewish girl—Lea Michele looks a lot like Idina Menzel—who cites Barbra Streisand’s refusal to get a nose job as her own cri de coeur, insisting that her difference is what will make her a star. In fact, she proclaims, the glee kids’ uniqueness comes from their differences, which she embraces as the source of their talent and their pride.

In the face of her rallying cry, all the kids puff out their chests—Artie in his wheelchair, wearing his ubiquitous driving gloves, Mercedes in her radiant, zaftig, belting divadom, Kurt in his queer elaborateness, which only he thinks is a secret, and Finn in his femme-y football hero straightness. They can all get behind being different as their club’s distinctive reason for being. When Will sheepishly but happily returns as their coach, he sets the best earnest example of what it means to ride that difference to your dreams.

Glee’s actors all boast backgrounds in musical theatre, although some have more professional experience than others. Matthew Morrison, who plays Will, performed on Broadway in Hairspray, was nominated for a Tony for his work in Light in the Piazza, and played Lt. Cable in the recent revival of South Pacific. Lea Michele, Glee’s Rachel, received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in Spring Awakening in 2006. Each of the show’s glee clubbers has performed live somewhere, and bring to their roles the authenticity of awkward young people who find themselves electric and at home when they’re on stage.

Glee’s jokes come fast and furious, but always with affection and never truly at a character’s expense. The show is designed in bright, candy colors that underline its satire, and shot at angles that pointedly indicate who’s the good guy and who’s the villain. But often, the villains turn out to be good guys, transformed by the power of singing to find their glowing inner decency.

That’s a moral for a story I can get behind. And the songs are great, too.

The Feminist Spectator

Hung on HBO

2009-08-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

Thomas Jane and Jane Adams in Hung.

HBO’s new summer series about a man whose anatomy becomes his professional destiny is not the first place I’d look for feminist television programming. And yet Hung turns out to be a wonderfully smart, funny, and indeed feminist story of a down-on-his-luck middle-class white history teacher-basketball coach whose wife divorces him, whose house burns nearly to the ground because of an electrical short in an overloaded extension chord, and who can’t get his life together, financially, emotionally, or pragmatically.

Ray Decker, played by the handsome, valiant Thomas Jane, is an otherwise ordinary man, beset with all the problems of someone whose best years are well behind him. He was a high school baseball star, who married his high school sweetheart, never left the Detroit suburb where he was raised, and in fact lives in a tent in the backyard of the house he inherited from his parents, which burns in a catastrophic fire in the series opener. He’s an average white guy stuck in his own history, who never progressed beyond his teenage success.

His wife, Jessica, the now-faded cheerleader, played by Anne Heche in parodic high dudgeon, has left him for Ronnie (Eddie Jemison), a high school geek who grew up to be a plastic surgeon (he gives Jessica shots of Botox after their morning coffee). Ronnie is short, blinkered, and socially clueless; it’s clear Jessica is more attracted to his money than to his body. Ironically, mid-way through the season, as the economic downturn hits, Ronnie announces that they aren’t rich anymore, leading Jessica’s busy-body mother (who looks like Dr. Ruth and speaks with an inexplicable Eastern European accent) to ask Jessica if she has to keep “giving him sex.” While Jessica dismisses her mother’s concern, in a later scene, as Ronnie rolls her way to nuzzle her ear in their marital bed, Jessica summarily announces that she’s not in the mood, predicting a lot of bad sexual luck in Ronnie’s future.

In an effort to improve his odds financially, Ray enrolls in a how-to-get-rich-quick seminar led by Floyd Gerber (Steve Hytner), whose large teeth, bad haircut, and empty inspiration reads as big-L loser immediately. In the seminar, Ray reconnects with Tanya (Jane Adams), a goofy poet with writer’s block with whom he had and has again a one-night stand. When their second tryst derails emotionally, Tanya’s accusation that all Ray has going for him is a “big dick” begins an entrepreneurial opportunity for both of them. The unlikely couple embarks on an even more unlikely business venture called “Happiness Consultants,” in which Tanya pimps Ray out to various sexually frustrated (or curious) middle-class suburban housewives.

If Ray is hobbled by his own stasis, Tanya’s earnest ambitions are enough to motivate them both. Although she’s a bohemian writer trying to be a vegetarian, she takes her work as Ray’s pimp very seriously. Part of the series’ comedy comes from watching Tanya navigate in the very unfamiliar waters of sexual capitalism. She’s been unable to write for years and works as a permanent temp as a copy editor in a law firm. But starting this business on the side with Ray let’s her aspire to the personal, intellectual, and especially financial freedom that she hopes will enable her creativity. Tanya’s “alternative” values are never belittled by the show’s writers, but her self-taught cutthroat business sense makes for a comic comparison with her otherwise progressive ethics. Tanya has a nasty mother who dismisses her (played by Rhea Perlman) and isn’t particularly pretty (in fact, in most scenes, Adam’s face is made up with a kind of oily sheen), but she’s vital and lively and cares about things in a way that Ray can’t fathom.

The unlikely affection between Tanya and Ray is utterly appealing as they begin to develop a friendship based on their business partnership. Thomas Jane and Jane Adams have great chemistry and work well off each other. The whole cast, in fact, has a nice bead on the show’s quirky humor, which treads a fine line between satirical and sincere. Heche’s Jessica, for example, who still has feelings for Ray, is surprised but generous when Tanya comes to see him coach a basketball game. Tanya joins the strange family easily, befriending Jessica as she cheers awkwardly (for the wrong team).

Ray’s twin kids, Damon (Charlie Saxton) and Darby (Sianoa Smit-McPhee), are disheveled teenage misfits with weird dyed hair and soft, puffy bodies. But their peculiar relationship to both parents, neither of whom knows exactly what to do with them, gives Ray and Jessica something to bond over. When Charlie pierces his tongue, for example, both parents are horrified. Jessica, maintaining her forced cheerleader cheerfulness, doesn’t understand a thing about her alienated, goth-leaning children, but her attempts to reach them prove funny parodies of the over-sharing, trying-too-hard parent. Saxton and Smit-McPhee do a nice job performing the kids’ incredulity at their parents’ stupidity. The kids’ allegiances shift depending on which parent has more money and the most comfortable place to house them.

Hung seems to be a story about failure, about the losers with whom people associate or who they inadvertently become, but the series’ pleasure comes from the small ways in which the characters succeed in each episode, whether sexually or financially, and the little ways in which their kindness toward one another makes their lives worthwhile.

The series also demonstrates perfectly how people perform what they think others want them to be. Ray’s role as the star of Happiness Consultants isn’t natural to his personality. He might be well endowed, but he needs to be tutored by Tanya in how to play the suave, debonair male prostitute they think their clients expect. The writers regularly prove that no one’s interested in his social performance; only his sexual performance matters, and in that, he always succeeds the way he and Tanya promise.

But in each assignation, Ray learns something about himself and about women. Early in their endeavor, on his first visit to a client, Ray balks at her middle-age, plump body, begging off with a cold. After Tanya scolds him about judging people on their appearances, Ray returns, only to find the woman now skittish about following through. She admits she’s sick of her husband’s inability to please her, but only when Ray shows her the goods is she persuaded (and eagerly excited) to complete the transaction.

In fact, none of the women Ray services are conventionally attractive or behave “normally.” Tanya persuades a sexually frustrated, homely proofreader colleague from work that she’d enjoy employing Ray. Their scene together in a hotel room is a gem, as the woman unmasks their meeting as only a fantasy in which she knows Ray is playing a role, but then happily goes along with it by letting go of her own inhibitions and gleefully repeating, “Let’s fuck” until they do. In all of these instances, Ray is happy to comply, and seems vaguely moved at what he sees in these women.

At the same time, although it’s Ray’s anatomy that provides their income, Ray is the objectified sex worker, a nice role-reversal in the cosmic scheme of conventional prostitution or pornography. Ray is not the agent of his own destiny; it’s Tanya who sets up his meetings, and who scolds him when he tries to arrange dates on his own. Tanya interviews potential clients, assessing their needs and how Ray can meet them. If their business is at all successful, it’s because Tanya understands the emotions that drive their clients’ sexual desires and talks Ray through how to satisfy each customer.

In another neat foiling of presumption, Ray falls in love with Jemma (Natalie Zea), a particularly complicated client with a host of unusual demands. When he tries to date her and begins refusing her payments, she purposefully hurts him. A contrite Tanya realizes too late that Jemma’s game is to construct Ray as the victim in their relationship, to avenge her own victimhood in past relationships. But the scenario upends the assumption that for men, sex is only physical, while for women, it’s emotional, since here the roles are exactly reversed. Ray’s hapless naiveté is partly what makes him so appealing. His masculinity isn’t built to handle the situations in which he’s called on to act. He needs Tanya’s help to navigate the emotional currents of his trick’s needs. But he’s charming in part because he rises to each occasion (literally, of course, and figuratively).

Hung is a really a family drama, with a twist that makes it interesting and a perspective that makes it feminist. No one here is starry-eyed about the American Dream; everyone knows that it’s precarious at best, diseased and desiccated at worse. But the series finds something sweet and poignant, rather than resigned and bitter, about the prevailing state of affairs, drawing the characters’ humanity against the odds. In the last episode, Ray, devastated by Jemma’s betrayal, gets drunk in a bar where he’s recognized by an old rival, a man who pitched against him when he was a senior in a high school and still hasn’t gotten over the fact that Ray, who was a freshman, batted his pitch out of the park. In pouring rain, the men head to a baseball field to relive the moment. The older man throws Ray a duffel bag full of balls one by one, and one at a time, Ray hits them away, saying, “Contact,” after he manages to connect with each pitch. The other man’s middle-aged body is paunchy and sagging as he winds up to throw, the outlines of his mortality palpable against his wet shirt. Ray looks only marginally better as he sways over home plate. The men barely speak, but the scene is a wonderful, soggy illustration of lives stuck in place.

Happily, it’s the proto-feminist Tanya who gives them all hope, who swats away references to her own inferior looks (a constructed claim, since Adams is actually very cute), who glows with newly found confidence, who schemes about ways to increase their business, and who engages her clients with tough pragmatism and no-nonsense business ethics. Adams plays beautifully the blooming power of the underdog who comes into her own. In the last episode, as Ray stumbles back to his tent wet and drunk to find Tanya waiting for him with a wad of cash from Jemma, Adams and Jane perform a sweet scene of friendly intimacy, need, and pleasure that portrays one of the most moving, innovative, insightful relationships on television.

Watch Hung.

The Feminist Spectator

Nurse Jackie Revisited

2009-08-21T09:29:00.001-07:00

Jackie (Edie Falco) and her husband, Kevin

Now that the first season of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie has ended, I was happy to find out that the show has officially been renewed. After I last wrote, the series only got better, more complicated, more darkly funny, and occasionally, poignantly, sad.

One of the most interesting things about Edie Falco’s leading character, Jackie, is that she has no real back story. Although we know that she has a husband and two young daughters with whom she lives above the bar they own in Queens, and that she has a pharmacist lover named Eddie with whom she has sexual trysts every day at work, we don’t know why she keeps her two lives so resolutely separate. We also don’t know why she’s a drug addict, aside from the usual stress (and temptation) that plagues some nurses in chaotic, poorly staffed and resourced city hospitals.

Rather than becoming irritating, however, Jackie’s mystery adds to her allure. She’s an enigma not just for her co-workers—who alternately find her brusque and sensitive, present and distracted—but also for viewers accustomed to having characters’ histories laid out with too many dollops of information. Instead of a pat psychological reason for her odd behavior, we’re asked to go on faith that Jackie needs her life the way it is. The reasons don’t matter, only that she’s able to maintain the fine line of keeping her separate worlds far enough apart and her addiction hidden.

Only halfway through the first season does it become clear that even Jackie’s best friend at work—Dr. Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), who’s officially her superior—doesn’t know about her drug problem. When Jackie’s nose begins bleeding from all the drugs she’s snorting, O’Hara checks out her nostrils and comments that she doesn’t know what Jackie’s been putting up there, but her sinuses are entirely irritated. Jackie responds with her trademark eye roll and brushes her off.

[Spoiler alert!]

When her lover Eddie is replaced by a computerized machine that dispenses meds, Jackie’s need and desperation become palpable for the first time. With Eddie down the hall happy to ply her with Vicodin and other narcotics that make her sexually pliable, Jackie didn’t have to worry about her next fix. Without him present, she tries to game the machine the way he taught her, but the trick doesn’t work. She winds up punching in her own name and password to retrieve three vials of drugs, which she proceeds to pour down her throat without a chaser.

As the final episode of the season ends, Jackie drifts into a drug-induced haze, hallucinating herself dressed in 1950s white nursing finery, and waving to her husband and kids, who stand in front of a two-dimensional, cartoon-like, suburban-style ranch house wearing 1950s-styled clothing, waving at her robotically. Sprawled on the hospital floor comatose, Jackie can only watch these images play out in front of her as the scene fades to the credits.

The moment, typical of the crises that usually propel a series to the closing moments of a season, is disturbing and compelling. Is Jackie afraid of being trapped by the conventionality of her domestic family life? Is that why she has a secret affair with Eddie, and doesn’t tell any of her coworkers that she’s married and has two kids? Is she smart enough to want to resist the banalities of middle-class white heterosexuality, even as she’s clearly, at an earlier point in her life, decided to acquiesce to it? Does she take drugs because of her back pain (which isn’t mentioned much as the show progresses), or because she needs to take the edge off a life that can’t contain everything she feels herself to be?

Whatever the reason, to see a woman as complicated and wonderfully opaque as Jackie Peyton (shades of the old soap, Peyton Place?) anchor a series on a major cable network feels like something of a triumph. Jackie isn’t a perfect mother—in fact, although she takes her oldest, the troubled Grace, to mother-daughter tap dancing classes, Jackie’s skirmish with an old high school friend embarrasses both of them and they abandon the class. Jackie isn’t the perfect wife—she works nights, which means that she and her husband are passing ships in a domestic sea that’s often barely functional.

Jackie isn’t the perfect nurse—she operates under her own moral code, which means that sometimes, she breaks rules to favor people she decides won’t otherwise get a break. She’s unsympathetic with her trainee (although over the course of the season they’ve developed something approximating a warm understanding) and she’s flip with her superior. She’s a flawed middle-aged woman, a character not often enough seen on television.

Although these days, that’s not entirely true. Jackie Peyton joins the ranks of Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) on The Closer; Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), on Damages; Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) on Weeds; and Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter) on Saving Grace, all of whom are middle-aged white women with “issues,” whether drug addiction, dire financial problems, alcohol abuse, or power mania that make them as complicated and imperfect as the male heroes who more typically star in television series.

The surrounding characters on Nurse Jackie help flesh out the quirky environment, and each became more adroitly drawn and magnetic as the season proceeded. Although Mohammed de la Cruz, Jackie’s best friend on the ER floor, remains something of a cipher, his desire for other men has been flaunted happily throughout the season. And instead of being the lone gay man, another of the male nurses—the white guy with sandy hair and a more fey demeanor—is also openly queer. The two often perform scenes together, in which they cruise patients or tell Zoey, Jackie’s bumbling assistant, how she might improve her appearance. Although these characters still trade in stereotypes, at least there are two of them on the show regularly, creating a small but important queer community.

Likewise, Zoey has become sharper in her own zesty, over-sharing, over-caring style. By the season’s end, the character had come to think she knew Jackie, a rather endearing assumption, given all of Jackie’s dark and mysterious layers. Merritt Wever, as Zoey, is ever more fabulous in the role, her comic timing impeccable and her physical humor deft.

The best supporting character, however, is Mrs. Akalaitus, played by Anna Deavere Smith in one of her best scripted acting outings. In the season finale, Akalaitus gets stuck in an elevator, and rather than hurry to rescue her, the nursing staff lets her languish before they call for repairs. To entertain herself (and us), Akalaitus props herself against the stuck doors and pretends she’s being interviewed on the Letterman show.

Smith carries off the brilliant, hysterical bit of business with panache, and reveals the human side of the character. The scene tempers her rule-bound ambition, just as Akalaitis’s attachment to an Asian baby left behind (for weeks, it seemed) in the ER earlier in the season showed her softer side (although the storyline was far-fetched and her failure to call in the authorities completely out of character).

Watching a series as smart and morally, emotionally, and ethically complicated as Nurse Jackie, peopled with so many interesting, unique, and individualized women and gay male characters has been a real treat. That the story proceeds from a flawed woman’s perspective feels like progress indeed.

The Feminist Spectator

The Temperamentals

2009-08-19T11:12:00.001-07:00

Michael Urie, Tom Beckett, and Matthew Schneck in a scene from The Temperamentals
(photo © Michael Portantiere)

Gay plays, as they’ve proliferated and mainstreamed over the last 10 years, tend to address relationships between lovers, friends, and family. Plays by and about gay men often delve into sexual conquests and disappointments; the more exploitative ones use nudity to draw audiences and encourage a prurient, if fun, spectatorial pleasure. Plays by lesbians, which thanks to gender discrimination remain relatively fewer than those produced by or about gay men, tend to be more relationally based, dwelling on family dynamics and the domestic sphere.

I’m overstating grossly here to underline how refreshing it is to see a play about gay (or “homophile”) activism in the 1950s as the focus of an evening at the theatre. Written by Jon Marans, The Temperamentals tells the story of Harry Hay, considered by many historians to be the father of the U.S. homophile movement, who doggedly persuaded men to sign the manifesto of what he called The Mattachine Society. The Society was named after a troupe of medieval dancers who only appeared publicly in masks, an apt metaphor for closeted homosexuals of the ‘50s. Hay was the first to publicly call gays and lesbians a “minority” and to argue for homosexual rights along the lines of what would soon become the civil rights movement.

As an event happy to succeed by telling its important story, this production’s one acquiescence to commercial pressure is director Jonathan Silverstein’s casting of Michael Urie (of tv’s Ugly Betty fame) in one of the supporting roles. Although some of his tv character’s flaming gestures and flamboyant sarcasm seeps into his performance as Rudi Gernreich, Harry Hay’s young Viennese-Jewish clothing designer boyfriend, Urie’s acting is subtle, generous, and sincere, bringing depth and intimacy to the complicated exchanges between the two lovers.

In fact, all of the acting dignifies a slightly too earnest script. Marans skillfully describes the difficulties of being the least bit “out” and homosexual in the early 1950s in the situations he sketches. For instance, although he was one of the first gay proselytizers, Hay was married (to a woman) through much of his initial activism. And while he was aggressive about asking famous but closeted men (like film director Vincent Minelli, who makes a campy, sad appearance as a character here) to sign on to his manifesto, Hay’s own paranoia made him reject Rudi’s more public gestures of affection, so terrified was he of inappropriate display. The Temperamentals' perhaps most important contribution is its portrayal of just these contradictions and the social disapprobations from which they rose.

As it traces the beginnings of a language for gay activism (well before the word “gay” was commonly used to name homosexuals), some historical contrasts become amusing and poignant. For example, Hay and his few faithful compatriots—energetically portrayed by Tom Beckett, Matthew Schneck, and Sam Breslin Wright, who impersonate an array of good buys, bad guys, and the occasional woman, lesbian, or mother—discuss whether or not gay men should be allowed to get married . . . to women. One of the few lesbian voices in the play belongs to a radical butch who says she’d never marry, unless it was to a woman. The script deftly highlights historical shifts in its construction of these conversations, as it leads the audience to understand how the course of events and the contours of activist discourse have changed over the last 50-odd years.

Although gay news outlets, bloggers, and commentators have lately expressed disappointment in President Obama’s failure to follow through on his campaign promises about LGBTQ issues, watching The Temperamentals is a happy reminder that progress has indeed been made for gay men in U.S. culture and politics, despite what the movement still needs to accomplish. For example, when Rudi networks his way into an apprentice position with a noted, publicly visible clothing designer, the man tells him in no uncertain terms that Rudi requires a wife by his side, implying that the field’s obvious homosexuality needs to be defended by the normalizing choice of fake marriages. A spectator need only think of the overt queerness of a tv show like Project Runway to note how far gay male visibility and acceptance—in fashion design alone—has come since the early ‘50s.

Throughout the story, Rudi pressures Harry to leave his wife, Anita. Ironically, when Harry finally gathers the courage to tell her that he’s a homosexual, Rudi finds himself marrying a woman coincidentally also named Anita. The moment’s sadness, necessity, and ubiquity resonates as a poignant reminder of what gay men in the 1950s gave up to lead socially and professionally successful lives. Vincent Minnelli, who’s played as a limp-wristed, lisping, utter stereotype of a gay man who couldn’t pass for heterosexual if he tried, explains to Harry and Rudi that his career took off when he married Judy Garland.

Director Silverstein leads the audience to see that while from a contemporary perspective, these men would never be mistaken for straight, the persistence of the closet, and the social contract that enforced a purposeful refusal to see sexuality as anything but heterosexual, required the kind of visible and public declarations for which Hay fought. What queer theorist Eve Sedgwick would by the 1990s call the “open secret” of homosexuality clearly operated in the 1950s as a way to repress progressive public discourse about sexual fluidity and choice. The men Hay approaches to sign his manifesto believe in his work, but they can’t risk their lives and livelihoods by lending it their signatures.

Even hard won declarations of agency were often foiled. In one scene of The Temperamentals, the working class, police officer boyfriend of one of Hay’s friends is entrapped in a public bathroom by another police officer, who cruises him for sex then arrests him. While most men tricked in these situations pled guilty, Harry persuades this man to insist on his innocence. When he does, and the judge decrees him not guilty, the triumphant activist moment is defanged and neutralized when the press refuses to cover it. The moment goes unnoticed, unwritten as history that matters.

Many of Hay’s inner circle are portrayed as racist and anti-Semitic in The Temperamentals, despite their willingness to fight for their own homosexual rights. Maran does a nice job complicating identity politics with such contradictions, as these men fail to find common cause with other oppressed people unless their struggles provide helpful models. That Rudi is Jewish and his family dead at Auschwitz gives Harry a built-in analogy through which to ply a gay rights manifesto. But a general lack of political affiliation with people unlike him seems to weaken Hay’s cause, just as it would decades of subsequent too-white, too-middle-class, and too-assimilationist LGBTQ activism.

Although Marans’ script covers important moments in 1950s homophile activism, the characters mostly appear to be ciphers or stereotypes, mouthpieces for history rather than embodiments of people who are more than cogs in a predetermined wheel of time and social change. And although the script details the impossible contradictions of closeted gay life in this period, Marans lets a preachy didacticism creep into his writing, particularly in the second act. More judicious editing for length and tone would enhance the play, whose potential is signaled by the five actors and Silverstein’s sensitive, fluid direction.

The theatre at the Barrow Group space on 36^th street in which I saw the production (on August 7, 2009) was set up with spectators seated on two sides of the stage facing each other, raked up from the square wooden platform that provided the playing space. The surrounding audience seemed to embody the ever-present hegemony that enclosed Hay and his gay friends. Silverstein moved the actors through various locations using only six wooden chairs and a few props (a telephone, a clarinet, some pieces of clothing), cutting away extraneous visuals and business to focus on their human interactions.

The actors succeeded in finding the humanity of men (and the occasional woman) struggling to make sense of lives few words described in the 1950s. Even if some of the subsidiary characters are caricatured by the script, Beckett, Schneck, and Wright draw them sharply, with respect and care for what they represent in the history told.

As Hay, Thomas Jay Ryan provides a square-jawed performance, finding an arc of emotional growth in a man who begins by protesting (too much) his masculinity, only to begin a second movement 25 or so years later, this one called The Radical Fairies, in which he rejected conventional maleness for the free-flowing garments and gestures of men who refused gender constrictions and embraced spirituality.

Ryan finds generous ways to communicate Hay’s necessary contradictions, as his radicalism and conservatism bump up against each other through the period The Temperamentals covers. With Michael Urie as his sympathetic if bemused, ambitious but frustrated lover Rudi providing a lovely, warm emotional grounding for Hay’s barnstorming, Ryan delivers on the sense of promise in the pioneer’s vision.

Even though its script devolves into platitudes toward the end, The Temperamentals offers a necessary, gentle reminder of how difficult it was for two men to create physical, emotional, sexual, and political spaces in which to be together not so very long ago. For that, it’s worth celebrating—and seeing. It closes in New York on August 23^rd.

The Feminist Spectator

Wendy and Lucy

2009-07-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

Kelly Reichardt’s quiet, devastating film is a character study with social resonance that requires very few words to deliver its story and its critique. Little dialogue intrudes as the Reichardt, who directed and edited, notes the most prosaic moments of an ordinary life and somehow turns them into a sad comment on what it means to be poor and female and trying to live with very few choices available to make it all work.

Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) sleeps in her car with her dog, Lucy. She’s traveling from Muncie, Indiana, to Ketchikan, Alaska, to look for work at the Northwestern Fisheries cannery that she’s heard pays well and comes with room and board. Wendy is deliberate, calm, and careful. She traces out her route on her wrinkled map with a yellow highlighter and writes down each of her expenses as she accounts for her rapidly diminishing financial reserves. Wendy is also young; flowery doodles illustrate her record-keeping in her spiral notebook.

But the young woman’s admirable resourcefulness is clear. When she encounters groups of other people traveling together, she’s wary and watchful, gleaning information but revealing nothing. She’s steeled herself for this trip, wearing a money belt Velcro-ed around her waist and carrying her belongings in the trunk of her car.

When her old car breaks down, Wendy’s fortunes begin to down shift even further. A gentle, middle-aged night watchman guarding the empty Walgreen’s lot where Wendy parks overnight in a small town in Oregon wakes her to force her to move the car. When she turns the ignition, it won’t start, so she and the guard push it to the curb, where Wendy waits for daylight and for the garage across the street to open.

She finds the last crumbs of dog food stashed in the trunk for Lucy, who laps them up gratefully but clearly wants more. In fact, Wendy’s sense of responsibility for her dog propels her through the film even more than her desire to get where she can find work that will let them both survive. Lucy is her only companion; Wendy’s love for her sustains them both. The mixed-breed dog is valiant and faithful, thrilled to chase the sticks Wendy throws and patient as Wendy goes about her human tasks.

Her determination to care for Lucy gets Wendy into the jam that slowly unravels her precarious mobile stability. As she waits for her car to be fixed, Wendy trolls the aisles at a local market, carefully shoplifting. She pockets a bread roll for herself and later, when she’s busted on her way out of the store by Andy (John Robinson), a sanctimonious young grocery clerk, he pulls two cans of Iams dog food from her bag. Her choice of premium canned food makes the risk she’s taken that much more touching, and her capture that much more pathetic.

When Andy presents Wendy’s theft to his boss, Reichardt stages a scene that demonstrates the sticky complications of being poor and the levels of righteousness that distinguish people’s places on the economic ladder. Andy—who’s young enough to be picked up after work by his station wagon-driving mother—implores his reluctant boss to follow procedure and call the police. Andy insists that anyone who can’t afford dog food shouldn’t own a dog, emphasizing that if they make an exception for Wendy, their shoplifting prohibition is meaningless.

The boss, looking small behind his desk, wavers. He’s clearly embarrassed by the situation but lets Andy bully him into calling the police. As she’s driven off, Wendy explains that her dog is tied up outside the store. The cop doesn’t care. Through the rear-view window, Reichardt frames Lucy waiting on her leash, looking into the grocery store as Wendy is taken away and booked.

Williams’ performance as Wendy is so understated and true that she barely lets her irritation register on her face, even as she withstands the ineptitude of the young officer who books her and has to consult the manual to work the station’s computerized fingerprinting machine. You can see from the clench of Williams’ jaw and her surreptitious glances at the police station clock that she’s anxious to return to Lucy, but Wendy is a woman practiced at hiding her needs and her feelings.

The young white officer and the older African American woman who process her aren’t particularly nasty. Reichardt clarifies in simple strokes that no one individual is responsible for how the law or the economy binds and controls and constrains each of them differently. None of them band together to change anything, but they each suffer how things are from within their own proscribed roles, adhering to the rules of a game none of them have devised. No animosity flows between people in Wendy and Lucy, just a general resignation with the fact that everyone’s doing the best they can.

Only the security guard (Walter Dalton) breaks through proscription to reach out to Wendy. His job requires him to make her leave the Walgreen’s lot, but the guard can’t help but talk to her and try to help her out. He tells her about a nice, clean hotel not far from the store and describes the way to the pound when Lucy is lost. He clearly comes to care about her, even though they know nothing about one another.

In one of the film’s many small, finely wrought and poignant moments, the security guard comes to find Wendy in the lot on his day off, and passes her some money on the quiet, as the woman waiting for him in his car fixes her make-up. “I don’t want her to know about it,” the security guard explains, insisting Wendy not refuse his gift. When he drives away, Wendy looks down at the cash in her hand and counts out a five dollar bill and a few singles. The man has little more than Wendy, but he’s rich with humanity.

After she’s arrested for shoplifting, pays a $50 fine for her misdemeanor that she can’t afford, and is released, Wendy runs back to the grocery store. Lucy isn’t there, and no one knows where the dog has gone. The security guard suggests the pound and Wendy trudges off to look there for Lucy. The clerk at the animal shelter is kind, but Wendy’s sad tour through the kennels doesn’t turn up her dog. Instead, the camera tracks Wendy walking past other caged and desperate creatures, some barking hopefully at the bars of their cages, others retreated into the inner chambers of their small spaces, peering out warily and without hope.

The parallel is clear—at least the dogs get food, water, and a roof over their heads as they wait out their fates, some with hope and determination, and others with sorrowful acceptance. Wendy stays one step ahead of homelessness. She washes herself in a gas station restroom, trying to maintain her dignity in the face of her increasing deprivation. But losing Lucy means doing without her lifeline. Wendy’s car, which proves much more expensive to fix than she can afford, is easier to abandon. But life without her dog is too lonely to bear.

Wendy and Lucy’s script—based on the short story “Train Choir” by Jon Raymond—is never predictable and never sentimental. The film doesn’t ask the spectator to pity the characters, but to see them instead as human beings struggling with whatever limited means they can muster, each in his or her own way. The world Wendy and Lucy paints isn’t easy or kind—it’s lonely, hard, and sad, with little to remediate the economic blight and emotional benightedness the film depicts unremittingly.

But the elegant photography and eloquent editing—and Williams’ impressive, powerful acting—tell a sympathetic story about the people it depicts, not as a mess of psychological trouble and relational woe, but as individuals grinding out the only lives they can, given the poverty of their class and the paucity of possibility provided by the shopworn American dream.

The Feminist Spectator

Les Éphémères

2009-07-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

The densely packed circular "chariots" of sets in Les Emphemeres.

Les Éphémères, created collectively by Ariane Mnouchkine’s fabled company Le Théatre du Soleil and performed at the Park Avenue Armory for the Lincoln Center Festival 2009, exemplifies theatre’s importance and its pleasures. Legendary French director Mnouchkine conceived the stunning, two-part, seven-hour long event, and transplanted it to the US with many of the company’s trademark devices intact.

Théatre du Soleil makes its home at the Cartoucherie, a large old factory just outside Paris, where arriving audiences typically watch the actors preparing for their performances, and join them at impromptu meals at intermission and after the show. The communal atmosphere, and the company’s willingness to reveal the apparatus of performance that conventional theatre so insistently hides, immediately invites spectators to participate not just in the play’s reception, but in the production of its ambiance—that is, its warmth and its demonstrations of human connections over time, space, and history.

At the Armory in New York, the cast’s dressing area lined one end of the large hall into which the theatre auditorium was built. With floor-length curtains tied back to frame the buzz of the cast’s pre-show preparations, spectators could observe the actors sitting together at long tables, peering into mirrors lit with bare bulbs, or putting on their make-up, or arranging their props or costumes. Children ran between the tables, although since many of them, too, performed in the production, they were as busy as their adult counterparts (some of whom are their parents; this is a company for whom the public overlaps and intertwines with the private).

Climbing the steps up to the theatre built within the armory, spectators look down onto a playing floor arranged between two banks of steeply raked seating. Each long row of benches was built with a half-wall that butted up against spectators’ knees, onto which some people leaned in to watch the action. Little pen lights dot these walls, so that when you look across the stage into the seats opposite, if the stage lights are dark enough, the other side of the house looks like a night sky specked with unusually orderly stars. That image represents just a smidgen of the magic the company conjured at the Armory.

Mnouchkine watches a rehearsal from the banks of seats that line both sides of the playing area.

Les Éphémères offers a deceptively simple but sumptuously rich day of theatre. The numerous stories told by the large cast of actors, many of whom play several roles, range from brief vignettes that sketch a particularly clarifying moment in otherwise ordinary lives, to longer, interlocking stories that draw on personal memory and national history. The play’s longest tale winds in and out of the present, finally finding its meaning in a family history haunted by the Holocaust and by personal acts of supreme courage and kindness or of the basest cowardice and fear.

Whether or not the stories tie together neatly, they all touch each other with some basic fact about humanity: that people can be good or evil; that love is triumphant until it fails; that the past shadows people; that simple pleasures can be taken without being bought; and that the present is a thin filament of time inexorably linked to the past and the future.

Written and delivered in French (with supertitles projected on either side of the theatre for easy viewing), Les Éphémères’ dialogue is short and simple. No one monologues; their speech clips out, functional and sometimes expressive, but composed of quotidian, idiomatic expressions that sound comfortably familiar. The play underlines how easily people understand one another by juxtaposing times when the characters don’t, or when they withhold information to try to control the present or the future.

For example, in a memory piece that turns out to be surprisingly central to the play toward the end of Part II, Aline, a young French child whose Jewish parents have been deported during the war, is left in the care of Nora, a sympathetic Catholic woman who teaches her the Lord’s Prayer and winds up saving her life. When an oily German officer happens upon Aline playing on a beach, his cajoling, manipulative words aren’t translated, so that the audience (if they can’t understand German) hears him just as Aline does. The pompous, vaguely sinister officer reduces himself to gesturing to make himself understood.

The actor clarifies the difficulty of communicating across languages and yet at the same time, how much can be understood without knowing another vocabulary. The German officer’s intentions are horrifyingly clear—he’s testing Aline’s ethnicity, mistrusting the cross that hangs around her neck, probing her for evidence of Jewishness. Thanks to Nora’s prescient instruction, when the officer insists she say a prayer, Aline rattles off the one she’s been taught, instead of the Jewish brucha she learned as growing up.

Les Éphémères addresses the costs of erasing identity and piecing it back together over time. Although Aline’s story threads through the play most prominently, other vignettes share a similar theme. Gaelle, a young woman proprietor of a café, holds herself just out of reach of those she so generously serves, casting her glance through the café window and seeing her personal history play out just beyond reach of the present. As the scenery of her past is rolled into the playing space, we watch Gaelle as a child, helplessly observing her father beat her mother and then try to apologize.

Later scenes show that eventually, Gaelle’s father kills her mother in a car accident, in which Gaelle is also hurt but survives. Her story connects subtly with another of the play’s vignettes, in which a lonely girl whose mother and sister have also been killed in a car accident forms a friendship with the ostracized transgendered person who lives in her building. The girl’s father bottles up his grief, which poisons their domestic space enough that she wants to stay away from their apartment. Before long , the father, too, visits the transgendered woman, breaking down emotionally as she looks on with quiet compassion.

The domestic violence Les Éphémères depicts is as horrifying as the Nazi’s state violence and just as indelible for those who suffer it. And yet, the production suggests, people soldier on, resisting, reaffirming, triumphing over personal and political trauma in their own quotidian ways. Their prosaic lives prove their victory over forces that would destroy them, be it the ravages of Nazi ideology or the devastation of mercurial, abusive patriarchal power.

Mnouchkine and her cast embody these themes in gorgeous, moving theatrical metaphors. In Les Éphémères’ opening image, the house lights go down and a circular wooden disc perhaps twelve feet across, which the company calls a "chariot," is rolled out from behind a nearly sheer gray curtain at one end of the playing space. Several people busy themselves around the platform, carefully building a set while spectators watch. Someone holds a pen light in their teeth to light their work; someone else drills a half-wall into the chariot’s floor. Others carry on a sofa, a coffee table, a small cabinet; others dress the set with magazines, books, papers, photos, and dozens of other little objects that make a room a place where someone lives.

The spectators watch as these people fill the small set, then laugh as they roll the finished playing space off through a matching curtain at the other end of the space, as though all this meticulous work has been for nothing. But it soon becomes clear that this careful dressing of a small set represents the work the company will do throughout the richly textured and evocative afternoon and evening; they carefully embellish the outlines of lives that other productions draw only faintly. At the end of Part I, the company just as precisely dismantles another set, then rebuilds yet another at the start of Part II. The mirrored tasks speak volumes about what we’ve seen in between.

It turns out that those we might at first think are stagehands are actually part of the cast, as each performer shares the labor of literally moving the production from moment to moment and place to place. The chariots, like the wagons of a pageant play, are rolled through the long, narrow playing area by actors who push them along and around with their arms, their legs extending out behind them to give the sets momentum. Their movements look like dance; some of them drag their toes across the floor with graceful flourishes, and each of them exudes as much electrifying presence as the actors performing on the platforms they control.

The actors moving the chariots watch the actors “on stage” with great empathy and affection. They aren’t performing, per se, but they watch with a heightened sense of presence, creating a bridge between the characters created just above them and the spectators lining either side of the space. One of the day’s many pleasures is seeing people who’ve performed wrenching, touching, or comic moments later dressed in dark, unobtrusive clothing and helping move other scenes along. The cast doesn’t hide its dual roles, but uses them to empathize with both the actors in the scenes and the spectators, as we all experience these vital slices of life.

The chariots each contain their own working world. When the characters wash their dishes, they dip them into water in real sinks. When they cook, the frying pans smoke as the stoves heat the eggs or boil the pasta water. When they sit down to eat, they consume the food they’ve just made. When they watch television, spectators, too, can see the movies or images they refer to on the small screens on the set.

Although the cast creates each scene with ultra-realistic detail, the production revels in its obvious theatricality. The acting style lies somewhere beyond Stanislavsky, closer to post-modern performance art, as the performers venerate the simple tasks of daily life while they play the complexity of emotions that drive them: making tea, cooking pasta, signing papers, putting children to bed, getting dressed, combing the sand on a beach, lighting a fire, giving an ultrasound, eating dinner.

In some of the scenes, the characters never reveal more of themselves than their actions. For instance, in “The Farm Next Door or Deliverance,” a man and woman sit at a table together in silence, eating a meal we’ve seen her prepare. He wears work clothes and she wears an apron; they seem to be from an earlier moment in history, their home rural and isolated.

Suddenly, he stiffens and his body folds at the waist, his weight falling on the table. She watches, startled, and then resumes her meal, suffused with a very subtle sense of relief. Then the moment ends and the chariot that’s encapsulated this small moment of two obliquely drawn lives rolls off. Exposition isn’t necessary to communicate the fraught sadness and gladness of the moment, or to debate who exactly has been delivered by the man’s sudden death. We derive what we need to speculate from how the couple looks away from one another, from how they cut their food, from how they hold their bodies at the table, from how they chew. The text lies in their actions, in the daily movements of everyday life that speak volumes.

If the emotional detail of Les Éphémères comes from a combination of heightened theatricality and very subtle, task-based actions, the chariots on which these stories play out provide their own momentum. The actors moving the wheeled circular platforms push and pull them through the alley-like space, so that the spectators’ perspective changes continually. The characters move as their places are pulled around the stage; the effect is of lives always in motion, whether or not they’re going anywhere.

A long, narrow, two-sided viewing situation that could be frustrating for spectators instead becomes an exhilarating experience of multiple views of the same scene, as the playing areas roll this way and that, on and off, toward and away from each other, as doors join rooms, as living rooms give way to bedrooms and bathrooms and then move back to front doors.

The cumulative effect suggests the continuity of these lives, a fluid, always changing connection between those small, sliced platforms, rather than the static isolation proscenium arches often frame. The production exemplifies Brecht’s materialist view of history, of the present as a moment in a string of time that can affect the future in unpredictable ways, just by looking at the same scene from a different angle.

At the end of Part I, as if to underline the operation of memory and to jog your own, the actors parade the chariots with sets we’ve seen so far in Les Éphémères across the stage, as if to remind us of the lives that have played out before us for the last three hours.

The spoken text does justice to the texture and loveliness of the production’s visuals. Little conflict propels each vignette. Often, a phone will ring that delivers news or information that informs the scene’s emotional tone, sets its narrative in motion, or punctuates its action. And the musical score (by Jean-Jacques Lemetre) that accompanies the play underscores its emotional ambiance with poignant sounds and effects. Lemetre’s music apparently inspired the play’s initial construction and continues to inform its performances.

Throughout the play, he sits on a platform above one end of the playing area, watching the action below. He plays a series of unusual-looking instruments—an angular cello and various stringed instruments that look, to my untrained eye, like modifications of the more typical configurations, somewhat like those in Laurie Anderson's repertoire. An assistant clad in black hands him various instruments as he needs them, while he sits watching the action and adjusting the sound effects. He hovers above the stage, his presence quiet, benevolent, and motivating.

Les Éphémères’ stories begin with a scene called “The Marvelous Garden” (all the scenes are titled in the program), which concerns Jeanne Clément (Delphine Cottu), who’s grieving her mother’s recent death and putting the woman’s effects in order so that she can sell her house. When a man whose wife has just had a baby sees her freshly placed “For Sale” sign hanging on the gate, he enters the house and immediately decides to buy it. The juxtaposition of her sorrow with his joy sets up the play’s emotional fluctuations, as well as how subtly modulated those extremes will appear.

The play’s pieces come together in surprising ways that reveal themselves only gradually over the seven-hour production. In several sweet scenes, for instance, a divorced woman playfully entertains her young daughter with costumes and masks, their pleasure only interrupted by regular calls from a man who we come to realize is the girl’s father. When the father finally enters their home, coming to collect the girl in a scene called “Every Other Saturday,” it’s suddenly clear that the irritating man on the phone in these scenes has been the joyous new father from the play’s opening.

This example of how Les Éphémères moves through time in unexpected but moving ways is repeated in other stories throughout the play. At the beginning of Part II, Jeanne visits an archive with a letter she’s found in her mother’s effects, and learns that her mother’s parents were deported from Paris to a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Jeanne, who didn’t even know her mother was born Jewish, is stunned to learn her history, which subsequent scenes describe in stories that subtly interlock. Jeanne sees her mother’s history pass in front of her eyes, as more circular platforms roll on to encapsulate her secret history. The cast enacts moments of courage and cruelty that cross time, from one woman’s refusal to hide her Jewish friends during the Nazi occupation, to Nora’s fearlessness in the face of a mortal threat.

The connections among characters in the present and the past appear like images developing in liquid in a darkroom. The script never points underlines them obviously. Sometimes, a name hints at a common thread. The doctor/radiologist in one story shares a surname with Nora, the heroine of the World War II drama that grounds Jeanne’s family history.

That one actor—the sublime Juliana Carneiro da Cunha—plays both Dr. Altunian da Silva in the present and Nora Altunian in the past emphasizes these connections across time and across emotional coordinates. The exact relationship between the doctor and Nora is never spelled out. But the connection itself matters most, and the kindness and altruism that informs both characters’ choices.

Dr. Altunian plays out her story in several scenes with Perle (Shaghayegh Beheshti), an ancient, addled woman who arrives for an ultrasound in filthy clothing, her teeth blackened from neglect, with a dirty white cloth flower pinned in her matted gray hair. Dr. Altunian has been warned about Perle’s eccentricities; the woman is difficult, querulous, opinionated, and strong. That Perle comes to trust the doctor, and that Dr. Altunian comes to grow fond of the old woman, tracks one of the play’s most moving trajectories.

Beheshti is marvelous as the curious Perle. The actor is probably in her 30s; the woman she plays is easily on the far side of 80. She twists her body to portray Perle’s arthritic limbs, her fingers wracked with pain, her back bowed, her stomach pained by something she mistakenly believes to be pregnancy, her eyes twitching with suspicion and later, mischief, her mouth opening and closing spasmodically over decayed teeth. Age make-up is obviously drawn on Beheshti’s face—gray lines are penciled over pancake make-up with no attempt to make the effect look realistic.

But knowing that a young actor plays Perle makes her portrayal that much more affecting, since what you observe in the performance is the actor’s love and respect for the character’s humanity, rather than the virtuosity of Beheshti’s acting (although it is that). What could be a caricature instead becomes an eloquently choreographed dance of the indignities of age, the sharpness of character, and the persistent need for human connection as time passes and the body betrays its frailties. Da Cunha’s and Beheshti’s scenes together are lovely, heartbreaking instances of warmth and compassion.

The actors all play multiple roles, especially the principals—da Cunha, Cottu, Serge Nicolai (who plays Alain, the happy then angry father), and Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini (who plays various key supporting roles). They transform themselves with obvious, fake-looking wigs, make-up, and costumes, but mostly by embodying the physical characteristics of people whose lives are particularized by their circumstances, by what they do, in the present, more than how they got there and what it means.

The effects of each character linger, so that when the same actor embodies each part, you can see the violence of the wife-beater reappear in the upper-class father and the dying sharecropper. The actors become their own inter-texts, layering proximity and touching intimacy simply by relating the last character they played and to the present one. Each person stamps his or her role with an indelible trace of something very real, something recognizable and true even without the back-stories of exposition.

I saw Les Éphémères on one of the Saturdays in its run (7/18/09) when you could see Part I at the matinee and Part II in the evening. The pleasure of consuming the play in one delicious gulp was enhanced that day by other spectators, who happened to include Anne Bogart, Tony Kushner, Wally Shawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks. But even those among us who weren’t theatre luminaries became important to one another. I spoke with the man sitting next to me in Part I and the woman beside me in Part II differently than I typically talk to my fellow spectators. We talked about what we were seeing and what we saw, and how it made us feel.

The long play was a feat of endurance, however pleasurable (and the seating was, frankly, uncomfortable), that also made us turn to one another for support and a kind of care we don’t usually need from strangers. Eating the cookies the cast served and drinking the water we could pour together from the long table the cast rolled out at intermission also brought us that much closer; no one (or perhaps fewer people) ran out to smoke or check their cell phones. The audience walked down to the stage to collect our refreshments, and hung around talking instead of dispersing.

But something else circulated among us that day, something I like to call a “utopian performative,” when the fact of an audience’s being together creates a current of what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, or belonging among strangers, that lets us feel elevated together. In those heightened moments, I think we get a sense of what utopia might feel like. Watching Les Éphémères, I felt lucky to be among this particular group of people, those I knew and especially those I didn’t, watching a play that reminded me of theatre’s magic and the affecting beauty of experiencing it with an audience who feels it, too.

The Feminist Spectator

The Wiz

2009-07-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ashanti, Nigel the dog, LaChanze

City Center’s Encores! series has recently extended its season of staged readings of rarely revived musicals into the summer, outside of its typical three-show run in the spring. Two years ago, a summer remount of Gypsy triumphed with Patti LuPone in the lead, in a production directed by Arthur Laurents that went on to garner multiple Tony Awards during its subsequent Broadway run.

Hopefully, their latest summer production, a revival of The Wiz, will have the pleasure of a similar fate, despite Charles Isherwood’s less than charitable review in the Times. Directed by the talented Thomas Kail, who also directed In the Heights, musical directed by Alex Lacamoire (who also did In the Heights), and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler (currently represented on Broadway by 9 to 5), the production teems with talent and energy, offering a dazzling evening of great fun from a talented, infectiously delighted cast.

Even though the show was first produced in the 1975, this production didn’t smell a whiff out of date. Some of the language, on closer scrutiny, might seem anachronistic. A few bon mots suspiciously close to “here comes the Judge” are rattled off by an earnest cast that’s fully behind them, never pausing for a moment to be suspicious or snobby about the phrasing’s provenance (this despite the fact that many of the cast probably weren’t alive in the 70s).

Kail, himself a young Wesleyan University graduate, puts his shoulder behind the music and the dialogue, creating a fast-paced romp from Kansas to Oz in a musical retelling of the classic story with an African American spin that stamps the music with an erstwhile Motown idiom.

Perhaps because it was first produced in the 70s, when feminism was very much in the air, women dominate the musical. Ashanti, the Grammy Award-winning pop singer, plays Dorothy, and LaChanze matches her fame in the double role of Auntie Em and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. The show’s best numbers are sung by these two and the supporting women. Dawnn Lewis plays Addaperle, the Good Witch of the North, the first to meet Dorothy in Oz. She enters decked out in denim dotted with colorful patchwork quilt accents, wearing tall hats stacked on top of each other and horizontal striped stockings that somehow elongate legs that already tower on platform shoes.

Addaperle’s number, “He’s the Wizard,” promises that Dorothy will find her way home with his assistance, which begins her quest. But since we know the story, it’s the song’s delivery, and Lewis’s interpretation of Addaperle as sweet, well-meant, but addled that makes the number such fun. (Like a failed student at Hogworth’s, she can’t get her wand to work.)

Paul Tazewell’s imaginative, campy costume design—along with the hair and wig design by Charles G. Lapointe and makeup design by Cookie Jordan—distinguishes all the characters in this production, and provides much of the evening’s fun.

Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Tichina Arnold) also sings a show-stopping number, for which she dons the fabulously red, richly textured and layered outfit of a modern-day devil, wearing a tight-fitting body suit in a red and black paisley print, over which she pulls a hoop skirt, half covered with a fringey dress, topped by a red and black wig styled in long curly dreads. The whole campy effect gives her a devil-may-care-if-I’m-a-devil attitude that Arnold delivers with energetic panache. Her song, “No Bad News,” forbids anyone in her court to tell her anything she doesn’t want to hear, which eventually means the flunky who announces Dorothy’s arrival meets a comically bad end.

LaChanze has the pleasure of the first and the penultimate number in The Wiz, first as Auntie Em, singing a maternal ode to her niece as she hangs laundry on the clothesline while that foreboding wind kicks up. Even wearing Auntie Em’s shapeless housedress, LaChanze is a riveting presence with the best voice in the cast. When she returns as Glinda, wearing a diaphanous sky-blue gown with a silken turban wrapped around her head, LaChanze is luminous, glowing with the promise that if Dorothy believes in herself (as Glinda’s song goes), she’ll get home to Kansas and control her own destiny. LaChanze puts over the anthem to 1970s-style self-actualization like she’s announcing the one true religion. How can Dorothy not get back to Kansas, given LaChanze’s faith-full notes?

Ashanti is the production’s weakest link, but then, Dorothy isn’t the most interesting character in The Wiz. After she’s displaced by the tornado—which happily, Kail doesn’t try to reconceptualize by referring to Hurricane Katrina or any other available current event—Dorothy arrives in Oz, where she mostly reacts with either wonder or dismay at its marvels. The role is one long reaction, and Ashanti’s expressions shift—or not—accordingly. But her responses seem practiced, rather than spontaneous; her face looks stiff and too carefully arranged.

She’s cute and earnest but bland, and lacks that glowing musical theatre-person presence that her co-stars exude. Ashanti acts like the pop singer she is, a girl who’s accustomed to being technologically mediated and much more amped up than she is here. Ashanti’s voice, though, is gorgeous, and she gets her songs’ tone and spirit just right. She’s also a very game; for some reason, she doesn’t dance, but she’s happily led around the stage by chorus boys and girls, and vamps in place with the other characters.

Ashanti is also the lightest skinned person on stage, whatever that might mean to the politics of race, which this production downplays. Since no white characters appear in The Wiz, the African American characters and cast create a world in which their race is the norm and goes without comment. Ashanti stands out in this context, although perhaps her exceptionalism makes sense for Dorothy, who is indeed different in Oz.

Ashanti never gets in the way, but she never stands up to the sparkle and shine of the other performers. She’s upstaged by each new character Dorothy meets. The Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Lion each get their own tour-de-force number, which they put over with skillful aplomb. Christian Dante White is all floppy limbs as the Scarecrow, in a wonderfully physical and relaxed performance. Joshua Henry, as the Tinman, taps his heart out for his “Slide Some Oil to Me” solo. James Monroe Iglehart, as the Lion, is a big teddy bear of a performer, who inhabits his furry suit with the appropriate aw-shucks charm. Iglehart manages to wrangle a bit of heart from Ashanti, who seems to enjoy his company. Warmth radiates between them that doesn’t spark between the lead and her other co-stars.

Orlando Jones, as the Wiz himself, is intermittently effective, handsome in his bedazzled emerald coat and fantasy make-up when the wizard deploys shock and awe, and later, unapologetically matter-of-fact about his fall from power. He’s charming at the end as he goes about solving everyone’s problems, making each of the principles happy but Dorothy, whom he leaves on the ground as his hot air balloon takes off (or here, is blown sideways offstage) without her.

Dorothy doesn’t return to Kansas at the end of The Wiz to reveal the real-life identities of all her Oz friends. Instead, she sings “Home,” gesturing toward a happy end to her journey, and the curtain rings down. Perhaps because Ashanti can’t quite fill the moment emotionally, the ending feels a bit inconclusive.

But these minor defects don’t mar what’s otherwise an entertaining evening. Blankenbuehler’s terrific choreography evokes the story’s high drama. The black-clad dancers embody the tornado in a stunning coup-de-theatre. They fly about t he stage, putting their arms through the shirts hanging on Auntie Em’s line and wreaking havoc with her house. The set, designed by David Korins, comes apart creatively; the dancers create the damage of gusting winds by uprooting each piece of the house and planting them in odd parts of the stage, as if the weather explodes Dorothy’s home into its constituent parts.

The dancers’ choreography accomplishes many of the set changes. They create the yellow-brick road by appearing with small suitcases painted in a brick-like pattern that they put together like blocks, passing them under the feet of the actors as they “ease on down the road” to Oz. Dancers comprise the dangerous poppy field, twirling around the principles in form-fitting green sheaths and wearing bright red fright wigs.

As the munchkins, they sit on rolling chairs that halve their height, and wear hoop-skirt costumes that cover their bodies from chin to toe, while extravagant Koosh-ball shower caps adorn their heads. The flying monkeys, who get a kind of Michael Jackson Thriller treatment, threaten the company with their sinister moves.

And Toto, of course, is adorable.

The audience loved the high energy production the night I attended (a preview performance on 6/13/09). In the Bush years, the failed wizard might have been reminiscent of W., with his empty insistence on missions accomplished, and the sham promises of a few last left-over miracles that never transpire. But by this production’s end, the Wiz sounds more like Obama as he delivers his gentle, yes-you-can moral, the everything-you-need-is-within-yourself boosterism on which The Wiz, like The Wizard of Oz before it, stakes its happy ever after claim.

In a production like this one, though, watching the talented ensemble tell the old story, the moral feels a lot more like yes-WE-can. That works for me.

The Feminist Spectator

Twelfth Night, Central Park

2009-07-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Audra McDonald and Anne Hathaway (photo Jane Marcus)

Seeing theatre in Central Park is magical under most circumstances. The Delacorte is an intimate space; its horseshoe-shaped house brings the audience in toward the stage, which is small enough that the actors appear close. Behind the set, you can see trees sway in the breeze, and with the best designs, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the scenery leaves off and nature begins.

The Public Theatre takes advantage of the idyllic location and offers a production of Twelfth Night that doesn’t reinterpret the comedy in radical ways, but fulfills its potential with a lovely, funny, sweet evening in which actors and spectators alike seem to revel in one another’s presence under the stars (and the planes flying in and out of Laguardia that hum regularly overhead, their lights like far flung Leikos or Fresnels shining down to help the actors’ way).

Director Dan Sullivan sets the play in a vaguely Edwardian moment, which allows the elevated language to make sense without making the costumes (subtly wrought by Jane Greenwood) intrusively “period.”

John Lee Beatty’s set literalizes the pastoral theme. Instead of furniture, the floor is built up into small hills of various sizes, some planted with trees and some gleefully bare, which allow the actors to slide down or bounce against the faux-grassy surfaces. Given the high camp physicality of the production, those actions are often in evidence. Setting the play in an outdoor world mirrors the outdoor theatre, making its effect even more whimsical and midsummer-esque.

Anne Hathaway and Raul Esparza (photo by Jane Marcus)

The Public’s is the third production of Twelfth Night I’ve seen this year. In London, a Donmar Warehouse production that moved to the West End set the story in what looked like the belly of a great ship, with huge wooden slats extending the height of the stage. The actors nearly cowered under the arching dark wood, which gave the production a more foreboding tone. Derek Jacobi’s presence as the ridiculous but wronged Malvolio lent the play a peculiarly sad air, despite the antics of Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek.

In the McCarter Theatre Center production I saw last March, Twelfth Night played out against a wide and high white scrim that swept down into a parabolic wooden stage floor that looked like an elegant version of a roller derby rink. The set design featured blood red roses, hung in two dimensional photorealist images and later concretized by hundreds of three-dimensional flowers that fell from the flies and remained on stage for the actors to walk among until the play’s end. The design emblematized the relief and revelry of spring and of love.

But the Public’s outdoor setting and outdoor-inspired scenery did the most to enhance the play’s merriment and melancholy, framing its movement from one emotion to the next as a kind of picaresque, as the characters traveled the set’s green byways. The black stage apron concealed Malvolio’s prison in the second act, and in the first, its imposing steel grate rose up to expel the shipwrecked Viola onto the shores of Illyria in a puff of fog, smoke, and damp. But for the most part, the dark forestage was overshadowed by the set’s calm and playful green and its tall, leafing trees that blended seamlessly with the real arbor the set incorporated.

Emphasizing the comic over the melancholic focused the production squarely on Viola and her turn as Cesario, courting the mourning Olivia for Cesario’s employer, the Duke Orsino. In the McCarter production, Veanna Cox turned in a sublimely funny performance as an awkward, pratfall-prone Olivia, which made her attraction to Cesario—so easily transferred to the properly heterosexual love object Sebastian, when he makes his appearance—less serious, closer to the comic subplot of mischief that Toby, Aguecheek, and Maria play out.

In the Public production, Audra McDonald, though beautiful and wistful as Olivia, plays the character as more conventionally moonstruck over Cesario, whose presence pulls her out of her extended mourning for her brother, as she’s gradually brought back to life by her attraction for Orsino’s young messenger. MacDonald performs a few deft double-takes later in the play, as she begins to sort out the double-vision of Viola and Sebastian. But she’s a rather wan presence against Anne Hathaway’s vitality as Cesario/Viola.

The Public often casts high profile film actors in its summer shows in the park. Hathaway makes a wonderful Viola. Her performance is full of life and energy, but carefully modulated to accommodate Viola’s wistful longing for Orsino. I heard lines in the play that never sounded so pertinent before, thanks to her heartfelt, meaningful delivery. Instead of struggling to project personality and to command a physical presence, as do many transplanted film actors (Hathaway was nominated for an Oscar for her devastating performance last year in Rachel Getting Married), Hathaway seemed a natural.

Hathaway’s star power brings the production buoyant liveliness, she connects warmly with the rest of the cast. Her relationship with Orsino, played by a slightly campy, appropriately pouty Raul Esparza, develops quickly into easy camaraderie and the attraction that surprises them both, with her consternated that her true sex is hidden, and he distracted by erotic longing for a person he thinks is a boy. The casting winks at itself—Esparza has been out as bisexual for some time—which makes the gendered confusion of his attraction to Cesario that much more fun (and the moment at the end when he reaches for Sebastian’s hand by accident that much more sweet). He and Hathaway seem to share genuine affection; it’s clear that they’re having great fun together onstage.

But then, so is the rest of the cast. McDonald flings herself into her flirtation with Cesario, exuberantly kissing him on the mouth in her desperation to have him. Hathaway reacts with dismay at Olivia’s demonstrativeness, but somehow manages to avoid the homophobia implicit in that reaction. Instead, when the misunderstanding is revealed, she and Olivia/McDonald instantly translate their affections for one another into sisterhood. Olivia gets to have her soul mate as both a man and a woman. The production revels in this abundance of erotics and affection.

In fact, a kind of queerness tinges the whole event, especially in the antics of Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek. Jay Saunders, who’s typically cast in films and television crime dramas as the sober sidekick (he most recently played the lovelorn neighbor lusting after Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road), pulls out all the stops to play the red-faced, alcohol-sodden Toby, a barrel-chested, grizzled companion to the slight, very fey and befuddled Hamish Linklater as Aguecheek.

Anne Hathaway and Hamish Linklater (foreground) (photo by Jane Marcus)

Linklater performs the most captivating, hilarious version of the hapless suitor of any of the productions I saw this year. In London, Aguecheek’s comedy came mostly from his height—he was a long string bean of an actor who towered over Belch and the others. In the McCarter production, he was played as slightly fey, as well as ridiculous. But here, Linklater perfectly embodies both the character’s physical timidity (despite his sometimes blustery words) and his emotional and intellectual inadequacies, nearly bringing down the house with his delivery and his physical comedy. Just watching him too carefully hook his lank blond hair over his ears provoked laughter, so nicely calibrated and comic were his gestures.

Julie White, as Maria, brought the proceedings a 21st century comic perspective, as each of her line readings and actions seemed of the moment, which only amplified the comedy in the Belch/Aguecheek scenes. Michael Cumpsty dignified the dour Malvolio with his resonant voice and pompous posturing. He affected an appropriately wounded exit after his imprisonment, but his anger didn’t dint the good humor of this production.

This Twelfth Night boasted enough music and lyrics to be a quasi-musical, which the cast sang beautifully. Audra MacDonald’s voice was wasted as Olivia, but Hathaway, who proved her mettle in the impromptu/staged improv with Hugh Jackman at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony, showed off a lovely soprano, and seemed as comfortable singing as she was acting. Esparza offered her a stalwart duet partner.

David Pittu, playing a very wry, quick witted, rather understated Feste (which I appreciated, since the character, pushed too far, as he was in the McCarter production, can be tiresome), produced a commanding tenor for his many solos. A band of violin, guitar, Irish Flutes, smallpipes, whistles, and percussion, played by period-costumed musicians who gamely acted as part of the show, accompanied the actors with music composed for the production.

The final song is an ode to performance itself, regardless of what the elements bring. The lyrics about the wind and the rain prompted laughter from the audience, as it drizzled throughout the show on the night I attended (7/11/09). While the real thunderstorms came later that evening, and didn’t delay the production, the actors and the audience commiserated in our mutual dampness. As she ran offstage after the rousing and enthusiastic curtain call, Hathaway flung her arms into the air with the rest of the cast, all of them hooting and hollering, weather be damned, as irrepressible at the end as they were throughout this wonderful production.

The Feminist Spectator

Nurse Jackie

2009-07-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Merritt Wever, Janie Kelly, Edie Falco

This new Showtime series stars Edie Falco as a wry, knowing, harried emergency room nurse. The show offers a terrific vehicle for the versatile actor, as a well-written, smart and funny situation-based character study that takes advantage of Falco’s intelligent, restrained emotional presence and her quirky humor. Unlike network doctor dramas like ER, women characters propel Nurse Jackie’s narratives. Jackie begins each episode with a brief voice-over remark, and then the story continues from her perspective.

Jackie’s best friend at work is Dr. Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), an elegant Brit whose arrogance is matched by her intelligence and wit. The upstairs/downstairs aspect of their friendship provides lots of comic fuel—O’Hara often refers casually to how much she spent on various items of clothing, from her $1,200 scarf to her almost as expensive silk stockings. Jackie and her bar-owning husband clearly pinch pennies to make it through their week. Jackie rolls her eyes at her friend’s profligacy, but her indulgence of O’Hara’s class idiosyncrasies emphasizes their bond as women in a professional environment skewed to favor men.

Pompous and powerful male doctors are represented here by Dr. “Coop” Cooper (Peter Facinelli), an Ivy League grad who struts into the ER with a blimp-size ego that Jackie promptly deflates when Coop’s misdiagnosis—against Jackie’s instincts—causes a young patient’s death. After the first few episodes, Jackie’s frequent corrections seem to be bringing Coop into line; he’s cultivating his human side and considering his patients’ emotional needs. In a recent episode he lavished rather sweet attention on an elderly woman on one of her regular trips to the ER from a nursing home. Coop adjusts her wig and compliments her vanity while writing her scrips, even though when she soon expires, he’s out by the nurses’ station boasting of how skillfully he handled his first gunshot wound patient a few curtains down.

Facinelli plays Coop with a dollop of humility and lots of magnanimity, although even he seems uncomfortable with the character’s odd, unconscious tendency to grab women’s breasts when he’s anxious (a completely gratuitous quirk that says more about the producers’ anxiety about the women characters’ strength than Coop’s). This week’s episode revealed that Coop is the son of lesbian parents (deliciously played by Swoozie Kurtz and Blythe Danner), a plot twist that also particularizes and humanizes a character who could be a too stereotypically thoughtless and self-involved heel. O’Hara, in fact, looks at Coop differently once she realizes he has two mothers; the information makes him more than a run-of-the-mill, ambitious male doc.

Nurse Jackie draws all of Jackie’s relationships with men in refreshing, slightly off-beat ways. She’s married to a sweet guy who cares for their two young daughters while he runs the bar they own in Queens. But at work, Jackie removes her wedding band, closets her family life, and carries on a regular sexual liaison with the hospital’s pharmacist, Eddie (Paul Schulze). He not only services her physically (with Jackie always literally on top) but keeps her stocked in the painkillers that make long days of walking hard floors possible. Jackie’s back seems seriously compromised, but the painkillers come with an addiction problem. She snorts Percocet and other opiates in doses small enough to let her function, but regularly enough that her drug use has to become an issue down the narrative line.

Jackie’s secrets, though, keep the character complicated. She never slides into the self-abnegating golden-hearted-but-gruff nurse stereotype that lurks just around the corner of this story. So far, the show avoids that pitfall, gilding Jackie’s essential goodness with enough sardonic cynicism to keep her from being a simple saint. Her first-year student nurse, Zoey (Merritt Wever), offers her a useful foil, as Zoey delivers the platitudes about wanting to help people that drives some idealistic young women and men into nursing in the first place.

Put up against Jackie’s unsentimental pragmatism, Zoey’s enthusiasm plays as funny but not quite ridiculous. The character could easily be the butt of facile jokes—Zoey is a bit chunky, not conventionally beautiful, and too open and cuddly for what proves the ER’s more cut-throat environment. But instead, she gets her own sharp edges. Wever’s loose physicality gives Zoey embodied, character-driven humor; for instance, when O’Hara blithely walks off with Zoey’s new stethoscope, the young nurse’s attempts to retrieve it provide Wever with moments of stuttering explanation and stealthy borrowings that show off Zoey’s agency and nascent power, instead of belittling her as inept.

Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman), Jackie’s nursing colleague, unfortunately bears the burden of race and sexuality in the narrative, a load too heavy for any one actor to carry easily. Sleiman’s features are ethnically ambiguous (his character’s full name is Mohammed de la Cruz), allowing him fill the “colored” slot in the character list, and his slightly fey, gentle presence and willingness to give Zoey fashion advice betray his gayness. Although his easy relationship with Jackie gives Sleiman and Falco some nice moments, so far, Mo-Mo represents still another gay person of color serving the development of the far more centralized white characters, a narrative strategy we could by now all do without.

On the other hand, Anna Deveare Smith makes regular appearances as Mrs. Akalitus, a nurse-turned-hospital administrator now charged with guarding the bottom line. The character is a hard-assed factotum, but Smith brings her, too, subtle off-beat humor. When she borrows what she thinks is a packet of Jackie’s sugar, and unknowingly gets high on the painkillers Jackie has ground up and put into the packet instead, Smith’s performance as the suddenly high and goofy administrator is priceless.

In another episode, Akalitus finds a taser gun lying in the corridor. After she shouts with anger to no one in particular about how irresponsible it is to leave such things lying around, she gets on an elevator and prompting stuns herself with the gun. Her electrified pratfall is hilarious. Watching Smith, who usually plays the steely, powerful, alpha female roles in films and television shows, play a comic character role makes me admire her acting even more.

Many terrific New York-based actors play the ER’s patients and visitors, offering keenly observed turns as the sick and dying and their families. The situations into which they’re written, however, are often predictable and run to stereotypes. For example, in Episode #3, Lynn Cohen is on hand as an elderly Jewish woman who tends to her dying husband’s heart disease with chicken soup. Their scenes are saccharine and lachrymose, their Jewish accents wearying echoes of vaudeville sketches about Jews and their magic ministrations that should be put to rest soon.

Likewise, the Latina mother whose son’s lung collapsed in a playground accident speaks with a thick accent, and her other son is excessively emotionally expressive; the elderly white woman who’s regularly delivered to the ER from her nursing home is vain about her appearance; the tourists from the Mid-West are white, middle-class, and heterosexual, and apologize for everything (even though the woman turns out to be an opium addict, offering a neat mirror for Jackie’s developing habit); and an international diplomat savagely murders a prostitute but can’t be touched, thanks to his legislated immunity. Jackie navigates these characters and their issues deftly, always looking out for the well-deserving underdog and wreaking what vengeance she can on the powerful and evil. But they still remain vehicles in which to drive her character, rather than truly interesting people of their own.

Nurse Jackie swivels from wistful and wry to parodic and satirical fairly quickly. For instance, when Jackie and her husband Kevin attend a meeting at their daughter Grace’s school, the teacher, the school psychologist, and the school nurse are played in high farce and shot from camera angles that make them appear large and confrontational to the prosaic, confused Jackie and Kevin. But the small family’s scenes at home are wistfully realist, as the girls cuddle with Kevin on their parents’ bed watching television while they wait for Jackie to come home at night. The combination of exaggerated and earnest works, as Nurse Jackie’s sharp humor oscillates between its poignant observations about the proximity of death to life and its insights about how we navigate all those moments in between.

The Feminist Spectator

Groundswell

2009-06-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Larry Bryggman, Souleymane Sy Savane, David Lansbury

In playwright Ian Bruce’s note in the program of the New Group’s production of Groundswell, he addresses the intractable politics of the new South Africa. He describes how blacks are desperately finding their way through administrating a new government, trying to undo decades of damage from apartheid, while whites struggle to find their place in the country’s new cosmology.

Bruce says, “While most blacks and some whites maintain hope and sanity by remaining loyal to the older liberation structures or ideas, this loyalty is no longer a given. As it should, the political pressure is building around bread and butter, rather than ideological issues. For the very poor, which is the majority, the more that is offered, the more they become discontented about what they still lack.”

I visited South Africa a few years ago, and witnessed the bitterness of native Afrikaners who feel disenfranchised for the first time, as well as the unbearable poverty of Black South Africans still living in the corrugated tin shanty towns that line the country’s highways. People walk on those interstates, waiting for jitneys to deliver them to jobs, and selling fruits, vegetables, and other wares, as though these major roads are extensions of the marketplace, the thin threads that connect one poor community with another.

On our trip through the country, our Afrikaner driver disparaged what he believes to be an ineffectual new government, and could barely conceal his antipathy for the regime under which he now lives. The black South African trackers and guides in the game preserves we visited told stories about their fathers and grandfathers, who knew the land we traveled intimately. These men passed down their knowledge of the animals we drove to see, to sons now employed by large corporations that own and organize thousands of acres of land with herds of elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, zebras, and other amazing species. We visited shanty towns, where we were introduced to hopeful residents, determined in their faith that their turn would come to move out of their jerry-rigged tin shacks into the concrete bunkers that represent a step up into real housing.

The country’s contradictions are confounding and upsetting. Bruce manages to capture these paradoxes in Groundswell, his poignant, intense play about three very different South African men confronting their positions in the nation’s chess game of a future. Meticulously directed by the New Group’s artistic director Scott Elliott, the play carefully portrays the hopes, dreams, and frustrations of men whose relationships to South Africa’s new structure of power and possibility couldn’t be more different.

The play’s narrative spins out through generic realist conventions. The men confront each other in an isolated guest house along South Africa’s desolate West Coast, acting in a gorgeous box set designed by the ubiquitous Derek McLane (who designed Our House at Playwrights Horizons and 33 Variations on Broadway as well as Groundswell, with all three productions running simultaneously). The one-set design depicts in detail the living and dining room of the small guest cottage on the ocean, with its slightly shabby nautical décor, its knotty pine walls, colonial wooden tables, chairs, and sideboard, and carved pictures of the sea lining the walls.

Jason Lyons’s lighting evokes the sun gradually setting on the water; from the cottage’s windows, the sky can be seen deepening into azure hues tinged with pink as the play progresses. Shane Rettig’s sound design also textures the production, with elegiac tolling bells and fog horns, constantly reminding the men of where they are as they wonder, for very different reasons, whether or not they’ll ever be able to leave.

Deep-sea diver Johan (David Lansbury) and his black friend Thami (Souléymane Sy Savané), who runs the guest house in its owner’s absence, cook up a scheme to get Thami’s guest, Smith (Larry Bryggman), to part with some of his obvious wealth to fund their application for a government empowerment scheme for small business owners. With Smith’s help, the two men believe they can move out of their relative poverty and dependence on employment from others to make their own way.

Smith has arrived at the guest house somewhat by accident, under the impression that he was traveling to a golf resort where he could relax on holiday. Instead, he finds a much smaller, simpler lodging than he expects, and the setting more intimate than anonymous, and much more remote. Golf isn’t an option; Smith can’t get a signal for his cell; and he’s obviously accustomed to finer food and drink. Bryggman does a fine job establishing Smith’s pretensions. When he comes from his room for dinner, he wrinkles his nose at the wine Thami and Johan have carefully chosen to honor his arrival. What for them is a top shelf choice for Smith is barely drinkable, although he’s pleasantly surprised to find his first taste adequate.

Smith’s colonialist class status is first established in these bits of business. After their dinner, for example, Smith asks for another glass of whiskey, waiting for Thami to pour for him even though the bottle is close at hand. Elliott and Bruce underline that Smith’s privilege is so deeply ingrained, he wouldn’t think of pouring for himself if a Black server is at the table. While the three men sit in apparent camaraderie, their class and racial differences lurk not at all far beneath the surface.

Johan’s relationship with Thami proves even more delicate, because their class affinities make a real friendship seem possible. Johan has been injured in a dive; Lansbury plays him clutching his upper arm in apparent discomfort through most of the play. He finally admits that he’ll no longer be able to dive, which means the end of his only source of income. Johan speaks in a thick Afrikaner brogue, but he also practices broken Xhosa, Thami’s native language, asking his friend to teach him new words and to correct his pronunciation.

Johan at least tries to understand his Black friend, to approach him as a full human being. Johan, in fact, argues most vociferously, when the three men’s relationship becomes strained, that Smith owes Thami reparations for apartheid, that part of Smith’s wealth rightly belongs to the Black man. Even Thami can’t quite get behind Johan’s protestations. Although he doesn’t say so outright, Thami’s eyes and his behavior indicate that he’d rather not blame one individual for decades of racial oppression.

But Bruce’s play asks who, then, is responsible for the long years of apartheid, and how should Black South Africans’ plight be redressed? After all, if it’s not Smith himself, it’s certainly more his kind’s fault than it is the working class seaman Johan’s. But the play complicates even Smith’s position by making him relatively sympathetic. He defends his own propriety, insisting when pushed that he contributed his money to all the right causes, that he, too, was against apartheid, and that he, too, is distraught over the country’s disrepair.

Smith’s second act monologue describes being let go from a government position, only to be called back to consult when the people who replaced him had no idea how to do the job. Bruce’s play proposes that Smith isn’t the source of all evil. He’s a decent, wealthy man who’s lived through an untenable situation differently than Thami and Johan, but who sees the inequities clearly. Still, Smith’s hubris is his inability to see that although the course of history hasn’t been in his control, he’s benefited in ways that bear consideration. Groundswell ultimately accuses him of a smug avoidance of blame.

Director Elliott and his cast carefully build the evening’s tension. The play opens with Thami reading out loud in Xhosa a letter he’s writing to his wife. The lyrical language—full of clicks and mouth-tongue positions alien to English speakers but musical to hear—is left untranslated. But it’s clear that Thami is describing something beautiful, as his face is full of a mixture of joy and longing.

When Johan later tries to translate the letter, it seems Thami is constructing an edited version of his life for his wife, painting a much more hopeful scene than the one in which he’s living. Gracefully played with a welter of conflicting emotions by Savané, the tall, slender Thami is an elegant man, whose simple black pants, white shirt, and apron mark his servitude. But he holds himself with regal dignity, and takes very seriously his position as the absentee owner’s landlord.

Johan arrives on a gust of wind, all vim and vigor, filling the air with the imagined scent of salt and surf. He’s a seafarer on land, boisterous and physically unsteady, as though he can’t quite find his footing out of the water. Even when he cleans up and changes his clothes for dinner, Johan’s skin retains its moisture, as the saltwater seems to seep from his pores. Lansbury’s wonderful performance keeps a tight hold on Johan’s volatility, but his imminent violence and unpredictability courses just under the surface of his florid face. He and Thami provide a study in contrasts, not only of personality, but of lifestyles and responses to lives of hardship and deprivation.

On his entrance, as he peels off his wet clothes, Johan removes a long fishing knife from its sheath at his belt and puts it in a drawer in the sideboard. The knife amounts to a symbol as potent as the gun in Hedda Gabler; the rules of theatrical narrative dictate that at some point, the weapon will be used. Groundswell’s plot acquiesces to tradition. Our knowledge of the knife haunts the exchanges that follow, and gives Johan a powerful secret that puffs him up beyond his class status.

Hearing that a well-off guest has registered, Johan decides that he and Thami should persuade Smith to sponsor their application for a small business loan that will buy them a lease on an area in which they can mine diamonds. The two men become excited at the prospect of persuading Smith to bankroll their plans, and put together what for them is a special meal over which to convince him.

The meal goes badly from the start. Thami and Johan try to ingratiate themselves with forced jollity, jolted by nerves taut from the high stakes of the interaction. Smith is at first oblivious to the subtext coursing under the meal. Bryggman beautifully executes his dawning understanding that he’s being played. If the three men begin their repast at least performing as equals, Smith’s practiced power soon becomes evident, as Johan can’t get him to see the potential in the government’s assistance plan.

Smith’s own political analysis suggests that the government scheme into which Thami and Johan want to buy is nothing but a sop to the poor, a way to appear to be sharing opportunity that hasn’t been adequately considered or tested. Smith intimates that the land they want to lease has already been thoroughly mined, that there are no diamonds left, and that the government’s empty gesture is meant to provide a false sense of ownership and only fabricated hope.

As Johan becomes more and more desperate and Smith becomes increasingly rational and cynical, the obvious disparity in their power and knowledge is painfully clear to all three men. Thami watches, occasionally interjecting but often simply moving his eyes from one white man to the other, as he observes the contretemps play out. Savané’s face registers his dawning disappointment, as he realizes earlier than Johan that Smith will refuse to contribute to their future.

But Johan won’t let Smith off the hook. As his convoluted proposals become increasingly desperate against Smith’s cool refusal, Johan turns to the bottle to maintain his strength. At the top of the play, he reassured Thami he wouldn’t drink, setting up, like the knife, the inevitability that liquor will arrive in his near future. Over the painful dinner, as Thami clears away a course and moves into the kitchen for the next, Johan pulls a bottle of wine from the shelf and quickly drains it. His belligerence grows with his alcohol consumption, until finally, he’s threatening Smith with the knife he’s pulled from the sideboard to hold at the rich man’s throat.

That the two white men enact the play’s most violent confrontation clarifies how much class is at issue, along with race, in the new politics of South Africa. The comfortable colonialist might be threatened temporarily, but inevitably, he can pack his suitcase, pick up his wallet and his keys, and move on to a more luxe, more impregnable resort. Johan and Thami, trapped in their circumstances, try to build common cause. Johan genuinely wants to learn Xhosa, and his affection for the Black African seems real, even if his demonstrativeness appears alien and discomfiting to Thami’ physical propriety.

But finally, Thami is forced to reject Johan’s gesture of brotherhood. The diver’s methods aren’t his own, and the prideful Thami painfully points out that although Johan tries to learn his language, he can’t truly understand his life. Thami’s commitment to his family outweighs his camaraderie with Johan, whose dreams are larger but less realistic than Thami’s, who wants a small piece of land and a home in which to gather the family from which his work keeps him separate.

Thami’s isolation comes from an economic structure that requires him to leave his village to survive; Johan’s lack of opportunity derives from his alcoholism and his belligerence, along with his class and his place in an economic system with no room for aging divers.

By the play’s end, as the bell by the sea rings mournfully, nothing has changed. But the three tired men, now isolated by their intractable differences, have gained an even deeper understanding that solutions to their awkwardly shared conundrum will be very slow in coming.

The production is beautifully calibrated, as Elliott orchestrates the three men’s emotional trajectories like a conductor leading a trio through a complex musical score. As the tension among them builds and their affiliations subtly shift, each man reveals vulnerabilities only to cover them up once again. They know they can’t be open or honest with one another, that their mutual survival depends on maintaining the roles history has crafted for them, despite their surprisingly mutual, fervent wish that the future will be different.

The Feminist Spectator

Our House

2009-06-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Stephen Kunken, Morena Baccarin, Christopher Evan Welch,
Haynes Thigpen, and Jeremy Strong. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Theresa Rebeck has worked in television on and off, writing for, among other series, NYPD Blue. She's currently developing an HBO series called Women's Studies with actor Julie White. To say she’s seen the dark side of the medium would be putting it mildly. Her latest satirical play about the industry is Our House, at Playwright’s Horizons, smartly directed by Michael Mayer and beautifully performed by a cast that successfully communicates its difficult tone. Everything works in this production. At times, Rebeck delivers her warning message about the confusion of reality and television with too heavy a hand. But since the matinee performance I saw (6/6/09) was a preview, that kink will no doubt get worked out during the run.

Originally commissioned, workshopped, and produced at the Denver Center Theatre, the play describes Wes, a New York, shark of a corporate network television honcho; Jennifer Ramirez, his ambitious news-anchor mistress; and Stu, the dubious, conscience-prone head of the network news division, as their wheelings and dealings overlap with a household of down-at-the-heel roommates somewhere in St. Louis. The play’s intercutting structure reveals its plan and purpose just before the end of the first act, which meanders a bit as Rebeck unspools the relationships and issues that drive the eventual crisis.

I won’t reveal the necessary surprise of that first act’s explosive ending (although I should also say: Spoiler alert!). Suffice it to say that four oddly matched roommates comprise the shabby household in St. Louis. The characters are lightly drawn; Vince (Haynes Thigpen) is a computer nerd who rides a bike to and from work; Grigsby (Mandy Siegried) is a med student intern at a hospital ER; and Alice (Katie Kreisler) newly arrived from Vermont, is a strident, politically correct woman who grates on the others’ nerves.

The fourth roommate is a couch potato graduate student named Merv (Jeremy Strong) who owes the others $4,000 in back rent, but lives blithely unconcerned with his responsibilities or the niceties of a shared household. He raids the refrigerator, poaching his roommates’ food; he stares at the tv for hours, talking back to vapid reality tv shows; and he appears to have the emotional and intellectual constitution of an adolescent. His roommates do little to provoke his eventual violence, which he enacts as spontaneously and thoughtlessly, as he might play a video game.

In fact, Merv’s behavior illustrates Rebeck’s point, which is that network television is in cahoots with an increasingly banal culture that elevates “reality tv” to the status of real-life urgency. Merv looses his ability to discern what’s real from what’s not and can’t grasp the consequences of his actions, which prove dire and irreversible. Instead, when he finds himself in trouble, he asks for help from the only heroine his blinkered broadcast world regularly offers—Jennifer Ramirez (Morena Baccarin), the network news-reader who seems more real to him than his flawed, ordinary, live roommates.

When Merv asks that Jennifer come to negotiate his situation, Wes (Christopher Evan Welch), the crass network head whose machinations provide the counterpoint to Merv’s actions, smells an opportunity for publicity and the fabricated drama he’d much rather program than real reportage. “Who needs news?” he scoffs, as he insists that staying informed in America is optional. Rebeck uses Wes’ response to her contrived events to satirize the networks’ self-serving self-importance and their social irresponsibility.

When Jennifer arrives at the St. Louis residence to interview Merv live on national television, the other roommates urge her to intervene in what’s become a life-and-death crisis. She firmly demurs, insisting that members of the press can’t interfere with the events they cover. Trotting out this chestnut of journalistic ethics in this situation provokes one of the play’s biggest laughs, as Rebeck demonstrates how the presence of the press creates as much as it reflects on the news as it happens.

Jennifer is mouthpiece with an ear-piece, her life-line to Wes and his instructions. When her interview with Merv doesn’t generate enough heat, he tells her to “juice it up,” which she does without hesitation, further illustrating how journalists are agents, as much as archivists, of the events they cover. After Jennifer’s shocking intervention, Wes crows that “the numbers are through the roof,” as he and the anchorwoman/reporter lock lips in the sensation-fueled desire that brought them together in the first place.

Rebeck’s plays sometimes come uncomfortably close to sexism in her portrayals of women. Although most of her work satirizes current events and values, it’s occasionally difficult to tell where her gender stereotypes end and her social critique begins. She draws those lines much more clearly in Our House, and Mayer’s sharp direction and the actors’ clear choices clarify her critique of how gender is used to help networks jockey for position.

Jennifer works her body much more than her mind to move up the corporate tv ladder. She and Wes have sex on his desk as he schemes about cutting 700 jobs from the news division. She’s happy to be his puppet to improve her career, and gleefully participates in her own objectification. One of the production’s many sight gags has Jennifer popping in and out to report short news briefs, each time in a different, increasingly more revealing outfit. The series of costumes changes ends with the anchorwoman in her bra and a skirt, refusing the cowl-neck sweater sent to her from Wardrobe.

And yet, Jennifer isn't stupid; when she mispronounces "Shi'ite" as "shite" in a newscast, she catches her humiliating mistake and wants to fix it. She also hosts a reality tv show, as well as serving as a news anchor. When Stu (Stephen Kunken), the head of the news division who in some ways serves as the play's however ineffectual moral anchor, balks at the combination of “lite” and serious duties, Jennifer and Wes protest that reality tv is just as important as news-making events. The line between contrived and real, serious and stupid, smart and dumb is continually crossed in Our House, so that they finally blur indistinguishably.

Merv, the hapless villain of the play, isn’t supposed to be stupid. He’s a graduate student in an unnamed field, a character point that’s repeated with increasing sarcasm throughout the play. Yet even the presumptively smart guy spends his time glued to the screen, in awe that “tv makes people look so real,” saying he’d like to climb in and live among those he sees reflected.

That desire doesn’t make him particularly crazy, Rebeck intimates. After all, doesn’t “reality tv” invite spectators to consider themselves integral to the proceedings, asking them to vote on their favorite singer, or their least favorite member of the house,or to hear the testimonies of survivors and dog owners and other contestants in pre-arranged conflicts carefully scripted to seem real? Doesn’t even “real” news invite spectators to participate in the judgments its producers devise, posting phone numbers to call to register opinions? What’s crazy about believing what you see and hear broadcast?

Heroes rarely prevail in Theresa Rebeck’s plays, which makes her an equal opportunity playwright. While Wes and Jennifer’s corruption qualifies them as evil purveyors of material Rebeck believes poisons the national psyche, the oblivious roommates of Our House are equally culpable in their inability to note, diagnose, and prevent Merv’s breakdown. None of the characters establish a clear bead on reality or what compels people to continue living it; the dialogue in St. Louis sounds as banal as the repartee at the network.

Rebeck doesn’t pit a well adjusted, authentic heartland against a dishonest, mercenary corporation. Instead, the entire American landscape of time and space, knowledge and truth—as Wes intones at the end, backed by music reminiscent of the all-American soundscape of composer John Williams—is revealed as illusory, banal, and bereft, empty of meaning and driven only by the hollowest pursuits of fifteen minutes of fame and fortune.

Our House takes a moment to get out of the gate, but once the inciting incident occurs, the play runs as fast, furious, and unpredictable as the Kentucky Derby. Mayer uses set designer Derek McLane’s evocative environment to beautiful effect. Wes’ corporate office is drawn in grays, blacks, and transparent, hard materials that move as a unit on and off the small stage.

The disheveled St. Louis house, which rolls out from behind the closed metallic blinds that decorate Wes’ office, is filled with mismatched, stuffed sofas and chairs, and the clutter of four unrelated, not at all wealthy young people living together in a small, untidy space. The television into which Merv stares without blinking is of course positioned in the audience, so that spectators both witness and are implicated by his unnerving fascination for the illusions created for him.

The acting in Our House helps deliver Rebeck’s critique with the necessary satirical panache. Welch beautifully embodies the oily, slick Wes, who’s unaware of his own idiocy and proud of what seem to him shatteringly original and creative ideas (one of which is that Jennifer’s cleavage should be enhanced by a bra with pumps that push together her breasts). Baccarin proves a stalwart Jennifer Ramirez, bringing a bit of intelligence to a character that exists to be used and abused in exchange for the doubtful achievement of television fame.

But Jeremy Strong’s performance as Merv clinches the production’s success. Without an actor capable of shading and modulating Merv’s excesses, Our House could slip over the top into meaningless parody. Instead, Strong brings nuance and a necessary humanity to a character that could quickly become annoying. In his clear-sighted portrait of Merv’s damage—his own and the harm he inflicts—Strong reveals Rebeck’s cautionary tale: if you believe in what television broadcasts as reality, you quickly lose touch with your own.

The Feminist Spectator

33 Variations

2009-05-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

Susan Kellerman as Gertie and Jane Fonda as Katherine in 33 Variations

Moisés Kaufman first achieved fame as the artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Company, with whom he collaborated on The Laramie Project, their ethnographically- based treatment of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s death at the hands of two local gay-bashing murderers. Tectonic’s first production was Indecent Exposure, which used a similar pastiche process to knit together various archival sources to offer a sympathetic, Brechtian rendition of the trials of Oscar Wilde. The company’s non-narrative, fragmented style suited their investigations into historical events of questionable morality and ethics, representing a theatrical refusal to take sides while still giving fraught proceedings the benefit of searing examination in performance.

In his solo outing as a playwright, Kaufman’s 33 Variations (on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill, in a production I saw 5-9-09) narrates a somewhat different inquiry into history. Using a more conventional structure and style, the play centers on Dr. Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda), a musicologist studying a minor project by Beethoven in which he obsessively wrote 33 different variations on a simple theme provided by an amateur colleague. In her effort to understand the root of Beethoven’s enduring fascination with the piece, Katherine comes to terms with her own desire to know and her own obsession with work at the expense of intimacy and family life.

The play falls squarely into the tradition of Wit and Third, plays in which smart women are punished for prizing their intellect over more traditionally gendered skills like nurturing. In the more brutal Wit, the female protagonist is a Donne scholar, an exacting teacher who’s isolated herself so that as she lies dying, only her own academic mentor comes to visit. Her death seems retribution for her life choices, even though the playwright, Margaret Edison, metaphorically describes the end of her life as a liberating release.

In 33 Variations, too, a talented female scholar has intimacy issues, and is propelled through the plot by her urgency to solve her research challenges before she’s overtaken by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the degenerate illness that will soon immobilize her body while it leaves her mind intact. Racing against a timetable that gives her a clear handicap, Katherine travels to Bonn to conduct her archival research against the wishes of her daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis), and her doctors, insistent that she’s strong enough to see the trip through. Her journey toward understanding Beethoven’s motivations—since, as she notes, “History doesn’t record what he said”—also marks her own progress toward ill health, in vignettes titled with projected numbers that count off the variations. When the play reaches 33, Katherine’s life has nearly ended.

Kaufman’s conceit presents the past and present simultaneously. Katherine toils in the archive alongside her German colleague, Dr. Gertrude Landenburger (Susan Kellermann), the taciturn, gruff woman who guards Beethoven’s boxes with the fascist fist of archivists the world over. While the two women gradually come to trust and even care for one another, the play intercuts scenes among Beethoven (Zach Grenier) and his assistant, Anton Schindler (Erik Steele), negotiating with Diabelli, who wants to include Beethoven’s variation on his theme in a collection he plans to publish. Diabelli (Don Amendolia) swings between frustration and pleasure at Beethoven’s delay, his ego flattered by the master’s attention to his trifle. As Beethoven grows increasingly deaf—his own historical decline mirroring Katherine’s in the present—the variations take on more weight and import than they might have earlier in his life. Grenier--nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play--does a nice job impersonating a mad artist, and Steele is appropriately protective and self-righteous as his helper.

As Katherine’s health deteriorates, she refuses to return to the States, so Clara and her boyfriend, Mike (Colin Hanks—as in Tom’s son—who’s ingenuous and charming), join the scholar in Bonn. Katherine stumbles toward achieving historical understanding; she finds her tentative way toward a limited kind of intimacy with her daughter and Gertie, whom she finally claims as a friend (after at first demurring that the other woman is merely a “kind acquaintance”); and she comes to terms with her immanent death from an “orphan disease” that afflicts too few people to make it worth the research required to find a cure. The irony, of course, is that Katherine tracks an obscure reference in Beethoven’s oeuvre as her life’s work, while scientists can’t be bothered (or can’t be funded) to find an antidote to save her life.

Nothing much more than that happens in 33 Variations, but the production is replete with small pleasures that make it a worthy experience. The set recalls the vertically stacked wooden boxes that composed the décor for I am My Own Wife, a play about similar reconstructions and memory. Derek McLane, who designed the set for Wife and 33 Variations, riffs on the archive theme again here (and received a Tony nomination for his work), with acid-free boxes neatly laddered atop one another in rows that move up and down and side to side, like the portable, space-saving stacks in some libraries. These three-dimensional representations of a scholar’s labor, however, are far from dusty and untouched, as they were in Wife. They’re luminously lit (by designer David Lander, also Tony nominated), with light that graces them like treasures.

The other visual theme of the impressive but simple set appears on rolling racks, from which sheets of music hang in neat rows, overlaid at various moments with projections of music staffs and the graphic announcements of the numbers of ever accumulating variations and scenes. These moving racks and flying archives allow the set to transform across time and locale; the few set pieces or props—a high desk here, a piece of luggage or a backpack there—become iconic, but leave Kaufman (who also directed) plenty of room to shift his actors and to focus attention on the interactions that form the play’s emotional core. The production moves fluidly and gracefully, its naturalistic acting unimpeded by spectacle or technology, and offers the audience a visually rich but essentially unmediated engagement with its characters.

33 Variations’ other pleasures come from its cast and their beautifully understated acting. Fonda turns in a surprisingly sure, moving performance, appearing to empathize enormously with Katherine and her pursuits while understanding her emotional reticence and occasional coldness as the price of being a woman in a man’s field. Her friendship with Gertie blooms like a rose unfolding in slow motion, as the two women come to trust and admire one another and let down their mutual defenses. Watching two female scholars enjoy their research together, and one another’s company, is a pleasure seldom afforded by a Broadway production. Fonda and Kellermann make the most of their scenes, establishing warmth that’s all the more real for being so muted and taciturn.

As Katherine’s health fails, she becomes more fragile, but Fonda keeps her strong, never pitying the character or deploring her situation. Although the woman who began the aerobics craze in the 1980s is now 71, Fonda’s perfect posture and physical self-confidence make her a presence with which to reckon on stage. Yet her performance isn’t showy; she doesn’t come off as a diva enjoying the adoring attention of rapt fans. Instead, her Tony Award-nominated performance delivers the emotional complexities of a woman who’s chosen her intellect over intimacy without a moment’s regret.

Kaufman’s production—in its words and its images—honors Katherine and the idea of a woman like her, respecting her strength, her choices, and her determination without romanticizing or infantilizing her. In some ways, in fact, Katherine is perfectly ordinary, a woman whose work takes her burrowing deep into the past to look for arcane bits of information which, when she finds them, bring little pieces of the puzzle of knowledge and life clicking into place. No more, no less; but in this production--appropriately nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play--that’s plenty.

The Feminist Spectator

God of Carnage

2009-05-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

Gandolfini, Davis, Harden, and Daniels in God of Carnage
Sara Gulwich, New York Times

Yazmina Reza writes crowd-pleasers, plays that appear to give the audience something meaty on which to chew, but essentially put her characters on a predictable collision course, a highway of lite moral complexities in which they find themselves unwittingly and sometimes unwillingly debating ethical issues that finally sound a bit hollow.

But Carnage’s farce kept me from taking it too seriously. Instead, I enjoyed the four fine actors volley Reza’s dialogue (translated by Christopher Hampton) back and forth with superb timing and physical comedy. Although many critics find Carnage a pale imitation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I thought the play too farcical to accept that comparison.

Sure, God of Carnage concerns two couples who begin their evening with polite, decorous banter, trying to come to terms with a school yard altercation that’s left one of their sons “disfigured” by the other's aggression. And sure, the evening ends with both couples drunk and disheveled, their secrets and pretensions summarily revealed, and all of them crumpled in defeated heaps around a living room that’s been trashed by their exploits. But this superficial resemblance to Albee’s classic domestic conflagration makes the comparison unfair to a comedy that wants to bite, but ultimately patches up any breaks it leaves in the skin.

Reza concocts a delightful, short evening of smart comedy by four actors (Tony Award nominees all) who’ve definitely got game. God of Carnage’s confectionary pleasures derive mostly from its actors’ obvious pleasure in zinging one-liners back and forth for a quick 90 minutes under the smooth, confident, and well-paced direction of Matthew Warchus. The actors perform with comic élan and style, delivering this light parody of contemporary parental mores through the social, class-based competition it stages between two white, heterosexual, upper-middle class couples that feels to them much more serious than it appears to us.

In Reza’s conceit, Alan (Jeff Daniels) and Annette (Hope Davis) visit Michael (James Gandolfini) and Veronica (Marcia Gay Harden) to resolve the crisis precipitated by Alan and Annette’s son’s “disfiguring” attack on Michael and Veronica’s boy. The playground conflict has left Michael and Veronica’s boy missing two of his teeth, a crisis apparently severe enough in the bourgeois cosmology Reza depicts that their parents’ draw up what sounds much like an official legal agreement about what’s happened and how they’ve all agreed to respond.

The boys’ skirmish occasions what escalates into their parents’ all out battle to maintain their shredded self-respect and dignity. In a predictable but nonetheless enjoyable trajectory, their awkward and contrite meeting turns into a scathing indictment of neglectful child-rearing, corrupt pharmaceutical practices, pretentious art venerating, and bourgeois propriety that barely covers the quickly melting icy veneer on which these two marriages skate.

The meeting, at Michael and Veronica’s faux-modern co-op, begins with the superficial chatter of two couples who don’t know one another reluctantly thrust together to work out their boys’ conflict. But as their conversation continues past the point at which Alan and Annette should have said their good-byes, they begin to recognize in one another the mirror images of their own failures and falsities.

Jeff Daniels, as Alan, performs a perfectly pompous, self-congratulatory high-powered lawyer with a cell phone glued to his ear. Every time it rings, he announces, “I have to take this,” loudly imposing his pretentious conversations on the gathering then appearing indignant when the other three overhear his business. Daniels delivers a sharp, wry performance as a man puffed up by his own self-importance.

A land line phone also rings constantly throughout the play, as Michael’s mother checks in with her son while she's at a doctor’s appointment. Gandolfini, as Michael, gets the timing just right, switching from the heat of battle with his guests to an enforced calm to speak with his aging, unwell mother, whose plaintive calls regularly interrupt the couples’ engagement. In one of Reza’s too convenient, calculated but perfectly funny coincidences (mild spoiler alert), Michael’s mother is told she’ll be treated with the toxic medicine whose effects Alan has been coaching his client to deny in his cell phone exchanges.

As their meeting devolves into a wonderfully physical brawl full of alcohol, ruined art books, projectile vomiting, and a pretentiously proffered cake, the actors rise to the comic occasion with impeccable style. Each character has his or her own meltdown, following an arc that requires the actor to move from faked, attentive concern into high umbrage, up to a physical crisis that dishevels their clothing and overturns some furniture, then down into resigned indifference to the revelation of their common and essential imperfections. Each character is unmasked as much less than he or she first appeared--more ordinary, whiny, and unhappy than the accomplished, socially exceptional people they first present.

To Reza’s credit, the characters’ devolutions occur without regard to gender. Alan and Michael reveal themselves to be as shallow and unhappy as Annette and Veronica. No one is more responsible than another for their mutually destructive encounter. Gender alliances shift throughout the play. Halfway through, the men share cigars and bourbon and a bitter understanding of the silliness of their lives, and the women pair off to commiserate by ridiculing their husbands.

At other moments, the couples rearrange themselves to express at least a superficial empathy, Alan for Veronica and Annette for Michael. When the couples inadvertently reveal their pet names for one another (Alan and Annette call each other “Woof Woof”), their intimacies seem childish and reductive, no more meaningful than the names their sons called each other on the playground.

Gandolfini’s presence inspired the audience to applaud at the play’s opening the night I attended (5-2-09). As the actors waited for the clapping to die down, I saw Hope Davis wink at Gandolfini, a lovely, warm tribute to his fandom before the actors began to chew the scenery. The affection the actors clearly feel for one another shows in their beautifully orchestrated performances.

In fact, what might at first seem a cynical casting choice calculated to boost box office turns out to be a coup for Gandolfini in his post-Tony Soprano era. Watching him transform Michael from a husband trying his best to conform to the overly polite customs of upper-middle-class behavior to a man who can’t stand the suit coat he wears, and happily rips his shirt out of his pants when the going gets rough, is one of the production’s many pleasures.

Likewise, Marcia Gay Harden, whom I followed on television in her stand-out performance as the Iago-like lawyer for the corrupt corporation on Damages this season, offers a grounded and hysterical turn as Veronica. Her horror when her precious art books are accidentally covered with vomit is a high point of the evening.

Hope Davis is also terrific as Annette, the character whose movement from good to bad is the least predictable. Perhaps because of Davis’s inherently sympathetic presence, and her slight fragility, even when she’s performing indignation, Annette becomes the fulcrum of the couples' full-pitch battle. When she indulges in alcohol and quickly gets drunk, Davis captures the pleasure, exasperation, and fear of a woman unaccustomed to losing social and emotional control. She’s also very funny.

All in all, Reza satirizes the wreckage of heterosexual marriage in God of Carnage, the petty bitterness that courses under what are carefully calculated to look like successful, luxe upper-middle class relationships sailing into their pre-destined futures without a ripple on the glassy waters of their lives. She satirizes how children become possessions, simple pawns for adults who at best treat them indifferently, and at worse, actually despise them.

While the comedy lets the audience laugh, Reza sneaks in recognitions that balance the evening’s affects. Somewhere in the uproarious meeting, the playwright comments on how people who no doubt mirror many in the Broadway audience live their lives. Under the humor, she urges spectators to consider what matters and what doesn’t, what we can control and what we can’t. By continually shifting the allegiances across couples and between the men and the women, Reza clarifies that no one wins, and that the stakes are equally high or low for all.

The production’s vivid realism and impeccable acting make it easy to swallow and probably mitigates whatever gentle punch to the gut Reza might intend. Watching actors more often seen in serious roles exercise their comic chops is entirely enjoyable. That God of Carnage concerns squarely middle-aged people also makes it a refreshing antidote to the many contemporary plays that address the angst of 20-something white characters figuring out how to live.

Reza examines the superficially comfortable, apparently successful lives of white upper-middle-class heterosexuals at the point when they’re supposed to be reveling in their achievements. God of Carnage demonstrates that the façade of their marriages and their families are already weakened and could be destroyed by the devastating moral emptiness and social pretension that’s chewed into their relationships like termites into the family house.

God of Carnage isn’t Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but it’s a great deal of fun.

The Feminist Spectator

Mary Stuart

2009-05-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

Schiller’s play Mary Stuart stages a fictitious meeting in the late-1500s between the queen of England and her cousin, the queen of Scotland, a pair of rulers who fought to Mary’s death over religion, power, and the English throne. But this Donmar Warehouse transfer production of a play written in the 1800s that refers to English history of the 1500s has an utterly contemporary aspect. The fabulous Janet McTeer just snagged a Tony Award nomination for her role as Mary; McTeer can make any part in any play vibrate with life and intelligence. She wields mesmerizing physical and emotional command of her role as Mary that’s thrilling to watch.

Peter Oswald’s new version updates Schiller’s language, so that the dialogue sounds fluent and natural to contemporary Western ears. For instance, the first scene, between Mary and her nurse, Hanna (Maria Tucci), who’s raised her and sees her to her death in the end, plays like a 21^st century mother/daughter moment, with all the warm, casual physical intimacy derived from a long and candid relationship. The dialogue’s realistic cadences abate what might otherwise be a very talk-heavy play.

The production style, too, clears away what could have been historical visual clutter to reveal the kernel of the play’s conflict. Mary Stuart’s spare set butts up against a constructed wall of black brick that looms, immobile as the Queen of England, behind every scene. The stage is sometimes decorated with a simple bed and a chair; sometimes, with a small desk or a bench; sometimes, with nothing but the bodies of the actors, carved by light (designed by Hugh Vanstone).

The production exemplifies the austere, actor-centered Donmar Warehouse-style direction and design, which retains its appeal on Broadway. The sharp, cinematic lighting sculpts the actors, so that every word and every shift in emotion is recorded with searing verité. Director Phyllida Lloyd, who took so much flak for her work on the Mamma Mia film, creates a fluid, fast-paced production that focuses our attention on the human costs of state power, a theme that never loses its relevance.

The costume design, too, helps anchor the production’s transhistorical import. McTeer’s hair is bobbed in a modern cut, while her dress evokes the 16^th century more than it quotes it. While the women are all dressed in vaguely period fashions, the men wear black business suits with white shirts and dark ties, clad as though they’re CIA or FBI operatives—which in some ways, they are. The men’s machinations disrupt what might otherwise be an innate sympathy between the two powerful women.

The long-imprisoned Mary, whom her cousin Elizabeth (Harriet Walter) suspects of conspiring to usurp her title to the English throne, believes that if Elizabeth will meet with her, and allow her to make her case in person, their common condition as women trying to rule will prevail and her cousin will allow Mary to go free. Schiller’s play stages the meeting, even though it never actually took place. The scene between the two women—by two terrifically talented actors—is the play’s climax, though a subsequent sequence of arresting, carefully choreographed stage pictures and haunting sound effects lead the spectator through the doomed Mary’s march to the guillotine.

In Schiller’s rendering, Elizabeth dictates Mary’s execution orders with murky ambivalence, and gives them to a bumbling aid-de-camp who’s utterly unsure of their exact import and her intent. His superior officer forestalls the aid’s frantic indecision by taking Elizabeth’s order in hand and setting Mary’s beheading in motion.

Lloyd makes terrific use of theatre effects to evoke the tragedy of Mary’s death. The court allows Mary to see a priest for her last rites, the first time she’s interacted with her own religious traditions in decades. McTeer as Mary exudes peace and lightness of spirit after her priestly blessing, and approaches her death with energy and dignity.

McTeer plays Mary’s final exit with ironic exuberance, as though death is finally her liberation. The men, who are the agents of her demise, line up at the top of the stage, facing off right into a bright, beckoning light. They linger there like harbingers of fate, while Mary completes her affairs and takes her place at the head of their line, in front of her trusty nurse, asserting her stateliness and her authority until her very end.

As they somberly march off, sound effects represent Mary’s beheading. Clanging chains echo across the stage, and we hear at last the final, horrible sound of the guillotine descending swiftly, with a metallic, audible sharpness, toward Mary’s neck.

After this provocative aural moment, the play returns to Elizabeth’s chamber, where she’s been persuaded into a change of heart, only to learn that her aid followed through on her command to consign her cousin to death.

Mary Stuart’s final scenes underline Elizabeth’s weak indecision and her refusal to take responsibility for her cousin’s execution. She twists her memory of her words so that she can blame her aid with impunity, punishing him, too, with death and multiplying the fatalities that cascade from her own ethical failure. The chain of miscommunication and arrogant abuses of power leads back to Elizabeth, but her rhetoric and her position allows her to pass along the assignment of blame.

What could be more relevant after eight years of George W. Bush’s administration, which accustomed Americans to leaders who shirked responsibility and twisted their own words to reflect new meanings when it was expedient? Who can forget the absurdity of that “Mission Accomplished” banner draped over the stacks of that war ship, as a flight jacket-clad president preened with false victory, and then soon rescinded his actions as though they never happened? Schiller’s play and Lloyd’s production let us wonder if history has evolved at all from Elizabeth’s machinations 500 years ago.

If Mary Stuart’s ending leaves us cynical about the ethics of poorly exercised power, Lloyd’s production nonetheless offers moments of brilliant abandon and hope in the most unlikely moments and places. In the second-act opener, as one of Mary’s many male confidants promises they’ve figured out how to stage her escape, she finds herself outside her tower for the first time in years. She and her nurse, standing in a courtyard, get caught in a downpour, represented by water cascading from the flies and covering the stage floor with lush pools of rain.

McTeer raises her face to the “rain,” reveling in its sensuality as it drenches her clothes and skin. Her fabulous commitment to the moment lets the audience feel her wondrous freedom; you can almost sense the freshness of the air and the cleansing effects of the water as Mary absorbs it with physical and spiritual hunger.

This moment continues to stick with me days after I saw the production (5-2-09), turning my memory of a play about one queen executed by another into an image of freedom from the cruelties of history and the impossible contradictions of female gender and power.

McTeer and Walter say that audiences have been so convinced that the two actors hate one another, they stage their curtain call to represent their mutual affection. After they take their separate bows, they put their arms around one another in a warm embrace and exit the stage holding hands.

Both women have been nominated for Tony Awards, and will compete in the June ceremony. But the Times reports that McTeer and Walters don’t care about the outcome, and are already chatting about what they’ll wear to the awards show. It’s not who wins, they agree—it’s how much they enjoy playing the game Mary Stuart so generously provides them as women.

The Feminist Spectator

Susan Boyle: Self-Made Icon

2009-05-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

But of what, might be the question? Mark Harris, one of Entertainment Weekly’s best columnists (who happens to be Tony Kushner’s husband), remarks this week (5-8-09) that Boyle’s internet success sounds a hopeful note in an otherwise cynical and self- serving celebrity scene. Here’s a woman who attests that her only dream is to sing professionally. As Harris notes, she doesn’t want to be a “star”; she only wants to do what she loves.

The friend who sent me the link to the Boyle’s YouTube clip (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk) added a note that extolled the virtues of the event, suggesting how hopeful it made her feel in an historical moment in which there’s so much to worry about. Why has this ordinary woman from a tiny village in the UK inspired so much affection and adoration? What does she say to or about people that encouraged her video to be seen by over 120 million people around the world?

What does it mean that the horrible, churlish deprecation of the Britain’s Got Talent audience changed to frank admiration and wild enthusiasm once Boyle sang through a few bars of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis? That art triumphs over the “misfortune” of homeliness and poor fashion sense? That faith and desire are really all that matters to raise someone from the relative boredom of a daily life spent caring for an aging mother into the unexpected adulation of an anonymous public more typically hungry for the facilely cutting humiliations of cruel reality show hosts like the despicable Simon Cowell?

I was as moved as the next viewer by watching Boyle sing on my computer screen. Most touching was Boyle’s faith in her own ability, her innocent certainty that nothing but her voice—not her appearance, her age, her hair, her infamous (and now tweezed) bushy eyebrows (see the "before" photo, above left)—would matter once she opened her mouth to sing.

I was moved by Boyles’s ingenuous resilience, her uncoached, open answers to Cowell’s miserable, insinuating questions, and her apparent belief in the essential goodness of man (well, “men”). Her delight in her public conquest, and her subsequent demurrals of anything but happiness about not being immediately booted off the show, are, as Harris suggests, refreshing anti-celebrity behavior.

Does it matter, then, that she was whisked off by a “family friend” to have her hair styled and colored, and those notable eyebrows plucked (see "after" photo, above right)? What to make of this “mini-makeover”? Does it matter if her unstylish frock will now surely be replaced with more fashionable clothing, as more recent photographs of Boyle suggest she’s been urged to purchase? Will her voice sound as pleasing if her looks are more conventional? Or was it the incongruity of the package and the voice that created the magic the first time around?

Was the television audience shamed by its knee-jerk judgment of Boyle’s appearance once she began to sing? Was its uproarious response to her song expiation of its own guilt at how they had already dismissed her? Harris says people are now acting toward her like she’s a “cute pet hobbit” to be infantilized and exoticized. I think she’s being treated like a “wild child,” someone who’s lived outside of civilization and its restrictive customs.

Harris reports that some spectators think her refreshed appearance will rob her of the authenticity that prompted her initial appeal. God forbid she should look like any other conventionally made-up and neatly dressed middle-aged woman and still sing like an angel. What would happen to the media hook if that were the case? No one cares about conventional middle aged women, whether or not they can sing so well.

The sexism—not to mention the “looks-ism” and ageism—of spectators’ response to Boyle’s audacity (as in, How dare a woman who looks like her think she could compete on a show like this?) makes her triumph bittersweet. On the basis of watching her sing, reading about her in People Magazine, and catching one or two minutes of television interviews after her appearance, Boyle seems to me like a nice enough, perfectly ordinary woman.

Her bravery and desire has thrust her into extraordinary circumstances from which she’ll most likely not escape unharmed. I don’t relish watching the media work its black magic, turning Boyle’s fairytale into something sordid and distasteful, something that will no doubt soil what appears to be her genuine desire to make herself and others happy with her voice.

Perhaps she should have stuck to singing in the shower.

The Feminist Spectator

“Life after ‘The L Word’” at Times Talks

2009-04-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Kim Severson, Ilene Chaiken, and Jennifer Beals

I admit that my unshakable fan status prompted me to bite on the Times offer to see Ilene Chaiken and “members of The L Word cast” talk about life after the series (Their lives? Our lives? Life in the world? Didn’t know). I dutifully paid my $30 and traveled into the city April 20th, a miserable rainy night, and stood in line with hundreds of other lesbians and other folks (I did see one or two men in the crowd), and poured into the very comfortable Times auditorium, and opened my program to see with pleasure that Jennifer Beals would be that “member of the cast.” And all my old and vaguely silly but extremely pleasurable L Word fascination was fanned back into high flame.

After watching the series for six years with at most six or eight friends at a time, and more frequently just with my partner, first on video tapes that started fading with over-viewing and eventually on DVR and then “on demand,” as all our technology changed over those years, it was a revelation to sit in a live audience of hundreds of fans. The demographics surprised me—my unscientific assessment suggests that a third of the audience were squarely middle-aged white women; a third, women in their 20s and 30s; around a quarter women of color of various ages; and the rest illegible to me. When many of these spectators lined up at the open mike during the last segment of the evening, it also became clear they’d come from various parts of the tri-state area and even around the country to hear Chaiken and Beals speak. (I learned only later that various on-line sources, including www.afterellen.com, had revealed earlier that Beals would be Chaiken’s dialogue companion. Here's a YouTube clip--taken against the wishes of the ushers and security, no doubt, of Chaiken and Beals' entrance at the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkIZrJK7rpk.)

Kim Severson, a Times food writer and out lesbian, moderated the evening with casual wit, channeling a fan’s desire for dirt with a journalist’s sense of the well put, productive question. Chaiken and Beals answered graciously and seemed entirely forthcoming, especially Beals, whose obvious intelligence, fair-mindedness, and generosity lent the evening a great deal of dignity. Beals’ dedication to the larger project of the show was palpable in each of her remarks, and her overtly articulated feminist politics a real pleasure to hear. She described how much her work on the show changed her awareness of gender and sexuality issues in American (and Canadian, since the show was shot in Vancouver) culture, and the new-found confidence working on the series has brought to her own work as an actor on film sets she said are “usually monolithic, patriarchal structures.” She now feels comfortable challenging film and television directors and producers on casual (or explicit) sexism, refusing demeaning dialogue and character set ups.

Beals also related that her connection to her body was strengthened by her L Word work. She told a story about a recent film shoot for The Book of Eli, a movie she just wrapped with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, written and directed by the Hughes brothers (whom she noted with pleasure were terrific to work with because they’re biracial and were raised by a lesbian). The director of photography on the shoot explained apologetically that a shot that started at her feet and moved up her body wouldn’t “linger”; she reassured him that she’d just spent six years on The L Word, and wasn’t at all worried about how he’d film her body. Hearing her pride and pleasure in her own sexuality, and the obvious feminism through which she sees her work, was striking throughout the evening.

Apparently, the rumored spin-off starring Leisha Hailey (to be called The Farm) was put on indefinite hold, but Chaiken is pursuing plans for an L Word film. The Beals and Chaiken also have a new project they’re working on together that, they protested, is still germinating and too soon to reveal. But the pleasure they take in their own professional partnership was palpable. They told stories they’ve rehearsed many times elsewhere about how they started working together. Beals was the first person cast on the show; at the time, she was contemplating an offer to play a prostitute, and said she happily chose to play a lesbian instead.

Given the choice to play Bette or Tina, she choose Bette, and asked that Chaiken write her character as biracial, since in addition to the progressive work she knew the show would do for representations of lesbians, she said she also wanted to see her own identity on screen. Beals said she also loved Rose Troche, one of the show’s first directors, when they met. Since most of the episodes were directed by artists who, like Troche, were associated with independent film, Beals said shooting each episode was like doing a “little movie.”

Chaiken admitted that the most autobiographical characters on the show were Bette and Jenny (until, that is, Jenny “went crazy,” in Chaiken’s description). Bette connected to Chaiken’s life as a high powered professional woman trying to balance a relationship with someone slightly less socially visible, and the complications of being a woman in the arts and media. Chaiken didn’t say much about how Jenny reflected her own life, but one can surmise. She said that the two characters channeled “a lot of my issues” until they “became themselves.”

Severson asked how Chaiken secured so many terrific, high-profile female guest artists for the show. Chaiken explained that many women were taken enough with the series that they had their agents call to express their interest. Although she insists she didn’t write for any particular actors, she was pleased with the pool of people available from whom to cast. She and Beals agreed there are so few parts for women that are “interesting and different and not in the service of a man’s story,” that especially women actors into their 30s and beyond were eager to join the cast. Beals emphasized how different it was to perform a character whose life doesn’t revolve around a man.

Severson referred to the controversy that surrounded the show since its premiere, with some spectators complaining that the characters (and the actors who played them) were too beautiful, too thin, or too unrealistic. Chaiken responded that if no one were inflamed about the series, it wouldn’t have lasted for six years. She admitted that she got attacked because Jenny was Jewish, even though, Chaiken said, “I happen to be Jewish, too.” Beals seemed more distressed by some of the harsh, on-line responses to the twists and turns in Bette’s portrayal, and decided she needed to steer clear of fan site discussion boards.

Severson joked about the peculiar plot twists of the final season (referring casually to “the guy with the beard,” who killed Jenny, and the various other “what’s up with that?” moments of the season), and Beals quipped that Chaiken “went over to the dark side” for the show’s last episodes. Chaiken protested that the show reflected “life” and couldn’t always be sunny; likewise, when Severson, to the glee of much of the audience, accused her of “killing” Dana, Chaiken defended herself by saying that she thought it was a true, important depiction of lesbians with cancer.

Chaiken and Beals stressed throughout the evening that the show’s goal was to tell stories that hadn’t been told before. Beals, in particular, underlined that her work on the show always had a political quotient, while Chaiken side-stepped the politics, demurring that you can’t begin with the intent to make a political point and wind up with “good art.” I was more impressed by Beals’ attention to what it meant to American culture for a series about lesbians to persist for six good years.

She said as she was doing press, she remembered that the “personal is political,” using good old fashioned feminist language to mark the intersection of life and ideology. She said she was excited about the possibility of helping a “young girl in the middle of nowhere find herself represented,” and about “giving someone safety and the room to be authentic. Everyone needs to be heard,” she said.

Questions from the audience were sometimes sweet and moving, and sometimes astute. One middle-aged African American woman responded to Beals’ remark about the isolated young would-be lesbian, saying that even those of us who live and work in places like New York are empowered by seeing representations of ourselves on screen. The woman related how her co-workers, to whom she was already out, seemed to have a new appreciation for her life and her lesbian family, and that the show gave her an opportunity for a “second coming out” that obviously filled her with surprised pride.

A surprising number of straight women took the microphone to attest to how The L Word affected their own lives, prompting the audience to murmur with a rather affronted impatience. But Chaiken and Beals responded magnanimously, especially Beals, who took each question seriously, looked directly at the speaker, and answered precisely and carefully. Beals has the same gravitas she brought to Bette; I could feel the audience responding with a great deal of respect (and no small amount of pleasure and desire. She was clearly the icon of the moment).

Chaiken and Beals struck a mutually wistful tone through much of the evening, considering the show’s six year life-span and its recent end. Beals said she’s in frequent touch with Kate Moennig, who played Shane; she texted her recently to ask what she wouldn’t give for one more scene at the Planet, chatting over a cup of coffee. The nostalgia and longing was sweet, and reminded me that those scenes in the restaurant always seemed among the most authentic, full of real connections among the actors and the characters. Beals recalled how much she learned from doing the show. “My eyes were also opened,” she said. “I learned how connected we all are. All women are connected. Homophobia is a form of misogyny.”

Chaiken said she thought The L Word happened at a moment of “receptivity for gay characters on tv,” when “the culture was ready.” Now, she believes that if she were to pitch the series, producers would tell her that lesbians have “been done.” The pair said they thought they’d be “passing a baton,” but instead, they said, “there’s nothing” on television that will continue to till the ground The L Word broke.

At the end of the evening, Beals made a point of thanking the fans for their dedicated support of the show. She said she’s realized, by attending various fundraisers, that there’s a market for the photographs she took on set during the series (Beals has a solid reputation as a photographer, as well as an actor). She’s thinking of making an L Word photo book, for which she’d give the royalties to various charities.

I have to say I was proud to be among those fans that night, proud of Chaiken and Beals and Severson and how smart they all were, how feminist, how progressive, how positive and articulate about the need for the kind of work The L Word accomplished in the cultural imagination. A couple days later, I watched a clip online of Laurel Holloman accepting an award for “sexiest scene on television” at the Bravo A-List Awards show. She paraded her lovely self up to the mike, looking sexy and gorgeous, took hold of the vaguely phallic globe that served as the trophy, and joked, “This looks a prop from my show.” She went on to remark that she was accepting the award for a scene in which she “sat on Jennifer’s face.” She applauded how remarkable it is (“How cool is that?”) that such a scene could be televised, let alone awarded, and said, “I don’t know what’s with this Prop 8 business,” before she left the stage.

Maybe it’s politics lite, but it’s politics, just the same. The L Word girls are out there getting it said, getting it done, chipping away at those “patriarchal structures” and homophobia and misogyny, not just in the film and television industries, but in many of our lives.

How cool is that?

The Feminist Spectator