Discontented Bohemians: the darkness of "Design for Living"

Happy birthday, Noël Coward! "The Master" was born 117 years ago today. In his honor, here are some thoughts on his play Design for Living, which I read for the first time last month.

Alfred Lunt, Noël Coward, and Lynn Fontanne in the 1930s world premiere of Design for Living. SCANDALOUS.

I had heard that Design for Living was a scandalous-in-its-time comedy about bisexual polyamory, so I expected it to be a naughty and frothy romp. But I found it a much sadder, angrier play than I anticipated. The characters’ unconventional sexual mores don’t seem to make them happy; they think free love will liberate them but it mostly seems to lead to discontentment and anguish.

The two men in the play’s poly-triad – painter Otto and playwright Leo – are not very distinctly characterized, but the woman, Gilda, is an enormously powerful role. Gilda is full of a frustrated, neurotic, self-loathing energy. She’s a liberated woman by 1930s standards, but she still can’t seem to imagine herself without a man, and she is keenly conscious that the world sees her as a mere dilettante (she is an interior decorator) while lauding Otto and Leo as “real” artists. The driving force of the plot is Gilda’s dissatisfaction and inability to be happy with what she has.

I wasn’t expecting it, but this play reminded me a lot of Jules and Jim, another story in which the close relationship between two bohemian men is upended by the arrival of an alluring, unstable woman. Granted, Design for Living ends more happily than Jules and Jim – in the last act, Leo, Otto, and Gilda’s free-spirited ways are contrasted with the stuffiness of conventional society, and the play finally starts to feel like a comedy. But Acts One and Two, despite the glamorous pajamas-and-cocktails trappings, are a surprisingly dark story about, in Noël Coward’s own words, “glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures […] [who] are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness, and equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising one another’s wings.”

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"Shake 'Em Up": High-Spirited Civil Disobedience

I decided recently (prompted by a viewing of The Palm Beach Story on TCM) that my goal in life is to be one-half of the madcap couple in a screwball comedy. For Christmas, my parents gave me a book that might help me achieve that: a genuine Prohibition-era cocktail-party guide.

(And of course, it was the perfect book to read on New Year's Eve. Happy New Year to all!)

Shake 'Em Up!: A Practical Handbook of Polite Drinking by Virginia Elliott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Shake 'Em Up" is a book of cocktail recipes, party-giving tips, and hangover remedies, first published in the United States in 1930 -- when Prohibition was still the law of the land. Authors Virginia Elliott and Phil Stong even advise on what mixture of herbal extracts will give your bathtub gin the most authentic flavor, which got them in trouble with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Truth be told, a lot of this book consists of recipes for cocktails and canapes that probably won't appeal to a modern palate, which is why I'm only giving it 3 stars. The recipe for a "dry" martini would be considered outrageously "wet" these days (two parts gin to one part vermouth), and the appetizers are mostly variations on "slice white bread, butter it, and put something salty-fatty-savory on top."

Still, there's enough historical interest and insouciant 1930s wit to make this slim book worthwhile. For instance, to introduce their section on drinks for cocktail novices, the authors write "Tender young things, who have just been taken off stick candy, prefer complicated pink and creamy drinks which satisfy their beastly appetite for sweets and at the same time offer an agreeable sense of sinfulness. If you have any creme de menthe or creme de cocoa about the house, make them up some kind of a mess of it and push them under the piano to suck on it."

Civil disobedience has rarely been so cheerful or such good fun.

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What I Liked and What I Didn't about Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"

THINGS I LIKED

• The opening shot took my breath away and the first scene is the best example of over-the-top cinematic Francophilia since Moulin Rouge. I wasn't even paying attention to the plot or characters at first -- I was just luxuriating in the art direction and the 1930s atmosphere. That train station! That café!

• As far as I could tell, every bit of printed text in the movie (signs, books, posters) was in French. Amazing attention to detail and I appreciate that they resisted the temptation to make things easier for an English-speaking audience.

• Two of my favorite time periods, in terms of art and aesthetics (and I think this is true for a lot of people) are the Art Nouveau fin-de-siècle and the Art Deco 1920s-30s. Hugo has a plot that accommodates both periods, and is set in Paris, the epicenter of both of these movements, to boot.

• Hugo is the second 3-D movie I've ever seen (Avatar was the first) and IMO it used the medium very, very well. By the end of Avatar, I was kind of over the 3-D, but Hugo kept surprising me with innovative ways of employing it. At the same time, it knew when to hold back and revert to a flatter picture plane, e.g. for the more intimate scenes in Papa Georges' house.

• Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths as two late-middle-aged folks striking up a tentative romance in the train station. This plot has no purpose other than to be charming and delightful, and it delivers. It's even more charming if you saw and admired these talented character actors in The History Boys -- I was so happy to see them working together again.

• My friend Stuart saw Hugo last week and posted on Facebook that it made him "think a lot about Marissa Skudlarek as there is essentially a character who is her (tall, big vocabulary, wears a beret)."  Ha!  He was referring to Isabelle (played by Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl who befriends Hugo. She's a type of character we've seen in other movies -- spunky, bookish, romantic, precocious. In the scene in the bookshop she reminded me so much of Disney's Belle.  And when Hugo asks Isabelle why she's helping him, I could predict Isabelle's response before she said it: "Because this is an adventure!"  So she's not the most original character, but she's an archetype that I enjoy. And even if she is a 13-year-old girl, she's one of Scorsese's few female characters that it's OK to be compared with. I may have just found my Halloween costume for next year (and if I do dress up as Isabelle, I will carry the vintage 1930s edition of Les Miserables that Stuart gave me for Christmas).

• Early on, I was convinced that I caught a glimpse of someone costumed and made up to look like James Joyce. Sure enough, "James Joyce" is listed in the credits. So is "Salvador Dalí" but I guess I missed him. (It could not have been as memorable as Adrien Brody's portrayal of Dalí in Midnight in Paris!)

• I also enjoyed playing "spot the cinema reference" throughout the movie. E.g., I'm pretty sure that an allusion to Vertigo was intended during the final scene with Hugo in the clock tower.  Making Hugo the second 2011 film that owes a debt to Vertigo, after The Artist swiped Bernard Herrmann's music for the climactic sequence.

• Another similarity to The Artist: the fake-out dream sequence in Hugo is very well done.

• Innuendo that would only be mildly amusing in an adult movie is somehow made funnier by being in a kids' movie, where you know it will go over the heads of the children in the audience.

• Throughout the whole movie, I was convinced that Olivia Williams was playing Mama Jeanne, Georges' wife. Turns out that the role is played by Helen McCrory, an actress I was not familiar with before. She gives a lovely performance.

• I had a teenage crush on Jude Law and he is still an incredibly good-looking man. (He appears in a flashback as Hugo's father.)  Hey, this movie is all about cinephilia, and one reason we love the movies is that they let us stare into the faces of beautiful people whom we would never have met otherwise.

THINGS I WAS LESS KEEN ON

• I'm not sure it was a good idea to have the character of the Station Inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, function both as the movie's principal villain (chasing Hugo through the station and threatening to send him to an orphanage) and as its principal comic relief (in his amusingly awkward flirtation with a pretty florist played by Emily Mortimer). While I appreciate the desire to depict the Inspector as a real person with some complexity and some heart, as opposed to an incarnation of evil, we can't take the Inspector seriously as a threat to Hugo if he is also a harmless buffoon.

• The first part of the movie hinges on an Idiot Plot. When Papa Georges discovers Hugo's notebook, accuses him of stealing it, and demands to know who drew the pictures in the notebook, why does Hugo remain silent instead of saying "My father did those sketches"? I know that Hugo is a cautious, scared little boy who is still mourning his father, but he never promised to keep the notebook secret, and would it have hurt anyone if he admitted that it was his father's?

• Much is made of how Hugo likes to "fix things" and how his repairing the broken automaton parallels his healing the broken and depressed Papa Georges. Yet I never got a sense that Hugo genuinely loves fixing things and playing with clockwork and gizmos. He repairs the automaton because it is his last connection to his dead father, he fixes the train station clocks because he sees it as his duty... but I never felt that he took sheer delight in mechanical things for their own sake. The character of Isabelle is on hand to supply plenty of wide-eyed wonder, but I could have used some of that from Hugo as well.

• When Hugo uses the word "panache," the script missed an opportunity for Isabelle to respond "Panache! Just like Cyrano de Bergerac!"  I may have been the only person in the theater who would have appreciated this joke, but I would have loved it SO MUCH.

• The little boy next to me was very bored by the movie and began sucking noisily on the dregs of his soda until I had to tell him to knock it off. In fairness, his parents shouldn't have taken him to the 8:30 show and they shouldn't have bought him the industrial-size Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, if this is a "family film," it should not bore children. Even I thought that the movie moved too slowly in parts and contained a few too many scenes of Hugo being chased through the train station and Hugo fiddling with clockwork.

• Now is the time to mention that the international terminal at the San Francisco airport currently has an exhibit of vintage French automata on display (was it timed to the release of this movie?) and if you're there you should check it out. I stumbled upon it last week on my way to Portland and even got to talk with the exhibition's "registrar" (its caretaker) who happened to be unlocking the glass cases and inspecting the automata at the time.  It was super cool, but it also made me realize that the automaton depicted in Hugo is a bit of an exaggeration.  The automata in the museum display can do nifty things, but nothing nearly as elaborate or complex as the automaton in Hugo. And, all right, it's a movie, we can't expect it to be 100% accurate, but it annoys me that the filmmakers felt that the automaton had to be even better than it would be in real life, when real automata are plenty amazing on their own. In fact, the same goes for the portrayal of silent cinema in Hugo -- Scorsese makes it look even more exciting than it actually was by using brief snippets, concentrating on Meliès' special effects, showing several films that were hand-tinted rather than black-and-white, and 3-D converting some of the Meliès films. Will a child who wants to see a silent movie after watching Hugo be bored by the real thing?

"Furious Improvisation" reviewed

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I am fascinated by the history of America in the 1930s. Particularly '30s American theater history. Even more particularly the Federal Theatre Project and its director Hallie Flanagan, a former Vassar professor. Therefore I was thrilled and delighted to read a new-ish history of the Federal Theatre Project, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times, by Susan Quinn.

In the course of my fascination with '30s theater, I had already picked up some of the information contained in Furious Improvisation--but I had never read a popular history book that spells out the whole story of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), its four short years of creativity and struggle. Furious Improvisation is a quick read, full of vivid detail, with an emphasis on the strong personalities that populated the FTP. If the book has a heroine, it is Hallie Flanagan; through reading excerpts of the letters she sent home to her husband, Phil, while she traveled the country, you feel like you really get to know her. Orson Welles, his famous "Voodoo" Macbeth, and his The Cradle Will Rock put in their expected appearances (which are always fun to read about), but the book also tells some less familiar stories from the FTP. I hadn't known anything about the failure of the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia; or the challenges of adapting Sinclair Lewis' anti-Fascist novel It Can't Happen Here into a play that would open in multiple cities on the same day; or the endeavors of the Federal Theatre in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco--but I enjoyed reading about all of these topics.

Even better, however, are the last chapters, where Quinn puts forth an intriguing thesis about what really caused the demise of the Federal Theatre. In the late 1930s, conservative Congressmen (many from the South) began to turn against FDR's New Deal policies, accusing him of setting the country on a dangerously Socialist or Communist path. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) came into existence, the committee went after the Federal Theatre and accused it of harboring Communists, and, because of these trumped-up charges, popular opinion turned against the FTP. Halfway through 1939, allocations for the WPA arts projects were removed from the federal budget--and thus the FTP shut down.

Quinn's contribution, however, is to note that what really frightened HUAC was not the idea that the FTP harbored Communists who were plotting to destroy the American government, but rather, that the FTP encouraged "dangerous" equality between blacks and whites:

The issue of race was never far from the surface in the Dies committee's assault on the Federal Theatre Project. In fact, the success of many productions of the Negro units, and the visibility they brought to blacks--not to mention the integration the project sponsored in its casts and in its audience--were all viewed by the committee as signs of Communist influence. In truth, for most on the committee, and certainly for Martin Dies, its chairman, the racial policies of the Federal Theatre Project struck a deeper note of alarm than the alleged Communist infiltration.

Now, what's fascinating about this is that Furious Improvisation was published in July 2008--and therefore written long before it was certain that the United States would elect a black president. And yet, haven't we seen the exact same thing happen, since Obama's election, as happened in the 1930s--conservatives accusing him of "socialism" as a coded way of saying "his policies help racial minorities and hurt Real White Americans"?

History repeats itself, folks. And because of that, Furious Improvisation also can serve as a useful counter-argument to any idealist who says "but why can't the United States be like Europe and devote more of the federal budget to supporting the arts?" Well, because it would set off a political firestorm. It did in the 1930s (even before HUAC formed, there were many political struggles over what kind of art the FTP ought to present), and it would probably be even worse in the current partisan political climate. Don't get me wrong, I'm deadly jealous of the "European-style" model for funding art! But I can see why it wouldn't work in this country, unless we are able to resolve the problems that stymied and killed the FTP. And if even an administrator as enthusiastic, intelligent, bold, and talented as Hallie Flanagan couldn't make this kind of program work for more than four years... how could it work in the 21st century?

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Me and Orson Welles"

Title of movie: Me and Orson Welles

Reasons for anticipation: Zac Efron is sooo dreamy!

Kidding! No... my reasons for anticipating this have nothing to do with teen heartthrobs, and everything to do with the fact that I am totally obsessed with backstage dramas, and the 1930s, and the American theater of that time, and the portrayal of theater on film... So this movie, being the story of Orson Welles' 1937 production of Julius Caesar, would surely be amazing--wouldn't it?

My verdict: Unfortunately, Me and Orson Welles is not as awesome as I'd hoped. It plays like a fairly generic backstage drama/coming-of-age story, rather than pinpointing what is specifically interesting about Welles and his Caesar.

It's a charming movie, but very lightweight, and at two hours, a bit too long. (It's supposed to deal with the frantic final week before the opening of Caesar, but is not paced very urgently.) What it has to say about the theater--actors can be needy and insecure and vain and petty, making art involves a lot of bluster and bullshit, there is always a crisis but the show always manages to go on--has all been said many times before. The idea of the "genius artist who is also a pain in the ass to work with" is also a cliché, even if Orson Welles was a pretty stellar real-life example of the type.

But then, the movie never explains why Welles was a genius or what made his Caesar so revolutionary. You see, in 1937, it was mindblowing to update Julius Caesar to the present day and stage it as an anti-Fascist polemic, as Welles did. But because the movie focuses on the shenanigans of the last week of rehearsal, and is told through the perspective of naive teenager Richard (Zac Efron), it never reveals the social/political/philosophical implications of Welles' production.

The other mindblowing thing is that Welles was only 22 when he produced, directed, and starred in Caesar; in other words, he was the same age as Zac Efron is now. But good luck finding an actor who resembles the baby-faced 22-year-old Welles (at left), and can imitate his famous voice, and convey the immensity of his character--his genius, his hubris, his desires. Faced with such a challenge, Me and Orson Welles decided that the best it can score is two out of three, and cast unknown British actor Christian McKay in the role. In terms of his acting and his voice, McKay is excellent--charismatic, powerful, and a showman through and through. But he is also 36 years old, and looks it; he comes across as a paterfamilias, not an arrogant youth just striking out on his own. Welles is supposed to be just 5 years older than Richard--think how much more complicated and interesting the movie would be if McKay and Efron seemed to be only 5 years apart in age!

Zac Efron annoyed me less than I thought he would, though his performance is nothing more than serviceable and I have no desire to see him in any role that is darker or more complicated than that of Richard Samuels. But Richard is a 1930s male ingenue, so the role suits Efron.

Claire Danes plays Sonja, the theater's secretary/production assistant. (I was tickled that Sonja is a Vassar alumna--no doubt one of Hallie Flanagan's protegees!) She's smart, efficient, and ambitious; and because being smart and efficient was not enough for a woman to get ahead in the 1930s, she's willing to sleep her way to the top. However, her character is confusingly written. It's unclear what the "top" is for her (is her goal to be an actress? a writer? a producer?) and it's also unclear why, if most of her sexual encounters are mercenary, she chooses to sleep with Richard. Sure, Richard's got chutzpah and a nice profile, but why would a pretty twenty-something woman go after this high-school kid? It feels like the screenwriters thought, "This is a coming-of-age story, so Richard needs to lose his virginity and have his heart broken," without considering why Sonja would acquiesce to this.

It seems that one of the assumptions behind Me and Orson Welles is that the 1930s were "a more innocent time" and that the people who go see this movie just want to be transported back to an era when the theater was "the thea-tuh," and bright-eyed teenage boys could luck into show business, and people sat around and talked about how sad it is that George Gershwin died. (This reference, and others, will go completely over the heads of any teenage Efron fangirls who go to see the movie--which is kind of a shame.) That's why the movie's main character is the bland and inoffensive Richard instead of the complex titan Orson Welles. That's why it neglects to explore things like the fallout of the Great Depression, or the implications of Welles' anti-fascist take on Caesar, or anything else that would be too gritty and depressing. But, see, why I love the 1930s is that it wasn't a more innocent time. It was passionate and scary and keyed-up, just as much as the 1960s were, just as much as our current era. And that's what's missing from Me and Orson Welles.

Inner Sunset Moderne

San Francisco is such a beautiful, architecturally vibrant city that living here has made me a bit jaded. I was about to write that my neighborhood, the Inner Sunset, is not one of San Francisco's most architecturally interesting, when the truth is that by the standards of almost any other city in America, it's gorgeous! Only by San Francisco standards would it seem to lack anything--that's because it was developed a bit later than the rest of the city, and it was a working-class area, so it doesn't have as many ornate Victorian houses as do some of the other neighborhoods. But there are lots of cheerful brightly-colored stucco buildings with bay windows; as well as some Tudor-style wooden houses that look like they should be in a German village.

For my money, though, the most interesting building in the neighborhood has to be this vacant Streamline Moderne building at 320 Judah Street. I wish someone would rent it and fix it up--and I'd love to see what it's like on the inside! Here are some pictures of it I snapped while on a walk today. (Click on any image to enlarge.)

The right-hand side of the building, as viewed from across the street. Reminds me a bit of an Egyptian temple. (And of Michael Graves' Portland Building!)

The left-hand side of the building. Love the porthole-like clock set into the wall--now broken and rust-stained.

A closer view of the glass-brick walls and the fantastic wrought-iron gate (behind it is an ugly area where they keep the Dumpsters).

Closer view of the stainless-steel double doors and the Deco chandelier in the lobby (and my white jacket half-reflected in the glass).

The wonderful sunburst pattern inlaid in front of the building's doors.

I just learned online that this building was constructed in the 1930s to serve as the offices for an architect named Henry Doelger, whose best-known project is the Daly City tract homes--aka "little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky!" Strange to think that the man who designed such uninspiring buildings had his studio in such a sleek and interesting one...

The 1930s are Back! (and not just economically speaking)

For a long time I have been interested in fashion from past eras, whether it is seeking out authentic vintage clothing, or buying new clothes with vintage-inspired details. But even faux-vintage, like everything else, is subject to trends.

Especially online, a lot of the reproduction-vintage shops go for a 1950s rockabilly-pinup-bombshell vibe, with sweet crinoline skirts or sexy wiggle dresses. It is also fairly easy to find 1960s shifts and baby-doll dresses. But what if you're a '30s and '40s kind of gal? And I don't mean slinky satin '30s-style evening dresses (there are always plenty of those around, and too few occasions to wear them!), but day dresses and separates. For those of us who would rather be Ginger Rogers singing "Pick Yourself Up" than Marilyn Monroe singing "Havin' A Heat Wave," it's not always easy.

This fall, however, I have been surprised to see a few dresses in mainstream stores that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1930s. I wish these had been around six months ago when I was trying to costume my play that took place in 1934!

This is the "Silk Ruffle Dress" from Banana Republic. One of my favorite things about 1930s fashion is that silk crepe wasn't just a fabric for evening gowns; day dresses were often made of silk as well. This revives the idea of a silk dress that you can wear to the office.












This is the "Quotidian Dress," on sale at Anthropologie. It is also made of silk crepe. The fabric-covered buttons and narrow belt are, for me, what make this just so 1930s. Can't you picture it on the sweet and innocent heroine of a movie from that time, perhaps Joan Fontaine in Rebecca?


(addendum 9/17/08: here's a randomly found photo of Broadway actress Ashley Brown wearing this dress.)



I also like the color choices for these two dresses. Again, because of the rockabilly-pinup thing, a lot of vintage-inspired clothing is in vivid shades like black, cherry red, and hot pink. But these soft grays and blues feel much more authentically '30s-'40s to me.

I've tried on both these dresses, but haven't bought either of them (though if I had unlimited money I certainly would). Instead, the dress I most recently purchased is inspired by the '60s, not the '30s. I can't seem to find a picture anywhere online, but it's a Banana Republic black sheath sweaterdress with 3/4 sleeves and princess seams. I'm calling it my "Joan from Mad Men goes to a funeral" dress. All right, maybe it is fun to pretend you're a bombshell sometimes...

Jessica Mitford, Red Sheep

Like many people who are intrigued by the 1930s, by British aristocrats, by women who defied expectations, I have a healthy interest in the six Mitford sisters. A few years ago I read eldest sister Nancy's comic novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, inspired by her family's history but with names changed and roles reassigned. And yesterday, I finished next-to-youngest sister Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels.

Jessica Mitford, known as "Decca," called herself the "red sheep" of the family--an ardent Communist among conservative English aristocrats. Her older sisters Diana and Unity were famously attracted to Nazism, making Decca's position even more remarkable. At the age of 19, she used the money that she had saved for years in a "running-away fund" to flee to Civil War-riddled Spain with her second cousin Esmond Romilly. The young anti-fascists got married soon after, though their time together was cut short by Esmond's death in World War Two (Hons and Rebels stops a little before this point).

I knew the outlines of Decca's story but very much enjoyed reading it in her own words. For instance, most sources simplify things by saying that Decca and Esmond "eloped to Spain," but she tells it a little differently. She'd had a crush on the intriguingly rebellious Esmond from afar, but had never met him due to family disapproval. In 1937, Esmond was in England recuperating from an illness contracted in Spain, and by chance a mutual relative invited Decca to spend a weekend at the country house where Esmond was staying. Esmond said he planned to return to Spain in about a week and Decca begged to go with him--not as a lover, but as a fellow anti-fascist. Esmond and Decca concocted a plan and ran away together just a week later; only when they got to France did they admit they loved each other. The chapters of Hons and Rebels surrounding Decca's escape are absolutely thrilling even if you know the outcome--because of the many ways her plan could have failed, and the very romantic idea of young lovers on the run.

Hons and Rebels can be divided roughly into three sections. First, Decca discusses her isolated childhood, her eccentric family, her growing frustration, and the birth of her Communist beliefs. The Mitford parents had strange ideas about raising children, to say the least; e.g. they prohibited all doctors and medicine, except surgical operations, because of the "biblical sanction in the passage 'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out'" (40). Decca describes the Mitford children's made-up language, their brutal teasing games, and her relationships with each of them. For a long time she is closest to her two Fascist sisters--Diana, beautiful and charming when she's not supporting Hitler, and Unity, as eccentric and frustrated as Decca, but channeling that frustration into the opposite political philosophy. This section of the book also looks humorously at upper-class traditions, a few months spent in France, and a Mediterranean cruise; Mitford has an eye for the telling detail in all these situations.

The second section of the book is the aforementioned running-away and its aftermath, which thrusts Decca into a totally different milieu. She doesn't actually spend a lot of time in Spain, but she and Esmond learn to live on not much money, first in France then in England (though Esmond has an awful weakness for get-rich-quick schemes). They have a hard time reconciling their lingering aristocratic upbringing with their downtrodden, working-class surroundings, though, and they become frustrated that they cannot do more to stop fascism.

Eventually, English snobbery and pessimism overwhelm them, so they move to America. This means no more funny Mitford anecdotes, and Decca spends a bit too much time praising the warmth and generosity of Americans as compared to Britons, but there are some great scenes in this section too. Her stories of how she and Esmond supported themselves (selling Scottish tweeds at the World's Fair, selling stockings door-to-door, bartending) are hilarious.

Decca ends the book by summing up some of the people in her life, especially Esmond and Unity. She shows an admirably nuanced attitude to her beloved older sister, wondering how "a person of enormous natural taste, an artist and poet from childhood, [could] have embraced [the Nazis'] cruel philistinism" (273). And Decca admits her own faults, as well: "[Unity] was always a terrific hater--so were all of us" (273) and "The qualities of patience, modesty, forbearance and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life, the instinctive respect for the fundamental dignity of every other human being [...] were on the whole conspicuously lacking in [Esmond and me]" (280).

Still, after reading Hons and Rebels, I admire Decca's courage, resilience, humor, and sheer nerve. I must say, though, that I identify more with Nancy: as I noted yesterday, I'm an aesthete, not a revolutionary. Nancy doesn't always come off well in Hons and Rebels--Decca has no patience for aesthetes, and describes Nancy's personality as "astringent," "cutting" etc.--though she admits that Nancy had enormous strength of character to stand up to their parents: "She had broken ground for all of us, but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears" (29). I suppose it's rare that the eldest daughter is the greatest maverick in a family; so in a way, Nancy cleared a path for Decca to become the Communist rebel she always knew she'd be.

Lesbians, Tomboys, and a Queen

Overt the weekend I saw/heard three different shows, one about lesbians, one about a tomboy, one about a queen. Witches and bitches also made an appearance. Read on...

On Friday I saw a student production of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. Though in one sense, it's a 1930s melodrama with a retrograde view of lesbianism, I was amazed that much of it still felt relevant. It's funny that I wrote the other day about girl-on-girl bullying being a good subject for a play, because for me, that was the most powerful part of The Children's Hour. The words and methods used by bullies may have changed since 1934 (no little girl in 2008 is going to ask other girls to swear loyalty to her "with the solemn oath of a knight," as Mary Tilford does), but the underlying motivations have not. And even though every woman knows that 13-year-old girls can be downright vicious, it's still almost a taboo subject--seeing it represented onstage is still surprising. As is the fact that The Children's Hour has just one male character in it, and otherwise completely concerns itself with female points-of-view! Makes me wonder how far we've really come since 1934...

The other thing that surprised me about The Children's Hour was its language: several "goddamns" and one character referred to as an "old bitch." When writing The Rose of Youth, which takes place in 1934, I consciously tried not to use swear words. I had one (male) character say "goddamn," in a scene with another man, and wondered if even that was too strong. Guess I shouldn't have worried so much!

Still, it was a challenge to write a whole play without using 21st-century locutions such as "like," "y'know," and "I mean." And a challenge to keep the actors from inserting "y'know" and "I mean" into the script where it didn't belong! No playwright likes to hear actors add or change words, but it's even more jarring when the additions seem to come from a whole different decade than the rest of the script!

On Saturday afternoon I listened to the Met opera broadcast of La Fille du Régiment, starring two of my favorite singers, Juan Diego Flórez and Natalie Dessay. Really great work all around, though I was disappointed to miss most of Flórez's Act II aria "Pour me rapprocher de Marie" when the streaming audio on my computer decided to misbehave. And after studying French for nearly four years, it is a real thrill to be able to listen to an opera and understand the singers! I've known the melody of "Pour mon âme" since I was 4 years old, but the words only recently...

La Fille du Régiment, with its spoken dialogue, also made me see the kinship of comic opera and musical comedy. When Tonio, Marie, and Sulpice launched into the energetic trio "Tous les trois réunis" (The three of us reunited) in Act II, it reminded me of nothing so much as those cheery musical-comedy songs pledging friendship and happiness. "Together Wherever We Go" from Gypsy or "Old Friends" from Merrily We Roll Along...that kind of thing. And during Marie's music lesson, as her aunt instructs her to sing "plus fort!" then "plus doux!" (Louder! Sweeter!) how could I help being reminded of "Anything you can sing, I can sing louder"? Come to think of it, Marie has a lot in common with Annie Oakley...an illiterate tomboy, delighting in simple pleasures, kind and loyal to a fault.



Don't they look similar? Reba McEntire as Annie, Natalie Dessay as Marie.

My operatic day continued when I went to see the Vassar music department's production of Dido and Aeneas. This is an odd little piece, with Aeneas perhaps the most under-characterized hero of any opera ever written. The Vassar production tried to remedy that by interpolating another Purcell aria ("What shall I do to show how much I love her?") for him at the end of Act 2.

The singers performed in real Restoration-theater style, which means lots of poses and gestures to accompany the singing. A few of the singers were skilled enough to infuse emotion into these gestures; most looked merely like they were striking attitudes. But, I realized, if you are a singer who can't really act, it's better to aim for dignity and simplicity, than to try to do too much. During the final chorus after Dido's death, the girl who played Belinda (Dido's handmaiden) switched positions every five seconds, grimacing, dabbing at her eyes, burying her face in her hands, in an attempt to convince us of Belinda's sadness. But it was distracting, and seemed as if she was flailing around, unsure of what to do. Much better to find one pose and hold it.

My favorite part of Dido and Aeneas is the witches' "ho-ho-ho" chorus. It amuses me to know that the stereotype of gleefully cackling witches has been around since 1689.

Voodoo Macbeth!

A quick addendum to my post on Macbeth just because I think it is so very cool: a clip of the infamous "Voodoo" Macbeth, directed by a 20-year-old Orson Welles for the Federal Theater Project. OK, the acting isn't terrific, but it is amazing to be able to see a bit of this legendary production. (Thanks to About Last Night for the link.)



John Houseman, in his book Entertainers and the Entertained, recalls "the selfless fervor that kept us going, night after night, through rehearsals of the Negro Macbeth, in the freezing, barren Harlem winter of 1935-36. There is no theatrical aphrodisiac more potent or satisfying than extreme collective penury." During the rehearsal process, many Harlemites "suspected [the play] of being a deliberate and cruel hoax calculated to ridicule the Negro in the eyes of the white world" but, according to Houseman, opening night was a "triumphal consecration."

People still talk about this production (the novel I'm currently reading, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, even alludes to it) so I am thrilled that a piece of it was preserved for us YouTube viewers of the future!

Whither sophisticated lyrics?

Last week one of my friends asked me if I had ever considered writing musicals and not just plays. "I used to think that that was what I was going to do," I replied. "In high school I even tried writing a musical version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But I don't know enough about writing music, or music theory...so I gave it up. I'd still be interested in writing lyrics though, if I could collaborate with someone else."

"I think you'd be good at it," said my friend, "especially coming up with sophisticated rhymes and allusions--you know, like Dorothy Fields."

This led us to discuss why the art of writing "sophisticated" lyrics peaked around the 1930s and has been in decline ever since. We thought of Fields' "Never Gonna Dance" (admittedly the lyrics are a bit odd, but the song as a whole works wonderfully):

Have I a heart that acts like a heart,
Or is it a crazy drum,
Beating the weird tattoos
Of the St. Louis Blues?
Have I two eyes to see your two eyes
Or see myself on my toes
Dancing to radios
Or Major Edward Bowes?

or her absolutely delightful "I Won't Dance":

When you dance, you're charming and you're gentle
'Specially when you do the Continental
But this feeling isn't purely mental
For heaven rest us,
I'm not asbestos

And that's why
I won't dance, why should I?
I won't dance, how could I?
I won't dance, merci beaucoup
I know that music leads the way to romance,
So if I hold you in my arms I won't dance

or any number of lyrics from Ira Gershwin (here, "They All Laughed")

They all laughed at Rockefeller Center
Now they're fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin
They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his chocolate bar
Ford and his Lizzie
Kept the laughers busy
That's how people are

or Cole Porter (with "You're the Top" perhaps the all-time pinnacle of this kind of lyric writing):

You're the top
You're an Arrow collar
You're the top
You're a Coolidge dollar
You're the nimble tread
Of the feet of Fred Astaire
You're an O'Neill drama
You're Whistler's mama
You're Camembert

But this style of lyric seems to have become less and less frequent, perhaps to have died out entirely. Yes, Stephen Sondheim has written sophisticated, clever, perfectly rhymed lyrics long after Fields, Gershwin and Porter stopped, but his are sophisticated in a different way. Maybe "The Ladies Who Lunch" is Sondheim's version of a Cole Porter-ish urbane list song, but it originates out of Joanne's drunken self-loathing, rather than just being a witty showpiece like "You're the Top." In general, Sondheim's songs are too psychologically acute to be mistaken for these popular hits of the '30s.

My friend and I thought of several reasons why these kind of lyrics have died out. First, there are just fewer musical comedies being written; for a long time in the 1980s and 1990s, the most popular shows were Lloyd Webber-style pop operas. There are perhaps a few clever lyrics in those shows (we thought of Evita's "They need to adore me / So Christian Dior me") but in general they don't allow much humor.

The musical comedy was revived with The Producers, but it, and many shows that followed, are set in past decades, so they can't make contemporary allusions. I feel that Mel Brooks would write some gleefully vulgar lyrics incorporating names of current celebrities, if only The Producers wasn't set in the 1950s and Young Frankenstein in the 1930s. Hairspray and Little Shop of Horrors find some clever rhymes in their early-1960s setting, but I'd love to hear what the lyricists of these shows could do with a story set in the 21st century. (Or could have done. RIP Howard Ashman.)

Third, the art of making rhymes about contemporary events, celebrities, and trends has been taken over by rappers. From Kanye West's "Jesus Walks": "The way school needs teachers / The way Kathie Lee needed Regis / That's the way I need Jesus." Now, that's not a perfect rhyme, but it's in the spirit of the 1930s lyricists and their clever allusions to current cultural phenomena.

In the end, the only modern musical-comedy song we could think of that sort of replicates the 1930s lyrical style is "Great Big Stuff" from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. And it's a rap song--as if the only way to get away with these lyrics nowadays is to set them to rap music.

A house in the Bahamas
Paisley silk pajamas
Poker with Al Roker and our friend Lorenzo Lamas
[...]
Chillin' in the city
Sittin' pretty in the Caddy
With P. Daddy
Or Puff Diddy
Or whatever!

These lyrics require contemporary knowledge to get the joke (Mr. Sean Combs' ever-changing nom de rap) and shamelessly cite D-list celebrities just for the sake of a rhyme--not far off from what some '30s songwriters were doing. Indeed, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is an interesting test case for how to write a musical comedy set in the present day. It takes place on the sophisticated French Riviera and blends skilled old-fashioned songwriting (sincere ballad "Love Sneaks In," peppy charm song "Here I Am") with modern-day vulgarity and pastiche (gross-out "All About Ruprecht," power-ballad parody "Love Is My Legs"). Perhaps even its plot--classy European Lawrence vs. crass American Freddy--reflects an insecurity about the form a modern musical comedy should take.

As a thoroughly modern girl*, it annoys me that so many musical comedies take place in the nostalgic past. It seems to bespeak a dissatisfaction with our own time: "Nothing these days is worth writing songs about, so let's all reminisce about an era when musical comedies were the pinnacle of taste!" But I firmly believe that the art we make helps construct the world we live in. So if we wish the 21st century was more sophisticated--well, why not write sophisticated songs and stories that take place in 2008, and hope that life imitates art?

Because, if you think about it, the 1930s wasn't all-sophisticated either--there was that nasty little event known as the Great Depression. But we remember it as sophisticated in large part because of the work of songwriters like Fields, Porter, and Gershwin. Songs like "You're the Top" help preserve 1930s ephemera that otherwise might have vanished. We need to preserve our own era in song. We need to create a second Golden Age instead of pining for the first one.

*How can Thoroughly Modern Millie be thoroughly modern when it is doubly nostalgic: a 21st-century musical based on a 1960s movie set in the 1920s?

Decoding the 1930s

As I continue revising my play set in 1934, I have to research and consider all kinds of odd subjects. I can spend inordinate amounts of time pondering questions like "What would a 21-year-old theater-loving girl name her new pet cat?"--even though it might seem like a throwaway line of dialogue. (I chose the name "Pandora," if you're curious.)

One of the first things I learned about 1934 was that it was the year the Production Code went into full effect, imposing a new level of censorship on American movies. In my revised draft, I have a scene for 2 characters discussing the Code after they go see a Mae West movie. Oddly enough, as I surfed the Internet while taking a break from writing this scene, I came across an essay by the Self-Styled Siren about the Code and why nostalgia for it is misguided. Go check it out--it, the other stuff she links to, and the long comment thread, is fascinating and thought-provoking. And gave me even more stuff to TRY to cram into my play.

The Mae West movie in my play, by the way, is I'm No Angel (which actually came out in 1933 but I am taking poetic license). I chose it because, in the course of some more research ("research" meaning "random Wikipedia-surfing") I learned that it has a musical number in it called "No One Loves Me Like that Dallas Man." Some of the characters in my play are from Dallas--perfect! And thanks to YouTube, you can see Mae in action:



I learned that even though I'm No Angel is "pre-code," it still came in for some censorship. The original title of Mae's song was supposed to be "No One Does It Like that Dallas Man." I also had trouble understanding some of the lyrics in this film clip, so another source revealed that they are "He's a wild horse trainer / With a special whip." I'm guessing that the censors made Mae hum and "da-da-da" over those lyrics in the final version.

But, to make this song choice even more appropriate, my play already had a whip in it...though I'll leave you guessing as to how!

The Fervent Years

I just this morning finished reading The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman's account of the Group Theatre from its origins to its collapse. My high-school theater teacher gave it to me, recommending it as "the best book ever written about the American theater," or some such, but I never got around to reading it until now.

I couldn't have read it at a better time, though. The Group Theatre existed from 1931 to 1941, and as you know I'm writing a play set in 1934 and find that decade fascinating. Clurman knows that the Group was a product of its time, and charts how the plays it produced mirrored the shifting national mood. Also, this spring, I'm going to be part of a theatre group of my own--under the auspices of the Drama Department, some of us at Vassar are going to spend six weeks forming an ensemble to put on three new plays as well and as efficiently as we can--so the book has got me thinking more about the process of making theatre.

Clurman was one of the Group's three founders (along with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg) and the only one to stick with it until the end. Naturally, this provides him with a valuable and unique perspective--he is very opinionated as to the Group's successes and failures, and does not spare himself from criticism. He is also a good writer who can make interesting pronouncements about the time and place in which he lived. His analysis of how Americans fear unequivocal statements and big theories, and instead favor the ability to be fluid and ambiguous and adaptable (p. 217), will stick with me for a long time, I think.

One of the most interesting aspects is Clurman's portrait of his friend and colleague Clifford Odets, a truly fervent character. Odets began in the Group as an actor of great enthusiasm and little talent, but with a striking personality that combined "an appetite for the broken and rundown" with "a bursting love for the beauty immanent in people, a burning belief in the day when this beauty would actually shape the external world" (117). From this impulse he wrote plays; he and the Group experienced their greatest successes with the one-two punch of Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing in 1935. This success is inspirational; but what follows, Odets' slow downward spiral, torn between the Group and Hollywood, is a cautionary tale for any young playwright. I'm curious to learn more about Odets now and went looking for his plays in Powell's yesterday, but, would you believe, they only had a single book by him? Meanwhile, next to him, Sean O'Casey gets an entire shelf. I don't understand it.

I know it's still hard to make theater in America, and maybe I'm just naively optimistic (maybe I have to be naively optimistic in order to even consider a career as a playwright) but I think things have gotten better since the Group Theatre era. Throughout the second half of The Fervent Years, Clurman constantly reiterates that even though the Group was critically acclaimed and doing good work, it was doomed to failure, because it was trapped in the "Broadway" model for producing and mounting plays. Every time the Group got a new script, Clurman had to go around raising money for it, often begging people like Odets to put up some of the money themselves. The Group had no steady source of income; it had to find backers and give them a cut of the profits.

But nowadays, theatres are allowed to incorporate as nonprofit organizations, and most of them take advantage of it. When some Portland actors, directors and techies formed Third Rail, the most successful new company in town, they did it as a nonprofit. They plan their seasons in advance and sell 3-show subscription packages to provide cash before they even start rehearsing, and the website includes a way for visitors to donate money. Instead of needing to raise thousands of dollars from a single backer and then make a return on the investment, they can take smaller amounts of money from more sources. I'd wager that they also scope out grant opportunities and write grant requests; something that was not possible in Clurman's day because the infrastructure was not there.

The 1930s were indeed a fascinating time in the American theatre, more idealistic, more fervent than anything we know today. But I'm glad to live in the 21st century, where I can still read Odets' plays and Clurman's books and become inspired by them, yet can be thankful that good theatre is no longer synonymous with Broadway playhouses and for-profit production.

Photo from geocities.com

"Anything Goes": What Recording is the Top?

Doesn't this make you want to go on a transatlantic cruise in the 1930s--preferably with Cole Porter writing the music? Poster from lapl.org

Writing my 1934-play last weekend, I got struck by a mania to listen to Anything Goes, the year's hit musical. The lyrics of "You're the Top" alone provide enough mid-1930s topical references to transport me to the past. And songs like "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" and the title song are just great, great musical-comedy treasures. The other songs found in Anything Goes, though, can vary depending on which version of it you see. The show's Wikipedia article thoroughly explains the revisions that have been made over the eyars.

I couldn't find much information comparing different recordings of Anything Goes (that's why I'm writing this blog post) so I checked out two of them from my school library. One is the 1987 Broadway revival starring Patti LuPone, which featured a rewritten book and several interpolated songs, including Cole Porter favorites like "Friendship" and "It's De-Lovely." The other is the 1989 EMI studio recording, which bills itself as "The First Recording of the Original 1934 Version." Maybe it was produced in reaction to the 1987 revisions?

Like Ethel Merman, who originated the role of Reno Sweeney, Patti LuPone is a star performer with an instantly recognizable voice and personality. Her mannerisms are on full display here: a torchy, dark-hued voice; a slight sloppiness of phrasing and enunciation. But she definitely has Reno's diva-charisma. Kim Criswell, who plays Reno on the studio recording, is not as idiosyncratic. She has a bright, clear, powerful belt voice, which sounds higher and more exciting than LuPone's--and perhaps more Mermanesque. Yet she sings "I Get a Kick Out Of You" with a tenderness that Merman could never achieve.

Both of the actors who play hero Billy Crocker--Howard McGillin in 1987, Cris Groenendaal in 1989--sing very well. Advantage goes to McGillin for his dreamy near-falsetto at the climax of "All Through the Night" and "De-Lovely."

Opera star Frederica von Stade sings the role of ingénue Hope Harcourt on the studio recording. Perhaps her mezzo-soprano timbre is a little too warm and mature for 21-year-old Hope, but it's a lovely voice, and she generally avoids being too "operatic" with it. At any rate, she's much better than the Broadway Hope, Kathleen Mahony-Bennett, whose thin and breathy soprano is not pleasant to hear, and far too cutesy when she sings "De-Lovely."

Neither actor who plays the comic role of Moonface Martin is a very good singer. Bill McCutcheon (Broadway) mumbles and strains his voice; Jack Gilford (studio) barely has enough breath to get through his solo. (In fact, he died the next year.) However, you can tell that Gilford might once have had a pleasant voice; McCutcheon seems like he never did.

The "Ambrosian Chorus" take on choral duties in 1989, singing in a "square," classical style. This works for the sailors' hornpipe "There'll Always Be a Lady Fair" and the satiric hymn "Public Enemy No. 1," sung with the proper rhythmic and harmonic precision. The Broadway version tries to make these songs swing, which feels wrong. But for the rest, I prefer Broadway's more casual, jazzy chorus.

The 1987 version assigns solo songs to more characters than the 1934 version does. Gangster's moll Erma now gets to sing "Buddie, Beware" (instead of Reno)--and it makes more sense for this character, even if singer Linda Hart's voice is a little raspy. The even raspier Rex Everhardt, playing Elisha J. Whitney, sings a pointless few bars of "I Want to Row on the Crew." Hope's solo "The Gypsy in Me" gets reassigned to her fiancé Evelyn Oakleigh, becoming funnier in the process.

The studio recording's insistence on using all the original orchestrations, arrangements, and lyrics means that it can get a little monotonous. All seven verses of "You're the Top" are sparklingly witty, but since the orchestration doesn't vary enough with each verse, it's "as the French would say, de trop." The recording is so complete that it even includes three cut songs as an appendix: "There's No Cure Like Travel," (a nifty countermelody to the song "Bon Voyage"), "Kate the Great" (solo for Reno that Ethel Merman vetoed as too bawdy), and "Waltz Down the Aisle" (sung by Hope and Evelyn--melody later revised and recycled as "Wunderbar" from Kiss Me Kate).

The Broadway version cuts the more obscure or overkill lyrics, as well as some pointless songs like "Where Are the Men?", and fills out the recording with additional dance music. You really get a sense of how the big songs worked as production numbers. And the orchestrations are great--love the musical joke after Reno sings "the feet of Fred Astaire" in "You're the Top"!

For my main purpose--getting a sense of the world of 1934--the studio recording proved invaluable. I loved learning additional lyrics to the title song, which reference topical events like the Depression:

And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaux
When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo'es
Anything goes.

But I can understand if modern audiences prefer the trimmed-down and more "Broadway" 1987 recording--even if it does have some pointless interpolations and bad singers. The studio cast is maybe slightly stronger...but Howard McGillin and Patti LuPone are great too. So, in the end, I'm not sure which recording is the best, if you could only buy one. Um...anything goes?

Links for your pleasure:

• NY Times article about the '87 revival discusses the parallels of the '30s to the '80s--which are still true today!
• Recent New York Observer article about Ethel Merman
• NY Times review of the '89 studio cast recording
• Slate Magazine analyzes the lyrics of "You're the Top" and figures out their obscure references.
• Biographical article on Cole Porter that quotes some of his best lyrics
  
• Browse the Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter through Google Books

This should tide you over for a while. I've got a very busy week ahead of me and doubt I'll blog much.

So my blog goes bust
For a week it must
Close shop
But if, baby, it's the bottom
You're the top!

Idyllic Childhoods and Rude Awakenings

Today in the New York Times Online, Kurt Campbell blogs about how the Republicans are now trying to impugn Bill Clinton by saying he treated his presidency like a "holiday from history," ignoring global problems in favor of a "Gatsby-like...fun-filled and frolicking interwar period." I found this article interesting and thought-provoking. Although I am a Democrat, I guess I too had thought of the 1990s as a "holiday from history." Campbell makes a good case for Clinton's real foreign policy achievements, but you have to admit that these are not as well publicized or as flashy as other events of the Clinton years.

Perhaps I can be excused for not knowing this about Clinton--I was a child, aged 5 to 13, during his presidency. And though all parents try to give their children a carefree childhood, I think that growing up in the 1990s was especially idyllic. I never had to worry about "the Commies." I never thought of America as having any real enemies, and if we got involved in a war, I was sure it would only be to help an innocent little country that was threatened by a nasty dictator (like Kuwait or Kosovo). I thought there would never be an attack on American soil, nor would America ever become the aggressor in a war. And though part of this is just childish naivete, I doubt I was the only person who felt this way. After all, the 1990s were the decade when people talked seriously about Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" theory.

I was 14, beginning my sophomore year of high school, on September 11. The external, foreign world came crashing into America and all I could think of was that old cliché "This is the first day of the rest of your life." And usually that's a positive, optimistic sentiment, but I saw it as something darker. I knew that the 1990s tranquility had vanished--for the rest of my life. And of course I was saddened and angry with the terrorists. But I have also felt increasingly betrayed by the Republican administration, whose policies make peace and tranquility even more a relic of a bygone age.

And now that I'm writing a play set in 1934, I can't help imagining that the girls I'm writing about experienced emotions similar to mine. They were born circa 1913, so the first five years of their lives were taken up by the "Great War," which probably frightened them, but they were too young to really understand it. Then, from the time they were 5 to the time they were 16, they experienced that "Gatsby-like interwar frivolity" that Campbell mentions. It was the Roaring Twenties, business boomed, the international community was basically at peace, it was just as idyllic as the 1990s were for me. But when they were about 16, the stock markets crashed, and the rest of their high school and college years were an attempt to find their way back to normalcy in an increasingly unstable world.

You can even draw further parallels, saying that in both cases, the crisis (9/11/01 or 10/29/29) occurred on a Tuesday in autumn, when the president (Bush or Hoover) hadn't even been in office for a year. This reinforces the sense that something had shifted: a new decade, a new president, a new era. Though of course, the people of the 1930s at least gained hope when they kicked Hoover out of office in 1932 and elected Roosevelt. Me, I've had to resign myself to spending my formative years, ages 13 to 21, under George Bush's presidency...and I couldn't even cast a symbolic vote against him in 2004.

Though my play is set in the past, I want it to be relevant to the present, so I'm trying to bring out this theme of an idyllic childhood suddenly shocked into brutal reality. I think my peers ought to relate. It's interesting to note that in the "Generations" theory of history, which sees things as cyclical, my generation (the Millenials) and the generation of the girls born in 1913 (the G.I or Greatest Generation) are categorized as belonging to the same point in the cycle. We are born during an Unraveling and come of age during a Crisis. Sounds pretty accurate to me.

Cleopatra in Bias-Cut Lamé

Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra. Photo from jurgenfauth.com

One of the many cultural artifacts I am incorporating into my new play is Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 movie of Cleopatra starring Claudette Colbert. After all, the premise of my play is Hallie Flanagan and a bunch of Vassar girls performing Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in 1934, so how could I not mention it?

The movie is a rather bizarre mix of tones. Sometimes it's very stilted, the dialogue clumsily "rhetorical," too much emphasis placed on DeMille's eye-popping spectacle. At other times, the characters are very modern and earthy--sometimes jarringly so. In one Roman party scene the dialogue could pass for 1930s cocktail banter and the ladies' "togas" could pass for stylish Art Deco evening gowns.

But this made me think of the intriguing website The Cleopatra Costume, which investigates what the real Cleopatra might have worn, and how she has been costumed in movie and stage versions of her story. The conclusion? Cleopatra's costume nearly always reflects the fashions of the day. Colbert's Deco-style gowns are just one example.

Hallie Flanagan definitely would have approved of this. In her 1934 production, Cleopatra wore a sleek turquoise velvet sheath dress, and the soldiers wore white uniforms based on the uniforms of Mussolini's troops in North Africa. Hallie scorned "historical or archaeological" designs, and wanted to make the play immediately accessible to her audience. She preferred to capture the essence of "Seductive Queen" or "Soldier" rather than getting trapped in irrelevant historical detail.

"Passion Play" at the Goodman

Jesus (Joaquín Torres) learns his lines. Photo from goodmantheatre.org

Chicago's reputation as a theater town made it imperative for me to see a show when I visited last week. I'd first thought I'd look somewhere other than the big regional theatre, the Goodman--maybe Steppenwolf or Lookingglass? But, ironically, Steppenwolf was doing The Crucible, that regional-theatre staple...and the Goodman was doing the big, new, exciting show: Passion Play: a cycle by Chicago native Sarah Ruhl.

According to Ruhl's playbill essay, she "started writing this play ten years ago after rereading a childhood book which includes an account of Oberammergau in the early 1900s." I'm pretty sure I know what book she means--Betsy and the Great World, part of the classic Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace--because it made an impression on me, too. When Betsy goes to see the famous German passion play, everyone in the book knows exactly what "Oberammergau" signifies, and treats the play as a great and holy effort--meanwhile, I'd never heard of it, and I was shocked to learn that the actor who played Jesus would willingly be crucified, onstage, for fifteen minutes!

Ruhl saw potential in this for writing a play that would explore religion and politics, art and life; big subjects, which she handles adroitly. The "cycle" has three acts, each set in a different time and place: Elizabethan England, where the Queen is cracking down on Catholic rituals like passion plays; 1934 Oberammergau, when the Nazis have just seized power; and South Dakota during the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

The play is a backstage drama (like many theatre folk, I've got a soft spot for this genre) where in three different eras, three different sets of relationships are affected by current events and by the play that all the characters are working to perform. This multilayered set-up provides a real challenge for actors. For instance, the same actress (Kristen Bush) plays the Virgin Mary, as well as the woman portraying the Virgin Mary in the passion play, in all three acts. But her relationships to the other characters shift from act to act. In a sense, then, she's playing six different roles--two in each act, onstage and offstage! However, all of the actors at the Goodman were very good: I especially liked how Brian Sgambello (Pilate) and Joaquín Torres (Jesus) slightly altered their physicalities from act to act. Also, because the anti-hero is usually more interesting than the straightforward hero, Passion Play's sympathies lie with the Pilates of this world, not the Jesuses.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry: this concept is much more complicated to explain than to watch. At the Goodman, the play was smoothly directed by Mark Wing-Davey: the set seemed plain at first but interesting elements popped out of it as needed, and the large cast (11 speaking actors plus 5 silent supernumeraries) moved as a fluid ensemble.

The Elizabethan first act of Passion Play is terrific--funny, intelligent, moving, with characters that you care about and Ruhl's trademark poetic dialogue. In fact, I'd even call it a perfect 55-minute play. And those are hard to write: I can think of perfect 15-minute plays and perfect 2-hour plays, but not another perfect hourlong play. In 55 minutes, this act covers a lot of ground, and ends before the themes become redundant.

The second segment of the play (Nazi Germany) is much weaker, and that's a pity, because it probably has the richest material to explore. Should it have been a full-length instead? Here, the actor who plays Pilate is a German soldier, and the actor who plays Jesus is his lover. Provocative stuff, but I don't think Ruhl made palpable the experience of being a gay man in Hitler's army, or even a gay man in the '30s. The study guide mentions that the "Night of the Long Knives"--when Hitler purged the Nazi ranks of all "threats," including homosexuals like Ernst Röhm--occurred in 1934, but this important information is not worked into the play. Another storyline, in which the actress playing the Virgin Mary gets hit on by a Nazi officer, doesn't go anywhere. If it's an attempted comment on the role of women in the Third Reich, much more could have been done with this theme.

Pilate (Brian Sgambati) proposes marriage to the Virgin Mary (Kristen Bush), while Queen Elizabeth (T. Ryder Smith) blesses them.

Thankfully, Act 3 is a lot better. Spanning several years in the 1970s and 1980s, it feels like a bit of a departure for Sarah Ruhl: more contemporary and with plainer dialogue than she usually writes. (The Clean House is ostensibly contemporary, but set in a "metaphysical Connecticut." Passion Play creates an all-too-real South Dakota.) Usually Ruhl's dialogue gets noted for its lyricism and quirky turns of phrase, but when that gets stripped away, as in the South Dakota scenes, you realize that she is a very strong dramatic writer. For instance, I loved an exchange where one character accuses another of belittling him by saying "actually" all the time--it got me to see things differently, since now I'm hyper-aware of when I say "actually"! And I'm glad to discover for myself that there's more to Sarah Ruhl than her vivid and whimsical imagination--she's got a damn solid technique too.

A minor irritant: in a scene set in 1984, a character we know is 14 years old (we know she was born in 1970) says she's in "sixth grade"--but most kids are 11 or 12 in sixth grade. She even talks rather babyishly for an 11-year-old. Would it have been that hard for the girl to say, instead, that she was in "eighth grade" and have slightly more mature dialogue?

A bigger problem: Though, as I said, Passion Play is less whimsical than other Ruhl plays (no one turns into an almond or dies of laughter here), at the end she brings out the old whimsy. I can tell it's supposed to be lyrical, spectacular, and literally "uplifting," but it just seems to come out of nowhere. The earlier parts of the script do not seem to lead to this conclusion, and it feels like a pasted-on happy ending. Actually.

The Ultimate Vassar-Girl Novel

Getting in touch with my Vassar roots and the 1930s setting of my new play, and countering Terry Teachout's recent statement that "no one without tenure now reads Mary McCarthy's novels," I just finished her most famous work, The Group. While researching my play on Hallie Flanagan, I discovered an interview where McCarthy talks about her disdain for Hallie's students: "They always had paint in their hair. They wore blue jeans when others didn't. They had a kind of mindless enthusiasm. I describe one of them in The Group, as 'Kay.' Hallie was a cult figure, but I don't think that was her fault." So I added The Group to my reading list--and was excited to see Hallie's name mentioned on page 3.

The novel covers the years 1933 to 1940 and hops between the lives of eight members of the Vassar class of '33, each girl getting a chapter or two devoted to her. In rough order of appearance, they are:

• Kay, energetic, enterprising, but ultimately defeated
• Dottie, a proper Bostonian with a hidden sensuality
• Helena, a wry observer, cynical about love
• Pokey, jolly, lazy, and extremely rich
• Libby, a gossip with literary pretensions
• Priss, a serious-minded young mother
• Polly, kind-hearted but impoverished by the Depression
• Lakey, beautiful, haughty, and aristocratic

There is also Norine, who is not a Group member but stands as a contrast to it: slovenly in her habits and radical in her politics. By depicting scenes from the life of each girl (with flashbacks to their years at Vassar), McCarthy compares and contrasts their attitudes toward love, sex, politics, money, and other issues. For instance, she shows us Dottie's, Helena's, Pokey's, and their respective mothers' different reactions to the news that Kay's husband has been arrested for inciting a strike.

When it was first published in 1963, The Group became a bestseller largely due to its reputation as a "sexy book." (One of the characters in Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others even says "The first I ever learned about sex or diaphragms was from reading The Group.") From a 21st-century perspective, it fares differently: it may be a book about sex, but it is not a sexy book. The whole novel is resolutely anti-romantic and anti-erotic, with the male characters coming off very badly. If a man seems perfect at first, he'll try to rape you when you don't succumb to his advances. If a man is good in bed, he'll turn out to be a weak-willed womanizer. Polly and Dottie, the sweetest and most sympathetic girls, get burned the worst by love. Makes me glad I don't live back then!

Like Tess Slesinger in The Unpossessed, McCarthy satirizes her characters and their foibles. However, because she is writing in the 1960s about the 1930s, The Group has an extra satirical bite derived from hindsight. For instance, Kay has absorbed her doctor father's attitudes: "Birth control...was for those who knew how to use it and value it--the educated classes" (79) while "criminals and the unfit" should be sterilized (72). In sentences like these, you can hear McCarthy's mocking 1960s voice intrude to comment on the stupidity of these 1930s girls.

The Group is a fairly quick read, though dense at times because McCarthy rarely begins a new paragraph when someone else speaks. Her attention to detail means that it helps to know something about the trends and ideas of the 1930s (and of course, you'll get even more out of the book if you went to Vassar). These details successfully characterize each Group member: I especially appreciated how McCarthy slightly alters her writing style to reflect the voice of the girl whose life she is describing. For instance, Libby's chapters are loaded with words like "spiffy," "nifty," "splendiferous," and other breezy slang.

I am now intrigued by Mary McCarthy, as well. Like me, she was a Vassar girl from the Pacific Northwest. But she was ambitious and iconoclastic and not afraid to be satirical or contrarian...that's her reputation, anyway. Now I want to see for myself; as always, finishing one good book makes me add five more to my ever-growing reading list...

Tess Slesinger's "The Unpossessed"

An unexpected, but fortuitous, discovery for me as I research the 1930s was the novel The Unpossessed, by Tess Slesinger (get it on sale at Powell's or the NYRB site). Slesinger was born in 1905, went to Swarthmore and the Columbia School of Journalism, became a "New York Intellectual," wrote this one novel, went to Hollywood and worked on screenplays including The Good Earth and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and died of cancer at the age of 39.

The back-cover blurb says: "The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts.... Cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after." After reading it, I can tell you it's definitely more "cutting" than "comic": Slesinger wickedly satirizes her characters and their world. She knew the left-wing intellectual scene very well--she was friends with Lionel Trilling, among others--but she doesn't stint at describing its blind spots, its hypocrisies, its flaws. I admire how she observes and analyzes and thinks critically, instead of apologizing for herself and her circle.

The Unpossessed does not have a strong narrative; it's more a collection of portraits of representative 1930s types. (Oh yeah-- Slesinger subtitled it A Novel of the Thirties. She knew she was capturing the Zeitgeist.) The central characters are three men born circa 1900 who decide to found a left-wing magazine: Jeffrey, a Don Juan of a novelist (his surefire way to seduce women is to say "I am something of a lone wolf"); Miles, a tough-minded New Englander whose puritanical upbringing still shows in him; and Bruno, a Jewish- American professor, outwardly congenial but inwardly self-loathing. Then there are the women: Jeffrey's oblivious, placid wife Norah; Miles' wife Margaret, more intelligent than Norah but with the same deep need to care for her husband; and Bruno's cousin Elizabeth, living in the fast lane and also loathing herself for it. Then there are the rich people who get a vicarious thrill from supporting left-wing causes, and the (Columbia?) university students flaming with radical passion... Part III of the novel brings everyone together for a huge party to raise funds for the new magazine. Slesinger is at her most satirical here: the rich people discuss horses and have no idea what cause they are supporting; the intellectuals snipe and backbite among themselves; romantic complications ensue for all.

Slesinger writes a dense, descriptive prose that commands your full attention. Sometimes she'll simply observe and record her characters: the dialogue scenes always have multiple conversations weaving in and out. Other times, she's more introspective, getting inside the characters' heads. I loved her chapters about Elizabeth, written in an almost musical stream-of-consciousness:

Steward a drink for the lady--the lady is lost, the lady has boarded the fast express, all aboard ladies and gay modern gents, try an art colony first, all aboard, no stops no halts no brooding there, all aboard the twentieth century unlimited, hell-bent for nowhere, the only nonstop through express, try and get off it kid once you're on board, no peace for the young, no rest for the restless, the rollicking jittery cocktail express, nothing can matter so wear down, you nerves, no brakes, no goal, no love, on we go glittering jittering twittering, try and get off it kid once you're on board, it'll rattle you shatter you, if you jump out you're lost, stick with it girl, where's all your masculine guts? (115)

This passage also gets at what surprised me the most about The Unpossessed: its modernity. We're often taught that women weren't "liberated" until the 1960s, and didn't regret or question the idea of free love for another few decades, but Elizabeth is a free-loving woman realizing that her jazzy modern ideals only lead to empty hedonism. Margaret also considers herself economically and sexually liberated, though wonders what she has really gained: "O Economic-Independence Votes-For-Women Sex-Equality! you've relieved us of our screens and our embroidery hoops, our babies and our vertigo; and given us--a cigarette, a pencil in our hair" (82). The Unpossessed is also the oldest book I can remember reading that has an explicitly gay character in it: 20-year-old Emmett Middleton, who has a crush on Bruno. Bruno is thus caught in a quasi-love-triangle with his female cousin and his male student: would you expect that from something published in 1934? And the book's concluding sense of futility--that the world will go on, in all its awfulness, as the intellectuals talk themselves into a state of paralysis--is also very, very modern.

I enjoyed this foray into the 1934 leftist-intellectual mindset and am going to continue in this era for a bit longer: my next read is Vassar girl Mary McCarthy's The Group!