"How To Tell If You're In a Stoppard Play" Now Up at The Toast!

The Toast illustrated my piece with a still from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern film, but this is my blog so I'm illustrating it with a picture of Rufus Sewell as the original Septimus Hodge. You're welcome.

This is the "fun piece" I alluded to this morning!

For The Toast's famed How To Tell If You're In a Novel series, I wrote and submitted How To Tell If You Are In a Tom Stoppard Play.

The piece begins:

You have devoted your life to translating Ovid, but your guilty pleasure is ‘60s bubblegum pop. 

You are a young woman who’s not shy about displaying her intellectual gifts or her perky breasts.

Thinking of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, you burst into tears.

And continues with many more items of Stoppard-related literary criticism in the guise of silly jokes.

This piece is, I believe, the first thing I've ever written for the Internet that I'm getting paid for, and I couldn't be more thrilled to have that happen with a bunch of Tom Stoppard jokes. I also think I talk more about sex here than I customarily do, and again, I'm amused that this is what it takes to get me to write about sex.

The piece also seems to have found its audience -- closing in on 3,000 social media hits as I write this --  which is so flattering and gratifying. I love that so many of the people who've shared this piece said something like "I always knew I was a Stoppard character" -- I've always intended that as the subtext of the piece: if you love Stoppard's work, if you think these jokes are funny, you're probably a lot like a Stoppard character yourself.

All of the Toast's commenters have been lovely and smart and supportive too -- if only the whole world could be like the Toast's comments section! I'm especially pleased that the "bad Czechs" joke is getting so much love, because it's the last item I added to the piece, after a late night of drinking hot toddies and thumbing through my Collected Works of Stoppard. (After I submitted the first draft, the editor asked me to make it longer, and I feared I didn't have any more good jokes left in me.) And to the person who commented "Somehow this is both a devastating skewering of Stoppard's tropes and a heartening reminder of his genius" -- yep. That's what I was aiming for, and I'm so glad I may have hit the target.

Further reading:

• All of the How To Tell If You're In a Novel entries are pretty fab, but the one that has made me giggle like no other is How To Tell If You are In a Logic Puzzle, by Diana Walter
• If you like my Stoppard jokes, you might also like my essay from two years ago about my decade-long crush on Septimus Hodge and seeing Arcadia for the first time after years of anticipation. Or browse the Stoppard tag on my blog.

Wishing you a happy and delightfully nerdy December!

Artists Are Members of a Privileged Class @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I'm rereading Tom Stoppard's Travesties tonight (for a very cool reason which I am not yet at liberty to disclose) and I have to say that it makes for very interesting reading in light of what I wrote for the Theater Pub blog earlier this week.

My Theater Pub piece is about living in an age when "count your blessings" has turned into "check your privilege," acknowledging that being an artist is itself a privilege, and wondering if anything short of total social revolution will change that.

And then I start rereading a play in which Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara debate art and revolution with Henry Carr, a privileged British guy who'd rather talk about his Savile Row suits than about the carnage of World War I. Despite that, he gets in some rather trenchant commentary on art and privilege.

Some choice quotes from Travesties:

"To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war." (Carr)

"Art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the paymaster." (Tzara)

"Revolution in art is in no way connected with class revolution. Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it's absurdly overrated by everyone else. [...] What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist." (Carr)

Miss Fisher and Miss Crewe

In my most recent Theater Pub column, I wrote about some of the non-theater things that kept me sane/happy/entertained in January: the f.lux app, trying new hairdos, cleaning my room, and watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix.

I saw some enjoyable theater, too: Indian Ink at ACT is a good play in a lovely production. Though Arcadia will always be my all-time favorite Stoppard, this one is still smart and entertaining and well worth your time.

Brenda Meaney as Flora Crewe, in ACT's production of Indian Ink. Photo by Kevin Berne.

And I got to thinking about how Flora Crewe, the heroine of Indian Ink, and Phryne Fisher, the title character of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, feel like variations on an archetype: confident, independent-minded, adventurous women of the between-the-wars period. They pursue careers that aren't quite "respectable" (Flora is a poet, Phryne a private detective), but which still allow them to dress glamorously and mingle with interesting people. Flora gets denigrated as an empty-headed "flapper poet" and Phryne gets patronized as a meddlesome amateur, but they do their best to shake off such criticisms and go on with being their awesome selves. They are single but have many lovers; they are not ashamed of their sexuality. They are very fond of stylish automobiles.

Their biographical details are similar too. Indian Ink gives Flora's birth year as 1895; she is 35 when the play takes place in 1930. The Miss Fisher show takes place in 1928 Melbourne, at which time Phryne seems to be in her mid-to-late 30s. (Per Wikipedia, Phryne's birth year is 1900, so she's 28 when we meet her, but maybe that's just for the novels the TV show is based on -- actress Essie Davis is great and looks younger than her real age, but I don't think she can pass for 28.) They both have a beloved younger sister, though Phryne's sister was murdered in childhood while Flora's sister is alive and well. After spending childhood and adolescence in an English-speaking country (England/Australia), they run off to France during World War I and join an ambulance unit. They both remain in France for a bit after the war ends, too, living the bohemian life in Paris and working as artists' models.

Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher.

Here's where the parallels get really crazy. In Paris, Flora poses nude for Modigliani and when the painting is later exhibited, it infuriates her fiancé so much that he buys it and burns it in a bathtub at the Ritz. Phryne poses nude for a fictitious artist, Pierre Sarcelle, which infuriates her lover so much that he resorts to murder to get his hands on the painting. Okay, I can understand how this is a trope (jealous sexist man commits violence when he learns his girlfriend has posed nude for someone else), but it was very odd to see Indian Ink and the Miss Fisher episode about the nude painting less than a week apart, and to note all of these similarities in terms of character, era, etc.

Are both Flora Crewe and Phryne Fisher based on a real-life woman that I should know about? Is there some well-known story about a young Anglo woman who drove an ambulance in France during World War I, then posed for a nude painting that was later at the center of some scandal?

And, to compound the hall-of-mirrors effect, I first became aware of the Miss Fisher actress Essie Davis when I saw her star in a different Tom Stoppard play, Jumpers, on Broadway in 2004. (Her character had a nude scene in that one, too. Stoppard has a reputation as a super-cerebral playwright but there's enough female nudity written into his scripts -- Jumpers, Indian Ink, Coast of Utopia -- that it seems he also has quite an eye for the ladies.)

At any rate, I have two new fictional heroines to inspire me with their independence, courage, and flair.

"To Say Nothing of the Dog" -- Catnip in Book Form

Does anyone else find it odd that Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love and Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog -- two works that both make several allusions to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat -- came out within one year of one another, in 1997 and 1998, respectively? What was going on in the space-time continuum in the late '90s to make that happen?

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh my goodness, this book is wonderful. It reads like Tom Stoppard and A.S. Byatt had a love child and then brought that baby up on a diet of classic screwball comedies (including Bringing Up Baby). It’s a time-travel story whose romantic elements are sweet and charming, rather than tragically tear-jerking. It will even appeal to both cat-lovers and dog-lovers.

I read To Say Nothing of the Dog during a difficult and stressful time in my life, and I couldn’t imagine a more congenial companion. The mystery is absorbing, but the overall tone is lighthearted. I could tell that nothing really bad would happen to the characters and that there’d be a happy ending, even if I couldn’t predict how all the threads would come together.

And there are a lot of threads: Victorian decor; literary allusions; discussions of historical causality; the Nazi fire-bombing of Coventry Cathedral; human and animal behavior; the stability, or lack thereof, of the space-time continuum; and plenty of comic hijinks and wry asides. The protagonist, time-traveling historian Ned Henry, is a likable fellow who nonetheless makes for an amusingly unreliable narrator, at least when he’s suffering from “time-lag” in the first part of the book.

To Say Nothing of the Dog tends to be shelved in the sci-fi section of the bookstore, and the paperback boasts ugly, incomprehensible cover art. Which means there’s a chance that readers who don’t consider themselves “sci-fi fans” may overlook this book, and that’s a shame. If you’re a nerdy Anglophile who appreciates obscure history and wishes you had a time machine so you could go back to the past and look around – something that describes many of my friends – you will love this book.

View all my reviews

A Decade of Loving Arcadia (and Septimus) @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I am really, really proud of my latest Theater Pub column. In it, I write about seeing ACT's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia exactly ten years after I read the play for the first time, and having So Many Feelings.

If you've ever experienced a decade-long love for a work of art, wondered if a staged production of your favorite play would live up to your expectations, or just had a massive crush on Arcadia's Septimus Hodge, this one is for you.

I was also glad to finally take the opportunity to write about one of my favorite plays, and my biggest literary crush of all time, at length. Here are some links to other, briefer posts I've written that have to do with Arcadia:

• Arcadia on the brain (May 30, 2009)
• Inspiration's Promise, Fulfilled (March 23, 2009)
• A rolling stone in Arcadia (October 18, 2007) -- I reused a bit of this in the conclusion of my new Arcadia essay

Epic Plays, Small Theater: "Coast of Utopia" at Shotgun Players

While reading this profile of Blanka Zizka, artistic director of Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, I was most struck by the section that described Zizka's production of the Tom Stoppard play The Invention of Love.

Though the play had a successful run in London, no theater in New York took it up. "People kept thinking that Invention of Love was dry as toast," says New York actor Martin Rayner, who portrayed the elder [A. E.] Houseman. "Nobody wanted to touch it in New York. Blanka took it and made it this vibrant thing."

It would become the highest-grossing show in Wilma history, and it prompted Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater -- who had passed on the play because he thought it too difficult and complicated -- to drive to Philly to see it. Not long after the lights went down, Bishop remembers, "Suddenly the play, which had made no sense to me in London, made total sense to me now. I don't honestly know how. The design was much simpler. The theater was smaller. It wasn't that the actors were better than the British actors. They were clearer. They had an emotional life."

The reason this passage struck me is because Bishop's experience seeing The Invention of Love at the Wilma mirrors what I've been telling people about the experience of seeing Stoppard's plays Voyage and Shipwreck (the first two parts of his Coast of Utopia trilogy) at Shotgun Players. The Wilma Theater has 300 seats; Ashby Stage, where Shotgun performs, has 150. I feel like 125 to 300 seats is really the ideal size for a theater: large enough to make you feel like part of an important communal experience, but small enough to still feel intimate.

And maybe that intimacy is especially important when staging one of Stoppard's challenging and cerebral plays. At least, I connected far more with Shotgun's production of Voyage, last year, than I did when I saw the play in its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theatre in 2006.

In New York, I think there were something like 60 people in the cast, including famous faces like Ethan Hawke and Jennifer Ehle. The production was lavish, sparing no expense; it opened with an elaborate effect of ocean waves swirling and spiraling around Brian F. O'Byrne (who played the trilogy's protagonist, Alexander Herzen). But, aside from Billy Crudup's brilliant performance as Vissarion Belinsky -- he spoke some of Stoppard's most complex monologues as if he was actually coming up with the words on the spot -- I wasn't really able to connect with the play. The bigness, the lavishness, the constant emphasis on "we are doing something epic and highbrow," overpowered the story. My friend Lexi, who went with me to the show, thought that the opening special effect was the best part of the whole thing. But special effects should not be the reason that you go see a Stoppard play.

The Coast of Utopia features much discussion of intellectual topics, which can make it seem dense and confusing. But it also bears a Chekhovian influence -- there is poignant human drama amidst all of the storms and streams of talk. That element of it, though, got swallowed up by the massive Lincoln Center production. But in Shotgun Players' 150-seat house, the epic grandeur and the human intimacy of the play are balanced. Shotgun may have only 20 cast members instead of 60 (and face it, 20 actors is still a freakin' huge cast). Their set is bare-bones, their costumes are serviceable but perhaps not 100% historically accurate. But the play is clearer. It has an emotional life.

I wanted to love Voyage when I saw it in New York, because I love Stoppard and I love big intelligent plays... and, I guess, I respected that production, but I didn't love it. (Billy Crudup excepted.) It didn't even bother me that I had to miss seeing the other two parts of the trilogy in New York when I left to go study abroad.

Nowadays, I have immense respect for Shotgun for daring to tackle this epic trilogy in their mid-size East Bay venue. Moreover, I am connecting with what they're putting onstage -- getting caught up in the characters' emotional predicaments as well as their intellectual jousting.You can bet that I'm already looking forward to Salvage, the conclusion of the trilogy, which they'll produce next season. In the meantime, Voyage and Shipwreck are playing at Shotgun Players through the end of this weekend (May 5).

Image: Joseph Salazar as Mikhail Bakunin, Patrick Kelly Jones as Alexander Herzen. Photo by Pak Han.

Billy Collins, Plagiarist?

Billy Collins has a poem in The New Yorker musing on Zeno's paradox:

Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus
one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie--
asked if any one of us had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

[...]
If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows.
No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach.
St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

Well, this is suspiciously similar to Tom Stoppard's explanation of Zeno's paradox, in his play Jumpers:

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

This is too strange to be a coincidence, right? Collins has to have somehow gotten the seed for his poem from Stoppard, doesn't he?

Maybe the dinner party actually happened as described in the poem, and Collins overheard "a bearded man in a tie" trying to pass Stoppard's idea off as his own original thought, but Collins wasn't aware of this, and wrote the poem in perfect innocence. Maybe the bearded man acknowledged that his Zeno-Sebastian speech was inspired by a line of Stoppard's, but Collins decided to leave that out of the poem. Or maybe there wasn't any dinner party, and the bearded man is fictitious-- a framework invented by Collins to hide the fact that he had really gotten the idea for his poem by reading or seeing Jumpers (or just by reading Stoppard's wikiquote page). What I like about this is that, even though Collins doesn't credit Stoppard, his poem still acknowledges the deeper truth: the Zeno-Sebastian idea is not original to Collins, he got it from someone else.

Some among us might simply call Collins' poem an "allusion" to Stoppard, or a work "inspired by" a line of his. And I might buy that reasoning if the Stoppard quotation were more well-known, or recognizable. (I mean, if Collins had written a poem playing off the idea of "beauty is truth, truth beauty," I wouldn't write a blog post excoriating him for plagiarizing Keats!) But, in my opinion, there is something not quite right about building an entire poem around an idea that another writer had, and then not crediting that writer.

Also, am I wrong in thinking that Stoppard's way of phrasing this idea is more snappy, more economical, more memorable, more, dare I say, poetic than Collins'? "Saint Sebastian died of fright" is much better than "No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach. / St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack." That's why I remembered the Stoppard quote, after all these years...

"Casanova": Who Writes Your Screenplays?

I spent Thanksgiving with my aunt, uncle, and cousin in the East Bay. After dinner (the basics like turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, plus a dish of creamed peas and pearl onions--a tres Midwestern contribution from my Minnesotan uncle) we watched the Casanova film that came out a few years ago, starring Heath Ledger. My aunt is very proud of our Italian heritage and loves any kind of costume drama with Venetian vistas; plus, knowing that we won't get any more Heath Ledger movies makes his whole filmography seem precious.

But I wasn't really crazy about Casanova. I guess I wanted Casanova to be like Don Giovanni--an unrepentant rake and lady-killer--but this film version removes his edginess and complexity. He is always likable, as chivalrous as a seducer can possibly be, and despite his reputation, we don't see him juggle many lovers. Instead, the movie says that Casanova just needed to find the one woman that was meant for him, and then he'd instantly go monogamous. Meanwhile, the woman (Francesca, played by Sienna Miller) is supposed to appeal to a modern-day audience because she pretends to be a dutiful daughter, but secretly she's feisty and fights in duels and writes proto-feminist pamphlets and disguises herself as a man. But all of this feels so calculated to appeal to us, and so anachronistic considering that the movie takes place in 1750, that it annoys me. Just because I'm a feminist doesn't mean that I want every movie to contain a spunky feminist role model. Instead, I want female characters to be believable according to the setting of the film, and Francesca is not.

When I got home, I looked up the original New York Times review of Casanova. A.O. Scott liked it lots more than I did--but he also revealed something interesting: Tom Stoppard evidently did an uncredited rewrite of the Casanova script!

It's funny what learning something like that can do. I had thought that Casanova was a mediocre romp with nice costumes, suitable for watching in a Thanksgiving haze of triptophan and wine, but not deserving of any futher consideration. But now, knowing that one of my favorite playwrights had a hand in the script, I wished I'd paid it more attention. Could I have detected a "Stoppard touch" in any of the scenes? None of the dialogue struck me as that great on first hearing, but rereading it on the IMDB quotes page, could I hear a hint of Stoppard in some of the sillier jokes? And was Stoppard's contribution more about giving the dialogue a witty sheen, or did it extend to fixing problems of plot and character? Because despite his script-doctoring, Casanova still has one-dimensional characters and a contrived, mechanistic plot. The film even contains elementary screenwriting mistakes like naming one character "Victoria" and a completely unrelated character "Vittorio"--couldn't someone have changed one of those names?

There is a moment at the end of Casanova that I'd like to think is a Stoppard contribution--or maybe it's from Jeffrey Hatcher, another playwright who worked on the screenplay. Casanova and Francesca are rescued from the Inquisition's clutches by a troupe of traveling players, who express hope that the young lovers will join the acting company. Francesca gives the head of the troupe an appraising look and says "Who writes your plays?"

The Remarkable Rocket

Have you bought your Fourth of July fireworks yet? Whether you have or not, might I suggest reading, in honor of the holiday, Oscar Wilde's short story "The Remarkable Rocket"?

I am thoroughly in love with this story. It features a frog, a duck, and a whole lot of fireworks (including the titular rocket) who all talk with Wildean wit, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's so awesome. It must have the highest number of aphorisms per page of any short story in the English language. It is completely charming, and deserves to be better known.

Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love contrasts Wilde with A.E. Housman, who exemplified opposite ways of living as gay men in late-Victorian England. Which is worse: to lead a long life of inhibition and suppressed sexuality (Housman) or to live flamboyantly only to be punished for it (Wilde)? "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light," Stoppard has Wilde say.

Could this image be inspired by Wilde's short story? I wonder. And I also think that The Remarkable Rocket: The Life of Oscar Wilde would be a great title. If the world needed another Wilde biography, that is.

But don't just take my word for it. Try it!

"Arcadia" on the brain

Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia has been on my brain a lot lately. Well, considering that it has a permanent spot on my list of Favorite Plays Ever Written, it's never far from my thoughts, but this week it's been especially prevalent. Here's why:

• As I blogged last weekend, I just reread Possession, and Arcadia is sort of its theatrical analogue.
• It's getting produced in Washington DC, and I just read Terry Teachout's review of it. I think he's right that Hannah and Thomasina are the most important characters, and they're probably one reason it speaks to me--two intellectual women in one play!
• It's also getting its first London revival, and here's the interview the Financial Times conducted with Stoppard in honor of that.
• Finally, this week there was a post on the New York Times' "The Wild Side" blog that strangely recalls the themes of Arcadia. Its attempt to find the differential equations that describe the ebb and flow of a love affair reminded me of Thomasina's attempts to find equations that can describe the form of a leaf or a cloud. Like Arcadia, it invokes Isaac Newton, and acknowledges that Newton's concept of an orderly mathematical universe actually conceals "the seeds of chaos." And its intellectual geeking-out, its whimsy, and its focus on romantic relationships are all very Arcadiaesque.

And one unrelated link: apropos of my last blog post about what I'm learning at my job, I actually felt a thrill when reading "The Financial Page" in the latest issue of The New Yorker--it's all about corporate governance and what makes a good board of directors. "I know what he's talking about! This is what I do all day!" I thought.

Inspiration's Promise, Fulfilled

I enjoy reading old interviews with my favorite artists while experiencing the benefits of living in the future: they don't know what will happen to them in years to come, but I do. My favorite thing is when they mention some project that is no more than a glimmer in their eye at the time the interview was conducted--a project that had a distinct possibility of never being realized at all--and yet I know that they did write that play or make that film, and furthermore, that it is brilliant. I collect these stories, because they inspire me, give me hope and make me happy--"dreams can come true" and all that. Here are examples from some of my own favorite artists.

• During the marathon interview sessions that became the classic Hitchcock/Truffaut, the two filmmakers discuss how strange movie soundstages can look to an outsider, what with all the behind-the-scenes tricks that don't show up in the finished film. At this point Truffaut confesses, "It's often occurred to me that one might make a first-rate comedy on the making of a movie." The Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews were published in 1967. Six years later, Truffaut released Day for Night, which is a first-rate comedy on the making of a movie--one of those films that always makes me happy.
• I once read a profile of Tom Stoppard from the late 1980s that mentioned that he was halfway through reading James Gleick's nonfiction book Chaos. The interviewer asked Stoppard whether this subject might find its way into his next play, and the playwright responded noncommittally. But in 1993, Arcadia premiered, a play inspired by chaos theory (plus a whole lot of other stuff)--and a work of freakin' genius!
• In the introduction to his collection of plays Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays, published in 2000, Tony Kushner wrote "Though I have been handsomely remunerated for my movie and TV writing, I am bitterly disappointed, as none of my work for Hollywood has achieved what I'd hoped for it, which is to provide its author a pretext to meet Meryl Streep." As we all know, three years after that, not only had Kushner met Streep, but she was starring in the epic miniseries adaptation of Angels in America!

It's Only "Rock 'n' Roll," And I'm Ambivalent

Two weeks ago my housemate and I went to NYC to see Rock 'n' Roll on Broadway. I started drafting this review as soon as I got back, but my busy student life intervened, and I never got around to posting it. But I'm sick of it sitting in my Drafts folder, so here it is, though slightly less polished than I'd like.

Rufus Sewell as Jan. Photo by Joan Marcus from broadwayworld.com

Rock 'n' Roll, the new Tom Stoppard play about communism, Czechoslovakia, and the power of music, took a long time to grab me. The first act is long, and mostly consists of scenes of our hero Jan (Rufus Sewell) being politically confused and changing his mind repeatedly. But because these scenes take place in his Prague apartment, we never see the external events that make him change his mind, just hear about them. The play's rhythm feels jerky--static and talky scenes alternating with '60s-'70s rock music during the transitions. Stoppard attempts to add human interest by such actions as having Jan's lover leave him for his best friend. But because we don't care enough about the characters, nor see their relationships fully develop, it all feels very ho-hum.

In addition, I really didn't like Sewell's overdone performance as the young Jan. The play requires Jan to be naive, more concerned with his music collection than with political realities. But in Sewell's portrayal, Jan is more than naive--he is silly. He giggles and shrugs and mugs in a way that is meant to be boyishly charming but just comes off as immature. You can hardly believe that this clown is supposed to have two doctorates in Philosophy.

Stoppard finally proves that he still has great playwriting skill toward the end of Act One. First, there is a monologue that manages to be both touching and intellectual in that Stoppard way: Eleanor, wife of the hard-line Marxist professor Max, is dying of cancer, and rails against her disease and against her husband's belief that human beings are nothing more than their bodies. Actress Sinead Cusack is excellent here. Then, back in Czechoslovakia, Jan discovers that the police have broken into his apartment and destroyed his music collection. The only album he has left is Pet Sounds, because he had loaned it to a friend. "Ah well," Jan says in a choked-up voice, "it's only rock 'n' roll." And begins to pick up the shattered LPs while listening to "Wouldn't It Be Nice"--that song so heartbreaking in its innocent faith that life will be perfect in the future. End of Act One.

Another great song choice begins the second act: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2. One of the biggest hits of 1987, it establishes that the play has jumped forward 10 years, but also lets us know that the characters still feel unfulfilled. Later in that act, The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry" caps an emotional moment. Song choices like these, though, only make you wish that every song used in the play was as effective, as attuned to the characters' situation.

Rock 'n' Roll is an intellectual play, and I think I understand its big theme: human beings are not predictable machines, not cogs in the wheel of a system. Our bodies break down but our minds remain intact (represented by Eleanor); our minds break down but our bodies remain intact (represented by Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett); even the best of us do illogical things like voting for political parties that do not have our best interests at heart. And thus totalitarian systems are doomed to fail.

But the parts of the play that make you lean forward, the parts that you remember after it's done, aren't the long speeches arguing political positions nor the cute metaphors that Stoppard finds to explain the more difficult concepts. Instead, it's the human scenes. It's Jan reconnecting with Max and his daughter Esme after the Iron Curtain falls. Jan, no longer silly and boyish, made grey-haired and hesitant and afraid after years in Communist Czechoslovakia. It's the shattered record collection. It's Eleanor rage-raging against the dying of the light. It's the final moment, where the whole theater turns into the spectators at a Rolling Stones concert--a wonderful moment of communion between the audience and the actors. Communion, not communism. Plus good old-fashioned Western capitalism and rock 'n' roll.

Whoa-oh-oh-oh, Da Doo Ron Ron

On Saturday I'll be in NYC again to see Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons (and maybe do some Christmas shopping). I'm excited: not only is playwright Jordan Harrison a great guy and a talented writer, but the subject of this play sounds right up my alley. It interweaves 3 stories: Richard Wagner writing Tristan and Isolde, a 1960s girl-group singer's career, and a contemporary gay man's coming of age. Y'all know that I'm in an opera phase right now (though I'm no Wagnerian) but it might surprise you that I absolutely love girl-group pop!

Probably this has something to do with playing a doo-wop girl in Little Shop of Horrors in high school and getting to sing Ashman & Menken's pastiche songs. Really, it's a great score; the choice to use girl-group music is just so perfect for the show's humor and its 1950s/1960s setting. And it parodies its sources just enough, never too much. In the opening number, we sang "Shing-a-ling, what a creepy thing to be happening. Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!" Only a few years later did I realize that that parodied the Shangri-Las' shouts in "Leader of the Pack."

This kind of music has also been heard on Broadway in Hairspray and Dreamgirls. Hairspray's "Mama I'm a Big Girl Now," with its three girls singing harmony and I-vi-iv-V chord structure, perfectly evokes the girl-group sound. It's one of my favorite songs in the score. However, I did not think that any of The Dreams' hit songs in Dreamgirls were as catchy or brilliant as the real deal from the Supremes. (More Dreamgirls carping here.)

Girl-group songs are a lot of fun, obviously, but their sweetness and innocence and adolescent heartbreak can also be quite affecting. When I went through my first quasi-relationship/quasi-breakup (eh, it was complicated) one thing that helped was listening to "Where Did Our Love Go?" and "You Can't Hurry Love" on repeat. Sounds clichéd, I know...but better than listening to emo.

It's funny that these songs should be this powerful, because they're the very definition of commercial music--written not from the depths of an artist's soul, but by teams of songwriters hoping to score a big hit. Much of the time, white adults wrote songs for young urban black girls to sing, which is a little creepy/exploitative (especially when said white man was Phil Spector!). At Motown the songwriters as well as the singers were black, but if anything, the "hitmaking machine" mentality was even more in effect.

Some people may scorn girl-group music because it's so commercial, but there's a lot of distinguished girl-group aficionados, too. They include:

Amy Winehouse: Her Grammy-nominated album (congrats Amy!) is heavily based around the classic girl-group sound: "Back to Black" might be the greatest Phil Spector song that Phil Spector never produced. But her voice gives it a modern twist: paradoxically, she's both more tough and more vulnerable than the typical poppy girl-group singer (the Shangri-Las excepted).



The Pipettes: A trio from the UK who is also contributing to the girl-group revival. Pretty, peppy, and polka-dotted, "Pull Shapes" ought to cheer you up if you just watched that funerary "Back to Black" video...



Martin Scorsese: Ever since seeing Goodfellas last summer I can't listen to "And Then He Kissed Me" without thinking of how it underscores the astounding tracking shot where Henry and Karen make their way into the Copacabana Club through the kitchen. Just ecstatically good filmmaking and music.



Tom Stoppard: His quasi-autobiographical character Henry, in The Real Thing, knows he "should" love difficult classical music, but really only likes the '60s pop hits from his youth. In one scene, he is trying to choose eight songs that are personally significant to him for the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs--but, ashamed of his musical tastes, is hunting for some more obscure tracks than the ones he usually listens to:

HENRY: I'm supposed to be one of your intellectual playwrights. I'm going to look like a total prick, aren't I, announcing that while I was telling Jean-Paul Sartre and the post-war French existentialists where they had got it wrong, I was spending the whole time listening to the Crystals singing "Da Doo Ron Ron."

That's one way of looking at it, Henry...or you could've been like Jordan Harrison, and put both your intellect and your love of girl-group music into one of your plays!

How is a cricket bat like a play?

When I was writing yesterday's post about Tom Stoppard I checked out his Wikipedia page, which, among other things, informed me that he is a participant in the One Million Masterpiece project. This is a charity effort that aims to be "the world's largest collaborative arts project," asking each person who signs up to create a square-shaped painting using a computer graphics program. This is Stoppard's artwork:



Simple, but effective graphic of a cricket bat and ball. I laughed out loud, though, when I saw it. You see, it's not just that Stoppard is a cricket fan. Instead, I'm almost certain that he's alluding to his famous "cricket bat" monologue from The Real Thing. In it, Henry, a playwright, uses a cricket bat as a metaphor to explain just why an amateurish play by a young political prisoner is so awful.

HENRY: This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise) What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...travel... (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script) Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting "Ouch!" with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicates the cricket bat) This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better. You don't believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this (the script) and see how you get on.

Yay for craftsmanship and uncompromising high standards! Yay for playwrights!

A rolling stone in Arcadia

Tom Stoppard has an article in the latest Vanity Fair that touches on his new play, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, and his writing process. You can tell from The Real Thing, and from the fact that his latest play is titled Rock 'n' Roll, that Stoppard is a big pop-music fan, but I really enjoyed this anecdote about just how music influences him:

With each play, I tend to become fixated on one particular track and live with it for months, during the writing—my drug of choice, just to get my brain sorted. [...] With Arcadia, the drug was the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and since that play ends with a couple waltzing to music from an offstage party, I wrote the song into the ending and stayed high on that idea till I'd finished. It was inspiring. When, in rehearsals, it was pointed out to me that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" isn't a waltz and that, therefore, my couple would have to waltz to something else, I was astonished, uncomprehending, and resentful.

Sorry, Tom, that you "couldn't get what you want" regarding the ending of Arcadia, though that makes a good ironic twist. (One of the fun things about being a playwright--or perhaps any kind of writer--is putting in-jokes and references to personal favorite songs, etc., in your plays.) I wonder what song the director ended up using--not many rock songs are in 3/4 time!

Still, I have always considered both Arcadia and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" brilliant, brilliant expressions of human creativity. And now, in my mind, they'll always be connected. The ending of Arcadia never fails to move me and this might make it even more poignant.

Evidently, too, "the sartorially elegant Tom modeled himself on Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, only to become a close friend of the rock singer" (citation) and there is a similarity to their facial features as well (big lips)...though I think Tom has definitely aged better, despite being 6 years older!













Sir Mick (photo from i.realone.com) vs. Sir Tom (photo from broadwayworld.com)



But Mick in 1969, singing and hip-swiveling and looking a lot like Stoppard--wow!

Sunday in Manhattan

Sunday. My first NYC day in nine months, and the first stirrings of fall weather in the air. I got out out my black leather blazer that made me feel so Manhattan-chic when I wore it to the city during high school.

Of course there's always something to do in New York--both what you plan and what you just stumble upon. Last time I was in the city, last December, I had a really great stumble-upon moment, which I'll blog about sometime. But this Sunday was pretty good, too. First, near Grand Central Station, the Mexican Day Parade was going on. Crowds of people dressed in red, white, and green--some from head to toe. Sombreros and banderas on sale in front of the Public Library. Since I was near the start of the parade route, things were very chaotic, so didn't stay long.

One of my favorite parts of city is "Library Way," the bronze plaques with quotes about books, libraries, learning, set in the sidewalk on 41st Street, leading up to the Public Library. One of them is by Tom Stoppard:

and I always pause a bit reverentially before it. (Go here and scroll down for a link to all the plaques. Beautiful stuff.)

When I got to Times Square, everything north of 42nd Street was blocked off. There seemed to be a crowd, and big echoing loudspeakers... "It's Broadway on Broadway" said a policewoman to a group of curious passerby.

Now, I faithfully check playbill.com, but it had slipped my attention that there would be this huge Broadway-promoting concert the day I was in the city. I set out to find the way into the barricaded area. Had to walk over to 8th Avenue, and then up to 46th or 47th... and as I entered that massive crowd in Times Square, I couldn't even see the stage, but I heard the singing, a huge brassy chorus of "New York, New York," and the confetti machines perched atop billboards and buildings were going like mad, and the semi-autumnal sunlight hit me in the eyes, and... New York, I'm back! I wanted to shout.

This was the final number of the concert (which explains the big chorus and the confetti) so soon I was filing out of Times Square again, snapping photos with my camera, the confetti drifting down only to get swept up... When I returned to Times Square about 4 hours later, there was no trace of it.


I continued on down 42nd Street to Playwrights Horizons--a nice, new theater building, with hanging banners printed with quotes from plays they have produced, which, again, just thrill my heart. I had to stop myself from snapping photos of everything (I got into that habit in Paris).

At the play I was sitting next to some girls my age or a little younger...college freshmen or sophomores, I'd guess. Those of you who are sick of Hollywood actors with no stage experience getting cast in the lead roles of Broadway shows, I have to tell you it's not going to change anytime soon, not when it leads to scenes like this one:

GIRL 1: (Reading her playbill, sees the Roundabout's ad for Pygmalion starring Claire Danes) Look, Claire Danes is gonna be on Broadway!
GIRL 2: Ooh, when?
GIRL 1: "Previews start September 21." That's soon!
GIRL 2: I love Claire Danes!
GIRL 1: Me, too! We should get tickets.
GIRL 2: Pygmalion...is that like Pygmalion and Galatea, the myth?
GIRL 1: I don't know.
GIRL 2: We should totally go!
GIRL 1: Totally!

I wanted to lean over and say "It's Shaw's play that got adapted into My Fair Lady," but refrained. Hey, at least these girls are getting excited about theatre, and Pygmalion's a good play to know, regardless of who's cast in it.

On my train back to Poughkeepsie I absolutely loved the way the conductor talked--with a West Indian accent, old-fashioned words and phrases, and an old-fashioned sort of concern for his passengers and human decency. Saying things like "I do beseech you, do not leave your belongings on the seat next to you" and "Please do not annoy your fellow passengers, everyone has the right to a pleasant trip," and "Let us all be on the good side of courtesy, folks!"

It's nice to hear that message, since even though I love New York, it can be a tough place. I honed some of my big-city survival skills living in Paris for 4 months this year, but it's still nothing like New York. In Paris, I feel, you can afford to be leisurely--there is always time for an espresso or a crepe, and if you don't like the looks of one café there's another on the next corner. But in New York, if you don't want to eat in Times Square because it's too crowded, you go two blocks over and you're in Hell's Kitchen and there's nowhere good to grab food before your matinée. Or, you arrive at Grand Central Station at 6:45 to find your train leaves at 7:10 and you need to eat something and the restaurants in the basement are already closing down for the night. In New York you cannot afford to be aimless or indecisive, or else the city will defeat you. So, despite my love for it, I don't know if I could live there. And yet I don't know of any other place in the world that has so much wonderment packed into so small an area.

OSF '07

Last week I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, seeing 4 plays in 3 days. This was one of my favorite seasons ever: no duds and lots to think about!


The Taming of the Shrew: Obviously, a difficult play to present these days, but I really liked director Kate Buckley's approach. (How cool is it to have "Shrew" directed by a woman named Kate?) She did not burden the play with too much comic shtick or anachronism, and she took a psychological approach to the characters. You might not agree with what they did, but you understood why they did it. This way, the play became thought-provoking rather than just offensive. It also helped that they established that Kate is instantly attracted to Petruchio--the first man who isn't afraid of her--but she's too proud to admit it, and too afraid of love. So she keeps acting shrewish, and you agree that Petruchio needs to jolt her out of it. And when subjected to Petruchio's ill-treatment, this Kate was never timid or cringing. Her final speech is still a little hard to hear...but I got the sense that she is proudly enjoying her new reputation as "most obedient" where before she was "most curst." And she gets to chastise her sister again--in a civilized way.

In this day and age, though, it's also hard to like Lucentio, who falls in love with a girl simply because she is beautiful and docile. Isn't that anti-feminist too?

The production was fairly traditional, with an extra passionate-Mediterranean flavor by a literal emphasis on the Italian setting. The actors playing Petruchio and Kate (Michael Elich and Vilma Silva) were perfect for their roles and I also really liked the wily-servant character, Tranio (Jeff Cummings). And "The Taming of the Shrew" is not a completely hidebound, conservative work. Any play with so many servants impersonating masters, and vice versa, gives some hope for overturning old hierarchies.

Photo of Kate and Petruchio by T. Charles Erickson.



The Cherry Orchard: Libby Appel's swan song as artistic director, a play about the sad end of old ways and the need to go on. The audience was really terrific and focused. What I love is that this play has so much truth to it, different audience members react to different emotional moments or lines of dialogue. But every moment of the play--in the writing and the acting--resonates deeply with multiple people. How many works of art can you say that for?

A theme I noticed for the first time was insiders vs. outsiders. The relations between the 12 characters constantly shift, so you wonder, Who belongs in the inner circle? Why do the outsiders not find common ground in their isolation? Or, is everyone an outsider? Many characters express admiration for "hard work," but very few of them actually want to work, and they can't see how this unites them. They all have deep and visible flaws, except for Anya, but can't recognize their own failings. (Is Anya meant to symbolize hope for the younger generation? Wouldn't that be too obvious for Chekhov?) Yet no one is a villain.

Libby Appel chose a great cast of OSF veterans who brought out the humor and idiosyncrasies and flaws and, again, truth of each character. I stayed for the talkback with actor Gregory Linington, who played Trofimov--he's getting typecast as shy, uncomfortable nebbishes, since last year I saw him as Mr. Marx in "Intimate Apparel." (And the actor who played Esther in "Intimate Apparel" played Varya here--another hard-working, emotionally closed-off woman.) Seeing this play, I also thought that the character of Trofimov must have influenced Tom Stoppard when he wrote the role of Belinsky in "The Coast of Utopia." Billy Crudup's portrayal of Belinsky ranks as one of the best performances I've ever seen; while no individual cast member of "The Cherry Orchard" gets on my "best performances ever" list, together they make up one of the best ensembles I've seen.

Photo of Lopakhin, Firs and Ranevskaya by David Cooper.



On the Razzle: I adore Stoppard, but this is one of his lesser efforts. The old Austrian play that he adapted has a sturdy farce structure, and he added lots of his trademark wit and ridiculous puns, the lies and misunderstandings pile up, the ridiculous stereotypes and silly costumes get trotted out... It's all very fast and entertaining, and OSF performed it well, but I wanted more. I'd rather laugh at something because it's true and recognizable (as I did in "Cherry Orchard" and "Shrew") than because it involves a crazy pun or wacky physicality. Any attempts to give "On the Razzle" a deeper message, like Weinberl's speech on the value of the merchant class, feel shoehorned in. File this one with Steve Martin's "The Underpants" under "Adaptations of old German-language sex farces that have lots of surface wit but no social value or empathy."

Photo of Christopher and Weinberl by Jenny Graham.


Rabbit Hole This is a powerful, moving play: I would say that it, too, feels truthful, but there are many scenes I know I cannot truly understand until I am married or have a child. I was gripped and wrenched, even, but did not sniffle along with the rest of the audience. Robin Goodrin Nordli, who played Becca, can do no wrong, in my book. Izzy (Tyler Layton) was charismatic and funny, Howie (Bill Geisslinger) and Nat (Dee Maaske) also splendid. However, I thought the actor playing Jason (Jeris Schaefer) was one-note and forced.

As a play, "Rabbit Hole" is almost great, but is ultimately too easily plumbed to be a masterpiece. I don't get why Shakespeare and Chekhov made the choices they did in the same way that I get David Lindsay-Abaire's play construction. He's following the modern playwriting rules, and I can see the skeleton a little too obviously. "OK, this is a play about a grieving mother, sympathetic, sober, upper-middle-class--so to provide conflict, contrast, and comic relief, let's give her an irresponsible sister who gets pregnant! Also, let's give the sisters an older brother who died, to underline the theme of losing a child..." As a comparison, it feels right, and mysterious, and not over-explained, for Ranevskaya in "Cherry Orchard" to have lost a son...for his absence to gently haunt the play. But it feels too transparent, in "Rabbit Hole," that Becca and her mother Nat have both lost children.

Photo of Izzy and Becca by David Cooper.