Tonys 2008: A Latin hat at that

In an ideal world, I'd have seen many more Broadway shows this season than I actually did--at the very least, Sunday in the Park with George, South Pacific, and In the Heights--but I had to watch the Tony Awards anyway! Some thoughts, post-ceremony:


Favorite moment: Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping his Best Score acceptance. He was obviously so exhilarated and overwhelmed--you could tell it was a bit of a struggle to get the words out--but he kept on going and gave a memorable, emotional speech. And of course, I loved the Sondheim shout-out.

Also great: how the Broadway community seems to support Mr. Miranda and wants him to succeed, hoisting him onto their shoulders after In the Heights won Best Musical. Now, it's probably easier for a young composer/lyricist to get this support than a young playwright, since there are not many musical theater composers these days compared to the number of playwrights...but still, I find it heartening. Also heartening, or at least a moment when I said "right on!": Tracy Letts' speech that said, basically, "You produced a new American play on Broadway without any movie stars in the cast--imagine that!"

I know there's no better way to divide it up, but I still think it's weird that the award for Best Play goes to both the writer and the producers. It becomes most jarring with something like The 39 Steps, which by all accounts is a wonderfully entertaining piece of theater but, as a comic adaptation of a film script, seems out of place with the other nominees in its category. I wish, too, that they'd allowed the writers their moment in the spotlight by announcing their names and filming their faces when reading the Best Play nominees.

But nope, it was Musicals Night, with the producers seemingly attempting to cram in mentions of every show currently running on Broadway. My reactions to the added musical numbers:

• The Lion King: I know it's Disney, but that is some awesome, awesome theatricality right there.
• The Little Mermaid: Too bad that theatrical magic isn't in this number. And notice that they filmed the actress in close-up, because otherwise we'd see how silly her mermaid costume really looked.
• A Catered Affair: Terrible. A banal, rambling mess of a song--and this is the best they could do for national television?
  
• Young Frankenstein: A one-joke song ("Deep Love") with a predictable melody/chord pattern, but at least the actors were selling it with great conviction. Is it just me, or is the tune a little reminiscent of "The Impossible Dream"?!
  

Thoughts on other musical performances:

• I was surprised to like the dancing from Grease. When you cast a girl from a reality show there's no guarantee that she'll be able to do the splits and high kicks.
• The dance number from Cry-Baby is very Susan Stroman in its use of props but if I hadn't read that the men were tap-dancing with license plates, I don't think I would have been able to tell what was on their feet.
  
• Riddle me this: If Passing Strange has got such great reviews, why have I never been able to work up an interest in seeing it? And why did I not get pulled in by their Tony performance? Why do people claim that Stew is a great lyricist, when the line "I've found a place where I can be / That thing called me" (or something like that) actually made me wince?
• I very much liked the In the Heights number and the way it told a story through music and lyrics, except at the end when too many of the lyrics got lost in the muddle.
  
• Ooh, I wish I could've seen Sunday in the Park. The projections looked gorgeous, and Daniel Evans had so much emotion singing "Move On" (and looked so happy to be there!). My friend was rooting for him instead of Paulo Szot.
• South Pacific looked good, too, though. Just-for-fun prediction: next time Kelli O'Hara gets nominated for a Tony, she'll be the front-runner to win it. She's come on so strongly over the past few seasons (Light in the Piazza, Pajama Game, South Pacific) that she nearly feels overdue.

What with Gypsy, and Sunday, and Lin-Manuel's shout-out, and his own special-achievement Tony, this felt like Stephen Sondheim's night, though he wasn't even there. Leave it to him to stick up for playwrights and librettists, thanking all of his collaborators in a letter (meanwhile, Best Book wasn't even awarded on the telecast!). What a classy and generous man. But I feel for him, too. Really, it must be lonely at the top--to be the most feted artist of the American musical theater for over twenty years, with people expecting miracles every time he writes a song. I wrote him a letter this spring after hearing him speak, to express my sincere gratitude for his songs and his creation of the Young Playwrights Festival--but I have to wonder if letters like mine just increase the pressure he feels of crushingly high expectations.

Photo from broadway.com

"August: Osage County," or, This Madhouse is My Home

The ensemble shares a disastrous dinner. Photo from time.com

A week ago at this time, I had just seen a performance of August: Osage County on Broadway. I'd anticipated August since August, and was not disappointed--indeed, I'm inspired.

First, it's refreshing to see a play with a 13-actor ensemble cast, dominated by female characters. There are 7 female and 6 male actors, and two of the men don't have much stage time. Special commendations to Deanna Dunagan as matriarch Violet Weston and Amy Morton as eldest daughter Barbara. Dunagan, skinny and tightly wound, popping pills and delivering lacerating insults, looks as though the sheer force of her bitterness has shriveled her up. Or maybe it's her character's oral cancer. (After seeing August, I laughed at the NYC bus ads urging mouth-cancer prevention. Wouldn't it be great if they used a photo of Dunagan in full harridan mode, and the slogan "Don't Be Like Violet Weston...Get Checked for Mouth Cancer Today"?) And everything about Morton's performance is perfectly calibrated, down to the way her Okie accent flickers in and out.

The strongest of the three daughters, Barbara makes a worthy antagonist for Violet. The other siblings are downtrodden middle daughter Ivy (Sally Murphy, playing against her ingenue looks) and amusingly self-absorbed youngest daughter Karen (Mariann Mayberry). Barbara is the only one with a child of her own: 14-year-old Jean (Madeleine Martin), who tries to act like an adult, but her nasal childlike voice betrays her. Aunt Mattie Fae (Rondi Reed), vulgar and overbearing, is the picture of the barely-tolerated relative. And Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero), the young Cheyenne Indian housekeeper, empathetically observes everything from high in the attic.

Next to these formidable women, the men--all of whom are weak and flawed, and lacking the females' gumption--don't stand much of a chance. Mattie Fae's husband Charlie (Francis Guinan) and son Little Charles (Ian Barford) chafe under her belittling attitude. The genial Charlie is one of the more likable characters, however, especially when he stands up to his wife. Barbara's husband Bill (Jeff Perry) and Karen's fiancé Steve (Brian Kerwin) are in the midst of midlife crises. Beverly Weston (Michael McGuire), the patriarch whose disappearance sets the plot in motion, is a dissipated Southern-gentleman poet. Last, there is the sheriff (Troy West) who functions as something akin to the messenger in a Greek tragedy.

Not only does the cast size seem like something from a bygone era (in a good way!), the structure and staging are also old-fashioned. Three acts, with relatively few scenes per act--this is not one of those cinema-influenced plays that switches to a new location every three pages. In fact, when scenes start to change more frequently during the third act, the play's rhythm feels a little erratic. And everything takes place on a three-level set full of props and furniture. Tracy Letts spends several paragraphs describing the set at the beginning of the published script--I thought playwrights had stopped doing that!

It's funny that, for a young playwright like me, the old-fashioned dramatic construction of August: Osage County can seem revelatory. But no playwriting book, no writing teacher, no artistic director, these days, is going to teach you how to write a three-act kitchen-sink melodrama...so I find it inspiring that Tracy Letts figured out how to write one on his own, probably from studying the great playwrights of the past. And yes, August: Osage County is a melodrama--but it's extraordinarily effective. How nice to laugh and gasp along with the rest of the audience--and not just once or twice, but throughout!

But don't get me wrong: even though August: Osage County has been compared to Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, that doesn't give you a proper idea of its tone. Neither O'Neill nor Williams are funny writers--the former is grandiose and self-serious, the latter an earnest poet. The tone, if not the subject matter, of August: Osage County instead is more like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: mordantly funny but deeply harrowing. At the end of Act One, Barbara says to Jean, "Thank God we can't tell the future, or we'd never get out of bed. Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just...survive. Outlive me, please." A bleak sentiment, though Morton's delivery of the line makes you chuckle...and the characters still have two acts to go, two acts further to fall.

Act Two is the centerpiece, the high point...just terrific writing. It's all one scene, taking up 40 pages in the published script, and ending with 11 of the 13 actors onstage eating dinner (see what I mean about old-fashioned construction?). It begins with Violet popping pills, so she's like a ticking time bomb, waiting for them to take effect. And boy howdy (as my Okie friends would say), they do. By the end of the act, Violet is attacking each of her family members where it hurts the most--my God, I love "disastrous dinner party" scenes, and this one is an instant classic.

The third act begins more calmly, with the three sisters chatting--another lovely choice, since they have not had a scene to themselves before this. I bet this selection will become popular in acting classes, which always need great female-only scenes.

Everybody is going to take something different from August: Osage County, and for me, it was the commentary on women and aging. The three sisters are all in their 40s and feeling the effects of the end of youth. The men, in subtle and overt ways, suggest that they'd rather be with younger women. Violet encourages Ivy to make more of her looks, while constantly telling her that women get less sexy as they age. The play seems to ask "If society values women only when they're young and beautiful, what options do older women have?" Perhaps this helps explain the Weston women's frustration and dysfunction.

So, to answer my own question from last August: yes, this play does say something, and Letts' characters are more than the sum of their secrets and faults. Though not clever in a smart-aleck way, the play is subtly crafty--I realized the brilliance of the T.S. Eliot references as I left the theater. If you've seen the play and are hungry to read discussion on it, I recommend the New York Times' "Reading Room" blog, which did a series of posts on this "modern classic," with the input of Frank Rich and Marsha Norman, among others. A big new American family drama, intelligently discussed by so many eager people--why did we think that this was a thing of the past? And how can we make it happen more often?

August: Clackamas County

I've got two more weeks before I go back to school, the crickets are chirping outside my window as though counting down to the end of summer, and this post is titled in tribute to a new play, August: Osage County, which seems to be creating quite a furor in Chicago.

I mean, Charles Isherwood even raved about it--a rare occurrence! And I am completely intrigued. First of all, by the sheer size--13 actors, 3 acts, 3 hours 20 minutes--a canvas that hardly any American playwright uses anymore. How many plays have had 13 cast members recently? The Kentucky Cycle? Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play? I'm looking forward to the complexity of human relationships afforded by having more than 5 or 7 cast members.

Second, I'm curious whether and how playwright Tracy Letts has done something original with his subject matter. Can a play that incorporates "drug abuse, alcoholism, adultery, pedophilia, emotional and physical abuse, and special bonus horror: incest!" rise above the shock value of those elements, escape the trappings of cheap melodrama and soap opera, and actually say something? Isherwood calls it "more a potboiler than a heart-scouring tragedy," and compares it to Martin McDonagh's style of ultra-violent ultra-black comedy...but I'm a fan of that. I'm actually glad that Isherwood says it is "ferociously enjoyable," rather than an entirely serious and melodramatic consideration of Important Issues.

As Isherwood's review proves, the classic American plays have always been about families--larger-than-life families. And there haven't been many larger-than-life characters on the American stage recently, I feel. Rabbit Hole is about a family, but they're everyday, relatable people going through a crisis--not dramatic personalities in their own right. The makeshift family of Angels in America are some of the last American stage characters that have become iconic figures. And I never get urges to write plays about families--perhaps because I'm an only child. Does this mean I'll have a harder time creating iconic characters or dramatic situations? (Aristotle would have you believe that the only possible plays are about families!) So I'm excited to see or read this dysfunctional-family drama, and meet what may be the newest additions to the list of iconic American characters.