Chip off the old block

We went to see Spencer in All My Sons on Tuesday. Talk about proud parents. He really did a great job. He has some of the only laughs in that very serious show, and his timing and delivery were spot on. Gosh I was proud!

The show was terrific. Very strong acting all around. It's an interesting part for Will Lyman, who has such an innate sophistication that at first he seems a funny choice for rough old Joe, but he is such a fine actor that it really didn't matter. I found him delightful and moving and utterly convincing.

And Karen MacDonald? Off the charts! She has this one moment, when she suddenly assails Joe saying something like "Don't you say a word" that is one of the most powerfully filled moments I've ever seen on stage. Her character's whole life is in the line, and I almost felt it physically knock me back in my seat. I was stunned. Such awful depth and power. It reminded me of her extraordinary Mother Courage, another landmark in her magnificent career. Yep, she good.

So, when it sweeps the Nortons, I will for once say "well deserved". It's really a special evening. I only wish it had been in a smaller space - I did sometimes feel the intimacy of the stage life, and the immediacy of what was happening, blunted by size and distance. I could see how good it was, but I couldn't feel it as powerfully as I knew I could if I were right in there with them. But there's nothing they can do about that. And the set was beautiful. I loved the huge cyc, and the use of film, and the presence of the indoor space that you couldn't see but could really feel.

All in all, very worthwhile. The whole show was almost as good as my son :)

War

So I've been trying for the last few months to understand why there is so much incivility and craziness in our civil discourse recently. Two people in the cast confirmed that Brown supporters had set fire to neighbor's Coakley signs and replaced them with Brown signs. I mean, what is that? Why so much hysteria, so much hate and fear mongering, so little actual conversation.

A day or so ago, somebody made reference to the familiar parallels between the U.S. and Rome in it's final days. It's an old song, but a very accurate one, and it suddenly occurred to me that this was what is was all about. Rome was a war state - perpetually at war for more than a two centuries. And now we are pure and simple a war state, too. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the so called war on terror. And this war-mentality has permeated every piece of civic life. Nothing can be a conversation, a dialogue, a process. Nope, everything is a war and the people on the other side are the enemy, even if they are fellow Americans. In fact, that's worse because they are traitors to whatever the true principles of America we decide are important.

I have to say that I think part of the problem with what the Democrats have been doing is that they are not good at war. The left-centrists have been trying to work with the right in the old-fashioned art of compromise, and the right is not interested. Nor is the left who want Obama to be a warrior for liberal policies. Now maybe that is what he should have done - said "Mandate! full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!" The whole compromise thing is certainly not working because nobody wants to compromise - they want to destroy the enemy.

But do we really have to be at war with everything? Is that really the American way?

People Suck

If I have learned one thing over the last two years, it is that people suck. I spent my whole life believing that they are essentially good, and bigger than their tiny lives, but the fact of the matter is that people are small, petty, fearful, easily swayed, impatient, intolerant, unimaginative and generally undeserving of this beautiful planet.

Sigh...

Another Opening another show

Tonight's opening night of Indulgences at New Rep. It's been a good process - great cast, great people over at New Rep - such a different vibe over there from what I've been used to.

I was pretty nervous about how people would take the play - especially the New Rep audiences. It's a strange play, no doubt about it, and I wasn't sure at all if people would go on the ride. It's got some really great stuff in it, though. I particularly love the character Joel Colodner plays (brilliantly) - he has these really fascinating ruminations on identity that are magical, funny and really thought provoking.

So far, people seem to be going along for the ride. The old ladies at the Sunday show were surprisingly into it, and if they like it, things look good.

Tonight should be fun - and then we're off.

Furthermore

Here's the thing. First of all, I really do mean it when I saw that I don't mind Garvey's endless criticism of me and my work. He is allowed to hate it. But here's what bothers me about it. It's the unspoken assumption that the people who are making this "tripe" are somehow some kind of fat cats who are just interested in selling pap to the masses and have neither integrity nor understanding. Garvey's cynicism is projected onto the objects of his criticism. It never seems to occur to him that dozens and dozens of people are working incredibly hard for weeks, many hours a day, for very little pay, not to be praised and extolled - because, let's face it, even the great reviews in a town like this don't really add up to much - but to make something that expresses their relationship to a story, in the hopes that people will be moved, entertained, and provoked by it. And if people are moved, entertained and excited, maybe that's actually a good thing, even if it doesn't fit into a certain reviewers presumptions about what a play is supposed to be about.

Rather than constantly saying, "this work is a transcendent work, and look how vile these people are to expect us to be excited by their trivial, trashy, trendy tripe - and yes, see, people are fooled, but isn't that just the worst? - maybe say, "people are moved, entertained and seem to enjoy this stuff, maybe they've tapped into a useful piece of this story." Because no production is going to encapsulate all the glory that exists in our minds when we imagine a play we love. But it's actually going to be in the world, and we're actually going to share it together, which is what the damn things were written for in the first place.

DeWitt he ain't

Can I just say that I love Tom Garvey? He is the ultimate example of the old adage, "Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't that either, become critics." He just makes me giggle. He clearly aspires to be Boston's answer to Addison DeWitt, the devilishly powerful critic from the Brilliant All About Eve but has neither the style nor grace nor "Witt" to achieve it. What you do get is as reliable as an old fart complaining about his Depends. He hates everything, ESPECIALLY the Actors' Shakespeare Project. It doesn't matter what they do. This is clearly what he believes the critics job to be. He goes to such lengths to let us know how much he knows about Shakespeare, going on and on and on expounding his narrowly dogmatic view of the "bard's greatness," and how ASP fails to achieve it.

And this, of course, is the problem. He is so enamored of his own deep understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare (and, it appears, drama in general), that he is completely unable to do the critic's job, which is to openmindedly examine the efforts of theaters to achieve their goals in putting on a particular play in a particular way. No doubt a good critic views a project through the prism of his own point of view - and Mr. Garvey certainly has a point of view - but if your only response to what other people are trying to do is to condemn it for not fitting within your point of view, then you are, as Mr. Garvey has so effectively done to himself, marginalizing yourself.

Here's his latest:

I must say, I kinda feel for the guy. How long has it been since he actually enjoyed a performance in a theatre, especially of the stuff he supposedly loves, that is, Shakespeare? And that's another thing, he is constantly ascribing the kind of cynicism that he is obviously burdened with to others. He can't imagine that anybody is actually looking for a dynamic and meaningful entrance into the physical experience of these plays (which, I must emphasize, is dramatically different from what we imagine them to be in our scholarly classes, which my friend seems to have taken a few too many of), but attributes everything to a cynical desire to be hip and trendy.

And then, there's the whining. That's where I begin to lose sympathy. "Well, Don Aucoin really liked it, but SIGH I just don't get it - once again I'm the prophet crying in the wilderness where everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, but I see that they have all drunk the Koolaid so let me just say that at least somebody has noticed that western civilization has gone down the toilet." If the people who are coming to the shows, including the hundreds of students and seniors, and just plain folk who have been scared and bored by Shakespeare their whole lives, are actually finding that they are excited and engaged by these EXPLORATIONS of the plays - and I write that in caps because that is all that any one production of any play can be - then maybe it's not they who are missing something. I'm just saying...

His Majesty

In case you can't make it out, that's Eddie Izzard on the jumbotrons, and that's me taking a picture of it while he is performing because we were there! Oh yeah! I got Kelli tickets for Christmas, and we went and howled and laughed, and wheezed and hyperventilated with 10000 other people. I haven't laughed so hard in I can't remember when. It was marvelous.

I mean, who else can do 15 minutes on the invasion of Italy by Hannibal, and how ridiculous the latin language is? How is that funny? In Mr. Izzard's hands, however, it is magic. That and the Raptor tipping his hat to everybody and growling (you had to be there) were a couple of my favorite moments.

He is such a genius at making the whole thing seem like a total improvisation. It's like you're at a really fun cocktail party with him, and he's just going off on this that and the other, except there's 10000 other people howling along with you. That's a sound I hadn't heard before.

Of course, given my current state of black cynicism, it did make me wonder about this whole theatre thing again. What it is, why we bother, when this is so much more satisfying in so many ways. However, we soldier on...

In my dreams

Hello again. Been a while.

So, I don't know if it's because I've just finished directing A Midsummer Night's Dream, but over the past few nights, my dreams have been incredibly interesting and vivid. I almost wrote down the one I had the night before last, and I wish I had, because it was cool, but now I can't remember it at all.

But I do remember some of the one I had last night, and it was both beautiful and profound.

The protagonist was a rather mousy, twenty-ish girl with short hair - never seen her before - who was my alter-ego in the dream, I guess - and a genius. She was also something of a paranoic, and had this incredibly complicated system whereby she would unlock various things of hers with a kind of a machine into which she would insert a certain number of one dollar bills - like a handheld atm in reverse. What she was actually doing I don't remember.

The significant event in the dream was that the sky - a beautiful, foggy, cloudy grey, was slowly descending on the earth. It got lower and lower during the course of the dream, until all the people were lying facedown on the ground, waiting for the sky to crush them flat. This was the conviction of all the people in this world: that space was being flattened, so that when the sky touched the earth there would be no more room for anybody, and we would all be squashed into oblivion.

But my mousy avatar didn't believe this - she did some strange thing with her dollar bills, and somehow, as the sky finally touched the earth she stood up into this strange new world - which was a foggy nothingness. All the other people were not annihilated either, but were transformed into strange arachnid creatures that scuttled away into the mist.

The strangest thing about this new place was that, in spite of the fact that it was formless, featureless, and completely grey and obscured, it was full of the hope of new possibility and life. It was so wonderful not to have been destroyed by the flattening of the universe, that this non-place was beautiful, magical, and full of promise. Gee, I wonder what that means?