Whatever Happened to Playgoer?

Forgive me Blogger, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last post.

Actually I feel compelled to finally add something since the sight of that random April 2013 entry on the home page just made this seem like Playgoer suddenly vaporized without wrapping things up. (Dead Blog Pinging?) So here's an attempt...

For the last two years I've been teaching full time, so that has been my main focus. But I have still published the occasional article or essay. Such as...

Two book reviews for American Theatre magazine of major new publications on that iconic team of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. First, the new collection of Kazan letters (hilarious), and, second, the new John Lahr Tennessee Williams biography (massively depressing).

Also, the new augustly titled Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies includes my essay on Sondheim's last musical (to date, that is), Road Show--yes, a.k.a Bounce, a.k.a. Wise Guys, a.k.a. never-made-it-to-Broadway and thus forgotten. But I grew quite fond of this dark chamber musical in the course of writing my chapter, so I recommend a second look at the show, if not a first!

Hmmm, so what else has been going on.... Oh yeah, I had a baby.  Or my wife did. So, yeah, it's been that kind of two-year gap.

It would be nice one day to resume blogging. Then again, I hear blogging is dead. (So 2006!) So we'll see.

(Meanwhile, miraculously, theatre is still alive.)

The Playgoer archive is here to stay, unless Google shuts me down for inactivity. So hopefully people will still happen upon old rants and comment-wars from the past. Ah, good times....

Funny how when I started Playgoer in May, 2005, I figured I was just typing into a void. And now, ten years later, I'm pretty sure I am once again. But, hey, if you're out there, go ahead and comment! Especially if you've got any advice on what to do with this enterprise. Or if you've got a writing gig for me! (Did I mention I have a child to support now?)

Peace be upon you all, and happy playgoing!

Happy 100th, Tennessee

While I've been away I did some writing for American Theatre's special feature marking the Tennessee Williams centennial. You'll have to buy the print mag to read my overview of some recent Williams-related publications, but online you can learn a lot about the lesser-known  oeuvre from Lonnie Firestone, Eileen Blumenthal, and Thomas Keith.

Money quote from Keith:

It can be jaw-dropping to fully grasp how low Williams's reputation had fallen by the time of his death in 1983. The slide began in 1963, when the Broadway production of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore altered the view that a Williams play was necessarily a commercial property....Although Arthur Miller and Edward Albee experienced similar periods of rejection, neither encountered the contempt that Williams did. Each of them lived long enough to become elder statesmen of the American theatre. Williams died at the nadir of his career, and the critical chill continued post-mortem. His plays from the 1960s and 1970s were mostly forgotten or avoided, and the unproduced material seemed to be solely the concern of scholars.

So here's to you, Thomas Lanier Williams.

Have another round on us...

"Emperor Jones": Stage vs Screen

I have an article in the annual Eugene O'Neill Review about the 1933 film adaptation of The Emperor Jones starring Paul Robeson. Basically I answer the question many have asked upon watching the film-- why is it so different than the play?

With live productions relatively infrequent, it is chiefly in the form of its 1933 film adaptation that The Emperor Jones is seen today, especially now that it has recently been restored by the Library of Congress and reissued on DVD in 2003. But far from just a photographed play, the movie Jones is in large part its own original drama, the fruit of a totally separate collaboration between director Dudley Murphy and screenwriter DuBose Heyward.  Faced with the challenge of expanding O’Neill’s fifty-page one-act play into a feature-length film, Murphy and Heyward went far beyond the usual “opening up” of Broadway-to-Hollywood “adaptations” and created an original “backstory” of their own for the hero Brutus Jones that, while built upon elements hinted at by O’Neill, ultimately transforms his story significantly.  (It also makes up more than half the film’s running time.)  While the character of O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones” is introduced to us as a larger-than-life tyrant from the start, Murphy and Heyward’s “Brutus” is a common man, faced with the temptations of everyday life.  And while the 1920 play is a modernist allegorical fable, marked by Primitivist Negro stereotypes, the film aims instead for a more realistic depiction of the lives of everyday African Americans, as opposed to the “ignorant bush niggers” of the play.

For those of you who have only seen cheap VHS "public domain" copies, do take note of that bit about the Library of Congress restoration. Emperor Jones was a film badly in need of restoration since its original length of 80 minutes was almost immediately cut down upon release (by censors) to 72 minutes. A complete restoration may never be possible, but the new Criterion DVD has restored over three minutes of previously lost material, including several uses of the word "nigger." Some of the more subversive moments seem to be forever lost--such as O'Neill's famous "slaveship" sequence and a shot of Robeson physically clobbering a prison guard.

Ultimately, my point in the essay is to argue for the significance of the film as a very different telling of the story from O'Neill's but an equally valid one--and one that I believe overcomes some of the play's problems of race.

"Paradise" Regained

I have an article in this month's American Theatre magazine (March 2010) about new directorial approaches to the work of Clifford Odets.  No link, unfortunately, but the issue is on newsstands now, and available online via various academic databases, like Proquest.  Meanwhile, here's the opening:

Can Clifford Odets be cool again? He certainly was in the 1930s. Odets was only 28 years old when his Waiting for Lefty became an overnight sensation, and his most ardent followers at the time were in the same age bracket. For fellow scribe William Gibson, he was "the playwright most of my generation wanted to be." And director Harold Clurman considered Lefty's opening night "the birth cry of the '30s," when "our youth had found its voice."

Though he's seldom been out of production, Odets's critical and popular fortunes have varied wildly since that bright beginning. His plays' complex leftist politics - always intertwined with the personal and the sexual - fell out of favor in the conservative 1950s. And when he reluctantly cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee to avoid being blacklisted - Odets depended on his screenwriting to raise two children as a single parent - he was shunned by many who once worshipped him.

Then, as fate would have it, when his politics at last came back into favor, after his death in 1963, it was his realist dramaturgy - and the association of his work with so-called Method acting, a legacy of the Group Theatre for whom he wrote - that made him seem passé. Reviewing a 1984 revival of Odets's Awake and Sing! in the New York Times, Frank Rich faulted the characters for lack of "psychological depth" and concluded that while the play "endures as a social document, its status as a stageworthy play has declined." A decade later Peter Marks, in the same paper, said of Waiting for Lefty. "Lacking the economic disaster and political context that once validated it.. .the play now is oddly airless."

In the eyes of many resident theatres around the country today, though, that economic disaster, and its attendant context, may now have arrived again. The 2009-10 season boasts no fewer than nine Odets revivals at TCG member theatres. And the new century has produced a new generation of directors who came of age post-cold war and post-Actors Studio, and who accordingly might be equipped to approach Odets without the cultural baggage that has weighted his work in years past. In their hands the archetypical playwright of the Great Depression may still have something to teach us about our own Great Recession.

In addition to emphasizing the timeliness of Odets's work I wanted to focus on how a new generation of directors are embracing this writer, normally considered an uber-naturalist, in more experimental ways.

My starting point is Bartlett Sher's Awake and Sing, produced by Lincoln Center on Broadway to mark the playwright's centennial in 2006, which won new accolades for the play including a Tony for Best Revival.  But aside from a landmark tribute, Sher's expressive use of scenery and insistence on this as a poetic play dared us to completely reconsider Odets's legacy and significance for a new audience--one not mired in either Group Theatre/Actors Studio nostalgia or 1950s communist witchhunt politics (during which he compromised himself by cooperating as a "friendly witness").

I also noticed another director taking on Odets in 2006--Daniel Fish, whose Rocket to the Moon I saw at Long Wharf.  Like Sher's production, it combined rigorous naturalistic acting and expressive stagecraft to force us to see the play in a new way.  As I describe in the article, it involved a revolving set that let us peer into the proceedings of this notably claustrophobic and intimate play (set in a Depression-era dentist's office) through windows and walls.  Kind of an expressionist naturalism, if you can imagine such a thing.

So when I heard Fish was taking on perhaps the biggest challenge of the Odets canon, the rarely revived Paradise Lost (a box office failure originally), I knew that, a) I had to see it, and b) I wanted to write about it.

The article went to press long before the production went up, so I was writing based on Fish's plans for it without having seen it.  But now that I've been up to Boston to see it at ART, I can gladly report that it is quite a momentous event in this writer's tormented afterlife, and something well worth seeing before it closes this Saturday (March 16).

Paradise Lost resembles Awake and Sing in some obvious ways--a three-act "living room" family drama about struggling to survive in the Depression.  Except here, the family loses everything.  And, Paradise's Gordons, being more upper-bourgeoisie than the lumpen Bergers of Awake, fall from a greater height, as we watch their fortunes wither away over a few years as they and the country sink deeper and deeper into an economic wasteland.

So this is quite a "depressing" play in more ways than one, unlike Awake, which at least features an uplifting and optimistic ending.  When I asked Fish why he thinks this play gets produced much less, he said, "Look at the two titles!"  Indeed this painful meditation on loss--both spiritual and material--would be a tough sell on Broadway.  (It was even back in 1935, with the Group Theatre actors no less.)

In fact Fish could barely get any nonprofit theatres to bite either.  So ART and its new AD Diane Paulus deserve a lot of credit for investing confidence and real resources into a tough--really tough--but important and wonderful play.  Part of what is thrilling about watching Fish's Paradise is how BIG a production it is.  Our only chance of ever seeing this in New York I imagine would be in a scaled down Off-Off/ Mint Theatre-style version.  So to see it playing out on that big ART stage with all the tools at a modern director's disposal really fulfills what the play is capable of today.

Now as you can see from the photos, this is indeed a modern production.  An updating? Yes, but not in the text.  Fish and his team have simply placed Odets's characters in a tangibly contemporary environment--the better to remind us that "The Great Depression" was not some distinctly historical time, some sepia-toned snapshot from the annals of the "Greatest Generation."  It is what we are living through now.  Right now.  So rather than the suit-and-tie world of 1930s nostalgia, we get a recognizably middle class world of middle-America, 2010.

One shocking thing about this to Odets purists might be how "white" the world of the play becomes.  The Gordon family has always been considered by Odets scholars a barely deracinated Jewish family, one coming from a culture that talked in the writer's Yiddish-influenced cadences and whose story reflected specifically the legacy of "the immigrant experience."  Fish makes no gesture to this being a "Jewish play" at all, and as a result it plays out on a broader canvas. With Andrew Lieberman's expansive set of fragmented pre-fab suburban housing materials, the image recalls Sam Shepard more than Clifford Odets; and the play becomes more obviously about America (as in the suburban middle-class image we usually see in the media) and its deeply embedded capitalist framework, rather than just another period piece about our Jewish grandparents in New York.  You'll feel the shock of this approach right away when you walk into the theatre and a loud and overblown Western shootout is playing on the huge upstage projection screen, as the "new" Gordons sit around the dinner table watching in numbed silence.

The extensive use of video projection is another startlingly contemporary aspect of the production.  And one apparently the Boston Globe critic couldn't abide--complaining she didn't know where to look as if she'd never seen this before on stage.  Most often this was used to enlarge the action already happening on stage (close-ups of actors talking in corners, e.g.)  and so I also don't understand her complaint that the video didn't have anything to do with the play.  I also don't understand how one can review this play and not discuss the parallels between 1930s America and today; she treats the modern touches as simply random and unexplainable, thus declining to spell out the underlying concept, good or bad.  But there you go.  The Boston Phoenix's Carolyn Clay at least seemed more attuned to the production's sensibility.

Anyway, as the opening mythical Western clip announces, what unfolds on stage is a ruthless dismantling of The American Dream, piece by piece.  The play will end on a practically bare stage, the Gordons dispossessed and cast out into a strange world.  Their business and their house is gone, and their children (in whom all families stake their future) have in various ways been picked off--Mother Courage-like--one by one.

The clash of visual anachronisms and the 1935 text certainly does raise eyebrows throughout.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  Having the play open with the daughter Pearl talking to her boyfriend not alone on the hallway telephone, but at the dinner table on her cell phone makes her an instantly recognizable teenager from today, immediately demystifying the play's period trappings.  On the other hand, the intermittent lines about Hitler and the future prospects of "television" just don't yield dividends to offset their jarringness (and probably would have been better off being cut, so rarely do they occur).  But overall, the risk pays off by how surprisingly easily this plays as a contemporary play.  It is, after all, about people living through financial freefall and the prospect of neverending war.  The anachronisms just remind us Fish is not trying to "fool" us into believing it wasn't written in 1935 and the dialogue we end up having with it across time is fascinating. 

And as a contemporary play, Paradise Lost is a burst of fresh air, since so few plays today (especially "family plays") are so infused at every turn with the effect of the economy on our daily lives.  (It makes  new plays today that claim to be about class--like Becky Shaw--seem so tame by comparison.)  As the Gordons' home and dreams are gradually, painfully dismantled bit by bit in front of our eyes, we don't see them as mere passive victims of greater forces--they are victims of their own obliviousness to them.  One son, a former Olympic athlete, now can't get a job to support his wife and so turns to petty crime; the father's business partner invites an arsonist over to seriously consider burning the store down to collect on the insurance.  Both drastic measures result in part from an earlier baseless optimism in the American Dream, in the system working, always working.

While Odets calls for the last act to be played Cherry Orchard-style in the house's now-empty living room, Fish offers another equally haunting tableau all too common today: the family cast out to its own front lawn, with everything they own in a U-Haul.  In a nicely sardonic touch, costume designer Kaye Voyce dresses various characters in leftover T-shirts bearing logos from recent political/financial disasters: AIG, Enron, and the Kerry/Edwards campaign. (They're good liberals, these Gordons.  And all the more clueless for it.)

The nearly three-hours of Fish's Paradise Lost is not a walk in the park.  But its tough-goingness is appropriate in making us feel the Gordons' dreadful progress from one economic disaster to the next.  Employing much in the way of alienation effects and long painful silence, it reminded me of another epic deconstruction of capitalism I saw at ART years ago: Robert Woodruff's chilling staging of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities.  But here we have Odets's more emotionally expressive language and characters to counterbalance the coldness; Odets thus plays very well in such epic staging.

This is helped by a wonderful cast that pours its collective heart into every impulse.  I particularly liked Michael Rudko as the odd character Pike--a rabble-rousing handyman who forms part of the eccentric extended family of neighbors and hangers-on in the Gordon household.  Outfitted in a old baseball cap, down vest, with a big white Grizzly Adams beard, Rudko's Pike may look nothing like what Odets had in mind--but he certainly looks like the kind of heartland radical you see today on Democracy Now.  His impassioned arias denouncing "the war to end all wars" that killed his son requires no "translation" to apply today; Rudko's at times direct address to the audience shames us, as he says, "Who are we if we remain silent while they make the next war--who then are we with our silence? Accomplices, Citizen!"

Also affecting were longtime ART actor Thomas Derrah as the ineffectual neighbor Gus--who I always considered a kind of boring spineless distraction until I saw Derrah walk out in old biker-leather gear and play him as just a good ol' boy with a heart.  (Gus is after all a motorcycle enthusiast in the text.)  Fish's expansive staging--where characters continually wander on and off stage or otherwise lurk in corners--also actually enhances certain roles that normally would get short shrift in performance.  Therese Plaehn's unsentimental Pearl gets to play away at her piano not offstage but visibly up on the set's higher levels, buried in her headphones and her teenage angst.  (No ingenue, she.)  And by allowing Adrianne Krstansky's Mrs. Katz to actually make an impression on the audience by letting us see her for more than the few walk-on's Odets specifies, pays off in her big Act II explosion, revealing the lies and desperation behind her marriage, the family business, and for that matter all middle class families when the bountiful riches run out.

Again, Paradise Lost closes this Saturday and I strongly recommend it.  To the adventurous, that is.  I would even acknowledge that not knowing the play (and most don't) could be a hindrance.  Fish's staging and the actors' delineations strike me as clear enough for a newcomer to the text, but there are some experimental "doublings" and other effects that might obscure certain plot points and character identities.  (Partly to scale back on the immense casting requirements of the play--24 characters in all--in one scene three shopworker characters are represented by "real" people onscreen, dubbbed over, the results of which are admittedly mixed.)  That said, even merely reading a synopsis of the play--if not the whole script--can only enhance one's appreciation here.  I consider myself very much an Odets fan and could not have liked this staging as much as I did if I didn't feel it stayed true to both the spirit and the letter of the text.

In the American Theatre article I hope not to draw some facile binary distinction between realism and expressionism, naturalist and experimental theatre.  Odets saw himself, in fact, as a kind of hybrid dramatist--striving, particularly in this play, for a poetic realism and struggling against the confines of the literal realism more common on the Broadway of his day in favor of a more expressive emotional truth.  (He thus embodies and anticipates the spirits of both Miller and Williams at once.)  So I have a hunch Clifford would like how Fish and his actors have let their imaginations work on his disenchanted "paradise" and let it awake and sing again for Americans in 2010.

(PS. One more note about the article.  Contrary to what it states, I personally do NOT deem Odets's last play The Flowering Peach a "slight biblical comedy" at all.  That was an editorial insertion, one I do not agree with.  I'm not saying it's a great play--but definitely a serious and a moving one.  So, caveat lector, as they say.)

Working Theatre Company

Something I worked on over "the break"--a profile of an interesting little Off Broadway outfit, the Working Theatre, for (of all things) the Clarion, the official publication of the Professional Staff Congress ("AFT Local 2334"). So expect some labor lingo.

While I've Been Gone...

I blog before you now a married man and an bonafide PhD "candidate." So, now that those milestones have passed, on with the blogging!

First, let me publicly and profusely thank all my fearless (and peerless) guest bloggers since August: Abigail Katz, Chris Mills, Brook Stowe, Steven Leigh Morris, and the good Dr. Cashmere. It was a pleasure to log onto the site as merely an observer and read so many different voices for a change. So thanks to all for keeping the conversation(s) going, on so many different fronts.

Now that I've returned, let me get the important business out of the way. Some plugs!

While my blogging life may have been dormant these past eight weeks, haply it's been a good period for me on other publishing fronts, seeing some long-gestating projects come to fruition.


-I'm proud to make my debut in the "Best Plays" series with an essay surveying the 2006-2007 Off-Off scene. So check it out if you want to revisit such golden oldies as Hellhouse, God's Ear, breakthrough work by Young Jean Lee and Thomas Bradshaw, the rise and fall of companies such as EST, Jean Cocteau Rep, and much, much, so much more. As it has since, oh, 1920, Best Plays also offers comprehensive stats on the season, production lists, and, in this edition, insightful essays on the actual best-play selections, including: David Cote on Blackbird; Michael Feingold on Spring Awakening; Charles Isherwood on Dying City; Charles McNulty on Frost/Nixon; and Alisa Solomon on Passing Strange.

(Much thanks to editor Jeffrey Eric Jenkins for the gig, and for asking me back for the next volume, wherein I'll be profiling Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate. So if you have any good resources on Foote or the play, please do send them my way!)

-Best Plays is a great buy at just $20-$40 on Amazon. I wish I could say that about my other recent hardbound publication, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 341: 20th Century American Dramatists. But, hey, for a 421-page reference book I say at $250 it's a steal! Such is academic publishing--which also accounts for how such a book could take a decade to produce! (I've been involved only for the last seven years.)

Basically it's an encyclopedic collection of lengthy essays I edited profiling various modern US playwrights: including biggies like Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson; relatively overlooked icons like Marie Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy; historically though seldom revived writers like Theodore Ward and Mae West (yes, that Mae West); and more recent contemporaries like Anna Deavere Smith, John Patrick Shanley, Eric Bogosian, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Charles Busch. I myself wrote the introduction and contributed a big fat piece on Clifford Odets, which I hope is the most comprehensive succinct narrative of his life and work you can get in one sitting.

I forgive you if you'd rather spend the two-fitty on a "premium" seat to 13, but if you're on a campus that has a library, perhaps you'd be so kind as to request its reference section order a copy. (After all, that's who it's really for.)

-A little while ago I got to interview Civillians AD Steve Cosson for a profile in Stage-Directions magazine, which came out in September. This was during their "Paris Commune" at the Public, which I got to sit in on an early rehearsal for. The performance itself--more or less a workshop in the Public's Lab series--was very, very promising, so I hope someone has the guts to stage it for real. The piece descrives both that piece and their "Beautiful City" which finally comes to NYC at the Vineyard in January. (Meanwhile, guest-blogger Steven reviewed the LA production while I was away.)

For a blogger used to the instant gratification of the internet tubes, waiting for all that dead tree material to finally come out sure was a drag! But, hey, now it's for the ages, I guess.

Nice to "see" you again, readers. Back to regular blogging soon....

Mike Leigh

My preview of Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years (now in previews at the New Group) is in this week's Time Out.

I did a lot of research for the piece, most of which, of course, couldn't fit into 750 words. So here's some rambling summing up of some things I found interesting but couldn't fit in.

I must say it was a rush to talk to the man (over the phone, alas), having been a devoted fan of his films since 1988's High Hopes--which it turns out was his first US release. Through the New Group's previous four stagings of his work (starting with 1995's Ecstasy, which I saw) we in New York have been able to discover some of his theatre oeuvre, as well. All the plays the New Group has done before this (Ecstasy, Goose Pimples, Smelling a Rat, and Abigail's Party) all date from his residence at London's Hampstead Theatre from the late 70s to late 80s. But he actually has been creating plays since 1965 and basically kept at it until the international success of his early feature films (especially Naked and Secrets and Lies) took over by the early 90s. Two Thousand Years, then, is his first new work for the theatre since then. It was commissioned by the National Theatre back in 2001. Nicholas Hytner, who had just taken over there, sought Leigh out and coaxed him out of theatrical retirement.

Of course, "commission" is a funny word to use in this case. Especially given the way Leigh works. Hytner knew full well he was never going to see a script in advance. And because of Leigh's film schedule (Vera Drake kind of got in the way) he did not even commit himself until 2005. But even when he did, he insisted on a total news blackout about his development process and even an off-site rehearsal location to work with his actors in total isolation from the National. My understanding is that not even Hytner had a clue what the play was going to be like before seeing a dress rehearsal, or even 1st preview.

Leigh is famously cagey with journalists about his process--which he told me, not without a chuckle, is a "trade secret." And he is as secretive with every project really, whether stage or film. But as good as it may be for publicity--the mystery of Two Thousand Years stirred up
the London press pretty good--it's also honestly a necessity given neither he nor his actors know what the script will end up being about for a very long time.

From my research and talking to him, I gather it's something like this: Leigh does begin with some sense of a theme, historical period, or specific event. (Obviously films like the Gilbert & Sullivan docudrama Topsy-Turvy and the WWII-era Vera Drake didn't just materialize out of nothing.) He casts actors not so much for specific roles, but for their temperamental openness to his methods, their facility with improvisation, and what they might personally bring to the project.

With Two Thousand Years, for instance, he told (finally) the London press he had set out to something about his Jewish background, but wanted to engage modern London Jews with each other arguing about the world. He then deliberately set out to only cast Jewish actors. ("I auditioned or at least considered every Jewish actor in London," he told me.) His bluntness about this struck me as unusual, by the way. Hard to imagine someone saying that here. (Yet he did instruct New Group director Scott Elliott to do the same.) For Leigh, the play had to come from a group effort of Jewish people reflecting upon themselves and their families.

Including his own--Leigh himself did a teenage pilgrimage to a kibbutz with the Habonim movement referenced in the play, and his parents had previously met under such circumstances a generation earlier. Talking of the play, he frequently discusses his own "Zionist Socialist" background, even though he seems to have been brought up--in what was a large Jewish community in Manchester--rather secularly. (Emphasis on the Socialist more than the Zionist, perhaps?) This secular, political experience of Judaism (or Jewishness) is exactly what the play is about, though--and the conflicts it comes into both against pious faith and political realities in contemporary Israel.

But back to his casting process...Leigh also mentioned that a separate "secret agenda" of the project was to reclaim Jewish roles for Jewish actors. At least in England, where he believes there is far too much "blacking up" of gentiles in major Jewish roles. He has even served on a committee of British Equity formed to represent the interests of black, asian, and Jewish actors
in not being passed over for roles matching their race or ethnicity.

Needless to say, such essentialist insistence on "authenticity" might be more controversial in the cultural climate here today. (Even David Henry Hwang questions it in his Yellow Face, which dissects the controversy that arguably, with his help, started the debate: the Miss Saigon affair.) I'll let others comment on that for now. But I was definitely struck by how adamantly Leigh insisted on this ideal for this play. In much the way August Wilson insisted on black directors for his work.

However, if we consider the "devised" element in Leigh's work, and the collaborative , ensemble-based creative effort, then his a different stance than merely "identity politics." After all, if you decided to gather Jewish actors in a room to tell their stories and then staged it as a "documentary" (or as the English say, "verbatim") play, then few would question the practice.

Make no mistake, though, Leigh's plays and films eventually are scripted, and scripted by Leigh himself. He says he does not "write" in a traditional lone-man-at-a-desk way. But rather he selects, shapes, and structures from what emerges in the rehearsal improvisations. There is never any improvisation on stage before an audience or in front of the camera. By that time everything has been "set."

Leigh spent four months "rehearsing" Two Thousand Years this way. Typically, the beginning of this--according to other accounts--consists of extended one-on-one discussions with each actor, exploring themselves and people they know, searching for interesting hooks for a character. The actor then goes out and researches on his or her own extensively before coming back into the room to work with the others. "Research" is a big deal to Leigh, whatever the project, and for Two Thousand Years he designated an assistant, a young Israeli filmmaker,
a resource for all things Israel. (One of the play's characters is Israeli.)

When actors begin improv-ing together, they may know their characters, but there's still no settled plot. Leigh may develop a storyline with some actors but not tell others. In Vera Drake for example, he was careful to keep all information about Vera's illegal abortionist work secret from those playing her family until they first improvised the scene when police come to arrest her: the points was to create the dramatic reaction of her family to the shock in as emotionally authentic a way as possible. (Again what you see on film is not the improv itself, but sort of a reenactment of it, presumably.)

So you can see why he insists on secrecy all around the project and to the press, if he's even keeping secrets on set. In London, this pissed off the press to no end on Two Thousand Years. The National was patient, and settled for advertising the play in their season brochure as merely "A New Play by Mike Leigh." The run sold out in advance anyway. The mere release of a poster--bearing the enigmatic image of a palm tree amidst sand--set off fevered speculation. "It could be about the Iraq war," someone in the Guardian wrote. "It could be about a desert island, or it could even be about coconuts."

When the play was finally unveiled, most were pleased with what they found. Having read the script, I don't want to "review" the play before seeing it at the New Group, but I will say I found it very engaging and very like a Mike Leigh film--except more contained, in its unit set and tight nuclear family. It's also relatively plotless and rather Shavian in its self-conscious staging of debate. But given the debate is about the issues facing Jews today (assimilation vs tradition, belief vs modernity, Israel right-or-wrong vs leftist solidarity with Palestinians) it's one automatically engaging. And since it's all really about how we all live as civilized people in a world where terrorism has ratcheted up the challenges to freedom and tolerance, then I imagine it should be of interest to non-jews, too.

One last thought about Mike Leigh as a theatre artist: I learned he's a major one in Britain, actually. Abigail's Party (I believe never done in the US until the New Group did it here in 2005) is a bona fide modern classic in the UK, constantly revived, imitated, and quoted. (Leigh also filmed it in a 70s TV version, which he now dismisses as a crude video of the stage production.) One senses his heart has been in film all along, though, at least that's what he says about his youthful ambitions. He began doing theatre, he says, as a way to develop this technique which he started applying to filmmaking as early as 1971 with his first feature. Then followed a series of highly regarded television films over the next two decades, which were never released here, but constituted an important oeuvre of largely working class drama on their own. (Some of these early films are now finally becoming available here on DVD.)

But it's interesting that the whole Mike Leigh Process really did originate in the theatre, and back in 1965. And it's, I hope, inspirational for young theatre artists today to consider what it must have been like for him, at 22--dropped out of a more traditional stage acting training at RADA in favor of art school and film school stints--to just gather together a group of actor friends and create together a play over a period of months. Little did they know, actors and director alike, that this was the beginning of a process that would catapult its leader into a career of now over four decades, doing exactly the same thing, except usually on bigger scales. With the spare simplicity of Two Thousand Years, though, he pretty much returns to his roots.

Peter Stein

You may remember six weeks ago my amazement that the NY Times, in announcing the Greek National Theatre's Electra, didn't seem to know who director Peter Stein was. Well David Cote and I decided to make sure the rest of New York knew.


The perk for me was to get a half-hour with the man on the phone. Some highlights from that interview, a brief overview of his career and interests, and a preview of his Electra are contained this week's Time Out theatre feature.


I also caught the show last night, which was one of the most involving productions of a Greek tragedy I've ever seen live. Much credit goes to the stunning lead performance by Stefania Goulioti. Her Electra is young, hip, pissed off, and downright hot. Despite Stein's age and asethetcially conservative rep, this is still not your father's Greek Tragedy. In fact, now I'm worried he comes off as too conservative in the article. While there's no easily described "concept", we're not talking big stiffs walking around in shoulder-padded Star Trek robes. The visual minimalism allows for great freedom. And even just a touch of modernity--the brooding Electra and Orestes wear black hoodies and sweats, while everyone around them is in ethereal white. In this and many ways, Stein successfully evokes Hamlet throughout. But this time there are two vengeful children of a fallen father.


Now the fact that Electra, Clytemnestra, and all fifteen women of the chorus are magazine-cover gorgeous does betray an old European he-man's sensibility. (Not to mention the female nudity.) And I think theatregoers from the 60s and 70s will recognize some perhaps outmoded "experimental" aesthetics. But I found it completely fresh.


Because of Stein's legendary textual specificity, the language barrier is frustrating here. Spoken in modern Greek, the subtitles are hard to follow without missing the stage action. But if you know the play well at all, this won't be a problem.


Plenty of empty seats, I believe. And discounts aplenty on Theatermania, Playbill, etc.


So read the article, and go!

Showcase Showdown

My very first proper "feature" article is out today, in the Voice.

Subject: that ol' Equity Showcase code. You may have already been reading about it here, and here, and here, here, and assorted other blogs and chatrooms. And this article may admittedly seem nothing new to you if you have. But at 600-odd words, I hope it can at least serve as a primer of sorts to give the issue itself wider exposure and explain to more theatre loving folk the basics of what's going on.

So many issues didn't make it into the final cut--AEA members' concerns about health insurance, the role of fringe festivals, to name just a couple--and there are also some different proposed remedies than the ones I cite from ART/NY. But if you're really interested in getting into it, just follow those links above.

I also want to express gratitude here for all those actors, directors, producers, playwrights that put aside time to talk or email with me who didn't get metioned or quoted explicitly. (You know who you are. I'll preserve your anonymity.) All these conversations helped enormously in my understanding of the issue, even if the final edit may smooth over some of the complexities a bit.

I also would like to encourage lots of comments, corrections, challenges and general feedback to the article. Even better--please comment on VillageVoice.com! (Click on "Write a Comment" at the bottom of the screen.) It would be great if the editors there saw how strongly people felt both about this issue and just the presence of more theatre reportage in the paper, something I credit my arts editor Brian Parks with seeking out.

Finally, if you're wondering just what the Showcase code is? Well, happy reading.

NYTR "Corrie" Essay

This essay was published in the 2007 New York Theatre Review, edited by Brook Stowe. It was written in December, 2006 and is posted here for readers of Playgoer.

[Apologies for the pre-dated, 2004, time-stamp here, but I did so to file this longer post directly into the blog's archives. I am in fact posting this on August 7, 2007]

Copies of the complete NYTR--which includes this and other essays, as well as three complete scripts from acclaimed downtown plays--can be purchased at Amazon.

In Praise of Controversy:

What the “Corrie” Conflict Taught Us About Theatre in a Post 9/11 World

by Garrett Eisler

When My Name is Rachel Corrie ended its Off-Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theatre on December 17, 2006, a question was at last answered that had been hotly debated all year: can you stage a play in New York City that is critical of the Israeli government and live to tell about it? The answer – which should have been unsurprising – turned out to be, “yes.” While Corrie, when it finally opened, could hardly be called a resounding hit (it received mixed notices and reportedly middling box office after an initial surge of interest), it survived. It even outlasted its initially announced limited run by four weeks. This may ultimately have been less significant as a vindication of the real Rachel Corrie’s own advocacy than a repudiation of those who would back off such a play out of fear that if a theater exercised its right to free speech on an unpopular issue, the sky would fall.

Thus ended a bitter and at times confusing chapter in the troubled story of political theater in America. The announcement on February 28, 2006 by the New York Theatre Workshop that they would not be presenting Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s play, My Name is Rachel Corrie that March, as planned, raised many questions about many different aspects of our current theater culture, especially in our cherished world of non-profit institutions that we have assumed are our last bastion of free expression in an ever more conservative country and restrictive corporatized marketplace.

Now that Corrie has come and gone, we can reflect a little less passionately and defensively on what some of us were fighting about back in March and April. I myself take away two larger lessons.

One is that controversy can actually be good for the theater. More than one commentator at the time complained of “more light than heat” in the uproar. But that cliché in all its hollowness missed the point. People were excited to engage with important global issues in the theater. Yet such passion was counted as part of the problem.

Fear of either “light” or “heat” – fear of argument, of honest and open debate – was the culprit here all along. Why else would the NYTW cancel a play its Artistic Director James Nicola actually claimed to believe in? Playwright Tony Kushner put his finger on it with his comments to Philip Weiss in The Nation: “Never having gotten a clear answer about why Nicola put off the play, Kushner ascribes it to panic: Nicola didn't know what he was getting into, and only later became aware of how much opposition there was to Corrie, how much confusion the right has created around the facts. Nicola felt he was taking on ‘a really big, scary brawl and not a play.’”

I actually take the position, perhaps unpopular, that we need more “brawling” in the theater, not less. A brawl is at least a sign of life, as opposed to the “deadly theater” (to use Peter Brook’s still-apt phrase from forty years ago) we see all around us. When we study theater history, we measure the significance of theater to a given era by the intensity of the trouble it got into. Even the Astor Place riots of 1849 signaled a deep connection between audience and performer that today we consider enviable. Not that I think we need to suffer that episode’s scores of casualties to foster a similar engagement. But theater does have to live with both the nice and not-nice effects of that passion.

This is why out of all the things said by the New York Theatre Workshop, what offended me most was their seeming resentment that its decision attracted interest and comment from outside the theater world. In a statement posted on the NYTW website April 25, Nicola and his Managing Director Lynn Moffat declared, “we are disheartened that NYTW has been so badly misrepresented in the press, and criticized by others looking to further their own political or personal agendas.” They continued:

The censorship charge, though unfounded, ignited a fierce, media-driven “controversy” that was quickly fueled by political groups and others who rushed to judgment and criticized the workshop without knowing what had actually transpired. And because the play itself is framed by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the story attracted international attention from journalists and others writing about larger issues such as the Middle East crisis, freedom of speech, and the nature of political theater.

In other words, how dare people engaged with other issues care what is going on Off-Broadway! Personally, I thought we should only be so lucky in the theatre. Too bad it took a censorship charge to finally attract some political attention.

The hypocrisy of this statement, though, was immediately apparent when one realized that NYTW has openly admitted that the play’s postponement was due exactly to such “others” with “agenda”—namely, those opposing Corrie’s politics (identified in the initial Times article as “Jewish religious and community leaders”). Only those who supported Corrie– like Weiss in The Nation – were branded meddling interlopers. And when asked by the New York Observer’s John Heilpern whether he had spoken with Arab-American groups in addition to Jewish activists, Nicola admitted passively, "We haven't heard from anyone in that community, and I can't speculate as to their reactions."

Such head-in-the-sand insularity is what got the Workshop into this mess in the first place. What else explains the apparent fact that it couldn’t predict that a pro-Palestinian play would be controversial in New York City as soon as Alan Rickman pitched it? What else explains how the Workshop could be swayed more by random Google searches and nutty propaganda about Rachel Corrie fronting for Hamas than by more objective news accounts? What else explains why the Workshop claimed it needed an entire season to “prepare” a “context” for an Israel-Palestinian conflict that is in the papers every day?

My point is not to harass the NYTW in particular. The time is over for that. But it is worth asking ourselves if this behavior was symptomatic of an entire non-profit theater culture that is “out of touch” with the world, or at least stuck in a stifling cocoon of safeness. When Nicola told the New York Times that he realized “the fantasy that we could present the work of this writer simply as a work of art without appearing to take a position was just that, a fantasy,” the “fantasy” he’s really talking about is the delusion that one can present plays to a living audience as if there is no outside world. Or that you can just block out the parts too complex or volatile to leave to chance.

Has it become too selective a slice of the world we see on our stages now? When our theatres claim to be “political” are they really venturing any further than the limits of the Democratic Party Platform? Sadly, New York theater needed a play like My Name is Rachel Corrie – as imperfect a work of art as it may be – to remind us there are issues out there in that real world we’re too easily avoiding, issues way out of our “comfort zones” both to the right and further left than we’re usually exposed to.

Another alarming legacy of the Corrie debate was the appropriation of such worthy ideals as “context,” “balance,” “research” – in short, dramaturgy – as a cover for damage control. I was puzzled throughout the spat by the NYTW’s constant invocation of some mystical dramaturgical process which it claimed was uniquely its own – some dense research and audience outreach that accompanied all its projects. The time it needed for Corrie, the Workshop claimed, was in no way unusual.

I found this odd since the NYTW was not a theater I ever associated with such efforts. It boasted of its work supporting Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, for instance, but the only “context” I remember from my experience of that show was a photocopied insert in my slim program with some dates about Afghanistan history—something I could have found in a library, or online, in minutes. I’m sure the Workshop did have talkbacks, as it said, but not the night I was there. I have seen talkbacks at other NYTW shows, but like the Five Lesbian Brothers chit-chatting about their process for Oedipus at Palm Springs, they were no different than the usual “meet the artists” Q & As at other theaters – “celebrity series,” as the Roundabout Theatre now calls them. That’s the funny thing about talkbacks as a cure-all. Theaters rarely have them every night. And even then, nothing compels the audience to stay.

All of which brings up another point about the sanctifying of “outreach” and other ways to pacify audience response. You can never reach all the audience all the time. “[O]ur responsibility was not just to produce it,” Nicola said about Corrie, “but to produce it in such a way as to prevent false and tangential back-and-forth arguments from interfering with Rachel's voice.” To which I can only respond – good luck! And why should a theater want to “prevent” some in the audience from having their natural response?

One low point in the whole debate was when radio talk show host Brian Lehrer—an icon of NPR liberalism—weighed in, seemingly uninformed by the complete facts. In a piece posted on his show’s website, tellingly entitled “How to Avoid a Controversy,” Lehrer wagged his finger at London’s Royal Court Theatre (the original producers of Corrie) for resisting NYTW’s purported efforts at audience outreach. Bizarrely he offered as a counter-model a small Westchester symphony concert he took part in of an oratorio about Israel-Palestine; Lehrer was so proud that the orchestra published materials, held pre- and post-show lectures/discussions, etc. But in comparing this to an Off-Broadway run of a play, Lehrer downplayed two major differences: the concert played only one night, and the audience was small and relatively homogenous. In other words, Lehrer’s example had nothing to do with the life of the theater, where controversy can’t be so easily contained because the theater is – or should be – part of the give-and-take of the everyday life of a large city.

Again, in the theater, you can’t reach all the audience all the time.

As a former practicing dramaturge myself, I have no problem with more research and more discussion. I think it is an embarrassment, in fact, that New York’s non-profit theaters don’t have big meaty program notes on a par with the best European theaters. But I would also be ashamed as a dramaturge if my work was being used primarily to soften dissent and contain disparate views.

In the post-9/11 era, we are going to have to find a way to be OK with staging controversial work. If our theater is going to remain relevant, that is. Artists are going to want to perform it. We’re going to have to find the courage to stage such work even if it hurts some people’s feelings. We’re going to have to prepare ourselves for angry emails and phone calls, for cancelled subscriptions and revoked donations. If our theater is going to be effective, all of this is going to happen.

(Is it revealing that the only way My Name is Rachel Corrie could open in New York was under the auspices of a commercial producer, with no one to answer to but her accountant?)

In trying so desperately to avoid a nasty brawl, look what happened to the New York Theatre Workshop. It was sidetracked for two months, with a dark theater, and here we are, still talking about it a full year later. It was hardly a vindication that every single review of the play when it finally opened at the Minetta Lane had to include some variation of the phrase, “controversially cancelled or postponed by the New York Theatre Workshop.”

In sum, it was important that this “brawl” happened, partly because it shined a light onto the decision-making process in our non-profit theaters (which are – for all practical purposes – our de facto National Theater). But also because it restored equilibrium. A decision was made under pressure from one side – the side of, “let’s not talk about this right now.” So it was only right that the other side – those saying “Yes, let’s talk about this, and now!” – applied some pressure of its own.

Now that’s fair and balanced.