"Beckett by the Madeleine"

January 25, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Tom F. Driver

[One of the most important Samuel Beckett documents is Tom F. Driver’s interview with “Beckett by the Madeleine” in which Beckett stressed the distress, the mess in the world today, and dismissed any overt religious interpretation of Waiting for Godot.   This text is reproduced  from: Stanley A. Clayes, ed., Drama and Discussion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 604-7.  Diver’s interview was originally published in Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 21-25.]

Nothing like Godot, he arrived before the hour.  His letter had suggested we meet at my hotel at noon on Sunday, and I came into the lobby as the clock struck twelve.  He was waiting.

My wish to meet Samuel Beckett had been prompted by simple curiosity and interest in his work.  American newspaper reviewers like to call his plays nihilistic.  They find deep pessimism in them.  Even so astute a commentator as Harold Clurman of The Nation has said that “Waiting for Godot” is “the concentrate . . . of the contemporary European . . . mood of despair.”  But to me Beckett’s writing had seemed permeated with love for human beings and with a kind of humor that I could reconcile neither with despair or with nihilism.  Could it be that my eyes and ears had deceived me?  Is his a literature of defeat, irrelevant to the social crisis we face?  Or is it relevant because it teaches us something useful to know about ourselves.

I knew that a conversation with the author would not settle such questions, because a man is not the same as his writing: in the last analysis, the questions had to be settled by the work itself.  Nevertheless I was curious.

My curiosity was sharpened a day or two before the interview by a conversation I had with a well-informed teacher of literature, a Jesuit father, at a conference on religious drama near Paris.  When Beckett’s name came into the discussion, the priest grew loud and told me that Beckett “hates life.”  That, I thought, is at least one thing I can find out when we meet.

Beckett’s appearance is rough-hewn Irish.  The features of his face are distinct, but not fine.  They look as if they had been sculptured with and unsharpened chisel.  Unruly hair goes straight up from his forehead, standing so high that the top falls gently over, as if to show that it really is hair and not bristle.  One might say it combines the man’s own pride and humility.  For he has the pride that comes of self-acceptance and the humility, perhaps of the same genesis, not to impose himself upon another.  His light blue eyes, set deep within the face, are actively and continually looking.  He seems, by some unconscious division of labor, to have given them that one function and no other, leaving communication to the rest of the face.  The mouth frequently breaks into a disarming smile.  The voice is light in timbre, with a rough edge that corresponds to his visage.  The Irish accent is, as one would expect, combined with slight inflections from the French.  His tweed suit was a baggy gray and green.  He wore a brown knit sports shirt with no tie.

We walked down the Rue de L’Arcade, thence along beside the Madeleine and across to a sidewalk cafe opposite that church.  The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.  For one thing, the world that Beckett sees is already shattered.  His talk turns to what he calls “the mess,” or sometimes “this buzzing confusion.”  I reconstruct his sentences from notes made immediately after our conversation.  What appears here is shorter than what he actually said but very close to his own words.

“The confusion is not my invention.  We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion.  It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in.  The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.  It is not a mess you can make sense of.” 

I suggested that one must let it in because it is the truth, but Beckett did not take to the word truth.

“What is more true than anything else?  To swim is true, and to sink is true.  One is not more true than the other.  One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess.  When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me.  I am not a philosopher.  One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.”

Then he began to speak about the tension in art between the mess and form.  Until recently, art has withstood the pressure of chaotic things.  It has held them at bay.  It realized that to admit them was to jeopardize form.  “How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be?”  But how can we keep it out no longer,  because we have come into a time when “it invades our experience at every moment.  It is there and it must be allowed in.”

I granted this might be so, but found the result to be even more attention to form than was the case previously.  And why not?  How, I asked, could chaos be admitted to chaos?  Would that not be the end of thinking and the end of art?  If we look at recent art we find it preoccupied with form.  Beckett’s own work is an example.  Plays more highly formalized than “Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame,” and “Krapp’s Last Tape” would be hard to find.

“What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art.  It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.  The form and the chaos remain separate.  The latter is not reduced to the former.  That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates.  To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artists now.

Yet, I responded, could not similar things be said about the art of the past?  Is it nor characteristic of the greatest art that it confronts us with something we cannot clarify, demanding that the viewer respond to it in his own never-predictable way?  What is the history of criticism but the history of men attempting to make sense of the manifold elements in art that will not allow themselves to be reduced to a single philosophy or a single aesthetic theory?  Isn’t all art ambiguous? 

“Not this,” he said, and gestured toward the Madeleine.  The classical lines of the church, which Napoleon thought of as a Temple of Glory, dominated all the scene where we sat.  The Boulevard de la Madeleine, the Boulevard Malesherbes, and the Rue Royale ran to it with a graceful flattery, bearing tidings of the Age of Reason.  “Not this.  This is clear.  This does not allow the mystery to invade us.  With classical art, all is settled.  But it is different at Chartres.  There is the unexplainable, and there art raises questions that it does not attempt to answer.” 

I asked about the battle between life and death in his plays.  Didi and Gogo hover on the edge of suicide; Hamm’s world is death and Clov may or may not get out of it to join the living child outside.  Is this life-death question a part of the chaos?

“Yes.  If life and death did not both present themselves to us, there would be no inscrutability.  If there were only darkness, all would be clear.  It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable.  Take Augustine’s doctrine of grace given and grace withheld: have you pondered the dramatic qualities in this theology?  Two thieves are crucified with Christ, one saved and the other damned.  How can we make sense of this division?  In classical drama, such problems do not arise.  The destiny of Racine’s Phèdre is sealed from the beginning: she will proceed into the dark.  As she goes, she herself will be illuminated.  At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination and at the end she has complete illumination, but there has been no question but that she moves toward the dark.  That is the play.  Within this notion clarity is possible, but for us who are neither Greek nor Jansenist there is not such clarity.  The question would also be removed if we believed in the contrary—total salvation.  But where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable.  The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps.’”

Given a theological lead, I asked what he thinks about those who find a religious significance to his plays.

“Well, really there is none at all.  I have no religious feeling.  Once I had a religious emotion.  It was at my first communion.  No more.  My mother was deeply religious.  So was my brother.  He knelt down at his bed as long as long as he could kneel.  My father had none.  The family was Protestant, but for me it was only irksome and I let it go.  My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died.  At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie.  Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper.  When you pass a church on an Irish bus, all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross.  One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs.”

But do the plays deal with the same facets of experience religion must also deal with?

“Yes, for they deal with distress.  Some people object to this in my writing.  At a party an English intellectual—so-called—asked me why I write about distress.  As if it were perverse to do so!  He wanted to know if my father had beaten me or my mother had run away from home to give me an unhappy childhood.  I told him no, that I had had a very happy childhood.  Then he thought me more perverse than ever.  I left the party as soon as possible and got into a taxi.  On the glass partition between me and the driver were three signs: one asked for help for the blind, another, help for the orphans, and the third for relief for the war refugees.  One does not have to look for distress.  It is screaming at you even in the taxis of London.”

Lunch was over, and we walked back to the hotel with the light and dark of Paris screaming at us.

The personal quality of Samuel Beckett is similar to qualities I had found in the plays.  He says nothing that compresses experience within a closed pattern.  “Perhaps” stands in place of commitment.  At the same time, he is plainly sympathetic, clearly friendly.  If there were only the mess, all would be clear; but there is also compassion.

As a Christian, I know I do not stand where Beckett stands, but I do see much of what he sees.  As a writer on theater, I have paid close attention to the plays.  Harold Clurman is right to say that “Waiting for Godot” is a reflection (he calls it a distorted reflection) “of the impasse and disarray of Europe’s current politics, ethic, and common way of life.”  Yet it is not only Europe that the play refers to.  “Waiting for Godot” sells even better in America than in France.  The consciousness it mirrors my have come earlier to Europe than to America, but it is the consciousness that most “mature” societies arrive at when their successes in technological and economic systemization propel them into a time of examining the not-strictly-practical ends of culture.  America is now joining Europe in this “mature” phase of development.  Whether any of us remain in it long will depend on what happens as a result of the technological and economic revolutions now going on in the countries of Asia and Africa, and also of course on how long the cold war remains cold.  At present no political party in Western Europe or America seems possessed of a philosophy of social change adequate to the pressures of current history.

In the Beckett plays, time does not go forward.  We are always at the end, where events repeat themselves (“Waiting for Godot”), or hover at the edge of nothingness (“Endgame”), or turn back to the long-ago moment of genuine life (“Krapp’s Last Tape”).  This retreat from action may disappoint those of us who believe that the events of the objective world must still be dealt with.  To say “perhaps,” as the plays do, is not to say “no.”  The plays do not say that there is no future but that we do not see it, have no confidence about it, and approach it hopelessly.  Apart from messianic Marxism, where is there today a faith asserting the contrary that succeeds in shaping a culture?

The walls that surround the characters of Beckett’s plays are not walls that nature and history have built irrespective of the decisions of men.  They are the walls of one’s own attitude toward his situation.  The plays are themselves evidence of a human capacity to see one’s situation and by that very fact to transcend it.  That is why Beckett can say that letting in “the mess” may bring with it a “chance of renovation.”  It is also why he is wrong, from philosophy’s point of view, to say that there is only “the mess.”  If that were all there is, he could not recognize it as such.  But the plays and the novels contain more, and that more is transcendence of the self and the situation.

In “Waiting for Godot” Beckett has a very simple and moving description of human self-transcendence.  Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) are discussing man, who bears his “little cross” until he dies and is forgotten.  In a beautiful passage that is really a duet composed of short lines from first one pair of lips and then the other, the two tramps speak of their inability to keep silent.  As Gogo says, “It’s so we won’t hear . . . all the dead voices.”  The voices of the dead make a noise like wings, sand, or leaves, all speaking at once, each one to itself, whispering, rustling, and murmuring.

vladimir.  What do they say?

estragon.  They talk about their lives.

vladimir.  To have lived is not enough for them.

estragon.  They have to talk about it.

vladimir.  To be dead it not enough for them.

estragon.  It is no sufficient.

(Silence)

vladimir.  They make a noise like feathers.

estragon.  Like leaves.

vladimir.  Like ashes.

estragon.  Like leaves.

In this passage, Didi and Gogo are like the dead, and the dead are like the living, because all are incapable of keeping silent.  The description of the dead voices is also a description of of living voices.  In either case, neither to live nor to die is “enough.”  One must talk about it.  The human condition is self-reflection, self-transcendence.  Beckett’s plays are the whispering, rustling, and murmuring of man refusing merely to exist.

Is it not true that self-transcendence implies freedom, and that freedom is either the most glorious or the most terrifying of facts, depending on the vigor of the spirit that contemplates it?  It is important to notice that the rebukes to Beckett’s “despair” have mostly come from the dogmatists of humanist liberalism, who here reveal, as so often they do, that they desire the reassurance of certainty more than they love freedom.  Having recognized that to live is not enough, they wish to fasten down in dogma the way that life ought to be lived.  Beckett suggests something more free—that life is to be seen, to be talked about, and that the way it is to be lived cannot be stated unambiguously but must come as a response to that which one encounters in “the mess.”  He has devised his works in such a way that those who comment upon them actually comment upon themselves.  One cannot say, “Beckett has said so and so,” for Beckett has said, “Perhaps.”  If the critics and the public see only images of despair, one can only deduce that they are themselves despairing.

Beckett himself, or so I take it, has repented of the desire for certainty.  There are therefore released in him qualities of affirmation that his interpreters often miss.  That is why the laughter in his plays is warm, his concern for his characters affectionate.  His warm humor and affection are not the attributes of defeatism but the consequences of what Paul Tillich has called “the courage to be.”

[Tom F. Driver (b. 1925) was the Christian Century’s drama critic and a Union Theological Seminary faculty member.  I have posted several pieces about Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot on Rick On Theater; see “History of Waiting For Godot,” 30 March 2009; “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 April 2009; “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 3 April 2009; “Is Waiting for Godot Trash?,” 17 April 2009; “Waiting for Godot,” a performance report, 31 October 2016; and “Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby,” another performance report, 1 May 2016.]

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Four Actors

January 30, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Kirk Woodward

[Readers of Rick On Theater may know that my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, is a long-time fan of mystery novels.  Among his most favorite series are the Erle Stanley Gardner novels about the indefatigable (not to mention undefeatable) attorney Perry Mason.  A devotee of the books and short stories (on which he’ll blog shortly), Kirk’s also a fan of the original television series starring Raymond Burr which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s.  I’m a fan, too, and we’ve each been watching the reruns on cable TV lately; we get different platforms on different services, so we don’t see the same episodes at the same times, but not long ago we both caught the four episodes filmed while Burr was recovering from an operation.  To cover for his absence, the series producers, Paisano Productions and CBS, brought in four prominent actors, two from the world of film and two from then-current TV series, to take the roles of the lead attorneys in the murder cases usually handled by Mason.  Kirk saw an opportunity to examine acting, especially—but not exclusively—TV acting, using the four contiguous 1963 episodes as examples.  So give “Four Actors” a read; I think you’ll find Kirk’s analysis of some aspects of acting edifying—and the look back at some old Perry Masonshows is kinda fun, too!  ~Rick]

A great deal has been written about the art of acting (including on this blog), much of it fascinating, but acting is difficult to write about. One reason is that to describe a performance of any size in detail is a daunting task, but, on the other hand, to zero in on a trait or several traits (as the New York Herald Tribune and New York Timesreviewer Walter Kerr frequently did) risks oversimplification.

There is also a memory problem: how much of a performance on stage can one recall afterward? Even with a superior memory – something a reviewer surely needs – is there space in which to publish a description of a performance in detail? When Bernard Shaw reviewed performances of the same role (Magda in the play Heimat, written by Hermann Sudermann in 1893) by Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) and Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), his review (in the London Saturday Review, 15 June 1895) was one of the longest he wrote. It takes up seven pages in the volume of his collected reviews.

And theorizing about acting isn’t much easier than describing it, as illustrated by the wide variety of ways the subject can be approached. (A convenient sample can be found in the classic collection of essays Actors on Acting, published in 1949, edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy.)

I can illustrate this problem by posing a classic question: is acting basically an internal or an external process? Typifying answers to this question are the Actors Studio (highly internal) and traditional British acting (highly external). The answer surely is that acting is both internal and external, in varied degrees of emphasis depending on the actor, the play, and so on; but this answer has hardly quieted the debate.

With the advent of film, video tape, and digital recording, fortunately, acting performances can now be studied over and over, and much can be learned from such study. One highly interesting example of contrasting acting styles can be found in four episodes of the original Perry Mason TV series (1957-1966). (For information that follows about the shows, I am indebted to the compendium The Perry Mason Book: A Comprehensive Guide to America’s Favorite Defender of Justice, published in 2014, by Jim Davidson.)

In 1962, Raymond Burr (1917-1993), who was in his sixth of nine seasons with the first Perry Mason TV series, had what was described as minor emergency surgery but was in fact the removal of an intestinal tumor that turned out, to everyone’s great relief, to be benign. Burr missed the filming of the four episodes we will discuss; brief instances of his talking on the phone with his substitutes were filmed after he got out of the hospital.

Four actors took Burr’s place as the lead attorney in the four episodes he missed: Bette Davis, Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, and Walter Pidgeon. I will briefly comment on the acting in these shows, and at the same time try to identify issues about acting that are raised by the performances of those four actors in those episodes – which have been released on video and can also be encountered on stations that rerun the show’s episodes.

BETTE DAVIS – BELIEVABILITY, REPUTATION

“The Case of Constant Doyle” (season 6, episode 16, originally aired January 31, 1963)

“Constant Doyle” is the name of the character Bette Davis (1908-1989) plays in this episode – a tribute to Davis that was one of only two times in the series that a character name was used in an episode title. (The other was “The Case of Paul Drake’s Dilemma.” Ordinarily an episode title in the series would be something like “The Case of the Constant Doyle,” referring to an object or a situation.)

Doyle, Bette Davis’s character, is the widow (and former law partner) of an attorney whose reputation has been besmirched, and as she solves a mystery involving a young man arrested for a petty crime, with much larger implications, she clears her husband’s name as well.

In 1963 Davis’s career was at a difficult stage. She was fifty-five, not old by everyday standards but old for Hollywood (especially women), where she was no longer a top box office attraction. (She had, however, just finished filming the movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which would significantly boost her career.) There was hope that the Perry Mason episode might lead to a new TV series for Davis, although this did not happen.

Fans of Davis’s work reflect in web postings enthusiasm for her performance as Constant Doyle. To my mind her performance is erratic and “stagy.” Davis did some stage work (including a lead in Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana in 1961, quite a histrionic play in itself), but most of her work was in movies. It seems fair to say, though, that her acting style became increasingly mannered and baroque, a fact memorably displayed in Baby Janeand its 1964 sequel Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. 

To put it another way: I don’t find her performance in the Perry Mason episode to be believable. But what do we mean when we say a performance is believable?

We might mean that if we saw the same person say the same words and do the same actions in everyday life, that behavior would be convincing to us. A moment’s reflection will show that that is seldom if ever the case. The simple fact that a piece of behavior is being performed before an audience changes the nature of that behavior. Add the conditions of the theater, a film set, or a television studio, and the result would definitely seem strange to us if transplanted to everyday life.

When we say a performance is believable, surely we mean believable in the context it’s presented in. One would hardly suggest a real life King Lear to walk in a pub, order a drink, and chat mildly about the weather. King Lear exists in the context invented by Shakespeare for his play, and a “believable” actor in the role is one that behaves appropriately in that context. In that sense, Davis simply does not strike me as believable in her role as Constant Doyle – or as a lawyer, for that matter. She seems to me constantly (sorry) to be a performer, rather than a person in the particular context of a particular script.

Comment on the web, however, often disagrees with me, which brings up another issue about acting, namely, the hopes and expectations we as audience members bring to and project on an actor’s performance. Bette Davis is a much admired performer and, although she hardly brings a “soft” dimension to her work, even (perhaps for that reason) a beloved one. Is an admirer justified in saying she’s wonderful in the role because she’s Bette Davis?

A stalwart aesthetician might say no, but I have no right to say that, because I do the same thing all the time. A best practice in reviewing is that a reviewer ought to analyze a famous person’s performance as though the person were unknown, and vice versa. Personally, however, I seldom do that. If I am an admirer of a particular performer, it is hard for me to admit that anything that artist does falls short of the mark.  In that respect I resemble, I imagine, many fans of Bette Davis. 

MICHAEL RENNIE – ACTOR AND SCRIPT

“The Case of the Libelous Locket” (season 6, episode 17, originally aired February 7, 1963)

Michael Rennie (1909-1971), appearing at the time of this episode as the TV incarnation of Harry Lime in The Third Man series (1959-1965) but best known perhaps for his role as Klaatu, the visitor from outer space in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still(1951), plays a law professor, Edward Lindley. A student in one of his classes believes she’s killed a dance instructor – except that no evidence of that murder can be found, until the instructor is found dead the next day, murdered at a different time in a different way. Lindley, who at the beginning of the episode has belittled the profession of trial attorney, decides to defend the student himself (with a bit of encouragement from Perry Mason, seen, as in all four of the episodes discussed here, talking on the phone, in this case from the hospital).

Rennie’s performance, to me, is tentative and halting. (The Perry Mason Book says that “Lindley [note – the character, not the actor] seems diffident, out of his league, bland, and generally unappealing.”)

Not so fast, though – because the character Rennie plays is also uncertain how to proceed in defending the case, since he has little or no trial experience. Am I responding to the actor or the role?

The acting issue raised here, then, is that of the relation of the actor to the script. If my observation about Rennie’s performance is correct, is it the actor or the character who lacks assurance and confidence? (Or, of course, is it both?) Has the actor’s personality overwhelmed the script, or is the actor simply carrying out the script’s requirements?

Reviewers frequently point with conviction to a director, an actor, or a script as the reason for something that happens in a production, but in many cases it’s difficult to be sure who’s responsible for what, and some highly dubious assertions can be made.

For example, I recall a production of Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900) in which reviewers generally blamed the script for the production’s weaknesses, when in fact, as far as I could tell, nearly every element of the production, including the acting, the direction, and the set, had the effect of sabotaging an excellent play.

The lesson I take from this subject is that we need to be careful when making statements like my “Rennie’s performance seems tentative and halting.” That impression, if accurate, may be Rennie’s fault; or he may be doing exactly what the director told him to do, or what he thought the script demanded. In deciding who’s responsible for what in a production, a little humility is perhaps not a bad thing.

HUGH O’BRIAN – PERSONALITY

“The Case of the Two-Faced Turn-A-Bout” (season 6, episode 18, originally aired February 14, 1963)

No apology is needed for the performance of Hugh O’Brian (1925-2016), best known for his performance from 1955 to 1961 as the title lawman on TV’s The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (still running when he made his Perry Mason guest appearance), as Bruce Jason, a former World War II spy turned attorney, in a frankly pretty improbable story of international intrigue, including mysterious papers that could have a huge effect on public opinion; representatives of foreign dictatorships freely wandering around Los Angeles chatting about their government; and a doppelganger.

The Perry Mason Book says that O’Brian “handles the role competently, but comes off a bit smug – a quality Gardner always cautioned about.” Competently? The man is sensational – relaxed, in control, commanding every scene he’s in, polished, smooth, droll, entertaining. Smug? Absolutely – see the previous sentence! O’Brian breezes through the preposterous plot in high spirits.

Hugh O’Brian was also, in “real life,” a smart, funny man. Wikipedia gives us this glimpse of his mind: when he married, fairly late in life, “the couple spent their honeymoon studying philosophy at Oxford University.” From the same source, we have this glimpse of his humor: after his original last name (Krampe) was misspelled in a program as “Hugh Krape,” he changed his name because “I didn't want to go through life being known as Huge Krape.“

The acting issue here is that of personality versus, well, acting. Is O’Brian giving an acting performance or is he essentially just lending his personality to a role? My own response to this question is that at least he has a personality to lend. Many of the performers we really want to see are “characters” in their own right.

For example, I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about Bette Midler (“Two Greats,” 3 May 2017), who has just finished up her role as Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly on Broadway. Midler is and apparently always has been an outsize and vivid personality. She certainly brings that personality to the role of Dolly. However, she doesn’t use her personality to burst the bounds of the musical; she lends it to her role.

An actor who in effect ignores a script and imposes her or his personality on a play or film is another matter. Zero Mostel (1915-1977), for example, was accused of doing this in the later part of his run as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and was widely reported to be unpopular with both the director and the cast. I only saw Mostel once, in a preview performance of a revival of Ulysses in Nighttown (1974) on Broadway, and what I remember best is that Mostel at one point “broke character” and imitated an actor who bobbled a line.

O’Brian doesn’t impose his personality on his Perry Mason episode, but he certainly pours a great deal of what appears to be his own charm and energy into a head-scratcher of a script. He stays within the bounds of his character (such as the character is); but he fills it to the brim.

WALTER PIDGEON – LISTENING

“The Case of the Surplus Suitor” (season 6, episode 19, originally aired 28 February, 1963)

I have a memory of seeing Walter Pidgeon (1897-1984) at the Brown Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, in a road company production of some Broadway play when I was a teenager, but I don’t remember much about his performance there. On his Perry Mason episode, Pidgeon plays Sherman Hatfield, a lawyer who takes on a case involving a struggle for the European rights to an electronics company, and, of course, murder.

Pidgeon’s performance on his Perry Mason episode is a delight. I spent a lot of time analyzing why I thought so – was it, for example, because of the richness and quality of his voice, equal to that of Raymond Burr’s? Finally I realized what struck me even more: Pidgeon is a terrific listener.

“Acting is reacting,” the saying goes, which implies that the actor has to listen to the other character in order to be able to participate in a scene. Similarly, the acting technique of Sanford Meisner (1905-1997) is based to a considerable extent on training an actor really to hear what the other actor is saying. In another example, the actor James Garner (1928-2014) wrote in his autobiography that he learned acting while appearing on Broadway as a juror in the Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), in which he never spoke a word and only listened and reacted.

Listening is an essential of the actor’s craft. What sets Pidgeon apart as a listener is that he is an animated, active listener, essentially a participant in everything going on in a scene, even – or especially - when he’s not speaking. With a mobile face and a great deal of energy at his disposal, he listens so actively that one almost experiences the moments when he’s listening as two actors are speaking.

What’s more, he listens so completely to what’s happening that his spoken responses practically seem to bounce out of him. Unlike Bette Davis and Michael Rennie (but not Hugh O’Brian) in their Perry Mason episodes, Pidgeon doesn’t gather his thoughts and then speak; he is always on the mark. He has taken in everything that’s been said and he is ready to move the scene forward . . . which he does, with enthusiasm.

*  *  *  *

Acting is a fascinating subject. There’s always more to be said about it, and we are fortunate to have the four episodes of Perry Mason discussed here as examples of the craft.

Perhaps I should also say a word about Raymond Burr, who so memorably played Perry Mason in the series.

Burr makes a big impression – that’s no secret. For one thing, he was a big man, and he had a sonorous voice. But his acting is minimalist – it almost all takes place in his eyes. When he raises his voice, the effect is thunderous. He is not like any other actor I can think of. But surely that’s an important fact about actors – like snowflakes, no two are alike.

[At the top of “Four Actors,” Kirk says that a lot has been said about the art and craft of acting even on ROT.  Almost all my performance reports and most of the other review-like posts say something about acting and actors, and many of the other posts often include comments on acting or make some point pertinent to the art.  By my spot count, however, nearly 25 posts are specifically about acting or discuss it in significant terms, including “Acting Shakespeare,” 5 September 2009; “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010; “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” by Kirk Woodward, 1 June 2011; “David Mamet On Acting & Directing,” 16 August 2013; “Acting: Testimony and Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; “The Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte,” 4 January 2014; “Why Acting Matters,” 10 and 13 February 2016; “Those Guys” by Bilge Ebiri (T magazine, New York Times), 11 December 2017; and quite a few more.

"Laser Scans Reveal Maya ‘Megalopolis’ Below Guatemalan Jungle"

February 4, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Tom Clynes

[On the NBC Nightly News onSaturday,  anchor Lester Holt presented a report on “Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings,” a special airing on the National Geographic channel on Tuesday, 6 February.  The special details how lasers on planes were used to reveal a massive complex of Mayan ruins covered for centuries by jungle foliage.  With this high-tech help, scientists have found that Maya civilization was more advanced and populous than previously imagined. 

[From time to time on Rick On Theater, I run articles on subjects that simply interest me.  One of those  topics is scientific discoveries that reveal something new about our world despite decades and even centuries of exploration and examination.  It might be a previously unknown species of fish or a hitherto undiscovered fossil, but what intrigues me even more is when the discovery makes scientists change their previously-held understanding of their field, making them formulate new rules and laws or rewriting history.  That what this revelation about the Maya promises to do, even though the hidden cities have been lying unexamined for over a millennium.  The article below was originally posted on the website National Geographic on1 February 2018 (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/).]

A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought.

*  *  *  *

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.

Garrison is part of a consortium of researchers who are participating in the project, which was spearheaded by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that fosters scientific research, sustainable development, and cultural heritage preservation.

The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.

The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.

In addition to hundreds of previously unknown structures, the LiDAR images show raised highways connecting urban centers and quarries. Complex irrigation and terracing systems supported intensive agriculture capable of feeding masses of workers who dramatically reshaped the landscape.

The ancient Maya never used the wheel or beasts of burden, yet “this was a civilization that was literally moving mountains,” said Marcello Canuto, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who participated in the project.

“We’ve had this western conceit that complex civilizations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilizations go to die,” said Canuto, who conducts archaeological research at a Guatemalan site known as La Corona. “But with the new LiDAR-based evidence from Central America and [Cambodia’s] Angkor Wat, we now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.”

SURPRISING INSIGHTS

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Already, though, the survey has yielded surprising insights into settlement patterns, inter-urban connectivity, and militarization in the Maya Lowlands. At its peak in the Maya classic period (approximately A.D. 250-900), the civilization covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, but it was far more densely populated.

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multi-disciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there—including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Virtually all the Mayan cities were connected by causeways wide enough to suggest that they were heavily trafficked and used for trade and other forms of regional interaction. These highways were elevated to allow easy passage even during rainy seasons. In a part of the world where there is usually too much or too little precipitation, the flow of water was meticulously planned and controlled via canals, dikes, and reservoirs.

Among the most surprising findings was the ubiquity of defensive walls, ramparts, terraces, and fortresses. “Warfare wasn’t only happening toward the end of the civilization,” said Garrison. “It was large-scale and systematic, and it endured over many years.”

The survey also revealed thousands of pits dug by modern-day looters. “Many of these new sites are only new to us; they are not new to looters,” said Marianne Hernandez, president of the PACUNAM Foundation. (Read “Losing Maya Heritage to Looters.”)

Environmental degradation is another concern. Guatemala is losing more than 10 percent of its forests annually, and habitat loss has accelerated along its border with Mexico as trespassers burn and clear land for agriculture and human settlement.

“By identifying these sites and helping to understand who these ancient people were, we hope to raise awareness of the value of protecting these places,” Hernandez said.

The survey is the first phase of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative, a three-year project that will eventually map more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of Guatemala’s lowlands, part of a pre-Columbian settlement system that extended north to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The ambition and the impact of this project is just incredible,” said Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a University of Calgary archaeologist and Maya specialist who was not associated with the PACUNAM survey. “After decades of combing through the forests, no archaeologists had stumbled across these sites. More importantly, we never had the big picture that this data set gives us. It really pulls back the veil and helps us see the civilization as the ancient Maya saw it.”

[A National Geographic Explorer is a scientist, conservationist, educator, or storyteller funded and supported by the National Geographic Society.  According to the organization’s own description, “Every one of them is infinitely curious about our planet, committed to understanding it, and passionate about helping make it better.”

[Tom Clynes is an author and photojournalist who travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, and education for publications such as National Geographic, Nature, the New York Times, and Popular Science.  His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek,  Scientific American, the Sunday Times Magazine of London, and many other publications.]

'The Yellow House'

February 9, 2018, 7:00 am

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[I’ve written about Leonardo Shapiro and his stage work quite a bit since I started Rick On Theaterback in 2009.  (See, for example, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009; “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009; “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010; “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010; “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010; “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011; “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014; “Mount Analogue,” 20 July 2014; and “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8 November 2015; as well as “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep,’” an early piece of writing by Shapiro himself, 7 May 2011.)  

[I’ve probably mentioned at one time or another that I first met Leo and saw his work in 1986 at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore.  Then a biennial program of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—it now no longer keeps to a regular schedule—its aim is to bring together theater artists and performances from all around the globe to one city for a few weeks—from 15 to 29 June in ’86—to promote world theater and international  culture.  He and his company, a revival of The Shaliko Company which he started in 1972 in New York City, had brought their current production, The Yellow House, a performance piecein which the painter Vincent van Gogh is viewed through the medium of his letters to his brother, Theo, an art dealer in Paris.  (The artist’s correspondence has been published in Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 3 vols. (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, [1958]).)  After the performance at the North Hall of the 1857 Peabody Institute near the Washington Monument at Mount Vernon Place and Washington Place in north Baltimore, I interviewed Leo.

[I was on assignment as the editor of the American Directors Institute’s in-house newsletter, Directors  Notes, to cover the Theatre of Nations, the first (and still only) TON held in North America.  I ended up also writing up the festival for The Drama Review.  (That report ran as “Theatre of Nations” in TDR in the spring issue of 1987 and a much abbreviated report was also published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986.  I posted a version of the TDR article as “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986” on ROT on 10 November 2014.)  I not only saw as many as three performances a day, but conducted formal interviews with some of the artists, and hung out at Club 45, the pop-up café-cum-bar behind one of the performance venues that was an oasis for the artists and performers at TON, to schmooze and kibitz.  Leo Shapiro was one of the artists I interviewed, in a session the day after I saw Yellow House.  I’m probably not giving anything away if I admit here that I was greatly taken with Yellow House, possibly the most striking production at TON and one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever seen. 

[It was four years later that I met Leo again and then two more years until Richard Schechner, editor of TDR, asked me to do a profile of Leo and Shaliko; I spent the better part of a year shadowing Leo as he worked, searching his files and picking his brains and memories.  The impression of that remarkable performance I witnessed in Baltimore six years earlier had never left me—in fact, it was the principal reason I took Richard’s assignment to write about Leo and Shaliko.  I’m going to try to recreate some of that sense of astonishment I felt that evening in 1986.  I warn readers, however, that while Shapiro’s theater work put an emphasis on language—he was a poet before turning to theater—his was a theater of performance as well—he was also a devotee of jazz—not literature.  Merely reading about his productions, including The Yellow House, deprives us of the full impact of seeing them performed.  I’ll give it a try, though.]

In 1986, with the first professional production of The Yellow House, The Shaliko Company’s performance piece about Vincent van Gogh based on his letters to his brother Theo, company founder and artistic director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) began creating what he designated as “Original Collaborative Work.”  Though this effort (from 1986 to 1992) overlapped his work on “New International Plays, Commissions, and Musical Adaptations” (1981 to 1990), it marked a change in the kind of material that occupied most of his attention.  (Shapiro designated Shaliko’s earliest period, from 1972 to 1977, as “Meetings with Classical Texts.”  The company disbanded until the director re-formed it in 1981 for a single season, and then again in 1983.)  Instead of finding texts that spoke to subjects of interest to him, Shapiro began creating pieces for what he wanted to communicate.  The pieces—Shapiro didn’t like the word, but agreed that they “are basically ‘theater pieces’ as opposed to ‘plays’”—were far larger in scope than Shaliko’s previous work, and drew on more and more diverse sources for materials and themes. 

Additionally, though Shaliko productions had always been site-specific, adapting to fit the performance spaces in which they were presented, works like The Yellow House and those that followed were changed, sometimes radically, to occupy each new venue.  Furthermore, when he recast Yellow House after its developmental workshop, he actively put together a new ensemble to explore this latest direction of his work.  A lack of money and the consequential lack of a permanent home base, however, prevented complete success in this endeavor.  (The company was dissolved again in 1993, a little less than four years before Shapiro’s death at 51.)

Having conceived an intense interest in Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) early in his life, Shapiro spent time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam while at the 1976 Holland Festival with the Shaliko production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (which starred former member of the Living Theatre and founder of the Open Theater, Joseph Chaikin, 1935-2003).  In 1982, when he was experiencing “a personal crisis,” Shapiro conceived the idea of a play about the artist, using some of the paintings (especially 1889’s Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, he said) as “settings for action.”  (This was, of course, 35 years before filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's 2017 release of Loving Vincent, an animated film created from many of van Gogh’s paintings.)

Shapiro wrote a first script of what would be known as The Van Gogh Project in the summer of 1984 and that June, he used parts of it in a workshop at the Quebec International Theatre Fortnight (Quinzaine Internationale de Théâtre de Québec) in Quebec City.  Shapiro began developing The Yellow House, still called The Van Gogh Project, in a November 1984 workshop with students and faculty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was then artist-in-residence. 

After reworking the script and reconstituting Shaliko, Shapiro mounted a new version of the performance piece, now entitled The Yellow House, at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan’s East Village.  As Jerry Rojo (b. 1935), who designed the mises-en-scène for La MaMa and, later, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, explained, the La MaMa production “had a very different feeling” than the one at Trinity, which had been designed by Shapiro and his students, because “all we used in the New York production was the furniture.”  The New York production, designated in the program as a “Work in Progress,” ran from 12 February to 2 March 1986. 

Following the New York “experimental production,” Shapiro did additional work on the literary and performance texts based on what he’d learned from the La MaMa workshop.  “The show [at La MaMa] was too dark and too focused on Van Gogh’s personal problems and his madness,” specified the director.  “I wanted to make the joy of the work and the process of creation more present than the madness.” The show that ran two hours and 45 minutes in Hartford and one hour and 45 minutes in New York, would now run an hour and a half at the Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore, where performances were scheduled from 21 to 29 June.  It was at the Peabody on the evening of Friday, 27 June, that I saw Shaliko’s The Yellow House—still dubbed a “work in progress”—and was introduced to the work of Leonardo Shapiro.  (I didn’t see the Van Gogh Project workshop at Trinity College, nor did I see The Yellow House at La MaMa.) 

(Shapiro had plans to take a finished Yellow House on tour in Europe over the summer of 1987 and then return to perform it in its completed form in New York at the La MaMa Annex—renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2009—in March 1988.  He was never able to raise the money to realize these plans, however, and, as Shapiro pointed out numerous times, La MaMa’s Stewart, 1919-2011, didn’t generally permit the mounting of plays at her theater that had already been presented elsewhere in the United States.  Still, even as late as 1992, Shapiro harbored hopes of mounting a final production of Yellow House in New York or abroad.)

The text of Yellow House that I saw was compiled by research and workshops with different groups of actors from the letters of van Gogh and other documents.  The director and creator, though, admonished, “While the words are important, they are not the essence of the piece . . .” and stressed the theatricality of The Yellow House.  It’s non-linear so a narrative is hard to assemble as Yellow Housedepicts what Shapiro called “Van Gogh’s heroic struggle to resist disintegration.”  J. Wynn Rousuck of the Baltimore Sun (25 June 1986) said it’s a portrayal “of the thin juncture between genius and madness.”  In the Baltimore City Paper, David Bergman (11-17 July 1986) felt that “Shapiro thrusts the audience quite literally into the center of the madness . . .” with his use of a kinetic set and staging the performance all over the North Hall space so that actors were often standing right beside spectators and even addressing them individually. 

In New York, Theo van Gogh was performed (by actor Paul Walker) as an unseen voice on tape.  The character was cut by the time the show came to Baltimore, but Shapiro had a notion, never articulated either from the stage or in the program, that the audience was Theo.  Spectators were “always addressed as Theo . . .,” and though it was never acknowledged, “that’s the [actor-audience] relationship we assume[d].”  The director maintained that “the goal of doing that show was to make the audience feel like Theo and respond that way, with that kind of generosity and understanding.”  Jo (Janet Langon), Theo’s wife, who was a minor character in Hartford, became, especially with the final elimination of Theo as a character in Yellow House, the mediator and the voice of both Vincent and Theo—the artist and society.  In the play’s prologue, Jo directly asks the audience Yellow House’s central question: ”Now that they’re gone who will carry on the courage and generosity of the vision?” 

The play covers the span of van Gogh’s life, from his youth in Holland to his death near Paris.  There are scenes of him as a young man, preaching to miners, and at the the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy—but most of TheYellow House, as the title suggests, takes place in locations in Arles (where he lived from 1888 to 1889).  The settings are all pulled from van Gogh paintings (as Shapiro’s original notion suggested: Van Gogh’s Bedroom, The Night Café (1888), Gauguin’s Chair (1888), Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, Crows Over the Wheat Field (1890), and, of course, Starry Night (1889). But Yellow Houseisn’t a bio-play like  Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) or even Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo(1990); if we stick with movies, it’s more like 1999’s Being John Malkovichby  Spike Jonze, only more psychedelic and hallucinogenic. 

I’m not certain how early in his life Shapiro became interested in van Gogh, but it may have been around 1965, when the incipient director was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This conclusion is based on the possibility that Shapiro’s interest was sparked by Antonin Artaud’s writing about the painter in “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society” and other writings which were published in the Artaud Anthology in 1965, a book which I believe Shapiro read at that time.  (It’s certainly possible that Shapiro had already conceived an interest in van Gogh before this time, but he made no mention of the painter in discussions with me of his early childhood or his high school years at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts.  At Windsor Mountain, in fact, Shapiro was fascinated with Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, whose name he adopted: Leo Richard Shapiro became Leonardo V. Shapiro in 1960.)

(Theater theorist and Surrealist poet and essayist Artaud, 1896-1948, saw Vincent van Gogh, an important exhibit of 173 paintings which ran from 24 January to 15 March 1947 at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris.  In February of that year, after having read psychiatrist François-Joachim Beer’s “Sa Folie?” [“His Madness?”], a description of van Gogh as a degenerate, in the Paris weekly Arts on 31 January 1947, Artaud started Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, though it wasn’t published until September.  On 16 January 1948, Van Gogh won the Paris Sainte-Beuve prize for the best essay published in 1947, the only literary award Artaud ever won.  Illustrating “Sa Folie” was a print of van Gogh’s Corridor in Saint-Paul Hospital, a painting Shapiro used in the New York production of The Yellow House. 

                                                         

(Though there are other translations of this essay and other Artaud works, I believe that Shapiro knew, read, and probably owned Artaud Anthology, because the director made other references to Artaud which correspond to the volume’s content and translations, especially the David Rattray rendering of the surrealistic poem “All Writing is Pigshit . . . ” which Shapiro quoted in a 1970 theater column he wrote for the New Mexico commune newsletter Fountain of Light—and which I posted on ROT on 29 December 2010.)

Shapiro began working on a van Gogh theater piece six years after that trip to Amsterdam, “when I was 36 and thinking of killing myself.”  He was identifying with van Gogh who, he believed, had been “suicided by society” when the painter was 37, but when Shapiro had finished Yellow House four years later, he was already 40 and “had missed jumping out my window of opportunity.”  Working with composer-singer-violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), Shapiro and his team created The Yellow Houseas a vehicle for the painter’s “personal testimony about the life and the mission of the artist,” a recurring theme in Shapiro’s work. 

That the image of van Gogh, whom Shapiro considered the quintessential courageous artist and would certainly have seen as an art-martyr, would attract the director makes a great deal of sense, of course.  In alluding to Artaud’s surrealistic essay, Shapiro suggested some of the parallels he saw between himself and van Gogh.  Artaud, who also saw similarities between his life and the painter’s, particularly in his own nine-year commitment to psychiatric hospitals for schizophrenia (1937-46), focused in his essay on the suppression by societal institutions—doctors, scientists, asylums—of the non-conformity represented by van Gogh and his art. 

For both Artaud and Shapiro, society suffers spiritual poverty as a result of the suppression of such individuality.  Like Artaud, Shapiro felt that van Gogh’s art was “wildfire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision, compared to all the other paintings popular at the time, would have been capable of upsetting the larval conformity of the” societal establishment of his day; it didn’t attack just the “conformity of manners and morals” but society’s institutions themselves.  Van Gogh wasn’t just a pest, he was a truly dangerous force, “[f]or a lunatic is a man that society does not wish to hear but wants to prevent from uttering certain unbearable truths”—a characterization very like the one Shapiro applied to oracles and artists in general.  Like the poets in Plato’s republic, van Gogh had to be removed from society, hence he was declared insane, marginalized, locked away, and finally driven to suicide.  Van Gogh, in the terms with which Shapiro characterized David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), an artist whom he greatly admired, was “the canary in the mines.”  (I blogged on Wojnarowicz on 15 March 2011.)

Furthermore, like Shapiro himself, van Gogh was a difficult man whose personality created rifts with most of those with whom he came into contact, including, as Theo van Gogh (1857-91) remarked to his wife, the painter’s best friends.  Vincent’s brother wrote to their sister, “It seems as if he were two persons: one, marvelously gifted, tender and refined, the other, egoistic and hard-hearted,” a characterization that fit Shapiro, too.  “It is a pity that he is his own enemy,” Theo van Gogh continued, “for he makes life hard not only for others but also for himself.”  How different Shapiro’s career might have been had he not shared this characteristic as well. 

But van Gogh was also committed to his art, despite the lack of acceptance from the dealers, critics, and even other artists.  (Van Gogh had a famous love-hate relationship with painter Paul Gauguin, 1848-1903, with whom he shared the little, yellow house in Arles, France, for nine weeks in 1888.  Gauguin appears as a character in The Yellow House, played in New York by Olek Krupa and in Baltimore by William Verderber.)  The painter was destined, his brother predicted, to be “appreciated by some but not understood by the public at large.”  Nonetheless, he insisted on pursuing his own vision, no matter the consequences:

Believe me, in art matters the saying, “Honesty is the best policy,” is true; rather more trouble on a serious study than a kind of chic to flatter the public.  Sometimes in moments of worry I have longed for some of that chic, but thinking it over I say, No, let me be true to myself, and express severe, rough but true things in a rough manner.  I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers; let whoever wants to come to me.

“I do not care a penny for the world’s opinion,” van Gogh declared in an unambiguous statement that Shapiro undoubtedly relished, and further noted that

he who wants to accomplish something really good or useful must neither count on nor want the approval or appreciation of the general public, but, on the contrary, can expect that only a very few hearts will sympathize with him and take part in it.

As Shapiro stated, he’d worked on the van Gogh piece expressly “to learn about courage”: the project had come out of his own “search for courage and a way to do real work and not rely on technique.”

Like Shapiro, too, van Gogh took an uncompromising view of what art and artists should and can do.  “I want to do drawings that touch some people,” the painter wrote, but even more, “I draw . . . to make [people] see things which are worth observing and which not everybody sees.”  His sister-in-law, Johanna (1862-1925; called “Jo” in Yellow House), pointed out after his death that “Vincent had often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.”  As for the real subject of his paintings, however, van Gogh insisted, “I . . . will not let myself be forced to produce work that does not show my own character.”  The painter proclaimed, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”  Being an artist, both he and Shapiro believed, means “[a]lways seeking without absolutely finding.”

This principle was the artist’s own expression of “testimony,” a performance technique Shapiro developed with Shaliko.  In Yellow House, Shapiro explained, it was manifested as “using Van Gogh’s words without pretending to be him; to talk directly one-to-one, actor to audience” not simply to present a play, a fictional story, but to use the text as a way to communicate with the spectators, to concentrate “on the interaction between actor and audience.”  (I blogged on this technique in “Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.)  Shapiro asserted that he’d always intended testimony to be “a principle mode of performance, but somehow at La Mama . . . narrative took precedence over the real world inhabited by the actors and the audience.”  The reworking of the script after New York focused in large part on developing this aspect of the script and the production, including writing a new scene, entitled “Testimony,” that came third in the production.

The Yellow House was Shaliko’s first deliberate experiment with testimony, though it figured in previous works, albeit in rudimentary form.  Building on the established Shaliko technique of asking questions, and inspired by van Gogh’s own “testimony,” Shapiro intended Yellow House to consider courage and the artist’s struggle to find a role in society.  Describing one moment in the performance, Shapiro explained: “[T]he actors address the audience directly as themselves—using Vincent’s words . . . but speaking for themselves as actors, artists and citizens . . . .”  The technique, in simplistic terms, is akin to Stanislavskian acting except that instead of finding elements of the characters in themselves, the actors make personal connections to aspects of the role—which Shapiro sometimes spoke of as “cross-documentation.”  This technique is combined with the Brechtian practice of an actor commenting on and criticizing the character and the situation.  While testimony started in The Yellow House mostly as direct address to the audience, it appeared afterwards in subtler manifestations. 

In The Yellow House in New York and Baltimore, four actors played different aspects of one character, Vincent van Gogh, and Shapiro explained that they each played a different role: Young Vincent (Elena Nicholas), the Painter (Judson Camp in New York; Brian Mallon in Baltimore), the Mirror (Olek Krupa in New York; William Verderber in Baltimore), and Self Portrait (Cristobal Carambo).  (At Trinity, one actor played the character.)  As their labels suggest, Shapiro didn’t see them as “characters,” but as “roles”—the various roles van Gogh played (or in which society cast him) in his life; this form of “role-play” Shapiro called “psychodrama.”  (I examine this Shaliko acting principle in the second part of “Testimony & Role vs. Character.”)

As a collaboratively built piece, The Yellow House changed as it developed.  At Trinity in 1984, it had been “frontal, chronological, direct [and] biographical,” but when the piece was restaged at La MaMa in February 1986 and then at Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations in June, it had become more intricate, less linear, and more metaphorical.  Set designer Rojo created an environment first for the long, narrow second-floor theater at La MaMa (the stage is 22 feet wide and 30 feet deep), then for the huge, vaulting 35-foot-by-100-foot North Hall of the Peabody Institute.  The two designs were very distinct, and Shapiro exploited the special qualities of each space. 

At La MaMa, for instance, “it was all head-on,” Shapiro explained.  “The good part of that was we were able to use this deep perspective” to get “the feeling of depth,” placing van Gogh far upstage on the fire stairs of the theater.  Behind him was a rear projection of the artist’s 1889 painting of Saint-Rémy, Corridor in Saint-Paul Hospital, “so you get depth behind depth behind depth,” added the director.  “That’s how I made that small space work.”  They performed “a lot of scenes way up behind the theater, so you’re really looking very hard through.  And that’s very good for van Gogh—depth.  But [with only a 16-foot ceiling,] there isn’t any height.”

Contrastingly, in his most striking theatrical effect in Baltimore, Shapiro used the high, vaulted ceiling at the Peabody to create his climactic moment.  As soon as he saw the North Hall while scoping out the available performance spaces in Baltimore, he chose it for The Yellow House.  “I like the height and the windows,” said the director to himself.  “That’s what I liked about the room.”  Projecting van Gogh’s Starry Night onto the 30-foot-high ceiling, Shapiro had Cristobal Carambo (as Self Portrait) climb up a rope 23 feet into the “sky above St. Remy” where he stood on a pipe to “paint” the picture.  “As soon as I saw that room, I knew I had to do something like that,” he effused.  He felt that the effect “made The Yellow House into a kind of passion play,” revealing “the religious, artistic, and social impulses in all of us.” 

As an illustration of how Shapiro reconceived his productions for each performance venue, the evolution of what the director called “the Ascent” is revealing:

The script had always called for Vincent to transcend the bars of St. Remy and paint Starry Night, but before Baltimore, we didn’t have the height to make it possible.  At Trinity, using only one Vincent, we made plywood cutouts of the stars, the Cyprus trees, and other features of Starry Night which we flew in in a three-dimensional arrangement and on which we projected a slide of Starry Night from the front (that is, from the center of the audience).  Van Gogh stood there and pretended to paint it.  At La Mama, with its four Vincents, the Mirror (the protagonist at this moment [Krupa]) was painting Starry Nightin his cell beyond the back wall, shown by rear screen projection.  Young Vincent [Nicholas] came in and pulled a large (20 feet by 30 feet) white scrim out of the cell and diagonally across the stage, as if Vincent’s canvas were being stretched across the theatre.  On this was projected Starry Night.  All four Vincents stood on chairs to help paint it.

In Baltimore, the Self Portrait [Carambo] painted Starry Night after climbing a rope up 23 feet, where he stood on a pipe to paint.  The picture was projected on the 30-foot high ceiling.

Starry Night was the final spectacle of the TON Yellow House, but the performance also started with a site-specific effect.  Those big windows in the North Hall, seven feet wide by 16 feet tall, had inspired Shapiro as well.  They were left exposed, with the curtains pulled back so that when the show began at 8 p.m. on the mid-June evenings, the sun was still shining in from the real world outside.  It was all the “lighting” designer Marc D. Malamud used until the daylight from outside faded gradually until sunset a little after 8:30 as the performance progressed.  (The room once had skylights, but a false ceiling had long ago been dropped beneath them.  Shapiro mused that it “would be great to do it like that.  To figure it out so that you started at the right time and went right through.”) 

Malamud and Shapiro hung theater instruments outside the windows as well to use for the testimony scene so that they could match the “color and quality” of the outside light to the stage lights inside.  In a scene set inside Vincent’s house, Rojo aligned the house’s window with the ones of the North Hall so that Vincent opened his window and pointed out to a real Baltimore landmark and said: “[T]his could be the center of a new renaissance”—acknowledging the real world.  (The Peabody is within view of the Walters Art Museum, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Baltimore’s Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place, among other sights.)

As I noted earlier, The Yellow House also reintroduced the Shaliko technique of the multiple casting of one role.  Shapiro had used this technique before, but in Yellow House, four actors, including a woman and an African-American, played van Gogh in various avatars.  In one remarkable scene, three Vincents, all dressed the same (in a representation of 1889’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, appeared together as the Painter (Camp/Mallon) painted his Self Portrait (Carambo) from his reflection in the Mirror (Krupa/Verderber)—as they conversed with one another (or themselves, as it were). 

Shapiro also used Julie Lyonn Lieberman’s music and songs as the voices of characters on stage.  He explained that “Van Gogh was inarticulate and rough . . ., and yet his letters are so eloquent.  I wanted him to stand on stage unable to speak . . . while someone was singing the words of one of his letters.”  In an interview, Shapiro commented about these devices, reminiscent of practices in certain Asian performance forms.  At the time, Shapiro said he knew nothing about Asian theater and that the resemblance was certainly not conscious.  (He surmised he might have absorbed this effect through his long-time study of Bertolt Brecht who was influenced by Asian theater forms.)  In retrospect, Shapiro concluded, he’d “stumbled on very early without the slightest knowledge” that he had done so, the “essence” of Asian theater: an emphasis on storytelling and a “complete redefinition of the concept of dramatic action,” the spectator-performer relationship, and the way both the actors and the audience relate to the story.  (It’s interesting to note that van Gogh, himself, was influenced by Japanese art.) 

The Asian-theater similarity goes even farther, and reveals another of Shapiro’s long-time goals.  The Yellow House, which Shapiro described in publicity as an “image opera,” also began the exploration of the synthesis of arts in performance with Kabuki and Beijing Opera as paradigms.  This Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerkwas also a principle of one of Shapiro’s significant influences, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940): “Wagner’s idea of a new theatre which would be a dramatic synthesis of words, music, lighting, rhythmical movement and all the magic of the plastic parts.”  (Meyerhold,arguably an inspiration for almost all avant-garde theater people who came of age in the 1960s as Shapiro had, maintained a life-long interest in Asian theater which was one of the central influences on his work as a director.)

Though previous Shaliko shows had included music and dance—or at least choreography—with The Yellow HouseShapiro began complecting music, sound, dance, movement, speech, poetry, and slide projections more and more into his pieces.  The director saw Yellow House as a “musical dialogue involving singers, musicians, actors, and set.”  Theater technology, as represented by projections like the van Gogh paintings at La MaMa and TON and, later, videos, also became increasingly integral to Shaliko performances.  In other productions, Shapiro also used recorded voices, electronically distorted speech, and on- and off-stage microphones. In the Trinity  performances of The Van Gogh Project, Theo van Gogh’s voice was heard over a microphone from off stage.  At La MaMa, Theo’s voice was on tape.   

While the La MaMa workshop was performed largely on the stage, however much Shapiro extended it beyond the back wall, with the audience out front, the TON performance space was essentially a huge room with a raised recital stage at one end.  Rojo lined the room with 16-foot construction scaffolding (not coincidentally, the same height as the windows) on three sides, leaving the recital platform open (for the musicians).  Shapiro (who’d been constrained not to alter the room itself) felt the “versatility, verticalness, cheapness, and roughness” of the scaffolding “subverted some of the room’s formality and prissiness.”  The viewers were seated along the sides of the room while the action took place all over the center of the space (including near enough to the spectators for the actors to speak to them) and on the scaffolds.  In contrast to the New York performances, the Baltimore presentation was much more environmental.  The Yellow House sets were even interactive: when van Gogh goes mad, the furniture danced in mid-air, manipulated like marionettes by the actors, themselves, in full view of the audience. 

Just as the set was a vital element in the performance, however, the music and singing, composed and performed by violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), was also integral.  John Strausbaugh of City Paper (4-10 July 1986) remarked that the text “was less a dramatic script than an oratorio.”  This was intended, as Shapiro asserted, “to reveal the psychic activity with extended moments and images.”  In Baltimore, Lieberman and a cellist (Pam Devier) played and sang on a tall platform at one end of the hall (at La MaMa, Rojo had a balcony built above the audience’s heads)—but members of the cast also sang, chanted, and otherwise vocalized from the performance area.  Shapiro dubbed the show “an image opera,” and Strausbaugh called the music “as much an environment as the set.”  (In his review of the New York presentation, Victor Gluck contended in the theater trade paper Back Stage on 28 March 1986 that the concept owed “much to the Theatre of Images” of Mabou Mines, Lee Breuer, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman.)  The music and singing, declared Stausbaugh, “provided both the emotional and narrative context for the piece.”

The Yellow House was perhaps Shaliko’s prettiest production.  Director Shapiro and designer Rojo derived the colors for the set and other production elements from van Gogh’s last painting, Crows Over the Wheat Field, dominated by blues and a deep, intense yellow color. (This fact contained its own small irony: the cadmium yellow pigment was significant to the painter because it evoked the bright, hot sun of Arles, but it also contained arsenic and may have helped cause van Gogh’s madness because he had a habit of sucking on his brushes.)  Though essentially ignored by critics outside Baltimore (there was one review of the New York production), it received excellent notices at the Theatre of Nations.  Non-linear in structure and surrealistic in design, it was visually stunning, captivating audiences and critics alike. 

The presentation at La MaMa received one sole review, in Back Stage (published almost a month after the last performance), in which Victor Gluck wrote that the production “as a visual experience . . . was absolutely startling.”  While complaining that as drama, “it was quite fragmented and sketchy,” Gluck declared that “it brilliantly captured Van Gogh’s psychological states of mind.”  He also proclaimed that the performance “was always startling and always intrigued the mind, the ear and the eye.” 

The TON production garnered a few more notices, but they were all local—no national press covered the festival as heavily as it deserved—and the weekly City Paper ran two reviews, one covering the whole event and the other on The Yellow House alone.  Both, though, came out after the Theatre of Nations had folded its tents and left town.  First up was John Strausbaugh’s “The Color Yellow,” in which he described the Shaliko production as “boldly staged.”  Reporting that Shaliko had “totally transformed their performance space . . . with an ingenious environmental set,” he added, “The staging made brilliant use of the entire room.”  The Yellow House, wrote Strausbaugh, “was a busy, highly stylized production that filled this space with an imagistic interpretation of Van Gogh’s troubled life.”  It was “an almost operatic interweaving of music and text.”  The reviewer described the painting scene with the three van Goghs I mention above as “gorgeous” and characterized the scene in which the set pieces “literally danced in the air” as “a great moment of theatrical overload, very like being stuck in Van Gogh’s mind and being barraged by a chorus of mad, conflicting voices and visions.”  The Yellow House, summed up Strausbaugh, “was crammed to bursting with ideas and images, words and actions and music.”  He went on:

There was so much going on, at such a constant pitch of intensity and ingenuity, that it was sometimes overwhelming and exhausting.  Mounting a production that was both this monumental and this meticulously detailed was a feat of heroic, obsessive vision worthy of its subject. 

David Bergman’s omnibus City Paper column, “The Party’s Over,” followed Strausbaugh’s review a week later and he called The Yellow House“a devastating play.”  Of the three-Vincent painting scene, Bergman labeled it “unforgettable” and declared, “I have never seen schizophrenia so convincingly handled on stage.”  He also called the Starry Night climax “one of the most beautiful stage images I have ever seen.”  (He concluded his article by averring, “The gesture summarized what the festival was all about—the power of artists to make another world.”)

In Baltimore’s daily Sun, J. Wynn Rousuck called the play a “highly inventive piece that’s “an intriguing study . . . suffused with a sense of the sanctity of the creative life.”  He, too, praised the three-painter scene as the performance’s “most stunning effect.”  Lieberman’s songs and Jo’s narration “bring to life the written words and inner thoughts of this plagued spirit.”  Rousuck was so taken with The Yellow House that a decade later, when Shapiro’s production of The Seagull byAnton Chekhov came to Baltimore’s Theatre Project from Albuquerque, the Sunreviewer reminded his readers about Shapiro’s “extraordinary work about Vincent Van Gogh” (31 October 1996) which had been “stunning” enough to "take your breath away” (12 November 1996).  (The theater artist hadn’t come east with his Riverside Repertory Theatre Company cast because he was too ill to travel.  Leonardo Shapiro died of cancer at home in New Mexico, where he’d gone to retire in 1993, on 22 January 1997.)

[I think that Yellow House was the most potentially successful of Shapiro’s work in terms of critical and audience reception—had it only received the kind of attention it deserved, especially at the Theatre of Nations.  It’s more accessible than Strangers, arguably the theater piece that most realized the principles and techniques Shapiro developed with the Shaliko Company (see my post on 3 and 6 March 2014), but it still demonstrates the theatricality, the space use, the synthesis of arts,  and so on.  It’s also a recognizable topic—people know about van Gogh—and it’s an exploration of something audiences understand intuitively.  Shapiro agreed that Yellow House was “pretty” and “not too rough . . . to be popular,” as he recognized that some of the Shaliko projects were.  The Baltimore theater festival was largely ignored except as a local event (even the Washington Post didn’t cover it, much less the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, New York magazine, Variety, Time, or Newsweek.  As you see, those Baltimore reviewers that did write about The Yellow House essentially raved over it.  Had the show garnered that kind of attention out of New York or nationally, it might have allowed Shapiro to raise the money for that unrealized European tour of Yellow House and a final New York production of the finished theater piece.  Nothing probably could have prevented Shapiro getting the diagnosis of bladder cancer the director received in July 1995, but had Yellow House gotten the kind of press coverage I think it should have, the end of Shapiro’s career might have been very different.

[I don’t put footnotes on Rick On Theater, but all the quotations in “The Yellow House” are sourced; I will be pleased to furnish any reader who’s interested with the citations for them upon request.  The sources, some of which aren’t published, run a gamut of Shaliko documents, articles and essays written by Leonardo Shapiro, reviews and press coverage of Shaliko’s and Shapiro’s work, interviews with Shapiro and  his colleagues and associates conducted by me, interviews of Shapiro conducted by other writers (some published and some not), transcripts from video tapes, and several other resources.  I won’t append a list of sources here—it would go on for pages—but I will list the reviews I quoted at the end of “The Yellow House”:

·   Victor Gluck, “The Yellow House,” Back Stage [New York] 28 March 1986: 42A.

·   John Strausbaugh, “Theater: The Color Yellow,” City Paper[Baltimore] 4-10 July 1986: 28-29.

·   David Bergman, “Theater: The Party’s Over,” City Paper[Baltimore] 11-17 July 1986: 28.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “‘The Yellow House’ Paints a Brilliant Picture of Van Gogh,” The Sun [Baltimore] 25 June 1986, sec. B: 1, 3.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “Shapiro’s Chekhov,” The Sun [Baltimore] “Like” [magazine sec.] 31 October 1996: 28.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “Theater review; Avant-garde director takes wing with ‘Seagull,’” The Sun [Baltimore] 12 November 1996, sec. E: 3.

[If any reader wants to verify a citation, leave a request in the Comments section for this post.  Just a reminder, however: not all sources will be available to the public and others may be hard to access because they exist only in non-circulating collections like the New York Public Library Billy Rose Theatre Division.]

"History of Valentine’s Day"

February 14, 2018, 7:00 am

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[In the past, I’ve published posts marking various holidays when the schedule for Rick On Theater coincides with the date of celebration.  I thought, since today’s Valentine’s Day, that a history of the unofficial holiday celebrating romantic love would be fun.  The article below was posted originally on the website History.com in 2009 and has been reposted annually (at http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day/history-of-valentines-day).  I’ve amended the History version a little to include some dates of figures and events mention in the article]

Every February 14, across the United States and in other places around the world, candy, flowers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint, and where did these traditions come from? Find out about the history of this centuries-old holiday, from ancient Roman rituals to the customs of Victorian England.

THE LEGEND OF ST. VALENTINE

The history of Valentine’s Day—and the story of its patron saint—is shrouded in mystery. We do know that February has long been celebrated as a month of romance, and that St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. But who was Saint Valentine, and how did he become associated with this ancient rite?

DID YOU KNOW? Approximately 150 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine's Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas.

The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine [226-269 CE] was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II [Claudius Gothicus, 210-270 CE] decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death [on 14 February].

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first “valentine” greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl—possibly his jailor’s daughter—who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed “From your Valentine,” an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic and—most importantly—romantic figure. By the Middle Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of the most popular saints in England and France.

ORIGINS OF VALENTINE’S DAY: A PAGAN FESTIVAL IN FEBRUARY

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial—which probably occurred around A.D. 270—others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.

VALENTINE’S DAY: A DAY OF ROMANCE

Lupercalia survived the initial rise of Christianity and but was outlawed—as it was deemed “un-Christian”—at the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius [reigned 492-496 CE] declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day. It was not until much later, however, that the day became definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds’ mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of Valentine’s Day should be a day for romance.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine’s didn’t begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans [1394-1465], to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt [25 October 1415]. (The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.) Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V [b. 1386; reigned 1413-22] hired a writer named John Lydgate [1370-1451] to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois [1401-37; Queen Consort of England, 1420-22].

TYPICAL VALENTINE’S DAY GREETINGS

In addition to the United States, Valentine’s Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France and Australia. In Great Britain, Valentine’s Day began to be popularly celebrated around the 17th century. By the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes, and by 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one’s feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine’s Day greetings.

Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland [1828-1904] began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as “scrap.” Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.) Women purchase approximately 85 percent of all valentines.

[Valentine’s Day 2018 coincides with Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent in the Christian religion.  The cultural clash has been covered extensively in news reports so I won’t replicate them.  I will note, however, that the calendrical coincidence is the first since 14 February 1945—73 years ago—and won’t occur again until 14 February 2024 and 2029—six and 11 years from now.  (In a further temporal concurrence, Easter Sunday, the end of Lent, will fall this year on 1 April . . . also known as April Fool’s Day.)] 

Perry Mason (Part 1)

February 19, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk posted a recent article, “Four Actors” (30 January), concerning the acting of the guest stars in four episodes of the Perry Masontelevision series.  I pointed out then that Kirk’s a devoted fan of the Mason mystery novels (as he is of the entire genre).  Back in 2006, he wrote an essay about the novels for a site called Perry Mason TV Series (http://www.perrymasontvseries.com/wiki/); Kirk’s article, “Perry Mason,” is at http://www.perrymasontvseries.com/woodward/.  The post below and Part 2 on 22 February is a lightly reedited version of that essay. 

[“Perry Mason” isn’t about acting, of course, but mystery writing (and writing in general).  I’ve never been a reader of Gardner’s novels, but I found the essay (which I first read when it was originally posted on line) fascinating.  I guarantee you all will, too, possibly because the novels are not familiar.  (Those of you who have been fans of Gardner’s writing will find interest in seeing if you agree with Kirk’s points or not.)  Between Part 1 and Part 2, you’ll find that Kirk covers most of the salient points of the Mason mystery books, and he’s done it with his customary insight and style.]

Introduction

For years I have read, re-read, and enjoyed the Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970). Generally speaking, a mystery reader becomes immersed in a series for two reasons: affection for the main character or characters, and an imaginative response to the world of the stories. Those are certainly my reasons for enjoying the Perry Mason series, and my pleasure is increased by my inability to remember the solution to any mystery, which means that I can return to it time after time without being bored.

I’m not sure that books that have sold so well (it is still the third best selling book series of all time) need much of a defense, but I have the impression that the positive qualities of the Mason books are not always sufficiently appreciated. In this essay I want to help correct that situation by addressing both complaints and strengths. I have discovered after years of reading that some of the emotional wellsprings of the books are not exactly what one might expect. Those discoveries are included in the material that follows, which I present according to themes.

There are some eighty Perry Mason novels, plus a novella and a short story. Gardner published his first Mason novel in 1933 and continued to write them until his death in 1970, at the age of eighty. In my opinion the books written in the forties and fifties are probably the strongest as a group, but there is little falling off in quality through the entire series; they are all fun to read.

A “prototypical” Perry Mason mystery should include the main cast of characters, including Sergeant Holcomb, the boorish police sergeant, as well as Lieutenant Tragg; it probably should involve a switch in guns, a Gardner specialty; and it should end in a courtroom. I would propose The Case of the Long Legged Models (1958) as a classic example: a gambler is killed over his IOU’s and Mason defends the gambler’s daughter when she’s charged with the murder of the man who killed her father.  For his defense, Mason must sort out three identical guns which he manipulates until no one can follow where each gun was and who had it when.

For illustrations in this essay, however, I will use The Case of the Grinning Gorilla, published in 1952. Gardner was sixty-two years old at that time – he was approximately ten years older than the twentieth century. Guns are not a major feature in Gorilla, in which Mason, at a public administrator’s auction, buys a packet of memorabilia of a woman who drowned herself; after the murder of a man who’d been interested in obtaining the woman’s diary, Mason finds himself facing a hypnotized gorilla. But in other respects it is an excellent representative of the corpus, and a colorful and imaginative story.

(The titles of Mason mystery novels, unlike the television episodes, all begin with The Case of the . . . In referring to Mason books I will use only the parts of the titles that are unique.)

Women

Someone told me once that the Perry Mason books appeal only to men, not to women. I can’t imagine that this is true – I have known women who love the books – but we may begin by recognizing that Gardner displays characteristics in his writing that cry out to be labeled male chauvinism. Numerous times a woman getting out of a car “shows a glimpse of shapely leg,” or nylon. Women are sometimes described in terms of their physical appearance, in a sort of barroom or smoking club tone.

But in contradiction to this somewhat sniggering masculine attitude is the redoubtable Della Street, Perry’s secretary, treated by him almost always as an equal – consulted and relied on, not just for her looks (there we go again), but for her brain. In Stuttering Bishop, published in 1938, Gardner makes a deliberate point about women’s capabilities when Della makes several deductions that would not have occurred to Paul Drake. After Paul says that women simply aren’t cut out for detective work, for example, she notices blood stains in a car, upon which Paul says: “You’ve got a good eye, Della.”  And lined up with her are a number of smart, self-sufficient, self-motivating women (as well as Bertha Cool, the detective, who with her sidekick Donald Lam has her own series of books, written under the name A. A. Fair). Consider the following, from Sleepwalker’s Niece, published in 1936. Mason is talking with a golddigger:

“I understand the woman is a nurse. Think of it, Peter Kent marrying a nurse!” 

“What’s wrong with a nurse?” Mason asked.

“Everything,” she replied, “so far as Peter Kent is concerned. She has to work for a living.”

“And a mighty fine thing,” Mason said. “I like women who work for a living.”

In Velvet Claws, the first Mason novel, published in 1933, Mason mentions that Della’s family was rich and lost its money (the Great Depression, which began in 1929, was a recent event), so Della had to work.

Gorilla is mostly a book about men – perhaps appropriately, considering the gorilla theme! But Helen Cadmus, the beautiful stenographer who hoped for a movie career before disappearing from a ship, is shown in her diaries as sensitive and intelligent, and Fern Blevins, although no rocket scientist, has a lot of what used to be described as moxie. We can say that even the women in the stories who define themselves in relation to men, also have their own lives to lead.

Race

The same can be said about Gardner’s attitudes toward race. As a practicing attorney Gardner specialized in representing Chinese immigrants, so he had experience with treating members of minorities as individuals rather than as stereotypes. The early books do contain portraits of grinning Negroes, devious Asians, and shiftless Hispanics (for example, in 1940 in Baited Hook); but quite soon these are replaced by a different attitude: “minorities” are people, with feelings, ideas, and experiences of their own. In the late novel Fabulous Fake (1969) Mason defends a young black man pro bono; the man has been accused of theft because he is walking through a white neighborhood carrying a paper bag (his lunch) when a robbery takes place, and is only exonerated when someone else is arrested for the crime.

Gorilla handles race in a particularly interesting way, by using Chinese culture as a recurrent theme. The restaurant staff behaves in what could be considered a stereotypical way, with the waiter portrayed as stolid and imperturbable. Perry and Della discuss their “fortunes” seriously, speculating on the roles of fate and chance. Later, when a client is upset, Perry quotes the fortune he received, “Courage is the only antidote for danger” – particularly appropriate for his life – and recommends familiarity with Asian proverbs. At the end of the book, another “fortune” provides the book’s emotional conclusion.

Gardner’s treatment of an ethnic group, then, shows nuance and creativity. Whatever his prejudices and inherited limitations may have been, he ordinarily treats people as people.

Writing style

Could Gardner “write well” – was he a “good writer” – and are not the Perry Mason books in fact badly written? Gardner built his career by producing on demand: he wrote what he needed to in order to make a living. But when style was required, he was excellent, as many of his short stories attest. Consider the following, the opening of the short story “The Valley of Little Fears” (published 1948, possibly written earlier). I love the rhythms of this passage, and how much it accomplishes in a short space:

This thing is true of the desert, the first time you feel its spell you’ll either love it or you’ll hate it. If you hate it, your hatred will be founded on fear.

Those who know the desert claim you never change that original reaction, no matter how long you live in the sandy wastes. In that they’re wrong. I know of one case where the rules didn’t work. The desert is hard to figure, and you can’t make rules about it.

The Perry Mason books put a premium on dialogue and on speedy narrative. The jacket cover notes (author unattributed) to Seven Complete Novels (Avenel Books, 1979), in an excellent critical evaluation of Gardner’s writing style in the Mason books, points out that

Each of these stories is a murder mystery written with stunning economy of characterization and dialogue, moving from an intriguing beginning, through intricate plots and subplots, to the crescendo of a battle of wits and expertise in the courtroom to a climax that is always unexpected.

Arguments about “good writing” tend to point toward a generalized notion of “beautiful style”, and often to forget that to be “good,” writing must succeed at the purpose for which it is intended. Gardner’s purpose is fast-moving narrative and dialogue. This purpose lends itself to dictation – a method of writing suited to a dialogue-centric style – and Gardner did frequently dictate his books. This practice may not be a flaw, though; perhaps partly as a result, the speeches in the books are varied, well characterized, lively with slang and idiom, and, needless to say, fast-paced.

While Gardner’s dictating his books may have contributed to their lack of “literary” style, it also surely contributed to the quality of the dialogue, which is colloquial, character-based, and flexible.

It is true that Gardner has his favorite expressions – many times someone is said to “take a button and sew a vest on it” – but for this reader at least, such affection for particular phrases is part of the charm of the series.

Subjects of particular interest

But there are two subjects in the Mason books (in addition to crime and the law, of course) on which Gardner writes with particular eloquence, two subjects dear to his heart: the undeveloped American West and wilderness, and dogs. In particular, as a writer he seems almost to relax (as do Perry and Della) when his stories leave the cities and head for the mountains and the deserts, as in Drowsy Mosquito (1943), Rolling Bones (1939), and many short stories. He seldom bothers to describe the physical properties of a scene unless it involves the desert or the mountains:

Down below the desert stretched interminably. The tall, weird shapes of the Joshua palms cast long, angular shadows. Over on the right snow-capped mountains turned to a rosy glow in the rays of the setting sun. Then the desert gave way to mountains, piling up in jagged, tumbled peaks until the crests became covered with dark green pines. A lake flashed into view. (Runaway Corpse, 1954)

As for dogs, Gardner loved them; they play a role in the plots of several books, and Mason displays deep familiarity with their behavior, as for example in this passage from Drowning Duck (1942):

“They’re nice dogs,” Mason said. “Peculiar thing about canine psychology. They hurl a challenge at you, and you stand still and look at them, and, as we lawyers say, ‘the issue is joined.’ You keep right on going about your business, and show absolutely no fear, and almost any dog is inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Gardner was not anti-cat, however; the behavior of Careless Kitten (1942) is crucial to the solution of the plot, and it is one of two books named for cats, as well as for birds and other animal life.

Aside from his interest in the west and in animals, Gardner is consistently interested in what goes on in life. Subjects as varied as racetracks, modern art, corporate management, beauty contests, real estate, ducks, photography, detergents, casinos, waiting on tables, farm-bred trout, Hollywood, motel management, prospecting all are grist for his mill.

Aristotelian structure

The Perry Mason books have both internal and external climaxes. The external is the moment when the case swings Perry’s way. As with classical Greek tragedy, this is followed by a denouement, in which the situation is resolved, sometimes (though by no means always, as it sometimes seemed on TV) with the public confession of the guilty party. The internal climax is the moment when Mason suddenly sees the true configuration of the events of the mystery. (This is equivalent to Nero Wolfe’s pushing his lips in and out, in the Rex Stout mystery novels, but for Mason it happens in various ways.) This moment is always at least implied in a Mason book; sometimes it is not described, but we know it must have occurred. The false connections melt away, and Perry understands what must have really happened.

The structure of the Mason novels is in fact highly Aristotelian, typically including an exposition, a rising action, an inciting incident (almost always the murder), a climax, and an unraveling. However, Mason is not a tragic hero; instead, he is both the protagonist and the one who restores order to a society torn apart by the worst of all crimes, murder. His client is innocent too (with a qualified exception or two), at least of murder – not always of wrong behavior. Frequently clients get themselves in trouble by making dubious decisions (for example, in Screaming Woman of 1957,Perry’s client, a salesman, tries to talk his way out of being arrested by the police, with the opposite result). Many of the books provide examples, and very often the clients lie to their attorney as well as to the police.

Lawyers

Perry Mason is a lawyer. To Gardner, who was himself a resourceful and capable attorney, this is explanation enough for Mason’s actions. A lawyer’s duty is to fight for the client. On the other hand, it is worth noting that although Gardner holds in the highest esteem the ideals of the legal profession, he does not idolize lawyers as such. The Mason books are full of inept or crooked ones, like Nathaniel Shuster in The Caretaker’s Cat (1935), Banner Boles (not a practicing attorney, but trained in the law and all the more dangerous on that account) in Lucky Loser (1957), or the excellently named “Old Attica, the shyster” in Half-Wakened Wife (1945).

In Gorilla Mason finds himself teamed with the young attorney James Etna. The two attorneys exercise considerable professional caution before they join on the case, and collegiality once they do. Mason always observes legal etiquette, and makes sure his young associate gets to take part in cross-examination at the trial, although he also keeps him in line – explaining why, so his junior associate will be able to grow. Sidney Hardwick, a lawyer for another group of characters in the story, is resourceful and willing to use the status of his client to manipulate the district attorney’s office for his own purposes. He gives the impression that he works the margins of the law as Mason does; one also gets the impression that his faith in justice is as not as high.

As an attorney, surely Mason appeals to readers everywhere because he returns his phone calls. Anyone who has tried to get a lawyer – or anyone else – to call back knows how glorious this is. Mason may not answer his mail (he hates to), but when a client needs him, he is there. No wonder he doesn’t like unimportant cases.

Gardner periodically mentions that Mason has multiple clients, and occasionally introduces one; on the TV show it generally seems as though he has only one client at a time, and devotes all his attention to that one person. In the books we see Mason accepting pro bono work (Hesitant Hostess, 1953), and shifting appointments so he can concentrate on the most important case of the moment. The man can prioritize. His clients are of all sorts – young and old, rich and poor, attractive and unattractive, cooperative and uncooperative, sympathetic and unlikable, naive and manipulative, sometimes pure as the driven snow, sometimes so shifty that they ought to be guilty, even if in fact they’re not.

Gardner, like Abraham Lincoln in his days as a trial lawyer, enjoyed tricky defense strategies – not dishonest ones, but strategies that take advantage of every nook and cranny of the law. We see Mason home late at night, reading the advance decisions (Hesitant Hostess). He keeps a file of unusual decisions (Singing Skirt, 1959), as did my father, also a lawyer. [Kirk’s grandfather, also a lawyer, founded the firm in which his father practiced and wrote a chronicle of his life as an attorney over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Kirk composed “A Lawyer and a Life” (11 November 2010) for ROT based on that memoir. –ed.] The fact is that Mason stretches the limits of the law in order to carry out what he considers (to borrow Star Trekterminology) its Prime Directive: to represent and defend his client to the best of his ability. This principle often leads him to the edge of both trouble and the law. One sympathizes with the police.

Judges

Gardner doesn’t spend a lot of time personalizing judges; they almost certainly appear as they would to a lawyer – fairly remote figures with individual traits worth noting primarily for strategic reasons. Mason is on personal terms with some (1954’s Restless Redhead, the posthumously published Fenced In Woman of 1972, 1965’s Beautiful Beggar), and he does his best to gain an advantage from what he knows of a judge’s personality (Careless Cupid, 1968).

Some judges in the series are tougher than others. None are visibly corrupt or unable at least to listen to Perry’s arguments, although many express strong reservations about Perry’s tricks, especially his habit of turning preliminary hearings into conclusive trials. But the ethos of the books requires that Mason have at least a fair chance before the Court, something he seldom gets from the police or the District Attorney.

In another installment of this article we will look at how the practice of law is presented in the Perry Mason books, and at the interesting “family” structure that Gardner develops as the series of novels progresses.

[Kirk notes above that the Mason books are still popular and selling well even after over half a century in print.  Apparently that wasn’t always the case.  Kirk told me that the Mason novels were out of print for some years at one point, but are now being reissued by Ankerwycke, which is the publishing arm of . . . the American Bar Association!  (I never knew that the ABA had a “publishing arm”!  I imagine Gardner was an ABA member, but they must feel Perry Mason is a good ambassador for the profession.)

[I hope readers enjoyed the first part of Kirk’s “Perry Mason.”  Log back on to Rick On Theater in three days to pick up Part 2 of Kirk’s discussion of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries.  There’s plenty more yet to be said (including a brief look at the popular TV series as it relates to the books), as I’m sure you’ll discover.]

Perry Mason (Part 2)

February 22, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Kirk Woodward

[This is Part 2 of Kirk’s essay on the Perry Mason mystery novels of Erle Stanley Gardner.  (If you haven’t read Part 1, I strongly recommend going back to 19 February—the post just below this one on the Rick On Theater site—to be sure you have all the background to this discussion.)  Here, Kirk picks up where he left off, examining the various approaches to constructing Gardner’s mystery stories that make his novels different from most of the rest of the genre.

[In this part of the post, Kirk touches on the TV series of 1957-1966.  Gardner was still writing the novels while the series was on the air and many of the books were adapted as episodes.  Gardner also allowed the successful TV show to influence some of the ways in which the novels changed over the later years.  I’m sure ROTters will enjoy the conclusion of Kirk Woodward’s “Perry Mason.”]

The practice of law

A collection of Perry Mason’s comments about the practice of law gives a fascinating picture of determination in the service of justice. Here are some remarks found in The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952. The titles of Mason mysteries all begin with The Case of the . . . ; as I did in Part 1, in referring to Mason books I will use only the parts of the titles that are unique.)

:

“I make my living by knowing something about law and something about human nature. I stand up in front of juries. I cross-examine witnesses. I have to know a lot more about human nature than the average man.” 

“You don’t get to understand human nature by listening to what people tell you when they’re talking to you. That’s when you see them with their make-up on, with their best foot forward. You learn about human nature by watching people when they don’t know they’re being watched, by listening to conversations that they don’t know are being overheard, by prying into their thoughts whenever you can find what their true thoughts are. You learn about people when you see their souls stripped naked by suffering.”

“I saw no reason to comply with an empty legal formality.” (Della Street replies to this, “I think probably that last remark is a very complete index to your character.”)

“We’re never going to get anywhere by denials and evasions, and being on the defensive. This is a case where we’re going to have to carry the fight to the other man.”

“When a lawyer has to argue with himself to try to talk himself into believing a client’s story, it’s a damn sight better to keep anyone else from ever hearing that story.”

“There’s a difference between retreating until you can fight at the right time and at the right place and just running away.”

“You have to take them as they come, Jim. You can’t skim the cream all the time. Every once in a while Fate hands you something.”

“We advise our clients for their best interests, not ours.”

Mason often describes himself as a fighter. His comments on his own motivations don’t go much farther than these (from Runaway Corpse, 1954) in a conversation with a District Attorney:

Vandling said, “The district attorney in Los Angeles gave me quite a briefing about you. He told me you were tricky, shrewd, diabolically clever, and while he didn’t say in so many words that you were crooked he intimated that you’d cut your grandmother’s throat in order to obtain an advantage for a client.”

“Why not?” Mason asked, grinning. “After all, I’m supposed to represent my clients. Then again you’re not my grandmother.”

Gardner certainly would have approved of the comment by Leslie Charteris (1907-1993, the creator of the series of novels featuring The Saint) that he created his great series character as a protest against “the miserable half-heartedness of the age.” Mason sees the law as a great ideal, and its ambiguities as a testing ground for personality.

I’m a hunter, Della. Some men get their thrills in life out of standing up to a charging lion or tiger. Some like to shoot small birds; some just like to hunt, not for what they kill, but for the thrill of hunting. Well, I hunt murderers. And, Della, I want to bag that murderer. I don’t want Tragg to do it. I’m willing he should have the credit, but I want to be the one to do the hunting, and finding. (Haunted Husband, 1941)

To that end he will sacrifice even the typical human ideal of the happy family life. And it seems to have sacrificed him as well. He never mentions parents, and says he has no brothers or sisters. And of course he is unmarried.

Mason is the classic example of Benjamin Franklin’s precept in his Autobiography(1790): “I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.”

Mason lives in an apartment; we don’t learn much more about it than that it has curtains and he reads in his chair. He has a good car; he dines out and eats well; he goes camping with cronies and makes what they call Thousand Island Gravy. Otherwise he is a saint to the law. Where does this devotion come from? We aren’t told, but it may remind us of Bible verses like Psalm 119:34: “Give me understanding, and I shall keep Your law; indeed, I shall observe it with my whole heart.”

The family structure

Mention of marriage brings us to the central emotional feature of the books – the nature of Perry Mason’s “family.” Gardner periodically tries to establish a romance between Perry and Della Street, his secretary. (After Gardner’s wife died, very late in his life, Gardner married his secretary.) Perry and Della discuss marriage (for example, in Lame Canary, 1937; Golddigger’s Purse, 1945; and Caretaker’s Cat, 1935), but they never marry; they move toward marriage, and then away from it. Their moments of hugging and kissing don’t feel quite right to the reader.

The reason for this dance of closeness and distance, I believe, is that in a psychological, or even psychic, sense, Mason’s team actually is a family. Mason is the paterfamilias; Della and Paul Drake are his children, and Burger and Tragg are alternately cranky and bearable relatives. (Sergeant Holcomb is an unpleasant neighbor.)

Perry Mason doesn’t marry Della, then, because the relationship would be too weird; it would feel as if he had married his daughter. So the efforts to kindle sparks between Perry and Della are doomed; because of the way the stories are structured, such a pairing would strike us as icky, even if it were not literally so. (When a new Perry Mason series starring Monte Markham appeared on network TV in the 1970s, the producers indicated that Perry and Della would be a sexually active couple. The series was a failure.)

I am not claiming that this interpretation is “true” in terms of the stories – that “Della really is Perry’s daughter” – or that Gardner intended to present the situation this way, but that this is how the situation feels to the reader, and apparently how it felt to Gardner too, since he was not able to overcome the structural resistance between Perry and Della, like trying to bring two magnets together at the same pole.

Readers and audiences love families. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, as created by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) are a family, and readers can hardly get enough information about their relationship. Lord Peter Wimsey, Bunter, and Harriet Vane, as created by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), are a family. We still want the Beatles to reunite as a family, even though alas that is impossible. The family relationship in the Mason books gives the stories an emotional strength, even if a slightly odd one, that carries them through. (A contemporary example of the same pattern can be found in the Harry Potter book series:  Harry, Ron, and Hermione can be thought of as brothers and sister, Dumbledore as the father, Voldemort as the evil uncle, Draco Malfoy as the mean cousin, and so on.)

Mason says the same things that every other ordinary male of his time might have said about women; but he is a gentleman, and, when actually offered a sexual encounter, he is practically a monk, again illustrating his remarkable single-mindedness – a constant theme of the books, and a quality at the core of his character.

The plot hook

The “engine” of the plots of the Mason books, the “hook” that gives them their distinctive nature, is that Mason invariably does something that puts him in as much trouble as his client is in – he runs the risk of being disgraced, or jailed, or, worst of all, disbarred and forbidden to practice his sacred craft any more. He must then fight as hard to extricate himself from the mess as he fights for his client; and, to make things more difficult, if their interests clash, he must put those of the client ahead of his own.

A typical Mason client looks guilty as sin because someone has deliberately arranged appearances that way. It is not always clear whether Mason sees through the deception from the start, or whether he is merely acting according to the principle that everyone is entitled to an effective defense. He often proclaims that he only defends the innocent; he is not interested in getting scoundrels off. However, appearances damn his clients; how does he know they are innocent?

In any case, each defendant is by definition an underdog in some way. Gardner does not always view the law from the defense’s perspective; he wrote books with a District Attorney, Doug Selby, as the hero. Even in those cases, though, Selby is fighting heavy odds. Gardner was a scrapper in real life – an acquaintance is said to have called him “a contentious son of a bitch” – and the series characters of his stories are scrappers too.

Keeping current

The practice of law in the United States has evolved over the decades, to the point where Perry Mason would find much of it unfamiliar. Pre-trial discovery, in particular, would remove a number of strings from his bow, or make them more difficult to use. However, in the books Mason stays current with the law, just as Gardner stays current with what happens in society.

The writer Penelope Gilliatt(1932-1993) once remarked how interesting it was to watch the hemlines go up and down over the years in Agatha Christie’s long-running mystery play The Mousetrap (which opened in 1952, and is still running). In the same way, one sees both social and legal fashions change in the Mason books. Perry Mason begins as practically a tough-guy detective out of a book by Dashiel Hammett (1894-1961); Gardner, always on the watch for a market for his writing, freely imitated the core concepts of other writers. (His Bertha Cool and Donald Lam bear a remarkable and I would guess not coincidental resemblance to Rex Stout’s characters Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.)

But as the years pass, Mason becomes much less obnoxiously tough, and more the sophisticated lawyer, a fact Gardner comments on in his introduction to a reissue of Lucky Legs (1967), originally published in 1934, where he notes that the early Perry Mason was seldom without a set of master keys to use when breaking and entering, but gradually settled down to become a law-abiding member of the bar, shunning his initial cavalier lawbreaking.

The reader of the books in sequence sees the Miranda warning of 1966 (“You have the right to remain silent,” etc.) coming into effect, irritating the police but interestingly not seeming to influence Mason at all – he frequently instructs his clients to stay silent anyway, and he knows all about their need for an attorney.

As legal fashions change, so do social. Gardner keeps Mason’s world as unrestricted by time period as possible (a remarkable bit of foresight); but we see glimpses of speakeasies, of the Depression, of World War II, of beatniks and the turmoil of the 1960’s (Gardner and Mason don’t have much use for it, but Mason treats everyone even-handedly until he reaches the point of exasperation). People lose their fortunes in the Depression, soldiers come home from war shell-shocked, rationing makes it difficult to buy tires. Gardner doesn’t connect his stories to particular dates, but the real world does make shadowy background appearances.

Gardner was an active, participatory sort of man, and his books demonstrate his powerful curiosity. Gorilla includes a great deal of speculation about the possibility of hypnotizing animals – and what would you do with them then? – plus substantial interest in the actual habits of gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys. Typically a Gardner book reflects a lively interest in what’s going on in the world.

Through it all, as noted, Mason continues to get himself in trouble as he tries to get his clients out of it. The major difference between the books and, in particular, the TV movies starring Raymond Burr (1917-1993) that began in 1985, is that on TV Mason is of course a tough cross-examiner, but not particularly a risk-taker, while the Perry Mason of the books can hardly resist an opportunity to throw himself into the fire.

Perry Mason on TV

The original TV series falls somewhere between these two stools, but of course any faults of the years of the series (1957-1966) are redeemed by the extraordinary cast. It is well known that Burr was barely allowed to audition for the role at all; Gardner saw him audition for the antagonist, the role Burr frequently played in movies, and announced, “That’s Mason!” It can be said that Burr did not fit Gardner’s physical description of Mason (not that he ever describes him extensively): his features are not steely or craggy, but soft. But Burr had the extraordinary gift of making the simplest line, like “Then what did you do?” crackle with significance.

He also seemed to contain a deep well of kindliness. When I was a child, my parents took me to hear him speak to the Bar Association, and he gave me his autograph afterwards. I recall him as pleasant and considerate.

The family unit in the series – Barbara Hale (1922-2017) as Della Street, William Hopper (1915-1970) as the private detective Paul Drake, William Talman (1915-1968) as District Attorney Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins (1889-1965) as Lt. Tragg – is also perfectly cast, again not necessarily in keeping with the descriptions in the books. Hopper was tall but not glassy-eyed or bug-eyed. Talman was not “bear-like”. Collins was not Mason’s age, and tall, but older, and short. But surely none could have been equaled.

In the books written after the TV show had begun to take hold, the characters subtly begin at least not to contradict those on TV. (Gardner, as is well known, played a judge in the last episode of the TV series, incidentally one of the best examples of a “final episode” of a TV series.)

Keeping the formula fresh

Since the TV series usually ended up in the same courtroom every week, we may forget that Gardner worked hard to vary the characteristics of his books. By my count about a quarter of the books in the series either do not end in a trial at all, or end in some sort of a hearing other than a trial, or in a county other than Los Angeles, and the District Attorney, Hamilton Burger, does not appear in every Los Angeles trial, although he tends at least to make an appearance toward the end, when he anticipates that Perry is at long last about to lay an egg.

It should go without saying that Gardner is a master plotter, from the initial incident (in Gorilla, Perry purchases a series of diaries at an auction) through the denouement, which may contain a surprise inside the surprise. One of the surest signs of the high quality of Gardner’s plotting, to my mind, is that not all Perry’s schemes pay off. Some backfire, getting him in trouble; some simply don’t amount to anything, a realistic observation – nobody’s perfect, and Mason makes mistakes, and loses his temper, like anyone else.

What’s in a name?

The mention of Burger brings up the topic of Gardner and names. He loves triple-names and middle initials, although none of the core team has them. Names of peripheral characters can be exotic, as though they had been assembled by a quick visit to the phone book (although there are plenty of ordinary names as well). Those in Gorilla are not as bizarre as, say, Eduardo Marcus Deering, the District Attorney in Duplicate Daughter (1960), or Dr. Herkimer Corrison Renault in Runaway Corpse (1954), but neither are they ordinary:

Helen Cadmus
Benjamin Addicks
Josephine Kempton
Nathan Fallon
James Etna
Mortimer Hershey
Sidney Hardwick
Fern Blevins
Herman Barnwell

And was Gardner aware from the start that his DA’s name was Ham Burger? 

Religion

There is little about religion in the Mason books. In Caretaker’s Cat (1935) a clergyman is suspicious and afraid to open the door of his house, an attitude that bemuses Mason and Drake. The title character of the Stuttering Bishop (1936) is evaluated primarily in terms of his professional responsibilities, but it is also reported that in Australia he was “one of the most human ministers I’ve ever seen. He didn’t have the smug, self-righteous attitude so many preachers have. He was a man who wanted to help people – and he helped me.”

Then there’s the following interesting conversation from Stepdaughter’s Secret (1963). A client is speaking:

“There was a chaplain in that prison who took an interest in me. I won’t say that he gave me religion, because, in a way, he didn’t. He simply gave me confidence in myself and my fellow man, and in a divine scheme of the universe.

“He pointed out that life was too complicated to be accidental, that it took a master plan to account for life, as we knew it; that fledglings emerged from the egg, grew feathers and poised on the edge of the nest with the desire to fly because of what we call instinct; that instinct was merely a divine plan and a means by which the architect of that divine plan communicated with the living units.

“He asked me to consult my own instincts, not my selfish inclinations but the feelings that came to me when I could deliberately disregard my environment and put myself in harmony with the universe. He dared me to surrender myself in the solitude of night to the great heart of the universe.”

“And you did?” Mason asked.

“I did it because he told me I was afraid to do it, and I wanted to show him I wasn’t. I wanted to prove he was wrong.”

“And he wasn’t wrong?”

“Something came to me – I don’t know what it was. A feeling of awareness, a desire to make something of myself. I started to read, study and think.” 

And in Haunted Husband (1941), Mason tells a woman a parable of life and death that I have not seen elsewhere, and that would stand out in any discussion of death and immortality. If the reader is not familiar with it, I highly recommend it. It begins, “If only we had the vision to see the whole pattern of life . . . .” Needless to say, the passage is integrated with the plot.

Looking for a savior

I described above the “hook” to the plots of the Perry Mason books, in which Mason immerses himself in his client’s case to the extent that he is in almost as much trouble as the client is. I have saved to the end a comment on the “myth” underlying this device. (By “myth,” of course, I do not mean something fictional, but rather a significant underlying story.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, Perry Mason is a Savior. He enters a world not his own, participates in it, and saves his devotee from death. In other words, Mason is a Christ figure. Jesus as he appears in the gospels is not merely someone, even a loving someone, who looks at us, possibly sees the best in us, and pleads our case with God. That would be fine, of course (and would correspond to the TV Mason movies), but that’s not the Jesus story. Instead, as the author of Hebrews 5:2 writes, “He can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is also subject to weakness.”

I am not claiming that Gardner was a Christian – I have no idea. (He requested that the only religious event at his graveside be a reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm.) I definitely am claiming that the Mason books resonate because of their mythic structure, because they dramatize the situation of all of us who get ourselves deep in life’s messes, and pray – whatever that may mean for us – for help. In the Mason books, that help is provided – which is also the upshot of the Christian story.

The poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973), in The Dyer’s Hand (1962), writes in a famous essay called “The Guilty Vicarage” that murder mysteries end in “a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt.” That, perhaps, is the root of the appeal of the Perry Mason books, and why many people like me still read them.

[Well, that’s Part 2 of the Perry Mason two-fer.  I called it the conclusion . . . but is it?  Kirk’s working on reediting a possible addendum, a sort of coda to “Perry Mason.”  I won’t provide any details—in case he decides not to include it—but if he does, it’ll be a little lagniappe forROT readers.  Keep an eye out for “Perry Mason (Part 3)”—it could appear at any time.]

Dispatches from Israel 13

February 27, 2018, 7:00 am

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by Helen Kaye

[Helen has curtailed her usual active schedule somewhat of late.  That’s part of why this is her first contribution to “Dispatched from Israel” since last October.  I’m glad to report, however, that she’s back now with three reviews of productions, all from Tel Aviv, from last fall and this month.  As many ROT readers know, I’ve known Helen for many years—from when she was an actress here in New York City—and we’ve remained in contact since she made her aliyah to Israel some 30 years ago.  She became a cultural journalist for the Jerusalem Post (as well as a stage director in her off-duty life) and has shared her writing with me and, therefore, with readers of Rick On Theater, since I started the blog almost nine yeas ago now.  I really like posting her JP reviews and occasional other reports on ROTbecause it gives me a chance to cover theater from outside my own small cruising range.  It’s also another voice on the blog, which I try to promote as much as I’m able.]

The Book of David

By Ro’i Chen based on the book by Stefan Heym

   directed by Yevgeny Arye

GesherTheater, Tel Aviv; 18 September 2017

Whether he uses his knife to peel an apple or slit a throat, it’s all one to Benaya (Doron Tavori) Solomon’s (Micki Leon) thuggish, and ever practical Chief of Staff whose job it is to get things done – in this case The Book of David to be written by historian Eitan (Alon Friedman), plucked for the job from his cosy life with wife Esther (Karin Seruya) and mistress Lilit (Ruth Rasyuk).

If he undertakes the task it’ll have to be the truth Eitan says in half a question, awed in the presence of Might.

“Of course, of course,” Solomon reassures him, leaving Benaya to growl that it’s gotta be the ‘right’ book, making sure that the exploits of shepherd boy David turned powerful monarch David are seen in the ‘right’ light and if it all didn’t quite happen that way, well, “man is the legend he creates.” Facts, fiction, who cares?

Sic transit gloria mundigoes the Latin tag meaning that all glories and honors are transitory and Michael Karamenko seems to have designed his set of plastics, scaffolding – a replica of Michaelangelo’s celebrated David is surrounded by it – and creaking, massive wooden doors to reflect that, as does eternal outsider Amenhotep, Solomon’s massively cynical Egyptian eunuch beautifully handled by Israel Demidov. Stefania Georgeokayta’s costumes cleverly link past and present because, as we quickly understand, The Book of David is a satire that Yevgeny Arye has realized with his usual flair and perception, his love of all things circus this time portrayed in marvelously grotesque mime sequences that tell the story of David and Goliath and David and Bathsheba played by such as Gilad Kelter and Alexander Senderovitch.

To get to the truth Eitan interviews people who actually knew David such as Michal, his first wife played with sorrowful dignity by Lilian Roth and Yoav, David’s army chief, now a shadow offered by Yevgeny Terlitzki. It’s Yoav’s throat that Benaya slits, saying “We’re building an enlightened and cultured society here and don’t need the likes of him.”

Tavori and Leon alternate Solomon and Benaya – the all-wise and his alter ego. Tavori – gravelly voiced and little bent, makes Benaya impatient. He wants deeds, not words. As the natively arrogant Solomon, Leon is all for words. They hide so much.

Seruya and Rasiuk play their roles with grace. Friedman’s Eitan grows from village innocent to horrified chronicler who realizes too late what he’s let himself in for.

“The more I learn about you, the less I understand about myself,” Eitan tells the statue. “Danger lurks behind every written word.”

The satire is about legitimacy, truth and what we do with either or both. It’s not a coincidence that Eitan is a historian. “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is a paraphrase from George Santayana.

Even if you do ignore history, go see the production. It’s well worth.

*  *  *  *

Herzl Said

By Ro’i Hen

Artistic direction by Yevgeny Arye

Music by Roni Reshef

Gesher Theater, Tel Aviv; 15 October 2017

Herzl Said starts with a coffin on a stage and it’s full steam ahead from there. This is a gleeful, irreverent, exhilarating, zippy and mischievous sleigh-ride of a show/satire that will delight the eye, tickle the funnybone and warm the heart of all who watch it, and by all means take the kids above the age of 10.

It’s only afterwards you realize that it also makes us think.

In 1902, two years before his death, Herzl published Altneuland, his famous and utopian romance on a future Jewish state in the then Ottoman Palestine whose contents fuel this show, as does the title. “Herzl Said” is the Israeli equivalent of “Simon Says” and its antics also propel the musical in unexpected, often risible, directions.

Just to give you a taste, during one of the many scenes, Herzl, very nicely played with the ever undiminished gravitas and dignity of the straight-man by Gilad Kelter, comes across the rest of the cast discussing another person whose name (tfoo!) begins with H, but Herzl thinks they’re discussing him . . . .

The rest of this accomplished cast plays two sets of characters, the Israelis of 1949, the year Herzl’s bones – remember that coffin? – were moved to their present site on Mt. Herzl, and the protagonists of the novel living in a Jewish state where Arabs and Jews live harmoniously side by side, where there’s no social or economic inequality, where . . . but you get the drift, right?

And they do it superbly, tossing off Ro’i Hen’s rhyming couplets, barbed dialogues and song parodies with utmost suavity, especially Ruth Rasyuk and Henry David, who sing most of them – taken from beloved songs by such as Naomi Shemer and John Lennon.

The others are Uri Yaniv, Assaf Pariente, Eli Menashe, and Ziv Zohar Meir in his alter ego as a 1949 haredi rabbi, who at one time snarls “If you will it. Zero. It’s a dream!”

Herzl Said happens on a stage within a stage – Nadav Barnea and Judith Aharon are responsible for the show’s deft lighting and costumes – into and from which actors and props enter/emerge as they switch between time and novel.

As every Israeli Jewish child knows, the thoroughly assimilated Viennese journalist Herzl was jerked into awareness of his Jewishness by the infamous Dreyfuss trial of 1895, convening the 1st Zionist congress at Basel in 1897.

And every Israeli Jewish child knows in his bones and blood the proper version of Herzl’s famous dictum from Altneuland: ‘If you will it, it is no dream’ but Hen and the play insist that we also pay attention to the end of that sentence – printed on page two of the handsome program – that says, no less definitely, “And if you don’t will it, everything I have related here is a dream, and a dream it will remain.”

Is that our aim? To be a failed dream? I hope not.

*  *  *  *

Doing His Will

By Moti Lerner

Directed by Aya Kaplan

Habima National Theatre, Tel Aviv; 5 February 2018

First of all, go and see this play because it’s good theater and Aya Kaplan has done a great job on it. Second it impels you to think because politically-hearted playwright Moti Lerner has written a thoughtful and gripping drama that asks some uncomfortable questions about faith, belief and the question of religion in our lives.

Doing His Will is based on the true story of Esti Weinstein, born into Hassidut Gur, who left the sect for the secular world, wrote a book that opened a window to the Gur world and her experiences, yet later committed suicide, leaving a note that said in part “. . . time isn’t healing and the pain doesn’t stop.”

The drama moves back and forth in time and space, but essentially we meet Dassi (Osnat Fishman) at her wedding to Yaakov (Yoav Donat). The trouble starts with the wedding night. Though he continually turns to Rabbi Zilber (Igal Sade) for advice and instruction, he cannot perform, and the blame, naturally, is ascribed to Dassi. From there things go from bad to worse. Try as she will, Dassi cannot accommodate herself to what she perceives as the soul-destroying rules of Gur. She leaves for the secular life with one of her daughters, Gilli (Sivan Mast) divorces Yaakov and pays a dire price. She may not see or communicate with the other six.

All efforts to reverse that rabbinical ruling are in vain. So is life she decides. It is a week before she is found dead in her car.

The title is deliberately ambiguous. Is it ‘his’ or ‘His’ or both? And which is paramount? Jehudit Aharon’s understated set contributes to the ambiguity. Two tall brick walls bisected by a path are the backdrop. Are they protection or boundary? In the foreground on a platform facing one another are two single beds – and it is no coincidence that they resemble biers. Dori Parnes’ minor themes add poignancy – we could do without the ‘heavenly choirs’ though. Keren Granek’s lighting and Aviah Bash’s costumes meld seamlessly.

The secular Jewish world, whether or not it believes in a Deity, is at a disadvantage vis á vis the religious one, especially that of the ultra-orthodox whose passion we cannot fathom and whose way of life is often as alien to our understanding as a man from Mars. The guiding principle of Gur is Sanctity from which human sexuality detracts. Hence the very severe prohibitions regarding marriage and sexuality save those for biblically enjoined reproduction.

This is the world to which Yaakov adheres and which breaks Dassi. Lerner has not written an anti-religious polemic. Doing His Will is not about faith, or belief but about control. In his absolute obedience Yaakov becomes a robot. In her questioning the order of things Dassi becomes a rebel and therefore intolerable. Lerner is asking which way do we want and need to go, a question particularly apposite in a society whose government is moving swiftly towards fascism.

The acting is uniformly splendid. Fishson’s Dassi is powerful, passionate and touching. Donat’s Yaakov is not a bad man but one who is irretrievably torn between instinct and obedience. Sade’s omnipotent Zilber is as unyielding as granite but could use some human nuance. The ever excellent Orna Rothberg shines as Ahuva, Dassi’s torn mother, and Moti Gershon is gently tough as Dassi’s brother Haim who has also joined the secular world, become a lawyer and her advocate. Mast as Gilli must needs wear her courage visibly and as pregnant Hanni, Dassi’s eldest, Aurelle Maor is as visibly torn. Also, and as definitely, “don’t judge” says this play.

[As I observed in my afterword to “Dispatches 12,” the list of Helen’s past contributions to ROT has grown too long to append to new offerings.  I suggest that anyone curious about my friend’s opinions of past productions in Israel, as well as her other cultural commentary and travel journals, look back at “Dispatches 10” (11 November 2016) for the dates of Helen’s posts—look down in the afterword—and add numbers 11 (17 June 2017) and 12 (27 October 2017).]

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'Hangmen'

March 4, 2018, 7:00 am

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Gallows humor is usually comedy about death and dying, particularly in the face of the joker’s own imminent mortality.  Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen takes the term ‘gallows humor’ literally.  The subject of Hangmen, after all, is . . . well, hangmen.  That is to say, executioners (not so Lord High, either, to be sure).  Though the subject is deadly (yep, I went there!) serious, Hangmen is quite funny—though sometimes I had to catch myself and wonder if it really ought to be funny.  I assume other spectators had the same sensation.  (Diana, the friend with whom I often go to theater, once turned to me and asked, “Why are people laughing?”  I told her simply, ”Because it’s funny.”  I’m not certain because of the darkness, but I’d say she reacted quizzically.  “Is it?” she said—as if she didn’t believe me.)

Given that the playwright is McDonagh, there are lots of jokes and (dark) humor.  When, for instance, a prisoner is about to be led to his execution but, protesting his innocence, he’s holding onto his bed and struggling mightily not to go, the assistant hangman tells him, “If you’d’ve just tried to relax, you could’ve been dead by now.”  And when the condemned man wails, “I’m getting hung by nincompoops!” the official corrects him: “‘Hanged.’ . . .  “You’re getting ‘hanged’ by nincompoops.”  The prisoner ripostes, “I’ve heard it all now.  Correcting me English at a time like this!”  (This diction error is a gag that runs through the play.)

The New York première of Hangmen at the Atlantic Theater Company is a visiting presentation of the Royal Court Theatre in London where it opened on 10 September 2015 and ran until 10 October;  The production transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End where it  opened on 7 December 2015 and ran until 5 March 2016.  The first new London play of McDonagh’s since 2003’s The Pillowman at the Royal National Theatre won two 2016 Laurence Olivier Awards (Best New Play and Best Set Design for Anna Fleischle) and was nominated for Best Director (Matthew Dunster).  The production also received Best New Play and Best Designer honors at the 2015 Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards and the Best Design nod at the 2015 Evening StandardTheatre Awards.  Hangmen also received a National Theatre Live broadcast on 3 March 2016 and was published by Faber and Faber on 17 September 2015. (National Theatre Live is a 2009 program of the Royal National of live broadcasts via satellite of performances of the company’s productions—and those of other theaters; the first Broadway production was transmitted in 2014—to cinemas and arts centers around the world.)

The Atlantic Theater Company production, with many of the casts from the Royal Court and the West End, began previews at ATC’s Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea on 17 January 2018 and opened on 5 February; the production is now scheduled to close on 25 March (having been extended from 4 March first through the 7th and again for the final time the week before last).  I walked over to West 20th Street and met Diana for the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 23 February.  The New York and U.S. première of Hangmenis McDonagh’s first since the brief, poorly received Broadway run of A Behanding in Spokane in 2010.

Like the London stagings, ATC’s Hangmenwas directed by Matthew Dunster and mounted by the London design team.  Several members of the Royal Court cast have also traveled to New York City to reprise their roles here, including Johnny Flynn (Mooney), Sally Rogers (Alice), and Reece Shearsmith (Syd); others appeared in the West End production and still others are either American actors or U.S. based and joined the cast at ATC.  Dunster, with the aid of dialect coach Stephen Gabis, blended them all excellently on an ensemble (about which I’ll have more to say shortly.

I’ve only seen one McDonagh play before, The Cripple of Inishmaan, and that was back in March 1998 (the U.S. première at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival’s Newman Theater).  Born of Irish parentage in London in 1970 (he turns 48 later this month), Martin Faranan  McDonagh’s been on the radar since 1996, making his stage début with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the first in a trilogy of plays (including A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West, both 1997) set in County Galway inn Ireland.  (Leenane’s New York production was nominated for a Tony as Best Play and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.)  His next three plays were set in the Aran Islands: The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and the unproduced and unpublished The Banshees of Inisheer (written, like all the six plays, in 1994—though McDonagh says Banshees“isn’t any good”).  The playwright and his older brother, John Michael McDonagh, a writer and director, continue to live in London after their parents moved back to Galway, where they’d spent their childhood holidays; they both hold dual Irish and British nationality. 

McDonagh’s The Pillowman (1995) is set not in Ireland but in a fictional totalitarian state and premièred at the National in 2003 and then came to Broadway in 2005.  It won the best play Olivier in London and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play.  A Behanding in Spokane is McDonagh’s first play set in the United States.  McDonagh’s also composed radio plays and is the screenwriter of three films: In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017 – nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture; the awards are to be announced tonight, 4 March). In Bruges, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2009,is the only one of these that I’ve seen and I didn’t care for it much.

The playwright is known for his dark and bloody plays larded with black humor—though there’s less actual blood spilled in Hangmenthan in his Galway and Aran trilogies, I’d say—but only because hanging doesn’t shed any blood as a rule.  I’m not sure how much of a distinction that is, though.  The main practitioner of the titular profession says that hanging is a dignified way to die—as far as executions go.  I doubt the audience saw it that way, gauging from their vocal reactions to the two hangings that happen on stage.  Diana positively flinched next to me, letting out a series of little shrieks.  Less physical forms of threats and menace, along the lines of the Pinteresque—in spite of the humor—are also part of Hangmen’s dramaturgy. 

His plays (and his screenplays) are often generated by a character who tells a story in exaggerated detail—and storytelling is a frequent basis for many scenes.  (Therefore, pubs and bars are favorite settings for McDonagh’s scripts, or some other site where people tend to sit around and drink and spin yarns.)  One of the initiators of the “In-Your-Face” theater movement in the U.K., whose aim was to put  controversial and even shocking material on stage (I think hangings qualify, don’t you?), his characters are loose with political correctness, especially with respect to race or national origin.  (In Hangmen, where the main setting is a pub, there’s considerable banter about “southerners”—people from London and the south of England—and several comments about “blacks.”)  Disrespect for women and girls, as well as body-shaming occurs frequently—as does profanity and vulgar language.

London’s Royal Court Theatre, a non-commercial West End theater that equates somewhat like one  of our more substantial Off-Broadway companies here in New York City, was acquired in 1956 by the English Stage Company and, still under its operation, has gained a reputation for contributing significantly to the English-speaking modern theater.  (There is something of a profile of ATC in “Cloud Nine,” posted on Rick On Theater on 26 October 2015.)  Opened near Sloane Square in Chelsea as the New Chelsea Theatre in a converted chapel in 1870; it was renamed the Court Theatre the next year.  The home of early plays of W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert (later of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), the building went through numerous managers and several alterations before closing in 1887, when it was demolished. 

A new building was constructed nearby on Sloane Square and opened as the New Court Theatre in 1888.  It also went through a succession of managers, and by the end of the 19th century, the theater was called the Royal Court Theatre.  For the first few years of the 20th century, actor, director, playwright, and critic Harley Granville-Barker managed the Royal Court and the plays of George Bernard Shaw were produced there for some years.  In 1932, the building stopped being used as a playhouse, but from 1935 to 1940 it operated as a movie theater until damage during World War II forced it to close once again. 

In 1952, the building reopened as a theater after reconstruction.  In 1956, the English Stage Company occupied the theater emphasizing new British plays but also producing classics and new foreign works.  The ESC’s goal was to create a playwright’s theater to promote new writers and works for the stage.  In its first season, for instance, the Royal Court presented John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which put the original “angry young man” on the post-war British stage and launched a new kind of contemporary drama spotlighting the anti-hero.  (The next year, ESC staged Osborne’s The Entertainer starring Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, another ground-breaking production.) 

Following Osborne, the ESC brought to its stage such tradition-shattering writers as Edward Bond (Saved, 1965), Caryl Churchill (Owners, 1972; Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, 2006; Seven Jewish Children, 2009), Timberlake Wertenbaker (Our Country’s Good, 1988), Ariel Dorfman (Death and the Maiden, 1991), Jez Butterworth (Mojo, 1995; Jerusalem, 2009; The Ferryman, 2017), Conor McPherson (The Weir, 1997), and many other dramatists on a list of startling, experimental, and controversial theater art that’s too long to reproduce here.  In the mid-1960s, over issues of censorship, the Royal Court became a private club (in a move similar to Ellen Stewart’s tactic in the same era when she turned the La MaMa Café into the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club).  That way, the ESC avoided the requirement of getting the Lord Chamberlain to license their productions.  Two Royal Court productions, Bond’s Saved and Osborne’s A Patriot for Me (both 1965), were largely responsible for abolishing theater censorship in Britain with the passage of the Theatres Act of 1968. 

Artistic director William Gaskill, the company’s second after co-founder George Devine, launched the Young People’s Theatre in 1965 to develop and produce writing by young people under 25 from all sections of British society (it morphed into the Young Writers Programme in 1998 under artistic director Stephen Daldry). In 1969, the ESC opened the small Theatre Upstairs (63 seats) where the company staged its most experimental productions (many of which later moved to the larger Theatre Downstairs (400 seats).  The Rocky Horror Show, with music, lyrics and book by Richard O'Brien, premièred there in 1973; so did Athol Fugard’s 1973 Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986), and Harold Pinter’s 2006 performance in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp's Last Tape. 

Faced with serious deterioration and in need of technical up-dating, the theater was in danger of closing once again in 1995.  With several public grants, the Royal Court Theatre underwent a £16.2 million  reconstruction in 1996 (about $4.09 million today), preserving only the building’s beloved façade and the auditorium of the main house, reopening in 2000.  (The company continued to produce in other spaces during the interim.)  The current artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre since April 2013 is Vicky Featherstone, its first female leader (and the 11th over six decades), who was previously the founding head of the National Theatre of Scotland.

Hangmen, which runs two hours and a quarter (with one intermission) at ATC, takes place in Lancashire, England (200 miles northwest of London), in the early and mid-1960s; the first scene is 1963 (a slide says so) when executions, apparently still carried out by hanging in Britain, were still legal.  A man named James Hennessy (Gilles Geary), declaring his innocence to the last, is hanged in the first scene, set in a cell of the local prison, and the hangman, Harry Wade (Mark Addy), spiffed up in a jaunty bow tie, brushes off the man’s protestations.  “That’s nowt to do with me,” he declares, and carries out his duty—angry only that the  guards, the doctor, and Syd Armfield (Reece Shearsmith), the assistant executioner, didn’t do their jobs efficiently.  When the deed’s finally done and the prison doctor has pronounced Hennessy “Quite dead,” Harry announces, rubbing his hands together, “Now where’s our bloody breakfast?  I, for one, am fucking starved.”

When the next scene opens, the setting has shifted to two years later, on the day the death penalty was abolished in England (9 November 1965, by passage of The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965), to a pub which is Harry’s home, with his wife, Alice (Sally Rogers), and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Shirley (Gaby French), and sole livelihood.  (The naturalistic sets are by Anna Fleischle and lit by Joshua Carr.)  It’s also the haunt of a passel of barflies (Bill ­– Richard Hollis; Charlie – Billy Carter; Arthur – John Horton) which includes a police inspector, George Fry (David Lansbury)—the hangman’s groupies. (At one point, when Harry’s stepped out of the pub, dotty old Arthur says, “I don’t know whether to wait for the hangman to come back or to go.  I only came for t’ hangman.”)

It wouldn’t be fair to anyone who plans to see Hangmenlater to give away too much of the plot; I may have said too much already; I’m not sure that reviewers who even revealed the ending of the play aren’t overstepping.  Diana hadn’t read a review, but I’d read the New York Timesand when the last event came, she gasped in shock, but I was waiting for it all through the final scene.  I will also say that some of what McDonagh has written is intentionally ambiguous, so my interpretations would be misleading, and some of it is just obscure, or confusing, so my descriptions might just be wrong.  I’ll acquiesce to do a little précis, however. 

Harry was the second-best hangman in England and the rival, at least in his own mind, of Albert Pierrepoint (Maxwell Caulfield), who has the rep as the best hangman in the country.  On the day hanging has been abolished, a local reporter, Clegg (Owen Campbell), has come to the pub to get a quotation from Harry about the momentous change.  A stranger named Peter Mooney (Johnny Flynn) also shows up at the pub and puts everyone else on edge by toying with Harry and flirting with teenaged Shirley.  (In the London Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford aptly described Mooney as “like a character from a Pinter play but funnier,” and Bryan Appleyard, in London’s Sunday Times, characterized the character as “the love child of Harold Pinter and Joe Orton.”)  He also makes overtures of renting a room above the  pub from Alice.  When their daughter goes missing one morning, Harry and Alice, as well as the denizens of the pub, believe Mooney’s kidnapped and killed her.  (In a scene with Syd, with whom he’s in cahoots, Mooney as much as admits he’s holding Shirley—or is he lying?)  Making broad hints that he may have been the perpetrator of the gruesome murder for which Hennessy was hanged, Mooney’s actions and enigmatic statements make everyone uneasy and precipitate the play’s climax, leaving Harry to justify his former profession. 

Ben Brantley of the Times asserted that the play’s about “the uses and abuses of vengeance,” but it’s not clear to me that McDonagh is being that straightforward.  (Brantley invokes McDonagh’s current, Oscar-nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as evidence that vengeance is “much on McDonagh’s mind” these days, but I haven’t seen the flick yet so I can’t comment.)  It took me several days to figure out what I think Hangmen's about.  (That happens to me often enough with complex plays; I have to cogitate over it for a while.)  

Diana, on the other hand, pretty much dismissed the play by intermission.  I think, if a play isn’t immediately clear about its point at first viewing, Diana dismisses it; I think it’s the same with other kinds of art—like Jackson Pollock’s paintings (see “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA),” 2 October 2017).  As for me, I found the play intriguing (the production goes without further qualification, I think) and worth thinking about and trying to figure out.  I was immediately sure of one thing: Hangmen isn’t dismissable.  McDonagh is up to something, as Aaron Frankel, one of my acting teachers, used to say about actors who are really working on something.  I felt, to be sure, that execution is the playwright’s metaphor for something more universal and less linked to a 50-year-old historical situation. 

Other analysts have said that Hangmenpresents “a devastating vision of guilt, betrayal and flawed masculinity” (Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard) or is “about the abolition of the death penalty and the impact of violence on its perpetrators” (Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard).  I think both of these are overly simplistic and literal.  Why dredge up an issue so long settled and dead?  No, I think McDonagh’s on about something more relevant, pertinent, and contemporary.

There are several conflicts depicted in Hangmen, at the center of which in all cases is Harry.  There’s Harry versus Pierrepoint, Harry versus Syd, Harry versus Inspector Fry, Harry and Alice versus Shirley, Harry versus Clegg.  But the conflict that fuels the play is Harry versus Mooney.  The moment that Mooney walks into the pub, Harry makes it clear he doesn’t like or trust the Londoner.  He’s all wrong, not just for the bar, but for the town, for the north.  His clothes are too flashy, his hair’s too long and shaggy, his accent’s not right.  Mooney likes to say he’s “vaguely menacing,” but try as he might, he comes off as “creepy.”  His very presence generates upheaval; he’s the Joe Btfsplk of disruption.

Harry, on the other hand, calls himself “a servant of the Crown,” a good soldier in the service of the empire.  Authority is it’s own justification.  “The government—his government—is something that he doesn’t need to question or interpret . . .” is how Hilton Als put it in the New Yorker.  When the court says a man’s guilty and must be hanged, there’s no question to be asked.  It’s "nowt to do with me,” Harry insists.  Confronted with the suggestion that he may have participated in a miscarriage of justice, Harry shrugs off the possibility—and the responsibility: “And maybe we’ll never know.  Boo hoo.  Another pint, lad?” 

The clash is between Harry’s “need for empire,” as Als had it,his need for order and authority versus Mooney’s disruptive and destructive force (as embodied in the British youth of the 1960s: Mooney in his Chelsea boots, pegged trousers, mop-top hair, and long sideburns, is decidedly mod) shows the dangers of relying on power and authority without a sense of justice and humanity.  This is a conflict that’s current to the 2010s—we have it going on here as well.  Hanging stands for the irreversible consequence of “might makes right.”  In McDonagh-land, however, the outcome of the conflict is not an encouraging one.

I’ve already intimated that part of McDonagh’s dramaturgy is Pinteresqueness.  (I really like Bryan Appleyard’s description  of Mooney as the offspring of Pinter and Orton—Hangmen as a whole has that quality, too.).  Like the look of his play, his writing is naturalistic, liberally sprinkled with vulgarities and, at least for an American’s ear, crafted in heavy dialect.  His characters’ language can come fast, especially once they get ahead of steam up, and combined with the Lancashire dialect, it can be hard to catch the words as they whizz by.  Add drink, and comprehension can be a real challenge!

But the atmosphere the dramatist creates through the characterizations and the dialogue is palpable.  I’ve never been to the northern part of England, but I can imagine and it sure felt that we were back in 1965 in a working-class pub in a small Lancashire town.  This successful limning of a time and place, not to mention he people who inhabit it, may account for something McDonagh does that I’ve seldom seen accomplished (and which I can’t off-hand recall seeing any time recently).  He gets well into the diffuse first act without ever revealing—at least to me—where he’s headed.  He lets it show at the last moment of act one (and not very substantially—you could miss it), but then hooks into it in act two.  Usually a play that doesn’t seem to be leading somewhere in act one falls further apart in act two—it’s a bad omen and virtually impossible to recover from.  Of course, part of the Pinter-like dramaturgy are the hints, laid out like breadcrumbs, that the playwright’s “up to something,” even if we don’t know what it is.

As for the acting at ATC, I predict that Hangmen will receive OBIE and Lortel nominations for ensemble cast—and should probably win them.  Brantley praised the acting in the Times, and despite that northern accent, it was excellent all around.  There are several Americans in the cast (among them, David Lansbury, a nephew of Angela), and I couldn’t tell them from the Brits from the Royal Court and West End casts who came over with the production.  (ATC dialect coach Gabis has done an excellent job, especially with the American cast members.)  I think it’s due in large part to the establishment of this stage ensemble, this tightly interwoven community of personalities, that Flynn’s Mooney is such a threat: he’s a virus and the antibodies come together to defend against him and expel him.  Either the virus won’t survive, or the organism won’t.

Although the cast is an ensemble, the roles of Mooney and Harry are prominent.  Carter, Hollis, and Horton’s barflies (pubflies?  Is that a thing?), as well as Lansbury’s Inspector Fry, are excellent at carving out individual characters with distinct personalities; so are Rogers’s Alice and French’s Shirley.  French (who’s actually Welsh, by the way) paints a note-perfect portrait of a mid-adolescent who’s even younger than her years, subliming between moody (or “mopey” as her parents would say) and sullen and back.  As Syd (whom Terry Teachout described as “Uriah-Heepish” in the Wall Street Journal), who lost his job as assistant hangman for making inappropriate remarks about the size of an executed gangster’s genitalia, Shearsmith is squirrelly and needy, and Geary’s brief but salient turn as the condemned Hennessy is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time (figure that out!), a tribute as much to McDonagh’s writing as to Geary’s acting.

I have to say a word about Maxwell Caulfield, whom I haven’t seen on stage since April 1985, almost 33 years ago, in Louise Page’s Salonika (at the Public’s Anspacher Theater): I didn’t recognize him.  Even after I saw that he was playing Pierrepoint, I couldn’t make myself see the hot young guy (at 25) who’d been burning up the stages (and reviews) of New York City since his stunning performance in Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloan (1981, Cherry Lane Theatre)as the handsome, older gentleman (now 58).  He’s effective in his one climactic and crucial scene; I’m just a little chagrined that I didn’t recognize him.

In the central role of Harry, Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon in Season 1 of Game of Thrones) suggests a wary bear—or perhaps rhino is more apt.  He distrusts most people—and dislikes a majority of those.  He sees the world—his world—for what it is and no one else is as clear-sighted.  He knows the truth and anyone who doesn’t see things his way is a fool are best.  The pub is Harry’s realm, and even “Albert bloody Pierrepoint” holds no sway there.  A self-important bully, he doesn’t wear vulnerability well.  All this is in Addy’s smooth and sure portrayal, full of bluster and show.  Harry’s antagonist, Mooney, is played with insinuating menace and practiced charisma by Johnny Flynn.  Mooney clearly relishes the disturbance his arrival in any setting generates, and he plays it to the hilt.  He can confess a lie as convincingly as a truth—they’re the same to him in any case.  If he were a plant, he’d be a Venus flytrap—and Flynn plays one.  (Flynn’s program bio doesn’t list any Pinters—if he hasn’t done one, he definitely should.)

The general success of the Royal Court/ATC Hangmenis, of course, down to director Dunster, and there’s no doubt he’s mounted a terrific piece of theater from all perspectives.  I may have wished that he and Gabis had softened the accents a bit for American consumption, but that’s a small quibble in the end.  Otherwise, I can’t fault the acting, staging, or design.  Like the ensemble acting, all the individual parts of the production scheme worked together to generate a little world that was all of a piece and successfully supported, perhaps even enhanced, McDonagh’s text.  (I won’t make the same OBIE/Lortel prediction for Dunster to which I committed for the cast, but if the acting company gets an ensemble nod, the director ought to get a nomination as well.)

In addition to creating he sets, Fleischle also designed the spot-on costumes, evoking not only the mid-‘60s time-frame, but the region and the working-class status of the characters, plus their individual personalities.  (When Mooney takes off his coat and folds it inside-out so the lining shows, that striking orange satin liner makes a very clear impression.)  The ambient sound of Ian Dickinson’s soundscape was also a significant element in creating the little world of Oldham that exists outside the pub and the atmosphere is kept ominous and threatening thanks to Joshua Carr’s mood lighting, complete with a drenching rainstorm.

The Show-Score round-up of the press coverage was pretty extensive (36 reviews as of 2 March—and at least one I know of, Hilton Als in the New Yorker, wasn’t one of them so there may be others Show-Score skipped), which doesn’t surprise me since this is McDonagh’s first première in the U.S. in eight years.  His Oscar nomination probably also helped bring out the press.  The reviews break down into 89% positive, 11% mixed, and none negative.  (Several reviewers have promoted a transfer of Hangmen from ATC to Broadway—the Daily Beast’sTim Teeman asked why “Hangmen isn’t on Broadway right from the get-go”—and Michael Riedel of the New York Post reported that the show’s producers are in talks to move the play, though exactly when that might happen is up in the air.)  Show-Score’s highest rating was a 98 from TheaterScene.net (backed by 15 90’s, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the afore-mentioned Daily Beast); the lowest scores were a 50 from scribicideand a 55 from Lighting & Sound America, both websites.  My survey will cover 24 notices.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout pronounced Hangmen“a galvanizingly black farce about a subject . . . that few view as a laughing matter.”  Teachout pointed out that McDonagh “is never more serious than when playing the clown, and ‘Hangmen’ is a deadly serious play that is also (forgive me) chokingly funny.”  He labeled Hangmen“both a snapshot of provincial life at its most claustrophobic and a secular parable about the corrupting effects of vengefulness on the human soul.”  The Journalist paid tribute to the cast, old and new, for “the high quality of their acting” and “to the rich characterfulness of Matthew Dunster’s staging.”  He also praised Fleischle who “has contrived with neat resourcefulness to fit three different interiors, each one precisely and satisfyingly evocative, onto the smallish stage of the Atlantic Theater.”  In sum, Teachout observed:

“Hangmen,” like “Three Billboards,” scrupulously avoids in-your-face point-making, demanding instead that the audience connect the dots without prompting and insisting on a moral ambiguity that will doubtless discomfit viewers who prefer always to know exactly who’s wearing the black hat and who the white. That’s the idea: Mr. McDonagh wants you to think, and it is his genius to do so by first making you laugh yourself silly. “Hangmen” succeeds triumphantly on both counts.

The WSJ reviewer further noted that the play “is selling out every show, and I expect it would continue to do so were this glitteringly well-staged version . . . to move uptown to a Broadway house—as it absolutely should.” 

“[W]hile Hangmen lacks the metaphorical richness of McDonagh’s greatest work, The Pillowman,” declared Max McGuinness in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, “it’s still good nasty fun.”  McGuinness prefaced his review with an observation:

George Orwell once lamented “the decline of the English murder”.  Recent murders, he wrote in 1946, all seemed banal and colourless.  Orwell might well have approved of Martin McDonagh, whose blood-soaked oeuvre is never short of homicidal oomph.  And having piled up bodies across Ireland, the US and continental Europe, McDonagh finally turns to murder in his native England with this grisly little play . . . .

The FT reviewer went on: “Hangmen has many features Orwell associated with a “good murder” — sex, envy, cunning and, above all, extreme violence lurking behind a façade of respectability.”  He heaped  praise on the performance of Flynn, who “eats up the stage as a sinister cheeky chappie in the mould of Bob Rusk from Hitchcock’s Frenzy” and reported that Flynn’s “smoothly menacing performance provides a perfect foil to Mark Addy’s textured portrayal of Harry, who shifts from imperious Northern bonhomie to blustering insecurity and reckless pique” under “Matthew Dunster’s restrained direction.”  In conclusion, McGuinness, comparing Hangmento what he saw as McDonagh’s flawed film script for Three Billboards, asserted that “theatre’s formal constraints here serve to rein in the author’s excesses, creating a gruesome sense of confinement.”

The Times’ Brantley, dubbing Hangmen“criminally enjoyable,” described it as “a juicy tale of capital punishment and other forms of retribution” and a “sly throat-gripping mystery.”  The Timesman asks, “And aren’t we happy that Mr. McDonagh, who of late has mostly been otherwise engaged with movies . . ., has reclaimed his mantle as the great deceiver of contemporary theater?” and thanked ATC for bringing the Royal Court show, which Brantley had seen, to New York City.  Hangmen, asserted Brantley, “is every bit as dark as Mr. McDonagh’s early, bloody plays.”  “People are either foolish or dangerously flawed” in this world, and “these unadmirable qualities are joyous opportunities” for McDonagh’s “scalpel-edged gifts, . . .  allowing for the sort of conversation in which stupidity and pettiness achieve the sparkle of wit.” 

After remarking on the “gleaming precision and grinning relish” of Dunster’s staging, the Times review-writer lauded the cast, with (a lot of special) attention to (“sensational”) Johnny Flynn.  (Brantley posited that “though it might be an overstatement to call Mooney Mr. McDonagh’s alter-ego,” he allowed that “it must be said, [the character] has a lot in common with the artful playwright who created him.”)  Flynn plays Mooney “with fabulous insinuating swagger.”  He dubs Addy’s Harry “first-rate” and has high praise for all the actors, from :Pierrepoint, Fry, Syd, Alice, and Shirley, to the “three wilting barflies.”  Overall, Brantley reported, “‘Hangmen’ is often very funny.  But as you laugh, you may feel the walls of Anna Fleischle’s clammy pub set closing in on you,” reminding us that “Mr. McDonagh can still work his double-edged, sinister magic on a stage, making breathless, alarmed and deeply satisfied dupes of us all.”

“Martin McDonagh has turned his attention to the swinging ’60s, but don’t expect Twiggy to show up in a miniskirt,” warned Barbara Schuler of Long Island’s Newsday.  “It’s a very different kind of swinging McDonagh has in mind, the kind that takes place at the end of a rope,” she explained.  Labeling Hangmen a “dark comedy (in the McDonagh tradition),” Schuler added that it “is an entertaining, gripping mystery at heart, full of the kind of twists that, were it a novel, would keep you up turning pages all night.”  Though she dubs the conclusion “not-so-surprising,” the Newsdayreview-writer applauded Dunster for having directed “tautly” and praised the cast profusely: Flynn is “reeking malevolence”; Addy is “formidable”; Rogers is “fine”; French “perfectly captur[es] teenage angst”; and Geary “wring[s] a lot of pathos and some laughs out of his few minutes onstage.” 

Joe Dziemianowicz called Hangmen“thoroughly entertaining but not completely airtight” in the New York Daily News, noting that its “think” plot “chases ideas about power, guilt and innocence.”  Dziemianowicz declared that “the whole ensemble is killer,” including even the barflies and that Fleischle’s “set . . . harbors its own surprises, costumes and lighting hit the right notes as they add to the mood.” 

The Daily Newsman concluded, “There have been better McDonagh plays in New York.  But ‘Hangmen’ comes out swinging and despite questions that arise about why some characters do what they do, the play ropes you in.”

In am New York, Matt Windman quipped, “Familiar phrases like ‘gallows humor,’ ‘swinging sixties’ and ‘neck and neck’ take on a disturbingly literal meaning when applied to ‘Hangmen,’ Martin McDonagh’s old-fashioned, engrossing and extremely entertaining new play.”  He pronounced the play “unquestionably one of the most exciting Off-Broadway productions of the season.”  The amNYreviewer described Hangmen as “a meticulously-plotted work containing interesting, well-developed characters and built upon elements of black comedy, pub drama, physical farce, whodunit mystery, action thriller and legal drama—not to mention a noose and countless pints of cask ale.”  In a “lively production” under Dunster’s direction, “with a rich scenic design,” the “superb cast” features Flynn, “in an electrifying, star-making performance.”  The end result “finds the ideal balance between roaring entertainment and grim uneasiness.”

Hilton Als started off his New Yorker notice with a lament: he asserted that McDonagh’s “latest play, the comedic drama ‘Hangmen’ . . ., illustrates, perhaps more than any other, how the slick, self-satisfied cynicism that infects his weakest scripts threatens to overtake his real gifts.”  Als missed, for instance, the playwright’s “excellent sense of structure and . . . a genuine understanding of how loneliness can twist bodies and twist the truth.”  The New Yorker review-writer argued that “what one senses squatting onstage at the Linda Gross is the playwright’s tattered drive; no amount of spirited dialogue and action can hide his intellectual and spiritual exhaustion.”  Als posited that McDonagh “may now be trapped by his own success.” 

“Despite the contempt in his work—or because of it—McDonagh’s ‘bad boy’ image still gives audiences a racy thrill,” contended the reviewer.  “But the excitement that he elicits is hollow.”  The new play “relies on McDonagh’s technical skill and his jadedness: he knows what contemporary audiences want—to be dominated by ‘real’ men who piss on the theatre’s generally liberal air while conversing in unspeakable language.”  Als is exercised by the casual racism of Mooney and Bill, one of the barflies, and asked, “Were there no other signs of difference in class-conscious England—the poor, the unemployed, the general ‘problem’ of immigration—for McDonagh to use to make his characters feel superior?”  In the end, the review-writer summed up, “‘Hangmen’ is a pastiche about the patriarchy, old and new, and when, at the end of the play, Mooney has to pay for his cat-and-mouse sadism, the violence and the casualness with which that violence is met are simply proof of Harry’s right to keep his own counsel.”  Als concluded his notice by suggesting that McDonagh should have written a different play: “‘Hangmen’ would have been infinitely more interesting—more energetic and more true—had McDonagh’s point been to show how illusory power is, and how destructive.”

In New York magazine, Sara Holdren described McDonagh play as “sly, plot-driven, and morbidly funny, with a masterly ear for regional voices and an array of plum parts for actors.”  She went on to quibble a bit, however: “While more deliberate and less full-on explosive than some of McDonagh’s earlier work, Hangmen still taps into the undeniable satisfactions of clever plotting and strong character work.”  Less “a profound examination of those ‘big subjects’ its author wanted to tackle” than “an impish evocation of them,” Holdren felt.  The New York writer assured her readers that “the results are a nastily good time all the same.” 

Helen Shaw of the Village Voicecharacterized Hangmen as “a solid night out for those who enjoy a bit of crawling dread alongside their jokes,” having noted that “we walked into that theater knowing full well the sort of ultraviolent hijinks playwright Martin McDonagh likes to get up to” and “because we like McDonagh’s if-it-bleeds-it-leads dramaturgy.”  Shaw cavils a tad, though: “The play doesn’t have quite the same black magic it had back home—Hangmen is scaled to be a whale-versus-squid Battle of the Bad Men, and the whale has been recast with a pussycat.”  She also found

The shift to the small Atlantic Theater isn’t altogether comfortable.  There’s a distinct sense that Anna Fleischle’s beautiful set has been crammed too tightly into the space, and some of the performances still taste of the bigger venue.  The director, Matthew Dunster, is directing the broader characters (like poor, telegraphing Syd) to a balcony that doesn’t exist, and his farce-choreography sometimes flattens out to a hieroglyphic line.

Shaw’s biggest disappointment, however, is Mark Addy’s performance.  Comparing Addy to the Harry of his predecessor in London (David Morrissey), Addy comes off the loser in the Voice reviewer’s estimation.  (He’s the “pussycat” who replaced the “whale” in Shaw’s analogy above.)  “This leaves Mooney in too-clear command of the field,” she found. She explained:

We’re meant to see the men together so we can compare the various types of masculine violence—the kind that belongs and the kind that rebels.  Flynn’s mesmerizing in the part, but without Morrissey to counter him, the play loses its saw-blade effect.

Shaw concluded her notice with this assessment:

Hangmen toes right up to the line on “glib,” perhaps because it’s self-consciously about something—namely, capital punishment—and yet doesn’t wind up saying much about it.  But we don’t go to a McDonagh play to feel deeply about the world, or people, or life.  We go for a little brush of poison on our lips, because it makes other things taste so sweet by comparison.

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney labeled Hangmen as “a delectably dark comedy about injustice, revenge and man’s instinct for violence”; his “Bottom Line” was “The very definition of gallows humor.”  Rooney continued, “While the mood here is generally more playful, shadowed by an unnerving streak of menace right out of Harold Pinter, those bristling themes make this expertly crafted play a lively companion piece to McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”  Most of McDonagh most successful plays have been set in Ireland, but his “humor has lost none of its uniquely vinegary tang with the shift to England,” Rooney found.  (By the way, the HR reviewer had something of a response to Hilton Als’s complaint that only blacks were disparaged in McDonagh’s dialogue: “Northern Brits take the most flak, but black immigrants, Americans, the French, the Scots and particularly the Germans all are targets of droll swipes.”)  The HRwriter had high praise for the “uniformly strong cast” and reported that the “gruesome spectacle is made all the more startling by Anna Fleischle’s grimy set, Joshua Carr’s merciless lighting and Ian Dickinson’s unnerving sound design.”  “McDonagh is back in top form here,” affirmed Rooney, and his overall assessment was comprehensive:

The first act’s teasing set-up deftly suggests all sorts of nasty outcomes and then the second act cleverly dismantles most of those expectations in a multi-character confrontation that gets messy in unpredictable ways, abetted by Dunster’s crafty blocking.  If the later plotting becomes less precise, the dialogue—the majority of it in flavorful Northern English vernacular—crackles, the running jokes are devilishly good and the characters are incisively drawn, providing choice fodder for an electric ensemble.

Adam Feldman felt that Hangmen is “a play that wants to be both” funny and menacing.  A “spirit of theatrical self-consciousness pervades McDonagh’s play,” complained Feldman, so “rather than pushing that potential into new territory . . . he falls into comfy conventions that he winks at, but which also function as excuses for a thin and implausible story.”  Dunster’s direction “adds to the sense of artifice, with lurching shifts of mood-lighting and a physical space that works directly against the attempted comic suspense of the play’s denouement.”  In conclusion, the man from TONYaffirmed, “McDonagh twists his plot into a misanthropic noose that is only strong enough, in the end, to leave the play dangling, without a lethal snap.  But yes, it does seem cool.” 

In Variety, Marilyn Stasio warned, “Despite the howling laughter . . ., there’s a black storm cloud behind McDonagh’s surface wit.”  She observed of Harry and Mooney, “It’s a treat to watch these antagonists, played with excruciating edginess by Addy and Flynn, circling one another with murder in their eyes.”  The Varietywriter wondered in her conclusion, “But in the end, McDonagh questions whether we even need official hangmen in the first place.  Left to our own human devices, we will always find a way to kill one another.”

On TheaterMania, David Gordon characterized Hangmen as “quintessentially McDonagh: thrilling and chilling, ferociously hilarious, and wildly ambitious.”  Alluding to some “limitations,” Gordon asserted nonetheless that “Dunster’s production is so excellent, and so fantastically acted, that the imperfections are easy to look past.”  Both Hangmen and McDonagh’s current film “explore how out of reach justice must be for someone to be pushed to the point of exacting revenge,” contended the TM writer.

Both stories also question whether redemption is possible for someone trapped inside his or her own myopic universe.  The answers don't come easily, and, onstage as onscreen, McDonagh has a tendency to paint himself into a corner, losing control while allowing the characters to talk in circles when he needs to rein it in.

“Nonetheless,” added Gordon. “it's a whole lot of fun to be placed into this sepia-toned world we see onstage, one featuring all of the characteristics that delight McDonagh's fans: spine-tingling savagery, unexpected twists, and some truly macabre gallows humor.” Dunster’s “staged the play as a pitch-perfect thriller” and Fleischle’s “vintage costumes and miraculous set . . . expertly depict the period, “Carr’s “moody lighting” and Dickinson’s “eerie sound effects . . . amp up the melodrama.”  Singling out only Caulfield for criticism (his “tilted work seems a little too off even for this unconventional world”), Gordon dubbed the performances “firecrackers” in “a taut, eccentric ensemble.”  Addy earns both “both revulsion and empathy” as Harry and Flynn’s Mooney is “teeming with the psychosexual menace.”  In conclusion, Gordon asserted, “Hangmen falls on the higher end of the McDonagh spectrum, imperfect but engaging, and with enough exceptional moments to keep us talking.  This one deserves to hang around for a long time.”

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp was delighted that “McDonagh's defection [to screenwriting] has not diminished his ability to shock and delight us with his gritty gallows humor.”  Sommer observed, too, that “Hangmen is timely . . . because its title characters fit the much in the news global problem of job obsolescence.”  The CU reviewer then quipped, “But leave it to McDonagh to tackle this subject with a job category that quite literally fits his style of humor by taking on a work category [n]ever discussed, written about or dramatized by anyone else.”  Hangmen is “a work of McDonagh's ever active, darkly comic imagination,” she asserted.  Sommer affirmed that the play is “so much fun” because the playwright’s script is “stuffed with mysteries and surprises” and designer Fleischle “has managed to create three eye-popping, distinct sets.”  After lauding the work of the cast, especially noting Flynn’s “deliciously menacing” Mooney and Shearsmith’s “spot-on” Syd, Sommer posited, “For all its darkly enjoyable humor, Hangmen does send the audience home with a serious message: Welcome as a law ending a justice system prone to unjust executions was, it didn't immediately and universally undo the urge to commit acts of violence.”  She closed her notice with the declaration: “But hang it all . . . McDonagh does make his dark vision of humankind highly entertaining, no matter what the medium.”

On scribicide, the site with Show-Score’s lowest-rated review (50), Aaron Botwick opened his notice with a sort of psychoanalysis of McDonagh’s work:

The problem with being an enfant terrible is that eventually you grow up.  Martin McDonagh, the angry young man who banged out four plays in two years in his late twenties, is now nearing fifty.  The cynicism is still there; so is the black comedy, the moral ambiguity, and the penchant for spontaneous violence.  But the anger is gone, I think, and Hangmen, his first new play since 2010, feels deflated as a result.

Botwick went into more detail: “There is no doubt that Mr. McDonagh is a talented writer.  Hangmen is full of clever, funny lines.  It is never boring and in at least one instance terrifically theatrical.”  (He liked the working beer taps on stage.)  The scribicide scribbler went on:

But the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts; it feels more like a vehicle for those funny, clever lines than a cohesive narrative with a clear purpose.  Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s not as if we’re overwhelmed by playwrights with acid pens.  But from Mr. McDonagh, I expected more.

I don’t guess there’s any confusion why Show-Score assigned this review a low rating; perhaps the question is, why only a 50 and not low enough to be a negative notice?

David Kaufman’s review on TheaterScene.netis at the opposite end of the scale, at 98, Show-Score’s highest-rated notice.  Kaufman called Hangmen a “dark comedy” with “many twists and turns” and a “sense of good, old-fashioned suspense.”  On Stage Buddy, K. Krombie concluded, with praise for the acting and the staging all around, that “Hangmen tugs at the rotten business of retribution at the same time as eliciting unrepentant laughter.  It may be McDonagh’s best play yet.”

David Hurst called Hangmen“a brilliant, new black comedy” on Talkin’ Broadwayand  predicted, “Undoubtedly it will rack up accolades on this side of the pond.”  Hangmen, wrote Hurst, “finds McDonagh in spine-tingling form telling a story of resentment and retribution.”  With the help of he “impeccable design team,” director Dunster “weaves a spell of loony comedy with genuinely frightening violence to create a gallows-humor production that could only have come from the pen of McDonagh.”  

On Broadway World,calling the ATC show an “enjoyably discomforting production,” Michael Dale promised that in Hangmen, “violence is accompanied by realistically dark humor, played expertly by director Matthew Dunster's company.”  Samuel L. Leiter, writing on Broadway Blog, is of the opinion that “when it comes to sucking you into the vortex of a darkly funny, violence-tinted, dramatic world, nobody does it with quite the same reliably mesmerizing results” than Martin McDonagh, and so it is with his latest “dark comedy.”  “Hangmen has its feet in surface realism but,” demurred Leiter, “as devilishly well directed by Matthew Dunster, it’s up to its neck in theatricality.”  The Broadway Blogger complimented Fleischle’s set designs, adding: “But, with this sterling company, Hangmen would be riveting even if the stage was bare, the lights unchanging, and the actors in rehearsal clothes.”  The events of the play “coalesce in a gruesome, wickedly funny, technically clever denouement highlighting McDonagh’s themes of crime, revenge, and punishment” (which Leiter declined to reveal).  Leiter ended his notice with something of a pun (sort of): “Hangmen doesn’t necessarily add anything to the ongoing capital punishment debate but there’s no question that it provides capital entertainment.”

New York Theatre Guide’s Tulis McCall found that “[l]ike every other McDonagh piece we are served up a goodly portion of violence with the threat and the possibility of more hanging just around the corner of the stage.”  McCall continued, “There is cryptic humor, braggadocio, and the kind of bi-polar mood explosions that leave your stomach churning.”  But she had some issues, explaining, “Also like much of McDonagh's other writing, this one leads you exactly where he wants to take you, when your money would be better spent going in the opposite direction.”  She wondered, "What am I missing?" and decided she “was missing a story that I could believe, and characters who were more than two dimensional”—despite “quite excellent” performances.  “Perhaps this is supposed to be a rollicking farce,” McCall wondered, and “I am missing the intention of the entire shebang.”  Reminding me of my companion Diana’s question the night we saw the play, McCall remarked, “It is uncomfortable to sit in a theatre and hear people laugh at abuse in whatever form it takes.  And laugh they do.  And stand and cheer they did as well.” 

Michael Bracken of Theater Pizzazz points out, “Given McDonagh’s track record . . . we know we’re in for a shot of dark, twisted humor and more than a passing glance at the human underbelly.”  Hangmen, he found, “forces us to acknowledge the venality of human behavior, even while we laugh it off.”  Bracken affirmed, “At least part of the reason McDonagh is so successful in spinning the straw of tragedy into black comedy gold is his laser-like sense of character,” and the TP reviewer ran down the theatrical assets of the characters of Hangmen with relish, concluding that “Dunster coaxes fine performances from his cast, who are marvelously in sync with each other.”  He also observed that “McDonagh’s dialogue is, true to form, crisp and clear” and that the director “and his creative team deliver a world that sucks us right in; we could be sitting at the next table at the pub.” 

On WNYC radio, Jennifer Vanasco said that Hangmenis “a darkly comic thriller that is also a meditation on the justice of revenge.”  Vanasco contended that the play is about the “idea that revenge, even the civic kind, is a tricky business. Truth can be obscure. And heated (or judicial) certitude can turn out to be all hot air.”  On NY1, the proprietary news channel of Spectrum cable in New York City, Roma Torre said that in Hangmen“McDonagh’s trademark black humor and violent depictions are front and center . . ., making for yet another knockout production.”  Torre continued that the playwright, “a master storyteller, has laid out an edge-of-your-seat yarn that will draw both gasps and guffaws in equal measure” and “keeps us guessing with his misfit characters, seemingly crafted as stereotypes until we discover they’re not.”  She added that “under Matthew Dunster’s shrewd direction, you never see the plot twists coming.”  Furthermore, Torre declared, “The cast . . .is to die for.”  The cable TV reviewer summed up by stating:

There’s a lot packed into “Hangmen” which made me think of “Cheers,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “The Silence of the Lambs” mixed up in a crazy stew.  But hang all that; McDonagh and his wonderful cast of oddball characters are in a special class all to themselves.

[While I was noodling around on the ‘Net in prep for writing this report, I discovered two related factoids.  One is that Harry Wade is based on a real  person: a hangman named Harry Allen (1911-92) who became a pub-owner in Lancashire and who, like the character in the play, always wore a bow tie to executions.  Allen presided over the hanging execution of James Hanratty for murder—in 1962, not 1963 (the execution of the fictional James Hennessy in the play).  There was a movement to clear Hanratty’s name—until 2002 when he was proved guilty by DNA evidence.  Allen remained on the job until the end of executions in England; in 1964, he hanged one of the two last condemned men to be executed for murder.  (The last woman to be hanged in England was executed in 1955.)

[Harry Wade is the rival of Albert Pierrepoint in the play; it turns out Pierrepoint (1905-92) was a real person, too, known as the most efficient hangman in the country, or other titles of similar superlativity.  Harry Allen was Pierrepoint’s assistant from 1941 to 1955.  Also factual are the executions Clegg lists as “miscarriages of justice” which “Albert bloody Pierrepoint”  (as Harry Wade constantly called him) oversaw.  (One of these was Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England.)  He retired in 1956, almost 10 years before the abolition of hanging in England.  (Pierrepoint was pretty famous in his day—he was brought to Germany after World War II to execute some of the war criminals convicted at Nuremberg—but I wonder if anyone in the London audiences of today would recognize the name.)]

Technologies Old and New

March 9, 2018, 7:00 am

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“DIASPORA: NIGHT AT THEATER MAY MEAN MORE THAN WATCHING”

by Celia Wren

[On 5 December 2010, I published an article on ROT called “Theater and Computers” in which I discussed the uses computer technology was being put to in stage performances and where I thought it might be going in the near future.  I probably should have called the piece “Theater and Computer-Age Technology” because there’s more to the field than just computer-generated effects and computer-assisted visuals.  In this article, Washington Post writer Celia Wren writes about a whole performance festival centered on new technology, related to computer games and social media, that are being melded with traditional theater techniques in fascinating and imagination-provoking ways.  This article was originally published in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 4 May 2014.]

One minute you’re a ­theatergoer, the next, you’re an avatar in a ­cyber-thriller.

Such is the transformation one apparently undergoes at “15’000 Gray,” an interactive production that is part of the Zeitgeist International Festival and Symposium, running May 10-12 [2014] at the Goethe-Institut Washington and Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center.

The festival focuses on “Participatory Theater: The Intersection of Theater and Social Action.” But that solemn rubric might not do justice to the adrenaline quotient in “15’000 Gray,” which was devised by Machina Ex, a German company that specializes in fusing theater with the principals of digital gaming. “15’000 Gray” (the title refers to a radiation level) conjures up the laboratory of a scientist named Professor Hovel, whose trailblazing discovery is about to fall into bad guys’ hands. Audience members make decisions for the scientist characters, racing to protect Hovel’s discovery before a bomb goes off.

“Theater performance and gaming-arts culture combine really well, because they give each other something that the other is missing,” Philip Steimel, one of the leaders of Machina Ex, said. Theater gives the computer- ­gaming format the immediacy of live experience, he notes, while the fun vibe of gaming can counteract the all-too-frequent assumption that theatergoing “has to be very earnest and serious.”

Moreover, added his colleague Laura Schaeffer, theater can bestow a mantle of social significance that gaming culture covets. It is perhaps not surprising, then, as Schaeffer says, that interest in theater-gaming hybrids “is skyrocketing!”

Well, skyrocketing in Europe, perhaps.

“There are more pockets of folks thinking and speaking about a more immersive theatrical experience” in Europe than in the United States, says Washington thespian Rachel Grossman, who is co-facilitating the Zeitgeist symposium. Grossman recalls that when her company, Dog & Pony DC (“Beertown,” “A Killing Game”) began staging its brand of interactive theater a few years ago, “People thought we were crazy” even though such involve-the-spectator experiences were hardly new.

But there is increasing awareness among contemporary American audiences that participatory productions constitute a valid subgenre of theater, says Grossman. That uptick in recognition — combined with the fact that at least some contemporary audiences appreciate being actively involved in culture (they may well be tweeting and posting videos in their spare time) — lends an aura of timeliness to this year’s Zeitgeist proceedings.

Launched in 2011 by local director Gillian Drake, the Zeitgeist festival has been co-produced annually by a group of local theater folk and European diplomatic and cultural entities. Collaborating on this year’s edition of the project are the Goethe-Institut Washington, the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington, the Embassy of Switzerland, and — from the greasepaint side of the spectrum — institutions including the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Studio Theatre. (All the festival’s events will be in English.)

Studio is partnering on the “15’000 Gray” production. The Shakespeare Theatre is helping to present “Coffee & Prejudice,” the Swiss company MerciMax’s experiment in pairing an audience member and a performer, one-on-one, across a table.

Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics is co-producing “Love Club,” created by the Austrian troupe God’s Entertainment: In the piece, audience members armed with devices reminiscent of gaming controls steer a make-out session between two performers. The audience members can choose between four instructions — touch, kiss, undress and “intensify” — says Georgetown professor Natsu Onoda Power, who is directing the D.C. production. A performer can quit whenever the intimacy becomes too uncomfortable. So, for the audience member with the control, “You want your person to be romantically aggressive, but you also have to gauge what the person’s boundaries are,” Onoda Power says.

“Love Club” might sound like a very personal — not to say racy — project for a festival that has proclaimed its interest in “social action.” But several of the Zeitgeist organizers say that interactive theater implicitly poses questions about civic and personal responsibility, power structures and even democracy.

Expect discussion of such matters at the May 12 symposium, in which Grossman will be sharing facilitator duties with Georgetown’s Derek Goldman and with Michael Rohd, who heads Sojourn Theatre, a company with a national scope.

“Even if the content isn’t social justice-related,” participatory theater opens a discussion about “responsibility, or what the rules are, or who is really in control,” Goldman says. The format builds the audience’s sense of themselves “as chroniclers of their own lives,” and “there’s a power to that,” he says.

The Zeitgeist festival is of-the-moment. For international art with a through-the-ages luster, you can turn to the upcoming D.C. appearances by the Gundecha Brothers, virtuosos of the centuries-old Indian music form known as Dhrupad. The Gundechas — two brothers sing; another accompanies them on the pakhawaj, a two-headed drum — will give a concert at the National Museum of American History on Sunday. Then, on Monday at the Embassy of India, the siblings will preside over an evening devoted to Dhrupad appreciation.

Dhrupad can be intensely meditative; it can also be stirring. Accompanied by drone instruments, as well as — for some portions of the music — the pakhawaj, the Gundecha vocalists sing in a duet format, known as jugalbandi, that involves passing musical notes back and forth.

“You feel as if one is handing it to the other. One elaborates on the other’s [sound], improvises on it, and the other one picks it up from there. So there has to be a perfect understanding [between performers], because it’s so improvisational,” says Manjula Kumar, the Smithsonian project director who is producing Sunday’s concert.

Kumar has worked frequently with the Gundechas and has traveled to the academy they teach at in Bhopal, India. She says even newcomers to Indian classical music will enjoy the upcoming concert (to be live-streamed at museumstudies.si.edu). The Gundecha Brothers’ art can touch everyone “because of its spirituality” and because it speaks in “the universal language of music,” she says.

[Celia Wren is a freelance writer, editor, journalist, and fiction writer who has worked in publishing since 1989. She has held editorial positions at Harcourt and American Theatre magazine, and is presently a theater reviewer for the Washington Post and a media critic for Commonweal. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the New York Observer, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and elsewhere; her fiction has been published in American Letters & Commentary, the Gettysburg Review, the Greensboro Review, and Glimmer Train Stories. A fluent French-speaker with some knowledge of Russian, Wren has lived in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg, and has traveled in more than twenty countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. She holds a B.A. in literature from Harvard, an M.A. in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, and a second-degree black belt in shotokan karate. Zeitgeist International Festival and Symposium (www.zeitgeistdc.org) ran from 10-12 May. Dhrupad: The Mysticism of Sound, with the Gundecha Brothers, appeared on 4 May at the National Museum of American History’s Warner Bros. Theaterat 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., in Washington.  For more information, visit museumstudies.si.eduor e-mail kumarm@si.edu.]

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“THE LURE OF TECHNOLOGIES PAST”

by Nick Bilton

[This article on the apparent return of an old technology, appeared in the New York Times on 17 March 2016 in “Disruptions,” section D (“Thursday Styles”).]

For a glimpse of what teenagers are into these days, all you have to do is visit Abbot Kinney Boulevard in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. On weekend nights, the half-mile shopping drag is packed with style-conscious kids who traipse past coffee shops, ice cream parlors and boutiques, often while taking selfies.

Yet one of the most popular destinations for these teenagers is a white, single-story building with big pink letters on the roof that spell “Vnyl.” The store sells vinyl records, and the kids who gather there are often in awe.

“I’d say half of the teens who hang out in my store have never seen a record player before,” said Nick Alt, the founder of Vnyl. “They will walk up to the turntable, and they have no concept where to put the needle.” But once they figure out that the needle goes into the outermost groove, those smartphone-toting teenagers are hooked.

Whenever a new technology comes out, we often believe it will make an older technology obsolete. As a reporter who has been covering technology for The New York Times for more than a decade, I’ve made such proclamations, saying that the iPad would kill the Kindle (I later realized the error of my ways, and now own both), that eBooks would be the death of print (I later reversed myself, several times), and that driverless cars will make driving passé and allow us to nap in the front seat (this has yet to be disproved).

But what I’ve come to realize is that while the new thing gets people excited, the old thing often doesn’t go away. And if it does, it takes a very long time to meet its demise.

Just look at film cameras. You would think they have been vanquished from the planet, but millions of people still use them. In 2012, more than 35 million rolls of camera film were sold, compared with 20 million the year before.

And while Polaroid has filed for bankruptcy (twice) in the age of digital cameras, the company is making a resurgence (again). One of Polaroid’s largest growing demographics, surprisingly, is teenagers who want a tangible photo but also don’t want to wait. (Polaroid has also become the go-to camera for people who take nude photos and fear that their phones could be hacked.)

Other types of physical media have also held on.

More than 571 million print books were sold in the United States in 2014. About 55 million newspapers still land on doorsteps every morning. As for those vinyl records, 13 million LPs were sold in 2014, the highest count in 25 years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Records are also one of the few growth areas for the beleaguered industry.)

So why does old tech survive and, in some cases, undergo a revival? For some consumers, it’s about familiarity (e.g., newspapers and print books), while for others, it’s about nostalgia (e.g., record players and film cameras).

For example, I’ve been taking photos for over 25 years, and what made me fall in love with photography was the dirt, grit and grime of film (I used to shoot with Tri-X 3200 for the film nerds out there). And as much as I love my digital cameras, I’ve been shooting with film again to capture some of that visceral quality I no longer get with pixels.

The resurgence of old tech doesn’t stop with physical media.

For example, tens of millions of Americans still own a landline; millions of USB thumb drives are still being used, even though you can store anything in the cloud free; and people still use and buy tens of millions of flip phones every year, including such notables as Mayor Bill de Blasio, Anna Wintour, Warren Buffett, Iggy Pop and Rihanna. Pagers also never completely died.

You’ve probably heard the saying that the minute that you drive a car off a dealer’s lot, it loses value. Well, that is no longer true for old cars. Some vintage cars have increased in value by 500 percent. (One reason for this is that younger car owners want to be able to fix and tinker with their own cars. Try doing that with a Tesla, and you’ll void the warranty.)

Of course, there are some outdated technologies that die a fateful death and never return. I don’t know many people with a dedicated car phone, for example. (Though I’m sure some hipster just posted one to Instagram.)

To be fair, we have been wrongly predicting the demise of old technologies for some time. In 1876, for example, when The New York Times first wrote about the telephone, and later the phonograph, the writers of the day said that these devices would empty the concert halls and churches, as no one would ever want to leave home again.

And yet, just this month, Diplo held a concert for an estimated half-million people in Cuba. Something tells me that some of those people will also be buying the performer’s album on vinyl.

[Nick Bilton writes about technology, politics, business, and culture for Vanity Fair.  He is also a contributor to CNBC and the New York Times.  This article is available under the headline “Why Vinyl Records and Other ‘Old’ Technologies Die Hard” on the Times’ website at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/style/vinyl-records-books-film-cameras-die-hard.html.]

'At Home at the Zoo'

March 14, 2018, 7:00 am

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[Because of the amount and quality of the critical coverage, my report on Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zooruns longer than usual.  ~Rick]

Once upon a time, many years ago, a clever young man wrote a small play.  It was really his first play, though he’d tried his hand at writing plays before.  This was the first one he’d finished and liked; he was proud of his little play.  Unhappily, theaters in his homeland turned the young man away when he tried to persuade them to produce his play.  It was just too . . . unusual for them and they didn’t think their audiences would like it.  It was too European, they thought.

So the young man, who was not only clever but very determined, sent his play to Europe, where plays like his were, indeed, more welcome.  Lo and behold! a theater in Germany accepted the clever young man’s little play.  They put it with another unusual play, this one by an Irish writer, and presented them together in German for their audience—and the playgoers and critics in the foreign land loved it and wrote very good reviews of it.  The world, it seems, had discovered a new, young playwright with new, young ideas about theater and playwriting.

Now theaters at home began to clamor to present the clever young man’s little play and so the clever young playwright brought his little play home and it became a big success on the stages of his homeland.  He wrote more plays, little ones at first, like his first one, and then bigger, more ambitious ones, and he began winning awards and prizes and recognition.  But all the while, he felt bereft somehow.  His first little play seemed unfinished.  He needed to say more, but he didn’t know what exactly or how to do it.

The clever young man, now becoming a very successful and admired playwright in his homeland, went on with his writing career and created more and more successful plays.  But the missing part of his first little play continued to perturb him.  In the back of his mind, the clever young man kept feeling he’d left something out of his little play and, despite his growing success as a dramatist, it weighed on his mind.

Finally, almost 50 years after writing his little play, the clever man—who was now no longer young but an eminence of the theater community of his homeland—sat down and wrote another little play which he put together with his first one.  He gave the two plays together a new, long title with his name in it, and said it was now a new two-act play that must be performed as a single play.  Now, of course, no one in his homeland would deny the clever, famous man his desires, and so theaters around the country agreed to produce the writer’s “new” play . . . and the clever, famous playwright got his wish.  Not too many years later, the famous writer died and everyone was very sad.  But he left behind a treasure of wonderful plays . . . and his first, clever, little play, now part of a bigger one with a long title that looked very important on the cover of a program.

And that, children, is how The Zoo Story became Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife& The Zoo Story.  Let’s see if all this mishegoss was worth it.

Edward Albee (1928-2016) wrote The Zoo Story in 1958; it was his first play to be completed and produced.  As I said in my fairy tale account, producers in New York City rejected Zoo Story so the one-act play, after a circuitous and unlikely route (recounted in the preface to the 1960s paperback edition of The American Dream and The Zoo Story), was staged in German at the  Schiller Theater Werkstatt in West Berlin in 1959 on a double bill with the German première of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.  (The German translation of Albee’s play, by Swiss actor Pinkas Braun, was called Die Zoogeschichte.  The Berlin production was directed by Walter Henn with Kurt Buecheler as Peter and Thomas Holtzmann as Jerry.)  It débuted on 28 September as part of the Berlin Arts Festival and won the Berlin Festival Award; Berlin critics and audiences both responded with enthusiasm.  The play went on tour to a dozen other German cities and, before any of his works showed up on U.S. stages, news of Albee’s success abroad reached home.  (The Zoo Story was produced on German television in 1963.)

Zoo Story premièred in the U.S. at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village on 14 January 1960 with William Daniels as Peter and George Maharis as Jerry under the direction of Milton Katselas.  Paired again with the Beckett play, it ran for 582 performances, closing on 21 May 1961, and Albee and Beckett shared the 1960 OBIE Award for Distinguished Play; Daniels won the 1960 OBIE and Clarence Derwent Awards and Maharis, the 1960 OBIE and Theatre World Awards for their performances. 

Zoo Story  was staged again at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the Village in March 1962 as part of the Theatre of the Absurd series produced by Richard Barr (who had also produced the Provincetown Playhouse première) and Clinton Wilder, this time paired with Albee’s The American Dream(written around 1960).  This production was staged by Alan Schneider (who would later become known as an interpreter of the plays of Samuel Beckett, including the U.S. début of Waiting for Godot) and starred David Hooks as Peter and Jered Barclay as Jerry. 

The two plays were staged again in the same production in September 1962 and remounted (this time with The Dutchman by LeRoi Jones—later known as Amiri Baraka) at the Cherry Lane in November 1964 through February 1965 under Edward Parone’s direction with Pirie MacDonald taking over the role of Peter.  (The producers now were Barr, Wilder, and playwright Albee himself, having formed a company called Albarwild, which became a significant force in Off-Broadway and avant-garde theater in New York.)  Schneider again staged The Zoo Story (with Krapp’s Last Tape again) in June-October 1965 at the Cherry Lane, with George Bartenieff as Peter and Ben Piazza as Jerry.

In October 1968, as part of an Albee-Beckett series, Zoo Story and Krapp’s Last Tape were presented on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theatre, with the Albee one-act directed again by Schneider and Ben Piazza playing Jerry; Donald Davis played Peter.  As a single one-act, The Zoo Story, immensely popular among high school, college, community, and small rep theaters, as Albee wrote in 2007, “had gone on to have—at this writing—49 years of frequent performance and general acceptance.”

The playwright was very pleased with how The Zoo Story turned out: “‘The Zoo Story’ is a good play,” Albee told the Boston Globe in 2011.  “It’s a play that I’m very happy I wrote.”  He’s disclosed, however, that “it nagged me just a bit that it seemed to be not quite a two-character play—Jerry being so much longer a role—but more a one-and-a-half-character one.”  Apparently he kept thinking about this until, in 2001, he decided, “There’s a first act here somewhere which will flesh out Peter fully and make the subsequent balance better.”  So Albee—who’s the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes (A Delicate Balance, 1967; Seascape, 1975; Three Tall Women, 1994), two best play Tonys (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1963; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, 2002), a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, and the National Medal of Arts in 1996—sat down and wrote Homelife in two weeks; it became the first act of a new play with The Zoo Story comprising its second act.

There has never been a feature film adaptation of The Zoo Story (in any language) that I have been able to discover, but, in addition to the German TV airing in 1963, several television adaptations have been aired—though none in the United States.  The only English-language version was on Britain’s Independent Television (ITV) in 1961; other broadcasts have been in Sweden in 1964 and 1980, France in 1968, and Greece in 2016.  There’s an LP from the 1960s by Spoken Arts with William Daniels and Mark Richman (who replaced George Maharis in the U.S. première).  Texts of The Zoo Story have been published in many editions since 1960, including anthologies (though whether the old version is still available is questionable); Albee’s new version is available as the second act of At Home at the Zoo from Overlook Press (2008).

Under the umbrella title Peter and Jerry, the new two-act play premièred on 28 May 2004 at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut (which commissioned the new play) with Pam MacKinnon directing and Frank Wood as Peter; Johanna Day as his wife, Ann; and Frederick Weller as Jerry.  Peter and Jerry’s New York début was on 11 November 2007 at the Second Stage Theatre under MacKinnon direction again and Day again playing Ann, but with Bill Pullman as Peter and Dallas Roberts as Jerry. 

The title Peter and Jerry didn’t last very long.  (In an interview on TheaterScene.net, Albee explained that he didn’t like the title, though “it IS accurate,” because “it sounded too much like ‘Ben & Jerry’s’ ice cream.”)  On 20 March 2009, the Philadelphia Theatre Company presented the two-act version as Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story, its official title now, with Mary B. Robinson as director, T. Scott Cunningham as Peter, Susan McKey as Ann, and Andrew Polk as Jerry.  On 5 June 2009 the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco presented the play’s west coast première under Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s direction, with Anthony Fusco as Peter, René Augesen as Ann, and Manoel Felciano as Jerry. 

Subsequent productions of At Home at the Zoo were staged in Seattle (Theater Schmeater) in November 2009, Pittsburgh (Ghostlight Theatre Troupe) in July 2010, Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage) in March-April 2011, Boston (Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts) in May 2011, and Stockbridge, Massachusetts (Berkshire Theatre Group), in July-August 2017.  The first New York City mounting of At Home at the Zoo (and only the second presentation of the two-acter here) is the current Signature Theatre Company production which started previews on 30 January 2018 with the opening night on 21 February; the show is now scheduled to close on 25 March (after extensions from 11 and 18 March).  Albee, who was the playwright-in-residence for Signature’s 1993-94 season, had often returned to the company’s stages as a Legacy writer, most recently with The Sandbox, part of The Signature Plays, a bill of one-acts (on which I reported on Rick On Theater on 3 June 2016).

I met Diana, my usual theater companion, at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Manhattan’s Theatre Row to see the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 3 March.  Housed in the Irene Diamond Stage, the retitled revival, part of STC’s Legacy Progam, is directed by Lila Neugebauer (Signature Plays, which included Albee’s The Sandbox; A. R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody—all at Signature and all reported on Rick On Theater), with Robert Sean Leonard as Peter, Katie Finneran as Ann, and Paul Sparks as Jerry.

The two-hour evening (with intermission) starts with the prequel, Homelife, as act one of At Home at the Zoo.  It’s a Sunday afternoon (the published text says 1 p.m.) and we’re in an Upper East Side apartment on 74th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues.  (The sets were designed by Andrew Lieberman and lit by Japhy Weideman.)  Peter from The Zoo Story (Robert Sean Leonard), about 45, is sitting up right in a green upholstered chair with matching hassock; he’s reading what turns out to be one of the textbooks his company publishes.  He’s interrupted by his 38-year-old wife Ann (Katie Finneran) who bursts in from the off-stage kitchen and proclaims: “We should talk.”  The scene reveals the comfortable, but boring, domestic life of Peter and Ann, their two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets (they have two everything, Ann points out, including microwaves), before he goes to the park where he has the fateful meeting with Jerry.  

It’s an Ionesco-like dialogue between Peter and his wife—covering her prophylactic breast removal, the possibility of either or both husband and wife having an affair, his disappearing circumcision, sleep paralysis, the lack of animalistic sex in their marriage, conflicting desires between their marriage being “a smooth voyage on a safe ship” and the urge, or wish, to “behave . . . like beasts”—that’s supposed to tell more about who Peter is and where he comes from when Jerry encounters him in Central Park, to make him a fuller, more relatable person than he allowed to be in The Zoo Story.  Homelife doesn’t end with a conclusive moment; it’s elliptical and at the end of the act, Peter goes off to the park to read, setting up The Zoo Story. 

After intermission, we return to the theater for The Zoo Story to find an arc of park benches, empty except for Peter, who’s reading contentedly.  Actually, he’s sitting in almost the exact same spot, engaged in the same activity, in this set as he was at the top of act one!  It’s later that same afternoon and this is a place Peter comes to often on nice Sunday afternoons to sit and read in seclusion.  Into Peter’s solitude comes another, slightly younger man, in  his late 30’s and scruffily—Albee says “carelessly”—dressed.  This is Jerry (Paul Sparks), who sits on another bench further along the arc.  “I’ve been to the zoo,” announces Jerry after a moment or two.  As Peter doesn’t respond, he repeats the declaration several more times, each time more insistently.  From this initiation, Jerry increasingly dominates the encounter, essentially taking over and making Peter little more than his sounding board.  Thus begins the Pinteresque dialogue with the shocking ending (choreographed by UnkleDave's Fight-House) that is The Zoo Story; it’s far too well known and accessible to warrant summary here, so I’ll say no more. 

(I will say, however, that I was a little surprised that when Jerry provokes Peter into taking a dreadful action, there were gasps from several spectators.  I’d have thought, apparently wrongly, that pretty much everyone—especially in a Signature audience—would know how Zoo Story ends by now.  On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout insisted that “even if you know it’s coming,” Zoo Story‘s ending “is as shocking as a thunderclap on a sunny day.”)

The program doesn’t give a specific timeframefor the STC production; it just says “Sunday afternoon.”  The published text for At Home at the Zoosays “One p.m.  A Sunday” and “Later that same Sunday.”  (The old version of Zoo Story says “a Sunday afternoon in summer; the present,” which would have been 1959 or ’60 in its day.)  The production is costumed (by Kaye Voyce) ca. 2018, though nothing is really period-identifiable; the only set pieces are the chair and hassock in Homelife, and they’re characterless, and the park benches in Zoo Story, which are timeless.  

I caught a few references in Zoo Story that seem too contemporary for 1959: Jerry mentions Stephen King, whose first novel seems to have been published in 1974, and Peter says he earns 200 grand a year, which would have been a huge fortune in 1959 ($1.7 mil today).  The author named in the old version is J. P. Marquand, a popular author of the Mr. Moto mysteries who died in 1960, and Peter’s annual income is $18,000 (Albee gave him a raise: that’s only worth about $150,000 today!).  So At Home at the Zoo is up-dated to the 21st century, but non-specifically.  (Curiously, Peter carries only $40 with him in both eras—so he has less walkin’-around cash now than he did 50 years ago in terms of buying power.  Probably made up for with credit cards, rare in 1958.)  Oddly, there are a few references that are dated today, like pornographic playing cards, that the playwright might have changed but didn’t.

At Home at the Zoowas a disappointment from two perspectives.

To start with, Homelife is supposed to flesh out the character of Peter, whom Albee felt is underdeveloped in Zoo Story.  First of all, it doesn’t.  As Diana said, it’s purely an “intellectual exercise”; it doesn’t really have a function.  (I’d have called it theatrical masturbation, but that’s just me!)  In fact, as much as Jerry dominates Zoo Story, Ann dominates Homelife, though not as dynamically.  Second, seeing Zoo Story again (I hadn’t read it in a long time), Peter doesn’t need fleshing out.  I said to Diana, when the second act ended: “Zoo Story’s still a better play . . . by itself.”  In any case, Homelifestruck me (and Diana.) as unnecessary—at least with respect to Zoo Story.  If Albee wanted to write an Ionesco-like one-act, he’s perfectly free to do so, but it didn’t help Zoo Story as far as I’m concerned.  (A more compelling mystery for me than what Peter was like in the moments before Zoo Story is what he does after that soul-shattering encounter.  Albee apparently refused to answer that question according the Village Voice’s Laura Collins-Hughes, who added that the STC revival of At Home at the Zoo“has me wishing, for the first time, that he had.”)

Then, the Signature production of Zoo Story was the second problem with At Home at the Zoo.  I think Neugebauer has made a terrible mistake with Jerry by making him an eccentric.  His behavior and rhetorical style is a performance (Jerry performing, I mean), acting as oddly and peculiarly as he can.  It’s as if Jerry were in a manic episode of bipolar disease.  If I were Peter, I’d have skedaddled at the first opportunity.  Sparks’s Jerry is the kind of guy who, if he was in the subway with you, you’d move to the opposite end of the car.  But Peter has to stay, and Leonard (not Peter) looked awkward and uncomfortable—like he hadn’t come up with a rational motivation to stick around.  I don’t know Sparks’s work at all so I can’t speak about how he’s handled other roles, but I do know Leonard’s acting, and he’s not the kind of performer who’d let himself do whatever a director tells him without grounding it on an objective—unless he couldn’t find a workable one.  It looked to me as if Neugebauer and Sparks kept him from finding one.

If Jerry behaves like an ordinary guy, albeit one with an obsession, Peter—who’s established that he’s compulsively inoffensive (the New York Times’ Jesse Green called him “domesticated”)—could reasonably tell himself, he should stay and give this guy an ear.  Until it’s too late to escape.  I say this makes Jerry all the more menacing—and the ending more shocking.

Aside from this problem I have with Sparks’s portrayal of Jerry, I applaud the acting overall.  However wrongly I feel  Sparks (and Neugebauer) misinterpreted the character of Jerry, Sparks executed it well.  That’s assuming the director intended Jerry to be not just strange, but peripatetic, flitting from one temperament to another as if to keep Peter off balance.  (Teachout described the portrayal as “skitter[ing] around the stage like a pinless grenade.”)  The actor certainly commits wholeheartedly to the performance.  As Ann, the new character in the expanded play, Katie Finneran, a two-time Tony Award-winner (2002 Best Featured Actress in a Play for Noises Off; 2010 Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Promises, Promises), makes her role as provocateur of clueless Peter seem natural—or at least as natural as an Ionesco-ish milieu can seem.  She delivers absurdly droll lines with a straight face that occasionally morphs into a Cheshire-cat grin.  At the same time, Finneran can go dark, more ominous than Jerry’s hyperkinesis.

The connector for the two playlets is Peter, who remains a bit of a cipher in the hands of Robert Sean Leonard, Neugebauer, and Albee.  As the only character who carried over from Homelifeto The Zoo Story, Leonard (2001 Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for The Invention of Love, plus two other Tony nominations) is about as mild-mannered as any man could be before becoming a milquetoast.  As I suggested above, Peter shrinks from offending anyone, not Ann nor Jerry, and Leonard, who’s never a dynamic actor (not a fault), plays him as virtually imperturbable—until Jerry succeeds in driving him to an unthinkable act.  In both his roles (the same character, but different relationships), Leonard plays second banana-cum-straight man.  (Far from having been “fleshed out,” Peter has merely been expanded.)  As I’ve already said, however, Leonard hasn’t overcome the problem of performing opposite Sparks’s unmoored Jerry in Zoo Story—though he fares much better in his scene with Finneran’s Ann in Homelife.

I think I’ve pretty clearly indicated how I feel about Neugebauer’s directing for At Home at the Zoo: she did a creditable job with Homelife without really making the case for its existence and she took a major wrong turn in Zoo Story.  Her physical production, however, is fascinating.  I noted that the production doesn’t give away a period other than generally “present day”—21st-century-ish.  Voyce’s costumes, for example, are identifiable as modern-day mostly because they don’t identify as anything older—certainly not mid-20th-century America.  Weideman’s lighting  is almost operating-room stark and bright, as if we’re all supposed to be examining the specimens Albee’s put on exhibit. 

The most striking element of the mise-en-scène is the background of the set.  As I said, there are only a single selection of set pieces for each act: Peter’s chair, hassock, and the floor lamp he reads by in Homelife and the four park benches in Zoo Story.  The rest of the stage setting is a painted backdrop and the painted stage floor, the same for both acts (a second connection for the two playlets in addition to Peter’s presence) but shifted at intermission to alter the shape of the space.  The flats and the floor are both painted white overlaid with a random texturing that gives both surfaces the feel of a Jackson Pollock drip painting.  (Most reviewers who made an association invoked Cy Twombly; I’ll stick with my impression.)  In Homelife, it can be seen as abstract-expressionist wallpaper and carpeting perhaps; in Zoo Story, it stands in for foliage and ground cover.  Now, Albee describes the scenery for each act as largely realistic, but I found Lieberman’s rendition more in keeping with the non-realistic styles of the two playlets: Ionesco-like absurdism for act one and Pinteresque drama of menace for act two.  (There’s also a Brechtian aspect to the set design in that it leaves no doubt that this is a stage performance which seems appropriate for Albee’s American absurdism in the 21st century.)

The Show-Score review tally for At Home at the Zoo comprised 34 reviews as of 11 March.  The notices break down into 94% positive and 6% mixed; there were no negative reviews.  Show-Score’s highest ratings were two 95’s from Magical MissTari Tour and BSonArts, a pair of blogs (backed by 11 90’s, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, TheaterScene.net, and the Daily Beast); the lowest scores were a 60 from Lighting & Sound America and a 65 from Stage Buddy, both websites.  My round-up will cover 22 notices.

Terry Teachout asserted in the Wall Street Journal that Neugebauer’s mounting of At Home at the Zoo at STC is “masterly in its visual clarity and psychological acuity,” but declared that this “cannot cover up the fact that Albee made a bad mistake when he wrote ‘Homelife’ and an even worse one when he yoked it to ‘The Zoo Story.’”  The Journalist feels (as if he had read my own mind), “Part of the enduring power of ‘The Zoo Story’ lies in the fact that it is simultaneously clear and mysterious.”  He explained his perspective: “The mystery of ‘The Zoo Story’ lies in the absence of context for the violent encounter of Peter and Jerry, about whom we know nothing save what they tell us.”  Teachout asks why Albee even wrote Homelife, the prequel to Zoo Story; he complains that

there is no point in Albee’s telling us what he will show us after intermission, and the only effect of watching it spelled out in “Homelife” is to diminish the force of the second play’s climactic confrontation.  It’s as though a standup comedian explained the punchline of a joke to the audience before telling it.

“Since Ms. Neugebauer is stuck with ‘Homelife,’” the WSJ reviewer acknowledged, “her only choice is to make the most of it.”  Teachout reported, “Ms. Finneran’s performance, by turns fey and desperately sad, is instantaneously involving, while Mr. Leonard brings off the wire-walking feat of being dull in an interesting way”—as he accomplishes in Zoo Story as well.  Sparks’s Jerry, said Teachout, is “deliberately spectacular,” and Ms. Neugebauer has framed it with the loving care of a curator hanging an Abstract Expressionist canvas.”  Though he called Homelife a “pale exercise in social realism,” he affirmed that “‘Zoo Story’ is worth seeing anyway.”

In Long Island’s Newsday, Barbara Schuler cautioned, “Sometimes a good idea needs to simmer,” explaining, “So it seems with the late Edward Albee, who nearly 50 years after 1958’s ‘The Zoo Story,’ his first success, embellished on the story with ‘Homelife,’ a prequel of sorts.”  Schuler confirmed that “it’s easy to see how the more recently written play clarifies the early one, especially deepening the character of” Peter.  The Newsdayreviewer characterized the production as “meticulously staged” and praised the three actors, Leonard (“appropriately introspective”), Finneran (“talk about simmering”), and Sparks (“on-fire”).  Her one lament: “What’s really too bad is that Albee . . . is no longer around to finish the story.  I, for one, long to hear what Peter might have said to Ann when he finally got back from the park that fateful afternoon.”

Jesse Green of the New York Times asks at the start of his notice, “Was there ever a more terrifying opening line, in a play or in life, than ‘We should talk’”?  Those are the first words, spoken by Ann to her husband Peter in Homelife.  (“Well, maybe,” he continued.  “For those who recognize it, ‘I’ve been to the zoo’ is at least as ominous”—Zoo Story‘s opening line.  I heartily concur!)  In Green’s estimation, Homelife“emerges . . . as more than just the other half of an eggshell, jaggedly interlocking.  Lila Neugebauer’s terrific production proves it to be an indispensably excellent work in its own right.”  The evening’s full moniker, Edward Albee’sAt Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story, Green quipped, “produces a typically mordant Albee joke.  The playwright was nothing if not ‘at home at the zoo.’  Often, the zoo was marriage” (think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?or A Delicate Balance).  Of the marriage of Homelife to Zoo Story, Green asserted, “Now we know how much is at stake [in Zoo Story] not only for Jerry . . .  but also for his trapped listener.”  The Timesman felt that, though “‘The Zoo Story’ became an instant classic [at its première] . . ., I would argue that it is deepened immeasurably by Albee’s surgery nearly 50 years later.”  The prequel is “so cleverly done that it seems to be a restoration rather than an addition.” 

Green had found Pam MacKinnon’s 2007 première of At Home at the Zoo“anxious” because of Albee’s “hovering,” but Neugebauer’s version “is much freer and funnier and thus more powerful.”  The Times review-writer reported that “it breathes instead of hyperventilates, until its brutal conclusion.”  “The same,” he said, “is true of the actors: They do not approach the play as an awesome classic but as a living organism.”  Leonard, Green affirmed, “is very good” and “often catches the sound of Albee’s voice”;  Sparks “solves the . . . problem in Jerry, a character with almost too many colors, often verging on purple”; and Finneran “is spectacular” because “she uses [her] wit, gently but insistently, like a hygienist with a curet, to scrape away the social surface of her marriage.” 

The Financial Times’ Max McGuinness found that in At Home at the Zoo, “Albee’s writing is so lean and nuanced that there are no lurches between madness and civilisation.  Monstrousness here blends seamlessly into the fabric of normality.”  McGuinness feels, “The expanded version . . . broadens that psychodrama into a universal parable of man’s struggle to restrain his animal nature.”  Director Neugebauer’s “stripped-down staging suggests how fragile such bonds can be,” he found.  “And her Zoo injects an electrifying dose of terror into the ersatz wilderness at the heart of New York.”  Of the acting, the FT reviewer said that Leonard’s performance is “taut” and “turns Peter into a dense psychological enigma”; Finneran’s Ann is “vampish yet forlorn”; and Sparks’s Jerry is “played with a volatile blend of lunacy and vulnerability.”

In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz observed, “It doesn’t take much to reveal people’s animal side and lack of humanity—a bit of conversation will do.”  He offered STC’s At Home at the Zoo as proof.  Dziemianowicz reported that Homelife, which covers all manner of subjects, is “just talk” (“And how”), but “The madness gets real in ‘The Zoo Story.’”  The Newsman asserted that, even 11 years after its  première as a two-acter, “‘Homelife’ still sounds like characters spouting an author’s ideas about cruelty and isolation—and not real talk.  ‘The Zoo Story’ still manages to unsettle.”  Dziemianowicz felt, “Lila Neugebauer’s direction cannily underscores the unnerving closeness—and more often distance—between people;” while “[a]nother key to the show’s success is its abstract scenic design by Andrew Lieberman.”  Of the acting, the review-writer said, “Three winning performances show off each work to its best advantage”:

Leonard nails Peter's mild-mannered calm and the storm beneath it.  Sparks is spiky as required as Jerry.  Finneran brings so much smarts, humor, vulnerability and a subtle jagged edge to Ann that you can't take eyes or ears off of her.

Laura Collins-Hughes of the Village Voicedubbed the STC revival of “Albee’s stitched-together play”“electrifying” because Neugebauer “unlocks something essential in this production.”  “If you, like me,” maintained Collins-Hughes, “never thought Homelife worked before; if you, like me, suspected The Zoo Story was too much of a period piece to retain a powerfully visceral performative charge, well, you’re in for a jolt, too.”  She explained: “Freeing the text from” Albee’s notion of how it “should be staged,” Neugebauer “lets the menace of the play arise from its animal wildness, the pleasure of it from its human comedy.”  She “excavated” the “feral geography of human impulse and desire,” said Collins-Hughes.  The review-writer characterized the revival as a “thrilling, illuminating production” with a “sprightly, dark-edged, laceratingly funny performance” from Finneran, a “[s]ly and unbalanced in a gorgeously kinetic performance” by Sparks, and “surprising glimmers of poignancy” from Leonard.

In the “Goings On About Town” section of the New Yorker, the reviewer indicated that “it’s human self-consciousness—the thing that separates us from animals—and the impossibility of overcoming it that give these plays their humor and sorrow and horror.”  While Lieberman’s set “skews abstract,” Neugebauer’s “sensitively directed and finely acted production grounds the work in everyday behavior and real feeling.”  In New York magazine, Sara Holdren proclaimed, “There’s a small play playing on Signature Theatre’s largest stage.”  She elucidated, “Well, in some ways it’s small. In reputation, it’s big.”  Then Holdren demanded “why?”  

Why is Signature filling the 294-seat Irene Diamond with a play that, for all its historical significance, is a bit like the theatrical equivalent of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi: undeniably Good in certain senses—well-structured, surprising (well . . . the first time), and important from a cultural-literacy standpoint—but now so established, so known that its teeth can’t help feeling a bit dulled.

Raising the question that isn’t the same true of all revivals, including all those Shakespeares mounted in U.S. theaters every year, Holdren responded, “I’d argue that there’s something different in the continued examination of canonical works in the public domain—where there’s the potential, with each new production, for an entirely reenvisioned theatrical world,” responded Holdren, continuing, “than in the relatively unadventurous remounting of plays by writers who, living or dead, hold such sway over their work that different productions, despite their individual merits or shortcomings, feel much the same.”  Director Neugebauer “doesn’t take, and probably doesn’t have the option of taking, . . . liberties in At Home at the Zoo.  Her production is fine, well-drawn within the lines.”  It’s “unfussy and actor-focused,” said the reviewer from New York.  “At Home at the Zoo,” contended Holdren, “thus becomes an examination not of two fully wrought men but of how some men, no matter what, remain empty.”  She reported of the acting, “Leonard and Finneran both acquit themselves well in the play’s less fireworks-y roles” but Sparks “owns the show.”  He’s “compelling” in “his deadpan drawl and sloping, vulpine walk.”

Helen Shaw declared at the top of her Time Out New York review, “There’s no way to say this gently. The play At Home at the Zoo is a single drama Frankenstein-ed together out of two one-acts: Edward Albee’s 1959 masterpiece, The Zoo Story, is bolted onto its far inferior prequel, Homelife . . . .”  Shaw further asserted that playing both one-acts together, as Albee demands, may be “laudable, honorable even, but it makes for an evening that’s fully half bad.”  She exclaimed, “Yet there’s good news: Thanks to the diamondlike brilliance of Paul Sparks in Zoo, the show is unmissable.” (The woman from TONY, however, added: “Out of respect for his costar Robert Sean Leonard, I’m not telling you to just show up at intermission.”)  

Shaw called Homelife“almost . . . a spoof on an Albee play”; in addition, “Albee admitted in interviews that Homelife exists only to fill in ‘gaps’ in Peter’s character in Zoo, and everything about Ann . . . points to that purpose-built blankness.  She’s a margin where Albee could scrawl notes about Peter.”  (After listing all the attributes that make Zoo Story a modern theater classic, the TONY reviewer supplied her answer—and mine, too—to New York’s Holdren’s argument for not mounting the play anymore: “it’s the kind of play that opens wider every time you see it.”)  Shaw proclaimed STC’s Zoo Story “a duet, beautifully orchestrated by director Lila Neugebauer” and lauded the two actors: “Leonard finds a world of grace notes to play, but the melody line belongs to Sparks, who prowls like a Muppet tiger.”  In Homelife, the review-writer said of Finneran’s Ann that the actress “ladles charm on the part, but she can’t hide that it’s a paper-thin construction.”

Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” for his notice in the Hollywood Reporter was: “Superb performances enliven these classic and not-so-classic works.”  Describing the STC revival as “superbly acted,” Scheck added that the director “has assembled a first-rate cast.”  He asked, however, “whether the prequel enhances the impact of Zoo Story.  The answer is, not so much, really.”  The HR reviewer dubbed Homelife “a minor work, one that displays flashes of Albee’s brilliance at crafting wittily incisive dialogue” and deemed that “it mainly proves discursive and insubstantial.”  Scheck also felt, “Albee’s decision to update Zoo Story also feels unfortunate; jarring anachronisms have the ironic effect of making the play feel more dated than it actually is.”  He concluded, “Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating double bill” that features “terrific performances”: Leonard, Scheck reported, “acutely conveys Peter’s inability to be comfortable in his own skin”; Finneran “infuses Ann with a delightful sauciness, milking her arch dialogue for all its comic richness”; and Sparks “is a force of nature as the animalistic but canny Jerry, who . . . brings a particularly mesmerizing combination of malevolence and humor to it.” The HR writer’s final remark is that Sparks’s Jerry “is an acting tour-de-force that provides reason enough for this revival.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart called The Zoo Story a “breakthrough one-act” with a “gut-punch depiction of class rage”—even though he also denigrated it somewhat as a “short story masquerading as drama.”  He warned readers, “Now that class resentment has become one of the most potent forces in our national conversation, At Home at the Zoo serves as a prescient warning of things to come.”  He credited Neugebauer with showing “Peter and Ann’s specific brand of unostentatious wealth [in Homelife] with efficiency and clarity.”  Stewart reported that Leonard’s “soft, measured line deliveries also betray Peter’s effortless privilege” and Finneran “introduces a nagging dissatisfaction to this picture of bourgeois bliss” while “[e]nnui radiates from her spectral figure.”  Sparks, said the TM reviewer, “makes a thrillingly unpredictable Jerry, accenting his performance with birdlike eyes and pointed modulations in his voice”—though even he “isn’t able to fully activate Jerry’s extended monologue.”  

Michael Dale noted on Broadway World that At Home at the Zoo represents “the first major work by one of America’s most iconic playwrights paired with one of his last” and though “both plays are intimate by nature,“ director Neugebauer “takes full advantage of the large Diamond Theatre stage.”  Of the acting, Dale found that Sparks gives an “animated performance” that “also seems designed to fill the space, undercutting some of the play’s tension by making the character more entertaining than menacing; Finneran “is right on the mark as Ann, balancing sensitivity and love for her husband with the itching desire for more”; “Leonard’s beautifully subtle Peter is all the more fascinating for the emotions he hides than the emotions he expresses.”  In the end, however, the BWW reviewer found that “the two plays do tend to come off more like acting exercises than the social commentary they hint at.”  Nonetheless, he reported, the evening “makes for an intriguing experience.”

David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America(Show-Score’s lowest-rated notice at 60) felt that, while “Albee’s observations are . . . capable of chilling one to the bone,” in At Home at the Zoo, his “effort was not entirely successful, and Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Signature is, in many ways, not ideal.”  Homelife, the LSA reviewer stated “doesn’t land with as much force as it might” and, though the two playlets “make an elegant pair” on one hand, on the other they “are very uneasily joined.”  Barbour noted the up-dates Albee made to Zoo Story, but saw that “the seams still show.”  Though the review-writer found that Sparks “makes Jerry’s final act seem horribly plausible,” Barbour thought (as I did) that the actor “seems to be trying on one attitude after another in search of a coherent character.”  The LSA journalist shared my feeling about the character: “There should be a touch of menace about Jerry from the get-go, but instead, here we have an actor going through a series of exercises.”  In the end, Barbour dubbed The Zoo Story “a sometimes-problematic production of a slightly problematic work.”  He recommended, “If you’ve never seen At Home at the Zoo, this is well worth a visit; if you’ve seen it before, your time might be better spent elsewhere.”

On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell announced bluntly, “The yoking together of these two separate one-acts into a single play still doesn’t work for me.”  Mandell saw the combined two-act play “almost as an act of vandalism” and asked, “Why did Peter need to be fleshed out; why the need for balance?”  He explained, “There is an adolescent fury to ‘The Zoo Story’ that doesn’t belong paired with the more sedate, oblique and adult ‘Homelife,’” which the review-writer characterized as “decidedly second-tier Albee.”  Nonetheless, Mandell acknowledged that director Neugebauer “makes as good a case as seems possible for this play, thanks to the casting.”  Leonard “manages to make Peter’s desire for a marriage that’s like a ‘smooth voyage on a safe ship’ seem reasonable”; Finneran “brings some life to a woman who, unlike her husband, wants ‘a little disorder around here, a little . . . chaos’—a little passion.”  But Mandell found “some irony in realizing that ‘Homelife’ doesn’t so much ‘flesh out’ Peter as contrast his continuing emptiness against a second more vibrant character.”  As for Zoo Story, he proclaimed Sparks’s performances “spectacular.”  However much time has passed, Mandell felt, Zoo Story “still stands out; its vigor and humor and rage and sadness have not been destroyed by time, nor by its creator.”

Samuel L. Leiter described The Zoo Story as “a brilliantly calibrated, often bitingly funny tragicomedy” and labeled Homelife“one of the best one-acts of the young century”; he’s “not sure, though, that [Homelife] greatly illuminates what happens in” Zoo Story, in which “Peter’s enigmatic character can be viewed as one of its strengths.”  Once again, a reviewer praised the performances in STC’s At Home at the Zoo: Finneran “offers passionate curiosity and grace”; “Leonard’s helplessness is totally sincere”; and Sparks “captures Jerry’s angst and anger with scary friendliness.”  Leiter, however, found problems with the stage settings for both one-acts, with Lieberman’s “abstract design . . . on the too-wide stage . . . a cold, neutral, open space” which “creates an expansive world that works against the intimacy of each environment.”  Homelife’s setting, the Broadway blogger reported, “hints at a frigidity in Peter and Ann’s relationship that exceeds what Albee seems to be implying.  In The Zoo Story, having five benches in a semicircle, instead of the usual one, eliminates any sense of isolation from Peter’s nook.”  Leiter’s final comment (very similar to my own remark earlier) was: “I still prefer my Zoo Story by itself.”

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp called At Home at the Zoo at STC “a superbly cast, smartly directed production” and quipped, “I think if Mr. Albee were still with us, he’d be pleased.”  Sommer further observed that “Homelife . . . can be seen as a stand-alone marital drama” while Zoo Story displays “Albee's provocative insight into the darker passions that lie beneath the human veneer of civility.”  She cautioned, however, “In both plays a lot depends on the actors' ability to capture the subtle intricacies with which people communicate.”  In Leonard’s Homelifeperformance, “just watch his facial expression and body language, and you'll see a man of many moods,” while Finneran “is obviously more ready to steer the marital ship into less calm waters.”  The CU reviewer affirmed, “While Homecoming does flesh out the picture of Peter as a man symbolizing the complacent, upper middle class, seeing it doesn't really diminish The Zoo Story strength.”  Yet, Sommer asserted that “the sizzle still belongs to The Zoo Story. . . with the amazing Paul Sparks.”  She complimented Lieberman’s set, pointing out that the “set-up intensifies the connection between both plays.”  In her final words, the review-writer declared that “a visit to this Peter and Jerry (and Ann) is highly recommended.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller labeled At Home at the Zoo“a razor-sharp revival,” asserting, “In the hands of Ms. Neugebauer and a stellar cast, the two one-acts that Albee himself fused into a single work remain as relevant and psychologically true as they were more than a decade ago.”  He called Leonard “a master at turning ‘passivity’ into a verb” and dubbed Sparks “mesmerizing.”  Miller concluded that “the director, her fine cast, and the design team have shown us [The Zoo Story] to be timeless.”  Theater Pizzazz’s Brian Scott Lipton described At Home at the Zoo at Signature as a “splendid incarnation” of Zoo Story, which “can still rouse us from our metaphorical slumbers and force us to reexamine how we interact with each other.”  Lipton reported, “Much of the credit for this production’s success belongs to the sensitive direction of Lila Neugebauer” whose cast is “led by the great Paul Sparks, who finds just the right tone for portraying Jerry,” and features “the excellent Robert Sean Leonard.”  Homelife, said the TP writer, is “a slighter if quintessentially Albeesque meditation on marriage” in which Finneran “is alternately funny and heartbreaking, confident and unsure, matter-of-fact and deadly serious.” 

Joel Benjamin characterized The Zoo Story as a “stylized vision of an anonymous encounter in Central Park” on TheaterScene.net anddubbed Homelife“a sly study of domesticity” in which “[t]here are hints of darkness now and then.”  Finneran, reported Benjamin, is “amusing, strong and smart” and Leonard gives “an assured performance as a somewhat hyper-controlled personality.”  In Zoo Story, Sparks is “the personification of a ego attached to a fading machismo.”  The TheaterScene reviewer reported, “Lila Neugebauer has directed these two one-acts to bring out their naturalism” giving “the conversations a flow that reveals this play to be about people, not walking symbols.”  Kathryn Kelly of Stage Buddy explained that “At Home at the Zoo intends to add symmetry and depth to” the incomplete Zoo Story, but she found “the choices of this production make the venerable playwright’s intentions ultimately fall flat.”  Kelly asserted, “The setting of Homelife—or more appropriately, its lack of setting—is detrimental to the territory that it navigates” because, she felt, it provides insufficient information about the couple and their lives.  “The Zoo Story, however, is a spectacular showcase of the wickedly talented Paul Sparks,” proclaimed our Stage Buddy, who “was captivated by Sparks: his movements, his pauses, and his embodiment of Jerry were exhilarating.”  In the end, Kelly found that “despite strong performances . . . something is still missing from this production of At Home at the Zoo.”

On New York Theater Guide, Constance Rodgers reported, “Robert Sean Leonard, Katie Finneran and Paul Sparks all provide a deep understanding of and respect for the characters they play.  I felt like I was spying on two very private scenes.”  She praised Lieberman’s set as “fabulously sparse” so that “[o]ur attention is on the words spoken, the cadence of the language, the inflection of emotion.”  Bruce Smith blogged on BSonArts (to which Show-Scoregave its highest rating, 95) that STC’s revival of the Albee play is “enlightening” and “timely and worth re-experiencing now.”  The revival “is a beautifully conceptualized and an impressively executed evening in the theatre.”  Calling the production “near perfect,” Smith went on to report, “The real standout among a very strong cast is Paul Sparks” who “takes a role that is usually played as a series of aggressions and retreats and plays it as a happy-go-lucky story teller” who “quite literally dances around the stage.”  Leonard and Finneran “are a well-matched pair. . . . as far their acting is concerned” and Neugebauer’s “direction . . . is filled with perfectly placed pauses and perplexing moments of reflection.” 

[There’s some confusion about the availability of The Zoo Story as a stand-alone one-act play.  On National Public Radio, Caitlin Shetterly reports that “Albee is now insisting that ‘The Zoo Story’ can no longer be performed professionally on its own.  It has to be performed with the new opening act, under” its full, current umbrella title (that is: Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife& The Zoo Story).  On the Edward Albee Society webpage, however, is the statement: “According to the publishing firm Samuel French, ‘The Zoo Story may be performed independently.  However, Homelife may only be performed as part of the full length play At Home at the Zoo.’”  On the website Berkshire Fine Arts, Charles Giuliano specified in 2017 that after the Hartford Stage debut of At Home at the Zoo, “Albee refused permission for all but non equity [sic] and college productions [of The Zoo Story] in the original form as a one act play.”  The published edition of At Home at the Zoo doesn’t address the issue of production rights at all. 

[If I’m interpreting these mixed messages right, Albee’s estate has decreed that Homelife and Zoo Story can only be performed together under the cumbersome umbrella title in professional—that is Actors Equity—productions.  Samuel French has carved out an exception for Zoo Story, but French handles only non-professional rights; professional productions of The Zoo Story as a single one-act are excluded.  If that’s right, we’ve lost the opportunity to do Zoo Story the way Albee originally wrote it, which I say is still it’s best format. 

[I hope I turn out to be wrong, but Robert Orchard, executive director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, says: “The idea of an iconic play like ‘The Zoo Story,’ which everybody knows and which every theater student has performed, or at least been involved with, to have it all of [a] sudden no longer available is kind of a shock to the system.”  Shetterly interprets: “Orchard can no longer stage ‘The Zoo Story’ at A.R.T., but he can present it with his students because colleges and amateur companies need no agreements from Albee.”  Former New York Times theater reviewer Charles Isherwood believes that the restrictions on professional productions of Zoo Story are a bad decision: “[I]t’s kind of sad.  And ‘The Zoo Story’ is such a seminal play in the American theater that to limit the way it’s produced or in one context it’s produced is—I can understand why people would be upset about that.”]

Perry Mason (Part 3): On Life And Law

March 19, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: “Staging Our Native Nation”

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by Kirk Woodward

[On 19 and 22 February, I posted “Perry Mason,” a two-part article by Kirk Woodward on the mystery novels of Erle Stanley Gardner on Rick On Theater.  (Before that, Kirk published “Four Actors,” an examination of the acting of four guest stars on the Perry Mason TV series, posted on 30 January.)  While he was composing “Perry Mason,” Kirk collected a number of quotations he found revealing about Gardner’s ideas about life and the law.  He compiled a representative list for ROT and I’m running it here as “Perry Mason (Part 3).”  (A longer version of this list is posted at http://www.perrymasontvseries.com/woodward/.)  I think ROTters will find it amusing—and possibly even informative, as Gardner was, himself, a practicing attorney and had very strong—also practical—feelings about his profession.  ~Rick]

Recently I wrote several pieces for this blog about the Perry Mason books and television series (see “Four Actors,” 30 January, and “Perry Mason,” 19 and 22 February). Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote the original books, created in Mason a formidable character, made up of equal parts determination and skill.

Gardner himself was for years a practicing lawyer, and one gets a feeling of the kind of lawyer he must have been from the Perry Mason books, which contain comments on the practice of law – sometimes rather extensive comments – and a definite attitude toward life as well.

The quotations that follow are occasionally slightly edited. The most enjoyable way to read all of them, of

course, is to read all the books. Short of that, here is a sampling. All the book titles begin with the words The Case of the . . . . Only the last words of the titles are given here.

ABOUT HIMSELF

Lucky Legs, 1934

“I’m different. I get my business because I fight for it, and because I fight for my clients. Nobody ever called on me to organize a corporation, and I’ve never yet probated an estate. I haven’t drawn up over a dozen contracts in my life, and I wouldn’t know how to go about foreclosing a mortgage. People that come to me don’t come to me because they like the looks of my eyes, or the way my office is furnished, or because they’ve known me at a club. They come to me because they need me. They come to me because they want to hire me for what I can do.”

Counterfeit Eye, 1935

“I play a no-limit game. When I back my judgment, I back it with everything I have. I try not to be wrong. What the hell can a man lose? He can’t lose his life because he doesn’t own that, anyway. He only has a lease on life. He can lose money, and money doesn’t mean one damn thing as compared with character. All that really counts is a man’s ability to live, to get the most out of it as he goes through it, and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”

“I hate this office routine. [I want], not necessarily a murder case, but a good fight in front of a jury. I like dramatic murder trials, where the prosecution explodes an unexpected bomb under me, and, while I’m whirling through the air, I try to figure how I’m going to light on my feet when I come down.”

Baited Hook, 1940

“How I love a mystery, Della,” he said. “I hate routine. I hate details. I like the thrill of matching my wits with crooks. I like to have people lie to me and catch them in their lies. I love to listen to people talk and wonder how much of it is true and how much of it is false. I want life, action, shifting conditions. I like to fit facts together, bit by bit, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Regardless of what you may think, Mr. Brownley, I’m not merely a paid gladiator fighting for those who have the funds with which to employ me. I’m a fighter, yes, and I like to feel that I fight for those who aren’t able to fight for themselves, but I don’t offer my services indiscriminately. I fight to aid justice.”

“Dammit,” he said to Della Street. “One of those frosty, reserved, human adding-machines gets under my skin worse than a dozen shysters who try browbeating tactics.”

Mischievous Doll, 1963

“I have always been accustomed to controlling events, within reason. I hate like hell to find myself in a position where events are controlling me.”

Postponed Murder, published 1973

“When I start unraveling a mystery, I can’t seem to find a brake. Every time I put my foot down, it hits the throttle.”

THE TRUTH

Curious Bride, 1934

“What right have I got to sit back with that ‘holier than thou’ attitude and expect [clients] to come clean with a total stranger? They come here when they’re in trouble. They’re worried and frightened. They come to me for consultations. I’m a total stranger to them. They need help. Poor fools, you can’t blame them for resorting to subterfuges.”

Sleepwalker’s Niece, 1934

“Any time I have to depend on perjured evidence to acquit a client, I’ll quit trying cases. If he’s innocent, we’ll get him off.”

Demure Defendant, 1956

“Get this straight. You’re dealing with a murder case. No matter how awkward the truth is, you can’t fabricate a situation that will meet all of the requirements. You can’t get a falsehood that will dovetail with all of the facts. Sooner or later all of the other facts will be known. If your story doesn’t dovetail you’ll have to change it. If you change it under pressure the truth will then be ten times more awkward.”

Beautiful Beggar, 1965

“In the first place, as an officer of the court, I can’t tamper with evidence. In the second place, I’ve always found that truth is the strongest weapon in the arsenal of any attorney. The trouble is lawyers quite frequently don’t know what the truth is. They get half-truths from the evidence or from their clients and try to get by on those half-truths.”

THE LEGAL SYSTEM

Howling Dog, 1934

“We’re a dramatic people. We’re not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It’s a national craving. We’re geared to a rapid rate of thought. We want to have things move in a spectacular manner.”

Caretaker’s Cat, 1935

“A lawyer isn’t like a shopkeeper who can sell his wares or not as he chooses. He holds his talents in trust for the unfortunate.”

“That’s what I like about the practice of law – it’s an adventure. You’re looking behind the scenes at human nature. The audience out front sees only the carefully rehearsed poses assumed by the actors. The lawyer sees human nature with the shutters open.”

“A lawyer has a trust to his client. He can set any fee he pleases. If the client doesn’t pay it, the lawyer doesn’t need to take the business; but if a client pays it, it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s five cents or five million dollars. The lawyer should give the client everything he has.”

Perjured Parrot, 1939

“The prosecuting attorney has at his command all the facilities of organized investigation. He uncovers facts. He selects only those which, in his opinion, are significant. Once he’s come to the conclusion the defendant is guilty, the only facts he considers significant are those which point to the guilt of the defendant. That’s why circumstantial evidence is such a liar. Facts themselves are meaningless. It’s only the interpretation we give those facts which counts.”

Black-Eyed Blonde, 1944

“A lawyer can’t afford to get too big, Della. He always has to remember he’s a part of the machinery by which justice is dispensed. When it comes to a matter of justice or injustice there isn’t such a thing as big or little. Injustice is a social malignancy.”

One-Eyed Witness, 1951

“Many people misunderstand the duty of an attorney. It’s an attorney’s duty to see that a defendant has a fair trial. If the attorney makes up his mind that the defendant is guilty and therefore won’t represent that defendant, that’s asking an attorney to substitute his own prejudices, his own judgment for the judgment of a Court and a jury.”

Amorous Aunt, 1963

“As far as ethics are concerned, don’t overlook the fact that a lawyer is ethically bound to protect his client. That’s the first and foremost of all the rules of legal ethics. The people who formulate the canons of legal ethics take it for granted that an attorney will be protecting his client, so they lay down rules of professional conduct for the purpose of seeing the lawyer doesn’t go too far. But the number one canon of ethics which should dominate all the others is that an attorney should be loyal to his client and should protect his client.”

Bigamous Spouse, 1961

“It’s more than being loyal to your clients. It’s being loyal to the basic principles of justice. And when you’re trying to do that, you have to take it on the chin once in a while – or at least be ready to.”

Moth-Eaten Mink, 1952

“I never disbelieve a client, but whenever I’m listening to a client’s story, I’m constantly wondering how a jury is going to react to that same story.”

“Crying Swallow” [short story], published 1971

“I’ve practiced law long enough to know that a man should never torture clues to make them point in the direction he thinks they should go.”

CLIENTS

Careless Cupid, 1968

“I have an idea your client is holding something back.”

Mason said, “You can say that for about ninety percent of the clients who come to a lawyer’s office, Paul. I wonder if patients hold out on their doctors. They come to a professional man to get help and then they almost invariably try to color the facts.”

“Clients do strange things. There are several things you can always depend on a client doing. A client will usually hold out some pertinent fact, will substitute his own judgment for yours, and then make some crazy move which affects his status without asking you about it in advance.

“Aside from that, you can’t tell what a client will do. They’re unpredictable.”

Singing Skirt, 1961

“I know as far as I’m concerned, I’d rather have my hand cut off than betray the interests of a client. If I’m representing a client, I want the representation to be honest, loyal and efficient. I make it a point to believe everything my client tells me and to act accordingly in order to protect the best interests of that client.”

Nervous Accomplice, 1955

“I don’t know why it is, but it’s not once in fifty times that you’ll find a client who tells you the entire truth. Nearly all of them, no matter how innocent they may be and how honest they may be, will try to sugar-coat the facts so that they become more favorable.”

Phantom Murder, 1964

“In a murder case many things are entirely different from what they are in other cases. When a man’s life is at stake he will do almost anything.”

GUILT AND INNOCENCE

Caretaker’s Cat, 1935

“Suppose he’s really guilty?”

“Then we’ll find out all about the extenuating circumstances and either make him plead guilty and get the lightest sentence we can for him, or else let him get some other lawyer.”

“That’s not an orthodox way of practicing law.”

“Who the hell wants to be orthodox?”

Silent Partner, 1940

“I’ve always tried to represent clients who were innocent. I’ve been lucky. I’ve taken chances. I’ve played hunches, and the hunches have panned out. Circumstantial evidence can be black against a client, and I’ll see something in his demeanor, some little mannerism, the way he answers a question or something, which makes me believe he’s innocent. I’ll take the case, and it will work out . . . . I do know that a lawyer can’t simply sit back and refuse to take any case unless he thinks his client is innocent. A client is entitled to legal representation. It takes the unanimous verdict of twelve jurors to find a person guilty. It isn’t fair for a lawyer to turn himself into a jury, weigh the evidence, and say, ‘No, I won’t handle your case because I think you’re guilty.’ That would deprive an accused person of a fair trial.”

TRIAL TECHNIQUE

Curious Bride, 1934

“It’s an axiom of criminal law that a man should try everyone except the defendant. You know, sometimes you can try the prosecuting attorney. Very frequently you can try the prosecuting witness. You can start digging around, cross-examining on extraneous matters, trying to show some sort of a motive for murder. Then, if you can get a motive before the jury, you start showing opportunity, and if you can get motive and opportunity, you suddenly switch the accusation and claim there’s just as much ground to suspect the prosecuting witness as there is the defendant. [I’m simply telling you] how criminal lawyers play the game.”

“The way to get to the bottom of a murder,” he said, “is to pick out any pertinent fact which hasn’t been explained, and find the real explanation of that fact.”

Howling Dog, 1934

“There are lots of ways of trying a lawsuit. There’s the slow, tedious way, indulged in by lawyers who haven’t any particular plan of campaign, other than to walk into court and snarl over objections, haggle over technicalities, and drag the facts out so interminably that no one knows just what it’s all about. Then there’s the dramatic method of trying a lawsuit. That’s the method I try to follow.”

“Pick some dominant emotion if you want, but touch on it only for a few moments. Then swing your argument to something else. Then come back to it. The human mind is like a pendulum: you can start it swinging a little at a time and gradually come back with added force, until finally you can close in a burst of dramatic oratory, with the jury inflamed to white rage against the other side. But if you try to talk to a jury for as much as fifteen minutes, and harp continually upon one line, you will find that the jurors have quit listening to you before you finish.”

Substitute Face, 1938

“. . . when you start fighting, never try to hit the other man where he’s expecting the punch. And when you once start a fight, never give up until the other man’s licked. If you can’t do it by hook, do it by crook.”

Black-Eyed Blonde, 1944

“When I find that one theory of a case is hopeless, I squirm around and try to find some other theory. After all, it makes a great deal of difference how you look at a case. It’s what the lawyers call the legal theory on which it is to be tried. . . . A lawyer needs imagination. When you come to one legal road that’s blocked, you back up and try another.”

Empty Tin, 1941

“That is the secret of crime solution. You find the things that are unusual, the things which vary from the normal or average, and, using them as clues, you get away from generalities, and down to specific individual cases.”

Drowning Duck, 1942

“It’s a question of doing justice to a client. Once you become convinced your client is guilty, you interpret all of the evidence in a false light and weigh it by false standards. When you once get the correct master pattern, every single event fits into that pattern. It dovetails with every other event which impinges upon it. When you get a master pattern which seems to accommodate all of the events except one, and you can’t make that event fit in, it’s pretty apt to mean that your master pattern is wrong.”

Half-Wakened Wife, 1945

“The theory on which you want to work is always the theory on which the other man doesn’t want to work.”

Hesitant Hostess, 1953

“A lawyer who does much trial work has to make snap judgments. The clerk calls out the names of a prospective juror. That person gets up from his seat in the courtroom, walks up to take his place in the jury box. You have an opportunity to watch him for six or seven seconds. In those six or seven seconds you have to reach a snap judgment as to his character, how he’s apt to react to testimony and argument, what kind of a person he is, whether he’s broad-minded or liberal minded, whether he’s bigoted, good-natured or antagonistic.

Vagabond Virgin, 1948

“Of course, you have an opportunity to supplement that first impression by asking him a few questions, but as a rule a man has steeled himself by the time you start questioning him so his appearance is more or less of a mask. He’s trying to convince you that he’s intelligent and important. He knows that he’s in the limelight and he has that natural tendency to put his best foot forward. He’s trying to convince himself he’s something of a judge.

“The first basic principle of cross-examination is to start asking a witness conversationally, affably and in a friendly way about some of the minor points that the witness hasn’t thought over quite so much, and on which he doesn’t expect cross-examination. As long as you’re friendly and affable, if you get adverse answers it doesn’t hurt your case in the least, but if you do uncover a weak point then you can move in on it swiftly and capitalize on the advantage.”

Fugitive Nurse, 1954

“Identification evidence is given the greatest weight in a court, and it’s likely to be the poorest evidence. The person who is really trying to be fair says, ‘I think that was the person whom I saw.’ They riddle him with cross-examination and ridicule. Jurors dismiss his testimony. He’s apt to be telling the truth.’

“You have to hold the interest of a jury. You can’t do it by fumbling around with papers. Any time you make a pass at a witness and then quit and start fumbling around with papers you make it appear that you don’t know what you’re doing, that the witness has the best of you. You’re going to keep throwing questions at the witness. Rapid-fire questions. You aren’t going to pause for anything. You’re just going to keep slamming questions at him. . . . Furthermore, you mustn’t, under any circumstances, keep going over the same things he’s testified to in the same order. . . . Go at him from a different angle. . . . Bore into him. Give it to him hammer and tongs. Don’t let him have any time to think in between questions. The minute he answers one question, fire another one at him.

“Don’t let your mind go blank. Keep throwing questions at him, any questions. Ask him what the weather was. Ask him what kind of tires were on the automobile. Whether they were white sidewalls or not. Ask him exactly where the car was parked. How many feet from the corner. How many inches from the curb. Ask him how he happened to be there. Ask him if he was walking, or ask him if he stopped walking. If he had stopped walking to watch the girl, find out when he stopped walking and why. How long he stood there. Ask him how he happened to be there, where he’d been, how long he’d been there, where he was going, what stopped him, when he started walking again. Just keep throwing questions at him and all the time keep watching him like a hawk, using your powers of concentration to remember everything he says and to correlate every answer, looking for a weak spot.

“If you’re going to be a trial lawyer, you not only have to think of all those things but in addition you’ve got to keep watching the jurors out of the corner of your eye. You’ve got to see what impresses them and what doesn’t. You’ve got to see when they’re getting bored, and when they’re getting bored you’ve got to do something spectacular that will arouse their interest. You’ve got to keep thinking about the record. You’ve got to keep watching for errors. You’ve got to keep an eye on the court. You’ve got to frame your questions so they’re calling for evidence that is legally admissible and not have your questions couched in such phraseology that the other side can object and have the objection sustained. That makes the jury feel you don’t know what you’re doing. . . .

“You’ll get so they’re automatic. You’ll be able to stand on your feet, throw out a steady stream of questions, and keep thinking of all those things and half a dozen others.”

“Object to anything, just so it isn’t important. Let them get in all the important facts whether they hurt us or not. Save your objections for the facts we already know. Throw a little variety into the case and give him something to think about.”

“In a preliminary never object to any questions calling for new evidence. Only object to the form of questions so you keep the prosecutors off balance and keep them from letting a witness have things too easy. Otherwise let them drag in everything they want. You can never tell when something will do some good. The more a witness says the first time he’s on the stand the more he’s apt to contradict himself the second time he gets on the stand.”

Restless Redhead, 1954

“A defendant in a criminal case very seldom has anything to lose by letting the issues become confused.”

Amorous Aunt, 1963

“Don’t object to those things [being introduced into evidence]. That’s the mark of an amateur. Let the evidence go in and then get the guy all flustered on cross-examination.”

Queenly Contestant, 1967

“Razzle-dazzle is not good cross-examination. The purpose of cross-examination is to find out whether a witness is telling the truth.”

MOTIVES

Lame Canary, 1937

“Virtually every man has enemies. Sometimes they’re business enemies. More often they’re personal enemies, people who hate him, people who will look down their noses and say it’s too bad when they hear he’s bumped off, but who will be tickled to death just the same; but it takes a peculiar psychological build-up to perpetrate a murder. A man must have a certain innate ferocity, a certain lack of consideration, and, usually, a lack of imagination.”

“Why a lack of imagination?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “except that it’s nearly always true. I think imaginative people sympathize with the sufferings of others because they’re able to visualize those sufferings more keenly in their own minds. An unimaginative person, on the other hand, can’t visualize himself in the shoes of another. Therefore, he sees life only from his own selfish angle. Killers are frequently cunning, but they’re rarely original. They’re selfish, and usually determined. Of course, I’m not talking now about a murder which is the result of some sudden overpowering emotion.”

“A solution of any crime which doesn’t account for all of the various factors involved is no solution at all. In the long run, Della, the essence of all successful detective work lies in reconstructing the life of the victim. That gives motivation, and motivation makes murders.”

LIFE

Sulky Girl, 1933

“A man can nearly always think his way out of any situation in which he finds himself. It’s merely a paraphrase of the old saying that where there’s a will there’s a way.”

Baited Hook, 1940

“Whoever got anything in life by being careful? Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow’s going to do, you unconsciously figure what you’d do in his place. The result is that you’re not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.”

Lonely Heiress, 1948

“I like to watch people around a depot. It’s fascinating. You can see so much of human nature that way. People aren’t on their guard when they’re dead-weary or when they’re completely removed from their usual environment. A person who lives here in the city feels he’s on his own home ground, no matter what part of the city he’s in, unless it’s the depot. But the minute he walks into the depot he’s started, so to speak, on a complete change of environment and he lets his guard down.”

Phantom Fortune, 1964

“Make up your mind to one thing, Mrs. Warren. After water has run downstream and over the dam, you can’t find any way on earth of getting it back upstream and over the dam a second time. Take things as they come. Concentrate on the present, forget the past.”

Bigamous Spouse, 1961

“Money was made round so it can be kept in circulation. Did you ever realize, Della, that if I take a dollar and pay it to Paul Drake, and Drake pays it to his landlady, and the landlady pays it to the grocer, that dollar is doing a man-sized job in the economy? Whereas, if I put the dollar in my pocket and sit on it – “

Perjured Parrot, 1936

“Let’s cheer up; let’s get this feeling of hopelessness completely licked.”

“Staging Our Native Nation”

March 24, 2018, 7:00 am

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[Back in 1996, when I was reading scripts for the Gypsy Road Company’s 21st Century Playwrights Festival, I read Call the Serpent God to Me by M. Elena Carrillo, a native of southern Texas with Tejano and Native American roots.  I never saw a performance of Serpent God, and I have no idea what became of the play or playwright after I filed my evaluation, but I’ve often recalled that play, which I found a remarkable theatrical creation.  Carrillo incorporated images drawn from her American (Catholic), Tejano, and Aztec heritages in her dramaturgy, using both visual imagery and performative techniques from her various traditions. 

[I knew little about Native American theater before reading Serpent God and I’ve learned only a general outline of its appearance and development as part of the American theater scene since then, but I’ve felt that it’s a remarkable cultural phenomenon.  When I opened my April issue of American Theatre the other evening and started reading “Staging Our Native Nation,” a series on native peoples’ theater—which also covers the theatrical efforts of native Hawaiians and Inupiat (native Alaskans)—I discovered how far along the phenomenon has come. 

[In a very real sense, native American theater artists have invented our first truly indigenous theater.  Mainstream American theater, including African-American drama, is pretty much an adoption of existing European theater forms; we merely put an American stamp on it.  Indigenous peoples have taken the basic form of Western theater (as well as the performance forms of other cultures, I presume), and adapted it to tell their stories and, what’s more, incorporate their techniques of storytelling, including traditional music, dance, and ritual. 

[I’m republishing this series of nine articles about indigenous American theater, from the Theatre Communications Group’s AT of April 2018 (volume 35, number 4) to share this conversation about an under-covered part of American theater with ROTters.  (Some of the AT articles don’t appear in the print edition of the magazine, but are available on the TCG website; the whole series is accessible from https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.)  The first installment, “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet (a Mohegan Indianfrom Connecticut), appears below; the rest of the ATseries will follow at three-day intervals.  ~Rick]

NATIVE WOMEN RISING

by Madeline Sayet

Why three premieres in Oregon are a sign of the times—and a long time coming.

THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN EVERY SEASON:In Oregon this April, you can see three new plays by Native women produced at major resident theatres. Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play will be performed at Artists Repertory Theatre April 1-29; DeLanna Studi’s And So We Walked will be up at Portland Center Stage at the Armory March 31-May 13; and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahattaopens at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival March 28 and runs through Oct. 27. If you stop through Portland on your way to or from Ashland in April, you could see all three in one trip.

While the timing of this convergence is unique, FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota), Nagle (Cherokee), and Studi (Cherokee) are in no way new to the American theatre. They’ve made it this far because of their creativity, their community and ancestral support, and their unflinching belief that Native stories matter and will be told. Also: Their plays are really good. They vary widely in genre, as do the origins of each story. Each play has the ability to make you laugh and open your eyes to see the world around you in unexpected ways.

Indeed, opening eyes to an unacknowledged world was a key impulse behind Nagle’s Manahatta. As a member of the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater in New York City in 2013, she realized that none of her non-Native colleagues knew the story of the Lenape people whose land the theatre stood on. She knew that was the story she needed to write there.

For her part, Studi had been having dreams since she was a child of walking the Trail of Tears with her dad to find out where her family came from. So when a director asked about her dream project, she knew that was the story she needed to tell.

And FastHorse began The Thanksgiving Play in Ireland while staying in Tyrone Guthrie’s historic house on a fellowship from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis that provided her with the space and time to create.

But there was another prompt behind each project as well. Each of these women had been told countless times, in countless ways, that there was no room for Native stories in the American theatre. So these plays emerged not only from the writers’ storytelling impulse but also out of their drive to create Native plays that would make it to the stage. These playwrights are the kind of people who don’t tell you you’re wrong about something; they meet you where you are and show you something you need to see.

As the narrative of each of these plays illustrates, the silencing of Native stories is common. It is also catastrophic for Native culture and community, and for the policies that affect us. For us, the stories we tell are a matter of life and death. Traditional Native storytelling molds itself to the shape of the given moment and to what is needed. The narratives we put onstage therefore have direct consequences in shaping our world.

The U.S. theatre community seems to be acknowledging that fact, examining its practices and its roots. And what American roots run deeper than indigenous stories? Yet what American stories have been more mistold and silenced than those of Native Americans?

In many ways these three plays stand as powerful acts of defiance against the silencing of Native voices. They are also savvy hybrids of indigenous philosophies and Western theatre. After all, what good is writing an amazing play if the American theatre won’t produce it?

Larissa FastHorse has been told that her plays don’t get second or third productions due to casting demands. There is a widespread misconception in the theatre field that casting indigenous actors is an impossible task. So she removed that excuse by writing a play that can be performed with four white or white-passing actors in a single setting.

“The play is still dealing with indigenous issues and the indigenous experience in America,” FastHorse insists. “The whole play is a metaphor for the invisibility of indigenous people in the narrative.”

Meanwhile, artistic directors told Nagle they were only interested in telling contemporary stories, and that Native stories take place in the past, to which she responded: “If you think our stories from the past are not relevant to what is happening today, let me show you how the past is the present.” The interlocking dramatic structure she applied to connect characters across generations when working on Manahatta as part of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group has found its way into many of her plays since, because it illustrates the historic ripples of every law we make and every story we tell.

As Nagle puts it, “So you think what happened to the Lenape on Manahatta island is something from the 1600s, not relevant today? What do you think 2008 was about on Wall Street? How do you critique Wall Street as an institution when it began as an institution that took homes from the Lenape? That no one talks about. You can’t critique it and not tell the full narrative.”

Studi is an actor who hadn’t intended to become a playwright, but like many performers from marginalized communities, limited options drove her to create her own opportunities. “People don’t think of me when they’re just casting a play like Romeo and Juliet,” Studi explains. “They only think of me when they think of Native roles. That was something I got frustrated with. I wanted more. I wanted a challenge—and I got tired of waiting for people to write a role for me.”

So in her solo show And So We Walked, she challenges herself with many complex roles, showcasing new possibilities.

THE TAKEAWAY, IF YOU MISSED IT: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES are alive today, and not all of their stories come from “somewhere else.” When you look around you, do you know the stories of the place you are in? Or of the contemporary indigenous people who live there? How many indigenous street names do you blindly drive past every day without wondering what they mean? If we are the storytellers of America, and we ignore the indigenous stories of America, is it any wonder that the American theatre has something of an inferiority complex vis a vis Britain?

So if this year is a big year for Native theatre—and it does seem to be—I wanted to know why. These artists have been doing great work and building their craft for years. What’s different about now?

FastHorse, who has had her plays (including What Would Crazy Horse Do? and Urban Rez) produced around the country for more than 10 years, typically as the only Native voice there, credits the influence of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), on whose board she currently sits.

“They have been providing space at both the national conference and the Fall Forum for a good four or five years now to allow myself, Ty Defoe, and other indigenous folks to have a platform at the conference, a national voice—again and again and again. Just being able to have people realize we are here, we exist, we are actually in your theatre town and you could be producing a local playwright who is indigenous, and beyond that, you have a responsibility to do that to honor the people on whose land you are standing.”

FastHorse thinks that message is now being heard, and she has enjoyed hearing increasingly good news from theatres about how they have developed new relationships with local indigenous artists.

Nagle pointed to the work that has been done by Native theatre artists in past decades to pave the way.

“You look at what playwrights like Bill Yellow Robe, Diane Glancy, Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Suzan Harjo, and Spiderwoman Theatre, what they’ve been doing for decades—I think that laid the groundwork for what our generation is now coming in and doing. There have been a fair amount of battle cries from Native artists saying, ‘Why aren’t you producing Native plays? Why aren’t you producing Native plays? Why aren’t you producing Native plays?’” She laughs: “So in many ways it’s kind of easy to show up now and be like, ‘Hey guys, why aren’t you producing Native plays?’ when people have been saying it for decades.” (An exhaustive list of Native playwrights, theatres, and resources can be found here.)

Nagle also believes that the 2016 standoff between federal authorities and Native peoples and their supporters over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock was a game changer in the conversation, because its story affected people so deeply. Suddenly the conversation moved from the assumption that Native stories weren’t relevant to people wanting to know what they could do to help. Her advice: Produce a Native play.

“The reason things like Standing Rock happen—that a corporate oil company can literally, the day after a tribe files an affidavit marking where their ancestors are buried, where their sacred sites are—you know why the next day that corporation can show up with bulldozers and bulldoze 27 burials? Because no one puts Native narratives in the media or on the stage.”

Nagle, whose play Sovereignty was produced at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage earlier this year (story here), is thrilled that theatres are stepping up to tell these stories. She believes this will have a wider impact on people’s understanding of contemporary indigenous issues.

Studi also feels that Native stories are rising to meet the current moment. “I feel with our current political climate and our current president that a lot of our people feel like they are not being heard,” Studi says. “I know I feel like the current political climate is trying to stifle my voice. That makes me fight even harder to get my voice out there, and if there is a time that our voice needs to be heard, it’s right now. It’s time.”

She’s also optimistic that Native stories, far from being checked off a list of token efforts, will only whet audiences’ appetite for more. “When we have people like Mary Kathryn Nagle, Larissa FastHorse, or William Yellow Robe go out and do their shows, the audiences are moved and they want to know more. Hopefully that will encourage those theatres to hire more Native playwrights and produce more Native plays.”

IT IS NO ACCIDENT THAT THESE LEADERS ALSO HAPPEN to be women. In indigenous societies, women are often the story keepers. Still, everyone must contribute for a society to function. The complex structure of indigenous languages and cultures transcends gender binaries and hierarchies. America still has much to learn from Native people.

I have worked with and learned from these brilliant women in a variety of settings. These three theatre artists have also crossed paths with each other for some time, acting in each other’s plays and working together as activists, as when Nagle asked Studi to join her for a traveling piece about the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Sliver of a Full Moon.

Asked about their work, each describes a different approach. FastHorse describes her style as a kind of hyper-realism designed to get you to buy into a world, but where the entire play is a metaphor. Studi believes in the power of play, of modes of storytelling where things become other things and the audience jumps on board, not knowing where the journey will take them. And Nagle’s plays use real historical events and people to illustrate how everything is connected.

As a director and performer, I have been lucky to know these artists for a while. It began when I landed at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the magical moment between 2005 and 2010, when Professor Karmenlara Ely offered an annual course on Native American theatre. I enrolled in the final term of that course, in which future theatremakers studied Hanay Geiogamah, Spiderwoman Theatre, William Yellow Robe, and Diane Glancy, and read two-spirit philosophy. As one of two Native students in a class on Native theatre, taught by a Native professor, I was transformed by this palpable shift into the seat of cultural normativity.

Before then, the only thing my classmates had consulted me on was Shakespeare, since prior to college, Shakespeare and traditional Native stories were considered my fields of expertise. Much of the contemporary American theatre we were taught seemed irrelevant to my experiences. But suddenly, my classmates wanted to know about my home. About Mohegan (my nation). About our art and philosophy. About our stories. For one semester, contemporary Native playwrights were canonized in the same way as the dead white men of our other courses. Students talked about Yellow Robe the way they talked about Shakespeare, Brecht, and Beckett—with reverence.

A few months later, I visited Maine to volunteer as a performer in a reading of one of Yellow Robe’s plays, and there began my role in Native theatre. That event led to acting in readings by Nagle and FastHorse, and then into directing. When I told Yellow Robe that my non-Native professors told me not to tell people I’m Native because it would hurt my career, he laughed. “There’s enough Indians pretending not to be Indians,” he said. And that was that. That relationship changed my life.

I appreciate the effect that moment had on me. And on others: My mom recently told me she heard kids at the tribal youth center marveling that a Mohegan (me!) made this year’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” list for doing Native theatre. This was a huge surprise to them; it meant you could become successful for promoting your culture. Cultural erasure wasn’t necessary for success after all.

BUILDING A CANON IS ALSO BUILDING A COMMUNITY. That is why, when Larissa FastHorse’s plays are produced, she requests that her work not be the only indigenous art in the building and that she not be the only indigenous artist working on the production. For a large part of her career she has been the first indigenous playwright, often even the first indigenous artist working at a given theatre. Many or most of those institutions lack a history of engagement with indigenous communities, and in some cases, even an awareness that their local indigenous communities exist.

“It can be very tokenistic when theatres say, ‘Now we are doing a black play, so now we are going to reach out to the black community,’ or, ‘Now we are doing a Native play, so now we are going to reach out to the Native community,’” FastHorse says. “It can come across like, we’re only interested in you now. So to me it was really important to say, let’s take what resources we have and put them behind uplifting other artists.”

She believes that form of engagement isn’t just a good first step for many theatres; it’s also something that most every theatre can afford to do in some way. This policy has led to many diverse partnerships between theatres and indigenous artists in their area. These take the form of readings, dance pieces, commissioned site-specific works, Native visual artists selling work in the lobby, even indigenous catering companies who go on to have long-term relationships with theatres.

“Saying I’m not the only indigenous person they are hiring means they have to think, who else can we hire?” FastHorse adds that this approach has been very successful everywhere she has worked.

The spirit of collaboration and cooperation runs deep, Studi says. She cites the Cherokee word “Gadugi,” which means “the coming together of people to celebrate, support, and promote each other. I feel like that’s what we do as Native women. The things I am saying about Larissa and Mary Kathryn, and I will shout them from the nearest rooftop if I have to, is that I can guarantee that when people come see their plays they’ll be like, ‘Oh, yes, exactly.’ What I’m speaking is the truth. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

So this April in Oregon, as FastHorse, Nagle, and Studi begin to make the canonization of Native plays the new normal, let’s take a moment to realize what a significant a time we are living in. The erasure of stories, like the erasure of languages and sovereignty, dehumanizes us. It turns us Native people into objects. That dehumanization enables a culture where the rates of violence against Native women are significantly higher than against our non-Native sisters. But our stories, like our complex languages, remind everyone that the world still has much to learn from the indigenous cultures that spring from this land.

[Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut, is a director, writer, and performer.  For a list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, see the final installment of this series.]

"Staging Our Native Nation"

March 27, 2018, 7:00 am

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Article 2

[Welcome to Article 2 of “Staging Our Native Nation,” the American Theatre series (from the April issue) on theater by indigenous American peoples.  In “Indigenous States,” Frances Madeson looks at the efforts of native Hawaiians and Alaskans to stage their stories at such venues as Honolulu’s Kumu Kahua Theatre,  the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre.  But native theater in the United Statesisn’t just about telling the stories of indigenous peoples, but serves a much greater purpose for it’s community as well: it’s a way of connecting—or reconnecting—the younger members of the indigenous  community with their traditional culture.  This phenomenon operates for the audiences, certainly, but it also works for the nascent playwrights and indigenous actors as well. 

[Native theater also has another benefit: it is a way of reviving and prolonging the native languages of Hawaiians and Alaskan Tlingit and Inupiat as plays are being written and performed in the native tongues.  Tlingit actor Allan Hayton says about performing in his native language, “It was as if all of those years of loss and erosion of the culture had not occurred.”  Cultural and linguistic restoration and preservation, of course, as significant as they are, function alongside the other purpose of native theater: to spread awareness among non-native audiences of the stories, concerns, and issues of their fellow American whose identities have been too long hidden.

[The articles in this series stand on their own, but I recommend strongly that ROTters keep up with all of them.  So, go back to 24 March and read Madeline Sayet’s “Native Women Rising”—and come back in three days to read the next installment of “Staging Our Native Nation.”   ~Rick]

INDIGENOUS STATES

by Frances Madeson

Native theatre in the U.S.’s two non-contiguous states, Alaska and Hawai’i, shows resonant connections as well as telling differences.

The pace at which producers of Hawaiian and Alaskan Native theatres are creating original offerings specific to their lands and peoples and mounting them on their mainstages ranges somewhere in the giddy spectrum between prestissimo and full-tilt boogie.

“We’re experiencing a Native arts revival right now,” said Alaska Native playwright Vera Starbard, whose autobiographical advocacy play Our Voices Will be Heard was performed in Juneau, Anchorage, Hoonah, and Fairbanks. “There was one in the ’70s, and we’re right in the middle of a pretty exciting one now.”

Part of the exhilaration comes as a result of resources to match the rhetoric of support for Native theatre arts. In 2016 Starbard was granted $205,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to sustain her while she creates three full-length Alaska Native plays over three years. Likewise, funding was obtained for Dark Winter Productions, an ensemble production company Starbard formed with her husband and a few other Native writers to ready their scripts for staging.

There is also an attitudinal shift by institutional gatekeepers toward inclusion of Native theatre artists, some of whom have been maintaining the vision for a very long time with minimal support. The first Hawaiian-language play presented at the Kennedy Theatre at th-e University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa was in February 2015, “in the theatre’s 51st season,” said Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, who wrote it as the inaugural offering of a Hawaiian theatre program she helped establish in 2014. Her body of work includes two dozen plays in Hawaiian and Pidgin written since 1995. She repeated for emphasis: “Half a century to get anything Hawaiian on that stage.”

But now that the vessel’s been unstoppered, there’s a growing groundswell of audience demand for shows with Native-centric realities and expression.

“The success of Our Voices was completely community-driven,” said Starbard. “I never sent it anywhere, I never asked. It was a massive experience of what a community can give you when they see it and want it.”

Tlingit actor and playwright Frank Henry Kaash Katasse said he sees a category shift. “Indigenous stories are now seen as American stories,” he offered. “They need to be told and audiences need to hear them.”

And crucially it’s not only at culturally specific companies that this work is taking root. Katasse’s cultural identity play They Don’t Talk Back was staged at California’s La Jolla Playhouse in 2016 and at Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre in 2017. The new playwright got to see two polar opposite but equally authentic portrayals of the role of his teenage protagonist—one grittier, he said, and one more animated in his body language.

“I couldn’t believe how different the actors were in their interpretations,” he remarked. “I write these parts that are tricky, and think this will be so hard to cast—a teenage Native actor that can dance and rap and do monologues. And then we do find it, and it’s so rewarding.”

Katasse teaches theatre in schools to Alaska Native kids, and encourages them to take acting seriously. “They didn’t even know this was a career option,” he said.

Indeed, to keep pace with demand, artistic directors Harry Wong III at Kumu Kahua Theatre and Eric Johnson at Honolulu Theatre for Youth (HTY) on Oahu, and Art Rotch of Perseverance Theatre in Juneau and Anchorage, are prioritizing both actor training and play development. They’re actively building capacity through initiatives such as the Playwright’s Circle, a Perseverance program in which Starbard and Katasse are developing new works. All three theatres have long histories and deep roots in their communities.

Perseverance was founded in 1979 by Molly Smith as a theatre by, for, and about Alaskans. Honolulu Theatre for Youth, which was established in 1955, is one of the oldest children’s theatres in the country.

“HTY has the best productions, the best acting,” said Wong about his neighboring theatre. “I can’t say enough about what they do for our kids—they teach them how to watch theatre. And Kumu Kahua benefits.”

Kumu Kahua (“original source” in Hawaiian) was established in 1971 by university students wishing to pursue experimental forms with Professor Dennis Carroll, an Australian. Its emphasis under Wong’s artistic direction is expression for ethnically diverse locals telling stories about Hawai‘i, a place where no single ethnic group is a majority.

Katasse received his degree at UH Mānoa and has nothing but accolades for the Honolulu theatre scene.

“I did a couple of shows for Harry Wong at Kumu Kahua,” Katasse recalled. “It’s one of the gems of the American theatre—the quality, the topics, and making sure they’re very specific to Hawai’i. Their shows have influenced my vision of myself as a Tlingit playwright.”

UH Mānoa’s newly established Hawaiian Theatre Department is the first and only graduate academic program devoted to Hawaiian-language theatre in the world. Everyone, perhaps especially Tammy Haili‘ōpua Baker, who birthed it, has high hopes for the graduates’ potential impact in Hawai‘i.

“My aspiration is to have one playwright and director for every four or five of the eight islands in the archipelago,” said Haili‘ōpua Baker. “It’s important that it happen all cross the island chain so that our stories can provide a foundation for our children, and they do not feel they have to prove their validity.”

In this Haili‘ōpua Baker has a kindred spirit in Allan Hayton, language revitalization program director at Doyon Foundation. Meanwhile, 3,000-plus miles away in Fairbanks, Alaska, Hayton pursues theatre as a vehicle for cultural and linguistic survival.

“We are restoring balance,” Hayton said. “In indigenous tradition theatre is performed to achieve something for the people and balance for the world in the natural environment. Theatre is a healing art form in which we can address very serious and difficult issues safely, and offer a larger healing for society.”

In artistic terms this can translate into powerful, sometimes revelatory  juxtapositions. In Act III, Scene 4 of the 2004 Tlingit Macbeth, Banquo’s ghost haunted Macbeth while wearing a raven transformation mask. The mask was fabricated as a bird when closed, and opened to reveal Banquo’s face—spirit and flesh, emblems of both realms. What poetry was lost in the “translation” to plain English before translating to Tlingit was regained on the Tlingit side, a language Hayton said is full of imagery and metaphor.

It meant a lot to Hayton, who performed the role of Ross, to speak Tlingit publicly. “It was as if all of those years of loss and erosion of the culture had not occurred.”

For Starbard, Alaska Native theatre artists literally standing on thousands of years of storytelling tradition have nothing to prove.

“Our goal as Native artists and theatremakers is not to develop this ‘uncultured’ audience so they can come in and understand what a Western theatre is like. I think that’s the attitude taken sometimes,” she said, choosing her words with great care. “I’m proud of Native artists who are pushing back against this mindset. It’s not about how we can help our people adapt to the Western theatre, but how we can help Western theatre to be an even more dynamic and beautiful thing.”

For actor, storyteller, and playwright Moses Goods, the core beauty of Hawaiian culture lies in its most cherished values in the concept of Aloha (love, peace, and compassion) as articulated in an anagram by Hawaiian poet and philosopher Pilahi Paki.

“A equals akahai, meaning modesty; L stands for lokahi, or togetherness; O is for olu‘olu, to be pleasant; H for ha‘aha‘a—humility; and the second A is for ahonui, which is patience,” explains Goods.

He says that Hawaiians are extremely humble, almost to the point of meekness, and that the idea of self-promotion is foreign. But that’s the only to way to be, he explained: “If I don’t try to live inside Aloha then I can’t call myself a Hawaiian actor, versus an actor who happens to Hawaiian.”

Goods, who is half Native Hawaiian and half African American serves as HTY’s connection to Native communities, and speaks with elders and other advisers about delicate matters such as permissions to present cultural elements in HTY’s shows. Sometimes his report to Eric Johnson is that permission has been denied.

“Many times they’ll say no, we don’t want you to use this chant, but we’ll write you an original chant that says some of the same things,” Johnson explained. “It’s not ours to take, it’s theirs to give. As a non-indigenous producer, I have to recognize that at times Moses or another cultural practitioner making the work has much more responsibility on his shoulders than I do. We love this work, but it is not uncomplicated to produce.”

Kumu Kahua’s Harry Wong has occasionally adjusted the content of plays in deference to audience sensitivities. This happened recently in a production of Wild Birds, a drama by Eric Anderson set in 1839 in a mission school.

“The lead missionary mispronounces a word but everyone’s afraid to correct him,” Wong explained. “The children laugh and he realizes he’s saying it wrong. Pronouncing the word wrong advances the story.”

But one Hawaiian speaker in the audience was offended at the error and told Wong that he should not allow the word to be said incorrectly. “So we stopped,” Wong said. “The history of the repression is still so immediate. My own grandmother—they beat her feet when she spoke Hawaiian. I have to find that balance between telling a story theatrically and the feelings and memories of the people watching it.”

Art Rotch at Perseverance said he pays special attention to those kinds of tensions.

“Part of the opportunity here is that we can learn a lot about what theatre is, and the ways we can grow and change it,” explained Rotch. “It’s not just a matter of diverse performance styles, but the very ways in which plays are discovered and written down. Many of the ideas we’re exploring with Native writers and directors involve a theory of change. Playwriting can be catalytic of broader change if we work with intention.”

Katasse gives big props to Rotch and Perseverance for making a commitment to Native theatre, which he said is not an easy commitment to make. “This is the third year in a row with a world premiere, and another one’s planned for next year. It’s a gamble,” Katasse said. “We’re not bringing in Hamilton here!”

As a children’s theatre that reaches 120,000 students on six different islands, HTY is a “prime candidate to bring issues and discussion to young people and teachers,” Johnson said. Part of what guides his thematic choices is his conviction that in confronting an uncertain climate future “the children will need the support of the stories.”

Hawai‘i is the first state to commit to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045; in 2016, 38 percent of energy generation was from renewables and its electricity was the most expensive in the U.S. HTY’s 2017-18 season, named “The Power of People,” features a show called Shocka: The Story of Energy & Hawaii.

“In creating work for 10-year-olds we have the opportunity to look forward in a really beautiful way,” Johnson said.

HTY is also collaborating on projects in Tasmania and Micronesia, island societies facing similar perils from warming, rising seas, acidic oceans, and drought. “From this very specific community, we can be and are connected globally in an exciting new way,” Johnson said.

Perseverance Theatre is also looking ahead. Next season will feature not only a new show featuring a new Native playwright and director, but also a completely non-Western creative team.

“We can create an aesthetic that’s really non-Western. I don’t think we know where it’s going to take us,” Rotch said, “but we need to do the journey.”

[Frances Madeson is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  She’s a freelance journalist and playwright, and the author of three novels, including the comic Cooperative Village (Carol MRP/CO, 2007).

[For a list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, see the final installment of this series.  The AT series, including those articles that don’t appear in the print edition of the magazine, are available on the TCG website, accessible from https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.]

"Staging Our Native Nation"

March 30, 2018, 7:00 am

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[From 15 January to 15 February this year, 25 theaters in the Washington, D.C., area staged the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which presented works written entirely by women.  Among those plays was Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty, performed at Arena Stage from 12 January to 18 February under the direction of artistic director Molly Smith (who founded Juneau, Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, featured in Article 2, “Indigenous States,” of this series, posted on 27 March).  Celia Wren’s “Law of Nations,” below, recounts the development and staging of that production, which was also part of Arena’s Power Plays initiative to commission and develop new plays and musicals  that will center on politics and power, and examines some of the special issues faced by Smith, her cast, and her creative team to stage this play about Cherokee history and current concerns.

[As always, I strongly urge readers ofRick On Theater to go back and read the previous installments in thee “Staging Our Native Nation”series: “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet (posted on 24 March) and Frances Madeson’s “Indigenous States” (27 March).]

LAW OF NATIONS

by Celia Wren

At Arena Stage, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s ‘Sovereignty’ set out to reclaim Native stories—and bodies.

                                                 

“There’s a lot of humor in the play. Don’t be afraid to laugh,” artistic director Molly Smith said to spectators seated in an Arena Stage rehearsal room on a brutally cold January afternoon. The circumstances seemed to demand such encouragement. Performed for designers and other need-to-know folk, the pre-tech run-through for Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty had begun with a fight call in which, in slow motion, with matter-of-fact professionalism, actors had practiced a sexual assault and a racial-slur-charged drunken brawl. Not exactly mirth-inducing fare.

Then, too, there were the play’s weighty themes: law, justice, politics, and the inherent rights of the Cherokee Nation. A buzzed-about world premiere, Sovereignty was an installment in Arena Stage’s Power Plays initiative, a project designed to commission and develop 25 new works exploring politics and influence in American history. Sovereignty would also be one of the marquee titles in the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival in and around Washington, D.C., which ran Jan. 4-Mar. 4.

As if that context didn’t provide enough gravitas, Sovereignty was, on one level, an effort to address and correct the culture’s habit of ignoring, or at best misrepresenting, the Native American experience. “This will be, for many people, probably the most exposure they’ve ever had to anything Cherokee,” playwright Nagle had observed in an interview that morning. For this reason, she added, the play “needs to be as authentic as possible.”

Nagle has a rare vantage on the matter. An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she is not only a playwright but also a lawyer who has written briefs for federal appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. As a partner with Pipestem Law P.C., she has focused on working to safeguard tribal sovereignty  and the inherent rights of Indian nations. In her view, this work is by no means separate from her playwriting, since the realms of law and representation are entwined. To erase or debase a people’s stories paves the way for the undermining of their rights, she suggests. Conversely, to tell a people’s story authentically is to take a step toward preserving those rights. As a lawyer, she said, “I’m doing work to restore the sovereignty and jurisdiction that the Supreme Court has taken away [from Native people]. You can’t do that work unless you change the narrative that allows the court to take it away. And part of that narrative is erasure! So to me, that’s a responsibility that I have.”

If the Oklahoma-based 35-year-old felt a professional obligation to make Sovereignty ring true, she also had a personal stake in the matter: Her script recalls a turning point in the lives of her great-great-great grandfather, John Ridge, and his father, Major Ridge, who reached a risky decision to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in 1835.

Just a few years prior, in Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court had ruled for Cherokee Nation sovereignty. But the U.S. government, then led by President Andrew Jackson, declined to enforce that 1832 decision. So, under pressure from whites who coveted Cherokee land in the East, the Ridges signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which ceded Cherokee land east of the Mississippi in return for payment plus land further west. The treaty—which paved the way for the Trail of Tears—was hugely controversial among the Cherokee people and was opposed by the tribe’s principal chief, John Ross. In 1839, after relocating west, the Ridges were assassinated.

Sovereignty doesn’t just revisit a 19th-century story, though: It also imagines a contemporary tale (technically, set a couple of years in the future) about a Cherokee lawyer named Sarah Polson, who champions Cherokee Nation sovereignty. This plot strand turns on the historic 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which, when renewed and expanded in 2013, gave tribal courts jurisdiction over non-Native Americans who assaulted women on tribal land. In Sovereignty, a case involving such an assault goes all the way to a Neil Gorsuch-era Supreme Court. The play darts back and forth in time, paralleling its 19th- and 21st-century court cases, as well as two bittersweet interracial love stories.

Nagle explained that she regularly makes a point of including contemporary Native American narratives in plays that otherwise depict history. “I feel I cannot write a play that only takes place in the past, because that could, and would, likely promote the narrative that we [Native Americans] only exist in the past,” she said.

The ingredients of Sovereignty have been brewing in Nagle’s brain for a long time. Born in Oklahoma and raised in part in Missouri and Kansas, she grew up hearing about the Ridges, whose portraits hung in her grandmother’s home, and stories about Worcester v. Georgia fed her aspirations to a legal career. In law school, while studying the many milestone legal cases that hurt the Native American cause, she began to mull writing a play that would “deconstruct” the myth of Native inferiority that arguably underlay such rulings.

Enter Molly Smith, who was on the lookout for vibrant, diverse American works for Arena Stage. As it happens, the artistic director has long been interested in Native American issues and culture: Prior to assuming Arena’s leadership in 1998, she headed Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, where she oversaw productions drawing on indigenous voices and stories. What’s more, Smith’s partner, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, hails from the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota.

Smith says she first heard about Nagle’s work from an Arena associate who passed along the playwright’s script Manahatta, about a 21st century securities trader whose ties to New York reach back to Native American history in the area in the 1600s (the play opens next month at Oregon Shakespeare Festival). “I read it, and I thought, this is a very interesting writer,” Smith recalls. A subsequent meeting with Nagle led to Sovereignty’s joining Arena’s Power Plays slate.

For Nagle, it was particularly meaningful to get a production in the nation’s capital, where decisions related to Native American rights have so often been in play. “The sovereign-to-sovereign relationship between Tribal Nations and the federal government—this is the seat of it,” she said.

And there’s that word: sovereignty. The legal concept of sovereignty refers to the right of a people to govern itself. A recognition that Native American tribes are equivalent to sovereign nations stretches back centuries. Around the time of the American Revolution, a Sovereignty character says, “The whole world recognized the sovereignty of Indian Nations, but no one recognized the United States.” Native tribes’ sovereignty was implicitly recognized in myriad treaties that tribes and the U.S. signed over the years.

The concept of sovereignty underpins some landmark Supreme Court cases, including 1978’s Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which ruled that tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-Native individuals charged with committing crimes on tribal land. More recently, in Dollar General v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a 4-4 Supreme Court split, issued months after Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2016 death, left intact a lower court’s ruling upholding the jurisdiction of a Choctaw tribal court to hear a civil suit against the low-cost retailer.

Nagle’s play Sovereignty adds another layer of resonance to the eponymous legal and philosophical concept: The play’s contemporary plotline, which touches on sexual abuse and VAWA, draws a parallel between the idea of nation-level sovereignty and the right of a woman to protect, and determine the integrity of, her own body. In the #MeToo moment, that’s a concept with gale-force urgency.

The final Sovereignty script called for a nine-person cast, with five actors portraying historic and contemporary Cherokee characters and four playing white characters. Casting was a national effort, employing both Skype and a flight to Los Angeles to audition actors—a necessary step for locating Native performers, as Nagle explained, for whom the rule has been to “go to L.A. to find work or don’t find work! Because TV and film have been, for better or for worse, hiring Native actors.”

Also in L.A. is Native Voices at the Autry, a theatre company dedicated to new works by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights. In addition to its developing and producing activities, Native Voices at the Autry has helped cast productions across the U.S., producing executive director Jean Bruce Scott says, including Sovereignty. Native Voices ensemble members Kyla Garcia and Kalani Queypo ultimately signed on to portray, respectively, Sarah Polson and John Ridge, while ensemble member Andrew Roa would juggle the roles of Major Ridge and a Ridge descendent. (Almost all the actors in the production depicted both 19th-century and contemporary characters.)

The show’s other performers included Jake Waid, an actor and Tlingit tribe member whom Smith knew from her time in Alaska, and D.C.-stage fixtures Michael Glenn and Dorea Schmidt. Some of the actors appeared in early workshops of the play; there would be four workshops in all.

Smith had decided to direct the production herself. Asked if she had had any concerns about tackling the project, as a director who is not herself Native American, she said no. “It was a subject that was important to me,” she said. “As a director, I think that’s the most powerful piece [of artistic equipment] you could have.”

As the final production approached, Smith traveled to Oklahoma, where she visited the cemetery that is the Ridges’ final resting place, and got an up-close look at letters written by John Ridge and John Ross. Such preparatory groundwork “nourishes me, in a whole different way,” she said. “I also think that it shows respect for the ideas of the project.”

Smith wasn’t the only one to plunge into research: The show’s designers also sought information that would make Sovereignty both resonant and genuine. They faced other challenges, too, given that Nagle’s storytelling zips around swiftly in time and space, vaulting between locations like President Andrew Jackson’s Oval Office, an 1830s Georgia jail, and a 21st-century Cherokee Nation casino.

The rapid leaps among eras presented an obvious challenge to costume designer Linda Cho. “What you don’t want is actors just to be inundated with costume changes backstage that could throw off their performance. I needed something that could happen seamlessly,” said Cho, a Tony winner for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and a frequent collaborator at Arena.

After putting together her usual “bible” of research, Cho came up with a baseline layering strategy: Male characters wore the same trousers throughout, varying their looks with period-specific upper-body garments or accessories (jackets, neckwear, etc.) over contemporary, generally less-bulky tops. For example, the cravat and calf-length jacket actor Joseph Carlson wore to play a swaggering President Jackson quite concealed the grungy-casual look of his contemporary character, a detective named Ben.

Set designer Ken MacDonald also found a streamlined solution for the script’s zigzags through time and space. An artist who has worked on theatre and opera in the U.S. and Canada, he devised a Sovereignty set that was simple and relatively abstract, with white surfaces for locale-evoking projections (official seals; casino iconography; a newspaper’s front page) designed by Mark Holthusen. Furniture and other elements—Windsor chairs, a bar-counter-like wall, a fold-up day bed with lashed-on pillows—would have a timeless look. And running along the back would be a basket-weave pattern.

“I did an awful lot of research on Cherokee patterns of basket-weaving,” MacDonald said, recalling a process that involved book-buying, online sleuthing, and correspondence with a former Smithsonian-museum staffer. “I wanted to make sure I was really true to [the tradition]. Mary Kathryn Nagle was very concerned—and rightly so—that these were truly Cherokee patterns and weren’t confused with other patterns.”

Sound designer Ed Littlefield did his legwork, too, hunting up Oklahoma bird sounds for a scene set in the cemetery, for instance, and finding sample-worthy music by contemporary Native artists like the Canadian DJ collective A Tribe Called Red. (He credits Candice Byrd, Nagle’s friend and fellow Cherokee theatre artist, with putting him on the right track for the musical sound.) As frequently happens in theatre, during the rehearsal process, some of Littlefield’s early ideas were shelved: A 19th-century printing-press sound he’d been thrilled to track down ultimately gave way to a more stylized drumming that still evoked machinery, for instance. “You find the best sound for the show,” he said.

During the refinement of the designs and other production elements, Nagle wasn’t merely functioning as Sovereignty’s playwright: She was also the production’s Cherokee-culture sounding board, consultant, and expert eye. Asked if all that multitasking was tiring—she was also working her law job full-time throughout—she said yes.

“It’s scary too, because I don’t know everything,” she said. “I don’t! There’s a lot that I don’t know about my own culture.” That’s hardly surprising, she pointed out, since “most Native people in this country today live with the reality that to some extent, or to full extent, their culture and identity have been taken away from them.” She is working on regaining that lost heritage, she said. In the meantime, “What I have to do, in the best way possible, is ask for help and guidance from those that know more than I do.”

For example, she wanted the play to include some dialogue in Cherokee, though she doesn’t speak the language herself. So she consulted friends, who referred her to a Cherokee Nation contact with the familiar name of John Ross; Nagle says he not only translated her English-language lines into Cherokee, but also recorded the Cherokee versions, so that Roa (whose characters sometimes speak in Cherokee) could have a pronunciation model.

Sovereignty rehearsals began in early December. Relocating from L.A. to D.C. for an extended stretch, in the winter, was a significant undertaking, confessed actor Queypo. Still, he said, he never hesitated. Sovereignty is, “in the bigger picture, important to Native people and the history of Native storytelling in the American theatre, where we’ve been invisible for a long time,” he said.

At the end of the first week of rehearsals, Smith gave out a character-development assignment that is standard for her productions: Each performer would do an in-character improvisation introducing touchstones—a significant piece of paper, for instance—from the character’s life. Other cast members watch these improvisations, but, Smith observed, “What I say is, ‘This is just for the actor. There’s no value judgment.’” Queypo said there was “a gasp in the room when she presented the parameters of what we were going to do,” because the assignment would clearly be a source of “pressure,” but also “this activating energy.” On the day in question, Queypo brought in a letter written by young John Ridge to the love of his life, Sarah Bird Northrup, a white school steward’s daughter. Discoveries from the assignment ultimately informed Queypo’s first scene onstage, early in Act One, he said.

Kyla Garcia also found the exercise hugely helpful. “I learned so much about my character,” she said. She brought in a poem that Sarah Polson had written, with a first line running, “Justice in my blood.”

Meanwhile, as preparations for the production ramped up, Nagle found herself amazed at the resources Arena Stage had mustered. Previous airings of her plays had involved smaller theatres. At Arena, “Just the sheer number of people who are touching my show in some form or fashion is really mind-blowing,” she said.

Sovereignty began previews in Arena’s Kreeger Theater on Jan. 12, 2018, with an official opening following on Jan. 24. Writing afterwards in the Washington Post, Peter Marks found the play edifying and so “worthwhile” that it practically deserved a public-service award. But he noted that, because “Nagle’s characters…spend a lot of time explaining themselves, at the expense of the more satisfying kind of revelation that allows an audience to discover on its own who they are,” the material’s dramatic potential was “not fully realized.”

Writing for the online DC Theatre Scene, Kate Colwell marveled at the “depth of historical knowledge” the play conveyed, and noted how resonant the script was at time when citizenship issues, women’s rights, and Native American activism (over the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance) have been in the news. Still, she thought Nagle’s play rushed past moments that might otherwise have eloquently expressed character. In general, “the massive scope of [Sovereignty’s] ambition also weakens its emotional impact,” she wrote.

Critical quibbles notwithstanding, Sovereignty was ultimately more than just a theatrical production: It became a national event. The New York Times ran a feature on the show. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem participated—alongside Nagle and Smith—in a panel discussion after one performance.

Anyone attending the opening night performance would have spotted another achievement. When the play evoked human foibles and discomfiture—awkward romantic chitchat, kooky mishaps at a casino, a grandfather’s unease with changing diapers—the audience responded almost as if they’d heard Molly Smith’s early January advice. They laughed.

[Celia Wren is a former managing editor of American Theatre magazine.  She writes about theatre for the Washington Post and is the media critic for Commonweal and a frequent contributor to ATand the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the New York Observer, Smithsonian, and Broadway.com, among other publications.

[This is the last article of the “Staging Our Native Nation” series for American Theatrethat appeared in the print edition of the magazine; the installments in the series that follow are available only on the website at https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.  (A list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, will be posted after the final installment of this series.)

[Article 4 in AR’s “Staging Our Native Nation” will be posted in three days, 2 April.  Please come back to ROT then and for the subsequent installments as there is still much to be learned about this maturing American theater form emerging from its nest.]

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Article 4

[Rob Weinert-Kendt’s“Raising Native Voices, Then Amplifying Them,” below, is the first article in this series I’m posting on Rick On Theater that doesn’t appear in the print edition of the Theatre Communication Group’s American Theatre; it’s published only on AT’s website.  In his piece, Weinert-Kendt presents an interview with Randy Reinholz, co-founder, with his wife, actressJean Bruce Scott, of Native Voices, an organization that supports and promotes theater by the United States’ indigenous peoples.  Hosted now at the Autry Museum of the American West In Los Angeles (founded by and named for the original “singing cowboy,” Gene Autry), New Voices was launched 25 years ago at the University of Illinois, where Reinholz was a professor, and has been working for a quarter of a century toward a surge of interest in and focus on native American theater.

[As always, I urge ROTters to go back and read Articles 1 and 2 if you haven’t yet.  “Native Women Rising” by Madeline Sayet was posted on 24 March, Frances Madeson’s “Indigenous States” on 27 March, and “Law of Nations” by Celia Wren on 30 March.]

RAISING NATIVE VOICES, THEN AMPLIFYING THEM

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

After years of nurturing writers and performers, the work of L.A.’s Native American theatre is finally paying off.

If there is a resurgent tide of Native American voices in the American theatre of late—and based on the stories in this special issue, there certainly seems to be—a lot of the credit can be traced to a seemingly unlikely place: a theatre program that runs out of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Randy Reinholz, who has run Native Voices at the Autry with his wife, Jean Bruce Scott, for 20 years, was at first skeptical himself about partnering with the institution named for the singer of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” But to his pleasant surprise, he found that the Autry had a real appetite for telling the whole story of the conquest and settlement of the American West in all its bloody complications and from all perspectives, including Native Americans’.

So this actor, director, and theatre professor, a member of Oklahoma’s Choctaw nation who’d started Native Voices a few years before at Illinois State, relocated the program to L.A., where the Native population, the nation’s second-highest, numbers more than 50,000, and film and TV opportunities have attracted many of the nation’s Native actors and writers.

Native Voices has since found not only a local audience for their work but a national one: Their roster now includes more than 34 full productions, 20 tours, 23 new-play festivals, and 13 playwrights’ retreats. The impact of their training and nurturing generations of Native talent is harder to measure, but it has clearly paid dividends in both the quantity and quality of artists now working at all levels throughout the American theatre, from Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where Off the Rails, Reinholz’s own Native-themed riff on Measure for Measure, played last year, to Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, where Reinholz recently directed the premiere of Lucas Rowley’s dark comedy William, Inc.

I spoke to Reinholz recently about the slow but sure rise of Native theatre and the challenges.

ROB WEINERT-KENDT: One reason we decided to do a special issue on Native American theatre is that this seems to be a moment of raised or renewed consciousness about Native artists and themes, both at culturally specific institutions and at historically white theatres. But obviously this is not new to you.

RANDY REINHOLZ: Right. Actually this is what our plan was: to make a path for Native people into the professional theatre. It took longer than we thought, and we’re glad to see it happen. As you know, theatre’s so collaborative, and obviously it takes money, but it also takes a building, a space, a staff to make it happen. And as we started trying to move our storefront ideas into proper theatre spaces—that just took longer than most of us expected.

In addition to the influence of your organization, why do you think this wave of Native work is cresting now?

I think it’s generational. Certainly Spiderwoman, Hanay Geiogamah, Tomson Highway, Bill Yellow Robe were a generation before, and they were allowed in the back door of the theatre occasionally. But Native Americans were mostly told, “You can’t act because there aren’t plays by Native Americans, and you can’t write because there are no Native actors.” So there was a prejudice, and a self-fulfilling prophecy by well-resourced theatre institutions, that Native Americans simply weren’t part of the discussion or part of the reflection.

I’m a first-generation college student in my family. I think higher education was accessible for a number of folks, and it seems that theatre wants people with those credentials, particularly in administrative positions, working within the system. I had the privileged position of being at a university, so I had health insurance and a salary. A number of us had institutional positions where we were the one Native person who somehow broke the mold. Then we made space for this new generation, and you have a number of artists in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are really making some noise now.

And I think theatres were embarrassed. I remember at the TCG National Conference in San Diego [2014], it was the first time that there were spaces identified as safe affinity spaces for black, Latino, Asian. And there were also a large number of Native Americans there, about 8 or 10, and at about the third meeting where people were talking about what was going on, I said, “You have to come up with a phrase where you mention there are Native people in the audience, because even people of color are erasing us.” I think that was a consciousness-raising moment for the people of color in TCG.

How did Native Voices get started, and how did it end up at a Western heritage museum named for a Hollywood cowboy?

First of all, something that would be interesting to put somewhere in your article, is that our papers are archived now at the Autry, and we’re looking to make them available digitally. Our hope is that we can make readily known the strategies we employed, the kinds of funders we had, and how our evolution progressed, so that the next generation of companies can happen faster. We need these companies geographically spread throughout the country.

So I was a professor at Illinois State, and they liked a Moliere play I directed, so they asked me to direct a contemporary play from my culture. I didn’t know of any Native scripts; I’d always wanted to work on Native plays, I just didn’t know any. We met Bill Yellow Robe and we learned of Native Earth in Toronto, a company founded by Tomson Highway and Larry Lewis. We went up to see their staged readings, met Drew Hayden Taylor, who was the artistic director at that time and is a wonderful playwright. He shared some of his favorite plays. And we met Joseph Dandurand and Marie Clements—she’s a Governor’s General Award winner in Canada. [The Governor General’s Awards are a collection of annual awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, recognizing distinction in numerous academic, artistic, and social fields. ~Rick] They became our first cohort, and we brought them to Illinois State in 1993 to see if a predominantly white institution could adequately serve Native playwrights and mount a Native play. From that we learned that we had Native students, and people who had been disenfranchised within their own program. It was my second year at Illinois State.

We had this gathering called Native Voices. We read the plays, and saw how they fit on our students. We found a play we could produce, and we did the same thing again the following year, ’94 and ’95. From that work, we started meeting some other people who were working in Native communities. We were actors in Los Angeles, so we used to return there each summer, and we went over to the Autry to say hello. They were anxious for us to look at some of their exhibitions and galleries from a Native perspective. You know, it’s very difficult to look at Western history, particularly 30 years ago, with a Native lens, because it was mostly about conquest and colonization. We were a little embarrassed, wondering how we would say anything to the Autry—but it turned out they actually wanted to have a difficult conversation and to bring their own institution into the 21st century. We soon realized that one of the best things we could do would be to put Native people in charge of their own stories on stages, with examples of the issues in Native communities in Indian country and in America. We started in 1999 with Marie Clements’s one-woman show, Urban Tattoo.

So the Autry had an appetite for tough stories, and we found an audience in Los Angeles that also was interested in that. Our audiences tend to be about 30 to 40 percent Native, depending on the year. Then there’s also a theatre community in Los Angeles that is mostly denigrated and marginalized by the East Coast, it seems, and they were anxious to be part of another voice being enfranchised.

So here we are 20 years later, making space for Native people to be the center of a play, at a time when Native people have mostly stood to the side and said “yes” and “no” as actors. As they got the chance to play leads in stories that resonated from their own cultures, you started seeing a lot more Native people showing up in theatre and on television, so that when Oregon Shakespeare Festival went to cast my play Off the Rails a few years ago, they were confident they could find the actors. Actors Equity let them know there were 39 Equity members that had Native American heritage in the United States, and they were shocked. There are a lot more in the Screen Actors Guild, because television is hiring Native people. That paradigm is moving now. People are starting to feel less like outsiders in that conversation, and thinking, “I could do something.”

It does seem that if you’re doing a play anywhere in the U.S. that requires Native actors, you need to go to L.A. and talk to Native Voices. It reminded me of that way East West Players started both as a theatre company to stage their own work but also as a talent database for Asian-Pacific Islanders. Have you compared notes or talked shop with other culturally specific theatres or theatres of color?

Yeah, we get together and talk a lot: East West Players, Latino Theatre Company, Robey Theatre Company. Tim Dang of East West chaired a board for the L.A. Arts and Culture Commission for the county, and we met for two years to talk about what we could do to better represent the populations in the county. Maybe because our population is large in this region, we kind of merit a demographic consideration, a political consideration, that other parts of the country feel comfortable ignoring. But I think as the country starts to come to grips with our love for violence and the taking of things, we will start to think more about what happened in Native communities, and perhaps have some interest in that part of our history. We’ve been so excited about erasing that part of our history as a country.

So, yes, we have benefited so much from speaking with and working strategically with other communities. But Native Americans are different, in that this was once Indian land.

Whenever we write about theatre work among communities that have been marginalized that are now getting their story told in some way, we think about three components: their stories being told at all; members of that community getting the opportunity to write and perform the work; and finally theatres developing longterm audiences among that community. It sounds to me like all those components were part of your strategic thinking.

Also, you provide training for people at each of those levels. That’s been a big part of Native Voices. So at times we’ve provided acting classes. We certainly have always provided playwriting opportunities and places to make work. We’ve had some ensemble and group creative work. Each of those phases are things that normal theatre artists just expect to encounter, probably through their theatre training or a multitude of professional experiences where they get those opportunities. And Native artists—again, when you relegate everyone to “yes sir,” “no sir,” “that way,” “this way” lines, you sort of guarantee they’ll never be brought into the process.

So that’s been the strategy: to get the artists in position to deliver the work, so when they’re seen by the greater professional community, they hold up. They look like they belong. They don’t look like an anomaly, or it’s charity work, or at an Indian request.

The play you just directed at Perseverance, William, Inc. [Jan.-Feb. 2018], sounds pretty wild. Tell me about it.

Well, we’ve been working in Alaska since 2010. My wife’s family has been there since the ’70s, going back and forth. That particular play is so specifically Alaskan. Native people are organized as corporations in Alaska, not as tribes, by the U.S. government. Of course, that has all the advantages and shortfalls of any government that focuses on the bottom line in its attempt to serve people. And so the writer took that set of given circumstances and turned it into this sort of absurd look at what it means to be Native in Alaska—dealing with substance abuse, sexual abuse, violence. It’s incredibly funny, but you sort of have to be deeply aware of Alaskan issues for the jokes to land. In Alaska, it’s hysterical, but I don’t see it playing too much in the lower 48.

What struck me is that it doesn’t sound at all like a dutiful historical drama, and that some of the writing that’s emerging from Native artists seems to genre-bending, time-hopping, meta-theatrical, playing with the form in ways we’re familiar with now in the age of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Young Jean Lee. Is that a trend you’re seeing too?

I totally see where that view comes to you with this particular set of 2017-18 plays. Perhaps my longer view is, after the intentional stifling of Native voices in American culture, the first thing the group does when they get their voice back is talk about the oppression. So for the first decade in the States, and certainly the first 20 years in Canada, Native theatre was all about this systematized effort to oppress and colonize. Also, any Native play that aspires to reach beyond a Native audience has to deal with the fact that the audience doesn’t know much about Native people, is filled with intentional misinformation about Native people.

But that’s sort of the first play a playwright writes: They write from their own experience. You start to hear about families, and then from families, you start to hear other kinds of issues. And we have a group of theatre artists now writing their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th play, and they’ve got other things to talk about.

Off the Rails was 30 percent Shakespeare and 70 percent invention, and it’s all about the boarding school system. It’s a piece of history, but we realized we couldn’t approach that piece of history from a realistic standpoint, because how do you stage cultural genocide? Atrocity is pretty tough to put on a stage, and ask anybody to stay. So we looked at comedy.

Maybe another way to ask a similar question is to ask not whether Native theatre artists are developing plays that bend or break the dominant Western forms, but what have Native artists brought to the form from their own cultures? Is there a Native aesthetic?

Yeah, a couple things. Diane Glancy, one of our more accomplished Native playwrights, talks about how Native plays will always have reciprocity. And part of that is: I tell a story, which makes you think of your story, which shakes loose her story. And then when she tells me her story in return, I really start to understand my story, new and deeper. Native stories by and large are just retelling old stories with a teaching piece meant for cultural wisdom. So that’s a big hallmark of Native plays. Often they’re more interesting after you’ve heard them and thought about them a few times.

Another thing that happens, not in all Native plays, but in a lot of Native plays—there are a lot of spirits onstage. There are a lot of other people, from other worlds. A play like Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty [see Article 3, 30 March], you might say it ping-pongs back and forth between the present and the past. But a Native way of looking at that might be that those are just spirits that augment the contemporary story, and you can’t really understand the contemporary story unless you know this information that the spirits are bringing.

I would say, too, that music is interpreted differently. There’s almost always music and dance in Native plays. And the music has different meanings based on how well you know it. It’s easy to make a parallel with Western cultures in terms of ideas of faith: If you come from a system of faith, there are certain songs that come from that tradition that have different meaning to people who come from that faith than people who are outsiders to that faith. And Native songs, vocables often, have absolute meaning to people from those traditions, even though it’s not concrete language.

There are certain pieces of Native songs that are shared well across tribal identities. Still, you know, we have over 500 tribes in the country, with distinct languages, traditions, and cultures. How do we cross those boundaries? In some ways, I hope that’s what Native theatre brings to the country: the answers to the problems we’re facing as a country. How do we move beyond the isolationism that’s in vogue at the moment into bigger conversations with the rest of the people we should be in conversations with?

So things are looking up for Native artists and theatres, and you’ve accomplished a lot in the decades Native Voices has been around. What challenges do you see ahead for Native theatre?

What comes up in the TCG conversations about equity, diversity, and inclusion is, what’s a healthy ecosystem for Americans and American theatre? I think there has to be a way of continuing to support emerging Native voices as Native identity continues to evolve, and the idea of what it means to be Native American is not always influenced by suicide, addiction, violence, degradation. What are the other pieces of what it means to be Native American? And then, how are those voices supported and nurtured so that they belong to an American theatre that is not relegated to the storefronts and the emerging artists, never to be part of the professional system?

One exciting thing that happened after Off the Rails is that there are now nine, maybe 10, Native actors in the company at Oregon Shakes this season, and Mary Kathryn’s play there now, Manahatta,only has six Native roles. So those actors are part of the company now. They’re not just there to do this narrow set of Native roles. And that was super intentional on OSF’s part. You know, not every American theatre needs to follow that. They all have their own communities to serve and axes to grind. So where would be some places we could fit in? You know, William, Inc. is the third play written by a Native, directed by a Native, with a predominantly Native cast at Perseverance, and they’ve got another one on the books for next season and two more in the pipeline.

Who else is gonna do that work? Where does it belong? And how are we not going to put all the marginalized voices in competition for a few dollars? What does the industry want and need, and how can it benefit from these diverse voices? And what are the revenue streams?

These are all the questions on your mind at Native Voices.

Certainly. My wife and I, Jean Bruce Scott, are the co-founders, and next year will be our 20th anniversary in Los Angeles, and our 25th altogether. And if everything goes according to schedule, we’ll announce the new leadership of Native Voices in the next generation. So what does that mean, what does it become, and then how does that fit into a greater whole? You don’t need a beacon of hope. That might be a good sales pitch, but it’s a terrible way to make theatre. We need to have an ecosystem. And how do we fit with the East West Players, Latino Theater Company, Robey Theater Company?

And, though we often look to the large organizations, maybe there are coalitions in midsize professional companies. Maybe that’s part of the answer, rather than constantly looking to LORT theatres for everything. It seems LORT theatres are exhausted from trying to serve all these constituencies.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at USC and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[The next article in AT’s “Staging Our Native Nation” series will be posted on 5 April.  A list of Native American theaters and resources and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers will be posted after the final installment of this series.  The AT series, including those articles that appear in the print edition of the magazine, are available on the TCG website, accessible from https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/native-american-theatre/.]

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Article 5 & 6

[I’m posting Articles 5 and 6 together here, and I think you’ll find they inform one another somewhat.  Of course, I feel that all eight of the ATarticles in “Staging Out Native Nation” inform one another, so as always, I encourage Rick On Theater readers to go back and read Articles 1 through 4 (if you haven’t been keeping up with the collection) since they each tell a different story of theater by America’s indigenous peoples.  The series on ROT started on 24 March and each succeeding post followed at a three-day interval.  ~Rick]

WE START BY ACKNOWLEDGING THE LAND

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

[“Every day we walk obliviously over the bones of our land’s Native forebears,” feels AT editor Rob Weinert-Kendt,  “like imperial Romans over Etruscan ruins, driving Jeep Cherokees to Chipotle for a bowl of quinoa.”  Whether we live out west, in New England, or among the urban cliffs of New York City, America’s native heritage is all around us and right under our feet.  (I live on an island called Manhattan, a Native American name, as observed in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play Manahatta.)  The emerging American theater of the country’s indigenous people, the original inhabitants, is giving that heritage a voice and an artistic presence on stages all over the country now.  It’s been what this series has been all about, of course, but it’s also an important development in the theater of our nation, native and immigrant.]

Our nation’s Native history is all around us, if we would only pay attention. One place to look: at a rising generation of Native theatremakers.

Like most Americans, I grew up in a graveyard where the names of the dead could hardly be said to have been left unrecorded: More than half of U.S. states have Native American-derived names, and in my home state of Arizona (from a Pima/Papago word for “small spring”), my grade schools bore the names Hopi (an extant Arizona tribe) and Hohokam (an ancient Native culture of the Southwest). I now work on the island of Manhattan, a name derived from the Lenape language, and on summer weekends I and my family frequently head for the beaches at Rockaway, named for a Long Island tribe.

But these place names are at best phantoms, palimpsests; the indigenous cultures they signify have been largely obliterated, along with the vast majority of the continent’s original population. Every day we walk obliviously over the bones of our land’s Native forebears, like imperial Romans over Etruscan ruins, driving Jeep Cherokees to Chipotle for a bowl of quinoa.

Perhaps more bluntly indicative of the long-tail legacy of European-American genocide and erasure is the name of an arterial thoroughfare that runs near my childhood home in Phoenix: Indian School Road. Its namesake was a notorious fixture of downtown Phoenix, a military-style boarding school, in operation from 1891 to 1990, in which young students culled from several Arizona tribes were ostensibly educated in trades and vocations but in reality were stripped of their distinctive cultures and languages and exploited as cheap labor as they were frog-marched into a spurious “assimilation.” Not coincidentally, in the mid-20th century, the U.S. government’s Indian Relocation Act “encouraged” Native Americans to move to urban areas and train for jobs in the mainstream economy. The net effect: More than two-thirds of Native Americans now live in urban areas rather than on reservations.

The boarding schools have mostly closed, replaced by a network of tribal colleges and universities with a more Native-centric ethic. The combination of an increasingly urban demographic and a resurgent Native consciousness means that a new generation of educated, essentially bicultural Native Americans has emerged within and alongside mainstream culture, with a new relationship to their embattled heritage and justifiably raised expectations about their place in the larger U.S. culture and body politic. Today Native Americans are leading activists and politicians, authors and athletes—and, as a number of stories in this issue demonstrate and celebrate, makers of theatre, where a cohort of playwrights, directors, performers, and producers are reclaiming the narratives of the past, reflecting their complicated present, and redefining their future.

In so doing they are also reminding us of the heritage we all share on this stolen continent. Artists like Larissa FastHorse, DeLanna Studi, and Mary Kathryn Nagle—building on the pathbreaking work of such veteran Native artists like William Yellow Robe and Muriel Miguel—are giving bodies and voices to the vestigial markers many of us drive by without a second thought. FastHorse, who encourages all theatres to do a “land acknowledgment” before every performance and meeting (and not only of Native-themed events), will soon bring this reclamation project close to home, or to my hometown, anyway: She’s teaming with the University of Arizona to adapt her 2016 Cornerstone play Urban Rez, about Southern California’s urbanized Native population, to Arizona’s 22 tribes, for a spring 2019 debut. Cornerstone will then take the show on the road, courtesy of a New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) touring grant, adapting it to indigenous communities around the country, and earning the play its new title, Native Nation. Land acknowledgment, indeed.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is also the author of “Raising Native Voices, Then Amplifying Them,” Article 4 in this series, posted on 2 April.]

*  *  *  *

A MEETING OF TWO WORLDS IN NEW MEXICO

by Frances Madeson

[Kim Delfina Gleason, artistic director of Albuquerque’s Two Worlds, a Native American theater and film company, was pregnant when Frances Madeson met her to write “A Meeting of Two Worlds in New Mexico,” below, and both Gleason and Madeson would say it was a “pregnant moment” for America’s native theater all across the country.  “Meeting” is a brief profile of Two Worlds and serves as something of a paradigm for the emergence of native theater at this moment in American theater history.]

A fledgling theatre company in the Land of Enchantment tells Native American stories with both authenticity and imagination.

Pregnant with hope, pregnant with possibility, and just plain pregnant, on Jan. 25, the very night before Two Worlds artistic director Kim Delfina Gleason was due to give birth to her first child, she hosted a monthly table reading at the 12-year-old Native American theatre company’s offices at New Mexico Community Capital in Albuquerque.

While the baby rumbled his soliloquy of intention to join his parents and the vibrant ensemble of Native theatre artists and community members his mom has so devotedly served since 2009, Gleason photocopied scripts, made a fresh pot of coffee, and taped a sign on the street door directing newcomers to the conference room—her swollen belly floating before her, balloon-like, as she moved through her paces.

As participants filed in, some of them seeming almost magically well suited for the multi-generational roles in Zee Eskeets’s drama Fadeaway being read that remarkable evening, Gleason greeted everyone warmly, handing out scripts and gently assigning parts. Some of the readers were complete tyros, curious strangers who’d seen an event notice on social media or who’d been encouraged to attend by a therapist at rehab, while others, like playwright Jay B. Muskett, whose play The Weight of Shadows will be produced by Two Worlds in June, were already part of the Two Worlds family.

“The community kept asking me what’s next, what’s the next show, pushing me to not give up,” Gleason said about her commitment to Two Worlds over the years. “People are asking a lot more, ‘Tell me what happened at Wounded Knee—let’s hear the stories.’ They need Native theatre to exist; really, it depends on me.”

Two Worlds was founded in 2006 by James Lujan, currently the Chair of Cinematic Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, to professionalize the pool of Native actors available for hire in New Mexico’s bustling film industry. But when Gleason assumed the helm at Lujan’s request three years later, she realized there was no purchase in continuing to play savages and princesses, no matter how skillfully.

“I was done playing the poor little Indian girl who can put a feather in her long hair,” Gleason said about her own acting career. “Terry Gomez of the Comanche nation was writing powerful monologues for Native women, big characters. That’s what I wanted—I wanted to see more of that, and more contemporary stories in everyday settings. We’re real people, and not all of us have the same situations. We want to tell our own stories authentically and we don’t want the white society to tell our stories.”

Eskeets, a graduate of University of New Mexico’s MFA Program in Playwriting, wrote Fadeaway while working toward completion of her degree. Her third full-length play, it’s an imaginative rendering of the real life events surrounding Navajo high schooler Brooke Spencer, a basketball player whose layup won her team in Gallup, N.M.—the Lady Bengals—the state championship in 2006. The college-bound athlete was slain by her on-again, off-again boyfriend, just days after her family’s high school graduation party celebrating her achievements. The grotesque murder stunned the Navajo nation and hit Eskeets particularly hard: the 18-year-old Spencer was her cousin.

“I couldn’t go to her graduation party because I had to work,” Eskeets recalled. “Three days later on the front porch steps of my grandma’s house . . . [.]” She trailed off at the mention of the setting where Spencer was knifed by the boy, who is set to be released from federal prison next year.

Eskeet struggled with the first iteration of Fadeaway, as she tried to write it from the Brooke character’s vantage point. Ultimately she scrapped the 100-page script because she didn’t want the play to seem “victim-y”—and rewrote it from the murderer’s perspective.

“I hate that guy—I hate him with a passion,” she explained. “But writing the character I started to like him; I don’t know if empathize is the right word. I felt so bad for this guy who has nothing going for him except this girl. He’s in his prison. He loves this person so much, he’s never going to be able to say he’s sorry. I was crying as I wrote the murder scene at 5 o clock in the morning.”

The play received a university production in 2013 and “got standing ovations every night, people coming up to me in tears,” Eskeets recalled. She said Spencer’s mom told her: “That’s exactly how he was; I didn’t think anything like that would happen.”

Eskeets has hopes the show can be produced in Gallup, with Gleason directing. It’s not a far-fetched idea: As Two Worlds board member Lee Francis explained, touring productions to reservations, border towns like Gallup, and pueblo lands in New Mexico to engage Native audiences is very much a part of the company’s vision under Gleason’s leadership. Francis, who is the CEO/publisher of Native Realities Press, which produces indigenous comic books, is focusing his board participation on networking relationships to create an abundance of audience support in New Mexico’s most populous city.

“This is not Orlando, it’s Albuquerque, which should be the hub for this kind of work,” he said. “This is where we should be represented. Natives comprise 10 percent of the state’s population, and that level of support would be a game changer.”

Francis celebrates the current resurgence of interest in the work of Native theatre artists, but as a watchful observer of American pop culture, he said he’s seen these cycles come and go—one in the 1970s, another in the ’90s.

“It’s still at a fragile place,” he said about the current moment. “The press tends to gravitate around the same names, but excellent Native actors and playwrights are popping up all over the place.”

Places like Mexican Springs, N.M., a Navajo community north of Gallup, population 1200, that playwright Jay Muskett calls home—a place he’s fled and returned to, a muse of a place that stirs his imagination like no other he’s found so far. Since 2013 Muskett has lived on his reservation in a hogan, writing every day, composing dozens of plays.

“Playwriting has saved my life,” he said. “It filled the hole I had always felt. It connected me back to my own culture. It helped me put two and two together. I finally understood why ceremony and performance are still important, especially being Native American.”

Like Eskeets, Muskett acknowledges the trauma of his people and lives with a sense of responsibility to tell their stories.

“There’s a lot of trauma on the rez, and people don’t really have the outlet to get things off their chest,” he explained. “In my writing, I don’t steer away from the bad things that happen to people.”

As Gleason put it, “We don’t have to pretend.”

For all its willingness to face uncomfortable truths, Two Worlds also loves to present fantastical works featuring zombies and other chimerical beings. In response to a recent call for 10-minute plays centered on the theme of Blue Corn, one submission was a sci-fi script, a delightful surprise.

“Plays were submitted by writers with six years of professional experience to no experience,” Gleason said. “We’re gearing up to bring on the new generation.”

In August Two Worlds will present a staged reading festival of three full-length plays, to be directed by film directors who want the chance to direct for the theatre. “They can find it to be a little intimidating—there are no second takes,” said Gleason, clearly relishing the differences between the two worlds of theatre and film.

She’s also hoping to stage a Native/Hispanic Romeo and Juliet and is keen to find ways to work with the increasing number of Native playwrights who are now approaching Two Worlds to stage their work. A black box features prominently on her near-term wish list, but her ultimate dream is a fully professional Equity theatre. Toward that aim, she’s been building her business skills and seeking resources to move forward, including attracting a strong, skilled board who wants nothing more than to help take her where she wants to go.

Lee Francis sees a bright future for Two Worlds under Gleason’s leadership.

“Our audiences aren’t coming because it’s an an exotic version of Native life; our shows are neither niche, nor novelties,” he said. “They’re coming because it’s good theatre, because they’ll experience solid performances, and engage in theatre that is not predicated on Western ideals for engagement.”

Like so much in Native country, progress is a marathon, not a sprint.

“I push little by little, year by year; we’ve been planting the seeds and people have been helping us grow more,” said Gleason, her hands resting lightly on her middle. “It takes so much energy, so much passion and dedication to see yourself fail and fail and fail. It’s only pushed me harder to make us exist. When doors keep shutting on us, I tell myself there’s going to be that one door that will open.

“It’s been so hard at times, there have been moments when I wanted to walk away. But then I’ll come out from backstage, and some woman will have tears in her eyes, our show affected her so much, so personally. That opens my eyes anew, changes my perspective of what I can do towards making a change for my community, which I’ve always wanted to do. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to keep that hope alive, because maybe that’s all they have.”

[Frances Madeson is also the author of “Indigenous States,” Article 2 in this series, posted on 27 March.

[The last two articles in “Staging Our Native Nation” will be posted on 8 April.  Please log back onto ROT to read the final two parts of the AT series—and be sure to read the foregoing four articles.  I remind you, too, that at the end of Articles 7 and 8, I will be posting a list of resources for native theater in the U.S., published by American Theatre as well.]

"Staging Our Native Nation

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Articles 7 & 8

[Here are the final two articles in the American Theatre series, “Staging Our Native Nation.”  (A list of Native American theaters and resources, and the names of more than 100 living Native American writers and theatermakers, appears at the end of this post.)  As usual, I strongly recommend that Rick On Theater readers who haven’t read the foregoing pieces in this collection go back and read the earlier articles; the previous five installments began on 24 March and ran every three days until this concluding post.]

NATIVE IRON WORKERS AND 9/11 LINKED BY ‘MANGLED BEAMS’

by Christie Honoré

[As far back as the mid-1880s, men of the Iroquois nation, mostly Mohawks (upstate New York, southern Quebec, and eastern Ontario), worked steel in  construction.  It began with bridge-building along the St. Lawrence River and moved into high-steel work on the skyscrapers of the early 20th century.  And where else is the modern skyscraper most prominent in this part of the world?  Why, New York City, of course, whose skyline has been dominated by tall buildings since before World War I.  The iron workers for most of those iconic New York City edifices have been Iroquois Indians for now well over 100 years.

[As you’ll read in Christie Honoré’s “Native Iron Workers and 9/11 Linked by ‘Mangled Beams,’” these same Native American high-steel workers, descendents of the men who built the Twin Towers in the 1960s and ’70s, were engaged in the recovery and clean-up at Ground Zero after the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001.  Honoré’s article, the seventh in my series from American Theatre’s “Staging Our Native Nation” special feature from the April 2018 issue, is about the new play, Mangled Beams, by Dawn Jamieson, which tells the stories of four of those steel workers.  It begins previews on 13 April at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres on West  53rd Street in Manhattan.  (The production will run through 29 April.)]

In Dawn Jamieson’s new play, four Iroquois high-beam walkers reckon with trauma past and present.

To find compelling inspiration for her next play, Cayuga-Iroquois [the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York] playwright Dawn Jamieson didn’t have to look very far. She was a member of the board of directors of the American Indian Community House in New York City [on the Lower East Side] when Native American iron workers came to town to join in the search-and-rescue effort around Ground Zero after 9/11.

“They were welcomed and given the support of other Native people, some who had come from the same reservations,” Jamieson said. “Later, some of the workers came to attend a support group there. After a few years, I contacted and interviewed some of them.”

Brad Bonaparte, a worker who died from cancer developed after exposure to the air at Ground Zero, became a particular inspiration. The characters in Jamieson’s Mangled Beams—opening April 19 at A.R.T./New York, in a production from NYC-based American Indian Artists Inc., a.k.a. AMERINDA [in the East Village]—are four Haudenosaunee (Iroquois [upstate New York]) high-beam walkers who contribute to the Ground Zero cleanup efforts. Along the way, these iron workers—whose trade tends to be passed down from father to son in Native American families—strive to reclaim their identity by untangling beams laid by their own ancestors.

Diane Fraher, the Osage [Great Plains] and Cherokee [American Southeast] artistic director of AMERINDA, was eager to support Jamieson’s project. “We are a community-based organization, so we have known Dawn for quite some time. She’s worked very hard on it for a number of years.”

Now in its 31st year, AMERINDA is a Native American arts organization working to make the indigenous perspective accessible to a wider audience through the creation of new works. Throughout the next few years Fraher plans to focus on supporting female playwrights like Jamieson who have emerged from the New York contemporary Native American art movement. “It’s a little known art movement here in New York City which is very vital and dynamic, with this really really rich texture to it that stretches back generations,” said Fraher.

Jamieson has felt firsthand the positive impact the movement has had on Native artists. “The support and encouragement are invaluable, as well as the feeling of being part of a vibrant whole—an ensemble, a network, a support group, an audience, a movement,” she said.

But despite the progress made both by the movement and the support of organizations like AMERINDA, Native artists still often must fight for authentic Native American representation in the arts. When she first began booking acting jobs, including two on Broadway [The Price, 1992; Inherit the Wind, 1996], Jamieson was cast according to her Caucasian appearance. But after she listed Native American on her résumé, she received very few non-Native parts.

“I’ve been asked to get a tan, wear a wig, and ‘sound Indian,’ and these suggestions often come from well-meaning people who are looking to promote Native work,” Jamieson marveled. “Until it’s generally accepted that Native people vary in appearance and voice, the situation won’t change.”

Fraher has seen the slow progress made in the battle for representation, first for Native actors to be able to play Native roles and now for Native playwrights to be able to tell their stories. “Perhaps the next big thing we want to conquer is developing leadership—we need to develop Native directors in theatre,” she said.

These advancements are especially important in dispelling the notion that Native American culture exists only as a part of history.

“We’re a living culture—we’re not just figures of the past, so our stories are not just about our historical past,” says Fraher, “It’s really important for people to recognize us as a living culture that’s a part of the whole in order for us to take our place in the American theatre and the canon of American theatre.”

And take their part in the story of one of 21st-century America’s defining traumas.

[Christie Honoré is a writer, editor, and theatermaker with experience in dramaturgy and teaching.  She’s a recent graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.] 

*  *  *  *

A TROUPE THAT TURNS TROPES INTO TAKEOFFS

by Anne Hamilton

[Until now, most of the AT series on native theater has been serious business—most of the plays are dramas (Randy Reinholz’s Off the Rails, a Native American adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is one exception) and the issues have all been profound and addressed with solemnity.  Well, the guys of the sketch troupe the 1491s take a different tack.  The subjects may still be significant to Native Americans and non-natives as well, but the approach is comedic . . . even silly at times.  And it’s apparently been working since the four-man group, who came together by serendipity, have grown in popularity and demand—and they still have a point to make.  Anne Hamilton’s “A Troupe that Turns Tropes into Takeoffs” is a brief profile of this out-of-the-ordinary comedy quartet.]

The 1491s have gone from YouTube videos to live sketch comedy to a major play commission, and they’re laughing all the way.

The travel route from Minneapolis to Tulsa runs right down the center of the country. If the Midwest is the heart of the country, this route looks like a jagged scar from open heart surgery.

This is the path that members of the nearly decade-old sketch comedy troupe the 1491s travel to meet up with each other and work on their shows and sketches. And if they have their way, their comedy will help to heal an ancient divide as sharp and deep as a scar.

Their work has had national play: In Al Jazeera’s 2012 piece “A dynamic year of indigenous communication,” reporter Manuela Picq led with a nod to the 1491s’ video “Geronimo E-KIA,” which riffed tellingly on the controversial use of the Apache warrior’s name for the Osama bin Laden raid. And members of the group of five appeared in 2014 on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” in a segment called “The Redskins’ Name – Catching Racism” about the controversial name of Washington, D.C.’s football team.

I recently interviewed three of [the] troupe’s five members, then followed up with a more in-depth talk with Bobby Wilson, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota artist and educator. I also spoke with Migizi Pensoneau, an Ojibwe and Ponca writer and producer, and Ryan RedCorn, a[n Osage] portrait photographer and graphic designer from Oklahoma. The group is rounded out by Dallas Goldtooth, a Dakota and Navajo comedian and environmental organizer, and Sterlin Harjo, a Creek and Seminole filmmaker from Oklahoma.

Goldtooth and Pensoneau are stepbrothers who grew up together in northern Minnesota. Deadpanned Pensoneau: “My name is Migizi—it’s spelled like it sounds, only the e is silent.”

I’ll admit the discussion was slightly disconcerting; I felt a bit like I was interviewing frat brothers the day before Spring Break. Topics were introduced rapid-fire and ideas batted around with good humor. Laughter was abundant.

I learned that all their work is co-created. “We aren’t reinventing any wheels—it’s sketch comedy, but we are a different voice,” says Pensoneau. “We like to make what we like to make. We have our own guidelines. Five of us work as a collective. We are a unified voice.”

Wilson agrees: “There’s so much expectation put on indigenous people in the arts, especially in the media. It comes from a longstanding tradition of non-Native people, most often white men, writing stories for Hollywood and the stage. We’re fighting those tropes. If they show up in our work, it’s just to lampoon them.”

The five members met for the first time in 2009 at a festival called the Santa Fe Indian Market, which has been a national gathering place for almost 100 years. “It’s just where all the top Native artists and artisans go to sell their wares and party it up,” says Wilson. “Okies tend to travel in packs. We didn’t have a place to stay, so Ryan RedCorn invited us to stay in a hotel room.” They told stories and laughed for hours, and the group was born. They took their name in oblique reference to Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a touchstone of Native Americans’ culturally rich and advanced civilizations.

Since then the group has made and posted 150 videos to YouTube on topics from film depictions of Native Americans to sovereignty, from cultural appropriation to Halloween to Columbus Day. Their work traffics in silliness as much as satire, breaking up stereotypes and turning tropes around.

They say [they] made their initial video just for fun: To satirize the depiction of the werewolf pack in the Twilight films, they shot “New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions!!!!”, presided over by Harjo, they borrowed a camera for the day. The video took off and won them many fans who asked for more, leading in turn to requests for live performances.

“The videos were a blast,” says Wilson. Then, he said, they got queries from tribes who “asked us if we had ever done live comedy shows. They would ask us to come. They were pretty small venues. The demand for it became so frequent that we do three or four shows a month. As far as we know, we’re the only indigenous sketch comedy troupe in the U.S. If there is even one Native kid in a school district, they often ask for us.”

November has them touring most of the month, as it’s Native American history month. “It’s the only time you’re allowed to be Indian in public,” Wilson quips.

It was while the 1491s were performing at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa that they got a big break of sorts: The Twin Cities’ New Native Theatre took note and brought them to the attention of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Alison Carey, director of OSF’s American Revolutions program, offered them a commission. The troupe has finished their play’s second draft, about which they say there have been no restrictions.

Wilson explains their approach to playwriting: “We asked ourselves, what does a comedy look like in this space? We played around with the idea of doing a musical until we realized that none of us are musical, but there are some components that will end up in this production. We thought, let’s insert music for the comedic timing, and the sake of the storyline.”

As a subject they settled on pivotal moments in American history connected to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The action starts with the American Indian Movement’s occupation of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1970s, and flashes back to events at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1890. The title: Between Two Knees. [No date had been announced for a production of the 1491s’ play. ~Rick]

While the consensus is that they want to act in the play’s first production, they hope it has a life of its own. “Our dream is that it will go out and there will be people producing it, and it will have a life outside of us,” says Pensoneau.“I would be thrilled if some tribal high school out in the middle of nowhere would put it on.”

There may be an even broader appetite for their work. The troupe recently gave a very well-received show at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ([Friday, 2 March,] during a nor’easter, no less). “It’s super inspiring to know that Native jokes are landing with a non-Native crowd that is younger,” Wilson said. “A lot of the stuff that we do is regional, but being at Vassar, we were way far away from where we were raised. It gives me a lot of hope that there is definitely a shift and a change.”

By sharing humor with Native and non-Native audiences, the 1491s may just patch together a new American consciousness.

[Anne Hamilton is a New York City-based freelance dramaturg who’s worked with Andrei Serban, Michael Mayer, Lynn Nottage, Niegel Smith, and Classic Stage Company, among others.  Her specialties include new-play development, production dramaturgy, new musicals, career advising, advocacy, and oral histories.  She has an MFA from the Columbia University School of the Arts and was a Bogliasco Foundation Fellow.

[When I got the April issue of American Theatre in the mail—it came last month—and I started leafing through it, I found the series of articles on theater by indigenous Americans.  American Indian theater, from what little I knew of its history and development, is a fascinating phenomenon.  (I knew nothing of native Hawaiian and native Alaskan theater efforts, which are covered in the AT series.)  It’s a little like Inuit art (on which I’ve blogged a few times), except that was originated and subsidized by the Canadian government and Indian theater is organic.  Since Indians didn’t have a theater tradition, they took European theater but turned it to telling their native stories and incorporated their various storytelling techniques and styles.  It took time for that marriage to work integrally—and also for mainstream theater people (producers, agents, literary managers, non-native directors/artistic directors, and others) to accept it as a mature, stageable American theater art.  According to the articles in AT, that’s been happening slowly, still mostly out west, but it sounds like it’s at a tipping point.

[I read the articles as I got them ready to post, and they proved to be really interesting.  I believe they’re perfect for ROT!  I hope ROTters have read them all; I’m sure you’ll learn things about our theater, as I have.  They’re absolutely engrossing.  (That promised list of native theater resources is below.)]

*  *  *  *

A LIST OF NATIVE THEATRES AND THEATREMAKERS

by American Theatre Editors

Resources, institutions, and more than 100 artists spanning North America.

This list of Native American theatres and theatremakers was compiled in part by Madeline Sayet, with suggestions from Randy Reinholz and with help by Jerald Raymond Pierce.

Native-run theatre companies:

Amerinda (American Indian Artists) Inc. (NYC)

Dark Winter Productions (Alaska)

The Eagle Project (NYC)

Native Voices at the Autry (L.A.)

New Native Theatre (Twin Cities)

Oklahoma City Theatre Company’s Native American New Play Festival

Raving Native Productions (Twin Cities)

Red Eagle Soaring (Seattle)

Safe Harbors Indigenous Collective (NYC)

Spiderwoman Theater (NYC)

Thunderbird Theatre (Kansas)

Turtle Theatre Collective (Twin Cities)

Two Worlds Theatre (New Mexico)

Other producing organization and university resources:

Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)

Project HOOP at UCLA (dir. Hanay Geiogamah)

Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (dir. Mary Kathryn Nagle & Reed Adair Bobroff)

Writers/theatremakers:

Ishmael Angaluuk Hope (Iñupiaq/Tlingit)

Alani Apio (Native Hawaiian)

Jules Arita Koostachin (Attawapiskat, Cree)

Annette Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria)

Jaisey Bates (Longhouse Huron, Algonquin)

Nick Bear (Penobscot)

C.W. Bearshield (Sicangu Lakota)

Diane Benson (Tlingit)

Columpa Bobb (Tsleil Waututh/Nlaka’pamux)

Reed Adair Bobroff (Navajo)

Murielle Borst-Tarrant (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Ed Bourgeois (Mohawk)

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki)

Margaret Bruchac (Abenaki)

Candice Byrd (Cherokee/Quapaw/Osage)

Julie Cajune (Salish)

Marisa Carr (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe)

Lee Cataluna (Native Hawaiian)

Monica Charles (Klallam)

Vic Charlo (Salish)

Dillon Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna/Isleta Pueblo)

Marie Clements (Métis)

Montana Cypress (Miccosukee)

Maulian Dana (Penobscot)

Joseph Dandurand (Kwantlen)

Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit)

Daystar, a.k.a. Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa)

Ty Defoe (Oneida/Ojibwe)

Darrell Dennis (Secwepemc)

Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)

Ed Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock-Nez Perce)

Steve Elm (Oneida)

Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota)

Lori Favela (Yankton Sioux)

Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan)

Charli Fool Bear (Yanktonai Dakota)

Eric Gansworth (Onondaga)

Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware)

Diane Glancy (Cherokee)

Kim Delfina Gleason (Navajo)

Terry Gomez (Comanche)

Moses Goods (Native Hawaiian)

Jason Grasl (Blackfeet)

Tammy Haili`opua Baker (Native Hawaiian)

Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek)

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee)

Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway)

Lance Henson (Cheyenne)

Tomson Highway (Cree)

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)

Philip Hooser (Choctaw)

LeAnne Howe (Choctaw)

Claude Jackson Jr. (Pima/Hopi)

Dawn Jamieson (Cayuga/Iroquois)

Terry Jones (Seneca)

Frank Henry Kaash Katasse (Tlingit)

Aassanaaq Kairaiuak (Yup’ik)

Margo Kane (Cree-Saulteaux)

Ajuawak Kapashesit (Ojibwe/Cree)

Bruce King (Oneida)

Martha Kreipe de Montaño (Prairie Band Potawatomi)

Donna Loring (Penobscot)

Nancy McDoniel (Chickasaw)

Gloria Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)

Duane Minard (Yurok, Piaute)

Kohl Miner (Ho-Chunk)

Sam Mitchell (Yaqui)

Monique Mojica (Kuna/Rappahannock)

N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa)

Vicki Lynn Mooney (Cherokee)

Tara Moses (Seminole)

Jay B. Muskett (Navajo)

Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee)

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Native Hawaiian-Samoan)

Michael Nephew (Cherokee)

Judy Lee Oliva (Chickasaw)

Robert Owens-Greygrass (Lakota)

Richard Perry (Yup’ik)

PJ Prudat (Métis/Cree/Saulteaux)

Kalani Queypo (Blackfeet)

Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora)

Randy Reinholz (Choctaw)

Marcie Rendon (White Earth Anishinabe)

Mark Anthony Rolo (Chippewa)

Lucas Rowley (Inupiaq)

Madeline Sayet (Mohegan)

Laura Annawyn Shamas (Chickasaw)

Kim Snyder (Oglala Lakota)

Vera Starbard (Tlingit/Dena’ina Athabascan)

Arigon Starr (Kickapoo)

DeLanna Studi (Cherokee)

Cathy Tagnak Rexford (Inupiaq)

Xemiyulu Manibusan Tapepechul (Salvadoran Nawat)

Maya Torralba (Kiowa)

Joseph Valdez (Navajo)

David Velarde Jr. (Jicarilla Apache)

Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo)

Dianne Yeahquo Reyner (Kiowa)

William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine

"Native American Imagery Is Everywhere But Understanding Lags Behind"

April 13, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Dispatches from Israel 14

≪ Previous: "Staging Our Native Nation

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by Jeffrey Brown

 [I just posed eight articles from the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine on the emergence of indigenous American theater (see “Staging Our Native Nation,” posted from 24 March through 8 April).  No sooner had I uploaded the last of the six posts in theRick On Theaterseries than the  PBS NewsHour ran a segment on 29 March 2018, reported by Jeffrey Brown, that touched on one of the points of the articles:  that there are “symbols of Native American life and culture all around,” in the words of anchor Judy Woodruff.  I think the segment dovetails perfectly with the AT native theater series, so I’m posting the transcript of the broadcast for ROTters.]

Native imagery is embedded in the national subconscious, whether we're paying attention or not. A new exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian is titled simply "Americans" and shows how all aspects of life have been touched by the history and symbols of native culture. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Judy Woodruff:  Now a change of pace, history, mythology, imagery. A museum exhibition opens our eyes to the symbols of Native American life and culture all around.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

Jeffrey Brown:  A 1948 Indian brand motorcycle, one of the sleekest machines you’re likely to see, clothing with the logo for your local sports team. And perhaps in your refrigerator right now, a box of Land O’Lakes butter.

Paul Chaat Smith:  She’s on her knees, and she’s holding the box that she’s on. So it recedes into infinity. So there’s something really profoundly weird going on.

Jeffrey Brown:  Even more profound, just how pervasive Native imagery is embedded into the American subconscious. That’s according to Paul Chaat Smith, a member of the Comanche Tribe and co-curator of an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Paul Chaat Smith:  It’s really this paradox that the country, 330 million people today, 1 percent of that population is Native American. For most people, they don’t see or really think about Indians, yet they’re surrounded by Indian imagery, place names, and have connections with Indians on a kind of deep, emotional level.

Jeffrey Brown:  Whether we know it or not.

Paul Chaat Smith:  Whether you know it or not.

Jeffrey Brown:  Yes.

To that end, the exhibition is titled, simply, “Americans,” and shows us Indians everywhere in all aspects of life. Overhead, a prototype of the Tomahawk missile, on loan from the nearby Air and Space Museum.

On one large wall, clips from films and TV shows. A side room takes us through the strange history of Pocahontas, known, but not really known, by all. Around the gallery, headdresses everywhere, in signs and advertising.

The image of the Native American or Indian — the museum uses the terms interchangeably — as a symbol of ruggedness or bravery, but often with no discernible connection to the products, as in ads over the decades for Calumet Baking Powder.

Paul Chaat Smith:  An Indian in a feather headdress has nothing to do with baking powder. It’s a completely artificial connection. Yet it sometimes works, because I think it talks about a kind of Americanness and quality that people say, OK, well that baking powder is probably pretty good because there’s an Indian in a headdress in it.

And note that it is a red, white and blue headdress.

Jeffrey Brown:  Yes.

A history of extermination and appropriation of lands, and yet an embrace of American Indians as a symbol authentically American.

Paul Chaat Smith:  There’s certainly explicitly racist imagery, but it’s a pretty small minority of it, because the whole way that Indians have been objectified in the United States is about a kind of noble Indian idea, which is a different kind of caricature than one that’s explicitly vicious and that we’re dirty and backward and unintelligent.

But, obviously, it is — even though it’s flattering in some way, it’s still another kind of a stereotype.

Jeffrey Brown:  It’s also, of course, about images and myths, and not about the actual people themselves.

Smith says this distinction began in the late 19th century after the protracted armed conflict between Natives and settlers, and later the U.S. Army, had come to an end.

Paul Chaat Smith:  It was like there was a big meeting of the American collective unconscious to say, now we’re going to freeze Indians in the past.

The actual Indians that are on reservations in 1895 or 1910, or the actual Indians who might [be] living in L.A., living lives like the other people in Los Angeles, they’re not going to appear in entertainment.

Jeffrey Brown:  One area of continuing contention, sports names and logos.

In recent years, some schools and universities have stopped using Native American nicknames. Earlier this year, Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians announced they will stop using the cartoonish Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms. But they’re keeping the Indians name.

More controversially, the National Football League’s Washington Redskins are keeping their name. Smith is a fan of his local team, but not its name, though he understands the strong feelings.

Paul Chaat Smith:  I have great empathy for fans, especially here in D.C., but fans don’t choose the name of the team, right? A rich owner chooses it. And in the case of these names, it usually goes back a century sometimes.

I get why people aren’t pleased when someone like me comes in and says, you know, this name is a dictionary-defined slur, as it is in D.C. But if you come in and try to take it away from somebody, I get that that’s — you know, you feel attacked.

Jeffrey Brown:  No one would name a team the Redskins anymore, but not long ago, Victoria’s Secret dressed model Karlie Kloss like this, only to apologize after criticism.  [The model, who’s of northern and eastern European extraction, was dressed in a suede-like bikini with fringe, an oversized, feathered headdress, festooned with turquoise jewelry in Native American motifs, wearing high-heeled pumps. ~Rick]

The museum wants people to think about the images around them and what they convey. Visitors are encouraged to write of their own experiences.

Look at this one. “I had a dream catcher over my bed as a kid. Why?”

Paul Chaat Smith:  I think what the show is designed to do is to say, you’re not alone with these stories.

Jeffrey Brown:  And for the country as a whole, Smith says there’s something more at stake.

Paul Chaat Smith:  There’s this challenge to the United States’ idea of itself to have to acknowledge that the United States national project came about at great cost to Native people.

So, what do we think about that? That’s what this exhibition is saying. How do we come to terms with that? Should Americans just feel guilty? I don’t think so.

All Americans inherit this. How do we make sense of it? And a starting point is kind of looking at Indians in everyday life.

Jeffrey Brown:  For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

[I’ve mentioned the NMAI, both the New York City branch and the main museum in Washington, D.C., where Americans is mounted, in several posts.  See, for example, “Fritz Scholder,” posted on 30 Mach 2011; 'Awake and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April  2017; and “Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait,” 15 January 2018.]

Dispatches from Israel 14

April 18, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Mr. Dylan Gets Religion

≪ Previous: "Native American Imagery Is Everywhere But Understanding Lags Behind"

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by Helen Kaye

[Helen Kaye is back again with a pair of reviews from Israeli theaters last month.  Both plays, Jeff Baron’s Visting Mr. Green and Dario Fo’s The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, are translations in Hebrew of plays that have been around for some years and have been staged around the world (including New York City).  Both plays have been produced in Israel previously as well, but Helen, whose last contribution to Rick On Theater was “Dispatches from Israel 13” on 27 February, has found both these revivals worthy of praise and great enthusiasm.]. 

Visiting Mr. Green

By Jeff Baron

Translated by Ido Riklin

Directed by Natan Datner

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 7 March 18

On the face of it, nothing could be more straightforward. A hard-nosed judge sentences young executive Ross Gardiner (Ido Rosenberg) to six months of weekly visits to the very elderly, very cantankerous Mr. Green (Gadi Yagil), the penance for nearly running him down. What starts with overt and near mutual hostility mutates over time into intimate friendship that tentatively begins when the old man discovers that Ross, like himself, is Jewish. It survives Ross’ disclosure that he is gay and Mr. Green’s revelation that he has a daughter, disowned and mourned as dead because she married a gentile.

The delight of this jewel of a performance of this jewel of a play was the appearance of a genuine cockroach that appeared in Mr. Green’s seedy flat designed as inside/outside – the fire-escapes – by Alessandra Nardi, and exited, scuttling, stage right to the guffaws of the audience.

And when you think of it, the cockroach is a perfect metaphor for this not-so-straightforward-after-all, play. Cockroaches are shy creatures, preferring concealment, like Ross and Mr. Green.

The latter is at first shattered and repulsed when Ross discloses he is gay, just as Ross is appalled at Mr. Green’s emotional intransigence when he learns of it.

Visiting Mr. Greenis a very funny comedy, but it is also an uncompromising and penetrating examination of prejudice and irrational hatreds, and if that doesn’t strike a chord, then we are beyond redemption.

The play is so good that it seemed sometimes that we were eavesdropping on the neighbors, and indeed, it has worked in some 45 countries and been translated into 23 languages, Mr. Riklin’s seamless effort being one.

The acting: Mr. Yagil is beyond superb. An experienced comedian, he has schticks, but here he shapes, pares, and edits them so that the few he employs in his metamorphosis into the character become intrinsic to it. Mr. Rosenberg, not to be outdone, makes sure that Ross stays clear of excess, which leaves plenty of space for his compassion and innate decency.

Finally, the two men genuinely work together, each complementing the other. If you don’t walk out of the theater on cloud nine, you must be an Alien.

[I had never heard of Visting Mr. Green, or couldn’t remember having heard of it, so I checked its stateside production history.  I was shocked to see that the play ran for a year in New York City in 1997-98  with El Wallach as Green, and that it played at the Union Square Theatre, which is right across the square from where I live.  How could I have missed it?  Before the New York début, the play also ran for a year at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, also with Wallach in the title part.]

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Accidental Death of an Anarchist

By Dario Fo

Translated by Nissim Aloni

Adapted and directed by Michael Gurevitch

Khan Theater, Jerusalem; 21 March 2018

When you have a certified nutcase (Erez Shafrir) making twice-ground mincemeat of four cops (Itai Szor, Yoav Hyman, Nir Ron and Yossi Eini) with most certainly guilty consciences then you have a certifiable probability of farce which Mr. Gurevitch’s production of Death of an Anarchist provides in most generous measure.

More simply, if you’re not rolling around laughing ¾ of the time from the quartet’s verbal, facial and physical antics, you need to get a refund on your sense of humor – disclosure: the other ¼ is for thinking.

Because you have to think that if it takes a maniac to uncover the cover-up of a probable murder by the police (because nobody else is), then the corruption goes further and gets broader, which is the point the play makes, adding a few (unsubtle) and comical comments about certain Persons (here) and a President (elsewhwere).

In 1969, in the wake of a series of thought-to-be anarchist bombings in Milan, known anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli was arrested, questioned and either jumped or, as was more commonly thought, was pushed out of a fourth floor window at the Milan Central Police Station. 

Fo wrote the farce the following year; the authorities fumed; the public flocked, and has flocked ever since.

For this one, Svetlana Brega did the set – a shabby office, oh, and it would be patently unfair of me to reveal how the set is changed from the 1st to the 4th floor – and the costumes which are completely, if not nattily, attuned to the various characters. Daniel Salomon did the music and Roni Cohen the lights.

Now then. Mr. Gourevitch directs comedy with the deftest, lightest and most assured touches and the actors in Anarchistare accomplished comedians all.

It’s Mr. Shafrir’s show all the way from his first entrance as a bag-laden Maniac with papers to his exit as a clown-like character in a red fright wig and piratical overcoat. He conducts most of his “investigation” in the character of a judge who goes from ingratiating to terrifying, from jovial to hectoring in the blink of an eye with tone, stance, and gesture to match. It’s bravura and hilarious.

As a young cop and (partial) straightman, young Itai Szor is lovably clueless and admirably loyal. Yoav Hyman, equipped with excess weight, bad hair and awful clothes is the ultimate in bumbling, incompetent, ineffectual cop-hood in the person of Inspector Bertozzo. Nir Ron, who has been blessed with the ability to shift his face and body into innumerable subtleties, uses them to the full as the equally bumbling etc. Inspector Pissani. Like a demented train, Yossi Eini charges electrically about with gruesome purpose as the wannabe ferocious Superintendant. Carmit Mesilati-Kaplan cameos most brightly as journalist Feletti.

Loverly. Go see it.

[Dario Fo (1926-2016), for those who have forgotten, was the Nobel Prize laureate in literature in 1997.  The Accidental Death of an Anarchist was presented with a cast that included Jonathan Pryce and Patti LuPone on Broadway in New York City in 1984 but only ran for 20 regular performances and 15 previews.  The production originated at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage.]