Well no WONDER As You Like It was so depressing

From The Daily Mail on the Sam Mendes/Kate Winslet split:

A source close to Mendes explained the break-up by saying: 'He became bored working on his latest theatrical project, and he took that boredom home with him. And that led to the spark being taken out of their marriage.'

Thank God That's Over!

Contrary to what is laughingly referred to as the calendar, The Februaries do not actually end on 2/28 or 2/29 -- they end when Daylight Savings time begins. And I don't know about you, but this year, it took me totally by surprise. I kept wondering why all the movie times were off when I tried to see Green Zone Sunday at noon. Silly rabbit. Now once again it is dark when I rise out of bed to go to work, as it should always be at 6 in the morning. And once again there is daylight long after I emerge from the dungeon of my day job. It's spring. Rejoice. Or better yet, download this and play it as loud as you can:

Sing Sing Sing - Benny Goodman

Off With Their Heads

Watching Tim Burton's Return to Wonderland -- wait; no -- The Hatter The Bitch and the Rabbit Hole -- no; sorry -- Alice In Wonderland, you can't help but think that whatever else he may be interested in, actual human beings are rather low on this director's list of loves. (And by the way: DO NOT (repeat) DO NOT waste your money on the 3D version of this. It's visually stunning, but it is not Avatar. Nothing much except a couple of dragonflies at the beginning and a blue butterfly at the end have that great zoom-out-at-you 3D effect.) (Oh, and Johnny Depp, who is getting more and more like a CGI effect with every film.)


Actually? I lied. It's exactly like Avatar; it has the same what-passes-for-plot, which is actually a character description: The Reluctant Outsider-Of-Destiny who joins one side in a battle and helps them win against all odds. Because of the immutable law of Hollywood which says you can never ever have your main character be the straight woman for a bunch of nut cases, Alice now has a lethal case of that modern artistic disease called a Character Arc. This comes complete with a missing father, a helpless mother, an impending marriage to a dentally-challenged ninny, and a Pitch Line: Alice must embrace her destiny as the savior of Underland (a word she mispronounced as Wonderland when she was a kid--idn't dat kewt?), which only takes place when she remembers that what she thought was a childhood dream actually happened to her. (Insert allegory about child abuse here.) (No--wait--sorry--that's A Thousand Acres.)


Insert names, too. The Red and White Queens have names, their kingdoms have names, the Dormouse and White Rabbit have names, even the Caterpillar has a name. (But though he puffs on a hookah, he never inhales the smoke. God forbid we show the children a blue worm inhaling.) Only the Hatter doesn't have a name. But Depp makes up for that by switching back and forth between Loopy British Accent and Sarcastic Scottish Accent, just to fulfill the Mad part of his character. This is all part of the general design, which is aimed at giving a local habitation and a name to what was originally a satire on Victorian manners and politics, none of which makes it into this version (no Mock Turtle, no Knight, no Lion and Unicorn). Instead, what we have is a scroll with a Latin name I have already forgotten (something like The Oraculum, which is Latin for Unobtainium), in which the end of the film is predicted and everybody tries to prevent it. This is what happens when a bunch of people in suits shoehorn a story into a concept. You get nothing but a gigantic echo chamber.


And there are echoes galore. On one level, watching this movie is like playing How Many References Can You Find. When you’re not thinking “Stephen King did this so much better in It,” you’re thinking “CS Lewis did this so much better in the Narnia novels.” And when you’re not saying to yourself “All this needs is a couple of Harburg/Arlen songs to be Wizard of Oz,” you’re saying “All this needs is a couple of French accents to be Joan of Arc.” Me, I sat there thinking, "I know exactly how the Disney suits thought of this movie."

DISNEY SUITS: We're going to to do to Alice In Wonderland what Hook did to Peter Pan!
ME: If you mean fuck it up? You're exactly right.



But don't listen to me; I'm the jaded adult in the theatre. The kids who were there when I saw this? Loved it. They squealed at the action sequences, cheered at the finale, giggled during the Futterwhack (don't ask), and were generally awed at the visuals. Which are deservedly awesome. When it actually stops to breathe, this is a gorgeous movie to see on a big screen, just for design alone. You can spend the entire film grooving on all the heart-shaped props in the Red Queen's castle. And Helena Bonham Carter's giant bobble-head is the perfect expression of both character and actress. The movie is full of brilliant little touches like that. But, like Avatar, you walk out wishing the script was as brilliant as the visuals. Which just shows to go you that, whatever else he may be interested in , set design and atmosphere are sky-high on Tim Burton's list of loves.

The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance

The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play. It’s the play that made me fall in love with Shakespeare, which means it’s right up there with all the other things that made me fall in love: Seven Samurai (Japanese movies), Sasha and Digweed’s Communication (techno), Maverick, Cheyenne and Sugarfoot (westerns), Myrna Loy (Myrna Loy) and Sheila Tagrin (girls). It's also the play I directed, in the dark backward and abysm of time, when I was a senior in high school. As I have so often had occasion to remark these days, boy, do I have a great future behind me.

I know the script of this play the way I know a Beatles song -- I may not be able to recite all the words on my own, but I will be word perfect once the song starts playing. Which is why it’s impossible for me not to be annoyed when Argiers becomes Algiers, the still-vexed Bermoothes turn into the still-vexed Bermudas, the line “Oh what a blow was there given!” is missing its punchline (“An it had not fallen flatlong.”) and my favorite WTF line in all of Shakespeare, “And most chirurgeonly,” is nowhere to be found. This is also why it’s impossible for me to be objective about this play, so what follows is not so much a review as a collection of thoughts about the experience of this particular production.

First thought: nice opening. The play begins with a shipwreck scene, but the production begins with Prospero, who’s sitting stage left reading a book from the moment the house opens. It's a great conceit: here's somebody with his head in a book all the time; no wonder he lost his dukedom. And that was 12 years ago. Guy hasn't changed a bit. Only when he’s ready does he don his magic robe, put on his belt of power (shades of Wonder Woman and her magic belt), take up his staff, and conjure up the storm which will cause that opening shipwreck scene. At which point we’re reminded that Sam Mendes is directing this play, since the shipwreck scene is marred by the same annoying effect that marred last year’s Winter’s Tale: any time there’s an aside, the actors all freeze, the stage goes dark, and a spotlight hits the commenting actor. Then the action starts up again, only to stop with the next comment; and then it begins yet again only to grind to a halt with the next aside. It’s so jerky and frustrating that it’s impossible not to believe that the single most formative experience of Sam Mendes’ life is his struggle to drive stick.


The next, oh, 20 minutes is the longest single exposition scene in Shakespeare. The story is, he wrote it to win a bet with Ben Jonson, who kept making fun of the fact that Shakespeare never stuck to the Aristotelian unities of place and time.

JONSON: If you wrote the Agamemnon, you would have staged everything from Aulis to the Trojan Horse before getting to the homecoming. You and your mouldy tales. You put Father Time in Winter’s Tale, and Pericles takes place over what, twenty years? Man, you couldn’t do single set and real time if your life depended on it.
SHAKESPEARE: Oh yeah? Here; read this. It’s called The Tempest.
JONSON: Oh my God! The second scene is nothing but exposition! And not even interesting exposition.
SHAKESPEARE: Yeah. See how boring single set and real time are?

And that’s the challenge when doing this play: how to sugar the long Prospero speeches so that they don’t put everybody to sleep. (And it’s not like Shakespeare is unaware of what he’s doing, either; Miranda’s line “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness,” could be spoken by anybody in the audience.) So what does Mendes have Prospero do? Blindfold his daughter so that, in effect, he is just a disembodied voice, and then rattle on while she sits there like a prisoner waiting for the firing squad to arrive. I’m still trying to figure out the whole blindfolding motif, and it is a motif -- Prospero covers Miranda’s eyes a couple of times in this production, like he’s protecting her from something. But what? I can understand covering her eyes when Caliban shows up, but when you’re giving the premise?

PROSPERO: I’ve led a rather interesting life; would you like to hear about it? Good; let me blindfold you.
MIRANDA: Whatever, Dad.

All I can think of is that it's about two things: his magic, and the fact that this particular Prospero has no idea how to deal with real people. As far as the magic goes, I can buy that Prospero creates the shipwreck. But if you’re going to set him up as somebody who can control not just the winds but the other characters on stage, if you're going to make the man a puppeteer, then you have to be very precise about (a) who the puppets are, (b) when and if they can ever act on their own, and (c) why the puppeteer is manipulating them. That clarity is missing here. Lenane’s Prospero appears to be manipulating everybody, including the bad guys. I mean, Antonio and Sebastian are natural plotters; it’s only natural for Prospero to use his arts to make sure their plotting fails. What is not natural is for Ariel to hand both of them daggers so they can attempt to commit murders which will then be prevented. It’s beautifully staged; Ariel walks past them and the daggers he hands them look like they have always been in their hands. But it’s troublesome when you think of the puppeteer angle. It’s one thing to say, “I know you will try to commit murder, but I am going to prevent you,” and quite another to say, “Here’s a couple of daggers so you can try to commit murder so I can prevent you.” It makes the game look rigged from the start. I mean, if Prospero can control everybody to this extent, then you’re watching an argument against the existence of free will, not a play. Or an argument about an all-powerful figure who makes people commit sins so that he can indulge himself in not just preventing them but in forgiving the sinners. After, y'know, an appropriate amount of spiritual torture. I don't know about you, but to me this is both dramatically and theologically unsound.

I used to do the "You are three men of sin" speech as an audition piece,

so don't get me started on this guy's Ariel.

It’s also untrue of this production, which is about vengeance and forgiveness. Almost everyone who’s not being tested or manipulated in a center ring of sand sits on chairs in an upstage pool of water and waits their turn to go onstage, staring off into space while they wonder if the Equity healthcare plan covers the kind of pruney foot rot that infected half the grunts in ‘Nam. The constant presence of actors waiting to go on gives the impression that Mendes is staging a Brechtian exercise in presentational ethics, where everything has a pointed moral and everyone has a lesson to learn. Especially Prospero. Judging the production backwards, the naturalism of Stephen Dillane’s underplaying, once the opportunity to forgive has been presented to his character, stands in stark relief to the shouting hand-waving over-emphasizing hammyness of his early scenes. I kept asking myself “Why is he over-acting like this?” and of course, by the end of the play I understood exactly why: to make a contrast between Prospero the avenger and Prospero the forgiver. The problem I had with it is that shouting is a technique, not a character revelation. When he's observing -- like Jacques -- Dillane's Prospero is in his element, speaking naturally and pointedly. But when he's talking to other people, he's a completely different person, and unfortunately it looks like he's a completely different actor as well. It's a valid and fascinating choice to make Prospero the socially inept twin brother of Jacques, but I feel like I'm making an after-the-fact excuse by thinking of Dillane's performance this way, because while watching it, I didn't know what to make of it. It's like he was playing an acting version of vengeance versus forgiveness: the rarer action is in underplaying than in hamming it up.

But like I say, it’s impossible for me to be objective about this play. Or to see it fresh, for that matter. Even the moment that made people gasp -- Caliban’s first entrance -- reminded me of the same entrance, done in exactly the same way, from the 1974 Public Theatre Tempest with Sam Waterston as Prospero, Carol Kane as Miranda, and Randy Duk Kim as the best Trinculo I have ever seen. (And God, what a weird production THAT was.)

But I will say this. If everything Dillane did as an actor was designed to make his delivery of the epilogue poignant, simple, and profound, then he totally succeeded.

Homeless man helps color-coordinated ingenues find true love.

A Fire In The Snow

The thing about Sam Shepard is, he can’t create a story to save his life. When you shout “Plot!” at Sam Shepard, he hears “Graveyard!” He’s much more interested in situation, and since situation is inherently static –- is pretty much a pot, not a plot –- the success of a situationwright (as opposed to a playwright) is how well he or she brings that pot to boil, and what the characters do while they’re getting cooked. Like Beckett, it’s impossible to ever tip the pot over and walk away; like Pinter, the pot is just a device to see how everybody reacts when things heat up. But with Shepard, the pot is always made up of something symbolic, like the idea of manhood or the idea of America, and these are what everybody in a Shepard play winds up bouncing against or embracing when everything starts bubbling and steaming. They fight the pot or grab the pot, and they all get burned. When the pot is bigger than everybody else, you get Buried Child, which is all symbol and no substance (or as Christopher Durang would say, all sty and no eye). But when the pot is smaller than the people, and you get to see the characters cooking their own goose, that's when you get something as perfectly-balanced as The New Group’s production of A Lie Of The Mind.


Written in '85, after Shepard collaborator and friend Joseph Chaykin had a stroke that resulted in severe aphasia, the play features a central character who has been beaten up so badly that she's brain damaged, and her speech patterns (from all accounts) mirror those of Chaykin after his recovery. As for the rest of the characters, it’s got all the usual Shepard trappings (One brother who’s angry and violent? Check. One brother who’s a bit of a pussy? Check. One son who will never please his father? Check. One father from hell? Check and double check.) as well as the Ineffectual Mom, the Outsider Female (the one with aphasia), and the Insider Female, who actually gets to deliver the Big Revelation Monologue that usually goes to one of the brothers.

Out of this overly-schematic cat’s cradle of echoes and connections, director Ethan Hawke has created something a lot less self-indulgent than any other Shepard production I’ve ever seen, for which he deserves a lot of credit. As does the cast. Laurie Metcalfe and Keith Carradine give the kind of performances which, if this was a film, would earn them both shoo-in Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. Marin Ireland keeps you hanging on her every word as their damaged-in-so-many-ways daughter. Alessandro Nivola makes the Angry Brother incredibly precise and incredibly dangerous. Josh Hamilton mines the Weak Brother for comic and pathetic gold. Frank Whaley inhabits the thankless part of Thankless Son without making the guy annoying (no small feat). And Maggie Siff keeps you hanging on her every word by portraying a woman whose head is too fast for her tongue; she’s always breaking off in mid-syll --mid-sentence because what she just said isn’t quite true –- and she wants to tell the truth –- which makes her the damaged-in-a-different-way sister-under-the-skin to Marin Ireland. Only Karen Young's Lorraine is a disappointment; you'd think the only other parent on stage would rise to the level of Metcalfe and Carradine, but no -- while everyone else lets you know just where and why the ice broke under their feet, Young skates through her part without a stumble, and in a way reminds you of what a train wreck this play would be in the hands of lesser actors. Or a lesser director.



Kudos also to set designer Derek McLane and the brothers Gaines for their original music. The stage at the Acorn looks like a cross between the contents of a wagon train and one of Charles Foster Kane’s storage spaces, with chairs and tables and knick-knacks (and guns) hanging everywhere. And the score by Shelby and Latham Gaines creates its own landscape by using pieces of the set to create the kind of Bernard Hermann underscoring that literally stands as a completely different character on stage.



The afternoon I saw it, my friend Lisa and I skewed the average age to under 70 just by walking in the door. The oldster in front of me gave me a nasty glare over her shoulder the first time I laughed, so I kept the howling to a minimum out of respect for her hearing aid. And a couple of other oldsters were talking afterwards about how Shepard really wants to be O’Neill, except that he lacks O’Neill’s sense of tragedy. Which is like saying Gene Kelly wanted to be Fred Astaire, except that he lacked a closet full of tuxedos. So I kept my thoughts to myself, out of respect to their preference for booze-soaked Irish blather salted with over-repeated refrains like “Damn pipe dreams!” and “It’s only a summer cold.”

So don’t go expecting to see O’Neill. And actually? Don’t even go expecting to see Shepard. Go to this one expecting to see a great production of an ambitious play that doesn’t get done a lot because it’s not easy to do right. And do it quick; it closes on March 20th.

Haiku

I have a confession
I was high when I met you
Haven't come down since


Copyright 2010 Matthew J Wells

In an age without faith

In an age without faith
reason is the moral compass.
Logic points to the answer.
Answers riot in the streets.
Events replace history.
Things happen
before they've barely begun.
Disasters are digested
before they've barely been tasted.

In an age without faith
there is more criticism than creative writing.
Earthquakes are trivialities.
Trivialities are rated from one to ten.
Physical pleasure is a conditioned response.
Death is unnatural:
death is a crime and the living are its victims,
death is a terrorist and the living are its hostages.

In an age without faith
God is a commodity.
The faithful hoard him
and flaunt him
and use him like money.
The frightened wear him like a flag.
Zealots shoot him like a drug.
The worldly treat him like a senile parent.
The government uses him
to support a life of obedience,
the liberty to do as you’re told,
and the pursuit of self-indulgence.

In an age without faith,
hope is replaced by expectation.
Rewards become rights.
Gifts become givens.
Disappointment and disenchantment
are always someone else's fault.

Because in a godless age
there is no responsibility.
There are only accidents, and the victim.

There is no justice.
There is only malice, and the scapegoat.

There is no conscience.
There is only shame, and the secret.

There is no forethought.
There are only predictions, and assumptions.

There is no divinity.
There is only man, and his mortality.

There is no truth.
There are only facts, and opinions

and people like me
who wonder why all the things
that everyone believes in
are smaller
and meaner
than they are.


copyright 2010 Matthew J Wells

Food Poisoning Really Kicks Your Arse

Tuesday night, before seeing Marion Bridge (highly recommended, by the way), I picked up a roast beef sandwich, a Coke and a bag of chips, and ate it in a deli on 47th Street. About 20 minutes after the play finished, my stomach began its own two-day-long production of The Eruption Of Mt. Vesuvius, with me in the part of The Broken Gargoyle, not knowing which end to spout from first. I'm tempted to chalk it up to chance or bad luck, but why do that when I have an entire month to blame? Also: never going into that deli again.

Attack Of The Februaries!

Yesterday I got the first rejection letter from everything I sent out in November and December last year, so it's official -- the Februaries are off to a running start! Nothing like rejection, low self-esteem, and an inner voice saying that the only way your name will be in fucking lights is if they bury you with a neon tombstone to make you feel like, if the earth had a shoulder, it would shrug you off like the annoying bug you are.

Other examples of the Februaries: I'm at The Bitter End last night when this guy wearing a chckered cap leans over and says:

GUY IN CHECKERED CAP: Hey, do I know you?
ME: Not unless you know a lot of unproduced playwrights.

Ninety minutes later they announce a special guest, and up to the stage goes the guy in the checkered cap. Turns out he was Garland Jeffreys. This is what the Februaries does to me. It's the month when I'm guaranteed to make a snarky comment about the Schubert Organization while a Schubert is sipping wine at the next table.

And it's also February 2nd! And you know what that means -- today's the day when, if Anne Hathaway sees her shadow, we have four more weeks of Oscar speculation. That's right, Oscar noms come out today.

More on all this later, because really, what's a depressed writer stuck in a soul-destroying day job to do except escape into a discussion of why Avatar is the coming of the apocalypse, why Kathryn Bigelow is like Victoria Woodhull, and why Nine should be retitled "Four, With a Six Point Five From The Russians."

Happy Birthday, Ava

If beauty was a knife, then I would bleed
  To death in seconds every time we meet.
If elegance was one unplanted seed
  Then gardens would grow up around your feet.
If sweetness had a tongue, then it would sound
  Like bells on Christmas morning when you laugh.
If lovely was a teardrop, I would drown
  With HE DIED HAPPY as my epitaph.
If your smile was a snowflake, I would freeze.
  If your touch was a feather, I could fly.
If words were music, you’d speak symphonies.
  If your kisses were life, I’d never die.
     So many ways to paint your beauty true;
     So many diamonds, and the necklace you.

Copyright 2010 Matthew J Wells