The Wiz

Ashanti, Nigel the dog, LaChanze

City Center’s Encores! series has recently extended its season of staged readings of rarely revived musicals into the summer, outside of its typical three-show run in the spring. Two years ago, a summer remount of Gypsy triumphed with Patti LuPone in the lead, in a production directed by Arthur Laurents that went on to garner multiple Tony Awards during its subsequent Broadway run.

Hopefully, their latest summer production, a revival of The Wiz, will have the pleasure of a similar fate, despite Charles Isherwood’s less than charitable review in the Times. Directed by the talented Thomas Kail, who also directed In the Heights, musical directed by Alex Lacamoire (who also did In the Heights), and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler (currently represented on Broadway by 9 to 5), the production teems with talent and energy, offering a dazzling evening of great fun from a talented, infectiously delighted cast.

Even though the show was first produced in the 1975, this production didn’t smell a whiff out of date. Some of the language, on closer scrutiny, might seem anachronistic. A few bon mots suspiciously close to “here comes the Judge” are rattled off by an earnest cast that’s fully behind them, never pausing for a moment to be suspicious or snobby about the phrasing’s provenance (this despite the fact that many of the cast probably weren’t alive in the 70s).

Kail, himself a young Wesleyan University graduate, puts his shoulder behind the music and the dialogue, creating a fast-paced romp from Kansas to Oz in a musical retelling of the classic story with an African American spin that stamps the music with an erstwhile Motown idiom.

Perhaps because it was first produced in the 70s, when feminism was very much in the air, women dominate the musical. Ashanti, the Grammy Award-winning pop singer, plays Dorothy, and LaChanze matches her fame in the double role of Auntie Em and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. The show’s best numbers are sung by these two and the supporting women. Dawnn Lewis plays Addaperle, the Good Witch of the North, the first to meet Dorothy in Oz. She enters decked out in denim dotted with colorful patchwork quilt accents, wearing tall hats stacked on top of each other and horizontal striped stockings that somehow elongate legs that already tower on platform shoes.

Addaperle’s number, “He’s the Wizard,” promises that Dorothy will find her way home with his assistance, which begins her quest. But since we know the story, it’s the song’s delivery, and Lewis’s interpretation of Addaperle as sweet, well-meant, but addled that makes the number such fun. (Like a failed student at Hogworth’s, she can’t get her wand to work.)

Paul Tazewell’s imaginative, campy costume design—along with the hair and wig design by Charles G. Lapointe and makeup design by Cookie Jordan—distinguishes all the characters in this production, and provides much of the evening’s fun.

Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Tichina Arnold) also sings a show-stopping number, for which she dons the fabulously red, richly textured and layered outfit of a modern-day devil, wearing a tight-fitting body suit in a red and black paisley print, over which she pulls a hoop skirt, half covered with a fringey dress, topped by a red and black wig styled in long curly dreads. The whole campy effect gives her a devil-may-care-if-I’m-a-devil attitude that Arnold delivers with energetic panache. Her song, “No Bad News,” forbids anyone in her court to tell her anything she doesn’t want to hear, which eventually means the flunky who announces Dorothy’s arrival meets a comically bad end.

LaChanze has the pleasure of the first and the penultimate number in The Wiz, first as Auntie Em, singing a maternal ode to her niece as she hangs laundry on the clothesline while that foreboding wind kicks up. Even wearing Auntie Em’s shapeless housedress, LaChanze is a riveting presence with the best voice in the cast. When she returns as Glinda, wearing a diaphanous sky-blue gown with a silken turban wrapped around her head, LaChanze is luminous, glowing with the promise that if Dorothy believes in herself (as Glinda’s song goes), she’ll get home to Kansas and control her own destiny. LaChanze puts over the anthem to 1970s-style self-actualization like she’s announcing the one true religion. How can Dorothy not get back to Kansas, given LaChanze’s faith-full notes?

Ashanti is the production’s weakest link, but then, Dorothy isn’t the most interesting character in The Wiz. After she’s displaced by the tornado—which happily, Kail doesn’t try to reconceptualize by referring to Hurricane Katrina or any other available current event—Dorothy arrives in Oz, where she mostly reacts with either wonder or dismay at its marvels. The role is one long reaction, and Ashanti’s expressions shift—or not—accordingly. But her responses seem practiced, rather than spontaneous; her face looks stiff and too carefully arranged.

She’s cute and earnest but bland, and lacks that glowing musical theatre-person presence that her co-stars exude. Ashanti acts like the pop singer she is, a girl who’s accustomed to being technologically mediated and much more amped up than she is here. Ashanti’s voice, though, is gorgeous, and she gets her songs’ tone and spirit just right. She’s also a very game; for some reason, she doesn’t dance, but she’s happily led around the stage by chorus boys and girls, and vamps in place with the other characters.

Ashanti is also the lightest skinned person on stage, whatever that might mean to the politics of race, which this production downplays. Since no white characters appear in The Wiz, the African American characters and cast create a world in which their race is the norm and goes without comment. Ashanti stands out in this context, although perhaps her exceptionalism makes sense for Dorothy, who is indeed different in Oz.

Ashanti never gets in the way, but she never stands up to the sparkle and shine of the other performers. She’s upstaged by each new character Dorothy meets. The Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Lion each get their own tour-de-force number, which they put over with skillful aplomb. Christian Dante White is all floppy limbs as the Scarecrow, in a wonderfully physical and relaxed performance. Joshua Henry, as the Tinman, taps his heart out for his “Slide Some Oil to Me” solo. James Monroe Iglehart, as the Lion, is a big teddy bear of a performer, who inhabits his furry suit with the appropriate aw-shucks charm. Iglehart manages to wrangle a bit of heart from Ashanti, who seems to enjoy his company. Warmth radiates between them that doesn’t spark between the lead and her other co-stars.

Orlando Jones, as the Wiz himself, is intermittently effective, handsome in his bedazzled emerald coat and fantasy make-up when the wizard deploys shock and awe, and later, unapologetically matter-of-fact about his fall from power. He’s charming at the end as he goes about solving everyone’s problems, making each of the principles happy but Dorothy, whom he leaves on the ground as his hot air balloon takes off (or here, is blown sideways offstage) without her.

Dorothy doesn’t return to Kansas at the end of The Wiz to reveal the real-life identities of all her Oz friends. Instead, she sings “Home,” gesturing toward a happy end to her journey, and the curtain rings down. Perhaps because Ashanti can’t quite fill the moment emotionally, the ending feels a bit inconclusive.

But these minor defects don’t mar what’s otherwise an entertaining evening. Blankenbuehler’s terrific choreography evokes the story’s high drama. The black-clad dancers embody the tornado in a stunning coup-de-theatre. They fly about t he stage, putting their arms through the shirts hanging on Auntie Em’s line and wreaking havoc with her house. The set, designed by David Korins, comes apart creatively; the dancers create the damage of gusting winds by uprooting each piece of the house and planting them in odd parts of the stage, as if the weather explodes Dorothy’s home into its constituent parts.

The dancers’ choreography accomplishes many of the set changes. They create the yellow-brick road by appearing with small suitcases painted in a brick-like pattern that they put together like blocks, passing them under the feet of the actors as they “ease on down the road” to Oz. Dancers comprise the dangerous poppy field, twirling around the principles in form-fitting green sheaths and wearing bright red fright wigs.

As the munchkins, they sit on rolling chairs that halve their height, and wear hoop-skirt costumes that cover their bodies from chin to toe, while extravagant Koosh-ball shower caps adorn their heads. The flying monkeys, who get a kind of Michael Jackson Thriller treatment, threaten the company with their sinister moves.

And Toto, of course, is adorable.

The audience loved the high energy production the night I attended (a preview performance on 6/13/09). In the Bush years, the failed wizard might have been reminiscent of W., with his empty insistence on missions accomplished, and the sham promises of a few last left-over miracles that never transpire. But by this production’s end, the Wiz sounds more like Obama as he delivers his gentle, yes-you-can moral, the everything-you-need-is-within-yourself boosterism on which The Wiz, like The Wizard of Oz before it, stakes its happy ever after claim.

In a production like this one, though, watching the talented ensemble tell the old story, the moral feels a lot more like yes-WE-can. That works for me.

The Feminist Spectator

Twelfth Night, Central Park

Audra McDonald and Anne Hathaway (photo Jane Marcus)

Seeing theatre in Central Park is magical under most circumstances. The Delacorte is an intimate space; its horseshoe-shaped house brings the audience in toward the stage, which is small enough that the actors appear close. Behind the set, you can see trees sway in the breeze, and with the best designs, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the scenery leaves off and nature begins.

The Public Theatre takes advantage of the idyllic location and offers a production of Twelfth Night that doesn’t reinterpret the comedy in radical ways, but fulfills its potential with a lovely, funny, sweet evening in which actors and spectators alike seem to revel in one another’s presence under the stars (and the planes flying in and out of Laguardia that hum regularly overhead, their lights like far flung Leikos or Fresnels shining down to help the actors’ way).

Director Dan Sullivan sets the play in a vaguely Edwardian moment, which allows the elevated language to make sense without making the costumes (subtly wrought by Jane Greenwood) intrusively “period.”

John Lee Beatty’s set literalizes the pastoral theme. Instead of furniture, the floor is built up into small hills of various sizes, some planted with trees and some gleefully bare, which allow the actors to slide down or bounce against the faux-grassy surfaces. Given the high camp physicality of the production, those actions are often in evidence. Setting the play in an outdoor world mirrors the outdoor theatre, making its effect even more whimsical and midsummer-esque.

Anne Hathaway and Raul Esparza (photo by Jane Marcus)

The Public’s is the third production of Twelfth Night I’ve seen this year. In London, a Donmar Warehouse production that moved to the West End set the story in what looked like the belly of a great ship, with huge wooden slats extending the height of the stage. The actors nearly cowered under the arching dark wood, which gave the production a more foreboding tone. Derek Jacobi’s presence as the ridiculous but wronged Malvolio lent the play a peculiarly sad air, despite the antics of Sir Toby and Andrew Aguecheek.

In the McCarter Theatre Center production I saw last March, Twelfth Night played out against a wide and high white scrim that swept down into a parabolic wooden stage floor that looked like an elegant version of a roller derby rink. The set design featured blood red roses, hung in two dimensional photorealist images and later concretized by hundreds of three-dimensional flowers that fell from the flies and remained on stage for the actors to walk among until the play’s end. The design emblematized the relief and revelry of spring and of love.

But the Public’s outdoor setting and outdoor-inspired scenery did the most to enhance the play’s merriment and melancholy, framing its movement from one emotion to the next as a kind of picaresque, as the characters traveled the set’s green byways. The black stage apron concealed Malvolio’s prison in the second act, and in the first, its imposing steel grate rose up to expel the shipwrecked Viola onto the shores of Illyria in a puff of fog, smoke, and damp. But for the most part, the dark forestage was overshadowed by the set’s calm and playful green and its tall, leafing trees that blended seamlessly with the real arbor the set incorporated.

Emphasizing the comic over the melancholic focused the production squarely on Viola and her turn as Cesario, courting the mourning Olivia for Cesario’s employer, the Duke Orsino. In the McCarter production, Veanna Cox turned in a sublimely funny performance as an awkward, pratfall-prone Olivia, which made her attraction to Cesario—so easily transferred to the properly heterosexual love object Sebastian, when he makes his appearance—less serious, closer to the comic subplot of mischief that Toby, Aguecheek, and Maria play out.

In the Public production, Audra McDonald, though beautiful and wistful as Olivia, plays the character as more conventionally moonstruck over Cesario, whose presence pulls her out of her extended mourning for her brother, as she’s gradually brought back to life by her attraction for Orsino’s young messenger. MacDonald performs a few deft double-takes later in the play, as she begins to sort out the double-vision of Viola and Sebastian. But she’s a rather wan presence against Anne Hathaway’s vitality as Cesario/Viola.

The Public often casts high profile film actors in its summer shows in the park. Hathaway makes a wonderful Viola. Her performance is full of life and energy, but carefully modulated to accommodate Viola’s wistful longing for Orsino. I heard lines in the play that never sounded so pertinent before, thanks to her heartfelt, meaningful delivery. Instead of struggling to project personality and to command a physical presence, as do many transplanted film actors (Hathaway was nominated for an Oscar for her devastating performance last year in Rachel Getting Married), Hathaway seemed a natural.

Hathaway’s star power brings the production buoyant liveliness, she connects warmly with the rest of the cast. Her relationship with Orsino, played by a slightly campy, appropriately pouty Raul Esparza, develops quickly into easy camaraderie and the attraction that surprises them both, with her consternated that her true sex is hidden, and he distracted by erotic longing for a person he thinks is a boy. The casting winks at itself—Esparza has been out as bisexual for some time—which makes the gendered confusion of his attraction to Cesario that much more fun (and the moment at the end when he reaches for Sebastian’s hand by accident that much more sweet). He and Hathaway seem to share genuine affection; it’s clear that they’re having great fun together onstage.

But then, so is the rest of the cast. McDonald flings herself into her flirtation with Cesario, exuberantly kissing him on the mouth in her desperation to have him. Hathaway reacts with dismay at Olivia’s demonstrativeness, but somehow manages to avoid the homophobia implicit in that reaction. Instead, when the misunderstanding is revealed, she and Olivia/McDonald instantly translate their affections for one another into sisterhood. Olivia gets to have her soul mate as both a man and a woman. The production revels in this abundance of erotics and affection.

In fact, a kind of queerness tinges the whole event, especially in the antics of Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek. Jay Saunders, who’s typically cast in films and television crime dramas as the sober sidekick (he most recently played the lovelorn neighbor lusting after Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road), pulls out all the stops to play the red-faced, alcohol-sodden Toby, a barrel-chested, grizzled companion to the slight, very fey and befuddled Hamish Linklater as Aguecheek.

Anne Hathaway and Hamish Linklater (foreground) (photo by Jane Marcus)

Linklater performs the most captivating, hilarious version of the hapless suitor of any of the productions I saw this year. In London, Aguecheek’s comedy came mostly from his height—he was a long string bean of an actor who towered over Belch and the others. In the McCarter production, he was played as slightly fey, as well as ridiculous. But here, Linklater perfectly embodies both the character’s physical timidity (despite his sometimes blustery words) and his emotional and intellectual inadequacies, nearly bringing down the house with his delivery and his physical comedy. Just watching him too carefully hook his lank blond hair over his ears provoked laughter, so nicely calibrated and comic were his gestures.

Julie White, as Maria, brought the proceedings a 21st century comic perspective, as each of her line readings and actions seemed of the moment, which only amplified the comedy in the Belch/Aguecheek scenes. Michael Cumpsty dignified the dour Malvolio with his resonant voice and pompous posturing. He affected an appropriately wounded exit after his imprisonment, but his anger didn’t dint the good humor of this production.

This Twelfth Night boasted enough music and lyrics to be a quasi-musical, which the cast sang beautifully. Audra MacDonald’s voice was wasted as Olivia, but Hathaway, who proved her mettle in the impromptu/staged improv with Hugh Jackman at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony, showed off a lovely soprano, and seemed as comfortable singing as she was acting. Esparza offered her a stalwart duet partner.

David Pittu, playing a very wry, quick witted, rather understated Feste (which I appreciated, since the character, pushed too far, as he was in the McCarter production, can be tiresome), produced a commanding tenor for his many solos. A band of violin, guitar, Irish Flutes, smallpipes, whistles, and percussion, played by period-costumed musicians who gamely acted as part of the show, accompanied the actors with music composed for the production.

The final song is an ode to performance itself, regardless of what the elements bring. The lyrics about the wind and the rain prompted laughter from the audience, as it drizzled throughout the show on the night I attended (7/11/09). While the real thunderstorms came later that evening, and didn’t delay the production, the actors and the audience commiserated in our mutual dampness. As she ran offstage after the rousing and enthusiastic curtain call, Hathaway flung her arms into the air with the rest of the cast, all of them hooting and hollering, weather be damned, as irrepressible at the end as they were throughout this wonderful production.

The Feminist Spectator

Nurse Jackie

Merritt Wever, Janie Kelly, Edie Falco

This new Showtime series stars Edie Falco as a wry, knowing, harried emergency room nurse. The show offers a terrific vehicle for the versatile actor, as a well-written, smart and funny situation-based character study that takes advantage of Falco’s intelligent, restrained emotional presence and her quirky humor. Unlike network doctor dramas like ER, women characters propel Nurse Jackie’s narratives. Jackie begins each episode with a brief voice-over remark, and then the story continues from her perspective.

Jackie’s best friend at work is Dr. Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), an elegant Brit whose arrogance is matched by her intelligence and wit. The upstairs/downstairs aspect of their friendship provides lots of comic fuel—O’Hara often refers casually to how much she spent on various items of clothing, from her $1,200 scarf to her almost as expensive silk stockings. Jackie and her bar-owning husband clearly pinch pennies to make it through their week. Jackie rolls her eyes at her friend’s profligacy, but her indulgence of O’Hara’s class idiosyncrasies emphasizes their bond as women in a professional environment skewed to favor men.

Pompous and powerful male doctors are represented here by Dr. “Coop” Cooper (Peter Facinelli), an Ivy League grad who struts into the ER with a blimp-size ego that Jackie promptly deflates when Coop’s misdiagnosis—against Jackie’s instincts—causes a young patient’s death. After the first few episodes, Jackie’s frequent corrections seem to be bringing Coop into line; he’s cultivating his human side and considering his patients’ emotional needs. In a recent episode he lavished rather sweet attention on an elderly woman on one of her regular trips to the ER from a nursing home. Coop adjusts her wig and compliments her vanity while writing her scrips, even though when she soon expires, he’s out by the nurses’ station boasting of how skillfully he handled his first gunshot wound patient a few curtains down.

Facinelli plays Coop with a dollop of humility and lots of magnanimity, although even he seems uncomfortable with the character’s odd, unconscious tendency to grab women’s breasts when he’s anxious (a completely gratuitous quirk that says more about the producers’ anxiety about the women characters’ strength than Coop’s). This week’s episode revealed that Coop is the son of lesbian parents (deliciously played by Swoozie Kurtz and Blythe Danner), a plot twist that also particularizes and humanizes a character who could be a too stereotypically thoughtless and self-involved heel. O’Hara, in fact, looks at Coop differently once she realizes he has two mothers; the information makes him more than a run-of-the-mill, ambitious male doc.

Nurse Jackie draws all of Jackie’s relationships with men in refreshing, slightly off-beat ways. She’s married to a sweet guy who cares for their two young daughters while he runs the bar they own in Queens. But at work, Jackie removes her wedding band, closets her family life, and carries on a regular sexual liaison with the hospital’s pharmacist, Eddie (Paul Schulze). He not only services her physically (with Jackie always literally on top) but keeps her stocked in the painkillers that make long days of walking hard floors possible. Jackie’s back seems seriously compromised, but the painkillers come with an addiction problem. She snorts Percocet and other opiates in doses small enough to let her function, but regularly enough that her drug use has to become an issue down the narrative line.

Jackie’s secrets, though, keep the character complicated. She never slides into the self-abnegating golden-hearted-but-gruff nurse stereotype that lurks just around the corner of this story. So far, the show avoids that pitfall, gilding Jackie’s essential goodness with enough sardonic cynicism to keep her from being a simple saint. Her first-year student nurse, Zoey (Merritt Wever), offers her a useful foil, as Zoey delivers the platitudes about wanting to help people that drives some idealistic young women and men into nursing in the first place.

Put up against Jackie’s unsentimental pragmatism, Zoey’s enthusiasm plays as funny but not quite ridiculous. The character could easily be the butt of facile jokes—Zoey is a bit chunky, not conventionally beautiful, and too open and cuddly for what proves the ER’s more cut-throat environment. But instead, she gets her own sharp edges. Wever’s loose physicality gives Zoey embodied, character-driven humor; for instance, when O’Hara blithely walks off with Zoey’s new stethoscope, the young nurse’s attempts to retrieve it provide Wever with moments of stuttering explanation and stealthy borrowings that show off Zoey’s agency and nascent power, instead of belittling her as inept.

Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman), Jackie’s nursing colleague, unfortunately bears the burden of race and sexuality in the narrative, a load too heavy for any one actor to carry easily. Sleiman’s features are ethnically ambiguous (his character’s full name is Mohammed de la Cruz), allowing him fill the “colored” slot in the character list, and his slightly fey, gentle presence and willingness to give Zoey fashion advice betray his gayness. Although his easy relationship with Jackie gives Sleiman and Falco some nice moments, so far, Mo-Mo represents still another gay person of color serving the development of the far more centralized white characters, a narrative strategy we could by now all do without.

On the other hand, Anna Deveare Smith makes regular appearances as Mrs. Akalitus, a nurse-turned-hospital administrator now charged with guarding the bottom line. The character is a hard-assed factotum, but Smith brings her, too, subtle off-beat humor. When she borrows what she thinks is a packet of Jackie’s sugar, and unknowingly gets high on the painkillers Jackie has ground up and put into the packet instead, Smith’s performance as the suddenly high and goofy administrator is priceless.

In another episode, Akalitus finds a taser gun lying in the corridor. After she shouts with anger to no one in particular about how irresponsible it is to leave such things lying around, she gets on an elevator and prompting stuns herself with the gun. Her electrified pratfall is hilarious. Watching Smith, who usually plays the steely, powerful, alpha female roles in films and television shows, play a comic character role makes me admire her acting even more.

Many terrific New York-based actors play the ER’s patients and visitors, offering keenly observed turns as the sick and dying and their families. The situations into which they’re written, however, are often predictable and run to stereotypes. For example, in Episode #3, Lynn Cohen is on hand as an elderly Jewish woman who tends to her dying husband’s heart disease with chicken soup. Their scenes are saccharine and lachrymose, their Jewish accents wearying echoes of vaudeville sketches about Jews and their magic ministrations that should be put to rest soon.

Likewise, the Latina mother whose son’s lung collapsed in a playground accident speaks with a thick accent, and her other son is excessively emotionally expressive; the elderly white woman who’s regularly delivered to the ER from her nursing home is vain about her appearance; the tourists from the Mid-West are white, middle-class, and heterosexual, and apologize for everything (even though the woman turns out to be an opium addict, offering a neat mirror for Jackie’s developing habit); and an international diplomat savagely murders a prostitute but can’t be touched, thanks to his legislated immunity. Jackie navigates these characters and their issues deftly, always looking out for the well-deserving underdog and wreaking what vengeance she can on the powerful and evil. But they still remain vehicles in which to drive her character, rather than truly interesting people of their own.

Nurse Jackie swivels from wistful and wry to parodic and satirical fairly quickly. For instance, when Jackie and her husband Kevin attend a meeting at their daughter Grace’s school, the teacher, the school psychologist, and the school nurse are played in high farce and shot from camera angles that make them appear large and confrontational to the prosaic, confused Jackie and Kevin. But the small family’s scenes at home are wistfully realist, as the girls cuddle with Kevin on their parents’ bed watching television while they wait for Jackie to come home at night. The combination of exaggerated and earnest works, as Nurse Jackie’s sharp humor oscillates between its poignant observations about the proximity of death to life and its insights about how we navigate all those moments in between.

The Feminist Spectator

Groundswell

Larry Bryggman, Souleymane Sy Savane, David Lansbury

In playwright Ian Bruce’s note in the program of the New Group’s production of Groundswell, he addresses the intractable politics of the new South Africa. He describes how blacks are desperately finding their way through administrating a new government, trying to undo decades of damage from apartheid, while whites struggle to find their place in the country’s new cosmology.

Bruce says, “While most blacks and some whites maintain hope and sanity by remaining loyal to the older liberation structures or ideas, this loyalty is no longer a given. As it should, the political pressure is building around bread and butter, rather than ideological issues. For the very poor, which is the majority, the more that is offered, the more they become discontented about what they still lack.”

I visited South Africa a few years ago, and witnessed the bitterness of native Afrikaners who feel disenfranchised for the first time, as well as the unbearable poverty of Black South Africans still living in the corrugated tin shanty towns that line the country’s highways. People walk on those interstates, waiting for jitneys to deliver them to jobs, and selling fruits, vegetables, and other wares, as though these major roads are extensions of the marketplace, the thin threads that connect one poor community with another.

On our trip through the country, our Afrikaner driver disparaged what he believes to be an ineffectual new government, and could barely conceal his antipathy for the regime under which he now lives. The black South African trackers and guides in the game preserves we visited told stories about their fathers and grandfathers, who knew the land we traveled intimately. These men passed down their knowledge of the animals we drove to see, to sons now employed by large corporations that own and organize thousands of acres of land with herds of elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, zebras, and other amazing species. We visited shanty towns, where we were introduced to hopeful residents, determined in their faith that their turn would come to move out of their jerry-rigged tin shacks into the concrete bunkers that represent a step up into real housing.

The country’s contradictions are confounding and upsetting. Bruce manages to capture these paradoxes in Groundswell, his poignant, intense play about three very different South African men confronting their positions in the nation’s chess game of a future. Meticulously directed by the New Group’s artistic director Scott Elliott, the play carefully portrays the hopes, dreams, and frustrations of men whose relationships to South Africa’s new structure of power and possibility couldn’t be more different.

The play’s narrative spins out through generic realist conventions. The men confront each other in an isolated guest house along South Africa’s desolate West Coast, acting in a gorgeous box set designed by the ubiquitous Derek McLane (who designed Our House at Playwrights Horizons and 33 Variations on Broadway as well as Groundswell, with all three productions running simultaneously). The one-set design depicts in detail the living and dining room of the small guest cottage on the ocean, with its slightly shabby nautical décor, its knotty pine walls, colonial wooden tables, chairs, and sideboard, and carved pictures of the sea lining the walls.

Jason Lyons’s lighting evokes the sun gradually setting on the water; from the cottage’s windows, the sky can be seen deepening into azure hues tinged with pink as the play progresses. Shane Rettig’s sound design also textures the production, with elegiac tolling bells and fog horns, constantly reminding the men of where they are as they wonder, for very different reasons, whether or not they’ll ever be able to leave.

Deep-sea diver Johan (David Lansbury) and his black friend Thami (Souléymane Sy Savané), who runs the guest house in its owner’s absence, cook up a scheme to get Thami’s guest, Smith (Larry Bryggman), to part with some of his obvious wealth to fund their application for a government empowerment scheme for small business owners. With Smith’s help, the two men believe they can move out of their relative poverty and dependence on employment from others to make their own way.

Smith has arrived at the guest house somewhat by accident, under the impression that he was traveling to a golf resort where he could relax on holiday. Instead, he finds a much smaller, simpler lodging than he expects, and the setting more intimate than anonymous, and much more remote. Golf isn’t an option; Smith can’t get a signal for his cell; and he’s obviously accustomed to finer food and drink. Bryggman does a fine job establishing Smith’s pretensions. When he comes from his room for dinner, he wrinkles his nose at the wine Thami and Johan have carefully chosen to honor his arrival. What for them is a top shelf choice for Smith is barely drinkable, although he’s pleasantly surprised to find his first taste adequate.

Smith’s colonialist class status is first established in these bits of business. After their dinner, for example, Smith asks for another glass of whiskey, waiting for Thami to pour for him even though the bottle is close at hand. Elliott and Bruce underline that Smith’s privilege is so deeply ingrained, he wouldn’t think of pouring for himself if a Black server is at the table. While the three men sit in apparent camaraderie, their class and racial differences lurk not at all far beneath the surface.

Johan’s relationship with Thami proves even more delicate, because their class affinities make a real friendship seem possible. Johan has been injured in a dive; Lansbury plays him clutching his upper arm in apparent discomfort through most of the play. He finally admits that he’ll no longer be able to dive, which means the end of his only source of income. Johan speaks in a thick Afrikaner brogue, but he also practices broken Xhosa, Thami’s native language, asking his friend to teach him new words and to correct his pronunciation.

Johan at least tries to understand his Black friend, to approach him as a full human being. Johan, in fact, argues most vociferously, when the three men’s relationship becomes strained, that Smith owes Thami reparations for apartheid, that part of Smith’s wealth rightly belongs to the Black man. Even Thami can’t quite get behind Johan’s protestations. Although he doesn’t say so outright, Thami’s eyes and his behavior indicate that he’d rather not blame one individual for decades of racial oppression.

But Bruce’s play asks who, then, is responsible for the long years of apartheid, and how should Black South Africans’ plight be redressed? After all, if it’s not Smith himself, it’s certainly more his kind’s fault than it is the working class seaman Johan’s. But the play complicates even Smith’s position by making him relatively sympathetic. He defends his own propriety, insisting when pushed that he contributed his money to all the right causes, that he, too, was against apartheid, and that he, too, is distraught over the country’s disrepair.

Smith’s second act monologue describes being let go from a government position, only to be called back to consult when the people who replaced him had no idea how to do the job. Bruce’s play proposes that Smith isn’t the source of all evil. He’s a decent, wealthy man who’s lived through an untenable situation differently than Thami and Johan, but who sees the inequities clearly. Still, Smith’s hubris is his inability to see that although the course of history hasn’t been in his control, he’s benefited in ways that bear consideration. Groundswell ultimately accuses him of a smug avoidance of blame.

Director Elliott and his cast carefully build the evening’s tension. The play opens with Thami reading out loud in Xhosa a letter he’s writing to his wife. The lyrical language—full of clicks and mouth-tongue positions alien to English speakers but musical to hear—is left untranslated. But it’s clear that Thami is describing something beautiful, as his face is full of a mixture of joy and longing.

When Johan later tries to translate the letter, it seems Thami is constructing an edited version of his life for his wife, painting a much more hopeful scene than the one in which he’s living. Gracefully played with a welter of conflicting emotions by Savané, the tall, slender Thami is an elegant man, whose simple black pants, white shirt, and apron mark his servitude. But he holds himself with regal dignity, and takes very seriously his position as the absentee owner’s landlord.

Johan arrives on a gust of wind, all vim and vigor, filling the air with the imagined scent of salt and surf. He’s a seafarer on land, boisterous and physically unsteady, as though he can’t quite find his footing out of the water. Even when he cleans up and changes his clothes for dinner, Johan’s skin retains its moisture, as the saltwater seems to seep from his pores. Lansbury’s wonderful performance keeps a tight hold on Johan’s volatility, but his imminent violence and unpredictability courses just under the surface of his florid face. He and Thami provide a study in contrasts, not only of personality, but of lifestyles and responses to lives of hardship and deprivation.

On his entrance, as he peels off his wet clothes, Johan removes a long fishing knife from its sheath at his belt and puts it in a drawer in the sideboard. The knife amounts to a symbol as potent as the gun in Hedda Gabler; the rules of theatrical narrative dictate that at some point, the weapon will be used. Groundswell’s plot acquiesces to tradition. Our knowledge of the knife haunts the exchanges that follow, and gives Johan a powerful secret that puffs him up beyond his class status.

Hearing that a well-off guest has registered, Johan decides that he and Thami should persuade Smith to sponsor their application for a small business loan that will buy them a lease on an area in which they can mine diamonds. The two men become excited at the prospect of persuading Smith to bankroll their plans, and put together what for them is a special meal over which to convince him.

The meal goes badly from the start. Thami and Johan try to ingratiate themselves with forced jollity, jolted by nerves taut from the high stakes of the interaction. Smith is at first oblivious to the subtext coursing under the meal. Bryggman beautifully executes his dawning understanding that he’s being played. If the three men begin their repast at least performing as equals, Smith’s practiced power soon becomes evident, as Johan can’t get him to see the potential in the government’s assistance plan.

Smith’s own political analysis suggests that the government scheme into which Thami and Johan want to buy is nothing but a sop to the poor, a way to appear to be sharing opportunity that hasn’t been adequately considered or tested. Smith intimates that the land they want to lease has already been thoroughly mined, that there are no diamonds left, and that the government’s empty gesture is meant to provide a false sense of ownership and only fabricated hope.

As Johan becomes more and more desperate and Smith becomes increasingly rational and cynical, the obvious disparity in their power and knowledge is painfully clear to all three men. Thami watches, occasionally interjecting but often simply moving his eyes from one white man to the other, as he observes the contretemps play out. Savané’s face registers his dawning disappointment, as he realizes earlier than Johan that Smith will refuse to contribute to their future.

But Johan won’t let Smith off the hook. As his convoluted proposals become increasingly desperate against Smith’s cool refusal, Johan turns to the bottle to maintain his strength. At the top of the play, he reassured Thami he wouldn’t drink, setting up, like the knife, the inevitability that liquor will arrive in his near future. Over the painful dinner, as Thami clears away a course and moves into the kitchen for the next, Johan pulls a bottle of wine from the shelf and quickly drains it. His belligerence grows with his alcohol consumption, until finally, he’s threatening Smith with the knife he’s pulled from the sideboard to hold at the rich man’s throat.

That the two white men enact the play’s most violent confrontation clarifies how much class is at issue, along with race, in the new politics of South Africa. The comfortable colonialist might be threatened temporarily, but inevitably, he can pack his suitcase, pick up his wallet and his keys, and move on to a more luxe, more impregnable resort. Johan and Thami, trapped in their circumstances, try to build common cause. Johan genuinely wants to learn Xhosa, and his affection for the Black African seems real, even if his demonstrativeness appears alien and discomfiting to Thami’ physical propriety.

But finally, Thami is forced to reject Johan’s gesture of brotherhood. The diver’s methods aren’t his own, and the prideful Thami painfully points out that although Johan tries to learn his language, he can’t truly understand his life. Thami’s commitment to his family outweighs his camaraderie with Johan, whose dreams are larger but less realistic than Thami’s, who wants a small piece of land and a home in which to gather the family from which his work keeps him separate.

Thami’s isolation comes from an economic structure that requires him to leave his village to survive; Johan’s lack of opportunity derives from his alcoholism and his belligerence, along with his class and his place in an economic system with no room for aging divers.

By the play’s end, as the bell by the sea rings mournfully, nothing has changed. But the three tired men, now isolated by their intractable differences, have gained an even deeper understanding that solutions to their awkwardly shared conundrum will be very slow in coming.

The production is beautifully calibrated, as Elliott orchestrates the three men’s emotional trajectories like a conductor leading a trio through a complex musical score. As the tension among them builds and their affiliations subtly shift, each man reveals vulnerabilities only to cover them up once again. They know they can’t be open or honest with one another, that their mutual survival depends on maintaining the roles history has crafted for them, despite their surprisingly mutual, fervent wish that the future will be different.

The Feminist Spectator

Our House

Stephen Kunken, Morena Baccarin, Christopher Evan Welch,
Haynes Thigpen, and Jeremy Strong. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Theresa Rebeck has worked in television on and off, writing for, among other series, NYPD Blue. She's currently developing an HBO series called Women's Studies with actor Julie White. To say she’s seen the dark side of the medium would be putting it mildly. Her latest satirical play about the industry is Our House, at Playwright’s Horizons, smartly directed by Michael Mayer and beautifully performed by a cast that successfully communicates its difficult tone. Everything works in this production. At times, Rebeck delivers her warning message about the confusion of reality and television with too heavy a hand. But since the matinee performance I saw (6/6/09) was a preview, that kink will no doubt get worked out during the run.

Originally commissioned, workshopped, and produced at the Denver Center Theatre, the play describes Wes, a New York, shark of a corporate network television honcho; Jennifer Ramirez, his ambitious news-anchor mistress; and Stu, the dubious, conscience-prone head of the network news division, as their wheelings and dealings overlap with a household of down-at-the-heel roommates somewhere in St. Louis. The play’s intercutting structure reveals its plan and purpose just before the end of the first act, which meanders a bit as Rebeck unspools the relationships and issues that drive the eventual crisis.

I won’t reveal the necessary surprise of that first act’s explosive ending (although I should also say: Spoiler alert!). Suffice it to say that four oddly matched roommates comprise the shabby household in St. Louis. The characters are lightly drawn; Vince (Haynes Thigpen) is a computer nerd who rides a bike to and from work; Grigsby (Mandy Siegried) is a med student intern at a hospital ER; and Alice (Katie Kreisler) newly arrived from Vermont, is a strident, politically correct woman who grates on the others’ nerves.

The fourth roommate is a couch potato graduate student named Merv (Jeremy Strong) who owes the others $4,000 in back rent, but lives blithely unconcerned with his responsibilities or the niceties of a shared household. He raids the refrigerator, poaching his roommates’ food; he stares at the tv for hours, talking back to vapid reality tv shows; and he appears to have the emotional and intellectual constitution of an adolescent. His roommates do little to provoke his eventual violence, which he enacts as spontaneously and thoughtlessly, as he might play a video game.

In fact, Merv’s behavior illustrates Rebeck’s point, which is that network television is in cahoots with an increasingly banal culture that elevates “reality tv” to the status of real-life urgency. Merv looses his ability to discern what’s real from what’s not and can’t grasp the consequences of his actions, which prove dire and irreversible. Instead, when he finds himself in trouble, he asks for help from the only heroine his blinkered broadcast world regularly offers—Jennifer Ramirez (Morena Baccarin), the network news-reader who seems more real to him than his flawed, ordinary, live roommates.

When Merv asks that Jennifer come to negotiate his situation, Wes (Christopher Evan Welch), the crass network head whose machinations provide the counterpoint to Merv’s actions, smells an opportunity for publicity and the fabricated drama he’d much rather program than real reportage. “Who needs news?” he scoffs, as he insists that staying informed in America is optional. Rebeck uses Wes’ response to her contrived events to satirize the networks’ self-serving self-importance and their social irresponsibility.

When Jennifer arrives at the St. Louis residence to interview Merv live on national television, the other roommates urge her to intervene in what’s become a life-and-death crisis. She firmly demurs, insisting that members of the press can’t interfere with the events they cover. Trotting out this chestnut of journalistic ethics in this situation provokes one of the play’s biggest laughs, as Rebeck demonstrates how the presence of the press creates as much as it reflects on the news as it happens.

Jennifer is mouthpiece with an ear-piece, her life-line to Wes and his instructions. When her interview with Merv doesn’t generate enough heat, he tells her to “juice it up,” which she does without hesitation, further illustrating how journalists are agents, as much as archivists, of the events they cover. After Jennifer’s shocking intervention, Wes crows that “the numbers are through the roof,” as he and the anchorwoman/reporter lock lips in the sensation-fueled desire that brought them together in the first place.

Rebeck’s plays sometimes come uncomfortably close to sexism in her portrayals of women. Although most of her work satirizes current events and values, it’s occasionally difficult to tell where her gender stereotypes end and her social critique begins. She draws those lines much more clearly in Our House, and Mayer’s sharp direction and the actors’ clear choices clarify her critique of how gender is used to help networks jockey for position.

Jennifer works her body much more than her mind to move up the corporate tv ladder. She and Wes have sex on his desk as he schemes about cutting 700 jobs from the news division. She’s happy to be his puppet to improve her career, and gleefully participates in her own objectification. One of the production’s many sight gags has Jennifer popping in and out to report short news briefs, each time in a different, increasingly more revealing outfit. The series of costumes changes ends with the anchorwoman in her bra and a skirt, refusing the cowl-neck sweater sent to her from Wardrobe.

And yet, Jennifer isn't stupid; when she mispronounces "Shi'ite" as "shite" in a newscast, she catches her humiliating mistake and wants to fix it. She also hosts a reality tv show, as well as serving as a news anchor. When Stu (Stephen Kunken), the head of the news division who in some ways serves as the play's however ineffectual moral anchor, balks at the combination of “lite” and serious duties, Jennifer and Wes protest that reality tv is just as important as news-making events. The line between contrived and real, serious and stupid, smart and dumb is continually crossed in Our House, so that they finally blur indistinguishably.

Merv, the hapless villain of the play, isn’t supposed to be stupid. He’s a graduate student in an unnamed field, a character point that’s repeated with increasing sarcasm throughout the play. Yet even the presumptively smart guy spends his time glued to the screen, in awe that “tv makes people look so real,” saying he’d like to climb in and live among those he sees reflected.

That desire doesn’t make him particularly crazy, Rebeck intimates. After all, doesn’t “reality tv” invite spectators to consider themselves integral to the proceedings, asking them to vote on their favorite singer, or their least favorite member of the house,or to hear the testimonies of survivors and dog owners and other contestants in pre-arranged conflicts carefully scripted to seem real? Doesn’t even “real” news invite spectators to participate in the judgments its producers devise, posting phone numbers to call to register opinions? What’s crazy about believing what you see and hear broadcast?

Heroes rarely prevail in Theresa Rebeck’s plays, which makes her an equal opportunity playwright. While Wes and Jennifer’s corruption qualifies them as evil purveyors of material Rebeck believes poisons the national psyche, the oblivious roommates of Our House are equally culpable in their inability to note, diagnose, and prevent Merv’s breakdown. None of the characters establish a clear bead on reality or what compels people to continue living it; the dialogue in St. Louis sounds as banal as the repartee at the network.

Rebeck doesn’t pit a well adjusted, authentic heartland against a dishonest, mercenary corporation. Instead, the entire American landscape of time and space, knowledge and truth—as Wes intones at the end, backed by music reminiscent of the all-American soundscape of composer John Williams—is revealed as illusory, banal, and bereft, empty of meaning and driven only by the hollowest pursuits of fifteen minutes of fame and fortune.

Our House takes a moment to get out of the gate, but once the inciting incident occurs, the play runs as fast, furious, and unpredictable as the Kentucky Derby. Mayer uses set designer Derek McLane’s evocative environment to beautiful effect. Wes’ corporate office is drawn in grays, blacks, and transparent, hard materials that move as a unit on and off the small stage.

The disheveled St. Louis house, which rolls out from behind the closed metallic blinds that decorate Wes’ office, is filled with mismatched, stuffed sofas and chairs, and the clutter of four unrelated, not at all wealthy young people living together in a small, untidy space. The television into which Merv stares without blinking is of course positioned in the audience, so that spectators both witness and are implicated by his unnerving fascination for the illusions created for him.

The acting in Our House helps deliver Rebeck’s critique with the necessary satirical panache. Welch beautifully embodies the oily, slick Wes, who’s unaware of his own idiocy and proud of what seem to him shatteringly original and creative ideas (one of which is that Jennifer’s cleavage should be enhanced by a bra with pumps that push together her breasts). Baccarin proves a stalwart Jennifer Ramirez, bringing a bit of intelligence to a character that exists to be used and abused in exchange for the doubtful achievement of television fame.

But Jeremy Strong’s performance as Merv clinches the production’s success. Without an actor capable of shading and modulating Merv’s excesses, Our House could slip over the top into meaningless parody. Instead, Strong brings nuance and a necessary humanity to a character that could quickly become annoying. In his clear-sighted portrait of Merv’s damage—his own and the harm he inflicts—Strong reveals Rebeck’s cautionary tale: if you believe in what television broadcasts as reality, you quickly lose touch with your own.

The Feminist Spectator

33 Variations

Susan Kellerman as Gertie and Jane Fonda as Katherine in 33 Variations

Moisés Kaufman first achieved fame as the artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Company, with whom he collaborated on The Laramie Project, their ethnographically- based treatment of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s death at the hands of two local gay-bashing murderers. Tectonic’s first production was Indecent Exposure, which used a similar pastiche process to knit together various archival sources to offer a sympathetic, Brechtian rendition of the trials of Oscar Wilde. The company’s non-narrative, fragmented style suited their investigations into historical events of questionable morality and ethics, representing a theatrical refusal to take sides while still giving fraught proceedings the benefit of searing examination in performance.

In his solo outing as a playwright, Kaufman’s 33 Variations (on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill, in a production I saw 5-9-09) narrates a somewhat different inquiry into history. Using a more conventional structure and style, the play centers on Dr. Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda), a musicologist studying a minor project by Beethoven in which he obsessively wrote 33 different variations on a simple theme provided by an amateur colleague. In her effort to understand the root of Beethoven’s enduring fascination with the piece, Katherine comes to terms with her own desire to know and her own obsession with work at the expense of intimacy and family life.

The play falls squarely into the tradition of Wit and Third, plays in which smart women are punished for prizing their intellect over more traditionally gendered skills like nurturing. In the more brutal Wit, the female protagonist is a Donne scholar, an exacting teacher who’s isolated herself so that as she lies dying, only her own academic mentor comes to visit. Her death seems retribution for her life choices, even though the playwright, Margaret Edison, metaphorically describes the end of her life as a liberating release.

In 33 Variations, too, a talented female scholar has intimacy issues, and is propelled through the plot by her urgency to solve her research challenges before she’s overtaken by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the degenerate illness that will soon immobilize her body while it leaves her mind intact. Racing against a timetable that gives her a clear handicap, Katherine travels to Bonn to conduct her archival research against the wishes of her daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis), and her doctors, insistent that she’s strong enough to see the trip through. Her journey toward understanding Beethoven’s motivations—since, as she notes, “History doesn’t record what he said”—also marks her own progress toward ill health, in vignettes titled with projected numbers that count off the variations. When the play reaches 33, Katherine’s life has nearly ended.

Kaufman’s conceit presents the past and present simultaneously. Katherine toils in the archive alongside her German colleague, Dr. Gertrude Landenburger (Susan Kellermann), the taciturn, gruff woman who guards Beethoven’s boxes with the fascist fist of archivists the world over. While the two women gradually come to trust and even care for one another, the play intercuts scenes among Beethoven (Zach Grenier) and his assistant, Anton Schindler (Erik Steele), negotiating with Diabelli, who wants to include Beethoven’s variation on his theme in a collection he plans to publish. Diabelli (Don Amendolia) swings between frustration and pleasure at Beethoven’s delay, his ego flattered by the master’s attention to his trifle. As Beethoven grows increasingly deaf—his own historical decline mirroring Katherine’s in the present—the variations take on more weight and import than they might have earlier in his life. Grenier--nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play--does a nice job impersonating a mad artist, and Steele is appropriately protective and self-righteous as his helper.

As Katherine’s health deteriorates, she refuses to return to the States, so Clara and her boyfriend, Mike (Colin Hanks—as in Tom’s son—who’s ingenuous and charming), join the scholar in Bonn. Katherine stumbles toward achieving historical understanding; she finds her tentative way toward a limited kind of intimacy with her daughter and Gertie, whom she finally claims as a friend (after at first demurring that the other woman is merely a “kind acquaintance”); and she comes to terms with her immanent death from an “orphan disease” that afflicts too few people to make it worth the research required to find a cure. The irony, of course, is that Katherine tracks an obscure reference in Beethoven’s oeuvre as her life’s work, while scientists can’t be bothered (or can’t be funded) to find an antidote to save her life.

Nothing much more than that happens in 33 Variations, but the production is replete with small pleasures that make it a worthy experience. The set recalls the vertically stacked wooden boxes that composed the décor for I am My Own Wife, a play about similar reconstructions and memory. Derek McLane, who designed the set for Wife and 33 Variations, riffs on the archive theme again here (and received a Tony nomination for his work), with acid-free boxes neatly laddered atop one another in rows that move up and down and side to side, like the portable, space-saving stacks in some libraries. These three-dimensional representations of a scholar’s labor, however, are far from dusty and untouched, as they were in Wife. They’re luminously lit (by designer David Lander, also Tony nominated), with light that graces them like treasures.

The other visual theme of the impressive but simple set appears on rolling racks, from which sheets of music hang in neat rows, overlaid at various moments with projections of music staffs and the graphic announcements of the numbers of ever accumulating variations and scenes. These moving racks and flying archives allow the set to transform across time and locale; the few set pieces or props—a high desk here, a piece of luggage or a backpack there—become iconic, but leave Kaufman (who also directed) plenty of room to shift his actors and to focus attention on the interactions that form the play’s emotional core. The production moves fluidly and gracefully, its naturalistic acting unimpeded by spectacle or technology, and offers the audience a visually rich but essentially unmediated engagement with its characters.

33 Variations’ other pleasures come from its cast and their beautifully understated acting. Fonda turns in a surprisingly sure, moving performance, appearing to empathize enormously with Katherine and her pursuits while understanding her emotional reticence and occasional coldness as the price of being a woman in a man’s field. Her friendship with Gertie blooms like a rose unfolding in slow motion, as the two women come to trust and admire one another and let down their mutual defenses. Watching two female scholars enjoy their research together, and one another’s company, is a pleasure seldom afforded by a Broadway production. Fonda and Kellermann make the most of their scenes, establishing warmth that’s all the more real for being so muted and taciturn.

As Katherine’s health fails, she becomes more fragile, but Fonda keeps her strong, never pitying the character or deploring her situation. Although the woman who began the aerobics craze in the 1980s is now 71, Fonda’s perfect posture and physical self-confidence make her a presence with which to reckon on stage. Yet her performance isn’t showy; she doesn’t come off as a diva enjoying the adoring attention of rapt fans. Instead, her Tony Award-nominated performance delivers the emotional complexities of a woman who’s chosen her intellect over intimacy without a moment’s regret.

Kaufman’s production—in its words and its images—honors Katherine and the idea of a woman like her, respecting her strength, her choices, and her determination without romanticizing or infantilizing her. In some ways, in fact, Katherine is perfectly ordinary, a woman whose work takes her burrowing deep into the past to look for arcane bits of information which, when she finds them, bring little pieces of the puzzle of knowledge and life clicking into place. No more, no less; but in this production--appropriately nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play--that’s plenty.

The Feminist Spectator

God of Carnage

Gandolfini, Davis, Harden, and Daniels in God of Carnage
Sara Gulwich, New York Times

Yazmina Reza writes crowd-pleasers, plays that appear to give the audience something meaty on which to chew, but essentially put her characters on a predictable collision course, a highway of lite moral complexities in which they find themselves unwittingly and sometimes unwillingly debating ethical issues that finally sound a bit hollow.

But Carnage’s farce kept me from taking it too seriously. Instead, I enjoyed the four fine actors volley Reza’s dialogue (translated by Christopher Hampton) back and forth with superb timing and physical comedy. Although many critics find Carnage a pale imitation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I thought the play too farcical to accept that comparison.

Sure, God of Carnage concerns two couples who begin their evening with polite, decorous banter, trying to come to terms with a school yard altercation that’s left one of their sons “disfigured” by the other's aggression. And sure, the evening ends with both couples drunk and disheveled, their secrets and pretensions summarily revealed, and all of them crumpled in defeated heaps around a living room that’s been trashed by their exploits. But this superficial resemblance to Albee’s classic domestic conflagration makes the comparison unfair to a comedy that wants to bite, but ultimately patches up any breaks it leaves in the skin.

Reza concocts a delightful, short evening of smart comedy by four actors (Tony Award nominees all) who’ve definitely got game. God of Carnage’s confectionary pleasures derive mostly from its actors’ obvious pleasure in zinging one-liners back and forth for a quick 90 minutes under the smooth, confident, and well-paced direction of Matthew Warchus. The actors perform with comic élan and style, delivering this light parody of contemporary parental mores through the social, class-based competition it stages between two white, heterosexual, upper-middle class couples that feels to them much more serious than it appears to us.

In Reza’s conceit, Alan (Jeff Daniels) and Annette (Hope Davis) visit Michael (James Gandolfini) and Veronica (Marcia Gay Harden) to resolve the crisis precipitated by Alan and Annette’s son’s “disfiguring” attack on Michael and Veronica’s boy. The playground conflict has left Michael and Veronica’s boy missing two of his teeth, a crisis apparently severe enough in the bourgeois cosmology Reza depicts that their parents’ draw up what sounds much like an official legal agreement about what’s happened and how they’ve all agreed to respond.

The boys’ skirmish occasions what escalates into their parents’ all out battle to maintain their shredded self-respect and dignity. In a predictable but nonetheless enjoyable trajectory, their awkward and contrite meeting turns into a scathing indictment of neglectful child-rearing, corrupt pharmaceutical practices, pretentious art venerating, and bourgeois propriety that barely covers the quickly melting icy veneer on which these two marriages skate.

The meeting, at Michael and Veronica’s faux-modern co-op, begins with the superficial chatter of two couples who don’t know one another reluctantly thrust together to work out their boys’ conflict. But as their conversation continues past the point at which Alan and Annette should have said their good-byes, they begin to recognize in one another the mirror images of their own failures and falsities.

Jeff Daniels, as Alan, performs a perfectly pompous, self-congratulatory high-powered lawyer with a cell phone glued to his ear. Every time it rings, he announces, “I have to take this,” loudly imposing his pretentious conversations on the gathering then appearing indignant when the other three overhear his business. Daniels delivers a sharp, wry performance as a man puffed up by his own self-importance.

A land line phone also rings constantly throughout the play, as Michael’s mother checks in with her son while she's at a doctor’s appointment. Gandolfini, as Michael, gets the timing just right, switching from the heat of battle with his guests to an enforced calm to speak with his aging, unwell mother, whose plaintive calls regularly interrupt the couples’ engagement. In one of Reza’s too convenient, calculated but perfectly funny coincidences (mild spoiler alert), Michael’s mother is told she’ll be treated with the toxic medicine whose effects Alan has been coaching his client to deny in his cell phone exchanges.

As their meeting devolves into a wonderfully physical brawl full of alcohol, ruined art books, projectile vomiting, and a pretentiously proffered cake, the actors rise to the comic occasion with impeccable style. Each character has his or her own meltdown, following an arc that requires the actor to move from faked, attentive concern into high umbrage, up to a physical crisis that dishevels their clothing and overturns some furniture, then down into resigned indifference to the revelation of their common and essential imperfections. Each character is unmasked as much less than he or she first appeared--more ordinary, whiny, and unhappy than the accomplished, socially exceptional people they first present.

To Reza’s credit, the characters’ devolutions occur without regard to gender. Alan and Michael reveal themselves to be as shallow and unhappy as Annette and Veronica. No one is more responsible than another for their mutually destructive encounter. Gender alliances shift throughout the play. Halfway through, the men share cigars and bourbon and a bitter understanding of the silliness of their lives, and the women pair off to commiserate by ridiculing their husbands.

At other moments, the couples rearrange themselves to express at least a superficial empathy, Alan for Veronica and Annette for Michael. When the couples inadvertently reveal their pet names for one another (Alan and Annette call each other “Woof Woof”), their intimacies seem childish and reductive, no more meaningful than the names their sons called each other on the playground.

Gandolfini’s presence inspired the audience to applaud at the play’s opening the night I attended (5-2-09). As the actors waited for the clapping to die down, I saw Hope Davis wink at Gandolfini, a lovely, warm tribute to his fandom before the actors began to chew the scenery. The affection the actors clearly feel for one another shows in their beautifully orchestrated performances.

In fact, what might at first seem a cynical casting choice calculated to boost box office turns out to be a coup for Gandolfini in his post-Tony Soprano era. Watching him transform Michael from a husband trying his best to conform to the overly polite customs of upper-middle-class behavior to a man who can’t stand the suit coat he wears, and happily rips his shirt out of his pants when the going gets rough, is one of the production’s many pleasures.

Likewise, Marcia Gay Harden, whom I followed on television in her stand-out performance as the Iago-like lawyer for the corrupt corporation on Damages this season, offers a grounded and hysterical turn as Veronica. Her horror when her precious art books are accidentally covered with vomit is a high point of the evening.

Hope Davis is also terrific as Annette, the character whose movement from good to bad is the least predictable. Perhaps because of Davis’s inherently sympathetic presence, and her slight fragility, even when she’s performing indignation, Annette becomes the fulcrum of the couples' full-pitch battle. When she indulges in alcohol and quickly gets drunk, Davis captures the pleasure, exasperation, and fear of a woman unaccustomed to losing social and emotional control. She’s also very funny.

All in all, Reza satirizes the wreckage of heterosexual marriage in God of Carnage, the petty bitterness that courses under what are carefully calculated to look like successful, luxe upper-middle class relationships sailing into their pre-destined futures without a ripple on the glassy waters of their lives. She satirizes how children become possessions, simple pawns for adults who at best treat them indifferently, and at worse, actually despise them.

While the comedy lets the audience laugh, Reza sneaks in recognitions that balance the evening’s affects. Somewhere in the uproarious meeting, the playwright comments on how people who no doubt mirror many in the Broadway audience live their lives. Under the humor, she urges spectators to consider what matters and what doesn’t, what we can control and what we can’t. By continually shifting the allegiances across couples and between the men and the women, Reza clarifies that no one wins, and that the stakes are equally high or low for all.

The production’s vivid realism and impeccable acting make it easy to swallow and probably mitigates whatever gentle punch to the gut Reza might intend. Watching actors more often seen in serious roles exercise their comic chops is entirely enjoyable. That God of Carnage concerns squarely middle-aged people also makes it a refreshing antidote to the many contemporary plays that address the angst of 20-something white characters figuring out how to live.

Reza examines the superficially comfortable, apparently successful lives of white upper-middle-class heterosexuals at the point when they’re supposed to be reveling in their achievements. God of Carnage demonstrates that the façade of their marriages and their families are already weakened and could be destroyed by the devastating moral emptiness and social pretension that’s chewed into their relationships like termites into the family house.

God of Carnage isn’t Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but it’s a great deal of fun.

The Feminist Spectator

Mary Stuart

Schiller’s play Mary Stuart stages a fictitious meeting in the late-1500s between the queen of England and her cousin, the queen of Scotland, a pair of rulers who fought to Mary’s death over religion, power, and the English throne. But this Donmar Warehouse transfer production of a play written in the 1800s that refers to English history of the 1500s has an utterly contemporary aspect. The fabulous Janet McTeer just snagged a Tony Award nomination for her role as Mary; McTeer can make any part in any play vibrate with life and intelligence. She wields mesmerizing physical and emotional command of her role as Mary that’s thrilling to watch.

Peter Oswald’s new version updates Schiller’s language, so that the dialogue sounds fluent and natural to contemporary Western ears. For instance, the first scene, between Mary and her nurse, Hanna (Maria Tucci), who’s raised her and sees her to her death in the end, plays like a 21^st century mother/daughter moment, with all the warm, casual physical intimacy derived from a long and candid relationship. The dialogue’s realistic cadences abate what might otherwise be a very talk-heavy play.

The production style, too, clears away what could have been historical visual clutter to reveal the kernel of the play’s conflict. Mary Stuart’s spare set butts up against a constructed wall of black brick that looms, immobile as the Queen of England, behind every scene. The stage is sometimes decorated with a simple bed and a chair; sometimes, with a small desk or a bench; sometimes, with nothing but the bodies of the actors, carved by light (designed by Hugh Vanstone).

The production exemplifies the austere, actor-centered Donmar Warehouse-style direction and design, which retains its appeal on Broadway. The sharp, cinematic lighting sculpts the actors, so that every word and every shift in emotion is recorded with searing verité. Director Phyllida Lloyd, who took so much flak for her work on the Mamma Mia film, creates a fluid, fast-paced production that focuses our attention on the human costs of state power, a theme that never loses its relevance.

The costume design, too, helps anchor the production’s transhistorical import. McTeer’s hair is bobbed in a modern cut, while her dress evokes the 16^th century more than it quotes it. While the women are all dressed in vaguely period fashions, the men wear black business suits with white shirts and dark ties, clad as though they’re CIA or FBI operatives—which in some ways, they are. The men’s machinations disrupt what might otherwise be an innate sympathy between the two powerful women.

The long-imprisoned Mary, whom her cousin Elizabeth (Harriet Walter) suspects of conspiring to usurp her title to the English throne, believes that if Elizabeth will meet with her, and allow her to make her case in person, their common condition as women trying to rule will prevail and her cousin will allow Mary to go free. Schiller’s play stages the meeting, even though it never actually took place. The scene between the two women—by two terrifically talented actors—is the play’s climax, though a subsequent sequence of arresting, carefully choreographed stage pictures and haunting sound effects lead the spectator through the doomed Mary’s march to the guillotine.

In Schiller’s rendering, Elizabeth dictates Mary’s execution orders with murky ambivalence, and gives them to a bumbling aid-de-camp who’s utterly unsure of their exact import and her intent. His superior officer forestalls the aid’s frantic indecision by taking Elizabeth’s order in hand and setting Mary’s beheading in motion.

Lloyd makes terrific use of theatre effects to evoke the tragedy of Mary’s death. The court allows Mary to see a priest for her last rites, the first time she’s interacted with her own religious traditions in decades. McTeer as Mary exudes peace and lightness of spirit after her priestly blessing, and approaches her death with energy and dignity.

McTeer plays Mary’s final exit with ironic exuberance, as though death is finally her liberation. The men, who are the agents of her demise, line up at the top of the stage, facing off right into a bright, beckoning light. They linger there like harbingers of fate, while Mary completes her affairs and takes her place at the head of their line, in front of her trusty nurse, asserting her stateliness and her authority until her very end.

As they somberly march off, sound effects represent Mary’s beheading. Clanging chains echo across the stage, and we hear at last the final, horrible sound of the guillotine descending swiftly, with a metallic, audible sharpness, toward Mary’s neck.

After this provocative aural moment, the play returns to Elizabeth’s chamber, where she’s been persuaded into a change of heart, only to learn that her aid followed through on her command to consign her cousin to death.

Mary Stuart’s final scenes underline Elizabeth’s weak indecision and her refusal to take responsibility for her cousin’s execution. She twists her memory of her words so that she can blame her aid with impunity, punishing him, too, with death and multiplying the fatalities that cascade from her own ethical failure. The chain of miscommunication and arrogant abuses of power leads back to Elizabeth, but her rhetoric and her position allows her to pass along the assignment of blame.

What could be more relevant after eight years of George W. Bush’s administration, which accustomed Americans to leaders who shirked responsibility and twisted their own words to reflect new meanings when it was expedient? Who can forget the absurdity of that “Mission Accomplished” banner draped over the stacks of that war ship, as a flight jacket-clad president preened with false victory, and then soon rescinded his actions as though they never happened? Schiller’s play and Lloyd’s production let us wonder if history has evolved at all from Elizabeth’s machinations 500 years ago.

If Mary Stuart’s ending leaves us cynical about the ethics of poorly exercised power, Lloyd’s production nonetheless offers moments of brilliant abandon and hope in the most unlikely moments and places. In the second-act opener, as one of Mary’s many male confidants promises they’ve figured out how to stage her escape, she finds herself outside her tower for the first time in years. She and her nurse, standing in a courtyard, get caught in a downpour, represented by water cascading from the flies and covering the stage floor with lush pools of rain.

McTeer raises her face to the “rain,” reveling in its sensuality as it drenches her clothes and skin. Her fabulous commitment to the moment lets the audience feel her wondrous freedom; you can almost sense the freshness of the air and the cleansing effects of the water as Mary absorbs it with physical and spiritual hunger.

This moment continues to stick with me days after I saw the production (5-2-09), turning my memory of a play about one queen executed by another into an image of freedom from the cruelties of history and the impossible contradictions of female gender and power.

McTeer and Walter say that audiences have been so convinced that the two actors hate one another, they stage their curtain call to represent their mutual affection. After they take their separate bows, they put their arms around one another in a warm embrace and exit the stage holding hands.

Both women have been nominated for Tony Awards, and will compete in the June ceremony. But the Times reports that McTeer and Walters don’t care about the outcome, and are already chatting about what they’ll wear to the awards show. It’s not who wins, they agree—it’s how much they enjoy playing the game Mary Stuart so generously provides them as women.

The Feminist Spectator

Susan Boyle: Self-Made Icon

But of what, might be the question? Mark Harris, one of Entertainment Weekly’s best columnists (who happens to be Tony Kushner’s husband), remarks this week (5-8-09) that Boyle’s internet success sounds a hopeful note in an otherwise cynical and self- serving celebrity scene. Here’s a woman who attests that her only dream is to sing professionally. As Harris notes, she doesn’t want to be a “star”; she only wants to do what she loves.

The friend who sent me the link to the Boyle’s YouTube clip (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk) added a note that extolled the virtues of the event, suggesting how hopeful it made her feel in an historical moment in which there’s so much to worry about. Why has this ordinary woman from a tiny village in the UK inspired so much affection and adoration? What does she say to or about people that encouraged her video to be seen by over 120 million people around the world?

What does it mean that the horrible, churlish deprecation of the Britain’s Got Talent audience changed to frank admiration and wild enthusiasm once Boyle sang through a few bars of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis? That art triumphs over the “misfortune” of homeliness and poor fashion sense? That faith and desire are really all that matters to raise someone from the relative boredom of a daily life spent caring for an aging mother into the unexpected adulation of an anonymous public more typically hungry for the facilely cutting humiliations of cruel reality show hosts like the despicable Simon Cowell?

I was as moved as the next viewer by watching Boyle sing on my computer screen. Most touching was Boyle’s faith in her own ability, her innocent certainty that nothing but her voice—not her appearance, her age, her hair, her infamous (and now tweezed) bushy eyebrows (see the "before" photo, above left)—would matter once she opened her mouth to sing.

I was moved by Boyles’s ingenuous resilience, her uncoached, open answers to Cowell’s miserable, insinuating questions, and her apparent belief in the essential goodness of man (well, “men”). Her delight in her public conquest, and her subsequent demurrals of anything but happiness about not being immediately booted off the show, are, as Harris suggests, refreshing anti-celebrity behavior.

Does it matter, then, that she was whisked off by a “family friend” to have her hair styled and colored, and those notable eyebrows plucked (see "after" photo, above right)? What to make of this “mini-makeover”? Does it matter if her unstylish frock will now surely be replaced with more fashionable clothing, as more recent photographs of Boyle suggest she’s been urged to purchase? Will her voice sound as pleasing if her looks are more conventional? Or was it the incongruity of the package and the voice that created the magic the first time around?

Was the television audience shamed by its knee-jerk judgment of Boyle’s appearance once she began to sing? Was its uproarious response to her song expiation of its own guilt at how they had already dismissed her? Harris says people are now acting toward her like she’s a “cute pet hobbit” to be infantilized and exoticized. I think she’s being treated like a “wild child,” someone who’s lived outside of civilization and its restrictive customs.

Harris reports that some spectators think her refreshed appearance will rob her of the authenticity that prompted her initial appeal. God forbid she should look like any other conventionally made-up and neatly dressed middle-aged woman and still sing like an angel. What would happen to the media hook if that were the case? No one cares about conventional middle aged women, whether or not they can sing so well.

The sexism—not to mention the “looks-ism” and ageism—of spectators’ response to Boyle’s audacity (as in, How dare a woman who looks like her think she could compete on a show like this?) makes her triumph bittersweet. On the basis of watching her sing, reading about her in People Magazine, and catching one or two minutes of television interviews after her appearance, Boyle seems to me like a nice enough, perfectly ordinary woman.

Her bravery and desire has thrust her into extraordinary circumstances from which she’ll most likely not escape unharmed. I don’t relish watching the media work its black magic, turning Boyle’s fairytale into something sordid and distasteful, something that will no doubt soil what appears to be her genuine desire to make herself and others happy with her voice.

Perhaps she should have stuck to singing in the shower.

The Feminist Spectator

“Life after ‘The L Word’” at Times Talks

Kim Severson, Ilene Chaiken, and Jennifer Beals

I admit that my unshakable fan status prompted me to bite on the Times offer to see Ilene Chaiken and “members of The L Word cast” talk about life after the series (Their lives? Our lives? Life in the world? Didn’t know). I dutifully paid my $30 and traveled into the city April 20th, a miserable rainy night, and stood in line with hundreds of other lesbians and other folks (I did see one or two men in the crowd), and poured into the very comfortable Times auditorium, and opened my program to see with pleasure that Jennifer Beals would be that “member of the cast.” And all my old and vaguely silly but extremely pleasurable L Word fascination was fanned back into high flame.

After watching the series for six years with at most six or eight friends at a time, and more frequently just with my partner, first on video tapes that started fading with over-viewing and eventually on DVR and then “on demand,” as all our technology changed over those years, it was a revelation to sit in a live audience of hundreds of fans. The demographics surprised me—my unscientific assessment suggests that a third of the audience were squarely middle-aged white women; a third, women in their 20s and 30s; around a quarter women of color of various ages; and the rest illegible to me. When many of these spectators lined up at the open mike during the last segment of the evening, it also became clear they’d come from various parts of the tri-state area and even around the country to hear Chaiken and Beals speak. (I learned only later that various on-line sources, including www.afterellen.com, had revealed earlier that Beals would be Chaiken’s dialogue companion. Here's a YouTube clip--taken against the wishes of the ushers and security, no doubt, of Chaiken and Beals' entrance at the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkIZrJK7rpk.)

Kim Severson, a Times food writer and out lesbian, moderated the evening with casual wit, channeling a fan’s desire for dirt with a journalist’s sense of the well put, productive question. Chaiken and Beals answered graciously and seemed entirely forthcoming, especially Beals, whose obvious intelligence, fair-mindedness, and generosity lent the evening a great deal of dignity. Beals’ dedication to the larger project of the show was palpable in each of her remarks, and her overtly articulated feminist politics a real pleasure to hear. She described how much her work on the show changed her awareness of gender and sexuality issues in American (and Canadian, since the show was shot in Vancouver) culture, and the new-found confidence working on the series has brought to her own work as an actor on film sets she said are “usually monolithic, patriarchal structures.” She now feels comfortable challenging film and television directors and producers on casual (or explicit) sexism, refusing demeaning dialogue and character set ups.

Beals also related that her connection to her body was strengthened by her L Word work. She told a story about a recent film shoot for The Book of Eli, a movie she just wrapped with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, written and directed by the Hughes brothers (whom she noted with pleasure were terrific to work with because they’re biracial and were raised by a lesbian). The director of photography on the shoot explained apologetically that a shot that started at her feet and moved up her body wouldn’t “linger”; she reassured him that she’d just spent six years on The L Word, and wasn’t at all worried about how he’d film her body. Hearing her pride and pleasure in her own sexuality, and the obvious feminism through which she sees her work, was striking throughout the evening.

Apparently, the rumored spin-off starring Leisha Hailey (to be called The Farm) was put on indefinite hold, but Chaiken is pursuing plans for an L Word film. The Beals and Chaiken also have a new project they’re working on together that, they protested, is still germinating and too soon to reveal. But the pleasure they take in their own professional partnership was palpable. They told stories they’ve rehearsed many times elsewhere about how they started working together. Beals was the first person cast on the show; at the time, she was contemplating an offer to play a prostitute, and said she happily chose to play a lesbian instead.

Given the choice to play Bette or Tina, she choose Bette, and asked that Chaiken write her character as biracial, since in addition to the progressive work she knew the show would do for representations of lesbians, she said she also wanted to see her own identity on screen. Beals said she also loved Rose Troche, one of the show’s first directors, when they met. Since most of the episodes were directed by artists who, like Troche, were associated with independent film, Beals said shooting each episode was like doing a “little movie.”

Chaiken admitted that the most autobiographical characters on the show were Bette and Jenny (until, that is, Jenny “went crazy,” in Chaiken’s description). Bette connected to Chaiken’s life as a high powered professional woman trying to balance a relationship with someone slightly less socially visible, and the complications of being a woman in the arts and media. Chaiken didn’t say much about how Jenny reflected her own life, but one can surmise. She said that the two characters channeled “a lot of my issues” until they “became themselves.”

Severson asked how Chaiken secured so many terrific, high-profile female guest artists for the show. Chaiken explained that many women were taken enough with the series that they had their agents call to express their interest. Although she insists she didn’t write for any particular actors, she was pleased with the pool of people available from whom to cast. She and Beals agreed there are so few parts for women that are “interesting and different and not in the service of a man’s story,” that especially women actors into their 30s and beyond were eager to join the cast. Beals emphasized how different it was to perform a character whose life doesn’t revolve around a man.

Severson referred to the controversy that surrounded the show since its premiere, with some spectators complaining that the characters (and the actors who played them) were too beautiful, too thin, or too unrealistic. Chaiken responded that if no one were inflamed about the series, it wouldn’t have lasted for six years. She admitted that she got attacked because Jenny was Jewish, even though, Chaiken said, “I happen to be Jewish, too.” Beals seemed more distressed by some of the harsh, on-line responses to the twists and turns in Bette’s portrayal, and decided she needed to steer clear of fan site discussion boards.

Severson joked about the peculiar plot twists of the final season (referring casually to “the guy with the beard,” who killed Jenny, and the various other “what’s up with that?” moments of the season), and Beals quipped that Chaiken “went over to the dark side” for the show’s last episodes. Chaiken protested that the show reflected “life” and couldn’t always be sunny; likewise, when Severson, to the glee of much of the audience, accused her of “killing” Dana, Chaiken defended herself by saying that she thought it was a true, important depiction of lesbians with cancer.

Chaiken and Beals stressed throughout the evening that the show’s goal was to tell stories that hadn’t been told before. Beals, in particular, underlined that her work on the show always had a political quotient, while Chaiken side-stepped the politics, demurring that you can’t begin with the intent to make a political point and wind up with “good art.” I was more impressed by Beals’ attention to what it meant to American culture for a series about lesbians to persist for six good years.

She said as she was doing press, she remembered that the “personal is political,” using good old fashioned feminist language to mark the intersection of life and ideology. She said she was excited about the possibility of helping a “young girl in the middle of nowhere find herself represented,” and about “giving someone safety and the room to be authentic. Everyone needs to be heard,” she said.

Questions from the audience were sometimes sweet and moving, and sometimes astute. One middle-aged African American woman responded to Beals’ remark about the isolated young would-be lesbian, saying that even those of us who live and work in places like New York are empowered by seeing representations of ourselves on screen. The woman related how her co-workers, to whom she was already out, seemed to have a new appreciation for her life and her lesbian family, and that the show gave her an opportunity for a “second coming out” that obviously filled her with surprised pride.

A surprising number of straight women took the microphone to attest to how The L Word affected their own lives, prompting the audience to murmur with a rather affronted impatience. But Chaiken and Beals responded magnanimously, especially Beals, who took each question seriously, looked directly at the speaker, and answered precisely and carefully. Beals has the same gravitas she brought to Bette; I could feel the audience responding with a great deal of respect (and no small amount of pleasure and desire. She was clearly the icon of the moment).

Chaiken and Beals struck a mutually wistful tone through much of the evening, considering the show’s six year life-span and its recent end. Beals said she’s in frequent touch with Kate Moennig, who played Shane; she texted her recently to ask what she wouldn’t give for one more scene at the Planet, chatting over a cup of coffee. The nostalgia and longing was sweet, and reminded me that those scenes in the restaurant always seemed among the most authentic, full of real connections among the actors and the characters. Beals recalled how much she learned from doing the show. “My eyes were also opened,” she said. “I learned how connected we all are. All women are connected. Homophobia is a form of misogyny.”

Chaiken said she thought The L Word happened at a moment of “receptivity for gay characters on tv,” when “the culture was ready.” Now, she believes that if she were to pitch the series, producers would tell her that lesbians have “been done.” The pair said they thought they’d be “passing a baton,” but instead, they said, “there’s nothing” on television that will continue to till the ground The L Word broke.

At the end of the evening, Beals made a point of thanking the fans for their dedicated support of the show. She said she’s realized, by attending various fundraisers, that there’s a market for the photographs she took on set during the series (Beals has a solid reputation as a photographer, as well as an actor). She’s thinking of making an L Word photo book, for which she’d give the royalties to various charities.

I have to say I was proud to be among those fans that night, proud of Chaiken and Beals and Severson and how smart they all were, how feminist, how progressive, how positive and articulate about the need for the kind of work The L Word accomplished in the cultural imagination. A couple days later, I watched a clip online of Laurel Holloman accepting an award for “sexiest scene on television” at the Bravo A-List Awards show. She paraded her lovely self up to the mike, looking sexy and gorgeous, took hold of the vaguely phallic globe that served as the trophy, and joked, “This looks a prop from my show.” She went on to remark that she was accepting the award for a scene in which she “sat on Jennifer’s face.” She applauded how remarkable it is (“How cool is that?”) that such a scene could be televised, let alone awarded, and said, “I don’t know what’s with this Prop 8 business,” before she left the stage.

Maybe it’s politics lite, but it’s politics, just the same. The L Word girls are out there getting it said, getting it done, chipping away at those “patriarchal structures” and homophobia and misogyny, not just in the film and television industries, but in many of our lives.

How cool is that?

The Feminist Spectator

West Side Story

Various images from West Side Story, courtesy www.westsidestory.com
Clockwise from upper left: The Jets dance; Maria and Tony meet;
Maria feels pretty (singing in Spanish); the girls like to be in America

Late in his distinguished career, Arthur Laurents is making a new name for himself rethinking classic American musicals for which he was an original, key collaborator. After the spectacular success of his recently directed remount of Gypsy, with Patti Lupone, for which he wrote the 1959 book, Laurent has again transformed his writer’s eye into a director’s perspective on West Side Story, for which he wrote the book in 1957.

If his approach with Gypsy was to find its authenticity by sharpening the edges of the three leading characters, his concept for West Side Story is to more closely reflect the lives of the Puerto Rican gang members in 19 50s New York who anchor one half of the story’s revision of Romeo and Juliet. I admire Laurents’ decision to hire Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) to translate some of the show’s dialogue and two of its key songs into Spanish. I went to see the show (at the Palace Theatre, 4/4/09) hoping that the choice to honor its characters’ ethnicity might bring the musical new poignancy. But somehow, Laurents’ connection with the material seems less organic than gimmicky.

The Spanish language addition is more than a publicity stunt. The difference between the Sharks and the Jets becomes palpable and meaningful, and the very different textures of their adjacent lives in Manhattan starker, when the Sharks curse the Jets in Spanish and speak to one another in their own language. The fact that some portion of the Broadway audience will be marginalized from their dialogue matters, too, to the extent that it’s worthwhile to put a mainstream American audience in the position that non-English speaking immigrants in the States feel every day. The simple difference of language could productively underline the condition of being “othered” in an English-dominated, predominantly white culture.

But many of Laurent’s other choices work against the realism the Spanish dialogue and songs might provide. The stunning visual design woos the eye with gorgeous, romantic lighting, especially for “There’s a Place for Us,” a number choreographed as a utopian fantasy for Maria and Tony, in which the considerably brightened stage radiates with what feels like vibrant sunlight and vital warmth. Otherwise, the darkened set, too, seems to take place in something of a “nowhere.”

Although the design is vaguely reminiscent of Jo Mielziner’s concept for Death of a Salesman, with abstracted New York apartments sketched as wings on the side of the stage, the décor does little to evoke what it feels like to be Puerto Rican (or, for that matter, white) and poor and young in Manhattan in the 50s. There’s something very clean about this production, even though the young male actors wear conspicuously applied dirt on their faces and arms to give them a rough and tough appeal. Later, after the tragic rumble by the highway, their wounds, too, seem pasted on. They resemble the blood and gore of a B horror film, instead of the hard earned, knuckle-bruising knocks of a senseless fight.

The production, in fact, is peculiarly unconvincing, despite its obvious heart. A lot of love and attention has gone into this revival, but the only place the lavish affection pays off is in the dance numbers. Joey McKneely’s ’s reproductions of Jerome Robbins’ original choreography thrillingly recalls what it might have been like to see those moves for the first time, when the idea of dancing gang members was novel and exciting. In the Prologue and the opening “Jet Song” number, the boys lightly leap into the air, rising and falling with a kind of strenuous effortlessness. The dance at the gym, the horrible rumble, even the Jets’ abuse of Anita in Doc’s drug store, all are accomplished with an attention to detail that brings the choreographic archive alive.

The production’s more inferior aspects stem from poor casting choices. If Laurents aimed for verisimilitude with his choice to texture the production with Spanish, casting Josefina Scaglione, a lily-white Argentinean opera singer, to play Maria compromises what might otherwise be seen as a racially progressive gesture. Most of the Sharks and their women at least look Latino, with olive-color skin and shiny dark hair. But Maria appears practically corn fed; she and Matt Cavenaugh, who plays Tony, could be brother and sister.

For the star-crossed lovers to find and fall for each other, as a result, doesn’t seem taboo-breaking as much as it does pre-ordained. That Maria’s youth and virginity should be signified by her very white skin compromises the importance of the lovers’ difference from one another, and seems even more glaring in a production that wants to emphasize ethnicity. If Laurents intended to address the politics of skin color in minoritized cultures, his casting choice for Maria might have been interesting.

But nothing in the production suggests that this was his intent. In fact, Maria is mocked for her idealism and her naïveté by actors whose Latino/a ethnicity is generally more visible on stage, which gives those scenes an odd air of intra-race jealousy, instead of the concern and disapprobation of a community truly fearful for what might happen if miscegenation is condoned.

That Scaglione isn’t a very strong actor doesn’t help her make a convincing case for empathy. She plays Maria as more sophisticated than her years, her attraction to Tony less world-changing than the standard erotic charge of a woman who knows exactly what she wants. Scaglione and Cavenaugh are a pleasing couple, but they don’t generate the chemistry that leaves an audience devastated by their inevitable separation through death.

In fact, rather than making any of the by now mythic story fresh and surprising, this production takes the audience and the cast through our paces, bringing us to the sorry end through a well-traveled route. None of the actors’ interpretations reveal new angles on their characters’ situations. Even though thinking about race and class—especially during the nascent Obama administration—has changed considerably in the U.S. since the original production opened on Broadway, this revival captures none of that new energy or insight. The performance feels not so much like a slavishly faithful, museum-quality revival, but more like a remounting under glass, distanced and strangely clinical.

The cast’s youth might contribute to this remove. While many of the Sharks and Jets are terrific dancers who convey their slightly drawn characters with convincing body tics and emblematic physical signatures, and the principals have beautiful, resonant singing voices, no one in the cast stands out for their acting. While their talents energize the musical numbers that provide the revival’s most enthralling moments, the cast’s acting deficits make the book’s more emotional moments disappointing. No one seems to discover anything in the moment; they present their interactions—romantic or hostile—as a done deal, without showing us what prompts them to act.

I waited throughout the production to be genuinely moved, but felt instead continually disappointed. Only “There’s a Place for Us” brought welcome goose-bumps to my arms and a lump to my throat, and that was because a young red-headed boy of perhaps 10 or 12, who’d lurked in the back of some of the gang fight scenes with Anybodys, was trotted out to sing the first few phrases a cappella, while Tony and Maria fled offstage to change their costumes. Something about the musical change and the transformation of the production’s physical gestalt for that number approached the heart wrenching emotion I’d expected from the whole evening. (On the other hand, the use of the boy’s pristine soprano reminded me a bit too much of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in Cabaret, for which recent productions have used the same eyes-of-the-innocents gesture to manipulate audience response.)

Even the production’s last scene, in which Tony roams the abandoned streets, calling for Chino to slaughter him as Tony believes Chino has killed Maria, seems manufactured, offering canned, pat feelings rather than real emotion. When poor Anybodys—in a haircut that makes her look like Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in the film Boys Don’t Cry—approaches Tony to try to call him back to his senses, he snarls, “You’re a girl. Act like one.” Too bad that a production that tries—even if it fails—to be racially complex has to end, as usual (and as the original book dictates), by damning the one character in the musical performing herself through more complex gender identifications.

Hearing the orchestra play the soaring score and listening to those wonderful lyrics, I was only sorry that the singers conveyed the music’s emotion with more technique than heart. Laurents and his cast missed an opportunity to say something much more, to help us think through racial difference in new ways in a historical moment in which day to day politics already lead the way. In this West Side Story, the theatre is left lagging behind.

The Feminist Spectator

Chasing Manet

Jane Alexander (l) and Lynn Cohen in Chasing Manet

Tina Howe’s new play, at Primary Stages (which I saw just before it opened on 4/4/09), continues her career-long exploration of the foibles of blue-blood families and the women they oppress. This version of the story regards a patrician woman toward the end of a distinguished life, who finds herself—thanks to her feckless son—ripped summarily from a life spent as a painter in Boston and stashed in a nursing home in the Bronx.

Jane Alexander plays Catherine Sargent (fictionalized cousin to the great American painter John Singer Sargent), wearing a head full of long, flowing white hair and radiating the wasted vitality of someone stored to wait for her death much too early. Even curled up in a bitter fetal position at the beginning of many scenes, Alexander retains the play’s focus. Her intelligence and charisma as Catherine helps push a play that might have been a predictable trifle into more compelling evening.

Alexander’s terrific partner in this transformation is Lynn Cohen, who finds the humanity, warmth, and comedy in a character suffering the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Cohen plays Rennie Waltzer, who becomes Catherine’s new roommate at the nursing home, bringing with her a large and loud family of Long Island Jews (played by Julie Halston, David Margulies, among others).

Director Michael Wilson brings the actors performing as the Jewish family close to stereotype—that fine line between laughing at and laughing with is walked here—but manages to make them familiar but particular, with individual stories that keep them from falling squarely into type.

Rennie’s husband Herschel died several years before, sending her quickly into an emotional and mental spiral down toward losing her mind. She thinks that Herschel is still alive, calling out to him to observe the things that amuse her—frequently—in her new life. Rennie thinks she’s living in a four-star hotel, much to Catherine’s dismay.

Catherine’s plaint is that she’s trapped in a place she finds far beneath her; her burden is that she’s now blind, and truly can’t care for herself. Her son, Royal (Jack Gilpin, in an appropriately sedate turn as the ineffectual middle-aged man), is a Yeats professor at Columbia who moves her to New York thinking he’ll participate in her care and see her often. But his stressful academic life limits his availability, and he winds up leaving her warehoused, isolated, and lonely.

Catherine’s acidic fury at being left to die among strangers she openly finds inferior requires Alexander to convey a complicated set of emotions. On one hand, her anger makes her caustic and her arrogance can be tiring. On the other hand, the audience wants to empathize with a woman who’s clearly still smart and healthy. Catherine is a blind painter, who has to conjure her favorite images—especially Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’Herbe—from an old and deep mental archive. The injustice of watching someone who loves light and color no longer be able to see is enough to draw spectators to the character.

That blindness is Catherine’s only challenge raises disability politics that Howe doesn’t seem to consider. Why couldn’t Royal have found help for her at her own home in Boston? Why couldn’t Catherine learn to get around with a cane or a guide dog? But Chasing Manet is a comedy, which apparently lets Howe off the hook for not thinking very deeply about the logistics of her central metaphor.

The nursing home is indeed demeaning, as Catherine claims when she’s invited to toss around a beach ball that a well-meaning physical therapist suggests to his charges is molten lava. Catherine simply refuses to play, sitting off to the side wearing her own sour whimsy—she’s splattered a pair of spectacles with red paint and crashes into the physical therapy scene calling herself Oedipus. When no one rises to her joke—most of the others are wheelchair bound, while Catherine is mobile and strong—she sits outside the circle, sulking.

The play clarifies that the indignities of aging aren’t suffered only by the rich and by those still for the most part mentally and physically intact. The beach ball scene, and other interactions between the staff and the residents, shows how the elderly are infantilized, even by personnel as well meant as those Howe creates here. Played with sensitivity and humor by Vanessa Aspillaga and Rob Riley—the only two actors of color in the cast—the nursing home staffers are entirely empathetic, seeing the people with whom they work as people to respect and engage. But even for them, it’s clearly difficult to keep from speaking down to people who are, in fact, losing control of their bodies and their minds.

Sometimes the play wants us to identify with Catherine’s son and Rennie’s daughter, who’ve enrolled their respective parents in this circumscribed life because there seemed no other choice. Howe writes both characters scenes in which they express their fear at losing their parent, and both are given ample reasons for their decision about where to let their mother end her life. In other scenes, Howe wants us to feel the indignities of aging and losing control of your own agency.

Aside from Cohen and Alexander, the nursing home residents are played quite over the top by the other actors (all of whom rotate through multiple roles as family members and friends, nursing staff and residents). They select physical and emotional mannerisms—based on the excesses of Howe’s text in these scenes—that push their characters into caricatures. One is a sex-obsessed elderly gentleman who can’t keep his hands out of his pants. Another is paranoid and fearful; another dotty and weird, with uncontrolled facial tics (Halston, overacting as an old woman here, while she’s more reserved and effective as Rennie’s daughter, Rita). That these scenes push into the absurd and grotesque undercuts the critique Howe wants to launch of how older people are treated by their families.

Assisted by topnotch actors like Alexander and Cohen, Catherine and Rennie retain the story’s focus. Rennie’s exuberant love of life begins to thaw Catherine’s icy Brahmin reserve. And once Catherine realizes that Rennie, who at least can see, could be a partner in her plan to escape from the prison of assisted living, the two strike up an unlikely friendship that gives Rennie back her dignity and Catherine back her heart.

As farfetched as Chasing Manet’s resolution might really be, it’s a pleasure to see two strong older female characters get what they want and deserve (see Howe’s conversation with Jane Alexander at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/theater/09howe.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Tina%20Howe%20and%20Jane%20Alexander&st=cse). That they enable one another, and wrest back control of their lives, immersing themselves in pleasures and choices their children prematurely decided they should lose, lets Chasing Manet sound a triumphal, hopeful note. Watching Alexander and Cohen play off of one another in elegantly timed, warm repartee reminded me of Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes in Terrence McNally’s Deuce a few seasons back. That two-hander gave the older actors more complex live stories but less to do, as they sat watching a tennis match and reminiscing about their lives of competition with one another and the tour. In Chasing Manet, women who should by rights be less mobile are ironically empowered to travel—literally and figuratively. Perhaps that difference comes from Howe’s career-long attention to women’s plight, and her determination that neither age nor gender should hold a good woman back.

The Feminist Spectator

Frozen River

Misty Upham, left, and Melissa Leo, in Frozen River

Courtney Hunt’s film Frozen River is a quietly moving examination of lives blinkered by poverty in a small town in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border. As the local economy withers away, residents of the town and those on the nearby Mohawk reservation turn to illegally smuggling immigrants into the country as a way to turn a quick buck.

Melissa Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman whose husband has run off with the balloon payment due on the double-wide trailer they’ve been saving to buy. The film starts with Ray sitting in the passenger seat of her car, wearing a worn, pink chenille bathrobe. The car is parked outside her rusty single-wide mobile home, which sits precariously, isolated on an abandoned, grassless lot in the middle of the nowhere where the surrounding town is already dying.

The camera moves in for an extreme close-up of Ray’s face, scrutinizing every pore and inch of her rough red skin, worn from smoke and worry. Unexpected tears suddenly spill out of her eyes, while she blows smoke from her mouth. Her tears flow without a drop of self-pity; they release something that lets her pull herself together and go back into the house to attend to her two sons. T.J., the teenaged boy (Charlie McDermott), watches over his five-year-old brother; he can’t bear to see him suffer the disappointments T.J. already knows are in store. The younger boy lives happily ignorant of their poverty, as both Ray and T.J. struggle to keep his world intact.

At the film’s start, Ray’s husband has just left, and not for the first time. While the boys are in school, she goes to look for him at the Bingo parlor on the nearby Mohawk reservation, where wary locals refuse to help her. In the parking lot, Ray sees Lila, a young Native woman, driving her husband’s car. When Ray confronts her, Lila says she found it with the keys in it at the bus station, and later mentions she saw the car’s owner getting on a southbound bus. Ray knows her husband is headed to Atlantic City; she also knows the money is irretrievably gone.

Ray’s initial interactions with Lila play out in icy recriminations, as neither woman has much sympathy for the other. Their equally desperate straits make them natural competitors, but they’re both smart enough to realize they’d be better off as collaborators. The car holds value for Lila, because she needs a vehicle to participate in a smuggling ring that shepherds illegal immigrants across the St. Lawrence River, frozen solid in the bitter winter. Once they see that they can help one another, they strike up a situational relationship of convenience. How it changes propels the film into surprising emotional territory.

Lila is implacably calm about the smuggling operation into which she initiates Ray. Lila knows everything: how much it costs to be smuggled into the States; how long the immigrants have to work until they pay off their debt to the people who bring them in; how much time you have to serve if you get caught running an illegal; and how much they make for each smuggling run. But Lila needs a car and she also needs someone who can see. Her ill-fitted glasses are too uncomfortable to wear. But she worries that the smugglers will cheat her, and makes sure that Ray counts their money at the beginning and end of every trip.

Lila lives in circumstances even more humble than Ray’s; her trailer is a one-room camper, abandoned in deep, snow covered woods. An unexplained crime has destroyed Lila’s reputation on the reservation. Something happened that resulted in her young husband’s death, which prompts the tribal council to collude with Lila’s mother-in-law to take away Lila’s one-year-old child. Lila watches the baby, hiding in the bushes outside her mother-in-law’s house, leaving money for them in potato chip canisters she quietly props by their door.

Because Ray has the car and Lila has the knowledge, the two women make a business deal. They drive together across the frozen river to still another ramshackle mobile home, rolling across the ice to where the smuggler keeps illegal immigrants waiting to be ferried into the U.S. Ray and Lila load two of these people into their trunk at a time and drive back on the ice to the unwatched border. When they get off the river, they drive through a portion of the route watched by a state trooper. The tensest moment of the trip is when they look to see if he follows. Lila tells Ray bitterly on their first trip, “He won’t stop you, you’re white.”

Throughout the film, Ray forces herself into situations in which she’s singular—the only white woman, the only working mother, the only woman who’s not a stripper or an alien in the Canadian club they visit in the film’s climactic scene to collect their last load of illegal immigrants. She handles herself with incredible resolve and aplomb, once she decides to participate. She and Lila clear $600 for each trip they make; the money is generous and easy for someone who works long hours, standing on her feet for a minimum wage that amounts to much less.

Unsavory men run the smuggling operation. One is a hirsute, brutal Canadian who owns the strip club; the other is the long-haired Native man in the trailer on the river, who takes one look into Ray’s car and tells Lila, “I don’t like to deal with white women.” But Ray needs the money and can’t afford to bristle at the racism she suffers. After all, Ray is racist, too.

Hunt’s film carefully calibrates the dual oppressions of being poor and white or Native American in a country in which there are fewer and fewer social service nets. Without her husband, Ray needs to earn twice as much. But she works as a clerk at the local Dollar Value store, where her manager is an unctuous much younger white man who refuses to put her on the schedule fulltime after she’s worked dependably for two years. But he lets another, younger, prettier female employee come in late and keep much more lax work habits. Ageism also works against Ray and her struggle to feed her kids.

T.J. complains about eating popcorn and drinking Tang for breakfast and dinner. Ray searches for coins in the couch pillows, meting out the few quarters and dimes she can scrape together so that the boys can buy themselves lunches at school. T.J. wants to leave high school and get a job, but Ray insists he continue his education. She’s steely in her resolve that he’ll do better, that he’ll somehow transcend the circumstances in which she’s raising him.

Ray hasn’t yet acquiesced to her situation. Every act is motivated by her dream of buying the double-wide trailer with three bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in the master, and wall-to-wall carpeting. At the film’s start, the new house is being delivered on a flatbed truck that pulls right up to the field where the old one sits, desolate. But since her husband has absconded with the cash, Ray doesn’t have the final payment. The angry trailer salesman drives the truck off, telling her he won’t come out again.

Ray wants that home. The film respects that the double-wide is the apogee of the better life toward which she can stride. Frozen River isn’t a fairy tale. But its clear-eyed understanding of Ray and Lila’s plight insures that we don’t pity either character. Their part of upstate New York is forsaken and barren, but it has a brutal, chilled beauty that makes the landscape look like a Catherine Opie painting of strangely symmetrical, subtly colorful ice-fishing huts on a frozen lake.

Ray isn’t asking for hand-outs; she isn’t even really blaming her husband. She understands he’s sick: “He has an addiction,” she tells her son with clenched teeth. They settle in at the end of their evenings to have important conversations as they look beyond one another, staring at the television while they talk about how they’re going to get through the next day.

The son substitutes for his father, even though he, too, is still a child. T.J. makes crank calls to swindle unsuspecting elderly people out of $29 and their credit card numbers, telling them they’ve been left an inheritance for which he needs their information to process the small fee before he releases their windfalls. His own anxious ploy for cash preys on the desperation of the people he reaches, extending the cycle of poverty and despair and determination to survive by your wits.

T.J. isn’t scamming for drug money or alcohol, or anything about which a young boy with slightly more means might scheme. He’s trying to pitch in, since Ray won’t let him pull his weight and work for the few dollars of extra cash that might mean real food on their plates. Ray has rented a flat-screen television from a place called “Rent to Buy.” When the store calls to say if she doesn’t make her payment, they’re coming to take it away, T.J. frantically plots to find the money, so that his little brother won’t be left without his meager entertainment. These quotidian crises propel this drama, and yet they generate surprisingly ominous suspense.

Hunt produces a narrative that could be told much more conventionally. For instance, when a state trooper comes to their trailer at the film’s end, looking for T.J., a different sort of film-maker could succumb to cliché and have him haul the boy to jail. In Frozen River, the officer brings along the elderly woman T.J. swindled, asking only that the boy apologize face to face for what he did and that he not do it again. The law here isn’t the enemy—the troopers (including Michael O’Keefe, nicely underplaying as the officer whose interactions with Ray over the course of the story determine her fate) find themselves employed among people whose actions are motivated by the extremity of their poverty, not by evil.

Likewise, Ray’s future comes as no surprise, but how it’s handled is humane and forgiving. For someone managing such a hard-scrabble life, she finds reserves of compassion and understanding that model a hopeful extension of conventional kinship systems across race, ethnicity, and class. On the other hand, Ray isn’t portrayed a saint. She deflects any empathy she might receive from the other characters as well as from spectators. On one of their smuggling trips, Ray carries a Pakistani couple in her trunk, a man and a woman who have a duffle bag they insist Ray and Lila carry inside the car. Ray doesn’t know what “Paki” means when Lila refers to their passengers, or where Pakistan is when Lila explains.

The mysterious package makes Ray uneasy, and she decides to leave it on the icy river halfway through the trip. When they arrive at the roadside motel where the illegal immigrants are passed along to the next operative in the seedy smuggling ring, delivered into a life of servitude working for the people who bring them over, the Pakistani couple is distraught about the abandoned bag. For good reasons, Ray and Lila return to the river in the glacial cold of a very dark night to retrieve it.

Ray makes mistakes; she’s not worldly; she’s racist; she has a gun and she’s more than willing to use it. But her innate intelligence and her sharp survival skills make her a compelling, moving study in economic determination. Leo’s performance—for which she received a richly deserved Academy Award nomination—is unsparing and vulnerable. She brings a transparency to her performance that lets you see Ray deliberately make each of her impossible decisions, and track her commitment to seeing them through.

Leo registers the injustices she confronts with bitter knowledge, but never with self-pity. There’s no wallowing in her performance as Ray, just a deep willingness to bring this woman dignity and finally, understanding. Each of the central performances is equally unsparing and natural. Misty Upham, as Lila, has the same blank affect as Elaine Miles, the Native American woman who played Marilyn on the television series Northern Exposure in the early 1990s. Lila is perhaps a bit of a stereotype, as the unemotional, inexpressive Native American who nonetheless observes and comments dryly but perceptively.

But the character’s back-story and her uneasy relationship to the Mohawk territory where she clearly lives as an outsider lets Lila exceed stock. Her determination to retrieve the baby that was stolen from her fuels her own trips back and forth across the border. One of her most painful scenes shows her holed up in her tiny, snow encrusted camper, startled awake when the container in which she’s been leaving money for her mother-in-law and her baby is thrown against her thin tin door with all her money still rolled up inside.

Frozen River details the kind of desperation that drives good people to do bad things. The movie is as suspenseful as a James Bond film, but the drama here is all about the struggle to survive and the most human of emotions. When a connection is finally made, no one lives happily every after, but they do manage to pool their wits and their wiles enough to survive. For these two disenfranchised women and three young boys, that’s admirable enough.

The Feminist Spectator

Ruined, by Lynn Nottage

Photo Joan Marcus
Manhattan Theatre Club

Lynn Nottage’s new play, Ruined (Manhattan Theatre Club, 3/8/09), rewrites Mother Courage and Her Children in the context of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She weaves a story that chills spectators with its violence and moves us with the remnants of compassion evident in even the most hard-boiled of the play’s characters. Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) presides as the Madame of a bar and brothel isolated in a mining town in the middle of a rainforest, from which rebels and government soldiers roam and return.

Caught in the crossfire of men’s war, Mama Nadi and her girls survive by profiting from the men’s loneliness and their desire, appealing to them with seductive dance moves, sitting on their laps, teasing and cajoling them into parting with their cash and into joining the women in the bar’s back rooms, where higher prices can be charged for more intimate encounters.

Mama Nadi provides music, food, drink (however watered down her whiskey), and the comforts of female flesh to interchangeable batteries of men who arrive from the same forest, their chests adorned with weapons and their foreheads swathed in bandannas, their only distinguishing marks the color and cut of their uniforms. In fact, the warring soldiers in Ruined are played by the same male actors, implying that although their rhetoric is righteous, their brutality and crimes against humanity are equivalent and indistinguishable.

Mama Nadi’s, however, is no peaceful refuge. Only the force of her personality and the sexual pleasures with which she barters keep the soldiers from raping her and her girls and pillaging the small stores on which they survive. The social contract is utterly tenuous here; although the rainforest rows of dense trees comprise the back half of the set, they’re lit (by Peter Kaczorowski) ominously, almost as though they harbor the deliverers of the women’s violent demise. The precarious operation is both haven and hell, its safety and comfort mercurial.

Nottage builds the characters’ fear and tension slowly, delivering information about the setting and the political moment by carefully filling in the outline of her characters’ pasts, presents, and futures. When Christian (Russell Gebert Jones) arrives at the bar, along with the sundries and supplies he brings to sell to Mama Nadi, he offers her two other pieces of merchandise for the price of one. Not until he drags into the bar two dirty, clearly abused young women—Sophie and Salima—do we realize he’s been talking about people, so callus and indifferent appears the bartering between him and Mama.

Mama surveys the two women like a slave auctioneer. Sophie, Christian reveals, even though she’s beautiful, will be no good to Mama’s business because she’s been “ruined”; rebels have raped her with a bayonet and destroyed her genitals. Sophie walks with the ragged, uneven gait of someone who bears the memory of her assault in every move she makes. Despite her lack of value on Mama’s economy, the older woman reluctantly agrees to take Sophie in, along with the less physically broken young woman, Salima.

In between Mama’s tentative embrace of the two damaged women and their eventual losses and redemptions, Nottage demonstrates that Mama has more heart and shrewder politics than it at first appears. Although she treats her girls sternly, her gruff affection for them motivates her actions. Salima, too, has been raped by rebels, and forcibly separated from her husband and her little girl. Nottage unfolds Salima’s story across the play’s two acts, until her pregnancy as a result of rape, and the arrival of her desperate husband, combine to propel her to an unspeakable act that provides one of the play’s several climaxes.

Nottage modulates the play’s tension level, intercutting visits from rebels and government soldiers with more familial scenes of Mama and her girls, trying to establish some sense of a normal life in between the anxious moments with the men, whose brutality and arrogance are interchangeable. Mama and the girls suffer their presence because it puts food in their mouths, but the acts required of them in exchange fray their souls.

Sophie, however, pays her way through Mama’s employ by singing, accompanied by a guitarist and drummer who perform for the theatre’s spectators as much as for the characters in the bar. (Nottage wrote the songs’ lyrics to original music by Dominic Kanza.) Condola Rashad (Phylicia Rashad’s gorgeous young daughter) has a golden, bell-like singing voice that lights up her face. The beauty of that sound, ringing in a place of such spiritual and physical impoverishment, is a lush and heart-rending contradiction. The musical performances also provide a Brechtian element that lets spectators—and the characters—rest from the viciousness of the action, giving us a chance to breath, to think, to contemplate how a sound so beautiful could come from a situation so untenable.

The women focus Nottage’s anti-war plaint. Played by Ekulona, Mama is a powerhouse, whose gestus here, rather than Mother Courage’s fastening her teeth on each coin she earns, is to stuff into her bra the wads of cash she receives from the soldiers, patting at her breasts as they grow heavy with bills. Nestled close to her flesh and her heart, the money appears to go directly to sustenance, as though hidden from the work for which it’s payment. The money might be dirty, but lodged between her breasts, Mama Nadi rechristens it before she exchanges it with Christian for food (and the occasional piece of chocolate over which she’s enraptured).

Nottage emphasizes that the wages of war are visited on the bodies of women who are pawns in battles between men. When Salima stages her tragic protest late in the play, she shouts, “Don’t fight your wars on my body.” Ravaged by assault, these women nonetheless find dignity and strength. Mama, the towering, wily matriarch of this outpost, tells Christian, “I didn’t come as Mama Nadi; I found her here.” She steps into the shoes of a heroine, rising to an occasion not of her own making.

Men have failed these women. Salima’s husband was buying a new pot when the rebel soldiers overran their village and attacked her; she was an arbitrary victim in a war without rules, but her body bears the price. Pregnant, she cries that she’s carrying the “baby child of a monster.” As her husband pleads with Mama to allow him to see Salima, he holds the new pot in his fist, a pitiful symbol of reparations he’s unable to make.

In the play’s world—and in the real world of violence in the Congo Nottage references—raped women are considered damaged, as though the violence inflicted on their bodies is somehow their fault. Caught in such impossible contradictions, the women have nowhere to turn. Women like Mama capitalize on their spoiled flesh.

But Mama draws her empathy from another source. After a critical confrontation between the rebels and the soldiers, in which Christian and the women are caught as potential victims, life settles back into its uneasy rhythms. Christian, who’s trying to recover from alcoholism, and whose status as a merchant has marked him as somewhat less than a man throughout the play, finally articulates his love for Mama.

Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man. Before she can accept his affections, the previously stalwart Mama unravels with emotion, and tells Christian the secret that binds her to the women in her employ. The 11^th hour confession, which Christian accepts on the way to reintegrating the nuclear family, is the play’s one false note, one that compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.

Would that Nottage had maintained her singular, Brechtian vision of the consequences of war for women to a more bitter end, instead of capitulating to realism’s mandate that narratives resolve with heterosexual marriage that solves everything. The gender politics of the Congo that Ruined describes with such force are compromised by this conservative happy ending.

Still, director Kate Whoriskey (who teaches at Princeton) stages a taut, muscular drama filled with compassionate, fierce performances (especially from Ekulona as Mama, Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the doomed Salima, and Cherise Boothe as their hardened colleague, Josephine). Rashad, as Sophie, is the story’s fragile, luminous center, the hope in the women’s despair. She makes Ruined a moving testament to survival.

The Feminist Spectator

The L Word: Good Night and Good-Bye

From the Showtime web site

And so they go, the girls of The L Word, off into the LA lesbian sunset . . . or wait, are they going into the police station to give their testimonies about Jenny’s mysterious death to the hot sheriff who came to investigate her drowning? An overhead shot at the show’s end lets us watch as a number of very large cars pull into a nearly empty parking lot in some ambiguous LA location, from which the city, glittering at dusk, looms in the background. One after another, our heroines leave their vehicles and walk—each in her idiosyncratic way, but each looking remarkably like a model, with that showy swagger, that lithe, winsome affect, and that hair blowing in a breeze that comes from nowhere—toward a destination ultimately unknown.

At first, their faces are serious. Perhaps they’re thinking toward their fateful meetings with Lucy Lawless (in an amusing piece of intertextual casting) as the sheriff, Sergeant Duffy. But wait, moments into their individual saunters, they begin to smile, almost slyly. Gradually, the women meet up and acknowledge one another, in twos and threes, ending up in a long row of L Word women, their arms wound gleefully around each others’ waists in a final kick-line to send off their six-season show.

Bette and Tina smile particularly widely—after all, they began the end by deciding to decamp to New York, where perhaps this time, Tina really will pull her weight and Bette really will let her be the family’s Uber-mom. Or maybe Kit’s new erstwhile drag queen lover—whom Angie sweetly calls “Daddy” when he and Kit bring the little one home after a trip to the zoo—will join them and create a transgendered as well as biracial nuclear family. Maybe Max, despite his sudden aw-shucks reaction to his baby’s first kicks, will move to New York, too, and ask Bette and Tina to help him raise his child (or maybe they’ll adopt his kid after all, and Max will grow his beard back).

Hard to say. But in those final moments of winsome walking, everything seems both possible and forgiven. Even the wretched Jenny Schecter is resurrected from the recently-dead to join the long march toward The L Word’s ending, wearing some sort of gold lamé dress and, eventually, smiling, too, as Bette and Tina and then Shane reach out their hands to bring her back into the fold. But hey—are they still acting? Or are they Jennifer Beals, Laurel Holloman, Kate Moenning, and Mia Kirschner, just taking their curtain call?

Since the producers held the valedictory credits until the very end, I was surprised to see that Ilene Chaiken wrote and directed the finale. The episode was shot with a sense of style and written with a kind of restraint that I haven’t associated with Chaiken’s work in recent seasons. A lot of final exposition had to be set up and moved along, but the dialogue that accomplished the girls’ propulsion into their futures was crisp and true to character.

Even the camera work got a bit arty, especially in the interspersed, flashed-ahead scenes of the women’s interrogation at the police station, where high, stark lighting, dramatic angles, and extreme close-ups gave them a cool film noir style. Chaiken lent scenes set in “West Hollywood” some equally varied angles, shooting a number of them from high above the action. (Maybe she was just giving us a god’s-eye view on the characters she created.) The filmic choices gave the episode a richer texture. And happily, Betty’s grating theme song was absent, replaced by a music collection ranging from female pop artists to melancholic cello work, all of which heightened the emotions of the moment.

After all, this was the swan song for history’s first more or less mainstream lesbian soap opera/“dramedy.” That it lasted six seasons (for which spectators were thanked in a producer’s note after the credits) seems remarkable and notable, regardless of whether you watched avidly and with pleasure or watched not at all, unable to stomach the whole proceedings. During a visit I made recently to the University of Maryland, more than one lesbian apologized for not being a fan; one even said with dismay, “Do I have to watch it?”

Of course, I said no, since I’m hardly the arbiter of these things. But why not, I wondered? Isn’t it even fun to hate? Is it just that my nearly 52-year-old self is still amazed to be watching Lez Girls cavort, between the sheets, at the Planet, at Helena’s palatial ocean-side abode, at Bette and Tina’s newly renovated house, with its pool-side cabana and its conveniently, fatefully unsteady deck railing? While I, too, got impatient or bored with the show more than once through its run, I watched every episode and I’m sad that it’s over.

It’s not that I won’t have other things to do with my Sunday nights. But a story has ended in which I felt implicated and cathected, emotionally and psychologically connected to characters that had little to do with my life, but everything to do with a cultural moment I needed to mark and enjoy on a weekly basis. The availability of television by and about lesbians required me to witness it as a new wrinkle in the American cultural zeitgeist. I don’t want to see the space The L Word created in public consciousness close over without a ripple.

Gossip has it that Chaiken is developing a spin-off for Leisha Haley. Another lesbian-focused series would be terrific, but Alice Pieszecki became one of the least interesting characters on The L Word. Why couldn’t she let go of Tasha, even after it was Alice who seemed attracted elsewhere at the end of season five? Haley and Rose Rollins are capable performers, but their chemistry as a couple was never convincing. In their brighter moments, their banter and teasing and flirting were fun, but their sex scenes always lacked conviction. Haley and Rollins just couldn’t manufacture on-screen magic. Mei Melancon, playing the last season’s third wheel interloper, Jamie, and Rollins, although they never consummated their attraction, gave their longing gazes more zing.

In fact, Tasha’s return to Alice at the last episode’s 11th hour seemed unrealistic, a forced happy ending rather than a choice the character actually might have made. Alice and Tasha were never right together; why not choose the biracial girl who seemed to “get” Tasha instead of Alice, who always blundered through their relationship, disrespecting Tasha’s difference on numerous levels. Alice became shrewish and grasping by the end.

When she confronted Jamie and Tasha about their feelings for one another at the Planet in the last episode, and Jamie finally confirmed her love for Tasha, Alice acted like a teenager, saying, “Thank you. And fuck you,” and later, “Shut up,” as Jamie tried to talk to her. The old Alice might have been tougher, her response more complicated. For someone who began the series as the keeper of the Chart—that genealogical web of dyke relationships, that cartographic image of incestuous lesbian lives—Alice became strangely attached to a very conventional notion of monogamy.

Still, much of the humor in the last episode came from Alice’s drunken day waiting for Tasha to choose her or Jamie. Alice wiles away the tense time talking on the phone to Shane and Helena, fantasizing about what Tasha and Jamie are doing together. Haley got the one-liners right; it made me miss Alice’s video blog, when she served as the voice of a community, commenting on its mores and foibles. Too bad Chaiken reduced Alice to just another needy lesbian by the finale.

Shane, on the other hand, seems to be the character who grew the most. The final show spends a lot of time resolving her narrative thread. She conveniently bumps into her most recent ex, Molly (Clementine Ford), in a gift store. When Molly refers to dropping off Shane’s coat and the letter that (of course) Jenny never passed on to Shane, poor Shane blanches visibly, as the shoe drops and the various pieces of Jenny’s deception and its consequences fall into place.

Ford makes a crisp, wistful cameo appearance. With a new girl looking soulfully into her eyes, Molly’s able to tell Shane that she’s over her and that it’s okay. Shane initiated her, and like so many other girls, Molly fell for her hard. But she’s okay, Molly says, and trots off to put her new arm candy back on. The devastated Shane watches her past and her preferred future walk out the door and races home to find Molly’s letter in the jacket Jenny stuffed in the attic of their house. In the process, she comes across the stolen negatives of Lez Girls that Jenny had stashed away the whole time.

The last episode confirmed that Jenny truly was pathological. She stole the negatives; she kept Shane from Molly; she meddled outrageously in Helena and Dylan’s relationship, as well as Bette and Tina’s. Thanks to Jenny, Helena rejects Dylan (Alexandra Hedison), forever unable to trust that Dylan loves her for herself and not her money. (“It’s a cliché,” Rachel Shelley says into the camera, during her scene with Sergeant Duffy, eyes batting, “But it’s hard to be rich.”) It’s a shame Helena has to dump Dylan, since their rekindled relationship was one of The L Word’s more mature, their sex the best Rachel Shelley ever performed on the show. In one of the several reminiscence reels available from Showtime On Demand, Shelley remarks that she and Hedison “clicked”—it shows.

Jenny’s plan to tell Tina about what she mistakenly believes is Bette’s infidelity proves the final straw. In my oh-so-close examination of the last episode, I think Chaiken intimates that Bette killed Jenny. Their last scene together on the deck leaves the two women in a face off, with Bette practically snarling that she won’t let Jenny hurt her family. As the scene cuts away, Jenny’s lower lip trembles with defiance. After Bette returns to the house, Jenny is never seen again.

And is Jennifer Beals smiling just a bit too knowingly in that final bow? And why is her interrogation scene with Sergeant Duffy repeated twice, shot at a different, even closer angle, but with the same dialogue, as Bette repeatedly rolls up the sleeves on her crisp white blouse? “Jenny is complicated, complex,” Bette says thoughtfully, “talented, sometimes generous, but complicated, complex.” What’s that supposed to mean? And how could Bette, with the walls of her home adorned with smart, contemporary feminist art, think that Jenny’s execrable novel and trashy film indicates talent?

Setting Bette up to take the fall for Jenny’s murder—even if only implicitly—continues the demonizing of Bette for her season one original sin of her affair with the carpenter. Bette’s vilification is one of The L Word’s most conservative ploys. In the end, Bette tells Kit that she’s sick of everyone being in her business. I don’t blame her, given how eager they all became to vilify Bette and how easily her friends and her sister believed that she’d stepped out on Tina with the horrible gallery owner Kelly Wentworth (Elizabeth Berkeley, not at all redeeming her Showgirls debacle). Surely Bette has more taste than to be attracted to the manipulative, voracious Kelly, when she’s got earnest, exasperated but lovely Laurel Holloman at home.

Bette and Tina have always been the show’s leading couple; they were destined to be together at its end. Shane, in fact, gives them a nice nod, stumbling upon them after one of her nights out carousing as Bette and Tina sit on their house steps, drinking coffee and beginning their day after a night of loud sex and quiet intimacy. (Scenes of them sleeping intertwined are all shot from above, too; the goddess is watching, don’t you know.) Quoting the threesome’s exchange from the first season, Shane teases them about having sex—she can always sense when they’ve been at it, and her envy is rueful and sweet. Using the same moment to bookend the series is a lovely acknowledgment of the couple’s longevity.

Jenny’s farewell video for Bette and Tina brings all the women together for a nostalgia fest. The intercut clips of testimonials from friends near and far serve as a benediction for the show as well as the characters. Karina Lombard appears in a silly clip as the long forgotten Marina, speaking now with a French accent since she’s apparently moved to the south of France. She’s probably sorry she missed those six seasons of steady work. Tim (Eric Mabius) pops on to wish them well, cracking jokes about “crazy” Jenny. (Mabius generously sets aside his Ugly Betty character to resurrect Tim.) Ivan (Kelly Lynch), in his rather Goth trans regalia, sends regards staged in front of a placard that says “Vote No on 8,” bringing the show into the political present.

The soigné Peggy Peabody, played by the inimitable Holland Taylor, gives Bette and Tina her blessing, making me nostalgic for the good old days when Bette was mounting the “Provocations” show at the LA museum. Angus (Dallas Roberts), who betrayed Kit with Angie’s babysitter, says he’s got his heart open and waiting for Bette and Tina in New York. Jodi (Marlee Matlin) signs to the camera how much they’ve changed her life, surprisingly setting aside her ugly break-up with Bette (or maybe she’s just being ironic). Even the jilted Carmen (Sarah Shahi) appears, looking self-serious (and not at all like “herself” or like a lesbian) to wish the couple well.

Kit jokes that the video is a catalogue of her ex-lovers, but the clips recall many of the women’s former romantic entanglements. (At least Jenny/Chaiken steered clear of including clips of the long dead and gone Dana, which would have been really cloying.) That these old characters appear in Jenny’s video brings the show full circle and gestures toward a truism of many lesbians’ lives—ex-lovers do eventually become friends, because we need and value the extended circle of people who once were intimates. Watching the women watch what amounts to a home movie underlines their intimacy and their kinship. (Max calls them “framily”—more than friends, not quite family.)

As they watch her (three hour) video, the gang finally realizes that Jenny isn’t there to see their reactions. Alice, who’s valiantly decided to be friends with Jenny again, goes to search her out. Max quips, rather uncharacteristically, “Maybe someone threw water on her and she melted,” which turns out to be not far from the truth. They should have noticed Jenny’s Pomeranian frantically sniffing and whining around the pool while they were eating popcorn and watching the video.

Some viewers are disappointed that Jenny’s murder, so touted in previews and so anticipated in the script, was so anticlimactic. Did Jenny fall in the pool? Did she jump? Was she pushed? By Bette? Who cares? We’ll never know and it hardly matters. Perhaps Chaiken was just trying to fulfill fans’ wishes, many of whom have wanted Jenny dead since the first season. Like so many others over the show’s run, the plot point was contrived and unnecessary; Bette and Tina’s move from LA would have been enough to wrap up the story.

But Jenny’s death keeps The L Word true to its roots. The show was always a fantasy, a fairy tale about beautiful, sexy lesbians who never seemed to worry about money, despite how often they changed precarious jobs. The clothes, the bodies, the situations—few of them were authentic to most people’s idea of what it’s like to be a lesbian, or a dyke, or queer in early 21st century America.

But The L Word’s flashes of humorous insight, and complicated desire, and hard fought relationships, and fraught friendship networks, and love and commitment among a group of women who helped one another survive really did hit a vein of something true. For those moments, I’ll miss it.

Mourning an era’s end,
The Feminist Spectator

Streetcar Named Desire at Princeton

Usually, there's something pathetic (and as a result irritating) about the women in Williams's Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche is flighty and damaged, and Stella is so blindly in love with Stanley, she follows him around like a puppy waiting for him to throw her a bone. Usually, too, even though Blanche, well, blanches when she sees the squalor into which Stella has descended from their glory days on their family's Belle Reve plantation, in other productions, the size of the stage makes the apartment in New Orleans's French Quarter seem spacious and colorful.

The Princeton Program in Theatre and Dance's terrific production of Streetcar (3/6/09) avoids both of these traps. To take the second trap first, thanks to set designer Jeffrey Van Velsor's spot-on conception, a good half of the expansive Berlind Theatre stage at the McCarter Theatre is blocked off for use as the social environment surrounding the apartment. Characters exit to walk the streets or saunter off to the bowling alley or bar nearby. The other half is a small, square, raked platform, onto which is crammed Stella and Stanley's tiny kitchen, with its filthy sink, ancient refrigerator, and few worn wooden cabinets, as well as its round table and four chairs, at which Stanley and his buddies spend most of their time in energetic, beer- and cigarette-infused games of low-stakes poker.

A sheer white curtain, hung on a precarious rod from a few thin rings, separates this very public space from Stella and Stanley's bedroom, which is adorned with an over-sized bed, a narrow dresser, and a rickety night table. Behind this room is the bathroom, enclosed with an imaginary door that's mimed by the actors. The audience watches voyeuristically as each of the characters enters what should be their only truly private space, where they use the toilet (quite realistically), shower, gaze at themselves in the mirror, change their clothes, and otherwise try to compose themselves for the on-going battle to survive that comprises their lives.

The bathroom “mirror” looks into the apartment’s kitchen, which allows the audience to see how the characters peer at themselves and also underlines the permeability between the rooms. Blanche's Army-issue cot hovers downstage in the nether-region between the public and the private spaces, with her trunk of worldly possessions as her only furniture. Blanche's tiny corner overflows with her finery and her fantasies, as she begins to spin her deluded narrative of her past, her present, and her future.

The cramped space quickly becomes a powder keg when Blanche arrives, as she robs Stella and Stanley of their little privacy. Without her presence, as Stanley complains to Stella, they'd “play our colored lights” and enjoy the intense and intimate pleasures of one another's flesh, which draws them magnetically together. With Blanche and her fantasies sucking the air out of their home, Stanley becomes the violent animal Blanche assumes he is from the start, and Stella is frustrated and exhausted by trying to mediate between her sister and her husband.

The lack of room to breathe—and the New Orleans heat, which the actors here all manifest in the sweat they wear across their foreheads—makes it difficult for anyone to be civil or loving, and lets the audience feel viscerally how their circumstances trap the characters, forcing them to either lash out or to weave stories that allow them to escape their surroundings, if only in their dreams.

In this production, the female characters are far from pathetic, avoiding the second typical trap for Streetcar. In Shannon Lee Clair's intelligent, nuanced portrayal, Blanche is a woman desperate to survive in much reduced circumstances. The character is often played as driven only by desire, and moralized against as a slut masquerading as a saint. But Clair’s delivery clarifies that Blanche has suffered the devastation of her homestead, burying her parents and their servants as they each slowly decline and decay, then finding herself left with nothing ("Death is expensive, Stella," she says cuttingly).

Stanley finds out that Blanche has been working not just as a teacher but also as a prostitute in Laurel, Louisiana, and proceeds to deride her for her loose morals and easy virtues. But Clair's Blanche is a woman who'll do anything to survive. She’s tough and resilient, and though her choices aren't always admirable, she's kept food on her table and a roof over her head. Until, that is, she's run out of Laurel by the sheriff for having sex with one of her 17-year-old male students.

That indiscretion reveals Blanche's motivating guilt: She married, quite young, a beautiful boy who turned out to be gay. When she stumbled on him and an older man having sex, her disgust rushed the boy toward suicide, an action for which she still can't forgive herself. Blanche is eternally caught in a nexus of guilt and desire from which she can't be extricated. She flashes back to the scene of her betrayal, hearing again and again the carnival noises and the flashing lights that accompanied her harsh confrontation of her husband, and the gunshot that signaled his death.

Director Tracy Bersley illustrates the flashbacks with sound and lights, as the interior of Blanche's psychic turmoil is manifested on stage. For a play that's more often staged as strict realism, these flights into the sensual texture of Blanche's fixations make for very compelling theatre. And while those moments could sink into melodrama, Clair's Blanche tethers them to a keen sense of the woman's unbearable remorse, her desire to make it right, and her inability to stop finding herself attracted to young boys who stand in for her dead lover.

Stella is hardly a simpering fool in the Princeton production. Played with intelligence and warmth by Veronica Siverd, Stella becomes a compassionate foil, caught in her corner of the triangle she comprises with Blanche and Stanley. She knows that Blanche is fading off into fantasy and she can see that Stanley is infuriated by her sister's class snobbery and phony airs. But Siverd plays Stella's love for them both as sincere and complicated.

Stella's drawn to the physicality of her life with Stanley, but in Siverd's hands, she’s equally thrilled by her life in the French Quarter, with the jazz playing through the apartment's windows, the speakeasies to visit down the block, Stanley's bowling games to watch, and the easy camaraderie of her upstairs neighbors, whose easy laughter and on-again off-again domestic squabbles echo her own. Stella has saved herself from Belle Reve's ruin by making her own way in New Orleans, finding Stanley and reinventing her life. She knows that Blanche can't drag her back, but she's compelled by her own guilt at the burden Blanche has borne on her behalf.

All the actors present excellent performances. Tyler Crosby's Stanley avoids the temptation to imitate the iconic Marlon Brando characterization, and instead finds Stanley's scheming, workmanlike intelligence, if not his intellect. Crosby's Stanley knows he's not smart, but he compensates by being wily and manipulative, asserting his power through mental as well as physical intimidation. Shawn Fennell is gentlemanly and effete as Mitch, nicely playing the double standard of a man who wants his women to be virginal yet is willing to take his turn when he finds out they're whores, as he does with Blanche.

Peter Walkingshaw and Stephen Strenio play very well the burdens of working class men trying to enjoy themselves over poker and a case of beer, and Arielle Sandor and Alexis Brown ably create the women who are Stella's compassionate, empathetic but strong neighbors. James Mears, Cristina Luzarraga, Brad Baron, and Laura Hankin all take advantage of their supporting roles, turning in crisp images of the characters who people Streetcar’s world.

Bersley reprints in the program parts of a letter Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, who directed the Broadway production and the film version of Streetcar, which relates that he thinks the play is about the tragedy of judging one another falsely. In the spirit of our times, however, this production of Streetcar seems to me much more about the lengths to which people will go to survive, when their reduced circumstances give them so few options. Love becomes a pawn in a game that's much more about economics than emotion, but still, the characters with the most compassion remain standing with their hearts intact at the end.

The Feminist Spectator

Savannah Disputation

Kellie Overbey, Dana Ivey, Reed Birney and Marylouise Burke

Photo by Joan Marcus

As religion and fundamentalism come under closer scrutiny, one can only hope, in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s refusal to separate church and state, plays like Savannah Disputation (at Playwrights Horizons, 3/8/09) are a welcome addition to the debate. Evan Smith’s play is ultimately a confection, but its wry barbs and ironic parries with questions of faith and belief sure taste good going down. With sharp comic performances by all four actors and direction by Walter Bobbie that keeps the action going and the dialogue moving, the play scores some minor but necessary points for secular humanism.

Marylouise Burke plays her stock dotty grandmotherly character, this time in the person of Margaret, an elderly, never-married woman who lives with her sister, Mary, played with perpetually rolling eyes by Dana Ivey. When Melissa, an evangelical missionary (Kellie Overbey), arrives at their door, Margaret can’t resist engaging the challenges to her Catholicism that the woman’s proselytizing provokes. Although the more sober-minded Mary dismisses the young woman without a second thought, Margaret arranges for her to return for an evening’s discussion about matters of faith.

Against Mary’s wishes, Melissa descends on their home with her show-and-tell box of trivial pursuit questions about Jesus and his teachings. Frustrated by her mindless but strangely persuasive adherence to what Mary considers heresy, the ever rational but clearly competitive sister invites Melissa back, clandestinely arranging for Father Murphy (the terrific Reed Birney, late of his virtuosic turn in Blasted at Soho Rep) to join them as ministerial ballast in their debate.

The third scene of this zingy three-part 90-minute play stages the confrontation between the surprised, hesitant clergyman and the eager young evangelist, both of whom, it seems, have turned to religion to quiet their own personal demons rather than because they’re inherently believers. Father Murphy sets Melissa straight while making it clear that he admires her fervent desire to commit her life to something that matters, while at the same time chastising Mary for using him as a pawn in her contest. He suggests that Margaret address her own gullibility (and grow up) and exits the evening ruefully, inviting himself back next week for his regular dinner with the sisters.

The play is rather pat, and Father Murphy’s service as the intellectual and emotional agent for the three women is irritating. Rather bland and milquetoast, he’s not the most compelling character. Savannah Disputation would be more interesting if it were Mary who prevailed on her own terms, instead of by maneuvering her priest into being her mouthpiece. Instead, she’s left at the play’s end standing by her answering machine, listening to the fourth message from her doctor’s office, urgently asking her to call in for her test results.

The specter of mortality that hovers over the character is too easy an excuse for her crisis of faith, and leaves the audience feeling manipulated. The comic dialogue offers more than a few entertaining moments, and Smith’s writing is knowing and observant about the foibles of religious devotion. But to write off Mary’s quandary as an effect of a life-threatening illness needlessly moves the play to movie-of-the-week territory. The four excellent actors deserve better.

The Feminist Spectator

The Illustrated Feminist Spectator . . .

Thanks to Marilee Lindemann of Roxie's World (see "Fellow Travelers" on my sidebar, which is my new version of the blog roll), I've managed to add a few gadgets to The Feminist Spectator.

I appreciate all of you who sign up as Followers, and I'm beginning to add more links and cross-referenced material to better engage the on-line information community and hopefully make The Feminist Spectator more useful to all of you.

In future posts (which I continue to hope will be more and more frequent), I intend to include photos of the various productions, films, or television shows about which I'm writing, and even the occasional YouTube clip . . . When I manage that, I'll know I've arrived.

Thanks for reading, and for your patience with my text-heavy site.

I'm looking forward to the visuals myself and in the interim, have included this shot from a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies last summer. My bit for environmental sustainability . . .

The Feminist Spectator

The 81st Oscars: Entering the 21st Century

I watch the Oscars avidly, but like most people, have begun to find them boring in recent years. From the opening, insipid red carpet interviews to the long-awaited always too late end, they’ve seemed banal and ridiculous exercises in star-gazing more than celebrations of filmmakers’ accomplishments. Last night’s new and revised show was a vast improvement over the recent past, as a fresh set of producers created a new look and a new feel for the broadcast, jettisoning the lame comedy (for the most part) and the uninspired patter between ill-at-ease presenters. The show’s new writers (no sign of the much over-used and comically exhausted Bruce Vilanch this time around) made the evening almost sophisticated, reaching for the wry and the ironic without the kind of cynicism that might make that approach harder to take.

The Tina Fey/Steve Martin routine, in fact, epitomized the evening’s tone. Presenting the awards for best original and adapted screenplay, they stood together in front of a screen that displayed a typescript of their own dialogue, which then morphed into dialogue and filmic descriptions for the movies in question, as the brief, fully realized scenes played under the words. Fey and Martin brought their usual dry wit to the routine, acting the brief moment more than reading it from prompters. Most of the presentations evinced the same bright spontaneity, which only comes from talented actors who’ve carefully rehearsed their shtick.

Hugh Jackman, the evening’s host, brought lots of earnest energy to the evening, a welcome respite from the snarky attempts at industry deprecation that usually characterize the host’s work. Although he stars in the Wolverine film franchise—about which I know nothing except for those knife-like things that sprout between his knuckles when he’s angry—Jackman is a theatre song and dance man. Like several of the evening’s stars, he “played gay” in The Boy from Oz, playing songwriter/performer Peter Allen, giving a physically unleashed, terrific performance. Jackman’s also performed in Oklahoma and other Broadway musicals, and he proved his stuff recently hosting the Tony’s.

Jackman’s opening musical routine was a bit forced. The premise was that despite the lack of a budget for an opening number, Jackman put one together anyway. This occasioned stage hands schlepping out rough hewn-looking little two-dimensional sets, in front of which Jackson performed a Bill Crystal-esque sung medley of references to the awarded films and actors. The number might have fallen flat, but Jackman is hard to resist. In a moment of rehearsed spontaneity, he pulled Anne Hathaway onto the stage with him, where she gamely sang (in a beautiful, strong soprano) and horsed around. Everyone seemed willing to give Jackman the benefit of the doubt, which made the proceedings more, well, human and warmer than usual.

The rearranged seating also helped. Jackman moved in close to the elite crowd sitting in semi-circular rows of seats down front, standing on a modified thrust stage with steps down into the nearby crowd that he used liberally. The translucent curtains that framed the arched proscenium were designed to create a cabaret atmosphere, harkening back to the days when the ceremony was delivered to Hollywood’s royalty as they were seated at tables, eating and drinking (not unlike the Golden Globe awards). The choice made the evening seem more intimate; very few camera shots panned the larger crowd in the still enormous Kodak Theatre.

The evening’s contrived narrative hinged on teaching spectators how films are made, from the initial script development to production design to shooting to marketing to, ostensibly, their awards. Although the story became a bit forced and inevitably rushed by the end, the light (or lite?) pedagogy was inoffensive and mostly effective. Rather than standing at sterile podiums, most presenters stood further into the stage, surrounded by props that evoked the filmic aspect of the moment. The choice made the television picture more visually interesting, and disrupted the typically stiff pose of actors standing behind a microphone reading silly dialogue.

Many of these moments, interestingly enough, turned into shtick in which the female presenter admonished the male presenter for his excesses. Jennifer Aniston chastised Jack Black for speaking badly about Dreamworks; he said he made movies for them but then bet on Pixar for all the awards. Poised, smart Natalie Portman was forced to deal throughout her skit with Ben Stiller, who was made up as the recalcitrant, “I’ve-retired-from-acting” Joaquin Phoenix. As Stiller stayed in character through the whole bit (wearing a bushy full fake beard and dark sunglasses), Portman’s irritation with the impersonation seemed to become more and more aimed at Stiller. But she soldiered on and made the most of it. Too bad, though, that intelligent women had to be sacrificed to the sophomoric humor of their presenting partners.

Baz Lurhmann, of Moulin Rouge! and this year’s Australia fame, choreographed the evening’s one lavish production number, which saw Jackson and Beyoncé Knowles singing various phrases from movie musicals over the years. Meant as a throw back to a Follies-style extravaganza, the number looked more like A Chorus Line, with various dancing boys and girls lined up and standing tall to flatter Jackson’s and Knowles’ duets. Poor Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens were trotted out to harmonize; they looked terribly young and uncomfortable, knowing they were sops to the younger audience the show’s producers seemed to be courting.

This rather long number, which ended with Jackson proclaiming “The movie musical is back!” could easily have been cut. But the two leads worked very hard to make it all look easy. In some ways, the number honored the actors’ labor, which is always curiously missing from the Oscar telecast.

Another of this year’s innovations was to have the awards to actors presented by a set of five previous winners. Each was announced with clips from their various award-winning performances and/or their acceptance speeches, after which tall panels lifted into the wings to reveal the past winners. Eva Marie Saint, Whoopi Goldberg, Tilda Swinton, Goldie Hawn, and Anjelica Houston presented the Best Supporting Actress award (won by Penélope Cruz). Each of the women spoke directly to one of the nominees, extolling her role in some detail. The picture cut between the presenter and the nominee, most of whom had tears in their eyes.

Although I can imagine that some spectators might deride this technique, I found it moving to hear actors testifying to one another’s work, and much more satisfying than watching a film clip preparatory to staring at the nominees in five small frames waiting for their names to be called. The strategy honored the work and the history of the award at once, and brought a more intimate touch of human feeling to the proceedings. Raquel Welch, Shirley McClaine, Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, and last year’s Best Actress winner, Marion Cotillard, presented to this year’s five Best Actress nominees, and were all on hand for hugs and kisses when Kate Winslet won for The Reader.

This year’s acceptance speeches, too, seemed way above the abysmal par set by recent Oscar shows. Someone must have instructed the winners that, in addition to speaking for no more than 45 seconds, they tell a meaningful story rather than simply reading a list of people they’d like to thank. Most personalized the award with anecdotes that made them much more interesting, fleshing out the narratives of filmmaking and artists’ lives that circulated throughout the evening.

Perhaps most moving was Dustin Lance Black’s speech when he accepted the award for best original screenplay for Milk. Choking back tears, he described the pain of his own coming out story and dedicated his work to young people, so that they might not have to repeat his own history of suffering.

Likewise, Sean Penn, winning for his wonderful performance as Harvey Milk in the film Black wrote, chastised demonstrators apparently holding homophobic signs outside the Kodak Theatre. He shamed those who voted against California’s Prop 8, which invalidated the recently bestowed right of gays and lesbians to marry, and called for equal rights for everyone. Penélope Cruz, in her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress, referred to how films bring people together around the globe, and said she’s proud to be part of the industry.

Heath Ledger’s family accepted his posthumous Best Supporting Actor award, butchering their moment with mumbled, inarticulate remarks that thankfully did nothing to invalidate how much Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight deserved to be recognized. In the Best Actress race, Kate Winslet seemed something of a surprise win, stealing thunder from Meryl Streep, who contemplated her fifteenth nomination with her youngest daughter sitting awkwardly by her side. (The poor girl had a front row seat, which put her in most camera shots. She spent the night hugging herself; I guess she was cold in that strapless dress.)

The audience seemed well behaved. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie laughed politely and were good sports about the occasional joke lobbed their way. Jennifer Aniston’s presentation and her seating within the same close circumference as the Jolie-Pitt’s seemed designed to create some star tension, but the celebrities handled their proximity like pros. Each loser seemed gracious in his or her defeat, each winner rightfully radiant without being arrogant.

Only Bill Maher, in fact, marred the evening with his miserable presentation of the best documentary awards. Right, we know he made a film this year; Religulous got generally decent reviews for its smart critique of organized religion. But Maher seemed in a genuine, rather than rehearsed, huff about not being nominated, and seemed to ad lib a few snarky tone-deaf jabs at the audience that only made him look foolish.

Slumdog Millionaire triumphed, no surprise, winning most of the many awards for which it was nominated, including best director, best song, best editing, and of course best picture. Much of the Indian cast was there, including the fresh-faced Dev Patel and his on-screen love, Freida Pinto. Each of the young boys and girls who played Jamal and Latika at various stages of their lives were also present, along with most of the key adult character actors. The gathering read a bit awkwardly, as one white man after another got up to thank the Academy for their award, demonstrating what a colonialist project Slumdog perhaps might have been. But the rags-to-riches story, and the film’s great heart, prevailed.

The Academy Awards ceremony will never be as big or as important as, say, the Super Bowl. But for people invested in film and performance and what it means to share stories about our lives, the broadcast will always be one of those rare moments of connection, just as Penélope Cruz said about the movies. This year, the proceedings were dwarfed by President Baraka Obama’s inauguration, and the frisson of immediacy, of sharing the moment with people all over the world that that televised event entailed.

Even so, the Oscar show seemed to tap into something equally prideful about our humanity. The humble knowledge that it matters what we know of one another and how our stories are told seemed key to the evening, as well as the processes of identification and empathy across difference that makes it all work.

That’s entertainment,

The Feminist Spectator

The L Word's Season Six: Going, Going, Almost Gone . . .

The sixth and last season of The L Word constructs the ending of its dyke drama around the mysterious death (murder?) of Jenny Schechter, the character everyone loves to hate. I have to say that I wasn’t an early adopter of the antipathy for Jenny, as were so many fans of the show. When the first season or two centered on her coming out story, I even found aspects of her experience resonant and somehow true. I still remember, for instance, her decision to visit Marina (a character I much preferred loving to hate) in the Planet’s office after closing time one evening, with the formerly resistant Jenny now peeling off her top and succumbing to her new, impossible-to-corral Sapphic desire.

But since the show has embraced its fans’ distaste for the character, Jenny’s arrogance and narcissism have become loathsome, so it’s only appropriate that the swan song season should focus on her early demise. The flashback structure lets us anticipate what we hope will be a delicious and deserved death. (This sounds like quite a cold thing to say, but in the fantasy/melodrama/comedy vein of the show, it’s entirely appropriate.)

In the first episode of season six, the girls (and that’s The Girls, not Les [or Lez] Girls, to you) huddle in Bette and Tina’s living room (which I always find remarkably small, given the lavish décor and generous spread of the rest of their fantasy house), watching in shock as Jenny’s body is removed on a stretcher after she’s found floating face down in the Ur-couple’s pool. The Sunset Boulevard-esque device is fun and effective; each of the next several episodes flashes back to set up a different potential murderer, planting enough motive among the main characters to persuade spectators that any one of them might have done Jenny in, and sending us barreling toward the show’s grand exit.

The L Word has only ever been as good as each episode’s writer/producer and director. The sixth season’s first, written by Ilene Chaiken, The L Word’s creator and executive producer, was typically terrible. Chaiken has never been the best of its many scribes; I cringe when I see her name in an episode’s opening credits as writer or director. Her dialogue is flatfooted and awkward, and the characters’ interactions are always less complex and witty when she’s at the helm.

True to form, the first episode of season six was filled with obvious, stagy patter and melodramatic events, most of which set up the subsequent episodes: Bette and Tina’s plan to adopt another baby and their over-the-top rush to the E.R. when Angie gets a cold; Shane’s dejected determination to win back Jenny’s friendship after betraying her by having sex with Niki at the Les Girls wrap party; Helena’s chastity, while she invests her time and energy into the new, upscale evening disco arm of The Planet, in which she’s Kit’s new business partner; Tina’s despair over the hetero-izing of Lez Girls, which by the second episode has been renamed The Girls and its ending changed so that the main character goes back to men; Bette’s friction with Jodi, who’s now got a vendetta against her boss and former lover; and Alice and Tasha’s attempt to mend their faltering relationship.

Although the story-line is no doubt produced by committee, Chaiken’s rendering of the characters rings hollow and sends the proceedings plummeting from the realm of guilty pleasure and into embarrassing boredom. Thankfully, the redoubtable Rose Troche wrote and directed the second episode and several more this season, returning The L Word to its more parodic outlook and moving it along with a much lighter, wittier touch. Subsequent episodes have mostly maintained a more satirical élan, but you can also feel the producers’ urgency about developing new plot threads for this last season while also tying up loose ends as it moves toward its wrap.

The women’s various relationships—both as couples and within the larger kinship network that’s perhaps always been one of the show’s most interesting and successful projects—have grounded The L Word’s view of its very partial lesbian community. Alice and Tasha, whose interracial pairing is interesting mostly for the class differences between them, struggle to stay together despite the clashes of values and interests that continually threaten to break them up.

Their second episode scene in a couple’s therapist’s office was both hysterical and sad, as it nicely clarified Alice’s inadvertent but nearly total domination of her girlfriend. Alice answered each question the shrink addressed to the more reticent Tasha, talking for her and about her as Tasha sat in uncomfortable silence. By the end of the session, the shrink suggested they’re too different to stay together, which only appeared to strengthen their resolve to work things out. Leisha Hailey’s Alice continues to be the show’s bright spot, whether because of her innate sensitivity to lesbian relationship vibes (if I could be so essentialist to suggest), or because of how genuinely she responds the game Rose Rollins’s laidback demeanor. Rollins’s/Tasha’s throaty laugh, which throws her chin up and her head back with pleasure, is one of the show’s unadulterated, infectious delights.

Then there’s Phyllis (Cybill Shepherd), the newly out provost, and her determined butchy lover, Joyce (played by the redoubtable Jane Lynch), who insists they marry and proclaim life-long dedication. The show’s portrait of Phyllis’s work as the provost of a major university is so ridiculous it’s campy, capped by Joyce’s appearance, in the nude, in Phyllis’s office to propose holy matrimony. Phyllis’s betrayal of Bette, when Jodi threatens to sue her former lover for sexual harassment, seems cold and out of character, although Phyllis has always been played more for laughs than for depth.

After several uncomfortable professional moments, in which it’s clear that Jodi’s career has taken off after the opening of her piece exposing Bette’s disloyalty, Bette resigns from the university, blithely leaving her prominent deanship to return to the art world. The big-eyed Elizabeth Berkeley was quickly introduced as an old college chum who reappears in Bette’s life as a recently divorced, settlement-wealthy art collector, who needs Bette’s expertise to run her gallery and whose not so subtle flirtation with Bette fans the always smoldering flames of Tina’s jealousy.

The appearance of still another woman to distract Bette from her long-term if fraught and only just recently reaffirmed relationship with Tina feels forced. I don’t know why the show brands Bette as an always-straying Jezebel, but there’s something incipiently racist about this aspect of The L Word, as though being biracial keeps Bette from making clear choices about whom to love.

Tina’s constant jealousy has reduced her character to a charade of a whiny house-frau. Laurel Holloman’s already superficial acting chops haven’t been flattered by the recent vagaries her role, which requires too much righteous indignation—over Bette’s new/old friend, over the disintegration of the lesbian perspective of Lez Girls, which she produced, and over the possibility of adopting another child. Holloman spends too much time with her voice and her eyebrows raised, and her relationship with Beals has so far lost much of its sexy luster. I hope it returns by the series’ end, as their erotic connection has always been one of the show’s main attractions.

In one of the most blatantly ripped-from-the-headlines plot threads, transman Max has become pregnant, thanks to his gay male lover Tom’s sexual ministrations. Max, now sporting a full (and very unconvincing) beard, discovers his pregnancy too late to abort, and Tom at first claims to be willing to raise the child with him. But Max discontinues his testosterone treatment (which doesn’t seem to affect the fullness of his beard) and finds himself swelling and suffering from too-female pregnancy hormones.

A scene in Episode Four in which Max disrobes, revealing an obviously prosthetic belly and breasts and the utterly disposable dildo he packs, is pedagogical—as though the producers want to instruct the audience in the apparatus necessary for a transgender person to perform masculinity—and laughable, as Max’s equally plastic-appearing stomach and boobs give off an unnatural sheen.

It could be giving the producers too much credit to suggest that they’re underlining the construction of both masculinity and femininity in this scene. And such a critique doesn’t quite work because the moment is so flat and overwrought, and Max’s psychology so superficially drawn. When he throws a jealous hissy fit over Tom’s innocent flirtations at a gay bar, Tom has second thoughts about their partnership and decides to walk, emptying his closets and drawers without warning or word. Episode four ended with Max’s discovery that he’s been abandoned by his erstwhile partner. With his trans surgery postponed because of his pregnancy, Max’s life is left very much up for grabs. Here, the story line veers from its obvious referent, the transman Thomas “Pregnant Man” Beattie, who maintains a stable relationship with his female partner and is now pregnant with their second child.

In another far-fetched plot development, after Jenny skewers Shane and Niki when she catches them in flagrante delicto, she admits that she’s in love with Shane, who takes the bait and hops into Jenny’s bed with barely a second thought. Earlier in the series, the two women’s friendship was one of its sustaining elements, their easy physical and emotional camaraderie always grounding and pleasurable, especially given Shane’s disastrous affairs and Jenny’s increasingly self-centered self-stylings.

But to recreate them as a couple forces their intimacy into a nearly incestuous phase, and implies reductively that close lesbian friendships inevitably fall into sexual romance. The rest of the crowd expresses impatient antipathy for their new status as a couple, and even Shane seems dubious. Jenny’s increasingly excessive jealousy, and her insistence that Shane stop smoking and stop flirting, can’t bode well for their romantic longevity.

Of all the characters, Helena’s trajectory tops the pack as the most surreal. She’s gone from being the mean-spirited, competitive, wealthy art benefactor of her first season on the show to a rich girl disinherited by her mother (played with ecstatic verve by the terrific Holland Carter), to a clueless inmate serving jail time for fraud, to an escapee who disappears to a Caribbean island to have a fling with her escaped cellmate, to serving as Kit’s partner at the Planet.

In her insistent indifference to dating, who should reenter the scene but Dylan (Alexandra Hedison), the erstwhile straight woman who blackmailed Helena earlier in the series by seducing her into a relationship that set her, too, up for charges of sexual harassment which (if only temporarily) ruined Helena’s life. The otherwise chaste Helena can’t resist Dylan’s reinvigorated seductions, despite her earlier betrayal. Dylan has come out as queer and returned to the Planet (and the lesbian planet) determined to woe Helena. Despite her friends’ admonishments to steer clear, Helena can’t help but find her interest rekindled.

In episode five, the girl gang use Niki to test the authenticity of Dylan’s renewed love for Helena. When Dylan successfully resists Niki’s seductions (as the others watch through the Planet’s elaborate surveillance system), Helena marches back into Dylan's arms. Their episode-closing love-making moved me more than any of the characters’ sex scenes so far this season, perhaps because their intimacy actually forwarded their characters’ development, rather than throwing a sop to the show’s voyeuristic spectators (of all sexual persuasions).

Kit, meanwhile, flirts with the Planet’s drag queen disk jockey, a large African American man made up in high camp femininity, whose deep, laconic voice seems startling coming from such a package. Poor Kit (Pam Grier) always gets the most superficial treatment from the show’s writers, her relationships the most outlandish and fantastical. Once written as a recovering alcoholic with demons of her own to chase, Kit now serves as the other characters’ helpmeet, commenting from the sidelines on actions from which she’s always strangely excluded. Grier, though, has settled nicely into the role’s absurdities, delivering her Greek chorus commentaries with irony and sardonic attitude. But the writers waste the character’s—and Grier’s—potential.

More than halfway through this season’s eight episode arc, The L Word has maintained much of the sly self-referential satire it established in season five. In one episode, Shane tells Jenny that she’s running off to coif Eric Mabius’s hair, a sweet inside reference to the man who played Tim, Jenny’s swim coach husband, in the show’s first few seasons, who now stars as the clueless magazine entrepreneur on Ugly Betty. More of those moments would add to the show’s fun.

Fans who’ve stuck with The L Word over these last six years have become part of the extended sphere of references that have created community not only on screen but off. Our Chart, spun off from earlier seasons’ references to Alice’s dyke genealogy project, has become successful on line, and the show’s official web site shills for jewelry, curios, and other products that entice spectators to be part of its world. Relatively fewer criticisms of The L Word’s dyke exclusivity seem to float around lately, in part, I’d suggest, because most spectators know it’s all a fantasy anyway. Part of the fun has become to simply go with it, to enjoy its excesses of character and plot and to tolerate its rather sweetly absurd attempts at relevance and authenticity.

After all, a lesbian soap opera remains a gift to those of us still eager for dyke representations of any kind, who still thrill to mainstream references to what remain, for many of us, subaltern lives. Even if those “lives and loves”—as the show’s repulsive theme song repeats ad nauseam—are represented by a tiny portion of a very partially drawn lesbian “community,” The L Word gives fans public visibility to enjoy and contest, to affirm and critique. I have to admit that I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

The Feminist Spectator