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