[Note: For any readers who might have caught an earlier, briefly posted version of this installment, please discard that one and read this one! It's been further edited, tightened, and considerably trimmed (although it's still a rather lengthy post). With thanks, the FS]
Although the recently announced Tony Award nominations held few surprises, my recent spate of New York theatre-going allowed me to see some of the performances/productions vying for the upcoming distinctions. Here are my own biased opinions on a few of this season’s shows.
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Drowsy Chaperone is a wonderful confection of a musical (with lyrics written by my several times removed Canadian cousin, Lisa Lambert, who won a 2006 Tony Award for her work). I was too late to see the show with the original cast; Bob Martin, who also wrote the book, has joined the cast of the London production. But John Glover has ably replaced him in the sweetly fey role of the nameless “Man in Chair,” who invites the audience to “listen” with him to an old-fashioned musical from the 20s called The Drowsy Chaperone. He pops in to comment on the plot and the structure and idiosyncrasies of musicals, speaking directly to the audience about the pleasure of being transported by theatre, which should, he says, always entertain and never be a chore. In fact, the show opens in the dark, with his voice announcing, “I hate theatre.” He goes on to qualify, saying before each curtain goes up, he prays that the show will be good, but is often disappointed.
Drowsy works hard not to disappoint. It’s a bonbon of a show, a box of chocolates sent in honor of the very genre in which it works. Its collaborators clearly love musicals; they know enough about them to send them up flawlessly and affectionately. Each of the characters is purposefully two-dimensional, but played to the hilt of their stereotypes by a troupe of game, talented dancers and singers. The two leading characters in the musical-within-the-musical—the romantic leads—are named after the original lead of the framing production of Drowsy (Bob Martin) and his real-life wife, Janet Van de Graaff. This little not-so-inside-joke is part of the show’s amusing and knowing self-reflexivity, and helps to signal the good humor with which it’s meant to be received.
Glover does a wonderful job with the role of the dithering, but happily transported spectator, who at the end of the play-within-the-play is rewarded for his faith in the power of transformation with an invitation into the fantasy musical that’s crowded his living room throughout the short evening. The performers, conjured alive by his vivid imagination, convert his shabby apartment into places of romance and theatricality, using the refrigerator to make grand entrances and his barred apartment windows to hang draperies that elevate the décor’s élan. His Murphy bed goes up and comes down to reveal an assortment of characters in compromising positions, the bedclothes redecorated for each occasion.
Through Drowsy’s amusing pedagogy, Man in Chair instructs us what to listen for and look at, cheerfully and enthusiastically teaching us how to be appreciative spectators for a musical lollipop that gives him enormous (and infectious) pleasure. Occasionally, the actors appear to get stuck or skip, as they would were we really listening to a record (which Man in Chair holds up at the top of the show, proud that it’s not a CD). The convention is fun, if obvious, and the vaudeville shtick sprinkled liberally through the proceedings also offers surprising amusements, given how stale the jokes should by rights feel.
Casey Nicholaw (who most recently choreographed Spamalot) directs the production to fly through its paces without missing a beat. The show is sharp, visually elaborate and imaginative, nicely choreographed, and managed with assurance and appropriate alacrity. It’s also moving to watch this lonely man (about whom we know nothing but his love for musicals, which is all that matters, in a musical) conjure this cast of characters to keep him company and entertain him.
Race and gender stereotypes abound, as they did in musicals of the era. The actors play them to the hilt, enjoying the buffoonery of the ingénue and leading man as much as the ditziness of the soubrette and her foil. Danny Burstein received a 2006 Tony Award nomination for playing the oily Latin lover Adolpho with thick layers of inspired vocal and physical comedy. Drowsy comments as knowingly on its racism as it does on shopworn musical conventions, and escapes offense because it admits to its excesses and historicizes them as conventions of the musical-within-the-musical’s moment.
The Man in Chair’s innocence, faith, and willing suspension of disbelief rewards him with transformation. He leaves the show carried into the flies on the wing of a biplane (which appears from nowhere, flown by an aviatrix who would now, he tells us, be called a lesbian), allowed into the sacred and sacrilegious world of unreality that’s the pleasure of the musical.
Spring Awakening
Spring Awakening (which lead this year with a total of eleven Tony Award nominations) does more for the musical than offer a valentine to its slightly archaic past. Based on the Wedekind play of almost the same name, the musical—with an urbane, slightly dissonant, but not entirely memorable score by Duncan Sheik and a book and lyrics by Steven Sater, both nominated for Tonys—concerns the angst of a group of high-school boys tightly reined in by teachers and foolish, socially hyperconscious and hypocritical parents. While the story is set in late 1800s in Germany, its contemporary resonances seep through in every moment, as the pop-style music reminds us that students today suffer the same cruel rites of teenage passage.
Spring Awakening clearly means to be the Rent of its generation, and its reviews supported its ambitions. I don’t find the show musically or theatrically revolutionary. Like Rent, Spring Awakening is a coming of age story. But unlike its predecessor, the musical doesn’t divide its situations among a range of contemporary and exemplary bohemian types, but instead focuses more conventionally on the complicated lives of just three of its young characters.
There’s Melchior, the romantic male lead (played with high energy and sweaty passion by Jonathan Groff, who received a Tony nomination for his efforts), and his love object Wendla (Lea Michele), the doomed heroine who doesn’t rise from the dead as Mimi does in Rent, and Moritz (John Gallagher, Jr., also Tony-nominated), an unstable foil for Melchior, whose death is caused by the brutality of his parents and his teachers, who bear responsibility here for everything horrible that befalls the characters.
Played by Christine Estabrook and Stephen Spinella, the adult figures are vile and oppressive, but they’re also comic, especially in Estabrook’s droll renderings. Her schoolmarm quivers with a facial tick that seems to have its own blocking, yet she never appears to be mugging. Likewise, Spinella grounds his vignettes in his characters’ desires and his ultimately good intentions, even if their choices wind up inflicting palpable harm. For instance, he plays Moritz’s father, enforcing the pressure of social norms on a son ill-equipped to acquiesce to them, and feverishly insisting the boy’s failure will blemish the family’s reputation.
Michael Mayer directs Spring Awakening with a powerful attention to emotional detail, crafting moments full of meaning and portent. When Wendla asks Melchior to treat her roughly, so that she’ll feel something deeply, the action builds to a beating that intimately links sexuality and violence.
Propelled by roiling desires they can’t understand, none of the characters are trustworthy, and few are fully known. Instead, they stand for archetypes, generations of Euro-American young people tortured by hormones, social regulations, and existential philosophy that descends on them like lightning with a thunderclap.
The young women are incidental to Spring Awakening. Aside from Wendla and Isla (an enigmatic character whose fate is unclear, although she sings a couple of songs that the actor delivers beautifully), the girls blur into a generic ensemble. They rotate through verses of a chilling song about sexual abuse, but their plaints never sound a major theme or advance the plot.
Mayer handles the production’s brief moment of chaste queer desire with sweet good humor. But that, too, is fleeting and doesn’t forward the characters’ relationships. Unlike Rent, Spring Awakening is more homosocial than queer. Rent’s central intent—however successfully executed—was to imagine new forms of kinship, which included queer and straight couples across a spectrum of race and ethnicity. Here, under cover of Wedekind’s original play and its late 19th century setting, even the all-white schoolboys’ homosociality is muted, while they try to find their way toward the heterosexuality that for the most part seems their destiny.
In Spring Awakening, abortion leads to Wendla’s tragic end, representing a social “problem” that resonates with contemporary politics all too well. Mayer wants Wendla’s plight to echo; he confronts the actors stage left and right with a bank of risers and seats for an on-stage audience, and the small orchestra lines the stage’s bare back wall. The action takes place down stage center, in a relatively small square from which the actors often retreat into the on-stage audience in between their scenes to watch their colleagues perform.
Mayer also plants in the on-stage audience four chorus members wearing everyday (2007) clothing, so that at first, they look like the other spectators. At various moments, however, they pull wireless mics from their shirts or pants, and sing along with the other characters. Then they retreat back into watching the performances from their seats. This rather Brechtian touch brings home the musical’s contemporary resonances.
Spring Awakening's climax in Wendla’s death by back-alley abortion, in fact, seems prescient after the Supreme Court's recent upholding of the so-called partial birth abortion ban, which in its very name ideologically manipulates a standard medical procedure to make it sound like murder. In the musical, Wendla has asked her mother to explain where babies come from, but the woman (played with poignant tragicomedy by Estabrook) is woefully inept, her own fear and timidity prohibiting her from finishing the task.
Her stupidity comes home to roost when her daughter gets pregnant, since Wendla has no idea that heterosexual intercourse can produce life. Nonetheless, her mother blames Wendla for her pregnancy, and takes her to an abortionist she surely knows will kill her. The mother’s hypocrisy, and her insistence that social propriety matters more than her daughter, echoes the religious right’s contemporary activism, which insists that parents ignore their children’s budding sexuality, preach abstinence, and force young girls to bear the consequences if they’re unlucky enough to conceive.
I loved Spring Awakening's calculated informality, which also underlines its relevance. The casually dressed musicians are onstage throughout, watching the action along with the actors when they’re out of character. The stage isn’t dressed; all the décor hangs on the brick walls of the actual stage house. The set resembles the design for I Am My Own Wife—memorabilia tacked up in odd places along with portrait paintings that lend the proceedings a period feel and gravitas, but are mostly decorative.
The lighting design dresses that blank back wall with hanging colored bulbs that move up and down its face, and pinspots that seem to peer out from cracks between the bricks. Lighting effects punctuate moments in sometimes breathtaking ways. For instance, when Melchior crawls onto a platform center stage, it begins to rise, pulled aloft on ropes by the other boys. As Melchior rises, blue light bulbs descend from the flies, making the sky appear to draw closer to the woodsy hideout where he waits for Wendla.
The design creates a sense of space through metaphorical choices like these. Even though young people’s confinement in a soulless, deadening environment sounds Spring Awakening's major theme, the set makes tangible the freedom they seek, which is always somehow just out of reach.
Love Musik
This showcase for the songbook of Kurt Weill artfully arranges many of his songs and plunders his letters to tell the story of his relationships with Lotte Lenya and Brecht. Tony-nominated Michael Cerveris performs practically unrecognizable, wearing padding and wigs to represent the very talented but pedestrian looking Weill. Tony-nominated Donna Murphy plays the talented Lenya, who was a feminist well before her time, in all her Weimar German skinniness. The show portrays Brecht as a womanizer, a rough man who doesn’t change his clothes frequently and who’s petulant about getting credit for his work while he collaborates with Weill.
The show’s vignettes stitch together a plot that moves through time without creating much crisis, conflict, or resolution, which is, in its way, fairly Brechtian. A projected title locates each scene in geography and time, but doesn’t really historicize the story.
The production takes an inordinate amount of time with clunky set changes that slow it down considerably. The story is fascinating, and the actors sublime, but the way it’s told, with its clunky revolving set and lengthy blackouts, suck the excitement out of what could be a vital, emotionally compelling slice of theatre (and world political) history.
Even though it’s directed by Hal Prince, who should know better, Love Musik isn’t very theatrical, and probably would have worked better as an Encores! style chamber musical instead of an elaborate Broadway show.
The Brig
Judith Malina first directed The Brig in 1963 for the Living Theatre, just before she and her husband and collaborator Julian Beck were imprisoned for tax evasion and forced to leave the country. In her recent remount, the play remains sadly relevant, addressing the military’s abuse of its own troops in an army prison in some nameless place that could be anywhere (and probably is everywhere).
The play moves through one long day of dehumanizing, demoralizing rituals that 10 men endure at the hands of lazy, brutal guards. The jailers create arbitrary white lines that the prisoners must ask permission to cross, emblematizing the capriciousness and illogic of power.
The evocative set layers barriers between the performers and the audience and, implicitly, between the prisoners and the world. Five iron bunk beds compose the interior space, surrounded by fencing that encages the men’s sleeping area. Outside the cage, the men access an exercise area, gravel drawing its perimeter. Finally, a barbed wire fence marks the membrane between freedom and constraint, and between actors and spectators.
The soldier/prisoners march with mincing steps, with their hands held up beside their chests. They strip to their skivvies and wear black boots with no socks to march to the showers. They dress and dress again, careful to meet all the picayune sartorial requirements of military style. They leave their cage for the toilets, each handed a razor that they carry high over their heads like flags. They repeat menial tasks while the guards bark orders, and they respond with the ubiquitous “Sir, yes sir,” yelled at the top of their lungs without making eye contact.
The guards call the prisoners “maggots,” which today sounds unmistakably like “faggots.” Although the guards’ epithets are surprisingly free of direct race, gender, or sexuality slurs, the production implies that the brig queers these men, breaking down their personalities and their souls, turning them into creatures far removed from the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.
In the second act, one of the prisoners breaks down, rebelling with hysteria against his victimization; he’s carried out in a straitjacket on a stretcher. Another prisoner soon takes his place, and is quickly initiated into the prison rituals. Unlike the other men, who now follow the rules robotically, this new prisoner shows his fear, breathing erratically, unable to pull his face into the blank mask of abjection that the others wear. For that, the second act is more chilling than the first, as it shows more viscerally how men are changed so easily into animals.
The performers (men, all) playing the prisoners achieve the rote ritualistic, fear-inspired behavior of prisoners trying to survive their degradation, sweating at the callisthenic marching and cleaning and bed-making they’re ordered to do at top speed. While none of the performances stand out (appropriately so), the ensemble persuades the audience of the prisoners’ plight by essentially enacting it, live, for the two hours we watch.
The performers who play the guards, however, appear laconic and quiet in their exercise of power, and are never quite believable as brutes following orders from their own superiors. While the prisoners sweat with the exertion required of them as actors as well as characters, the guards don’t seem scary enough to make the situation authentic. If this is a choice, it could be more nuanced; that is, spectators could somehow be lead to see the prisoners as afraid of something less tangible than those who push them around, as oppressed by ideology instead of the man-to-man contact that’s the brig’s stock in trade. But in this production, the guards’ soft-spoken and physically soft appearances and actions seem a mistake of casting or an oversight of direction rather than a meaningful choice, which takes the edge off an evening that could be even more powerful.
Still, seeing The Brig brought out of the archive and knowing that it remains politically relevant over 40 years later makes for a sobering theatre experience. The Living's new basement theatre on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side seats perhaps 75, an intimate space in which ushers pull a curtain to separate the house from the small concession area by which it’s flanked. It’s easy to imagine the Living carrying on its important work here, not only resurrecting its history, but propelling new generations of experimental theatre artists and committed audiences into a meaningful future.
At the performance I saw, Judith Malina, the doyenne herself, mingled with spectators lined up in the narrow hallway before the house opened and happily joined the actors onstage at the curtain call. Seeing her up there—her tiny body clad in tight black stretch pants and a bright white oversized shirt that mirrored the contrasting colors of her hair—reminded me that The Living Theatre is itself an institution. To Malina’s credit, the company has yet to lose its importance to ever-new generations of theatre-goers who see performance as a way to make a difference in what we think about the world.
Stairway to Paradise
This season’s City Center’s Encores! closing performance represented a new choice for a company that typically spends its considerable artistic capital on recreating old musicals from the American archive. Instead, Stairway to Paradise, conceived by Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel and director Jerry Zaks, knit together revue songs from 1900 to the 1950s, foregoing thematic links for a tour through American history via its theatrical music. Written by lyricists and composers from Irving Berlin to Comden and Green, Eubie Blake to Yip Harburg, this perfectly pitched and paced production offered an entertaining, affecting few hours of cracker-jack singing, dancing, and star charisma.
The show alternated songs with the occasional comedy sketch for a bit of theatrical relief, and mixed solo ballads and torch songs with chorus numbers and dance routines that expertly shifted mood and tone. Stairway held the audience’s interest not just by whipping up a nostalgic desire to hear what the artistic team chose for us next, but by inciting our desire to see what performers like Kristin Chenoweth, Kevin Chamberlin, Christopher Fitzgerald, and Capathia Jenkins would do with the material.
The three principals’ infectious, appealing chemistry made watching them do comedy as joyful as listening to them put over the more serious songs. Chenoweth is marvelous, a true star whose presence lights up the cavernous City Center. Her smile literally twinkles. Her presence is ingratiating.
Chenoweth’s generosity with her fellow performers creates a palpable community on stage. She shares her energy not just with the audience but with everyone in the theatre, bringing us all together with her enthusiasm, her love for the moment, and for how she plays a song, a joke, a moment with such grace, precision, and spontaneity.
Stairway to Paradise captured the pleasure of old television variety shows as well as the theatre revues from which they stole their structure. The show moved so smoothly from one act to the next, flattered its talent so well, and selected its numbers with such good sense and care, that it was impossible not to be seduced by this kaleidoscope of song, comedy, and dance.
Deuce
Terrence McNally’s lobbed trifle stars Angela Lansbury and Marion Seldes as veteran doubles partners returning to the U.S. Open to be honored after the current season’s final match. Lansbury and Seldes somehow find nuances in the slight text, and manage to create the semblance of a relationship from a story that gives them only threadbare, stereotypical character impressions.
Lansbury plays the feisty, blue-collar, Pittsburgh-born Leona Mullen, who retired from the game reluctantly when her partner Midge Barker (Seldes) decided she was through. The play intimates there’s been some strife between the two women that’s kept them from seeing one another for the last ten years, but McNally never really details or resolves what’s kept them apart. They’ve weathered the tensions and triumphs of pioneers who played when the Virginia Slims tours that put women on the map of professional tennis were just beginning.
Leona and Midge started on the ground floor of women players’ insistence on being paid equally for their court time (a struggle that continues, as it’s only very recently that Wimbledon and other major tournaments agreed to provide the same prize money for women as for men). They reminisce about wearing make-up and impractical clothing during their matches to persuade fans of their femininity. They remember the lesbian “scare” inflicted on early pros, when any athletic woman was accused of being queer.
The tennis partners speculate aloud about the sexuality of various women on the tour, and express mutual interest in whether or not the other thought she was a lesbian. McNally renders lightly here an issue that nearly rent women’s tennis in two; his characters take the same affectionate, wistful tone to much of women’s tennis history. Midge and Leona recall an exhibition match they played (which turned out to be their last), a battle of the sexes in which they defeated two elderly men 6-0, 6-0, a situation reminiscent of Billie Jean King’s gender-pitched match against Bobby Riggs (which, happily, King won).
The old partners reflect on their respective marriages, their children and grandchildren, and their lives in Maine and Arizona. They reminisce about their careers, choices made and unmade, paths taken and those deferred. Leona regrets that they never won a Grand Slam, in large part because she choked at the Australian Open and double faulted on the match point serve. When the match Midge and Leona watch through the short play ends similarly, with the young player for whom Leona has been rooting double faulting on her own final serve, Leona addresses her publicly during the ceremony, telling her not to hold on to the moment, but to put it behind her, as Leona herself hasn’t quite been able to do. With that benediction delivered to the next generation, Leona seems to come to terms with the failures in her own past.
Two blathering, empty-headed commentators remark on the match and on these much revered doubles partners throughout the play, their scenes of comic relief alternating with Midge and Leona’s fond rememberings. A unnamed narrator lumbers on occasionally like Tom in The Glass Menagerie to create an elegiac tone for the proceedings, but the memorial pitch doesn’t stick because Lansbury and Seldes know they’ll do better playing the sardonic comedy with which McNally, too, seems more comfortable.
Leona remarks at the play’s beginning that she doesn’t “do” wistful. Although McNally tries to help Leona soften her self-critical, crusty edges, Deuce works best as a light comedy of courtside manners than as a poignant meditation on fame and the past.
Watching Angela Lansbury perform provides the evening’s key pleasure. Seldes generously gives Lansbury her due, knowing that she’s onstage mostly to play Lansbury’s straight woman. But the two grand dames work nicely together, with Seldes’s sharp features and prim WASPiness complementing Lansbury’s earthier, more unfettered, foul-mouthed star turn.
Lansbury makes Leona a complicated old broad, unsure what she feels about her own past or her future, ambivalent about growing old, unsettled about her eventual demise. But Leona takes pride in her career as an athlete (aside from that damned double fault), and you can see in Lansbury’s usually regal bearing a new kind of strength, the remains of agility and power, the grace of someone who’s successfully competed in a game that requires mental toughness as well as physical resilience and prowess. She utterly commits to a superficial character. She’s riveting and enormously pleasing to watch, which in turn makes it worth spending an evening with Deuce.
All These Plays, All These Days
I won’t use the occasion of a week in New York to proclaim about the state of mainstream theatre. But it’s worth one final observation. None of these productions cast enough people of color. In roles for which color isn’t necessarily named by theme or plot, it would be easy to select actors across a range of race, ethnicity, and type. Instead, each production presented remarkably, almost uniformly white casts.
The Encores! productions are usually much more racially diverse than Stairway to Paradise, in which Capathia Jenkins and two male dancers were the only obvious people of color onstage. The Brig included one or two men of color, but given the demographics of the U.S. military, could have cast many more. Deuce could have cast a person of color in one of the two commentators’ roles, since the leads were obviously written as star turns for Lansbury and Seldes.
Love Musik, Spring Awakening, and The Drowsy Chaperone could have cast men and women of color in any number of roles, at least adhering to liberal color-blind casting practices, if not to the more ideologically radical cross-casting choices any of these productions could have made. To see Broadway still embody the Great White Way left me bemused and dismayed.
Nourished but queasy,
The Feminist Spectator
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
Welcome Friday Night Lights, Good-bye Grey’s Anatomy
Friday Night Lights debuted to critical acclaim this television season, but didn’t pull in the viewers a show ostensibly about football might have predicted. But then again, if it was only a show about football, I wouldn’t be watching myself, since I’m the only one in my Steeler-faithful family who wouldn’t know a touchdown from a soccer goal if someone showed me captioned pictures of either. The series takes its name and its themes from the feature film Friday Night Lights, which was in turn based on the book of the same name, by H.G. Bissinger. The stories concern the lives of families, friends, and colleagues linked by their dedication to the Panther football team at Dillon High School, in a small, fictitious but perhaps typical, Texas town. In the show’s central conflict, the new football coach and his family weather the sometimes brutal pressure of the town’s expectations for the team, on which Dillon’s residents focus all their thwarted wishes and desires.
Shot in and around Austin, FNL never loses sight of its feature film roots. Much of the camera work is handheld and lit without highly theatrical contrasts, which gives it a gritty, authentic look that nicely complements the story’s ambiance. The soundtrack, too, evokes dusty rural Texas, but manages to be suggestive without being stereotypical. In fact, the whole show works because of its deep respect for its characters, whom its writers paint with a nuance and depth rarely seen on network television. In situations ripe for caricature, FNL manages instead to convey the complexity of relationships, dreams, and desires, and the casual ways in which simple interactions can have lasting, if not cataclysmic, effects.
Although each episode includes at least a scene or two at a football practice or a highly anticipated Friday night game, each week’s plot focuses on the characters more than it does the score. Some of the games provide climactic moments, but they rarely end an episode, because the characters’ interactions off the field are much more central to the story FNL tells. Also unusual for network television, writers provide the actors with plot outlines and key moments, but allow them to improvise their scenes. This gives the actors a great deal of creative freedom and results in dialogue that sounds unfiltered and remarkably fresh.
For example, the banter between recently hired Dillon football coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton), who now works as the high school’s supportive, smart guidance counselor, rings absolutely true to the complications of a heterosexual marriage. Both partners are under public pressure to perform; they both interact with the same people in the same school; they try to parent a teenaged daughter; they're relatively new to Dillon; and the dreams they both harbor for the future sometimes conflict. But we actually see the Taylors work at their marriage, while they hang on to their bedrock love and affection for each other.
In the season’s finale, the coach contemplates a job offer that would require his family to move to Austin but that would send him higher up his career ladder. Tami and his daughter resist the move, Julie because of her relationship, and his wife because she believes her own work with students at the high school isn’t finished and is too important to abandon. Although the coach tries to resort to male privilege and insist his family follow his ambitions, Tami stands her ground and suggests that Eric commute between Dillon and Austin. Even Tami's unexpected pregnancy, which would (in another show) predict that the family should stay together and follow its man, doesn't shake her resolve that somehow, all three of them should get what they want.
Chandler’s performance as Eric Taylor is a masterpiece of restraint and wired, barely contained, intelligent energy. Chandler takes his time with Taylor’s responses, but he keeps his thinking process close to the surface. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a male actor whose furrowed brow seemed so sincere and so transparent, his confusion and insistence on weighing complicated decisions so true. Chandler chooses unusual vocal rhythms for Taylor; he pauses in unexpected places and speeds through words that other actors would draw out. His quiet intensity makes him fascinating to watch, because it’s never clear how he’ll respond.
Britton, playing Tami Taylor, presents one of the most complex, mature female characters ever played on network television. She's generous with her time and her affections; doesn't mind admitting her mistakes when she makes them; has a useful, often used sense of humor; has an open (but not "bleeding") heart; and respects without reservation the students with whom she works. Her relationship with Eric prizes mutual support and respect; she's good at what she does, and while she's impeccably committed to Eric's coaching, her own counseling demans equal time and attention in their marriage. Watching Chandler and Britton create the nuances of this mature relationship offers viewers a real and rare pleasure.
Improvising dialogue is a challenge for actors accustomed to being handed inviolable scripts, but these actors seem to relish the opportunity. The whole cast is peopled with smart artists who can think through their characters’ likely responses in a variety of situations within the constraints of a quick moment. They always seem to be truly listening to each other, since they aren’t waiting for prearranged cues. Their conversations range from playful to painful, but they’re never predictable or pat.
The storylines, too, don't follow conventional television narrative patterns. Multiple plots overlap and develop, and the writers take the characters in unusual directions with rich results. For example, when Dillon’s star quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) breaks his spine tackling an opponent early in the season, the show spends as much time with his rehabilitation as it does tracking Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the soft-spoken, diffident second-string player who tries to fill his shoes.
Jason revitalizes his athletic career despite his paralysis by joining a wheelchair rugby team on its way to the Olympics, giving him a new set of sports aspirations to replace those he lost. When the Olympic team tells him he’s too new in his chair to be able to compete this time around, Jason starts hanging around the field advising Matt, and eventually gets a spot on the football team’s coaching staff. The actors play these shifts in fortune with depth and insight, never reverting to predictable responses even to situations that might seem familiar.
The show also confronts the racial politics of small town Texas without flinching. Running back “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles) anchors the team’s offense. When “Mac,” one of the older white coaches, thoughtlessly suggests that the team’s African American players are “like junkyard dogs” who provide its brawn while the white players offer its brains, Smash finds himself forced to address the racism incipient but never before so overt in the team’s power structure. He stages a walk-out of all the team’s African American players at a key moment in their season, turning the media spotlight on Mac’s unacceptable remarks.
The episode follows Smash as he becomes a reluctant spokesperson for racial oppression and simultaneously wrestles with his own desire to play for a team that desperately needs his talent to win. Everyone has something to lose in this episode; everyone is forced to confront Mac’s racism and develop an individual, somehow ethical, response.
When Smash decides to end the work stoppage and return to play the crucial away game, he and his colleagues suffer even more racism on the playing field. The white players on the opposing team taunt the Dillon Panthers; the referees make a series of bad calls; and the game devolves into a brawl that stops play. When the refs decide the Panthers get the win, since they were ahead before the fight, the locals throw garbage at Dillon’s players as they board their bus for home.
Two local cops follow their vulnerable yellow school bus down a forsaken country road, and try to arrest Smash on trumped up charges that he started the melee. Mac winds up confronting the police on Smash’s behalf, challenging their intent to arrest him without a warrant. His rather heroic action in very threatening circumstances allows Mac and Smash to come to a wary truce: Mac sees the power of his white privilege, and Smash sees that despite Mac’s racism, he means to do the right thing by the team and all its players.
The contretemps ends without a moral victory for either Smash or the coach, but rather as a simple moment of understanding that our motivations are never as clear to us as we expect, and that white racism’s systemic poison can always seep through, despite people’s best intentions.
FNL’s open-hearted, even-handed approach to Dillon’s identity politics makes it notable television, although strangely, it’s white v. black racial issues that structures the imagined town, rather than Anglo v. Latino or Mexican-American politics. In the feature film, another of the significant team members was Latino, which helped anchor the story in Texas demographics. The lack of a Chicano/a lead character seems a peculiar omission for this otherwise smart, perceptive series.
The characters’ lives are also crossed by the politics of class, brought home by Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), the high school’s “fast” girl, and her mother, who live in a shabby rental while Tyra’s sister works as a stripper at a local club. The family bears the burden of “white trash” circumstances: Tyra’s father is absent, and her mother beds a series of lowlife men, one of whom Tyra runs out of the house with a kitchen knife after he beats her mother once too often.
But when Tyra befriends the coach’s naïve daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden), it becomes clear that Tyra’s shoplifting and other vices are practiced from necessity rather than spite. Tyra, in fact, turns out to be quite smart, her aspirations limited only by the much constrained dreams meted out to people whose class background cruelly stunts their imaginations along with their self-esteem. Watching Tyra come into her own as a capable, strong, bright young woman was one of the many pleasures of this first season.
Likewise, Lyla, the cheerleader who dates Jason, the disabled star football player, resists stereotypical characterization. Beautiful Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) comes from a home in which her father—Buddy, the bombastic, glad-handing car dealership owner who heads the Panther’s booster club and holds the highest, meanest expectations of Coach Taylor—cheats on her mother. Her painful realization of her father’s adultery is handled with careful grace, as Lyla’s illusions about her world are dashed one after the other as the season progresses. Even this young character gets fleshed out in complex ways on multiple levels, so that although we see her perhaps a little too often in her figure-flattering cheerleader uniform, she’s never dismissed as only a silly, pretty girl.
Lyla stands by her paralyzed boyfriend, even though her life has been turned upside down by his disability, until she catches him kissing a woman he met in Austin at rugby practice. Yet because of her own indiscretion—she slept with Jason Street’s best friend, the handsome, rootless, rather dissolute but good-hearted running back Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) after Jason was hurt—she can’t take the moral high ground. Instead, she tries hard to make sense of a life completely reconfigured when it was supposed to play out as the typical fairytale high school romance between the quarterback and the prom queen.
Other equally appealing, interesting, well-rounded characters flesh out FNL’s story, all of whom go about trying to lead their lives the best way they can, given their circumstances. The show’s obvious affection for each of them, and its willingness to treat them with both humor and gravity, makes FNL one of the most human, humane, radically humanist shows around.
Spectators understand the town through the newly-arrived Taylors’ eyes, and come to see that people they first thought were forces for evil (like Buddy Garrity, the powerful, garrulous dealership owner) are actually people whose foibles, eccentricities, and weaknesses humanize them and make them compelling and sympathetic. We come to understand, along with the coach and his wife, that these characters truly want to do the right thing, for themselves and for each other, and they’re keenly aware of the community in which they live. Their lives intertwine for better or for worse, and they measure themselves against each other’s accomplishments with a healthy lack of jealousy or deceit.
FNL has replaced Grey’s Anatomy in my television affections. Grey’s has sadly “jumped the shark” this season (a phrase I just learned, which means that the show has lost its luster, become outlandish and illogical, and now reaches far from its original milieu to find plots and situations. The saying apparently comes from the moment in Happy Days when the Fonz, I think, literally did jump a shark while water skiing, propelling that series into its eventual decline).
Grey’s plot lines have indeed become outrageous: Meredith’s near-death experience; her reconciliation with her recently deceased mother in a hospital-set limbo; McDreamy’s anger with her because she “didn’t swim” when she fell into the water by the ferry accident; the ridiculous competition among the attending physicians/department heads to replace the Chief as the hospital’s administrator; and, among many other things, the laboriously deferred romance between George and Izzy, which makes a mockery of Callie, who remains one of the show’s only interesting characters.
For a show that began as an intelligent, unconventional hospital dramedy (see my earlier blog on the series), Grey’s has abandoned its progressive politics and sunk to the slapstick, heterosexist schtick that’s routine for sit-com tv. Where the doctors’ relationships were once complicated by their ambitions with a refreshing disregard for gender binaries, the sublime Sandra Oh’s character Cristina is now regularly punished for her “un-feminine drive.” (And this when she’s even given “work” to do, since much of her character's time is now spent debating about her upcoming marriage to Preston Burke.) Despite her understandable reservations about marriage, she’s going forward with the ceremony and even changing her last name to Burke, completely capitulating to heterosexual tradition.
Burke’s investment in the ceremony offers a slightly gender-forward twist; he’s the one who bakes 10 different cakes to decide which will be best for the reception, and he’s clearly more compelled by the arrangement details than Cristina. But although this revises typical gender assumptions, his behavior seems out of character, given his sharp-edged professionalism and his brilliant surgeon’s arrogance. While his preoccupation with recipes jives with his compulsive character, it mocks his focus on his work.
Meredith and Derek’s relationship has settled into dull complacency, although it seems that the Chief’s admission that he won’t promote Derek because he promised Meredith’s mother that he’d watch after her daughter has startled Shepherd into rethinking his commitment. Would that they’d break up; it might give the show back some of the sexual tension that drove the much more delicious earlier episodes. Likewise, George’s precipitous marriage to Callie moves still another couple toward unexamined, conventional, ironically unhappy heterosexuality. The sudden jumping-the-shark influenced revelation that Callie is wealthy only made George revert to macho Neanderthalism, making him anxious about his own manly ability to support his wife.
George’s girlfriends’ inexplicable dislike for Callie has become more and more offensive (especially given that Callie is the show’s only Latina). How George has become the man in the middle of two intelligent, beautiful women like Callie and Izzy also challenges logic. His character works much better as the drippy lovesick puppy who can’t get Meredith to give him a treat.
Even the McSteamey-Addison-Alex triangle has been pushed into predictable jealousies and competitions. Addison challenges Mark Sloan to curb his sex drive to prove his allegiance to her, but she can’t help cornering Karev in the broom closet for some quick sex. Meanwhile, she pretends that what she wants is a man who will settle down and command her backyard grill. Her originally mordant, sardonic wit has been replaced by dunderheaded dithering about men that drains the edge out of a character that had a great deal of potential (so much, in fact, that ABC plans to give Kate Walsh her own Grey’s spin-off next season).
Its racial complexities were once the most interesting part of Grey’s anatomy, as the characters of color and the white characters conducted their lives in ways that made racial difference an important but “natural” part of life at the fictional Seattle Grace. This season, though, in addition to Callie’s unending ostracism, Richard Webber (the Chief) mopes over the end of his career and the dissolution of his marriage while his residents buzz around him like vultures picking over the carcass of his job.
Once dubbed “the Nazi” for her exacting standards, resident Miranda Bailey has lately sunk to playing Mammy to the white characters, caring for Izzy when the daughter she gave up for adoption suddenly (and unbelievably) reappears in her life, and preoccupying herself with the clinic instead of the surgery for which she’s trained. Even though she's a resident, and can't be promoted to Chief in the present competition, Bailey seems much less focused on her career than she was in other seasons. Seeing her character capitulate to her new and less flattering role as the show's emotional caretaker is a waste of Chandra Wilson's huge talent and skimps on Bailey's story lines, which used to be much more powerful and compelling (and that much more so because of the paucity of meaty, complex roles for African-American women--especially ones who aren't rail thin and tall--on network tv).
Even the inimitable Preston Burke—the heart surgeon with elegant, adept hands worth their weight in gold—has been reduced to wedding planning by the show’s race to marry off or otherwise partner up its characters. Burke walks through the show in a daze, even unfazed by a visiting (white) surgeon (played by the appropriately oily though alarmingly aged British actor Roger Rees) who obviously vies for Cristina’s affections. The complexities of adult life have been drained from these characters, who now seem more like high school teens playing doctor. Could the very talented producer Shonda Rhimes have capitulated to shlock tv conventions so quickly? What a shame.
But of course, despite its precipitous drop in story quality and character execution, Grey’s will continue to prevail on ABC. Sadly, because of its low ratings, Friday Night Lights could be canceled. You can watch the season’s episodes and catch up on FNL’s truly inventive, moving characters and story lines at http://www.nbc.com/Friday_Night_Lights/index.shtml. If you’re already a fan, you can sign a petition to keep the show on the air at http://www.savefridaynightlights.com/. NBC’s web site also has a link through which to offer feedback about their shows. Write to tell them how much you value quality television like FNL, and how much you’d like to see these characters back for another season next fall. And write to ABC to tell them to cut the crap with Grey’s.
Your Friday Night Light's fan,
The Feminist Spectator
Shot in and around Austin, FNL never loses sight of its feature film roots. Much of the camera work is handheld and lit without highly theatrical contrasts, which gives it a gritty, authentic look that nicely complements the story’s ambiance. The soundtrack, too, evokes dusty rural Texas, but manages to be suggestive without being stereotypical. In fact, the whole show works because of its deep respect for its characters, whom its writers paint with a nuance and depth rarely seen on network television. In situations ripe for caricature, FNL manages instead to convey the complexity of relationships, dreams, and desires, and the casual ways in which simple interactions can have lasting, if not cataclysmic, effects.
Although each episode includes at least a scene or two at a football practice or a highly anticipated Friday night game, each week’s plot focuses on the characters more than it does the score. Some of the games provide climactic moments, but they rarely end an episode, because the characters’ interactions off the field are much more central to the story FNL tells. Also unusual for network television, writers provide the actors with plot outlines and key moments, but allow them to improvise their scenes. This gives the actors a great deal of creative freedom and results in dialogue that sounds unfiltered and remarkably fresh.
For example, the banter between recently hired Dillon football coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton), who now works as the high school’s supportive, smart guidance counselor, rings absolutely true to the complications of a heterosexual marriage. Both partners are under public pressure to perform; they both interact with the same people in the same school; they try to parent a teenaged daughter; they're relatively new to Dillon; and the dreams they both harbor for the future sometimes conflict. But we actually see the Taylors work at their marriage, while they hang on to their bedrock love and affection for each other.
In the season’s finale, the coach contemplates a job offer that would require his family to move to Austin but that would send him higher up his career ladder. Tami and his daughter resist the move, Julie because of her relationship, and his wife because she believes her own work with students at the high school isn’t finished and is too important to abandon. Although the coach tries to resort to male privilege and insist his family follow his ambitions, Tami stands her ground and suggests that Eric commute between Dillon and Austin. Even Tami's unexpected pregnancy, which would (in another show) predict that the family should stay together and follow its man, doesn't shake her resolve that somehow, all three of them should get what they want.
Chandler’s performance as Eric Taylor is a masterpiece of restraint and wired, barely contained, intelligent energy. Chandler takes his time with Taylor’s responses, but he keeps his thinking process close to the surface. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a male actor whose furrowed brow seemed so sincere and so transparent, his confusion and insistence on weighing complicated decisions so true. Chandler chooses unusual vocal rhythms for Taylor; he pauses in unexpected places and speeds through words that other actors would draw out. His quiet intensity makes him fascinating to watch, because it’s never clear how he’ll respond.
Britton, playing Tami Taylor, presents one of the most complex, mature female characters ever played on network television. She's generous with her time and her affections; doesn't mind admitting her mistakes when she makes them; has a useful, often used sense of humor; has an open (but not "bleeding") heart; and respects without reservation the students with whom she works. Her relationship with Eric prizes mutual support and respect; she's good at what she does, and while she's impeccably committed to Eric's coaching, her own counseling demans equal time and attention in their marriage. Watching Chandler and Britton create the nuances of this mature relationship offers viewers a real and rare pleasure.
Improvising dialogue is a challenge for actors accustomed to being handed inviolable scripts, but these actors seem to relish the opportunity. The whole cast is peopled with smart artists who can think through their characters’ likely responses in a variety of situations within the constraints of a quick moment. They always seem to be truly listening to each other, since they aren’t waiting for prearranged cues. Their conversations range from playful to painful, but they’re never predictable or pat.
The storylines, too, don't follow conventional television narrative patterns. Multiple plots overlap and develop, and the writers take the characters in unusual directions with rich results. For example, when Dillon’s star quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) breaks his spine tackling an opponent early in the season, the show spends as much time with his rehabilitation as it does tracking Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the soft-spoken, diffident second-string player who tries to fill his shoes.
Jason revitalizes his athletic career despite his paralysis by joining a wheelchair rugby team on its way to the Olympics, giving him a new set of sports aspirations to replace those he lost. When the Olympic team tells him he’s too new in his chair to be able to compete this time around, Jason starts hanging around the field advising Matt, and eventually gets a spot on the football team’s coaching staff. The actors play these shifts in fortune with depth and insight, never reverting to predictable responses even to situations that might seem familiar.
The show also confronts the racial politics of small town Texas without flinching. Running back “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles) anchors the team’s offense. When “Mac,” one of the older white coaches, thoughtlessly suggests that the team’s African American players are “like junkyard dogs” who provide its brawn while the white players offer its brains, Smash finds himself forced to address the racism incipient but never before so overt in the team’s power structure. He stages a walk-out of all the team’s African American players at a key moment in their season, turning the media spotlight on Mac’s unacceptable remarks.
The episode follows Smash as he becomes a reluctant spokesperson for racial oppression and simultaneously wrestles with his own desire to play for a team that desperately needs his talent to win. Everyone has something to lose in this episode; everyone is forced to confront Mac’s racism and develop an individual, somehow ethical, response.
When Smash decides to end the work stoppage and return to play the crucial away game, he and his colleagues suffer even more racism on the playing field. The white players on the opposing team taunt the Dillon Panthers; the referees make a series of bad calls; and the game devolves into a brawl that stops play. When the refs decide the Panthers get the win, since they were ahead before the fight, the locals throw garbage at Dillon’s players as they board their bus for home.
Two local cops follow their vulnerable yellow school bus down a forsaken country road, and try to arrest Smash on trumped up charges that he started the melee. Mac winds up confronting the police on Smash’s behalf, challenging their intent to arrest him without a warrant. His rather heroic action in very threatening circumstances allows Mac and Smash to come to a wary truce: Mac sees the power of his white privilege, and Smash sees that despite Mac’s racism, he means to do the right thing by the team and all its players.
The contretemps ends without a moral victory for either Smash or the coach, but rather as a simple moment of understanding that our motivations are never as clear to us as we expect, and that white racism’s systemic poison can always seep through, despite people’s best intentions.
FNL’s open-hearted, even-handed approach to Dillon’s identity politics makes it notable television, although strangely, it’s white v. black racial issues that structures the imagined town, rather than Anglo v. Latino or Mexican-American politics. In the feature film, another of the significant team members was Latino, which helped anchor the story in Texas demographics. The lack of a Chicano/a lead character seems a peculiar omission for this otherwise smart, perceptive series.
The characters’ lives are also crossed by the politics of class, brought home by Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), the high school’s “fast” girl, and her mother, who live in a shabby rental while Tyra’s sister works as a stripper at a local club. The family bears the burden of “white trash” circumstances: Tyra’s father is absent, and her mother beds a series of lowlife men, one of whom Tyra runs out of the house with a kitchen knife after he beats her mother once too often.
But when Tyra befriends the coach’s naïve daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden), it becomes clear that Tyra’s shoplifting and other vices are practiced from necessity rather than spite. Tyra, in fact, turns out to be quite smart, her aspirations limited only by the much constrained dreams meted out to people whose class background cruelly stunts their imaginations along with their self-esteem. Watching Tyra come into her own as a capable, strong, bright young woman was one of the many pleasures of this first season.
Likewise, Lyla, the cheerleader who dates Jason, the disabled star football player, resists stereotypical characterization. Beautiful Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) comes from a home in which her father—Buddy, the bombastic, glad-handing car dealership owner who heads the Panther’s booster club and holds the highest, meanest expectations of Coach Taylor—cheats on her mother. Her painful realization of her father’s adultery is handled with careful grace, as Lyla’s illusions about her world are dashed one after the other as the season progresses. Even this young character gets fleshed out in complex ways on multiple levels, so that although we see her perhaps a little too often in her figure-flattering cheerleader uniform, she’s never dismissed as only a silly, pretty girl.
Lyla stands by her paralyzed boyfriend, even though her life has been turned upside down by his disability, until she catches him kissing a woman he met in Austin at rugby practice. Yet because of her own indiscretion—she slept with Jason Street’s best friend, the handsome, rootless, rather dissolute but good-hearted running back Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) after Jason was hurt—she can’t take the moral high ground. Instead, she tries hard to make sense of a life completely reconfigured when it was supposed to play out as the typical fairytale high school romance between the quarterback and the prom queen.
Other equally appealing, interesting, well-rounded characters flesh out FNL’s story, all of whom go about trying to lead their lives the best way they can, given their circumstances. The show’s obvious affection for each of them, and its willingness to treat them with both humor and gravity, makes FNL one of the most human, humane, radically humanist shows around.
Spectators understand the town through the newly-arrived Taylors’ eyes, and come to see that people they first thought were forces for evil (like Buddy Garrity, the powerful, garrulous dealership owner) are actually people whose foibles, eccentricities, and weaknesses humanize them and make them compelling and sympathetic. We come to understand, along with the coach and his wife, that these characters truly want to do the right thing, for themselves and for each other, and they’re keenly aware of the community in which they live. Their lives intertwine for better or for worse, and they measure themselves against each other’s accomplishments with a healthy lack of jealousy or deceit.
FNL has replaced Grey’s Anatomy in my television affections. Grey’s has sadly “jumped the shark” this season (a phrase I just learned, which means that the show has lost its luster, become outlandish and illogical, and now reaches far from its original milieu to find plots and situations. The saying apparently comes from the moment in Happy Days when the Fonz, I think, literally did jump a shark while water skiing, propelling that series into its eventual decline).
Grey’s plot lines have indeed become outrageous: Meredith’s near-death experience; her reconciliation with her recently deceased mother in a hospital-set limbo; McDreamy’s anger with her because she “didn’t swim” when she fell into the water by the ferry accident; the ridiculous competition among the attending physicians/department heads to replace the Chief as the hospital’s administrator; and, among many other things, the laboriously deferred romance between George and Izzy, which makes a mockery of Callie, who remains one of the show’s only interesting characters.
For a show that began as an intelligent, unconventional hospital dramedy (see my earlier blog on the series), Grey’s has abandoned its progressive politics and sunk to the slapstick, heterosexist schtick that’s routine for sit-com tv. Where the doctors’ relationships were once complicated by their ambitions with a refreshing disregard for gender binaries, the sublime Sandra Oh’s character Cristina is now regularly punished for her “un-feminine drive.” (And this when she’s even given “work” to do, since much of her character's time is now spent debating about her upcoming marriage to Preston Burke.) Despite her understandable reservations about marriage, she’s going forward with the ceremony and even changing her last name to Burke, completely capitulating to heterosexual tradition.
Burke’s investment in the ceremony offers a slightly gender-forward twist; he’s the one who bakes 10 different cakes to decide which will be best for the reception, and he’s clearly more compelled by the arrangement details than Cristina. But although this revises typical gender assumptions, his behavior seems out of character, given his sharp-edged professionalism and his brilliant surgeon’s arrogance. While his preoccupation with recipes jives with his compulsive character, it mocks his focus on his work.
Meredith and Derek’s relationship has settled into dull complacency, although it seems that the Chief’s admission that he won’t promote Derek because he promised Meredith’s mother that he’d watch after her daughter has startled Shepherd into rethinking his commitment. Would that they’d break up; it might give the show back some of the sexual tension that drove the much more delicious earlier episodes. Likewise, George’s precipitous marriage to Callie moves still another couple toward unexamined, conventional, ironically unhappy heterosexuality. The sudden jumping-the-shark influenced revelation that Callie is wealthy only made George revert to macho Neanderthalism, making him anxious about his own manly ability to support his wife.
George’s girlfriends’ inexplicable dislike for Callie has become more and more offensive (especially given that Callie is the show’s only Latina). How George has become the man in the middle of two intelligent, beautiful women like Callie and Izzy also challenges logic. His character works much better as the drippy lovesick puppy who can’t get Meredith to give him a treat.
Even the McSteamey-Addison-Alex triangle has been pushed into predictable jealousies and competitions. Addison challenges Mark Sloan to curb his sex drive to prove his allegiance to her, but she can’t help cornering Karev in the broom closet for some quick sex. Meanwhile, she pretends that what she wants is a man who will settle down and command her backyard grill. Her originally mordant, sardonic wit has been replaced by dunderheaded dithering about men that drains the edge out of a character that had a great deal of potential (so much, in fact, that ABC plans to give Kate Walsh her own Grey’s spin-off next season).
Its racial complexities were once the most interesting part of Grey’s anatomy, as the characters of color and the white characters conducted their lives in ways that made racial difference an important but “natural” part of life at the fictional Seattle Grace. This season, though, in addition to Callie’s unending ostracism, Richard Webber (the Chief) mopes over the end of his career and the dissolution of his marriage while his residents buzz around him like vultures picking over the carcass of his job.
Once dubbed “the Nazi” for her exacting standards, resident Miranda Bailey has lately sunk to playing Mammy to the white characters, caring for Izzy when the daughter she gave up for adoption suddenly (and unbelievably) reappears in her life, and preoccupying herself with the clinic instead of the surgery for which she’s trained. Even though she's a resident, and can't be promoted to Chief in the present competition, Bailey seems much less focused on her career than she was in other seasons. Seeing her character capitulate to her new and less flattering role as the show's emotional caretaker is a waste of Chandra Wilson's huge talent and skimps on Bailey's story lines, which used to be much more powerful and compelling (and that much more so because of the paucity of meaty, complex roles for African-American women--especially ones who aren't rail thin and tall--on network tv).
Even the inimitable Preston Burke—the heart surgeon with elegant, adept hands worth their weight in gold—has been reduced to wedding planning by the show’s race to marry off or otherwise partner up its characters. Burke walks through the show in a daze, even unfazed by a visiting (white) surgeon (played by the appropriately oily though alarmingly aged British actor Roger Rees) who obviously vies for Cristina’s affections. The complexities of adult life have been drained from these characters, who now seem more like high school teens playing doctor. Could the very talented producer Shonda Rhimes have capitulated to shlock tv conventions so quickly? What a shame.
But of course, despite its precipitous drop in story quality and character execution, Grey’s will continue to prevail on ABC. Sadly, because of its low ratings, Friday Night Lights could be canceled. You can watch the season’s episodes and catch up on FNL’s truly inventive, moving characters and story lines at http://www.nbc.com/Friday_Night_Lights/index.shtml. If you’re already a fan, you can sign a petition to keep the show on the air at http://www.savefridaynightlights.com/. NBC’s web site also has a link through which to offer feedback about their shows. Write to tell them how much you value quality television like FNL, and how much you’d like to see these characters back for another season next fall. And write to ABC to tell them to cut the crap with Grey’s.
Your Friday Night Light's fan,
The Feminist Spectator
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Terrence McNally's Some Men at Second Stage in NYC
Terrence McNally’s reputation as a bankable out gay playwright and adaptor precedes him, so it’s not surprising that this spring alone, he has two plays running in New York: Some Men, the Off Broadway trifle recently produced at Second Stage, and Deuce, starring Angela Lansbury and Marion Seldes as two aging tennis rivals, opening on Broadway in May. McNally’s brand of liberal gay storytelling and conventional, comfortable dramaturgy makes him a natural for popular audiences; no doubt Some Men will become a staple on the regional theatre circuit.
Or maybe not. Because despite its rather pat resolutions and rather unsurprising turns of plot and character, Some Men does address the history of gay men over the last fifty or so years, and tries to put in perspective the seismic shifts in their politics and their emotional and sexual practices. With a company of seven men—one or two slightly older, the others mostly 30 somethings, all white except for one African American man and one or two perhaps Latinos—McNally creates a generationally and genealogically overlapping crowd whose adventures tell an episodic story of the highs and lows of American gay men’s recent past and present.
The stage is first set—quite beautifully, in fact, by set designer Mark Wendland—at the Waldorf Astoria, where in the opening scene a disparate group of men forms to attend a wedding. One is a couple fighting about who remembered or forgot the wedding gift; another is a father attending alone; another is a young man in uniform; another is a rather disheveled young punk; and another is playwright/actor David Greenspan, camping (already and always) through the scene. The stage is decorated almost completely in white, and graced with one wall of mirrored tiles, huge heavy chandeliers, and a baby grand that give the proceedings a sense of both gravitas and wealth. White wooden chairs face out to the audience; throughout the play, director Trip Cullman uses vaguely Brechtian devices to position the audience as a participant in the history the play unravels.
From here, the play leaps backwards and then forwards again in time, offering a non-chronological travelogue of key moments in the recent gay male past. The scene at the Waldorf bumps back to the late 60s or early 70s, when Mayor Lindsay regularly sent vice squads to entrap gay men staging assignations at hotels, and finds a married man arranging a tryst with a hustler whose day job is being an English major at Columbia. The hustler reassures the anxious married man, instructing him to take off his shirt and the rest of his clothing, acting more like a nurse than an erotic companion.
(The night I saw the production [March 30, 2007], the Second Stage audience seemed to tense, just a bit, wondering how far this strip would go, and seemed to feel palpable relief when it ended before the men were fully, frontally nude. As a subscription-based theatre, many of its spectators are white, middle- or upper-middle class, and heterosexual. Many of them are dressed up, as though this is a night on the town that differs from their regular routines. For Some Men, at least a third of the audience was white gay men.)
The military man approaches the older man at what’s turned into his son’s funeral, and subtly helps the mourning man understand that his son was loved, even if his lover was a man. A stockbroker maintains an affair with his Irish chauffeur, blithely unaware of how his class privilege and power plays out in their East Hampton relationship. Men face computers (and the audience) and flirt with each other in chat rooms, making up fantasy identities and exaggerating their physical (and sexual) attributes. An encounter group trades pop psychology aphorisms and affirmations, skimming the surface of complex emotions.
Some of these scenes are bogged down with dogmatic, didactic writing, in which McNally tells rather than shows the politically correct and incorrect consequences of his characters’ actions. A moral judgment underlies each scene, which too easily categories the characters as “heroes” or “villains,” as prescient or deluded. Some men in the early years want to be out and proud; others suggest that “’gay is good’ is crap; gay sucks,” and insist on staying in their marriages and remaining closeted. Patrons at a piano bar circa 1969 ostracize a drag queen who arrives looking for companionship, refusing to serve men who won’t abide by gender-appropriate rules of dress and comportment.
As they congratulate themselves on their conservative complacency, sounds of a riot can be heard from a bar across the way that’s clearly the Stonewall Inn, since this is the night of Judy Garland’s death. One of the more radical men leaves his friends to join the riot, while the straight-acting gay men agree that laws are fucked up but find activism too “strident.” They remain by their piano, singing wistfully to “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” in a moment that at once points out the apathy and sadness of preppy gay men pre-Stonewall, but at the same time reminds us that gay history wasn’t written only by those who rebelled. McNally’s portrait underlines how history happens in ways that affect us whether or not we participate in its making. As they hum along to Garland’s signature song, one of the two show queens asks the other, “Would you marry me if you could?” establishing what seems then like an impossible wish as a way to measure current progress.
For, at the end of Some Men, the wedding does indeed take place, the once-unthinkable joining in matrimony that’s now, in some places in the US and abroad, legal for gay men and lesbians. “Will you marry me?” is answered with an emphatic “I do,” as if there were any doubt that this might be the right answer, regardless of which men form the couple. Even though McNally has fun presenting scenes in the notorious gay baths—where the older men want to see the performers and the younger men only want to have sex—and, for the more contemporary “some men,” in anonymous chat rooms that promise potential live assignations, like any many conventional “tramedies,” the play moves inexorably toward marriage as its final, most meaningful, right, true act of faith. Those years of raided bars and sex in bathhouses, McNally suggests, are safely in the past, now that gay men can assimilate into these hallowed heterosexual practices.
Perhaps to McNally’s credit, it’s the young gay men in Some Men who rush to marry, not the older ones, who seem content with their relationships in the outlaw form they’ve always taken (and in most places still take). When two “gender studies” majors from Vassar arrange to interview “older” gay men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, McNally uses the occasion to insist that gay men were happy before Stonewall, even if they weren’t “out and proud” and weren’t able to marry or commit in public civil unions. His genealogy is in some ways nostalgic for a moment before conventionality set in, although his memories of the baths are about finding partners with whom to couple, rather than a more licentious, happily promiscuous and anonymous expression of sexual practice.
The one black man in the cast plays a variety of characters, from a show queen in a long-term committed couple to the therapist in a group encounter scene that’s rife with pat “truth or dare” situations and moments of uninspired twenty or more questions. But his salient tokenism here begs at least a casting question. None of the characters are specifically raced one way or another. Why not cast more people of color, so that Some Men won’t look so inexorably white? Why not write more characters of color, so that when the play is picked up by the regionals, they’ll be encouraged to cast a more multiracial group of actors? Why not use the highly public forum that a popular playwright like McNally commands to make a point about diversity in the gay male population, even if these characters are more moneyed and privileged than most (and in that way conform to the most insistent stereotype of gay men, which is their command of huge amounts of disposable income, which is true really of only some men)?
Likewise, no women characters flesh out this community. Why aren’t gay men ever accused of separatism, when so many of their rituals and places of entertainment and their theatre and performance are in fact sex-segregated? Women rarely get even a mention in Some Men and none live on stage. Again, it’s McNally’s choice to create whatever his imagination (and conscience) dictates. But what kind of gay male world is represented when no women at all even orbit around their planet?
Era-appropriate music introduces and plays under each scene, from “Crimson and Clover” to other touchstone melodies for people of a certain age. In fact, Some Men aims its wistfulness squarely at an older generation of gay men, which is meant to shake its collective heads at the foibles of the young queers who flaunt their radicality as they don their wedding rings. His project means to gently remind us of recent history, while we ride blithely into a sanctioned future with empty soup cans and streamers flying from the backs of our (family) cars. His wants to be wry and rueful about how history has changed the social position of gay men, but Some Men isn’t sure whether to celebrate this assimilation or to be nostalgic for days rife with the excitement, mystery, and even the danger of their underground status.
Finally, McNally brings us full circle, back to the wedding scene that writes these particular middle- to upper-middle class into a traditional family scenario (in the second East Hampton beach scene, two couples even bring their new babies along and trade stories about formula and feedings). Some Men wants to teach queer youngsters something about the old days, but ultimately, in his affectionate, slight portrait, the old days don’t look much different from the new.
A woman among some men,
The Feminist Spectator
Or maybe not. Because despite its rather pat resolutions and rather unsurprising turns of plot and character, Some Men does address the history of gay men over the last fifty or so years, and tries to put in perspective the seismic shifts in their politics and their emotional and sexual practices. With a company of seven men—one or two slightly older, the others mostly 30 somethings, all white except for one African American man and one or two perhaps Latinos—McNally creates a generationally and genealogically overlapping crowd whose adventures tell an episodic story of the highs and lows of American gay men’s recent past and present.
The stage is first set—quite beautifully, in fact, by set designer Mark Wendland—at the Waldorf Astoria, where in the opening scene a disparate group of men forms to attend a wedding. One is a couple fighting about who remembered or forgot the wedding gift; another is a father attending alone; another is a young man in uniform; another is a rather disheveled young punk; and another is playwright/actor David Greenspan, camping (already and always) through the scene. The stage is decorated almost completely in white, and graced with one wall of mirrored tiles, huge heavy chandeliers, and a baby grand that give the proceedings a sense of both gravitas and wealth. White wooden chairs face out to the audience; throughout the play, director Trip Cullman uses vaguely Brechtian devices to position the audience as a participant in the history the play unravels.
From here, the play leaps backwards and then forwards again in time, offering a non-chronological travelogue of key moments in the recent gay male past. The scene at the Waldorf bumps back to the late 60s or early 70s, when Mayor Lindsay regularly sent vice squads to entrap gay men staging assignations at hotels, and finds a married man arranging a tryst with a hustler whose day job is being an English major at Columbia. The hustler reassures the anxious married man, instructing him to take off his shirt and the rest of his clothing, acting more like a nurse than an erotic companion.
(The night I saw the production [March 30, 2007], the Second Stage audience seemed to tense, just a bit, wondering how far this strip would go, and seemed to feel palpable relief when it ended before the men were fully, frontally nude. As a subscription-based theatre, many of its spectators are white, middle- or upper-middle class, and heterosexual. Many of them are dressed up, as though this is a night on the town that differs from their regular routines. For Some Men, at least a third of the audience was white gay men.)
The military man approaches the older man at what’s turned into his son’s funeral, and subtly helps the mourning man understand that his son was loved, even if his lover was a man. A stockbroker maintains an affair with his Irish chauffeur, blithely unaware of how his class privilege and power plays out in their East Hampton relationship. Men face computers (and the audience) and flirt with each other in chat rooms, making up fantasy identities and exaggerating their physical (and sexual) attributes. An encounter group trades pop psychology aphorisms and affirmations, skimming the surface of complex emotions.
Some of these scenes are bogged down with dogmatic, didactic writing, in which McNally tells rather than shows the politically correct and incorrect consequences of his characters’ actions. A moral judgment underlies each scene, which too easily categories the characters as “heroes” or “villains,” as prescient or deluded. Some men in the early years want to be out and proud; others suggest that “’gay is good’ is crap; gay sucks,” and insist on staying in their marriages and remaining closeted. Patrons at a piano bar circa 1969 ostracize a drag queen who arrives looking for companionship, refusing to serve men who won’t abide by gender-appropriate rules of dress and comportment.
As they congratulate themselves on their conservative complacency, sounds of a riot can be heard from a bar across the way that’s clearly the Stonewall Inn, since this is the night of Judy Garland’s death. One of the more radical men leaves his friends to join the riot, while the straight-acting gay men agree that laws are fucked up but find activism too “strident.” They remain by their piano, singing wistfully to “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” in a moment that at once points out the apathy and sadness of preppy gay men pre-Stonewall, but at the same time reminds us that gay history wasn’t written only by those who rebelled. McNally’s portrait underlines how history happens in ways that affect us whether or not we participate in its making. As they hum along to Garland’s signature song, one of the two show queens asks the other, “Would you marry me if you could?” establishing what seems then like an impossible wish as a way to measure current progress.
For, at the end of Some Men, the wedding does indeed take place, the once-unthinkable joining in matrimony that’s now, in some places in the US and abroad, legal for gay men and lesbians. “Will you marry me?” is answered with an emphatic “I do,” as if there were any doubt that this might be the right answer, regardless of which men form the couple. Even though McNally has fun presenting scenes in the notorious gay baths—where the older men want to see the performers and the younger men only want to have sex—and, for the more contemporary “some men,” in anonymous chat rooms that promise potential live assignations, like any many conventional “tramedies,” the play moves inexorably toward marriage as its final, most meaningful, right, true act of faith. Those years of raided bars and sex in bathhouses, McNally suggests, are safely in the past, now that gay men can assimilate into these hallowed heterosexual practices.
Perhaps to McNally’s credit, it’s the young gay men in Some Men who rush to marry, not the older ones, who seem content with their relationships in the outlaw form they’ve always taken (and in most places still take). When two “gender studies” majors from Vassar arrange to interview “older” gay men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, McNally uses the occasion to insist that gay men were happy before Stonewall, even if they weren’t “out and proud” and weren’t able to marry or commit in public civil unions. His genealogy is in some ways nostalgic for a moment before conventionality set in, although his memories of the baths are about finding partners with whom to couple, rather than a more licentious, happily promiscuous and anonymous expression of sexual practice.
The one black man in the cast plays a variety of characters, from a show queen in a long-term committed couple to the therapist in a group encounter scene that’s rife with pat “truth or dare” situations and moments of uninspired twenty or more questions. But his salient tokenism here begs at least a casting question. None of the characters are specifically raced one way or another. Why not cast more people of color, so that Some Men won’t look so inexorably white? Why not write more characters of color, so that when the play is picked up by the regionals, they’ll be encouraged to cast a more multiracial group of actors? Why not use the highly public forum that a popular playwright like McNally commands to make a point about diversity in the gay male population, even if these characters are more moneyed and privileged than most (and in that way conform to the most insistent stereotype of gay men, which is their command of huge amounts of disposable income, which is true really of only some men)?
Likewise, no women characters flesh out this community. Why aren’t gay men ever accused of separatism, when so many of their rituals and places of entertainment and their theatre and performance are in fact sex-segregated? Women rarely get even a mention in Some Men and none live on stage. Again, it’s McNally’s choice to create whatever his imagination (and conscience) dictates. But what kind of gay male world is represented when no women at all even orbit around their planet?
Era-appropriate music introduces and plays under each scene, from “Crimson and Clover” to other touchstone melodies for people of a certain age. In fact, Some Men aims its wistfulness squarely at an older generation of gay men, which is meant to shake its collective heads at the foibles of the young queers who flaunt their radicality as they don their wedding rings. His project means to gently remind us of recent history, while we ride blithely into a sanctioned future with empty soup cans and streamers flying from the backs of our (family) cars. His wants to be wry and rueful about how history has changed the social position of gay men, but Some Men isn’t sure whether to celebrate this assimilation or to be nostalgic for days rife with the excitement, mystery, and even the danger of their underground status.
Finally, McNally brings us full circle, back to the wedding scene that writes these particular middle- to upper-middle class into a traditional family scenario (in the second East Hampton beach scene, two couples even bring their new babies along and trade stories about formula and feedings). Some Men wants to teach queer youngsters something about the old days, but ultimately, in his affectionate, slight portrait, the old days don’t look much different from the new.
A woman among some men,
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The 2007 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville
I’d never been to the notable Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), which staged its 31st season this year, but the roster of talented women playwrights presented under its auspices drew me to explore what I’d long heard was a hotbed of exciting new projects. Over March 24th and 25th, I saw five plays in two days and reveled in the intensity of the festival atmosphere. In between productions, actors from one show mingled in the lobbies with actors from another. Other spectators began to look familiar as we cycled our way through the productions. Performers could be spotted in the audiences for one another’s shows, watching carefully as they all plied their craft.
Last weekend was apparently the “professionals” weekend, when lots of dramaturgs and other staff from regional theatres and universities around the country descend on the festival to check out the wares. People wandered the spacious ATL facility with badges, and the air crackled with that very particular vibe of people who toil in the same field but don’t often get to spend face-time.
As an academic, I’m not considered a “professional” and enjoyed being on the festival’s fringes. For me, Humana felt like a lark, and I wasn’t disappointed by my luxurious weekend at spectator’s camp.
Here, in order of delight, is my round-up of the shows I saw.
Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle
conceived by Alice Tuan, Whit MacLaughlin, and New Paradise Labs
Alice Tuan’s plays stretch the proprieties of American morality. She stares in the face of all our taboos and preconceptions, and insists that we take a very close look along with her, staging a gaze so intense that everything we thought we knew begins to melt from its heat. Tuan received an MFA in playwrighting from Brown, where she studied with Paula Vogel. Vogel’s spirit of absurdity crossed with her enormity of heart and feeling also imbue Tuan’s work with verve and importance. This collaboration with Whit MacLaughlin and New Paradise Labs, a movement theatre company based in Philadelphia, sees Tuan’s words embellished by a rich physical style that literalizes the lines she crosses.
Batch was staged at The Connection, a gay bar several blocks from ATL, a sprawling two-story corner building with three different bars, video monitors of various sizes playing along the walls, a large lit dance floor graced by the ubiquitous disco ball, and of all things, a theatre in the back of the place borrowed for the occasion. I saw a 5:00 performance and wondered if later in the evening, spectators waded through crowds of dancing, drinking gay men to arrive at the theatre. Such an experience would only underline the complications of heterosexuality that Tuan and NPL viscerally engage.
But for the 5:00 show, we crossed an empty dance floor and wended our way through stale cigarette smoke and left over beer haze into the theatre, where we took seats at tables set in two tiers around a stage raised 10 feet above the floor. The square wooden empty playing space drew attention with its height and its emptiness until the first performer appeared through a square trap set upstage left. Four huge video screens hung from the theatre’s walls, surrounding the audience and the stage with visual images sometimes projected directly from cameras manipulated by actors, sometimes cut from stationary cameras around the theatre, and sometimes culled from video shot at other times, in other spaces.
Unlike some multi-media performances in which video seems a pretentious embellishment that distracts from the live performance, in Batch, video images made the truth tangible and mysterious, as spectators watched previously taped or projected simultaneous images interacting with live bodies. Sometimes, the images created a mirroring effect that extended a moment into infinite time and space; other times, the video images graced a scene with an echo of a poignant moment, or allowed us to focus on an actor’s reaction to a particular line or gesture. The projected images worked scenically, as well as thematically, to enhance the live spectacle Tuan, MacLaughlin, and the six performers created.
Batch takes on the pre-marriage rituals of bachelor and bachelorette parties, exposing the homosocial bonding that leaves actual marriage secondary to this “last chance” to play with same-sex friends. Batch revels in Dionysian rituals of abandon and celebration, in final flings of freedom. These parties, the play suggests, release something primal that (if we let it) would upend the socially sanctioned marriage pact. One of the play’s best jokes is that the “bride” and “groom” barely know one another and have neither kissed nor touched. Their estrangement presents a deft and cynical view of a contract that’s supposed to be sanctified and lasting, but the play’s poignancy lies in the rich familiarity and intimacy it finds in the pre-nup parties.
Tuan and MacLaughlin and company address the gendered dynamics of these affairs with incisive critical wit. The play is staged in two rounds—one for the “women” and one for the “men”—and finishes with a coda in which the bride and groom descend to an underworld (performed below the surface of the stage and projected out via a live video feed or, for all I know, prerecorded and projected). The first round presents the “women” in cherry red cocktail dresses of various cuts, each of whom enters from the mysterious trap door that serves, in true absurdist style, as the site of ideological manipulation and assistance throughout the play.
As each barefoot woman parades up to stage level, accompanied by a vaguely Asian-inflected cover of “The Look of Love,” it’s clear that several of them sport chest hair, beards, and tattoos. Three of the “women,” that is, are men. This cross-gender play goes without comment; the men perform femininity as sincerely (and as critically) as the women. Here on the actors’ live bodies, the constructions of gender blend as seamlessly as the projected video images, all calling into productive doubt what we consider “real.” Betsy Competitive, the “bride” (who looks like a young Meryl Streep), faints and vomits regularly throughout the bachelorette party, a running joke that somatizes her anxiety (and perhaps revulsion) about her pending wedding. None of the other people comment on her reaction; they just scoop her up and move her along.
This first scene establishes that Batch isn’t about what the characters say or even about who they are, but addresses instead something more fundamental, derived from what the performers do and how they relate to each other in the moment. I can’t recall much of the actual dialogue in Batch, but I do remember with stunning clarity visual moments of physical interaction among the performers that spoke expressively about relationships past, present, and future, and the wistfulness with which we move from one moment in our lives to another.
Batch is about liminality, about people poised on that threshold between one thing and another and the reluctance with which we step from the present into the future. The large square trap door emblematizes our constrained choices and yet provides creative ways of managing them. The single entrance to the stage means there’s only one way in or out, but how the performers get there varies with thrilling theatricality. I can’t divine the stage magic that produced these effects, but the performers variously seem to fly from the stage to the under-stage, appearing quickly to fall long distances (as their dresses and hair rise above them with a whoosh of movement); walk sedately down stairs lit from below as their faces glow and the red of their dresses deepens; and slide into what could be a deep abyss, hanging on with their fingernails as some unseen force propels them downward. Alternately, props and people appear from below at various speeds and in unusual positions. As in Slawomir Mrozek’s absurdist drama Tango (1964), the hand of the state seems to encroach on the scene—not from the wings, as in Tango, but from below—handing up props that ensnare the performers in the seductions of liquor and the detritus of the marriage ritual.
Round Two begins with video of a bachelor party in a hotel room, in which the six performers—again, male and female, but this time performing as men—drink to excess and enact the trashing, scatological, virility-boasting practices of male-bonding. When the live performers enter in blue shirts and black pants, the men’s breasts from Round One still poke noticeably through their shirts, and the female performers now wear codpieces that bulge through their slacks. All six play at masculinity, exaggerating and yet strangely humanizing the excesses of socially inscribed roles.
The “groom” is a slight man, still “en-breasted,” who suffers his friends’ intent to inebriate him out of his mind. Once the men liquor up appropriately, a parade of sexy visitors arrive to torment the drunken groom. The first, a platform shoe-wearing stripper dressed to resemble Marie Antoinette, is a tall apparition from another world. Suddenly, the stage is littered with money, bills that stick to the performers’ bare feet and hands, and that seem to stay glued wherever they land. The bills materialize the financial transactions of marriage and sex and capitalism’s deep reach into rituals of heterosexual becoming. The second sexy visitor is “Special K,” a balding man/woman dressed in a form-fitting green gown, who uses a microphone as a dildo, slithering up the groom’s prostrate body then straddling his chest to force the mike into his mouth. The scene is redolent with a homoeroticism that’s both as “natural” and as mediated as any heterosexual act.
In the third part of Batch, after the two gendered rounds, the bride and groom do finally get together and touch, as another version of “The Look of Love” plays in the background. Their interactions are surprisingly tender and moving, given the uproar of gender play and celebration that precedes their coupling. The other four performers, acting now as a chorus of satyrs, appear as non-gendered rams, half-person, half-animal creatures with furry leg-wear and boxing headgear and gloves, who usher the couple through the underworld of marriage.
Batch shifts tone for this last third, engaging more mythological, allusive references that entwine the couple in the plots of loss and longing and entrapment. They descend under the stage, where we watch them on video (whether taped or live isn’t clear, but only adds to the scene’s ethereal quality). They encounter a “Myclops,” whose all seeing, single round eye is located on her one exposed breast, crossing Homer’s race of giants with Sappho’s Amazons. They take tea, as if they’re at Alice’s party through the looking-glass.
Through the Myclop’s eye, the couple see their reflection and fall, Mulholland Drive-like, into an alternate reality in which, dressed finally in the wedding clothes that signal their union, they’re caught running up and down stairwells with locked doors, unable to escape steps that wind about like an Escher sketch. They find their way to the blank hallways of a hotel, but here, too, offers no means of escape.
Although in its last moments, Batch begins perhaps too obviously to speak its subtext, its final descent into myth and archetype is sincere, relevant, and primal. Marriage, after all, is one of western culture’s motivating mythologies, its foundation in property exchange and gendered servitude cloaked under modern veils of romance and destiny. Batch deconstructs this myth, reminding us of the primacy of friendship, the eroticism of our bonds with people we’ve often known much longer than our partners (the incidental queer moments are lovely, including a long, unexplained kiss between the bride and a girlfriend in Round One), and the lurking pitfalls of capitulating to an ideologically driven ritual that promises us adulthood but too often proves a dead end.
Tuan’s collaboration with MacLaughlin and his physical theatre troupe help punctuate her language with schematic, non-realistic yet fully embodied movement absolutely true to the play’s ideas. Each of the six performers’ commitment to their work grounds the experience in the moment and lets spectators understand them not as “characters,” and not as “types,” but as performers in the present of performance. They play out on their bodies various gender roles and variously gendered relationships. They seduce the audience with their willingness to experiment, rather than be entrapped themselves in the limitations of Western cultural dictates regarding bodies and their interactions, emotions and their effect. The performers’ physical and emotional precision, in which every gesture is indeed gestic and meaning-laden, brought Batch alive as a Brechtian experience drenched in thoughtful, heightened emotion.
When Something Wonderful Ends: A History, A One Woman, One Barbie Play
by Sherry Kramer
Kramer’s melancholy, elegiac meditation on her mother’s death and world affairs is a one-woman, 90-minute monologue in which “Sherry”—the character who represents the author onstage, played here by Lori Wilner—tours the audience through her collection of 1960s Barbie dolls, their wardrobe, and their boxes and packing cases that decorate the stage. Out of this simple premise, Kramer stages a intelligent, moving, even gripping analysis of the state of the nation as the American Dream “goes bad.” With acute political clarity (the “vivid clarity that comes after a death,” Sherry explains), Kramer argues that the last forty years of American foreign and domestic policy has revolved around safeguarding the country’s access to oil. Combining a left-oriented history lesson with an exhortation about environmentalism as one way to counter our reliance on the resource that corrupts the nation, Kramer requires the audience to listen to a progressive Jewish woman speak at the intersection of the personal and the political.
The autobiographical piece presents Sherry packing up the family home after her mother’s death. The occasion elicits Sherry’s memories, cherished and regretful, but her monologue addresses mostly her mother’s life, rather than the personal details of her own. Her musings connect world politics to the personal in ambivalent, contrary ways. Intermittently, Sherry shows an Inconvenient Truth-style slide show about the war in Iraq and more broadly about the “petrochemical regime” under which we live, moving in a Brechtian fashion between personal narrative and political analysis.
Speaking directly to the audience, she dresses and undresses her Barbie and Ken dolls, their little costumes pristine and valuable, and puts them in their original boxes and cases while she explains how and why they were manufactured and their complicity with petrochemicals (Barbie is, after all, made of plastic). Barbie’s “impossible proportions,” she relates, were meant to flatter the drape of her clothes, not to model, as the doll came to do, the inability of women’s bodies to conform to her ideal. Sherry rejects or resists what Barbie dolls stand for even while she recalls the pleasure of collecting and playing with them in the early 60s.
She makes room, in fact, for such ambivalence, also letting us know that she has no right to preach about the pervasiveness of petrochemicals, because despite her exhortation about greening ourselves away from our reliance on oil, she drives an SUV. None of us are pure, she suggests; all of us are implicated. But it’s how we come to terms with the dark side of the American Dream that matters. “When did we stop wanting a better world,” Sherry asks, surrounded by antique dolls that beckon her to a vision of gender and heterosexuality that was always constructed and idealized and as false as the righteous claims of politicians who were busy “regime-changing” in the Middle East to ensure the U.S. maintained its oil flow.
Sherry tells us that we need a consumable alternative to petroleum so that we can all get out of bed with the Saudis, but she doesn’t present pat answers. “We can count on greed to find solutions,” she says, indicting capitalism for the “river of fetish and greed that the internet made of the American Dream.” Her implicit plan is to reignite the longing for agency and for the belief that we need to honor a country that promised equality and democracy, rather than submitting to its current “deism,” the verticality of politics based in religious, rather than secular, faith.
Kramer puts Judaism front and center in Wonderful Ends, suggesting it’s an “upgrade in religion,” a kind of “God 2.0,” because with Judaism comes the end of “other worldliness” and a focus on the here and now. She describes carrying out Jewish rituals for the dead, and their loved-ones’ responsibility to honor and remember (although I must admit that I’ve never seen even reform Jews bring flowers to cemeteries as Sherry describes throughout the play. Usually, a visit to a grave is marked with a small rock or pebble, placed on top of the headstone). Religion, she says, “arranges the passage from living to dead”; this, she implies, is plenty. Religion shouldn’t also run countries. Her connection with these memorial rituals keep Sherry connected to something private (her mother) but also deeply public, which is the status of the nation she claims.
One of the ever-changing slides that provide the performance’s scenic décor reads, “I’ve been scared a long time,” again humanizing and personalizing without reducing or trivializing the impact of national policy and ideology. And yet Sherry leaves us hopeful, suggesting that “the miracle we do for our dead is save the world.”
I felt moved and stirred by this gesture of faith and idealism, and proud to hear this story told by a woman whose words and presence captivated the audience with her convincing, well-researched, politically progressive, and astute social and personal critique. She leaves enough room for ambivalence and ambiguity that the story doesn’t sound like a harangue, but a careful analysis and an exhortation to be, if anything, mindful of the contradictions and concessions we make in our own lives. The Barbies she’s collected were made to replicate the nuclear perfection of family and heterosexuality, but it’s clear that Sherry’s is not a domestically driven life. Seeing a woman command political issues, and hearing her interweave her story with personal musings and memories that aren’t about marriage and children provides a refreshing, pleasurable surprise. By the end of the performance, Sherry has neatly packed and stacked at the back the dolls and their clothes and boxes that cluttered stage, leaving our minds and our souls clear to take up Kramer’s challenge to change the world.
The Open Road Anthology, The As If Body Loop, and Strike-Slip
The other plays I saw at Humana less successfully provoked my emotions or my political or intellectual sympathies, although all were valiant attempts to say or do something new in the theatre. The Open Road Anthology was composed of short plays by a variety of playwrights and performed by ATL’s Apprentice Company. The plays linked thematically around the theme of travel and how it founds the American imagination, as well as the ways in which we find our identities by heading out toward a horizon of possibility that’s not always clearly defined. The piece is punctuated with music and songs—provided by the band GrooveLily, and often played by members of the cast—that give the performance a light, rollicking, wistful, always earnest attitude and tone.
A few of the best pieces capture the clarity of theme and character that short plays require. In Rolin Jones’s Ron Bobby had Too Big a Heart, the conventions of senior proms are upended when it’s clear that the girl wearing a blood-drenched dress has conspired to kill someone with her girlfriend. They hit the road, like Thelma and Louise, heading toward some reconfiguration of their dreams. In Ain’t Meat, by A. Rey Pamatmat, a Los Angelenos traveling across the country stops in a roadside diner for a meal, and is seduced with a series of double-entendres by his waiter. Their sweet gay encounter ends when the waiter yells at a waitress he calls “MethMom” that if she doesn’t shut up about their kissing, he’ll send her to be the only straight woman in West Hollywood so she can see how that feels.
Kia Corthron’s Trade puts two women on a New York subway, one wearing a black burka that covers her from head to toe, and the other a flighty barmaid recently arrived from LA. The LA woman chatters at the burka-wearing woman, projecting her vision of otherness and difference and a superficial understanding of politics in the Middle East. “We have lots of diversity in LA,” she says, “but everyone’s driving in their own car.” When the woman wearing the burka answers a cellphone, she’s revealed as an ordinary American who’s wearing the garment to stage a protest. At the end of the short scene, the two women trade clothes so that the woman from LA can see what it’s like to wear coverall garb.
In this very brief, funny play, Corthron crystallizes issues of identification and empathy that overshadow our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the politics of the Taliban, and the detentions at Guantanamo. The collection of short plays trades in standard American dramatic mythos and themes, but the diverse writers and performers twist the conventional into more fruitful, contemporary, and relevant insights, all with a patina of fun and sweetness.
Ken Weitzman’s As If Body Loop thematizes a similar American mythology through football metaphors, and like Wonderful Ends, centers on a Jewish family’s analysis of the politics of the moment. Aaron, Sara, and Glenn are siblings who’ve been deeply affected by traumas both personal and public, which the play unravels in two acts slightly tinted with magical realism. Aaron, the oldest, is a sportswriter with a bad stomach. Sara, the middle, is a social worker who comes down with a mysterious malady that drops her body temperature to 40 degrees and prompts her to repeat cryptic phrases about lists. Glenn, the youngest, breaks out in an unsightly rash when he leaves the house, condemning him to the company and teachings of his mother, who’s some sort of New Age healer.
Weitzman literalizes Antonio Damasio’s notion that when you see someone suffer, you suffer yourself, as a way to paint America post-9/11. Sara’s symptoms derive from her over-empathic sensitivities, which also produce unexplained earthquakes and snowfalls (not so subtle references to the World Trade Center towers crumbling on 9/11 and the ash that fell from the sky in Lower Manhattan). Only when Aaron takes on some of her felt responsibility does she begin to literally warm up and heal. The client with whom he connects is a black man who didn’t pick up his cell phone when his wife called him from the WTC that day, living out his grief through anger. Aaron uses a blocking sled—in a kind of football therapy—to help Martin get back on track.
Although the play’s ethnic politics have potential, the racial politics represent the rather tired cliché of a white man rescuing a black man. While As If is well-meant, it also suffers from tonal and generic confusion. Is this a comedy? A dramedy? A satire? Are we meant to laugh? Cry? Empathize? The characters aren’t drawn well enough to know; at this point, they remain the embodiments of symptoms, rather than fully fleshed out people whose suffering demands witnesses.
Least appealing and successful was Naomi Iizuka’s Strike-Slip, a failed attempt at a Crash-style episodic puzzle of a story of intersecting lives that feels forced and never rises above the obvious. This is surprising for a playwright whose other work—particularly the also episodic but much more theatrically interesting and insightful 36 Views—seems so sharp and sophisticated. Strike-Slip's resolutely domestic dramas center on three different families. A white couple buying an expensive house buries their disagreements and differences under the veneer of heterosexuality. But the man, a seismologist whose work lends the play its operative metaphors, is secretly gay and eventually comes out, leaving his crushed wife to adopt a baby from China by herself. A tyrannical, conservative father governs a motherless Korean family with a suffocating will, although he only wants the best for his first-generation American boy and girl. A righteous mother, who works as the real estate broker who sells the white folks their house, runs her fatherless Latina family, expecting great things from her teenaged son.
As the wheels of fate move, the Latino son has a relationship with the Korean daughter. When she gets pregnant, they marry and he leaves school to work as a mechanic. The Latina mother’s disappointment in her son’s relationship leads her to disown him, which she comes to regret, especially when she finds out she has breast cancer. The Korean son has a one-night stand with the closeted white man, who says he’ll call the kid but never does. The paranoid, trigger-happy Korean shop owning father murders a customer and winds up in jail. Incidental and yet central to all these relationships is a corrupt, undercover African American detective who winds up helping the young Latino/Korean couple to better their lives in a way that’s not exactly legal.
This deliberate, multicultural puzzle could have been interesting and relevant, but it feels forced and way too coincidental, unreal, and didactic. Playwright/director Chay Yew’s staging can’t overcome the very wide proscenium of this stage; he creates flat, uninteresting stage pictures. The unwieldy areas of domesticity and work don’t read as iconically as they should; each area is too isolated, which prevents the characters from careening into each other as they otherwise might. The direction needs more energy and focus; the pacing is deadly, the relationships only sketched. There’s no backstory to any of these characters; we don’t know why we should care about them, and we don’t. Their journeys are adumbrated and empty, and we learn nothing from the two hours we spend with them.
A “strike-slip” is geology’s term for what happens when tectonic plates move past each other. It refers to the unpredictability of earthquakes and to the existence of fault lines that no one knows are there. As such, it’s a neat dramatic metaphor, but Iizuka’s writing and the Humana production leaves the play with a prosaic surface, rather than truly plumbing the more complex potential of the depths to which the title refers.
All these plays are deeply “American,” in that they engage the rituals, conventions, and ideologies of the country and its place in the world. Some focus on individuals and their dreams and failures (As If Body Loop and Strike-Slip), others on the community and its responsibility to help us all live in the face of uncertainty (Batch, When Something Wonderful Ends, The Open Road Anthology). The “America” theatrically presented here is multi-racial and ethnic, sometimes queer, sometimes heterosexual, and offered from mixed gender perspectives in very productive ways.
Glad to have gone,
The Feminist Spectator
Last weekend was apparently the “professionals” weekend, when lots of dramaturgs and other staff from regional theatres and universities around the country descend on the festival to check out the wares. People wandered the spacious ATL facility with badges, and the air crackled with that very particular vibe of people who toil in the same field but don’t often get to spend face-time.
As an academic, I’m not considered a “professional” and enjoyed being on the festival’s fringes. For me, Humana felt like a lark, and I wasn’t disappointed by my luxurious weekend at spectator’s camp.
Here, in order of delight, is my round-up of the shows I saw.
Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle
conceived by Alice Tuan, Whit MacLaughlin, and New Paradise Labs
Alice Tuan’s plays stretch the proprieties of American morality. She stares in the face of all our taboos and preconceptions, and insists that we take a very close look along with her, staging a gaze so intense that everything we thought we knew begins to melt from its heat. Tuan received an MFA in playwrighting from Brown, where she studied with Paula Vogel. Vogel’s spirit of absurdity crossed with her enormity of heart and feeling also imbue Tuan’s work with verve and importance. This collaboration with Whit MacLaughlin and New Paradise Labs, a movement theatre company based in Philadelphia, sees Tuan’s words embellished by a rich physical style that literalizes the lines she crosses.
Batch was staged at The Connection, a gay bar several blocks from ATL, a sprawling two-story corner building with three different bars, video monitors of various sizes playing along the walls, a large lit dance floor graced by the ubiquitous disco ball, and of all things, a theatre in the back of the place borrowed for the occasion. I saw a 5:00 performance and wondered if later in the evening, spectators waded through crowds of dancing, drinking gay men to arrive at the theatre. Such an experience would only underline the complications of heterosexuality that Tuan and NPL viscerally engage.
But for the 5:00 show, we crossed an empty dance floor and wended our way through stale cigarette smoke and left over beer haze into the theatre, where we took seats at tables set in two tiers around a stage raised 10 feet above the floor. The square wooden empty playing space drew attention with its height and its emptiness until the first performer appeared through a square trap set upstage left. Four huge video screens hung from the theatre’s walls, surrounding the audience and the stage with visual images sometimes projected directly from cameras manipulated by actors, sometimes cut from stationary cameras around the theatre, and sometimes culled from video shot at other times, in other spaces.
Unlike some multi-media performances in which video seems a pretentious embellishment that distracts from the live performance, in Batch, video images made the truth tangible and mysterious, as spectators watched previously taped or projected simultaneous images interacting with live bodies. Sometimes, the images created a mirroring effect that extended a moment into infinite time and space; other times, the video images graced a scene with an echo of a poignant moment, or allowed us to focus on an actor’s reaction to a particular line or gesture. The projected images worked scenically, as well as thematically, to enhance the live spectacle Tuan, MacLaughlin, and the six performers created.
Batch takes on the pre-marriage rituals of bachelor and bachelorette parties, exposing the homosocial bonding that leaves actual marriage secondary to this “last chance” to play with same-sex friends. Batch revels in Dionysian rituals of abandon and celebration, in final flings of freedom. These parties, the play suggests, release something primal that (if we let it) would upend the socially sanctioned marriage pact. One of the play’s best jokes is that the “bride” and “groom” barely know one another and have neither kissed nor touched. Their estrangement presents a deft and cynical view of a contract that’s supposed to be sanctified and lasting, but the play’s poignancy lies in the rich familiarity and intimacy it finds in the pre-nup parties.
Tuan and MacLaughlin and company address the gendered dynamics of these affairs with incisive critical wit. The play is staged in two rounds—one for the “women” and one for the “men”—and finishes with a coda in which the bride and groom descend to an underworld (performed below the surface of the stage and projected out via a live video feed or, for all I know, prerecorded and projected). The first round presents the “women” in cherry red cocktail dresses of various cuts, each of whom enters from the mysterious trap door that serves, in true absurdist style, as the site of ideological manipulation and assistance throughout the play.
As each barefoot woman parades up to stage level, accompanied by a vaguely Asian-inflected cover of “The Look of Love,” it’s clear that several of them sport chest hair, beards, and tattoos. Three of the “women,” that is, are men. This cross-gender play goes without comment; the men perform femininity as sincerely (and as critically) as the women. Here on the actors’ live bodies, the constructions of gender blend as seamlessly as the projected video images, all calling into productive doubt what we consider “real.” Betsy Competitive, the “bride” (who looks like a young Meryl Streep), faints and vomits regularly throughout the bachelorette party, a running joke that somatizes her anxiety (and perhaps revulsion) about her pending wedding. None of the other people comment on her reaction; they just scoop her up and move her along.
This first scene establishes that Batch isn’t about what the characters say or even about who they are, but addresses instead something more fundamental, derived from what the performers do and how they relate to each other in the moment. I can’t recall much of the actual dialogue in Batch, but I do remember with stunning clarity visual moments of physical interaction among the performers that spoke expressively about relationships past, present, and future, and the wistfulness with which we move from one moment in our lives to another.
Batch is about liminality, about people poised on that threshold between one thing and another and the reluctance with which we step from the present into the future. The large square trap door emblematizes our constrained choices and yet provides creative ways of managing them. The single entrance to the stage means there’s only one way in or out, but how the performers get there varies with thrilling theatricality. I can’t divine the stage magic that produced these effects, but the performers variously seem to fly from the stage to the under-stage, appearing quickly to fall long distances (as their dresses and hair rise above them with a whoosh of movement); walk sedately down stairs lit from below as their faces glow and the red of their dresses deepens; and slide into what could be a deep abyss, hanging on with their fingernails as some unseen force propels them downward. Alternately, props and people appear from below at various speeds and in unusual positions. As in Slawomir Mrozek’s absurdist drama Tango (1964), the hand of the state seems to encroach on the scene—not from the wings, as in Tango, but from below—handing up props that ensnare the performers in the seductions of liquor and the detritus of the marriage ritual.
Round Two begins with video of a bachelor party in a hotel room, in which the six performers—again, male and female, but this time performing as men—drink to excess and enact the trashing, scatological, virility-boasting practices of male-bonding. When the live performers enter in blue shirts and black pants, the men’s breasts from Round One still poke noticeably through their shirts, and the female performers now wear codpieces that bulge through their slacks. All six play at masculinity, exaggerating and yet strangely humanizing the excesses of socially inscribed roles.
The “groom” is a slight man, still “en-breasted,” who suffers his friends’ intent to inebriate him out of his mind. Once the men liquor up appropriately, a parade of sexy visitors arrive to torment the drunken groom. The first, a platform shoe-wearing stripper dressed to resemble Marie Antoinette, is a tall apparition from another world. Suddenly, the stage is littered with money, bills that stick to the performers’ bare feet and hands, and that seem to stay glued wherever they land. The bills materialize the financial transactions of marriage and sex and capitalism’s deep reach into rituals of heterosexual becoming. The second sexy visitor is “Special K,” a balding man/woman dressed in a form-fitting green gown, who uses a microphone as a dildo, slithering up the groom’s prostrate body then straddling his chest to force the mike into his mouth. The scene is redolent with a homoeroticism that’s both as “natural” and as mediated as any heterosexual act.
In the third part of Batch, after the two gendered rounds, the bride and groom do finally get together and touch, as another version of “The Look of Love” plays in the background. Their interactions are surprisingly tender and moving, given the uproar of gender play and celebration that precedes their coupling. The other four performers, acting now as a chorus of satyrs, appear as non-gendered rams, half-person, half-animal creatures with furry leg-wear and boxing headgear and gloves, who usher the couple through the underworld of marriage.
Batch shifts tone for this last third, engaging more mythological, allusive references that entwine the couple in the plots of loss and longing and entrapment. They descend under the stage, where we watch them on video (whether taped or live isn’t clear, but only adds to the scene’s ethereal quality). They encounter a “Myclops,” whose all seeing, single round eye is located on her one exposed breast, crossing Homer’s race of giants with Sappho’s Amazons. They take tea, as if they’re at Alice’s party through the looking-glass.
Through the Myclop’s eye, the couple see their reflection and fall, Mulholland Drive-like, into an alternate reality in which, dressed finally in the wedding clothes that signal their union, they’re caught running up and down stairwells with locked doors, unable to escape steps that wind about like an Escher sketch. They find their way to the blank hallways of a hotel, but here, too, offers no means of escape.
Although in its last moments, Batch begins perhaps too obviously to speak its subtext, its final descent into myth and archetype is sincere, relevant, and primal. Marriage, after all, is one of western culture’s motivating mythologies, its foundation in property exchange and gendered servitude cloaked under modern veils of romance and destiny. Batch deconstructs this myth, reminding us of the primacy of friendship, the eroticism of our bonds with people we’ve often known much longer than our partners (the incidental queer moments are lovely, including a long, unexplained kiss between the bride and a girlfriend in Round One), and the lurking pitfalls of capitulating to an ideologically driven ritual that promises us adulthood but too often proves a dead end.
Tuan’s collaboration with MacLaughlin and his physical theatre troupe help punctuate her language with schematic, non-realistic yet fully embodied movement absolutely true to the play’s ideas. Each of the six performers’ commitment to their work grounds the experience in the moment and lets spectators understand them not as “characters,” and not as “types,” but as performers in the present of performance. They play out on their bodies various gender roles and variously gendered relationships. They seduce the audience with their willingness to experiment, rather than be entrapped themselves in the limitations of Western cultural dictates regarding bodies and their interactions, emotions and their effect. The performers’ physical and emotional precision, in which every gesture is indeed gestic and meaning-laden, brought Batch alive as a Brechtian experience drenched in thoughtful, heightened emotion.
When Something Wonderful Ends: A History, A One Woman, One Barbie Play
by Sherry Kramer
Kramer’s melancholy, elegiac meditation on her mother’s death and world affairs is a one-woman, 90-minute monologue in which “Sherry”—the character who represents the author onstage, played here by Lori Wilner—tours the audience through her collection of 1960s Barbie dolls, their wardrobe, and their boxes and packing cases that decorate the stage. Out of this simple premise, Kramer stages a intelligent, moving, even gripping analysis of the state of the nation as the American Dream “goes bad.” With acute political clarity (the “vivid clarity that comes after a death,” Sherry explains), Kramer argues that the last forty years of American foreign and domestic policy has revolved around safeguarding the country’s access to oil. Combining a left-oriented history lesson with an exhortation about environmentalism as one way to counter our reliance on the resource that corrupts the nation, Kramer requires the audience to listen to a progressive Jewish woman speak at the intersection of the personal and the political.
The autobiographical piece presents Sherry packing up the family home after her mother’s death. The occasion elicits Sherry’s memories, cherished and regretful, but her monologue addresses mostly her mother’s life, rather than the personal details of her own. Her musings connect world politics to the personal in ambivalent, contrary ways. Intermittently, Sherry shows an Inconvenient Truth-style slide show about the war in Iraq and more broadly about the “petrochemical regime” under which we live, moving in a Brechtian fashion between personal narrative and political analysis.
Speaking directly to the audience, she dresses and undresses her Barbie and Ken dolls, their little costumes pristine and valuable, and puts them in their original boxes and cases while she explains how and why they were manufactured and their complicity with petrochemicals (Barbie is, after all, made of plastic). Barbie’s “impossible proportions,” she relates, were meant to flatter the drape of her clothes, not to model, as the doll came to do, the inability of women’s bodies to conform to her ideal. Sherry rejects or resists what Barbie dolls stand for even while she recalls the pleasure of collecting and playing with them in the early 60s.
She makes room, in fact, for such ambivalence, also letting us know that she has no right to preach about the pervasiveness of petrochemicals, because despite her exhortation about greening ourselves away from our reliance on oil, she drives an SUV. None of us are pure, she suggests; all of us are implicated. But it’s how we come to terms with the dark side of the American Dream that matters. “When did we stop wanting a better world,” Sherry asks, surrounded by antique dolls that beckon her to a vision of gender and heterosexuality that was always constructed and idealized and as false as the righteous claims of politicians who were busy “regime-changing” in the Middle East to ensure the U.S. maintained its oil flow.
Sherry tells us that we need a consumable alternative to petroleum so that we can all get out of bed with the Saudis, but she doesn’t present pat answers. “We can count on greed to find solutions,” she says, indicting capitalism for the “river of fetish and greed that the internet made of the American Dream.” Her implicit plan is to reignite the longing for agency and for the belief that we need to honor a country that promised equality and democracy, rather than submitting to its current “deism,” the verticality of politics based in religious, rather than secular, faith.
Kramer puts Judaism front and center in Wonderful Ends, suggesting it’s an “upgrade in religion,” a kind of “God 2.0,” because with Judaism comes the end of “other worldliness” and a focus on the here and now. She describes carrying out Jewish rituals for the dead, and their loved-ones’ responsibility to honor and remember (although I must admit that I’ve never seen even reform Jews bring flowers to cemeteries as Sherry describes throughout the play. Usually, a visit to a grave is marked with a small rock or pebble, placed on top of the headstone). Religion, she says, “arranges the passage from living to dead”; this, she implies, is plenty. Religion shouldn’t also run countries. Her connection with these memorial rituals keep Sherry connected to something private (her mother) but also deeply public, which is the status of the nation she claims.
One of the ever-changing slides that provide the performance’s scenic décor reads, “I’ve been scared a long time,” again humanizing and personalizing without reducing or trivializing the impact of national policy and ideology. And yet Sherry leaves us hopeful, suggesting that “the miracle we do for our dead is save the world.”
I felt moved and stirred by this gesture of faith and idealism, and proud to hear this story told by a woman whose words and presence captivated the audience with her convincing, well-researched, politically progressive, and astute social and personal critique. She leaves enough room for ambivalence and ambiguity that the story doesn’t sound like a harangue, but a careful analysis and an exhortation to be, if anything, mindful of the contradictions and concessions we make in our own lives. The Barbies she’s collected were made to replicate the nuclear perfection of family and heterosexuality, but it’s clear that Sherry’s is not a domestically driven life. Seeing a woman command political issues, and hearing her interweave her story with personal musings and memories that aren’t about marriage and children provides a refreshing, pleasurable surprise. By the end of the performance, Sherry has neatly packed and stacked at the back the dolls and their clothes and boxes that cluttered stage, leaving our minds and our souls clear to take up Kramer’s challenge to change the world.
The Open Road Anthology, The As If Body Loop, and Strike-Slip
The other plays I saw at Humana less successfully provoked my emotions or my political or intellectual sympathies, although all were valiant attempts to say or do something new in the theatre. The Open Road Anthology was composed of short plays by a variety of playwrights and performed by ATL’s Apprentice Company. The plays linked thematically around the theme of travel and how it founds the American imagination, as well as the ways in which we find our identities by heading out toward a horizon of possibility that’s not always clearly defined. The piece is punctuated with music and songs—provided by the band GrooveLily, and often played by members of the cast—that give the performance a light, rollicking, wistful, always earnest attitude and tone.
A few of the best pieces capture the clarity of theme and character that short plays require. In Rolin Jones’s Ron Bobby had Too Big a Heart, the conventions of senior proms are upended when it’s clear that the girl wearing a blood-drenched dress has conspired to kill someone with her girlfriend. They hit the road, like Thelma and Louise, heading toward some reconfiguration of their dreams. In Ain’t Meat, by A. Rey Pamatmat, a Los Angelenos traveling across the country stops in a roadside diner for a meal, and is seduced with a series of double-entendres by his waiter. Their sweet gay encounter ends when the waiter yells at a waitress he calls “MethMom” that if she doesn’t shut up about their kissing, he’ll send her to be the only straight woman in West Hollywood so she can see how that feels.
Kia Corthron’s Trade puts two women on a New York subway, one wearing a black burka that covers her from head to toe, and the other a flighty barmaid recently arrived from LA. The LA woman chatters at the burka-wearing woman, projecting her vision of otherness and difference and a superficial understanding of politics in the Middle East. “We have lots of diversity in LA,” she says, “but everyone’s driving in their own car.” When the woman wearing the burka answers a cellphone, she’s revealed as an ordinary American who’s wearing the garment to stage a protest. At the end of the short scene, the two women trade clothes so that the woman from LA can see what it’s like to wear coverall garb.
In this very brief, funny play, Corthron crystallizes issues of identification and empathy that overshadow our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the politics of the Taliban, and the detentions at Guantanamo. The collection of short plays trades in standard American dramatic mythos and themes, but the diverse writers and performers twist the conventional into more fruitful, contemporary, and relevant insights, all with a patina of fun and sweetness.
Ken Weitzman’s As If Body Loop thematizes a similar American mythology through football metaphors, and like Wonderful Ends, centers on a Jewish family’s analysis of the politics of the moment. Aaron, Sara, and Glenn are siblings who’ve been deeply affected by traumas both personal and public, which the play unravels in two acts slightly tinted with magical realism. Aaron, the oldest, is a sportswriter with a bad stomach. Sara, the middle, is a social worker who comes down with a mysterious malady that drops her body temperature to 40 degrees and prompts her to repeat cryptic phrases about lists. Glenn, the youngest, breaks out in an unsightly rash when he leaves the house, condemning him to the company and teachings of his mother, who’s some sort of New Age healer.
Weitzman literalizes Antonio Damasio’s notion that when you see someone suffer, you suffer yourself, as a way to paint America post-9/11. Sara’s symptoms derive from her over-empathic sensitivities, which also produce unexplained earthquakes and snowfalls (not so subtle references to the World Trade Center towers crumbling on 9/11 and the ash that fell from the sky in Lower Manhattan). Only when Aaron takes on some of her felt responsibility does she begin to literally warm up and heal. The client with whom he connects is a black man who didn’t pick up his cell phone when his wife called him from the WTC that day, living out his grief through anger. Aaron uses a blocking sled—in a kind of football therapy—to help Martin get back on track.
Although the play’s ethnic politics have potential, the racial politics represent the rather tired cliché of a white man rescuing a black man. While As If is well-meant, it also suffers from tonal and generic confusion. Is this a comedy? A dramedy? A satire? Are we meant to laugh? Cry? Empathize? The characters aren’t drawn well enough to know; at this point, they remain the embodiments of symptoms, rather than fully fleshed out people whose suffering demands witnesses.
Least appealing and successful was Naomi Iizuka’s Strike-Slip, a failed attempt at a Crash-style episodic puzzle of a story of intersecting lives that feels forced and never rises above the obvious. This is surprising for a playwright whose other work—particularly the also episodic but much more theatrically interesting and insightful 36 Views—seems so sharp and sophisticated. Strike-Slip's resolutely domestic dramas center on three different families. A white couple buying an expensive house buries their disagreements and differences under the veneer of heterosexuality. But the man, a seismologist whose work lends the play its operative metaphors, is secretly gay and eventually comes out, leaving his crushed wife to adopt a baby from China by herself. A tyrannical, conservative father governs a motherless Korean family with a suffocating will, although he only wants the best for his first-generation American boy and girl. A righteous mother, who works as the real estate broker who sells the white folks their house, runs her fatherless Latina family, expecting great things from her teenaged son.
As the wheels of fate move, the Latino son has a relationship with the Korean daughter. When she gets pregnant, they marry and he leaves school to work as a mechanic. The Latina mother’s disappointment in her son’s relationship leads her to disown him, which she comes to regret, especially when she finds out she has breast cancer. The Korean son has a one-night stand with the closeted white man, who says he’ll call the kid but never does. The paranoid, trigger-happy Korean shop owning father murders a customer and winds up in jail. Incidental and yet central to all these relationships is a corrupt, undercover African American detective who winds up helping the young Latino/Korean couple to better their lives in a way that’s not exactly legal.
This deliberate, multicultural puzzle could have been interesting and relevant, but it feels forced and way too coincidental, unreal, and didactic. Playwright/director Chay Yew’s staging can’t overcome the very wide proscenium of this stage; he creates flat, uninteresting stage pictures. The unwieldy areas of domesticity and work don’t read as iconically as they should; each area is too isolated, which prevents the characters from careening into each other as they otherwise might. The direction needs more energy and focus; the pacing is deadly, the relationships only sketched. There’s no backstory to any of these characters; we don’t know why we should care about them, and we don’t. Their journeys are adumbrated and empty, and we learn nothing from the two hours we spend with them.
A “strike-slip” is geology’s term for what happens when tectonic plates move past each other. It refers to the unpredictability of earthquakes and to the existence of fault lines that no one knows are there. As such, it’s a neat dramatic metaphor, but Iizuka’s writing and the Humana production leaves the play with a prosaic surface, rather than truly plumbing the more complex potential of the depths to which the title refers.
All these plays are deeply “American,” in that they engage the rituals, conventions, and ideologies of the country and its place in the world. Some focus on individuals and their dreams and failures (As If Body Loop and Strike-Slip), others on the community and its responsibility to help us all live in the face of uncertainty (Batch, When Something Wonderful Ends, The Open Road Anthology). The “America” theatrically presented here is multi-racial and ethnic, sometimes queer, sometimes heterosexual, and offered from mixed gender perspectives in very productive ways.
Glad to have gone,
The Feminist Spectator
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
The L Word’s Season Four Grand Finale
I enjoyed this—the fourth—season of The L Word more than any since the first. Producer Ilene Chaiken has returned to form, allowing a pleasing lightness back into the show, and slowing down the race to caricature and stereotype the characters. The star-billed guest artists enhanced the season, and the plot stayed on the more realistic side of outlandish than it has for the last two years. Even Sunday night’s grand finale (see clips from this and other episodes at http://www.sho.com/site/lword/episodes.do) avoided cliffhanging flourishes, ending wistfully and ambiguously with just enough mystery to keep us anticipating the start of Season Five (since the show has been renewed).
The Season Four finale left our heroines in various states of relationship distress, disorder, and for the first time in a while, pleasure. Max, our transgender hero, showed up only to load a rented van for Bette’s sign-stealing caper, but for long enough to suggest that he’s hesitating to go through with his sex surgery. Max was estranged from the rest of the L Word women this season, spinning out his gender transition mostly at work, which offered the show a chance to address gender discrimination in employment. Max is ostracized when he reveals he’s transitioning, which he does to advocate for a woman at the office who’s being sexually harassed.
Once his boss and co-workers understand Max’s identity, though, they shun him, despite his obvious talents, and the woman he outed himself to protect winds up assigned a major account in his place. When it’s clear Max has to quit, instead of blowing up or speechifying (which the writers could have chosen for his final moment on the job), Max closes his laptop and makes his way around the conference table, shaking hands, thanking people individually, and telling them how much he learned from them. While this polite trans-mentsch says his good-byes, the smug straight people sit chagrined and a little ashamed at their own ignorance and bigotry.
Shane and her new lesbian mommy girlfriend Paige come out to Paige’s son so that they can start spending nights together instead of having sex in cars and other public places (as if there's really something wrong with that). Jared reacts badly, but Shane persuades him that they’ll all be a family and that Shane’s little brother Shay (their father clearly had little imagination where names were concerned) will come live with them, too. The “promise” works and the boy’s down with the plan. I worried, though, that Shane, the champion of promiscuity and non-monogamy, seemed to be promising a nuclear family as the answer to the boy’s homophobia (“I don’t want you to be a lez, too,” he whines to his mom). And in fact, we soon find Shane brushing her teeth in Paige’s bathroom and contemplating a house in the suburbs for them and their kids.
But to her credit, Chaiken (who wrote and directed the episode) intercuts a 1950s-style fantasy sequence through their interactions, representing in tinny, monochrome reds and blues Ossie and Harriet moments of Shane in middle-class suburban male drag and Paige in Leave it to Beaver dresses, both playing at the stereotypical gender and class roles of the era. The critical irony works, and allows for the possibility that the lesbians-with-kids-in-the-suburbs fantasy might sour in Season Five.
After all, we’ve seen Shane reject this domestic scenario before with Carmen, who seemed much less intent on chaining her to a conventional coupled life than Paige and Jared. And Paige emanates a suspicious fragrance; there’s something not quite right about her wholesale embrace of Sapphistry. Or perhaps I don’t trust the character because I’ve heard rumors that the actor playing her (Kristanna Loken) has bad-mouthed The L Word cast, calling them cliquish and cold.
How Paige and Shane’s relationship resolves remains to be seen, but if their sexual encounters are any indication, it doesn't look good. At first, The L Word was the one of the only mainstream representations of lesbian sex to get it even remotely right. But after the first season, the show’s erotic quotient nosedived and hasn’t recovered. Shane and Paige literally go through the motions; there’s no performance of heat, desire, or even love in their awkwardly choreographed, forced couplings. Katherine Moennig’s desperately thin body could be partly to blame; seeing her sharp, jutting bones click through her less than suave faux butch fumblings takes all the ardor out of the scene. Or maybe it’s just that Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman were better at faking lesbian sex. And now that Papi’s been defanged as the chart-busting Romeo, Shane bears the burden of the show’s sex, and she buckles under the weight.
In another nice, cynical touch, Helena and her gambling dominatrix boss/lover Catherine bet on whether Shane and Paige will be together in six months. Helena says they will; if she wins, she gets a million dollars and her freedom. If sleazy, filthy rich Catherine wins, Helena signs up for another year of luxuriously indentured sex and wagering. Helena takes the bet, but as Catherine goes off to play the tables, Helena urgently empties her safe into a pillow case. Who knows what this might mean, but it’d be nice to have Helena back in control of her own life and finances. Perhaps Holland Taylor will reappear next season as her once again benevolent mother and give Helena back her inheritance. Although this season humanized Helena significantly, it’s not exactly clear what function the character serves, and watching her run about in sneakers moving boxes and jumping to do Catherine's bidding seems way out of her original aristocratic character.
The finale leaves Jenny, the newly anointed, always irritating diva, literally out to sea--or up the river without a paddle, or whatever metaphor works to describe her literal and figurative situation . At the beach-side going away party for Tasha, who’s being reposted to Iraq, Jenny drags a little yellow raft out into the waves, planning on a float with her new dog, the Pomeranian Sounder (who replaces the shelter dog she bought to be put down by her nemesis’s veterinarian lover earlier in the season).
Somehow, Sounder misses the boat, and trots up to alert Shane that Jenny’s drifted out on the ocean. But since Shane can’t yet speak dog, Jenny sits alone, artfully arranged in the small raft as the sun comes up at the end of the episode. She’s been fired from writing the movie based on her thinly veiled tell-all, Lez Girls, and she’s alienated all her friends and collaborators with her headstrong vanity. This, The L Word tells us in no uncertain terms, is what happens to girls who go bad and turn on their community—they get stuck out on the water without sunscreen.
Devastated by Tasha’s pending return to Iraq, Alice resists going to her send off party until Dana returns from the grave to talk some sense into her. How nice to see Erin Daniels back on the show, even for that brief scene, which gets Alice to the party. But the scene also made me recall how sparkling the relationship between Alice and Dana (and Leisha Haley and Daniels) was before the producers sacrificed Dana to breast cancer. The actors' witty repartee and the open affection between the characters (and the performers) was one of the highlights of the show. Alice hasn’t had a relationship with anyone as appropriate as Dana yet. But she heads off to Tasha’s party, showing up on the beach like a white apparition as Tasha and two of her friends (of color, happily) head in from a walk.
Tasha’s presence this season has lent the show some welcomed racial diversity, but her status as a closeted Army officer strains credulity. It’s doubtful that someone of Tasha’s commitments would endure the L girls' vague liberalism, or their entrenched political ignorance and apathy. The rare political conversations the writers whip up sound false and trite. Politics do better on this show when they’re incidental, references or jokes made in passing, or when they’re grounded in situations (like Max’s work environment) and relationships (like Bette’s with Jodi, who’s deaf and played by Marlee Matlin) than they are delivered in well-meant but wooden, didactic dialogue. Sending Tasha back to Iraq seems a convenient way to dispense with a character who has no future in The L Word's trajectory.
Likewise, stripped of her Casanova-esque sexual randiness, the ubiquitous Papi has lost her way, and her future on The L Word. Her attachment to Kit, the one non-lesbian in the circle (now that Tina’s back in the fold), never made sense. After indulging herself with a couple of alcoholic and sexual benders, Kit goes back to the remorseful Angus and returns to her AA meetings, determined to straighten up (in every sense of the word). Papi hangs on to Kit's group like an appendix holds on to a colon, vestigial and useless. Her other friends of color, who played such good basketball earlier this season, and who seemed a more formidable, complex presence in this mostly white show, disappeared after an episode or two, leaving Papi and Tasha as the sole representatives of another community.
Papi’s down and dirty physicality and her refusal to make a commitment longer than a couple of hours offered a refreshing balance to the other characters’ self-serious searches for mates. But with both Shane and Papi domesticated this season, no one remains to round out the representation of choices for lesbian sexual expression. And if Papi and Tasha go, two woman of color characters could bite the dust.
Cybil Sheperd, who’s done a yeoman’s job with her guest role, finally finds her match when Bette introduces her to Joyce, the divorce lawyer who arbitrated Bette's break-up with Tina, played by the impeccably campy Jane Lynch. Phyllis wants to get a divorce from her disapproving husband (and hopefully from her intolerant daughter); when she meets Joyce, it’s love at first sight. They gambol off into the butch/femme sunset of independent, happy women in their late 50s. Sheperd’s presence, while sometimes ridiculous and always sentimental, nonetheless tried to address the sexuality and desire of older lesbians. When Phyllis visited The Planet earlier in the season, the scene clarified how few places exist in which older lesbians can go to meet other women and socialize, especially when they’re just coming out. Seeing Phyllis walk off happily with Joyce redeemed her with dignity as a bona fide lesbian, even if she was never (not for one minute) believable as the Chancellor of a major university.
The finale also returned to the slapstick humor of the basketball game by sending Alice and Shane on a caper with Bette to steal a sign to give to Jodi. The large, rusted, antique piece of signage that cryptically proclaims “17 Reasons Why” looms over an abandoned warehouse, and the glamour girls press into uncharacteristic action to retrieve it. The basketball scene and this caper take great pleasure in parodying the characters' indolent passivity by throwing them into physical situations for which they're obviously ill-equipped. In this one, Bette, Alice, and Shane clip barbed wires, climb fences, throw meat to distract guard dogs, fall through windows, climb rooftops, and disassemble iron-cast signage, all without breaking a nail. In their hapless determination, they resemble Lucy and Ethel playing at Ocean's Eleven.
(jenniolson writes in her blog on the Our Chart web site that the "17 Reasons Why" sign was a real architectural and emotional landmark in San Francisco's Mission District for many years, until it was dismantled inexplicably and replaced by an illegal billboard that looms over the lesbian neighborhood to this day. She writes, "Erected in 1935, the 17 Reasons Why sign was a terrific Depression era commercial advertising structure, which originally sported neon tubing and stood as a neighborhood landmark promoting the Redlicks Furniture Store." Check out her very interesting history of the sign and its current status at http://www.ourchart.com/node/56427. The one in the show was a facsimile made by The L Word props folks.)
This season recuperated Bette back into the fold, and even let her friends tease her for the first time. Although Bette’s lost none of her sophistication, and although she still seems older and wiser than her friends, the writers let other characters poke fun at her foibles. Jennifer Beals plays great deadpan, listening to Tina and Kit and the others as they tell her that she’s controlling, that she makes mistakes when she’s scared, and as they enumerate all the ways she misfires in a relationship. Bette in fact has lost Jodi to an art commission in upstate New York. Bette evinces a kind of cluelessness that makes her well-wrought and well-played character that much more endearing. When Bette shows up in a field New York in the last scene driving a tractor towing the reassembled “17 Reasons Why” sign behind her toward the outdoor artwork Jodi's musing over, the moment is campy and sweet and does indeed win Jodi back.
This leaves Tina pining for Bette in the season’s wistful final moment. After all the vituperative recriminations of Season Three, Tina and Bette pulled together in Season Four to raise the rarely seen Angelika and to renew their friendship, if not their partnership. Sexual tension resurfaces between them, but Tina feels most caught by her resurgence of love and longing. Despite the ardor of Kate (played by the tough, sexy Annabella Sciorra), the director she’s hired to shoot the film adaptation of Jenny’s book, Tina’s stuck on Bette, feeding her lines like Cyrano so that she can win back Jodi’s affections. When Bette asks Tina for lines to deliver to Jodi, Tina tells her to say that she loves her and that she’d do anything for a second chance, which we know, as in Cyrano, is exactly what Tina wants to say to Bette. They misread each other’s cues and go off searching for their next relationship, when the woman they should be with is the one they both already lost.
Even the musical score improved this season, remanding Betty’s atrocious theme song to the opening credits and selecting popular singers with poignant lyrics to underscore the show’s moods. Toshi Reagon guest starred in the last episode, with her booming, plangent voice and affecting guitar providing the background for Tasha’s beach-side going away party. Finishing the season without the overwrought pyrotechnics of Bette driving off into the dark with her co-parented daughter in the back seat of her car was a welcome relief. The season ended as it ran, on a wistful, warm, funny, sweet, and human note.
And so it goes for the L girls of Vancouver (sorry, LA). Although I don’t think I’ll ever again feel the desperate sense of loss I experienced at the end of the first season, knowing the story wouldn’t continue for another nine months, I find myself ready to buy the fourth season DVD and to wait, distracted but eager, for the start of the fifth.
Sated, sapphically,
The Feminist Spectator
The Season Four finale left our heroines in various states of relationship distress, disorder, and for the first time in a while, pleasure. Max, our transgender hero, showed up only to load a rented van for Bette’s sign-stealing caper, but for long enough to suggest that he’s hesitating to go through with his sex surgery. Max was estranged from the rest of the L Word women this season, spinning out his gender transition mostly at work, which offered the show a chance to address gender discrimination in employment. Max is ostracized when he reveals he’s transitioning, which he does to advocate for a woman at the office who’s being sexually harassed.
Once his boss and co-workers understand Max’s identity, though, they shun him, despite his obvious talents, and the woman he outed himself to protect winds up assigned a major account in his place. When it’s clear Max has to quit, instead of blowing up or speechifying (which the writers could have chosen for his final moment on the job), Max closes his laptop and makes his way around the conference table, shaking hands, thanking people individually, and telling them how much he learned from them. While this polite trans-mentsch says his good-byes, the smug straight people sit chagrined and a little ashamed at their own ignorance and bigotry.
Shane and her new lesbian mommy girlfriend Paige come out to Paige’s son so that they can start spending nights together instead of having sex in cars and other public places (as if there's really something wrong with that). Jared reacts badly, but Shane persuades him that they’ll all be a family and that Shane’s little brother Shay (their father clearly had little imagination where names were concerned) will come live with them, too. The “promise” works and the boy’s down with the plan. I worried, though, that Shane, the champion of promiscuity and non-monogamy, seemed to be promising a nuclear family as the answer to the boy’s homophobia (“I don’t want you to be a lez, too,” he whines to his mom). And in fact, we soon find Shane brushing her teeth in Paige’s bathroom and contemplating a house in the suburbs for them and their kids.
But to her credit, Chaiken (who wrote and directed the episode) intercuts a 1950s-style fantasy sequence through their interactions, representing in tinny, monochrome reds and blues Ossie and Harriet moments of Shane in middle-class suburban male drag and Paige in Leave it to Beaver dresses, both playing at the stereotypical gender and class roles of the era. The critical irony works, and allows for the possibility that the lesbians-with-kids-in-the-suburbs fantasy might sour in Season Five.
After all, we’ve seen Shane reject this domestic scenario before with Carmen, who seemed much less intent on chaining her to a conventional coupled life than Paige and Jared. And Paige emanates a suspicious fragrance; there’s something not quite right about her wholesale embrace of Sapphistry. Or perhaps I don’t trust the character because I’ve heard rumors that the actor playing her (Kristanna Loken) has bad-mouthed The L Word cast, calling them cliquish and cold.
How Paige and Shane’s relationship resolves remains to be seen, but if their sexual encounters are any indication, it doesn't look good. At first, The L Word was the one of the only mainstream representations of lesbian sex to get it even remotely right. But after the first season, the show’s erotic quotient nosedived and hasn’t recovered. Shane and Paige literally go through the motions; there’s no performance of heat, desire, or even love in their awkwardly choreographed, forced couplings. Katherine Moennig’s desperately thin body could be partly to blame; seeing her sharp, jutting bones click through her less than suave faux butch fumblings takes all the ardor out of the scene. Or maybe it’s just that Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman were better at faking lesbian sex. And now that Papi’s been defanged as the chart-busting Romeo, Shane bears the burden of the show’s sex, and she buckles under the weight.
In another nice, cynical touch, Helena and her gambling dominatrix boss/lover Catherine bet on whether Shane and Paige will be together in six months. Helena says they will; if she wins, she gets a million dollars and her freedom. If sleazy, filthy rich Catherine wins, Helena signs up for another year of luxuriously indentured sex and wagering. Helena takes the bet, but as Catherine goes off to play the tables, Helena urgently empties her safe into a pillow case. Who knows what this might mean, but it’d be nice to have Helena back in control of her own life and finances. Perhaps Holland Taylor will reappear next season as her once again benevolent mother and give Helena back her inheritance. Although this season humanized Helena significantly, it’s not exactly clear what function the character serves, and watching her run about in sneakers moving boxes and jumping to do Catherine's bidding seems way out of her original aristocratic character.
The finale leaves Jenny, the newly anointed, always irritating diva, literally out to sea--or up the river without a paddle, or whatever metaphor works to describe her literal and figurative situation . At the beach-side going away party for Tasha, who’s being reposted to Iraq, Jenny drags a little yellow raft out into the waves, planning on a float with her new dog, the Pomeranian Sounder (who replaces the shelter dog she bought to be put down by her nemesis’s veterinarian lover earlier in the season).
Somehow, Sounder misses the boat, and trots up to alert Shane that Jenny’s drifted out on the ocean. But since Shane can’t yet speak dog, Jenny sits alone, artfully arranged in the small raft as the sun comes up at the end of the episode. She’s been fired from writing the movie based on her thinly veiled tell-all, Lez Girls, and she’s alienated all her friends and collaborators with her headstrong vanity. This, The L Word tells us in no uncertain terms, is what happens to girls who go bad and turn on their community—they get stuck out on the water without sunscreen.
Devastated by Tasha’s pending return to Iraq, Alice resists going to her send off party until Dana returns from the grave to talk some sense into her. How nice to see Erin Daniels back on the show, even for that brief scene, which gets Alice to the party. But the scene also made me recall how sparkling the relationship between Alice and Dana (and Leisha Haley and Daniels) was before the producers sacrificed Dana to breast cancer. The actors' witty repartee and the open affection between the characters (and the performers) was one of the highlights of the show. Alice hasn’t had a relationship with anyone as appropriate as Dana yet. But she heads off to Tasha’s party, showing up on the beach like a white apparition as Tasha and two of her friends (of color, happily) head in from a walk.
Tasha’s presence this season has lent the show some welcomed racial diversity, but her status as a closeted Army officer strains credulity. It’s doubtful that someone of Tasha’s commitments would endure the L girls' vague liberalism, or their entrenched political ignorance and apathy. The rare political conversations the writers whip up sound false and trite. Politics do better on this show when they’re incidental, references or jokes made in passing, or when they’re grounded in situations (like Max’s work environment) and relationships (like Bette’s with Jodi, who’s deaf and played by Marlee Matlin) than they are delivered in well-meant but wooden, didactic dialogue. Sending Tasha back to Iraq seems a convenient way to dispense with a character who has no future in The L Word's trajectory.
Likewise, stripped of her Casanova-esque sexual randiness, the ubiquitous Papi has lost her way, and her future on The L Word. Her attachment to Kit, the one non-lesbian in the circle (now that Tina’s back in the fold), never made sense. After indulging herself with a couple of alcoholic and sexual benders, Kit goes back to the remorseful Angus and returns to her AA meetings, determined to straighten up (in every sense of the word). Papi hangs on to Kit's group like an appendix holds on to a colon, vestigial and useless. Her other friends of color, who played such good basketball earlier this season, and who seemed a more formidable, complex presence in this mostly white show, disappeared after an episode or two, leaving Papi and Tasha as the sole representatives of another community.
Papi’s down and dirty physicality and her refusal to make a commitment longer than a couple of hours offered a refreshing balance to the other characters’ self-serious searches for mates. But with both Shane and Papi domesticated this season, no one remains to round out the representation of choices for lesbian sexual expression. And if Papi and Tasha go, two woman of color characters could bite the dust.
Cybil Sheperd, who’s done a yeoman’s job with her guest role, finally finds her match when Bette introduces her to Joyce, the divorce lawyer who arbitrated Bette's break-up with Tina, played by the impeccably campy Jane Lynch. Phyllis wants to get a divorce from her disapproving husband (and hopefully from her intolerant daughter); when she meets Joyce, it’s love at first sight. They gambol off into the butch/femme sunset of independent, happy women in their late 50s. Sheperd’s presence, while sometimes ridiculous and always sentimental, nonetheless tried to address the sexuality and desire of older lesbians. When Phyllis visited The Planet earlier in the season, the scene clarified how few places exist in which older lesbians can go to meet other women and socialize, especially when they’re just coming out. Seeing Phyllis walk off happily with Joyce redeemed her with dignity as a bona fide lesbian, even if she was never (not for one minute) believable as the Chancellor of a major university.
The finale also returned to the slapstick humor of the basketball game by sending Alice and Shane on a caper with Bette to steal a sign to give to Jodi. The large, rusted, antique piece of signage that cryptically proclaims “17 Reasons Why” looms over an abandoned warehouse, and the glamour girls press into uncharacteristic action to retrieve it. The basketball scene and this caper take great pleasure in parodying the characters' indolent passivity by throwing them into physical situations for which they're obviously ill-equipped. In this one, Bette, Alice, and Shane clip barbed wires, climb fences, throw meat to distract guard dogs, fall through windows, climb rooftops, and disassemble iron-cast signage, all without breaking a nail. In their hapless determination, they resemble Lucy and Ethel playing at Ocean's Eleven.
(jenniolson writes in her blog on the Our Chart web site that the "17 Reasons Why" sign was a real architectural and emotional landmark in San Francisco's Mission District for many years, until it was dismantled inexplicably and replaced by an illegal billboard that looms over the lesbian neighborhood to this day. She writes, "Erected in 1935, the 17 Reasons Why sign was a terrific Depression era commercial advertising structure, which originally sported neon tubing and stood as a neighborhood landmark promoting the Redlicks Furniture Store." Check out her very interesting history of the sign and its current status at http://www.ourchart.com/node/56427. The one in the show was a facsimile made by The L Word props folks.)
This season recuperated Bette back into the fold, and even let her friends tease her for the first time. Although Bette’s lost none of her sophistication, and although she still seems older and wiser than her friends, the writers let other characters poke fun at her foibles. Jennifer Beals plays great deadpan, listening to Tina and Kit and the others as they tell her that she’s controlling, that she makes mistakes when she’s scared, and as they enumerate all the ways she misfires in a relationship. Bette in fact has lost Jodi to an art commission in upstate New York. Bette evinces a kind of cluelessness that makes her well-wrought and well-played character that much more endearing. When Bette shows up in a field New York in the last scene driving a tractor towing the reassembled “17 Reasons Why” sign behind her toward the outdoor artwork Jodi's musing over, the moment is campy and sweet and does indeed win Jodi back.
This leaves Tina pining for Bette in the season’s wistful final moment. After all the vituperative recriminations of Season Three, Tina and Bette pulled together in Season Four to raise the rarely seen Angelika and to renew their friendship, if not their partnership. Sexual tension resurfaces between them, but Tina feels most caught by her resurgence of love and longing. Despite the ardor of Kate (played by the tough, sexy Annabella Sciorra), the director she’s hired to shoot the film adaptation of Jenny’s book, Tina’s stuck on Bette, feeding her lines like Cyrano so that she can win back Jodi’s affections. When Bette asks Tina for lines to deliver to Jodi, Tina tells her to say that she loves her and that she’d do anything for a second chance, which we know, as in Cyrano, is exactly what Tina wants to say to Bette. They misread each other’s cues and go off searching for their next relationship, when the woman they should be with is the one they both already lost.
Even the musical score improved this season, remanding Betty’s atrocious theme song to the opening credits and selecting popular singers with poignant lyrics to underscore the show’s moods. Toshi Reagon guest starred in the last episode, with her booming, plangent voice and affecting guitar providing the background for Tasha’s beach-side going away party. Finishing the season without the overwrought pyrotechnics of Bette driving off into the dark with her co-parented daughter in the back seat of her car was a welcome relief. The season ended as it ran, on a wistful, warm, funny, sweet, and human note.
And so it goes for the L girls of Vancouver (sorry, LA). Although I don’t think I’ll ever again feel the desperate sense of loss I experienced at the end of the first season, knowing the story wouldn’t continue for another nine months, I find myself ready to buy the fourth season DVD and to wait, distracted but eager, for the start of the fifth.
Sated, sapphically,
The Feminist Spectator
Sunday, March 18, 2007
I Think I Love My Wife
Chris Rock’s just released comedy, I Think I Love My Wife, stars Rock as Richard Cooper, an upper-middle class investment banker whose seven-year, now sex-less marriage to an elementary school teacher bores him silly. Based on French New Wave director Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Rock’s adaptation turns in a slight comedy that documents Cooper’s slide in and out of sexual temptation. Life and sex options present themselves in the lovely countenance and luscious body of “old friend” Nikki Tru, played by the inestimable Kerry Washington (who deserves much better material, although she manages to wrangle a solid and smart—not just sexy—performance from what Rock, who wrote and directed the film, hands her here).
I Think . . . offers some promising social observations about race and class, but fails dismally to think in intelligent, progressive ways about gender and sexuality. Narrated by Rock’s Richard Cooper, the film winks and nods at the audience from the start, as he introduces what looks like his perfect family (a beautiful, professional wife, played by Gina Torres, two adorable children, one girl, one boy, a crisply landscaped and stately Westchester house, and all the other accoutrements that come with the paycheck of a Wall Street drudge). But when the camera first pulls back to frame Cooper leaving his domestic habitat for the Metro North train into the city, he looks out at the audience with bemused dismay, his image captioned “bored.”
These interjections of pointed (or to be more precise, pointing) editorial comments try to raise the level of this comedy to social satire, but it remains tethered to frat boy sexual humor infused with a strangely sad poignancy about the inevitability of assuming the stifling trappings of adulthood. The film makes it obvious that Richard is unhappy in his ritzy neighborhood (he’s the only person of color waiting for the train each morning), and dissatisfied with his high-powered job (where he knows by name the other people of color who work in his firm, one of whom is a cleaning woman and the other, a janitor) for reasons that have a lot to do with the singularity of his race in these resolutely white settings. But at the same time, the narrative insists, evidence to the contrary, that Richard’s problems really stem from his wife’s refusal to have sex. What the film intimates is a social problem it too quickly lets slide into a privatized, personal problem. His wife Brenda has become more interested in draperies than in his penis, leaving Richard to fantasize about women he sees on the train and on the streets of Manhattan.
At the banking firm where he toils, primly monitored by two white middle-aged female secretaries and George, a white middle-aged male colleague/friend (played by a wry and dissolute Steve Buscemi), Richard feels like a token but molds himself to the demands of his place in the firm. He wears sleek, expensive suits with silk ties, and holds himself like he’s born to the pedigree boasted by his prominently displayed degree from Columbia. The film gives nary a hint of his backstory, until Nikki Tru reappears in his life after an eight-year hiatus to catapult Richard back into a moment before the sober responsibilities of bread-winning and fathering and domestic husbandry descended to ruin his fun.
Nikki was Richard’s friend Nelson’s girlfriend. When she left Nelson, he tried to kill himself. We meet the poor schlub later in the film, and note that the bespectacled, straight-laced guy who reeks of “mama’s boy” is still pathologically hung up on his old girlfriend. This is the power of the Tru siren song; her galvanizing sexuality and intemperate spirit of adventure makes these men feel young and powerful. She good-naturedly hounds Richard at his office, raising the eyebrows of his morals-policing secretaries and even sympathetic George, who runs his own game of sexual infidelity with office temps. But George doesn’t take it seriously and no one seems to judge him for his indiscretions, as they do Richard. George keeps Viagra in his car's glove compartment, and can have sex with an array of women then go home at night to kiss his wife without compunction. Richard, on the other hand, has “feelings,” George tells him sadly, which makes it difficult to be an adept adulterer.
Indeed, the story tugs Richard’s feelings every which way as it proceeds to its inevitable conclusion. He loves his kids, scrambling across the floor to play with his daughter, but Nikki’s attentions make him feel like a kid again. She takes him to a car show, where they sit in the front seat of a sporty Porsche and fantasize about owning it. They play driving simulators together, hysterical at their video crashes and careering turns. She shows him a neat game where they sit on the windowsill of his office and throw dollar bills out the window, watching hapless pedestrians race to scrape the cash off the sidewalk. They make race jokes together, critiquing instantly and empathically how racial differences play out in almost every interaction, from crowded elevators filled with buttoned-down white people to the scramble-for-the-money-game where obviously well-heeled white men grab the cash from homeless people of color.
Nikki and Richard share a sense of their own outsiderness, not for how it oppresses them, but for how their analysis empowers them to be aware of moving through a world in which they know race matters. Brenda, on the other hand, makes Richard spell “white” and “black” in front of their daughter, hiding from her some truth about race that Nikki, loyal to her name, stands by with a rather appealing critical knowingness. Nikki won’t assimilate; Brenda accepts it as her rightful destiny.
While this narrative thread would make a smart, perceptive indie film, I Think I Love My Wife reneges on its promise and harnesses its story to the sexual possibility Nikki dangles in front of Richard with every move. She needs him to recommend her for a hostessing job at a restaurant, and to help her break up with a homicidal boyfriend, but she also needs his attention and his desire as evidence of her own power and agency. He resists the urge to have sex with her, but his longing for the unfettered, youthful possibility she represents in his life is nearly as distracting.
Brenda suspects something’s wrong and accuses Richard of infidelities he hasn’t, technically, committed. But when he comes home late, his clothes awry, and his excuses lame, she speaks to him like a child and he shrivels under her disapproval. Brenda isn’t his wife, she’s his mother, a withholding nag who reminds him of his domestic duties without giving him the sex he thinks is his married due. She emasculates him, while Nikki pumps him up to feel virile and heroic.
Richard joins Nikki in an unexpected, disastrous (and narratively unnecessary) trip to DC to cut her ties with her ex, which gets Richard beat senseless and nearly causes him to lose his job when their return flight is delayed and he misses a meeting. Brenda is apoplectic, so his marriage, too, nearly ends. This push to the brink snaps Richard out of his infatuated fantasy. He stops taking Nikki’s calls and hurries back into the family fold in a montage of scenes shot like Kodak moments ,with his wife and his children and Santa and the Easter Bunny and various other moms and dads (all white) singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” in nursery school classrooms while sitting in circles on the floor. Although the film wants to tell us that this is his proper milieu, you can’t help feeling Rock/Richard’s helpless acquiescence to this utter superficiality.
When Nikki reappears months later, suddenly professionalized and polished, sophisticated and mature, to visit Richard at his office wearing a lovely cream linen suit instead of a silken fire engine red cocktail dress, she’s found herself her own man. She’s decided that she isn’t getting any younger and should embrace the married-with-children destiny that descends on these characters with grim inevitability. Nikki doesn’t love the man she intends to marry; she just realizes that she’s 32, not 22, and that her sex appeal is already fading (another of the film’s more unbelievable assertions).
Nikki invites Richard to her place ostensibly for one last goodbye but actually to consummate their flirtation before they settle into their boring “normal” lives. After some barely convincing indecision, he slips off his wedding ring and follows her directions to her home. But even though Nikki’s tarted up in the lacy, barely-there underwear we know Richard loves, and even though she wears skyscraping catch me/fuck me heels that she hints she’ll keep on in bed, and even though Richard approaches his mission with appropriate zeal, when push comes to shove, he can’t follow through. Stripping off his tie, he catches himself in a mirror in Nikki’s bedroom and, in one of the film’s more odious substitutions, realizes that he’s a father, not an adulterer, and stops himself from going through with the act that will, according to the film’s logic, threaten everything. While Nikki languishes nearly naked on her bed, calling out to Richard not to go, he literally runs home to his wife. They resolve years of marital discord in a matter of moments with wailing musical accompaniment and theatrical lip-syncing to lyrics meant, I presume, to underline and satirize the high drama of the moment. Richard and Brenda promise to be close to each other, to have sex with each other, and to live together happily every after.
So, of course, Richard loves his wife. But what a sad state of affairs when marriage is painted as an obligation for men and women, when men are infantilized by their wives, when women are represented as mothers or whores, when African Americans are secluded in white enclaves and call it success, when people compromise vitality for deadening conformity, when being like everyone else, regardless of your race and your gender, is more important than your own aspirations. Can’t a pretty smart comedian make a movie that commits to a social critique instead of pretending nothing’s wrong with this picture? Can’t Rock imagine instead how to buck a system that whitewashes difference and squanders our talents, our desire, and our knowledge of how corrupt it is to want what the (white) Jones’s have?
Perplexed,
The Feminist Spectator
I Think . . . offers some promising social observations about race and class, but fails dismally to think in intelligent, progressive ways about gender and sexuality. Narrated by Rock’s Richard Cooper, the film winks and nods at the audience from the start, as he introduces what looks like his perfect family (a beautiful, professional wife, played by Gina Torres, two adorable children, one girl, one boy, a crisply landscaped and stately Westchester house, and all the other accoutrements that come with the paycheck of a Wall Street drudge). But when the camera first pulls back to frame Cooper leaving his domestic habitat for the Metro North train into the city, he looks out at the audience with bemused dismay, his image captioned “bored.”
These interjections of pointed (or to be more precise, pointing) editorial comments try to raise the level of this comedy to social satire, but it remains tethered to frat boy sexual humor infused with a strangely sad poignancy about the inevitability of assuming the stifling trappings of adulthood. The film makes it obvious that Richard is unhappy in his ritzy neighborhood (he’s the only person of color waiting for the train each morning), and dissatisfied with his high-powered job (where he knows by name the other people of color who work in his firm, one of whom is a cleaning woman and the other, a janitor) for reasons that have a lot to do with the singularity of his race in these resolutely white settings. But at the same time, the narrative insists, evidence to the contrary, that Richard’s problems really stem from his wife’s refusal to have sex. What the film intimates is a social problem it too quickly lets slide into a privatized, personal problem. His wife Brenda has become more interested in draperies than in his penis, leaving Richard to fantasize about women he sees on the train and on the streets of Manhattan.
At the banking firm where he toils, primly monitored by two white middle-aged female secretaries and George, a white middle-aged male colleague/friend (played by a wry and dissolute Steve Buscemi), Richard feels like a token but molds himself to the demands of his place in the firm. He wears sleek, expensive suits with silk ties, and holds himself like he’s born to the pedigree boasted by his prominently displayed degree from Columbia. The film gives nary a hint of his backstory, until Nikki Tru reappears in his life after an eight-year hiatus to catapult Richard back into a moment before the sober responsibilities of bread-winning and fathering and domestic husbandry descended to ruin his fun.
Nikki was Richard’s friend Nelson’s girlfriend. When she left Nelson, he tried to kill himself. We meet the poor schlub later in the film, and note that the bespectacled, straight-laced guy who reeks of “mama’s boy” is still pathologically hung up on his old girlfriend. This is the power of the Tru siren song; her galvanizing sexuality and intemperate spirit of adventure makes these men feel young and powerful. She good-naturedly hounds Richard at his office, raising the eyebrows of his morals-policing secretaries and even sympathetic George, who runs his own game of sexual infidelity with office temps. But George doesn’t take it seriously and no one seems to judge him for his indiscretions, as they do Richard. George keeps Viagra in his car's glove compartment, and can have sex with an array of women then go home at night to kiss his wife without compunction. Richard, on the other hand, has “feelings,” George tells him sadly, which makes it difficult to be an adept adulterer.
Indeed, the story tugs Richard’s feelings every which way as it proceeds to its inevitable conclusion. He loves his kids, scrambling across the floor to play with his daughter, but Nikki’s attentions make him feel like a kid again. She takes him to a car show, where they sit in the front seat of a sporty Porsche and fantasize about owning it. They play driving simulators together, hysterical at their video crashes and careering turns. She shows him a neat game where they sit on the windowsill of his office and throw dollar bills out the window, watching hapless pedestrians race to scrape the cash off the sidewalk. They make race jokes together, critiquing instantly and empathically how racial differences play out in almost every interaction, from crowded elevators filled with buttoned-down white people to the scramble-for-the-money-game where obviously well-heeled white men grab the cash from homeless people of color.
Nikki and Richard share a sense of their own outsiderness, not for how it oppresses them, but for how their analysis empowers them to be aware of moving through a world in which they know race matters. Brenda, on the other hand, makes Richard spell “white” and “black” in front of their daughter, hiding from her some truth about race that Nikki, loyal to her name, stands by with a rather appealing critical knowingness. Nikki won’t assimilate; Brenda accepts it as her rightful destiny.
While this narrative thread would make a smart, perceptive indie film, I Think I Love My Wife reneges on its promise and harnesses its story to the sexual possibility Nikki dangles in front of Richard with every move. She needs him to recommend her for a hostessing job at a restaurant, and to help her break up with a homicidal boyfriend, but she also needs his attention and his desire as evidence of her own power and agency. He resists the urge to have sex with her, but his longing for the unfettered, youthful possibility she represents in his life is nearly as distracting.
Brenda suspects something’s wrong and accuses Richard of infidelities he hasn’t, technically, committed. But when he comes home late, his clothes awry, and his excuses lame, she speaks to him like a child and he shrivels under her disapproval. Brenda isn’t his wife, she’s his mother, a withholding nag who reminds him of his domestic duties without giving him the sex he thinks is his married due. She emasculates him, while Nikki pumps him up to feel virile and heroic.
Richard joins Nikki in an unexpected, disastrous (and narratively unnecessary) trip to DC to cut her ties with her ex, which gets Richard beat senseless and nearly causes him to lose his job when their return flight is delayed and he misses a meeting. Brenda is apoplectic, so his marriage, too, nearly ends. This push to the brink snaps Richard out of his infatuated fantasy. He stops taking Nikki’s calls and hurries back into the family fold in a montage of scenes shot like Kodak moments ,with his wife and his children and Santa and the Easter Bunny and various other moms and dads (all white) singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” in nursery school classrooms while sitting in circles on the floor. Although the film wants to tell us that this is his proper milieu, you can’t help feeling Rock/Richard’s helpless acquiescence to this utter superficiality.
When Nikki reappears months later, suddenly professionalized and polished, sophisticated and mature, to visit Richard at his office wearing a lovely cream linen suit instead of a silken fire engine red cocktail dress, she’s found herself her own man. She’s decided that she isn’t getting any younger and should embrace the married-with-children destiny that descends on these characters with grim inevitability. Nikki doesn’t love the man she intends to marry; she just realizes that she’s 32, not 22, and that her sex appeal is already fading (another of the film’s more unbelievable assertions).
Nikki invites Richard to her place ostensibly for one last goodbye but actually to consummate their flirtation before they settle into their boring “normal” lives. After some barely convincing indecision, he slips off his wedding ring and follows her directions to her home. But even though Nikki’s tarted up in the lacy, barely-there underwear we know Richard loves, and even though she wears skyscraping catch me/fuck me heels that she hints she’ll keep on in bed, and even though Richard approaches his mission with appropriate zeal, when push comes to shove, he can’t follow through. Stripping off his tie, he catches himself in a mirror in Nikki’s bedroom and, in one of the film’s more odious substitutions, realizes that he’s a father, not an adulterer, and stops himself from going through with the act that will, according to the film’s logic, threaten everything. While Nikki languishes nearly naked on her bed, calling out to Richard not to go, he literally runs home to his wife. They resolve years of marital discord in a matter of moments with wailing musical accompaniment and theatrical lip-syncing to lyrics meant, I presume, to underline and satirize the high drama of the moment. Richard and Brenda promise to be close to each other, to have sex with each other, and to live together happily every after.
So, of course, Richard loves his wife. But what a sad state of affairs when marriage is painted as an obligation for men and women, when men are infantilized by their wives, when women are represented as mothers or whores, when African Americans are secluded in white enclaves and call it success, when people compromise vitality for deadening conformity, when being like everyone else, regardless of your race and your gender, is more important than your own aspirations. Can’t a pretty smart comedian make a movie that commits to a social critique instead of pretending nothing’s wrong with this picture? Can’t Rock imagine instead how to buck a system that whitewashes difference and squanders our talents, our desire, and our knowledge of how corrupt it is to want what the (white) Jones’s have?
Perplexed,
The Feminist Spectator
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Women Playwrights Foiled Again, Still . . . What About "The Scene"?
There’s been a great deal of internet chat lately on the American Society for Theatre Research listserve, ASTR-L, about a brief piece called “Women’s Voices Missing from the Theatre: Does Anyone Care?” published online by the Women’s Media Center (see www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020707.html). Writer Melissa Silverstein, reporting for the Center, suggests that because so many famous women actors are appearing on Broadway right now, and because some of the top grossing musicals tell women’s stories (she lists The Color Purple, Grey Gardens, and Wicked), “you might think women in theatre are doing great these days.” But she goes on to note that appearances to the contrary, women are “struggling for parity with their male colleagues.” Despite the fact that women comprise over half of the Broadway theatre-going audience, plays by women are frequently ignored by producers, and women playwrights continue to toil in the largely invisible world of workshop productions, waiting to be noticed and taken seriously.
Silverstein refers to a landmark report sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts in January 2002, co-written by Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett. Jonas has long been a staff associate for NYSCA (although she’s currently on leave), and Bennett was, until recently, the Associate Artistic Director of the Women’s Project and Productions, whose artistic director was still, then, founder Julia Miles. (The report can be accessed at http://www.womenarts.org/advocacy/WomenCountNYSCAReport.htm; it’s housed here with the Fund for Women Artists, an important advocacy group for women in theatre and other arts.) Sadly, little seems to have changed in the five years since that important study was distributed and discussed. Plays by women are still considered risky propositions for the most heavily capitalized Broadway productions, and regional theatres too often follow suit, playing the money card when they opt out of plays by women. There remain relatively few Pulitzer Prize winners in Drama who are women: Marsha Norma, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks pretty much round out the contemporary ranks.
What we can do about this sad and very static state of affairs? How can we prevent the next generation of arts writers from being required to make the same observations about the disempowerment of women playwrights as their predecessors? Silverstein’s comments really only echo those made by critics and scholars for the last at least 30 years. Why is there no movement toward equity in Broadway theatre?
The evidence seems to point to economics. Silverstein says that “In interviews with artistic directors for the NYSCA report, Susan Jonas noted that a common theme was, ‘Plays by women have limited interest and we’ll lose money on them.’” But this is the same lame excuse producers have offered for years. Many straight plays fail to recover their investments on Broadway; producing any homegrown American play (rather than a pre-approved British transfer) is, however shamefully, an economic gamble for the committed capitalists running theatres in Times Square. But that doesn’t explain why so many more plays by American men are given the chance to fail on Broadway.
Silverstein mentions that the new Theresa Rebeck play, The Scene, seems poised for a Broadway transfer, although her play Bad Dates was mentioned for the same move several years ago and never made it. Unfortunately, The Scene is a complicated example for this conversation, because although the play might have received some (though not universally) good reviews, its representations of women are so appallingly limited, I think it’d be a very good thing if fewer instead of more people saw the play. But before I discuss The Scene, which is currently playing at Second Stage on 43rd St., it’s worth pointing out that another Second Stage-produced straight play, The Little Dog Laughed, by Douglas Carter Beane, easily moved from 43rd Street to the Cort Theatre on Broadway after Ben Brantley gave it a glowing review in the Times.
Having seen both productions, I honestly can’t see why Rebeck’s play shouldn’t transfer, since it’s cut from the same cynical, ironic, sadly hopeless perspective on human endeavor as Beane’s. In Little Dog Laughed, the four characters—two closeted gay men, one young artsy woman, and one older, conniving and striving woman—have at each other while trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood stardom. One of the men (played by Neal Huff) is a closeted famous actor. When he engages the services of a rent-boy (Johnny Galecki) for an evening, the two improbably find themselves drawn to each other and begin a relationship that threatens the male star’s public stature.
Their assignations and glimmering hopes for a relationship are micro-managed by the star’s slimy, powerful agent (played by the indomitable Julie White) who, although she’s supposed to be a lesbian herself, becomes the mouthpiece for virulent homophobia that courses barely disguised under the play’s paper-thin surface. She can’t condone their relationship, because the star’s reputation would falter and the gravy train he provides for her would end. So she engineers a plan that puts the rent-boy on the road—with millions of dollars in his pocket—toward a new life, just to get him out of the picture, and arranges for the star to conveniently marry and raise a child with the rent-boy’s old girlfriend (a thankless role played by Zoe Lister-Jones).
When I saw the play at Second Stage last year, I was appalled by how callously these proceedings transpired, all marked by the supposedly witty, empty banter that contemporary comic playwrights seem to think human conversation sounds like. The men can barely string together sentences; they’re represented as handsome naifs with a powerful physical attraction but not enough balls to follow their desire to any sort of jeopardizing commitment. The rent-boy, because he’s less powerful and monied, is allowed more emotion than the star, who’s already soul-dead from his shallow image-making. That the rent-boy is happy to take the money and run, though, compromises any emotional potential he might have as a character, while his girlfriend and the star are happy to be hooked in a relationship with no substance but great public interest.
Pulling all these strings is the uber-agent, the rail-thin, ball-busting verbal gymnast who can crush an ego with an adjective and has no apparent life besides trying to ply her star’s trade. She has no emotion but irony and receives very little human contact in the course of the play (air kisses don’t count). For this role, Julie White got rave reviews.
I couldn’t figure out what people saw in Little Dog Laughed. Reading the promos, I anticipated a sharp critique of Hollywood hypocrisy, and a satiric inquiry into the costs of fame, all delivered with sparkling dialogue and witty repartee. No such luck. The talk is mean-spirited and superficial, the plot is driven only by fear of sexual exposure, without a thought for what might be lost in the process of hiding a person’s truth. Scott Ellis’s direction boasted a fair amount of man-on-man action, all tastefully cloaked in bed sheets and arranged so that body parts we discreetly hidden as their simulations played out. The men in the play are boorish bores; the women either cutthroat or common. But maybe that’s the point; nothing in this play challenges anyone’s conceptions of the world as it is and certainly not men and women as they are. The play’s queer politics are anathema, and its gender politics retrograde. Maybe that’s why it moved to Broadway.
Little Dog Laughed, perhaps thankfully, didn’t last that long at the Cort Theatre, and maybe that’s why Second Stage isn’t rushing to move The Scene, along with the added burden of its playwright’s gender. But The Scene has much in common with the earlier comedy. This, too, is a two man/two woman play; this one, too, is beautifully produced, with sets that fly in fully dressed or roll in from the wings decorated with the comfortable accoutrements of upper-middle class life. The Scene's production design is elegant and efficient; much money was no doubt spent to make the condo terrace and the two New York apartment settings in which the action unfolds. The actors are top-drawer, including Tony Shaloub (of the hit cable series Monk but also late of many very fine independent films like Big Night) as Charlie, the middle-aged fading television star (again); Christopher Evan Welch as his best friend, Lewis; Patricia Heaton (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame) as Charlie’s wife, Stella; and Anna Camp as Clea, the newly arrived from Ohio New Yorker who plays dumb but proves a wily adversary on these people’s common march toward their own blind ambitions.
Here again, despite its female origins, the gender politics are appalling. Clea first appears to be a quintessential bimbo, the cute young blond thing whom Charlie and especially Lewis ogle on the terrace outside their friend’s party. Charlie at first finds Clea’s Valley Girl inflections and her dim wit despicable, and mocks her rather cruelly. But when Lewis invites Clea to his apartment for a date, Clea’s interest in Charlie’s prior and potentially future fame seduces him into a full-blown, sexually charged affair, which they conduct literally under Stella’s nose. Of course, it helps that Stella supports Charlie by working a powerful media producer’s job while he’s unemployed. This gives him leave, in the second act, to justify his affair with Clea, when she finds them having sex in their apartment, complaining that Stella is just “too competent.” Throughout the play, Stella is accused of being a “frigid Nazi,” overly invested in keeping her desk at right angles and otherwise conducting her life reasonably. Her frigidity is underlined by her refusal to bend to Charlie’s physical administrations early in the play, and by the fact that her infertility requires her to adopt a baby from China. She epitomizes the castrating woman, long a staple of the white American male playwright’s canon. But is this all we can expect from a woman playwright?
Likewise, Clea is the stereotypical whore (without the heart of gold), a brainless, conniving trick of surfaces looking for a ride to power by lying on her back with her legs spread (a position she assumes, literally, countless times in this production, directed by Rebecca Taichman, who also directed lesbian performer Peggy Shaw’s Menopausal Gentleman). Clea dresses in pretentious, clinging black, has a tiny waist, bounteous blond locks, and not a shred of empathy for anyone she meets. That someone who at first appears as sane as Lewis would lust after her, and that someone who at first appears as sophisticated as Charlie would fall for her reveals the sick heart at the play’s center. Only Stella sees through Clea immediately, refusing to give her a job with her company and setting off the spiral of events that finally unravels her marriage, ends Charlie’s friendship with Lewis, and nails the coffin of Charlie’s career. But because the women view each other as mortal enemies, no sense of understanding is possible between them. In fact, Clea laughs with brutal delight when Stella walks in on her and Charlie having sex, a cruel, morally bereft moment that only underlines the lack of gendered kinship in this female-authored play.
Perhaps Rebeck means The Scene as a satire of corrupt Hollywood mores; she’s written plays on this topic several times, with a vengeance apparently derived from her own years as a television writer (for NYPD Blue, among other shows). But either Taichman’s direction lost the parodic focus, or it wasn’t never there at all. The play ends where it began, with a light disquisition on the “surrealism” of the terrace setting and, by extension, the unreality of the much rearranged situation of relationships, privilege, and power in which the characters finally end. But as comic social commentary, The Scene lacks weight or substance and ends as a hateful, misogynist evening at a wealthy theatre that’s lavishing money and time on work whose existence begs its own question.
This is not the kind of work by women playwrights for which I want to advocate. But it’s the kind of work I’m afraid will transfer to Broadway, following on the heels of The Little Dog Laughed, its gay male-written counterpart. I’m as keen for comedy as the next spectator, but not for work whose cynicism provides pat answers for a social malaise it can’t even diagnose, let alone engage in any potentially productive way. If this is the material that’s going to “make it,” failure sounds like a more progressive option. In fact, maybe women’s absence from Broadway theatres isn’t such a bad thing after all, if the bulk of what’s offered there panders to some low common denominator of what white middle class straight men find fun, or how they like to imagine the moral bankruptcy of women and queer men. If that’s so, who needs it?
I loved a local, Austin production I saw of Rebeck’s play, Omnium Gatherum, and I’ve long followed her work, as she’s one of the few women, besides the late Wendy Wasserstein, writing what I more often find rather incisive comedy. The problem is not the "popular"; that is, I don't think Broadway as a venue is necessarily, always politically conservative. But although accusations of “selling out” seem retrograde and, in fact, much too simplistic and not very useful, I do wonder that her increasing success is leading Rebeck to narrow, instead of expand, her portrayals of women.
Just as a footnote, here are some women playwrights whose work I admire that I’d much rather see on Broadway, or even given a sumptuous production of the sort that The Scene received here: Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Dael Orlandersmith, Irene Fornes, Alice Tuan, Naomi Iizuka, Diana Son, Lisa Loomer, Paula Vogel, Lisa D’Amour, and Heather McDonald, among more whom I’ll name, and hopefully write about, in the future.
The Feminist Spectator
Silverstein refers to a landmark report sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts in January 2002, co-written by Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett. Jonas has long been a staff associate for NYSCA (although she’s currently on leave), and Bennett was, until recently, the Associate Artistic Director of the Women’s Project and Productions, whose artistic director was still, then, founder Julia Miles. (The report can be accessed at http://www.womenarts.org/advocacy/WomenCountNYSCAReport.htm; it’s housed here with the Fund for Women Artists, an important advocacy group for women in theatre and other arts.) Sadly, little seems to have changed in the five years since that important study was distributed and discussed. Plays by women are still considered risky propositions for the most heavily capitalized Broadway productions, and regional theatres too often follow suit, playing the money card when they opt out of plays by women. There remain relatively few Pulitzer Prize winners in Drama who are women: Marsha Norma, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks pretty much round out the contemporary ranks.
What we can do about this sad and very static state of affairs? How can we prevent the next generation of arts writers from being required to make the same observations about the disempowerment of women playwrights as their predecessors? Silverstein’s comments really only echo those made by critics and scholars for the last at least 30 years. Why is there no movement toward equity in Broadway theatre?
The evidence seems to point to economics. Silverstein says that “In interviews with artistic directors for the NYSCA report, Susan Jonas noted that a common theme was, ‘Plays by women have limited interest and we’ll lose money on them.’” But this is the same lame excuse producers have offered for years. Many straight plays fail to recover their investments on Broadway; producing any homegrown American play (rather than a pre-approved British transfer) is, however shamefully, an economic gamble for the committed capitalists running theatres in Times Square. But that doesn’t explain why so many more plays by American men are given the chance to fail on Broadway.
Silverstein mentions that the new Theresa Rebeck play, The Scene, seems poised for a Broadway transfer, although her play Bad Dates was mentioned for the same move several years ago and never made it. Unfortunately, The Scene is a complicated example for this conversation, because although the play might have received some (though not universally) good reviews, its representations of women are so appallingly limited, I think it’d be a very good thing if fewer instead of more people saw the play. But before I discuss The Scene, which is currently playing at Second Stage on 43rd St., it’s worth pointing out that another Second Stage-produced straight play, The Little Dog Laughed, by Douglas Carter Beane, easily moved from 43rd Street to the Cort Theatre on Broadway after Ben Brantley gave it a glowing review in the Times.
Having seen both productions, I honestly can’t see why Rebeck’s play shouldn’t transfer, since it’s cut from the same cynical, ironic, sadly hopeless perspective on human endeavor as Beane’s. In Little Dog Laughed, the four characters—two closeted gay men, one young artsy woman, and one older, conniving and striving woman—have at each other while trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood stardom. One of the men (played by Neal Huff) is a closeted famous actor. When he engages the services of a rent-boy (Johnny Galecki) for an evening, the two improbably find themselves drawn to each other and begin a relationship that threatens the male star’s public stature.
Their assignations and glimmering hopes for a relationship are micro-managed by the star’s slimy, powerful agent (played by the indomitable Julie White) who, although she’s supposed to be a lesbian herself, becomes the mouthpiece for virulent homophobia that courses barely disguised under the play’s paper-thin surface. She can’t condone their relationship, because the star’s reputation would falter and the gravy train he provides for her would end. So she engineers a plan that puts the rent-boy on the road—with millions of dollars in his pocket—toward a new life, just to get him out of the picture, and arranges for the star to conveniently marry and raise a child with the rent-boy’s old girlfriend (a thankless role played by Zoe Lister-Jones).
When I saw the play at Second Stage last year, I was appalled by how callously these proceedings transpired, all marked by the supposedly witty, empty banter that contemporary comic playwrights seem to think human conversation sounds like. The men can barely string together sentences; they’re represented as handsome naifs with a powerful physical attraction but not enough balls to follow their desire to any sort of jeopardizing commitment. The rent-boy, because he’s less powerful and monied, is allowed more emotion than the star, who’s already soul-dead from his shallow image-making. That the rent-boy is happy to take the money and run, though, compromises any emotional potential he might have as a character, while his girlfriend and the star are happy to be hooked in a relationship with no substance but great public interest.
Pulling all these strings is the uber-agent, the rail-thin, ball-busting verbal gymnast who can crush an ego with an adjective and has no apparent life besides trying to ply her star’s trade. She has no emotion but irony and receives very little human contact in the course of the play (air kisses don’t count). For this role, Julie White got rave reviews.
I couldn’t figure out what people saw in Little Dog Laughed. Reading the promos, I anticipated a sharp critique of Hollywood hypocrisy, and a satiric inquiry into the costs of fame, all delivered with sparkling dialogue and witty repartee. No such luck. The talk is mean-spirited and superficial, the plot is driven only by fear of sexual exposure, without a thought for what might be lost in the process of hiding a person’s truth. Scott Ellis’s direction boasted a fair amount of man-on-man action, all tastefully cloaked in bed sheets and arranged so that body parts we discreetly hidden as their simulations played out. The men in the play are boorish bores; the women either cutthroat or common. But maybe that’s the point; nothing in this play challenges anyone’s conceptions of the world as it is and certainly not men and women as they are. The play’s queer politics are anathema, and its gender politics retrograde. Maybe that’s why it moved to Broadway.
Little Dog Laughed, perhaps thankfully, didn’t last that long at the Cort Theatre, and maybe that’s why Second Stage isn’t rushing to move The Scene, along with the added burden of its playwright’s gender. But The Scene has much in common with the earlier comedy. This, too, is a two man/two woman play; this one, too, is beautifully produced, with sets that fly in fully dressed or roll in from the wings decorated with the comfortable accoutrements of upper-middle class life. The Scene's production design is elegant and efficient; much money was no doubt spent to make the condo terrace and the two New York apartment settings in which the action unfolds. The actors are top-drawer, including Tony Shaloub (of the hit cable series Monk but also late of many very fine independent films like Big Night) as Charlie, the middle-aged fading television star (again); Christopher Evan Welch as his best friend, Lewis; Patricia Heaton (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame) as Charlie’s wife, Stella; and Anna Camp as Clea, the newly arrived from Ohio New Yorker who plays dumb but proves a wily adversary on these people’s common march toward their own blind ambitions.
Here again, despite its female origins, the gender politics are appalling. Clea first appears to be a quintessential bimbo, the cute young blond thing whom Charlie and especially Lewis ogle on the terrace outside their friend’s party. Charlie at first finds Clea’s Valley Girl inflections and her dim wit despicable, and mocks her rather cruelly. But when Lewis invites Clea to his apartment for a date, Clea’s interest in Charlie’s prior and potentially future fame seduces him into a full-blown, sexually charged affair, which they conduct literally under Stella’s nose. Of course, it helps that Stella supports Charlie by working a powerful media producer’s job while he’s unemployed. This gives him leave, in the second act, to justify his affair with Clea, when she finds them having sex in their apartment, complaining that Stella is just “too competent.” Throughout the play, Stella is accused of being a “frigid Nazi,” overly invested in keeping her desk at right angles and otherwise conducting her life reasonably. Her frigidity is underlined by her refusal to bend to Charlie’s physical administrations early in the play, and by the fact that her infertility requires her to adopt a baby from China. She epitomizes the castrating woman, long a staple of the white American male playwright’s canon. But is this all we can expect from a woman playwright?
Likewise, Clea is the stereotypical whore (without the heart of gold), a brainless, conniving trick of surfaces looking for a ride to power by lying on her back with her legs spread (a position she assumes, literally, countless times in this production, directed by Rebecca Taichman, who also directed lesbian performer Peggy Shaw’s Menopausal Gentleman). Clea dresses in pretentious, clinging black, has a tiny waist, bounteous blond locks, and not a shred of empathy for anyone she meets. That someone who at first appears as sane as Lewis would lust after her, and that someone who at first appears as sophisticated as Charlie would fall for her reveals the sick heart at the play’s center. Only Stella sees through Clea immediately, refusing to give her a job with her company and setting off the spiral of events that finally unravels her marriage, ends Charlie’s friendship with Lewis, and nails the coffin of Charlie’s career. But because the women view each other as mortal enemies, no sense of understanding is possible between them. In fact, Clea laughs with brutal delight when Stella walks in on her and Charlie having sex, a cruel, morally bereft moment that only underlines the lack of gendered kinship in this female-authored play.
Perhaps Rebeck means The Scene as a satire of corrupt Hollywood mores; she’s written plays on this topic several times, with a vengeance apparently derived from her own years as a television writer (for NYPD Blue, among other shows). But either Taichman’s direction lost the parodic focus, or it wasn’t never there at all. The play ends where it began, with a light disquisition on the “surrealism” of the terrace setting and, by extension, the unreality of the much rearranged situation of relationships, privilege, and power in which the characters finally end. But as comic social commentary, The Scene lacks weight or substance and ends as a hateful, misogynist evening at a wealthy theatre that’s lavishing money and time on work whose existence begs its own question.
This is not the kind of work by women playwrights for which I want to advocate. But it’s the kind of work I’m afraid will transfer to Broadway, following on the heels of The Little Dog Laughed, its gay male-written counterpart. I’m as keen for comedy as the next spectator, but not for work whose cynicism provides pat answers for a social malaise it can’t even diagnose, let alone engage in any potentially productive way. If this is the material that’s going to “make it,” failure sounds like a more progressive option. In fact, maybe women’s absence from Broadway theatres isn’t such a bad thing after all, if the bulk of what’s offered there panders to some low common denominator of what white middle class straight men find fun, or how they like to imagine the moral bankruptcy of women and queer men. If that’s so, who needs it?
I loved a local, Austin production I saw of Rebeck’s play, Omnium Gatherum, and I’ve long followed her work, as she’s one of the few women, besides the late Wendy Wasserstein, writing what I more often find rather incisive comedy. The problem is not the "popular"; that is, I don't think Broadway as a venue is necessarily, always politically conservative. But although accusations of “selling out” seem retrograde and, in fact, much too simplistic and not very useful, I do wonder that her increasing success is leading Rebeck to narrow, instead of expand, her portrayals of women.
Just as a footnote, here are some women playwrights whose work I admire that I’d much rather see on Broadway, or even given a sumptuous production of the sort that The Scene received here: Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Dael Orlandersmith, Irene Fornes, Alice Tuan, Naomi Iizuka, Diana Son, Lisa Loomer, Paula Vogel, Lisa D’Amour, and Heather McDonald, among more whom I’ll name, and hopefully write about, in the future.
The Feminist Spectator
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)