The Seagull and The Toxic Avenger

The Seagull

Hearing about—and scanning Ben Brantley’s review about—the wonders of the imported British production of The Seagull, I expected a transformative theatre experience. Imagine, then, my disappointment in a production (which I saw Saturday, 10/11/08) I found alternating between listlessness and hyperactivity, ringing dissonant tones without a clear sense of comment or critique.

The new translation by Christopher Hampton transports the play into some sort of Anglo netherworld. It also retains all the references to Russian culture, which seems jarring, considering the accents and the high British attitude of the staging. Although the variety of dialects and tones correlate slightly to the class status of each character, over the course of the long evening, the speech dulls out into a mish-mash within and between characters, making them strangely indistinguishable in their inarticulate misery and longing. Peter Sarsgaard, as Trigorin, loses his way through his accent rather quickly, but then, his vague portrayal of the supposedly great man blurs the edges of everything about the character.

Playing against such a non-entity, Kristin Scott Thomas as Arkadina appears manic and mannered, without the subtleties of depth or nuance that might layer her portrayal of the always already performative role. Her performance sounds shrill and desperate, not a bad choice for the character, but out of sync with the rest of the cast, whose performances ranged from the corpse-like pose of Sarsgaard to the dark, self-immolating, melodrama of the skeletal, hollowed-out Konstantin as played by Mackenzie Crook.

None of these actors sustain the appeal necessary to carry an audience through a long, static evening. With its atmosphere of decay and despair, the cold barrenness of the old country manor house is clear in the stark lighting and the set’s peeling paint, with the walls’ disrepaired framing, and rattling windows battered by the wind and storms that continue through the second act. Metaphorizing the torments of the characters’ souls, the production’s design had more to say about its intent than the actors.

Hints of an answer to the perennial question, “Why this play now?” (posed continually by my former colleague, the famed theatre historian Oscar Brockett) are provided mostly by the supporting cast, especially Christopher Patrick Nolan as Yakov. His bitterness at his station reads clearly as he sweats under the weight of luggage hauled back and forth, in and out of the manor house, at the whim of his capricious employer. His rolled eyes, his suffering posture, his eavesdropping on the ethically impure dalliances that his superiors carry on, all offer a glimmer of the class critique it seems director Ian Rickson wants to launch. Given the events of the day, The Seagull could be a sharp analysis of the excesses of emotion and expenditure that vex the upper class, and the ways in which fortunes are fickle and fleeting. But only intermittently does a strong point of view sharpen what’s otherwise a pedestrian production.

Perhaps the new American actors confused the issues for the celebrated British cast. Sarsgaard’s film-style technique fails to galvanize live on stage, but Zoe Kazan (late of the terrific Broadway production of Come Back, Little Sheba, in which she played the family’s seductive boarder) offers a focused performance of Masha, enacting her trajectory from hope to angry resignation with nuance and a nicely contradictory verve. Carey Mulligan, who’s transported from the UK original as Nina, does a good job with the deluded actress and her seesawing affections for Konstantin and Trigorin. Her Nina’s realization that she’s been used up and cast aside by the play’s end is one of the only sincere moments in a production that’s not carefully plotted enough by its director or its actors to move the audience from one point to the next in its emotional drawing.

The Toxic Avenger Musical: New Jersey’s First Superhero

Shifting tone abruptly, I saw this latest musicalization of the 1985 cult film at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, Sunday night (10/12/08). This is apparently the third musical version of the film, which garnered its fame as a late-night event at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Avenger). Wikipedia calls the George Street’s the “definitive” stage version of the film; director John Rando (Urinetown) provides the high energy, high camp, highly imaginative staging that keeps the 90-minute romp fun, if slight.

The genre-mixing stew of The Toxic Avenger proceeds in the parodic vein of Urinetown and Little Shop of Horrors, cut with the pathos of being green from Wicked and the blood-thirsty, blood-spurting horror gore of Sweeney Todd (as my musicals-expert companion, Stacy Wolf, pointed out), flavored with the blind-beauty and the beast romance of the film Mask, spiced with the resurrectionist narrative of Rent (or La Boheme), and iced with the one-actor-playing-two-characters-sharing-a-scene conceit of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. The show purées its references to take aim at environmental pollution and government corruption, mapping the most politically incorrect routes possible to hit its targets and to make its points. Rando and book writer Joe DiPietro collaborate on fun but forgettable songs with piquant titles like “Who Will Save New Jersey?” “Thank God She’s Blind,” “Choose Me, Oprah,” “Evil is Hot,” and “Hot Toxic Love.”

The cartoon-ish story finds our hero, the nerdy, unrequited-in-love teenager Melvin Ferd the Third (Nick Cordero) beleaguered and bullied by two high school toughs, who pound on him routinely whenever they cross his path. Melvin loves Sarah (Audra Blaser), the blind blonde who cheerfully resists the same two bullies’ attempted rapes and anti-blind people cat-calls, while (badly) shelving books in her library job. (The irony of her position is intentional to the plot—she’s been planted there by the villain, who wants to make sure the evidence of the scoundrel’s malfeasance isn’t, literally, seen.) Through a cruel twist of fate, the bullies dump Melvin into one of the many vats of toxic waste that pollute the landscape of “Tromaville,” their humble city, and he mutates into a muscled, if desiccated, superhero. Thanks to Cordero’s adept physical transformation, when Melvin emerges from the muck, it almost seems like he’s played by a different actor.

With one eyeball hanging out of its socket, “flesh” hanging from his arms, and his head and torso covered with green slime, Melvin becomes “Toxie,” who goes on a one-monster crusade to avenge his mutation and the town’s environmental degradation. The dumping is linked to the “Evil is Hot” Mayor Babs Belgoody, who’s importing the waste from Manhattan to make a quick buck. Needless to say, by the end, Toxie wins both the environmental battle and the girl, and the bullies are neutralized forever.

Rando’s fast and furious blocking makes great use of a set centered on piles of rusted metal drums, which occasionally steam and smoke with fumes that practically smell as nasty as they look. The performers climb about on this pile, performing on its top, on its sides, or just in front of the mountain of waste containers. The center of the mound peels open to reveal additional settings: Melvin/Toxie’s home, where his dithering mother, Ma Ferd, worries that he won’t meet the right girl; the Mayor’s office, where pictures of other nefarious officials (G.W. Bush included) hang from the tilted walls; a beauty salon, which becomes the setting for actor Nancy Opel’s virtuoso simultaneous performance as Ma Ferd and Mayor Babs, with a little help from the rest of the cast, Ludlam-style; a scientist’s study; and the library, where Sarah drops more books than she realizes as she feels about for where to place them. The scenes move fluidly, and the production design keeps the sets campy, the costumes vampy, and the lighting as fast and bright as the music.

The four-man band plays from a visible, elevated scaffolding stage right, obviously enjoying themselves and the show. David Bryan’s music is mostly just loud; a few of Sarah’s songs are fun, punny ballads, but the rest of the music is crude rock-pop with amusing lyrics, pumped up with energetic movement and delivery. That The Toxic Avenger is a musical just seems an excuse to highlight its campy predilections, rather than to have it taken seriously in the tradition of, oh, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Schwartz, Sondheim (god forbid), or even Adam Guettel. The music lets the show move as fast as possible; ninety minutes fly by in good-spirited, messy fun.

The two men—“White Dude” (David Josefsberg) and “Black Dude” (Demond Green)—who play multiple roles as the supporting cast do a wonderful job as a vaudevillian pair who rotate through their characters. Aside from the dumb bullies, they perform as gay hairdressers fussing alternately with the Mayor and Ma Ferd; as Sarah’s back-up singers, in tight, sequined dresses with Supremes-style attitude; as two women of the street, in even higher heels and even more attitude; and as regular “Joes,” one a policeman and the other a sports fan. All their characters come out in quick succession for the curtain call, more evidence that backstage, someone has been working wonders with quick costume changes throughout the show.

Demond Green looks like Tracy Morgan, and performs with the same expressive, not-as-dumb-as-you-think-but-almost deadpan that makes Morgan amusing to watch. Green and Josefsberg fill the holes in the plot and the show with lots of funny business; just watching them appear as still more new characters keeps things looking fresh while the show tries to figure out what it wants to be.

The home team New Jersey audience greeted the references to their state with glee and applause, embracing Toxic’s lampooning of its reputation as a chemical dumping ground of sulphurous fog and chemical muck. That the show ends with a paean to the cleaner, more liberal meaning of “green” and a rock ‘n’ roll exhortation to stop global warning seems a bit too heavy handed, especially sung loud and proud by its toxically mint-tinted, leprous-like leading man. Facile delivery aside, ending with a progressive bumper sticker-style message fits the hit and run approach of the entire production.

The Toxic Avenger is itself a mucky caper, with everything and nothing to say about crooked politics and devastated environments. That said, I was smiling, if not outright laughing, throughout, even when the jokes were predictable and obvious and good-naturedly offensive (blind jokes, girl jokes, and queer jokes included). Watching a talented cast inspired by a talented director made up for the weaknesses of the script and the music. And hearing the audience enjoy itself didn’t hurt either.

The Feminist Spectator

9 to 5: The Musical

9 to 5 is a silly, campy musical adaptation of the 1980 movie that starred Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda, but judging by the hilarity of the audience’s response, I wasn’t the only one in LA’s Ahmanson Theatre last Friday night who thought it was a whole lot of fun. With Allison Janney as the main draw in the wry, overworked, underpaid, professionally overlooked Tomlin role, along with Stephanie J. Block recreating an uptight, eager to be empowered Fonda and Megan Hilty giving her own physical and vocal impression of Parton, the faithful musical translation moves through the farcical story with crisp if unimaginative style under Joe Mantello’s direction.

To see three women as the leads in a Broadway musical, even in late 2008, is still great fun, as well as politically satisfying. The plot’s premise, set squarely in a historical moment of virulent materialism and overt misogyny, is that the sexist boss, Mr. Franklin Hart (Marc Kudisch, playing Dabney Coleman’s role), runs his corporate department with capricious control and focuses more on seducing his female employees than on the company’s bottom line. Violet Newstead (Janney), the steadfast office manager, trains one young man after another, only to see them achieve the promotions she deserves while she’s pushed squarely against an impenetrable glass ceiling. When another chance to move up the corporate ladder fails, a series of contrivances allows Violet to conspire with her co-workers Doralee (Hilty) and Judy (Block) to bring Hart down.

Judy is the prim, proper, newly divorced “newbie” who requires training in the quirks of office culture and Hart’s sexual and corporate malfeasance. Played by Block at first as a shivering mass of ineptitude and good will, she soon develops into a smart, dogged co-conspirator. Hart’s secretary, the buxom blonde Doralee, suffers the ostracism of her office-mates, because Hart has spread false rumors that the earnest Dolly Parton-look-alike is his mistress. Hilty (in costume) looks quite a lot like Parton, and conveys the same sense of sunny, torch-and-twang gusto.

The three women bond after a particularly bad day at work, when they retreat to Violet’s to smoke a joint provided by her teenage son (this is how we know it’s set in 1980). The women rock with contagious laughter, and spin pot-induced fantasies in which Hart gets his comeuppance. Back at work the next day, Violet thinks that she’s accidentally lived out her daydream by shaking rat poison into Hart’s coffee instead of sugar. Her hysteria prompts a series of madcap misunderstandings that lead the women to kidnap Hart, imprisoning him in his own home while they try to prove that he’s cooked the corporation’s books.

Hart spends much of the second act trussed up like a chicken in his bedroom. His hands and ankles are manacled, and when he gets out of control, the women use Violet’s garage door opener, attached to a harness, to raise him high into the air, where he kicks and screams like an out of control child. The women’s ingenuity and courage—as well as their humanity in dealing with their captive, unlike, say, the vicious woman in William Mastrosimone’s Extremities who mimics male violence—lets 9 to 5’s women get away with attempted murder.

Janney plays Tomlin’s role with equally wry aplomb. Her height alone makes her a commanding stage presence; she towers over the other two women and many of the men. But although her vocals reminded me of Rex Harrison’s, speak-singing his way through the melodies in My Fair Lady, Janney pulls off some respectable harmonies as the show progresses, holding her own through anthems and torch songs alike. She dances a fantasy number in a white silk suit ripped from the last scene of A Chorus Line, surrounded by male dancers whose moves camouflage her relative lack of skill. Janney carries off the part with the sheer force of her stage personality and her intelligent good humor.

Everyone involved in 9 to 5 throws themselves into the silliness with high spirits. Block and Hilty acquit themselves accordingly as Judy and Doralee, bringing them the sweetness and innocence that makes it easy to stomach the characters’ evolution into feminist professional determination. Kudisch plays Hart as a Dudley Doolittle type, but his over-the-top performance underlines that although the stereotype of the sexist male boss might be dated, it remains familiar and resonant.

Hart’s central henchman, Roz (Kathy Fitzgerald), plays Athena to his Zeus. Roz comes full of old pre-feminist female stereotypes: the heavy-set, overly capable woman, secretly in love with the boss, is so determined to curry his favor that she betrays her office mates, becoming a despised collaborator by enforcing Hart’s regressive policies. Mantello’s blocking makes sure we mock Roz’s crush on Hart; when she runs into his office, her large breasts jiggle in imitation of the much more seemly erotics of younger, prettier Doralee. The cheap laugh she wins makes the character and the actor seem pathetic, and the audience’s knee-jerk mirth makes us complicit in her degradation.

Sophomoric humor like this—tits and ass jokes, along with their male equivalents—knits together 9 to 5: The Musical, but its incipient feminism goes a way toward counterbalancing its offensiveness. Parton, who wrote the music and lyrics, and book writer Patricia Resnick create a tapestry of new songs and situations to flesh out the film’s scenes, all of which accumulate to represent 1980’s style proto-women’s liberation. Doralee/Dolly sings that there’s more to her than her appearance; Violet fixes the garage door opener and provides a self-actualized (if professionally foiled) role-model for her son; and when Judy’s straying husband crawls back expecting her to accept him with open arms, she shoos him out of her life for good, perfectly happy to be independent and working.

These messages telegraph Feminism 101, but hearing them in a Broadway-bound production still does a certain kind of hopeful cultural work. Although the show is set in 1980, corporate greed resonates even more in today’s failing markets. And although everyone’s now heard of the “glass ceiling,” it persists. Women in 9 to 5’s audience the night I saw it reacted with audible sounds of sisterhood, practically hissing at Hart’s antics. The musical’s cartoonish conception makes it easy (and fun) to cheer the heroines and boo the villain.

Like Wicked—which provides an entertaining intertext here, given Block and Hilty’s prior performances as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively, in the Broadway replacement cast—9 to 5 offers women the strong leading roles and keeps the men insignificant. Even Hart spends most of the second act immobilized, grunting or swearing with frustration at his captivity. Violet’s would-be paramour, Joe, is sweet but barely registers, except in a couple of obligatory duets. He helps Violet build evidence against Hart, but the erstwhile couple’s only displayed affection is a chaste kiss and some surreptitious hand-holding when they exit their central scene. Violet’s son exists mostly to provide her with the marijuana that loosens the trio’s morals and helps suture the their bond. Doralee’s husband shares only one scene with her, strumming his guitar while he listens to her complain about her mean workmates.

The show instead gives us three women getting high together, scheming together, watching each other’s backs and, as Hart languishes out of the way, making progressive changes in their work environment (albeit in his name, since no one but them knows he’s out of commission). They establish job-sharing plans that let women with children make their own hours, and a substance-abuse treatment program that lets their alcoholic co-worker get sober. They let the staff personalize their desks, bringing plants, color, and light into their grim corporate cubbyholes. The workers’ happiness increases the department’s productivity, prompting a visit from the chair of the board, a promotion for Hart (to bring multinationalism to the wilds of Bolivia), and finally, the hand up the corporate ladder Violet deserves for herself.

The musical’s implication that women executives will do things differently might now be anachronistic. Plenty of women follow the well-worn paths of conventional corporate behavior, and plenty of new companies with progressive politics are established and run by men. But still, the ethos of 1980s liberal feminism infuses 9 to 5 with good fun and unthreatening, nostalgic politics.

As a production, the musical falls short of the glitz brought to screen-to-stage translations such as, for only one instance, Legally Blonde, which managed to spiff up its live version with colorful costumes and a fluid sense of place that made up for its compression into the indoor world of an ivy league college, corporate boardrooms, and courtrooms. 9 to 5’s office set poses a more difficult challenge for its design team; it’s tricky to dance around desks, office chairs, and trash cans. In fact, the whole set is rather cumbersome, as the scene shifts from Hart’s office, to the typing pool, to the cafeteria, to Hart’s bedroom, and back, in an array of locations that gave the movie welcomed air, but makes the stage version busy and distracting.

Andy Blankenbuehler choreographs the dances around the trap door in the Ahmanson’s stage, a gaping square hole that opens when one section of the set lowers below the stage to be replaced with another. I spent much of the production worried that someone would misstep or get their timing wrong and wind up plunging into the abyss. The trap’s mechanism folds the floor up slowly and methodically each time it closes over the hole, throwing off the production’s otherwise brisk pacing. The cast moves around what comes to feel like a sink-hole center stage. Maybe Broadway’s technology can avoid this scenic stumbling block.

When 9 to 5 arrives at New York’s Marriott Marquis Theatre at the end of March 2009 (see details at http://www.9to5themusical.com/), it should be ready for primetime. The songs Parton’s created make it more closely resemble a jukebox musical than a conventional musical comedy; in fact, she lifts Doralee’s “Backwoods Barbie” number directly from her eponymous 2008 CD. But her torchy country songs appeal here, if nothing else because they heighten the emotionalism around plot twists that need a good bump up to make them compelling.

Approaching this campy outing with nostalgia for the original film and a healthy dose of forgiveness from the outset allowed me to enjoy its feminist-lite politics. I gave in to the pleasure of watching three female leads belt and bond and overcome male oppression with the ingenuities of farce and the spunk of woman-power.

What a way to make a living.

The Feminist Spectator

Fela! and Wig Out!

Aside from the exclamation points that dot their titles and the not insignificant fact that their subjects and actors are primarily African or African American, these two productions have little in common. Fela! is the terrific musicalized bio piece about Nigerian Afrobeat founder Fela Kuti, conceived, directed, and choreographed by Bill T. Jones. Wig Out! is a play about drag houses in Harlem written by the young playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Tina Landau. Although Wig Out!’s script is peppered with musical phrases and references, and although it, like Fela!, directly addresses the theatre audience as the spectators for its performances, Fela! makes of an inspiring life story an exciting few hours at the theatre, while Wig Out!’s mélange of Brechtian commentary, lip-synced performance numbers, and melodramatic monologues about how its characters came to drag never manages to thrill.

37 Arts houses Fela!, which turns the venue into “The Shrine,” Fela Kuti’s Lagos nightclub to which he retreated for long late-night hours late to perform his revolutionary music for audiences captivated by his on-stage acts of both musical and political resistance. The “we” he creates from the stage encompasses his fellow Nigerians, who sometimes risked their lives to play in his band or enjoy his music from the audience, and also the audience of the present moment, a refreshingly diverse group of New York spectators—across race and ethnicity as well as generation—whom Sahr Ngaujah, in a tour de force performance as Fela, hails as the “us” of the moment. Within the performance’s first few moments, he congratulates us for making our way to this “dangerous neighborhood,” which prompts laughs from a few spectators who clearly think he means 37th St. between 9th and 10th in Manhattan. Quickly, we realize he means the Nigerian audience into which Fela would have looked as he performed, and the twittering laughter among spectators stops.

Yet not long after, Ngaujah as Fela and the remarkable dancers and musicians he commands with an orchestral flick of his wrist and his mic instruct us—the 37 Arts audience—in pelvic thrusts, bumps, and grinds. Ngaujah asks spectators to stand, so that he and the ensemble can show us how to move our hips as though they’re tracing the numbers on a clock face. Spectators rise gamely, and laugh with pleasure when they realize how difficult it is to isolate your pelvis with such precision. That brief moment of mostly failed participation helps us realize that dances that look fluid, graceful, and somehow easy require high levels of talent and virtuosity to bring off.

Likewise, in the second act, Ngaujah invites us to vocalize with him and the cast, teaching us a short musical choral phrase to punctuate his verses. He and the ensemble stop their singing to listen to ours for a moment before they resume their show. These moments of blurring the then-and-there and the here-and-now work profitably, not to encourage a simple identification among these two very different audiences but to underline that even in Nigeria, Fela’s concerts were pedagogical, as he taught people how to move to the newly created beat.

Afrobeat rhythms and melodies surround the audience throughout the performance, which plays like a cross between a concert, a musical, a dance performance, and a one-man show. A dance troupe, a vocal ensemble, and a large band filled with bass guitar, trumpets, saxophones, and various kinds of drums and percussion back the production, and Ngaujah’s electrifying presence pulls the production elements together. The cast is costumed in eclectic draperies of beads and shells, which decorate flounces and bras on the women, who wear leather leg braces created with ladder-like, colorful belts buckled from ankle to hip. The men wear, without shirts, pants and jackets that look a bit like Zoot suits. Fela’s costume is an aqua jump suit in the first act and a pink one in the second, both decorated with geometric and circular markings that appear somehow tribal as well as playful.

The production spectacularizes everything, while at the same time, it maintains respect for traditions and histories far removed. The theatre’s walls are decorated with drawings of political icons, heroes in the Nigerian and the African American struggle for civil rights, including Malcolm X and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo, martyred when she was thrown from a second-story window by government flunkies harassing and terrorizing Fela’s family. She was a powerful, proud social activist, the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car. Her picture on the theatre’s wall is dotted with tear drops (or rain drops) that fall around her image.

Funmilayo appears live in the production as a ghostly presence, singing beautifully from a scaffold above the stage, her face always in shadow, even though she’s costumed in a rich and shimmering white headdress and gown. When at the end Fela joins her, comforted by her memory and her performative presence, they seem to ascend to somewhere more heavenly, drawn up and together again by the music he created.

Fela! plays like a revue, moving between songs and banter with the audience, and sprinkled with performances-within-the-performance that create an image of the man and his life. Fela rehearses the genesis of his music, doing what he calls “BID”—breaking it down—to guide us through his past. He saw Frank Sinatra play in London; he learned jazz and blues and reggae; he developed a political analysis of the history of colonialism in Africa; and he returned to put it all together in the sounds and stylings of Afrobeat.

Fela!’s talented onstage band is comprised entirely of men, who present a range of races and ethnicities, from white to Asian to Asian American to African to African American and Latino. Ngaujah, as Fela, interacts with them like a bandleader, his actions authoritative, commanding, and insistent, while he also plays with them as a comrade, handed by his dancers first the sax, then the trumpet, then again the sax, to stand center stage and blow his horn like the Pied Piper he was for many of his people. Ngaujah also sings, and works the audience like a stand-up comedian emptying a free flowing vein of politically pointed one-liners and observations.

Often, song lyrics appear projected behind Ngaujah and the cast, typing themselves out over black-and-white video images of Nigeria in political upheaval. The lyrics are poetic evocations, describing quotidian details of daily life as well as the more violent interactions Fela and others suffered at the hands of the army, national corporations, and other anti-libertarian factions. When a thousand soldiers surround Fela’s house, beating and raping Fela’s followers then burning the place down, the moment is described quietly, with each ensemble member reporting one of the brutalizing experiences whose details are projected in poetry above the stage.

Jones’s direction and his choreography balances moments of enormous sound with moments of moving quiet, modulating the performance’s tone and intensity so that his audience can absorb the details of the lives and performances shared. The dancers are mesmerizing, whipped to heights of creative, physical expression by the band and Fela’s voice, so that in one number, they seem to be flying off the floor, every limb swinging in movements both angular and circular that propel them away from gravity.

The ensemble’s skill and Jones’s choreography lets them isolate body parts and move them against each other simultaneously, so that the dancers seem larger than life, so much more than the sum of their parts. As they dance in unison, they meld together and then apart, embodying the fractures of community in struggle and the frenetic yet focused energy of resistance. Across gender, their muscular bodies shine with the sweat of not just their effort, but their commitment to the moment and the message. Watching beads of water fly from their limbs felt like observing a ritual born of water, earth, flesh, and heart.

Ngaujah’s performance carries Fela! into the posterity of theatre as much as Fela Kuti’s music wrote him into the history of the world. Ngaujah mesmerizes as he cajoles us to grind our hips or chant Fela’s verses; he inspires the dancers and the band to ever greater physical and expressive heights; and he pulls us into the past and the present at once, to embody the spirit of a man who refused to be broken and refused to be silenced, whose music honors resistance through art as a vital political response.

Wig Out!, too, wants to address art and survival, and the necessity of turning lives into performances that create meaning where there might otherwise only be emptiness. Playwright McCraney borrows wholesale the outline of Jenny Livingston’s classic 1990 documentary about Harlem drag balls, Paris is Burning, by staging a competition between two different “houses,” or families of drag artists who identify as a unit.

(Interestingly, both Wig Out! and Fela! include glossaries in their programs, presuming audiences who need instruction to follow the subcultural language and organizations they depict. In Wig Out!’s case, however, the pedagogy condescends to both its audience and its subject, since the kinds of balls McCraney represents are no longer unfamiliar, thanks to Livingston’s film and Madonna’s pop culture appropriations. Fela!’s glossary more helpfully defines African terms and sayings peppered through the script, translating key allusions and phrases.)

Over the structure of the ball competition McCraney lays a creaky melodrama about three gay male couples at various stages of accepting not just their sexuality but their penchant for drag, represented here for some characters as beyond the pale of conventional gay life. That each of the characters is Latino or African American also weights how they commit to their sexuality. Lucian (Erik King), the Latino “father” of the House of Light in which the play’s various heroes affiliate, is hyper-masculine, calling out the “faggots” he orders around and emotionally controls.

Eric (Andre Holland), a closeted gay African American man whom the statuesque Ms. Nina (Clifton Oliver) seduces on a subway, takes home to bed, and later brings to the ball, gives the audience its point of entry into this subculture, since somehow, as a black gay man in New York, Eric has never heard about the balls in Harlem. The lame device makes Eric an unconvincing and disposable character; he serves only to hold the spectator’s place in the narrative.

The earnest play suffers from a muddled conception. It aspires at once to a wry Brechtian commentary on its action, provided by “The Fates 3”—Fay (Rebecca Naomi Jones), Fate (Angela Grovey), and Faith (McKenzie Frye)—who serve as the Greek chorus as well as the play’s back-up girl group. The women sometimes hit a campy chord, especially when peppering the proceedings with relevant and punchy phrases from musicals or rock bands. But their commentary comes and goes. Too often, they retreat into the background, and they never work as fully thought-through characters.

When The Fates 3 recede, the play’s melodrama bubbles up, tracking the couples through sexual and strangely asocial traumas. Although Ms. Nina and Eric meet on a train, and although Eric is loathe to appear gay (or to be seen with a trans person), the outside world rarely intrudes. McCraney draws the houses and their competitions as insular and self-referential, creating a suffocating atmosphere that makes the play and the production begin to feel too close, airless, and tunnel-visioned.

In fact, with the Vineyard Theatre rearranged so that a runway projects from the stage into the center of the house, and a good third of the audience arranged to watch from either side of the stage, spectators are made complicit, like it or not. We’re sometimes treated as participants at a ball, sometimes as players in the melodrama, sometimes as the thoughtful spectator Brecht wanted to critically engage theatrical action. But we swing among these options, finally unsure where we’re supposed to put ourselves or what we’re supposed to think or feel. Watching Wig Out! is like being invited to a party where everyone knows one another. You realize that you’re there only to watch them diss themselves (or “throw shade,” which the program's glossary defines for us).

Besides Ms. Nina and Eric, father Lucian and the House mother, Rey-Rey (Nathan Lee Graham), run through a tired rehearsal of the aging drag queen trauma. Rey-Rey, according to the play’s (and the balls’) value system, is too old to win competitions in the fashion category in which she used to excel, so Lucian won’t permit her to perform. When she insists on taking the stage, she falls and fails, “crossed out” (eliminated from competition) by the judges. She’s mortified enough that she attempts suicide.

That melodramatic moment, however, happens practically offstage, on an elevated platform where Rey-Rey’s dressing room perches over stage left. The other characters find and rescue her, and Rey-Rey lives, shaking off her self-destructive impulse with a glass of water. She returns, chastened but reconciled to her new role as “grand” mother of the house. Graham’s over-the-top performance lends the proceedings some welcomed camp, and he plays Rey-Rey’s tragedy with enough of his tongue in his cheek to wring some good fun out of the plot’s twist.

King, as Lucian, delivers a version of his Sergeant Doakes character on Showtime’s Dexter, but here, his woodenness deflates his threat. The script requires him to manipulate his “children” sexually and emotionally, but it’s hard to care because his hulking presence feels empty and ineffectual.

The third couple, Venus (Joshua Cruz, in a sweet, clear performance of a femme character of the same name taken straight from Paris is Burning) and Loki (Sean Patrick Doyle, playing a hip-hop gay boy striving for “realness”), flounder on the constraints of sexual practices, as the masculine Loki resists Venus’s desire not to be the only bottom in the relationship.

At the play’s end, when Lucian appoints Venus the new mother of the house, she’s crowned like Miss America, though her elevation has just about as much significance. Landau stages the scene with the pageant reference no doubt in mind, but again, the potential parody is covered by McCraney’s ambivalence about whether his play should be a comedy or tragedy.

McCraney is a frequent award-winner, author of The Brothers Size (which has been produced in New York, London, and Ireland), and other plays that have made the rounds of the regionals, all after graduating from high school in 1999, college in 2003, and the Yale School of Drama with an MFA in playwrighting in 2007. Landau’s direction goes a long way toward harnessing the excesses of his script. She keeps the actors moving, creates shifting tones that layer in more emotion than the dialogue offers, and conjures through the proximities of placement more nuanced relationships than the actors can muster through words alone. She can do little about the fact that no sexual energy courses between any of the couples.

But even the talented Landau can’t redeem a script that requires each of its characters to at some point take center stage to deliver A Chorus Line-style monologue that begins, “My grandmother wore a wig” as an explanation for how they came to be . . . I don’t know, drag queens? Gay men? Emotionally stunted? Wig Out! needs more shaping, honing, and cutting before McCraney finds the kernel of its story and takes the true temperature of its heart.

The question remains: Why make a play from territory Paris is Burning covered to such memorable, searing effect 20 years ago? As it stands, Wig Out! doesn’t provide an answer. With more rewrites and re-stagings, someday perhaps it will. Too bad the question has to even be asked. It’d be great to see a smart, insightful play about African American gay men Off Broadway that’s about something other than drag balls, too.

The Feminist Spectator

The Emmy Awards' New Low for Women (9/21/08, ABC)

It’s ironic that in a year when Tina Fey practically swept the awards for her work as a writer, actor, and producer on 30 Rock, the Emmy Awards shows’ writers can only come up with lame misogyny to bolster its desperate humor.

The ceremony was hosted by five reality tv malingerers—Ryan Seacrest, Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandell, whom I admit I’ve never watched; Jeff Probst, from Survivor, which I tuned in during its first few seasons; and Heidi Klum, whom I occasionally enjoy on Project Runway. As awards show hosts, the group collectively blew their appeal in their first bit. The show began by humiliating Klum, who looked lost and stayed silent through most of the hosts’ opening “nothing” routine, in which they proclaimed proudly to viewers that they hadn’t prepared a thing, supposedly just like good reality tv stars always do (or don’t).

The joke fell instantly flat, and its insults redoubled when Klum was mocked for trying to look like the guys, who were all, like Klum, dressed in black suits, white shirts, and skinny black ties, making one of their few honest points of the evening—they’re all interchangeable. With her blond locks tied back and looking years younger and less mature than her pre-scripted lines make her appear on Runway, Klum protested that she was just trying to fit in.

At that point, for unfathomable reasons (or perhaps inside-joke ones that I just didn’t get), William Shatner was summoned up from the audience, ostensibly to pull at a thread on Klum’s costume. But it turned out that the old coot had a more devious assignment; he and his host henchman proceeded to rip off Klum’s suit to reveal the black spangled mini-shorts and low cut sleeveless blouse that lurked beneath.

To worsen the insult, Klum happily loosened her hair from its bindings, shaking it down into the Prell shampoo-style rich and luxurious look we recognize on her more easily. The skit offered the worst possible stereotype of a woman who gives in to her “femininity” since she can’t compete with the boys.

In another moment between awards during the long evening, Klum and one of the male hosts demonstrated the difference between drama and comedy. They guy embraced the hapless Klum as she threw her hand across her forehead to define “drama,” then dropped her on the floor to demonstrate the joke’s punch line—the definition of comedy. Klum seemed good-natured (if lifeless and clueless) throughout these shenanigans, but watching her being abused for cheap laughs was painful.

After serving as the butt of these jokes, Klum was, thankfully, missing in action the rest of the night. She was out of her element off the Project Runway set, as were three of the other four hosts. Only Howie Mandell, a comic by training, had the necessary charisma to even come close to pulling off the rigors of hosting. The rest of these fools looked awkward and phony (and not at all funny) even reading off the prompter.

Luckily, since the show quickly began to veer off schedule and to threaten its promise to end on time, the hosts were rarely seen after the halfway mark, until the unfortunate skit in which the winner of their competition for “best reality tv host” (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) was announced. I hope “the Academy” doesn’t dream up such a dimwitted idea for managing the show again.

Five bad hosts weren’t the least of the evening’s problems. Some of the fake banter between awards was amusing, especially at the beginning of the show, when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler teamed up, for instance, to announce the first award. But the introductory bits quickly grew tiresome and most were eventually cut altogether. Left intact, for some inexplicable reason, was the exchange between Brooke Shields and a male actor whose name I didn’t catch, in which he confessed that from the time he was a small child, he always found her seductive, and always “respected” her. Then he proceeded to fondle her rear end. She quipped, “Is that your hand on my ass?” To which he responded, “Yes, it’s being respectful,” or some such inanity, to which Shields wasn’t even given a comeback.

These moments of gratuitous sexism seemed rude and ignorant, compared to Fey’s wit and grace and the implicit feminism of her acceptance speeches. She’s a consummate performer and writer; as Alec Baldwin said, introducing her, she’s the Elaine May of her generation. Fey and Poehler’s smart, insightful, sharp parody of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live last week was consummate proof not only of her skills of mimicry, but of her astute satirical eye and her incisive political observations. Her imitation of Palin wasn’t just physically uncanny; her ability to capture the woman’s vacuity, her pride in her own limitations, and her willingness to be a pawn for a party that doesn’t even respect her itself was all there in Fey’s vivid, cutting, hilarious rendering (clips from the sketch appear in multiple versions on YouTube). Compared to Fey, the scribes of the Emmy Awards are simply hacks.

In other, unscripted moments, women didn’t fare much better. Glenn Close tried to score one for the team when she accepted her award for Best Actress in a Drama series. She credited her stiff competition—which included Kyra Sedgwick, Holly Hunter, and Mariska Hagaritay—with being strong, mature women who can carry their own shows, and was eager to say more about female solidarity before the cue music cut her off. But on her way to the mic, Close brushed aside presenter America Ferrara as the young woman tried to hand Close her statuette, barking “Hold that for me” and swanning into the spotlight. It was unnerving to hear Ferrara gasp, “Oh, okay,” Ugly Betty-style as Close gushed at the audience.

To top off a rather squirm-inducing evening for women, Mary Tyler Moore appeared close to the end, trotting out Betty White to make a presentation with her. (I have to admit that by the third hour, I was multi-tasking, and probably got wrong some of the details I’m sharing now. Although as Dick Smothers noted earlier in the evening—accepting an Emmy that Steve Martin explained Smothers had recused himself from in 1968, when he was deemed too politically leftist to be worthy of it—the truth is only what you persuade other people it is.) While I’m a great fan of Moore’s work, I wasn’t taken with her outfit. The sleeveless black gown showed her skeletal arms, from which her skin now hangs in loose folds painfully evident when she gestured. This anorexic image of a senior female entertainment icon did nothing to help redress the evening’s many insults to women.

Maybe someday, Tina Fey will produce, write, and host the Emmy Awards ceremony (and maybe the Oscars and the Grammies and the Golden Globes, too). Until then, maybe she could just suggest that the writers behave themselves and stop polluting the airwaves with sophomoric stunts at women’s expense.

Irritated, to put it mildly,

The Feminist Spectator

Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students

I delivered this position paper/manifesto on a plenary panel at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Denver on August 1st. The session was called "The Elephant in the Room"; speakers were encouraged to discuss issues we feel the field ignores at its collective peril.

The other manifestos can be found at http://www.athe.org/conference/ (look under the 2008 conference, manifestos for the plenary session--eventually, an audio link will also be available). My presenting colleagues included Jorge Huerta (UC-San Diego), Mark Heckler (Valparaiso), Susanne Bourgoyne (Missouri), Sandra Shannon (Howard), and Doug Paterson (Nevada-Omaha). The session was chaired by ATHE president Steve Peters.

In his wonderful, uncharacteristically generous report on the Educational Theatre Association’s International Thespian Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska, in July, Charles Isherwood describes how 2,000 self-described “theatre geeks” eagerly rehearse and perform and gossip, preparing themselves not only for their roles in the festival, but for lives in the theatre. Isherwood notes the T-shirts for sale in the auditorium lobby “with the words ‘Theatre Geek’ emblazoned upon them above masks of tragedy and comedy; these young drama enthusiasts,” he says, “are clearly happy and proud to declare themselves thespians” (7/13/08, NYT, Arts and Leisure sec., 1).

While an article about such a festival could be snarky and sarcastic, Isherwood instead records how impressed he was by performances of classics and contemporary plays and musicals, at which he consistently found tears in his eyes, and chronicles the long-standing quality reputation of the festival’s productions. The students learn, but also teach one another, trying out songs from less acclaimed musicals and mounting interpretations of a fairly standard range of classic and contemporary plays. The general impression Isherwood imparts is of a group of students and teachers happy to be involved in the festival, doing high-standard work for appreciative audiences. His article concludes, “Theatre geeks rock!”

My concern—which I currently see as the proverbial “elephant in the room” for our field—rests on what happens to these happy thespians after they graduate, when they apply to our college and university theatre programs eager to continue the fun they experienced as theatre geeks in high school. How is it that our programs tend to dissipate all that commitment and energy and pride, instead of stoking it and refining it and channeling it into new and different ways of continuing a life as a theatre geek? Why is it that so many of our undergraduate majors become disillusioned so quickly, dropping our programs for communications degrees because they decide that media might offer them more lucre, even if it’s not as much fun? Why do we impede their fun in ways that makes changing their majors likely?

What kinds of pressure do we impose by assuming that we’re grooming them for acting careers in professional theatre, instead of encouraging them to refashion their theatre geek-dom into careers as dramaturgs, arts administrators, critics, grant administrators, philanthropists, or maybe most importantly, theatre aficionados who will attend performances regularly and support theatre financially? And most importantly, what structural, cultural, and ideological influences pressure our departments to create this situation?

I just finished a nine-year tenure in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest departments in the country. During my stint there, the undergraduate major was reduced from a high of around 450 students to approximately 300, by various assessments meant to admit a stronger, leaner class. I also saw the growth of the MFA program in acting. Moribund when I arrived, thanks to the leadership of nationally acclaimed actor Fran Dorn, the three-year program soon gained a competitive reputation.

But despite what might seem these successes, the students in our undergrad and graduate acting programs never seemed very happy. Many undergrads left, and many grad students complained about the narrowness of what they learned. The grad students suffered a schedule that prevented them from taking advantage of the department’s other curricula, including our flourishing graduate program in Performance as Public Practice, which aimed to expand applications for theatre and performance studies outside professional, mainstream theatre into community-based and socially active settings. With pre-professional programs intent on feeding the US regional theatres, if not Broadway, the majority of our students weren’t encouraged to imagine other ways of plying their trades, or of using their studies creatively and with more agency than mainstream theatre employment practices for actors often allow.

Most discouraging to me was watching graduate students who’d been through three years of rigorous training in acting, voice, and movement arrive at the showcase moment of their MFA program tenure. Thanks to Fran Dorn’s professional connections, the students traveled to New York and Los Angeles to present work for casting agents, directors, and other people in the business. But when they returned, many of the students reported that the feedback they received concerned their looks more than their talent. More than one went on a crash diet; the first three-year class started nearly in unison a version of The Zone diet that reduced all of them to wan and wasted stick figures in a few weeks’ time. Men and women alike were told by showcase spectators that they needed to lose weight, fix their noses, their teeth, their skin, their facial bone structures, all in the service of hewing closely to the “type” in which they’d inevitably be cast.

For this a student needs three years of expensive MFA training?

Thanks again to Fran Dorn’s powers of persuasion, the MFA acting class boasted great racial and ethnic diversity (much more so than our woefully, predominantly white undergraduate program and even, to my chagrin, our Performance as Public Practice program). But I was regularly surprised by the casting choices made for our university theatre productions, which required students of color to perform in subsidiary roles (sometimes, frankly, in servant roles) while their white colleagues, although the minority students in their classes, received the leads. Apparently, not-conventionally-slender women of color and lesbians posed a particularly thorny problem in this context.

Why should a university acting program conform to the most egregious racial and body-type profiling practices of the mainstream profession? As an African American woman, Dorn herself has played across the canon of American drama. In the last ten years, I’ve admired her performances as Christine in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and as the Gypsy in Camino Real, both at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC. I had the great pleasure of seeing her powerhouse run as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Austin’s Zachary Scott Theatre, and watching her in Mrs. Warren’s Profession at Austin’s State Theatre. But I rarely saw graduate students in our program color-blind cast in comparably meaty theatre-historical roles.

The undergrads fared far worse, as the very few students of color routinely turned up as servants or backdrops in productions that conformed to conventional casting and staging practices.

I don’t mean to launch an ad hominem attack on my former department or any of my colleagues, all of whom I respect and admire (and miss). In fact, I’m curious how and if other college and university departments do this differently, or whether we’re all held hostage to trickle-down effects from television and film casting practices that dictate such rigid conformity to type and to such narrow notions of beauty. Perhaps only “character actors” are allowed to think outside the box of their bodies. Perhaps the late Heath Ledger, for instance, gets so much press for his transformative turn as the Joker in the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, after his Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, because physically, he could rest on his laurels as a romantic (and heterosexual) lead. Why aren’t all actors considered “character actors”? Isn’t that what all of them play? Characters who aren’t them?

It pains me to think of all those theatre geeks who love the freedom and creativity of performing, the community wrought by long hours of commitment to a common pursuit, the thrill of the audience, the intimacy of the dressing room, the camp-like spirit of can-do-ship seeing their passion squelched by the awful authority of cultural convention. How horrible to think of all those students arriving in our programs only to be told—by implication if not explicitly—that their bodies are wrong, that their color, ethnicity, size, weight, face structure, or sex appeal will consign them to shadowy support roles to those whose genes make them desirable to a very narrowly defined culture of beauty and low expectations of talent.

How nice it would be if instead, we could encourage our students to be healthy, as well as creative and committed. What if we taught them how to create their own theatres, where they can make art outside the dictates of an unimaginative mainstream, as my colleague Paul Bonin-Rodriguez does in his undergraduate senior seminar on the entrepreneurial creative artist? What if we taught them to be critics and dramaturgs who bring to wide attention the violence done to our bodies and souls by physical standards impossible for normal people to fulfill without surgical intervention?

What if we taught them to be smart, activist actors, who tried to change the industry from within, as well as from outside? What if we encouraged them to keep reasonable hours, to eat well, and to give up smoking, instead of tacitly condoning anorexia that helps them look “right”? What if we cultivated performers who don’t fit norms, as my colleague Lisa McNulty at Manhattan Theatre Club is trying to do with the Butch Casting Project (www.butchcastingproject.com), dedicated to “celebrating butches, trannies, and genderqueers in the arts, media, and entertainment”?

Some of our students do find the courage and the imagination to apply their training outside of norms. For instance, Anastasia Coon, a lesbian UT MFA acting student who graduated several years ago, moved to San Francisco where, in addition to plying her own acting talent, is teaching genderqueers how to use their voices to conform to their new, chosen gender interpretations. Flordelino Lagundino, a Filipino MFA acting student who also graduated from the reorganized program, has since worked with Perseverance Theatre in Juno, Alaska, where he’s created community-based theatre projects with the local Inuit population.

I continue to believe that university theatre programs should push at the envelope of cultural expectations about the arts. If we defy conventional beauty and body image standards; if we routinely commit to color-blind or cross-race cast our productions; if we teach students to critique representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers in our own and mainstream productions, along with their aesthetic and ideological values; and if we teach students to reach outside conventional theatre to form their own companies and to create their own plays and performances, then we’ve truly added something to the national dialogue not just about the arts, but about citizenship and democracy. Supporting the status quo is untenable.

Teaching to transgress and transform (a la bell hooks),
The Feminist Spectator

Hair in Central Park

So here’s the thing: Given Ben Brantley’s glowing New York Times review, Hair will no doubt move to Broadway. Although it deserves a wider audience and a much longer run (or re-run, given its original Broadway success), part of what makes the Public’s Delacorte Theatre production in Central Park wonderful is that Hair finds its natural setting outdoors. Entering the open-air house feels like stumbling on the young, energetic “Tribe” in their natural habitat.

It’s not that the designers have gone to great lengths to recreate say, Tompkins Square Park, the far East Village Ground Zero for New York’s Aquarius generation in the late 1960s. It’s that all the designers and the terrific director, Diane Paulus (recently appointed the next Artistic Director of ART, in Cambridge), have taken advantage of the freedom and the pleasure and the wonder of being young and alive under the sky, living on the streets as the characters in Hair (at least sometimes) do.

The actors enter the small, undecorated stage from the roofless house, roaming the aisles to address the audience. They’re not panhandling, but almost; they entreat us not for cash but for our opinions about their hair, their clothes, their beings. Spectators I noticed at the preview performance I saw August 5th happily went along with their interactions with the cast, turning the whole evening into something of a mutual love fest. And rightly so, since the Public’s revival is vivid and fresh, even magical.

The designers might maintain a bare bones aesthetic—perhaps inspired by the concert-style version the Public mounted in the park last summer—but the rest of the production is fully embellished with choreography and music. The energetic, geometric, and precise dance moves were devised by Karole Armitage, and Rob Fisher supervised the musical direction by Nadia Digiallonardo of a small band of horns, percussion, and electric guitars (since Hair was, as Stacy reminds me, the first rock musical) played by musicians decked out in the colorful, eclectic costumes of 1960s’ Hippies. The band congregates under a chuppah-like cloth canopy perched in the back middle of the intimate playing space.

Bare of more elaborate decor, the Delacorte stage is perfectly attuned to the musical’s simplicity. The stage floor sports a threadbare layer of Astroturf to evoke the balding grass of the Tribe’s arena, and the low fences at the back and sides of the stage became part of these Hippies’ hollow, the comfy outdoor encampment in which the characters frolic through a long night or two of the soul.

The night I attended, Hair seemed a wonderful nostalgia trip for the audience. As the band played the opening chords of “Aquarius,” and Dionne (Patina Renea Miller) wandered up to center stage to herald the approach of the new age, people across the packed audience sang along, grooving in their seats to those old lyrics and a tune that seems embedded in the collective memory of a certain generation of Americans. Even younger spectators rose to the occasion, singing along.

Who could fail to be moved by the infectious energy and commitment of the cast; by Paulus’s direction, which paces each number and exchange with fail-proof ease and speed; by uniformly excellent singers, who put their own stamp on these classic melodies without offending the audience’s recollection of their original delivery; or by dances that manage to seem both authentic to the physical and spiritual freedom of the Hippies’ historical moment and sharp and contemporary enough to speak to the movement vocabulary of today’s young folks? As “Aquarius” dawned and the song’s final chords sounded, I’d hazard to say we were all already hooked.

Hair is really a revue, a string of songs linked along the bare bones of a plot. Each number captures a feeling, an attitude that signals the emotions and passions of young people of the anti-Vietnam War, flower power, civil rights, psychedelic, free love, anti-establishment era. The characters, such as they are, depict stock figures of the moment: Berger (Will Swenson), the handsome womanizer who can’t be bothered to appreciate Sheila (Caren Lyn Manuel), his erstwhile main squeeze; Woof (Bryce Ryness), the about-to-be flamboyant on-his-way-to-being “homosexual” who’s in love with Mick Jagger; Hud (Darius Nichols), the Afro-encircled black man bursting with then-new racial pride; and Jeanie (Kacie Sheik), inadvertently pregnant by another man, but thoroughly, unrequitedly in love with Claude (Jonathan Goff, of Spring Awakening fame), the confused boy torn between fidelity to the Tribe and some misplaced sense of obedience to authority, whether incarnated by his parents or “the law” or “the country.”

For reasons that haven’t been clear in any production I’ve ever seen of Hair, Claude decides not to burn his draft card like his mates, but instead follows through with his Army induction. He cuts his down-to-there hair, goes off to war, and is promptly slaughtered, reduced from an idealistic, attractive young man to just another anonymous body sent home in a box wrapped in just another empty, wasted flag.

The draft-card-burning scene that ends Hair’s first act, staged to the reiterative melody of “Hare Krishna,” is particularly affecting in the Public’s Delacorte production, partly because the outdoor setting lets it viscerally evoke the moment. As smoke pours into the night air from a fire lit in a street-size steel garbage can, each of the cast’s men take their turn ritually dancing up to the light. They throw their cards into the flames as drums beat and trumpets blare, and the rest of the cast dances triumphantly, until Claude approaches the can and just . . . can’t . . . do it. As the ritual of refusal comes to an abrupt end, the Tribe backs away from their friend, confused. The spirit of group-think, so pleasurable a force to which to surrender, dissipates, and the group breaks apart, wandering off into the night in pairs or trios.

But as Claude sings the haunting ballad of ambivalence and bewilderment “Where Do I Go?”, the Tribe returns for the fleeting rather sacramental nudity that was part of what made the original Hair so radical for its time. Under cover of night and low stage lights, the Tribe gathers back near Claude, casting off their clothes not under the privacy of a large billowing tarp, as they did in the 1960s, but openly, and with a kind of conviction and vulnerability that both underlines and contrasts with Claude’s hesitancy. Discarding their outfits to stand naked before the audience gestures to a primal necessity underneath the radical posturing, to the possibility of feelings not sexual, but unmediated and, if you will, pure. Although nudity on stage no longer shocks (at least not in Central Park in New York City), in this production the cast’s collective disrobing played as a declaration of authentic presentness more than it did rebellion or desire.

The moment also works effectively here to question the momentum of political feeling in the 60s that sometimes devolved into lifestyle instead of a more considered, analytical program of dissent. In the Public’s production, I was struck for the first time that the Tribe isn’t first and foremost committed to activism, but rather indulges in a way of life that’s pleasurable because it’s free from the “square” expectations of the moment and unfettered by the dogma of its politics. Until it ends with the draft-card burning ritual, the first act establishes the Tribe’s preoccupation with personal relationships over the political, in songs like “Donna,” “Frank Mills,” and “Easy to be Hard.” It both lampoons and celebrates the counter-culture’s social practices in “Hashish,” “Sodomy” and “Hair,” evoking the moment but resolutely embedding it in personal, rather than political, choices.

On the other hand, Act One offers its share of social satire, critiquing the sorry state of our skies in “Air,” the impenetrability and proliferation of acronyms in “Initials,” and the rigidity of the 1950s generation in “My Conviction.” Performers Andrew Kober, who plays the drag role of Margaret Meade as well as the uptight, all-purpose “Dad,” and Megan Lawrence, who’s physically and vocally on target as the stereotypical yet familiar anxious “Mother,” parody the “establishment” with acerbic physical wit.

Although Claude is a cardboard cut-out of a character, his second act drift away from his community into the maw of the war machine is wrenching, not because the audience has necessarily identified with him or any other character, but perhaps because it’s in the last half of the evening when Hair becomes most relevant to the present and when analogies with the war in Iraq feel most palpable. This, too, is handled with a light touch consistent with the rest of the production. In the show's finale, as the Tribe sings the final anthem, they part down the middle to reveal Claude, dressed in full military colors, lying still on the stage floor across a large American flag. Their friend’s empty sacrifice resonates with those of the many soldiers over the last five years who’ve lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, for equally suspect political reasons.

The second act more specifically resonates with the ideological commitments of the moment (then and now). “Let the Sunshine In,” as Public Theatre Artistic Director Oscar Eustis notes in the program, was never “a celebratory anthem; it was always a broken-hearted plea by a tribe that has not only failed to stop the war, but failed to keep one of their own from being consumed by it.” Taken out of context, the song became a commercialized feel-good hit, but Eustis and this production recalls its origins as a cri de coeur, a heartfelt plea for tolerance and peace.

The Public’s production doesn’t suffocate Hair under overworked contemporary references. Paulus lets the cast’s freak flags fly in the exuberance of the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, and the invigorating night air. Hair is by now a “costume piece”—the long-flowing locks on most of the men are obviously wigs, and the fringed vests worn over their bare chests obviously evoke another era’s sartorial style. In fact, the cast’s bodies give away the persistence of the present most emphatically, in the sculpted six-pack abs of the male actors and the svelte physical lines of the women, perceptible even under their long, fluid skirts. The contrast between Hair's premiere 40 years ago and this revival seems embodied in how much tighter, leaner, and, ironically, rather warrior-like the ideal American body has become.

Still, Hair’s “messages” are all here, along with the pleasure of nostalgia, the poignancy of being reminded how history repeats itself, and the joy of watching young people so physically, musically, and emotionally dedicated to embodying if not fully fleshed out characters, then the simple spirit of a moment now long past, yet close to the present nonetheless.

When the cast invited the audience onto the stage to dance as the band played after the curtain call, people of all ages (and colors, although unlike the Public’s very diverse staff, working at the Delacorte as security and ushers, the audience for Hair was predominantly white the night I attended) bound down to join them. The dancing was a utopic, performative slice of “now” inspired by an evening’s performance that knit audience and cast together in communal fellow-feeling and hope.

I can imagine some readers or spectators disparaging this production as empty nostalgia or easy sentiment, unattached to actions that might actually change or critically note how bereft are the politics of war and imperialism. But I left the theatre buoyed not just by the electricity of memory, or by hearing the enduring if sometimes silly lyrics, but by the production’s full-hearted devotion to the present, to making these songs and the representation of an inclusive, open-handed spirit of belonging and rebellion mean something in a time when we don’t readily value ideas or movements or even just moments that bring us together so unashamedly.

In their program bios, each cast member ends his or her paragraph with “Love.” Just the word, period. Corny, but also sweet, and evidence, perhaps, of how much this cast’s generation came to appreciate and even share the sentiments first embodied in Hair by the last.

Good morning starshine indeed,

The Feminist Spectator

Mamma Mia! on screen

Seeing middle-aged women frolicking mindlessly on screen might not seem like much of a feminist achievement, but I’m pleased to consider Mamma Mia! part of the improving landscape for older women in popular entertainments. If summer is traditionally when action films like Hancock and The Dark Knight and Iron Man open, trolling for dollars from the pockets of the young and the male, then Mamma MIa! breaks the mold in a refreshing and pleasurable way.

The film continues in the tradition of the stage play on which it’s based, a string of ABBA songs never meant for the theatre that are stuck along a plot no more than a millimeter thick. A young girl, Sophie, about to marry her young boyfriend, Sky, is desperate to meet the father she’s never known before she begins her adult life. Her mother, Donna, was a free-spirited American who stayed on an idyllic Greek island after a summer vacation, pregnant with a daughter who could belong to any one of three men. The determined Sophie somehow finds these now 20-years-older men, invites them back to the fantasy isle for her wedding, and lo and behold, unknown to her astonished mother, they come.

Plot contrivances make sure Sophie and the audience never find out for sure which man is the father, but the cast winds up dancing and we wind up toe-tapping in our seats if we’ve let ourselves enjoy the fanciful fun and silliness of the slight enterprise. The musical was never meant as high art, but as a campy romp that uses ABBA’s songs to explain the paper thin depths of character psychology and motivation across a story that strains credulity, and the film follows suit. As more than one critic has remarked, those ABBA songs really are difficult to resist. Even glancing at a print advertisement for the film can lodge one of the tunes in my head for hours (and who needs to hum “Dancing Queen” while trying to work?).

Part of the film’s fun comes from watching Meryl Streep sing (not too badly) and dance (terribly, although not much is required of her) and, as one critic described, mug her way through the throw-away role of the counter-cultural mother, Donna. With her blond hair long, scraggly, and wind-blown, Streep magnanimously gives in to the proceedings’ campiness. Donna’s once-upon-a-time suitors, all of whom remember her fondly enough to traipse halfway around the world to see her again, are played by unlikely men, all three clearly surprised to find themselves in a musical: Pierce Brosnan plays Sam, the most serious of her former lovers, who’s saddled with the plot’s biggest leap of faith as (spoiler alert) he actually proposes to Donna, after no contact for 20 years, at the film’s end. The poor actor can’t sing a note, but watching Brosnan, and Colin Firth as Harry and Stellan Skarsgard as Bill, Donna’s other long-ago mates, warble their way through a verse or two makes you feel kindly toward guys who would so gamely essay something at which they’re really not very good.

In fact, only Christine Baranski, as Tanya, one of Donna’s two old friends who come to the wedding, has any experience with Broadway musical theatre, which makes Mamma Mia! more like a sing-along than a full-out movie musical. None of the leads are expected to really be able to dance—what passes for choreography looks more like the moves set on high school students eager to do The Music Man with no song or dance training. All the gestures key literally to the lyrics, and overly obvious visual puns and jokes ensure that they’re fun to watch, if not artistically innovative.

As a result, the music seems to heighten the lives of the characters, but in a highly quotidian, rather accessible way. Supernumeraries who otherwise serve as cooks or bellmen or handymen at the small hotel that Donna runs, suddenly become (of course!) the Greek chorus when they hear the tinkling intro to the next ABBA tune, dropping their tasks to face the camera and rock out as Streep’s back-up singers. That they return to their jobs without a thought after they’ve held each song’s last note just seems a matter of fact in Mamma Mia!’s alternative universe.

In one of the movie’s best scenes, Streep becomes a pied piper, the head point on a phalanx of women of all ages who leave their work at the hotel and their laundry lines in town to join Donna in singing and marching purposefully nowhere to “Dancing Queen” (if I’m remembering correctly), which they transform into an anthem of self-assertion about collectively washing their men right out of their hair. The film’s joke is that no one is meant to take these shenanigans seriously, but only to enjoy them with a big dollop of great good fun.

Streep, Baranski, and Julie Waters, as Rosie, the third of the adult female trio, appear to have their own hugely pleasurable time camping it up together. They all play women in their mid-50s or so, with tenuous connections to conventionality. Baranski’s Tanya is a sardonic, much-married sophisticate who clearly enjoys her husbands’ money as much if not more than she’s pleased by their companionship, and luxuriates in her mutual seduction with one of the hotel’s barkeeps. Waters’ Rosie rejects the idea of settling down, happily chasing after Bill for some good clean dirty fun. Their spirit of anti-establishment female hell-raising becomes infectious. And though they act silly and campy, the film (helmed by Phyllida Lloyd, who directed the stage version), never makes fun of them. Instead, we’re encouraged to be entertained by the good time they seem to be having, which is a rather neat trick for a mass market summer film when middle-aged women are involved.

The only unfortunate plot choice is that the film sticks to the original musical’s ending, which (spoiler alert, again, if anyone would rather try to be surprised by the story) requires Sam to propose marriage to Donna at the 11^th hour. Somehow, daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), whom Donna has tried to dissuade from her own wedding to the handsome but dunderheaded Sky, is finally convinced—at the altar no less--that she should travel the world instead of getting hitched. This is clearly a happy outcome for a girl so desperately young and obviously naive (signaled by how and what she sings and how shrilly she shrieks with her girlfriends, a trio not at all as compelling as Donna and her friends).

But god forbid a good wedding should go to waste. Sam comes to the rescue with his knees bent and his hat in his hand, asking Donna to forgive him for leaving her the first time and now, 20 years later, to give him another try and marry him while she’s at it. The rules of romance on film require her to accept, which Streep performs with watering eyes and tremulous lips in unnecessary close-ups, throwing over in a ludicrous moment Donna’s own adulthood of more sober, unconventional, interesting choices and perfectly competent hotel management. Apparently, Donna wasn’t even aware of the torch she’d been holding for Sam, and her eyes widen with surprise when it turns out to be burning her backside.

And so, of course, the priest is happy because he gets to say his vows, and the guests are happy, because they’ve schlepped up a very high and narrow, precariously winding mountainside stairway to get to the church for the ceremony. The movie’s setting, too, is a fairy tale—how could even a Greek island be that picturesque and dazzling, the hotel Donna runs so charmingly dissolute, and even the sailboat on which the three once-and-future suitors arrive together so vividly seaworthy? The whole enterprise resembles a karaoke performance of a Disney-like film: a lot of fun if you’ve drunk enough really sweet cocktails not to be bothered by performers who can’t sing and a lot of mass-manufactured by-the-numbers ideology about love.

But I was happy to watch those middle-age leading women throw their arms around each other and laugh, cavorting merrily, even if by the film’s end, I was so exhausted from all the forced gaiety and frivolity I needed a cocktail myself.

Dancing queens indeed,
The Feminist Spectator