A Reminder of Why We Do Theatre

A number of television shows and films beckon me lately, and once I’ve seen them, I hope to write about them. There’s the blockbuster Knocked Up, about which I’m entirely suspicious, given its pedigree and given what I’ve heard about the choices—or non-choices—Katherine Heigl’s character makes around her unexpected pregnancy. And then there’s the recently opened Evening, based on the book by Susan Minot, which I read years ago and found very moving. With a cast so full of talented women, that film must be worth seeing, regardless of how well they adapt Minot’s non-chronological, elegiac story.

I’ve also recently started watching Rescue Me, Dennis Leary’s FX-broadcast dramedy, which I find I like despite the incessant boy-banter among him and his firefighter buddies. Too soon to discuss it here, but I’m getting hooked by original plot lines and characters (the gay son of Jerry, the stressed out fire chief; the beautiful, baby-faced young Mike, debating his sexuality and whether or not to kill his terminally ill mother; and Leary’s Tommy, with his fluid moral code and his 9/11-survivor’s guilt), by the confident and easy ensemble acting, and by the writing, which cuts way above network tv.

I’ve also tuned in to the new season of The Closer, which I’ve written about in this blog before. Brenda’s new style—less garish make-up and clothes, which I suppose means she’s assimilating to LA—and Kyra Sedgwick’s impeccably committed performance attracted me instantly, although a recent episode in which she worried about her father finding out that she and her FBI agent boyfriend were living together didn’t make sense to me. I might have missed some back-story, but I can’t imagine why a woman as tough as Brenda would be so concerned about parental approval. But maybe that’s one of her rich contradictions.

Sadly, because of other commitments—work, play, travel—I’m missing more theatre in Austin than I’m seeing. I was unable to catch Sharon Bridgforth’s Love Conjure/Blues, the next version of the performance novel that she continually reshapes and restages, much to the delight of Austin’s audiences (see www.sharonbridgforth.com). I utterly admire Sharon’s passion, and her luscious language, inflected with poetry and spinning into stories of love and betrayal and wily tricksterisms that please the ear and the imagination alike. I’ve heard that the most recent version was a video installation in which Sharon interacted with taped performers. The large-hearted generosity of Sharon’s vision, I’m sure, remained intact and inspiring throughout.

I’m also missing a production of Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, which I’ve never seen performed by anyone but Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney. Produced in Austin by the City Theatre Company, Breanna Stogner and Kathleen Fletcher take on these roles, which require them, I assume, to play Kathy and Mo, as well as all the characters they cycle through in their performance/play, which addresses, with affectionate humor, the travails of everyday life for women in the 20th (and now 21st) century. I’d be curious to see how local actors handle performing performers performing multiple roles (see http://www.nowplayingaustin.com/index.php?app=eventDetail&id=74152).

An event I was lucky enough to attend at Zach Scott Theatre last Tuesday night, however, reminded me why I’m a theatre person in the first place. Ann Ciccolella, who served since 1999 as the Managing Director of the theatre, recently opted to end her tenure at Zach to pursue other local arts opportunities (see http://www.zachscott.com/about/MD_Release.pdf). During her eight years with Zach, Ann directed, among other things, a remarkable production of Cabaret, in which she cast singer Susanne Abbott as the emcee, a brilliant decision that opened up all sorts of new gender meanings in the musical. Abbott’s performance was as (if not more) sexy and sly and riveting as Alan Cumming’s on Broadway, and her gender brought with it new implications about the erotics of power when it circulates among women (even if those women are primarily the Kit Kat girls).

Ann also directed the best production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf I’ve ever seen, finding in the play more layers of menace and malice, vulnerability and veracity than I thought possible to retrieve. With the inimitable Fran Dorn (a nationally known actor who came to Austin from the Shakespeare Theatre in DC to head the MFA Acting Program at UT), as Martha, a full partner in the play’s movement and mood and style, the intricate, lengthy play was tragic, crystal clear, and awfully quick.

In addition to these two unforgettable productions, Ann directed The Vagina Monologues with rotating cast of local luminaries, including beloved local theatre doyenne Karen Kuykendall, the Austin City Manager Toby Futrell, and Fran Dorn. Adopting the casting scheme that kept the play running in New York for many years, Ann managed to invigorate the event and keep audiences coming for more lessons about what women call their female parts. With her cagey creative intelligence, Ann fashioned a sharp production of a play that’s been long overdone by college students celebrating Eve Ensler’s “V-Day,” her own canny anti-domestic violence activist/artistic creation.

With these memories of Ann and many more to chew on, the theatre hosted a send-off that itself proved memorable and moving. Although I’ve only been in Austin for eight years, I’ve found the theatre community warm and welcoming, taking care of long term denizens of the scene as well as us newbies. As some indication of the eclectic, ecumenical bent of the community, the crowd at Ann’s party boasted administrators from the Long Center (the new performing arts complex that’s slowly unfolding its stages just across Town Lake from downtown Austin); members of Zach’s board of directors and its staff (from front of house folks to techies, designers, and performers); local arts writers from the Austin American-Statesman and The Chronicle; fundraisers and philanthropists; other theatre-makers and performers; and numerous FOAs (Friends of Ann).

After a bit of circulating in Zach’s hot, increasingly loud lobby, we were ushered into the theatre for an hour of testimony and performance in Ann’s honor. The chair of Zach’s board talked about being a Jew in Texas and broke a glass under his foot, a ritual performed in Jewish weddings for luck. A board member told a story about meeting Ann for the first time during his interview, and wrapping up the hour feeling pleased with their conversation. When he stuck out his hand to shake, Ann said, “No-no-no-no-no, in the theatre, we hug,” and warmly embraced this more or less stranger.

Ann’s assistant, Barbara Chisholm, who also performs regularly at Zach and around Austin, spoke of what it’s like to work with someone who’s also a friend. Robert Faires, the arts editor of The Chronicle, honored Ann with his reminiscences. And Toby Futrell, the city manager whom Ann had cajoled into taking a role in The Vagina Monologues, related what it felt like to make her stage debut under Ann’s auspices. As Zach’s Artistic Director Dave Steakley remarked, the list invited speakers ranged from the theatre into the community, representing the reach of Ann’s influence across the city.

While these remarks were always amusing and apt, the performances interspersed with speeches moved me even more. Austin is the kind of theatre town where performers who work regularly become known to audiences, where you can see the extent of an actor’s range and the breadth of her creativity. Zach employs a stable of performers who I look forward to watching in every production, and four of them presented at Ann’s party. Jill Blackwood, who recently played Julie Jordan in a TexArts production of Carousel, and who performed as the prostitute living in Cliff and Sally’s boarding house in Cabaret, sang a Sondheim number from Into the Woods, which Ann directed for another theatre earlier in her career.

Meredith McCall, who played Sally Bowles in Ann’s Cabaret, sang “The Waters of March,” the poignant bossa nova written by Antonio Carlos Jobim. She sang with such warmth and affection and hope for Ann’s future, the catchy tune couldn’t help but be infectious and inspiring. Martin Burke, a Zach regular who played Prior in Steakley’s production of Angels in America, which Ann dramaturged after local playwright/critic/theatre professor David Mark Cohen died suddenly, performed Prior’s final monologue, the one in front of the fountain of Bethesda where he looks forward to the future with hunger and wonder.

Helen Merino, a local actor who moved to New York after playing Honey in Ann’s Virginia Woolf, Antigone in Ann’s adaptation of Sophocles, and many other parts, performed a monologue after surprising the audience (and Ann) by appearing live.

But here’s the thing about those four performances: The performers offered each of those speeches or songs as a trove of love and respect for Ann. Whatever their original context, they all took on new meaning in the performers’ address, and in the context of tribute, of memory, and of hope for Ann’s future. Through performance, Jill, Meredith, Martin, and Helen clarified how often and how intimately Ann touches people’s lives.

In a theatre, but without the typical mediations of text and character, set or direction, these four actors marshaled their craft and polished their emotions to deliver lyrics and melodies that struck just the right chord. Without a play or a musical to guide them, they used their art to deliver other art, wrapped with bows to Ann. What better way for an artist to receive the gift of people’s admiration but in art, as art, through art?

The evening shored up my faith in theatre’s power to rally us. Plied with deliciously plentiful food and bellinis, the audience flew high on Ann’s tribute. But the cocktails only enhanced an evening that was already magical, bringing together a hard-working, supportive, committed theatre community to toast one of its own and send her on her way to her next adventure in the arts. Moments like these provide milestones for people like Ann, who are moving on, and touchstones for the rest of us, who receive the gift of connection with the things that matter, and are moved and reminded of why we we’re people of the theatre.

Thank you, Zach,
The Feminist Spectator

Summer Theatre in Austin: "Constellation" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"

Constellation

Although the hot humid days in Austin rarely turn into cool comfortable summer nights, we got lucky a week ago when we saw choreographer Sally Jacques’s company Blue Lapis Light present their “site-specific aerial dance performance” Constellation between two federal buildings downtown. The typically enervating humidity lifted, caught between the storm systems that have kept the city green this spring and early summer. A soft breeze rustled our programs and flicked through our eyelashes, open in wonder at dancers stepping off the sides of buildings to soar into the air above us.

The audience sat rapt on the plaza between two completely quotidian government buildings, their impersonal, unaesthetic 1960s architecture suddenly transformed by the presence of bodies rigged to ropes, costumed in flowing, gossamer materials that draped and flattered their movement through the air. With sleeves and leggings fluttering behind them like wings, the dancers took leaps of faith off the tops of these buildings, diving, catching themselves, swinging into the air, pushing off window ledges to keep up their momentum, and reaching out towards each other as the air streams moved them first closer then farther away.

Resonant, crystal clear music—from soulful arias to resounding instrumentals, from classical turns to vaguely New Age stylings—lifted the performers’ spirits and our own as the rich sound seemed part of the current that held the dancers in the air. They flew in unison and in counterpoint to each other, complementing one another’s movement with their own strength and grace. I was riveted by the shear feat of their actions; what kind of courage does it take to trust your harness and cables enough to step off the roof of a building, lit like an angel, into a void, hoping this lowly technology will catch you as the audience tries to hold you up with its collective breath?

Part of the evening’s stimulating energy, in fact, comes from such shared adrenalin. The audience comes to trust that the performers are safely held by their harnesses, ropes, and carabiners, and strong enough to negotiate the space between themselves and the building, and the building and the ground, with the grace and style of dancers performing on the ground. Constellation changes your perspective. The vertical side of a building comes to seem horizontal; the wall begins to look like the floor, as the dancers careen gracefully about. The giddy feeling of losing all sense of foreground/background, floor/ceiling, or performer/audience transported me into a weightless, freeing sense of utter, communal presence in time and space.

The brief performance toggles between two sets of performers commanding the sides of the two facing buildings. One is considerably taller than the other. When dancers first approach the higher roof’s edge and make their leap off the side, they’re accompanied by tiny bright pin-lights, each attached to its own miniature parachute. These lights descend alongside the dancers, marking the distance between them and the roof and the ground below. The light breeze picked up these little stars and carried some of them toward the audience and dropping others, unseen, into what would be the wings of the stage, if this weren’t an exposed, outdoor plaza.

In fact, part of the pleasure of watching the dancers fly comes from seeing their colleagues standing on belay below them, supporting their movements while firmly rooted on the ground. The technology of the dancers’ flying is always exposed, but that doesn’t diminish the apparent miracle of flight we witness above. The belayers’ presence underlines a structure of support that’s necessary, if hidden, in any performance.

Nonetheless, fear and daring outline the dancers’ beautiful images. Much of the movement simply concerns the trajectory of their flight, as they swing back and forth across the building’s face. Pairs of dancers fly toward each other, not quite close enough to touch; the only plot or action concerns their subtle effort to gather the momentum they need to swing closer, to finally grasp a finger or a hand as they connect momentarily through space. Coming together and swinging apart with a grace that seems strangely human, even quotidian—given the virtuosity and courage such aerial dancing must require—forms a metaphor for human relationships: our desire to connect as each of us flies through our own biosphere, sometimes making contact, sometimes flying apart.

The tallest building’s honeycombed façade reminded me of the fallen World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. Constellation rewrites the tragic image of people falling from the burning buildings. Instead of plummeting desperately to certain death, the dancers leap from the buildings and find themselves caught, suspended in an acrobatics of hope that eases my memory of those other, desperate falls to earth.

In Constellation’s last act, two dancers catch each other in the air, and intertwine their limbs across a cable that bisects the plaza diagonally from one building to the other. Slowly, inexorably, followed by a cautious spotlight, the dancers lower themselves down the cable toward the ground. They end in a vertical drop into the center of the plaza, holding each other as they touch down. The other dancers run to surround them and the audience stands to applaud, captivated by the magic of their flight and their return.

Constellation and earlier site-specific Blue Lapis Light productions (see http://www.bluelapislight.org/) is public art at its best, transforming public space used to service impersonal and sometimes oppressive government systems into hopeful, beautiful, aesthetic, and emotional scenes of joy.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Dave Steakley, the artist head of the Zach Scott Theatre here in Austin, consistently demonstrates his talent as one of the most creative, well-rounded directors I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch working. As the director of eight of the nine show in his eclectic season, Steakley’s boundless energy and imagination always deliver, and his willingness to take political stands with his production concepts always impresses. In 2006 – 2007 alone, Steakley directed a rousing production of Rocky Horror Picture Show; an entirely campy, spot-on funny Noel Coward with Present Laughter; Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning Take Me Out, and will soon direct the stage version of the Disney film hit, High School Musical. Only An Almost Holy Picture, Heather MacDonald’s moving one-man play meditation, will be directed by someone else (Robert Faires, the arts editor of the local weekly The Chronicle and a regular Austin actor in his own right). (See http://www.zachscott.com/ for details on the season and the theatre.)

Zach’s latest show, Jesus Christ Superstar, is another risky Steakley extravaganza that somehow manages to get everything right, providing a transporting, breathtaking, thought-provoking evening of theatre. He sets the musical in contemporary Mexico City, and employed a translator (Álvaro Cerviño) to create Spanish lyrics for about 50% of the show. Steakley tries admirably to speak to the widest possible local audience (and Austin’s Latin/a and Chicano/a and African-American population is significant), not by presenting token plays by people of color, but by bringing new perspectives to any production he undertakes. He often uses color-blind casting, but also always casts with an eye toward how race and ethnicity might make a difference in a production. All-white casts are rare at Zach, which demonstrates Steakley’s commitment to an inclusive theatre for the city.

Steakley’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar (Jesucristo Superestrella) utterly rocks, from its score to its dance numbers to its interpretations of the story and its contemporary resonances. The first of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s megamusicals, the sung-through show tells the story of Jesus’s rise and fall, including Judas’s betrayal and the machinations of various religious statesmen who for political reasons needed him dead. Transported to Mexico City, the story becomes a parable about the personal and political costs of celebrity in an age when politicians compete for visibility with galvanizing leaders from all walks of life. In Steakley’s vision, the production also addresses the pressing social need for belief and for faith (which is in fact the theme of Zach Scott Theatre's season this year). He captures the zeal for leaders who will galvanize a population that wants change to happen, and the ease with which public hopes are raised and dashed.

Played by the handsome, soulful Joseph Melendez, Jesus in this production is a Mexican with a following. A panoply of people attends to his homilies, hanging on his words as he treats them with warmth and compassion. The crowd includes a Chicano in a zoot suit and another in the straw hat, white undershirt, and jeans of the farm worker; a young white woman in the zippers and black leather and harshly died black hair of a Goth or a punk; another young woman whose look resonates with 60s American hippies; and other performers, men and women, white and of color, who cycle through variously costumed incarnations of Mexican history, ritual, and iconography. The scene reads as global and transnational (and a bit transhistorical), while firmly rooted in the specifics of Mexican culture.

Judas is a white man here, played with raw, cutting energy by John Pointer. Pointer is a musician and composer, rather than an actor. Steakley uses his performance experience as a “human beatbox” to great effect here; Pointer uses his mouth as a percussion device to create sound effects that punctuate his scenes and bridge to his songs. His modified Mohawk haircut (his head isn’t shaved but a thicker band of hair stands up along the middle of his head) and his pasty white face contrast nicely with Melendez’s rich carmel-colored skin tones and his rich black hair and short beard.

The two render the high stakes of Judas’s friendship with Jesus more tenderly and passionately than in any production I’ve seen. When Judas accuses Jesus of setting up his betrayal, Judas shares torrents of pain that somehow never seem overplayed. Losing his friend as well as his leader, Pointer renders Judas’s emotions immediate, unrefined, and unfiltered, capped with a kind of howl of male passion for a brother/friend. Melendez, too, acts with physically invested expressions of pain, capturing Jesus's doubt in his abilities and the meaning of his ministry.

Theresa Medina performs Mary Magdalene with open-hearted, watchful intelligence. Her beautiful rich voice captures all the soulful melancholy of "Everything's Alright" and "I Don't Know How to Love Him," the two songs that grace her role. Medina sings the second song entirely in Spanish, yet for an English-speaker (even one, I'd venture to say, not familiar with the show), her confusion, helplessness, and fear are completely clear. Rather than the ethereal or hyper-sexualized version of the role offered by other performers, Medina makes Mary Jesus's shelter, his rock, his home, without losing the strenght of her own presence. All three leads create nuanced, original, unforgettable performances.

The whole production requires taxing physical commitments from its cast. For example, when Jesus is beaten after his arrest, Pilate’s henchmen stretch his arms across the stage with rope, leaving him at the center of a large, tall, rectangle white box of fluorescent light topped with a black ladder, which serves variously as Jesus’s cross and Judas’s perch, from which he cynically watches the action. With Jesus's arms outstretched to his side and his torso and legs bare, the rest of the cast runs on from the voms to slap Jesus with red “blood,” as the musicians create the sound of whips lashing his body. Like so many of Steakley’s choices, the effect is both efficient and effective, implicating the apostles and his followers in Jesus’s suffering, while the blood they slap across his body comes to resemble the beaten pulp of his flesh.

Steakley directs with almost gestic vision. When Judas betrays Jesus to Caiaphas, he receives a coin that he fingers disdainfully, knowing that money is hardly compensation for his pending private loss and the upcoming public cataclysm. As Judas sits center stage, contemplating the suicide that eventually follows, more coins fall on him from the catwalks, raining down one by one, single raindrops laden with the cost of his action. Somehow, the coins fall in tempo with the music, emphasizing the melody of Judas’s plaint in “Damned for All Time/Blood Money.” It’s a stunning theatrical moment.

The equivalences carry the production’s political grace-notes. When Jesus is arrested, two men costumed as border patrol agents carry him away. Pilate wears a conventional Western business suit and tie, and gives the thumbs up sign smugly to the audience as he and Caiaphas plot Jesus’s end. Pilate looks a lot like Bush the 2nd here, or any other politician who’s easily corrupted by power and pragmatism. Herod’s vaudeville-style number is staged as a campy theatrical performance by a popular Mexican wrestling star and his court of bodacious women in bathing suits and sashes. When Jesus dies, the company surrounds his body wearing the black clothing and white skeleton masks that signify the Day of the Dead. The production is rich with the semiotics of Mexico and its relationship with the US, as well as with references to contemporary celebrity and the empty hysteria of fandom across entertainment, political, and religious spheres.

I grew up knowing all the words to the original cast album recording of Jesus Christ Superstar, the one Lloyd Webber and Rice released before they ever mounted a production. More than 35 years later, I still remember each verse and refrain, each of its many shifts in tone and musical style. Hearing half of the lyrics in Spanish in the Zach Scott Theatre production deepened my experience of the musical, adding a moving poignancy to a visually awe-inspiring, physically commanding, emotionally and politically resonant production.

This, thankfully, again, is the joy of theatre: watching talented artists transform what we thought we knew into something both differently familiar and strange, into something we’ve seen before, offered to us in a completely fresh way. That’s my kind of theatre.

Proud to live in Austin, Texas,
The Feminist Spectator

Loving Annabelle

For some time now, Loving Annabelle has sat in the top five list of videos rented by lesbians according to Wolfe Video’s web site (see www.wolfevideo.com). It’s a small indie film, written and directed by Katherine Brooks, who according to the DVD shorts and extras, watched the classic lesbian film Maidchen in Uniform and decided to make her own teacher-student love story in which, instead of deferring the romance to longing, unrequited passion, and inevitable suicide, something actually happens between the two women. To paint the context for her version of the old story, Brooks creates a standard series of girls’ boarding school types: Colins (Laura Breckenridge), the slightly crazy lonely girl, who cuts herself and hides a rescued porcupine in a cage in her room; Cat (Gustine Fudickar), the aggressive, brash, brusque type, who is no doubt deeply emotionally wounded, but covers her emotions with nonchalant hostility; and Kristen (Michelle Horn), the more sexually experienced girl (who’s in fact had a child that her parents now call their own) who’s along for the ride in the awkward threesome these girls comprise.

Annabelle (Erin Kelly) is new to the strict Catholic school, brought to the isolated estate somewhere outside of LA by her mother, a wealthy, self-important senator. In the opening, Annabelle rides beside the senator in a stretch limousine, looking sadly out the window while her mother, talking into her cell phone and holding a sheaf of papers, ignores her. The two women are surrounded by white men in black suits, the entourage of government security that keeps Annabelle even further from maternal intimacy. We learn quickly that Annabelle has already been expelled from two previous schools, and that if the high school’s imperious nuns can’t break her free spirit, she’ll be sent next to military school.

The teacher in charge of corralling Annabelle is Simone (Diane Gaidry), herself a former pupil of the school who teaches poetry and lives as the housemistress in the girls’ dorm. She’s a wiry, lithesome woman, with the stooped stance that signals both barely repressed sexuality and a tragic past. Annabelle doesn’t take long to learn that Simone was once just like her—rebellious, passionate, and, of course, queer. Simone’s lover Amanda committed suicide, not strong enough—her final note confesses—to withstand the public condemnation (in the late 20th century?) of a lesbian life.

Simone pines for her lover, while she lets herself get involved with a perfectly nice, awfully boring male teacher from a nearby private school. As he presses for a commitment, her attentions and affections wander toward her young charge. Annabelle feels their mutual attraction first and fast. She comes on strong, practically stalking the older woman in her quest for Simone’s affections. But Annabelle is preternaturally sophisticated for her age (which would be, at most, 17). Once she learns of Amanda’s suicide, Annabelle understands Simone’s pain and sets about helping the older woman release her past.

Annabelle is smart and mature, which keeps the plot from plummeting into utter incredibility (and perhaps, to some, although I have to say not to me, moral ambiguity). Annabelle not only has the intellectual chops to attract Simone, she’s also emotionally articulate. One would think that a kid who’s been expelled from two previous schools would be a hellion, a shut-down wall of aggression and hostility (much like Cat, who expresses her fear and insecurity through harmful, destructive sarcasm and emotional manipulation). But Annabelle simply knows herself and her sexuality, and refuses to conform to social expectations that would make her heterosexual and in every other way straight. She empathizes with the marginalized and ostracized, comforting Colins when Cat strikes out at her, and otherwise shows herself as a young woman of strength and character.

Annabelle refuses to remove the Buddhist prayer beads she wears around her neck, given to her, she tells Simone, by the first “person” with whom she fell in love. (When Simone inquires after “him,” Annabelle corrects the pronoun.) The head nun, Sister Immaculata (played with campy parody by Ilene Graff) forces Annabelle to wear heavy crosses hung from chains over the beads, burdening the girl with the signs of a religion in which she doesn’t even believe. Simone persuades Annabelle to carry the beads in her pocket instead, so that she can keep her ex-lover close without incurring Immaculata’s wrath.

Annabelle, in turn, helps Simone take off the small gold cross Amanda gave her, which Simone fingers constantly at her neck, reminding her of what she, too, has lost. This is only one of several overly neat plot contrivances, but Kelly and Gaidry carry off these heavily parallel symbolic acts with aplomb. In fact, the women’s growing attraction works mostly because the two actors flesh out the characters’ emotional lives, and let their eyes and their faces communicate a seductive, credible intimacy that the dialogue sometimes flattens.

Annabelle and Simone’s attraction somehow remains sweet and pure; their age difference never seems to matter, because Annabelle’s worldly experience compensates for Simone’s sheltered Catholic girls’ school existence, balancing out whatever chronological age might otherwise mean.

Brooks builds the sexual tension between Annabelle and Simone, finally bringing them together after Annabelle witnesses Simone cajoled into dancing with her erstwhile boyfriend at the school prom. Taking off her dress and letting down her hair, Annabelle mounts the dance floor stage in a red slip with her guitar and a song, obviously written for and about Simone. When Simone flees in emotional confusion, Annabelle leaves the stage and runs after, catching up with her in the rain outside, where the two women finally kiss and return to Simone’s room to make love.

And pretty good love it is, too. Brooks, in the extras, describes how she wanted to film a love scene that would palpably represent the heat of the two women’s desire, rather than cutting away at some key moment or only intimating their physical intimacy. The scene is well-choreographed; Simone and Annabelle’s sexual connection is one of the most believable in the film. They share the lead in taking off each other’s clothes, in the first exploratory touches, and in the building passion that takes them to Simone’s bed where Brooks actually does show them having a pretty convincing, pretty hot, pretty moving simulation of lesbian sex.

Because of the storm, Simone’s alarm clock doesn’t ring the next morning. Tipped off by the jealous Cat, Immaculata finds the lovers in Simone’s room and promptly calls the police. The officers lead Simone out of the school, Annabelle tearfully running after them to toss Simone her Buddhist prayer beads, which the older woman catches and to which she clings as she’s driven away in a car ride that mirrors Annabelle’s arrival. Annabelle turns back into the school, running past the girls lined up to witness the spectacle. She returns to Simone’s room, where she finds the art photos Simone took of her on their day at the beach and smiles, loving Simone and not regretting it for a minute.

Brooks is careful not to judge the characters for their affair, despite the age difference. Unlike, for instance, the recent heterosexual version of a similar story, Notes on a Scandal (see my earlier blog entry), the teacher-student affair isn’t presented as the ruin of the nuclear family, or as a cruel manipulation of a vulnerable teacher by a horny, handsome teenaged boy or girl. Although the officers arrest Simone for her apparent indiscretion, until that moment, neither woman has suffered guilty misgivings about their obvious desire. Simone hesitates more because of the emotional wounds of her past than the prohibitions of the present. The film doesn’t sensationalize the story, either; in some ways, it’s just an old-fashioned lesbian movie that insists desire should be seized wherever it’s found. Loving Annabelle makes it clear that denying need and lying about love can disintegrate your soul.

Why am I so attracted to these stories? Why do these images linger for me for so much longer than those from other films, even though I know Loving Annabelle is a melodramatic diversion? Could it be that at 50-years-old, I’m still entranced by images of women falling in love against the odds, still starved to see this particular, predictable plot enacted? Is it because I, too, like director/writer Brooks, want to see consummated the desire that so many films of my own youth only suggested (even though Brooks is 20 years my junior)?

Does Loving Annabelle linger because in my own life, I seem to have moved from identifying with Annabelle’s precocious emotional sensitivity to Simone’s more painfully guarded passions? Is it because I came of age knowing that my sexuality and my own desire was illicit, so that watching the enactment of a forbidden teacher-student relationship reminds me that the erotics of sublimation and transgression are hard-wired into my own psyche? Or is it because the subtextual necessity of Annabelle and Simone’s flirtation recalls for me the necessity with which I lived for so long, of signaling to other women in the dark, hoping they could read what I was trying to tell them, hoping to find companionship, if not passion, with women who might truly know me?

When Annabelle finds Amanda’s suicide note in the astonishingly beautiful ocean-side condo Simone’s parents have left her, Simone is furious at the breach of her privacy. But Annabelle knows she’s found the key to Simone’s defenses. Struggling against Simone’s arms as the older woman tries to push her away, Annabelle insists that she intends to hold her and not to let her go. They tussle for a moment, then Simone surrenders to Annabelle’s embrace, sobbing on her shoulder as the younger woman holds her tightly, their hands entangled in each other’s hair.

As I describe the scene, I know how cheesy it sounds—I can’t even keep that hint of breathless sensation from my prose. And yet the moment was also very true and, for me, very moving. Here was the offer of understanding, the offer to care, to love, a living young woman wrapping her arms around Simone to comfort and sympathize. How many times, in my later teens and early 20s, just before and just after coming out, did I want someone to just “get it” like this, to use their body to tell me so, not to force me to talk about it, but just to let me feel it, whatever “it” was.

And honestly, “it” was mostly the complicated pain of being a lesbian before it was even marginally okay, as it is now, when it was still forbidden, taboo, perverted, misunderstood, when my attachments were to straight girls who could never reciprocate because I didn’t know any other would-be lesbian girls. I remember too well the inarticulate despair that came from not being able to express my desire openly, from being isolated without the words for what I felt and what I wanted, from being gripped by powerful hormones that sent my passion driving in the “wrong” direction, and not being able to do a thing about it.

I wanted to be Annabelle, but instead, I was Simone. Even though the film doesn’t illuminate anything new about this now-stereotypical story, Loving Annabelle still reminds me of my own coming of age.

When the Annabelle and Simone finally do give in to their desire, the film captures well the release of that instance, the combination of terror and depth of passion it inspires. Kelly and Gaidry bring something fresh and truthful and sincere to the moment, registering that there’s no turning back from transgression, and at the same time, that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says or what the consequences are—you just have to join your flesh with hers, you can’t deny it a second longer. When the harridan Immaculata confronts her with outrage, after finding Simone and Annabelle in bed together, Simone says simply, “I love her.” To make that declaration should be enough; in Loving Annabelle, as in my own life, indeed it is.

Sentimentally, perhaps,
The Feminist Spectator

Springtime Theatre in New York, Pre-Tony Awards

[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

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

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

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