Up in the Air

[Spoiler alert! This post is written assuming that readers will have seen the film, or won’t mind learning key plot points. Enjoy—the FS]

Many of the December and January holiday season’s most popular films seemed strangely woman-centered, or perhaps just old stories suddenly told from what seems to be a woman’s perspective. In Up in the Air, for example, George Clooney’s character finds himself in the gender-reversed position of being unceremoniously left behind when a happy affair turns serious on only one side of the equation. And in It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep plays a late-middle-aged woman with surprising agency, suddenly faced with the choice to revive her relationship with the husband she divorced 10 years before or begin a romance with a soft-spoken architect who’s having difficulty getting over his own two-year-old divorce. But in both cases, films that at first appear progressive about gender reveal a disappointing conservatism that qualifies their viewing pleasures. I’ll save It’s Complicated for next time.

Ryan Bingham, Clooney’s debonair, proudly commitment-free corporate frequent-flyer in Up in the Air, travels the country visiting downsizing companies too timid to fire their own employees. With a prepared script tucked under his arm, Bingham delivers to the newly pink-slipped useless pabulum about turning their “career transformations” into opportunities to follow long-deferred dreams. He moves through strangers’ lives bringing huge consequences for them and none for him.

Bingham appears in each faceless corporate environment with the same stack of bunk generated by his own company—professionals at “career transitions”—breezing into and out of lives more profoundly and less happily changed than he’s willing to admit. Yet part of what makes Bingham (as Clooney conceives him) appealing is his faith in his lines; he couldn’t keep doing his job if he didn’t believe at least partially in what he says to those he fires.

Director Jason Reitman (Juno), in his carefully and somehow compassionately conceived scenes of Ryan’s summary execution of devastated employees, clarifies that very few of his “victims” can actually hear Ryan’s pep talk. Many of the poor folks in these scenes are apparently real unemployed people, hired (I hope) as extras for a day or two to re-enact with Clooney their experiences losing their own positions. J.K. Simmons (a Reitman regular late of Juno)—the only obvious actor in these sad vignettes—plays the only character who actually takes Bingham’s message to heart. You can see him thinking through Bingham’s suggestion that he’s now free to follow artistic dreams he set aside when he compromised his goals for corporate security. Though a light of relief and real gratitude goes on in the man's eyes, he’s the exception; most of the others exhibit only devastation and terror when Bingham delivers the news.

Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is the catalyst for Bingham’s own unwitting transformation. As the new kid in their career transitions firm, she looks at the bottom line and suggests that the company is wasting money flying people like Bingham all over the country to do a job that could be accomplished much more cheaply via the internet. She suggests that the corporation’s firing squad be grounded. But Bingham’s boss, Craig (played as a cold-hearted capitalist by Jason Bateman, even more resigned and slimy here than he is in Juno), insists that she accompany Bingham on one of his trips, so that she’ll understand what Bingham sees as his job’s human factor. The thought of Keener’s company on the road horrifies Bingham, and she’s not much happier. Their odd-couple-esque road trip—through which, naturally, then come to respect and enjoy one another—provides the film’s narrative core.

In a breezy montage, Bingham shows Keener the ropes of expedient, efficient air travel. The camera captures close-ups of the in-line skate wheels on Bingham’s suitcase pivoting smoothly against the hard floors of look-alike airports, and records Bingham demonstrating how he can tell which security checkpoint lines will move fastest. For all her touted corporate time-saving savvy, Keener proves a loser at light travel. Bingham’s packing tutorial is the first step in rebalancing the power between them.

When he teaches her how to do his job, the stakes increase. Bingham is a well-oiled firing machine, whose years of experience have honed his ability to deliver the bad news quickly and what he can’t help but believe will be painlessly. While he adjusts his smile to exude warmth and sympathy as they meet soon-to-be former employees across a table, Keener can’t arrange her face and only looks nauseous and embarrassed. One of the women they fire tells them she’s going to jump off a bridge, which terrifies Keener. But Bingham reassures her that these are always idle threats, as though hearing people threaten suicide is an unavoidable and regular downside of his job.

On one of his last solo trips before Keener tags along, Bingham meets a woman executive—named only “Alex,” a masculinized nickname for a beautiful, sophisticated woman (played by the superb Vera Farmiga)—who matches his lust for travel and his comfort with the pleasures of the road. They fling their hotel and rental car loyalty cards on their bar table, matching and seeing one another like card players in a poker game. Bingham and Alex begin an affair, consulting their travel schedules to arrange future meetings. They’re well-matched physically and, it seems, emotionally; Farmiga and Clooney’s on-screen relationship is rich with good humor and chemistry.

In one of the film’s most effecting scenes, Keener’s boyfriend dumps her while she’s on the road with Bingham, so he and Alex help the young woman nurse her wounds in their hotel's bar. They dispense generous advice, but while Bingham casually boasts his antipathy for long-term commitments and kids, Alex waxes philosophical about what she wants in a man and her desire for children. This sly red herring leads you to anticipate a more conventional crisis between the leading couple, which makes the film’s surprise ending even more effective.

The bar room rap scene also demonstrates Bingham’s and Alex’s real humanity. They handle Keener gently without condescending to her, and she lets go of the uptight corporate hotshot role she’s been trying to play. The trio crash the hotel’s convention party by stealing attendee badges—Keener’s reads “Jennifer Lee,” and she’s not Asian American—and soaking up free drinks, food, and swag. The sweet and goofy party scene is also rather sad, because this evening of carousing at other people’s conferences obviously represents a good time for Bingham. Reitman does a lovely job modulating the film’s emotional tone, resisting the temptation to pity Bingham but clearly illustrating that his unencumbered life can be empty as well as liberating.

Bingham begins breaking his own rules as he becomes more and more attached to Alex. In his down time, Bingham supplements his career as a corporate ax-wielder by leading seminars that teach people how to lighten their emotional and material loads. He delivers a motivational speech that’s really a pat little talk about “what’s in your backpack,” which encourages his audience to unburden themselves not only of material possessions, but of entanglements with other people that keep them from enjoying their deserved freedom.

Thanks to Clooney’s innate, boyish charm, these speeches avoid their potentially smarmy masculine arrogance. In Clooney’s interpretation, Bingham preaches his credo not because he’s misanthropic, but because traveling light works for him and offers a convenient, rational, tidy belief system. All the guy wants is a good suitcase and enough frequent flyer miles to join the “10 Million Miles Club,” which entitles members to meet a pilot and fly anywhere in the world for free. Bingham’s only life goal is to accumulate more and more miles (an obvious metaphor for his flight from commitment). A heavy backpack would only hold him down.

Alex foils his plans. Bingham finds himself lonely without her, and notices, the few times he returns to his nearly empty, soulless condo in Omaha, his home base, that his life suddenly feels a bit too unencumbered. On a whim, he decides to attend his estranged sister’s wedding in Wisconsin, and invites Alex to come as his date. For some reason, she accepts, and they perform as a real couple in “real life” for the first time.

The family wedding scenes in Up in the Air offer a stark and sometimes calculated contrast to Bingham’s and Alex’s lives on the road. In the mid-West heartland, Bingham’s two sisters live simple lives with a lot less disposable income than their brother, whom they rarely see. The bride (Melanie Lynskey) and groom (Danny McBride) arrange the equivalent of a fire hall party after their church wedding, at which Alex and Ryan seem out of place, too sophisticated and worldly for the earthy northern Wisconsin surrounds (even though Ryan, after all, lives in Omaha; Alex, at least, is from Chicago).

When Ryan commits to attending the event, his sister asks him to collect photographs of a poster-board cut-out of the bride and groom situated against panoramic backgrounds in all the cities he visits. Ryan goes to some lengths collecting these pictures, assuming he’s doing his sister a unique favor. His self-importance deflates when he arrives at the fire hall, photos in hand, and is told to tack them on a large map of the U.S. that’s already covered with images. His family, it seems, doesn’t need him as much as Ryan imagines. A whole community supports them, decorating their party with pictures of the honeymoon they can't afford to take.

Which is part of Up in the Air’s point and its problem. The “flyover states” (that deprecating label from the political lexicon) appear mythologized once again as the place where people are simple and authentic, where family is cherished and relationships are built on loyalty and trust regardless of material means. Reitman films the wedding ceremony and party scenes with only a touch of comic condescension, since his goal is to portray Ryan’s new ambivalence when he compares his own choices to his family’s. Lost in the soft-focus filmmaking of these scenes is any critique of those family values as shopworn and exclusive. Up in the Air winds up promoting, like most movies, the conventional norm of white middle-class married heterosexuality as the benchmark of happiness.

Ryan usually prizes his individuality, boasting his rugged solitude. But when he sees his long-neglected family participating faithfully in the illusions of married fairy tales, instead of hightailing it back to the airport, he somehow realizes what he’s been missing. And that’s when the film gets conservative. Ryan starts choking on his “what’s in your backpack” speech, and shortly after his weekend with Alex at the wedding, decides to take his own plunge.

On a whim, Bingham changes his flight plan and arrives breathlessly at Alex’s Chicago brownstone, wearing Clooney’s trademark seductive grin and his aw-shucks stance. But when Alex throws open the door, he sees behind her children running up and down the stairs, and hears a male voice asking his “honey” who’s at the door. Answering that it’s “just someone who’s lost,” Alex’s face freezes in horror as she shakes her head at Bingham, wordlessly beseeching him to leave. Clooney registers in an instance how badly he’s misinterpreted Alex’s affections. He’s come to deliver himself like a prize, when instead, Alex chose something from behind another door a long time ago.

When she calls Bingham on her cell phone from a car in an empty parking garage, Alex demands that he explain his surprise appearance. In a hurt, wondering tone more familiar coming from jilted women, Bingham asks Alex what he means to her, and she responds, “A parenthesis.” Bingham has simply been an interruption in her life’s sentence, an afterthought, an addition that doesn’t really change its direction or flow.

Bingham swallows his devastation and goes on to achieve his former goal, suddenly finding a pilot sliding into the seat next to him on the plane to welcome him to the “10 Million Mile Club.” The hollow moment isn’t even bittersweet for Bingham; he’s mortified that this has been his aspiration, that he focused his energies on this empty meeting between himself and a man who’s just a corporate suit commanding a flying machine, to whom Bingham really has nothing to say. He has enough miles to go anywhere, and finds there’s really no where he wants to go. He books his sister and her new husband on a round-the-world trip, and just keeps packing his own “Travel Pro” to go off to his job letting people go.

The once heartless young Keener gets her own wake-up call when the woman they fired really does jump off a bridge. Keener leaves to find redemption in San Francisco at a new, more socially responsible firm. For Bingham, the ex-employee’s suicide is only a pin-prick in his rock-solid belief his profession is just. He’s left with his suitcase and a world that’s his oyster, one for which he’s entirely lost his appetite.

While Up in the Air begins as a refreshingly anti-marriage story of a man who nonetheless has a great deal of compassion for other people, it ends as a morality tale about the lonely individual who’s failed to commit to the community. Even in a movie as smart as this, in which the characters talk in full sentences and seem to have real ideas and feelings, living outside of married domesticity just can’t be imagined or sustained. The film's only progressive note is the gender-reversal that leaves Bingham alone at the end, while Alex has gotten just what she wanted—a friendly diversion from a real life that suits her just fine.

Thankfully, Up in the Air doesn’t moralize about Alex’s infidelity. The film makes Bingham appear foolish for investing in the happily ever after fairy tale against all his best wry instincts. The excellent cast helps make these characters compelling and complex. Clooney is terrific as the cavalier but emotionally acute Bingham, and Farmiga plays Alex with a great deal of controlled, cautious warmth behind her gorgeous, capable demeanor. Anna Kendrick, as Keener, brings a light comic touch as well as real depth to a character that seems at first just a heartless corporate cog. Her own awakening to what she will and won’t compromise for professional success nicely balances Bingham’s and Alex’s choices, and Kendrick plays the character’s emotional shifts beautifully.

For all its disappointing conservatism, Up in the Air is a grown-up, intelligent movie, especially compared to the puerile, adolescent situations concocted in Nancy Meyer’s fluff film, It’s Complicated. Up in the Air manages to be thoughtful and compassionate, rueful about choices made by a man who’s fully middle-aged and realizes he might have placed his faith in exactly the wrong things.

I only wish he knew he had more options.

The Feminist Spectator

Silver Stars

Silver Stars is a community-based, devised theatre piece by an Irish theatre company called Broken Talkers, who create work by mining people’s stories about their lives and knitting it into coherent evenings of theatre. The play, which I saw performed at the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater on January 16, collects narratives from middle-aged Irish gay men who, because of homophobia in their native country, had to flea elsewhere to live honestly and comfortably. Ten men tell the stories, sharing narration duties, so that it’s not necessarily clear whose story belongs to whom, or whether or not, for that matter, the story’s origin necessarily lies in anyone appearing on stage. The company has done a kind of ethnographic work to collect these narratives, which are then distributed among an amateur cast to be told, and turned into songs that dot the short performance and help texture it with emotional nuance that might otherwise be missing.

The songs are played by a trio of female cellists and a male electric guitar player who conducts this small but effective band. In the musical idiom of Phillip Glass or Steve Reich, played in repetitive but emotionally resonant and increasingly mournful tones, the music and songs allow the actors to tell these stories in quite a different register than the generally flat, uninflected vocal delivery they otherwise use. Perhaps the director didn’t trust the acting ability of these non-performers—to a person, they keep their faces still and impassive throughout the performance, even when the stories intensify and climb to greater emotional heights. Likewise, their voices are generally unmodulated. They don’t speak in monotones, but neither are their voices scored to reflect more poignantly the often brutal or devastating stories of family banishment and lovers’ deaths that for the most part provide the performance’s emotional key.

In some ways, this careful avoidance of outsized emotionality works well, as it allows you to trust the stories instead of distracting you with what could too easily be performance histrionics. The ten men range around the stage, positioned frontally toward the audience. But during each story, they turn their heads to listen to the central narrator, often contributing a line or two for punctuation or effect. The performers demonstrate careful, attentive, protective listening, perhaps modeling for the audience the calm but intense concentration Silver Stars wants us to bring.

Broken Talkers are known for combining media with live performance, and Silver Stars includes several video clips, projected on an aesthetically pleasing bright white square screen situated behind the performers stage left. In one scene, one of the younger men sits on a chair down center, and puts on large, black-framed glasses with eyes painted on the lenses in that psychedelic black and white swirling pattern that makes them appear to both actively bore into you and to be quite vacant and dead. The performer sits with his back to the audience as he’s filmed by a live video feed provided by a camera operator situated in the wings. His face is projected onto the screen as he tells his story, distancing the audience but in some ways making his account that much more intimate because the live projection brings him closer to us at the same time.

Some of the men are dressed formally in suits and ties, while others wear jeans and sweaters, standing with their hands tucked into their pockets. The men, throughout, are strikingly still; they move only occasionally, creating various groupings to which they walk with slow determination, in some ways illustrating how they left Ireland to find lives more accommodating to their gay desires. Sometimes they stand together, ranging across platforms that stagger their heights; sometimes, they stand across the stage distinct and alone, but maintaining that intense quality of listening that connects them in an invisible but unbreakable web.

Ironically, the actual stories are the least memorable aspect of Silver Stars. The names of the men in the are are projected on the video screen before each narrative, which describe parents disgusted by their sexual preferences who banish them from the family home, later to regret their actions. One story, in fact, is told by parents, Irish but living in America, videotaped sitting side by side in matching arm chairs, who describe how they couldn’t abide their son’s sexuality until he told them he was dying of AIDS. Only then could his father, in particular, set aside his distaste and figure out how to love his son regardless. He castigates himself for his narrow-mindedness, and describes how close he and his son became in the four remaining years of his life. The father’s unmediated grief and shame in his own behavior is poignant and raw, even on tape, and his wife, in a thicker Irish brogue, is nearly inarticulate with her own loss.

The stories delivered live by the performers for some reason stuck with me less. One relates how his lover, too, died of AIDS, how they’d always been together, an unbreakable pair whose names were inevitably linked in friends’ conversations, and the gaping absence left by his lover’s untimely death. Another story describes a young man leaving Ireland to find his sexual identity elsewhere, meeting two men on a train who take him under their wing, treat him to an adventure of gourmet food, elite hotels, and brilliant meetings with handsome men. His new companions turn out to be Benedictine monks, who bring him back to their monastery, where he finds these men have formed a beautiful, erotic, aesthetic community in which to live happily and with great devotion.

Each of the stories delivers its own poignant slice of life, most with the same elegiac, mournful or vaguely astonished happy tone, hitting their assigned marks both physically and emotionally before the performers fall back into their collective community. They take good care with one another and with the words they share, and the audience watches and listens with great respect. Because Under the Radar Festival, which produced the production, takes pains in the program to tell us they’re not really actors, it’s easy to admire the performers’ candor and bravery, as gay men willing to take the stage to tell stories about their lives or those similar to their own. Backed with graceful, mournful music that follows them along protectively and occasionally lets them sing or keen together, the men dutifully deliver the news that gay men in Ireland, even today, remain marginalized and too often despised. Silver Stars demonstrates how this particular group has put their lives together anyway, and lived, literally, to tell the tale.

The audience with which I saw Silver Stars at the Public was sympathetic and generous, inclined to listen intently and to witness these narratives as the men on stage did for one another. At the end of the performance, as people trickled out of the large Newman Theatre, the performers appeared back on the stage, coming out in the house to greet friends and acquaintances. Someone asked that they assemble for a photograph, and they formed a line on stage with their arms around one another’s waists, for the first time all evening smiling happily and proudly.

I was glad to witness that extra-theatrical moment, because it clarified the event’s personal importance for the performers. Watching them get their pictures taken felt like being in a high school auditorium after the senior play, when the actors are relieved at getting through their show, happy for the attention, grateful for the presence of their friends and families. Seeing these men gather, and watching their friends celebrate them, helped me recall that community-based theatre like Silver Stars is so important to people’s lives, not just for the stories it shares but for how it provides an opportunity for people like these ten men to stand within those stories, to justify and take pride in the lives they present in ways that few other social rituals provide. I was proud to be there.

The Feminist Spectator

Or, at the Women's Project

Maggie Siff and Andy Paris in Or,

Or, (spelled with the punctuation intact as Or,), the recently-closed first production of the 2009-2010 season at the Women’s Project, is a delightful romp. Based on the life of Aphra Behn, Liz Duffy Adams’s lively, contemporary interpretation is full of highly theatrical devices and whimsical plot turns. The production, directed with fluid energy by Wendy McClellan, boasts three of the most appealing performances I’ve seen all year.

Behn was the English Restoration playwright known for writing bawdy comedies in the style of her 1660 moment, who also had a double life as a spy (code name “Astrea”) for the Empire. She was one of the first women to write publicly for the stage.

In a prologue typical of Restoration comedy, addressed directly to Or,’s audience, actor Kelly Hutchinson stands by a ghost light center stage and speaks to spectators as herself. She describes how the play we’re about to see will straddle different moments in history—from 1660 to 1960 to “now”—and brook utter disregard for binaries like male and female, gay and straight, night and day, and other common terms and ideas typically held in opposition. Hutchinson’s costume mixes historical and modern dress, and her speech, although in verse, is entirely contemporary and colloquial.

After her warm greeting, Hutchinson disappears with the ghost light to reveal a simple set: a 1660s-style writing table and chair down stage right; a multi-purpose ottoman and wardrobe stage left, both of which assume various uses throughout the production; and a requisite double door center stage, through which the two supporting principles (Hutchinson and Gian Murray Gianino—who replaced Andy Paris—both of whom masterfully cycle through multiple roles) come and go in their various guises (and disguises).

Aphra Behn, the lady of the hour, settles in at her desk with familiarity, ease, and a voracious need to write, delighted to be in the chair to which she obviously loves to retire. Played with charm, wit, and a flirtatious intelligence by Maggie Siff (of tv’s Mad Men), Or,’s Behn is a portrait of a woman defined by her work, who’s never happier than when she has a pen in her hand.

Adams’s portrait of the artist as a dedicated woman scribe underlines Behn’s historical status as a forgotten woman playwright recovered by scholars during second wave U.S. feminism in the mid-70s and 80s. Behn’s play, The Rover, in fact, has been parsed by feminist performance scholars like Elin Diamond for the ways in which it both hews to and pushes against the conventions of the form. In Or, Behn is a firecracker, sexually adventurous and open, confined to her boudoir by a society that can’t quite fathom the conjunction of “woman” and “writer,” terms usually kept apart by the conjunction that names the play.

Behn’s magnetism draws people to her. In Or, she’s approached to satisfy the emotional and physical whims of both King Charles II, who visits her at first disguised, to suggest a liaison, and then by Nell Gwynne, the actor known for her wit and style as an performer on the Restoration stage, as well as for her role as mistress to the King. Adams fancies Gwynne as a happily bisexual woman who makes love to Behn and later shares her bed with the King, whom Behn offers her with the magnanimity of someone who can take or leave the mechanics of heterosexual sex.

The trio’s polymorphously perverse ménage a trios is set, in the end, against the psychedelic backdrop of a scrim painted like a Peter Max poster, with a rich splash of primary and pastel colors drawn in the rounded cartoon-style hand of the 1960s black-light posters under which people listened to Pink Floyd and smoked weed.

The characters speak in a wonderful mash-up of idioms from 1660s blank verse, to 1960s colloquialisms, to contemporary references to, for example, a faltering economy, while their clothing quotes the style and cut of Restoration cloth. The King first presents himself to Behn as a kind of bandit, wearing a black velvet half-mask through which his eyes roll and roam with comic precision. His black cape and velveteen rounded hat make him appear aristocratic against Behn’s simple white dress, with its gathered bodice and soft folds. Nell Gwynne, on the other hand, wears functional breeches and a loose white shirt, the flowing costume of a free-spirited artist comfortable with her body from within and without, watching herself as she is accustomed to being watched by others.

Part of the fun of Or, is how quickly these characters hook up (as their liaisons would now be called). After quick exchanges of pleasantries, Charles and Gwynne both profess their love for and attraction to Behn, who requites both of them with easy amusement. Both her suitors kiss her, caress her, and hold her, attention to which she submits until her desk and her quill pen call her back to her work. In fact, Behn demonstrations through her actions that her work holds more allure than sex.

Invited through the door in the upstage center of the set to come to bed with either partner, Behn is willing, but not until she scribbles one more line or two on her sheaf of parchment paper. Her suitors wait, happily. In this idyllic world, there’s no end to desire and lust, but it’s matter-of-fact rather than urgent, and always concedes to Behn’s need to work. Or, as a result, becomes a play about a woman with agency, who writes her life as she lives it (and likewise lives what she writes).

The two supporting actors rotate through multiple roles in short order, providing much of the production’s comedy. Hutchinson primarily plays Gwynne, but also appears as Maria, the trusty and crusty servant, for which Hutchinson adopts a lower-class accent and a stooped posture to deliver the old woman’s pungent observations. Gianino, along with his role as Charles, plays Behn’s ne’er-do-well former consort, William, who arrives at her chambers intent on bilking her of whatever funds to which he can lay claim. Because he has to hide his presence, Will spends a lot of time popping in and out of the wardrobe, which gives Gianino time to make the quick changes that allow the actor to reappear almost instantly on the other side of the stage as the King. Only the occasionally awry hairpiece indicates the arduous transitions made backstage

Gianino accomplishes the character transformations in a style made famous by Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatre, comic methods for multiple role-playing popularized in his much-produced The Mystery of Irma Vep. A fake arm in the wardrobe, for instance, makes it seem as though William is still in there as Charles woos Behn by her desk. Gianino also offers a funny turn as a theatre-company-owning dowager, Lady Davenant, wearing a towering wig and a complicated, layered pink dress that can’t quite disguise his height or his manly mass. Gianino’s quite game to distinguish among his characters’ genders and sexual overtones, so that each one he plays maintains their own kind of dignity, even as the costume of the other peaks out from beneath the hem of his dress.

The 90-minute Or, is an evening of good fun written with such wit and charm and played with such good humor and good faith that the production is irresistible. As the lovers form themselves into a happy ménage-a-trois, the stage fills with good will and the attractions of relationships built on fellowship and mutual attraction. Despite what we know of the 1960s sexual revolution, in which men were much more liberated by revolving partners and sexual licentiousness than women, in Adams’s version, Behn is the fulcrum of the trio, and the women are full of agency, desire, choice, and affection, and as sexually and emotionally fulfilled as the men.

McClellan moves the production along with ease and verve, so that although the action plays out on one simple set, it seems as though the characters are always moving along, that something momentous is always happening. Her direction exemplifies the play’s overlapping time frames—she moves us across time and space imaginatively and effortlessly, keeping the energy and spirits high. One moment, we seem squarely in the 1660s; in the next, Janis Joplin’s electric wail covers a scene break, and we’re recalled to the 1960s. The music, in fact, gilds the production with nostalgia and pleasure.

Siff gives a lovely, specific and grounded performance as Behn. She winks at the audience, bringing us along with the play’s jokes and fun. She scribbles happily at her work, bent over her desk with as much pleasure as she derives from her suitors’ kisses. All three performers, directed by McClellan with perfect pace, pitch, and possession, look like they’re having a great deal of infectious fun. The three share their happy kisses, forming the gestus of love without that dread conjunction “or.”

In its happy time-confusing world of 1660/1960/now that Duffy Adams creates with such pleasure, Or, is a play that’s ultimately about both/and.

The Feminist Spectator

The Good Wife

Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi on The Good Wife

CBS’s new prime-time series showcases the considerable talents of Julianna Margulies, who stars as Alicia Florrick, wife of a Chicago District Attorney who’s been jailed on corruption charges for which he might or might not be framed, and for consorting with a prostitute, evidence of which is plastered all over the local news. Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), sits in jail trying to work the angles to which he had access on the outside, while his beleaguered and beautiful wife returns to work as a lawyer in a firm run by one of her old school mates, Will Garvin (Josh Charles), and his haughty and hard partner/nemesis, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski).

In The Good Wife’s conceit, Alicia’s work as an attorney excels because of her unusual ability to empathize with people, and because of her sharp intelligence and steely resolve, all softened by a feminine, struggling-not-to-appear-hurt-and-damaged exterior. She also has an intuitive ability to think out of the box, often sensing that a case the other lawyers want to reject as unwinnable can actually be defended successfully. In that regard, The Good Wife trades on its star’s/character’s feminine wiles, but in other ways, the show’s writers let Alicia be much more than the superficially and stereotypically good wife/mother/woman, sometimes raising pertinent questions about just what constitutes “good.”

Margulies, who hasn’t performed in a prime-time series since her star-making turn on ER back in the day, is wonderful in the title role on The Good Wife. Alicia is a soft-spoken woman; most of Margulies’s acting is non-verbal. She reacts with a look, a subtle raise of her eyebrows or narrowing of her eyelids; emotion registers on her face almost imperceptibly. She’s a woman nearing middle-age, who’s been publicly humiliated by her husband’s malfeasance, and even more, by his dalliance with the prostitute, which is highly publicized in tandem with his conviction.

Instead of proceeding chronologically, the series establishes the barest bones of its back-story and thrusts Alicia into the present, where she’s learning how to be a single mother with two sullen and upset teenaged children, tended to by her husband’s mother, a tight-lipped upper-crust woman who disapproves of Alicia’s job and who’s loyal to her son at all costs. While Alicia debates what she thinks is true or not, her mother-in-law asserts her own version of her son’s story, and judges Alicia for her unwillingness to unquestioningly stand by her man.

Digital images of Peter and his prostitute seem easily available on the internet and television. Even Alicia’s kids easily find evidence and—confused and betrayed—watch video of their father enjoying his soft-porn dalliances. Alicia can’t bring herself to watch the whole scene, although she obsessively returns to various images of her husband in flagrante delicto, and then literally covers her eyes as the grainy images play. The series keeps her very public humiliation in the forefront of the story, so that mid-way through its first season, Alicia still hasn’t watched the whole scene.

Her husband’s betrayal, given his status on the Chicago political scene where the series plays out, thrusts Alicia into a kind of high visibility public sphere to which she’s clearly unaccustomed. Watching her navigate and find her own strength and dignity in the face of low-brow and prurient public mud-slinging is one of the show’s many pleasures. Alicia Florrick is a character to emulate—she’s moral but flexible, smart but sexy, creative but ethical. She gets the job done in the best way possible and her achievements, by each episode’s end, are celebrated and admired.

A basic pattern repeats week-to-week. Alicia’s firm lands a complicated case, in which underdog seems poised to be vanquished. Her superiors put Alicia in charge, often to test her, as the firm has only one spot open for a junior partner, and she’s required to compete with Cary (Matt Czuchry) a hungry, ambitious young white boy lawyer whose slick confidence contrasts nicely with Alicia’s ambivalent, tentative approach to her return to the rigors of lawyering. Because she’s not a conventional legal shark, Alicia connects with defendants more personally. They trust her and tell her things, or she understands them intuitively in ways that let her read the truth of their situations. Alicia’s high visibility in the press attracts clients to the firm; they request that she represent them because they know her own plight will make her effective defending their own.

Bemused but willing, Alicia steps up each week, and usually wins her cases through some unusual observation or creative choice about how to structure the defense. She often wins the grudging admiration of Baranski ‘s character, Diane, who clearly favors Alicia’s competition, Cary, for junior partner (although in a recent episode, she softens toward her after Alicia comes to her for advice and lets Diane prove that she’s ethical after all).

Will, on the other hand, tends a bit of a flame for Alicia, and remains staunchly supportive of her return to legal practice. The growing sexual tension between them gives the series the de rigueur romantic possibility in which to ground its weekly stories of the little guy vanquishing corporate wrong-doings or government greed. But to its writers’ credit, The Good Wife isn’t rushing Will and Alicia into an affair, but lets them circle one another cautiously, advancing and retreating multiple times in each episode.

In many ways, Alicia finds herself in a world not of her own making; it’s not clear she would be working if her husband weren’t in jail. But her very reluctance to fully embrace the world in which she’s now excelling makes her an appealing character. She’s exactly not one of those bracing, aggressive female assistant district attorneys who’ve cycled through each of the Law and Order series. She’s a woman with an unraveling, precarious domestic life; a now-cautious relationship with her incarcerated husband; a mother-in-law on whom she’s forced to depend, even though the two women don’t like one another very much; and two teenage children whose reactions to their father’s betrayal she also needs to supervise and manage.

Alicia’s reluctant success illustrates the pull of the professional for upper-middle-class women who’ve for one reason or another opted to stay home (and had the financial means to do so). I’m hoping that over the course of the series, The Good Wife won’t trade in tired tropes about women “having it all,” but will instead use its main character’s complexity to illustrate the contradictions and conflicts in how American society—even in the second decade of the 21^st century—judges women who are wives, mothers, and professionals making their way in the world.

Instead of fashioning the character as a heroine who juggles her conflicting tasks and situations with obvious élan, Alicia’s flaws and contradictions and tentative choices make her much more interesting. She has deeply ambivalent feelings about her charismatic husband, whom she visits in his minimum security prison and with whom she gradually rebuilds a very tenuous kind of trust. Peter offers her information from his various contacts that can be helpful to her cases; he seems to be the hub of a very fast wheel with multiple overlapping spokes. He’s eager to make amends for his bad behavior, but Alicia resists the information he tries to feed her, at the same time gradually understanding the depth of complex political systems of favors and pay-backs in which he’s made his career, and in which she now finds herself embroiled.

Ironically, from his rather cushy incarceration, Peter becomes Alicia’s mentor. In spite of her resentment and rage at his betrayal, she knows he can teach her things about how to succeed with the cases she builds. On the other hand, because of his notoriety, she can’t enter a courtroom anonymously; every judge she faces and every prosecuting attorney she battles knows her history. They all look at her through their own distaste for her husband, their desire for vengeance, or their prurient interest in how she’s holding up under such public humiliation. That Alicia insists she be treated as her own person, and unfailingly rejects everyone’s presumptions, is part of the show’s feminist appeal.

The writers temper Alicia’s strength and determination with an appealing fragility that she tries to hide, knowing that it won’t get her far in her law firm’s shark-pool. Yet that very humanity makes her effective as a litigator. She treats her clients like real people, and invariably learns information that her more hard-boiled colleagues miss.

Her partner in each escapade is Kalinda (the terrific Archie Panjabi), the private detective on retainer to the firm who is wry and skeptical and knows just how to extract useful information. Kalinda provides a counterpart to Alicia’s more insistently straightforward, ethical attorney. Their tentative friendship, which develops over the first season into a fierce loyalty, lets The Good Wife explore a relationship between female colleagues often foreclosed by more conventional law and order series.

Who wouldn’t have wanted to see Alex, the DA, and Olivia Benson, the detective, on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit spend more face time (especially after Stephanie March’s electric exit from the show several seasons ago, in a staged murder that found Benson obviously caring for and mourning the colleague she believed dead)? Who wouldn’t have wanted to see the revolving door of female actors/characters who’ve played Sam Waterson’s side-kick on the original Law and Order actually have female friends and colleagues, instead of the witchy female judges that more often berated them for perceived ineptitude and left them hanging in a world of unsympathetic men?

What a surprise it was when Serena Southerlyn (Elizabeth Rohm), dismissed from her job (and Rohm from her recurring role), worried that she had been discriminated against because she was a lesbian. Her private life hadn’t once been written into her role.

As a result, seeing Alicia and Kalinda develop a mutually beneficial professional relationship that’s enhanced by their grudging personal respect sets a new benchmark for female friendships on television dramas. Baranski’s Diane, on the other hand, has for most of the first season served as the resident ball-breaking shrew, in contrast to whom Josh Charles’s Will seems positively feminine and empathetic. That Will and Alicia are old school chums threatens Diane, whose cutthroat ethos doesn’t trust that Will can keep his feelings for Alicia disentangled from the firm’s high-stakes business.

On the other hand, Cary, the young white male tiger who the partners have established as Alicia’s man to beat for a permanent spot in the firm, has grown over the first season from a single-minded competitor to a more sympathetic colleague who can’t help but admire Alicia’s grit. To the writers’ credit, Cary and Alicia’s initial competition has resolved into a partnership in which they, too, help one another more often than not. That the unlikely pair has developed a grudging respect keeps The Good Wife from relying on gender- and age-based stereotypes about effective (at least on tv) lawyering.

Diane got her own moment of more complex character-based drama on an episode toward the end of the first season, which guest starred Kate Burton as a female judge who’s made her own political compromises to maintain her power and position. When Burton’s character and her minions approach Diane about running for a judgeship, Baranski plays Diane as flattered and pleased, taken in by the opprobrium of a woman senior to herself.

But in a parallel plot, Alicia uncovers evidence of corruption in another judge, who happens to be Will’s friend, and takes her quandary to Diane. When Diane shows her more ethical side, and refuses to take Alicia off the case as Burton’s character requests, Diane is shown the door by the local political machine that wanted to place her on the bench. The episode gave Baranski a chance to show Diane with more depth and thoughtfulness than usual, since she’s more often than not posing in power suits that make her look like a scowling dominatrix.

Margulies’s long-suffering affect, honed to perfection all those years on ER, is shaded here with more emotional nuance, which makes the character and Margulies’s acting much more interesting. Alicia, unlike Nurse Carol, has an ever-strengthening back bone. The more independent she’s forced to be, the stronger she becomes. Although the complexities of her single-motherhood are mitigated by her very upper-class status and her mother-in-law’s willingness to help (however much friction that causes Alicia and her children), she’s still a middle-aged (albeit gorgeous) woman finding her way in a professional world, and refusing to give up her humanity to succeed.

The Good Wife is one of the year’s most successful new series, nominated for several Golden Globe Awards and picked up for another season. If other networks develop clones, perhaps more roles will be written for middle-aged women who aren’t just mothers or mistresses, but who are professionals with complex emotional back-stories and complicated choices that make them unpredictable and compelling (see, for only one example, Edie Falco’s title character on Nurse Jackie). Here’s hoping.

The Feminist Spectator