Lost Lounge

This elegiac evening with Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and musician Vivian Stoll is a beautiful meditation on change, loss, and aging, delivered as a Sid Caesar/Imogene Coco- or Mike Nichols/Elaine May- style lounge act with post-modern stylings. In Dixon Place’s expansive basement black-box theatre—excavated, as Shaw and Weaver imagine, from three stories of layered dirt—the inimitable lesbian pair and their musical partner trade songs and repartee against a visual and sonic backdrop of the city being demolished and (presumably) reconstructed in unrecognizable ways. The images never picture the new; they only show us the wreckage, through an aperture that expands as the evening progresses. Lost Lounge testifies to the past, keeping its view of the present and the future only rueful.

The show is melancholic, the laughs wistful and poignant. Seeing the performance just a day or two after the death of Ellen Stewart, the doyenne of New York’s downtown theatre scene, made the performance even more of a testimony to time’s passing, an even more nostalgic, slightly doleful examination of life’s fleeting.

Before the show begins, as the audience waits upstairs in Dixon Place’s own small lounge, Shaw mingles, asking people what they miss about New York (be it a person or a building) and taking notes on small pieces of square white paper. Dressed formally in a black tux and cumberbund, with a lively black and white bow tie topping her on-going illusion of gentlemanliness, Shaw is a woman with a mission—she chats, but she’s collecting impressions, ideas, words, names. When the audience descends to the theatre, Shaw accompanies us.

Weaver is pre-set, sitting on a black wooden stool and slumped against the black wire bar that’s the evening’s only set piece. Weaver wears a wide black-and-white horizontally striped dress adorned with excessive petticoats, a black velvet bodice, and a décolletage deep enough to store some of her (and our) secrets.

Stoll, too, is already present, standing sentinel by her electronic keyboard, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, white against her purple-black dinner jacket. Throughout the short evening, she plays, sometimes 1950s standards to which Shaw and Weaver sing in off-key, heartfelt renditions, sometimes instrumentals, wistful melodies that set the evening’s scene and its tone.

The “lounge” act provides the evening’s conceit and its structure, while “lost” provides its theme. Shaw and Weaver play—although Lost Lounge is in some ways a “reality” show—an embattled duo who’ve worked together long enough to be able to predict one another’s moves and motives, whose long-term relationship chafes just enough to give their act a testy edge. In fact, when Weaver turns her back, Shaw flicks folded up bits of paper at her, whether to get her attention or to annoy her.

Weaver and Shaw have explored these themes before in their duets as Split Britches (they formed the influential, historic feminist performance troupe with Deb Margolin in the early 80s, and now use the name themselves). Their work together—It’s a Small House and We Live in it Always, for example—often tracks the emotional complications of a once romantic, life-long working relationship.

But the performance of on-stage intimacy takes on new poignancy in Lost Lounge, in part because Shaw and Weaver are now squarely middle-age, and in part because they perform their own longevity and their relationship’s changes against the backdrop of a city transforming in ways they mourn.

The video projections of demolition and deconstruction and the clanging, beeping sounds of jackhammers and dump trucks backing up and moving out also evoke the work that’s been on-going at Ground Zero for the last 10 years. But it also recalls the rest of downtown Manhattan and its many, if less cataclysmic, losses. When, at the show’s end, the performers read the slips of paper Shaw collected from us in the lobby, describing what and who we miss, we hear people refer to restaurants and other neighborhood locales that no longer exist, as well as people (more than one referred to Stewart’s death).

Weaver expresses her own astonishment at how quickly these changes are wrought. One day, she remarks, the Bowery mainstay Marion’s is there, flourishing, and the next, the neighborhood restaurant is just . . . gone. Spectators hiss at the mention of NYU, whose corporate expansion plans have changed much of the West and East Village into a student dorm.

Lost Lounge mourns these changes, but at the same time, it celebrates what endures. Weaver and Shaw (or their “characters”) might harp at one another, but they’re there, witnessing one another’s solo performance turns and helping one another with grace, respect, and love. One of the evening’s loveliest numbers is meant to be funny—and generates a few laughs and no doubt a lot of smiles—but it’s also deeply moving: Shaw and Weaver dance, partnering one another through iconic ballroom dancing poses and moves. But they need assistance to carry it off; instead of accomplishing the bends and lifts and twirls with which a younger couple might display their virtuosity, the ubiquitous black stool is used as an assistive dancing device for those whose bones and muscles and tendons can’t emulate those movements without it.

Weaver lays across the stool as she falls back into Shaw’s arms in a conventional swoon, and rather than lifting Weaver when she leaps, Shaw holds up the stool. Weaver reaches up toward it, representing, rather than executing, the balletic moves of a conventional romantic duet. The partners accomplish the scene with the wink and nod that’s the signature of Lost Lounge, but its elegiac implications are inescapable. These performers are aging women, whose bodies can’t quite realize everything for which their imaginations continue to wish. And yet at the same time, they’re observant, mordant, and smart, prodding us to see what’s lost and what’s gained in the inexorable progress of personal and public history.

Shaw and Weaver have always been very physical performers, actors who devise their own choreography (with help from Stormy Brandenberger) and dialogue, fashioning their numbers from a wish-list of images, ideas, and issues to which their desires lead them. Lost Lounge lets them mash up the crooning melodies of lounge singers (one of their best duets is “Autumn Leaves”) with the direct address of stand-up comics, combined with the feminist insights of the political project that always grounds their work.

Their career-long interventions in conventional gender performance and the signs of sexuality continue to flourish here, as Shaw’s mercurial gentleman courts and cares for Weaver’s femme dynamo. Shaw runs through her quintessential poses, arms up in the air, Richard Nixon-style, pointing and punctuating, fiery and present. Weaver is a solid, dependable presence, hands on her hips around her big hoop skirt, casting her ironic gaze in our direction.

Both performers get down and dirty. Shaw lies on the floor close to the top of the show to listen, she says, to the sounds of the earth, and Weaver falls to the ground later on, her petticoats awry, to deliver a ruminative monologue. They aren’t ginger with themselves—Weaver and Shaw’s whole-hearted physical investment continues to be risky and delightful, a model for how to dispense with fear of foolishness.

These two have always been clowns of a sort, but rather than playing for laughs, they play for insights, creating a community of presumptively like-minded folks. We’re something of a coterie crowd, the audience at this performance, an assumption borne out when Shaw, Weaver, and Stoll read what spectators miss about New York, and the performers, invariably, nod in recognition and agreement. Shaw and Weaver see the world through the unique, productive perspective of people who’ve been around the block and know its history intimately.

A palpable sense of “then and now” infuses Lost Lounge. But Shaw and Weaver don’t intend to chastise those who know the present better than the past, but rather to suggest a kind of costs-benefits analysis of what happens when time passes, when neighborhoods change, when the small get devoured by the large.

Lost Lounge is finally a generous gesture, an opportunity, Weaver tells us, for us to “rest,” since we so rarely get the chance. In fact, the show moves more slowly than much of their other work; several times, a big digital clock is projected on the screen behind the performers, and they stand, silently, while a few minutes tick by in something of a doomsday countdown. Or perhaps it’s just a time-out, a real rest, an opportunity to truly lounge, together, inspired and moved by our favorite lesbian feminist downtown performers, who carry our history and help us imagine our collective future.

The Feminist Spectator

Jomama Jones: Radiate

Jomama Jones: Radiate, an incomparable performance art/concert created by singer-lyricist-performer-playwright Daniel Alexander Jones, is the first downtown theatre must-see experience of 2011. Jones (Jomama and her alter-ego, Daniel Alexander) is a brilliant persona, full of love, light, and beautiful lyrics and stories. The abundance of charisma and good will emanating from the small stage at Soho Rep makes the house feel ten times its size, enlarged by the presence of a personality who could fill a space ten times larger still.

Jomama calls herself a “diva”—in fact, one of Soho Rep’s supplementary “Feed” events is a panel discussion called “What Makes a Diva?” But while she comports herself theatrically, Jomama is far from the imperious narcissism the image implies. Jomama performs herself with the calculated flair of the constructed personality she is—she’s a fiction wholly of Alexander Jones’s creation. But she’s got so much heart, and her interactions with her audience, her back-up singers, and her bandleader are so genuine and generous, it’s easy to forget that she’s not, well, real.

Jomama’s warmth is fueled her delightful singing. She carries her 1980s-brand funk-, R&B-, jazz- and disco-inflected original songs with ease and aplomb, each number revealing a new side of Jomama’s soulful performance stylings. Her dancing is casually choreographed, showing off Jomama’s great legs and beautiful carriage, which are gilded by costumes (designed by Oana Botez-Ban and Ron Cesario) that shimmer and slink and cut across her shoulders on provocative biases. Jomama boasts three different costume changes (as any diva should—the appearance of each new gown is a small, sweet joke in Radiate), each of which heightens her statuesque beauty and its performativity.

Her first dress is white, tight, and short, cut straight to hang halfway down her thighs and loosely across her muscular chest. Her next outfit is steel gray, cut on a diagonal, leaving one shoulder bare and her legs freer, which lets her dance with more abandon. Her last costume is a stately gown that extends down to the floor and up to Jomama’s neck, bringing her more stature than seems possible, given that she already wears staggering platform shoes that help her tower over her companions on stage. When Jomama appears after the show to greet friends and admirers, she’s wearing yet another costume, a feathery, bright red number that seems to make even her huge, round, 1970s Afro glow. To say she cuts a striking figure is a desperate understatement; she’s a wonderfully special effect.

But in performance, her theatricality is also effective. Jomama entertains with joyous, infectious abandon that provokes the audience to shout their approval at the end of each song and to join in the clapping and the moving and grooving while she sings. Jomama is also a woman with a mission; her patter delivers hope and social faith that Alexander Jones carries off without sanctimony or excessive sentiment.

Thanks to Jomama’s ingenuous earnestness, she’s entirely winning as she tells the audience how she left the U.S. for Europe in the 1980s because she didn’t like where the country was heading politically. She’s warily decided to return home to stage her own comeback, and to participate in what she wants to believe is Obama’s on-going culture of change. Jomama handily creates such an ethos in her performance, making an audience of strangers into a community of people she encourages to care for one another, however fleeting our moments of connection. Like a lovely, smart, embodied Tinkerbelle-cum-drag queen, Jomama invites us to make wishes and to believe along with her, and damn if she doesn’t pull it off.

The evening’s magical quality begins as soon as spectators enter Soho Rep, where we’re met near the box office by the spritely Jing Xu, a slight, young performer dressed in a sparkly white costume that seems like a cross between a gymnastics uniform and a riding outfit, a look that seems at once futuristic and fantastical. Clown-white make-up outlines and extends her eyes, which contrasts starkly with her spiky black hair. She encourages us to write a wish on cards she draws from a basket in her arms. Spectators gamely scrawl down their thoughts, leaning up against the theatre’s walls or crouching by chairs to write.

Later in the evening, toward the show’s end, Jomama and her back-up singers, the Sweet Peaches (played deliciously by Sonya Perryman and the dazzling Helga Davis), take turns reading aloud spectators’ wishes. These short desires are by turns comic or sincere, but all are announced with the graceful hope that through community, our wishes can in fact come true.

Jing Xu acts as a kind of Puck figure throughout the evening, welcoming the audience and providing the night’s benediction much in the spirit of Puck’s “If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended . . .” speech at the end of Midsummer. She moves stools on and off the stage for Jomama and the Sweet Peaches, and brings Jomama the occasional glass of water, moving with the fluidity of a dancer and the heightened theatricality of someone who knows she’s collaborating on a charmed event.

The narrow, deep stage at Soho Rep is set and dressed for a concert. Band-leader Bobby Halvorson (who wrote and composed the music with Alexander Jones with help from Sharon Bridgforth, Grisha Coleman, and Amy Hunt) fronts a five-piece band behind a round platform surrounded by sheer white curtains that Jomama and the Sweet Peaches pull around a track to expose and reveal the band and themselves in different configurations throughout the night.

The band and the singers are dressed in neutral shades of white, gray, and khaki which, thanks to lovely lighting designed by Lucrecia Briceno and David Bengali, seem to shimmer and reflect prismatically (occasionally assisted by the disco ball that hangs from the flies like a talisman).

Jomama grounds the heavenly scene, interacting with the musicians, the Sweet Peaches, and what quickly becomes her adoring audience. She’s beautiful, her Afro large, her heels high, her long legs striking, her face handsomely made-up, and her body passing convincingly as female. One of the pleasures of Alexander Jones’s drag, in fact, is how lightly it’s worn. His effortless performance suggests, in fact, that he’s not “crossing” gender so much as embracing a femininity that’s as much a part of him as masculinity. Neither does he parody women.

Alexander Jones’s is a lovely, loving, and lived-in performance that lets him revel in his adornments and use them as a vehicle for affect more than effect. So many drag performances are about surface, about gender as a set of constructed social codes we perform by cultural agreement. But that chestnut of feminist and queer theory isn’t Alexander Jones’s central point. His achievement with Jomama is how he fills in her outline with affective substance, with emotional care and connection that trumpets his (and by extension our) humanity.

Jomama interacts with the audience like a quick-witted stand-up comic. She asks people their names, playing off their responses with good humor and style. The evening feels improvisational, as good concerts do, persuading us that the performer really is with us in the moment and hasn’t told her stories a hundred times before. Kym Moore’s subtle but confident direction helps Jomama establish a physical connection with the audience. She comes off the stage into the house halfway through the show to tell part of her story, standing in the aisle for one of her numbers and shaking people’s hands. In between songs, house lights come up on the audience, so that Jomama and the Sweet Peaches can see who they’re addressing from the stage.

Jomama’s patter relates the story of her come-back. Although the character is fabricated, Alexander Jones appeals to the malleable operations of memory to nearly persuade us that we can remember her original performances in the ‘80s, and to convince us that we’re happy she’s back. In fact, Jomama’s amazing and amusing “realness” brings her fully to life. Alexander Jones believes in his character, and her charisma and caring makes it easy to invest in her presence.

He delivers the cabaret-style act with dialogic panache, a Martin Buber-esque enactment of intersubjective attention that ennobles both speaker and listener. Buber, the Jewish philosopher-theologian, also believed in the “wish” as a kind of performative utterance, something transformative for not just the person wishing, but for the world. Jomama and the Sweet Peaches embody just this sort of potential.

Jomama’s voice beautifully blends male and female sounds into a resonant baritone. Davis and Perryman harmonize gracefully, and provide additional radiant energy and focus that gleams like an aura around their star. Halvorson sometimes joins the trio on stage to sing along. The performers’ musical camaraderie is accomplished, their pleasure contagious.

I saw Jomama Jones: Radiate the day after the New York Times ran its favorable review. Many of the wishes Jomama and the Sweet Peaches read out at the show’s end were from people on the waiting list hoping to get in to see the performance. But Times reviewer David Rooney slightly missed the point of Radiate. He compared Jomama to the drag persona created by Justin Bond for the lounge-singing duo Kiki and Herb. The comparison couldn’t be less apt. Where Kiki is a liquor-soaked harpy at the piano, mercurial as she swings between contrition and vengeance for her difficult life, Jomama’s voice and her presence is all about shining light.

Alexander Jones’s reference isn’t Bond’s Kiki, but divas of color like Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Teena Marie, who graced the world not just with their strength of their voices, but with the size of their souls. Like each of them, Jomama, too, has struggled; Alexander Jones creates her as a woman for whom being in the world requires persistence, faith, and a spirit of grace.

The on-stage world that he conjures, accompanied so ably by Davis, Perryman, and Halvorson’s band, is one of love and hope, embodied in an evening of theatre magic. Alexander Jones’s performance is filled with a sharp theatrical and political intelligence that’s most obvious when he's improvising with the audience. His eyebrows raise, his voice deepens for a moment with interest, empathy, and a wicked wit, and his foot jumps off up the ground just enough to lift his hip in a kind of wry punctuation.

But Jomama doesn’t invest in irony. Her music and her outfits—and in some ways, her outlook—might hail from the ‘80s, but Alexander Jones doesn’t parody her anachronisms. On the contrary, she reminds us of something good and right, something we might reach back to and forward toward all at once, to grasp a pre-terror New York when we could with easy confidence be the community Jomama wishes for us throughout the evening.

It’s impossible not to be affected by Jomama’s example. She radiates the love and hope she wishes for us all.

The Feminist Spectator

A Small Fire

Although it takes a moment or two to pick up speed, Adam Bock’s play at Playwrights Horizons gathers momentum as it hurtles toward a conclusion that might have left me bereft but instead is surprisingly hopeful and heartening. A Small Fire is ultimately about what we can survive without, and how elemental love might become when there’s little left to feel with but your sense of touch. The play works metaphorically as it contemplates the stuff of relationships, but its content is quite brutal. I left the theatre feeling intrigued, but uneasy that once again, a ballsy middle-aged woman seemed to have been punished for leading her own singular life.

Emily Bridges (Michele Pawk) owns a construction company. She works in a man’s field in a man’s way, literally wearing pants and a hard hat, sauntering around construction sites swearing like the best of them. But while she might appear rough, and even upbraids her construction foreman for paying too much for a load of carpet, Bock establishes fairly early that Emily’s got a hidden soul and a basically big heart. Her care, however, is easier to express outside the confines of her small family. For instance, she’s concerned about a worker whose father is ill, and whose cousin was recently killed by a baseball bat wielded by her out-of-control son. But she has a harder time working up interest in her own daughter.

Emily trades stories about the workers with her foreman, Billy, a big teddy-bear of a guy whom she seeks out to trade confidences more often than she does her husband. John Bridges (the always wonderful Reed Birney) is a mild-mannered guy who adores his wife, probably more than she does him, and mediates patiently between her and their daughter, Jenny (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The two women, it seems, have never gotten along, and the daughter’s upcoming marriage to a man Emily expressly dislikes has salted a long-festering wound.

Bock spends perhaps 15 of the play’s 80-minute run time with short scenes of strangely awkward set-up. These small exchanges between two characters at a time aren’t really exposition, because we don't learn a whole lot more than I’ve just shared about these people. Bock establishes that Jenny sides with her father in what she perceives as his bad marriage to her mother. He also indicates that John is happy with Emily, despite Jenny’s projections about her mother’s neglect. More than the family’s past, the first few scenes are in some ways about their future. Jenny and John sit at the kitchen table going over a seating chart for Jenny’s wedding as they discuss Emily and her difficult demeanor. Jenny wants John to leave Emily, a strange desire for a child to express to a parent so openly.

In these initial scenes of both over- and understatement, Bock seems to make his case for why it’s soon going to be okay to cut Emily off at the knees. That’s the only explanation I can think of for these preliminaries, since we don’t know the characters well enough to care about who gets seated next to whom at Jenny’s wedding. Even though Bock notes, in his print interview with Playwrights Horizons’ artistic director Tim Sanford, which is handed out in the theatre lobby, that there are perhaps 80 different characters mentioned in his play, we see only four of them onstage. The others are cited too fleetingly and schematically to inspire empathy or interest. They’re the wallpaper of the Bridges’ lives.

As a result, Bock seems to be telling more than he’s showing in those first few scenes. Even when Emily fails to smell the small fire of the play’s title, which she’s inadvertently started by leaving a napkin near a stove burner, the play’s events seem prosaic.

But that insignificant fire augurs the strange things that start happening to Emily. When she announces that she’s in fact lost her sense of smell and taste, and that the doctor she’s seen can’t do anything for her, the play takes on a new sheen of urgency. Suddenly, the woman who doesn’t fit easily into her husband and daughter’s quotidian domestic world now has physical excuses for feeling alien. Emily can’t taste the wedding cake Jenny brings to her parents’ house for approval. While John revels in its lusciousness, Emily complains that it tastes like chalk. John is disconcerted by his wife’s reaction, but Jenny thinks Emily’s uncharitable response to the dessert represents only how much her mother hates her fiancée.

As Emily abruptly, inexplicably begins to lose her senses, each of John’s is suddenly heightened by comparison. For no apparent reason, as the couple sits at home talking, Emily loses her sight. She comes to Jenny’s wedding anyway, helped into her dressy clothes by her daughter in a moment of mutually uncomfortable physical intimacy. But at the wedding reception, Emily sits alone on a chair, heart-breaking in her new disability, feeling both invisible and conspicuous because she can't navigate away from the chair in which John has placed her.

In one of the play’s most touching scenes, John brings Emily champagne—which she refuses, since she can’t really taste it—and sits beside his wife, holding her hand and recounting the happy events taking place off stage. John vividly and joyfully describes someone catching the wedding bouquet, and the sometimes fraught results of the seating chart he and Jenny prepared earlier. Emily feigns polite interest, but she’s clearly terrified and perplexed by what’s happening to her, and finally admits she needs to go home. Soon after, she suddenly loses her hearing.

Pawk plays Emily with a beautiful mix of compassion, empathy, and irony. She seems to realize that in many ways, her character is more an absurdist symbol than she is flesh and blood. But at the same time, Pawk commits fully and convincingly to the devastated emotional response people must have to losing their senses after a full lifetime of enjoying them. When she realizes her hearing is gone, along with her sight, her smell, and her sense of taste, Pawk plays Emily’s reaction with palpable, wrenching terror.

Bock writes short, small scenes with a compacted emotional tension and energy. Director Trip Cullman moves the four actors gracefully and simply across a suggestive set by Loy Arcenas that allows the scenes to fade quickly into each other, and allows the actors to stay in character as they move from place to place. Pawk and Birney transport their emotions from moment to moment with equal fluidity and grace. If the situation is unconvincing as realism, Bock and Cullman manage to create a poignant Absurdism, one in which John and Emily find their way back to one another almost as a result of their changed circumstances. The play ends—spoiler alert—with this ordinary middle-aged couple having fairly graphic if simulated sex, after which Emily gratefully proclaims that “I’m still in here, John.” Bock and Cullman offer a moving affirmation of how people can continue to connect, even with very little left to go on.

Pawk and Reed manage to wring gravity and nuance from their cipher-like characters, and their chemistry with one another makes them convincing as a long-married couple. They find their way to something essential with one another, despite the adversity Emily’s mysterious deterioration presents and whatever emotional and physical drifting might have predated their new challenges. But what does Bock mean to suggest with these metaphors of loss and disability? What’s his central point? That if we love one another, we can overcome ever-worsening physical and emotional odds? That we need to stand by one another no matter what? That we can rise to the occasion of whatever life throws at us, regardless of how inhumane and horrific are the failings of our bodies and our ever more imminent deaths?

In the play’s best speech, Billy (Victor Williams), the company foreman, tells John that he should see Emily’s predicament as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, as a chance to be “bigger” about his life. It’s a beautiful line (I’ve probably misquoted it here), which I heard it to mean that we can often find reserves in ourselves that don’t ennoble us so much as they open us to new ways of thinking about our lives. John tells Jenny—his small-souled daughter, who can’t bear to deal with her mother’s new inability to communicate or to see her, since Jenny has always felt invisible to Emily—that it’s not what you get from a relationship, it’s what you give that matters.

This might be an overstatement, but Bock uses it as evidence of John’s growth, not into martyred selflessness, but into a dawning understanding that he can do this, that he can indeed enlarge himself, that he can become Emily’s conduit to the world, even as her body conspires to narrow her existence only to what she can touch. Reed plays John’s developing strength beautifully, with quiet empathy and a great deal of grace.

Williams is very good, too, as Billy, the sympathetic foreman who insists on visiting Emily and whose presence, for a moment, brings her back to herself. She can still talk, but the others can only communicate with her by squeezing her hand once for “yes” and twice for “no.” This limits their dialogue; Emily can only ask simple questions or monologue, speaking from the desperate, dark and quiet center of her isolation like someone in a Beckett play.

But when Billy sits beside her on the couch grasping her hand and signaling his responses, the two really seem to be talking, because she’s so glad to see him and their connection is so somehow genuine. The devastating scene underlines the strength of character Emily has lost—for a moment, she’s once again the swaggering, powerful, butch boss-woman whom Billy loves and admires. But then, in the very next moment, she needs help to the bathroom, and she dismisses Billy, humiliated.

Billy tries to relieve John by getting him out of the house, up to Billy’s roof to visit the homing pigeons Billy raises and flies. Their scenes, too, are sweet, if a bit too highly symbolic. The birds determined to find their way back to Billy, even after they’ve been driven long distances and released to test their ability to return, provide an almost too-clear analogy for Emily and John’s trial. But up on his roof, Billy embodies the largess of spirit he wishes for John.

It turns out that Billy is gay, and lost a partner some years ago to AIDS, a story he tells as he’s trying to convince John to take the challenge of Emily’s illness and let it change him for the better. The scene is somewhat surprising; although earlier scenes refer obliquely to Billy’s sexuality, that he talks about his past and present male partners so matter-of-factly is both refreshing and strangely unmotivated. I appreciated Billy’s references to a generation of gay men dying of AIDS; we’re too quickly forgetting the ravages of the 1980s.

The common cause Billy forms with John and Emily reminds his straight friends that others, too, have and will suffer terrifying, compromising, baffling illnesses. But on the other hand, Billy functions as the too saintly, finally external, non-family member, gay character who generously assists the straight couple’s plot trajectory and transformation.

I was moved by A Small Fire, even as I was disconcerted by watching yet another strong, middle-aged female character be stripped of her power and her dignity to serve the purposes of the plot and the playwright’s point. And my colleagues in disability studies would no doubt suggest that Bock’s play is another in a long time of American dramas and films that use disability as a metaphor, rather than examining what it means as a way of being in its own right.

But as a metaphor, Emily and John’s plight stands as a surprisingly moving reminder of how damaged we all are, and how helplessly at the mercy of our inevitably failing bodies. A Small Fire’s contribution, perhaps, is to remind us that our excuses for not rising to the challenge of love and commitment are entirely inadequate. Emily and John discover ways to reconnect and, in the process, Emily finds reasons to stay alive, to stay literally in touch, and to embrace even a compromised intimacy as one for which it’s worth living.

The Feminist Spectator

Angels in America, Part Two

The second half of the Angels revival at the Signature Theatre at proved as satisfying as the first, if not more so, since the story deepens and expands as the play breathes into its ideas and its characters. I love the progress toward a renewed community in Part Two of the play, in which Kushner lets Louis reconnect with Prior and Belize, and in which he imagines that Hannah Pitt (with her chic, notably new haircut) has finally become a permanent part of the men’s lives.

In Greif’s production, as the group sits around the Bethesda fountain in Central Park and Prior delivers his beautiful benediction, Hannah holds a dog-eared copy of The Nation, further indication that she’s not only adopted this complicated city as her new home (and a far cry from Salt Lake it is), but that she’s embraced the more progressive politics of the gay men into whom she’s remade her family. It’s a nice touch, one of the many small details that grace this lovely production.

I did see Christian Borle in Part Two, after enjoying Eric Bryant’s understudy performance as Prior in Part One. Borle brought more of Stephen Spinella’s original camp-inspired energy to the role, but at the same time, enough of the more tempered thoughtfulness that I found so appealing in Bryant’s performance.

Prior and Louis (Zachary Quinto) are mostly at odds in Part Two, which Borle and Quinto play with the kind of lived-in lovers’ sparring that makes the relationship poignant and convincing, even though they’re fighting about Prior’s right to succor and Louis’s moral limitations as a care-taker and partner. Prior doesn’t allow Louis to come home, when he reconsiders his flight from Prior, but he does allow Louis to rejoin their foundational community.

Joe (Bill Heck), on the other hand, along with the blighted Roy Cohn (Frank Wood) who’s his intellectual and political mentor, is the only major male character exiled at the play’s end. His absence under the fountain in the play’s last breath seems notable in this production, partly because thanks to Heck’s terrific, nuanced performance, he’s been such a key force throughout the play. But Joe’s exile from the final tableau demonstrates Kushner’s commitment to a progressive vision of politics. Joe doesn’t reform or change his ideology, even as he accepts his queer sexuality, and for that reason, there’s no room for him in this struggling community of those eager to change not just themselves, but the world—the great work to which Kushner refers at the play’s end.

Harper (Zoe Kazan), too, moves on, in the lovely visual image Greif conceives for this production. The curtains open on her sitting atop two suitcases piled on a set of bookcases, which theatricalizes the plane on which she’s departing from New York. The choice gives Harper height and captures her new-found freedom, but also grounds her in the lives she’s leaving as she flies off to San Francisco with Joe’s credit card securely in her purse, reparations for all she’s suffered that will enable her new life. Kazan delivers her final monologue beautifully, her face open and hopeful as she comes into her own, alone, strong enough to separate from the man and the Mormon community that’s only hampered her agency.

Kushner’s major themes sound resonant in Grief’s production of Part Two: his debate about the need for theory to fuel a revolution; his insistence, despite the hard work of the Angel, that movement forward should triumph over the stasis for which she’s the mouthpiece; and the hope for renewal that can be found in the most quotidian as well as the grandest gestures and choices one makes in a life. I heard those tropes echo through various characters’ speeches and monologues in new ways in this production, and felt Kushner’s motivating faith in progress (and progressive politics) newly hopeful and invigorating.

Part Two continues with the less flashy but more effective choices Greif makes throughout his version of the play. Prior’s visit to heaven, for instance, was staged as a post-apocalyptic spectacle in the Broadway version, with characters dressed in heavy medieval robes and the rubble of history literally strewn across the stage. In Greif’s production, the prophets are played by all the characters/actors but the visiting Prior—Louis, Joe, Hannah, Harper, Belize, and even Roy, are all there, not as themselves but representing history’s messengers and arbiters, the unseen forces that would mold and shake the universe. They wear black choir robes with bright red ties and carnations pinned to their lapels. These prophets group together with clear visual affinity, staggered at various levels across the stage right set. They connect to one another physically, whether by linking hands or by placing touching a shoulder, in gestures of communion and care that make the scene both human and heightened, fluid and stolid. Rather than frightening Prior with their Old Testament vengeance, these prophets seem of him, more saddened than infuriated by his decision to opt for more life. The lovely scene puts all of the actors onstage together in a show of unity, playing the gathering forces of history as hopeful rather than vengeful.

Likewise, the Angel (Robin Weigert, who appears in Part Two in a black version of Part One’s white costume, looking a bit like Natalie Portman as the black swan in Aronofsky’s movie) rings out her prophecies on an appropriately human scale in Part Two. When she visits Prior and Hannah Pitt (Robin Bartlett) in his St. Vincent’s hospital room, the Angel flies in and lands, as Weigert pauses to allow two black-clad stage-hands to unclip her from the cables that support her flight. She walks to Prior’s bed, where Hannah now lays dreaming this visitation, and kisses Hannah softly, prompting the orgasm that lets Hannah come to believe Prior’s vision. With Weigert’s warmth emanating from the moment, and Barlett’s nicely comic reactions fueling the orgasm, the scene plays like the bestowal of a gift, rather than a thunderous, abstracted visitation from on high with sexual and ideological consequences. Change, Greif and his actors seem to suggest, can be quietly cataclysmic, prompted by the most mundane exchanges, and the simplest kiss.

When Prior steps out of the scene in the production’s last moments to address us directly, the audience and the actors are included in his benediction, in Kushner’s fervent belief in the necessity for more life, and in his wish for more great work to always improve what the future might mean.

A mostly new cast goes into the production soon for its extended run—go see it. What a lovely experience of theatre.

The Feminist Spectator

The Town

I’m often still surprised by my own gullibility. My faith in performance (and film and television—in representation, really) means that I’m eager to see a broad swath of cultural productions, and that I read, regularly, other critics, amalgamating their comments and making choices about what to see on that basis. The Town, Ben Affleck’s new film, got very good reviews when it opened last month, and although I missed it in the theatres, I watched it last night at home on pay-per-view.

What was I thinking? And how could I forget that most reviewers (sometimes women, included) don’t watch for the things that preoccupy me—representations of gender, sexuality, race, identity, and all the ways that narratives imagine or reconceive of social relationships. So I spent an evening with The Town, waiting for something interesting to happen to one of its two female characters—both adrift in a sea of men—before I realized that of course nothing would happen.

In this familiar male redemption tale, one woman is the whore, damned to remain a loser drug addict languishing forever in Charlestown, where the story is set, and the other is the Madonna, a Yuppie who’s invaded the neighborhood with her social ideals, her sustainable gardening, and her naïve faith in her own ability to make headway among the heathens. Each of them appears in the story for only one reason: to provide foils for the hero, Doug MacRay (Affleck).

Doug is a failed hockey star, drafted by the national league but unable to last because of his hot temper. He returns to his incestuous Charlestown neighborhood, where he takes up with the band of armed robbers who have been his life-long friends and street mates. Jem (Jeremy Renner) is his best friend, an unreconstructed hellion who despite spending nine years in prison, returns to the life of crime that’s the only one he knows. Jem is also a stock character; he’s the guy who can’t see another future than the doomed trajectory on which he’s been set since his birth.

Doug, on the other hand, left the ‘nabe long enough to see something different on the other side of the highly symbolic bridge that connects Charlestown to Boston. He’s sobered up by the time The Town begins, and although he’s still willing to have quick sex with Jem’s sister, Krista (Blake Lively), whose child might or might not be his, her addition to Oxycodone, cocaine, and alcohol is now despicable to him, the repulsive habits of a life he longs to escape.

In the film’s opening scene, Doug, Jem, and the pair of subsidiary slobs who comprise their merry band rob a bank. The sequence is full of gratuitous violence, with an inexplicable cameo by Victor Garber as the bank manager whom Jem brutally, needlessly beats. The assistant manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall), is enlisted to open the bank’s vault, then kidnapped to provide the robbers some measure of safety (I guess, it’s not clear and mostly serves only as a story device) as they escape. They leave Claire, blindfolded, at the beach, warning her not to open her eyes until she feels the water lapping at her toes, and threaten her with rape and murder if she identifies them to the cops.

The FBI is on to these guys, and scoop Claire up for questioning. Jon Hamm plays the crusading G-man, Special Agent Frawley, who’s determined to track down Doug and his band. He questions Claire, but she can’t identify anything but the tattoo on Jem’s neck, which she saw as he beat her boss. The FBI warns her to stick around, and then Doug comes by, ostensibly to “take care of” her, since Jem worries that she’ll turn them in. But, surprise of all surprises, Doug falls in love with Claire instead, and keeps his real identity secret.

And so continues the hero’s redemption tale, where the essentially good guy with the tragic back story tries to save himself through the love of a good woman. Doug, it seems, was raised by a criminal long incarcerated (Doug tells Claire that his father—played by Chris Cooper—has moved to the suburbs). He thinks his mother ran out on the two of them, a psychic and emotional wound the screenplay uses to explain Doug’s wild side. When it turns out (spoiler alert, but believe me, this plot point comes as no surprise when it’s revealed in the film) that his mother was intentionally overdosed by the local drug lord, Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite, acting with slimy, placid cruelty), for whom Doug’s band contracts heists, Doug gets his revenge and engineers his escape from the Charlestown life that can only, finally, kill him.

All the conventions of the genre flick by at the appropriate moments. Doug wants out; Jem forces him to do one more heist, robbing an armored car driven by a man the band knows is trigger-happy. The botched robbery lands the four men at the FBI for questioning, prompting Doug to speed up the timetable for his departure and his desire to take Claire along. But Fergie has other plans, insisting that Doug and his men rob Fenway Park or he’ll kill Claire.

Forced to cooperate, Doug and Jem carry out the elaborate plan, which goes awry as they try to escape with the cash. Tipped off by Krista, who’s been scorned by Doug, that the men are planning to rob the park, Frawley and his compatriot, Dino (Titus Welliver of The Good Wife fame), set up an ambush that takes the lives of all but Doug. Dressed as a Boston cop, he watches his friends die one by one then saunters off, avenging his mother’s death by killing Fergie and his henchman, then taking Amtrak to Miami to start his new life.

Claire, the lovely idealistic woman who sees Doug’s goodness clearly, forgives him the lie that brought him into her life. Although she’s under surveillance by the FBI, before Doug leaves, through a kind of lover’s code, Claire indicates that she’ll follow him south when the coast clears. Frawley is frustrated by Doug’s getaway; the film’s funniest line has Frawley reminding Claire that his organization is national. But somehow, Doug escapes and Claire, too, is allowed to resume her life, with the hope of reuniting with her on-the-lam lover ever in the air. The film ends on a shot of Affleck as Doug presumably on the coast of Miami, watching the sun set and waiting for Claire to join him in the new, beach-swept life he’s finally achieved.

Ho hum, is all I can say. How many times does this story have to be told? Reviewers applauded Affleck’s authoritative filmmaking and storytelling; okay, fine, he knows how to shoot a getaway scene, and he builds suspense nicely throughout. But he’s delivered this story before in his debut film, Good Will Hunting, in which he was the character who stayed and Matt Damon the one who drove off to a new life elsewhere. Reviewers admire Affleck for getting under the skin of characters they say he knows so well, the Charlestown Irish who are fiercely loyal to their families and friends, for whom their slice of life off of Boston proper is their eternal territory, for whom marrying your buddies’ sisters and starting the cycle up anew for the next generation is considered enough. Sure, Affleck and Damon themselves made good, and Affleck seems to want to honor the neighborhood he knows so well by paying it continual homage in his films (see also 2007’s Gone Baby Gone).

But really, guys. At the end of 2010, can’t we consider the women in this perennial story as something more than agents of the men’s growth? Does Krista really have to be damned, both by snitching on Doug and Jem to exact her own revenge on Doug’s determination to leave her behind, and by her addiction to narcotics and alcohol? And do the feds really have to take her kid away to make the point? Bad girlfriend, bad mother, Krista doesn’t stand a chance.

But Claire, the pure and stalwart, who’s at first fooled by Doug’s impersonation of an upright citizen, but ultimately forgives him when she learns he’s not, because he so wants to be good—can’t that stereotypical character grow into a woman with a bit of agency? When will this stock character ever stand on her own, outside the choices that the hero makes for her? Hall plays Claire with a bit of gumption—she’s the Yuppie interloper in Charlestown, but she’s fearless, even thinks she can cross “the projects” by herself to get to work. But when she tells Doug that she gets harassed on her way through the area, he and Jem take baseball bats or golf clubs to the projects and beat up a couple of guys in revenge. Claire can’t handle anything herself, because the film is only about Doug’s quest to be good and get out.

What a waste. Affleck seems a smart guy. He’s a good actor (although the Charlestown accents he and Renner, as Jem, milk for all they’re worth sound too thick and fake) and an accomplished director. But why put that talent toward such a tired story? How many more times do we have to see the hero escape his doom on the backs of women, one good, one bad, both ultimately disposal?

It’s getting to be a real snore.

The Feminist Spectator

Angels in America

I’d heard mixed things about this production, since people had such strong attachments to the original Broadway version directed by George C. Wolfe, starring Stephen Spinella as Prior and Joe Mantello as Louis, Marcia Gay Harden as Harper and Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn, with Ellen McLaughlin and Kathleen Chalfant and Jeffrey Wright in all the other key roles. In 1993, it felt life-altering to see a gay play (and an overtly Jewish play) in a Broadway theatre, cast as spectacle with no apology for how it represented gay men as the center of the universe in conversation with all the big themes of American democracy.

I remember watching Part One: Millennium Approaches, from the balcony of the Walter Kerr Theatre, thrilled as the acts flew by and stunned when the Angel came crashing through Prior’s ceiling at Part One’s end, with his campy “Very Stephen Spielberg” response ending the evening. I felt like I’d witnessed history being made, and participated in the very same cracking open of time that Kushner goes on to address more overtly in the second part of his epic play.

Michael Greif’s production for Signature Theatre represents the first major revival of Kushner’s play since its Broadway debut. So much has changed in America since 1993, when it opened, and since 1985-86, when the play is set. Even though the left press is accusing Obama of returning to 80s-style Reaganomics with his recent compromise on taxes, we’re a long way from Reagan’s America in 2010. Although the political scene he draws, and Kushner’s incisive critique of democracy, still resonate, the sense of outsiderness that each of the play’s characters evokes has changed dramatically, if not completely.

And yet this production doesn’t quite present Angels as a history lesson, which I think (I’m not sure) is to its credit. That is, the production doesn’t seem particularly set in the 1980s—the costumes seem contemporary, with the exception of the occasional cut of a suit jacket or a particular pair of shoes. This production is full of detail, with each setting crammed with stuff, where the Broadway version was more abstracted and seemed to take place in nearly empty space. But at the Signature, the furniture and the sets are also not necessarily specific to the 1980s, a choice perhaps made to ensure the play’s relevance as we move into the second decade of the new millennium.

Perhaps most jarringly, the actors’ bodies are clearly contemporary. I recall Spinella playing Prior in the ‘90s, and how the audience gasped in unison when he took off his clothes for the scene in which he’s examined by a nurse in the hospital. Spinella was rail thin and his body was covered with prosthetic Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. His portrayal of a man afflicted with advanced stage HIV/AIDS was almost too convincing, and spectators murmured openly with concern not just for Prior’s health, but for the well-being of the actor who played him.

By contrast, Eric Bryant, whom I saw play Prior at the December 24, 2010, performance (he understudied for Christian Borle), looked like the picture of health. His body is muscled and lithe, covered with a reasonable layer of healthy pink flesh that made the fake KS lesions seem too much like the pasted-on representations that they are. Although dark circles were drawn under Bryant’s eyes to make him look ill, believing that he had HIV/AIDS was a stretch, despite convincing performances of cramping and pain that he played scrawled on the stage floor. (Incidentally, I heard the same comments about Borle’s body from friends and colleagues who saw his performance.)

Angels was written well before the protease inhibitor cocktails that have extended the lives of people with HIV/AIDS and even, some say, made it a chronic rather than a fatal disease. Perhaps this 2010 representation of Prior is true to what people with HIV look like now. Perhaps asking the actor to lose 25 pounds to play the role would throw the production into a period verisimilitude that Greif seems to have wanted to avoid. But the choice means something about how HIV/AIDS is represented in 2010, and says something about what the pandemic means now, too. If it’s more difficult to see Prior as doomed in this production, how does Kushner’s play change?

Since Angels was the first Broadway play to take seriously the cost of the AIDS pandemic for gay male communities (Larry Kramer’s earlier, important play The Normal Heart played Off Broadway), the changed status of the disease (at least for those who can afford the life-prolonging treatment) shifts the play’s urgency. (For a terrific history of the representation of the pandemic in American theatre, I highly recommend my friend David Román’s book, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS.)

Likewise, in a political moment in which the president just signed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and when at least in some states in the U.S. and in countries around the world, gay men and lesbians can, if they wish, get married, the status of queer people as an underclass has changed from what it was when the Broadway production of Angels premiered. The play was already a history, even as it made history—that is, it was set six years before the time of its production. Now, we’re nearly 30 years past the dark days of the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and St. Vincent’s Hospital, where so many of those who suffered from the disease in Manhattan went for treatment, has long since been closed.

So what does Angels mean now? Is it just a history lesson for those who weren’t there for one of the most traumatic moments in American politics and culture? Is it a trip into nostalgia of a peculiar kind for those of us who were there? And what of the play’s other themes, its attention to Jewishness, to democracy, to community, and to renewal? When I teach the play now—in courses on American drama, queer theatre, and most recently, Jewish identity and performance—I’m invariably moved by Kushner’s fervor for something better, by his acute intelligence, his inventive theatricality, his ability to interweave so many lives and experiences and come out at the end with a new idea of faith and family that his characters actually try to practice. And I’m moved by the memory of how galvanized I was by what was in the early ‘90s his bold take on gay themes and characters.

Seeing the Signature production, I felt as moved as I am when I reread the play. Greif’s provides a more intimate experience than Wolfe’s. The Signature’s Peter Norton Theatre is small, wide but not that deep, and Greif’s staging uses the extended proscenium to the play’s advantage by setting simultaneous scenes side-by-side and using the apron for transitional moments and “traveling.” Where the Broadway version saw the characters crossing the stage in wide arcs to tease out their interrelationships across the space, the Signature version uses interlocking sets moved about by unconcealed stage-hands that wheel into and away from one another.

I liked this choice more, as it came to represent, as Part One proceeded, the continuum of time and space that preoccupies Kushner, as the sets move together, break apart, swirl around, and return to their place, changed. Even the accumulation of detail in each set—the unpacked boxes in Harper and Joe Pitt’s Brooklyn apartment; the bookcases in Prior and Louis’s place, sharing a wall with Harper and Joe’s; the café where Louis and Belize talk (or where Louis talks and Belize listens), decorated with realistic cups and counters—all of this seemed to evoke the messy chaos of complicated lives as they spiral together and bounce apart. The production feels rooted in quotidian detail, which doesn’t detract from its philosophizing so much as ground it more concretely in the progress of our common lives.

The casting in this production also brings a whole new aspect to the work. Zachary Quinto, as Louis, provides a much more centered eye to this version of the play’s storm. Louis’s neuroses are tamped down in Quinto’s quieter, less flamboyant performance, and he seems to think through his words, instead of just letting them tumble out as Mantello did in the original. As a result, Louis seems a more careful, reflective character, which makes his inability to stick by Prior as he falls ill that much more painful.

Louis’s coffee shop scene with Belize (Billy Porter) retains much of its grim hilarity, as Louis’s political insights pour out alongside the racial insensitivities on which Porter comments by raising his eyebrows with alarm and incredulity. But the scene also demonstrates how hard Louis works intellectually, if not emotionally, to come up with an analysis that lets him move through a very complex life. In Quinto’s hands, Louis is much more empathetic, which gives the play a new emotional resonance.

Porter, in the difficult role of the only person of color in Kushner’s play, presents Belize, too, as grounded in his post-drag queen seriousness and his lingering, cutting campiness. Porter plays Belize less flamboyantly than Jeffrey Wright’s original performance, which brings the character more depth and helps make his outsiderness more poignant.

Bill Heck plays Joe Pitt with moving intensity. He’s slightly less of a pretty face than, for instance, Patrick Wilson, who played the role in Mike Nichol’s 2003 HBO film version of Angels, which somehow makes his own struggles with his sexuality, his fealty to his wife and his religion, and his conservative politics that much more persuasive and compelling. His physical revulsion for Harper (Zoe Kazan) reads palpably here, along with the queer desire he can’t tame or name.

Kazan, as Harper, brings new shadings to the role of the woman driven mad by her husband’s lies. Harper’s scenes draw out much of Kushner’s more theatrical, fantastical imaginings, and Kazan plays them with a thoughtful probity missing from Marcia Gay Harden’s Broadway original or from Mary Louise Parker’s HBO performance in the role. Kazan is a slight young woman with an appealing, round, open face. Heck, as Joe, towers over her, a physical demonstration of their power differential. But Kazan’s thoughtfulness gives her more power than most Harpers I’ve seen—she doesn’t fold as easily in the face of Joe’s cruelty and dissembling.

Greif’s staging allows Harper’s and Prior’s scenes to actually intermingle on the small Signature stage. Where Wolfe had the two characters meet in the middle of what felt like a vast, abstracted Broadway proscenium to play out their fantastical encounters, Greif moves Harper into Prior’s apartment and hospital room as their parallel scenes proceed. Although the choice might be less theatrical and spectacular than Wolfe’s broader staging, these scenes become more intimate and human in Greif’s conception of the play.

Harper and Prior don’t seem quite as unhinged, their visions less mad than melancholy and poignant. They see one another as soul mates in their mutual loss and uncertainty, and perform their brief encounters with mutual admiration and affection. Greif’s direction might not emphasize the pageantry or “fantasia” of Kushner’s play the way Wolfe’s did, but I found myself quite moved by the more quotidian-scale interactions among the characters. It’s almost as if Wolfe directed the original Angels as a big, presentational Broadway musical, while Greif directs it as a canonical straight play.

Bryant, standing in for Borle at the performance I saw, was wonderful as Prior. Although he’s a specimen of perfect health, and not quite convincing as a young man dying of HIV/AIDS, Bryant dignified Prior’s vulnerable neediness and brought a sweetness to his portrayal that made Prior less a campy queen than a sad, sometimes angry, more whimsical gay man muddling through the hand he’s dealt.

History’s revolutions since the play’s Broadway debut in 1993 seem most obvious with this new Prior. When Part One rings down with the Angel of History breaking through the ceiling of his apartment to announce that the great work begins, Prior famously exclaims, “Very Stephen Spielberg.” Spinella played this remark in the original production as high camp, but Bryant delivers it with a kind of wonder, a shift in tone that seems to signal the wholesale difference of 2010 from 1993. Camp and irony as a response to the cataclysmic HIV/AIDS pandemic don’t read the same way now as they did then.

The campy spectacle of the whole play, in fact, is toned down in Greif’s production, which seems to me a sensible reinterpretation for a new age. Even the Angel (Robin Weigert) is more human here than the abstracted, mythic figure portrayed by Ellen McLaughlin on Broadway. What seems to be an inherent goodness and warmth emanates from Weigert’s face as the Angel. Rather than a frightening godhead determined to stop the flow of time, this Angel seems a happily revivifying visitor, a good fairy rather than an evil harbinger of pending doom.

The wires on which Weigert flies in are obvious in Greif’s production. The Angel moves on a pulley system nearly to the lip of the apron, rather than floating in the upstage right corner of the scene where Wolfe put McLaughlin. She’s less remote, as a result, and more alive, less foreboding and more entrancing. (On this, for one of the first times ever, I seem to agree with Ben Brantley, in his October 28, 2010, New York Times review of the production.) I don’t know what this shift will mean for Part Two: Petestroika, but I’m eager to see.

Robin Bartlett, as the formidable Hannah Pitt, is off to a good start in Part One, although it’s difficult to erase the memory of the wonderful Kathleen Chalfant in the ensemble of roles Bartlett now assumes. Frank Wood, as Roy Cohn, brings perhaps the most captivating change of tone to his role, playing Cohn as a slithering snake, running his tongue constantly across his lips between the very wet deliveries of his lines. Cohn’s predatory sexuality reads very clearly in Wood’s performance, but his Jewishness—which seems highlighted by Wood’s choices—is repulsive in newly unsettling ways.

By contrast, Quinto, as Louis, barely reads as Jewish at all. Toning down the character’s neuroses, and with it, his excessive hand gestures and speech patterns, Quinto loses some of Louis’s motivating ethnicity. As a result, this version of Angels, so far, seems more about assimilation than about difference—Jewish or gay male or, so far, Mormon, for that matter. I’m not sure that’s the wrong choice for the play, in 2010, as in what I’ve seen already, the production speaks to something more humanist and universal than it did in 1993, when representing gay and Jewish difference on Broadway so complexly seemed like such an historical triumph.

But I’m only halfway through this revival of Angels in America. I see Part Two: Perestroika at the end of this week, and will report back on the grand finale. But I left Part One: Millennium Approaches moved and fed, buoyed by Kushner’s enduring text and by Greif’s intelligent, intimate production.

‘Til then,

The Feminist Spectator

The Black Swan

Natalie Portman deftly defies the genre conventions of what would otherwise be a predictable, unsettling melodrama about an unhinged ballet dancer who goes not so quietly crazy just as her career takes off. Because of Portman’s uncanny empathy for her character, the over-the-top camera angles and story lines of Darren Aronofsky’s The Black Swan aren’t quite as irritating as they might be without a lead actor who brings such nuanced insight and intuition to the role.

Portman’s plays Nina, an utterly, single-mindedly devoted ballerina with a prestigious New York City ballet company. Her technique is perfect but she lacks the requisite passion for the leading roles. The company’s artistic director, a French-accented martinet named “Thomas” (but pronounced “Tomah”), rewards Nina by casting her as the white and the black swan in his “avant-garde” production of Swan Lake, but only after he attacks her sexually and she bites his lips defending herself in response.

One of the film’s most interesting insights is into the twisted relationship between male ballet impresarios and their female dancers. Vincent Cassel plays Thomas with a cruel sneer in his upper lip and a leer in his eyes as he challenges Nina to give up her quest for perfection so that she might convincingly portray the evil and seductive Black Swan with the wild abandon he conceives for the role. That he uses his own body against hers to force her to find her strength is part of what Aronofsky’s film wants to critique, but also partly what makes watching it uncomfortable. Thomas doesn’t even pretend there’s any other way to “get” the performance he wants from his star but to sexually humiliate her publicly and to push her physical boundaries privately. Nina wants the role so badly she’ll do anything to get it and then keep it, even as she becomes more and more deranged. As her relationship with Thomas gets more and more entwined, she begins to suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, idealizing and even identifying with Thomas and his mercurial cruelty.

Haunting the proceedings as a cautionary object lesson is Beth (Winona Ryder), the aging (that is, over 30), once-glorious star of the company who’s forced into retirement so that Nina can take her place. All the dancers want to be Beth; when Nina sneaks into the older woman’s dressing room before her star casting is announced, she steals Beth’s lipstick, a pack of cigarettes, and a letter opener, totemic objects that Nina carries as talismans toward her own success.

But Beth’s precipitous tumble from the top to the bottom turns ugly when she won’t go gracefully into retirement. Instead, she causes a scene at a benefit party and then throws herself into New York City traffic, landing in a lonely hospital room where she languishes with ugly, disfiguring and debilitating scars. She sits in a wheelchair, her head canted down at a painful angle as she contemplates the cruelties of fate. Sadly, Ryder’s shrewish portrayal of the vanquished star mirrors too closely the details of her own career, and her one-dimensional, caricatured acting doesn’t help redeem her performance or the character. Nina, fascinated by the woman she’s replacing, visits Beth in her hospital room as some sort of weird penance for precipitating the star’s fate, but the visits aren’t instructive so much as increasingly macabre and violent as Nina’s reality begins to shatter.

Aronofsky signals his vision of his own leading lady with heavy-handed shots of Portman fragmented and multiplied by the various mirrors in which her life is continually reflected. In the claustrophobic apartment she shares with her equally insane mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), a mirror by the front door is cut into pie-shaped wedges that breaks Nina’s image into pieces, and the three-sided mirror in which she practices and obsessively laces and re-laces her toe shoes ensures that even at home, she’s always onstage.

Nina’s mother, it seems, was a corps member herself before she stopped dancing to raise Nina. No father is evident, just the suffocating co-dependency of two women who represent different generations of the same dream. Erica both wants Nina to succeed and desperately needs her to fail, so that her daughter will cling to her, imprisoned in the child-like state Erica insists on preserving. Nina’s bedroom is lined with rows of white and pink stuffed animals that stare down at her bed, and every night, she goes to sleep with the tinny music box sounds of “Swan Lake” that her mother sets in motion to soothe her. Erica intrudes on Nina’s privacy, checking the ever-worsening rash that blooms across her daughter’s back, chiding her for mutilating herself and at the same time, helping Nina hide her wounds. When Nina is cast in the lead role in Swan Lake, Erica doesn’t set out to sabotage her success, but willingly abets Nina’s fast downward spiral when it begins.

The real agent of Nina’s downfall is the woman who might otherwise be her savior. Lily (a stunning Mila Kunis) arrives in the company from LA full of self-confident sexuality and the distinctly unballet-like languor of the west coast. Nina catches a glimpse of her first on a subway, distracted from her own image in its Plexiglas windows by Lily’s hair and the headphones she wears. Lily makes her first appearance at the studio by banging open and closed the door while Nina is dancing, causing her to stumble in her audition for Swan Lake. But Lily’s laxity proves a refreshing counter-balance to a ballet world in which young women are wound tight, can’t eat, throw up what they do get down, and like Nina, are so disciplined to be perfect that they have no lives outside their dancing.

Lily, the film’s own black swan, loves sensuality and sexuality in equal measure. After she and Nina get off to a rocky start, Lily visits Nina at home, shocking both her and Erica with her brashness. Undone by Erica’s haranguing, Nina impulsively goes to a bar with Lily, where she’s persuaded to take a disinhibiting drug that Lily insists will just relax her and only last for two hours, “most.” Tempted by her desire to be free of her mother, and by Thomas’s insistence that she “touch herself” as homework to help her loosen up, Nina lets Lily drug her cocktail and gets very uninhibited indeed.

The two women flirt with men who are deeply disinterested in ballet—to Nina’s shock, since the art forms her entire world—then dance together wildly in a scene shot in pink light and edited frenetically to represent Nina’s descent into drug-induced ecstasy. The evening ends when Lily makes a pass at Nina in a taxi, and Nina brings her home, to the shock and dismay of Erica, who tries to batter down her bedroom door while the two young women have very wild, hot, and explicit sex.

The sex scene is the film’s pivot point, as it demonstrates how much Nina represses for her art, and how passionate indeed she can be. High as a kite, Nina won’t stand for her mother’s interdictions, and pulls Lily into her bedroom, where they rip off one another’s clothes and practically swallow each other’s tongues. Aronofsky films and edits this scene, too, with close-ups of body parts and quick jump cuts that heighten the intensity, until he finally focuses in on Nina’s sexual awakening under Lily’s ministrations. The scene reveals that other side of the carefully controlled artist is a young woman of painful depth and desire, who revels in just the kind of passion Thomas has been so eager to induce.

But the next morning, things go quickly awry. Lily is gone, but the pole Nina uses to keep her bedroom door propped closed hasn’t been disturbed. Nina wakes hung-over and late for rehearsal, where she finds Lily already in costume, performing in her role. Immediately, Lily becomes a palpable threat to Nina’s ascendancy, and when Nina refers to their evening together, Lily accuses her of having a “lezzie wet dream,” and denies that anything happened. From there, Nina’s sanity teeters ever closer to the brink, and Aronofsky plays even more fast and loose with what’s real for her and what’s real for us.

From the film’s beginning, moments that seem true are suddenly proven false. In the bathroom of the ballet benefit party, Nina’s ragged cuticles begin to bleed and she can’t get them to stop, eventually peeling a three-inch strip of flesh from her finger. But when she’s interrupted by, as it happens, Lily knocking on the door, Nina looks down to see her finger miraculously healed. This girl bleeds terribly—her toenails break from dancing on them, her back bleeds from scratching, and blood continually reddens the water in which she bathes and washes. But we’re never sure if her wounds are real, and neither, it seems, is Nina.

[Spoiler alert.] In fact, in the film’s climactic scene, Nina seems to kill Lily in a violent rage, shattering her dressing room’s full-length mirror with her rival’s head and then dragging her body onto the cold tile of her bathroom floor. When Lily’s blood seeps under the door, Nina covers it with a towel and goes off to triumphantly perform the second act of Swan Lake, where she nails her performance as the black swan with galvanizing passion and rage, murderous in her seductress’s make-up.

But when she returns to her dressing room to dress for the ballet’s third and final act, Lily comes knocking on her door to compliment Nina’s performance. The body in the bathroom is gone and so is the blood. Nina redresses herself in her white swan costume, but as she pulls on her white feathers, she finds in her own abdomen the seeping red wound she thought she’d inflicted in Lily’s. With morbid fascination and a strange glint of triumph, she retracts the shard of broken mirror she seemed to have used to kill her enemy.

As she returns to the stage to finish the ballet exultantly, we’re not sure if this, too, is a hallucination. The white swan falls to her death and Nina falls to the mattress that catches her behind the set, where her fellow dancers and Thomas surround her, extolling her glory and her talent. He calls her “little princess,” the affectionate but diminishing name he once used for Beth (just as Lily predicted he would), then notices with dismay that her white costume is marred by a spreading stain of very red blood. But as she lies there, apparently dying, Nina says both “I was perfect” and “I felt it,” fulfilling her own expectations and Thomas’s wish.

In Aronofsky’s vision, she’s also finally become a woman, her technical perfection infused with the reckless passion of adulthood and her cocoon-like innocence stained with the menstrual-like blood of her masochistic wound. The swan in the story dies, and while it’s not clear if Nina survives or not, we’re supposed to think she’s at the very least killed off the part of herself that held her too-adult passion and desire at bay.

I suppose Aronofsky also wants us to consider the depravity of those who give themselves to an art that gives so little in return. The rewards, The Black Swan suggests, are fleeting, ephemeral evenings of triumph and applause, which fades too quickly as ballet dancers inevitably age. As my film-going companion, Stacy, pointed out, adoring fans are faceless and strangely unrepresented in the film. Nina peeks out at the audience before she performs, but it’s really the adoration of her colleagues that she craves and finally achieves when they surround her fallen body at the film’s end.

Aronofsky indicts the cruelty through which Thomas realizes his vision of Swan Lake by manipulating the already unstable Nina, but the writer-director’s camera also enjoys a bit too much how the story makes Nina suffer, and happily represents her as a martyr to her art.

Thriller conventions bring The Black Swan its rather perverse excitement, as Aronofsky keeps the viewer off balance, like Nina, through quick confusing cuts to a murky woman who keeps turning up in the troubled young woman’s fantasy/reality. When Nina’s masturbating, following Thomas’s instructions to “loosen up,” nearly at climax she turns her head and sees another woman sitting on the chair in her bedroom, watching her. The cut happens so quickly, it’s not clear if the woman is Erica, the mother, or another young woman whose face and figure recurs in Nina’s dreams/fantasies, who may or may not be a younger Erica or some other Nina-style doppelganger. I kept expecting some previous trauma that would explain Nina’s insanity, but Aronofsky never delivers a back-story to illuminate her strange psychology. That choice heightens the film’s suggestion that it’s her single-minded dedication to art—encouraged by her similarly obsessed mother—that’s driven Nina mad.

Barbara Hershey is convincing as the over-bearing, bitter mother who watches her daughter achieve the career she always wanted. Erica lives through Nina and resents her deeply, calling incessantly on Nina’s cellphone, which displays “MOM” in insistent capital letters as the phone bleats plaintively. Erica doesn’t seem to be employed, but instead sits alone in a small room in their apartment (how these two afford a three-bedroom flat in Manhattan is never explained), creating Munch-like paintings of her own (or is it Nina’s?) face, images that seem to scream and follow Nina with their eyes when she peeks into the room. Erica and Nina’s bond is both incestuous and ambivalent, as they’re attracted and repulsed by everything they mean to one another.

Nina’s fantasy hook-up with Lily also seems to sublimate her strange push-pull relationship with Erica, while at the same time, to represent the entirely incestuous, homosocial, female-dominated world of ballet. Strangely, though, it’s also a heterosexual world, in Aronofsky’s conception. Lily enflames Nina’s jealousy during a performance when she flirts with the callous guy who’s dancing the white swan’s romantic object. The only obvious gay man in this world is the accompanist, who finally slams the lid on his piano after hours of solo rehearsing with Nina, telling her superciliously that he has a life (she, clearly, doesn’t) and leaving her in the dark as the building’s lights shut down.

What, finally, to make of The Black Swan? Aronofsky has created an absorbing, if sometimes repellent, Grand Guignol of a film about artistic cruelty and excess, one that might be laughable if the leading performances (Portman, Kunis, Cassel, and Hershey, especially) weren’t so heart-felt, layered, and persuasive. Portman’s shattered poise, shaky vulnerability, masterful artistry, and desperate desire for both success and real connection make Nina a character who’s difficult to wrest your eyes from. Even as Aronofsky dismantles the foundation of her world and her sanity, and keeps the viewer equally unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, Portman holds us squarely on Nina’s side, hoping she’ll be victorious against all the forces lined up against her.

Too bad that Nina’s victory requires a self-mutilation so extreme, she can only succeed by succumbing to her own death. That’s a message that’s not good for the girls.

The Feminist Spectator