Terry Teachout's Blog, page 132

TT: Beautiful losers

My Wall Street Journal drama column is about two New York productions, an off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel's Lovers and the New York premiere of a new English-language version of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People . Here's an excerpt.

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If life were fair, Brian Friel, the foremost living playwright in the English-speaking world, would have won a Nobel Prize long ago. Instead he labors in comparative obscurity, loved and respected by all who care about theater but mostly unknown to the American public at large....

The good news is that two of Mr. Friel's best plays are being done Off Broadway this fall. Not only will the Irish Rep be putting on "The Freedom of the City" in October, but TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, which covered itself in glory with its revival last season of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers," is now presenting the very first professional staging of "Lovers" to be seen in New York since the play received its Broadway premiere in 1968.

"Lovers" is a double bill of dark romantic comedies that take the grimmest possible view of love and its discontents. In "Winners," we meet Mag and Joe (Justine Salata and Cameron Scoggins), a starry-eyed teenage couple whose fast-approaching marriage is about to be short-circuited by the uncaring hand of fate. "Losers," by contrast, is a bitter little farce about a pair of middle-aged lovers (Kati Brazda and James Riordan) whose romance runs aground on the cold, hard shoal of Irish Catholicism at its most priggish.

Part of Mr. Friel's genius lies in the seamlessness with which he integrates more or less straightforward realism and narrator-driven presentationalism. "Winners" is a prime example of his technique at its most supple. In between glimpses of the young lovers at play, we hear from a two-person Greek chorus (played by Ms. Brazda and Mr. Riordan) who describe the life of their village in the dispassionate, "Dragnet"-like tones of a police report....

Drew Barr has directed "Lovers" with the deceptive simplicity of a fable. The impact of his staging is heightened by Brett J. Banakis' uncomplicated set, a wall covered with shabby wallpaper that slashes diagonally across the stage like a scar....

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's "new version" of "An Enemy of the People" is yet another attempt to update Henrik Ibsen's smug 1882 satire about a visionary doctor (Boyd Gaines) who becomes a pariah when he makes a discovery that threatens to gut the economy of the hypocritical small town in which he lives. (Yes, the doctor is a self-portrait of the playwright as genius.) Unlike Arthur Miller, whose squashily high-minded 1950 adaptation is the form in which "An Enemy of the People" is best known to American audiences, Ms. Lenkiewicz has made no attempt to paper over the play's contemptuous anti-populism. She has, however, cut the script ruthlessly, modernized Ibsen's language with four-letter words and ramped up the humor (such as it is) to the point of cartoonishness....

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Read the whole thing here .

A trailer for Lovers:

TT: Almanac

"It was a poetic drama, and the audience, though loath to do anybody an injustice, was beginning to suspect that it was written in blank verse."

P.G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Misalliance (serious comedy, G/PG-13, far too talky for children, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 28, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• Skylight (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING TONIGHT IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• Heroes (serious comedy, G, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Carousel (musical, G, closes Sept. 29, reviewed here)

TT: Snapshot

The only surviving film footage of Mark Twain, taken in 1909 by Thomas Edison:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"She was annoyed, and she expended her annoyance, as women will do, upon the innocent bystander."

P.G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless

TT: Almanac

"It is a disturbing thought that we suffer in this world just as much by being prudent and taking precautions as we do by being rash and impulsive and acting as the spirit moves us."

P.G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless

TT: Lookback

From 2005:

I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short--and so often shorter than we expect--that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"She was interested in everything Life presented to her notice, from a Coronation to a stray cat. She was vivid. She had sympathy. She listened to you as though you really mattered. It takes a man of tough fibre to resist these qualities."

P.G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless

TT: Just because

In an excerpt from Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore sings "Die Flabbergast," a parody of a Schubert song as performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Three to get ready

Rehearsals for the Long Wharf Theatre transfer of Satchmo at the Waldorf start this morning in New Haven. Since I also have to see two shows in New York and write three pieces between now and Friday, I thought it might be smart for Mrs. T and me to take a little time off from the daily grind and go somewhere quiet and out of the way--though not too far out of the way, since we only had three days to spare.

What to do? Inspiration struck when we saw Mystic Pizza on TV last week. We'd been talking for years about visiting Mystic , a picturesque seaport vilage that's a bit over forty miles from the front door of our little house in the Connecticut woods. Now, we decided, was the time to go--but could I find a nice place for us to stay on such short notice?

I hit the bull's-eye on the first try. The Inn at Stonington , located just five miles from the center of Mystic, is the very model of a romantic waterfront retreat: small, cozy, tastefully decorated, and wonderfully well run, with a simple but delicious continental breakfast that includes fresh-baked breads. This being a flawed world, there's a catch, which is that the inn figures prominently in Hope Springs , meaning that it's become harder to book a room there. Fortunately, we called a few minutes after somebody else canceled, and two days later we rolled up to the front door. That same night we stood on our tiny balcony, watched the sun set over the harbor, and reveled in our good luck. Henceforth the Inn at Stonington will be on on our very short list of B&Bs and inns to which we return regularly.

The meals we ate in and near Mystic were consistently good. (Yes, we made a point of stopping at Mystic Pizza , and it, too, was excellent.) One of them actually turned out to be spectacular. As we drove through town on Thursday afternoon, we passed by a restaurant called Oyster Club .

"That looks interesting," I said to Mrs. T. "Why don't you run in and check it out?"

A few minutes later she trotted back to the car with a menu in her hand and a smile on her face. "You know what the waitress told me?" she said. "I asked her what kind of place it was, and she said, 'I'm not just saying this because I work here, but this really is the best place in town.'" I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Mrs. T and I do a fair amount of traveling, and I can't remember where or when we've had a better meal. (The Oyster Club menu changes nightly, but if the handmade tagliatelle with ragout of pork, chicken livers, and chicken hearts happens to be available, order it. Unless you're a militant vegetarian, you won't be sorry.)

What I liked best about our mini-vacation, though, was that it really was a vacation. I didn't write a word or see a show all weekend. Instead, Mrs. T and I happily played tourist. Not only did we go on a schooner cruise , but we visited Mystic Seaport (to which Mrs. T went frequently as a child) and Groton's Submarine Force Museum , where we toured the U.S.S. Nautilus (about whose cruise to the North Pole I read with wonder when I was a boy). If I gave any thought to Satchmo at the Waldorf or the world of high art, it was strictly in passing.

It helped that we were never very far from the water. I wrote these words seven years ago:

Coming as I do from the middle of America, I find at the age of forty-nine that I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of nights I've slept by an ocean. Like everyone who falls in love with the sea in adulthood, I'm incapable of saying anything about it that hasn't been said a million times before: its ever-changing, self-renewing presence instantly reduces me to clichés. As I sat on the boardwalk and watched the waves that my beloved Fairfield Porter painted so well, I could do no better than to recall the words of Jean de la Ville de Mirmont that Gabriel Fauré set to music with such exquisitely apposite simplicity in L'horizon chimérique, the most perfect of all his song cycles: The sea is infinite and my dreams are wild.

Since then I've gone out of my way to spend as much time as possible within sight of the sea, which never fails to soothe my soul. Long Island Sound, being an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, doesn't quite fill the bill, but it suited me much, much more than well enough.

So yes, we had a great time...and now it's over. Mrs. T dropped me off at the New London train station on Sunday afternoon. An hour later I arrived in New Haven, and an hour after that I was being interviewed by New Haven Theater Jerk . Later today I'll report to Long Wharf's Rehearsal Room B, roll up my sleeves, and go to work. Good or bad, long or short, all vacations must come to an end, and even when they give way to something just as pleasurable, you can't help but wish you were back where you came from.