Terry Teachout's Blog, page 207

TT: Why would anybody write a play?

Satchmo at the Waldorf closes in Orlando on Sunday afternoon. Would that I were there! Not surprisingly, the experience of writing my first play and seeing it onto the stage has inspired me to write a "Sightings" column in which I talk about some of the things I learned along the way. Here's an excerpt.

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Tony Kushner can't make a living writing for the stage. America's most prominent playwright confessed in an interview published in Time Out New York earlier this year that "Angels in America" doesn't pay the rent: "I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I'm surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don't think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don't think anybody does." So far as I know, Mr. Kushner is right. I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series TV. Itamar Moses, for instance, has written for "Boardwalk Empire" and "Men of a Certain Age," which isn't stopping him from turning out stage plays (his latest effort, "Completeness," just closed Off Broadway).

The question all but asks itself: Why is anybody still writing plays? Theater, after all, is no longer a central part of the American cultural conversation, the way it was when Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams walked the earth. Nowadays most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch "Breaking Bad" as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play--assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet.

So if you can't make any money writing for the stage, why bother? Putting aside the obvious attraction of being able to make up your own characters, I can think of one excellent reason: You meet the nicest people.

You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike. It's a lonely business, which explains why a few authors choose to collaborate instead of flying solo. Moss Hart, who wrote his best plays in partnership with George S. Kaufman, explained his decision to write with a partner in "Act One," his 1959 autobiography: "The hardest part of writing by far is the seeming exclusion from all humankind while work is under way, for the writer at work cannot be gregarious....Collaboration cuts this loneliness in half. When one is at a low point of discouragement, the very presence in the room of another human being, even though he too may be sunk in the same state of gloom, very often gives that dash of valor to the spirit that allows confidence to return and work to resume."

To be sure, most playwrights, unlike Hart, write by themselves. Once a script is finished, though, they immediately plunge themselves into the endlessly pleasurable frenzy of a collaborative enterprise....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Home is where the hate is

In today's Wall Street Journal I review an important off-Broadway revival, Keen Company's production of Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky , and take brief but delighted note of the New Haven transfer of the Irish Rep's revival of Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney . Here's an excerpt.

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Lanford Wilson was big in the '70s and '80s, but the author of "The Hot l Baltimore" and "Talley's Folly" had largely faded from view by the time of his death in March. It's been ages since a Wilson play received a high-profile production in New York, and three years since I last reviewed one anywhere in America. For this reason, Keen Company's Off-Broadway revival of "Lemon Sky" is an occasion of no small consequence, an opportunity to take a second look at a once-admired playwright who has fallen out of fashion--and the news is good. Not only does "Lemon Sky" turn out to be a play of exceptional quality, but Jonathan Silverstein's production is an extraordinarily strong and finely acted piece of work.

First performed in 1970, revived Off Broadway in 1985 and turned into a TV movie three years after that, "Lemon Sky" is, like so many of Mr. Wilson's plays, a variation on a theme by Tennessee Williams, a memory play about a sensitive teenage boy (Keith Nobbs) and the boorish father (Kevin Kilner) who doesn't understand him. The setting is San Diego in the '50s, that benighted decade of backyard cookouts and wholesome-looking families, and you will not be even slightly surprised to hear that the sensitive teenage boy is gay, while the boorish father turns out to have a few high-voltage kinks of his own. We are, in short, in the land of "The Glass Menagerie," and no sooner does Alan, Wilson's fictional stand-in, inform the audience that "I've been trying to tell this story, to get it down, for a long time" than you roll your eyes and start thinking about where to have dinner after the show.

Well, guess what? You're in for a surprise--a very big surprise. For even though the plot of "Lemon Sky" is well worn and the premise predictable, Alan tells his tale of woe with a transfiguring intensity far removed from the soft-centered sentimentality of such better-known Wilson plays as "Burn This." Perhaps because "Lemon Sky" was explicitly autobiographical, Mr. Wilson got the bit between his teeth and ran hard with it, and the result is a play whose angry portrayal of Eisenhower-era family life has the salty sting of remembered truth...

If you missed the Irish Repertory Theatre's Off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel's "Molly Sweeney" earlier this year, you can now catch it at Long Wharf Theatre, which is remounting Charlotte Moore's production on a larger stage. Two of the three original cast members, Jonathan Hogan and Ciarán O'Reilly, are reprising their roles in New Haven, joined by Simone Kirby, who replaced Geraldine Hughes in the title role later in the New York run. Mr. Friel's masterly play, in which three related monologues are woven around one another like strands of ivy, tells the story of an Irishwoman (Ms. Kirby) who has been blind since childhood and whose sight is miraculously restored by surgery in middle age. What follows is a parable of false hope and devastating disappointment, staged by Ms. Moore with gentle grace, performed to perfection by her cast and lit with special delicacy by Michael Gottlieb and Richard Pilbrow....

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Read the whole thing here .

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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Apr. 29, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through Jan. 22, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, 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)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• August: Osage County (drama, PG-13/R, closes Nov. 5, reviewed here)

• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Nov. 6, reviewed here)

• Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Nov. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• The Habit of Art (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• The Pirates of Penzance (operetta, G, suitable for children, closes Oct. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT:

• The Crucible (drama, PG-13, partial nudity, extended through Oct. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• The Tempest (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, remounting of 2010 production, suitable for children, original run reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards."

Alan Bennett, Forty Years On

TT: Almanac

"Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word."

Alan Bennett, Writing Home

TT: Snapshot

Big Joe Turner, live at the Apollo in 1955:



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

TT: Off we go

It seems as though Mrs. T and I just unpacked our bags, and now we're hitting the road again. Our first stop is Chicago, where we'll be driving up to Glencoe to see Writers' Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing , a play that I adore, then spending the night at an airport hotel. Tomorrow we fly to St. Louis and drive from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., to visit my mother and attend the marriage of Lauren Teachout, my beloved niece, who is getting hitched to her longtime boyfriend on Saturday. I don't doubt for a moment that a good time will be had by all.

After that we'll spend most of Sunday driving up to Kansas City, where I'm going to deliver a public lecture on Monday at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, about which more here . (Come hear me if you're in the vicinity!) In addition, Mrs. T, who's never been to Kansas City, will join me for her first visit to the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum , a great and insufficiently appreciated institution whose innumerable treasures include one of my all-time favorite American paintings, Fairfield Porter's "The Mirror." I also hope to feed her some authentic Kansas City barbecue chez Arthur Bryant , though I have a sneaking suspicion that all our meals are already spoken for, damn it.

Would that we could spend a few days unwinding in Kansas City, but we have to fly back home the morning after my speech. The theater season is getting underway next week and I'll have four shows to see in New York, two on Broadway and two off, and three Wall Street Journal columns to write.

You can guess the rest. I'll see you when I see you. Until then, whenever "then" ends up being, content yourself with the usual almanac entries and regular theater-related postings, and wish me barbecue-related luck.

TT: Almanac

"I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil."

Alan Bennett, Writing Home

TT: A study of reading habits

The Little Professor posted this meme, and I thought I'd play along:

1. Favorite childhood book?
 Charlotte's Web (and I still love it).

2. What are you reading right now? David E. Kyvig's Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940.

3. What books do you have on request at the library?
 I gave up using libraries years ago. It's far easier and quicker to order a used book from Amazon than it is for me to visit any of Manhattan's public libraries. If I lived elsewhere, though, I'd probably do things differently.

4. Bad book habit?
 I'm a compulsive dog-earer.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? See #3.

6. Do you have an e-reader? 
No--I ought to buy one, but simply haven't gotten around to it.

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once? It's rarely a matter of preference. Because of the nature of my work, I tend to be reading two or three books at any given time.

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?
 No.

9. Least favorite book you read this year (so far)? I stop reading a book as soon as I'm sure that I don't like it--life's too short to finish reading a bad book--so I don't have a good answer to this question. I'm about to review a biography that I disliked, but I can't say what it is until the piece appears.

10. Favorite book you've read this year?
 John Williams' Stoner, with Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer running it a close second. (Both of these books, incidentally, were suggested to me by the same person.)

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone? I don't think I have a "comfort zone." I read whatever interests me, and my tastes wander in all directions.

12. What is your reading comfort zone? See above.

[image error]13. Can you read on the bus?
 I could read on a roller coaster, so long as I wasn't simultaneously being shot at.

14. Favorite place to read?
 In bed.

15. What is your policy on book lending?
 I lend books to good friends. If they don't return them, I stop lending to them.

16. Do you ever dog-ear books? Reflexively.


17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books? I've never written in or highlighted a book in my life. For some inexplicable reason, the very thought of doing so makes me cringe--it borders on a phobia. And yes, I realize that this is irreconcilable with my dog-earing habit. Go figure.

18. Not even with text books?
 No, never.

19. What is your favorite language to read in? Alas, I'm a monoglot.

20. What makes you love a book?
 I want it to tell me things I didn't already know, and to do so in a way that I find irresistibly seductive.

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book? The fact that I liked it, so long as I think that the recommendee would be interested in its subject matter.


22. Favorite genre?
 I don't have one. I suppose biography comes closest, but that's mainly because I write biographies.

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)? I've never been able to get into science fiction, and I suspect I'm missing something as a result.

24. Favorite biography? W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson. Runner-up: David Cairns' Berlioz.

25. Have you ever read a self-help book? I read Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living as a boy. (It was on the living-room bookshelf.) Nothing since then, so far as I can recall.

26. Favorite cookbook?
 I can't cook, but I do love M.F.K. Fisher.

27. Most inspirational book you've read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?
 I don't read "inspirational" books. Stories of heroism, broadly defined, inspire me, and on occasion certain books inspire me to try to write better.

28. Favorite reading snack?
 I rarely snack while reading, though I usually read when dining alone.

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.
 It's never happened. As Marlene Dietrich says in Touch of Evil, "What does it matter what you say about people?"

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?
 I don't keep track.

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews? A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose?
 French. I very much wish I could read Proust in the original.

33. Most intimidating book you've ever read? I don't find books intimidating (or much else, truth to tell).

34. Most intimidating book you're too nervous to begin?
 See above.

35. Favorite poet?
 I don't have a favorite poet. I like Yeats, Frost, Hardy, and Larkin, and lately I've gotten interested in Kay Ryan and Samuel Menashe.

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time? See #3.

37. How often have you returned a book to the library unread? Back in my student days, not infrequently.

38. Favorite fictional character?
 I'd have trouble choosing between Vicky Haven in Dawn Powell's A Time to Be Born and Amanda Turck in James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor. In addition, I confess--somewhat reluctantly--to identifying with Charles Gray in John P. Marquand's Point of No Return.

39. Favorite fictional villain? Richard Stark's Parker (if you can call him a villain--it's a slippery proposition). Runners-up: Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now and Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

40. Books I'm most likely to bring on vacation?
 Whatever I'm reading at the moment.

41. The longest I've gone without reading.
 I went without reading for a couple of days the last time I was in the hospital.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.
 Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Velvet Claws.

43. What distracts you easily when you're reading?
 Nothing.

[image error]44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?
 Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place. I suspect, however, that this question is meant to elicit films made from novels that are distinguished in their own right, in which case I'd single out Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things and Paul Mazursky's Enemies: A Love Story.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation? Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent.

46. The most money I've ever spent in the bookstore at one time? Probably a couple of hundred dollars, but I rarely go to brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore.

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?
 Almost never, unless I'm consulting it for purely professional reasons.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book halfway through?
 If it bores me, I'll stop after ten pages.

49. Do you like to keep your books organized? Yes, though I'm not excessively finicky about it.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you've read them?
 Living as I do in a New York apartment, I dispose of superfluous books ruthlessly.

51. Are there any books you've been avoiding? No.

52. Name a book that made you angry.
 That is one long list, baby.

53. A book you didn't expect to like but did?
 James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed. Dwight Macdonald's famous takedown fails altogether to convey its actual quality.

54. A book that you expected to like but didn't? Colette's The Pure and the Impure. I didn't hate it, but I expected to like it a lot more than I did.

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?
 Unless money is changing hands, I always read for pleasure, and I don't do book-related guilt.

TT: Just because

Slim Gaillard and his trio sing "Dunkin' Bagel" in 1946: