Terry Teachout's Blog, page 34

TT: Almanac

"There is one postulate on which pessimists and optimists agree. Both their arguments assume it to be self-evident that life is good or bad according as it does or does not bring a surplus of agreeable feeling."

Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics

TT: Snapshot

Avi Avital plays Joseph Szigeti's violin arrangement of Bartók's Hungarian Folk Tunes on mandolin, accompanied by Alice Sara Ott:



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

TT: Almanac

"A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."

George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

It is an aspect of American manners that our politicians emulate our advertisers by engaging in the 24-hour robotic spin that determines their every public utterance: "So, Senator, how do you explain the presence of that cheap hooker in your hotel room?" "When I am elected president, the failed economic policies of the current administration will be reversed, thus reducing the burden on the middle class!" (No doubt this phenomenon is in large part a function of the takeover of the political process by lawyers.) In the process, they debase the culture as well, precisely because they're not fooling anybody. When the men and women who lead us, or wish to lead us, engage in such shameless and transparent verbal trickery, they are going far beyond the necessary quotient of euphemism that lubricates everyday human transactions. They are proving themselves consistently untrustworthy in small things. Why, then, should we trust them in large ones?...

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Ray Price, R.I.P.

Ray Price, who died yesterday at the age of 87, sings Harlan Howard's "Heartaches by the Number":

TT: Almanac

"Cynicism is the form in which base souls approach what they call honesty."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

TT: Almanac

"I remember hearing Mr. Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves."

George Meredith, The Egoist

TT: Peter O'Toole, R.I.P.

Peter O'Toole, who died yesterday at the age of 81, in a scene from the 1968 film version of James Goldman's The Lion in Winter:

TT: See me, hear me (but not about Duke!)

A reminder: Project Shaw , which puts on concert-style semi-staged readings of the plays of George Bernard Shaw each month, is performing The Devil's Disciple tonight. The production will be directed by David Staller, and I'm the narrator. This is, as I mentioned last week, the first time in thirty-five years that I've appeared on stage in a theatrical performance, so come out and cheer me on--or do the other thing, if you feel so inclined!

The show is at Symphony Space, 95th and Broadway, and starts at seven p.m. To order tickets or for more information, go here .

TT: Two solitudes

In today's Wall Street Journal I have nothing but good things to say about two plays by Conor McPherson, the New York premiere of The Night Alive and a Chicago revival of Port Authority . Here's an excerpt.

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Conor McPherson's "The Seafarer," the best new play I've seen in the past decade, transferred from London to Broadway in 2007 and has since been done all over America. Now Mr. McPherson has returned to New York with another play on a closely related theme. Like "The Seafarer" before it, "The Night Alive" is an agonizingly black Christmastide tale of poverty, despair and transcendence that ends with a sharp twist--and it, too, is a stunner.

In his "Letters to a Young Poet," Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of "the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other." I thought of Rilke's words as I watched "The Night Alive," whose two central characters, trapped in their twin solitudes, struggle to bridge the yawning gap that separates them. Tommy (Ciarán Hinds), a fiftysomething failure who lives in one grubby room of a Dublin house owned by the disapproving uncle (Jim Norton) who raised him, picks up Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a sometime prostitute in her late twenties, after she gets into a brawl with her sinister boyfriend (Brian Gleeson). Both of them appear to have given up on life, yet they reach out to one another--slowly, haltingly--across the canyon of hopelessness to which the equally lonely Uncle Maurice gives voice: "You're just knocking the days off the calendar. There's even days when Mass just takes you nowhere, just deposits you back on the pavement, just another invisible man, knowing that the end is sneaking in on you and knowing it's gonna be the worst part of your life."

You've seen this plot before, more or less, and there are few surprises in Mr. McPherson's iteration save for the very last scene, which adds a quiet note of mystery to the proceedings. The beauty is in the telling, which is so fresh and full of coarsely vital poetry that you'll cling to every word, and in the acting, which is worthy of the script....

"Port Authority," a three-man play from 2001 in which Mr. McPherson weaves together a set of parallel monologues about love and disappointment, has just received a flawless revival out in Chicagoland. Directed by William Brown, who staged Writers' Theatre's frenziedly funny production of David Ives' "The Liar" earlier this year, "Port Authority" is being mounted in the smaller of the company's two houses, a 56-seat black-box theater located in the back room of a suburban bookstore. Mr. Brown's trio of Chicago-based actors (Patrick Clear, Rob Fenton, and John Hoogenakker) is identical in quality to the ones, Mr. Norton among them, who appeared to impressive effect in the play's U.S. premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2008....

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Read the whole thing here .

The trailer for the Writers' Theatre revival of Port Authority: