Annapurna by Sharr White

Annapurna was a relieving contrast to the last play.  It is similarly contemporary and domestic (sorta), but it was so much better crafted and more enjoyable that I almost immediately lent my copy to a friend.  That makes it a little harder to review in detail.

This I will say.  It IS a domestic drama, and it plays on some of those same “familiarity breeds contempt” tropes we are familiar with, though “intimacy breeds contempt” might be a more accurate cliche for this long-estranged but still intimately connected couple.  The aspects that charms in Annapurna and elevate it above that traditional form are its pitch perfect dialogue, its extraordinarily complex and divided main characters, and its unflinching confrontation of the various uglinesses of life and even of love.

The show was premiered in NYC starring Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, which is perfect casting and makes the play more awesome in all the obvious ways.

Sharr White is a compelling voice worth watching; I’m sure his work will be found on American stages for years to come.

Saving Kitty by Marisa Smith

I hate this play.  I hate this play.  God, how I hate this play.

This is a wretched polemic of a play about how, hey, maybe we should be less critical of evangelical Christians because actually some of them are very educated and reasonable.  Fine.  That is true, and I believe that.  But, okay, for one, I don’t think that is an adequate or adequately non-preachy conflict for an entire play, and for two, I don’t think that point need be made by creating on the one hand a young sunny couple comprised harmoniously of a non-religious young woman and a smart and reasonable young man with a Ph.D. in religion (The phrase “unequally yoked” never comes up somehow.  If you don’t know what this phrase means, you’ve never hung with evangelicals.)  – and on the other, an ignorant, sorta racist, rich, drunk, dreadful, flirtatious, motor-mouthed harpy of a mother who just can’t understand how her beloved daughter has been seduced by the religious right.  Yes, the secular left has often made a straw man of religion.  Absolutely true.  That does not excuse using art as an excuse to set up a straw man of the secular left and then knock it down in the most self-satisfied way imaginable.

The following exchange actually takes place in this play:

Kate:  I know I’m terrible but all I can think of is that awful Tammy Faye Bakker with her horrible clown make up and that raving Jerry Falwell who said that our sin caused 9/11!

Kitty:  Mother, they’re dead, where have you been?  That’s ancient history.  Think Rick Warren, get with it!

Huntley (yes, the father’s name is really Huntley):  But Kitty, Bakker and Falwell were very influential when they were alive, wouldn’t you say, Paul?

Paul:  Yes, absolutely, but they were fundamentalists, not evangelicals.  Fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals, they read the Bible literally, we see metaphor and poetry.

Kitty: Thirty-five percent of Americans — possibly more — consider themselves evangelical Christians Mother [sic].

Putting aside the “tell, don’t show” nature of this and MANY MANY other exchanges and the horribleness of the name Huntley, let me just go on, as an ex-evangelical of the non-fundamentalist  variety, to point out some logic and other problems.  To start, basic syntax will show us that if “fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals,” then the statement “they were fundamentalists, not evangelicals” is false.  It’s true syntactically and it’s true in reality.  Jerry Falwell was a VERY influential fundamentalist who is ALSO an evangelical and whose influence has clearly outlived his death in ways that showed up in the news TODAY – and you know what? He only died in 2007, six years before the premiere of Saving Kitty.

Second, Rick Warren’s beliefs are not particularly awesome or enlightened.  He’s kinda anti-science, he’s anti gay marriage and has publicly equated gay relationships with incest and pedophilia, and he believes in abstinence-only education despite the abysmal record of such programs in actually protecting youth from sex or pregnancy.  So there’s that.

Finally, while evangelicals do see metaphor and poetry in the Bible as any non-insane reader of the Bible would, many of them – I dare say most, I dare say nearly all evangelicals – believe in reading many portions of the Bible quite literally.  That’s how they come up with most of their beliefs, both crazy and non-crazy

BUT NONE OF THAT IS THE POINT.  All of that is my personal soapbox, but none of it at all is at all the point.  The point is, this play is terribly written, and the idea that out of all the truly excellent dramas by women in this country – so hard to find, which is why I ended up buying Saving Kitty at a B&N, because it was the ONLY PLAY BY A WOMAN THEY HAD THAT I HAD NOT READ – this is the one chosen to go forward, to be staged and published and starred in by Jennifer Coolidge.  Come on now.  Just come on.

The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

Maybe I should not be patting myself on the back for having finally read The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, two classics of the modern theatre by Anton Chekhov.  Possibly I should be hanging my head in shame for having waited to get through them until just weeks before my 35th birthday.

I was going to say “slog through,” and a slog was definitely what I was expecting.  But as it turns out, Chekhov is actually pretty funny.  You should never start your Chekhov experience with The Seagull as I did.  It’s depressing, and yes certainly, all of Chekhov is sort of constitutionally depressed, but it really does give one the wrong idea.  Chekhov’s grasp of the ridiculous is at least as strong and confident as his grasp of the tragic.

Sonya won my sympathy of course; hardworking, steady, and overlooked, she is captured in a state of eternal waiting, as are so many of Chekhov’s women.  And yet she waits bravely “through a long, long line of days and endless nights.”  Varya fills a similar role in The Cherry Orchard and amidst that absurd cast she is perhaps the only one grounded in reality.  These plays perhaps beg a question about whether it is better to be a hopeful yet unrealistic optimist or a realist without hope – but certainly they reveal the ways in which without practical, clear-eyed people, it would be difficult for the world to move forward at all.

Funeral Games by Joe Orton

It would be easy, having successfully finished reading all 90 plays, to stop writing these pesky reviews I’ve gotten so far behind on.  But not I!  I am resolved to move forward.  For now.  Maybe.  If I keep feeling like it.

This review will (should. if I feel like it) be short, though, because – can I just say? – I just don’t enjoy Joe Orton very much.  I just discovered as I was briefly refreshing myself on the plot of this play that it was written for TV – and that helps.  Actually, this farce had some charming features, including that one of the primaries is a pastor/cult leader who wishes to gain a reputation for having murdered his seemingly-adulterous wife.

The wife, though, is in fact alive and not a cheater, though she is spending a lot of time with a man who has actually killed his wife and buried her body in the cellar.   (Those might seem like spoilers; they really aren’t, unless you mind the exposition getting spoiled.)  Wacky hijinks ensue.  They are funny enough.

So this play was funny, and a chuckler.  It’s just the style.  Proper domestic farces are just really done, and I feel like they were already really done before 1968.  However, I enjoyed this one more than Loot, and I think it could be fun on the stage.  It’s short enough to be paired with something a little more ground-breaking.

The Reading Is Complete!

I just finished my 90th play of the summer – hooray!  I didn’t quite make it in time to say – “and I finished before labor day!”  But I was close.

I’ll be continuing to post more reviews of the plays I read this summer.  I also hope to update my list of 90 plays with stars by those I particularly recommend for reading (I will not * the unpublished plays even if I enjoyed them a lot, since it’s cruel taunting to recommend to my readers a play they can’t get!).

I also hope to continue the project with a play a week through the fall, winter, and spring – and then maybe, just maybe, next summer I’ll start this whole crazy thing over again.  If nothing else, I still have a whole bunch more Shakespeare histories I can read.

More Tennessee Williams. A Lot More.

I have not yet read everything that Tennessee Williams ever wrote.  Not yet.  But as I enter the last week of the project, I have read every play in The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams, Volumes I and II.  So.  I’m getting to know the playwright pretty intimately.  And you know the old saying – familiarity breeds contempt.

OK, not contempt.  NOT contempt.  But, just, I’ve read just, you know, a lot more BAD Tennessee Williams plays at this point than I ever expected.  As I got into the extremes of his career – the very beginning, the very end (and the post-peak career stretched over a couple of decades) – I was reading at least one bad play for every good one, sometimes two bad plays for every good one. However – I must say this.  Buried in there were some miracles, some wonderful things, and I never would have read them if I hadn’t dragged my way through the hot mess that surrounded them.  So – here are four more reviews of Tennessee Williams plays, for worse and for better.

Let’s get this out of the way.  Spring Storm is a disaster.  This is evidenced by the fact that while it was written in 1937, it was not produced until 1995.  Having said that, I’m not sure I’d want many plays I wrote in apprentice playwriting classes put on the stage today, and that’s where Tennessee Williams wrote it.  The show focuses on main characters Heavenly and Dick; Heavenly seeks a permanent commitment from her stormy (ahem) lover, while Dick is restless for freedom from confinement.  Meanwhile, Heavenly is courted by Arthur, a respectable alternative to the uncertain Dick – but though Heavenly’s prospects with Dick become more and more tenuous, she cannot give up her slim hope.  (MILD SPOILERS BELOW)

It seems momentarily that Heavenly and Arthur will find consolation with one another – or perhaps that Arthur will find consolation elsewhere – but instead the play ends in a disaster disproportionate to the action; this, of course, feels contrived, and it is hard to mourn the multiple tragedies when they feel so mechanical.  So that’s the big downside.  On the other hand, Spring Storm pretty clearly serves as a kind of loose prequel for Sweet Bird of Youth – if Tennessee Williams has a miraculous strength as a playwright, it’s his ability to never give up on failed or partially successful material.  A committed rewriter, he no doubt ruminated over this material for the 20 years between the two scripts, until something new and greatly improved emerged.

Not About Nightingales – ho-leeeeeeee crap.  This is what I meant when I said you wade through the mess to find something amazing.  This play was incredible, and astoundingly (I’m learning this stuff as I go along) ALSO was not produced until the ’90s, when Vanessa Redgrave unearthed the manuscript after working on a production of Orpheus Descending.  She then brought it to Broadway, and it was nominated for 6 Tony Awards.  In nineteen ninety freaking nine.

It. Is. Amazing.  It is incredibly timely now.  It is about the ills of the prison system (timely), abuse of power (timely), the corruption of law enforcement and corrections (TIMELY), and the justification of riot and counterviolence in situations of unbearable and persistent violence (TIMELY!!!!!).  It should be in production right now.  No other play I’ve read by Williams feels so contemporary and so prescient.  Read it!

Okay – moving along – “I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix” is about the last minutes in the life of D.H. Lawrence.  It’s kind of philosophical, and I suspect I would have appreciated it more if I knew more about D.H. Lawrence.  Like, a lot more.  It was very, very short, and I found it interesting – but I don’t have a lot more to say about it than that.

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore was another hidden gem, though much less so than Not About Nightingales.  After I reached a certain mile marker in my march through Tennessee Williams, I started to say sarcastically to my husband at the start (or the fifth page, or the tenth page) of any given play, “Oh, a neurotic heiress/former debutante/wilting actress past her prime with an nervous complaint!  How surprising!”  These women show up over and over in Tennessee Williams, of course, because he was dealing with his own stuff – and Flora Goforth is that woman in this play.  Chris, a young man who has been dubbed “The Angel of Death” because (purposely or by chance) he is often serves as companion to dying older women.  His character is one part common gigolo, one part kind but disaffected boy, and one part abstraction – and it is that one part abstraction that gives the play its mystery and pleasure.  Ms. Black, Flora’s longsuffering secretary, stands in for the audience to a certain degree, sympathizing with Chris and going around the imperious Flora when possible.  In the end, the meanings and relationships are left a little uncertain, and that is delightful.

You might think this is it, but never fear!  I’ve got lots more Williams still to review.

Mandragola by Niccolo Machiavelli (or, the one big problem with most pre-Shakespearean comedies . . .)

The problem with most pre-Shakespearean comedies, and some Shakespearean comedies, is that notions of sexual consent and what constitutes violence against women weren’t all that well developed yet.  So there’s a part of me that wants to write, “This is a play about sexual violence against an innocent woman, basically, except it’s supposed to be funny, and the woman is barely in it.”  That is TRUE.  Lucrezia, the female whose love and chastity is at the center of this play, is coerced by her husband, her priest, and her would be “lover” into a sexual union she doesn’t want and even protests will kill her.  From the point of that declaration, she essentially has no voice until the final scene, when she’s been brought miraculously around to the arrangement by the prowess of her lover.

So – it’s hard to talk about such a play in terms of my reaction to it.  In terms of the form, it is a well-crafted example of the Italian comedy – more enjoyable in certain ways than some of Moliere’s work 100 years later.  It is lyrical and well-paced, even in the literal translation I read.  It’s a very good play to study, and I’m glad I read it.  But essentially, I think it has little place on the modern stage, and we’d do better working with Shakespearean problem plays like All’s Well that Ends Well which complicate the questions of consent and female rights, lending themselves to more nuanced and modern performances.

The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman

I’ve enjoyed reading the screenplays of Ingmar Bergman for this project, and it’s made me eager to see more of his films – maybe I’ll request a collection for my upcoming 35th birthday!  Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal seem particularly well-paired for review, because while their tones are very different in many ways, their thematic thrusts are deeply similar and reveal Bergman’s preoccupation with the interaction between death and rebirth, the relationship of youth and aging.

It’s strange that I haven’t seen The Seventh Seal because I have the distinct impression that virtually all my undergraduate friends and colleagues were required to watch it at one point or another.  I found this script a less enjoyable read than Bergman’s others because it was so allegorical in nature; but because of its clear relationship with medieval morality plays, it ultimately engaged my interest in the relationship between that seminal British form and the dramatic works that followed. Its link with a play like Everyman is undeniable, as Death’s personification and chess game with the Knight makes it clear from the early moments of the script what the central struggle will be – and the presence of plague in the play strengthens this relationship with the medieval.  Yet death, though called “the severe master,” is not shown as an altogether unkind force – and the presence of death is linked with love and fertility, an uneasy relationship that Bergman portrays again and again.

Wild Strawberries is far less allegorical and has a modern setting – yet the themes are strikingly similar.  But let’s talk about form for a moment – I was very surprised by the form the stage directions took, written essentially as monologue by the protagonist, Isak.  I’m eager to see how these are treated in the film – as narration, I would think, but are all of them narrated? – but in any case, Isak’s monologues from the first are very revealing. He states from the first that he has nothing to hide from himself, and that if called upon to evaluate himself, he “would do so without shame or concern for [his] reputation.”  From this we imagine Isak to be a very self-aware main character, yet even as his first monologue continues, we have reason to doubt the accuracy of his non-regretful self-evaluation.  As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that at its center is an old man close to the end of life, who is forced by the discovery of his own loneliness to evaluate himself again, to see his past action and consider its effects – on others and on himself.  Again here, Bergman persistently makes use of the contrast between introspective old age and giddy youth – and further explores the ways in which one casts light on the other.  I found this script to be deeply appealing, bare-faced in its truthfulness, and yet still allowing hope to spring out of the hopelessness of life’s alienations.  It’s something that Bergman does so beautifully – and again I am eager to get hold of the film.

Having put off for so long almost any exposure to Bergman’s work, reading his screenplays is a really strange first foray – yet I’m very glad that I dove in this way.