What to see (there's a lot), and what's next

Pick a door, any door - there's probably a good show behind it.

Frankly, there's almost too much to see in town right now. Where to begin? Probably the best of the bunch is Nicholas Martin's expert production of Bus Stop at the Huntington - but the rest of the bunch is pretty strong, too. Fräulein Maria, which closes at the Paramount this weekend, is an absolute riot, and I've heard good things about The Laramie Residency as well (I can't see it till Saturday). (ArtsEmerson, which a friend described to me as "like having our own little BAM here in Boston!" has indeed, opened with a BAM.) Meanwhile 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is still buzzing at the Lyric, and Camelot is jousting away down at Trinity. If low-down humor is your bag, then the North Shore has up a crackling version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - or if you're a hopeless trend victim, SpeakEasy Stage is doing a solid version of Sarah Ruhl's silly In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Let's see, that's (1-2-3-4 . . .) SEVEN shows worth seeing up around town. Perhaps a record.

But wait, there's more - this weekend, I'm catching up with Stoneham's Glee-ful Perfect Harmony, which got strong notices, and closes Sunday. Then it's off to the ICA for a rare program of local dance from area stars Daniel McCusker (his company, above), Caitlin Corbett, and Kelley Donovan. Then comes the Laramie Residency, as noted, and finally, the opening of Handel and Haydn's season, with an all-Mozart program ranging pleasingly from the greatest hits (Eine kleine Nachtmusik) to the obscure (the overture and march from Mitridate, written when the boy genius was 14). This weekend also marks the kick-off of Handel Haydn's count-down to their two hundredth birthday (yes, you read that right). More to come on that. In the meantime, get online, or get out to the BosTix booth, and go see a show.

A Far Cry goes further

The talented musicians of "A Far Cry."

I'm catching up late with A Far Cry, the "self-conducted" string orchestra of young virtuosi that has taken the local press by storm.  And I confess I was a little skeptical of them - their ethos seemed to me like a possible mis-application of that totally-awesome DIY millennial attitude that often leaves me shaking my head.

It's important to keep an open mind, though, right?  Right!  But as I settled into my seat and began to peruse the program for their "Primordial Darkness" concert last week, my heart sank.  "This is your shovel.  The music is your earth.  Dig in," were the opening lines - which maybe would have sounded better as a tweet; but the notes' author, Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot, kept digging from there.  We learned much post-collegiate wisdom from her, including that composer Iannis Zenakis "built metaphysical alternate universes" and that playwright William Congreve was "a flash in the pan" - because, as she mused sagely, "the entertainment business has always been fickle."  Uh-huh.  I closed the program trying not to dislike these kids before they'd even hit the stage.

And to be honest, there was plenty to dislike about the first piece on the program, Xenakis's "Analogique A et B," for tape and live orchestra.  The composer worked as an engineer with Le Corbusier before launching his musical career, and his output, like that unfortunately influential architect's, is mostly a kind of high-minded blight. Xenakis was always claiming to have derived this or that piece from "Einstein's conception of time" or from game or set theory, or even from "architectural concepts" (like "window" and "door," I suppose).  But I'm afraid his compositions often end up sounding like out-takes from Forbidden Planet - not so much primordial dark as primordial bull - and that's what "Analogique A et B" sounded like, too (below, Robbie the Robot before the priory of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which Xenakis worked with Le Corbusier).

And for my next piece - Villa Savoye!

At the same time, though, it was hard to tell from the blippity-beeps of Xenakis whether the "criers" of A Far Cry were actually any good; the real test was the next piece on the program, Mozart's "Serenata Notturna, " (K. 239), a spirited and lovely, but relatively little-heard, piece of "night music" by the young composer (he was only 20 when he penned it). And I'm happy to say that soon after the performance began, my skepticism regarding A Far Cry had pretty much melted away; the group cohered in a way not many young ensembles do, and gave the music a hearty, forward pulse, propelled by the first and second violins, Jennifer Curtis and Miki-Sophia Cloud, who were exceptional (Curtis is practically already a star). As I listened, though, I realized that A Far Cry wasn't so much "self-conducted" as "first-chair-conducted;" this wasn't orchestral music done in a new way so much as an old way. And when you've got someone like Curtis in the first chair, that way is just fine; indeed, the high point of the serenade came in the cadenza at the very end of the rondo, when Curtis let rip with a witty bit of gypsy harmony that pulled us back to the folk origins of the form.

Nothing else in the program reached quite that high a pitch of invention - but the evening's premiere, Richard Cornell's "New Fantasies," boasted both a mysterious luster and an eerie atmosphere, which the criers did full justice. Unfortunately Cornell seemed to retreat into technical tinkering in the later movements of the piece, just when we felt he should be breaking through to a larger statement.  Still, "New Fantasies" was a good deal better than most local academic music.

But alas, things went a little awry again in Purcell's rarely-heard music for The Old Bachelor (by that flash-in-the-pan, Bill Congreve). The criers played these dances with vigor, but they were using modern instruments, which sound too blurry and grand for Purcell's jigs and hornpipes, and his slightly-dissonant suspensions, that can have a lean, sweet edge on period strings, here were just muddily out of tune.

Things improved enormously, however, with Bartók's familiar "Divertimento for String Orchestra," a piece that again was clearly in the criers' comfort zone.  First violinist Jesse Irons led the group in a powerful, if somewhat predictable, reading - but the playing only really caught fire in the cold, slowly overpowering second movement.  Elsewhere in the piece, I'm afraid A Far Cry sounded a bit like a standard-issue collective, with an interpretive profile that can easily creep toward the mean.  Yes, it's wonderful that the criers can play so coherently without a conductor - but what's the point of that, if the end results aren't striking individual interpretations?  I don't mean to question their achievement, which is a considerable one - and I'd happily hear them again (although I might skip the program notes).  And I welcome their programming of obscurities, from the sublime (Purcell) to the ridiculous (Xenakis).  But the question of what they're trying to achieve in musical terms, I think, has yet to be answered.

Another new kid on the block

I've been remiss in not mentioning that we actually have yet another new theatre in town - the "Hemenway Project," designed by Handel Architects, at the Boston Conservatory (above).  As the Conservatory's old performance space had gotten so tatty I sometimes actually couldn't face seeing shows there, I'm very excited about the new venue.  And you should be, too.  An opening celebration is scheduled for the weekend of Oct. 13-16, with free guided tours for the public on Saturday, Oct. 16, and a tribute to Tommy Tune on the boards that evening, featuring Conservatory alum Chad Kimball (of Memphis fame).  More info is available here.

The hills are alive, yo

Julie Andrews reaches out in The Sound of Music.

How do you solve a problem like The Sound of Music?  The 1965 blockbuster (above, with additions) was sneered at by hipsters upon its release (Pauline Kael called it "The Sound of Money") to whom its creepy cultural underpinnings were all too clear. Usually Rodgers and Hammerstein, for all their corniness, were progressive in their politics; but this time, it was hard to make the same claim. Because they'd written a musical that purported to be about Catholics in Austria during the time of the Anschluss - and yet the fact that Hitler was Austrian and Catholic was somehow never mentioned. Indeed, the movie's subliminal message, that good Catholics resisted Hitler's advance, has been shown by historians to be preposterous.  (And the Austrians had no trouble later electing a former Nazi as President.)

The Sound of Music even scrambles what in many ways is most appealing about Rodgers and Hammerstein's legacy - their embrace of female sexuality.  In South Pacific and Oklahoma - in hell, all their musicals - the heroine is portrayed as a healthy sexual being with an appetite for physical love, which doesn't qualify her as a fallen woman. As long as sex goes hand in hand with emotion, R&H consistently counsel, it's okay (even their "fast" girls, like Ado Annie, are forgiven for their loose ways).

But The Sound of Music subtly whitewashes its romantic, as well as political, story.  Maria von Trapp was a 20-year-old orphan when she "fell in love" with the wealthy Captain von Trapp, who was twenty-five years her senior (not the seeming twelve or fourteen years between Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the movie).  It wasn't quite a case of "You Are Sixteen, I'm Going On Seventy," but given that the Captain threw over age- and income-appropriate women for his twenty-year-old, penniless nanny, there are undercurrents to their romance that, shall we say, the movie elides.  No wonder the Jewish, single, fifty-something Pauline Kael had a conniption when she saw it.

What probably drove her even crazier was the obvious fact that The Sound of Music is an absolute triumph of pop culture (and pop was her thang).  It's perfectly cast, paced, and produced, and visually it's one of the few movies you can really call "stunning."  The music - which is so harmonically simple it should be a total bore - is instead utterly charming and instantly memorable, and the lyrics are justifiably famous.  "This can't be happening!" you may tell yourself as you watch it, but The Sound of Music is a kind of an anschluss of entertainment, and as you watch it you realize - you will be assimilated. No wonder the movie has become embedded in the culture the way that only The Wizard of Oz and a handful of other family films have.

But it's also of course a totem of white culture - indeed, maybe no movie but Triumph of the Will is whiter.  And that has made The Sound of Music both cultural touchstone and target over the years.  Of late, however, the touchstone has won out over the target - in Moulin Rouge!, for instance, the bohemians all sang along with the title song sans irony, and now Doug Elkins has choreographed a whole suite of hip-hop and break dances to the movie's score in Fräulein Maria (at the new Paramount Theatre through this weekend).

The ridiculous contrast between these street moves and this whitest of movies is the show's big (though not only) joke.  Instead of lilting waltzes and lifts, the choreography hugs the ground, and darts here and there, sometimes defensively, sometimes seductively.  But if Elkins has taken The Sound of Music to the street, he's done it without really subverting (much less lampooning) it.  Indeed, although his scenario for "I Am Sixteen, Going On Seventeen" is about an aging queen trying to seduce a hung piece of rough trade, and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" is set to the smooth moves of a naïvely posturing rapper, Fräulein Maria is clearly designed not to ridicule its corny source, but rather to bestow some of that source's golden-tinged innocence on the culturally disenfranchised.


And the trick works, pretty much over and over, because of course the primal drives of The Sound of Music - for love, and experience, and joy and beauty - pretty much drive everything on the street, too.  There is something actually like innocence in that old queen's hopefulness, and a touching faith in that rapper's belief in his dream.  Meanwhile other numbers, like "Do Re Mi" (below) and "The Lonely Goatherd" simply translate the original's whitebread rambunctiousness into a happily chaotic street milieu.

The kids krump out with two of their Marias.

Of course perhaps this means that the "street" is actually as corny as Kansas in August - but is that really such a surprise?  And at any rate, Elkins never tries to tie Fräulein Maria into a tight conceptual statement. He simply seems to let this or that song take him wherever it wants to,  while trusting that his signature style will give everything a rough coherence (which it pretty much does).  To be honest, the show does take a while to get going - the opening numbers aren't particularly inspired. But the choreography gets stronger as the evening progresses, and as the men take over more of it; I'm afraid only one of Elkins's female dancers, Deborah Lohse, really blossoms (as a hilariously hard-boiled "Baroness"). Likewise, of the (count'em) three Marias, only Joshua R. Palmer makes a clear impression - perhaps because he's the one who best channels the yin/yang of innocence and experience latent in the role. Martial arts expert Gui Greene meanwhile is nothing less than stunning as the leaping, flipping object of Liesl's affection in "I Am Sixteen," and Elkins himself exhibits a fluid precision as that dreaming rapper. The choreographer also appears in the one number that seems to deconstruct, a bit, its source - a sad, seedy little pas de deux (to "Edelweiss," which literally means "Noble White") between two men vying for an Austrian hat; somehow in its unspoken subtext we sense the whole sad history of the Anschluss. And somewhere, maybe, Pauline Kael is smiling.

Getting down and Dirty at the North Shore

After their great performances, these "Scoundrels" deserve a rest.

"What you lack in grace you more than make up for in vulgarity," the lead of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels quips at one point to his sidekick, and it's the kind of back-handed compliment that pretty much sums up the whole show.  Spawned in the shadow of The Producers, Scoundrels starts out broad and bawdy - and then just gets broader and bawdier, its shenanigans always laced with smart-alecky, Mad-Magazine-style wit.  But this seems to be (again, as the show itself would have it) merely a case of "giving 'em what they want": Scoundrels survived a slew of lukewarm reviews on Broadway, went on to win a Tony for one of its stars, and seems to have been touring somewhere ever since.

And now it's at Beverly's North Shore Music Theatre, in a jazzy, snazzy production that should prove a hit, because it definitely gives the crowd what it wants - even though I began to tune out well before the last whoopee-cushion gag (although I'm speaking metaphorically; the whoopee cushion, oddly enough, never makes its appearance).  I'm hardly immune to raunchy humor - but I'm not a fan of repetition; and while Scoundrels seems to just want you to let out a great big horselaugh (which you're happy to do), it then wants you to do it again, and again, and again.  Indeed, its tone and attack never vary for two and half hours (the physical schtick in the second half particularly begins to drag).

But if I don't have the stamina of a horse, a lot of people do, and they were clearly enjoying the hell out of this show the night I saw it.  And to be honest, in many ways Scoundrels, which some have called "Son of The Producers" is actually quite a bit better than The Producers.  David Yazbeck's score and lyrics are definitely stronger: the finale's hook is actually memorable, as is "Great Big Stuff," which cleverly parodies its own stupidity - plus there's a hilarious ballad near the end that ruthlessly savages Broadway's sappy little broken heart.  And every now and then, hidden in its adolescent-suburban vision of sophistication (and its knowing acknowledgment of its own bad taste) there's a nugget of genuine, if crude, wit.  After all, listening to your kid brother's dirty jokes can be pretty funny.

Jennifer Cody and Brent Barrett face off in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."

And Yazbeck and book writer Jeffrey Lane couldn't ask for a stronger cast than the one at the North Shore to put over their material, whatever its virtues.  The sets are again pretty minimal, and the dancing still hasn't reached the "old" North Shore's athletic standard - but the stars are of exceptionally high wattage, as they're mostly folks who know their way around Broadway, or have actually toured with this show before.  Lead Brent Barrett is perhaps more distant than debonair as Lawrence Jameson, the smooth "scoundrel" who romances women away from their jewelry in a Riviera resort.  But he's got a strong voice, chiseled looks, and a skillful versatility that covers all the many bases he's got to run, as the show requires that he channel Harvey Korman one minute, then Cary Grant the next.  This smooth swindler still can't prevent, however, the hyperactive D.B. Bonds from stealing almost every scene from him as his less "classy" sidekick, Freddy.

Or from being upstaged by a bevy of talented women, either.  As the socialite who's even tackier than her seducers, Jennifer Cody (above) romped off with the whole production, and Brynn O'Malley proved a bright blonde firecracker (a kind of Kristin-Chenoweth-in-waiting) as the gal who just may be beating the big boys at their own game.  Even on the sidelines there was great work, from John Scherer and Lynne Wintersteller as a corrupt police captain and a sweetly clueless society dame who still carries the torch for her swindler.  Director Mark Martino punched everything up, and kept all the "great big stuff" moving with appropriate zip.  Because, I know, I know, sometimes you just have to give people what they want.

The minstrel goes meta

Since World War II, mainstream writing on race in America has always had a reformist element - naturally enough, it always seemed. Racism was duly condemned as evil and false, and characters deluded by it were either censured, defeated, or eventually reformed.  Even ironic latter-day twists on this formula, like David Mamet's Race, still unconsciously clung to the quaint notion that character transcended color.

But Young Jean Lee's highly original The Shipment - the last performance of which you can catch at the ICA this afternoon - may be the first meditation on race I've ever seen that pretty much dispenses with that sweet sentiment.  To this young Korean-American playwright, racism is simply how the world operates, and how we operate, too - it's a crucial ingredient not merely of our social identity but of our actual, inner identity - if that really exists (Lee carefully sidesteps this question). As whites stereotype blacks, so blacks stereotype whites, and both play off their own stereotyping in not just their social presentations but in how they think about themselves. In short, racism is our actual lingua franca; you can't be hip, or even self-aware, without it.

This, of course, is a common belief in the academy, but it's rarely voiced so openly on stage, perhaps because it's such a coolly despairing point of view (and quite possibly a hardcore racist one). And certainly The Shipment, intriguing as it is, is also coolly despairing, even if that despair is concealed beneath a pastiche of energetic vulgarity and clever button-pushing - most of which turns out to be a deception, by the way.  Indeed, we eventually learn the entire show has been a deception; even its marketing has been a deception - it has been widely praised as a searing indictment of racism.  But frankly, "a sad acceptance of racism" would be closer to the truth.

To be fair, at first it seems like an indictment; The Shipment opens with a ridiculous dance number (at top left) that recalls a minstrel show but plays out against something like current pop, and then segues into a similarly up-to-the-minute, and therefore scorchingly filthy, routine by an Eddie Murphy- or Chris Rock-like comic.  The comedian seems to be boiling over with rage, and baits his (supposedly) white audience relentlessly: "White people be evil," he declares, but then immediately retreats: "Naw, I’m just playin’ wit’ chall. Most white folks ain’t evil—they just stupid!" A split-second later, however, having made his jabs, he does another 180, into a grotesque self-abasement as a "Negro" who's obsessed with bodily functions that "whites" repress: "You think I enjoy talkin’ ’bout race?" he cries, putting on his best Al Jolson face. "I wanna talk about POOP, mothafuckahs!" Indeed, he conflates these two modes toward the end of his routine, when he snickers to us "crackers" that he hopes his white wife will "lick his asshole" later tonight. All told, it's a virtuosic dance through millennial minstrelsy, through which Lee subtly insinuates that the performer is not only exploiting but actually collaborating with his own objectification.

And the minstrel show just keeps on coming: next we get an after-school special about a young African-American teen lured into the drug trade, even though "rapping is his dream." Here the actors (a very strong group, btw, with star turns from Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Douglas Scott Streater, and Amelia Workman) are obviously bored out of their minds, and recite their clichéd dialogue ("Oh no! Not a drive-by shooting!") by hilarious rote. Finally comes a haunting song in which they tell us "we're not the dark center of the universe . . . we could disappear into thin air if you'd like," before standing still for several minutes, gazing silently out at the crowd, just staring (or maybe searching).

What comes next, though, is what gives the evening its only real sting. The set for what looks like a sophisticated "black" sitcom on Fox is assembled (at left), and the actors re-assemble for a performance that's seemingly naturalistic in its detail, and free of the stereotypic caricature we've seen so far. As the action progresses,  it grows slightly surreal, however, and its sense of cultural "surround" becomes unstable - and while the characters insist they're going to leave any minute, they seem unable to. We sense we're being set up, but we're not sure precisely how - and Lee displays a high level of skill in keeping her narrative bouncing along from one surprise to another, while keeping us guessing as to its true nature.

When the Sixth-Sense-like dénouement finally arrives, at first it feels like a satisfying white-liberal gotcha! moment. But as one ponders its real meaning, it too seems to be something other than what it appears. I won't give away the big surprise, but I will say that with it, Lee snaps shut what is essentially a hall of mirrors - but what it reflects, she is unwilling (or unable) to say. In the world of The Shipment, "race" has been replaced by "mediated race," and just as the actors can't cross the fourth wall when they stare out at the audience at the play's "hinge," so the script offers us no way to cross over from minstrel show to reality.  In the old days of Driving Miss Daisy, the theatre communicated a sentimental story of individual people of different races connecting despite the mores of the day. But "real life" doesn't seem to exist in The Shipment, and so no corny, patronizing Atticus-Finch style gesture, or even "Can't we all just get along?"-style accommodation, is really possible (it's not even on the table). In fact, our mediated culture depends on the assumption that it's impossible; for Ms. Lee, a Korean-American, to try to write actual black or white characters would be ridiculous and insulting in the world of The Shipment. This, I think, is a deeply millennial view - and its innocent cynicism is what makes The Shipment quite remarkable. The evening opens with an empty stage, echoing with a deep, melodramatic rumble: beneath the minstrel show lies THE VOID, it announces. But somehow that sense of emptiness made me a little nostalgic for Atticus and Miss Daisy.

Sex and Kansas City

For a gay man, seeing a play by William Inge is like stepping into the Way-Back Machine and coming out into a world in which gay culture was completely encoded into straight culture: Inge's vision of the empty sexual plains of the Midwest - into which a horny drifter suddenly intrudes (sometimes when we're lucky it's Paul Newman, at left) - is as gay as anything Tennessee Williams ever wrote, but it's also more closeted (like the playwright himself), and so embedded in the myths of the American heartland that it reads like some unconscious prequel to Brokeback Mountain.

Of course it says something about the American heartland that it pulled this playwright and his output so close to its hairy chest; indeed, Inge was so influential that his style sparked a cottage industry of hunk-at-large movies and plays (indeed, where would Newman, or William Holden, or Burt Lancaster, have been without him?).  At the same time, of course, gay culture all but took over the American arts scene - Inge orbited just outside a secret bi-coastal world that included not only Tennessee Williams but also Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Johnson - who wasn't gay in American high culture in the 50's?

Naked in the closet in John Cheever's "The Swimmer."

But it's no surprise that, as the closet door squeaked open, and the straight world grappled with gay liberation in the 60's and 70's, Inge wound up being discarded, and his work fell into contempt - he read, like Rock Hudson, as a form of dishonest camp. (Tragically, he committed suicide in 1973.)  But neither is it surprising that now, at least in the civilized portions of the world (where gay rights are kind of a done deal, so Inge's sexuality isn't such a big deal), this long-overlooked playwright is beginning to edge back into our good graces.

Because this minor American master is actually quite a bit better than Brokeback Mountain - although what's striking about Inge today is how he captured the identity not of the American gay male but the American woman (with whom I guess you could say he identified), caught between economic needs and sexual ones in a hard-scrabble world poised to punish any kind of pleasure.  Indeed, having just suffered through Mamet's Boston Marriage and Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, I was struck at how effortlessly in Bus Stop (now at the Huntington Theatre) Inge conjures living and breathing female characters seemngly at will, while Mamet could only construct Edwardian drag queens, and Ruhl psycho-sexual treatises.  Oddly, in Inge, it's actually the studs who seem a bit objectified and generic; the women feel drawn directly from life.  And while yes, they in some ways serve as vehicles for his own frustrated sex fantasies, they also exist independently of him, in a way that Blanche and Laura and Maggie are hard to separate from Tennessee Williams. Inge's women, like Balzac's and Flaubert's,  have histories, and homes, and even, we get the impression, salaries.  His may be the most realistic gallery of American women to ever hold the American stage.

Or perhaps I'm waxing euphorically about Inge because I've just seen a Nicholas Martin production of him.  Yes, the master is back, and pretty much at the height of his powers in Bus Stop, subtly drawing from the play a surprising emotional complexity, while coaxing superb performances from every member of a large cast, which gets to inhabit a big, beautifully rendered set (by James Noone, below) that's impeccable in its detail.  We can confidently add Bus Stop to the shelf of Martin masterpieces, like She Loves Me, Present Laughter, and Love's Labour's Lost, that the Huntington has acquired over the years (let's hope there's room for a few more).

Of course Bus Stop lands right in what I think of as the artistic sweet spot for Martin, where commercial craft edges into art.  So theatre-goers should not be surprised to find Inge's fifty-year-old hit has an audience-friendly melodramatic spine, with an opening stretch of bald exposition, plenty of sex, and a gallery of American archetypes (or maybe stereotypes): the cowboy, the hooker with a heart of gold, the smart kid sister, and the fatherly sheriff all make their respective appearances here, in some form or other; this was a play made not to win awards but make some money.  Inge's great achievement, however, is his orchestration of these characters' interactions over the night they spend stranded in a Kansas snowstorm; miraculously, from conflicts that seem almost pre-fab, he conjures a precisely-observed comedy of melancholy that hints at what you might call, for lack of a better term, the tragedy of the everyday.

Martin, as always, leavens all this with a light comic touch, and I'd argue his shunning of cheap pathos gives Inge's moroseness a needed shot of tonic.  Still, there are a few pastels in this production's palette that should be a shade darker: Cherie, for instance, the famous "chan-tooz" whose entanglement with Bo (that stereotypical cowboy) comprises the central plot, must be a touch more damaged and vulnerable than she appears here (given a sexual history that began at age 14!).  But in general, the tough love of Martin's direction suggests the pathos of these characters without wallowing in it (after all, they don't wallow in it, either).  He even treads lightly on the sexuality of the only person in the play to be literally "left out in the cold" at the close - Bo's quiet, Brokeback-esque sidekick - even though, post mortem (as it were), Inge's closing gambit is an obvious, heartbreaking nod to his own desperate isolation.

And luckily for us, Martin has assembled the kind of cast that will inevitably end up on the "best ensemble" lists for the year - but it seemed to me that first among equals were Nicole Rodenburg as that hardy, basically happy Cherie, Elma Duckworth as the smart, lovelorn young thing, and Noah Bean as the cowboy who mixes everything up.  All trade on a formidable level of technique - Bean's performance in particular is almost a dance of precise physical quirks - but all infuse their work with genuine feeling, so even if they tiptoe up to the edge of caricature here and there, they never cross that fatal line.

More committed, detailed work came from Huntington newcomers Henry Stram, as a seedily elegant professor with a penchant for young girls (another disguised self-portrait by Inge?),  Adam LeFevre as that gentle giant of a sheriff, and the poignantly taciturn Stephen Lee Anderson as the cowboy loner-to-end-all-loners. I don't think I need to tell you that local star Karen MacDonald is excellent (with perhaps the show's most lived-in accent) as the lonesome proprietress of that snowbound diner, or that the skillful Will Lebow, arguably miscast as her crude bus-driver beau, nevertheless makes the role work on his own terms.

What else is there - oh, there seemed to be a little trouble with the downstage light levels in the first act, but that was remedied by Act II.  The rest was pretty much pure pleasure.  We'll never see a better production in Boston of this American classic - or at least not for another fifty years.

What to see, and what's next

"Bus Stop" rolls in at the Huntington.

People are always asking me if there's a good show in town; the answer is always "yes," and usually (unlike with the movies) there's more than one.  Right now there are three (at least): The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the Lyric Stage, Camelot down at Trinity Rep in Providence, and especially Bus Stop (above) at the Huntington (which I'll review in a day or two, but which is just about perfect, and certainly Broadway-worthy).

This weekend marks a slew of new openings, though - including one noteworthy production, Young Jean Lee's breakout play The Shipment, which will run only this weekend at the ICA.  The controversial playwright herself will be in attendance to lead post-show discussions.

Elsewhere, the reborn North Shore Music Theatre opens Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the keenly-anticipated ArtsEmerson season (you know, the one that has replaced the A.R.T. in terms of intellectual expectation) kicks off for real with Fraulein Maria (a flash mob warms up the locals for the coming show, below).

Something for everyone, I'd say.

Coming attractions

It's Sister Sarah to the sexual rescue, ladies!

By now I think Sarah Ruhl's reputation as our greatest living figurehead playwright is assured, and if it's not, then In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (now at SpeakEasy Stage) pretty much seals the deal. As a friend who saw it in its failed Broadway run assured me, it is, indeed, better than Dead Man's Cell Phone or Eurydice. It's just not all that good. It's sometimes funny, but also both predictable and meandering; despite a national reputation, a MacArthur "genius" grant, and a slew of nominations for the Tony and the Pulitzer, Ruhl has yet to produce a play like American Buffalo or Curse of the Starving Class, or really any of the plays that made the names of America's great male playwrights.

But In the Next Room is still good enough to keep her nailed to the prow of a cultural barge that somehow includes the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters, Oprah, and the Times's Charles Isherwood (who I sometimes think should have stuck to writing about porn stars). And why? Because, as usual, Ruhl earnestly connects, not with any sort of personal artistic vision, but rather with the touchstones of the liberal arts college experience (her play is even derived from a book by a Smith professor). The uptight white women who can't function sexually, and the warm, black woman who can; the distant, inadequate straight guy, and the gay, flamboyant artiste; the clichés are all there, one after the other, straight from the campus coffeehouse.

I remember when I first saw Eurydice, I innocently fumed that it played like "meandering jottings" from some college girl's journal. Little did I know that was literally true (Ruhl wrote it while at Brown) - and what's more, that was the whole point. Another of Ruhl's "college plays" (Passion Play) has likewise seen regional productions all over the country, such is the nostalgic hunger for campus culture (especially as written by a woman) on our stages. Indeed, Ruhl's career is just one facet of a larger cultural movement I've written critically about before: the steady encroachment of the academy on the arts. Professors are no longer content to analyze our theatre; instead, they presume to direct it, via repertory houses and a farm system of new play development. To them, and their former students, Ruhl seems like a singular talent; but to a skeptic, she has rather obviously been manufactured by what I call the academic-theatrical complex.

Of course Sarah Ruhl has some talent - otherwise the ruse wouldn't work;  she just doesn't have enough talent to deserve a major reputation. There are flickers of genuine feeling in almost all her scripts, including In the Next Room. And I'll admit that this time, the playwright's usual dependence on twee "poetry" (of the kind that almost made Alison Croggon "fwow up") and her penchant for metaphysical abandon are both tamped way down. Ruhl sticks roughly to "naturalism," such as it is, as she recounts her re-imagining of the introduction of the vibrator to the Victorian domestic scene (a typical advertisement, at left). Nobody pops in from another dimension, or comes back from the dead, and none of the furniture talks. But in a way, the lack of metaphysical messiness only points up that the script is nevertheless still a mess. Shorn of her flights of "poetry," Ruhl's characters are all the more obviously trite (Victorianism, vibrators, and college girls - as Freud would say, it's almost over-determined). And her structure is lousy as ever; she simply lacks the discipline to make her scenes cohere and build.

Still, I'll admit that in some ways In the Next Room is re-assuring; if Ruhl suddenly produced a great script, we'd actually be in serious trouble (the academy - and the terrorists - would have won!). But by now I don't think she ever will. You can't make the old excuses of youth and immaturity for her (Ruhl is 36 these days, not 25), nor can you pretend that financial need has engendered haste in her writing (the MacArthur made Ruhl financially independent). No, she's got all the money and time that she needs. This is as good as she's going to get.

For many people, of course, it's good enough; they're happy to ignore the truly great female playwrights of our day (Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane), who are deeply original and difficult, to embrace the feel-good campus theatrics of Ruhl. That may be a bourgeois (or rather a "bobo") preference, but c'est la National Public Radio, ya know?

And SpeakEasy Stage, as usual, serves up a tastily sophisticated version of this superficial fare. Director Scott Edmiston provides a smooth surface to the production, and finds something close to the right tone of "sad" whimsy (which is no small trick). As he always does, he makes the play cute.  The director doesn't ameliorate the script's structural and thematic problems (he never does that), but at least he has engaged two of our best actresses - Marianna Bassham and Anne Gottlieb - as the Victorian ladies who discover the wonders of the clitoris, and go at the "little man in the boat" with the comic alacrity of Lucy and Ethel (above) in sweetly dirty scenes that are often a riot (the joke is all the funnier when they do each other, at left).  In supporting roles, Edmiston has also called back from New York the wonderful Lindsey McWhorter as Gottlieb's wet nurse (and her soulfulness takes some edge off the stereotypical vibrations of the role), and cast quietly intriguing newcomer Frances Idlebrook as the physican's assistant whose magic fingers get better results than any electrical instrument could.

The men fare less well - but then we get the idea they're supposed to; Ruhl almost never conjures convincing male characters (amusingly enough, her men are often cut from the same cardboard as Mamet's women).  The guys are there to serve as targets, and maybe take their clothes off. Still, the actors do what they can, and Derry Woodhouse strikes a nervous spark or two as Gottlieb's distant husband, and sportingly grits his teeth through the requisite stretch of SpeakEasy male nudity.  (Does this theatre ever feature naked ladies?  If they're not going to in a play about vibrators, I guess they never will!).

Still, I will admit - although I feel I'm a bit of a traitor to my own cause for doing so - that this isn't the best production of In the Next Room that I can imagine. Ruhl rambles so in the second half of her script that for her finale, she simply pulls a theme out of her play like a rabbit out of a hat; the drama turns out to be, in its final minutes, about men facing up to their fear of sexual inadequacy, and connecting with their women, even if electric puppetry can overpower the penis. Fair enough; and the production could, I think, have prepared us for this dénouement - but only if Gottlieb were even better than she already is. It's really up to her to deepen her characters' awareness of her situation, and thus the atmosphere of the play (she'd have to do it pretty much without Sarah Ruhl's help, though). Hard as this may be, that's the only way to shift the play's focus toward its final resting point, and maybe give it some real resonance as well. Till that happens, In the Next Room may give off fun vibrations, but will lack real electricity.

In what is becoming something of a ritual . . .

. . . the latest OK Go video.

Trinity finds a most congenial spot for Camelot

Yes, Lancelot, this is Camelot!

You have to feel for artistic directors these days - they can't approach a great old chestnut without some sort of radical excuse for doing so.  Don't worry, they tell us, we're not going to just "do" Our Town or You Can't Take It With You - we're going to "do" something with it!  The genders are reversed this time; or it's set on Wall Street; or everybody pees on the flag at the end; or a giant pineapple rolls through!  We're going to rip away the mask of gentility, and leave you shivering in the existential dark, staring your own failed, miserable existence in the face!   And you're going to love it!

Only of course nine times out of ten, you don't love it; the radical update, or reconstruction or what have you, falls terribly flat. You try to stare the meaninglessness of your own existence in the face, but you find yourself thinking about the grocery list instead.  That is when you're not happily daydreaming - as Emily urinates on George in the middle of Our Town - of innocent productions of chestnuts past, which gave you such pleasure, before Bob Brustein explained to you how wrong you were.


But some artistic directors are beginning to realize that you can have your radical frosting and still eat your theatrical cake, too.  Take Trinity Rep's new staging of Camelot, for instance, by artistic director Curt Columbus.  On the surface, it seems like a groovy radical update of this tired old thing that noobody could take seriously anymore - it's set not in some Ed-Sullivan-Show version of Sherwood Forest, but in London, in the Tube, during the blitz.  Gritty enough for you?  None of the ladies are wearing those pointy hats with tissues at the end, either - no, instead they're putting the best face they can on being forced out of house and home by the Nazis (just like in Cabaret!), who seem to be getting closer and closer, as the roof shakes, and plaster falls from a relentless bombardment.  In a word, this is not your father's Camelot!

But guess what - it is.  Within that newfangled frame, the "show within a show" unspools pretty much like that old-fashioned Ed Sullivan version, with witty romantic leads, and an idealized love triangle in which everybody's suffering and it's nobody's fault, and even an unapologetically lush rendering of that gorgeous chunk of melodic rock sugar, "If Ever I Would Leave You."  The whole radical update thing is really just a conceptual Trojan horse; the Camelot you love is hidden inside, and you'll pretty much love it all over again, much as you did before you went to college.  (Just don't tell Bob Brustein.)

And to be honest, the frame story is appropriate in its way - T.H. White began The Once and Future King, the source material of Camelot, as the bombs began to fall on London. Still, the concept trips up director Columbus a bit at the end (when he equates the battle over Guenevere's infidelity with the Battle of Britain); till then, however, it only intrudes superficially, and often to positive effect.  The whole "show" is here presented as an attempt to cheer the public up (rather like in real life, but never mind!) - so when the performers are interrupted in "The Lusty Month of May" by falling bombs, they defiantly do a second chorus, stiff upper lips firmly in place.  The updating even leads to some felicitous jokes in the staging, as when the Knights of the Round Table gather to listen to the day's jousting on an old-fashioned radio.

And the Trinity cast has the chops to (mostly) carry on in the long shadows of Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet (a cast which my partner actually saw on his eighth grade field trip to New York, so many moons ago; he was still enchanted by the Trinity version).  Stephen Thorne makes an endearingly callow Arthur (which is, actually, exactly as it should be; Burton's weary brooding, sexy as it was, was an imposition on the role), and though Rebecca Gibel (right, with Thorne) comes off as too experienced and common-sensible for Guenevere, her voice is beautifully matched to her songs, and she's a wonderful comic actress, too, so that's fine as well.

Alas, there's a subtler problem at work in Joe Wilson, Jr.'s performance as Lancelot.  Wilson has an eccentric charisma that could probably carry him through playing Mary Poppins, and he's hilarious whenever the part leans toward Lancelot's innocent conceit.  He even has the pipes to do justice to the lustrous "If Ever I Would Leave You."  But somehow he has no real chemistry with Gibel - or she has no chemistry with him - even though they both work awfully hard at pretending it's there; thus we accept, but don't really feel, the supposed pathos of their situation.

There are other missteps  - Jamey Grisham makes Mordred a kind of Kurt Hummel in bitch mode, and Mauro Hantmann mostly phones in his performance as Merlin.  But Janice Duclos may have never been better as a gimlet-eyed but gluttonous Morgan Le Fey, and Barbara Meek (who begins her fortieth season with Trinity this year) makes a crustily perfect Sir Pellinore.  The ensemble is slyly skillful, and director Columbus keeps bringing fresh twists to the unfolding action.  Until that slightly discomfiting finish (which is hardly the original's finest hour, either), I was consistently charmed.

But then why shouldn't I be?  Is it really so square to like Camelot, even in the Kennedy-White-House version (below) with the ladies in the pointy hats?  I mean, sure, Robert Goulet is obviously fatuous in his doe-eyes-and-chest-hair sensitivity.  But just ponder for a moment what the hip young Spamalot fans of today will be listening to in, say, forty years - an 80-year-old Amanda Palmer still singing about abortion.  Feel a little better about Robert Goulet?  I thought so.  ;-)

What's the worst piece of public art in Boston?

It's a common ritual for critics to hash out the best of the previous year (or decade), but picking out the worst . . . that's an unusual assignment. But one that local blogger Greg Cook - a man better known for sweetness than snark - has nonetheless bravely taken on.

And oddly, picking out the worst feels a whole lot more difficult than picking out the best!

For one thing, the field is crowded. When you're doing a "best of" list, you're dealing with (sadly) only a handful of contenders, guaranteed. But when you're trying to decide what the worst is, you find yourself surveying a vast wasteland, especially when it comes to public art. True, a few well-known disasters (like the Irish Famine Memorial, at left), come immediately to mind;but then you find yourself thinking of another candidate, and another, and another . . .

For not only is there an enormous field of contenders for the prize in question, there are almost as many reasons why they're bad. Indeed, nothing shows up critical folly like pondering the dreck of the past - because it always passed through some committee's critical filter, and was often even on somebody's "best of" list at the time! (Not so long ago, it seems critics thought wind sculptures were a good idea, for instance.) So it's worth remembering that public art is so bad partly because art criticism has been so bad.

Even so, you'd think a bit more quality stuff would get through the filter just by chance. But it's actually hard to think of any good (much less great) public art put up in Boston in the last, oh, forty years; I think, given Greg's apparent urge to have a contest about public art, it perforce had to be a race to the bottom. For it seems that not only has criticism wandered astray, but the culture has, too (after all, we just named our last big public works project after a ball player). True, some cities do better than Boston - but not all that much. Even Chicago's much-lauded "Cloud Gate" (below), though undeniably cool, is basically cool because it's very big and shiny, and thus elides the problem of "content" (the same way ball players do). Indeed, I suppose the last meaningful piece of public art I can think of may have been Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (at left, which Boston's more-recent Holocaust Memorial essentially imitated).

Big, bright and empty: the celebrated Anish Kapoor succeeds in creating public art sans public content.

In general, critics (and intellectuals) want something politically and formally challenging in public art; plain folks just want something accessible and celebratory.  The intellectuals have an execrable record, it's true, but those who have resisted their prescriptions haven't done so well, either; they often come off as simplistic reactionaries, and the representational stuff they've insisted on erecting has ended up looking clumsy, sappy, or clumsily sappy. (It doesn't help matters that very few representational sculptors have reached the level of prowess that was common in the past.) In a nutshell, these days the critical and academic establishments celebrate artistic modes that are inappropriate to the demands of public art, and the public's own nostalgic taste seems just as bad.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that the only recent "public art" that has made a splash locally has been the graffiti of Shepard Fairey. I hate Fairey because his work is plagiarized from other (better) artists, and because its rock-your-world narcissism is essentially as sentimental as the Irish Famine Memorial. Indeed, Fairey's success only seems to underline the unspoken crisis in public art: some folks seem to feel the only "authentic" way for an artist to enter the public sphere is to attack it. Clearly that can't go on forever - and at any rate, Fairey merely replaces nostalgic kitsch with hip kitsch, or just gnostic dopiness; I mean seriously, what is Andre the Giant doing up on those Boston tenements? Fairey's just as stupid as that sadly inscrutable giant pear in Dorchester (below).

What?

So what's the solution to the quandary Greg Cook has so deftly put his finger on? Like everybody else, I'm not sure - and there's probably no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of public art, anyway.  The odd thing is that we yearn for it, even though we here in Boston seem to have lost the knack for making it, so we're going to keep trying.  But perhaps we're just not aiming high enough - there may be no formula out there, but there are people around who are getting it right, and maybe we should just follow their leads. Below are a few exemplars of the form (all of them essentially representational) that are worth checking out; this is what we could be aiming for.

Antony Gormley

Jaume Plensa

Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

The future of Irish dance is in their hands

World-class Irish step dancers Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding re-configure "Lord of the Dance" for the table top, and "Irish hand dance" is born.

Stringing up the puppetmaster

Sometimes you really want to like a performer, despite his or her failings.

But sometimes, try as you might, you just can't.

I pondered this problem while watching Blair Thomas's new show, Hard Headed Heart, at the Charlestown Working Theater last weekend (which once again is offering a gutsy season, btw).  I wanted to like this show like hell.  Thomas is brilliantly versatile - in his "puppet shows" (somehow the phrase doesn't do these conceptual gambits justice) he plays most all the roles, and provides the narration, musical accompaniment, and sound effects too - along with just about everything else.  When he's not banging on a drum kit, or puffing on a tuba, he's expertly manipulating an array of evocatively-designed marionettes, and doing all their voices.  I've rarely seen a performer work harder.

And the "shows" themselves are marvels of ingenious design.  Each of the three pieces in Hard Headed Heart came with its own theatre - drama machines on wheels, if you will, equipped with in-house orchestras, stereo and projection systems, and all manner of props, tricks, and trap doors.  These pint-sized productions - and the contraptions that embody them - are almost relentlessly imaginative, and redolent with ghastly, Grand Guignol atmosphere.

But unfortunately the maestro himself, Mr. Blair Thomas, isn't a particularly warm or engaging presence - indeed, he plays puppetmaster with the kind of cold-blooded condescension that always kills things at the A.R.T.  (You can almost hear his type cackling, "Pathetic earthlings . . . don't you know Death is always pulling the strings???")  But alas, I'm afraid warmth - or at least humanity - is what's required to put over the crude rough-and-tumble of the first piece on the program, Lorca's "The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal," (at top), with its long stretches of violence and its hearty embrace of lust; without it, the Punch-and-Judy cruelty just gets tedious.

A similarly snide distance undermined "St. James Infirmary," a meditation on the folk and jazz standard about the heartbroken drunk who has just seen his girl "stretched out on a cold white table" at the eponymous infirmary.  She was "so sweet, so cool, so fair,"  he moans, but the song is not only an elegy but also a defiant cry against death, with the singer's demand that at his own funeral, "a twenty-piece jazz band . . . raise Hell as we go along." Thomas's macabre version (at left), however, hid no such poignant, life-affirming punch; indeed, it merely got creepier as it went along, with the girl's skeleton taunting the grieving singer with her red, fuck-me high heels.  "I'm so blue my favorite hooker's dead," seemed to be the only message of this version.

Thomas's final number, based on Wallace Stevens's epochal "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was likewise reductive - it seemed to want to shoe-horn this open-ended classic into the doomed-romance template of the rest of the evening.  Still, its melancholy accompaniment - Ben Johnston's String Quartet #4, which seems to slowly encrypt the hook from "Amazing Grace" - was gently appropriate.  And the piece's imagery - four back-lit scrolls on which panoramas were slowly, softly assembled - engendered something of the poem's quiet sense of meditation and ontological disruption.  Best of all, Thomas didn't actually "perform," and hence there was no metaphorical snickering to mar the piece's truly evocative moments.  More, please - and less.

If you ever wondered whether our culture is driven by our technology . . .

. . . ponder that King Kong is now being readied for the Broadway stage. And why? Because we have the technology (at left). And once you have that, you just go out and buy the creative; Craig Lucas is actually doing the book, and Marius de Vries the music.  That's right - the music.  It's a musical.  So if you ever wondered whether or not the musical is being driven by technology . . .

Lost in the labyrinth with Christopher Nolan (Part II)

What, if anything, is at the center of Christopher Nolan's maze?

In my first post on Inception, I attempted to explain why Christopher Nolan's blockbuster had incited such passion on the Web (and such recalcitrance elsewhere), using the director's own hints as guide.  And in brief, I found in the pitched battle over the movie a war between two cultures: the culture of film - with its attenuated but still real roots in theatre, music, and art - and the culture of the virtual, in which only genre and paranoid onanism hold sway.  Critics looked at Inception and saw everything it lacked: characters, narrative, resonant symbolism; but geeks simply saw themselves, writ large, and with superb skill.  To them, it seemed obvious that a dream should look like The Matrix (or some other cool action flick); because what else would a dream look like?  What is a film for other than to provide thrills, to serve as "a wild ride"?

Which isn't to say that Inception isn't brilliantly made, or that Nolan isn't very, very clever.  It is, and he is - what's more, the director clearly has his finger on something new that's embedded in the culture; his immense commercial success, built on movies of undeniable intellectual challenge, make his legacy impossible to ignore.  But the question remains - is that "something new" he has tapped into capable of making art - or is it simply replacing art?

In short, what is Nolan's legacy made of?  I'd argue that in their complexity, his films mirror art, and maybe even great works of art; but their material is always derivative of art (the way "genre" is) without ever quite becoming, Pinocchio-like, the real thing.  Of course it's been a staple of film criticism for a long time that pop can achieve the status of art - and it arguably has, in movies like The Godfather and Citizen Kane - but these days it seems the greatness of those pop baubles may have really been due to the actual sources of art leaking into genre on the down low.  A sense of the tragic isn't actually indigenous to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, for instance; Francis Ford Coppola worked it into his movie sideways, from his knowledge of opera and theatre.  Ditto Roman Polanski, and Orson Welles, and even Alfred Hitchcok.  And critics did handsprings over their movies because they sensed in them an old magic in a new, populist form.

But when Christopher Nolan goes to work - with a brain just as sharp as Coppola's, if not more so - he doesn't try to tap into theatre, or opera, or even the great movies of the past; he simply tries to deepen genre with more genre.  Thus as we get lost in the maze of a movie like Inception, we only meet up with - other movies.

The imagery for "The Dawn of Man" in "2001."

To see why this is so, ponder, for a moment, what many consider the "ambiguities" of Inception, next to what we think of as real ambiguity in genuine works of art.  And no, with apologies to William Empson, we won't even reach as high as Shakespeare - let's look again, instead, at Stanley Kubrick (in whose artistic vineyard Inception fans imagine Nolan is toiling).

Kubrick has his flaws, of course, but his movies are genuinely ambiguous - indeed, as we watch them repeatedly, an almost frightening sense of thematic depth often opens out beneath us.  Take 2001, for instance (above and below) - it took viewers a long time to appreciate that the "computer-goes-crazy" story of HAL hooked seamlessly into the meditation on mind and machine that was threaded through the whole movie.  Indeed, after repeated viewings, fans realized that much in the film was ambiguous - even early reviewers chuckled, for instance, that HAL seemed like the most "human" character in the movie, but only gradually did viewers realize what that meant.

Other assumptions - such as the unseen presence of "aliens" behind the mysterious monolith (an assumption of "genre," btw) - likewise collapsed over time.  By now, we appreciate 2001 as a strange, slow poem on the question of what, exactly a machine is - and whether we ourselves are anything more than that (and whether the universe is, either; note the visual parallels between HAL's "eye," below, and the sunrise above).

And the imagery for the dawn of HAL.

There's a similar thematic apparatus working through most of Kubrick's oeuvre; Full Metal Jacket simultaneously illuminates the protective and destructive aspects of the war instinct; Eyes Wide Shut ponders the dance of sex and death.  But if these movies are sometimes recondite, or seem frustratingly paradoxical - if they simply pause sometimes in the hope that we'll "catch up" with their imagery - it's because their themes (not merely their techniques) are recondite and paradoxical.  Kubrick never dabbles in deception for its own sake; he doesn't indulge in sudden narrative boomerangs just to "blow our minds."  He's simply not interested in keeping us on our toes as a means of distraction.

But sometimes it seems that's all that Nolan is interested in.  Indeed, the essence of Inception is his relentless cutting between different "levels" of narrative (in case you haven't seen the movie, the dreams-within-dreams afford convenient dilations of time) without any sense of thematic development.  Sure, effects from one dream are interpolated into another, but this only creates possibilities for cool special effects, as when gravity goes all nonsense in one lengthy action sequence.  Meanwhile the psychology of lead character Cobb (as he burrows deeper and deeper into his own psyche) basically remains at the level of an average Oprah Winfrey show - only drenched in a paranoid expectation that everything that "seems" to be happening isn't really "real."  Much as a resident of Second Life knows deep down inside that he doesn't really have wings, so Cobb is half-sure that everything (and everyone) he encounters is a construct - of his employers, or his enemies, or even, perhaps of his own subconscious.

The trouble for Inception is that such an enveloping sense of suspicion basically flattens any hope of the film inspiring any rich emotion (aside, of course, from self-pity).  Even the one possibly resonant surprise at the center of the maze (how Cobb "killed" his wife with the idea that reality itself was an illusion) quickly devolves into a new game-board of dream-gambits that really only exist for their own sake.  Thus when a train - which we realize figures as the means of her death, both real and imaginary - pops up unexpectedly in another, seemingly unrelated, dream, the moment hardly registers as meaningful; in fact it's only about as resonant, as it clicks into the movie's paranoid pattern, as one of the numbers on a Rubik's cube.

So while software geeks, and other obsessive-compulsives, may squeal with delight at every chance to chase Nolan's unreliable narrative weasel around his virtual mulberry bush (the last shot provides a final opportunity to do the same thing with the whole film), grown-ups without access to a bong and a dorm room may find themselves checking out of the whole experience long before its official end.  Or will end up looking at it merely as a kind of memory exercise for over-grown children (the inevitable Lego tribute, at left).

But to be fair, Nolan almost seems aware of this artistic problem himself; he seems half-cognizant of his own inability to create actual art from his brilliance.  Indeed, for most of its running time, Inception largely exists as a defense against its own emptiness.  Over and over again, the director feeds us the same strange-loop catnip as a way of fooling us into thinking his movie is actually going somewhere thematically, instead of merely cycling through three or four ideas that only seem intriguingly ambiguous because it's impossible (due to his ongoing game of narrative monte) to differentiate between them.

Thus the deep, unspoken mood of Inception is something like impotent introspection.  And looking back, it seems that the defining motif of Nolan's career has been a similar form of brooding isolation - think of Batman alone on that urban spire in Batman Begins (at right), grimly surveying a vast landscape of genre, but always separate from it: that's Nolan (and his fans).  And in Inception, that loneliness has metastasized into his own brain: Nolan and his heroes are now even isolated from themselves.

Or is that very lack of connection, perhaps, Nolan's great meta-theme?  Is the true meaning of his oeuvre its self-aware meaninglessness?  Such a claim sounds ridiculous, I know, until you wonder - is Nolan so very far from, say, M.C. Escher?  True, Escher isn't as grandiose, or as self-aggrandizing, as Nolan; the spooky metaphysics of his strange loops burrow into the brain without the help of caped crusaders or leather-clad biceps, or even the cool corporate chic of Inception.  And just btw, the narrative strange loop figures in plenty of Western culture, from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark down to Borges; my favorite example of it in movies, in fact, may be the kitten that wakes up at the close of Celine and Julie Go Boating.  What makes Nolan different, however, is that in his cinema, the strange loops are all that exist in artistic terms; the rest is a derivative flotsam of borrowed imagery and familiar tropes floating over a bottomless well of adolescent angst.


But what if that's all that exists for the audience, too?  In a way, it's possible to read Nolan (at left, in high recursion mode) as an avatar of the post-cultural artist, the professional who can conjure for the crowd the illusion of art's complexity without any of its actual content.  And in a world in which the "market" has replaced the "culture," and in which much of the mass audience already "lives" in a world that doesn't really exist, what other option does an ambitious artist have?  Perhaps film is destined to follow the other visual arts into that self-aware but barren realm in which art is denuded of its ancient richness, but still edges forward on the strength of this or that intellectual strategy, this or that awareness or critical stance.

And given that likelihood, maybe the brilliant Christopher Nolan is the best we can hope for; maybe, in fact, it's time we all bid Stanley Kubrick and his kind good-bye.