Critical corruption in two keys (Part I)

The temptations of Anton Ego . . .

A few eyebrows around town rose (slightly) in reaction to a recent whine from Bill Marx on his website The Arts Fuse.  In an April 22 post titled "Why is Boston's Arts Coverage So Bland?" the self-professed persona non grata opined that:

Too much local arts coverage is dedicated to reporting—pleasantly and unquestioningly—that the exhibits in the [cultural] window have been rotated and that the latest products on display are (always) the finest.

Marx went on:

You will rummage long and hard on WGBH and WBUR (broadcast or online) to find a critical word amid the depressing line-up of puffy interviews, rewritten publicity releases, and earnest proclamations of “stunning seasons.”

In contrast, Marx announced, his Arts Fuse 'scribes' were "passionately encouraged to be wrong-headed, hysterical, opinionated, stubborn, ecstatic, and pretentious, but never, ever uncompromisingly insipid."

But of course this is Bill Marx talking, so the call to arms inevitably modulated into panhandling:

For those who believe that arts and culture deserves trustworthy and thoughtful criticism and reporting, there is an alternative—The Arts Fuse. Please contribute to our first-ever advertising campaign, via the tops of Boston cabs, to support our mission by getting the word out about our reviews and coverage.

Okay, now maybe that's a fair sales pitch.  You give me your money, I'll give you "trustworthy and thoughtful criticism."  Or, in a nutshell - "I'm Bill, trust me."

But (surprise, surprise), if you actually check out the theatre reviews in the Arts Fuse, you find they're stuffed to the gills with pull quotes like: "Searing . . . rich and layered . . . shocking relevance . . . small missteps but delightful . . . absolutely worthwhile seeing."  In short, the usual middlebrow marketing lubricants; indeed, if you charted the most recent Arts Fuse reviews on a graph (I won't bore you with another Excel spreadsheet), you'd find mostly raves or near-raves, with even the most critical review doing a 180 at the last minute to announce that the play in question is "absolutely worthwhile seeing" - despite, apparently, an earlier laundry list of caveats.  (The music pieces are even more monotonous; of the five most recent reviews, all were raves.)

So I'm not sure what kind of snake oil Marx thinks he's selling. I don't disagree with his critique of the likes of the Globe or WGBH and WBUR - they are indeed too full of puffery and PR (WGBH in particular). The part I don't get is how he imagines he's any better than they are.  It's true that he personally has always been a bit brighter than the average bear at the Globe or Phoenix. And as my friend and fellow blogger Art Hennessey sometimes reminds me, we both do check out a review on the Arts Fuse if it's by Marx himself; he always provides an emotionally pinched but intellectually informed take on the piece in question.

Well, I should say literarily informed. Marx has always been an insightful book reviewer, and he's obviously very well-read; the idea that this qualifies him to opine on the performing arts is a kind of quaint prejudice that he has never really outgrown simply because it would be inconvenient to do so. Beyond that, there's the problem that he's hardly original (in six years I've sketched out more fresh ideas than he has in thirty), and reliably throws softballs to Harvard, and has little to offer beyond boilerplate about "critical standards" and "thoughtfulness." But he does have something of a voice, and he obviously is desperate to be confused with Edmund Wilson - and this ambition gets him somewhere on the page.  

The problem is that Marx rarely writes for his own site. Instead, he publishes people who happily write for the likes of the Globe, WGBH and WBUR (those dens of PR and puffery!) whenever they get a chance, and whose Fuse work is only marginally subtler than their output elsewhere. Marx does pick up the occasional worthy piece by blogger (and, full disclosure, friend of the Hub Review) Ian Thal, but generally when he showcases an untried talent, it's soon embarrassingly apparent that the writer is a critical naïf, and groping for credibility, much less a plausible perspective.

And whatever you want to say about the Globe these days, it has reached a high plateau in terms of pure style - it's probably better written now than it has ever been (or at least better than it has been for the past thirty years - when Marx himself appeared in its pages). People like Sebastian Smee write so superbly, in fact, that it hardly seems to matter that they have nothing to say - they say so very little so very, very well, you hardly care!  Meanwhile Marx has yet to discover even a single new stylist, and seems unable to develop one.

So editing is hard, and grooming a critical voice even harder.  Which may be why Marx seems to be trying to fool potential donors with a variant of the old bait-and-switch; he's basically branding his site with his own reputation, when it's actually stuffed with weaker writers, and their weaker writing. In effect, he promises that if you donate to the Arts Fuse, you'll get Bill Marx - but instead you get Terry Byrne.

Perhaps even more damaging to his case, however, are rumors on the theatrical Rialto that murmur Marx is in effect "selling" reviews to arts organizations. Marx even obliquely nods to these whispers when he claims that he is "not beholden to the advertising dollars that come in from arts organizations."

Okay.  I'm not sure what that means (or even could mean).  But I've heard now from three separate sources that Marx has made explicit quid-pro-quo offers to local presenters along the lines of "If you give me a donation, I'll give you a review." So in effect, it's pay-to-play over at the Arts Fuse (although I doubt Marx has ever stated the rules of the game quite that baldly). I won't argue that Marx has explicitly promised a positive notice for cash; but does he have to?  These sorts of arrangements, like the one that Scott Heller at the Times effected to promote Frank Rich Jr. (which Marx himself poked fun at recently) are always accomplished as unspoken understandings.  Trust me, journalists are expert at hanging questionable dealings on slender ethical threads; and as long as no one says anything, the whole crap game stays confidently afloat.

Thus even sans explicit instructions, Marx's writers are pumping out the puffery, as noted above; so any of the presenters whom Marx approached could look over his site and realize,"If I give the Arts Fuse a  donation, there's a four-out-of-five chance I'll get a rave."

And those are pretty good odds. So by the standards of this fallen world, there's no reason for Marx's money machine not to hum along quite comfortably. Given his endless (and I mean endless) jibes at the mercenary instincts of producers, these moves make him the height of hypocrisy. But like most operational hypocrisies, his system has a built-in deniability that makes it workable.

The more salient question is - why should you contribute to his scheme? I understand why arts organizations would, of course.  But why should readers pony up their hard-earned cash for an uneven, second-rate imitation of what they can get elsewhere (often still for free)? It's obvious why Marx is making a big push right now - with the Phoenix having just folded, there may be a window online for something like its older incarnation to rise from the ashes on the web.  But clearly, even with a claimed stable of some 60 writers, Marx hasn't nearly reached the standards of the vanished world of alternative publishing. His reach seriously exceeds his grasp.

Plus there are other contenders in the race to co-opt our critical discourse.  Here in Boston, in fact, Marx is facing stiff competition from Polly Carl, resident den mother at Howl Round and the Center for Theatre Corrup - sorry, Theatre Commons!

But we'll consider Ms. Carl, and her plans to kill criticism with kindness, in the next installment of this series.

If the performance you had tickets to was cancelled, or you missed it because of recent tragic events . . .

. . .  remember local theatres still need your support!  What better weekend than this one to make sure you see that show?

Looking at The Large Bathers

The Large Bathers by Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne may be unique among great painters in that, well - he couldn't really paint all that well.  

I know that sounds paradoxical; perhaps even oxymoronic. Yet it's quite obvious Cézanne had little natural gift for the art form he was determined to master. It's true that put to the test, he could eke out a solid figure study (as he did in art school); but anyone can see his heart wasn't in it - as soon as he could, he reverted to the thick, bulbous caricatures that came to him naturally.

The flip side of this lack of facility, however, was that Cézanne was never tempted by art-star showiness (a trap that in different ways snared Sargent, Picasso, and Dalí). There would be no easy success in the salon for him; and so he began a long, (almost) solitary trudge toward remarkable insights into how painted images operate, how they can be de-stabilized, and how the resulting abstractions hint at new metaphors, and unspoken questions.

Take The Large Bathers, for instance (above), which since February has been on loan to the MFA, where it has graced the wall next to the museum's major Gauguin (a melancholy comic strip which is certainly in debt to Cézanne, but may not be flattered by comparison with him).  When you look at these Bathers, however, it's best to look hard (I've visited the painting several times over the past few weeks; it returns to Philadelphia on May 12). For it's startling how many subtle optical tricks Cézanne has embedded in this seemingly "primitive" image.

The piece is clearly (though perhaps coyly) posited as a work-in-progress -  even though the artist had been working and re-working it for years (he died with it still in the studio). Despite a half-decade of attention, however - Cézanne's process was famously slow - unpainted patches still make up much, if not most, of key figures (so the canvas is as nude as they are), and the image as a whole is laced with mysterious lacunae. The seated woman on the left, for instance, is missing her head (it takes a while for most people to  notice this, such is the suggestive power of the composition), and it's unclear what, exactly, these "bathers" are up to, anyway.  Are they washing, perhaps?  Or drying their clothes?  It's hard to tell, for the object of the central trio's attention has likewise yet to be called forth from the canvas; Cézanne only supplies a flat glyph that might be intended to read as "motion" (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Nude Descending a Staircase may derive entirely from these gestures, btw).

Larger aspects of the picture are similarly unstable - the supine nude staring toward what would be a traditional "vanishing point" is wittily floating in some alternative perspective, while the object of her attention could either be facing us, or turned away.  And beyond the vaulted "frame" of trees, the background landscape is surprisingly evanescent: we can make it out to the left, but it vanishes entirely on the right.  Has it been occluded by foliage?  Again, hard to say, because Cézanne's leafy surround blends directly into his sky; the same luminous carpet of strokes serves for both.  In the end, the landscape has vanished from the right-hand side of the picture simply because it doesn't have to be there.

So The Large Bathers operates as a kind of essay in a new mode of pictorial illusion - one in which the painting persuades us even though much of it isn't there. But perhaps the solidity of Cézanne's structure renders irrelevant the gaps in his pictorialism; the sacred arch of the trees, the soft pyramids of figures - these could underpin a Titian or Poussin, and they anchor and reify what would otherwise be a series of half-realized suggestions. It's almost as if the artist is testing how little he can actually reveal while convincing us he is showing us something in its entirety - which only allows him to leave his actual content ambiguous.

But what is that content?  Here is where an atmosphere of almost wistful depth begins to emanate from The Large Bathers. As with all death-bed statements and famous last words, it's hard to resist the temptation to gaze into its surface and find there a mirror of many of Cézanne's life-long concerns.  Certainly here we can perceive something of the heavy deliberation of his early work - only now operating in a luminous palette that hints at his famous interactions with the sunny Pissarro. The image's tricks of perspective likewise recall the later still lifes, as does the curious sense of the "solidity" of everything on display (even those things that aren't fully painted!). Somehow, we feel, Cézanne's entire technical development is referenced or conjured in this work; it's essentially his Tempest.

The subject matter itself is likewise poignant. There is little sensual playfulness in Cézanne's oeuvre (he once confessed his Catholicism made him uneasy painting from nude models); when sex does rear its head, it's usually in paintings with titles like The Rape. Thus his  nudes splash about in an entirely different manner from Renoir's - and in a river of tears, probably; so it's no surprise The Large Bathers conveys a sense of erotic melancholy, even alienation, rather than joy.

Which only makes one wonder whether the details of the picture aren't so much unpainted as being erased; perhaps Arcadia is fading, and these goddesses are ghosts. Needless to say, for Cézanne, who was always possessed by the solidity of things, by their very thing-ness, this haunted quality is something extraordinary.  No wonder then that the indistinct figure - his face mostly bare canvas - who stands at the center of the image, on the far shore, is looking, Janus-like, in two directions at once: backward at the garden of Eden, and forward to the little bourgeois town that beckons from the horizon.  Meanwhile Diana and her nymphs stare after him, but do not wave or call; perhaps they know modernity means saying good-bye forever.

And yet given all this, it's strange how the painting seems to quietly glow somehow.  Perhaps for Cézanne it was a kind of sunset.  After all, he died working on it. It was quite literally his last farewell.

Where the Wilder things are

Photo: Cotton Talbot-Minkin

Matthew Woods and his Imaginary Beasts are without question the most daring theatrical programmers in the city - and maybe the world.  Indeed, Woods seems innately averse to the known theatrical quantity; he has an almost relentless taste for the obscure - I can't think of anything I've seen by the Beasts (aside from their winter pantos) that has been anything less than a rarity.  A typical Beasts season will lean heavily on Gertrude Stein, or Witkacy, or Meyerhold - and not even on their best-known stuff.

It sounds like a formula for commercial suicide; and certainly the Beasts aren't yet packing in houses. But like many on the intellectual edge of the fringe, they have slowly built a following, largely because despite the incredible range of his projects, Woods finds in all of them a mirror of his own eccentric perspective.

Indeed, next to Woods, just about every director in Boston looks hopelessly derivative.  He may be the Hub's only theatrical original, and certainly the only local director whose work depends utterly on a literal vision: in a Woods show, the movement, staging, costumes and lighting coalesce with a rare unity. But how to describe the ethos at their core?  For an Imaginary Beasts production is indeed a curious thing; the tone is whimsical, but its underpinning is strict; the atmosphere is usually one of surreal, magically sublimated innocence, like that of a forgotten daydream from childhood - but a sense of formal inquiry always moves beneath the sophisticated "simplicity" of the action.  Lewis Carroll and Gertrude Stein; puppetry and nursery rhymes and pantomime; these are the lodestars of Woods and the Imaginary Beasts.

A portrait of the artist as a young man.

So it's no surprise that Woods' style would find a haunting resonance with the "playlets" of Thornton Wilder, who was the gay offspring of a raging Calvinist father, a teetotaler who described his second son as "the last word in high browism; a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad . . . hopeless." Looking at Wilder's prim college-age self (at left), you don't doubt the accuracy of that assessment.  But they said the same thing about Proust, didn't they; and somehow both dreamy queens contributed something unforgettable to our literature.

You can feel that contribution gestating in "Little Giants," Woods' bestiary of some of Wilder's juvenilia (as well as a piece or two from the end of his life, which I guess count as senilia). The production wraps this weekend at the Boston Center for the Arts, and its enchantments are well worth a last-minute look, particularly for those curious about the mind behind the classic Our Town.

Judging from the evidence here, that mind was drawn (as Woods and the Beasts are) to the art of sublimation - as well as the sublimations of art. Those who have noted the strict denial of sex and other dark temptations in Our Town will be unsurprised to find the sensual impulse is relentlessly transmuted here into chastely florid musings on the likes of "Childe Roland" and Pietro di Cosimo (whose twisty imagery Woods has tapped for his publicity). Death and Mozart, mermaids and "leviathans," dark towers and young heroes fill scene after scene; you can tell much of this fantasy was dreamt up at Oberlin and Yale, but that doesn't compromise the poignant yearning informing it.  A prissy young man who writes of a lonely mermaid longing for a seaman is not too difficult to psychoanalyze, it's true; but that doesn't make these fables any less beguiling. A Wilder scholar might also be intrigued by the glimmers of later gambits that surface in the texts (I felt I glimpsed motifs from The Matchmaker and The Skin of Our Teeth), but what lingered the longest with this particular reviewer was Wilder's preternatural sense of his own importance, his struggle with the premonition that he was destined for something eternal.  At 20, I'm sure that looked more like self-importance than importance - but almost a hundred years on (Our Town is enjoying its 75th anniversary this year), I think we have a different perspective on his self-image.

Photo: Roger Metcalfe

To be honest, however, many of these dramas (like much juvenilia) aren't particularly dramatic. Still, the Beasts' poetic playing style makes the most of them.  Only the Beasts could conjure, for instance, a raging ocean - with a mermaid breaking from its waves - in the confines of the BCA's Black Box. And there are many such transfixing moments here - Death overcoming Mozart; the tentacles of the Leviathan; the starry night that guided the flight into Egypt (at top); these images, rather than the texts of Wilder's immature skits, are what you remember from "Little Giants."

This production seemed to mark a surge of fresh acting blood into the Beasts - but generally, those with more experience in Woods' eccentric modes did best. The exception was Gabriel Graetz, whose fussy clowning was a standout (indeed, his improv with Beth Pearson may have been the best "playlet" of the evening). Meanwhile familiar Beasts Molly Kimmerling, Amy Meyer and William Schuller (as the mermaid, at right) brought their customary skill to bear on the material, and newcomers Tim Hoover, Cam Cronin and Amanda Goble all had their moments.  As usual, the remarkable costuming was by the gifted Cotton Talbot-Minkin; Jill Rogati provided the evocative puppet design.  I could not pretend that "Little Giants" is for everyone; but I have a hunch it will build the Beasts' audience by at least a few more increments.

Lost in the trees

The place beyond the pecs . . . Ryan Gosling in Pines.

It is hard, I admit, for me to argue with Ryan Gosling when he takes his shirt off. As he does immediately in the man-candy opening of The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Gianfrance's damp ode to fathers and sons, the empty spaces between them, and - well - other stuff that's a little hard to parse, but also, I'm sure, very sad.  Argue I must, however, with the accolades accorded Mr. Gosling, even though there are plenty of other shots - in which he merely lets his bleached-blonde locks and deep blue eyes do his acting for him - that left me a little weak in the knees.

My, my, I thought to myself.  What an awesome talent.

Okay, I'm beginning to sound like a gay Gene Siskel (though unlike him, I don't actually review with my you-know-what).  Besides, I do think Gosling's talented, although it's clear he's coasting on his (considerable) physical charisma in Pines, in which he plays a kind of peroxided angel on wheels, who makes a living calmly enacting Wall-o-Death motorbike stunts in a traveling carnival.  That is, until he hooks up again with a one-night stand (a poignantly restrained Eva Mendes) in upstate New York, and realizes that the little boy she's raising must be his own.

This awareness sparks a transformation in his character, "Luke" (I know, I know), who leaves the carny life for a minimum-wage job in Schenectady (which roughly translates as "the place beyond the pines" in Mohawk, in case you're wondering).  Luke only hopes to be near, and hopefully provide for, his young son - so when these frustrated ambitions lead him to drift into robbery and petty crime, well - let's just say his sins are easy to forgive.

So far, I admit, so good; and for a while, The Place Behind the Pines operates as a kind of downer melodrama elevated by reticent naturalism.  The skies are always gray in Schenectady, where hopes are always broken, so we can feel in our bones that this is no world for virtue - and as the script inches forward, the slightly grainy photography begins to seem soggy with tears we haven't shed yet, but know are in the offing.

Indeed, they come halfway through, as Luke is gunned down after a robbery gone wrong by Bradley Cooper (Schenectady is thick with A-list looks, it seems), a young cop on the rise, and possibly on the make.  Cooper's character, however, is racked with guilt over the killing (even though he sustained a wound in the confrontation, as Luke did fire at him); and these emotional screws tighten when "bad cops" on the squad (with Ray Liotta in the lead, naturally) entice him into nabbing a "hero's bonus" by finding and keeping much of the money that Luke stole (touchingly, he hid it within his son's crib).

Not bad, but hardly in Ryan Gosling's league as a screen object.

It's here that Pines lifts off into intriguing thematic complexity, despite a slightly blank and self-conscious performance from Cooper (who's hardly Gosling's equal at relaxing into his screen persona).  We can feel that the moral positions of thief and policeman have overlapped, and when Cooper (left) turns to his father, a retired judge, for help in extricating himself from his entrapment in corruption, we also sense Gianfrance's gestures toward father-son dynamics could be headed for some sort of pay-off.

But no such luck.  To be honest, from the start we can sense the director and his two screenwriters haven't always been connecting the dots of their plot; indeed, the reticence of the film has sometimes barely disguised the fact that we've been quietly hustled from one contrived climax to the next.  And when the film abruptly leaps a generation to sketch in how the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons, things really fall apart, and we lose track of whatever fateful thread Gianfrance thinks he has been spinning.  It doesn't help that one member of the second generation (the pouty Emory Cohen, a kind of teen-age Bacchus) looks and acts nothing like his putative parents (the wiry Dane DeHaan is more convincing as Gosling's gosling), while a shift in references from the New Testament to Greek tragedy comes off as slightly ridiculous (the kids are portentously named "Jason" and "AJ" - Ajax, perhaps? - and one is from the city of Troy).

Still, most reviewers have showered Pines with honors, and I suppose it's still a cut above most indie fodder. Yet one leaves it more puzzled than anything else - and frustrated by the perception that if Gianfrance had only wrapped his movie about two thirds of the way through, it might have teased us with trailing, unresolved moral questions, and we would have forgiven the various gaps in its logic that only loom in the third act. Oh, well!  To Gianfrance, I suppose such issues hardly matter; judging from his press, he has already been officially designated a rising talent.

Only it seems to me he still has a good way left to rise.

Can we all stop pretending about Ryan Landry now?

You did have to be a little cuckoo to believe the hype. Photo(s): T. Charles Erickson.

Okay - we've all sat through "Ryan Landry's M" now.  And we've all seen that the Huntington made a big bet, blew the bank on it, and gave Landry everything he wanted.

And we also know by now that the show is no good.

So - can we stop pretending Ryan Landry is a playwright?

Please?

I'm not sure how this whole thing got started - although I'd say old Louise Kennedy (remember her?) basically got the ball rolling. And in a way, I admit if I didn't have a personal dislike for this particular auteur, I could find something poignant in the whole build-up-and-bust cycle we've just witnessed.  Or at least, I could find something touching in Landry's own apparent awareness that he's out of his league and over his head at the Huntington; the guy actually turns his anxiety over being unable to come up with a real play into an organizing motif of - well, whatever the hell "Ryan Landry's M" is.

But first - the (by now ritual) full disclosure. Something like four years ago, when this blog was still young, I asked Landry's troupe, the Gold Dust Orphans, for press tickets - and was refused on the grounds that I was not "a legitimate reviewer."  I mentioned this on the blog.

First came a direct threat from Landry's own email account:

"Give me one more reason to react to your bullshit... just one ... and you'll sincerely wish you didn't."

Then came a barrage of abuse from other Orphans and their fans:

"I will find you and hurt you . . . We hope you get AIDS and die . . . YOU SUCK!!!! . . . what would your boss say if he knew about your blog . . . "

It went on and on - dozens of emails - climaxing with another missive from Landry himself that closed with - well, you can read it here.

Now I'm a big boy, and I've hardly spent the last few years looking over my shoulder, dreading the sight of a giant drag queen armed with a clog. But at the same time, pathetic as his outbursts may have been, I haven't forgotten what I'd learned about Ryan Landry  - so I was quite loathe to drag myself to this queen's big premiere.  It seemed like a lose/lose - I doubted M would be any good, but that probably meant setting off another series of flaming email attacks; and if it was good - well, it would have been pretty depressing having to write a rave for this jerk.

But the Huntington kept asking, people kept wondering if I'd write about it, it was obviously going to be an "event."  So in the end I went (I admit I was mildly curious about it myself).

Fifteen minutes in, though, I was breathing a sigh of relief; I would be spared having to pen a positive notice, much less a rave! Even though, at first, "Ryan Landry's M" is a punchy, dirty little skit  (although certainly toned down from his usual fare). Which only reminded me that what Landry does best is write strings of gags. Which he drapes over existing scripts. The results are, in my opinion, hit-or-miss; but there's always at least one boffo moment in a Landry sketch. It helps that his design team provides all sorts of witty stage business on the fly - and on the cheap, which is important in that it resonates with the anything-goes, improvised tone of the show as a whole (if you ask me, the guys on his production team are the real geniuses over at the Gold Dust Orphans, and the Huntington's glossier, more "professional" work in M feels wrong somehow).

It also helps, of course, that Landry suffers from sexual tunnel vision in an amusingly childish way (a typical Landry "play" is basically a kiddie show with dildos). And his audience is reliably in a let's-make-mudpies kind of mood, so the scene over at Machine (his habitual haunt) usually has a giddy vibe of mutually infantile re-inforcement.

Which is fun as far as it goes, and I know it gives the repressed, middle-aged reporters at the Globe a thrill, but again - there are only so many ways you can goose the usual suspects. When Landry's targets are wide ones - fatuous or self-serious, or in denial, or simply dishonest - then his tawdry punches land, the inflated icon is punctured, and the skits really sing.

Karen MacDonald as Peter Lorre, kind of.

But when it comes to Fritz Lang's classic M - well, M isn't fatuous, self-serious, in denial, or at all dishonest.  There's no diva concealed in it, no sentimentality, no grandiosity - it's far more self-aware and cooler in its irony than anything Ryan Landry has ever written (or ever will). Indeed, Lang's vision of a tormented child-killer, and the cruelly amoral society that hunts him down, is one of the most devastating social critiques ever put to film. The movie already skewers rigid social and sexual norms; it already deflates moral sanctimony.  Basically Lang is way ahead of Ryan Landry, and in M he dryly undermines not only everything the Gold Dust Orphans attack, but also everything they are about.  Next to M, it's Landry who looks fatuous and in denial, which may be why his version of M tends to de-fang it, and sand down its subversive edge.  He actually tries to make M look bourgeois.

Lang's classic is also, just btw, one of the most innovative movies ever made, and although it certainly has its longeurs, much of its imagery (the child's balloon caught in power lines, the leitmotif of "In the Hall of the Mountain King," the tracking shots of the killer marked with the letter "M") remains indelible. Such masterstrokes are, of course, hard to parody - so generally Landry simply lifts them, in half-homage.

But there's a further problem - to Landry's usual audience (and the Huntington's, too), M is obscure. Its influence has been pervasive, but only cinephiles watch it now; its references are too deeply buried in the culture for Landry's techniques to reach. (Which may be why the stage design relies quite a bit on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and why the soundtrack borrows cues from Hitchcock.)

What all this means, in the end, is that for much of M, Ryan Landry is on his own. He has to write a play. I suppose he painted himself into this corner intentionally; he may have chosen M precisely because he sensed it would set him up for either triumph or disaster.

Well, what happened was disaster, although one alleviated by occasional laughs, as his skitmaster side sometimes leavens his own pretensions with a few raspberries. Landry fills stage time with all sorts of dated fourth-wall antics; he throws constant wrenches into Lang's action, or tosses in quotes from The Blue Angel (by now another obscurity) to slow things down; he conjures out of nowhere a screwball comedy couple (the capable Ellen Adair and Paul Melendy) to charm us with open-ended questions about what they're doing on stage anyhow (yet Landry wrings nothing from the culture clash he thinks he has set up). Or he just drags in good old Orphan alumnus Larry Coen, or new comrade-in-arms David Drake, both capable comedians, to work the crowd for awhile.

Through all this you can all but hear the clock ticking toward 90 minutes, when we know the whole debacle can end. But weirdly, there is a good, if half-baked, idea banging around in M. Landry seems to identify with the Lorre character (this only re-activates creepy ideas about gay people, if you ask me, but whatever), and so turns his child-killer into an auteur - indeed, into a playwright within the play, who can actually adjust the script at will.

Now this could have led somewhere interesting, I admit. We do wonder why the hunted criminal can't simply re-write himself a happy ending on the spot, of course - but we're willing to ignore such contradictions if the play can get at something about how this villain/victim might rationalize to himself his own triumph (or his own defeat). What do society's outlaws tell themselves about themselves if and when they can get away with their crimes? It's an intriguing theme.

Adair and Drake in The Blue M

But alas, Landry only uses his one good idea as a pretext for more dramatic delay and  obstruction. Karen MacDonald gives the role her all (it's actually her most intense work in some time) but she's investing herself in something that leads her nowhere. Don't worry, she sends herself to hell at the finale (remember what I said about the script being bourgeois), but her decision is barely dramatized, and how it actually maps to the rest of M remains a mystery.

Of course it's no mystery why the Huntington programmed this bomb - Landry comes with a built-in audience (indeed, before the bad reviews dropped, they'd added performances to the run).  No doubt the company hopes Landry could become a cash cow for them, à la Harvard's Donkey Show. But how about we all wait till he has actually written a play before we hand him over a theatre again?  Just a thought.

White zombies, and the best new play so far this year, at Trinity Rep

Rebecca Gibel and Darien Battle get their Walking Dead groove on. Production photos: Mark Turek.

White terror.

Let's admit it, that's what stalks us these days.

It's the ghost haunting the attack on the Boston Marathon (surely foreign terrorists would have claimed credit by now).  It's what shadows the Newtown tragedy, and most every other massacre on the network news (and there's almost one a week now, isn't there).

White men with assault rifles.  White men with bombs.  White men with gavels.

It's getting scary.  (Almost as scary as it has always been for black folks.)

Hence the re-purposing of the zombie to this new reality.  The undead once stumbled through exotic, racist dreamscapes (sometimes lushly-rendered ones).  But in 1968 George Romero neatly flipped the zombie brand with his (still potent) Night of the Living Dead, a tale of hungry white Republicans chowing down on a lone African-American hero.  A decade later, Romero went himself one better, sending his white zombies staggering to the mall - but slowly the rejuvenated genre lost its political edge, to either fresh paranoid targets (AIDS, etc.) or pure gross-out potential.

Obama changed all that, however, and brought the Romero formula back center-stage.  Suddenly America was confronted by a black man as its only real statesman of stature; intelligent, calm, responsible - basically Atticus Finch reborn - he drove racists crazy (indeed, just today an anonymous letter containing poison was sent to the President). And suddenly white zombies were everywhere. Zombie movies, zombie marches - even a zombie cable series! All at once, the walking dead were at the heart of the millennial zeitgeist.

And now, after many scrappy fringe efforts, we have our first "serious" play channeling all this undead energy in Jackie Sibblies Drury's Social Creatures, through this weekend only at Trinity Rep.  And to my mind, it's well worth a trip to Providence.  You could argue (as some have) that Drury's gorefest is too indebted to genre conventions: a wary band of survivors has holed up in (yes) the actual Trinity Rep, in actual real-life Providence, as some inexplicable plague rages outside.  They're basically all stereotypes (aging hippie, uptight yuppie, crotchety old coot), and they're inevitably overwhelmed by predictable threats from without and within.

Jackie Sibblies Drury

But if you made that argument, you'd be missing the point. For there's a fresh, unsettling edge to Drury's script that lingers with you - and visibly disturbed the audience on the night I saw it in a way you rarely see audiences troubled anymore.  In short, while Ms. Drury's play may be formulaic, this is at least partly intentional - and at any rate, you can sense through its lens that she's the real thing: a fresh theatrical voice already far stronger than most of the millennial brat pack.

Perhaps part of her punch comes from her sneaky, insinuating technique: her ragged little band apart, for instance, has unconsciously chosen new, white-bread sobriquets (Mrs. Smith, Mr. Williams) for their new social roles; they long for white normalcy, and when an African-American stumbles into their enclave, they immediately dub him "Mr. Brown" - "I know what you're thinking, but it's just so easy to remember!" they explain. Drury also has an eye for more deeply embedded detail: all the squirrels and rabbits have vanished, for instance (and even the trees are slowly dying), but the rats are doing just fine, thank you very much - which is why her characters panic whenever they see a member of the rat race (perhaps they're the ones carrying the plague).

But what exactly is that unnamed scourge? It's here that Social Creatures nibbles at the audience's assumptions.  Unlike The Walking Dead, or even George Romero, Drury openly treats her illness as metaphor; there's no mutated virus responsible, no bug from another world.  What happened, as the traumatized Mr. Brown explains, is that one day in a department store, "Some white lady couldn't get the dress she wanted in the right size, and suddenly she just ripped the salesgirl's face off."  Then another lady in the store went just as crazy, realizing that "now she could do whatever she wanted."

And so the plague began.  It was all about retail.

It's a clever gambit, one that neatly links the racist critique of Romero to the political chic of so many young millennials; this is a libertarian nightmare, one in which old moral and religious constraints have been shed, and white people have gone mad as a result.  For after all, what is the zombie but a consumer? Stumbling around mindlessly in the free market of human flesh, forever hungry for more "content," zombies don't merely reflect racism but also the market-driven rapacity of the new world (and Internet) order. (Indeed, there's even a dark hint here that official racism once constrained, rather than enabled, our basest instincts.)

Alexander Platt discovers the worst in Social Creatures.

Thus you slowly get a sense of the playwright's subtle game: she wants to reproduce the conventions of The Walking Dead while simultaneously subverting them.  And so she gives the audience quite a good time, serving up generous helpings of black comedy with some effective grindhouse chills, before whispering her true theme to us sotto voce.

Still, the play's not perfect.  Drury seems more assured in her portraits of women than men, so sometimes there's an air of Fried-Green-Tomatoes cliché to her action.  But at the same time she seems a little unsure of what to make of, or do with, her most intriguing character, the power-yuppie Mrs. Jones (a poignantly determined D'Arcy Dersham) who desperately, if tyrannically, tries to keep her tribe together against all odds (she sadly tells her self-absorbed husband, "I always thought you would be braver"). The other polestar of the play, damaged emo-waif Mrs. Smith (a perversely effective Rebecca Gibel) is likewise a bit blurry, hinting at far more than is ever theatrically realized; is her decline due to drugs?  Trauma? Mental illness? We're never sure, although it's highly amusing that it's she who succumbs to the zombie bug first (it's like watching Taylor Swift go cannibal). I should also add that the onstage violence isn't always convincing - even if the ensuing geysers of hemoglobin usually are.

But the acting at Trinity generally carries us over these quibbles, and to be honest, the entire ensemble, under the assured hand of artistic director Curt Columbus (who commissioned the script), is remarkably robust: Alexander Platt (at right, last seen in Ch'inglish at the Lyric) nails his nihilistic, suburban middle manager, and there's more compelling, witty work from Nance Williamson, Janice Duclos, Timothy Crowe, and the terrified Darien Battle.

Of course in the end, what most people may bring away from Social Creatures is Drury's daring with the gory tropes of the grindhouse (and be warned, the play includes a cannibal battle royale complete with squirting jugulars). But what stuck with me was its pathos - not the pathos of the zombie apocalypse, but the pathos of the refugees' pitiful attempts at being, well, "social creatures." In their spare time, they record long lists of groups they once were a part of; and tellingly, Eugene Lee's battered set is held together by nothing but duct tape. But is duct tape enough to keep the twin terrors of racism and libertarianism at bay?  Ms. Drury poses the question cleverly, but doesn't offer any answers.

Stephen Colbert says it better than I ever could . . .

Thank you, Mr. Colbert!

The day after

A woman prays amid the carnage on Boylston Street. Photo: John Tlumacki.

For Boston yesterday, it was like 9/11 all over again.

Shock.  Horror. Disbelief.  That sickening sense of encountering naked human evil, glaring suddenly from a happy crowd on a sunny day.

Yes, the scale was different - only a handful of deaths, and a hundred or so injuries against the thousands on 9/11. But tell that to the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, the little boy who lingered at the sidewalk to hug his dad as he crossed the finish line.  Today, Martin Richard is dead. And his mother is fighting for her life; his sister is hospitalized.  To his family, like the families of all the victims - many of whom suffered horrific, life-changing injuries - the tragedy is unthinkable in its scale and scope.

And somehow there's an extra twist, isn't there, in targeting a ritual so closely tied to hope, camaraderie, and idealism.  Martin Richard's father worked long and hard to be at the Marathon that day, and his family was there to cheer him on.  I have no illusions about the scrappy underside of the Boston Marathon (although it's certainly no darker than that of the Olympics, or any other large human endeavor).  And I can't pretend I still look forward to its annual appearance on the calendar - indeed, I probably registered a faint irritation with it yesterday morning, as the T was slower and more clogged than usual.  Long gone are the days when I was drawn to the finish line (although for several years, when I was working in the Pru, I would have been found on Patriot's Day very close to the spot where the second bomb went off).

Of course thousands - hundreds of thousands - of Bostonians could say the same thing.  The Marathon is a touchstone of the city, a defining experience, something you have to see while you're here, at least once.  Which is another reason why turning its finish line into a slaughterhouse strikes somehow at the very heart of my hometown - at what's best about it, at what it loves about itself, at what it's proud of, and is worth being proud of.

What happened yesterday was a desperate, sad bid to change all that.  To kill that spirit.  To instill horror and hatred in us, perhaps to excite awe, perhaps to incite revenge, perhaps merely to claim some sort of sick celebrity in the dark circus that our media culture has become.

But all that doesn't matter.  Justice - yes; we must find those who did this dreadful thing, and they must pay. 

But there can be no justice in this world.  That is the most heart-breaking thing about it.  There is no way to make the perps pay enough for there to be justice.  And we can't let ourselves go to the same dark places we wandered after 9/11 - particularly as we don't know whether terrorists (and if so which terrorists?), or some insane "lone wolf," are responsible for this tragedy.

And yes, let's even remember - the deaths of innocents are commonplace in this fallen world. American policy has even been responsible for more than a few.

Martin Richard

But a little boy named Martin Richard had nothing to do with any of that. He was just at the Boston Marathon to hug his dad. I suppose what I'm saying - even as I tear up while I type this - is that we must always remember Martin, and how his young life was snuffed out, and his family so cruelly attacked.

But we must also remember why he was at the Marathon. What it stands for. That we are a City on a Hill - or hope to be.

Martin would have wanted us to remember that.

The horror, the horror

The scene at Copley Square.

My close friends have all called in, the kid from our lab who was running has tweeted he's safe, I've posted on Facebook and e-mailed the family that I'm okay.

So just overwhelmed with horror right now.  Overwhelmed by the horror.

By the way, Vera Stark isn't a very good play

The talented women of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Photos: Johnathan Carr

I've long maintained that the celebrated Lynn Nottage is more pedagogue than playwright - and I think that after seeing By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (at the Lyric Stage through April 27), few could disagree. For this time the author is quite openly at the lecture podium, laser pointer in hand.  It's true she ribs her lesson plan a little (or rather the academics from whom she's cribbing), but this cannot disguise the fact that Vera Stark is full of familiar, self-indulgent conceits - and as a dramatic construction it's pretty rudimentary.  Still, you could argue that as PowerPoint, it sometimes sings.

What's too bad about Nottage's failure is that she's actually on to a resonant theme - the plight of generations of African-American actors and actresses locked into stereotypic roles on the silver screen (just as their brothers and sisters were locked into subservient roles in society at large).  And at first the author seems to be exploring an intriguing angle on this embedded racism; we meet her heroine, the "forgotten" Vera Stark, while she's running lines for a fictitious Jezebel mash-up called The Belle of New Orleans with her employer, the (likewise fictitious) Hollywood actress Gloria Mitchell.

Gloria, of course, is playing the southern belle; Vera's her sassy maid.  When the line readings end, however, we realize Vera is actually Gloria's maid, in real life; indeed, they're a team - Gloria's got the looks, Vera's got the brains.  Or rather the mixed-race Gloria has the white looks, while Vera has the talent; they're related (cousins, perhaps?), and started out in show business as a single vaudeville act.  But Gloria's "high yaller" skin tone allowed her to slip under the color bar  - so now she is essentially auditioning for the role of Scarlett O'Hara, with her darker, more capable cousin tagging along, hoping to play the maid!  Or actually hoping to play anything - as one of Vera's buddies puts it when she hears of the impending screen tests, "Are there any slaves?  With lines?"

The real Vera Stark? An uncredited Theresa Harris sings "St. Louis Blues" to Barbara Stanwyck in the 1936 Banjo on My Knee.

Again - this is a solid set-up, and it's hardly far-fetched; Hollywood star Merle Oberon, for instance, passed off her Indian mother as her maid for years.  Nottage herself has acknowledged the great actress Theresa Harris, who played Bette Davis' maid in Jezebel, as the inspiration for Vera (although a different, more complicated parallel could be found in the career of Fredi Washington, who in 1934's Imitation of Life played a mixed-race woman "passing" for white). Indeed, Nottage's concept is so rich that for a while she can coast on it, with witty cameos of other black girls just a shade darker than Gloria working the "Lena Horne/Brazilian" angle, even as clueless Hollywood producers wax poetic about "authentic Negroes" (while all the African-Americans around them helplessly "audition" to play these racist caricatures).

As I said, this is all good satiric fun - but it's not actually drama, it's sketch comedy.  And, like the academic colloquy that concludes the play, it all feels recycled (indeed SNL and "In Living Color" covered all this territory decades ago). The real drama here would lie in Vera and Gloria's relationship; but Nottage's sense of sisterly solidarity prevents her from digging into this with anything deeper than a few sarcastic jabs.  Rather obviously her first act should climax with Vera self-demeaningly keeping Gloria's secret under duress - in order to win a crack at the big time, in however low a role (with her internal conflict setting up the second act in turn).  But as usual for Ms. Nottage, nothing like a climax ever comes close to occurring in either act (indeed, as in Ruined and Intimate Apparel, this dramatist seems unconcerned with even the basics of dramatic development).

Bette Davis suffers in white before a crowd of racial stereotypes in Jezebel, the movie Vera Stark lampoons.

Still, the witty surface of Nottage's dialogue (and she is often funny) disguises for most people the structural problems lurking in her play. (Sigh; why does "development" always polish a play without actually improving it?)  It's not until the second act, in which Vera's slow career collapse - and eventual disappearance - is documented with free-floating postmodern tropes (films within films within television shows, and an academic discussion group deconstructing it all) that things fall apart, because there's no through-line, no actual dramatic connection with Vera.  Nottage tries to cover her tracks here by having her talking (egg)heads insist the key to Vera's crack-up lies in "what was unspoken" - but again, as Nottage never actually dramatizes this struggle to remain silent, these lines read more as excuse than explication.

I will say, however, in Nottage's defense, that under Summer L. Williams' direction, Vera is hardly given its due at the Lyric.  Full disclosure here - Williams, a leading force at Company One, has long campaigned against me and my blog, and been vociferous in claiming that I'm racist. I disagree, needless to say, but if what I've written so far - or what I'm about to write - disturbs you in so far as it reflects a white male critic assessing black female artists, by all means, tell yourself (as Ms. Williams does) that I'm racist, and you'll feel more comfortable about everything.  Frankly, by now I almost don't mind that particular slur, I've written part of the theatrical community off in this regard, and they've done the same to me. So we kind of co-exist on parallel planes - I continue to pursue dramatic criticism, they continue to claim that's racist when it comes to them.

Still keeping secrets in the 70's.

With that said, let's move on to Williams' direction - which is not all it could, or should, be.  To her credit, Williams has brought a number of exciting new faces to the Lyric - I hope to see the wonderfully knowing Lindsay Allyn Cox, the brashly sweet Terrell Donnell Sledge, the smartly exotic Kris Sidberry, and the hilariously gonzo Gregory Balla on this stage again sometime soon.  But at the same time, Williams has miscast (and misdirected) Lyric mainstay Kelby T. Akin, and more importantly, under-directed star Kami Rushell Smith (Vera) and Hannah Husband (Gloria).  

Husband paints in broad strokes throughout, suggesting little sense of private conspiracy with Vera; but it's Smith who's most at sea.  Her beaming intelligence (and lovely voice) serve her well in the first act, but she flails in the second, which attempts to limn her metastasizing bitterness as her career crashes into further racial roadblocks (while Gloria, indemnified by now as whiter than white, soars into the arms of some British cultural scion).  Here costume designer Tyler Kinney must shoulder some blame (David Towlun does much better by the set, and Johnathan Carr's screen simulations of Jezebel are witty); my inner drag queen tells me that poor Vera should look like a train-wreck by the time she appears at the end of her career on a Merv-Griffin-like talk show (soon she will strip naked on a Vegas stage before vanishing for good).  But neither Vera's outfit, nor her outlook, suggests she's inches from the precipice (or that Gloria's final betrayal will push her over it).  Smith simply hasn't found within herself the conflicts that, yes, go unspoken, but should still be informing her performance every minute. The bottom line is that there's brilliant work on the edges of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark - so it's really too bad its center doesn't hold.

Variations on Vivaldi at H&H

Ian Watson at the keyboard in a previous Handel and Haydn performance.

As the old joke goes, Vivaldi didn't write five hundred concertos, he wrote one concerto five hundred times.  Okay, not entirely fair - but in a nutshell, that's the problem with many a program devoted to the oeuvre of the "Red Priest" (the red-headed Vivaldi's vivid nickname) who may have contributed more to this particular musical form than any other composer; the works are always wonderful at first, but by the end of the performance a sense of relentless similarity inevitably sets in.

Last weekend the Handel and Haydn Society largely dodged that problem, however, with its "Vivaldi Virtuosi," a cannily curated concert that contrasted works by the "Prete Rosso" with lesser-known lights of his era - and at the finale, threw aside the early concerto's "fast-slow-fast" regimentation entirely for a beautifully integrated set of variations by Francesco Geminiani on the familiar theme of "La Follia."

The concert also served as a welcome showcase for the expert H&H string section, which hasn't held the spotlight for a while.  Led by harpsichordist Ian Watson (photo above, in action), a mainstay of the Society on the keyboard, this stripped-down ensemble performed virtuosically indeed - even if there were a few hiccups here and there.

To be honest, the stately opening of the initial Concerto Grosso (by Charles Avison, after Scarlatti) proved slightly fuzzy - it wasn't until first violinist Aisslinn Nosky took over the second movement with true fury (it's even labeled "Con furia") that things suddenly caught fire.  And it seemed whenever Nosky was in the spotlight, playfully nudging things along, the ensemble was focused and committed - indeed, sometimes she seemed to be almost acting the role of co-conductor, and later her influence likewise seemed to simultaneously support and challenge the three soloists who joined her (Christina Day Martinson, Abigail Karr and Susanna Ogata) for V's Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins.

The Avison was followed by Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor, and one soon got a sense of the shape of the program: Vivaldi would serve as the familiar, pulsing spine, from which the other composers (Durante, Locatelli, and Geminiani) would branch in intriguing variations.  Actually, the double-cello concerto more than pulsed, it all but thrusted, and soloists Guy Fishman and Sarah Freiberg, though their instruments sang in quite different timbres, gave it their all, and conjured a beguiling, if dark, duet (although Fishman seemed visibly displeased with a glitch or two in his own performance early on).

The mood immediately brightened with the buoyant Concerto V in A Major from Francesco Durante, which opened with a spritzily lyrical Presto, followed by an almost eerily misty Largo.  This only made me want to hear more from Durante - indeed, as concerto tumbled after concerto, I began to find myself looking forward to the non-Vivaldi items on the program; they were generally fresher and more eccentric than the pieces from the master's assembly line (Pietro Locatelli's Introduttione in D Major, for instance, came teasingly close to the edge of dissonance).  One exception to this general rule was the Red Priest's own seemingly improvised Sonata for Violin and Basso Continuo, a curiosity marked by brief movements and a free lyricism, which was expertly played by Nosky, Fishman, and Watson (whose harpsichord for once wasn't swallowed by the surrounding texture).  Its quirky, offhand appeal was amusingly summed up by Watson's ad lib to the audience, "The first part sounds made up.  Then there's a quick bit, followed by a slow bit, then another quick bit."

Of course there were other marvelous moments from Vivaldi; in his Sinfonia Il coro dell Muse, for instance, the whole string section seems to be tiptoeing behind the soloist in a delightfully long stretch of pizzicato, and the concluding Allegro wraps with an intriguing sense of anticlimax.   Still, the sense of variations on a steady theme was only broken by Geminiani's Concerto Grosso in D Minor, La Follia, which is itself (ironically enough) a set of variations, but so densely interwoven that it coheres as a gripping mood piece.  It's widely heralded as Geminiani's best work, and it may well have been the best work on this entire program.  Nosky was once more at her muscular best, and the ensemble moved as if one; folly or not, it ended the concert on a exciting high note.

The final question about the Final Solution?

The cast of Lebensraum - Photo: Natalia Boltukhova

In case you hadn't noticed, another intrepid small theatre troupe has joined the fringe - the Hub Theatre Company of Boston (no relation to the Hub Review, btw).  And, as you might expect by now, their programming is far more daring than anything you'd expect from one of our major companies.

Indeed, first up from the Hub is Israel Horowitz's provocation Lebensraum (in German, roughly, "Living Room"), which takes direct aim at the question that has haunted international relations since the world first learned of the Nazi regime's "Final Solution."

In brief - can the Jews ever forgive the Germans for what they did?

Merely stating the question no doubt raises hackles among many.  Even more disturbing is the idea that the answer to the question may be "Yes."  (Or, for that matter, "No.")  Or that history may slowly make the point moot.  (Just btw, before you write in, please ponder a few other queries, such as, "Should white Americans be forgiven for slavery? Or for their war on Native-Americans?"  No, perhaps not quite outright genocide, but still - forgivable?  Compare and contrast!)

So kudos to Horowitz, the playwright laureate of our own Gloucester, MA, for tackling - or at least trying to tackle - what amounts to one of the moral elephants in the post-war lebensraum.  Whether he actually brings down the beast, however, is open to debate.  His opening salvo sets up the terms of the conflict neatly: in the "near future," the German government opens its doors again to Jewish immigration, with full citizenship (in economic terms, a valuable prize) on offer.  In effect, Germany asks the Jews to come back.

But should they?  Could they?  Is the offer a real one?  Is Germany truly conscience-stricken - or truly trustworthy?  Or is there still some form of race-hate lurking in its national consciousness that makes any official promises essentially null and void?

Such questions imply dialogue, of course, but it soon becomes clear that Lebensraum is being told from a single perspective - the Jewish one (Horowitz himself is Jewish).  Thus a schematic frame is quickly assembled for the playwright's imagined Jewish response - some secularized Jews are intrigued (these scenes include an amusing and affectionate portrait, one senses, of Horowitz's own milieu); others, either more religious or just of longer historical memory, are appalled; still others, smelling a rat, themselves become militant - and militarized.  But the Germans in the play remain to some degree ciphers throughout; Horowitz teases us with the sense that economic pressures (where are jobs for the incoming Jews going to come from?) could possibly re-ignite anti-Semitism in Deutschland, but he also clings to the idea that the question of some latent German animus toward the Jews is essentially, well - unanswerable.

This is all completely understandable of course, but . . . the play's theme hinges on grappling with the moral status of modern Germany, so . . . hmmm.  While the old "unknowability" gambit has its spooky dramatic uses, it also has its limits - and sometimes we feel that Horowitz's feints around the issue are disguising the fact that his ambitions have pushed him to the edge of his considerable talent.

Which may be why (smart as it is) Lebensraum is somehow unsatisfying.  Horowitz does hint, it's true, at an intriguing role for secularization in this conflict; the son of his American family falls in love (of course) with a fresh-faced German girl immediately upon his arrival.  And unlike the other characters, these young lovers feel somehow divorced from history; indeed, the girl is not only free of anti-Semitism, but free of much characterization at all - in historical terms, she's a blank. (Needless to say, we immediately sense that her innocence will be a victim of whatever ironic plot mechanics Horowitz has in mind.) Far more compelling is the subplot in which a Holocaust survivor returns to track down the woman who betrayed him to the SS all those years ago. When fate delivers her into his hands, Tarantino-style, we feel initially an undeniable frisson of anticipation - but while I'm glad to report there's no stupid Django-esque pop-revenge at this juncture, I also have to add that Horowitz slyly side-steps his own climax.

Still, even if Lebensraum doesn't quite deliver on its promises, its hairpin twists and turns are always engaging, and it has received a scrappily compelling production from the Hub Theatre Company. The performances by the trio of actors who play all of Horowitz's roles (across several nations, classes and accents) aren't always subtle, but they're alway sharp (and their accents are always serviceable), and Horowitz's street-theatre techniques are forgiving of a few broad moments anyhow. Jaime Carrillo makes the most thoughtful impression (he seems quite a bit more comfortable here, in fact, than he did in The Motherfucker with the Hat), while young Lauren Elias and Kevin Paquette deliver more punchy versatility, and so are possibly more memorable.  Director John Geoffrion keeps his eye on the road and his foot on the gas; meanwhile Jason E. Weber's sound is sometimes over-amplified but always imaginative, and Michael Clark Wonson's lighting conjures several locales from what is basically a bare space.  As debut productions go, this is a winner (and it closes this weekend at the First Church in Boston); indeed, you could argue it's the most interesting thing on any Boston stage right now (and yes that totally includes The Book of Mormon).  So here's hoping the Hub Theatre can hold to its high standard.

A class in Callas-ness

Amelia Broome channels the divine Maria.

Theatre is about dreaming.  Dreaming big.

But there are limits.  And I think everyone involved in Master Class at the New Rep was dreaming just a little too big.  I am certainly a fan of its star, Amelia Broome, and I've generally admired the work of its intelligent director, Antonio Campo-Guzman - but neither seem to have faced the bottom line about Terrence McNally's valentine (or is it a raspberry?) to the great Maria Callas, undeniably the most fascinating diva of the twentieth century.

And that bottom line is: this show is nothing without an actress/panther who can prowl the stage with the same ferocity and neediness as Callas herself.  The role can't be a stretch.  It can't be an exploration.  It only exists as an apotheosis.  

But Amelia Broome, talented as she is, is much more pussycat than panther; indeed, she's known for projecting a gracious, maternal warmth.

Now, for all I know, Callas might have projected gracious warmth as well. But that's not what Terrence McNally has written; his Master Class is hardly a portrait of Callas in all her complexity - it's not even an accurate transcript of Callas as pedagogue (there are videos of her classes available which bear no resemblance to McNally's script).  It is, instead, a naïve sketch of Callas as drag queen, a kind of gay fantasia on operatic themes in which Callas-the-queer-icon always trumps Callas-the-actual-person. This is, shall we say, rather a narrow perspective, and without a galvanizing presence to animate McNally's puppet diva, his conceits grow repetitive, and long stretches of the script read as vulgar or simplistic.


Callas in mid-flight - Norma in 1957.

So this is not Terrence McNally's strongest play (yet it still won a Tony - sigh, only in New York!). Still, his conceit has some resonance, because there's a reason gay men revere Callas the way they do - and it all has to do with the braided power and vulnerability that come with self-transformation.

Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos (in Manhattan, not Greece) to an overbearing mother and weak father, who adored her older, slimmer sister (check, check and check on the gay-cliché crib sheet, btw).  She began her singing career as a somewhat chubby contralto - probably.  Frankly, nobody dares classify Callas's voice anymore, because she steadily pushed her range up to mezzo, then soprano, then coloratura territory seemingly through sheer force of will - rather as certain gay men tweeze and corset their way into out-sized visions of femininity. What's more, Callas drove herself into the most punishing vocal territory, mixing and matching roles that would make any voice teacher faint (in one famous season, she swung from Wagner's Brünnhilde to Bellini's Elvira in a matter of days).

Broome attempts to cast Callas' spell.

In the end, the voice was sui generis - indeed, Callas seemed to have several voices, including a strong baritone (she could sing from F below middle C up almost three octaves). But intriguingly, there was no clear line between any of these modes, and for her, the traditional "break" between head and chest voice didn't really exist (just as binary gender doesn't exist in drag). What's more, her sound was somehow inhumanly pure, and yet at the same time subtly unstable; what gave her performances a special thrill was the sense that the whole vocal edifice might topple off its heels at any moment.

And indeed, Callas ultimately destroyed her instrument; some claim her dramatic weight loss (she starved herself down to a glamorous sylph) was what, shall we say, tipped the scales; others claim the devastating end of her affair with Aristotle Onassis (who moved on from one trophy "wife" to another, Jacqueline Kennedy) was what sent her into a personal and artistic tailspin. But whatever the reason, her soprano began to collapse when she was in her late 40's (which is what makes the idea of her giving a master class rather ironic).

So it's no surprise that McNally couldn't resist sending the divine Callas, musically mute but in eternal high dudgeon, stalking through a heterosexual voice class like some diva-saurus rex. And there's fun to be had for a while, it's true, as she lays waste to the clueless fashion disasters who wander into her lair. But in the end, the vulnerability of her sense of self (and will), and her subsequently cruel "instruction," is all McNally has up his sleeve in dramatic terms - and it's enough for a sharp little one-act, but hardly a full evening.

Still, Broome does her best, and is generally diverting, if never entirely convincing (you can almost feel her suppressing her true self); she does fail, however, to make the swooning psychological breaks McNally has written into the play work.  But these are really the nadir of the script anyway; indeed, as Callas growls about Onassis' "uncircumcised Greek cock," whatever distance still exists between McNally's fantasies and the diva herself is erased, and we wonder whether she's staggering through memories of La Scala or the Ramrod.  But elsewhere in the cast the news is good, and so is the singing. The standout was tenor Darren Anderson's powerful turn, but Lindsay Conrad and Erica Spyres also acquitted themselves well.  (Spyres is a known quantity, of course; the surprise was Conrad's bumptiously amusing stage presence.)  Meanwhile Brendon Shapiro all but embodied the classic self-effacing rehearsal pianist, while the exasperated Michael Caminiti made every walk-on count.  Still, in the end, this was hardly a masterly Master Class - indeed, it made you wonder whether without a diva on hand to match Callas, this script is worth reviving.