Now why exactly did the state just hand Harvard $150,000 to upgrade the ART's lighting?

More cultural funding down the toilet.

Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the way this benighted state doles out its support for the arts.

A case i point: is there any fatter cat than Harvard University around, you might ask?  I can't think of one offhand - nevertheless, the state's MassDevelopment agency, under the stewardship of Marty Jones, has just seen fit to hand Harvard's ART $150,000 to upgrade its lighting and projection system.

I guess that's so Diane Paulus will be able to launch her next Broadway-bound money machine  (a reboot of Pippin, btw) with something like precisely the technical resources she can expect on the island of Manhattan (where it will inevitably land, with top ticket prices in the hundreds of dollars).

And thank God!  We were all so worried. I mean it's so irritating having to spend all that extra time in tech, when you could be off striking your next deal with the Gershwin estate!

I do wonder whether the lighting booth at the Loeb is really among the Commonwealth's top funding priorities, though.  I mean, I hadn't noticed that the Loeb's projection systems are noticeably below Boston standards!  But even if they are, I wonder whether other resources might have been available for their upgrade . . .

After all, Harvard is sitting on an endowment that even now is floating, after the economic tragedy of 2008 (which was, ironically enough, brought about in part by so many B-school grads, and the theories they were taught) at around $32 billion.  From which (I note) Harvard drew revenue of $1.2 billion last year.

$1.2 billion (pretty much tax-free, btw - a savings of something like, what, $180 million? - although I know Harvard tosses a few million to Cambridge and Boston as a consolation prize).  That's twice the size of Boston College's entire operating budget, and one-and-half times the size of Northeastern's.  It's a lotta clams.  Indeed, the $150,000 the state handed the A.R.T. is only a little more than one-hundredth of one percent of that total.  Wasn't there room in the budget of the greatest university in the world for a single lighting upgrade?

Apparently not.  So let's put it this way.  Harvard couldn't be bothered spending one-hundredth of one percent of its endowment revenue on this project.  Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts somehow thinks it's worth funding anyway.  With your money.

Hmmmm.  I think we just saw the 1% once again feathering its own nest.  I mean, it feels a little bit like MassDevelopment just remodeled Ned and Abby Johnson's TV room.  Only I think the shows are better over at Ned and Abby's place!

The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess'

Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis in Porgy and Bess.

I think what I'll remember most about the recent A.R.T. production of The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess' (henceforth just Porgy and Bess, btw) was the show that surrounded the show. The production itself proved pretty forgettable, aside from its vocals (from the great Audra McDonald, of course, but also from Philip Boykin, Bryonha Marie Parham, and Natasha Yvette Williams). Diane Paulus's direction was competent but a bit pedestrian, the choreography ditto, and the set design was weirdly grandiose - in fact it looked like something from Bayreuth circa 1976, amusingly enough.  Meanwhile Suzan-Lori Parks' controversial adaptation was streamlined, but clumsily so, and was thematically hamstrung by its political correctness.  And while the singers sounded pretty good (even though they were miked), the orchestra most definitely did not - its natural timbres were all but drowned out by amplification in the modernist barn that is the Loeb.

So the production was at best mediocre.  Yet local reviewers generally fell over themselves in their praise, because (hallelujah), it wasn't outright terrible, and because - of course - it had been designed to align with, and amplify, a middlebrow progressive politics that all our theatre critics feel they must kow-tow to.  (Tellingly, when I saw it, virtually everyone in the audience, aside from a school group, was a crunchy 70-year-old white Cantabridgian.)

The trouble with this kind of obeisance, however, crops up whenever a work's artistic content comes into conflict with the prejudices of its reformers.  For the "reform" of Porgy was bluntly posited as a chief motivator behind its revival; we were often told (in the New York Times, and elsewhere) by director Diane Paulus and her team of "excavators" that the opera traded in stereotypes that were now offensive.  When this proved controversial to those who love the original work (including Stephen Sondheim), and understand its place in history as a trail-blazing anti-racist piece of theatre, Paulus & Co. began an elaborate dance of back-tracking.  No, the show wasn't racist, no, not really, there were just "failures of understanding" in it, Suzan-Lori Parks babbled.  There were things, Paulus insisted, that a Broadway audience just would no longer tolerate!  NOT "racist" things, just "things!"

You get the idea. Basically, Porgy and Bess was racist, only it wasn't really, only it was in a way, unintentionally, only it kind of wasn't, not actually.

What this back-and-forth obscured, of course, was a simple discomfort with the abjection of the opera's characters. Porgy is a cripple, who gets around in a cart drawn by a goat (a metaphor for lost potency that is almost too intense in its pathos).  Meanwhile Bess is a "fallen woman" fighting a drug habit, who submits pathetically to the abuses of her lover, Crown.  To Paulus & Co., this was all offensive; they wanted to "empower" characters whose powerlessness was central to their being.  So Porgy got canes instead of a cart, and staggered off on his own two feet at the play's finale.  Bess was restyled even more radically - she threw away her "happy dust" in disgust, and seemed to "choose," rather than succumb to, her sexual abuse.

The trouble is, these decisions played hacky-sack with the themes, emotional trajectory, and even tragic dimension of the opera.  They turned a great, disturbing work of art into a "teaching moment" about, well, something, but I've no idea what; this Porgy and Bess was completely at odds with itself.  Because if the abjection of the characters was what offended, then why make them only a little less abject?  What was the artistic point of that?  And if you were going to really transform Dubose and Dorothy Heyward's Bess (note the Heyward name was not included in the project's marquee title), into an angry, totally-together Power Grrl, then how could you also hope to hang onto the Heyward plot, which depends completely on Bess's weakness?  To make good on such a re-conception, you'd  have to thoroughly rewrite the second half of the opera - something Suzan-Lori Parks simply didn't do.

What we were left with, then, was an oddity: an opera "reformed" of a racism it didn't "really have," by means of interventions which rendered it as crippled thematically as its lead character was physically.

But let's be honest - in the view of the revival's admirers, the opera had to be racist, because without a veneer of reform, Paulus's direction generally looks denuded of any significance (and Suzan-Lori Parks' playwriting doesn't fare much better).  I know, I know - Diane Paulus knows how to engineer an "event" (the publicity prior to Porgy was her real masterpiece), and thus she gets not only buzz, but butts in seats - the production quickly sold out at the A.R.T.  But once my butt is in that seat, I can't help but notice that as a director Diane Paulus is . . . well, she's okay, but no great shakes.  I keep trying to think of something particular to say about her style or sense of interpretation - but honestly, not much comes to mind.  She is dutiful; she attends to details; she has a good sense of pace.  (She was obviously once a Harvard student.)  She directs the traffic of her stage fairly well, and every now and then has a striking visual idea.  This only puts her, however, in the solid middle of the lowest tier of national-level directors.  She has no real interpretive profile; beneath her publicity-driven "brand" of pop-political activism, there is something close to an artistic void.

And please, don't write in to tell me I feel this way because she's a woman.  Would everyone stop making that kind of excuse for her?  I feel this way because I see a lot of great direction.  And even if Diane Paulus suddenly grew testicles she wouldn't be a patch on the ass of a director like, say, Mary Zimmerman.  Even locally, we have Melia Bensussen, who's clearly smarter and more imaginative than Paulus.  We have plenty of better female directors than Diane Paulus; her career is held in place by her politics, her connections, and the success of Hair.  That's it.  (And honestly, how interesting is Hair?  Seriously, people, catch a grip.)

What made this production even weirder was that basically all its racial stereotypes were still firmly in place (at left), just rendered in a warmly sappy, aw-shucks! idiom that made Cabin in the Sky look sophisticated; and it certainly still sported the unspoken frame of deracinated white folks watching the antics of earthy, free-spirited "Negroes."  Sassy, oversized mamas still clucked after randy, sexist bucks, just as I remembered from earlier productions of Porgy and Bess - and as I remember from The Color Purple, by the way, and all of Tyler Perry's movies, too.  Yeah, I know, Parks deleted the vulture scene, and Porgy's fear that a corpse might bleed afresh in the morgue, because these tropes were seen (by her) as too "superstitious."  Which makes no sense to me whatsoever, by the way.  Superstition is a mainstay of grand opera, and of Shakespeare, too.  Nobody ever thought any less of an opera character because he or she was superstitious.  (And oddly, one left this production more convinced than ever that Porgy and Bess is indeed an opera, not a musical - the lurches from recitative into dialogue were always abrupt and disconcerting.)

So if affectionate, but condescending, stereotype rattles your political cage, then I can't see how you wouldn't be staggered by this Porgy and Bess.  As for me, I put this kind of thing in the same category as O'Neill's parody of Irish poverty in Moon for the Misbegotten - I'm Irish, but I'm not offended.  Art may be rooted in stereotype, for all we know, and at any rate, Tobacco Road ain't so far from Catfish Row; there's plenty of Caucasian abjection out there, too.

I am offended, however, by productions that pretend they have conjured drama where instead they've only put up After-school Special talking points. (Like "Nice girls can be sluts, but they don't do drugs!") And as I've noted, this Porgy and Bess made no dramatic sense whatsoever.  The whole point of the opera is the fragility of its lovers' relationship, how their mutual frailty both allows their romance to blossom (Bess has always been overwhelmed by more powerful men), and also threatens to destroy it.  Its theme is the vexed condition of human weakness, and I'll be honest - the dilemma of these heroes always makes me cry; they are titanic, two of the truly tragic heroes of the twentieth-century theatre.

So rather obviously, turning them into avatars of empowerment pretty much drains them of their actual artistic power.  Plus it inevitably led this production into odd non-sequiturs.  Audra McDonald sang like an angel, it's true, but she only connected with Norm Lewis' Porgy musically - because the restyled script obviated the tender basis of their relationship.  Likewise, when attacked by Crown in the second act, she mysteriously strode off to her own rape with an irritated, "Come on, let's get it over with!" authority.  Then, once Porgy had been detained by police, she was seduced by Sportin' Life to abandon her lover because - well, because WHAT?  In the original version, of course, the spectre of "happy dust" reclaiming her desperate soul arises, and Porgy's journey to New York becomes one of redemption.  Here, however, Bess spurned Sportin' Life's offers of cocaine . . . and yet decided to run off with him anyway.  And how many drug-free Power Grrls would decide to run off with a pusher?  My guess is not many.  Clearly this was one moment that required a little extra inspiration from Suzan-Lori Parks, but so far she has come up with zip.

But by the end of the production I had long since understood that this was no longer a work of drama, music, or opera, at all, but merely a vehicle for an obviously muddled and pretentious politics.  Not even a politics, actually - just an etiquette.  And let's not forget it's a financial vehicle, too - a possible gold mine, I'd guess, for Paulus and the Gershwin estate.  Paulus by now has made a career from eking a profit out of white guilt - she's like some New Age "P.C." Barnum.  Which wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if she weren't perverting the purpose of her non-profit theatre in the process.  By now, of course, the A.R.T.'s second stage is a lost cause; Paulus's personal moneymaker, The Donkey Show, has run there for over two years, and what productions the space offers in addition must inevitably be styled around its requirements.  Thus a space that used to house truly challenging and original new work is programmed with rock "operas" or the likes of Cabaret and The Rocky Horror Show.  And the main stage Paulus clearly views as a launching pad for her own Broadway projects, like Porgy, which was obviously streamlined for purely commercial purposes.  That's right - the goal of this particular "nonprofit" theatre has become the commercialization of art into more politically-palatable pop entertainment.  It's doing precisely the opposite of what it was founded to do.   But then as several of the smarter critics have already pointed out, P.C. pop entertainment is what the PBS and NPR crowd now considers "art."   So why, I sometimes wonder, do I even mourn the mauling of a great work like Porgy and Bess?  Diane Paulus is probably right; there's no audience left to appreciate it anyway.

Two contrasting tales of racism and renovation

The screwball subtext of the original His Girl Friday?

Recently I've been mulling the role of race in our theatre (again!) as I've pondered two local productions, Porgy and Bess, or rather The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess (closing this weekend, but sold out anyway) at the A.R.T., and His Girl Friday down at Trinity Rep (up through next weekend, and worth a visit).

I'm still not sure what to make of the apparent contrast between these two productions, frankly.  Or perhaps I'm more puzzled by the contrast between their press receptions.  Porgy and Bess - which I caught earlier this week - was, of course, the middlebrow cause célèbre of the season, ever since director Diane Paulus and adaptor Suzan-Lori Parks announced, in a pre-show puff piece in the New York Times, that they were renovating the Gershwin classic with the insinuation that the original opera was racist.  Soon a hilarious, and deadly-accurate, sneer from Stephen Sondheim followed in that same paper (with a raft of outraged support attached to its comments section), and the usual suspects began to scurry and scuttle; by the time the show opened, the rumored "happy ending" had been dropped, the "renovations" mostly amounted to streamlining for commercial purposes, and Parks and Paulus - now faced with the scorn of an artist of far greater prestige and talent than their own - were babbling about "fleshing out the characters" and "failures of understanding."

And once it opened here in Boston, the fact that the resulting production wasn't nearly as bad as expected caused most of the critics to fall to their knees and kiss the ground in gratitude (sucking up to Paulus wasn't going to be nearly as painful this time as it had been so many times before).  The New York reviewers who saw the show, however - and who of course are much less under Harvard's thumb - told a different, more disappointed story, although everyone praised Audra McDonald's stand-out performance as Bess.  I'd disagree with that, actually - vocally MacDonald is indeed stunning, as expected.  Dramatically, however, her work is a mixed bag - because the one major, misguided renovation that survived the Sondheim imbroglio turned Bess from a recovering addict into a Power Grrl, which in many ways ripped the tragic heart right out of the opera.

But I'll go into that failure of misunderstanding in a full post-mortem later this week.  What I want to talk about now is the contrasting reception to His Girl Friday in the press.

For while I cannot agree that Porgy and Bess is, or ever was, racist - in fact I think the idea is ridiculous on its face - I'm afraid I think the original His Girl Friday, and the play on which it's based, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page, are actually kind of racist.  Indeed, obviously racist.  So it's no surprise the adaptation, by John Guare, directed by Curt Columbus (both at left), that has unfurled at Trinity Rep over the past few weeks, has amounted to a renovation far more radical than anything Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks attempted (or could attempt) with Gershwin.

And yet the press has kept almost completely mum about this fact.  Perhaps because the original works in question cast an unseemly light on the racism the press long tolerated in both its readership and itself.

First let's take a look at the rather over-written The Front Page, and the sleeker, superior adaptation, His Girl Friday.  The central difference between the two, of course, is that in Howard Hawks's screwball comedy, the central character of "Hildy" Johnson has been transformed from a man (Hildebrand) to a woman (Hildegard) - and thus the "bromance" between Hildy and editor Walter Burns becomes a straightforward heterosexual seduction.  (I've often wondered whether the original text could be tweaked into gay comedy, but that's a question for another day.)

What Hawks didn't change, however, is that the headline story Hildy is chasing is one in which a white man has shot a "colored" policeman.  There are a lot of extenuating circumstances to the crime, but the perp (who has also been smeared as a Communist) is going to swing regardless because the political establishment "needs the colored vote."

I know.  Isn't that interesting.  This issue has always "colored," if you will, my reaction to the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell confection, delightful as it often, but not always, is.  (There's also a crude reference to a "pickaninny" later in the film.)   It seems somehow - well, suggestive that the script, written by white men for a white audience, should portray a white man who killed a black man as a figure of sympathy, and that "the colored vote" should worry the lady with the Teutonic name as a corrupting influence. [And it's perhaps worth noting that in an earlier Hawks movie, Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant says to Katharine Hepburn, "That's mighty white of you."]

Such issues (and cultural framing) are far more troubling than anything in Porgy and Bess, it seems to me.  And so it's no surprise that adaptor John Guare has completely expunged them from his revised version, which conflates Page and Friday, but more importantly reverses their political spin.  In Guare's take, the perp is Jewish - he's even Czech - and he has been convicted of shooting a Nazi sympathizer (probably straight out of Germantown).  Guare also sets the action the day before Hitler invaded Poland!  In one fell swoop, he precisely flips the text's political overtones.

Although as you may guess from those details, Guare's liberal politics are a bit more heavy-handed than the original's racist ones were; it's as if he wants, understandably enough, to stamp out their very memory.  And in my full review I'll have a few caveats about how easily this new political frame - and its critique of 30's America - sits with the breezy screwball romance (although it certainly sits more easily than the original racism did!).

What I want to pause to ponder, however, is the press silence regarding this "renovation."  Reviewers seem to avoid discussing it directly, in fact.  The Globe's Don Aucoin, always a stickler for every plot point, did mention that "The man whose execution the reporters are awaiting is now a Jewish immigrant," but he avoids any contemplation of the character's original identity, or what the change in that identity means. Scanning other reviews for the show on the web, I couldn't find anyone who went into the issue, either - although one or two praised the show's new political spin, none discussed the racial history of the text.  [Update!  Don Aucoin suddenly returns to this topic in an article in the Globe today, but typically enough for this writer, he still can't bring himself to state clearly what the issues really are with The Front Page.]

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I think it's hard for the press to face its own racism directly - particularly the racism of the "swashbuckling," romanticized era that The Front Page represents. (In a way, Guare has recast the press of the past as the crusading heroes today's critics would like to imagine they were.) It's also difficult for a reviewer (other than me) to confront his or her readers with unpleasant facts about a movie as beloved as His Girl Friday. On the other hand, however, you could interpret the press silence on the true nature of these originals as a tacit admission that yes, they were obviously racist, and required renovation.

Which makes all the ballyhoo over Porgy and Bess all the more amusing. Yes, I know the original staging included the "n-word," and that Catfish Row is portrayed as abject, and that the book and music were written by white guys - but does anyone really believe that Porgy and Bess actually objectifies and demeans its characters? I mean seriously, really - does even Diane Paulus believe that? It's just not possible. Not even Suzan-Lori Parks could be so blindered by political correctness as to lose all contact with human and dramatic reality. And at any rate, if in the end she and Paulus didn't change anything substantial about Porgy and Bess - as people like Ed Siegel, Don Aucoin, and Carolyn Clay insisted - then it's still racist, right? I mean, am I missing something? If you don't change something's essential nature, if you're "true to its spirit," then it still is that thing.

Or was the brouhaha around Porgy and Bess really just a subtler kind of social stand-off, a sort of publicity stunt based on generational political vanity, a kind of diluted theatrical form of radical chic? I'll ponder these issues further in reviews of both shows later this week on the Hub Review.

Larry Stark's open letter to the A.R.T.

I was surprised to receive an e-mail yesterday from Larry Stark, longtime Boston critic (and IRNE member), as well as editor of the website The Theater Mirror. His note included a link to a post that he said I "might want to glance at." Well, I took a glance - and found the post quite heart-warming. So the first thing I want to do is thank Larry for his support. The second thing I want to do is share his post with you.  It's an open letter to the A.R.T. - the kind of thing they're getting a lot of these days - regarding the recent brouhaha regarding yours truly.  The letter kind of speaks for itself, so I'll just let it do that - but again, thanks, Larry. [The IRNEs ceremony is tonight, btw. Things could get interesting.]

Regrettably, until further notice, I shall not be attending any productions by the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.). Let me explain:

I have frequently been critical of other critics. In some cases, this has been my "internal editor" quibbling about style; at other times, it has been an attempt to let critics feel the personal pain that damaging criticism can cause in people who must get up before another audience knowing that critics' comments have shaped what at least some in that audience might thus believe.

But, even admitting these opinions, I believe even the harshest of critics, deep down, really love theater --- that creators and critics are really "on the same side". Sometimes it may look as though a critic Loves Theater To Death; still, in an austere era many of my colleagues are continuing to write critiques without being paid to do so, their love is that strong. And they try to apply their personal standards in as impartial a manner as possible, though it may not always look that way from outside. That, I think, is the critic's job.

The job of a Public Relations Coordinator for any particular theater company, though, is necessarily biased. The goal there is to get that same potential audience to view the company's shows in the best possible light, to see and appreciate what is there, and to come back again and again for more. And it may seem that P/R people and critics are at war --- especially when they disagree, with one seeing only negatives while the other must accentuate the positive.

But those on both sides operate in what is called "The Free Marketplace of Ideas" --- and audience-members may decide for themselves which one is right. This, at least, is how I assume the game should be played.

Lately, I have heard rumors that a vicious "kill the messenger" attitude threatens this entire structure. I have often voiced my opinions privately or written them publically, but deliberate attempts to disgrace or disbar or silence someone's free voice I cannot tolerate nor condone. I therefore sent the following letter to the producer at the American Repertory Theatre protesting what I see as disgraceful behavior, stretching back over many years, that has no place in that "Marketplace of Ideas" which I fervently hope will remain Free.


To: Diane Borger, Producer, AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE

Dear Ms. Borger:

Of late I have heard astonishing stories and rumors of the antics of a person in your employ referred to as "Catty" by those who have had contact with her. I undertstand that Public Relations work necessarily involves some sorts of manipulation; however, if even half of what I've been told
is true, this person has no ethical standards whatever. I am astonished that you continue to employ anyone who so totally misunderstands her profession, and mine.

You must realize that in the climate created by her actions, any positive reviews of your company's work can be construed as written out of fear of this woman's power to ruin the reputation of anyone voicing opposite opinions.

I cannot believe you are ignorant of this situation, but you must be aware that continuing to employ her in such a sensitive position can only be construed as approval of such behavior by the American Repertory Theatre, which I fervently hope cannot be the case.

But if you condone such actions, I cannot.

I cannot in good conscience continue to work with anyone who behaves with such vindictive misunderstanding of her job, and mine. To do so would suggest that I myself condone such behavior, which is decidedly Not the case.

Should there be a change in personnel in future, I would appreciate your notifying me.

Sincerely,

===Larry Stark

of Theater Mirror

I finally caught The Blue Flower at the A.R.T. just before it closed, and I was very much struck by one thing about it:

It was clearly a labor of love.

You don't always feel this at the theatre, believe me - and you almost never feel it at the A.R.T. But it was obvious that this weirdly melancholic "musical" (it's really a song cycle with a video, but never mind) had all but been doted on by its creators, Jim and Ruth Bauer (of Beverly, Mass!).

Now I'm never one to snicker at real feeling. But this time I had to at least allow myself a small, sad smile. For while it's obvious the Bauers are deeply in love with their putative subject - the "degenerate" German art of the first half of the century - at the same time it's utterly clear they don't understand that art in the least. They're clueless as to the object of their worship; they're like characters out of one of those books by Oliver Sacks - you know, the men who mistake their wives for hats, or the people who lead full, emotional lives despite deep perceptual deficits.

This gives The Blue Flower more poignance than anything in its supposed "book" (even though said book covers two world wars and the rise of Hitler!). Composer Bauer is certainly not a lyricist, and really not that much of a melodist either; but he conjures sweetly mournful pop textures through a gentle blend of cabaret and country instrumentation. And visual artist Ruth has dreamt up plenty of striking imagery to play out on the movie screen she has placed center stage.  Director Will Pomerantz hasn't gotten all that far with the "theatrical" side of the production, however - it often looks, in fact, like a bunch of people wandering around at the movies.  And while the cast proved capable and appealing, they couldn't really make much headway against the schematic design of both the staging and the book.

Moreover,  I have to say that in intellectual terms, The Blue Flower is appalling - nearly as appalling as The Donkey Show, in fact. It's hopelessly dishonest and deeply silly; it's just not offensive because the Bauers themselves seem so sweet.

You've probably heard the musical revolves around characters 'inspired' by Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Hannah Höch, Marie Curie. These cultural body-doubles engage in a decades-long ménage à trois (or quatre) that is torn apart, Doctor-Zhivago style, by war, then fascism, and then more war. To borrow another movie metaphor, like Jules and Jim and Catherine, these four all love each other so much, and they make so much great art (or science!) as they fight the madness that surrounds them.

Needless to say, though, Their Love Is Not to Be. Suicide, the Nazis, and finally a heart attack, pick them off, one by one. A tragedy, no? Yes, of course - and also pretty much total bull.

I know, I know, every play or musical from biographical material fudges its facts; and the Bauers admit their doomed quartet were only "inspired" by Beckmann, Marc, Curie and Höch.  Still, how far can "inspiration" be made to stretch?  Marie Curie never met Beckmann, Marc, or Höch - and actually, I'm not sure Beckmann and Höch ever met Marc, either, before his premature death (which was not a suicide, btw, as posited here).  As for the two characters who actually did meet in real life - Beckmann and Höch -  they hardly fell in love; in fact, they dissed each other (and Beckmann didn't think much of Marc and his fellow Expressionists, either).  And need I add that Höch did not resist the Nazis, as claimed here (instead she laid low, and thus survived)?  Or that Marie Curie did not die in a concentration camp?  (She passed away - in France - just before the Nazis came to power.)  Indeed, even the art in question is misrepresented (it was Höch, not Beckmann, for instance, who worked in collage).

Of course all these inaccuracies are uninteresting in and of themselves - they're only interesting insofar as they reveal a pattern, a pattern of relentlessly saccharine commercialization. Which renders the art that's supposedly at the center of the whole enterprise (at left) flat and uninteresting - we never sense the overwhelming disgust that powered Beckmann, or the passionate lyricism that burned within Marc, or even the alienated, quirky weirdness that animated Höch.  And of course the internecine battles between their various scenes - as well as within them (Höch could never make headway with the Dadaists because of their sexism, for instance) -  are all but ignored.

So we're left with some pretty musical textures, and yet another example of Diane Paulus's strange determination totally  screw the A.R.T.'s founding concept.  I admit I find the whole spectacle disturbing, yet fascinating - I can't turn away, in fact.  What's almost admirable about Ms. P., in a scary way, is that what she has done has been entirely an inside job.  (But then I suppose it had to be.)  In much the same way that Mikhail Gorbachev spent decades droning on in party congresses about praxis and the proletariat before bringing down the Berlin Wall, so Ms. Paulus spent years imitating her mentors' delusions (her early productions are indistinguishable from the standard boho/Soho template), only to turn their whole raison d'être inside out once she had the chance.  The A.R.T.'s founder, Bob Brustein, was bent on confronting the bourgeoisie - and his heir, with perverse logic, has turned this very idea into a form of bourgeois entertainment!

I suppose that irony is as nothing to the new political alignment at Harvard.  But isn't the disinformation peddled by The Blue Flower kind of problematic for an institution with the motto of "Truth"?  Because I'm afraid there's very little of that - either artistically, historically, or intellectually - in The Blue Flower.

Brustein in winter

Hub Review readers know I'm not a fan of Robert Brustein (above, in a wintry pastiche), and his tenure at the American Repertory Theatre (which he founded) I regard as a pretty profound failure - a long experiment which year after year, season after dismal season, disproved its own thesis.  For decades, in fact, Brustein wasted literally millions in public and private funds in a quixotic quest to "revolutionize" theatre in something like the way the wannabe communards of Columbia University (where he got his Ph.D.) thought they could transform politics in 1968.

Obviously, the A.R.T. managed no such feat.  Indeed, Brustein's idea that his critical eye could re-invigorate the entire American theatre (note the pretentious moniker he chose for his company) proved egocentrically overblown; America moved on without him, or his fellow travelers in Manhattan and the university circuit. After a strong start (with productions like The King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author, both of which were revived for years), the company soon found itself treading water, while clinging to a dated vision of the "cutting edge." It had the (very) occasional hit (like Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror), but subscribers still missed most everything that mattered in the theatre over the past generation; they never heard from Tony Kushner, or August Wilson, or Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Sarah Kane, or Tracy Letts (and they saw several musicals, but none by Stephen Sondheim). Tellingly, when a living writer of real stature (Dario Fo, Sam Shepard) graced the theatre's stages, it was almost always with work done in the 60's or 70's; because while the A.R.T.'s internal culture was militantly avant-garde, it was obviously nostalgic in what it thought of as avant.

Part of the problem was that Brustein's theories leaned heavily on directorial intervention, and thus turned his theatre into a formalist hothouse hostile to writers engaging with the actual culture. Inevitably, this theory (like all theories) forced the A.R.T. to retreat into an academic and political bubble. But of course Brustein was operating inside an academic and political bubble, at Harvard. And Harvard's king around here, of course - and if the king wants to stage an ersatz revolution every season, the peasants inevitably show up.  Meanwhile Brustein's career had made him superbly connected within the academic establishment, while his position as one of the country's last nationally-published drama critics made most reviewers loathe to cross him. So there was no way to stop him; his reign of error ground on until 2001.

When he finally left, there was a leap of interest in his successor, Robert Woodruff, and judging from figures recently published by the Boston Globe, moribund attendance at the A.R.T. suddenly jumped. But something went down between Woodruff and the university administration - and he was soon pushed from his post (why this occurred remains a source of rumor and debate). After a search that lasted over two years - and three seasons of further decline - Diane Paulus was installed as Woodruff's replacement.

But the soap opera only continued. Paulus quickly alienated - then eviscerated - her staff, and pretty much dis-assembled what was left of the acting company. She installed her husband, a burlesque impresario, as manager of A.R.T.'s second space, and opened their private moneymaker, The Donkey Show, which I think is still running there along with other New Age strip acts, including web diva Amanda Palmer, who's starring in a sold-out version of Cabaret directed by her high school drama teacher (which is resonant in just so many ways).

A backlash began to form, of course, but Paulus hired other business associates to bolster her power, and many local writers, who are essentially rock fans rather than theatre fans, responded to her embrace of the club scene. Plus Paulus had a trump card in her gender; dim "progressives" (with images of the fatuous Larry Summers still fresh in their memories) were sure to howl if she were to be fired - even though it was widely known that she was almost never at her theatre, but was instead attending to her New York career (as her buddy at the Huntington, Peter DuBois, is also prone to do).

But wait, the world's still turning for the young and the restless. As the actors dumped by the A.R.T. began to be seen more around town (by audiences too smart to waste their time at the Loeb), they began to be viewed as local heroes. One, Will Lebow, even wrote an open letter to Harvard expertly skewering Paulus's bad faith. Even more damagingly, Rob Orchard, a former member of the A.R.T. staff, began to gear up at Emerson College what you could think of as a kind of academic "third way" - a theatrical season of genuine intellectual challenge that was also emotionally satisfying, and thus commercially viable. (Last month it began with a BAM, if you will, with two hits, Fraulein Maria and the Laramie Residency.) Finally, word came out that Robert Brustein himself, in a gesture of profound dismay, had resigned from the A.R.T. board.

Not that that matters, really. But it's touching somehow; the dream is once again over, and once again we'll have to carry on. Brustein has had to abandon his brain-child, and I'm sure that hurt (as has its eventual artistic fate). In a recent exchange with former Globe critic Ed Siegel, Brustein even sounded a little defensive when Siegel hinted at what the rest of the city is saying out loud - that Orchard's ArtsEmerson has taken over the high-end cultural space Paulus's ART has evacuated. Which led Brustein to describe many ART productions as "light-hearted," a statement which I think made many readers' jaws drop. The ART was never light-hearted - not ever; it didn't know how to be; it just didn't have that generosity of spirit. That was part of why so many people hated it. In his comment, Brustein lists a series of shows (most of which I saw) which, it's true, were all intended as comedies, but generally relied on the crassest kind of humor to put over that idea; watching them was like watching Robespierre or Lenin do stand-up. And they were all so cold - "comedy" at the ART was seen as the formal flip-side of the theatre's usual chilly, rarefied post-surrealism. You could argue that at their best, the brutal shenanigans had a point - but then again, perhaps they were just playing to the cruelty of the Harvard home crowd (not for nothing did Harvard birth the legendarily nasty National Lampoon).

And at any rate, I wonder if Diane Paulus is really so far from Brustein's true legacy - that is the legacy of the "revolutionary" sixties filtered through Soho in the seventies. Amusingly, when Paulus does attempt a "straight" ART-style show, like Paradise Lost, she comes up with something remarkably like what Brustein used to produce on a regular basis (indeed, something like what she actually used to see when she was a student at Harvard!). Clearly, Paulus thinks these two modes are compatible - and I have a hunch she's right; or rather that all she has really done is commercialize the dream of orgiastic freedom that floated beneath the supposed rigor of so many ART productions. The few times I interacted with Brustein (he didn't know who I was at the time), he struck me as an avuncular, but inveterate, snob - and that snobbery certainly reverberated throughout his theatre. And it's that snobbery which gave Paulus her opening; all she has really done is down-market Brustein's vision to the bourgeoisie he despised. So sadly enough, the lion in winter set his own trap.

What's actually interesting about Paulus, in fact, is not her hand-me-down aesthetics, but the way in which in her commercial ambitions she's an avatar of the university system in general, which for the last generation has been talking about how important it was to "leave the ivory tower behind." Well, now they've left it, and taken up residence at the disco and the mall. And Brustein has seen his faux revolution put in the front window, with a price tag on it. The funny thing is - it was crass then. And it's crass now. Plus ça change, as they say in Au Bon Pain.

Will LeBow has his say

To all those who have been writing in - Will LeBow's open letter on the A.R.T. can be found here, at "www.LeBowTheatreEssay.blogspot.com." In other developments, LeBow lays into Globe reporter Geoff Edgers here, for distorting his message as "the stodgy old guard resisting the new exciting innovative regime." LeBow's quite right about the Edgers article - it does distort his letter - although frankly, that distortion merely reflects the attitude that suffuses the Globe in general, doesn't it.

Money quotes from LeBow's letter:



"Shakespeare serves the The Donkey Show as an effective marketing tool, but the process is not adaptation. It is not reinvention. It is, simply and precisely, exploitation. The resulting shows were popular, fun, and in one case visually stunning, but they contained none of the power, intellect, and beauty of Shakespeare. They didn’t need to. That’s not how they seek to impact the audience.

How did academia respond? Well, in a related panel discussion, a leading Harvard Shakespearean scholar, Marjorie Garber, apparently didn’t miss the text at all. Happily confessing that she “shook her booty at The Donkey Show”," she affirmed that "It's still Shakespeare," and “it will cause people to pick up and read Midsummer Night’s Dream.” To that last quote I say, “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” (That’s Shakespeare for “ain’t gonna happen, IMO”) . . .

What’s happening at a.r.t. is not “expanding the limits of theater.” It is diminishing it into a populist form. These shows seek to impact the audience the way a drug like cocaine does. By introducing elements of sex, drugs, booze, hot dynamic music, and the power rush of the crowd, and also by blurring the line between performer and audience, you can create an anodyne state in the theatre - pain-controlled, and intellectually narcotized, with, ideally, a euphoric rush or two or three. And it’s an environment where people will be more inclined to spend at the bar.

What has also happened simultaneously at a.r.t. is an almost complete replacement of the artistic and production staff and acting company. So, references to “a new direction for the company” or “how the ART thinks or feels about an issue”, are meaningless. That company no longer exists. That company WAS its people, giving heart and soul to Robert Brustein’s vision. That company has been replaced with a corporate model, complete with the power centric CEO (the Artistic Director being so officially named). The company’s new Financial Officer was formerly at Clear Channel, two words that send a chill up the spine of Equity Actors everywhere . .

What’s at stake right now is the direction of theatre in America, the function of the actor in the theatre, and the model of the regional theatre company moving forward. In my mind the stakes have never been higher. I believe we need to focus on and prioritize the reasons for doing theatre in the non-profit venue. My hope is for money and power to lose the top spot on the list, to a theatre of ideas, insight, and great heart."

I couldn't have said it better myself. I mean doesn't LeBow just nail it, from Marjorie Garber's booty to Clear Channel? But as for Harvard flushing Paulus and returning to some level of intellectual integrity - don't count on it as long as the money is rolling in. I still think our only hope may be to find a way to go after the nonprofit status of the A.R.T. legally, but that's probably just a pipe dream!

Racism strikes out; or, whitewashing the Red Sox at the A.R.T.

Huck and Jim watch The Curse play out from their time-raft in Johnny Baseball.

I swore to myself I wouldn't write about Johnny Baseball. But I suppose I have to, because so little of any value has been said about it. The Globe's Louise Kennedy was lukewarm to the show, but her general response was completely forgotten once she threw one of her out-of-political-left-field screwballs at the production, claiming it relied on "cheaply homophobic" jokes. I prefer expensively homophobic jokes, myself - but this was one of Louise's keepers, I must admit, if only because this time literally no one - and I mean no one - could tell what the hell she was talking about. Good old Louise - for synthetic controversy, you can't beat her.

Meanwhile in the Herald, Jenna Scherer's lede was kind of a head-scratcher in another way ("It isn't obnoxious," she enthused). Then Bill Marx wrote one of his "this little entertainment was energetic, but really beneath my critical authority as Grand Poobah" reviews. The Times's Ben Brantley wittily picked the show apart (largely because it is, indeed, kind of a ripoff of Memphis), and Variety seemed to love it before a killer close - something about it someday "being ready for the big leagues." That had to hurt.

Of course at the same time that the critics were hemming and hawing, Red Sox Nation did embrace the show (which was extended). And why not - it did two things, after all: it treated the trivia around which these sad people have built their lives with utter seriousness, and even more importantly, it absolved them of the charge of racism.

Not that Red Sox Nation was ever, ever racist. Of course not. The Yawkeys were racist; the management was racist. Oh, and of course Boston was long organized (and to some extent still is) in a form of geographic apartheid. The integration of the public schools - which hit at the center of the Sox audience - led to riots, in fact, in the 70's.

But the Red Sox fans themselves were not racist. Or sure, maybe they once were. Maybe some of them were, once.

But not now.

Or at least that's what Johnny Baseball would like you to believe. And "believing" is big in this musical. The bedraggled fans in the bleachers in the storied play-off game in 2004 that frames the musical all "believe" in the Sox. And they are just a crustily lovable bunch of white trash kooks, believe you me! So lovable! Which makes you want to "believe" right along with them. Until you suddenly think - what are we all "believing" in, exactly? I mean didn't the fans in 1919 and 1948 "believe" just as much as the ones in 2004? Hmm. So what's different? Well, the musical explains over the course of two hours, then the Red Sox were racist. And now they're not.

You see the problem, even if director Diane Paulus and her creative team keep a studiously blind eye aimed in its direction. What changed about the Red Sox and its audience? And how and when did it change? That's the question at the bottom of their putative theme. Certainly there's room for a popular musical about racism and the Sox - but to be of any value, it would have to address those questions.

But Paulus & Co. literally offer us no clue. And their "bleacher creatures" seem even more in the dark, as it were. Every amusing flaw and quirk about them is exposed - their drinking, their gambling, their petty crimes, even their masturbation habits. And in the persons of the ART's crack comic cast, their litany of Charlestown/Southie (but not, of course, Wellesley/Weston) foibles is, indeed, pretty funny. The only thing we don't hear about them, come to think of it, is their current feelings on race. Even though they're all white (as were 100% of the adults in the audience the night I saw the show). Because, of course, to broach that subject would suddenly open up genuinely raw feelings, and real questions of guilt and social justice.

And the box office of Johnny Baseball would tank. And all that really great "populism" would go to waste!

So we're stuck in some sort of daydream-timewarp of a show that we get the impression is supposed to operate as a kind of musical confessional - if Boston will only just admit that in the 40's it was racist - or actually just that Tom Yawkey and Joe Cronin were racist - then all will be forgiven. By Diane Paulus. Or maybe Harvard.

Okay, whatever. All I have to say is that as a money machine, this show may prove golden (in Boston, at least); but as "populist art with integrity," it's transparent b.s.; it just doesn't grapple with its own ideas. Indeed, it completely whitewashes (sorry) its central figure, the mythical "Johnny O'Brien" a.k.a. "Johnny Baseball" (Colin Donnell). Now let's see: Johnny's a white Irishman in the early years of the last century - and yet he has no racial baggage at all. He's ready to vote for Obama back in 1918, in fact - and falls head over heels for African-American chanteuse Daisy (Stephanie Umoh) in a heartbeat, even though she entertains in a bordello. What a nice open-minded boy! He's so - how to say this - so . . . so fucking unbelievable.

Now if Johnny Baseball had shown the eponymous Johnny struggling with his own received attitudes when faced with love, it might have had some real dramatic power. But the decision to eschew this topic turns both Johnny and Daisy into sweet, pretty blanks, and entirely cripples Richard Dresser's book. And as a result there's just no real conflict for anybody to play in the show; there are evil racists afoot, of course, until near the end, when suddenly there aren't anymore. We don't even really understand why, precisely, the Curse is lifted when it is. But who the hell cares? The Sox win the pennant! The end.

Still, the show has one secret weapon: its lyrics. Rarely has a musical depended on its lyricist (Willie Reale) as heavily as Johnny Baseball does; indeed, his lyrics aren't just the best thing about the show; they actually drive the production. Reale's knowledge of the Sox milieu - coupled with a wit that's light, but ruthless - results in songs that on paper are the best I've heard in years. One number - "Brotherhood of Bastards," that includes the immortal line "I wanna sleep with a girl/just like the one that slept with dear old Dad!" - may alone be worth the price of admission, and there's more deadly-accurate hilarity to be found in "One More Run," "Mr. Yawkey Has a Vision," and several more. Alas, the music (by Reale's brother, Robert Reale) isn't in quite the same class, although it's okay - it's yet another "jukebox"-style musical, with facile numbers from various periods and styles that somehow all sound alike. Still, Daisy gets one genuinely touching tune ("Do I Know You?"), and there's a kicky number for Willie Mays and (the again imaginary) Tim Wyatt in Act II. In an age in which Wicked counts as a high achievement, the score holds its own.

But again alas, Diane Paulus hardly lights a fire under the material. She manages the traffic smoothly and smartly, and has one powerful visual idea near the end of the show; and she gets off a lot of funny gags about skank, because you know, skank's her core brand. She doesn't let any real dancing in the show, which is a real deficit, but I guess dancing would just be too gay for Red Sox fans. Still, that gap contributes to the growing sense - since you could describe much of the production as "workmanlike" - that she's hardly in the major musical-theatre leagues inhabited by the likes of, say, Nicky Martin, or Michael Lichtefeld (whose brilliant work we sometimes saw at the North Shore Music Theatre).

On the plus side, however, the cast is indeed a good one - certainly the best large ensemble I've ever seen at the A.R.T., probably because everyone has honed their chops in national tours or on Broadway. There's really not a weak link in the cast, but special shout-outs should go to Burke Moses, for his ebulliently obnoxious Babe Ruth (he even nails the Babe's famously queeny trot around the diamond) and Charl Brown's quietly intense Tim Wyatt. And to be honest, leads Colin Donnell and Stephanie Umoh can both sing and act beautifully - and are just beautiful to look at, too.

These performances should be enough to put the show over - the trouble is, there's no real show to put over. Not yet. So we might lose all those great lyrics! And I don't want that to happen - so, even though I feel I'm giving aid and succor to the enemy, I'll play Elliot Norton for a minute for the A.R.T. and explain how to fix what's wrong with Johnny Baseball.

The show obviously needs to be about its hero - and that will require revamping the bland first act. Johnny has to have an inner conflict over Daisy; we have to see him develop from playing one of Babe Ruth's crude cronies to becoming his own man, and lose his racist baggage in the process - only of course this happens too late, and he loses Daisy, too. Therefore the second act, when he encounters his own son in the minors (sorry - was that a spoiler? Really?) becomes a theatre of his own (and his city's) redemption - which is frustrated once again. I hope the writers can fill in the final scenes themselves (although to be fair, Johnny Baseball's clumsy book doesn't feel like writer Richard Dresser's other work - my gut is the show owes its current form to pressure from other sources). An arc like this would provide the musical with both a dramatic engine (which it currently lacks) and some real resonance as social comment. And both are needed, I think, if the show's going to play in New York.

And of course it shouldn't bother Sox fans, either - as they're no longer racist, you know.

Say it ain't so, Joe: Dan Shaughnessy and dramatic license

Now I'm no fan of Johnny Baseball, but I couldn't help but feel a little twinge of sympathy for it when I read the complaints from Dan Shaughnessy (at left) about it in the Boston Globe.

Shaughnessy is a long-time sportswriter at the daily, and thus a long-time observer of the Red Sox, and so I was interested in his perspective on the musical (which posits that racism, not Babe Ruth, was at the root of the team's long inability to win the World Series). For the record, Shaughnessy also has his own theory about the same period, and even his own book - The Curse of the Bambino, which some construe Johnny Baseball as debunking. Still, Shaughnessy's response to the show as entertainment was positive - although he also wrote:

". . . I walked out of the theater bothered by the unnecessary blending of fact and fiction. I fear that most of the ART patrons now believe that Mays tried out for the Red Sox at Fenway in 1948 and was sent packing by a racist general manager named Joe Cronin.

It never happened. Robinson and two other black players did try out at Fenway in 1945. It was a sham. That episode is mentioned in “Johnny Baseball,’’ but the scene we see has Mays at Fenway in 1948, and a posse of Yawkey’s drunken “baseball men’’ turning him away."

Shaughnessy seems to feel this is a smear on Cronin (who was a player for, and then a manager of, the Sox). He sighs that "Cronin passed away in 1984 and can’t defend himself, and family members who still live in New England are saddled with this unflattering portrait."

But does Shaughnessy have a valid point, or is he merely quibbling? It's true that Mays never tried out at Fenway - he was, instead, passed over by Red Sox scouts; but the A.R.T. says so in a program note, which reads: “Willie Mays did not try out at Fenway Park in 1948 or ever. . . . For dramatic purposes we have Willie Mays trying out at Fenway Park in 1948.’’ Shaughnessy cites book writer Richard Dresser as admitting: "“We knew it was one of the liberties one takes to make things clear in a dramatic story . . . We felt that the truth of the situation was that the Red Sox passed on Willie Mays. That was the larger point we wanted to make. We compressed those things in the service of telling the story.’’

Shaughnessy's response? "Sorry. That's not ok."

Dresser's excuse, I admit, is a little weaselly. On the other hand, Shaughnessy's point would be much stronger if he could say that if Cronin had indeed been at that fictional Mays tryout, he would have signed him - or at least fought Tom Yawkey's bigotry and tried to sign him.

But that also seems unlikely. In fact, in his article Shaughnessy plays a little narrative sleight-of-hand of his own. For Joe Cronin was manager of the Sox during that notorious "sham" tryout of Jackie Robinson in 1945 - a scene in which another Globe writer (Clif Keane) later claimed there were shouts of "Get those niggers off the field!" There's also the unflattering fact that as long as Cronin remained manager, the Sox remained white as the driven snow; in fact, it was just months after he retired that the Sox hired their first black player (they were the last major league team to do so). Coincidence?

I don't know. But why doesn't Shaughnessy make those points clear? I'm likewise not sure. He's on firmer ground, though, when he notes that the Sox were still only a few years behind the times - the first major league team integrated in 1947, the Sox, in 1959. That still leaves about 74 years of "the Curse" unaccounted for.

Which leads me to a longer, deeper critique of the silly Johnny Baseball than I really want to write - but it looks like I'm going to have to. Right now I'll simply say - since when was racism wrong because it prevented you from winning the World Series? Are those really the values of Red Sox Nation?

Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know.

Pimping the Professor, Part II

I always knew there was something fishy about Diane Paulus.

I just never thought the facts would smell this fishy.

Suspicious types like me sensed from the get-go that there was something a little too neat about the importation of The Donkey Show, created by Paulus and her husband, Randy Weiner , into ART's Zero Arrow space last fall. The piece had been initially developed for night clubs (in New York and elsewhere) where it had run profitably for years. It was obviously a piece of commercial theatre (that paid undisclosed royalties to Diane and her hubby) sliding into what was widely understood to be a non-profit piece of cultural real estate. Unsurprisingly, due to its nearly-bare boobs and disco tunes, The Donkey Show was a hit - but people like me began to wonder, as it was extended over and over again, whether we'd ever see "real" theatre, or any performance risky enough to turn off the bachelorettes, at Zero Arrow Street again. After all, in its original locales, The Donkey Show had run for years.

(Note: we moved the NSFW graphic to after the jump.)



Will Harvard wake up to the ethics of Diane Paulus and her husband?

Meanwhile, of course, the press blithely applauded this obvious land-grab. As in the equally-dismaying case of Shepard Fairey at the ICA, the smarter print critics pretty much sat on their hands as the professors went pop (one local scribe whispered to me that Paulus was "middlebrow" - duh - but was too cowardly to say that on the record), while the dimmer bulbs did cartwheels; at last, high art had been obliterated (again)!!! And what do you mean, this all might be unethical? Diane Paulus is a woman, and she voted for Obama! She's one of us!!!!

Right. Or maybe she's a fembot with her eyes on the prize, as it were (which is how she comes off in interviews). At any rate, as in the case of Fairey, the Diane Paulus mystique may be about to look a little tarnished. Because now, in a Globe piece by Geoff Edgers, the picture over at Zero Arrow gets a good deal less murky, and a good deal less savory. It turns out that Paulus' husband has, indeed, been taking home a tidy royalty on The Donkey Show - a royalty which seems to include part of the bar tab. He even owns the "Club Oberon" trademark. To Edgers, this is "an unorthodox relationship [between a promoter and Harvard]." Others might use harsher words, particular when they read Weiner's babble about "What a show is, it's a promotion, like a wet T-shirt contest, it's karaoke, it's girls get in free. The genius of doing a show is that people will actually pay for that promotion. I'm winning on the promotion and I'm winning on the drink."

No, I didn't make that up - Weiner actually said that on the record. What's funny is the way Edgers buries this and other details in what could pass for a puff piece (is Edgers as clueless as he has often seemed, or is he clueless like a fox this time around? You decide!). To Edgers, there's really no issue in having a non-profit theatre space at our leading university host "a quiz show, a burlesque, and a conjoined-twin singer-songwriter duo," presented by (who else?) Amanda Palmer. But even he can perceive that the A.R.T. seems to be sliding toward Mafia-restaurant territory, where the husband of the artistic director is hawking drinks and pocketing the change, and the theatre's new producer, Diane Borger, has a son-in-law who in a very strange coincidence is one of said hubby's partners in his latest New York venture, "Caligula Maximus." Again, I'm not making this up - could the whole mess look more corrupt and money-driven if it tried? No surprise, then, that almost no one at the A.R.T. wants to comment on the situation.

Okay, I admit I'm laughing right now, and I'm wondering just when, exactly, Harvard will make its move to remove this big-ass omelette from its face. Of course Harvard hardly has an ethical reputation to rival Mother Theresa's; still, the situation at the A.R.T. pushes the limits of the plausible deniability that is the university's norm. The claim that The Donkey Show is, in effect, funding "riskier" work at the A.R.T., as A Chorus Line once did for Joe Papp, is debatable, I'd say - but if Harvard wants to go that route, it still pretty much has to move the dancing girls to a commercial venue (as Papp did with his hits) to make the argument hold water. If The Donkey Show were playing on Lansdowne Street (where it belongs), and held its own in the commercial sector, there'd be few arguments against it, even if Weiner and Paulus were throwing a few bucks Harvard's way. Of course it may well prove unfeasible to run Paulus and Weiner out of town on a rail (which, frankly, is what should happen), but Harvard owes it to its own reputation to at least move The Donkey Show downtown, and bring theatre back to Zero Arrow.

Methought I heard Bonnie Tyler cry, "Sleep No More!"

Why pay to see No-Doze when it's all on Youtube for free?

OMG, I finally like saw Sleep No More, which is like totally the hottest ticket in Boston? And OMG, it was way stupider than I ever thought it would be! I was sure the concept and all would be cool and millennial but OMG it was like I was stuck in a music video from 1985. And I was like oh no NOT more bad modern dance in the thrift shop! But YESSSS it was bad modern dance in the thrift shop 24/7! And WHAT was Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca doing in Macbeth anyway? OMG, it was like MacBecca! And WHY was the Second Mrs. DeWinter married to the old king, you know what's his name, the one who goes "This castle hath a pleasant - ACCCKK!!" I mean what was UP with that?

Ok, whatever. Somebody told me it was a lot better if you didn't know anything about the play or the movie and that's probably true. It's always better with the A.R.T. if you don't know anything going in. It would have been wicked cool, though, if like Mrs. Danvers had totally gone down on Lady M. but that was ONE opportunity they for some reason sadly missed. It WAS freaky sometimes when you'd be like watching some actress who you weren't quite sure who she was but anyway she'd be all intense and then you'd hear this SCREAM from another classroom, and you'd be like, whoa, I bet they just found that dead body I saw a minute ago! Awesome! And I did like the eel in the bathtub, that was kind of cool, but when I tried to catch it and leave it in somebody's locker this guy in a black mask stopped me and told me I'd be like ejected if I tried anything like that again. Bastard. LIGHTEN UP, okay? I guess there were some good parts where the guys took off their clothes but that was like the ONLY reason I was glad I saw this show and even that only happened twice unless I missed something. I mean half the time I'm like "Sleep No More"?? I'm nodding off already!!! But then BOOM the sound system kicks in and some asshole actor like SLAMS into you and all these jerks in their little white masks are chasing after him to get their 25 bucks' worth and you're like "Shit, wait for me! I'm tired of staring at all these antiques!!!" It would also probably be a whole lot better if it came with a card like from a scavenger hunt with things on it to check off, like "YES! I totally tagged the bloody baby!!" Anyway that would be my constructive criticism.

But what about the actors and the plays?

So I'm looking over the glossy season brochure for the A.R.T. and trying to decide what it means. And one thing it seems to mean is: no plays. Well, one play, Paradise Lost, by Clifford Odets. And a new musical. And a novel read aloud by hip New Yorkers (The Great Gatsby). And another musical, featuring gospel choirs. What is described as "an immersive experience" that's also like a Hitchcock film inspired by Macbeth, set in "an extraordinary, unexpected location." Oh, and The Donkey Show, a.k.a "the ultimate disco experience."

And uh - how many actors? The Hitchcock Macbeth thing is an import, the gospel choir thing is - well, a gospel choir thing. Maybe they're going to make good old Karen MacDonald go out in a thong and pasties for The Donkey Show, but I hope not. Gatz is an import. Red Sox Nation is another musical. (And only Tommy Derrah really sings.)

Sigh. I can remember when the "R" in A.R.T. stood for "Repertory." Which meant a repertory company. Which meant paid actors, working together as an ensemble.

Now I know I'm just an old stick-in-the mud who doesn't appreciate how new and daring all this is. I like plays, not concepts, I know that. But I'm wondering if they're going to remove the "R" from their name? And just be the A.T.? Because it seems they really should do that. Just to be accurate.

What should an academic theatre be?

After a reportedly troubled search that lasted something like a year, the ART finally settled on Diane Paulus (left), a Harvard grad and Obie-award winner, as its choice for Artistic Director. The good news is that the search is over, of course, and that we're now free of Gideon Lester's attempts to replicate past ART seasons. The downside of Diane, however, is that her résumé almost reads like parody. It's thick with pop-music adaptations of Shakespeare (The Donkey Show transported Midsummer Night's Dream to a disco and The Karaoke Show set The Comedy of Errors in a karaoke bar, while The Winter's Tale got a "gospel/R&B" treatment), and includes a pitstop in just about every ditzy directorial trend of the last twenty years: Mozart's Figaro got an update, of fucking course, as well as all three Monteverdi operas (they made it to BAM, naturally), which mixed with the likes of David Lynch (Lost Highway) and even Disney (The Golden Mickeys, whatever that was). Meanwhile her résumé lists no Chekhov, no Ibsen or Shaw, no Sophocles, no Marivaux, no Williams or O'Neill or Miller or Kushner, no Beckett or Brecht or - well, no anybody. Maybe she's done them, but she's certainly not advertising it - when it comes to classic texts, besides the Shakespeare travesties, she only lists Strindberg's phantasmagorical A Dream Play.


Titania goes clubbing in The Donkey Show.

You wonder, in short, if her career might have been devised by some imp at the Harvard Lampoon. It's hard not to get the impression of a very bright, very attractive careerist who read her "mentors" like a book and colored relentlessly within the postmodern lines. And note among all the disco and the Disney that there are few, if any, honest productions of interesting new plays by great playwrights; no, Diane was far too focused to do anything as silly that. That would have required, like, slavish obeisance to a text, dude! It would have blown the whole orgy of signifiers - not to mention the scene!


A scene from Paulus's Brutal Imagination, although it might be from any number of past ART productions.

So it's obvious (if you doubt me, check out the photographs of her work) that her artistic directorship will represent more of the same old, same old from the ART, where the late-70's Village never died (or rather, where it went to die). Indeed, it's hard to imagine how the Harvard search committee could have made a more conservative choice. One guesses the ART will remain mired in yesterday's critical theories, and grow more and more isolated from its community, aside from the Dresden Dolls' fan base, which is probably doing handsprings (along with the Dolls themselves, of course).

Sigh. But will the Huntington do much better? Will Peter DuBois, their incoming artistic director (who arrived after a far more smoothly managed search), actually connect with theatre, and with Boston, the way Harvard seems unable to? Maybe. He's done real plays - Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett, as well as Churchill, Kushner, and others (including, yes, politically-correct lesser talents like Suzan-Lori Parks). DuBois has also, it's good to point out, run a theatre - in Juneau, Alaska, of all places (I'm not making that up), and he's been a mucky-muck at New York's Public, certainly a highly-pressured, high-profile perch. Needless to say, he's also acquainted with the New York (and Hollywood) stars that the Huntington, under Nicholas Martin, began to rely on to boost audience interest in their seasons.

All this, I think, bodes rather well - in case you can't tell, I care far less for postmodern theory and rock-n-roll than I do for theatre. And I'm hoping that DuBois will not only continue the policy of engagement with the city that Nicholas Martin was known for, but will also improve upon it. But what, in the end, should DuBois set as his goals? What should an academic theatre be? In Boston, unlike almost anywhere else in the U.S., we've got two of them, and yet their roles and responsibilities have been a topic of almost no public discussion whatsoever. They are perceived as simply adjuncts of the power bases their respective universities represent; local critics seem to think it's almost rude, somehow, to question the assumptions and goals under which they operate (and under which they gobble down public dollars). But in my next post in this doubleheader, I'll ponder what, exactly, should be expected of an academy that begins to operate as an arts practitioner.

Walk like an electron

Will Lebow, John Kuntz and Karen MacDonald prepare to collide.

I know everyone says I expect too much of the local print critics, but there's a real downside to having average-joe (or -jane) journalists writing on the cultural scene - indeed, the reception to Michael Frayn's Copenhagen (recently closed at the A.R.T.) could serve as one example of how poorly Boston is served by the Globe and Phoenix.

Now Frayn's play is, I admit, often entertaining in the manner of much upper-middlebrow melodrama; but as a "play of ideas," it is, like such shameless potboilers as Equus and The Elephant Man, hooey through and through. And frankly, there's no one in Boston's print media with either the brains or the balls to make that call.

But before we get to the critical reaction, let's ponder the play. Frayn conjures a kind of No-Exit-like limbo for three historical figures, two of them among the century's geniuses - Niels Bohr, father figure to atomic physics, his wife Margrethe, and Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant upstart who wrested the universe, as it were, away from Einstein with his probability-based model of subatomic particles. Over the course of the play, this trio ponders, and re-ponders, a famous "walk in the woods" in Copenhagen between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941, during which somehow, away from the Nazi microphones which were surveilling Bohr's home, Heisenberg gave Bohr the impression (intentionally or not), that he was working on an atomic bomb.

Bohr, horrified, soon escaped occupied Denmark, and joined the Manhattan Project, which no doubt accelerated with the news of Heisenberg's activity. Heisenberg, rebuffed, returned to Germany and began furious work on a fission reactor, which, in one version of his story, was designed to produce plutonium for an eventual bomb. Upon Germany's defeat, Heisenberg was discovered literally in a hole in the ground (at left), working in near-hysteria on his failed reactor without even rudimentary safety controls. Technically, he was both wrong in his reactor design and in his assumption that the quickest route to a bomb was via a reactor; the Manhattan Project got further, faster, by simply separating existing isotopes of uranium (plus Heisenberg was wildly incorrect in his calculations - if he did them - of how much uranium he'd need). Still, despite being at the helm of a project that could have led to the vaporization of London and Paris, Heisenberg was never tried as a collaborator - like the brilliant Wernher von Braun, he was instead re-installed in the scientific firmament, at what became the Max Planck Institute, and spent the rest of his life essentially floating explanations for his past behavior.

Heisenberg (with Bohr in happier days, left) had many ways to revise his story, but the central question which he exploited was this: how could someone so brilliant have made such basic mistakes? Of course said mistakes look more obvious in hindsight, but Heisenberg was quick to hint that they weren't mistakes at all, but that he had, in fact, intentionally sent the Nazi nuclear project down the wrong path (and then wandered off the path to boot). This interpretation was undercut both by the ferocious speed with which he attacked the reactor project, and his own later conversations with his cohorts (secretly recorded in England after the war). In short, Heisenberg's story is a self-serving excuse from a useful genius, and that's pretty much that.

But not for Michael Frayn, who conjures in Copenhagen an elaborate game of philosophical hide-and-seek, forever hinting that we can't accurately guess Heisenberg's motives or even his actions - that instead, he's a kind of humanoid electron, always "scattering" into a probabilistic cloud before the slits of good and evil. Frayn of course is only following the lead of so many scientifically illiterate humanists - it's almost taken for granted now among the smart set that quantum mechanics implies some sort of historical, or even moral, uncertainty principle. How this should be - what the actual correlates are between matrix algebra and moral reasoning - always remains unspoken; yet somehow the idea survives, even thrives, at roughly the level of a Charlie Rose interview - a level that, frankly, you'd think Harvard would sniff at.

Yet here the A.R.T. was, positing the idea that the question of Heisenberg's culpability was somehow unanswerable and unknowable - instead of being simply an unpleasant fact that our society had long ago decided to ignore. Gosh, who can really say what his motives were at Copenhagen? Well, this question resonates only about as long as you try to square it with his later actions - then suddenly the best you can say is that he was of two minds, perhaps, at the start of his project, but then dove right in. And as for hints that Heisenberg hoped to get an agreement with Bohr that neither would work on an atom bomb - please; would anyone in Bohr's shoes have just sat tight in Copenhagen, trusting Heisenberg to do what was right? To be fair, Frayn does lay out what Heisenberg's success would have meant for the world - the end of London, followed no doubt by Berlin, then Paris - a cultural apocalypse before which the puny accomplishments of, say, Osama bin Laden would pale. But at the same time Frayn suggests the U.S. (and it seems Niels Bohr) bears some similar level of guilt for the actual bombing of Hiroshima, that we are perhaps even lower on the moral scale than his hero; no ditzy matrix-algebra morals for us, apparently!

Obviously, Copenhagen is Tony-winning claptrap - but at least it's entertaining claptrap, the same way Sleuth and Amadeus are entertaining, and it's skillfully brought off by the A.R.T. team. Still, it was troubling how little the critics engaged with its themes and theses. The play "dazzled and confounded" the Globe's Louise Kennedy, who then offered:

"Copenhagen" has provoked great controversy over its historical accuracy, especially with regard to Heisenberg's relationship with the Nazis. Feelings run high because it deals with profoundly troubling ethical questions and events arising out of the development of nuclear weapons during World War II . . . But director Scott Zigler's spare production helps to turn our focus from the possible discrepancies between Frayn's play and the facts to the broader but deeper concerns that are his true subject: What can we know? What should we do? How are we to live?

Uh-huh. Okay - here are the answers to those questions: What can we know? That Heisenberg, for whatever reason, was a collaborator. What should we do? Refuse to rehabilitate his reputation. How are we to live? By not collaborating with Nazis and their ilk. I mean really. She then tries to compare Frayn's sophistry with Shakespeare's willful misrepresentation of Richard III - which was committed over 125 years after the facts in question (as opposed to 50), and of course led to the creation of one of the greatest characters in literature. But Kennedy actually tries to posit the following:

"In time, I think, Frayn's "Heisenberg" and "Bohr" will become similarly detached from their counterparts in reality; our questions about whether Heisenberg helped or sabotaged the Nazi war effort will remain in the sphere of history, while our reading of the character "Heisenberg" will enrich our consideration of drama, ethics, and the largest questions of human nature . . . Even as I make this argument, I find myself wondering whether I agree with it. Facts matter, after all, and it has become pretty clear that Frayn, like Shakespeare, gets some facts wrong. That matters, too, especially if it gives any aid and comfort to those who attempt to minimize the evil of colluding with Nazis. Ultimately, though, I think my unease and perplexity is part of what Frayn is trying to provoke. He wants us to know that stories get things wrong, that any attempt to see "what happened" is colored by the storyteller's shaping of the story and then further refracted by our own interests, biases, and blind spots."

I don't really know what to say about this other than that the most interesting thing about it is watching Kennedy, like Heisenberg, try to wriggle out of her own position. But can she really believe that "Heisenberg" will ever matter as much to the culture as "Richard III"? And needless to say, any critique of the play's "quantum morals" - even the idea of such a critique - seems to be beyond her. Let's just say if Louise is ever called for jury duty, I think she could hold up this review as evidence of why she should be excused.

Over at the Phoenix, meanwhile, Carolyn Clay didn't do much better:

The play has stirred controversy, with allegations arising as to its scientific accuracy, not to mention its portrayal of lightning rod Heisenberg, who spent his 30 post-war years stepping lightly between identities as Nazi thwarter and bomb bungler. But the play is not intended as docudrama. Rather, it is a metaphorical musing in which Frayn applies scientific method (including what the characters might call the Elsinore principle) to a consideration of history, responsibility, and the human heart.

Clay never wrestles with the fact that the play is far more insidious as a "metaphorical musing" than as a docudrama, and as for "history, responsibility, and the human heart" - really, has she no sense of perspective?

Well, perhaps she has little hard knowledge of the ongoing controversy about Heisenberg. Draft letters from Neils Bohr have recently come to light which pretty much plant a stake in the heart of Copenhagen; in these letters, Bohr recalled Heisenberg declaring during their 1941 walk that "Germany would win the war and that he did not wish to be on the losing side." Put that line in the middle of Copenhagen and the whole pseudo-intellectual soufflé falls flat, doesn't it. Suddenly there's no cloud of probability, no competing Copenhagen interpretations: there's only a simple, hard-headed calculus of the kind scientists like Heisenberg and Bohr were in the habit of making every day.

What's intriguing is the fact that there probably is a fascinating play to be written about Werner Heisenberg - a theoretical genius (though not, thank God, a practical one!) so dazzling as to eclipse, perhaps, even Einstein. Heisenberg was reportedly no anti-Semite, and disdained the crude world of realpolitik - and ironically, he even opposed West Germany's acquisition of nuclear weapons after the war. So how was he drawn into the Nazi nuclear project? By his vaulting ambition, his romantic sense of his "German-ness," his belief that he moved in some otherworldly realm of "truth," above the common fray? It's a question that might someday yield a dramatic character to equal, yes, Richard III.