I admit it, I was wrong about Diane Paulus

Ta-da!  I have nothing new to say! Isn't that fabulous??? Photo: Michael J. Lutch.

For those of you have written in to ask, I did indeed go see Diane Paulus's production of Pippin at the A.R.T.  (I think it has closed by now; at any rate it sold out long ago.)

And I have to admit I was wrong about her.  

Yes!  (Bet you never thought you'd read that on the Hub Review, did you.)

You see - I thought Diane Paulus could direct Pippin.

And it turns out I was wrong.  Oh, so wrong.

Now I wonder if she can really direct anything.  I mean Pippin seemed so perfect for her!  PG-dirty, high-school-y, vaguely left-y, and with some lingering resonance as a cultural book-end for Hair, which Paulus made a solid (if not quite inspired) hit a few years back.  Indeed, Pippin is kind of the anti-Hair; back in the day, it was basically about the boomers withdrawing from their short-lived interest in political life, giving up on revolution, and settling down in the ex-urbs.

These days I'm not sure what it's about, and clearly neither is Diane.  Although to be fair, I can only really say that Paulus can't direct the first half (yes, I know in its premiere it was performed in one fell swoop - but the first half is probably the stronger half anyway).  You see I left at intermission. Sorry!  But I'm really ruthless when I've paid for my own ticket, and if a show is as empty as this one, I do NOT stick around - I have better things to do (like check out the chocolate at Burdick's).

Now, I know what you're thinking - it's not her fault: Pippin is bad.  And, okay. It's certainly not, well, good - but it's also not that bad.  I've seen it work (and honestly, it played for five years on Broadway for a reason). Of course Stephen Schwartz's score is terrible - and I mean DREADFUL - and the plot is, if anything, even worse.  The storyline is just whacked, utterly a-historical and ridiculous (there's even a resurrection), and the tone is relentlessly immature, basically because Pippin began its life as a college revue, and it has never entirely shaken off that undergraduate perspective - even though Bob Fosse tried his damnedest to transform it into a dark Brechtian fable for its Broadway run.

Now Fosse is one of the major cultural figures of the late twentieth century - and I'd argue he almost succeeded in making Pippin worthwhile.  Certainly for its day it seemed edgy, with orgies and Monty-Python-esque battles and an African-American "leading player" who all but begged for applause while hinting at a buried hostility behind his Mr.-Bo-Jangles mask.  No wonder Fosse banned Schwartz from rehearsals (tellingly, Paulus reportedly brought him back in); he was ruthlessly subverting Schwartz's schmaltz with a viciously cynical subtext.  

The trouble is, I think our familiarity with Fosse has made it hard to remember the sardonic, de-stabilizing atmosphere his work once breathed.  This whole show, with all its "ideals" and sentimental tropes, is just a kind of sexual sale, his trademarked moves whispered; I'm the pimp and you're the john. Any questions?

But Paulus's attempt to resuscitate Pippin's Fosse-ography falls bizarrely flat, because that sense of challenge is completely missing from her work (and maybe from her mind).  To be fair, perhaps any earnest pop faith in musical theatre is so far in the past that now half the Fosse equation is gone forever.  And don't get me wrong - as always, Paulus proves herself an apt pupil and a dedicated Harvard-level student.  She worked really, really hard on this, you can tell, and to many that means she deserves an A; and she's very open and honest about her lack of any fresh insight or angle on the material - she signals right up-front that she is bringing nothing original to the party.  Indeed, the show opens with a looming image of Fosse's shadow (and all but precisely apes a few of his most famous numbers).  

And yet somehow the whole thing is boring as hell, because Paulus is working at cross-purposes with herself, and doesn't understand Fosse's own conflicted attitude toward the hard sell - I mean honestly, how could she have brought Stephen Schwartz back to consult on the subversion of his own schtick? In the end, Fosse wanted the theatre to be more than high-end prostitution; I think actually he longed for innocence.  And let's be honest - Paulus doesn't.  She just wants to make the sale.  She quite desperately wants to make the sale.  That's all there is for her - the ka-ching.

And you know - that's okay, I guess; you can't really fault her morally because she just seems - well, kind of beyond morals.  I used to get upset with her dumbing-down of Shakespeare, or her slurs against Gershwin - but Pippin made me I understand those moves were just business as usual.  Even sleaze doesn't exist aesthetically for her; she doesn't get it.  She doesn't really understand what she herself is doing.

But like I said, she works hard.  What an effective manager!  And she has certainly built a gigantic whirligig of a production; it will no doubt seem the most dazzling iteration yet of the New-York-Vegas-tourist-theatre-trap when it opens on Broadway this spring (yes, this was always really a commercial show; Paulus just took advantage of the Massachusetts taxpayer for its try-out).  Indeed, sometimes it seemed that every single corner of the Loeb stage had been diligently filled with meaningless spectacle.  Paulus enlisted "Les 7 Doigts de la Main," the millennial Montreal circus troupe, to bring some Cirque-du-Soleil va-va-voom to Fosse's traveling-players conceit, and they did add spectacle, and how - so much so that they all but overwhelmed the slim spine of the musical.  

But if you've seen Les Doigts before (they've been through town three times by now), you've already seen all their best bits, and somehow their virtuosic chill is more bracing in their own work.  If you're from Topeka, of course, you'll be thrilled.  (Or from Harvard, I might add - as I left the lobby, I heard one Harvard blue-hair commenting, "Who are these young acrobats?  They're just wonderful!"  Which is why they call life at Harvard "island living.")

I will say the show had Andrea Martin (who actually gets up on the trapeze!).  We will always love Andrea Martin.  So there's that.  And the great Charlotte d'Amboise, alone among the performers, brought some real sizzle to her Fosse.  But Pippin and his Leading Player were just blanks - talented blanks, but blanks - and if you ain't got them, and you ain't got a director, well . . .

At least the Burdick's fudge was really good.

Isn't it "romantic" . . ?

Will Lebow holds court in Romance.

I checked out the ART production of David Mamet's Romance last weekend because there was IRNE buzz around Will Lebow's performance, so I felt I had to see it. But I have to confess the play was somewhat more interesting than it's been given credit for being (somewhat more interesting, that is). And the production, directed by Scott Zigler, was very slick, with a nifty set by Michael Griggs and a generally crack ensemble.

It's true that the play isn't quite as interesting as the cleverly engineered November was at the Lyric last fall (nor was the ensemble actually any stronger - the Lyric cast was brilliant). But then Romance is more a sketch than a play - it's really just funny fragments glued together in a thematic mosaic, whereas November is a rather well-structured farce. Although even November wasn't quite what the playwright wanted to pretend it was (he blew all kinds of smoke about it being a battle between the "tragic" and "optimistic" views of life); the sad fact is that Mamet hasn't produced an important play since Speed-the-Plow (if even that one is truly important), and it does seem that things have really been thinning out recently. Perhaps sensing the flyweight nature of this latest, the ART floated the idea to a few naïve reviewers that there was some kind of cultural throughline to this year's season, apparently leading from Chekhov (The Seagull) through Beckett (Endgame) to - wait for it - Mamet. Right. ROFLMAO.

Elsewhere the ART took the more sophisticated tack that Romance was somehow bracing and subversive because of its barrage of ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual slurs, but so many comics, radio hosts and cable shows have mined the same territory that none of this plays out as particularly transgressive. Not that Mamet's inventive insults are quite "archaic," as the youngest critic in town put it, because occasionally the bickering does tap into current political live wires (as when the playwright takes aim at our hands-off attitude toward Muslims, or pedophile priests). But generally all the bigotry plays more as coda than salvo, like the crude "Americana" of Mel Brooks's The Producers, which after 9/11 somehow transmuted ironic bigotry into patriotic gesture.

The disjuncture between this supposedly "offensive" banter and the play's oh-so-innocent title mystified several local critics, but the text is, indeed, obviously a romance, or rather a "bromance" - because, for one thing, there are no heterosexual women in it, which means Mamet is able to lower his defenses and conjure something like an atmosphere of fraternal affection out of all his bigoted, but at least honest, bathos. To Mamet, heterosexual women are a deep existential threat, and if they're present in one of his plays, it often devolves into some kind of trap for its hero. Homosexual women are a different story, however - Mamet kind of digs them, and he's not particularly homophobic toward gay men, either - we're allowed in the testosterone treehouse (although there's an intriguing meta-insult toward my tribe embedded in the play; more on that later).

But what is it about Mamet and heterosexual women? It is a puzzlement. Heterosexual women don't seem fully human to Mamet, and unsurprisingly, their opinion of him tends to mirror that assessment. Years ago, I went to the same gym that Mamet did in Harvard Square. And the few times I mentioned this to friends, the women present would always ask, "Have you ever seen him naked? How big is his penis?" Now don't worry, I'm not telling. I only mention this because I've never had women ask me that particular question about any other guy. Ever. So perhaps Mr. Mamet should be aware of what exactly his writing has suggested to approximately half of his audience.

Or maybe it's just that, as Harry told Sally, sex ruins everything for Mamet. Strange, then, that man-on-man love is what ties up all the loose narrative ends of Romance. The story, if you can call it that, revolves around the trial of a chiropractor for - well, we never know what, exactly, that's the play's MacGuffin. The script's genuine action begins when the defense lawyer, in private consult with the Jewish defendant, explodes that a particularly recondite rhetorical strategy is "talmudic . . . so Jewish . . ." He immediately apologizes profusely, and awkwardly, for this blast of seemingly honest ethnic contempt. As an excuse he claims he's exhausted, because he had to get up early to drive his kid to a hockey game at church. To which his client calmly responds, "So, do you think the priest will have his dick out of your kid's ass by the time you pick him up?"
Nice. And things move on, or perhaps down, from there; the scene devolves (or escalates!) into a wild orgy of slurs, some second-hand, but genuinely clever, others newly-formed things of beauty. Then comes the odd meta-insult of the play - a weird scene between the gay prosecuting attorney and his be-thonged lover, in a sex pad decorated in something like Caravaggio-meets-David-Hockney, in which it's revealed that this kike Mamet has no idea how actual faggots like me behave. (In case you can't tell, this review is taking the same stylistic turn as its subject.) Or maybe that is the idea (after all, later on a key character inquires of that gay attorney, "So what do you guys actually do?"). 


 Still, if the scene is unbelievable on its surface, it resonates slightly structurally, because Mamet intends us to understand that gay sex is the hil-arious mystery secret, the double-identity charm that will allow this farce to function. In ancient times, of course, this secret was usually identified with someone at the bottom of the social strata (a woman, or a slave) - and at the ART, that be-thonged lover isn't just gay, but also black, just to touch both bases, apparently. Most interestingly, he's also accorded a name (all the other characters are described by social role) - "Bunny." Thus, he's human, and not defined by his function - or is he? After all, "Bunny" is a kind of patronizing insult that references the ass - and yet is also weirdly close to "buddy," the ultimate man's-man term of affection. (See this is one of those moments that I think maybe Mamet should just suck some cock to get it over with.)

But I digress. All these scenes, it turns out, have been mere prep for the wackily operatic slur-fest that takes up the entire second act, in which the trial resumes, with a judge (Will Lebow, above) who has overdosed on his allergy medication and thus begun to experience "psycho-active side-effects." Here Mamet pretty much abandons all plot, and motivation, too, and just goes after thematic pastiche and silly effects: because he wants to show us that his 'characters' are getting emotionally naked, for instance, he has the judge tear off his clothes for no reason, and Bunny likewise makes a surprising, gay-us ex machina appearance because the playwright needs to wrap things up, etc. 


Thus Romance basically stops being a play, but it remains a pretty funny essay, at least as delivered by Lebow, who manages to constantly connect the very disparate dots of Mamet's dialogue. And Lebow somehow channels a Paddy-Chayefsky or Norman-Lear-like Jewish-liberal befuddlement (we half-expect Bea Arthur to rise from the grave and do a walk-on) that keeps the goings-on endearing, and dodges the WASP-wannabe chill that is the ART's dominant mode.

For this, I suppose, is Mamet's sentimental point; in his world, it's the cold manipulation of masculine language that keeps us apart; once we just begin to get sloppy and honest, it doesn't really matter that we're insulting each other, because everybody has a secret shame that we'd all just be better off exposing. (Ah, that locker room again.) Indeed, at the end of Romance, characters begin spontaneously confessing to everything under the sun, while across town, a Mideast peace conference falls apart because of a single insult. Just one insult. Wow. Isn't that ironic? I mean romantic?

Well, thank God we've had Will Lebow to sell us this weird, over-extended but under-developed piece of dramaturgy. Indeed, rarely has a "play" depended quite so much on its central performance. Watching him take his bow, it struck me just how versatile this mainstay of the ART and Huntington has proved over the years (to be fair, Thomas Derrah and Remo Airaldi both crackled here, too) - and how much less we may be seeing him under the disco-gospel directorship of incoming Artistic Director Diane Paulus. Or should we actually be glad that the ART is cutting its already-tiny acting company loose, because that way we'll get to see them in better, more serious productions elsewhere? Let's hope that's the silver lining glimmering from the clouds of this theatre's coming season.

Endgame replay

Remo Airaldi, Karen MacDonald, and Will Lebow in Endgame.

Was it really a generation ago that the A.R.T. and JoAnne Akalaitis screwed Samuel Beckett and Endgame? How time flies when civilization is winding down; that disastrous production feels like only yesterday. Alas, the Nobel-prize-winner didn't manage to prevent it - all he got was a disclaimer in the program - but clearly it made him decide for damn sure that nothing like it was ever going to happen again. So when the A.R.T. decided to return to the scene of its crime, Beckett's estate got everything in writing: this time, not a single beat or stage direction in the script was to be changed: a body-blow to the A.R.T.'s whole raison d'être. (Indeed, despite his failure to stop the Akalaitis Endgame, Beckett did manage to score one for intellect over attitude back in 1984: Brustein had made a career out of proscribing how - and even why - theatre should be done, and then arguably the greatest playwright of the twentieth century brutally smacked him down. That musta hurt.)

But how, exactly, was the A.R.T. to deal with a legal writ forcing it to produce a play exactly the same way everybody else does? Well, thinking fast - not for nothing are they at Harvard - the theatre turned this contractual obligation into its marketing concept: they would bravely soldier on in chains, honor the intentions of the author and still pull off his play! Oh my God, what a like totally awesome challenge! Nobody has ever tried that before!

Of course you knew they were only kidding. There's no way the A.R.T. was going to color within the lines.

And indeed, they've doodled a bit on Beckett's masterpiece; they really can't help themselves. No major sacrileges have been done, mind you - just petty gambits that read as tiny, secret tantrums. The idea this time around seems to have been to conjure a vaudeville playing out in an ambiguous time and space, which is fairly close to the right idea, and certainly an improvement over JoAnne's literalist post-Armaggedon setting. In this version, Hamm and Clov's cell floats in a metaphoric darkness, and it's decrepit, but somehow slightly urban, and hardly suggests the end of the world; instead, it's almost ostentatiously neutral, in a we'll-show-you-Mr.-Beckett-we're-not-going-to-do-anything kind of way (although it's actually ecru, not gray). Still, most of the deviations from the author's wishes come courtesy of the designers: neither Hamm nor Clov has "a very red face" as stipulated, the "high, small windows" are now full-size but boarded up, and the ash cans from which Nagg and Nell emerge are sunk into the floor, rendering their leglessness theatrically moot; the picture "with its face to the wall" is revealed to be of Beckett himself (genius!), and at the final moment, the set begins to slowly drift apart, which at least has some thematic resonance (although it was amusing to read Carolyn Clay wrongly identify this as "the production's only liberty;" read the play more carefully, Carolyn).

To be fair, I'm speaking from a specialist's perspective (I've directed Endgame), and almost all these deviations are well within the accepted limits of theatrical production. Still, it's amusing to see demonstrated yet again how unconsciously both the A.R.T. and its enabling critics depend on the ignorance of their "educated" audience (even when they're shouting about how they're following every detail of a script, they know they can actually fudge it). And there are similar small oddities and mannerisms in the performances as well - some of them serious - although to give the actors their due, this is a generally accurate, though superficial, rendition of the play.

And the critics were surprised to discover how funny a "straight" production of Endgame can be (although every production I've seen has been pretty funny). This is largely due to the fact that in the central roles, Will Lebow and Thomas Derrah (at left) drop hint after hint that they're engaged in some kind of meta-theatrical game (the hints are indeed there in the text), and effortlessly pull off the call-and-response timing of a seasoned comic team. The trouble, of course, is that Endgame should do more than just chase the February blues away, as Louise Kennedy would have it. There's a startling lyricism to its language, as well as great symbolic depth (there are Joycean echoes of the Greeks, and Shakespeare, and the Old and New Testaments throughout). And somehow little of this thematic density comes over at the A.R.T.; the actors conjure a sense of meta-theatricality and nail all their laughs, but Marcus Stern has directed them too superficially to suggest the Biblical power struggles and wounded psyches moving beneath the surface of the text. In the end, Endgame is primal, and there's always something terrible at stake - in a word, the end of the last human connection in the world. Yes, this is just a room, and "where" and "when" it exists is a mystery; and yet somehow, Beckett hints that Western civilization is playing itself out within its walls.

But you'd never mistake Will Lebow's arch, plummily-toned Hamm for the last, sterile gasp of the tragic hero, and you'd never imagine that Thomas Derrah's highly mannered Clov was actually a brutalized, broken-hearted slave. You'd likewise be hard pressed to guess from this production that "real" surprises keep breaking up their routine - and lead, step by step, inevitably down into the dust. But that's rather the trick, isn't it - to keep the audience wondering whether something is, indeed, "taking its course" (it is). Even the twists of the final "scenes" - the last dose of Hamm's pain-killer, and the possible appearance of a future Clov on the horizon - registered here as little more than blips in the ongoing schtick (when they're actually turning points). And at the curtain, it seemed obvious we were still stuck in a cycle of re-enactment. But are we? Or is Clov at last really leaving his master for good? Both interpretations should seem eminently possible, but this time only one - the rather more comforting one - seemed credible. Thus the moving walls didn't seem like much of a liberty - they were actually supplying what the actors weren't.

There was, to be fair, more truly Beckettian feeling in the performances of Remo Airaldi and Karen MacDonald, who perhaps looked too hale and hearty for Nagg and Nell, but clearly were in the right grimly gay frame of mind. Both referenced the music hall too - again, appropriately enough - but this time with more genuine feeling in their desperate, dying interactions. Somehow I think the talented Derrah and Lebow have more of this depth in them, too. Let's hope they find it before this Endgame meets its end.

Does Bob Brustein think Samuel Beckett was a racist?

Sigh. The A.R.T. is doing Endgame again, which means we have to revisit one of the most ridiculous episodes in its history, its botch of the play back in 1984. For those of you too young - or too wisely concerned with other things - to recall, Beckett (at left) tried to put the kibosh on a misconceived version of his script by JoAnne Akalaitis, avant artiste and former paramour of Philip Glass. Akalaitis pasted her usual dim downtown appliqué onto Endgame - she dopily literalized its sense of apocalypse by setting it in a bombed-out subway station (she even wanted an "overture" by her ex), and she cast African-American actors in two of its four roles.

Once Beckett got word of this, he objected, and almost shut the show down (it's too bad he failed; it proved to be bombastic and, well, stupid). But his reasoning allowed an opening for the A.R.T. to cast a kind of shadow on his reputation.

First, some background. Beckett always disapproved of productions of his plays that "mixed" the races (or the genders in ways not specifically described), because he felt that power relations between the races and genders were not a part of the artistic material he was trying to present, and so he wanted to leave them out entirely, as he felt they would inevitably draw attention in performance from his central concerns. He was happy, however, to see all-black productions of his plays - or all-female productions of single-sex scripts like Waiting for Godot. I suppose it's easy for Cambridge types to pooh-pooh Beckett's worries on this score - like Stephen Colbert, they probably "can't tell" when someone's black. But since Beckett's death, mixed-race productions of his plays have appeared elsewhere - and unsurprisingly have been largely interpreted as meditations on race and colonialism. So it's hard not to feel that Beckett's critics weren't - and aren't - being a little naïve. True, Endgame doesn't lend itself to blunt parallels with the civil rights struggle. But then again, isn't the very air of downtown hipness that Akalaitis was reaching for in her production itself a distraction from Beckett's vision?

Of course all this was lost on the Boston Globe back then, and it hasn't learned much in the meantime, to judge from a recent article by one Megan Tench bemoaning the fact that this time around, the Beckett estate has wrangled a promise from the A.R.T. not to change a single word or stage direction in their new production of Endgame. (Egad - a production of the play as the author intended! Could this be a first at the A.R.T.?) In the article, Tench dwells on the earlier controversy at length, but without any real insight. And she quotes Robert Brustein, then Artistic Director of the A.R.T., in the following manner:

"I was really astonished," says former ART artistic director Robert Brustein in a recent phone interview. "Beckett was a playwright who we revered. We were shocked. We had black actors in the cast playing the parts of Ham and Nagg, and we were most upset about his objection to that."

Now perhaps Brustein then continued: "Of course we knew that he was not a racist, and that his concern was essentially born of his passion for the formal means of his work, which he had devoted his life to paring to their essence." Perhaps he said that, and Megan Tench left it out.

Or perhaps he never said it.

But he should have said it. Because not saying it leaves hanging the sense that Beckett was somehow some sort of racist, consciously or unconsciously - a slur that the Globe article hardly avoids by one weak mention of "the issue of miscegenation."

And on top of all the things I've always found wrong with the A.R.T., I'd really rather not add the calumny, "And they dissed the greatest playwright of the twentieth century."

Sweet Chekhov Mine; or, More Revolting Theatre from the A.R.T.

The recent A.R.T. production of Chekhov's The Seagull had one glorious moment - when the cast ripped into Guns n'Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine" (video above). It's true the moment was gloriously stupid, but that's what made it awesome: the stupidity of the production - and, face it, the A.R.T. in general - was suddenly proud and free and bangin' its head, instead of hiding behind some postmodern mumbo-jumbo from the likes of Gideon Lester. No, here you suddenly felt the honest, adolescent imprint of director/auteur János Szász - one wild and crazy Hungarian guy who just can't get enough of 80's-hair-band American ROCK! JÁNOS SZÁSZ, WE SALUTE YOU!

I admit it: for a moment, I was in love. But the moment passed. Stupidity can be glorious only for a moment, then the moment's gone . . .

And I was stuck with the grim memory that Axl Rose was a moron, and so were the people behind this show.

I mean seriously. DUDES. Guns n'Roses??? Chekhov is crying out for "new forms" and you come up with a song from GUNS N'ROSES? A song older than the Harvard students listening to it? Seriously. Like not Franz Ferdinand or Arctic Monkeys or even the Strokes? Guns n'Roses? Dudes. Seriously.

Still, I guess it takes a while for pop culture to make its way to Hungary, director Szász's home (he basically works in Cambridge and Budapest), and we're lucky we didn't get Spinal Tap by mistake. And of course, other than that 22-year-old-single-from-a-hair-band thing, the show was like absolutely cutting edge in every way. I mean totally fresh, totally real. It was all up in your face, and like fuck tradition we are makin' this shit our own! There was like water on the floor, and rocker costumes, and like this dark cavernous space, and all this lighting from the side, and the actors were amplified and all alienated and shit and - what?

You saw this at the A.R.T. last time?

And the time before that? And the time before that and before that and -

WHAT?

Wait a minute - noooo, dude, you're like fuckin' with my head, right? I mean THIS IS THE A.R.T.! THEY CAN'T BE DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

Oh, yes they can. Let's play a little game, shall we? Let's call it "Name That Set"! I'll show you the set for an A.R.T. production, and you try to name the play it's attempting to evoke:


Quick! Is this the A.R.T. set for a) The Marriage of Figaro; b) The Merchant of Venice ; c) The Seagull or d) Marat/Sade?


Is this the A.R.T. set for a) Alcestis b) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum c) Romeo and Juliet or d) No Exit?


Is this the A.R.T. set for a) Julius Caesar b) Don Giovanni c) Waiting for Godot or d) Hairspray?

ANSWER: It doesn't matter what the play is. The set remains the same.

So how to explain the strange critical ritual that greets so many A.R.T. productions - you know, where the critic pretends that what she's seeing is shocking and new, instead of - well, what she saw at the A.R.T. last month? Hmmmm, what could be her motive there . . . wow . . . it's a toughie ain't it. Let's just say that maybe the professors at Harvard aren't the only ones trying to look hip. And in the end, isn't that what Bob Brustein's revolting theatre is boiling down to? (You can imagine that soon there will be evaluation forms handed out to the freshmen at the shows.) The incoming artistic director made her name with Hair and The Donkey Show (in which characters from Shakespeare lip-synched to pop songs). Last year the A.R.T. tried to cross Günter Grass with the Dresden Dolls, and set Racine to - yes, rock guitar. Now we've got Axl Rose starring in Chekhov. I think we all know where this going - actually, scratch that; we're already there. The future isn't now; it's yesterday.

So why don't I feel more nostalgic for this shit? Perhaps because it's not even good at what it's pretending to be. I'm sure there's a way to work rock and roll into Chekhov, for instance; you could make leading boy-man Konstantin resemble, I don't know, Lou Reed or Robert Fripp. But you can't make him Axl Rose; that's just embarrassing, and yanks the rug right out from under your own concept. And if you're going to attempt a "new form" for Chekhov, then you have to really do one, a consistent one; you can't keep contradicting yourself, or start throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks. Because the play posits a deep aesthetic question - "How can theatre achieve a new form?" - and rejects one possible, but pretentious, answer (from the Symbolists of Chekhov's own day), then provides a better answer via its own structure. Any new, successful "form" for the play must perforce meet this demanding, self-iterative standard.

But alas, Szász and the A.R.T. not only betray Chekhov's achievement, they unconsciously parody it. Because rock and roll is nothing if not pretentious (and Chekhov is not); true, rock is vulgarly pretentious, which makes people forgive its bombast. But bombast is precisely what Chekhov abhors (this is one reason why the A.R.T., which is always trying to make its Chekhov productions propaganda for Suprematism, or Symbolism, or some other -ism, gets the playwright so wrong). In a word, by centering his Seagull on Konstantin - in effect making the whole production a flashback before his suicide attempt - Szász reveals a complete and utter incomprehension of the play; he turns it into an over-the-top melodrama precisely like the kind he thinks he's decrying.

Or is he somehow actually aware of that fact, even if his audience isn't? It's hard to say. In this version, for instance, bad boy Konstantin is rebelling against his middlebrow actress mother, just like in the original - but they're both rockers (?), and she looks like an aging Axl Rose fan, too. So is the idea that they're both equally crass artistes, and that they both actually like the same thing? Maybe . . . but if so, we need a few more data points to fix that in perspective; even if briefly, during Nina's Patti-Smith-like performance, we sense something like Chekhov's bemused view of the Symbolists (an ironic stance which immediately evaporates). What we get the rest of the time is a rambling series of contrarian positions mixed and matched with traditional ones - characters flip back and forth between these tracks, seemingly at will. Thus Dr. Dorn, the supposedly alienated Don Juan, is neither sexy nor alienated, but shouty until suddenly sleazy; and Trigorin, the supposedly quiet, simple novelist, is here a coldly jealous brute (who actually fingers Nina's pussy onstage - I'm beginning to think we need a Tackiest Moment in Chekhov Award!), until he's suddenly a milquetoast when the text demands it. Nina is somehow half-mad and unstable, but also another blank, declamatory shouter, while Arkadina is an earthy rock mama until suddenly she has to be a flighty neurotic. I could go on and on.

And certainly this production does, what with endless splashing through puddles and tossing of baggage (both emotional and literal). The matinee I saw ran a stunning, soporific three hours and twenty minutes; by way of contrast, Trevor Nunn's recent production in New York was nearly an hour shorter, which still felt long. And let it be noted that once again, as he did with Desire Under the Elms, Szász has rewritten the last act. Not revised; not re-interpreted; rewritten. Not that anyone at Harvard knows or cares - or at least if they know, they're counting on their audience's ignorance to see them through. Just like they always have.

What does Harvard want?

It's a question worthy of Freud, of course, particularly when it comes to the A.R.T. As everyone knows, that theatre company is still looking for an artistic director. But has anyone really said aloud that the two candidates so far approached - James Lapine and Anna D. Shapiro - are both unusual choices, and rather strangely opposed? Both are essentially from the commercial theatre, with some academic connections - very slight for Lapine, true, but Shapiro is a professor at Northwestern (she teaches Graduate Directing there). Lapine is a librettist and director of classic Broadway musicals, and closely associated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn, while Shapiro is known for psychological realism, and directing several premieres at Steppenwolf (the latest of which, August:Osage County, is now a hit on Broadway). Both, of course, are very talented and highly accomplished people; but it's hard to imagine a job profile which would encompass both. You could argue that the two choices do indicate Harvard's interest in returning to some contact with the world of successful, commercial theatre, and rejecting the insular "avant-garde" clique of Anne Bogart (who for a time was a candidate), Peter Sellars, and their ilk. But beyond this, judging from Lapine and Shapiro, the field is essentially wide open. Perhaps that's as it should be, but, then again, perhaps that's not as it should be - particularly given that, not to put too fine a point on it, both candidates turned the job down. I'd hazard a guess that one reason both said no is that the search committee - and Harvard itself - has no clear idea of what they want in the job; and until that gets straightened out, something tells me the post may remain unfilled. In the meantime, who's planning the next season at the A.R.T.? Gideon Lester?

From my mouth to Drew's ears . . .?

Yes, you - the critic in the back!

Just weeks after my dust-up with Caldwell Titcomb on The Arts Fuse over Harvard's lack of support for theatre, and the arts in general, it turns out that none other than Drew Faust (above) seems to agree with me. How else to parse the news that she is organizing a task force to "examine the place of the arts at Harvard"? You can read the press release here. Maybe Caldwell would like to give her a piece of his mind, too.

The most fun you'll ever have at the A.R.T.

Will Lebow, Karen MacDonald, Tommy Derrah and Remo Airaldi in A Marvelous Party.

I went to "A Marvelous Party"
with Remo, Tom, Karen and Will
It was at Zero Ar
And they were all there
Only this time they weren't
in Hell.

At times they would be singing solo,
At others, together, all four;
And if now and then a note got a bit thin
It just didn't matter amid all the laughter -

I couldn't have liked it more!

Ah, I wish I could go on and on and like that - certainly Noël Coward made it look easy in the tunes he turned out like clockwork over the course of his life's work. A Marvelous Party essentially skims la crème of said career, and reminds us of Coward's consummate ability as a posh vaudevillian. He didn't just have "a talent to amuse," which he ruefully admitted was his one claim to fame; he had an obsession to amuse: the list of Coward "entertainments" is a very long one, most of them coasting not on his melodic gift (which was modest) but instead on his wit (which was promethean). And the A.R.T. production, helmed by the smoothly competent Scott Edmiston, captures this wit superbly, and with neither apology nor condescension (much less any hidden attempts at deconstruction).

It's also nice that (unlike in the Huntington's Present Laughter), Coward is allowed to peek out of the closet; Edmiston gives "If Love Were All," Coward's most poignant paean to his frustrated love life, to Tommy Derrah, who turns it into a painfully straightforward gay lament:

I believe
the more you love a man -
the more you give your trust -
the more you're bound to lose . . .

So much for gay pride! True, Edmiston also gives "Mad About the Boy" to Karen MacDonald - when it, too, would be more compelling from a man - but MacDonald's smoldering neurosis makes you almost believe a heterosexual can match a homosexual in passion (well, almost). Alas, MacDonald can't match the level of cabaret singing we've come to expect from Boston's smaller theatres (imagine what Leigh Barrett could do with that song), but her occasional vocal wobbles - like those of most of the cast - are less due to limits in range than a gap in practiced control. In short, this crew can carry a tune at least as far as Coward requires (Derrah, the most accomplished vocalist, also handles Coward's most memorable melody, the conventionally sentimental "Matelot").

Key to these non-singers' success, however, is Coward's lyrical signature: a kind of free-form limerick, which he could stretch or shrink to his requirements with a rippling flourish - and these A.R.T. vets are more than crack at snapping that tongue-tripping whip in such hilarious trifles as "Why Do the Wrong People Travel?," (Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage,) Mrs. Worthington," ""Mad Dogs and Englishmen," and my particular favorite, “A Bar on the Piccola Marina.” Special mention must also be made of Remo Airaldi's hilarious take on "Nina (from Argentina)" while possessed by the ghost of - or at least the fruity headgear of - Carmen Miranda (at left). The evening reaches a giddy high with Coward's bitchy update of Porter's "Let's Do It" (lifted from his famous Vegas act), which the performers hilariously extend to the present day, and our current First Family.

The giddiness fades, of course, as we shuffle out and ponder that this is probably the last good time we'll have at the A.R.T. for months, if not years. But does it really have to be that way? The show definitely has a "second-tier" feel - it's riding a wave of local Coward productions, the set is re-purposed (from "The Onion Cellar" - it works about as well for Vegas as it did for Weimar), and Scott Edmiston is neither from Eastern Europe nor New York. And let's not forget that it's utterly, sublimely conventional, and reminds us in no uncertain terms that Coward was a cockney who through talent and hard work transformed himself into a sleek, closeted Tory. But will it penetrate management's postmodern skulls that it's nevertheless a huge hit, and that their subscribers, relieved of the responsibility to revolt, are relaxing instead, and enjoying themselves in a way they never have before - as in ever? Probably not. And more's the pity. It reminds me of an odd conversation I once had with Robert Woodruff, who wondered aloud why it was that gays and minorities didn't flock to the A.R.T. "Because your shows are no fun," I told him simply. And they still aren't - except this one time (and you've only got one weekend left to take advantage of the opportunity!). So, in celebration of the appearance at the A.R.T. of the one thing that money can't buy, here's my final attempt - I promise - at a Noël Coward lyric:

I went to a marvelous party
held by the post-modern A.R.T.;
With no platform shoes or onstage lagoons
and no gravel at all on the floor!
No jocks or kimonos? Quick, call Yoko Ono!
They're not avant-garde anymore!
(And I couldn't have liked it more!)

Nowhere man

Max Wright and Paul Benedict in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land.

Harold Pinter's No Man's Land opens with the promise of a night cap, but soon devolves into something like a recap - of the playwright's career. The play, which drifts through a kind of personal witching hour and beyond, is notorious for morphing before its audience's eyes. Hirst, a respected author (rather like Pinter) has lured Spooner, a rather sketchy one (again, like Pinter?), into his elegant tomb of a living room - but what their relationship is, and what Hirst's (and Spooner's) intentions toward each other are, remain in constant flux. Are they, indeed, old college friends? Or perfect strangers? Possible lovers - or mutual cuckolds? The introduction of two more ciphers - one a thug and one a poof - adds little clarity to the proceedings, although hints of a standard Pinter power game begin to be gamely floated. Are these interlopers servants of Hirst? Or his abductors? Or his killers? Or are the two doppelgangers intended as mirrors of the first? And is this all happening within one of the protagonists's minds? Or in both? Or, for that matter, have the participants passed on (has Hirst been literally hearsed?) and are we now at some late-night happy hour in Hell?

The problem with No Man's Land, alas, is that not only does its ultimate "meaning" remain tantalizingly submerged, but its uninterpretibility often feels like a gambit to disguise its incoherence. The play is "meta-Pinter" I suppose, in that the audience is corralled into the same position as the characters in so much of this writer's work - the shifts in context seem aimed at us rather than them (the folks on stage take everything in their stride). This may be a defensible extremity of Pinter's style, but I'm not convinced of the work's greatness - and find it telling that it's the next-to-last of his major plays (only one full-length drama, Betrayal, would follow). Is No Man's Land a kind of Tempest for Pinter, the way that, say, Ohio Impromptu was for Beckett? Or is it more a thing of patches, if not shreds, stitched together from abandoned scenes and sketches?

I lean toward the latter interpretation (after all, even Spooner notes the familiarity of certain tropes), with the proviso that as Pinter's techniques and concerns were deep but limited, the resulting crazy quilt does occasionally hang together. Clearly, star power could put the play over, as in its debut, which featured Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud as Hirst and Spooner - only said wattage is precisely what is lacking at the ART, where we have to make do with Paul Benedict and Max Wright in the same roles. It would of course be wrong to write off these actors due to their sitcom work (in such hits as The Jeffersons and ALF); still, it's almost impossible to overlook the fact that both are miscast. Benedict in particular lacks the necessary touch of madness that Richardson could insinuate beneath his magisterial manner, while Wright is simply too lovable to suggest the conniving underside of Spooner. Under David Wheeler's thoughtful direction, they both contribute carefully worked-out performances - but nevertheless skate right over the depths they think they're limning.

As latecomers Foster and Briggs, Henry David Clarke and Lewis D. Wheeler (at left) bring more of the right kind of energy to the party - although Clarke's swish didn't have quite the malevolent snap required. Lewis D. Wheeler, however, the son of director Wheeler, more than justified his father's decision to cast him. Nastily natty, with shaved head and a shiny suit that exactly matched the set (costumer David Reynoso was perhaps more on top of the play than the cast), Wheeler brought a precise accent and attitude to bear on the role, with satisfyingly malicious results. For threat is essential to Pinter - his signature twist on the Theater of the Absurd was to perceive that a godless universe might as well be hostile. With this handsomely appointed but empty production, Wheeler and the ART seem to have forgotten that Hirst and Spooner may be in their cups, but Pinter is always out for blood.

I've got a little (wish) list

Below are a few of my most fervent wishes (and the reasons why) for the coming year.


Imagine if you'd just seen this part. . .

1) How about just paying for what you get at the ART?

Veterans of this theater know that their shows only heat up in the last 15 minutes. So how about a "15-minute" subscription? Tickets would be a fraction of full price, but would only allow you to see the last fifteen minutes of the production (i.e., the good part). Since many audience members leave at intermission (if you're lucky, and management is feeling confident, there is an intermission), there should be plenty of empty seats available.



Is this really a keeper?

2) Could the contemporary art become just temporary?

The ICA has begun its much-ballyhooed permanent collection precisely the wrong way - by showcasing only artists it has shown before. This cuts out such reigning visual masters as Richter, Freud and Marden, as well as more controversial conceptual stars like Barney and Koons; oddly, the best artists at the ICA are only on view in their current show, "Super Vision," but not their permanent collection, which showcases such minor lights as Laylah Ali and Taylor Davis. True, there is some first-rate work in the permanent collection, from Paul Chan, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Boris Mikhailov, as well as a solid, if basically picturesque, piece from Cornelia Parker and some okay pix from Nan Goldin. But the museum has essentially set its sights too low; the wall text accompanying the collection even mentions the high cost of collecting as a factor in its choices. The implication seems to be that these works are from artists the ICA has launched whose prices haven't gone up too much - a pretty lame M.O. if you ask me. Save your pennies for something worth saving, please.



And suddenly the ICA looks fantastic . . .

3) Can we make the "new MFA" just go away?

Okay, it's possible, according to Stephen Hawking (and he's really smart). Malcolm Rogers could disappear into a wormhole, and pop out into some alternative universe where museums are already seen as amusement parks. And he could take the plans for the Foster addition with him, where it could house an indoor roller coaster. We'd want to keep the $400 million donated to build the damn thing in this universe, of course - we could use it to cure cancer. Or AIDS. Or egomania.



Faster, Carmen, kill, kill!

4) Somebody make sure Jorma Elo takes his Ritalin this spring!

Hyperactivity ruined last year's "Carmen" - please, Boston Ballet, don't let it happen again!



Yeah, right, we'll believe you when we see you!

5) And nobody in New York or L.A. hire Victor Garber, okay?

The Broadway types that Nicky Martin tries to lure to the Huntington have so often proven unreliable (Andrea Martin, Brooks Ashmanskas), that we don't really believe they're coming anymore until the curtain actually rises. Victor Garber is scheduled to lead Coward's Present Laughter (itself a replacement for Streamers) at the end of the Huntington's season. Garber's perfect for the role - the question is, will he make it?



6) If we say Schoenberg's better than Beethoven, will you stop?

Not that the ongoing Schoenberg/Beethoven bitch slapdown at the BSO would ever lead one to that conclusion - instead, the series is proving (surprise!) exactly the opposite. But maybe if audiences continue to cheer wildly (as they did at Moses and Aaron, even though some players admitted privately they couldn't always follow the beat), Levine will declare victory (I've changed music history, now gimme a Snickers!) and end this huge waste of his organization's resources.