What to see

Of the four best shows in town, three are closing this weekend.  You only have till Sunday to catch the intriguing Persian Quarter up at Merrimack Rep, a pitch-perfect revival of The King and I over at the North Shore, and John Guare's hilarious pastiche of The Front Page and His Girl Friday down at Trinity.  Yes, I know, they're all a bit out of town, but trust me, they're worth the trip.  And remember those three companies as well - Merrimack, North Shore, and Trinity; generally you won't go wrong with these people.

And of course within the city limits, Candide, which is the early triumph of this (or any other!) season, only has one more week to go at the Huntington.  I saw it for the second time last Tuesday, and fell in love with it all over again.  I may still return for one more farewell visit; a show like this you savor.  I hope to see you there.

His Girl Friday, Trinity Rep

Angela Brazil and Fred Sullivan, Jr. as Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns.

They don't make 'em like they used to, do they.

Really, they don't; looking across the new play landscape, I can only think of a single script I've seen this year that can match the density and heft of texts like The Front Page or Porgy and Bess.  (And everybody thought that one play was far too long and complicated.)

Which may be why we're constantly "appropriating" things, I think - rewriting them, re-configuring them, "making them our own" when of course they can never really be our own (more on that later), returning again and again to the rich, racy ground of the artistic past; we know in our bones that nowadays, the soil is thinner.

But of course, back in the day, things weren't only racy, they were often, at least implicitly, racist.  Which is great for today's appropriators; it affords their labors purpose, and gives them something to "excavate" and "renovate."

Two major examples of this artistic cottage industry have been on display in New England recently: the A.R.T.'s misguided Porgy and Bess, and Trinity Rep's crackling His Girl Friday.  But as I pointed out last weekend, these productions operate like opposed arguments in our ongoing culture war.  Porgy and Bess isn't really a racist work - indeed, it's pretty obviously an anti-racist work - so the much-ballyhooed "renovation" of it by Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks amounted to little more than obnoxious grandstanding by two mediocre talents.  It was an elaborate misfire that, don't worry, I'll trudge through in detail later this week.

Meanwhile, down at Providence's Trinity Rep, something very different was afoot in John Guare's clever blending of The Front Page and its screwball comedy spawn, His Girl Friday.  Where Parks and Paulus failed, Guare succeeded - basically because he was, indeed, working with two texts that, unlike Porgy and Bess, shared a genuinely racist frame.  And he had a straightforward, if radical, method of reframing them; indeed, Guare not only "renovated" the politics of The Front Page and His Girl Friday, he isolated, and then completely reversed them, turning his freshly-minted, politically-correct amalgam into a new kind of critique of its period, authors, and self.

His very success, however, hints at larger questions with unclear answers, which I'll consider briefly at the close of this review.

But first - the review itself.  Should you make the trip to Providence to catch His Girl Friday, which closes this weekend?  Yes, you definitely should; the show is a big, brassy smash that channels the smart comedy of the screwball era if not, perhaps, its undertow of knowing romance.  Both strains of theatrical feeling are evident in the original Friday, of course, which is a mash-up of post-divorce love-story and dark social satire."Hildy" Johnson (Angela Brazil), the former star female reporter of Chicago's biggest daily, has returned for one last drink with the boys before getting (re-) married.  On the day in question, however, the year's biggest story - an execution at the state prison - is about to unfold just outside the windows of the press room.  Even the paper's hard-charging editor, Walter Burns (Fred Sullivan, Jr.), has shown up for the big event - which complicates things for Hildy, as the person she was previously married to was - yes - Walter himself, who'd like to get her back as both reporter and wife.

Of course in the ultimate source for Guare's update, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page, Hildy and Walter were both guys, and their relationship had a "Damon and Pythias" quality, as one wag put it.  (Their sparring bromance was loosely modeled on the antics of editor Walter Howey and reporter John Hilding Johnson, although details of Hecht and MacArthur's own careers in the Chicago press figure in the script.)  Director Howard Hawks ditched the gay subtext entirely, however, by turning "Hildebrand" into "Hildegard" and hiring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as his leads - and the rest, of course, is Hollywood history.

Although not quite all of it is.  A certain racist taint that's obvious in The Front Page survived here and there in His Girl Friday - although lovers of the movie are usually determined to ignore it.  In the original script, the perp who's about to swing - and whom our wise-cracking reporters become determined to save - has been convicted of killing a black ("colored" is the quaint term) police officer - and while the crime looks a lot like self-defense, he has to swing, because the governor "needs the colored vote."

I'm afraid the racist cast of all this is just too obvious to ignore.  A white man threatened by a black man.  A gunshot in self-defense. An execution rigged to satisfy the "colored" masses.  Ugh.  And yes, this is what Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell chatter about, if you pay close attention, in His Girl Friday.  Sorry.  I love them too, but that's the awful truth.

And there's the rub as well.  The repartee from His Girl Friday is just too delicious to ever lose (for the record, Guare has added witty quips of his own that blend in seamlessly), and even The Front Page crackles with rude energy and gallows humor (literally) - as well as, believe it or not, a kind of outraged moral force, directed at the press, the politicos, and even the public.

Which makes the racial cast of its story strange, frankly - and even stranger given that the politics of writer Ben Hecht were famously liberal; he fought the KKK and campaigned for America's early entry into World War II, among other things.  Of course he also wrote the script for Gunga Din (which Guare tweaks him for in Friday).  So one senses in his career a strange ability to play to racist sympathies professionally while fighting them privately - a not-unusual state of affairs in show business, or in business generally.

The deep irony in what John Guare has done to His Girl Friday, in fact, is that he has basically imported into the script the personal politics that Hecht (a Jew of European extraction, devoted to liberal causes) might have espoused if he felt he'd been able.  In Guare's version, the convict who is about to be hanged is, indeed, a Jew of European extraction (he's even Czech), who has killed a Nazi sympathizer in what - yes - looks a lot like self-defense.  And this time it's the isolationist and German vote, rather than the "colored" vote, that's calling for his neck.

Which gives Guare room enough and time to remind us of what precisely was going on politically in America in the late 30's (to up the moral ante, he even re-sets the script to the end of August 1939, just before Hitler invaded Poland).  Somehow Americans like to forget, I think, that in the late 30's, conservatives all looked much more like Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill - whatever they may claim today - and isolationists unapologetically shared political bedclothes with fascist sympathizers.  We also prefer not to recall that it was the Democrats, not the Republicans (in general) who opposed Hitler - although the political landscape was complex enough, I admit, to scramble the particulars of any moral accounting on this score (figures as diverse as the young Gerald Ford, Gore Vidal, and Kurt Vonnegut all opposed fighting Germany).

Hildy and the "boys" on Eugene Lee's sprawling set.

At any rate, Guare goes even further than that particular argument - he labels his perp a "terrorist" at key moments, which provoked murmurs of dissent in the Trinity audience I caught the play with.  A Jewish terrorist? you could hear people wonder aloud.  Yes - imagine Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell sticking it to the Israel lobby!  I really had to smile at that (Guare's a lapsed Catholic, btw, so that gambit is doubly gutsy).

So political fireworks are constantly popping in His Girl Friday - but are romantic ones sparkling as well?  Alas - not really.  Brazil and Sullivan are both highly charismatic actors, and their work here is crammed with delightful detail - as two talented professionals besotted with each other's work (oddly, rather like the same-sex careerists of the original!) they're certainly believable,  but as battered lovebirds sliding back into the connubial nest, they're not completely convincing.  Still, their disillusioned wisecracks can work without that emotional undercurrent, and they certainly crackle here.

The rest of the acting is mostly crack, too.  The Trinity acting team is too small to cover The Front Page, hence constant doubling is called for - which actually becomes a kind of in-joke on the thinner theatrical resources available in the present day (Eugene Lee's expert set still sprawls, but the cast doesn't).  Director Curt Columbus (with help from Guare) has devised a zillion different witty ways for folks to be obscured for a moment - sometimes just barely - so they can change costume for their next role; the trick itself becomes a gag.  But it also hints at a melancholy, metaphoric awareness that we can't quite cover all the artistic bases anymore of a script as wide and deep as The Front Page.

Even though there are several performances here that do cover all the bases, and then some.  Trinity stalwart Brian McEleney, for instance, does his best work in some time as both a persnickety gay fascist (see, everybody gets fisked) and the cigar-chomping, seemingly glass-eyed, gangster Diamond Louie (people began to chuckle every time Louie staggered on, the performance was such a hoot).  There were similarly neat turns (even spins) from Janice Duclos and newcomers Brough Hansen and Lovell Holder, and really the entire cast was in fine form  - only Phyllis Kay disappointed slightly with a subdued performance as the sad streetwalker who kills herself rather than see her boyfriend's execution.

Of course maybe Kay felt she was bringing a few moments of emotional relief to the show - which, to be honest, it could use.  Sometimes when Trinity is firing on all cylinders (and director Columbus is filling every single second of stage time) things begin to feel a little over-choreographed and pre-determined - and a little broad and exhausting, too (Stephen Thorne, this means you).  But the lighter, more spontaneous touch we sometimes yearn for really belongs in the scenes between Hildy and Walter Burns, I think - particularly in Brazil's performance; whether or not she's getting the right kind of flame from Sullivan, she still has to melt a bit as if its warmth was there.

Still, this is as strong an outing of His Girl Friday (or The Front Page) as we're ever likely to see.  But what does its success really mean, I sometimes wondered?  Guare's text feels as if it has been designed to replace the racist original entirely - but is that entirely a good thing?  Doesn't it amount to rewriting history, in a way?  It becomes all too easy while watching Guare's rewrite to imagine that the press (for all its warts) really was on the side of the angels, that Hecht never suppressed his own politics, and that America really would have engaged with Hitler without the cruel prod of Pearl Harbor.

I worry a bit about all that, even as I applaud Guare's cleverness.  And I'll ponder those questions a bit further when I consider the failure of the A.R.T.'s Porgy and Bess, coming later this week.

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.