Can we see Bombshell without having to watch Smash?

I can't stand Theresa Rebeck's TV mini-hit Smash, which is unsurprising; I can't stand Theresa Rebeck, period. But the New Yorker - which I also often can't stand (I once threw up while reading Sasha Frere-Jacques, or whatever his name is) - recently made a point that has been nagging me, too, every time the partner unit has turned Smash on (yes, at home sometimes we're into cultural dumpster diving).

And that is that the numbers from the show's mythical Broadway musical Bombshell are consistently pretty good - actually, better than just about anything else I've heard from Broadway recently.  So, like the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum - who rivals Wesley Morris for snark-to-flattery-in-nothing-flat - I've been wondering: can't we see Bombshell on Broadway without having to watch the rest of Smash?  Alas, the show has already been renewed, so I guess the answer is "no."  But I can dream, can't I?

Valley of the Dolls

A romantic triangle plays out under an architectural one in DollHouse.

The "doll house" in the New Rep's DollHouse may be the biggest one on record: Kathryn Kawecki's set (at left) soars to the top of the Mosesian Theater, and is all opposed angles and jousting joists; this is a house that clearly could not stand if it weren't for the empty atrium at its core. A nice metaphor for the "classic" marriage analyzed by Henrik Ibsen's classic play, surely - and accurately scaled to the size of the playwright's impact on the culture, too.

The performances in DollHouse, however, are drawn to the dimensions of Ibsen's adapter (and updater), Theresa Rebeck, who has downsized her source into a commentary on the financial foibles of the millennium.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - under the direction of the thoughtful Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, the New Rep cast offers a series of persuasive portraits of people many of us probably know all too well.  The trouble is that in this gallery of types, Ibsen's sense of archetype has gone missing - and in the central role of Nora (certainly one of the greatest female characters of the past two centuries), has all but been erased.  What's left is Rebeck's usual set of tropes - "good" girls and "bad" girls, and the cheating ways of the moneyed set, and a few funny, feminist "Truth-About-Cats-and-Dogs"-style jabs.  It's not that bad an evening of theatre, actually.  Just don't kid yourself that it's Ibsen.

But first, full disclosure - I had the original fresh in mind when I caught DollHouse, because I'd just come from the closing performance of the Gamm Theatre's A Doll's House the night before.  Not that I cared too much for the Gamm version - much of it was far too broad, but still it hewed to the original script more closely than Rebeck did, and so the depth of the play was often perceptible beneath the surface of the acting.  Oddly, at the New Rep, the opposite was true - the performances were far more subtle, but the script seemed far more superficial.

That superficiality, of course, earned Rebeck one of her most notoriously negative reviews in the Times - which I think played out in her mind as a sexist slap.  Which maybe it was; at least I would never argue that said critic, Alvin Klein, was not a jerk.  Still - he had a point, both about Rebeck's play and her central character.  Ibsen's Nora is a manipulative naïf, a child who grows up before our eyes and realizes that her happy home is merely "a doll house." But Rebeck's Nora is just manipulative - a point unconsciously underlined at the New Rep by the no-nonsense presence of actress Sarah Newhouse, who has been wonderful in other roles, but who couldn't play weakness even on a pair of crutches.  From the opening moments she's obviously a match for Will Lyman as her lightly domineering husband (in the original "Torvald," here "Evan"); this Nora isn't dodging and parrying for her emotional survival, she's doing it to keep the upper hand (and keep herself in Prada).  What's more, where Ibsen's Nora merely forged a signature to save house and home, Rebeck's has pulled off a complicated embezzlement.  True, as she insists, she paid the money back, but the complexity of the caper labels her in the audience's mind as a smooth operator - and it doesn't help things that she stood by while someone else took the fall for her chicanery.  And as for her kids - yeah, rather obviously to this Nora they belong with Barbie in her Malibu camper.  Rebeck's Nora is so unsympathetic, in fact, that sometimes you feel the playwright is almost baiting the audience, along the lines of "So - how do ya like your feminist icon now?"

But if you think the playwright has it mind to deconstruct Ibsen, or feminism - well, think again.  Rebeck seems to imagine that instead of the original's craggy (and at times, admittedly, melodramatic) existentialism, we'll be happy with her smooth ability with satire.  Still, to be fair, she has a few pretty good ideas - Rebeck has made a more convincing romantic figure out of Ibsen's dying Dr. Rank (smoothly underplayed by the talented Diego Arciniegas), which is interesting, even though she doesn't really know where to go with the emotional triangle that results.  And the playwright has done a good job - probably her best work in the play, in fact - of "updating" the original Christine into a world-weary, but also worldly-wise, career woman (here given a wounded, wary depth by Jennie Israel).  As a result, at times DollHouse flickers to life with a low but complex fire.

But in the climactic showdown, I'm afraid the play falters thematically more than it flickers, even if it's still plausibly entertaining.  Evan's abrupt betrayal of Nora, once he learns of her double-dealing, retains its power to shock, but we don't sense from Rebeck the deeper point of this turning point - that Evan and Nora have no real life together, that they've merely been playing at a set of empty bourgeois conventions.  This is because, I'm afraid, Rebeck's own vision is nestled comfortably within that set of conventions - she knows these people are cheats, but she can't seem to express why, and so she can't dramatize Nora's new horizons.  Instead we get an amusing-enough back-and-forth between these soon-to-be exes, the kind of exchange in which the women in the audience occasionally murmur "Right on, sister!" while the men every now and then mutter "You go, bro!"  Rebeck plays both sides of this ancient argument quite well - and of course there's some truth on both sides - but in the process sidesteps the crux of the play.  Which makes DollHouse, I'm afraid, ultimately a house of cards.

Rebeck reboots Kafka - kind of

One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from restless dreams to find himself transformed into a successful playwright and screenwriter. He lay on his brittle back and, raising his head a little, gazed out at his Park Slope condo and thought to himself, "What has happened to me?? How unfair that I'm not more successful! This is, you know, an existential dilemma - just like I read about in college!!!"

No, this is not how the famous Franz Kafka story "The Metamorphosis" actually begins - but you get the impression, from her irritating play The Understudy (now at the Lyric Stage), that this is how Theresa Rebeck would handle the rewrite.

But wait, let's back up a bit.  As you may recall, Rebeck is one of the most successful whiners - oh, sorry, I meant writers - of the New York stage. She has been produced all over, been published many times, written several movies, and landed gigs on TV shows like Law and Order. She lives a comfortable - very comfortable - life for a playwright. Still, she's not happy. She should have done better!, she lets everyone know. Why hasn't she been on Broadway?  Why hasn't she won a Pulitzer? (Hell, why hasn't she won the Nobel?)

At first her widely-reported rationale was: "Because I'm a woman, that's why!" Only eventually she got to Broadway (her show closed quickly), and then was short-listed for the Pulitzer (but didn't win). Meanwhile other, more talented female writers (Lydia Diamond, Annie Baker) began to appear on the scene, and Rebeck sensed it was time to upgrade the foundation of her whining from sexism to something - well, bigger, more pervasive; something that could withstand a rebuke like "Oh, but we did give the Pulitzer to a woman - only it was Lynn Nottage!"

Hence, you get the impression, The Understudy, in which a sad-sack stage actor understudies a "talent-free" action star in - get this - a newly-discovered drama by Franz Kafka (that's the big guy himself on the poster at top, behind actor Christopher James Webb). Now it seems life on the fringes of Broadway isn't just embarrassing, status-wise, for a relentless social climber like Rebeck, it's actually - no, literally - Kafkaesque.  Rehearsing for a hit show, she seems to think, is somehow like being transformed into a giant cockroach, or being executed for an unknown crime.

Hmmm.  Somehow I find this whole premise just ridiculous.  We should all be so lucky as to be understudies on Broadway shows, it seems to me, but as for Gregor Samsa's gig - well . . .

BUT, that's what the lady wrote.  And do I have a development deal with Drew Barrymore?  No, I do not. And at least Rebeck half-develops an interesting idea at the top of her three-hander, in which she hints that our new, collective-libertarian consensus about the free market may be driving us to a very dark place indeed, culturally speaking.  (Seen from the stage, the free market looks a LOT like the bureaucracy in Prague.)  To which I say: Hear, hear!  The playwright soon drops this worthy theme, however, and begins taking up other, less-interesting ones (only to quickly drop them, too).  Slowly her script becomes a series of contrived comic dialogues, in which the author airs her familiar grievances (bad boyfriends, sexism) through various permutations of her trio of characters - that sweet, not-so-very-dumb hunk of an action star, his capable, but frazzled, stage manager, and the rather self-impressedly depressed understudy.  Just to hammer home the Kafkaesque-ness of the situation, Rebeck pencils in a few other, unseen characters, like the stoned technical director, just to screw with our onstage friends every now and then.  Because, you know, that's what happens in Kafka.

Only try as hard as Rebeck may, she can't really convince us that her set-up is Kafkaesque.  Because - dare I say it? - she doesn't understand Kafka.  Of course her audience doesn't understand Kafka either - they just know vaguely that he's weird and depressing - so she figures she's safe.

But here's the  important thing to understand about Franz Kafka, just so you'll know where Rebeck goes wrong - the master of Prague is considered "existential" because his characters participate in their own predicaments.  Their travails are not merely thrust upon them, like Stalinism (or libertarianism) - they are, instead, something they are responsible for, that perversely enough, they actually support.  Gregor Samsa's physical metamorphosis, for instance, only mirrors his moral condition - he "becomes" a cockroach because spiritually he long ago became a kind of pathetic vermin.  (Indeed, in a literal translation from the German, he's not specifically a roach at all, but instead "an unclean animal.")  And in The Trial, Herr K. is so persuaded of his own guilt that he comes to believe his execution is "inevitable;" it's only at the last minute, with his dying words, "Like a dog!," that he realizes what he has allowed himself to become.

But for Theresa Rebeck to make any of her characters truly existential would throw a wrench into her upper-middlebrow commercial appeal (she'd never write a career woman who realizes she's morally "like a dog," for instance).  So instead she writes a kind of long-form sitcom with pretentious, NPR-audience allusions and in-jokes - jokes designed for people who've heard something of Kafka, but have never actually read him.

Even this would be okay, I suppose, if The Understudy were simply more entertaining - or even just shorter.  Or if its inevitable romantic triangle weren't so ineptly rendered.  Indeed, the unhappy trio of The Understudy remind you more of the damned souls in No Exit than anything in Kafka - only the problem is that this time there's no exit for us, the audience.   The only real "development" is our slowly-dawning awareness, as the play grinds on, and as Rebeck runs through the various chips, and quips, on her shoulders, of how little she understands of her supposed inspiration.  One scene is actually devoted to the idea that Kafka would be more effective if he were sexier, for example.  And if more of his faceless bureaucrats happened to be hot babes.  (No, I'm not making this up.  This clever play really gets that stupid - which is when you realize Rebeck is actually a part of, rather than opposed to, the pop milieu she pretends to condemn.)

Luckily, the Lyric cast is quite strong, and they're wittily directed by Larry Coen, so they keep the laughs coming, and the script going (despite itself), for about two-thirds of its length.  Laura Latreille is the stand-out as the harried stage manager (although she enters with a tad too much bitterness, I think - the acid should rise in her performance when she realizes, in a standard Rebeck trope, that her understudy is also her ex).  And luckily Latreille is well-matched by hottie Kelby T. Akin as that action star - who, improbably enough, has not just the requisite killer abs, but also a real jones for Kafka (which only means he understands the author about as well as Rebeck does).

The slightly weak link in the trio is Christopher James Webb, who's actually fine in his snarky soliloquies and asides, but who can't conjure much chemistry (even fizzled chemistry) with Latreille, and who hasn't figured out how to put over his supposed awesome renditions of that weird new Kafka script.  Not that can I can blame him; Rebeck seems to want to play Herr K strictly for laughs, and yet at the same time make some sort of existential pit yawn before us.  She succeeds intermittently in the first aim (she's helped along by Arshan Gailus's witty sound design) but needless to say pretty much fails at the second.

And slowly the one-liners begin to land with more and more of a thud, and as they lose steam, so does the whole play (because let's face it, one-liners are what Theresa Rebeck does). By the finish, I can't tell you how often I had checked my watch, hoping each scene of The Understudy would prove its last.  Indeed, as the curtain finally fell, I was more than willing to admit one thing about Rebeck's script:

For the audience, it was almost Kafkaesque.

Of Top Girls and girls on top

Playwright Theresa Rebeck (at left) raised a small kerfuffle in the theatre blogs when the Guardian published a tantrum from her called "Broadway's glass ceiling," in which she bemoaned the paucity of plays by women on Broadway:

One might put this trend down to something like, hmm, discrimination. But actually what we're told is that the plays that are produced are just the plays that were worth doing, and that playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene. So women should just back off, because putting plays written by women into production because maybe audiences might like a really well-written play that was well-written by a woman would be pandering to ideas of political correctness. And art doesn't do that . . . What art does is celebrate the lives and struggles of men.

Unpacking this little rant is something of a challenge. Rebeck's screed may have spawned many arguments, but in and of itself it could hardly be called an argument at all; it's more like an angrily sputtered non sequitur. Her statement, for instance, that "what we're told is that the plays that are produced are just the plays that were worth doing, and that playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene" doesn't actually make sense - there's no logical connection between its two clauses; one could quite reasonably believe the plays that were produced last year were indeed the only ones worth doing, and yet also snort at the idea that "playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene," whatever that means. And honestly, playwriting is now a gene? Who, exactly, is saying this?

Well, we get a better idea of who the real author of this "argument" may be as she keeps going, and keeps getting stupider:

There's some feeling in rehearsal halls and writers' retreats and drunken dinner parties, that maybe the American theatre participates rather too enthusiastically in the supposed gender bias that the American media tosses about willy-nilly while discussing candidates for higher office. Mostly it is women playwrights who feel that way; male playwrights think the system is really, really fair and that women playwrights who raise these questions are whiners or dirty feminists. After all, everyone is discriminated against! It's show business! Nobody's happy! We're all narcissistic egomaniacs, you can't expect it to make sense! This is about the work. Which means, apparently, that any woman who cares enough to raise her voice about the fact that women's stories are not reaching the stages for which they are intended is a whiner, a dirty feminist and a lousy artist too - because a true artist wouldn't care.

Honestly I am not making one word of this up.

Okay - she is not making one word of this up. So . . . we're supposed to take this whole diatribe, I assume, as what came out of some male asshole playwright at a "drunken dinner party," probably one in which Charles Isherwood's NYT feature on the 2008 theatre season came up in conversation. That's the idea I get, at any rate. But whether or not what comes out of male playwrights at drunken dinner parties reflects the actual attitudes of the people producing plays is never pondered. Instead, we get the outraged observation that only about 13% of the shows on Broadway last year were by women - the same percentage as a century ago! - which obviously proves there's discrimination afoot on the Great White Way.

But does it? I mean, a century ago, women couldn't vote, or hold office. It does seem odd, doesn't it, that sexism could have given in on those counts, yet still hunkered down for a last stand on the Broadway stage. But perhaps that's because sexism has never given up on what really counts - "the culture"; for as Theresa insists in her final statement:

"Who owns the stories, owns the culture." For the life of me I can't remember who said that, but by God it is true.

Just btw, I'm not sure who said that, either, besides Rebeck; when I googled it, I came up with zip. But what's suddenly obvious is that Theresa doesn't want simple equality and opportunity for women; she wants to own the culture, not share it. (This cry against sexism is from a woman, by the way, who is in fact a very successful writer and television producer, and whose one play on Broadway was rather obviously an imitation of a male playwright's best-known work.) In fact, one senses suddenly that feminism in its pure sense doesn't really mean much to her; for Theresa, feminism - or rather sexual politics - is simply a springboard, a steppingstone, to owning the culture (after Mauritius, she probably imagines she 'owns' American Buffalo). And by God, she is being frustrated in her objective!

Well isn't that too bad - although I have to confess this is where things get a little troubling for me. Because, you see, I don't want Theresa Rebeck to own the culture - in fact I'm very, very glad she doesn't. I could be down with a woman owning the culture in principle - just not Theresa. Because to be honest, I don't think she's a very good playwright - and not because she's a woman, but because she's superficial and derivative (though, I admit, clever and funny and certainly a craftsman - uh, craftsperson - in her way). I suppose she has as much of a right to be on Broadway as Neil Simon did - only I didn't want Neil Simon to be there, either! And I certainly didn't want him to own the culture.

But never mind. The thing is, other women seem to feel the same way as Ms. Rebeck - that feminist posturing could serve as a means to getting produced. And they're working on doing something about it. For instance, there's a note that playwright Julia Jordan has been circulating to theatre professionals, which reads in part:

Already there has been a meeting of over 150 female playwrights in New York and the Dramatists Guild is announcing that it will no longer give grants to theaters who discriminate against female writers.

(Leonard Jacobs also reports there will be a "Town Hall" held to address the topic in New York in late October.)

Discrimination against female writers is of course indefensible, but somehow Jordan's note is a bit Stalinist in its cadence, don't you agree? You get the distinct impression that to Jordan - and the Dramatists Guild - female writers are now more equal than others. I mean, couldn't you write a similar protest letter on behalf of African-American writers, and Asian writers, and Native-American writers (funny, if you carved up the Broadway season by minorities, white college-educated women might only get a little more than 13% of it)?

It's also a bit troubling that Charles Isherwood's piece, which seems to have started the whole kerfuffle, is actually being so obviously misrepresented by both Rebeck and Jordan. Rebecca asserts that "The New York Times tells us this week that this is the Year of the Man;" Jordan says that the article, "puts forth the premise that this is the year of the 'male' play, unlike every other year." But where, in the article, does Isherwood use the phrase 'Year of the Man,' and where does he calls this 'the year of the male play'? Somehow I can't find either phrase in this rather ordinary feature, and indeed, it's rife with irony and obvious jabs at the male gender: "most of the news-media glare will soon rest once more on the flaws and strengths, the goofs and the gaffes of the two men leading the tickets . . . a handful of productions, probably converging by coincidence, will provide a season-long seminar on the subject of the male animal under pressure . . . men behaving badly may be a dispiriting spectacle in the public sphere (see Edwards, John), but it almost inevitably makes effective theater." That's how the article goes (just try to imagine a woman writing about 'the female animal under pressure', or opining about 'women behaving badly in the public sphere (see Palin, Sarah)'!)

So the whole tempest seems to be have been kick-started by a willful misrepresentation of an ironic article by a gay man, and a drunken riff by some competitive jerk at a dinner party. Still, legitimate conversations can arise from misunderstandings, drunken quarrels, and the sudden expression of long-held prejudice. But on that note, I'd like to throw a few further thoughts into the discussion.

I'm worried, for instance, by what "discrimination against female writers" could be construed to mean. Are Julia Jordan, the Dramatists Guild, and those 150 female playwrights seeking a 50/50 parity in play production? Because I certainly can't think of a great play written by a woman to match every great play written by a man. Or are they only speaking about new play production? Even this is a bit disturbing, because it seems to me that many (not all, but many) of the weakest plays I've seen this year (Dessa Rose, Eurydice) have been awash in some form of identity politics; I rather doubt they'd have been produced without some consideration of the fact that they were written by women. Indeed, it's hard for me to believe that Rebeck, Ruhl, or Suzan-Lori Parks would have enjoyed the careers they've had if they weren't women. Ruhl, in particular, has been lauded as a "genius" by the MacArthur Foundation, and been short-listed for a Pulitzer, for a body of work that has been judged over-rated by many critics (mostly men).

Ah, but there's the rub. Am I simply unable to see the quality of these plays because of my own subconscious biases? Am I the kind of sexist lout Theresa Rebeck and Julia Jordan decry?

Whenever I ponder this question, though, I find myself asking myself the following - if I'm sexist, then why do I adore so many female authors? Why do I perpetually tend little shrines in my heart to George Eliot (or rather Mary Ann Evans) and Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf? Why do I worship Caryl Churchill? It seems that if I were indeed prejudiced against women, I should reject all women authors, and not simply ones I judge inferior.

Then again, it's worth noting that most of the women I just cited were novelists, not playwrights. Indeed, Churchill is the only female playwright I can think of whom I consider great, and even she, of course, has never written a work to compare with the greatest masterpieces written by men. Why is this so?

It would be easy - and hardly entirely wrong! - to reply that sexism is the main reason. And I notice that in many of the arts, there is a gender gap. There is no great symphony by a woman in the classical canon, and indeed few lesser works, either - although the earliest composer with a biography was a woman, Hildegard von Bingen - and while there are many female virtuosi on many instruments, there is no great female conductor on the planet. It is also hard to think of a major painting by a woman (although there are many wonderful minor ones), or a major sculpture, either. In some artistic fields, however, women have lately made major names for themselves: Twyla Tharp is clearly one of America's great choreographers, and Louise Bourgeois has achieved a formidable reputation as a sculptress (as Louise Nevelson did before her).

How to explain that women have reached leading roles in some artistic fields, but not others? Was sexism stronger in the social structures of certain modes of expression? Or do some modes of expression tend to interest women more than others? I don't have answers to those questions, but I don't find it hard to believe that sexism continues to exist in many artistic fields (I've heard comments from classical musicians that you wouldn't believe).

But I also think it's worth noting that among the art forms, theatre seems to have been among the friendliest to women. Not as friendly as fiction, but still friendly. There are plenty of female playwrights with careers, and several major female directors and designers. I support that - indeed, I hardly feel that Rebeck, Ruhl, and Parks don't deserve productions; I'm simply not that impressed by their talent.

And therein lies my rub. I'm confident that eventually there will be more great female playwrights - maybe we'll even reach that 50/50 parity I get the impression Julia Jordan dreams of. But I have my doubts about Rebeck's and Jordan's methods for getting there. I don't much like agitprop, and I'm highly aware that the springs of artistic talent tend to spurt from unlikely sources; talent is, to be blunt, by definition a kind of statistical anomaly. Rectifying statistical injustices may even exacerbate artistic ones, in my experience; in other words, simply producing more plays by women may not in the short run give us better plays (and this in an art form that is all but on financial life support). And in the meantime not seeing some of the great plays could slowly induce a kind of acceptance of mediocrity in the theatre, as we see now in pop music and film (and the stage is already mediocre enough!). So I suppose I'm opposed to sexism, but for artistic reasons I'm also opposed to quotas, which is where I worry Jordan's proposal might lead. I may be wrong; there may be a great many scripts out there by women that are better than what is currently on the boards; but Rebeck, Ruhl and Parks don't give me much hope.



But Caryl Churchill does. I'll say it again - it's shocking she's only just seen a major production of Top Girls (above) on Broadway, and has never gotten one in (wait for it) Boston! If Theresa and Julia want to get out the torches and pitchforks to rectify that injustice, count me in. But if their opposition to injustice is really a form of service to their own careers, well, I may take a pass this time, and wait for the next Churchill to emerge.