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?

A mismanaged Misanthrope

Just a few words on the production of "The Misanthrope" that closed at the New Rep last weekend. I've never seen Molière’s (at left) supposed magnum opus work on stage (the play's brilliantly perceptive, but its thin plot and somewhat static oratory work against it), and alas, I still haven't, although the New Rep production was intermittently amusing, and did afford some sympathetic insights into the play's mismatched central couple. Director Adam Zahler updated the text to the belle epoque, but offered little apparent justification for the change (oddly, the play feels like a better fit for the present day), and didn't really deliver much authentic period atmosphere: the set was lovely, but looked more like a soda fountain than a boulevard hotel, and the costumes were similarly cartoonish. The astringent wit which one associates with the play was likewise replaced with well-meant buffoonery. James Lloyd Reynolds brought a good deal of technique to bear on the eponymous Alceste, Molière’s honest man in a world of hypocrisy, but somehow never conjured much sympathy for his plight (or his eventual undoing). Meanwhile Amy Russ was both too mature and too hearty a presence to convince as his sparkling, but possibly vacuous, beloved - and in concert with the antics of Jason Bowen and Karl Baker Olson, she managed to produce little of the play's requisite malicious fizz. There were still some good moments, however, mostly from Steven Barkhimer's philosophical Philinte, Billy Meleady's nimble Oronte, Ellen Colton's broad, but still appealing Arsinoe, and (especially) Zillah Glory's sweet, sadly wise Eliante. The translation was a new one, by Constance Congdon, which sounded, at first blush, like a slangy update of Richard Wilbur's celebrated version. I'm not sure Congdon won me over, but I'd be interested to hear more from her; she's also done The Imaginary Invalid and Tartuffe - the times seem ripe for either. Anyone? Anyone?

Naked white men and others

You can see this onstage . . . . but why not this? . . . . . . or that?

I know, I know, "Tom, stop picking on Louise, the girl can't help it!" But really, Louise Kennedy's such an accurate middlebrow barometer that what she can't help is to take cultural readings by mistake, as it were . . . Consider, for instance, her latest piece, "Three plays, no clothes, no problem," in which she ponders how liberated Boston has become, based on the recent "gay three-way" at the BCA. Apparently in Chicago, a theatre company balked at the nudity in The Little Dog Laughed, which Speakeasy presented in half-hearted fashion (I mean the nudity, not the whole play). Author Douglas Carter Beane protested the Chicago version, but approved Speakeasy's compromise - "I was so fine with that (one actor's back being turned to the audience)" he said, because "there's a bigger vision involved."

Indeed - and hooray for us, I suppose, even if the Speakeasy version of that gay connection wasn't all that believable - at least it happened. But then Kennedy moves on to the next local actor to appear in the altogether: local stalwart Diego Arcinegas, who's appearing nude in Speakeasy's next outing, Some Men.

I know, you're yawning already - another nude dude in a gay play (again by Speakeasy)! But of course what's interesting about Diego is that he's Latino. Which reminds one immediately of precisely whom you can see naked onstage in Boston - basically, gay white men. Or straight white men pretending to be gay. Kennedy, of course, never makes these connections - which made me wonder, suddenly, if she would be quite so philosophical about three concurrent plays featuring naked women. Something tells me she might have penned a rather different article about that.

But why? Obviously, as Arciniegas says in Kennedy's piece, nudity is "actually about vulnerability and identity." Indeed. Not to mention politics. A naked woman onstage is immediately politically loaded - at least, I think, to Kennedy - in a way that a naked white man is not (Kennedy even freaks out when she hears the "c-word" onstage). And as for a naked black man - good luck, casting directors! (I think Speakeasy had to go national to find a black man willing to strip for Take Me Out.)

Yet it's hard to find any rhyme or reason to these new mores. A woman who strips in "new burlesque" is somehow perceived as empowering herself. And no one seems to be able to criticize rappers like Snoop Dogg, who actually makes hardcore porn videos (left), yet still appears in mainstream movies and sitcoms. Does racism trump sexism, or something like that?

Perhaps the key lies in the fact that, unlike Snoop Dogg, most theatrical producers try to honor the idea that stage nudity serves some theatrical purpose - a position that's hard to maintain when the people with their clothes off aren't perceived as empowered. (Rap meanwhile seems to have no problem simultaneously railing against the exploitation of black men while openly exploiting black women.) But are gay men really more empowered than other groups? A decade or so ago a production of Steaming went up in Boston that featured a dozen or so naked actresses - certainly women haven't become less empowered since then, but aside from a glimpse at the Huntington last year, I haven't seen a lady's garden on stage in a queen's age. One has to wonder at a culture that is so hasty to approve of gay sex scenes, but seems to freak out at straight ones. Is our comfort level with nude gay sex due to the fact that the gay men involved are still perceived as men, or is it that the gays in the audience are themselves perceived as powerless, so the nudity doesn't matter? I sometimes wonder. But what's obvious is that the body politic still controls what we can show of the body, and yes, plenty of nudity is still "banned in Boston."

Walk like an electron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return flight

The Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.

It's been almost fifteen years since Tony Kushner's Angels in America opened in New York, and nearly two decades since it was first workshopped in L.A.; and yet, as the current revival by Boston Theatreworks proves, much of it sounds as if it could have been written yesterday - even if the ravages of AIDS are now (mostly) behind us. Perhaps this is because while the medical landscape has changed, the political one hasn't, which I note with a heavy heart. It would be nice to say that Angels is "timeless" or "prophetic," as some recent writers have claimed, but I fear Angels seems timeless simply because the times haven't changed that much; we're still stuck in Kushner's brilliantly-evoked polarizations, and the play itself reflects this strange gridlock. Indeed, while the first half, Millennium Approaches, all but longs for some new vision that could truly transform the culture, its companion piece, Perestroika, contents itself with the thought that any such revelation would somehow be a step back.

It's an odd, contrarian position for a work of art to take (Angels is one of a rare breed - the self-refuting classic), and it's hard for me to pretend that I've ever been deeply satisfied with Kushner's masterpiece. But one can be dissatisfied and still dazzled, and Angels remains, even in its current stripped-down staging, amazing. In the breadth and salience of his analysis of millennial America, Kushner has very few peers - as in no peers - and his scenes are studded (particularly in Millennium) with speeches which are, in and of themselves, indeed timeless in their mix of electrically accurate attack and rueful wisdom.

And with all due respect to the superb Mike Nichols film, these speeches should be heard live, on stage, rather than on your widescreen. They demand to be heard in an agora, a public space, as they operate as rhetoric as well as character, in much the same way that Angels is more dialectic than drama. Kushner conjures the most disparate samples of America imaginable (gay New Yorkers and Mormon Republicans), and then smashes them together - often ignoring the exigencies of time and space - to consider and re-consider them as theses and antitheses (a technique far more successful onstage than onscreen). The resulting mix of "magic realism" puts us, as more than one character puts it, at "the threshold of revelation," as it's Kushner's special genius to perceive the parallels between his opposed worlds: the Reagan administration is crawling with gays, the Mormon hero is closeted, and of course, an angel appears to the AIDS-ridden hero, Prior Walter, in a parody of Joseph Smith's famous vision. The opposite poles of the 80s - AIDS and its corresponding political plague, Reagan (one invading the immune system of the body, the other the body politic) thread through and into each other throughout Millennium Approaches in ways that still stagger us with their insight, imagination and sympathy.


Elizabeth Aspenlieder drops in on Tyler Reilly as Millennium Approaches.

But alas, in Perestroika, the dialectic ends not with synthesis but refutation. From the opening moments - in which "the world's oldest Bolshevik" derides us for our lack of a guiding cultural vision - we can sense that Kushner is backing away from the closing challenge of Millennium ("The Great Work begins!"), and though he toys with "restructuring" his Mormon hero and his consort, the "logorrheic" Louis (an obvious self-portrait), by his finale little of the promised "great work" seems to have been accomplished. The gay Mormon has been told off and banished from the play, and his wife has vanished into the ozone, literally - only his mother has been integrated (for reasons never quite made clear) into the circle of politically chatty Cathys Kushner assembles around the Bethesda fountain (at top) in his final tableau. But then perhaps that's the only real angel in the play - since AZT, which couldn't save Roy Cohn but preserves Prior Walter, also came from Bethesda (headquarters of the National Institute of Health).

So it seemed, as I sat down to the new Boston Theatreworks version, that I'd never actually left Angels - everybody sounded just the same as they did in the 90s. But then I had to admit - the Clintons, like political AZT, managed to control Reaganism, but couldn't cure it. Gay men are still marginalized, the Mormons are deeper in denial than ever, the country is still riven by a falsely wholesome "conservatism" - and as a result, directors Jason Southerland and Nancy Curran Willis have been spared the task of revising or updating this play. This is, essentially, the original production - writ a bit smaller, with a slightly grittier edge, but with no surprising new insights or angles. Still, a quite solid cast generally keeps it afloat; even if, as the text loses focus in Perestroika, the production meanders more obviously than the New York original years ago, it's still a highly accomplished, and often deeply moving, version.

It also features, alas, a slightly uneven ensemble; the production essentially depends on three central, sterling performances: Bree Elrod's darkly haunted Harper, Tyler Reilly's wry Prior Walter, and especially Maurice Parent's bitchily regal Belize (at left, with Richard McElvain). This trio is ably abetted by Christopher Webb, who's perhaps a shade too dark as Louis (but who nails Kushner's politically-correct conversational convolutions) and Richard McElvain, who makes a sad serpent of Roy Cohn, but lacks the old dragon's requisite fire. Meanwhile Susanne Nitter brings an intriguing air of acidic bemusement to Ethel Rosenberg, but doesn't really find a center to the (underwritten) role of Mother Pitt, while Sean Hopkins is too often an attractive blank as her (overwritten, but underdeveloped) gay son. Still, as a whole the cast can claim to have successfully wrestled Angels to the boards - as can Boston Theatreworks.

A Girl's Guide to Bad Shakespeare

It only takes a few minutes for the sad truth about "Shakespeare's Actresses in America" to sink in: we're supposed to be pretending that Rebekah Maggor (at left) is really pulling this thing off, and she's so not. It's not that Ms. Maggor lacks talent; she's a statuesque actress with a cool yet exotic presence who naturally conjures an aura of faintly bored sexual challenge, and I'd be interested to see her essay any number of roles (Hedda Gabler comes immediately to mind). What she's not, however, is the kind of chameleon who can believably inhabit the styles of about a dozen other actresses (her own presence is just too palpably obdurate). Yet that's precisely what she has set out to do, in a 70-minute tour of famous turns by such stars of the past and present as Ellen Terry, Eva Le Gallienne, Mary Pickford, and even Elizabeth Taylor and Claire Danes.

The results are a weird kind of waxworks, in which Maggor successfully captures the outward style of each actress (and hence the conventions of her day) but fails repeatedly to channel their inner essences. This gap is most obvious when she's mimicking the ironic shrugs of Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet, or Elizabeth Taylor's tinny, spitfire diction in Taming of the Shrew (performances with which many are familiar through film and video). Yes, Maggor accurately apes these women's mannerisms, but not their method: she misses both Danes's quicksilver intelligence and Taylor's near-slatternly sensuality - so what we get are their diction and tics grafted onto Maggor's own elegant, distant presence. The result is that "performance" after "performance" seems really, really bad - in fact, each seems bad even within the standards of its day.

I mean, sure, it's fun to mock the noble tremolo of actresses from a century ago, like Ellen Terry and Julia Marlowe - but something tells me these women made the conventions of their age work on their own terms. Ditto Anita Louise, whose Titania here looks almost absurdly daft, but who seems utterly at home within the art-deco artifice of Warner Bros' Midsummer Night's Dream (also available on home video). Predictably, Maggor's on firmer ground with roles that more closely fit her own skills - she threw off some sparks as Lady Macbeth, for instance - and it was interesting to hear Desdemona in Yiddish (via Celia Adler), or Hamlet in French (via Sarah Bernhardt). Notes on Paul Robeson's debut as Othello at our own Brattle Theatre - via Maggor's tour guide, the intriguingly butch producer Margaret Webster - were also welcome. But you can't really say that Maggor made any of her actresses look good - and as somebody once said, ay, there's the rub.

The fat lady sings for the Pats

Some days being a queen who only cares about opera, ballet, art and theatre definitely has its advantages . . . my condolences . . .