Dead playwrights' society (or yes, Virginia, Sarah Ruhl still sucks)

A telling moment came about two thirds of the way through the first act of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at the Lyric this weekend. The show had been punctuated, as one expected, by a cell phone's relentless ringing - but suddenly everything went "meta" when one began to bleat in answer from the audience.

And its owner answered it. She took the call.

Now, normally, this kind of thing makes my blood boil (see note at right). But this time around, I could kind of sympathize; the call would probably prove more interesting than Ruhl's play, the woman had clearly reasoned. Indeed, I began to think about turning my cell back on and placing a call myself. I didn't think I'd miss anything.

Because once again Sarah Ruhl has produced a willfully whimsical piece of melancholic tedium masquerading as a statement. Watching it, I could hear a little inner voice murmuring "Nothing new here, Garvey, move along, move along . . ." So I'm going to spare you my usual level of chagrin at the travesty of this woman receiving a MacArthur grant (which of course means she can keep writing without any financial worries) and various other honors. Paula Vogel, the lesbian playwriting professor down at Brown, fell in love with Ruhl's work years ago and began to promote her, and Charles Isherwood, the gay New York Times second stringer, seems to have an inexplicable weakness for her twee meanderings too, so I guess Ruhl is here to stay. Maybe Charles and Paula are friends; I dunno. But there's got to be some explanation for the ascension of this mediocrity to the heights of American theatre (her next opus is slated for Broadway); I'm just damned if I know what it is.

But in case you haven't heard, the pretty-good premise of Dead, etc. is the chance encounter of a "nondescript" young woman with a glamorous businessman who drops dead next to her in a sushi place. She herself only notices he's sleeping with the fishes because his cell keeps ringing, and she's finally forced to answer it. Then she answers it again. And again. Then attends his funeral. And slowly becomes drawn into his life, that ever-jangling cell offering a magical "open sesame" to his family, lovers, friends, and business associates.

Just precisely what his unspoken business is (or was) is the rather obvious MacGuffin that Ruhl uses to tease us into Act Two. But after her big reveal - it turns out the sleaze sold human organs - she lets what loose structure she's maintained up to this point go, and just begins to play with her dramatic finger paints, as usual. Interludes from the afterlife, trips to heaven and hell, even a brief snippet of the Ice Capades (above left) - everything goes, and it's mostly pretty lame. Yes, I know Ruhl's unbound by logic or plot or psychology, and I know she's unafraid to be unpredictable, and embraces the profoundly irrational, and the irrationally profound. The only trouble is that she's unpredictably, irrationally, profoundly lame.

To be fair, as with Eurydice, there are a few bright spots here and there in all the pretentious whimsy - a few tight, pointed monologues about cell phone bondage, and a couple of weirdly bittersweet, amoral jokes about The Way We Live Now; but mostly, we sit staring, wondering what the fuck Ruhl thinks she's getting at with the latest hairpin turn in her "plot." Oh wait, don't tell me - it's like cell phones bring us together, and yet push us apart. Was that the irrationally profound part?

Sorry, I can't help snickering at this playwright and her my-journal-belongs-on-Broadway aesthetic. Because there's an intellectual error in her self-justifying prattle that's all too obvious: Ruhl assumes that she has the poetic power to take the audience along with her on her magical mystery tours. But - how to put this nicely? - she just doesn't. There's little or no resonance in Eurydice or Dead Man's Cell Phone - no weird chills like the one in Buried Child, for instance, where the corpse of the baby is mysteriously exhumed from the vanished cornfield, when the image feels strangely "right' even though we can't quite explain why. Perhaps the greatest theatre depends on such deep, irrational responses and recognitions, on a kind of shared dream between playwright and audience. But what's always at issue is that "shared" part - Ruhl doesn't realize it, but she's off daydreaming by herself, while most of her audience, the ones with no stake in her young-female-writer identity, are scratching their heads.

Still, to be honest, I can't really sneer at the Lyric's current production. It looks coolly terrific (the stylishly mutating set is by Cristina Todesco) and has been ably directed by Carmel O'Reilly, of whom I'm hardly a fan; but I have to admit this time she's assembled a strong cast, and dresses this turkey about as well as I think anyone could. I never actually bought, I admit, the talented Liz Hayes as Ruhl's mousey heroine; Hayes is just too strong and capable a presence. But she goes through the motions with commitment, and you can almost buy, for instance, that she'd let some slightly-creepy guy braid her hair in the closet of a stationery store, as Ruhl would have it. Almost. At any rate, Hayes gets a lot of help in maintaining the illusion of her supposed insecurity from the rest of the cast, in which there's not a weak link. Neil McGarry is all confident, handsome-anchorman smarm as the eponymous Dead Man, and as his distant wife, Bryn Jameson ably tosses off a weirdly amusing drunk scene which is probably the high point of the script. Meanwhile Jeff Mahoney manages to make that slightly-creepy hair-braider sympathetic (and even a little appealing), and Beth Gotha at least nails all her laughs as his erratically imperious mother (she can't really pin down a character in this pastiche of gimmicks, but who could?). The real find of the production, however, is newcomer Jessica D. Turner, who definitely knows, as her hot-to-trot character purrs, both how to enter a room and how to walk in nosebleed heels. We'll be hearing more from Ms. Turner, trust me. If only this were the last we were to hear of Ms. Ruhl.

How low can Shepard Fairey go?

So low that even his lawyers have withdrawn from his case against the Associated Press. Something about the "artist" having misled them "by fabricating information and destroying other material." Yep, you read that right - Fairey sued AP under false pretenses. But given the intellectual dishonesty of his work, is anyone other than fanboy Joel Brown surprised? Somehow I don't think so; this is just more evidence of Fairey's general M.O. Sigh. Guess I'll file this under "Leopards- change their spots?" in the growing "I Told You So" drawer at the Hub Review.

[P.S. - It occurs to me that the "Fairey affair" reflects a rather larger cultural theme - i.e., the conflict that arises when the standards of current pop culture, with its promiscuously lifted hooks and images, crashes into the still-slightly-higher standard of originality expected of high culture. Of course, to many (like Joel Brown, who I admit is my posterboy for intellectually-suspect arts criticism), attracting the younger generation to the fine arts means eradicating the boundary between high culture and pop - and if need be, making high culture no more original than pop has become. But what's the point of keeping something alive if you destroy its standards in the process? More to come on this troubling dilemma.]

Well worth the Ride

Adrianne Krstansky in 2.5 Minute Ride. Photo by Christopher Mckenzie.

Time is tight today, but I did want to post that if you've been on the fence about seeing the final performances of 2.5 Minute Ride at the New Rep, by all means go. The Globe review, by the erratic Sandy MacDonald, was quite bizarre, and utterly wrong-headed. Lisa Kron's meditation on the mystery of her parents draws most of its power from the collision of her hip, gay sensibility with the enigma of her father, who escaped the Holocaust via the famous Kindertransport; the script's two contrasting poles are, believe it or not, a visit to Auschwitz and a day at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. Between these two extremes winds a second narrative thread, about the marriage of Kron's brother - and her own reaction to, and integration into, that tradition. Kron doesn't really achieve any synthesis of her opposed perspectives, but the piece is nevertheless touching and funny by turns, and even shocks with a calmly stated moral dilemma that I won't give away here. Adrianne Krstansky replaces the author, but at least judging from Kron's performance in Well at the Huntington, we're lucky for that; Krstansky is a far better actress than Kron, and is affectingly un-affected throughout. M. Bevin O'Gara, whom I'm beginning to realize may be one of the best directors in town, directed. Through October 24.

A rambling, but well-sung road

I don't have too much to say about Maureen McGovern's A Long and Winding Road, now at the Wimberley Theatre through November 15, except that it's a thoroughly enjoyable evening in the mode formerly known as "mellow." It's chiefly so because of McGovern's voice, which seems to have aged not a day since her heyday on the soundtrack of The Poseidon Adventure (the lady herself just turned 60). Whether by the grace of God or as the result of superb training and care, McGovern is still blessed with a wonderful pop instrument, and a consummate technique to match it. She was lightly miked at the Wimberley, but seemed to have plenty of power, and deployed a startling variety of color across a still-impressive range (she's an alto with a mezzo top).

And her play list was by and large admirable - a little bit of Dylan, a touch of Simon & Garfunkel, a sprinkling of the Beatles (although not, for some reason, the eponymous tune), etc. Not all the songs she sang were actually ideal for the rather bouncy piano accompaniment by Jeffrey Harris, but McGovern's vocals themselves were always expert, and with her trademarked, romantically-mournful timbre she delivered particularly lovely renditions of "You've Got a Friend," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", "Let It Be," and believe it or not, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

As for the rest of the show - well, I'm never much one for wallowing in boomer nostalgia, and the piece is, I'm afraid, rather transparently a companion/promotion piece for the auburn-haired chanteuse's latest album. And I sometimes felt that McGovern's reliance on major political turning points of the last forty-odd years felt too on-the-nose, and a little unearned - after all, what, precisely, did she have to do with Martin Luther King, or the March on Washington? (Then again, probably half her audience credits themselves with marching at Selma and sewing an AIDS quilt, too.) Still, one never doubts McGovern's personal sympathies were, indeed, with the enlightened crusades of her generation, and at any rate, in a nostalgia piece, it's hard to dodge cornerstones like Kennedy's assassination or the "age" of Reagan.

Between the politics and the classic pop lies a somewhat-rambling, light litany of life lessons (divorce, record-company perfidy, loss of a loved one, etc.), each one graced by, yes, a "morning after" (McGovern's chart-topper topped the show). To be honest, McGovern's story isn't all that compelling (nor is she a gifted raconteur; nothing really builds over the course of the evening). But her anecdotes are amusing enough, and she has a solid sense of humor and the timing of a gifted comedienne (a little medley of "da-doo-ron-ron" nonsense was a particular charmer). In some basic way, she's just good company. Particularly on a long and winding road.

The Shakespeare and Company crisis

The sad news of the financial crisis at Shakespeare & Co. didn't surprise me; rumors of the eccentric management of that institution have been rife for years (and years). At the same time, however, whatever their management lapses, the group's purchase and renovation of its expansive new digs (after being booted from The Mount, which has faced its own fiscal problems) put an understandable pressure on their finances. Still, it's striking how the public face of the situation parallels that of the North Shore Music Theatre - full-steam-ahead, business-as-usual behavior masking a mounting deficit, followed by the sudden announcement of an enormous debt load, and a last-minute pitch to raise a huge sum of money just to stay open (in this case $2.3 million by March, although the Globe article seems to equivocate on that deadline).

Sigh. More "boards behaving badly," I suppose. And history doesn't offer much hope in scenarios of this kind. On the other hand, the group has enormous popular support (although I admit I'm not really a fan), and is certainly a driver of the Berkshire summer economy. And with the stock market in something of a recovery, perhaps new donors can be found, and a restructuring may stave off the financial deadline. With Shakespeare, hope springs eternal.

Joe Lanza, John Kuntz and Michael Balcanoff in The Caretaker.

The Nora Theatre's current production of The Caretaker (through November 1 at the Central Square Theater) is in many ways a worthy piece of work. Director Daniel Gidron has (wisely) decided not to attempt to "update" the play that first brought Harold Pinter international attention; indeed, within the production's budget, Gidron and his designers seem to have attempted to replicate as faithfully as possible the circumstances of Great Britain in 1959, the year of the drama's debut. The accent work in the production may be only adequate, but it's still good enough to not distract; and the acting (particularly by John Kuntz) is thoughtful and detailed, and at times quite absorbing.

Yet despite all the care taken with The Caretaker, the mysterious sense of unknown danger that once defined Pinter - and which I am old enough to remember from productions I saw in the 70's - has gone missing from this version. And the Nora is hardly alone in its inability to conjure that once-famous atmosphere of threat. The A.R.T.'s No Man's Land from two seasons ago felt similarly flat, and its Birthday Party from a few years before that had been faintly ridiculous. Other, smaller local productions that I've seen in recent years - of One for the Road, or The Lover, for instance - have been similarly threat-free. Indeed, as I watched The Caretaker I realized that I hadn't felt a classic Pinterian chill from a new production in perhaps two decades; you might have to go all the way back to the late 80's, and the Huntington's production of The Birthday Party, to sense the playwright's old black magic. And this issue couldn't be laid at the feet of directorial interference; true, at the A.R.T. director JoAnne Akalaitis had essentially parodied The Birthday Party, but other recent productions had been quite seriously conceived, and Daniel Gidron clearly intended this Caretaker to be as close an approximation to the original production as possible. (Indeed, a clip from the original film, below, reveals that even it is none too disturbing today.)


A sequence from the 1963 film of The Caretaker, with Donald Pleasance and Alan Bates.

So is Pinter "dated"? And if so, why? And how might his seemingly lost immediacy be recaptured?

Of course what's clear at once about Pinter is that if he is dated, it's due to his incredible success and influence. Listening to The Caretaker, in fact, I was struck again and again by how his voice has become the lingua franca of so much pop culture. Saturday Night Live appeared just as his output began winding down, and its skits were often rife with light, dumbed-down riffs on his central tropes. Then came Quentin Tarantino, whose dialogue is essentially a drive-in-movie version of Pinter's comedy of menace, re-fitted with fresher pop references (and goosed along by literal threats of torture and rape). But a funny thing happened to the Theatre of the Absurd once Quentin Tarantino and Lorne Michaels got their hands on it: it went meta, and lost its powers of critique.

But then today we don't have "irony" anymore; we have meta-irony instead. The ironic stance is no longer a challenge for an audience - rather it's an escape hatch. Culturally we're all channel-surfers, no longer embedded in the consensus that Pinter was savaging in 1959; belief in God, normative heterosexuality, the oppressions of bourgeois capitalism, the threatening police state - to today's audiences, all these things are essentially avoidable via the all-too-aptly-named "remote." And "irony" is the knowing lubricant by which we slide past each other in what remains of our cultural meeting-places.

The problem for Pinter's legacy is that while his manner has become ubiquitous, nothing coherent has replaced his initial target. Thus his stance has become comforting rather than disturbing - indeed, the audience I saw The Caretaker with responded warmly to the bizarre non-sequiturs of the leather-jacket-clad Mick, who rattles on about interior decorating while hinting at violence. The character's dislocations of meaning were funny and familiar; we took him as one of us, our theatrical avatar.

And we do so because we no longer identify with Pinter's benighted victims, but instead feel secure in our superiority to them as they grope around (sometimes literally) in the cultural dark. Unlike them, we're sure of our powers of control over our separate lifestyle-niches; if worse comes to worst, we don't have to grapple with existential questions, we can simply go shopping for a new identity.

Against this deeply cynical, but utterly self-amused alienation, Pinter has little or no power. Indeed, what's striking about his current cultural position is that the playwrights he was thought to replace, like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, have seen a renaissance in interest, as their durable virtues match well to a certain nostalgic demographic. In a word, the well-made play is hot, the Theatre of the Absurd is not.

But how to restore Pinter's former potency? Ah, there's the rub; the decline of "monoculture" may have dealt a greater blow to the absurdists and existentialists than it has to the bourgeoisie (which, in case you haven't noticed, is flourishing). And so far, at least, no one has managed to crack the carapace of self-satisfaction one senses in our Gen-Y "glibertarians" - they're not shivering in some Beckettian wasteland, struggling with the bleak truths of the absurdists; they are, instead, snug as bugs in their respective digital rugs. And the idea of using absurdity to attack their own assumptions strikes most of them as, well, simply absurd; indeed, their strategy of simultaneous disconnection from, yet accommodation to, the social and political world may make them all-but-impervious to theatre as a mode of communal critique. Thus any clear-eyed observer must inevitably face the underside of all those calls to draw more young people into the theatre: if we do so, we may inevitably compromise what theatre still, just barely, is.

Of course all's not quite lost, and even this production of The Caretaker offered some insights into how Pinter's legacy might be kept alive. The production's central problem lay in the performance of Michael Balcanoff, as the tramp who tries to destabilize, but then is victimized by, the power relationship between two mysterious brothers (Joe Lanza and John Kuntz). Balcanoff was a convincingly scruffy, homeless gentleman, but was unable to insinuate much in the way of either seedy subservience or indeterminate identity. He was a bit better once his own sense of power began to inflate, but as a particularly destabilizing form of Pinterian threat, he still fell short. Likewise, Joe Lanza brought little sense of sadism to the preening, malicious Mick, although he did, as expected, make the character's long flights of fancy quite funny. It was John Kuntz who made the production memorable, even if at first his take on the brain-damaged Aston was almost too recessed to be truly theatrical. But in his long solo in the second act, in which Aston recalls how he came to be so mentally impaired (unlike Beckett's Lucky, Aston's mind was violated, a key difference between Pinter and his great mentor), Kuntz was superb - quietly, but meticulously, intense. And briefly, the cold fires within the play flickered to life.

Fireworks sans fire

Feng Ning and friend.

Last weekend, for the first time in 25 years, the Boston Philharmonic programmed the famously demanding Brahms Violin Concerto - because, conductor Benjamin Zander let it be known, he had finally found "the man for the job" (according to the Globe's Jeremy Eichler) in the young Chinese sensation Feng Ning.

Well, Mr. Ning is certainly "the man" for just about any job on the violin - like so many Chinese prodigies these days (Lang Lang, Yuja Wang), he has an almost unbelievable level of technique. And he needs it all in the Brahms, which is widely believed the most difficult of violin concertos - as the canard goes, the piece was not written for the violin, but against it.

But Eichler went on to praise Ning's "warm singing tone" - which is a bit bizarre, because brilliant as Ning is, his playing is mostly flash with little passion. Or is it even flash? There's something a little blank about Ning's stage presence, and while his playing seemed fevered - indeed at times devoted to a relentless rubato - beneath the sparks dancing on its surface it felt oddly dutiful (meanwhile, rather than shaping his usual grand gestures, Zander seemed to be constantly lifting, then pressing, his foot to the pedal too). Ning only opened up into real feeling in the themes of the lovely second movement (perhaps inspired by the opening passages from the woodwinds, here tenderly essayed by oboist Peggy Pearson). My partner's comment was that "he plays like a competition winner" (and he's won just about every one there is): that is, technically brilliant, and driven to dazzle, but not deeply musical.

But I can't say Ning left me cold; the encore brought a note of surprising poignance to the performance. The young violinist chose an arrangement for violin of Francisco Tarrega’s familiar guitar piece “Recuerdos de la Alhambra" - but this time its famously lush textures, pushed far up into the violin's range, sounded hauntingly lonely and sad. The final notes seemed to trail after Ning like a melancholy question mark.

Zander had paired the Brahms with another large-scale set-piece, Dvořák's rarely-heard Symphony No. 7 (yes, two symphonies before he went to the New World). The piece has a reputation as "one of the greatest symphonies you've never heard," and Zander proved the saying true with one of his trademarked barn-storming performances. This conductor loves the colossal, of course, and has a special talent for grand clashes, and you get all that in spades in the Dvořák Seventh. The symphony is an affecting paean to the political struggles of the composer's homeland - it's shot through with both pride and foreboding, and features the usual (for Dvořák) cornucopia of memorable tunes, and even a mad kind of waltz in its middle.

Zander (who's rather like the David Lean of local conductors) handled all this with both a gripping sense of command and a nearly-brimming sense of emotion, and the players, who clearly adore their conductor in his high mode, responded with almost overwhelmingly energy. The symphony's final peroration sounded something like an orchestral shout of triumph. It was hard to imagine a more compelling version of a piece that deserves far more attention than it receives.