Mamet in the middle

It's always painful watching a really terrible production, but it's positively excruciating watching good actors suffer through a bad play that's been directed even more badly.  You can see the realization that they're bombing slowly register in their eyes, but of course it's not their fault - and none of the actual perpetrators of the disaster are on hand to take the blame, either.  That awareness may be what makes the New Rep production of Boston Marriage, a play that I can only describe as David Mamet's misbegotten love child with Oscar Wilde, particularly agonizing - sitting through it is like watching three talented actresses slowly crucified before your eyes.  And unlike Jesus, who only had to go the distance once, these ladies are going to have to endure this artistic Golgotha six times a week.

Frankly, it's even painful to review a bomb like this, but . . .  well, I thought about skipping out on my duty last night, but today I figured, "Oh, just hold your breath, Garvey, and write it as fast as you can."  So here goes nothing.

Okay, first things first - who's to blame.  Perp #1 is David Mamet (above left) who in mid-career supposedly decided to pen a riposte to critics who claimed he couldn't write roles for women.  But instead of contradicting their argument, he confirmed it.  For the "characters" (and I use that term loosely) of Boston Marriage are certainly not women.  I'm not sure what they are, to be honest - the closest thing I can come up with is "Henny Youngman's idea of gay men in Edwardian drag."  For not only did Mamet decide to shake up his career crisis by writing for women, he also chose to write in a style he thought of as a facsimile of Edwardian wit, although it comes off as a florid undergraduate spoof of something said undergraduate doesn't really understand (and perhaps has a secret contempt for).  Somehow I get the impression the playwright thought hilarity would ensue from simply mentioning words like "reticule" and "rodomontade" - that is when the audience wasn't rolling in the aisles from jokes like "I was stroking your muff when your parts came."  But what can I say, he was so wrong.  I admit some of these lines do get laughs, but they're of the "OMG, that's the weirdest one yet!" variety.  (Fans of The Room take note - it occurs to me you could really enjoy this production.)

But anyway - I swore I'd write this as fast as I could.  So - the plot is about conniving lesbians.  Okay?  'Nuff said!

On to Perp #2 - Kate Warner, artistic director of the New Rep.  WHAT was she thinking?? We thought she had an erring eye when she chose Mister Roberts for her opener last season, but now I'm beginning to wonder if she doesn't have a kind of fever that comes on annually, and only affects her play choice for September.  For it bears mentioning, I think, that Boston Marriage has been seen twice already in the Boston area - once at the A.R.T., and once at Merrimack - and nobody has been asking to see it again (particularly not the people who saw it the first time).   I'm not about to give up on Ms. Warner - there were several good shows at the New Rep last spring; but I would advise subscribers to stick to the offer that allows you to choose your own plays - and give a thought to red-pencilling the one in September.

Finally, Perp #3 - director David Zoffoli.  Wow, where to begin.  Zoffoli inflates this logorrheic bamboozlement into a two-hour skit that might have shamed Carol Burnett and Ryan Landry.  I've heard from other critics that with a lighter touch, the script is more bearable - not actually good, but bearable.  But here everything is telegraphed, or over-acted, or even flat-out shouted; the actresses literally brace themselves at times, legs planted far apart, the better to holler at each other from opposite ends of the overlit, gargantuan set.   I'm not kidding when I say I've never seen anything like this on a professional stage.  It's up there (or down there) with the worst pieces of direction I've ever encountered in my life.  (Just as an aside, while the design of the show is quite bizarre, it does all kind of hang together; the designers did their job, such as it is.)

As for the actresses - well, connoisseurs of the arcane may find some intrigue in the fact that as Mamet's warring lesbians, Debra Wise and Jennie Israel are both incredibly broad and campy, but in slightly different keys.  Wise is  entirely presentational, while poor Israel looks like she's being forced to violate something like a characterization.  Both are very good actresses generally, so nobody should hold this show against them, but it is interesting to note their contrasting body language as the deadly shenanigans grind into their second hour: Israel looks increasingly guilty, Wise all the more determined to survive, no matter what.  Meanwhile sidekick Melissa Baroni is just as schticky, but as she's playing schtick to begin with, she probably comes off the best of the three.

At any rate, eventually the show does end - and the run will, too, eventually.  There's a light at the end of the tunnel for everyone.  So here's to you, ladies!  And now I have to go have a drink.

That which does not kill us only makes us stronger! the talented actresses of Boston Marriage agree.

Make a bee-line to this Putnam County

Life is pandemonium at the Lyric Stage with the cast of "Putnam County."

This is, I think, Boston's third annual rendition of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (I guess it's a natural for the Athens of America), but the iterations of the show have so far all been champions, with the latest version (at the Lyric Stage through October 2) quite possibly the strongest yet. There's nothing really new in director Stephen Terrell's staging, but this bee still has more sting than its predecessors - the satire is sharper (and sometimes a bit broader), the sense of frustrated youth a little stronger - the bully is a little meaner, the over-achiever even more of a pressure-cooker. This could be reason enough to see the show, if it weren't for the simple talent of the cast, which is as easily as strong as that of the national tour. Director Terrell is a big mucky-muck at Emerson, and has cherry-picked from its graduating class several age-appropriate rising stars; add to that a few thespians who have played their roles at other regional theatres, and a turn from an actress who did the show on Broadway, and you have one of the best casts I've ever seen at the Lyric - and in vocal terms one of the best casts I've seen locally, period. (All the better showcased because this particular theatre still valiantly refuses to mike its performers - thank you.)

Of course, even in the best of hands, there's only so far the relentless quirk of Putnam County can take you. (We're not talking South Pacific here.) And director Terrell has unwisely decided against an intermission - which makes the stasis of the situation, when added to the relative lack of variation in composer William Finn's clever but repetitive songs, begin to feel almost as long as - well, an actual spelling bee. Still, Rachel Sheinkin's book is always wittily observant of its white, New Age milieu (no Tea Partiers in this crowd, that's for sure). And we always have the reliable Will McGarrahan to distract us as the slightly-weird vice principal with the deadpan definitions and sample sentences, along with the appealing Kerri Jill Garbis as his perky foil. Rounding out the "grown-up" cast, De'Lon Grant likewise made a believably pissed-off parolee doing community service as a juicebox-equipped "grief counselor."

If the adults were admirable, however, the kids were even cooler; each seemed just about perfectly cast and delivered ace characterizations and vocals (although sometimes I wasn't sure I could bear any more adorability from Leaf Coneybear). So here's to Sam Simahk (the unfortunately tumescent Chip), Lexie Fennell Frare (a super-sensitive Logainne), Michael Borges (an aggressively vulnerable Leaf), Daniel Vito Siefring (a surprisingly nasty William Bar-fay), Lisa Yuen (a sad class-superstar Marcy), and Krista Buccellato (a sweetly longing Olive): you guys are as good as Boston musical theatre gets.  I wasn't sure we needed another trip to Putnam County, but you made it more than worthwhile.

The pleasures of alt cliché

That destabilizing man-thang gets a workout in "The Kids Are Alright."

Guess what - I saw another movie! And it was actually enjoyable, even if it was completely predictable. The movie was The Kids Are Alright, the lesbian-couple comedy which people had been recommending to me for weeks, because I'm gay and everything. I'm not sure why I dragged my feet on seeing it, but perhaps I feared it might be "gay" in the same way that Glee is "gay" - i.e., designed to make suburbanites like Joel Brown and Ty Burr proud of themselves for being down with the gay thing. Also, why not cast lesbians as the lesbians? I wondered. BUT, when you're looking for a movie - unlike when you're looking for a show - you often have only one (and sometimes no) choice, particularly when your partner won't sit through anything too grim or too gross, like Lebanon. Which is why we basically only see movies when the latest Pixar is out.


To be honest, my gay antennae did crackle occasionally during Kids, for all its good intentions. The straight sex, for instance, is shot with a refreshing dash of raunch, but the, uh, lezzie licking occurs beneath a heavy blanket - while the girls watch gay man-porn, of all things. Hmmm. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and I guess that's what you get when you cast Warren Beatty's main squeeze as a lesbian. Points to director Lisa Cholodenko, though, for choosing clips from The Best of Colt (at left), perhaps my fave old-school beefcake series. And I did enjoy creating my own "In a world where" Kendall-style trailer for the film during this sequence ("In a world where heterosexuals have sex in broad daylight, but homosexuals only do it under heavy blankets . . .").

Still, despite such occasional misgivings, I admit I was largely charmed by The Kids Are Alright, because it did two things very well: it updated a classic melodramatic set-up quite cleverly, and it featured some really terrific screen acting. The classic set-up is that of the romantic interloper (or the fox in the henhouse, if you will). Here, a comfortable, but inevitably somewhat discontented, yuppie/hippie couple (Annette Bening as the yuppie, Julianne Moore as the hippie) who have raised two teen-aged kids together find themselves face-to-face with their anonymous sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo) - whom the kids have sought out.

So far, so good. And I confess that as the movie's set-up had clearly been lifted from Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, I hoped that Kids might have a drop or two of that classic's subversive zing. Alas, I must report, this was not to be; the movie might as well be called The Bourgeoisie Are Alright, because director Lisa Cholodenko shies away from really developing any of the conflicts latent in her material. The teenage boy's search for a father figure, the women's frustrations and longing for sexual freedom, the donor's manipulation of his Whole Foods hunk-dentity (indeed the whole question of the seductive, destabilizing masculine principle vs. the nurturing, stifling feminine one ) - these themes are hinted at, but always kept partially under wraps. Cholodenko skates gently over our awareness of them instead, expecting us to fill in the gaps she and co-writer Stuart Blumberg never actually write scenes for. But if Kids isn't exactly subversive, it's still very knowing, and its character's flaws and blind spots - as well as the gentle New Age afflatus of their self-aware conversation - are observed with the accuracy of a laser (the teen-aged boy is even called "Laser," while the girl's named after Joni Mitchell!).

Which leads to the movie's second great strength - its acting. This is the kind of film that makes you wish the Academy Awards gave out a statuette for Best Ensemble; the three leads are each simply perfect (although maybe I'd give the great Annette Bening, who is overdue for an Oscar, a slight edge among equals), with the two teens, Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska, only a small step behind. Here the performances fill in, minute by minute, the contradictory richness that the script leaves out in its scramble to affirm family values at the finish - a finish which is sweet, by the way, but might be even sweeter if it had been more hard-won.

But of course then we might lose sight of the movie's "See, gays are just like us!" subtext; perhaps the culture's not yet at a point at which filmmakers can give alternative hypocrisy quite the shake-down that Renoir gave straight society. But The Kids Are Alright still serves as an entertaining way-station on that cultural journey.

The houndtrap

The Publick Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (at left) is perhaps almost too smart for its own good. And maybe not quite sharp enough for its own good.

Which isn't to say this Hound isn't friendly; it's just never frisky, despite the efforts of a large chunk of Boston's best theatrical talent. The central problem is that director Diego Arciniegas has weighted the script with a rather heavy sense of its own intellectual importance - he heightens the shadow of the Theatre of the Absurd, and draws out (while actually slightly obscuring) the script's inter-textuality, and has even updated the look of Stoppard's play-within-the-play to the inter-sexuality, if you will, of Charles Ludlam. And Arciniegas has made Stoppard's meta-play so very thoroughly meta that he has even thrown in an intermission, at which I found myself peeing next to one of the script's "critics" in the john. (I admit I felt my performance of the role at that moment had an urgency his lacked.)

But clever as he is, Arciniegas seems to have forgotten that the dramatic engine of this one-act (and despite its dilation into two acts here, Hound is most definitely a one-act) is a snarky parody of Agatha Christie - her moth-eaten classic The Mousetrap in particular, which I think is still running in London after 58 years (Stoppard even ridicules, and therefore ruins, the old Dame's big twist). Yes, yes, the script is chock-a-block with then-up-to-the-minute theatrical ideas; but Hound should scamper through them like a puppy, as it's basically a long-form skit, not a seminar.

Thus, while this may be the most self-conscious Hound I've ever seen, it was far from the funniest. You could have driven a hearse through many of its cues, and to be honest, only a few in the talented cast were at their polished best. Just in case you've never seen it, the script's hook is the slow interpolation of a pair of critics (called, in classic Stoppardese, "Birdboot" and "Moon") into a ghastly murder mystery they're supposed to be reviewing. But I was surprised to see Arciniegas going easy on my benighted profession (although I know, I know, I don't really act like a professional). In any real Boston update of Hound, of course, at least one of the print critics would have to be female (the sex talk could still work, just make her from The Edge) - but even beyond that, the roles are quite a bit more wicked fun than William Gardiner and Barlow Adamson seemed to realize (and Arciniegas didn't really differentiate his critical Didi and Gogo enough, either).

Meanwhile, up on "stage," there was fine, ghoulish work from Sheridan Thomas as the aptly-named Mrs. Drudge, who does both the literal and dramatic drudgery (a typical line: "Muldoon Manor, one morning in early spring"), and the amusingly over-poised Georgia Lyman as the deathly attractive lady of the house.  Meanwhile Gabriel Kuttner and Danny Bryck knew what they were doing, but hadn't quite given it their own spin yet, and on the sidelines some supporting roles looked even more under-rehearsed.  The effectively funereal set was by Dahlia Al-Habieli, and the atmospheric (if occasionally intrusive) lighting was by Jeff Adelberg.

But one last nitpick: at a famous hinge-point in Hound, Stoppard has one of his critics actually step onto the stage to answer a telephone that's mysteriously ringing (even though we know the line has been cut) - at which point all ontological hell breaks loose, and the critics are suddenly "embedded" in the play they've been watching.  Here, however, Arciniegas has his scribbler answer his cell at the last moment - a funny jab at local reviewers who forget to turn off their digital devices, it's true; but doesn't this subtly undermine Stoppard's intent?  I thought so; a better solution to the problem of "updating" this moment of inter-text (if it must be updated) might be to have the critic's cell ring first, and then be "taken over," as it were, by the phone onstage.  Just a thought from Mr. Moon here.

Lost in the labyrinth with Christopher Nolan (Part I)

Our fandom, like our politics, has become steadily more polarized - but few directors  have been quite as controversial as Christopher Nolan, the blockbuster auteur responsible for Memento, The Dark Knight, and now Inception, the sleeper (in more ways than one) of the summer.

Indeed, as A.O. Scott famously pointed out, Nolan by now is so polarizing that an online flame war broke out over Inception before the movie even opened - this after a tsunami of threats and rants had washed over the Internet when the critics (and the Academy Awards) didn't rate The Dark Knight as highly as the sages of Ain't It Cool News had. Within days a conventional wisdom had coalesced that Nolan could be counted on to pull in the big bucks, but simultaneously divide moviegoers into factions about as affectionate as the Shi'ites and the Sunnis.

Things didn't start out that way. Nobody even saw the director's first feature, Following (except me, it seems), but everybody loved Memento, the "backwards" thriller about a man suffering from a rare memory disorder. And everyone went batty over Batman Begins, Nolan's clever resuscitation of a comic franchise that had turned cartoonish.

But then came The Dark Knight and Inception - Nolan's biggest hits yet - and soon battle lines had been drawn between those who insisted these movies were masterpieces (but were hard pressed to explain exactly why), and those reviewers who found them brilliantly realized, but strangely empty - and dramatically pointless. The fanboys had an answer to these critics, however - they might not be able to "explain" Nolan's work, but someday it would be explained, just as the films of Stanley Kubrick survived initial critical drubbings to slowly reveal themselves as the great works they are.

In all this, however, little illuminating has been said about Inception - so I was surprised to discover, when I finally caught up with the movie a few weeks ago, that the most insightful critic of Inception may in fact be its director. For Christopher Nolan has embedded in his recondite magnum opus (which may be a masterpiece of its type, more on that later) a pretty accurate - and pretty obvious - guide to his own drives, methods, and meaning. This has happened before - Hitchcock, Lean, and Fellini all proffered exegeses of their own oeuvres in films as diverse as The Birds, Doctor Zhivago, and 8 1/2. It just took the critics years to catch up to these director's self-analyses.

But first things first - sorry, fanboys, Christopher Nolan is no Stanley Kubrick (at left, in HAL's memory bank), even if superficially both directors are drawn to themes that conceal their own contradiction. Or make that "even if Nolan is drawn over and over to a single theme, which, somewhat like Kubrick's many themes, contains within itself its own contradiction."

That theme, of course, is the reliability of subjectivity. Which leads me immediately to another misconception about Inception (one the movie promulgates itself): Nolan's film is in no serious way about dreams or dreaming. The director may import his lead character's dead wife into his "dreams," but she's essentially window-dressing on a plot that has nothing like the logic of a dream, with a symbology that's utterly unresonant, and never psychologically disturbing. Indeed, the movie's supposed nightmares are hopeless kitsch - they play as out-takes from action flicks as various as The Matrix and Where Eagles Dare (as the dreaming gets "deeper," the movies get more old-school). "Dreaming" merely serves the film as what Hitchcock would have called its "MacGuffin." Indeed, Nolan hardly bothers explaining how, in even the most general way, a dream could be shared by several people, much less "architected" (what, precisely, could Ellen Page's "dream architect" be "architecting" a dream from?). In speculative fiction, these kinds of logistical lacunae are generally covered by references to some leap in technology or theory - like Star Trek's "warp drive" - but Nolan doesn't even bother to nod in that direction, because he knows that we know his movie is really about something else entirely.

For the film's true "leap" is not into the dream world but rather the virtual one. Without ever saying so aloud, Nolan exploits with Inception a presumptive mind-set that has already taken hold in his audience - that the digital realm of video games and the Internet is a genuine subjective experience we can fruitfully compare to dreaming (just as we're now supposed to believe Sandman is on a continuum with War and Peace). This sleight-of-hand may be what many critics, with their memory of the "thick" psychological themes you used to be able to expect in "cinema" (such as that of, say, Stanley Kubrick), have responded to with such ire; you can feel Nolan in one fell swoop superficializing a huge swath of movie culture, and maybe the culture in general. Remember those episodes of Futurama in which people found companies were advertising in their dreams? Well, that would hardly matter if the dream itself were no more than an overblown heist movie.

So the thinness of Inception's conception of "dreaming" is of a piece with its actual subject, the online world of mediated experience.  And unsurprisingly, that world dovetails with Nolan's personal obsessions.  Remember how earlier I mentioned that the director was his own best critic? Well, what I had in mind was an early scene in Inception in which Leonardo DiCaprio asks Ellen Page's dream architect to come up with a maze - a really tough one; she responds with a sketch of a circular labyrinth - like the kind that Theseus faced (so it's no surprise her name is "Ariadne").  In a movie that's generally utterly flat in its affect, this one gesture struck me with sudden resonance. For of course Inception itself is structured as a kind of double circular maze - its heroes descend deeper and deeper into "dreams" with "dreams", while the movie itself is edited into a  circular labyrinth of possible narratives, some (or all) of which lead to dead ends.

And just by the way, the circular maze counts as a metaphor for much of Nolan's oeuvre as well; in a way, it's his signature. People were mistaken, for instance, to imagine that Memento, his breakout movie, was structured "backwards" - indeed, when fans watched the scenes in reverse on their DVD players, some were dismayed to discover that the narrative didn't quite "add up" as it should. This is because Memento was actually constructed as a kind of circular maze, with scenes nestled within each other like Russian dolls - every time the hero "woke up" into an earlier time frame, we got a bit more of his surrounding circumstances. There are echoes of the technique in The Dark Knight as well - although in that paranoid opus, we never got to "wake up" into an awareness that might have explained its relentlessly bleak events.

In "Inception," even Paris folds in on itself.

In the case of Inception, the maze of Theseus has added resonance in that it's also reminiscent of recursion, the looping process central to programming, in which a function takes itself as its subject, then takes the resulting "subject" as its next "subject," and so on and on to infinity - or until some bound is reached. (In Inception, that "bound," I suppose, is the strange state of "limbo" which - in my interpretation - begins, ends, and encapsulates the whole narrative.) And for the techno-savvy, that resonance derives from their nervous sense that even our shared "reality" is just a way-station on a spiraling loop heading down (or up) into "limbo," too. To them, we are all like Leo DiCaprio's Cobb (we just don't know it). In short, Nolan hooks the fanboys by aping, in cinematic form, a mindset they use constantly in work and play, and which, as a result, they tend to project as the organizing principle of the universe. Therefore pointing out the superficiality of Nolan's narrative looping isn't just a piece of criticism - it's an attack on a mode of being, an entire way of life.

But can that way of life actually yield anything that we might think of as genuine "art"? More on that paradox - and others - in the second part of this posting.

War Horse, Spielberg, and the wooden O

War Horse (above, a promotional clip that gives some sense of the power of its puppetry) is scheduled for March 2011 on Broadway - and I anticipate a response like the mobbed performances us old-timers remember from the tour of Nicholas Nickleby some twenty-five years ago. The arrival of the National Theatre blockbuster, followed by the much-anticipated residency of the Royal Shakespeare Company later that summer, will no doubt revive the persistent sense that American theatre lags behind its British cousin - indeed, the fact that the RSC is building a facsimile of its own digs in the Park Avenue Armory (below) only reinforces this impression with an added, subliminal message, "Not only do we have to show you Yanks how it's done, but we have to bring our own theatre to do it."



And let's be honest: there's a great deal of truth behind that impression; I admit I haven't seen anything on the American stage for several years that equals the eloquent power of War Horse. No new musical has come close, and even the considerable firepower of August: Osage County seems to flicker in comparison. War Horse isn't perfect - its second half drags a bit, due to a lengthy extension of its pacifist metaphor; but for all of its first half - and of course for its finale - it's just about peerless.

But precisely what is it peerless at? you may ask - Isn't it really just a children's story, a kind of inflated version of "Lassie Come Home"? And what does it have to tell us - that war is horrible? I think we already know that!

These points are well taken, of course; there's little that's thematically novel or striking in War Horse. What is unforgettable about it is not its message but the means of its artistry, and how those means are linked to the primal basis of theatre. To revive a much-repeated phrase, in War Horse, the medium is the message. Its meaning is embedded in its presentation on the stage.



To understand why this is so, ponder (for a moment) the fact that upon seeing the production, Steven Spielberg immediately optioned the book for the silver screen - in fact he's shooting his version right now, on location outside Devon, England (left). But of course he's using real horses, and real soldiers, for what sounds like an equine version of Saving Private Ryan (for his script, he ditched the stage adaptor for the screenwriters of Love, Actually and Billy Elliot). I heard quite a few people discussing the film in the West End theatre where I saw War Horse; they all agreed it simply wouldn't be the same thing as the unforgettable stage version we'd just witnessed.

But what precisely would be missing? For make no mistake, the Spielberg War Horse will be a masterful tearjerker. It will also no doubt be spectacular; I'm sure no expense will be spared in the reconstruction of the No Man's Land between the British and German trenches of World War I, in which the eponymous "war horse," Joey, almost meets his doom. The story will be "brought to life" in a way that will be utterly convincing in every detail. And yet when fans of the theatre piece think of the pushy, obvious sentiment and grandiose illusionism Spielberg is known for, they almost reflexively curl their lips.

Part of this reaction, of course, is testament to the power of understatement - for the National Theatre's War Horse is careful (at least until its finale) to avoid milking its material. The production is intentionally rough around the edges, the characters hard, and hardly lovable - and the bond between boy and horse that is the spine of the play takes its time to develop, and so is all the more believable once it has developed.

All that, of course, may not be evidence of actual artistic virtue but rather a form of canny commercial sophistication, of a type Mr. Spielberg doesn't, and perhaps cannot, share; I'd wager the makers of War Horse knew quite well that sentiment is most savory when it's hard-won. I can only say - give me that kind of commercial sophistication over Spielberg's phony dreamland any day.

No, wait - I can say more (of course). What kept coming back to me during War Horse was the fact that its horse-puppets (designed by South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company), though utterly convincing in their incredibly detailed motion, were nevertheless always and obviously puppets - you could see right through their transparent skins, in fact, to the men nestled inside, pulling every lever and turning every gear, and bracing for the moment when some actor or other would leap onto their shoulders for a ride. The "horses" existed in two perceptive "valences," if you will - one as machine, and another as living, breathing - yet imaginary - being.

The same dichotomy prevailed throughout the scenery-free production (the motif of which was rough sketches done by the young hero), although in its circular playing space - its postmodern "wooden O" - War Horse powerfully evoked the vasty fields of France (and England) just as Shakespeare did in Henry V. Indeed, in the famous prologue to that play, the Bard put his finger on the artistic crux of the theatre - "Let us," the Chorus pleads, "ciphers to this great accompt / on your imaginary forces work."

Ah, our imaginary forces - how much more powerful imagination can be than mere illusion! And how powerful, and mysteriously rich, are the sensory experiences we summon from within ourselves! Evocation is so much more potent than illusion, in fact, that the theatre need make no apology for its supposed paucity before the blandishments of cinema. I can believe that Spielberg's War Horse will be shattering, and stunning, and all those other things movies have wanted to be since cinematic history began. But will it stir our imaginations? Somehow I doubt it, because film, at least these days, inevitably strives to impress rather than evoke.

And the engagement of imagination is what theatre will always have "over" the silver screen. Which isn't to say movies can never manage the same trick - but it takes a lot; the movie screen is famously "flat" unless it's goosed along with music, effects, and superb editing and camera placement; unless a director can induce a kind of dream-state in the audience, his film will be stillborn. Oddly enough, truly evocative magic is often conjured in film by simulating the conventions of the theatre - think of Citizen Kane with its deep-focus, stage-like spaces in which the Mercury Theatre actors move; even the jumps between close-up and panorama which we think of as essentially cinematic are actually perceptual outgrowths of Shakespeare's fluid shifts from pageant to soliloquy to aside. (Intriguingly, when War Horse wants to tamp down its evocative wattage, and simply impress us with its carnage, it resorts to slow-motion "cinematic" sequences.)

But why is film so flat-footed next to theatre? Oddly, it may have something to do with the fact that in theatre, the mechanical apparatus - the valence of "actuality" - is always obvious. You can see the strings on the puppets, and the men inside the horse - we are aware of the live presence of the magician, and our connection to him. In movies, by way of contrast, the strings are hidden, and the illusion complete - but this makes the illusion impenetrable, and unengaging; in effect, we have to be lulled to a kind of perceptual sleep to be moved by it, to "accept" its fantasy as our own. But in theatre, we can remain wide awake while dreaming, and that fact makes theatre incredibly freeing, and thrilling, when done right - and it can be done right with unbelievably simple means.

The resulting effects, however, are anything but simple; they can include so much more than cinema can achieve. An electrifying scene in War Horse, for example, is the one in which the young lad Albert finally teaches the growing Joey to accept a rider; the sequence wraps with a wild gallop on horseback - something that you'd think is "beyond" the capability of the theatre to evoke. Yet in War Horse, the audience experienced not only the thrill of forward motion - a staple of the cinema, from The Great Train Robbery to Avatar - but also so much more: we felt the rush of the wind, and the surge of the horse's body, even the pounding of our own lungs. And that's because we weren't dreaming - we were living.

Shakespeare at Stratford

For the American theatre-lover, the Stratford Festival right now feels like some sort of theatrical Promised Land, just across Lake Erie, where huge casts (with live music!) perform complicated, challenging versions of the canon almost entirely free of the various strains of cant emanating from New York, Chicago, and the academy. None of the three Shakespeare productions I saw - As You Like It, The Tempest(at left), and The Winter's Tale - were among the very best I've seen the Festival do (all the greatest Shakespeare I've ever seen has been either in Britain or Canada). But all three kept me engaged with their ideas, emotion, and, to be honest, old-fashioned staging prowess - and I left seeing at least one of the plays (As You Like It) in a new light. I'm not sure how America lost its way, but after this and my recent trip to London, I'm beginning to wonder why, exactly, Americans have such a problem producing classical theatre.

Part of that problem, of course, is that in the States we think of classical theatre as "a problem." How are we going to save it? is the constant cry, which of course inevitably leads to surgical solutions which flirt with killing the patient.

Compare to Stratford, where over and over again, I was struck by how the actors - speaking lines that are literally four hundred years old - easily connected with the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if that connection were a simple thing - obvious, even.

I suppose the reasons for this miracle are myriad. In Canada, the connection between acting for the stage and acting for the screen was never severed, as it was here. The Canadian educational culture likewise hangs onto the rudder of tradition - kids still learn Shakespeare in Canada; I'll never forget watching The Taming of the Shrew with 1500 high schoolers in the Festival Theatre and realizing they were catching every joke, following every line.

And somehow Canadians aren't paralyzed the way Americans are in the cross-hairs of puritanism and prurience, and thus are more easy-going about the body (and their own humanity); in the Stratford A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for example, the Roman statues sported hilariously huge schlongs, and I remember in a Molière production a decade ago, a woman nonchalantly breast-fed her baby in the background; bare bums, bare boobs, and full frontal have crossed Stratford stages, and in an earlier Tempest, Caliban even completed his self-humiliation (on the line "Come, kiss!") by burying his face in Stephano's butt. (The audience just went "Ewwww!" and the show went on.) Even this year, Touchstone groped Audrey (to her bemusement) in As You Like It, and various nookies were tickled in Dangerous Liaisons without anyone batting an eye; the evil Diane Paulus would have no sway over these people.

Of course a deeper factor at work is simple experience; Christopher Plummer, who essayed Prospero this season, tore through several Shakespearean leads at Stratford in the 60's. Ben Carlson, this year's Leontes, has already done Brutus and Hamlet; when Lucy Peacock galumphed onstage as Audrey, I suddenly realized I'd first seen her at Stratford in 1988, as Helena (she's been there most years since). Other veterans abounded, including Tony-winner Brent Carver (one of the few actors ever to triumph as Hamlet, Tevye, and the Pirate King), Martha Henry, the great Seana McKenna, Tom McCamus, John Vickery, and Geraint Wyn Davies, while a "new" (or at least "newish") generation - including Dion Johnstone, Sarah Topham, Yanna McIntosh, and Bruce Dow - began to take pride of place in leading (or larger) roles. That's another joy of attending Stratford, btw - unlike in the tiny, faux "repertory" company at the A.R.T., you can actually see actors arrive, mature, achieve greatness, and move on at Statford.



Ben Carlson sees the errors of his ways too late in The Winter's Tale.

But back to the productions themselves. All successfully integrated what you might call "mass appeal" with sophisticated insights. Marti Maraden's Winter's Tale was the most traditional of the three. Maraden didn't try to "solve" the play's central problem - how to explain the sudden, psychotic jealousy of its protagonist, Leontes - but instead focused on subtly tying together the tragic and comic touches of this famously experimental play into a tone that pretty much worked throughout (believe it or not). She was helped by strong performances from Yanna McIntosh as the victimized Hermione, Seana McKenna (of course) as a subtly funny Paulina, and a consummately wry turn from Tom Rooney as the thieving Autolycus. I didn't quite buy lead Ben Carlson (above) as the haunted, vulpine Leontes of the first half - but his repentance in the second half proved quite moving; this was one Winter's Tale in which the restoration of the hero's happiness felt truly earned.


Brent Carver as Jacques pops right out of As You Like It.

Des McAnuff's almost-overstuffed production of As You Like It, by way of contrast, took a strikingly new perspective on its text: McAnuff seemed to approach the play not as a roundelay of romantic engagements but rather as a study in disengagement. Indeed, the avatar of the production was not Rosalind at all, but rather Brent Carver's Jacques, who at one point popped right out of the set design (above) as if to impress on us his importance. And Carver was an unusual Jacques, to boot - hardly dyspeptic or even particularly depressed, he was instead an utterly disinterested intellectual, as well as a dead ringer for René Magritte's famous Son of Man (at left - that apple made an appearance in the production, too).

At first I resisted this conceptual gambit, I admit - Magritte's imagery makes for rather a chill Forest of Arden - but it grew on me as the play progressed; for Magritte, that great questioner of all appearances (including, of course, the appearance of love) is not so far in spirit from the questioning spirit animating almost everyone in the play at some point. If McAnuff had managed to somehow conjure a real tension between his vision for Jacques and Shakespeare's vision of Rosalind, he might have come up with an As You Like It for the history books. But alas, he had a bright, clever, but somewhat mechanical Rosalind in Andrea Runge, and if no one in Arden is believably in love, there's not much to really question, is there. Still, there was good character work around the edges of the show, not just from Carver but also from Lucy Peacock (a definitive Audrey, frankly), Cara Ricketts (a mischievous Celia) and Randy Hughson (a delightfully droll Corin). And the design team had clearly gone into overdrive on this one, producing one striking image after another (below).


A cold, but beautiful, Forest of Arden in As You Like It.

Finally, there was the production that probably was responsible for bringing the crowds back to Stratford this year (the weekend I attended, virtually everything was sold out): The Tempest, starring the eighty-year-old Christopher Plummer as Prospero. And I'm here to report that, yes, Mr. Plummer is still a consummate stage magician, although on the night I attended he was clearly husbanding his energies for his big moments (which including a memorable "Ye elves of hills" and a quietly heartbreaking "Please you, draw near"). Elsewhere, a deft touch was consistently in evidence - his was a crustily witty Prospero, and one designed to make light of the role's latterday revision into colonial oppressor, even though director McAnuff seemed most interested in the political aspects of the play (his Miranda, Trish Lindstrom, was a kind of sturdy, knockabout utopian).

This dodging of political correctness was all the more unusual in that McAnuff had cast an African-American, Dion Johnstone (one of a rising number of actors of color at Stratford these days) as Caliban (right), and an Asian woman, Julyana Soelyistyo, as Ariel (at top). These choices didn't seem to translate into an aesthetic of identity politics, however - as they would almost inevitably in America. Instead, Johnstone's Caliban was depicted not as sentimental colonial victim but as something close to Shakespeare's terrible vision - a flawed creature both power-hungry and yet eager to serve somebody as slave. (Today we often forget that Caliban has no vision of "freedom," as Ariel does; he simply wants to trade Prospero for Stephano.) Johnstone was close to an ideal Caliban, I thought, and while Soelyisto was hardly a musical Ariel, she was a dazzling acrobatic one; her opening gambit - "swimming" some thirty feet straight down from the top of the Festival Theatre to the stage, to retrieve Prospero's magic book from the ocean floor - was one stage image I will always remember.

Other moments of literal magic dotted the show (although the design was otherwise almost too restrained), but there were gaps in the acting among the courtiers that held the production back from greatness. And while Bruce Dow made a rather originally simpering - and obviously gay - Trinculo, Geraint Wyn Davies offered only a solid, rather than an inspired, Stephano (he didn't seem quite sure how to play off Dow, who therefore simply chewed the scenery, albeit with consummate skill). Still, this was a Tempest of uncommon clarity and depth - in which McAnuff delineated cleanly and beautifully the recurrent motif of power struggle that serves as the spine of this exquisitely meditative play. I'm not sure when I'll see its like again.