How do you debate a liar? Obama better learn . . .

I wish people would begin to see Obama's "lackluster" performance in the first debate as what it was: something like shell-shock before what may be the most brazenly dishonest performance in recent political history - and yes, this is even taking into account the usual fibs and stretches we normally expect from political candidates.  The sad fact is that Mitt Romney got up before a national television audience and simply lied about his ideas, his proposals, and his  platform, as well as Obama's first term and platform, and was never called on any of it.

At last people are beginning to realize this, I think - or at least the Wall Street Journal is getting nervous about it, which is surely a good sign.  The question is, how does Obama counter it?  To be honest, his weak spot as a political tactician has always been his apparent trust in his ability to find common ground, to get to the facts of the case, to build a reasonable coalition based on truth.

But to be blunt - with the Republicans, that ain't never gonna happen, Barry!  So take a page from Joe Biden's play book, why dontcha - just don't respect Romney's b.s. anymore.  And you'll have to somehow prepare for a "debate" in which your opponent continually denies his own positions.  (An interesting intellectual quandary, surely!)

Meanwhile, to everyone else who cares about this country - the next time someone describes Mitt Romney as a "flip-flopper," stop and correct them.  Mitt Romney is a liar.

Double, double, this Macbeth is in trouble

Allyn Burrows reacts to slashing something - maybe the text?

I don't know why, but Macbeth seems to drive the Actors' Shakespeare Project crazy.  Their last version of it was an all-female free-for-all that cut the play to ribbons and was pretty much completely incoherent.  And while there are some boys on stage this time, once again a strange kind of feminine hysteria hovers over the production, and needless to say, the play has been cut to ribbons and is pretty much completely incoherent.

Sigh.  Local affection for actress Paula Plum, who directed this disaster (for the record, I love her as much as anybody as an actress) will no doubt lead to misleadingly positive notices for this turkey.  But I'm warning you, do not believe her middle-aged fanboys!  This talented lady is over her head here, I'm afraid, and her dude-posse - yeah, nice guys all, I know - should really be reviewing the Patriots rather than Shakespeare.

I will admit there's a method to Plum's madness - let's call it back-story mania. And the back-story she has made the backbone of her Macbeth is Lady M's, not her hubby's.  Now decades ago, when I was in college, the question "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" was considered evidence of amusing aesthetic naiveté.  But basically that's the question Plum has built her production around.

For those not familiar with this particular text, that notorious query stems from one stanza that sticks out from Lady's M's murderous suggestions to Macbeth like a sore thumb (given that there are no kids in evidence at Dunsinane):

I have given suck, and know 
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, 
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn 
As you have done to this.

It's memorable, isn't it - and essentially evidence of Lady M's mad, willful stripping away of all feminine feeling.  She has already called on the fates to "un-sex" her, and elsewhere she taunts her husband with the jibe that a real man would have no problem committing murder.  Now she tells us her vaunting ambition has pushed her beyond even any maternal feeling (surely the deepest instinct of the species).

This being Shakespeare, of course, those lines resonate and echo throughout the play; part of what makes the canon great is the way in which its texts operate not merely as narratives but as webs of thematic investigation.  And here sterility and gender and power are at the center of Shakespeare's concerns - only not at all in the way Plum imagines.

For clearly the Macbeths' vanished spawn are yet another example of those Shakespearean lacunae (like the disappearance of the Fool in Lear) that are meant to tease us subconsciously; what's more, they're just one more facet of an incredibly wide mosaic: the Macbeths themselves may be sexy as hell, but they're childless, and so essentially sterile - while the Witches, Banquo tells us, are genderless: both men and women (and not quite either), they play with strangled babes, and the blood of animals that have eaten their litters.  Meanwhile Macduff, the only person who can kill Macbeth, is "not of woman born" (and he is only able to do so once his own children are slain, and thus he also has become "sterile").  And we note that Malcolm, who replaces Macbeth on the throne, is a virgin, "yet unknown to woman" - while Banquo's issue only joins the royal lineage once he himself is dead.

So the grim sterility of power is one of the cruxes of Macbeth - those among its characters who would tempt or tamper with the political fates are almost always "sterilized" as a result.  Perhaps Plum understands this, but she turns these concerns into a strange, neurotic back-story for Lady M that pulls focus from the actual drama and adds nothing to our understanding of the play.  She actually opens the production with a confusing funeral (later we realize it must have been for that babe who so tenderly milked our leading lady), and then keeps Lady M around in scenes she's not in, listening via radio to the battles of Act I (the production is set, to some positive effect, somewhere after - or during? - World War I).  But alas, the nuns who attended that initial interment stick around too, and turn out to be our Three Witches, and this proves a disastrous choice - nuns these days simply come with too much comic baggage, and of course Plum has to slash their lines to the bone to dodge all the pagan references, and keep her Catholic-school conceit going.

But then she can't keep her hands off the text in general - I'd say the play has been cut by a third; I actually lost track of all the great lines that are missing, even though incredibly, somehow the whole thing still clocks in at two and half hours!  (How'd they do that?)  What's more, Plum has re-arranged things at will, so sometimes missing speeches pop back in when you least expect them.  And needless to say, she has made several male characters, like Banquo and Macduff's son, female because - well, just because, you know, women and stuff!  Oh, and Banquo seems to be a Red Cross volunteer - what?

While watching all this, I admit I had no idea what Plum thought she was plumbing; luckily, she has provided her own exegesis in the program notes, where you can read that she was inspired by Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, which of course has absolutely nothing to do with Macbeth (but which did inspire Ken Russell's The Devils).  The director also writes that she was greatly influenced by a player piano she came across in the pit of the theatre.

O-kay!  No wonder Allyn Burrows, probably this troupe's most reliable actor, seems to have checked out as Macbeth until the last act (where he does finally show some life, to be fair). If only Mara Sidmore had followed suit - she's capable of a much better Lady M. than the melodramatic caricature Plum has drawn from her here; but then I get the impression she and her director were involved in a kind of folie à deux during rehearsal.  The witches, for their part, are helpless before their gi-normous wimples, but some of the boys get some traction when they're left alone. The skillful Richard Snee made a wry Porter, and James Andreassi understood that it's best to underplay Macduff's grief; meanwhile Ross MacDonald managed an intriguing (if minimal) profile as Ross.  The surprise was newcomer Edmund Donovan, who actually pulled off Malcolm's impossible speeches in Act 4.  Indeed, oddly, this trickiest of all scenes in Macbeth - which I've never actually seen work before - was probably the strongest sequence in this addled production.

You know, I'll vent a little further here, probably because I just saw an exciting production of Hamlet from London that featured actors no more talented than we have here in Boston.  Honestly, between Allyn Burrows, Ross MacDonald, James Andreassi, Edmund Donovan, Joel Colodner, Nigel Gore, Johnny Lee Davenport, Bill Barclay, Benjamin Evett, Richard Snee, Steven Barkhimer, Michael Forden Walker, Maurice Parent and Gabriel Kuttner, among others - not to mention Marianna Bassham, Marya Lowry, Obehi Janice, and Ms. Plum herself  - we have a fine troupe of Shakespeareans in Boston.  You could do just about every goddamn play in the canon with these people. So why can't ASP pull it together more often than they do???  Seriously, I'm just frustrated by now - how do these wacky, half-baked misfires keep happening? Clearly internal politics, bad castings, and variable direction often undo the troupe's best intentions.  Or is their very M.O. - that the actors call the shots - fundamentally flawed, perhaps actually as fallible as the model behind the ART's dreadful old director-driven Shakespearean train wrecks?  Can these good actors ever admit that they need better, stronger direction?  Oh, who knows - in the meantime, let's just blame Aldous Huxley, or maybe that player piano . . .

Trippingly on the tongue

Squaring off against Hamlet's own history?

As I left the Shakespeare's Globe production of Hamlet (at ArtsEmerson through next weekend), I wondered myself at how much I had enjoyed it.  This isn't the kind of thing I'm supposed to like - millennial in its attitudes, and thus somewhat flat and unevocative, and all but dripping with admiration for immaturity.  Usually this kind of thing makes me break out in hives.

My only excuse for being so tickled by this wicked-smart production is that it is, indeed, the smartest version of this warhorse (oh btw, be sure to catch War Horse, Metro readers!) that Boston has seen in ages.  Indeed, watching these actors scramble over their bare-bones set as they scamper through Shakespeare's bare-bones text, you realize just how coated and clogged Bostonian (and American) Shakespeare has become with pseudo-intellectual gunk.  We've suffered through the ministrations of the Method, and the orbiting low-end and high-end Big Apple bull of Joe Papp and Bob Brustein, and now the wacky conniptions of the Actors' Shakespeare Project - there has been just so much crap between us and Shakespeare!

Thank God that the raison d'être of Shakespeare's Globe is to bring audiences back to something like Shakespearean Ground Zero - literally, the actual ground of the old Globe (or as close as we can get to it), its actual stage, and the unadorned text.  And frankly, in this production they pretty much succeed at conveying that concept in shorthand (for better and worse), even if they can't recreate the original context of the play (indeed, sometimes this production's funny mood seems to derive from a sense of Hamlet as an ur-text floating in a certain quizzical postmodern frame).

But needless to say, there's a flip side to this achievement: many of the interpretive riches that have been mined from Hamlet by our long excavation of it are here tossed aside.  Young Michael Benz's bleach-blonde Prince dazzles us with a sense of contrarian, ironic brilliance let loose and running free; and witty commedia stagecraft supports his capers at every turn; but we sometimes pay for our fun by forgetting the emotional depths of Hamlet and his play.

Indeed, the text is consistently clipped to neutralize the prince's unconscious emotions, and likewise trim the complicating facets of the supporting cast; we essentially see everyone as Hamlet sees them.  And since he is here played as roughly sixteen or seventeen, there's much he doesn't perceive, despite his  high IQ. His mother is merely a cipher, for instance (rather than a psychological complex), and Polonius just a foolish old man, rather than our hero's doddering doppelgänger; likewise Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are clowns who play to the groundlings, who themselves probably never realize that in working out his revenge, Hamlet becomes the chief villain of Laertes' parallel tragedy.  Indeed, the famously complex dance between theatre (or should I say consciousness?) and reality that is perhaps the play's most haunting dimension is here simply a clever sight gag  - admittedly, a hilarious one, one of the production's many comic brilliances.

Then again, if you're going to evoke the first performances of one of the touchstones of Western culture, doesn't it also make sense to forget and forego all the exegesis to follow over the next four centuries?  Well - let's just say I appreciate that argument.  I also have some sympathy with the case for a very young Hamlet, as played here.  Although the standard version that we all read in high school nails Hamlet's age as thirty (yes, 30!), that's based on textual readings that some scholars have long called - well, at best unstable.

Okay, not to get bogged down in all this, but the chief evidences for Hamlet being thirty are the Gravedigger's famous lines in Act 5, in which he tells us he came to his post the very day that young Hamlet was born.  In most published versions, he says the following: "I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years." Which would make Hamlet thirty.

The trouble is that as printed in the First Folio the line actually reads: "I have bin sixeteene here, man and Boy thirty yeares."  Hmmm.  So did the Gravedigger actually say "sexton" (which makes sense in context) or "sixteen"?  And is Hamlet therefore 30, or a teenager?

Well, the Second Quarto text uses the word "sexten" rather than "sixeteene," which argues for "sexton" - but then the First Quarto omits the line entirely, but says that Yorick's skull has only lain in the earth twelve years, rather than the 23 years of the Folio (which would make Hamlet, yes, about 16).  So you see the problem - and that there's an argument either way.

A word more about that First, or "Bad" Quarto - it seems to figure in this production, even though it's called "Bad" for good reason: it's hilariously inaccurate and second-rate, and almost certainly derived from the poor memory of one of Shakespeare's players.  Yet intriguingly, some of its variant lines were spoken in this production instead of those from the standard version.

Here, for instance, is the standard take on the Ghost's entrance into Gertrude's closet:

Ghost: Do not forget: this visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose . . .

But onstage at Shakespeare's Globe, the Ghost muttered:

Hamlet, I once againe appear to thee / To put thee in remembrance of my death: 
Do not neglect, nor long time put it off . . .

"Do not neglect, nor long time put it off"?  Is this Shakespeare, or a memo from upper management?  And there were other textual oddities in this performance - mostly in the Players' scenes, it seemed to me.  Clearly the conceit here is to give us a Hamlet as it might have been performed before the text was clarified, and the First Folio printed (in 1623); but are the "Bad" Quarto lines even from Shakespeare's quill, and do they belong onstage without explicit explanation? (I'd argue "no.")

But enough Shakespeare geekery!  Even with a sixteen-year-old Hamlet, and even with the odd bad line from the "Bad" Quarto, I think you can still argue for more passion (even adolescent passion) in Hamlet than Shakespeare's Globe delivers (for the record, Michael Benz even got ironic laughs with his very last gasps, which is surely pushing it).   There are other gaps: the lovely Carlyss Peter is far too rosy an Ophelia to make her delicacy and madness credible, and Dickon Tyrrell wasn't nearly formidable enough as Claudius - oddly, however, his prayer speech was superb.

Which points up another winning aspect of this production - everyone but Benz doubles over and over again, so if they don't impress you in one role, they may score in another (Miranda Foster's Second Gravedigger is actually more compelling than her Gertrude, at left with Benz).  Add to that the fact that the cast sings and plays instruments well (Boston's own Bill Barclay, one of the brightest lights at ASP, arranged the music) and even dances (yep, all the dead people get up from the floor at the end and do a rueful, hearty jig, just as they did in Shakespeare's day) - and you find yourself liking everyone, even if maybe you don't like what they're doing at any particular moment (a curious twist on Brechtian distance, surely).

And you cannot deny that the production conjures a sensation we almost never feel anymore - the startling tumble of thought from Shakespeare's pen, the sensation of insight piling onto insight, of epigrams immediately enjambed with quips and quibbles, even as the virtual parchment of the text is sprayed with imaginary ink.  By simply conjuring the freshness of that incredible cascade, the Shakespeare's Globe team - and young Michael Benz - have surely earned themselves a worthy place in Hamlet's history.

Is Good People only good, or is it actually great? (Pre-occupied by Occupy, Part 2)

At home in Southie with Lindsay-Abaire's Good People. . .  Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

Craft is such a rare thing in a new play that whenever it appears, I feel (to quote a certain highly relevant author) that attention must be paid.  And I can't think of a better-crafted new play - at least in the past few years - than David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, which completes its run at the Huntington this weekend.  The drama's quality is slightly muted, I think, by a flawed production helmed (somewhat underwhelmingly) by Kate Whoriskey, whose P.C. pedigree (ART Institute, Lynn Nottage, et al.) probably explains her fumbling of Lindsay-Abaire's satiric valentine to the battered souls of Southie (whose denizens are his eponymous good people). Actually, for half the play Whoriskey can coast on the talent and experience of two of our best local actresses, who deliver an expert and fully-realized vision of the Southie sisterhood; it's when Lindsay-Abaire shifts his sights toward the western 'burbs that Whoriskey stumbles (she's from Harvard by way of Acton, a wealthy exurb with a median household income roughly twice Boston's).  Still, the dazzle of the Huntington's production values (and Alexander Dodge's deadly-accurate set) put over the second act for the most part, and perhaps even highlight some of the script's less-obvious strengths.

Among these qualities (pardon me if I sound like I'm purring) are memorable characters and a realistic, recognizable milieu; a theme (remember those?); and what's more, a refreshingly current political resonance. That Lindsay-Abaire clearly intends his play as a political statement - and what's more an accessible, up-to-the-minute political statement that you don't need an advanced degree to decipher - seems to have given a few critics pause, however.  Not that they have advanced degrees themselves (please!), but they seem uncertain how to broach the delicate question of class, and how it maps to education, in a town that is always denying it even while relying on it to oppress the locals.

For let's be honest about the Athens of America - it's really the Athens of Apartheid, where clear demarcations - often simple streets, like Huntington, Mass, or Dot Ave. - function as virtual Mason-Dixon lines defining a topology of race, class, and educational achievement as clearly and cleanly as the East River cleaves Manhattan from Queens.


What's more, within the ramparts of our ethnic fiefs a deep-rooted class trauma often simmers (and is savored), while dueling cults of authenticity duke it out in the pages of the press and those few arenas where our warring tribes must cross paths (and where the Great Famine unconsciously competes with slavery, for example, which in turn goes head-to-head with the Holocaust).

Or is that quite accurate - do we really think of the Irish Famine as a holocaust, as a British-engineered  genocide-by-other-means?  Indeed, perhaps that strange gap in the sympathies of the local anglophile academy goes a long way to explaining the strange, resentful history of the Irish in Boston: even their holocaust doesn't get any respect (it certainly didn't get a decent memorial!).

Sorry for the digression, but such thoughts inevitably occur while watching Good People.  You can tell Lindsay-Abaire has Southie in his bones, and so renders a panorama of his hometown's defeated dysfunction that's almost resplendent in its detail.  When we meet his heroine, for instance, she is desperately attempting to talk her way out of being fired from her job at a dollar store.  The pretty but weather-beaten Margie (a touchingly grim Johanna Day) has her deadpan street wiles, of course, and an excuse for every lapse - not to mention the beyond-bitter wit of worldly endurance.  But it's all no use; her up-and-coming, baby-faced manager lets her go, even though he's from the neighborhood, too - and so knows only too well what a 50-something Southie girl with a high school education is up against in the globalized economy: essentially, at the dollar store she was already clinging to its bottom rung.

But then things have been going wrong for Margie for a long time, and Lindsay-Abaire details with calm accuracy her cascade of misfortunes: she has a mentally challenged adult daughter at home, no husband, an unreliable baby-sitter, bills from dental work - the kinds of setbacks that the better-heeled can take in stride, but which easily morph into a perfect financial storm for those living sans a safety net.

In a series of poignant, hilariously pointed scenes, however - that rumble on and off a giant loading dock, appropriately enough for Southie - Margie's longtime "frenemies" Jean (Karen MacDonald, never better in an aging-rock-chick wig) and her feckless landlady, the appropriately-nicknamed "Dottie" (Nancy E. Carroll, ditto) suggest a possible lifeline - an old flame of Margie's named Mike fought his way out of Southie years ago, and is now a successful doctor with a trophy wife in Chestnut Hill.  Surely he must know of some low level job somewhere for someone like Margie - and after all, isn't he still "good people," as the Southie loyalists like to call their own?

But does Mike still count as "good people"?  That's the question Lindsay-Abaire probes with a colder and sharper scalpel as the play progresses.  At first Mike's and Margie's encounters only amount to a sad comedy of her cluelessness in the new professional class (she drops awkward f-bombs, and imagines that Mike hires his own cleaning staff); but slowly the playwright closes in on a curious twist in this former Southie boy's psyche: he, too, wants to believe he's "good people," that inside he's still authentic, still Southie, that he can still be counted on.

But can you still be authentically Southie if you live in Chestnut Hill?  Is it possible to be true to blue-collar roots while chasing a white-collar paycheck?  A lot of people don't see that contradiction as a conflict, frankly - as I've noted before, outspoken conservative avatars like David Brooks, and even Republican hacks like Chris Christie, are huge Bruce Springsteen fans, for instance. Indeed, Lindsay-Abaire has probably pinned a particularly delusional breed of boomer on the point of his playwriting quill in Good People.

So with this challenge to his "authenticity," Margie has Mike - well, perhaps not just where she wants him, true; but he also has trouble struggling off this particular social hook, and soon enough Margie finds herself invited to a party at his deluxe digs that she otherwise would never have been asked to.

 . . . and at home with the not-so-good people in Chestnut Hill.

Of course, you could argue she invited herself - indeed, when Mike cancels the party for the sake of his ill daughter, Margie takes this as a transparent ruse to ditch her, and shows up at his front door anyway.  Only it wasn't a ruse, and so she finds herself alone in Alexander's Dodge's wickedly rendered, white-and-taupe temple to yuppie chic (above) - along with Mike's young wife (who is black, as Margie flatly notes), nibbling at a full party's worth of cheese and red wine, and mulling whether or not to reveal certain secrets about her host's Southie past that might undo forever his hard-won upper-class status.

It's here that, admittedly, the production loses focus, largely because thespians Michael Laurence and Rachael Holmes (good actors both) are simply miscast as Mike and his wife Kate - and obviously miscast, at that.  Laurence struggles to convey the Southie boy within Mike's gleaming yuppie shell, and Holmes seems to take at happy face value a character who must, at some level, be rather bitterly self-aware.  And director Whoriskey not only misses much of the scene's sarcasm toward the educated classes (something that, btw, Kirsten Greenidge missed as well in The Luck of the Irish), but seems utterly blind to the deeper undertow of Lindsay-Abaire's second-act action.  For as Margie toys with unveiling exactly how her former flame spent his misspent youth, we can sense instinctively something of the ugly Southie street fighter should rise again in Mike (for it's clear he hasn't really left the old neighborhood behind - can anyone, ever?).  Indeed, by the end of the act, I'd argue the cozy Chestnut Hill nest of Mike and Kate should be in shambles - and revealed as something of a sham, just as Mike's libertarian self-image is; for it turns out Mike was only able to scramble up the collegiate ladder thanks to certain acts (and certain attitudes) being forgotten, or forgiven, long ago.  In a pungent line, Margie explains, Mike "always had someone looking out the window for him."  Margie herself was not so lucky, of course - so now while she and Mike both have a sick daughter upstairs, they're on opposite sides of the class divide.

That is only one of many parallels and subtle contrasts in Lindsay-Abaire's clever structure (and don't worry, he does eventually reveal who counts as "good people," and who does not).  Indeed, sometimes I worried that his play was almost schematic in places (just as occasionally it dawdles a bit here and there in local arcana).  But then again, at this point I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth; years ago, Good People would have counted as merely a good play; today, it feels border-line great. Which makes me wonder just how far Lindsay-Abaire can go.  The Pulitzer he won for his previous opus, Rabbit Hole, struck many as premature - but I'd argue he has earned it retro-actively with this particular script.  Perhaps, I admit, his drama deserved better than Whoriskey's production - but that doesn't stop me from hoping he has another like this one in his back drawer, or perhaps in the works, even as we speak.

Race on Boston's stages, Part I

The young Paul Robeson. Eighty years after his Othello, it's still rare to see an African-American, Latino or Asian Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth.

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of conversations devoted to questions of race in the Boston theatre.  In this post, I will be sharing space with my IRNE colleague Beverly Creasey, who covers theatre on her own blog, the Boston Arts Review (which, btw, you should read regularly). I asked Beverly to engage in this dialogue as I felt she could offer a unique perspective on issues that have become top-of-mind again for the community after a spirited forum at last summer’s Theatre Communication Group conference, and the announcement of a “Diversity/Inclusion/Gender Parity Task Force” initiative by StageSource.  So without further ado -

TG: Now Beverly, you've been involved in what has been called "non-traditional" casting for a long time – maybe since its beginnings; you were one of the first advocates for the practice locally. I can remember when critics like Arthur Friedman of the Herald used to question in print whether actors of color could convincingly play “white” roles, so I appreciate your pioneering work.  But tell me a little bit more about your efforts in this area, and how you feel the casting situation has changed in Boston.

BC: Well, for a little background on “Non-Traditional Casting” (NTC): In 1986 the Theater Communications Group (TCG) did a study which revealed an appalling pattern of exclusion for a lot of Americans in what was supposed to be their own theatre. Something like 90% of the professional productions in the U.S were cast with Caucasian actors. The TCG then began an initiative to promote access to non-white actors and actors with disabilities so that casting people would see the possibilities (and advantages) of hiring/casting Chekhov or Shakespeare or Wilde with actors who reflect who we all are. (Imagine the resonance of a physically challenged actor ruminating on his disabilities as Richard III, or a black actor in Chekhov discussing serfdom – i.e., slavery. Thanks to NTC, I have seen both.)

So I worked with TCG on a Boston conference and then ran the Boston NTC file (of actors, playwrights, directors, tech people etc.) until it was adopted by StageSource as their "unity file." This was essentially before Internet access. Now you can go to the StageSource website and pull up the "actors of color" file. I know it's hard now to believe that this was even an issue, because today most of Boston's theaters cast non-traditionally – to some extent - as a matter of course. So NTC has been an unqualified success. The excuse used by theaters back in the day to exclude actors of color was always some variant of "We cast the best actor for the role," which of course was code for "the best white actor” – meaning trained at the right school, familiar with the right people, more acceptable to the subscription audience, etc. I thought that excuse was a thing of the past!


TG: The bottom line then is that the situation slowly improved for actors of color, and there seemed to be a new understanding among casting directors – that many roles, particularly classical ones, were much more widely castable than (white) theatrical tradition had dictated. But recently you’ve seen some casting decisions that have disturbed you, can you tell me more about that?

BC: Well, this past year I've noticed something disturbing recurring several times. (I see about 200 small and large theater productions a year). I've seen repeated instances of the casting of white actors in parts either specified for, or originated by, actors of color, like the “Brother” role in Songs for a New World.

TG: So in an ironic twist, you began to see casting of white people in those few roles that had long been reserved for actors of color.

BC: Exactly. Even though it's absurd to hear a white man singing/talking about being black. Which by the way, has happened twice to Jason Robert Brown's Songs. Two different productions in less than a year!

TG: Maybe we should re-title that one Songs for a White World . . .

BC: What are these people thinking? They didn't even have the sense to change the lines and take out the ethnic references! It also happened to A Chorus Line this summer, at a big Equity company that has often cast nationally - a white actress played the role of the Asian-American dancer (who even talks about being stereotyped!!). I asked why this was the case and was told they “couldn't find anyone." Now this has been quite a year for Asian-American women on the stage and just off the top of my head (without consulting StageSource) I can name four local actresses. So the real answer is they didn't try very hard. They didn't go to StageSource. They didn't call me. There aren't many roles out there for actors of color, so doesn't it seem cruel to take away the few opportunities there are? A critic wryly suggested to me that this is just turnabout-fair-play for Non-Traditional Casting - I would have let out a blood-curdling scream, but we were in a theater at the time.

TG: Hmmm - was that critic me? (Thanks for not screaming, btw). But seriously, just to play devil's advocate for a minute - I'm wondering if we could pursue the reasoning behind that excuse a little further, and either find the flaw in it, or begin to at least better understand it. For if actors of color are now being represented on many, if not most, Boston stages, doesn't the urgency of non-traditional casting somewhat diminish? And doesn't that mean that the very logic of NTC can be flip-flopped (sorry, Governor Romney) in some cases? I mean last time I checked, just about every actor I know was looking for work, not just the actors of color! And don't casting directors work with networks of people they know and trust, who inevitably often reflect their own experience and ethnicity?

But at this point I'd like to take a break - Beverly and I (along with, I hope, other members of the Boston theatre community) will chew on those arguments further in the next post in this ongoing series.

(To be continued . . .)

It's time to Honk!

This weekend, check out the "revolutionary street spectacle" that is the annual HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands, which began right here in Boston - in fair Somerville, to be exact - and is now a nation-wide phenomenon.  Check their website for the schedule of events - you can sing, dance, march, play, or just do your thing - but it all wraps up Monday!

Les 7 doigts perform more than 7 wonders at ArtsEmerson

Les 7 doigts de la main (that's "The 7 Fingers of the Hand") are back in town.  Through Sunday at ArtsEmerson. 

There, shouldn't that be review enough?

Anyone who caught Psy, the troupe's first appearance in the Hub last spring, knows what I mean: there are so many delightful thrills on tap in a 7 doigts show that critique seems . . . well, simply beside the point.

I suppose I could chew for a minute or two on the conceptual interest of this millennial circus variant from Montréal (where else?).  You shouldn't expect sequins or spangles, or lions or tigers or bears, or even much in the way of glamorous display from the Fingers (as I like to call them).  Like so many millennials, they take the stage in slacker duds, with confident, low-key DIY attitude, and they mostly build their circus from scratch - like a kit from IKEA.

They are into concept - just not the "high concept" of Cirque du Soleil, which is always claiming their shows are about the rainforest, or the Higgs boson, and then trot out the Flying Wallendas anyway.  No, the Fingers prefer small-scale, quirky concepts, usually rooted in theatre-school psychology (think A Chorus Line goes to the circus).  Psy, for instance, was putatively about acrobatics as an escape from phobias and fears; the current casual extravaganza, Sequence 8, is likewise supposedly about the sparks that fly when personalities clash.

Well, maybe.  The show, I have to report, ends up amiably picking up a variety of concepts (a radio show, bits of standup, a striptease)  and then shrugging and setting them down again. Which was fine, really.  To be honest, the program loses a little steam after the halfway mark, but I was still indulgent of the troupe's half-morphing of the circus into theatre, as the results generally had a funkier, more intimate feel than Psy (which sometimes felt coolly narcissistic). Perhaps this was because many of these performers have been working together for years, and so you could feel something of their own personal dynamics - the tension and the affection - in their routines (maybe that was what they meant by that clash-of-personalities stuff).


It also helps that most of the Fingers are not only hotties, but reliable comedians, if not actual actors  (although a few can conjure moments of pathos).  And that's all they need to be.  For in the end, the circus is always about the thrill of the daring young man (or woman) on the flying trapeze (or some similar, improvised apparatus).  In short, "theatre" stops where the tightrope begins. But if nothing else, the Fingers' off-hand, casual set-ups actually enhance the shock of their derring-do, as their sudden virtuosity seems to erupt out of nowhere, and just as quickly vanish into air.  Indeed, they occasionally make a mistake - or at least seem to (they immediately run the bit till they get it right), which only  gives a fresh edge of danger to their daredevil exploits.

But be warned: you may begin to think, as Sequence 8 unfolds, that the normal rules of physics have been suspended, and that gravity is all nonsense now, so frequently do these acrobats spill forward into flips and spins of every type.  But don't try this stuff at home!  Leave it to the professionals.  And trust me, as you watch you will experience amazement (Eric Bates' cigar-box juggling), enchantment (Maxim Laurin's sinuous turn on the trapeze), and even terror (Alexandra Royer's seemingly mile-high tumbles on the bouncing Russian beam).

I myself left the performance in something like a blissful trance, with only one question still lingering in my mind:

What the heck does their name mean?