Murray Ross

On Broadway

 

There were four of us at dinner right after the show.  We agreed the new 7 p.m. Broadway curtain time was good for hungry people and old people, and we were old and hungry.  We were three old friends from college and one friend’s wife, one theatre director,two lawyers, a professor, all theatre lovers. We had a lot of catching up to do.

My friend Alan is a recently crowned "Champion of Justice" in San Francisco, but as he is wired for his anxieties, he says he’s afraid his younger colleagues are making fun of him behind his back. They call you the walrus we said. But you are very well liked.

The other male lawyer, the lion of this gang,  was on his Blackberry most of the dinner. They know him up and down New England.  The finest people.  He’s a partner in a large imploding law firm where there are more empty desks every day.  The woods are burning, boys.

His wife, a former judge, teaches law downtown and is deeply depressed about how the Court may undo  the health care law.  In her opinion the average caliber of a Supreme Court Justice these days is zero.

The New York Times reports that more than 600 people have posted their passionate responses to the new Broadway production beautifully directed by a guy older than us.  Critics from major newspapers across the country have reviewed it.  We are part of a national conversation about a play whose every moment, every phrase lodges in the memory, even and especially in old memories. Attention must be paid.

I'm telling the champion he'd have been a great Bernard, the nerdy kid who follows Biff around in high school but grows up to become a tennis playing lawyer. The champion admits he followed a mutual friend of ours around freshman year because he was a quarterback. When he introduced him to foreign films and the guy became an intellectual, Alan was disappointed-- he didn't need another egghead friend; he needed a quarterback friend. He would have carried his shoulder pads. 

"Why did we choose this show?" groans the lion, not looking up from his Blackberry.

The champion makes the case that Howard, the man who fires Willy, is a sympathetic figure. He's in a tough place, he says.  Willy is washed up and Howard wants to let him go as gently as he can. "Howard is horrible," I say, “he plays recordings of his kid reciting state capitals while his old employee is standing there at the end of his tether.”  The lion agrees with me, but the professor agrees with Alan and so does Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune critic, who says in this production you actually prefer this very human Howard, whereas Willy comes across as "an unstable, self-delusional man whose pain emerges not as weariness and struggle but as fits of rage." That's the problem with this production, Jones says.  No, that's the problem with Willy, says the lion, "because Willy's an asshole"---in one grand sweep dismissing half a century of debate on the tragedy of the common man.  I'm finding it hard to argue with him, remembering another friend who said the same thing about Oedipus. But Oedipus at least solved the riddle of the sphinx whereas Willy never has one clue and isn’t even a guy you'd especially want to have a burger with.

Two of our party have ordered the meatloaf and the lion wants extra spinach.

The champion tells us his parents went to see the play when it opened in 1949, and every man in the audience had a hat and a brown overcoat like Willy's, and that when the lights came up after the final curtain every man in the audience was in tears.  And this in a time when men did not cry.  There weren’t many manly tears at the end of the new production, or at least I didn’t see hear or see or feel them.  Ben Brantley said the same thing in his review.  It’s a different time, suggests the professor.  She really liked Philip Seymour Hoffman’s intensity, and so did I, and so did Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times, while also finding his performance too monochromatic.  I agree with them both: Hoffman was so concentrated, economical and restrained that his Willy wound up too constricted.  A constricted Willy can be a problem. But so can a loose one.

Like Brantley I too almost wept for joy when the curtain rose on Joe Mielziner’s set, re-created from the original production, and when the autumn leaves came out in the flashback scene the past shimmered in a hallucinatory golden light. Ravishing, those big elms.  First thing we gotta do when we get time is clip that big branch over the house . . . We get a rope and sling her around, and then we climb up there with a couple of saws and take her down.

We all loved the scene in the restaurant, and the great scene in the kitchen where Willy doesn’t learn he is only a dime a dozen but does see his son loves him.  As  the Rocky Mountain representative and nothing if not critical I felt obliged to point out Andrew Garfield doesn’t look like he’s ever been west of 8^th avenue, and he’s too skinny to bust through a line, and he looks too young to have failed at anything.  But so what, the kid can act, we all agree.  Everyone liked Linda Edmond who handled her arias with smoke and fire, but she didn’t cry luxuriously at the end.  I explain with quiet authority that Miller says Linda cries luxuriously, and I should know.  But it turns out I am wrong, it’s Stella who cries luxuriously at the end of that other play;  Linda simply sobs more fully, released.  So I might be right in thinking Linda’s release into tears could have helped the audience with the ones that didn’t come.  But maybe this Salesman wasn’t meant for tears: it’s luminous, lucid and contained in its immaculateness.

Over dessert, there’s some talk of endings, almost inevitable these days.  The champion says he’s been wondering what he will say at the lion’s funeral.  The lion says he’s only asking Beyonce and Oprah to speak because he wants more people at his than Dave Singleman got, and that was hundreds.  Things will be sad on a lotta trains for months after that.

It’s time to go.  We pay the check; we are free and clear. We are the last ones to leave, and for a moment the empty room at Joe Allen’s looks like Frank’s Chop house two blocks away over on 6^th avenue, where Willy had his collapse.  I’m looking for him under the tables.  The lion calls our attention to the show posters on the restaurant’s wall of flops: The Moose Murders.  Dude.  Here is Where I Belong.

“Seeing the play at 71 is different from when you were 55,”  says the champion.  “Then it was about a father and a son. Now it's about the death of a salesman.”

“Where was that line about I could have been a contender,” roars the lion. “I missed that.”

 

Two Queens. One Kingdom.

This queen is in prison.  She's losing her head and fighting for her soul.

This queen is losing her mind, but keeping her throne.

Peace doesn't come easy to power in Schiller's marvellous,turbulent play.  Who can you trust? The Earl of Leicester? Maybe not.

You are always surrounded by powerful men with hidden agendas.

 

The Queen may feel a little like our Secretary of State;

Perhaps a walk in the park will give you a taste of freedom.

But before long you'll be brought to your knees.

 

And the worst is to yet to come: "Who will save me from my savior?"

Disaster strikes with blurring intensity

And leaves just as suddenly.

What do to with an order for an execution?  It looks like catastrophic regicide.

The Queen tells him: "Do Your Job."

The Lord High Treasurer wants you dead.

Journey's end is lover's meeting (as every wise man's son doth know):

But in the end, you are alone. 

With God.

With your conscience.

And with yourself.

 

Rules for Actors

In the small town of Weimar in 1798, Johann von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller formed a famous  partnership to create a new kind of theatre.  Schiller became the theatre's leading playwright, writing Mary Stuart for the state theatre there in 1800, while Goethe assumed the position of Artistic Dictator Director, taking complete charge of the actors and production. Both men wanted to create a theatre that would function as a moral institution, furthering the perfection of human culture.  Goethe developed a series of rules for actor movement, which were written down and assembled by two of his actors.  They were intended to effect a graceful series of elevated stage pictures, which the audience could contemplate at a distance from behind the proscenium arch.  Since Goethe attended to  Mary Stuart's first production I was eager to see what the Master had prescribed.  Here's an example from Goethe's long list of rules:

#35  First of all, the player must consider that he should not only imitate nature but also portray it ideally, thereby, in his presentation, uniting the true with the beautiful.

To this end we have engaged a beautiful cast, capable of acting truthfully.  You'll see.  Here's another rule:

#41. It is an important point that when two are acting together, the speaker should always move upstage, while the one who has stopped speaking should move slightly downstage.  If this advantageous shifting is carried out with skill--and through practice it can be done with great ease--then the best effect is achieved for the eye as well as for the intelligibility of the declamation. An actor who masters this will produce a very beautiful effect when acting with others who are equally trained.

In fact, though we are playing in a thrust rather than a proscenium space, there is a lot of diagonal movement in our production, and we have found that indeed this produces "a beautiful effect."

#45  To be avoided: the newfangled fashion of hiding one's hand behind the lapel of the coat.

We have corrected this new fangled fashion altogether.

#48. The two middle fingers should always stay together; the thumb, the index and little finger should be somewhat bent.  In this manner the hand is in its proper position and ready for movement.

We're still working on this one.

#67. The actor, especially the one who has to play lovers and light parts, should keep a pair of slippers on stage in which to rehearse, and he will soon notice the good results.

All our lovers wear slippers now.  The results are wonderful.

#82. The stage and the auditorium, the actors and the spectators, together represent the theatrical entity.

So it is, and especially in our wonderfully intimate space, where actors and audiences really are in the room together--and in our staging, both actors and audiences are really in the same room, the same prison.

#83.  The stage is to be regarded as a figureless tableau for which the actor supplies the figure.

We aren't working behind a picture frame, so tableaus are less frequent on our stage.  But Russell Parkman's beautiful bare floor and austere set do serve as the space for actors to supply the figures, and what figures they are too!

I'm not sure Goethe would entirely endorse our production of Mary Stuart, which offers a rougher, less idealized version of play than was staged in Weimar. But slippers and index fingers aside, it's worth noting that some of Goethe's aesthetic survives in our production, mounted two hundred years later and in another country.

 

Bones of Contention

Schiller's Mary Stuart is a storm of fierce and thrilling argument.The scenes thunder in like the surf at Torrey Pines--as one rolls by you barely have time to catch your breath before the next one crashes over you.

My analogy is intentional. The play, written in 1800, is Romantic drama at its best, and we don't get a lot of that these days, except maybe in corn syruped Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. The Romantics, remember, were the ones who rediscovered nature, especially violent, potent nature, non-stop nature, the nature of the grand sublime--one reason why later painters flocked to paint the Rocky Mountains. And one reason why you should flock to the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater.

For Schiller, it was human nature in extremis that sparked the lightning. Each scene is Mary Stuart is an argument, and each argument has right on both sides. Each side has a truth to tell, and each truth excludes the other. In this respect the play is absolutely modern. It's a Romantic version of Renaissance history that sometimes sounds like a presidential debate. The stakes could not be higher--an economic recovery now, the pending execution of a monarch then. Our production, very much influenced by the one directed by Phyllida Lloyd that we saw in London a few years ago, acknowledges the simultaneity of historical and contemporary action that is essential to the play's brilliance.

This is not ye olde Masterpiece Theatre, as fine as that often is. There are no lutes in tapestried rooms. There are no men in tights. These are the corporate corridors, now and then.

These are stone hives ruled by two elevated and bejewelled Queens who are as much imprisioned than empowered.

For a moment we invite you to forget your Fox News and your CSNBC. Come take a look at real power in action, come to where the lightning strikes and the thunder crashes. These players speak poetry and the heads of state are better dressed. Both heads rock; one will roll.

Sex and Salome

Sometimes old plays come along that seem mysteriously tuned to their moment, and so it is with our student production of Oscar Wilde's Salome,which opens this week at the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theatre. And how is it that this precious and sometimes tedious play, a relic of the decadent movement of a century ago, can speak to us now? It's because the play exotically mirrors the cultural chasm about sex that now seems to be ever widening in our country. Rush Limbaugh's grotesque response to Sandra Fluke is only the most recent and sensational illustration of the deep conflict between passion and puritanism that pervades our society. The whole thing is admirably spelled out in Paul Harris' essay in the London Guardian today, worth reading in its entirety:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/10/america-war-on-sex-hots-up

Harrris explains what anyone can see--America is currently in the grip of a fervant new Puritanism at exactly the moment when sex in our country has never been more promoted or widespread. The war on contraception arrives just at the time when the porn industry is worth more than $12 billion a year. In the article, Dr. Marty Klein, a sex researcher, explains that when he is asked if America is getting more progressive sexually or more conservative, he simply answers,"yes."

Such a radical conflict between freedom and restriction is at the heart of Wilde's play. Salome, as we all know, has the the hots for John the Baptist--and he wants no part of her. He is the enemy of desire, a tormented fanatic lurking like a spider imprisoned in the cistern of Babylon. Salome is desire incarnate. Her dance of the seven veils is the oldest and most celebrated strip tease in human history. But that's only the beginning, since what really turns her on is the prophet's head on a platter. The scene is an emblem of perverted lust, chronicled through the centuries. Here it is in the Renaissance:

This is a compatatively tame version--but note where the locket is lodged. Now jump to the movies--this silent film of 1927, not exactly an outake from The Artist:

And finally, from a modern production of the Strauss opera based on Wilde's play:

The image yokes together violence, death, insanity, castration and desire--it remains powerful and disturbing no matter how many times or ways in which it is re-imagined. Wilde's brocaded language swirls lust, beauty, and psuedo-biblical phrasing into one toxic cocktail. Here is Salome talking to her lover, when he is hers at last:

Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. . . Thou didst bear thyself toward me as to a harlot, as to a woman that is a wanton, to me, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea! Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will.

What Salome does with her head, her most stimulating new sex toy, remains in the hands of each producer. I will not spill any bloody beans, but I would strongly suggest that any members of our community who tend towards the conservative side of our sexual chasm avoid this production. Or perhaps they will be inclined to picket it. Or perhaps they will point to it as a textbook example of what happens when sexual impulses go uncurbed, just as they often do today. Herod's Babylon might well serve as a puritan's image of contemporary America, with Herod himself as its dead-souled porn addicted Tetrach.

Oscar Wilde, of course was a moral aesthete and famous provacateur, and while he knew full well that Salome was crazy and dangerous, there was a part of him that felt deeply connected to her radical excess. He was given to saying things like this:

"Do you really think ... that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not -- there is no weakness in that."

Salome remains a transgressive story tricked out as a moral fable, and Wilde's version is in half in love with this transgression. To my mind Salome is not really a good play--its many repititions are inert, plastered over fin de seicle Babylon like old cake frosting. The play lacks the one quality Wilde is deservedly most famous for: wit. But others have found Salome a sensual feast, a kind of masterpiece. It certainly is one of a kind. And this decadent oddity arrives on our stage with perfect timing. What would Wilde have written if he were were writing this story now, with Sandra, Rush and Rick in mind? Let's not go there. Please. It may be enough to say that Wilde's Babylon, polarized between oppressive restriction and corrupt sexuality, looks strangely familiar, and that on both sides of the yawning divide what is missing is the essential word of Jokannon's prophet. And that word is love.

 

Bad News

Perhaps you noticed that Warren Epstein, Entertainment Editor of Gazette, has just submitted his resignation after 23 years on our newspaper. Perhaps you didn't--the news hardly made headlines.

You may have also heard that earlier this year John Moore, the Denver Post theatre critic, also resigned.

While the departures of both men were officially "voluntary" it is unlikely they will be adequately replaced. These two resignations are part of a larger mega trend: the slow death of the newspaper. That will be a protracted event, but the toll on the arts is immediate and shocking. The state of theatre criticism in Colorado has rarely been high, even with Warren and John at their posts. That's because a real theatre critic is hard to find. The position requires more than genuine interest and a minimal ability to write. It requires a real liberal arts education, a knowledge of theatrical history and literature, a familiarity with what is happening in the best and most interesting theatres in the world, and the time and space to write at a length that serious thought and engagement demand. There is no one writing about theatre in Colorado at the present time with these qualifications or opportunities.

Perhaps this is because theatre serves such a very small proportion of our population -- about one percent of the Pikes Peak Region. But perhaps it is also because the role of arts criticism has been dumbed down in our newspapers. The recently retired John Moore once told me that he thought of himself as an "average Joe" who was reporting on his experiences. As far as I am concerned, that statement was grounds for dismissal. I don't want my culture mediated by an average Joe any more than I want my politics guided by a plumber. Warren Epstein told me that Gazette Theatre reviews and their inane grading systems were designed to advise average readers about what they might go see and like. This is a distressingly diminished sort of criticism, at least in my old fashioned view. I'd much rather read a critic who was guided by the fuddy-duddy principles of Matthew Arnold, the eminent Victorian.

It was Arnold who famously said the business of criticism was "simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known,to create a current of true and fresh ideas." The proper business of the critic is not just to describe what he or she likes, and then assign grade (C+!), so that average Joes and Janes can decide on an evening menu. The real job of the critic is to identify what is really excellent, and by thoughtfully engaging with it help create a stimulating climate of discovery and progress. Now we're talking! We might all get down on our knees and thank the critics blessed with the talent, the education, and the opportunity to serve us in this way. There are not so many of them anywhere, even in film, where there are a zillion critics in every cinema. In London at least there are enough theatre critics so that every serious production gets a dozen reviews, but often these reviews are skimpy and, of late, far too generous. I thank the stars that every morning I can read Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, two critics who have the knowledge, the intelligence, and the generous word counts to really tell us something. I thank David Denby at the New Yorker, whose recent essay on The Artist was truly illuminating; so was Geoffrey O'Brien's essay on The Tree of Life in the New York Review of Books.

But the bad news is that this dismal and diminished state of critical affairs is about to get worse. At the Denver Post, John Moore was in fact much more than the average Joe he claimed to be. He was intelligent, open and amazingly assiduous, going well beyond the call of a critic's duty to become the glue of the Colorado theatre scene---indeed, he as much as anyone, is responsible for creating that vibrant scene over the last decade. When he was involuntarily furloughed last summer, and forbidden to write, John came down to see our Merchant of Venice anyway--and though he could not publish a review, he served us well by awarding Christopher Lowell as Colorado's 2011 Actor of the Year for his performance as Shylock. Now John has been vaporized into the ether. It's very unlikely we will see a Post critic here in the near future. At the Gazette, Warren Epstein was full of passion and enthusiasm for local arts for two decades, and now he, too, is no more. There is no evidence these crucial critical cultural energies can or will be replaced. We are far likely to see even less theatre criticism of any kind in print. Of course there will be some on-line, but the internet is not a medium that invites extended critical thought or engagement. Its success will be measured by page views, and page views are largely driven by photographs. So we can expect to see lots more pictures of roller derby in our arts and entertainment sections.

It is the shameful way of the newspaper world that the departures of these two hardworking and passionate servants went virtually unnoticed. John cleaned out his desk and disappeared (though you can still find him on facebook, with the rest of the world). Warren managed a few words of farewell in his Go DVD review this week, but you had the feeling his goodbye was a stealth operation. This is disgraceful. And it is our loss. I conclude with a few more words from Matthew Arnold, a writer not made for tweeting: "to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and great proof of being alive,and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge." To have such a criticism present in our lives is devoutly to be wished--devoutly! Judged by the loss of John and Warren, as far as our newspapers go, we are wishing in the wind.

Farewell, Captain Smollett!

I should like to say a few words about Mike Anslemi (1946-2012), whose funeral was this morning. Mike was a member of our THEATREWORKS Board for more than a decade, and he took a distinguished turn as our advisory board chairman. And he was our dear friend.

He was ill for many months and I was lucky enough to see him a few days before he went. I was hoping it would not be my last visit, but it was clear we didn't have much time, so we cut to the chase. I had a list of the top five regrets of the dying I had read in the Guardian recently. I am a teacher and there was time left for one last oral exam. I went through the list with him one by one; and he, once a teacher too, was happy to play. "Mike," I said, "Do you wish you had the courage to live a life true to yourself, and not the one others expected of you?" "No", he said. "Mike, do you wish you hadn't worked so hard?" (Mike was a hard worker, and this is a common regret). "No", Mike said. "Do you wish you had had more courage expressing your feelings?" "No". "Do you wish you had stayed in better touch with your friends?" "No". "Do you wish that you had let yourself be more happy?" "No," again. I asked him, "Are you saying that in your life you were true to yourself, that you didn't sacrifice yourself to your work, that you could talk about your feelings, that you stayed in touch with your friends and allowed yourself to be as happy as possible?" "Yes," he said. I told him he had scored a perfect zero on his final exam and I didn't know what to do with him.

There was a long pause, of smiles. Then he allowed that he did have one regret. He wished he had met his second and present wife Sue a little earlier, so they might have had children. He thought they would have been good kids, able to give something to the world.

I could only say that in some ways that the arts had been their children; that we were his kids, and that he had nurtured, encouraged, guided and worked for us all. And this is true enough.

There was one time when we nurtured him. Mike had expressed an interest in taking a small non-speaking part in our production of Treasure Island. I soon realized he was unsuited for a deckhand or smelly pirate. There was only one role he could play, Tobias Smollett, captain of the Hispaniola, and leader of the expedition to recover the buried treasure. Mike had not been prepared to be kicked upstairs to the bridge, but he accepted his appointment with characteristic grace and even enthusiasm. It was brilliant casting: in so many ways the role was the man himself. Like Mike, Smollett was a man of few words, and like Mike, Smollett was always logical: point first, point second, point third. Like a good captain, Mike was a made of discipline--but always ready to issue an extra round of grog when the crew needed one. Smollett never sought the limelight and neither did Mike--it was enough to know and do your duty. He had courage and tenacity. He would stick to his guns and you knew he never strike his colours. He could chart a great course--at the helm to Skeleton Island, or at the computer at Columbine Capital. He was not as idiosyncratic, as lively, or as attention-getting as his boss Jack Brush or Long John Silver, but he was a diligent man and he could hold his ground. And he had a twinkle, a definite twinkle.

At the end of the play, Long John Silver and Smollett momentarily step outside of the action to comment on the parts they have played. Silver says (and these are the words of Robert Louis Stevenson), "I'm the Author's favorite character. He does me fathoms better than he does you--fathoms. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all, and he leaves you down in the hold, where no one can see you, or wants to." Smollett replies, simply, and in character: "I know the author respects me; I feel it in my bones. I am a man who tries to do his duty and makes a mess of it as often as not . . But I know the Author's on the side of good .. and I'm glad enough to be Alexander Smollett."

It did not occur to me then that these words were as true of the actor as they were of the character. But it occurs to me now. Mike was glad enough to be Mike Anselmi, and that was saying something. He was a man of deep and resonant faith, a faith which he never imposed on others. It was clear he liked doing his duty, and could feel in his bones that his Author respected him. He was also a man, who, in one happy spark, could be touched by art into a brief, heroic life on Skeleton Island.

Thank you, Captain Smollett. We hate to see you go. Extra grog for the men. A twenty gun salute. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

 

 

Our Oscar Pick

Who could it be?  Janet McTeer of course, in Albert Nobbs.  In a supporting role, she took over the movie from Glenn Close, no easy business (just ask Michael Douglass).

Janet looked a little different when I saw her first. She looked just like this in London as Mary Stuart a few years ago:

In fact, Ms. McTeer is a very tall and handsome woman, positively imperial.  The sight of her fabulous bosom heaving in the rain (it was a royal wet T-Shirt afternoon) was transfixing.  We, the royal We, knew in an instant We had to have her and We had to do this play.  So We asked her around to our hotel where We had some lovely chat:

After that she carried me up to my room and had her way with me.  There are no photographs of this event, possibly because it only happened in my dreams. But we are doing Schiller's great play, in April, and we have found a new Queen of Scotland. She's actually from the Island of Guernsey, and she too is lovely, and very tall. Her name is Claire Warden and here She is.

We are very happy!  We are thrilled with our new Queen!  And Janet, we hope you win---You were so lovely in the rain, so beautiful walking to your scaffold, and really, such delightful and radiant company for the short time We had together. We love you!

Moments to Remember

On the last night of The Lost Boys I sat next to a gentleman who had seen many of our shows in the distant past. He reminded me of a play we did about 30 years ago, The Nerd, and of how funny it was.  He said he and his son have never laughed so hard, and they still talk about the moment when the nerd (the hilarious Leonard Riley) emerged from the bathoom, trailing a long strip of toilet paper in his shoe.  I too can recall this moment vividly, always with a laugh, and it occurs to me that long after a show has been swept away there are still moments that remain in the heart and the mind's eye, even decades later. 

So thinking back over this last year at THEATREWORKS, what moments, what images abide from this year's season?  Here is my list, show by show.

Boeing Boeing: This was one of the most popular shows in our history, but thinking back no specific moment jumps into my mind--instead I recall lots of pleasant sensations, indeed a continuous wash of pleasant sensations without one surmounting another.  But when I close my eyes, what do I see?  All right, I confess: it's the girls. All three of them, Air Italia, Lufthanasa, and TWA.  They were sensational to look at, especially in the beautifully tailored air hostess outfits Jan Avramov put them in. No wonder that Lothario Bernard could not give any of them up. Who can blame him? No man, I say, no real man!

The Inspector General: There's a lot to remember from the stylish and energetic student production, but there is only one image that is firmly imprinted above all: the final tableau when the entire compnay froze into mannequins of astonishment after learning the real inspector has just arrived. Our production followed the famous direction of Meyerhold by sustaining this freeze for 90 seconds, a very long time in the theatre, almost as long as a sixties foreign film.  Long enough for the audience to wonder, laugh, squirm a little nervously, and feel almost as trapped as the characters themselves. Great stuff.

The Seagull:  This beautiful play is composed like a painting, full of resonant pictoral moments: Nina in the moonlight, as the earth spirit in Konstantin's play; three women on a bench on a hot summer's day; a dead seagull dropped at a girlfriend's feet.  But for me the image that stays most in the mind occurred in the last act, on the Russian estate, with the wind howling outside.  Nina has come in from the rain, and she hears the laughing voice of the lover who adandoned her in next door. And immediately she flies, she flies like a small bird, to the door, pressing herself against it to hear everything.  Jamie Ann Romero was so lovely, so delicate in her mouse gray travelling dress, and with her hands and face pressed against the door, saying nothing in the darkness with light gleaming under the door in the next room, she spoke volumes.  She was a seagull.  One of the most beautiful moments ever on our stage.

The Merchant of Venice: Another play studded with vivid verbal and visual imagery.  I'm tempted to say most memorable were the signs I posted full of biblical proscriptions against usury, since they were the source of some unusually vehement protest.  But inside the tent you can hardly forget Shylock, and especially the entire trial scene, wonderfully and forcefully acted by the whole company, led by Christopher Lowell and Jane Noseworthy.  It's one of Shakespeare's most lucid and thrilling set pieces; it makes the audience completely reverse their opinions about nearly everything. But the moment from this production I most treasure was the very last one.  The lovers are dancing to a hot Charleston in Belmont,and Launcelot Gobbo is spewing out money from a money blower all over the stage.  The tent is raining money, the joint is jumping, everyone is so happy excepting the lonely Antonio, alone on stage as someone nearly always is at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, and then Jessica sees on stage her father's yarmulke---she stops dancing, she picks it up, and looks at it.  Blackout.

Church.  There's a lot to remember about this play, but most of it was what happened afterwards--it was easily the most controversial show in our history.  And that's rather surprising when you consider it consisted mostly of four earnest if slightly odd ministers preaching the Word of God, and telling stories. And yet I venture to say that everyone who saw it will remember the final  image that the entire play was pointing towards: the arrival, one by one,  of a full gospel choir singing "Ain't Got Time to Die."  The music was powerful,and even more powerful than the music was the feeling of joy and faith written on the faces and hearts of the choir members. You just can't beat that.

Women of Will. Tina Packer is a force of nature, and when powered by Shakespeare she is titanic, as she demonstrated over and over in her one woman show dedicated to Shakespeare's women.  But the image that abides with me comes not from her potent performance, but from her workshop with our theatre students, and particularly one instance where she took in hand a young man who was rather timidly mouthing a few lines from Hamlet. In the space of five minutes she coaxed him, lead him, mauled him, and beat him--using his body like her putty to remold, like her drum to beat, and suddenly this mousy young actor was speaking Shakespeare from the center of a new being.  Astonishing.

The Lost Boys. Another show studded with images bursting from Roy Ballard's remarkable set, which in effect converted our entire stage into a vet's nursing home.  I won't soon forget the flying scene on scooters and trapezes, or Tinker Bell almost dying, or the parade of boys, pirates and redskins, or Hook swimming to his ship, or little Wendy and Peter shaking hands as they say goodbye in Neverland, or Pan flying on his wheelies, Peter standing heroically on the rock, or an old man staring into an aquarium, or the fight on the lagoon with trays and toilet plunger.  But my favorite, I confess, was the dance the lost boys did with Peter and Wendy on their last night on the island:  "Such a deliciously creepy dance it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows."  Our wonderful old lost boys will never make it to the finals of  Dancing with the Stars, but that's just that show's loss. They put a spell on us with charm, gusto and semi-precision timing.  You had to love Melvin Grier shaking his booty (in rehearsal I asked him if could dance, and he said, "I'm black, of course I can dance!"--and he could).  You had to love Peter and Wendy's rock star entrance, he with his aviator glasses, and she flipping like a flying fish over his shoulders.  Speaking as a lost boys myself, I loved it, and was ready to jump up and join them.

 

So that's my list.  It was  kind of a tough year all round in many ways--but rich on our stage.  If you have other moments from 2011 you remember and want to share, please do!

 

Happy New Year to one and all!

 

 

 

 

Second to the right, straight on till morning!

The Lost Boys and Wendy fly away this week with final performances Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

You needn't worry about the boys too much; once Wendy is there to tell them stories, all will be well.  Except for Peter, of course. He hates to hear stories about people who actually grow up.

Poor Peter, he doesn't even understand what it means to be thimbled. After all, he's only a boy.

But he does know that a boy who gets bit by a dastardly grown-up (happens all the time) is never the same again:

Meanwhile, the pirates have designs on Tiger Lily (fools,they want to leave her on the rock to drown).

And Peter does know that to die will be an awfully big adventure.

So come fly away with us!