Lahr's Foote, and His Achilles Heel

I've had my issues with him in the past, but when John Lahr is on, no one can touch him. As with his recollection of Pinter or his profile of August Wilson, his recent profile of Horton Foote (alas, available only to subscribers) is a model of economy, grace, empathy, and insight--indeed, what's best and most astonishing about Lahr's piece is that its very qualities, its unruffled warmth and care, evoke the playwright's work at its best. It's hard not to note as well another quality Lahr shares with Foote: His lovingly handcrafted and felicitous prose is in part the product of a lifetime of observation and percontation. This is profile as performance, though not as a gonzo showpiece but an act of extraordinary interpretive sensitivity and subtlety. I just can't think of anyone else who does it this well.

On the other hand, in the same issue is Lahr's mixed-to-positive take on the roundly reviled new production of Bye Bye Birdie. While I cherish the priceless image of his father, Bert, having to pull the family Chevy off the road in hysterics the first time he heard Little Richard, I'm unpersuaded that the visceral kick of rock 'n' roll--the subject of Lahr's opening reverie--has anything do with Bye Bye Birdie, an enjoyable show at its best but not one with a score that anyone could mistake for rock 'n' roll. Let's just say that Charles Strouse's flimsy "rock" tunes make the synthetic score of the new Memphis, a musical also ostensibly about the siren song of early rock, sound positively rafter-shaking.

The downside, it seems, of Lahr's intimate familiarity with the world of mid-20th-century theater--the sort of facility that makes him capable of writing such great, fine-grained profiles--is that as a theatergoer he's got a huge soft spot for old shows, particularly musicals: He was almost alone in praising Des McAnuff's Guys and Dolls; he liked the Roundabout's Pal Joey more than many critics; he inexplicably adored the hash that Arthur Laurents has made of West Side Story (though to be fair, he was not as lonely in that view); and he famously claimed that the recent revival of The Pajama Game bested his memory of the original (that may be true, but why should we care?). That's not to say his show-review criticism doesn't also have piercing insights and flashes of uniquely Lahrian brilliance, but for me it's generally an unreliable barometer of a particular production's value.

Bottom line, it's a tradeoff I'll gladly accept: What Lahr lacks as an opening-night critic he more than makes up for as a positively irreplaceable longform critical reporter.

Rocco's World

"While I want to state in no uncertain terms that the NEA is not a political agency and that when art becomes propaganda I lose all interest in it, I also want everyone to know that the days of a defensive NEA are over."

New NEA chief Landesman sketches an encouraging agenda and addresses the challenges the org faces but downplays the danger of revived culture-war attack on arts funding in today's LA Times interview. The jury remains out, of course, but I'm prepared to give the man who cajoled a great musical out of Roger Miller the benefit of the doubt.

UPDATE: The full text of Rocco's speech at Grantmakers in the Arts National Conference is here. It's hard not to be stirred by the following excerpt, particularly the references to his own theater background:

I've been at the NEA eight weeks and already I have my own litany: the NEA is funding porn in California, the agency has become a propagandist for the Obama Administration programs, and to truly add insult to injury, we've been told, vis-ý-vis our share of the stimulus money, that we in the arts don't even work.

One congressman summed up this view perfectly when he stated, "How can we spend 50 million dollars on the National Endowment for the Arts when we could spend that money creating real jobs like building roads?" I should pause here to note that that $50 million is one six-thousandth of one percent of the money in the stimulus bill. But more importantly, if you are, say, a musician who through long study and practice and talent has risen to play first violin in a symphony orchestra, please understand that although you have two kids to put through college, you don't have a real job. Discouraging? Just a little.

But here's the thing. The rational and appropriate response is the wrong one. The right response is the irrational and inappropriate one: Optimism. I will elaborate.

My first interview in the White House for the job of Chairman of the NEA was with Valerie Jarrett. I did a rather odd thing. I brought to the interview a prop (I'm a theater guy), which I placed down on the table in front of me. It was a book written 3 decades ago by a zoologist, Lionel Tiger. The title was: "Optimism. The Biology of Hope." This book made what now seems to me to be an obvious point: that optimism is a core survival mechanism of the species. It may be unrealistic, misguided, maybe even irrational, but vital. It is hardwired into our DNA. Every day we make decisions because we assume--often foolishly and mistakenly--a positive outcome. We get married, have children, buy stocks, bet on horses, change jobs, you name it.

I'm a theatrical producer. Fewer than 20% of the shows that open on Broadway earn back their investment, it is an absolutely terrible business and the people who invest in it know that. So why do they do it? Because they're optimistic.

Which brings me to President Obama, our Optimist in Chief. He is a writer, an artist but we'll come to that later. His second book had a title that would resonate with Lionel Tiger: "The Audacity of Hope". This is much more than a felicitous phrase that he found in a sermon: it is the manifesto of this presidency and will lay the groundwork for the most arts-supportive administration since Roosevelt.

I'll revise what I said above: The jury is in, as far as I'm concerned. I think we've got the right man at the NEA. RTWT.

Blogger on Fire

Isaac is tearing it up today with two of his best posts in memory, on

1. Do theaters really want young audiences? Really?

2. The age-old how-close-should-critics-get-to-the-world-they-cover question, with a great example from the English punk scene.

Sometimes There's God

An interesting and utterly unexpected interview with the great Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who's directing the upcoming Streetcar with Cate Blanchett, in the Catholic weekly I occasionally write for, America. I liked and identified with this quote in particular:

In my work I have found God. It is a help that I am an artist because it is all so real—because God is bigger in life and in death than I would have ever been aware of. Doing art, reading other people, connecting to the audience, I know that we live in a higher dimension, and not just at the best of moments.

I like also the idea, which she connects to Blanche DuBois' famous quote about the kindness of strangers, that we embody God to each other. In somewhat related matters, I was very struck by this talk on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Beckett, Pinter, Pop Culture

One of the more startlingly unlikely cultural legacies of mid-century drama is the line that runs from Beckett to Sanford and Son, with a crucial side tour through Pinter, but there it is. Given that strange genealogy, I'm inclined to keep an open mind about these things, but I'm less than convinced by a few other recent claims about the purported pop-cultural influence of the oft-paired Sam and Harold. The first was at Thomas Garvey's Hub Review, where, in trying to figure out why Pinter's work doesn't seem to pack the punch it used to, he theorizes:

Listening to The Caretaker, in fact, I was struck again and again by how his voice has become the lingua franca of so much pop culture. Saturday Night Live appeared just as his output began winding down, and its skits were often rife with light, dumbed-down riffs on his central trope of oblique threat. Then came Quentin Tarantino, whose dialogue is essentially a degraded, high-school version of Pinter's "comedy of menace," re-fitted with fresher pop references (and goosed along by literal threats of torture and rape). But a funny thing happened to the Theatre of the Absurd once Quentin Tarantino and Lorne Michaels got their hands on it: it went meta, and lost its powers of critique.

The irony-has-lost-its-sting critique is fair enough, even banal by now, but looking for traces of Pinter in SNL and Tarantino seems a stretch. Then along comes the Times' Jason Zinoman, whose review of the would-be horror play Ghost Light lays another trend at the feet of these two mid-century masters:

My advice for macabre theater artists is to...look to Beckett and Pinter, who were inspirations for the great horror boom of the 1970s. Roman Polanski wanted to film “Waiting for Godot”; and before William Friedkin shot “The Exorcist,” he adapted “The Birthday Party.” People say horror doesn’t work onstage, but trust me, if you dare to look closely at great 20th-century drama, it’s right there, hiding quietly, like a body buried in the basement.

That's some great trivia and good advice, but honestly, contemporaneity isn't causality. Pinter was a giant, but I don't think even he would claim that he invented menace, subtext, or suspense, let alone irony.

Most Produced (Updated)

You may be familiar with TCG's annual list of plays that will get the most productions in the coming season; this year Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom took top honors. But after going through season survey (in the October issue of American Theatre, I discovered that while Nachtrieb's play will certainly get the most productions of any single play, he's not the most produced playwright this coming season.

I decided to do my own calculations to find out which writers take the honors, and I found the results, while not entirely surprising, quite illuminating. I think they speak for themselves, but I should first note two caveats: These numbers are compiled from self-reporting TCG member theaters; there may be another Crucible out there somewhere that hasn't yet made its presence known. Oh, and in the case of the most-produced playwright, I added two productions off the top of my head (because they're Broadway productions and thus weren't tallied in the TCG list). Pop quiz: Which of the three (or is it four?) productions listed below are premieres? (You have to count co-productions that played first on the West Coast and are now coming to NY--otherwise the number of world premieres listed below is just two.*)

Without further ado, here they are: the most produced playwrights in America for the 2009-2010 season.

UPDATE: I've gone over the list again and added a few blind spots: some big ones (McNally, Simon, Coward) and a few less obvious ones (Sheinkin, Hatcher). Also, if my commenters are right, Steven Dietz might actually belong at the top of this list; to confirm, I've got to look to non-TCG sources. More anon. *I'd initially only said one; these addenda add precisely one world premiere to the tally.

David Mamet
19 productions: 5 of American Buffalo; 3 of Speed-the-Plow; 2 of November, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna; and one each of A Life in the Theatre, Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, Romance, Race, and The Voysey Inheritance (adaptation)

August Wilson
17 productions: 5 of Fences; 3 of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; 2 of Jitney, Seven Guitars, and Radio Golf; and one each of The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, and Gem of the Ocean

Sarah Ruhl
17 productions: 8 of Dead Man's Cell Phone; 3 of Eurydice and The Clean House; and one each of Passion Play, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and Late: A Cowboy Song

Steven Dietz
17 productions: 7 of Yankee Tavern; 4 of Becky's New Car; 2 of Shooting Star and Go Dog Go (adaptation); one each of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure and Honus and Me (adaptation)

Neil Simon
14 productions: 4 of Lost in Yonkers; 3 of The Odd Couple; 2 of Broadway Bound; and one each of Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Barefoot in the Park, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Come Blow Your Horn

Terrence McNally
13 productions: 4 of Master Class and The Full Monty; 2 of Golden Age; and one each of Ragtime, A Perfect Ganesh, and The Lisbon Traviata

Arthur Miller
13 productions: 5 of All My Sons; 4 of The Price; and 2 each of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman

Tennessee Williams
13 productions: 7 of The Glass Menagerie; 4 of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire

Jeffrey Hatcher
12 productions: 4 of Ella; 3 or Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (adapt.); 2 of Tuesdays With Morrie (adapt. w/ Mitch Albom); and one each of Cousin Bette (adapt.), The Government Inspector (adapt.), Lucky Duck, and Mrs. Mannerly

Noel Coward
11 productions: 4 of Blithe Spirit; 3 of Private Lives; and one ach of Brief Encounter, Present Laughter, Design for Living, and Hay Fever

Donald Margulies
10 productions: 6 of Shipwrecked! An Entertainment; and one each of Dinner With Friends, Time Stands Still, Collected Stories, and Brooklyn Boy

Horton Foote
9 productions: 2 of Dividing the Estate and Trip to Bountiful, and one each of The Orphans Home Cycle (which is technically 9 one-acts over 3 programs, so special props to Horton), To Kill a Mockingbird, Valentine’s Day, The Carpetbaggers, and The Young Man From Atlanta

Conor McPherson
9 productions: 6 of The Seafarer, 2 of Shining City, and 1 of The Weir

Peter Sinn Nachtreib
9 productions of boom

Michael Hollinger
8 productions: 7 of Opus and one of An Empty Plate in the Cafe Du Grand Boeuf

Harold Pinter
8 productions: One each of No Man’s Land, Moonlight, Betrayal, The Collection, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker, and two anthology shows: Two by Pinter and Hearing Noise in Silence: A Six-Play Celebration

Rachel Sheinkin
8 productions: 7 of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and one of Little House on the Prairie (adapt.)

Wednesday Matinee Links

• The Vatican for sale?
  
• Oleanna Mamet's best?
  
• Patrick Courrielche, NEA whistleblower or media manipulator? (via)
  
• Playgoer vs. talkbacks.
  
• Vincentelli's right about Donuts.
  
• Some background on Kaufman & Ferber.