Moments Between the Moments

photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images North America
Had the pleasure recently of meeting and chatting with the very busy director Daniel Aukin, a new play specialist formerly of Soho Rep, now working at every other Off-Broadway theater in town, including Signature Center, where he's directing the new Sam Shepard play. I particularly liked this window into his work:

“Part of the job is to figure out, what are the things in this play that, no matter how we do it, are going to come across anyway?” Mr. Aukin said in an interview in the Signature Center’s cavernous new lobby before a rehearsal. “You could say very broadly that with a lot of plays, there are somewhere between 15 and 30 moments that have to work in a certain way — that have to do something for the storytelling to land. And then there’s room between those places.”

Those liminal spaces are where Mr. Aukin thrives. Indeed, he has few contemporary rivals in finding texture and resonance in a play’s stillness and silence, or what [Itamar] Moses called “the moments between the moments.” That may be why the delicate, fine-grained naturalism of [Amy] Herzog’s “4000 Miles” was such a good fit for his talents. Paige Evans, artistic director of Lincoln Center’s LCT3, said, “He draws drama out of small, ordinary moments, but doesn’t hit them on the head.”

My piece for the paper of record is here.

Quote for the Day

"There is no real world/We live side by side/And sometimes collide"

—Everything But the Girl

I Wish

I don't recall exactly how it started, but I've become one of The Sondheim Review's regular reviewers, and the winter issue will contain my evaluation of the current Shakespeare in the Park production of Into the Woods. Director Timothy Sheader's production, to my eyes, works more than it doesn't, and it feels/looks particularly English, so much so that it reminded me of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, another play about magic and mischief in the woods that ends stirringly with a summoning of giants. I write:

If Sheader’s production never reaches [Jerusalem's] incantatory power, it has a little to do with his staging, a little to do with his casting, and a fair amount to do with the source material. Sondheim and Lapine’s 1987 musical is a brilliant piece of craftsmanship that richly rewards repeated viewings and study, both compositionally and dramaturgically. But the show’s final turns, all of them inward, usually grind the evening to a halt while the characters mopily contemplate the complications of families and morals; that stately procession of closing ballads (“No More,” “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen”) can start to sound dangerously close to a series of self-help sermons. I’ve seen very few productions, including the original one (on video, like most of humanity), that have avoided this trap; it’s my fond recollection that a tiny but big-spirited rendition at Actors’ Co-op in Hollywood back in 1994, with Janet Carroll as the Witch, was an exception, and I think what put it across was the intimacy of the space and the clear, bright contours of the characterizations. Indeed, most of the problems with the Central Park production fall along those lines: its frequent lack of intimacy and occasional lack of definition.

For the review and much more besides, you can subscribe or order individual issues here.

Quote for the Day

"I hate that word blog
It sounds like a large accumulation of snot"

—Melissa James Gibson, This

My Three Uncles

Blanchett and McElhinny in the Sydney Theatre Company production; photo by Lisa Tomasetti

So I've now seen three Uncle Vanyas in as many months. Which takes the gold? If you count length of run as a measure of success, Soho Rep's Annie Baker/Sam Gold version, which has been extended through the end of August, is the clear winner. On the other hand, if you count how far a production has traveled, then the Sydney Theatre Company production, recently in town as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, clearly takes the prize. Target Margin's odd meta-take, which I saw in May, would win only in the first-out-of-the-gate category.

I should preface remarks about my own response to this triptych by saying that while Chekhov's rueful comedy may be my favorite play, as I've mentioned before, and though I've aired my dissatisfaction with the Soho Rep production, I honestly don't feel like I have a dog in the how-Chekhov-should-be-done derby: I get what my colleagues David Cote and Jason Zinoman are saying—roughly speaking, the argument is whether Chekhov's plays are nuanced, layered dramas of everyday disappointment or rip-roaring Russian comedies of passion and excess—but at the risk of copping out of the argument, I'll just say that I've seen enough productions of his plays to be an agnostic on the question. If I take anything away from these three wildly various Vanyas, not to mention the furious, punk-rock Seagull I saw in Moscow in April (which would give purists of any camp conniptions), it is that Chekhov's plays are not fragile, delicate hothouse flowers; they can take, and deserve, a wide range of interpretations.

In fact, what I think has been overlooked in the discussion of this recent spate of Vanyas, and in particular, in comparisons between the Baker/Gold version and the Sydney version (directed by Tamás Ascher from an adaptation by Andrew Upton), is that neither of these two is a stuffy, traditional samovar-and-cravats approach. Both strive for a kind of faithfulness to the text, certainly, but one is set at a vaguely 1940s, possibly-Australian outpost, while the other is set in a kind of casual-contemporary attic limbo. Neither is "traditional," as was the one I was part of in L.A. years ago.

But yes, these two can stand in as case studies for either side of the century-old argument about whether Chekhov's plays are primarily comedies or dramas, ruminative or raucous (while Target Margin's made its own modest case for deconstruction/experimentation). Again, that we have this debate at all signifies to me that the answer is, of course, they are both. They are capacious plays with both grand architecture and fine filigrees; they can be played broad and played tiny. I can think of no better argument for remaining open to interpretation than the Malle/Gregory film of the Mamet adaptation, Vanya on 42nd Street, which makes a quiet, no-frills case for both the humor and the pathos; it gets the rumination and fine-grained behavioral observation without losing the larger shape of the piece.

And that's, finally, what I responded to most in the Ascher/Upton production, apart from some of its undeniable pleasures (which would include, yes, Cate Blanchett's deliberate yet disarmingly messy take on Yelena, as well as Richard Roxburgh's angry-turned-catatonic-clown Vanya): that it revealed the shape of the play as much as its component parts. I can imagine, in theory, the value of being so immersed in the play that you can't see or feel its edges, and I think that's what the Baker/Gold version aspired to (and seemed to achieve, I should hasten to add, for the large majority of critics); and it's possible that some of the problems I had with the Baker/Gold version were simply a matter of the technical difficulties I alluded to here.

But I do think that discerning or guessing at a play's larger shape and movement while remaining alive to each moment as it happens is not only part of the satisfaction of theater, which is both a performative and literary art; it is also very close to life as it's experienced. We don't invariably live in the moment, and we don't experience life as simply a series of events, unless we have a serious dissociative disorder; we make narrative, we infer and/or impose meanings on events, we plan and perform rituals and routines, we daydream. One of the joys of a play is that it reflects these experiences within a dramatic shape, and the unique joy of Chekhov is that he seems to have found ways to conjure these experiences more directly, without shaping his plays into rigid plot forms. But they do have shapes and rhythms, and it was clear from the moment Sandy Gore's Maria Vasilyevna blew in to pick a fight with any takers (Roxburgh's Vanya being only her most obvious target) that Ascher's production crucially understood the play as a series of arguments between bored, dissatisfied people—arguments some were spoiling for, some were at pains to avoid, and still others didn't even realize they were in.

This conflict-driven interpretation fired the whole evening, even the scenes of ostensible comity, as in the risky choice to play the Sonya/Yelena reconciliation as a giggly, vodka-fueled slumber party (a bridge too far for me, actually, and a bad sign for Hayley McElhinney's Sonya, who was far too much the needy, grabby child for my taste; if you wanted to point to a casualty of Ascher's high-pitched approach, it would be his Sonya, though she rallied by the end).

Ultimately, my reaction to the Sydney Vanya was closest to Scott Brown's: bracing but not definitive, with occasional and forgivable lapses of taste. I liked Zinoman's tart observation that "an Uncle Vanya with no trace of vulgarity betrays the work," though this is hardly a deficiency of the Baker/Gold version, which envisions the Vanya/Astrov drunk scene as a fratty, pants-optional romp; that production's problem isn't too much reverence or decorum, by any stretch. And though I ended up responding more to the Upton/Ascher version than to those of Baker/Gold and Target Margin, I'm heartened enough by this outbreak of diverging Chekhovs in New York to suggest that, far from feeling glutted, my appetite is only whetted for more, and not just merrier, productions.

Friday on the Links

• Going deep into the astonishing new Dirty Projectors' album.
• Maybe this is why there aren't more theater practitioners doing criticism.
• "If I expect them to build an ethical iPhone, then I had better build an ethical monologue."
• I'm seeing the final Vanya of the season tomorrow night. Will I agree with Zinoman or with Cote, or neither?
• One case of the film version improving on the play.
  
  

Doers Vs. Watchers

On HowlRound today, Sherri Kronfeld brings fresh passion and (seeming) common sense to an age-old debate (or at least one that's been raging as long I've been in the arts journalism racket). Essentially:

Why aren’t there more theater practitioners among theater critics? Why is ours one of the rare fields—unlike sports, books, economics, etc—where esteemed practitioners can’t comment on each other’s work? In fact aren’t they the best people to do this?...Why should theater practitioners only write about theater in the most oblique ways, and on blogs? I want Adam Rapp to review the next Stephen Adly Guirgis play, and in the damn New York Times (if he wants to). I want a busily working lighting designer (too many to name) to review plays in Lighting and Sound America. And no, I do not think it’s a conflict of interest. I think it would be a celebration of the art form we’ve dedicated our lives to. Why, in theater only, is enthusiastic advocacy and lifelong experience viewed as a conflict of interest?

In response I could cite my own previous thoughts about sometime practitioner/critic John Lahr, roughly to the effect that this line of thinking hugely undervalues the role of the seasoned aficionado (and Matthew Freeman's related thoughts); I could mention my colleague David Cote at Time Out, who's been a practitioner before and is dipping back into it; or WSJ's Terry Teachout, former jazz bassist, now part-time playwright. I stand by all that (and I'll use this opportunity, again, to plug my favorite piece ever on the purpose of criticism). I can add that I agree in part with Kronfeld's point; I'd like to see the conflict-of-interest canard challenged more vigorously, and I for one would like to read more intra-theatrical dialogue, something we definitely encourage at American Theatre, where we frequently publish practitioner/journalists. I'd like to do my part to break down the wall on the editorial side of this impasse, and pieces like Kronfeld's serve as good reminders that we have further to go on that score.

But the resistance of editors and publishers is not the whole story here; artists also have an aversion to practicing criticism in the public square. Some of that is for entirely self-interested and political reasons, the old don't-shit-where-you-eat conundrum. But I would argue that it goes deeper than that, and that there are practical and personal reasons you don't see more crossover. In my own experience as a full-time arts journalist/critic and sometime theater composer/musician, I can say that the cliché about the "inner critic" is entirely true; it is surpassingly hard to shut off one's evaluative, analytical mind at will when trying to be creative, and vice versa. It's a switch that most artists worth their salt don't flip back and forth lightly, and I can say that putting an emphasis on one over the other, in my own case, has had its costs.

And these costs aren't just internal; they're also eminently practical. Arts journalism is a trade and a craft (if increasingly a tough career), and not only are there are only so many brain compartments into which one can file critical and creative thoughts; there are only so many hours in a day. Kronfeld alludes to this issue but I don't think she quite gives it the weight it deserves. She quotes playwright Jason Grote, who used to do a fair amount of theater journalism and blogging, as to why he doesn't do that anymore:

“I never had a problem with writing for The Brooklyn Rail or American Theater—but everyone else seemed to. I’d just ignore stuff I didn’t like or wasn’t interested in, and offer something closer to analysis than criticism. But I stopped, mostly because of burnout, but also because many people didn’t seem to understand ‛what I was’—I felt forced to choose between thinker and artist.”

To the extent that Grote means he felt external pressure to fit into one career box or another, that's lamentable; I think that kind of prejudice about job description should be set aside as much as possible. But I think Kronfeld underestimates the extent to which that choice between thinking and doing, reflecting and creating, is a genuine artistic crossroads. The folks who can keep straddling those two roads without strain are few; heck, the list of folks who can do either playwriting or criticism well is short enough.

Speaking as an editor, I'd love nothing more than to publish eminent playwrights' writing about their peers; who wouldn't? But I understand why I get vastly more pitches from people who've dedicated themselves to writing about theater than from people who are busy doing it.