Realism and Its Discontents

photo by Julieta Cervantes

I couldn't have been more on board for Soho Rep's indie-star-studded Uncle Vanya, and not just 'cause I got the chance to report on and contemplate it in advance. A little over a month ago, I'd sat through Target Margin's meta-take on the play—a kind of surface playing-at-the-text rather than in it—and was both fundamentally dissatisfied with the production and curiously interested in it; I didn't like it, by any stretch, but I was surprised how much it didn't bore me. The experience was a bit like skimming through the play while my mind was elsewhere; it wasn't involving on its own rather modest terms, but it was still Uncle Vanya, probably my favorite play (and one I know as well as I know any play).

So I went to Soho Rep eager to see what seemed on paper like an inspired idea: to have an extraordinary cast perform it in an intimate space without period frills, to just see and hear the play without distraction, not unlike the quietly intense version captured in Louis Malle's film of Andre Gregory's gorgeously idiosyncratic production, titled somewhat unfortunately Vanya on 42 Street.

This new Vanya is most decidedly not a meta-take, or a coolly distanced one, but its soporific effect on me made Target Margin's seem peppery by comparison. I could write for a while about a lot of the show's problems, but I think their root causes can be ascribed to two interrelated problems I would call phony naturalism and technical difficulties.

The first, phony naturalism, is a rookie mistake I almost can't believe adapter Annie Baker and director Sam Gold have made, since their work together has if anything been characterized by a laser-like specificity, a reinvigorated attention to detail that can make fly-on-the-wall naturalism feel urgent, even experimental, rather than just the people-on-a-couch default of lazy theatrical imagination. This Vanya, alas, is a shruggy, desultory affair that seems to have confused casual, offhanded, non-specific mumblecore sensitivity for realism. Indeed, it plays almost like a parody of the Annie Baker/Sam Gold aesthetic, and its shabby-hipster limbo makes a frustratingly imprecise match for Chekhov's world—which, with touching perversity, Baker's adaptation keeps faithfully referring to, right down "versts" and "barley kasha."

The show's technical difficulties are integrally related to the first problem. It was a bold, quixotic idea to stage the whole thing in the round, actually more "in the square," as we're seated (quite limb-crushingly uncomfortably, it must be added) on carpeted risers against four walls of a frustratingly non-specific room. The space and the staging are challenges I don't think this production ever surmounts. The invigorated naturalism Baker and Gold do so well, as they must realize themselves, only seems effortless, but it's as crafted and calibrated as a piece of music, and it relies on us not doubting its reality for a second, and on us entering the world of the play as smoothly and unobtrusively as possible. But largely because of the weird, unforgiving space, this Vanya never feels real in that way; it's impossible to guess in what room we're in or what the characters are doing there, or where they go or come from when they're offstage (Serebryakov may call the place "a labyrinth," but I'm not sure we should all feel as lost as he does for the whole play); why, for an interminably long stretch of the first act, the actors are so dimly lit as to be inscrutable, even from a few feet away; or why, for a disorientingly long part of the second act, they must sprawl across the unattractive shag carpet floor (Was the place robbed of its furniture during intermission? my colleague wondered). And, it must be said, while I think Gold has largely earned his rep as a wunderkind director, the challenges of an in-the-round staging, of making it feel natural and simply observed rather than effortful, self-conscious, and sightline-defying, almost entirely defeat him here.

I get why he and Baker thought all this would work like gangbusters; I think almost every one of these actors would be great in their roles in another production of Vanya (as I more or less felt about many of the actors in Target Margin's rendition); and I even think Baker's quirky but doggedly faithful adaptation, with its many contrasting registers, might be worth another look in another production. The good news for Soho Rep is that most critics don't agree with me, and seem to see instead the Vanya that Baker and Gold envisioned; the bad news, as far as I'm concerned, is that those unfamiliar with this great, great play will be bored stiff by it.

Vamping at Will

A scene from As You Like It by Francis Hayman (c. 1750)

Why do we keep returning with joy to As You Like It, one of Shakespeare's most plotless works? A delightful suspension of action may be part of its perverse appeal, as I wrote in a program piece back in 2005 for the Center Theatre Group:

In As You Like It, Shakespeare comes as close as he ever did to a kind of Socratic dialogue in theme-and-variations form, with characters gathering in various combinations in their languorous forest exile less to advance the plot than to talk, mock, and muse. The mere wisps of story Shakespeare provides are there primarily to usher the characters into the forest as quickly as possible, and later to provide a quick and painless ending. At the play's center, then, are some of the Bard's great ruminative exchanges on life and love, sharpened by contrasts—male and female, jaded and hopeful, city and country—and leavened by an easy laughter that bubbles throughout like an unhurried brook.

..Comedies are characterized by a movement from discord to harmony, which is why so many of them end in marriages and reconciliations. The special genius of As You Like It—a title whose self-confidence mirrors its heroine's—is that Shakespeare managed to minimize the discord so he could vamp expertly on his chosen themes, like a composer holding a suspended chord in mid-air until he's good and ready to resolve it. It's a rarefied comedy form, certainly, but consider the durability of such plot-light and argument-heavy antecedents as The Importance of Being Earnest, Heartbreak House, or the entire ouevre of Chekhov, who famously thought of his plays as comedies. As You Like It proves, as if we needed proof, that Shakespeare's virtuosity is in his insights as much as his imagination.

I'll be seeing the Shakespeare in the Park production tonight, and the Soho Rep Vanya tomorrow. It will be a ruminative weekend, I think; I'll leave incidents for the police blotters.

Auteur, Auteur

Does the auteur theory stop at the stage door?

The idea that playwrights shouldn't direct their own work is almost axiomatic; you can see it all over the reviews of John Patrick Shanley's Storefront Church, for instance, and it's such an article of faith for an old hand like Sondheim that he takes pains in Look, I Made a Hat to point out that frequent collaborator James Lapine is the exception that proves the rule. I understand the reasoning--that writers can't be "objective" about their work—and I've certainly seen plenty of shows in which the directorial hand of the writer was insufficiently strong, and it was probably safe to assume that someone outside the writer's own head would have sharpened the proceedings. But I don't quite understand why the writer/director is held up as an ideal in film, the showrunner/creator/producer is similarly elevated in television, but stage autocrats get the stink eye.

I asked the question flatly on the American Theatre Facebook page today ("Should playwrights direct their own work?") and got a fair number of immediate and unqualified "nos" and "nevers," as well as some predictable and healthy pushback. But my favorite response comes courtesy of Robert Garfat of British Columbia:

Canadian playwright, George F. Walker, used to get flak from two particular press critics for directing his own work. One critic said that Walker's plays were great, but Walker was a poor director. The other said that Walker was a fine director, but his plays were no good. Then George discovered a play written by an obscure French playwright and took it to the stage, directing the production, called Theatre of the Film Noir. Both critics loved the production, the first because Walker's direction of this inferior and obscure French work was sublime. The second critic lauded the play, saying that even though Walker's direction wasn't up to its usual standard, this play was much superior to those plays written by Walker. A week later, George revealed that he had written the play under a pseudonym.

Check and mate. Nobody knows anything.

L.A. Tony Times

What happens if you hold an online chat about the Tony Awards and only five people turn up? Could it be a sign that you're in the wrong city?

Checking Off a New Vanya

The cast of Soho Rep's Uncle Vanya

In the spring of 2002 I appeared in an L.A. Classical Theatre Lab production of Uncle Vanya; I don't recall how they found me, but they needed a guitarist because their Waffles, Alex Wells, didn't play; I was given the two or three lines assigned to the hired man, and was then gently worked into the scenes in which Astrov asks Waffles to play. (For the record, I came up with some minor-key tunes that sounded a bit more Spanish than Russian, though I also threw in a few bits of my favorite Janacek string quartet for good measure.) The production was a success and was extended, running at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice after bowing at Hollywood's Met Theatre.

I went into the show more or less considering Vanya my favorite play, or at least my favorite Chekhov play, which comes to about the same thing. And it was a fine, intense, intimate production with an eminently watchable cast (the only "name" being Orson Bean, who made a perfectly dry-as-dust Serebryakov, though our stage manager, for what it's worth, happened to be James Tupper). Good thing it was watchable, because director Bruce Katzman's decision to have no one exit the space but simply go to chairs arranged around the back of the set when our scenes were done meant that I, and my castmates, took in every second of the show about a hundred times in a few months. My admiration for Uncle Vanya did not diminish—if anything, my appreciation for its fine-grained, multilayered craftmanship only grew—but I got more than my fill of its despairing beauty, enough to last me for a number of years. A break from Voinitsky et al was in order.

I've seen only a handful of productions since, none particularly impactful; Target Margin's recent meta-rendition left me cold, which I think may have been the intention. I do look forward with interest to the reportedly rip-roaring version by Sydney Theatre Company, coming to the Lincoln Center Fest later this summer.

In the meantime, though, I have been happily occupied with a consideration of the new version opening soon at Soho Rep, with playwright Annie Baker and director Sam Gold at the rudder. It's intimate, it's in the round, it's matter-of-factly contemporary, and it has a great cast (seen above)—in short, it promises to make explicit the link between Baker's exquisite, oblique observational writing (on sample in full in a fantastic new anthology published by my employer) and Chekhov's, which many critics have already noticed and eagerly pointed out.

My piece for the Times is here. One of many delicious details I couldn't fit in: In this production, Waffles does play guitar, and he and the hired man will be breaking into the authentic Russian stylings of Lubeh. You heard it here first.

Stage-Door Ray

I've little to add to the encomiums (encomia?) for the late Ray Bradbury, except to recount that he was a source for my first Arts & Leisure byline back in 2006, when Godlight Theatre was staging a version of Fahrenheit 451 at 59E59. He'd given countless interviews already but of course I wanted a fresh one for my piece; but he was in L.A. and quite hard of hearing, I was told. So to make it happen, I was to fax him written questions, which he would then answer by calling me a few minutes later. Problem is, the nearest fax machine to me, a new-to-Brooklyn freelancer, was the Fedex/Kinko's down the street in Cobble Hill, so I had to request that Mr. Bradbury delay his reply for, say, 15 minutes, so I could rush back to my home phone and receive his call. It all worked out, and he gave me some fine quotes (including a provocative solution to Israel/Palestine conflict).

My only other experience with him (as opposed to with his work, which has been blessedly everywhere around me throughout my life, as it has all of us) was when he accepted a special award for his theater work at the L.A. Weekly awards back in 2004. He was, as always, very quotable:

"This is the culmination of a lifelong dream," he began, recalling that in junior high he told his friends he was going to be an actor at the local radio station. " 'Do you know anybody?' my friends asked me. I said no. 'Does your father know anybody?' they asked me. I said no. And they said, 'How are you going to get work as an actor if you don't know anybody?'" The only logical reply: "I said, 'I'll hang around the stage door and be lovable.' "

Bradbury thanked the theatre for "saving my life, when motion pictures have so often destroyed it." He explained, "I've dedicated my life to the theatre. I've always written plays, but no one was interested in doing them. So I saved my money. Eventually I asked my wife, 'Is this the year we open the window and throw the money out?'" He hailed Charles Rome Smith, the founder of Pandaemonium, an all-Bradbury-all-the-time company which has gone into overdrive on the man's work of late. His sharpest jab was at Hollywood mendacity: "The studios want to come over and pee in my soup. They say it will improve the flavor."

Though Francois Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451 is a bit of a dead letter, it did inspire one of Bernard Herrmann's most gorgeous scores (sampled above). The tireless imagination around which such inspiration orbited will be missed. This beautiful, James Agee-worthy childhood recollection in a recent New Yorker is a good a way as any to remember him:

I’d helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky. My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar boy. I helped take the red-white-and-blue tissue out of the box and watched as Grandpa lit a little cup of dry straw that hung beneath it. Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside.

But I could not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside. Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a gentle nod of his head, did I at last let the balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across the night among the stars.

We stood watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it. By then, tears were streaming down my face, and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last clear his throat and shuffle his feet. The relatives would begin to go into the house or around the lawn to their houses, leaving me to brush the tears away with fingers sulfured by the firecrackers. Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.

Major Over Minor

(cross-posted at Train My Ear)

I'm not entirely approving of the Tori Amos-ish direction of Regina Spektor's new record, but there's no arguing with the catchiness of "All the Rowboats." It's not that three-note minor key melody that hooks me—the same riff Tom Waits' "Cemetery Polka" is built on, not to mention a recurring motif of JC Superstar ("Talk to me/Jesus Christ"):

No, it's the odd note she drops in at the :34 mark on "rowboats" and "paintings":

She avoids hitting it again until 2:20, and finally, extremely satisfyingly, hammers it a few times after 3:03 (she does sneak it in briefly at the :52 mark on the word "sculpture"). Why is it so satisfying? Because that interval is a classic tension-builder: a major seventh over a minor chord. This is Bernard Herrmann/Sweeney Todd territory. I may not be willing to go to the mat for Ms. Spektor's compositional genius (though I think I would for this gorgeous new song), but to toss this major-minor collision into a three-minute pop ditty gives fresh sharpness to the term "hook." It certainly pulls me in.