Owe, That's Us

Chris Myers and Danny Wolohan in An Octoroon

"I rarely hope for my writing to have any effect. But I confess that I hope this piece makes people feel a certain kind of way." -Ta-Nehisi Coates, reflecting on his Atlantic case for reparations

"The whole point of this thing was to make you feel something." -a character in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon

What kind of country are we? Is the past, to paraphrase Faulkner, not only not dead but not even past? In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful recent conversation starter in the Atlantic, he ostensibly makes the case for economic reparations to black America not only for slavery but for the systemic injustices visited either uniquely or disproportionately on African Americans (Jim Crow, redlining, block-busting, the “war on drugs") in the 150 years since slavery’s legal end. But apart from the practical and political challenges of such a proposal (to take only the most obvious objection: Should clear, demonstrable cases for economic redress, as in the instructive story of Clyde Ross, by rights take precedence over computing a price tag for the more generalized plunder of all descendants of African slaves?), I take Coates’ mission with the piece to be more about resetting the terms of the discussion than nailing the terms of a settlement. His project, it would seem to me, is nothing more nor less than to make us see ourselves more clearly and honestly: to understand that our ideals of freedom and democracy, not to mention private property and rule of law, have never been impartially or equally granted to all citizens (citizenship itself being a prize that can’t be taken for granted), indeed were never intended to be so; and that to the extent they ever have been, it has been as the result of furious, in fact still-ongoing struggle. It is to coolly grant the nationalist/nativist observation that the country was founded by and for white men, but to insist that those men’s founding ideas require us to do better, to effectively unyoke the country’s promise from its heritage of plunder (to use Coates' evocative word).

But if Coates’ meticulous reporting here (as elsewhere) makes us realize is how far we haven’t come, indeed how recent in our history we can find cases of outright white-on-black theft, his larger point seems more existential and despairing: We are a nation, as he has starkly put it, “defined by white supremacy," in much the same way an alcoholic, no matter how long he’s been clean, will always be an alcoholic (an analogy he makes here). His case for reparations, in essence, is a plea for the U.S. to keep going to meetings and admitting we have a problem. It is not a recipe for closure, for healing, for a final moment when we can say, "That’s over and we’ll err no more," but for a process that will help us routinely and relentlessly face the past that still marks us, and turn away from it to do better. Indeed, though Coates’ project can be reduced (as it has been by his critics) to familiar arguments about redistribution, white guilt, and affirmative action, it is set apart by this insistence on a deeper, dare I say spiritual purging.

I thought of Coates’ piece while watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ extraordinary bit of postmodern meta-minstrelsy, An Octoroon, at Soho Rep last night, which, though in grave danger of being vastly overrated, is only slightly so (I found the first act a little dozy, but relished the second act all the way to the end). Like Coates’ piece, Jacobs-Jenkins’ play--essentially an annotated adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon--doesn’t play by now-familiar rules of the race-card game, particularly the shame-the-audience transaction by which we’re made to see how awful American attitudes used to be (oh but not anymore). Instead it shifts and shatters the frame, taking the racist conditions of 19th-century chattel slavery for granted while also taking Boucicault’s characters and their drama disarmingly seriously, give or take a contemporary joke here or a meta-theatrical gambit there. The result plays less like The Scottsboro Boys, about whose schematic ironies I had misgivings similar to Mildly Bitter’s, and feels closer in spirit to George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, which by connecting dots throughout black history implied continuity more than progress. Similarly, in An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins has the past and present hang out, seemingly casually but never less than pointedly, in the same space: a white actor in blackface alongside black actors, or a slave admonishing another, self-help-style, "Don't bring your work home with you." By suggesting these tropes' comfort with each other rather than italicizing their obvious differences, Jacobs-Jenkins is making a point not unlike Coates’: that Boucicault's literature of tragic blackness, of bad vs. good whites struggling for power while black folks get on with their lives as best they can, is who we are culturally, at least as much as or more than we are represented by the ameliorative liberal tradition currently on parade uptown in the great-man-of-history play All the Way.

Ostensibly, the feeling Jacobs-Jenkins hopes to evoke with An Octoroon ultimately has more to do with form than content (though as I think I’ve argued, Coates’ essay also advocates a change on the level of rhetoric as much as policy). The playwright has included some some fourth-wall-breaking footnotes to explain the way melodrama was supposed to affect its audience in Boucicault’s day, and then attempts to recreate something of that for our age of sensory overload (and by the way, the production, by Sarah Benson, is as sharp and unexpected as the play). In a long interview with my colleague Eliza Bent, Jacobs-Jenkins refers to melodrama as "the science part of what we do":

A generation of French guys literally just kept doing things to an audience and refined a codified formula for making an audience feel the way that these French guys thought they should feel at any given moment. This idea that we’re just these animals that are easily manipulated by certain steps or moves or gestures is so profound to me and made me wonder: What is it that we’re doing? Is it ethical? Or are ethics somehow besides the point.

But like Jackie Sibblies Drury’s brilliant We Are Proud to Present a Presentation… a few years ago, also at Soho Rep, Jacobs-Jenkins is using an inquiry of genre to get at thornier issues of agency, responsibility, of what we think we’re doing with our entertainment; weighing a container this loaded is ultimately inseparable from a consideration of what’s in the container. Though Drury's project was a little more explicitly about interrogating our aesthetic response genocide and horror--about questioning the very idea that we should have an aesthetic approach to such things--Jacobs-Jenkins’ approach is more impish, elusive, less visceral, in a sense less universal but also somehow broader. It is as if he’s opened a giant volume titled America, a book that can be read backward and forward, sometimes both at once, and made from certain of its pages a flipbook of disturbingly lovely silhouettes (and no, the reference is not idle).

Not to be too glib about it, but if this is one theatrical form Coates' reparations might take, sign me up.

Stalkers

Blogging has been light for much the same reasons as I noted here, but I feel I should catch readers up with my extra-curricular work.

• I interviewed Norm Lewis, Broadway's first black Phantom, for the paper of record. A confession: When I was assigned the story (this does still happen occasionally), I thought, "Oh, good idea; he can't possibly be the first, right?" Well, yep; apart from Robert Guillaume's brief turn in the role in the Los Angeles run, a news item I recall from my time there (that's where I saw it, with Davis Gaines in the lead), this is indeed an historic first. Lewis started in the role on May 12 opposite Sierra Boggess (interestingly, he's on a six-month contract and she's only signed up for four--which makes me think that rumors I've heard about a Broadway return of this classic sometime in August may indeed be true), and I've been told that critics might be admitted to re-review at some point.
• I spent a fascinating hour with Michael Shannon, a true American original whose work I've followed with interest since I caught him in Bug, which I count as one of the best things I've ever seen on a stage. For a piece in Time Out, we talked about his Chicago theater days (including this early appearance with Nick Offerman), about his hilarious "cunt punt" video, about religion and politics and Brooklyn but above all about his love for Ionesco, in whose seldom-performed play The Killer he's starring at Theatre for a New Audience. One gambit I tried was to trade favorite Ionesco quotes, like "I sometimes wonder if I exist myself" from Rhinoceros, or this choice one from Michael Feingold's new Killer translation: "As far as inner light is concerned, my electricity's about to shut off for nonpayment." The exercise foundered on my inability to recall my favorite of all, from Exit the King, which I half-remembered as being about how we should contemplate our own death, the details of our own inevitable physical extinction, for a certain amount of time each day to better prepare for it. A quick Google search for the quote led me to my own review of the 2009 Broadway revival with Geoffrey Rush, in which I helpfully preserved it, and with which I leave you now, as it is a timeless and actually quite useful piece of advice (not that I've followed it). Marguerite tells the dying Berenger: "You are doomed, and you should have thought about it from day one. And then every day after that, five minutes every day. That's not too much to ask. Five minutes a day. Then ten minutes, quarter of an hour, then half. That's the way to train yourself."

Once More Unto the Breach

Mark Ruffalo and Laurel Green in Justin Tanner's Still Life With Vacuum Salesman at the Cast Theatre, 1994 (photo by Ed Krieger)

I haven't lived in Los Angeles since the summer of 2005 but I've been back many times, I try to keep tabs on what's going on there culturally, and, as I told an editor at Vanity Fair when they asked me recently to write a rebuttal to this much-maligned piece by Jimmy Im, I still consider it in many ways my theatrical hometown. I've touched on my paradoxical formative years as a theatergoer in a movie town at some length before, so this may not be new to many of my readers. But it is likely to be news to many of Vanity Fair's readers, and I'm happy it will get a platform. My nut graf:

The paradox of L.A. theater [is that] nobody seems to know how good it can be and has been, and what great talents are slogging away at it, because of the persistent perception that L.A. is not a theater town. That perception is just plain wrong, though there’s a handy explanation for it. If, by some counts, more stage productions open in L.A. annually than anywhere else in the world, that’s one of the root problems: Too many of those 1,000-plus productions are, admittedly, staged merely as showcases for actors or writers eager for the film industry’s attention (though, as Ruffalo’s story indicates, good luck with that). That actor’s-showcase tendency may not be as prevalent as some people seem to think, but it’s common enough that it’s practically a rite of passage of living in L.A. to be invited by an actor friend to see them do third-rate Sam Shepard in some rat-trap theater with sketchy parking. It's hard to blame Jimmy Im, who recently wrote about the For The Record movie-scene cabaret series did, for assuming that L.A. theater is otherwise “dead.”

You can read the whole VF piece here.

Stuck on Hitch

A favorite scene from Foreign Correspondent, referenced in David Rudkin's new play The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock. 

"Alfred Hitchcock was a very close friend of mine from early boyhood. I mean that metaphorically.” -Playwight David Rudkin, in a recent interview about his new Hitchcock bio-play

Some time in the early 1980s, my dad flagged a listing in our local paper for a Chaplin feature, The Circus, that was screening at the nearby Scottsdale Center for the Arts. He knew I was into movies and thought I wanted to do that for a living one day (I was just into my teens by this point), so he suggested we go. What followed over nearly the next decade or so was a film education, and not just in Chaplin but in Welles and Hawks and Ford and Huston, Astaire and Minnelli and Donen...and, possibly above all, Alfred Hitchcock. I had the great good fortune to see just about every canonical work by the Master of Suspense on the big screen, with almost no prior knowledge (so I didn't know what was coming in, say, Psycho or Strangers on a Train). What's even better is that that little revival house would often bring back some audience favorites, so I must have seen North by Northwest on that big(gish) screen three summers in a row.

Later, in film school at USC, I binged on films, as many as five a week, not only in plush cinemas on campus but at such priceless big-screen revival houses as the New Beverly, film series at LACMA and UCLA, the Silent Movie, the State Theater in Pasadena, and among the world cinema, new and old, that I was exposed to, I would never pass up the chance to see or revisit a Hitchcock film. Even better, I had the great pleasure of taking an entire critical-studies class on Hitch, taught by an ex-Jesuit, Drew Casper, who illuminated many of the subtexts and influences, religious and otherwise, in the master's films.

So I was chuffed at the chance to chat recently with David Rudkin, whose new play The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock opens at 59E59's Brits Off Broadway festival on May 4. Rudkin, though from quite another generation and continent, and exposed at a much younger age to Hitchcock's film, followed a similar journey to mine from enthrallment to enlightenment; as we learned more about what Hitch was really up to and "working out" in his films, our admiration for his genius has been complicated, surely, but only deepened. As Rudkin put it: “He was able to develop an intensely private personal form of art, and yet do so in a way that spoke universally." Exactly. My piece, for the paper of record, is here.

Hall Monitor

I happened to catch Michael C. Hall in two early-ish stage roles: as the young kid in the Taper's exquisite production of Skylight (with Laila Robins and Brian Cox) and as the emcee in Cabaret, opposite fellow replacement Susan Egan (a great Sally in the Julie Harris mold). His sinuous performance in that last role helped land him the first of his two iconic cable series, and he's seldom been back to the stage since. So it was a pleasure to sit down with him recently to talk about Will Eno's strange new play on Broadway, The Realistic Joneses, in which Hall is excellent, for the paper of record.

Shaking in the Grass

The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama has just been announced, and I'm so happy to hear it went to Annie Baker's The Flick, I played I thoroughly enjoyed and admired. I don't know how Annie got the news or what she's up to today, but I happened to be interviewing Quiara Alegria Hudes recently for another publication; she was the only playwright on this year's Pulitzer committee, and she won the award, quite unexpectedly, in 2012 for Water by the Spoonful. Here's how she found out, and how she reacted:

The play had only been done at Hartford Stage Company. I guess maybe I asked, "Did you guys submit it?" But it was far from my radar. I didn't even know it was the day the Pulitzer was announced. I was at Wesleyan teaching, and my phone was off, which is when it got announced. My class was three hours long there. So everyone knew before me. I had so many voice mails from my husband and my agent. There are all these weird, hysterical messages--it's funny, I've saved them, and my husband gets so mad about that, he sounds like he's hyperventilating. The way he found out is he was looking at the New York Times site, and he was like, "Whaaat???" And his friend came in from the office next door and said, "I think I just saw your wife's name." He was like, "Oh my God!"

No one from the committee calls to tell you the news?

No, they just release it to the press. You find out when the world finds out, and in my case I found out after the world found out. Then everyone's calling me, and I'm in Connecticut and I have to drive home. And usually for me the drive is really relaxing; I put on music and I take the country roads. My husband was like, "You gotta come home, we gotta celebrate!" And I was like, "I can't come home right now, I will crash the car." So I just sat in the grass at Wesleyan for a few hours until I was kind of calmer, and then I got in the car and drove home. It was amazing. By the time I got home, a few friends were already here. We celebrated that night.

Unnaturalism

I came across this lede in an old review of mine while working on my recent feature on Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, and it struck as worth highlighting. The review is of the Mike Leigh play Ecstasy, and though it may not sound like it, I intended this as a compliment to Leigh:

Like documentary filmmaking, theatrical naturalism implicitly lays claim to direct, unmediated truth: This is how things really are, how people really behave, how time really passes. That's rot, of course. From the time we're children, it is storytelling and play-acting, and the distorting stylizations that accrue to them naturally, which come to us easily, almost unconsciously, and which thus express much about who we are and imagine ourselves to be. Authentic observation and reportage, on the other hand, take herculean effort and soul-searching--and inevitably involve more conscious interpretation, circumspection, and, yes, stylization.

Given more time and space to develop this line of thinking, I'm not quite sure I'd come up with. But I'm glad I put this down as a kind of marker for further exploration.