Holiday Reading

 

It has arrived. Have a great Turkey Day, dear readers!

Stepping Up With a Throwback

New Yorker illustration by Pascal Blanchet

I was one of the few critics who unreservedly loved Jordan Harrison's last play at Playwrights Horizons, Doris to Darlene, a Cautionary Valentine. But Maple and Vine, which I saw at Humana in April, felt like a breakthrough work for the 34-year-old playwright.

In researching and talking to him and his collaborators for this Times piece, in anticipation of the play's current Playwrights production, I discovered at least one reason why this play feels like a departure: It began its life as a Civilians project by director Anne Kauffman, and still contains germs of interviews the troupe conducted with real-life off-the-gridders, which gave Harrison his premise (a contemporary couple flees their rootless, neurotic contemporary lives to join a community of 1950s reenactors).

The combination of Harrison's seriously fanciful imagination, which earns him frequent comparison to Sarah Ruhl (he did also study at Brown with Paula Vogel), with the bracing, too-odd-to-be-fictional documentary material may partly explain Maple's exceptional richness and ambivalence. It could also be that Harrison has simply grown into a major playwright. Whatever the case, I can't wait to see the New York cast dig into this (though I'm quite delighted that Kauffman kept the inimitable Jeanine Serralles, one of only two holdovers from the Louisville cast, as the play's mesmerizing and forbidding authenticity enforcer).

Jung, Freud, and Spielrein, Take Two

Sam Robards as Jung, Harris Yulin as Freud in the Taper production of The Talking Cure

Sounds like Christopher Hampton's script for A Dangerous Method is an improvement over the original play on which it's based, The Talking Cure, which I reviewed in the LA Times in 2004:

Whatever their quirks or blind spots, surely the fathers of psychoanalysis were at least interesting company. But somehow Hampton has managed to drain the fraught relationship of two fascinating men of all vital signs.

Intellectual vigor, competitive spark, anxiety of influence -- all are missing in action from this lifeless tintype.

But A.O. Scott calls the new film "intellectually thrilling", and he doesn't seem to be alone. It could be that Cronenberg as director made the difference, or perhaps the medium. Or maybe it was the spanking scenes.

Re-Breaking News

At American Theatre, we often write about artists and plays before they reach the wider consciousness, or at least the stage of a major media town. When I was researching Tracy Letts last year, for instance, for a piece about August: Osage County in Oregon Shakes' Illuminations, I discovered that American Theatre profiled him and the play when it premiered at Steppenwolf back in 2007, which means we didn't cover that play's subsequent meteoric ascent in our pages, except to note the prizes it went on to win. It's one reason American Theatre is such a hard pitch for freelancers: If you're not plugged into the whole regional scene (and/or you don't read the magazine religiously), you're less likely to know which emerging writers we've already written about before their big national splash. Want to write about that hot new playwright at Humana or Steppenwolf? Better make sure we didn't already go there.

It's a modest example, but last May I wrote about Holland Taylor's one-woman show as late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, which she had the Lone Star State-sized cojones to debut in Galveston under the title Money, Marbles, and Chalk. It's now on a big stage in Chicago under the name Ann. So I thought, stealing a favorite trick from Fresh Air's Terry Gross, who deftly repurposes her interviews when someone she talked to years ago is in the news again, we could post the news piece (which never appeared online till now) as a reminder that the magazine is on the case.

Some Splaining To Do

In my inbox this morning, this news stuck out:

Steppenwolf Theatre said Wednesday that the actress Julianna Margulies will be the guest of honor of its annual Women in the Arts fundraising luncheon.

The star of "The Good Wife" (a CBS drama set, but not filmed, in Chicago) will be interviewed by Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey about her career. The event is slated for March 12 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St.

Margulies is certainly worth honoring, but I have to wonder if this is all an elaborate ruse to get her in the room and ask her to account for this major Good Wife fail, from last October:

The first scene of Tuesday's episode, penned by Robert and Michelle King, was set at a fundraiser in a hotel ballroom. "And now as dinner is served," says the hostess, "Steppenwolf Theatre will entertain us with scenes from their hit play, 'The Cow With No Country.'"

Yeah, that's credible. Steppenwolf does bits of its shows in hotel ballrooms all the time. Just as the beef is served.

And with that introduction, a motley and pathetic little group of ragamuffin actors popped out, replete with their crude puppet-cow and all, and do some kind of whacked-out performance that lands somewhere between moronic Medieval drama, pantomime, Bertolt Brecht, "War Horse" and "Jack and the Beanstalk."

English accents and all. We kid you not. What has that got to do with Steppenwolf?

The Midwestern rubes were putting on a show. The fictional politicos snicker at the childishness of it all.

The obvious next move would be for members of Steppenwolf to playfully invade the Women in the Arts luncheon with a scene from The Cow With No Country. All in good fun, of course.

Friday Links

Buried under another deadline avalanche, so here are some stray links:

• Dominique Morisseau challenges the default whiteness of character breakdowns.
  
• One of the first reviews of Sondheim's lyric-anthology sequel is hearteningly circumspect.
  
• I'm a fan of Show Showdown, but reviewing a play in previews and giving spoilers seems over the line.
  
• Jason Zinoman's persuasive case for Lobby Hero calls to mind the weirdly vicious reception it got on the West Coast (and my take on a later revival).
  
• Laura Eason's Tom Sawyer goes up in Denver.
  
• Optimizing Brel.
  

From the Leftover Quote File

On musical theater writing, from my February feature on multifacted playwright Laura Eason:

I once got this incredibly sweet email from Charles Strouse; he saw an adaptation of mine at 59E59 a couple of years ago, and completely out of the blue wrote me an email saying how much he enjoyed it, and I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. So I wrote him when I was trying to work on [some] musicals, "What is your advice about process?" And he said, "The advice is that there’s no process, and it really has to be dictated by who you’re in the room with, and what the material is, and what works for you is what you should do. How you’re going to use the music, how it’s going to function in relation to the book, and then once you know that, trying to execute it well."