Thoughts on Playwriting

by Kirk Woodward

[My longtime friend Kirk Woodward is the one person I know with the broadest experience and knowledge of theater.  I’ve gone through this list a number of times on this blog, but it’s important to do so again now: Kirk’s an actor, acting teacher, singer, accompanist (piano), and reviewer (his book The Art of Writing Reviews is available on his website http://spiceplays.com/). 

[His two main theatrical occupations, however, are directing and playwriting.  (Kirk writes both musicals and non-musical plays, so he’s also a composer and lyricist.)  He’s been doing at least some of these things since before I knew him—and that’s 55 years now.  That’s a lot of years to cover a lot of territory in the theatrical world. 

[Kirk also reads a lot—about all kinds of subjects, including religion and philosophy as well as the Beatles—a favorite subject, along with Bob Dylan—and, of course, the stage and its people.  He’s going to talk to us this time about writing plays—but he’s not going to talk from books or classrooms; he’s going to talk to us from his experience . . . lived experience.

[Pay heed.  I guarantee you’ll pick up a few things—about theater, art, playwriting . . . and even people and little about life, too.  Don’t take my word—check it out!

[“Thoughts on Playwriting” isn’t Kirk’s first foray into this topic: on 18 February 2016, I published “How to Write a Play” by Kirk Woodward on Rick On Theater; on 19 July 2020, Kirk’s “Playwriting Bake-Off” described the process he used to compose a play for a contest; and on 22 July 2020, I posted Kirk’s “Dance Break,” the script he created.  (You’ll find other theater-related articles by Kirk mentioned in his article below.)]

Since this article is about playwriting, I ought to give a brief summary of my experience in the field. I’ve written dozens of plays, primarily in three categories: multi-act comedies or dramas; plays for young audiences; and one-act plays for adults. Of these, some thirty have been performed somewhere. None have been published by any of the major theatrical printing houses (at least initially my fault – I haven’t tried very hard).

Several have had multiple productions, a good sign. One, a musical version of The Wind in the Willows for which I was co-lyricist, toured the country for two years. A commissioned narration I wrote for a concert version of Candide (1956) was absorbed by the owner of the rights for the work, a mark of approval if not a financial benefit. I have usually written by myself; the actor Ken Jennings wrote most of the Wind in the Willows I just referred to, and I have happily collaborated with Mona Hennessy, when we wrote together for our touring children’s theater company, and with Martha Day on several one-act plays.

So I have some background in playwriting, and I will presume on that in order to write about the experience from my point of view. I will phrase this piece as a series of instructions to playwrights, not that they need any; it’s just, as we say in the theater, a convention (that is, a device in a play that helps get the story told efficiently).

A related convention in this article is that I will write as though “you” want to be a playwright, and I hope that this perspective will be useful in giving a picture of how one playwright, at least – me – thinks, feels, and works.

JOIN THE DRAMATISTS GUILD. First things first. If you’ve had a play performed, if you’ve written a play, or, frankly, if you’ve so much as imagined writing one, you should join the Dramatists Guild (not to be confused with the Writers Guild, which represents film and television writers). It’s not a union, it’s literally a guild – a craft association – and an extremely good one.

It fights for playwrights’ legal rights; it will advise you on contracts, without charge; it assists indigent older members; it sponsors terrific lectures and has representatives across the country and in Canada; and its magazine, The Dramatist, features excellent discussions on various topics among playwrights both famous and not.

All in all, the Guild is a dream of a resource. Its address is 1501 Broadway, Suite 701, New York, New York, 10036, and its phone number is (212) 398-9366. I’m serious – “join the Guild” is about the best advice a playwright can have.

REGISTER YOUR WORK. While we’re on the subject of outside organizations, be sure to register your work with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. This can be done online; there’s a fee, but currently you can group ten separate works together in one application.

People often refer to this procedure as “copyrighting your play.” It’s not, exactly, it’s registering it; you own the copyright when you write the play, but how would you prove it if you have to? So register it, too.

HAVE A GOOD IDEA. Obvious? Maybe not – otherwise every play would be a success.  In particular, now and then an idea seems almost to write itself. Bernard Slade (1930-2019) had an idea about a couple who meet for a one-night stand every year; that idea became the enormously successful play Same Time, Next Year (1975) and its success could easily have been predicted from the idea – that’s how solid the concept was. (I met someone who came to the same conclusion, invested in the show, and became unbelievably rich.)

Not every idea is great; good ideas are important; and a playwright may simply start to write, without any idea in mind at all – it’s been done. A snatch of dialogue, a fleeting image, the sound of a voice . . . anything can lead to a good play.

But there’s something to be said for letting the idea find you, if possible, rather than the reverse. Critics have observed that Noel Coward (1899-1973) had more success with the plays he wrote that came to him more or less fully formed, than he did with plays when he had to struggle and revise them extensively.

Similarly the reviewer Walter Kerr (1913-1996) wrote about the play The Star-Spangled Girl (1966) that Neil Simon (1927-2018) “hasn't had an idea for a play this season, but he's gone ahead and written one anyway," and Simon admitted that was probably the truth. (I felt the same about his later play Rumors of 1988, but it had a run of over 500 performances, so my opinion clearly is not worth much.)

Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in his Poetics (c. 335 BC) that plot is “the life and soul of the drama,” and one can make the case that a play “exists” before it is written down in dialogue form. There is a story, conceivably true, about the French playwright Jean Racine (1633-1699) coming to a party in a good mood and announcing, “I’ve just finished my new play. All I need to do now is write the dialogue.”

In teaching playwriting I have always taught that the important thing in writing a play is the idea . . . the most important thing in writing it, not necessarily in achieving a successful production, which is an issue further down the line. Not only in writing a play, but in any kind of writing, the “getting it down on paper” (or whatever medium one uses) ought to precede the editing, and many people tangle themselves in knots by trying both to write and to edit at the same time.     

One might object that playwriting is different in this regard from writing¸ say, a novel or a poem, because the success of a play depends on its structure. I don’t argue with this idea if one wants to write a highly structured play, but that’s by no means the only choice. There are others.

There are, for example, episodic plays like those of the “epic theatre” of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). There are also numerous experimental works, and there is a current generation of playwrights who regard a tight dramatic structure as oppressive and/or culturally biased.

In addition, playwrights may write a script believing they are writing “whatever comes to mind,” when they are actually filling out a structure that already exists in their subconscious minds. I have had the experience of writing a play that knew exactly where it was going, even though I didn’t, something I discovered when the play was completed.

In a survey of the plays of Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that I wrote for this blog (“Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016), I noted that there are both plays that Shaw tightly plotted from the first, and plays that he wrote as the words came to him.

NEATNESS COUNTS. Once you’ve written what you want to write, getting produced and/or published is of course a different matter. At that point one might want to think of production issues like scenery and cast sizes. Does the play really require that Mars set? Is that sea nymph really a necessary character?

The answer, of course, may be yes – it’s your play. Others will evaluate your choices in terms of what they are looking for.

In any case, it’s a good idea to circulate your play in a standard script layout. There’s no one acceptable format, but here is an excellent guideline: http://www.caryplaywrightsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/CPF_play_formatting-1.pdf.

The Theatre Communications Group (520 Eighth Avenue 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156; Tel: 1-212-609-5900 | Fax: 1-212-609-5901; E-mail: info@tcg.org) puts out the Dramatists Sourcebook which provides information to playwrights about theaters (limited to TCG members) that accept unsolicited scripts and what criteria submitted plays should meet.  DSB also lists who the staffer at each theater is who receives scripts and inquiries.  (DSB used to be an annual publication, but now it only comes out periodically.  The latest edition seems to be 2010.)

Many theaters and contests enlist play readers whose job is to pass recommendations on to others for further reading. Their job is a strenuous one and anything you can do to make it easier for them, like formatting your play so it’s easy to read, will be appreciated.

Playwrights have told me that readers nowadays want extensive stage directions so they don’t have to work hard at visualizing a scene or action. Maybe so. Some playwrights are minimalists when it comes to stage directions. There’s undoubtedly a middle ground.

WRITE TO DEMAND. Once a play has been written, how does one get it produced? The best way is to write a play so overwhelmingly good that it has to be produced, and may you be the one to do it. Failing that, however, there are other approaches.

One can submit plays to theaters and contests, and resources available from the Dramatists Guild will help you in that. If you can get an agent, your play will be submitted to theaters that otherwise won’t look at it.

An agent may also be able to tell you if your play was accepted or rejected. Otherwise, be prepared for extensive uncertainty, since many theaters and contests never bother to reply at all.

There are two ways of getting a play produced that have a better than average chance of succeeding. I have used them both, with a great deal of satisfaction. The first is to write plays that you know somebody wants.

For example, a play I wrote won the 1990 Hardin County Playwriting Contest – in fact I suspect there were few serious entrants, because as I recall, the author had to be from Kentucky (I am); the play had to take place in the Hardin County Library, because that’s where it would be staged; and the story had to be a mystery of some sort. I wrote a play to meet the criteria, and had the great satisfaction of traveling to the library and seeing my characters wandering around the stacks, plus getting a check.

I mentioned above that I co-wrote lyrics for a version of The Wind in the Willows. This happened because Ken Jennings, the principal writer, sang and acted out the entire script at a party late one night, indicating in certain places that he hadn’t finished a particular song. I asked him if he’d like me to see if I could complete the incomplete lyrics, and he was satisfied with the result.

In another instance, a friend who taught and directed at a regional community college wanted to produce a “Living Newspaper” at the school. The Living Newspaper was a kind of play particularly associated with the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), in which news stories of the day were dramatized in a revue format. My friend wanted to do a Living Newspaper on the AIDS crisis, which was rampant at the time.

Shortly before his rehearsals were due to start, I asked my friend if he had a script to work with and he said he actually didn’t. I volunteered to write one; I had less than a week in which to deliver it.

I camped out with a copy of And the Band Played On (1987) by Randy Shilts, and whenever I saw something in it that gave me an idea for a scene, I wrote it. With the addition of a few student-written scenes, voila! We had a play.

A cautionary side story: some months later a cashier at a bookstore turned out to have been in the play. I didn’t tell her I had written it, but said I’d seen it, and complimented her on her acting. “Thanks,” she said, “it was difficult. The dialogue was awful.” To each their own. I should have told her I was the author right up front.

I have written plays for local dinner theater productions; for theaters that wanted new plays for young audiences (“children’s theater”); for drama schools, because they needed something to meet specific class requirements; for church anniversaries; for a theater that needed a play specifically about Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus; and so on.

A caution: unless you agree to accept a writing job as a “work for hire,” protect your ownership of the piece – don’t sign it away, as theaters, producers, and others will often try to get you to do. The Dramatists Guild will advise you on how to protect your rights. Plays are the property of their authors unless the authors specify otherwise, and one must be extremely wary of situations where your rights are at risk.

If you do the best you can with whatever you write, nothing says it can’t have a further life after the first production. Andrew Lloyd Weber (b. 1948) and Tim Rice (b. 1944) wrote the first version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1967) for a school choir, at the request of its supervising teacher, and it has been produced continually ever since.

SELF-PRODUCE. If one strategy for getting your play produced is to write it to fill someone’s need, another is to produce it yourself.

With yourself as producer, you are reasonably certain of getting a production of your play. Actors will jump at the chance to work if they are available. Your family and friends certainly wouldn’t miss such an event, especially if you don’t charge admission.

Expenses depend on the scope of the production. At one end of the scale, a reading in your back yard will cost nothing. At the other end are the so-called “vanity productions” in which an author finances a full production and, if necessary, keeps it running with the author’s own money. You presumably won’t charge yourself royalties for your play.

I have directed several “living room productions” that were staged, with the actors memorizing their roles, but without sets or costumes. The COVID crisis has made another kind of staging possible – presenting a play on a platform like Zoom. I have written about both kinds of performances, both live and virtual, in this blog (“MicroRep,” 27 July 2017; “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report,” 19 May 2020; “Acting Class (On-Line Edition),” 4 Aug. 2020).

Hearing your play performed is valuable no matter how it’s done. So is seeing the reactions of a real audience. The following is a warning, however.

YAKKETY YAK, DON’T TALKBACK. Theaters may want to hold “talkbacks” after a reading or performance, or you may want to, in order to collect feedback on the piece. I have the impression that playwrights increasingly dread this practice, because it is often either useless or destructive.

A talkback, if not carefully structured, invites people who just heard your play for the first time to tell you what they’d do if they’d written it. They didn’t write it, you did. If the talkback isn’t carefully structured, the most you get out of it may be a headache.

I suggest two rules for a talkback, and if they’re not accepted, I would refuse to allow one. First: set a time limit, and when that limit is reached, end the session, because otherwise it may go on forever. Second: make it clear to everyone that all you want to know is what worked well for them in the play, and what didn’t. 

Based on those questions, you may get something valuable out of the comments, or you may not, and unless an observation strikes you as a revelation, probably the best thing to do is to say thank you to everything (not trying to defend yourself or the play, go away, let time pass, and allow the things you’ve heard to simmer in your subconscious mind.

It’s your play; you know it better than anyone. The old adage that “plays aren’t written but rewritten” contains a tiny grain of truth for certain kinds of plays, but in general is a recipe for trouble. William Goldman (1931-2018), in his must-read book The Season (1969) about Broadway theater, writes about rewriting:

It’s as if you want to go north, due north, that’s the place, and off you start. But then there’s a change and then another, and suddenly you’re heading north by northeast, and that isn’t quite the same any more, but what the hell, it’s close enough, it’s still north. And then one morning you wake up, and the sun’s dead in your face, and you think, “East, huh?,” and then you think, “East? I don’t wanna go east, I’m a north man.” And then you think, “Well, what the hell, at least I’m moving and – east, north – motion’s the thing; when you get right down to it, I’m a motion man more than anything.” And on you go . . . .

Don’t go there.

PUBLISH AND/OR BE DAMNED. For me, having a play published is a gold standard of playwriting success, so I should begin by reiterating that none of my plays have been published by a major publishing house. As i acknowledged, I haven’t tried very hard, discouraged, possibly, by a rejection note I received from a publisher in Boston that read, in its entirety, “Further consideration of your play would be beneficial neither to us nor to you.”

I do have my plays listed on the web, on a site called spiceplays.com. The Internet has loosened the grip that the major theatrical publishing houses held on the circulation of plays. However, those publishers are nevertheless important and valuable. They make plays widely available, and they cheer the spirits of the playwrights whose plays they publish. Even catalogues full of scripts that will never, never see a “major” production may contain gems.

Publishing houses ordinarily want your plays to have been produced somewhere before they will consider them. Beyond that, the principle seems to be the same as that of job interviews: know everything you can about who you’re dealing with. See what kinds of plays a particular publisher wants, and try, if interested, to supply them.

GIVE THE DIALOG A HAIRCUT. Recently I wanted to enter a full length play in a contest that only wanted longish one act plays. The obvious solution was to trim the full length play. I found that I could shorten it considerably by attacking a mannerism I hadn’t realized my writing had: beginning a line of dialogue with a reaction to the previous line, before going on to the next thought. For example:

ONE: I’m going to the grocery.
TWO: The grocery! You know you eat too much.

There’s nothing wrong with TWO’s line, but the phrase “The grocery!” only slows the conversation down. It’s better to write:

ONE: I’m going to the grocery.
TWO: You know you eat too much.

This second example intensifies the tension between the two characters, and in its small way it keeps the action moving. The moral of this story: it’s never too late to learn something new.

ENJOY THE SATISFACTIONS. While watching a rehearsal for something I’d written, I sat next to a friend who has had a long career in Broadway theater and who knows just about everyone you’ve ever heard of. I understand he’s writing a book, and I can’t wait to read it.

Without warning he leaned over and said to me, “The higher you go in this business, the less the satisfaction.”

I don’t know if he’s correct, although he’s certainly had plenty of opportunity to observe what he’s talking about, but I do know that playwriting can offer great satisfaction at any level. Very likely it won’t go smoothly – the playwright Robert Anderson (1917-2009) had a sign over his desk that read

NOBODY ASKED YOU TO BE A PLAYWRIGHT.

But if you choose to be one, you may have a wonderful time with it. I certainly have.

[I have said that I don’t understand creative writing (including playwriting), but I have been a dramaturg/literary manager (who’d be the staffer to whom the scripts would be sent initially and who’d conduct the workshops and “talkbacks”) and I taught expository (non-fiction) writing, so those parts of the process are known to me.  As such, I have some thoughts I can share that parallel and support what Kirk had told us. 

[Kirk advises “formatting your play so it’s easy to read”: When I was a play reader myself, screening scripts for a play contest, I wrote this in my 1996 evaluation report for a script called Natural Child:

Summarizing this play is nearly impossible because it’s not linear.  [The playwright] says that his textual model is the Talmud, and, indeed, his playtext looks much like pages from that book.  (Unfortunately, the Talmud wasn’t written to be performed, but studied in scholarly solitude and then discussed in a Socratic forum.  This makes reading Natural Child as a potential performance text extremely difficult.)

[A page of the Talmud contains in its center a passage from the Torah (the Bible).  All around it are scholarly explanations, arguments, discussions, interpretations from down the centuries addressing the passage.

[Kirk says, “SELF-PRODUCE”: In 1982, I directed Comes the Happy Hour!, a play by an acquaintance, Ken Greenberg.  He financed the Off-Off-Broadway production so we could be in control of all the aspects.  I had laid out the various production possibilities and their benefits and drawbacks (including the fact that Ken would lose his whole investment if we self-produced).  The one drawback I didn’t consider was that since none of us—I enlisted a friend who wanted to be a producer, to be ours—had a track record, we had no press clout.  Nonetheless, I was very proud of the work.

[Kirk asserts, “Actors will jump at the chance to work if they are available”: An actor I knew, Steve Fireman, used to say, “Actors will work for nothing . . . if you let them.”  (We joked about making up T-shirts with that on it!)

[“At the other end are the so-called ‘vanity productions,’” says Kirk, “in which an author finances a full production and, if necessary, keeps it running with the author’s own money”: Happy Hour (above) was a showcase—finite and limited.  But I wrote a report for ROT on Warren Manzi’s Perfect Crime (5 February 2011), an execrable Off-Broadway play my friend Diana and I saw.

[Perfect Crime was a commercial show and I called it a vanity production because everyone involved in it, including the director, producer, and lead actress, were all former or current associates when the play was first mounted and family money was used to put it up and keep it going.  (As awful as it is, Perfect Crime is still running after almost 35 years!)

[“Talkbacks”: As a literary manager, I was asked to set up one of these—but I dissuaded the artistic directors of the theater because I find the sessions valueless for the play or playwright.  Their only value is to the theater for making their subscribers feel as if they have some input into the play-selection process—it’s public relations (read: propaganda). 

[In the expository writing classes I taught, I also did Writers’ Workshops at which writers read their work for feedback from fellow students. .Because it was a class exercise, I could control it more than the theater talkbacks, and I could side-coach and even stop a discussion that was going in the wrong direction. 

[Kirk explains that “all [the writer] want[s] to know is what worked well for [the viewer] in the play, and what didn’t”: This doesn’t work.  I tried to get the student respondents in the writing classes to do this, and I had to keep prompting them not to suggest rewrites but to tell the writer what worked for them and what didn’t—and just to tell the writer what they heard or read. 

[In the theater version, with audience members as responders, they’re all going to try to tell the authors how to write the play the spectator wants to write, not how the play the playwright wrote can work better. 

[Kirk admonishes the writer “not [to try] to defend yourself or the play”: This is really important!!   I told my student writers not to answer back, explain, or argue with the responders—just to listen and make a note (written or mental, whichever works for them) and then think about the comments later at home in private.  I also told the writer, “You decide what to do with the comments—including ignore them.” 

 [“Further consideration of your play would be beneficial neither to us nor to you”:  This is terrible.  When I was lit-advising for a small Off-Off-Broadway showcase house, one of my first assignments was to compose sample letters of rejection that were positive and encouraging. 

[(I have a sort of example on ROT with the script report for Call the Serpent God to Me; see “Two Script Reports,” 20 February 2020.  The difference is that this wasn’t a rejection—I like this play a lot—but I had some reservations I had to find a way to pass on without sounding negative or discouraging—or like someone who wanted the playwright to rewrite her play to suit me.)]

The Show Goes On During the Pandemic

 

[Since March 2020, when the theaters in New York City and all over the country closed for in-person performances, few industries have been hit as hard at their cores as the live performing arts.  Like other businesses that have sought alternative and innovative ways of keeping their work alive, theater has been coming up with ways to keep performing.  Here are some reports on some of the ways theaters around the U.S. have kept the faith with their audiences in the time of COVID-19.] 

THE SHOW WILL GO ON! PERFORMING ARTS PIVOT DURING PANDEMIC
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[The following story aired in the PBS NewsHour on 23 October 2020.]

The coronavirus pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of American life, including the performing arts. Actors and dancers are experiencing unemployment rates over 50 percent, and many companies have said they will remain closed for in-person performances for the foreseeable future. But there are glimmers of hope and pockets of movement where the show goes on. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Judy Woodruff: The pandemic has affected every aspect of life, including the performing arts.

There’s plenty of data, third-quarter unemployment rates of 54 percent for dancers and 52 percent for actors, a 33-fold decline in consumer spending on all performing arts.

Many companies have announced that they will remain closed for in person performances for the foreseeable future.

But, as Jeffrey Brown found, there are glimmers of hope and pockets of movement, where the show, even in new ways, is going on.

Here’s a look for our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: On a recent Indian summer evening in an urban New York City field next to a cemetery, the thrilling sound and movement of flamenco dancer Nelida Tirado, performed for a small socially distanced audience.

This is the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, known as BAAD!, an organization that presents work by local artists, especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists.

Dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles is BAAD!’s co-founder and served as the evening’s emcee. Its theme? Staying alive.

Arthur Aviles: What’s important to us is to make sure that we keep in touch with who it is that we are in these unfortunate times.

We want to create a platform for the community to be a star on. That’s really what we say.

Jeffrey Brown: Housed in a Gothic revivalist church, with a black box theater that seats just 50 people, this 21-year-old organization has a seven-person staff and budget under a million dollars, supported by foundations and government grants.

Arthur Aviles: BAAD! is one of the few theaters or presenting arts organizations in the Bronx. And in this particular area, there are none. And that’s really sad for the Bronx.

Jeffrey Brown: Indoor performances aren’t possible, but BAAD! offers its space to local artists to create virtual events, and to teachers to continue dance and other classes.

In one, young students take turns in person, while the rest join via Zoom.

Arthur Aviles: This is about boxes, and where we are confined to that. And art is all about pushing against the boundaries of those boxes, and helping all of us see the world.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re used to having to deal with difficult circumstances.

Arthur Aviles: People would say, oh, you’re just poor. And I would say, yes, and, yes, and.

You can find great creativity in the simplicity of the voice, of the simplicity of the body, of the simplicity of communication.

Jeffrey Brown: In Portland, Maine, another approach as we watched a rehearsal for an upcoming indoor performance at Portland Stage.

How can this show go on? Through a determined response to an existential threat.

Anita Stewart: It’s like going on an expedition to the moon, in a way, Jeff. It’s a different way of doing something that I have been doing for years and years and years, and that seems so secondhand.

Jeffrey Brown: This is the kind of theater where the artistic director, Anita Stewart, pitches in to paint the sets.

Last spring, Portland Stage was closed, leading to a million-dollar loss in ticket revenues, a huge hit for a company with an overall budget of $2.5 million.

Was there ever any question for you that you would be presenting live theater?

Anita Stewart: Oh, yes, absolutely. This summer, it seemed like it was not going to be possible.

Jeffrey Brown: Instead, they’re aiming for an October 29 opening, but with a play, Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly,” directed by Sally Wood, with just two actors. And Kathy McCafferty and David Mason are married. No fears about social distancing.

Portland Stage installed equipment and its HVAC system which can eliminate any COVID virus in the air. And it provides regular testing for actors, crew and staff.

The audience will be limited to just 50 in a 288-seat theater.

Even 50, how do you convince people to come in?

Anita Stewart: It is a challenge. And I think a big part of it is doing the work that we’re doing to make sure know that we are taking safety precautions that are going to make this experience as safe as it possibly can be.

Jeffrey Brown: That’s helped by being in a state with relatively few COVID cases. Still, going forward is fraught.

Is this a viable financial model for you, though? This isn’t going to bring in much money, right?

Anita Stewart: Long-term, this is not viable. This is about providing a service right now. And it’s a service of the heart. It’s a service of the soul.

It’s a service for the artists that we can employ. And it’s a service for the small number of people that will be able to come in and see the work.

Jeffrey Brown: Innovative new production and financial models are also being tested, including scaling down the grand in opera to something more intimate and even colorful, in an outdoor circus tent on a baseball field.

Tomer Zvulun: You know, they say never waste a crisis. And I think this crisis created two sort of business models that could be with us for years to come, and that’s the people and the location.

Jeffrey Brown: Artistic director Tomer Zvulun is still working with international-caliber singers, but all are Atlanta-based, and now comprise the Atlanta Company Players, a kind of hometown all-star team.

They were all grounded anyway, with lost bookings and income. And, as soprano Jasmine Habersham told us, there’s now an added and unexpected benefit.

Jasmine Habersham: It changes the dynamics.

You can have a family, and you can be secure, and you can even just have that availability to be by the ones that you love and do what you love as well.

Jeffrey Brown: The company canceled its planned season and scaled down for a COVID era alternative, fewer singers and musicians, a smaller audience and budget, from $10 million to $6.6 million.

Tomer Zvulun: This pandemic really exposed the vulnerabilities of non-for-profits with a very high cost structure.

And it’s a lesson to all of us to make sure that the cost structure that we keep is nimble enough for us to pivot when times get rough. During some of the darkest time in humanity, artists found ways to connect with other people through performance.

And that is something that this company is very committed to.

Jeffrey Brown: The lessons here won’t apply to all performing arts organizations, and success for any of these groups is hardly guaranteed, with winter bringing new challenges.

Still, in some places, and last night in Atlanta, in new forms and spaces, the show goes on.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.

[Jeffrey Brown is the chief correspondent for arts, culture, and society at PBS NewsHour.  Anne Azzi Davenport is NewsHour’s Senior Coordinating Producer of Canvas.] 

*  *  *  *
CITY TRIES HELPING SMALL THEATERS WITH
OFF-BROADWAY POP-UP PERFORMANCES ACROSS NYC
by Ray Villeda

[Ray Villeda’s report was broadcast on WNBC-TV, Channel 4 in New York City, on 23 October 2020.]

The pop-ups are done in a way that will keep crowds small, and will be in all five boroughs as the city said it is trying to contribute to the same small companies that bring in $1.3 billion to the city's economy in normal times

The sounds of singing and of a performance, reminiscent of pre-pandemic Ne[w] York City, rang out on city streets once again Friday night, part of the city’s effort to entertain residents with artists and performers who still call The Big Apple home.

The audience wasn’t in a a concert hall or a Broadway theater, but rather was made up of people who happened to be walking by, stopped, took out their phone and listened to the small show on Astor Place in Manhattan.

The seemingly random act of artistry was just one example of the “Off Broadway in the Boros” program, which does exactly as its name describes — brings shows and performances to the five boroughs during the pandemic.

“We’ve been really exploring the new medium that is this online platform, but at the same time there’s nothing that’s going to replace that in-person experience,” said Artisic Director of the program, Mia Yoo.

The pop-ups are done in a way that will keep crowds small, to 50 people or less. Friday evening’s performance was put together by Dane Terry, who said he almost forgot how much he enjoyed the whole process.

“I didn’t know until today how much I . . . really missed that. I love writing, love sort of hiding and writing and making a thing then going out and sharing it,” Terry said.

The program serves as a way to help the small theater industry and its performers. The mayor’s Office of Media Entertainment said small theaters contributed $1.3 billion to the city’s economy before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the city is trying to contribute to those same small companies.

“We just want to make sure we are amplifying that and really keeping it on the forefront of everyone’s minds,” said Anne Del Castillo, the Commissioner of the Office of Media and Entertainment.

There are performances scheduled in Queens and Brooklyn on Saturday, and on Staten Island on Monday. While the locations of the pop-up performances are being kept secret, organizers advise those looking to keep their eyes peeled. York City, rang out on city streets once again Friday night, part of the city’s effort to entertain residents with artists and performers who still call The Big Apple home.

[Ray Villeda is an Emmy Award-winning reporter,  He joined the NBC 4 New York news team in June 2015.]

*  *  *  *
IN MIAMI, MAKING LIVE THEATER WORK DURING THE PANDEMIC
by Jeffrey Brown

[Jeffrey Brown, the chief correspondent for arts, culture, and society at PBS NewsHour, filed this story on 25 January 2021.]

Miami, one of the top tourist destinations in the U.S., has been hit hard by COVID and the travel shutdown. Officials at Miami International Airport say traffic is off by more than half, impacting hotels, restaurants, and hot spots like Miami Beach. But somehow live theater is happening. In fact, Miami is now home to the largest live production in the country. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Judy Woodruff: We want to now raise the curtain on an experiment to keep theater alive, while propping up a local economy amid the pandemic.

Miami, one of the country’s top tourist destinations, has been hit hard by COVID and the travel shutdown. Officials at Miami International Airport, where some 90 percent of tourists arrive, say traffic is off by more than half. And that affects hotels, restaurants, and hot spots like Miami Beach.

Somehow, though, live theater is happening. In fact, Miami is now home to the largest live production in the country right now.

Jeffrey Brown has our look for our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress (in performance): He said that he had taught you to value money over everything else.

Jeffrey Brown: Making theater in the time of pandemic, it’s the goal of Miami New Drama in a project called “Seven Deadly Sins,” seven 10-minute plays presented to a limited outdoor audience, performed by actors inside empty storefronts.

Venezuelan-born Michel Hausmann is the company’s co-founder and artistic director.

Michel Hausmann: It was a moment of reckoning for the whole industry, but it was also a moment for us to realize, OK, what it is that we do, right? Are we in the business of filling venues with people, or are we in the business of live storytelling?

And I think the paradigm shift opened up the way we were able see the possibilities of what we could still do.

Jeffrey Brown: The five-year-old company, described by Hausmann as a theater of color proudly representing its diverse city, normally performs a lively mix of new plays and classics in the Colony Theatre, a restored 1935 art deco gem in Miami Beach.

When COVID forced its closure, Hausmann had a revelation while riding his bike along nearby Lincoln Road, Miami Beach’s famed pedestrian street of shops and restaurants.

Michel Hausmann: I saw all the empty storefronts on Lincoln Road. I thought, hmm, there might be something there.

Jeffrey Brown: Empty storefronts, the impact of the pandemic and earlier economic shifts, and now a new kind of theater, performed twice during the evening.

Audience members gather at an outdoor bar aptly named Purgatory. They’re divided into small groups of no more than 12, each with a guide, and move storefront to storefront, play to play, with socially distance seating and earbuds that connect to wireless receivers. There is a kind of screen involved, but Hausmann wanted to get beyond the virtual experience.

Michel Hausmann: I think it’s as close as the real thing as you can get. The actors are seeing the audience and they’re seeing the audience’s response to the work. And I think this is theater with a capital T.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s also an artistic outlet and source of income for artists in need of both.

Hausmann commissioned seven acclaimed playwrights, five Latino, two Black, to write short plays performed by one or two actors.

Carmen Pelaez: When Michel Hausmann first called me to tell me about the idea, I was just like, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes?

Carmen Pelaez: Yes. Yes, sign me up.

And the people that surface in memory, people that cut you to your core.

Jeffrey Brown: Playwright, filmmaker and actor Carmen Pelaez, a Miami native, performs in one play, “Memories in the Blood,” written by Dael Orlandersmith.

Actor (in performance): They say I’m to be placed in a center of study, of learning.

Jeffrey Brown: And she wrote another, titled “Strapped.”

Carmen Pelaez: I was excited to get my creative juices flowing again. So, I thought it was fairly ingenious. And I thought it was a — it was a huge relief for me, not only to be able to address some of the things that I’m seeing going on and feeling artistically, but to know that I was going to have a paycheck.

Jeffrey Brown: Strict protocols are followed, including weekly COVID tests.

Backstage, actors prep in pods’ [sic] with their own ventilation system. Those performing in pairs are also isolating together.

Actress (in performance): If you have come to the Red District at this hour, you must have a need.

Jeffrey Brown: The writers picked one of the classic seven deadly sins and created mini-dramas, some, more personal, like Pulitzer winner Nilo Cruz’s “Amsterdam Latitudes.”

Actor (in performance): It only takes one shattered storefront for you to shake your head in condemnation.

Jeffrey Brown: Others directly address current events.

Carmen Pelaez chose pride as her sin and wrote a piece, performed by Stephen G. Anthony, in which a statue of the 19th century politician John C. Calhoun, a defender of slavery, comes to life as he’s being pulled down.

Actor (in performance): And now you gather here today to try and take me down. Well, go ahead. My foundation is 400 years’ thick.

Jeffrey Brown: You were watching the same news stories we all were seeing, these monuments being pulled down, and then the playwright in you thought, what if this — what if one of those statues could actually speak now?

Carmen Pelaez: Right, because, if one of those statues could actually speak and be full-throated in the defense of themselves, we would also actually see what they were defending.

So, when you see the banality and the cruelty of what they were actually defending, are you willing to still see that statue up?

Jeffrey Brown: Artistic expressions, but also an economic engine. Sold-out performances, with ticket prices at $60 and $75, are covering the nonprofit theater company’s costs, and, for Lincoln Road, an upscale commercial center all about shopping and cultural experience, a new sign of life.

Miami’s mild climate helps, of course, but Michel Hausmann points out that theater has always adapted and changed.

Michel Hausmann: The way I look at it, theater has been around for 2,500 years. And even at the most horrible moments of humanity. There are different and new ways of telling stories that don’t necessarily mean that we all need to gather in a building, and that the lights dim, and then there’s intermission.

The theater, it is a very vast art form that is very generous and it’s very big. And we just need to keep exploring the outer rims of it.

Jeffrey Brown: And it’s no sin at all to hope for the success of this and other experiments in live theater.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.

Judy Woodruff: So good to see some good things coming from this pandemic, in this case, something creative.

Thank you, Jeffrey Brown.

'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!