'N/A'

 

I didn’t see N/A, the political two-hander by Mario Correa, when it ran at Lincon Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2024, so when it showed up on WNET (Channel 13), the Public Broadcasting Service outlet in New York City, in May, I DVR’d it. 

I finally got around to watching it a few nights ago, not planning to do more than see what it was all about, so to speak.  Then I considered writing it up as I have done with many plays since I started Rick On Theater 17 years ago.  I decided I’d give it a try.  So. here goes.

At the top of the PBS broadcast, a voice-over explains that the play is

A behind-closed-doors conversation closely inspired by two larger-than-life public figures.  Despite their clashing ideas about government, both hold deep convictions for progress in the future of the country.

Let’s get the book on N/A down for the record first.  The intermissionless, 80-minute play had its world premiere on 23 June 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway house, the Newhouse Theater, after opening for previews on 14 March. 

Though playing at a venue of the non-profit Lincoln Center Theater, the première of N/A wasn’t an LCT production.  It was an independent, commercial rental of the Newhouse, produced by a team of outside backers assembled by veteran commercial theater producer Jeffrey Richards.

The limited performances of N/A, which were initially scheduled to end on 4 August, were extended through 1 September.  The play closed after 96 regular and preview performances.

The telecast I watched aired on Sunday, 31 May 2026, as part of the Theater Close-Up series produced by The WNET Group.  (Theater Close-Up isn’t a national PBS network program.  It’s a localized, curated series produced specifically by WNET.)

Directed for the stage by Diane Paulus (the TV director was Donna Zaccaro), the production was recorded live on stage at its Lincoln Center home toward the end of its 2024 run in August, right before the production officially wrapped its performances.

Unlike many new plays that spend several years in multiple regional tryouts, academic workshops, or staged public readings, N/A was fast-tracked specifically to meet the political urgency of a major election year (the 2024 presidential rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump). 

The traditional multi-year developmental pipeline for N/A was bypassed through the intervention of Richards, who has an extensive record of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows (among them, the current Maybe Happy Ending—6 Tonys, including Best Musical, and 6 Drama Desks, including Outstanding Musical—and last year’s Beetlejuice and Glengarry Glen Ross).

Upon reading Correa’s script, Richards realized that the play’s thematic tension was vital for the immediate cultural moment.  So, instead of routing the play through a non-profit theater’s multi-season workshop system, Richards formed an independent, commercial producing coalition. 

The team bypassed the standard developmental workshops by mounting a commercial production and renting the Newhouse Theater directly.  This meant the play didn’t undergo the typical public “try-out” or laboratory phase associated with standard regional non-profit commissions.

Through this streamlined commercial process, the script went from an unproduced text directly into New York rehearsals, transitioning straight to its first public performance.  It also attracted creatives like the Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus (Best Direction of a Musical, Pippin, 2013) and actors Holland Taylor (who has a proven track record with political solo-shows like Ann, the 2013 Broadway monodrama about Texas governor Ann Richards) and Ana Villafañe (who won a Theatre World Award for her Outstanding Debut Performance as Gloria Estefan in the 2015 Broadway jukebox musical On Your Feet!).

Now, let’s look at the play itself (which I’ve largely been avoiding till now, you’ll have noticed).  It got a fair amount of coverage when it made its way to Lincoln Center, but that was not only two years ago, but it was also a summertime run—and a limited run at that—so not everyone was paying attention.

In a nutshell, N/A is a generational debate between two unnamed congresswomen, “N,” the first female Speaker of the House, and “A,” the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.  Though their names are never used on stage—and the initials appear only in the program (or, in my case, in the credits at the end of the broadcast)—these figures are modeled explicitly on Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940), Democratic Congresswoman from California since 1987 and the 52nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives, serving from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), since 2019, Democratic U.S. Representative from New York and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

(Just so everybody knows: I’m closer to Pelosi’s age—not quite seven years her junior—than to AOC’s—almost 43 years her senior.  I’m not sure what significance that holds, though.)

Lead producer Richards moved the script to Off-Broadway production at an accelerated pace because he saw that it dovetailed with Real Politics in the field, the presidential election of 2024, and he wanted to catch the wave, but to an extent, that seems to have backfired a little.  The presidential race was such an attention-grabber that most people, including avid theatergoers, were paying more heed, I think, to the real world than to an Off-Broadway play.

The night of the official première, 23 June 2024, was a Sunday, an unusual night to schedule an opening.  But this wasn’t actually an opening in the traditional sense of the term.  It was a gala event for high-profile political figures, media personalities, and theater elites who Richards hoped would start whispering, posting, and talking about the show.

The producers set a strict embargo on the press, however, telling all publications that their representatives (i.e., reviewers) may watch the show at designated press previews or the première night, but they can’t publish reviews until Thursday evening, 27 June.

(Because the public couldn’t read the reviews until 27 June, outlets like the New York Times or New York Theatre Guide labeled the 27th, the day the show “unveiled” itself to the world, not the 23rd, as N/A’s “opening.”)

What no one could have predicted, was that Thursday evening, 27 June 2024, was the night of the momentous presidential debate between the Democratic candidate and incumbent president, Joe Biden, and the Republican challenger and former president, Donald Trump—and Biden gave his disastrous performance that changed the presidential campaign. 

This created a fascinating, accidental intersection of art and reality: the very night the play “officially” revealed its political commentary to the wider public was the exact same night the landscape of Real Politics completely shifted. 

On the one hand, this occurrence enhanced the focus on the play (which was, of course, about a different political debate), but on the other, it probably distracted many potential theatergoers to focusing on the real-world politics that was far more consequential.

Playwright Mario Correa (b. 1969 in Chile) describes himself as a “political junkie,” so all this background and foreground focus on elections and campaigning, both by the play’s presenters and its potential audience, is in his wheelhouse.

Correa immigrated to the United States with his family at age six, growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C.  (That’s Montgomery County.  At the end of her life, my mother lived in Bethesda, and I grew up in Chevy Chase, the first town north of D.C., before Bethesda.)  He spent his early career immersed in real-world government, working directly as a congressional aide during the late 1980s and 1990s.

At 17, he campaigned for House candidate Connie Morella, then running to represent Maryland’s 8th district (Montgomery County), setting him on a political path.  The liberal Republican—Correa labeled her “a very progressive Republican” in a 2025 interview for Barrington Stage—was elected in 1986 and served from ’87 until 2003; Correa became her aide.  This experience gave him a firsthand understanding of the inner workings, rules, and unspoken dynamics of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Washington Post reported that Pelosi also took office as a congresswoman in 1987.  Because there weren’t many women in the House, they became unlikely friends across party lines.  When gerrymandering made it untenable for Morella to be reelected, she was defeated by a Democrat and left Congress.

Correa left Congress upon Morella’s defeat, but he became a congressional lobbyist for high-tech corporations.  “I loved the Hill,” he confirmed in a July 2024 interview for the Theatre Development Fund, referring to Capitol Hill, “but I didn’t love the post-Hill lobbying world.”  So, after a few more years, writing comedy at night, he “quit my day job.”  That was 2005. 

(Reporters, politicians, and government workers and staffers, like Correa, use “the Hill” and “Capitol Hill” metonymically to refer to the work of senators and representatives.  I did this, too, habitually, when I was 15 and had a summer job in 1962 in the congressional office of New Hampshire Representative Chester Merrow [1906-74], also a liberal Republican, who was running, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for the senate.  [I returned to prep school for my sophomore year before the September primary that cost Merrow his seat in Congress and his bid for the Senate nomination.]  I picked up the usage from my longer-serving colleagues in Merrow’s office who guided me in learning the office routines.)

Correa left politics behind, he says, but admits it still pops up in his writing.  (His Off-Broadway comedy Tail! Spin! [New York International Fringe Festival, 2012] is about political sex scandals.)  He sees N/A as “kind of a love letter to Connie and everything I learned” working at the Capitol.

Of Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, as well as their avatars, Correa avers, “I’m really conscious of the fact that I admire these real-life women. I enjoy writing about them . . . .”  He admonishes us, however, “This is not the biography of Nancy Pelosi or AOC.”

Because the playwright has such positive feelings about the actual congresswomen, however, there’s no mistaking who their fictional doppelgangers are—the initialese of the program and the absence of names on the stage notwithstanding.  As Gillian Russo points out in her New York Theatre Guide notice, it’s “immediately obvious.”

(In point of fact, no names are spoken in the play—with the exception of Oscar Alberto Martínez and Angie Valeria, a would-be refugee and his infant daughter who drowned in Rio Grande in 2019.  Donald Trump, for instance, is referred to only as “that man” and a few more colorful descriptives.)

To be clear, N/A isn’t actually a documentary play, or even a “docudrama,” which allows for considerable fictionalization.  Correa’s dialogue isn’t drawn from any documents or recordings.  (Tail! Spin!, unlike N/A, is a verbatim documentary play.  Correa compiled the script from the actual text messages, e-mails, and public statements of the politician-characters.)

In N/A, the words of “N” and “A,” though based on Correa’s interpretations of Pelosi’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s positions and statements, are composed by him.  They’re his distillations of what he believes the women have said or might say. 

(For an examination of documentary theater, see my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama“ [9 October 2009], as well as later posts “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre‘“ [15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017], and “Documentary and Investigative Theater“ [10 September 2025].)

Correa, the PBS voice-over explained, focused N/A’s text around the historical events that transpired between “2018, when the Democrats win the House [6 November] . . . to the 2022 midterms [8 November] when the Republicans take it back.” 

(Actually, the first scene occurs the day after “A”’s historic upset primary election victory in the New York State primaries (26 June 2018)—which, in New York’s 14th district (Queens and the Bronx), essentially means she’ll almost certainly win the general election in November—and the play ends on 6 November 2025, when “N” announces to the House that she wouldn’t seek a leadership role in Democratic Caucus.)

As WaPo also reported, Correa said that as the play developed in rehearsals, “it became clear that [it] was less about the mechanics of legislation than he intended and more about two powerful women trying to figure each other out.”

But, as I’ve established, it isn’t a portrait of two real-life congresswomen whose politics and goals clashed.  It’s a fictional debate that dramatizes the intergenerational clash of the political philosophies of an old-line centrist Democratic party leader and a brash insurgent from the left wing of the party.  (Something we’re seeing a good deal of right now in the run-up to the midterm elections in several districts.)

And therein lies the problem I had with the play.  So, let’s get into that.

First, let me state that I found the two performances powerful and engaging.  In my estimation, there’s no way that either of these actresses didn’t feel what the characters were feeling, believe what the characters were saying.

I’ve seen Holland Taylor, who plays “N,” and she’s strong, even fierce, and sure of herself in the most convincing way.  She’s the pragmatist, and David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America dubs her “the sternest of schoolmistresses.” 

I hadn’t seen Ana Villafañe (“A”), but she measured up to her opponent surefootedly and steadfastly with all the assertiveness I could expect.  In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Isherwood writes that she “put[s] cool but clear passion into her performance.”  She’s the idealist.

Taylor, for reasons including one I’ll delve into some shortly, dominates as “N.”  That “schoolmistress” analogy holds true as she educates “A” in the political process (part of N/A is a civics class) and the world at large.  We get to see “N”’s self-confidence, intelligence, understanding, and wry humor at her every turn.

It helps a good deal that Taylor has made herself look very much like Pelosi, with the assistance of Myung Hee Cho’s costume, a hot-pink skirt-suit and high-heeled pumps.  (With no specific credit given for N/A’s make-up, I presume that the costumer was responsible for that, too, as is traditional.)  As several reviewers noted, Taylor did not try to mimic Pelosi’s distinctive voice—but, then “N” isn’t “Pelosi.”

Bringing ardent sincerity to “A”’s radical objectives, Villafañe demonstrates genuine frustration at the political realities she finds in the House and the Democratic Party.  She captures “A”’s resolve, assertiveness, and rejection of compromise.  It doesn’t hurt that Villafañe, in Cho’s a black pantsuit and black flats (later heels), is virtually a double for AOC.

As long as I’ve touched on Cho’s costumes, let me say a word about her set design.  I found it underwhelming—though that may be oddly appropriate for this production: a Lucite desk, three Lucite cubes for use as seats, and, prominently up center, a five-foot Lucite case containing a gavel.  

On the desk, which is in “N”’s office, is a landline phone on which she does her cajoling and utzing.  “A,” by contrast, is tethered to her cell, on which she livestreams to her “followers” almost continuously.  That’s, of course, supposed to be emblematic of the generation gap on display here.

(One other prominent item in the set decoration is subtly significant: a small, silver bowl.  It sits on “N”’s desk and is usually full of chocolate squares, which she offers to “A” in the first scene and it becomes a leitmotif.  The squares are Ghirardelli chocolate, “N” tells “A.”  What isn’t articulated is that the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is inextricably associated with San Francisco, the heart of Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district.  If ya know, ya know.)

Rhoda Feng of Observer suggests that the scenic design “encourages the notion of a diorama on loan from a museum”—and it does.  (The gavel turns out to be the one “N” used the first time she called the House into session—and she says it will go to the Smithsonian museum “when I’m done with it.  Which I’m not!”)

Diane Paulus directs the play with sharp assurance.  Oh, some of the blocking is “stagey,” especially when Paulus has one actress speak to the other who’s behind her so that the speaker’s facing the audience, not the person she’s addressing.

The problem at which I hinted above, however, gets in the way, as N/A soon begins to seem like a string of mini-debates over the same issues.  Johnny Oleksinski compares the dialogue to “a campaign robocall” on the New York Post and Feng labels them “off-puttingly vague.”

The New York Times reviewer, Jesse Green, asserts that the playwright “is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.”  In the play itself, “N” accuses “A” of speaking like “a metaphor shower” and “A” characterizes one of “N”’s pronouncements as “a bumper sticker.”  To my ear, both women are right.

In my view, this happens because Correa doesn’t have a catalogue of Pelosi’s and AOC’s actual statements from which to compile his dialogue.  He only has something like a punch list of topics and he ends up repeating himself—or has his characters doing so.

There’s a second problem with Correa’s portrayals of the antagonists, and it may have been generated by his personal feelings—not necessarily his political leanings—regarding the real-life characters.  His prior acquaintanceship, however glancing, with Pelosi may account for the fact that he gives “N” most of the best—that is, funniest—lines in the play.

In his Vulture/New York magazine review, Jackson McHenry points out that “giving a character laugh lines is like handing them a weapon.”  He goes on:

The playwright may intend to be evenhanded, but the humor tends to be the giveaway.  It can make someone seem smarter, wiser, more relatable, even if they’re espousing ideas you don’t agree with.

Most of the play’s humor, McHenry observes, “tilt[s] solidly in N’s favor,” rendering “A” as something of a pill.  I suspect that Correa didn’t intend to queer the pitch to “N”’s benefit—I believe he meant for us to witness equal combat—and I don’t really know that the writer was influenced by his long-ago encounters with Pelosi in Morella’s office, but the result is what it is, irrespective of the causes.

McHenry, however, seems to think that Correa leans in favor of “N”/Pelosi’s political philosophy.  Nevertheless, he says something with which I agree:

If you, like me, are more inclined to sympathize with A than with N [which I tend to, even as I recognize that her agenda is probably impossible to enact], a play that keeps insisting that better things aren’t possible gets frustrating quickly. . . .  N/A wears quickly as a drama.  It’s boring watching one generation dunk repeatedly on another for 80 minutes.

“I wanted to write about a battle of ideas,” Correa wrote in the Playbill for N/A, “the philosophical and strategic disagreements that have placed two historical figures seemingly at odds, despite shared values and objectives.”

It turns out, though, that that’s not actually what came about—and it’s probably just as well.  As the writer told the Washington Post, the play moved away from his intended focus on civics and focused more on the two women.  As Times review-writer Green observes, “[P]lays, performed by real people, can’t help but be personal too.”

I’m not sure that’s an axiom, but it happened in this instance.  The political wrangling, as I’ve asserted, gets enervating pretty quickly, especially if you listen to newscasts and talk shows.  We’ve heard it all before—especially just now, in the preliminaries to the midterms when Pelosi-like centrist candidates are facing progressive opponents in the mold of AOC. 

But as dynamic shifts from articulating politics to revealing the characters, the individualities, the actors inject humanity and draw this viewer’s attention.  Now, this doesn’t enhance the drama, but it does make for more compelling theater.  In the hands of less charismatic actors, this might not happen, but with Taylor and Villafañe, it works.

The press in 2024 was mixed, leaning more towards the “meh.”  Of the reviews I read, probably the most negative was Oleksinski’s Post notice.  His first words are: “Don’t come looking for juicy drama at ‘N/A’ . . .” and then he adds,

The behind-closed-doors scenes pitting the Speaker of the House against the upstart New York congresswoman are more like Disney’s Hall of Presidents—reverential and robotic—than brutal Capitol Hill.

The Post reviewer complains that “no moment is ever explosive.  In fact,” he continues,

“N/A” is almost a light comedy. Playwright Mario Correa turns Pelosi into a Don Rickles who delivers mean zinger after mean zinger about the then-30-year-old rep of the Bronx and Queens as if she’s working the Catskills.

“There’s no critique, really,” Oleksinski writes, “or insight into these famous women beyond what we already know,” summing up with, “It’s a whole lotta duh.”  His appraisal of the performances is, “Taylor and Villafañe are ideally cast in less-than-ideal circumstances.”

In the Times, Green declares,

The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves.  N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers . . . .

He praises both actors.

The Timesman, however, points out that “the conflict that Correa means to foreground as political keeps falling out of its frame,” explaining, “However policy-oriented the relationship was in Washington, onstage it becomes personal despite the playwright’s intentions.”

Green complains that “Correa is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.” As an example, he notes that “N”’s notion of the chain in which every fight leads to the next (Green called this the “ouroboros,” which I thought was kinda clever) “gets tiring fast, or would, had the actors not long since taken over the play’s agenda.”   

In the Wall Street Journal, Isherwood opens with a quip: “Given the existential despair in which most Democrats are swimming—or drowning—an evening at ‘N/A’ . . . will almost qualify as comfort food, or a weighted blanket soothing the nerves.”

“Mr. Correa's writing,” Isherwood writes, “is sharp and smart, convincing in its understanding of the characters as we know them, and often refreshingly funny.”  Diane Paulus, the WSJ reviewer attests, directed the play “with crisp authority.”

Isherwood, too, praises both actors.  Taylor delivers her lines “with a delicacy that nevertheless keeps their acerbic veneer firmly polished,” he reports, and Villafañe “does not shy from portraying Alexandria as, at times, stubborn and high-handed.”

He concludes that “[e]ven at just 80 minutes, ‘N/A’ can feel like a series of debates circling around the same subjects . . . .  Nevertheless, even if it does resemble a debate without moderators, as such things go it passes like a refreshing breeze . . . .”

On Vulture, McHenry, noting that the play’s described as “a battle of wills—and wits,” protests that “[t]he wits, and most of the play’s will, tilt solidly in N’s favor.”  He adds that “N/A . . . is like being stuck at dinner with a relative you wish would please talk about anything else (do N and A have any thoughts on the weather?).  It’s claustrophobic, and ultimately boring . . . .”

“[T]he structure traps the performers in limited caricatures,” McHenry asserts.  Taylor “specializes in playing toughened older women” and “applies all her steel to N, throwing out one-liners with hefty torque . . . .”  In contrast, “Villafañe’s done musicals . . . and her angle on A turns the congresswoman into something of a flustered theater kid.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart capsulizes N/A, which he labels “this 80-minute political hagiography,” thus:

If you’re looking for a comedy that flatters the sensibilities of Boomer liberals without ever rudely suggesting that they might bear some responsibility for the overwrought state of our politics, this is your ticket.

Of the actors, Stewart says,

Villafañe is the more convincing mimic of the two, perfectly capturing AOC’s pitch and cadence.  She does a fine job completing the task set out by Correa’s script, which is to set up the pins for Taylor to knock down.

He switches sports references and remarks that Villafañe “throw[s] softballs to her comedy partner,” so he can quip that “Taylor easily knocks them out of the park.”  Of Taylor’s “N,” the TheaterMania review-writer proclaims, “She’s less Nancy Pelosi than she is Lady Bracknell with a gavel.  She dispenses salty morsels of wisdom . . . .”

“Diane Paulus helms the production with a steady hand and on a relatively slim design budget,” writes Stewart.  “Myung Hee Cho’s set of transparent office furniture on dull carpet suggests a popup Thai restaurant . . . .”

The reviewer’s final assessment is that

N/A succeeds as a light summer comedy for the vote-blue-no-matter-who set.  But if you’re looking for reassurances that liberals young and old have . . . learned any valuable lessons that will keep Donald Trump out of the White House, I’m afraid they’re not available.

Russo of New York Theatre Guide finds that

Correa's approach to N/A . . . feels like that of a politician's speechwriter.  The task is to carefully curate an image of his subjects that's commanding and true—perhaps with the occasional imperfection or vulnerability so as to be human, but making sure they're someone you can root for.

“Correa deftly advances his goal with spirited, entertaining writing,” says Russo.  “A few lines sound like they truly were written for a speech . . ., but he makes up for them with a stream of zingers.”  She continues, “It seems more likely to reinforce people's existing alliances than encourage them to really consider other perspectives.  The play feels tailor-made, and -timed, for one express purpose: Get out the vote.”

Observer’s Feng slams N/A, the latest on a spate of plays “with shortened character names” as the least surprising, most anemic of the bunch.”  She adds that “N/A is about as suspenseful as an electoral abecedarium.”

“Part of the problem has to do with déjà vu.” Feng explains.  Correa . . . sticks closely to the facts (so many facts!), delivering dutiful capsule summaries of the women’s backgrounds and hobbyhorses with the efficiency and spontaneity of a teleprompter . . . .”  “N/A,” declares the Observer writer, “suffers from . . . information overload.  The welter of information is funneled through exposition-heavy dialogue and needlepoint-ready slogans.”

On This Week in New York, Mark Rifkin dubs  N/A “potent.”  He pronounces Pelosi as “splendidly portrayed by Taylor,” and AOC as “fully embodied by Ana Villafañe.”  (Reporting that after he got home, he watched “the debacle of a debate” between the 2024 presidential candidates . . . he wisecracked that he “decided to cast my vote for Taylor.”)

Rifkin designates Correa’s script as “well-written” and finds it “astutely directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus . . . .”  “Cho’s costumes capture the characters to a T,” the reviewer states. 

“Taylor shines as Pelosi,” declares Rifkin; “it’s as if she has a glow as she tries to educate the younger congresswoman in the ways of politics, and the world itself.  She exhibits Pelosi’s confidence, intelligence, and understanding of the tactics of negotiation in her every movement.”

“Villafañe . . .,” reports the TWINY reviewer, “more than holds her own with Taylor, capturing her character’s determination, aggressiveness, and refusal to compromise.”

Samuel L. Leiter on Theater Life acknowledges that while N/A “breaks no ground dramaturgically, it does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to imagine a series of encounters . . . between the politicians.”  He adds that “Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are ideally cast, . . . making it easy to imagine that what we’re witnessing approximates reality.”

Leiter points out that “Correa gives both women enough personal detail to make them believable simulacra of the real-life people they represent.”  He adds. “Both performers are excellent and not only because of how closely they resemble their famous counterparts.”

“Villafañe . . . brings fiery conviction to A’s radical aspirations, along with sincere frustration at the political realities she must deal with,” finds Leiter.  “As so often in the past,” he says of Taylor, “I was impressed by how she can turn on a dime from emotion to emotion, or put a spin on three or four words to conjure a big laugh out of them.”

Director Paulus “elicits sharply edged performances,” finds Leiter, “but her staging . . . can be a bit clunky, with blocking seemingly motivated more by a need to get the actors moving than from organic motives; too often, the actors seem to be playing to the audience [rather] than to each other” (as I noted myself).

“As represented by the conflict between the steady, if ploddingly incremental, bridge-building practices of someone like Nancy Pelosi,” Leiter sums up, “and the angry, outspoken, bridge-burning tactics of someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the result is a drama that not only has educational value but strikes enough dramatic sparks to light up the stage.”

In N/A’s “fly-on-the-wall view of the pairing of and occasional headbutting between longtime congressional superstar "N" (as in Nancy Pelosi) and blazing newcomer "A" (as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez),” says Howard Miller on Talkin’ Broadway,

[t]he sense of authenticity is aided to a prodigious degree by whip-cracking, razor-sharp performances by Holland Taylor as N, delivering both calm self-assuredness and subtle sarcasm with pitch-perfect timing, and Ana Villafañe as A, offering scorching indictments of "the system" with the fervency of an evangelical Fury.

In the end, Miller believes, “even though audience members are unlikely to be surprised by the stances of each of the two, it is the personalities and the beautifully crafted and performed interplay between them that makes N/A such a pleasure to watch.”

On Lighting & Sound America, David Barbour spent most of his notice describing the contents of N/A—and much of that writing about Holland Taylor’s “N”—instead of evaluating it.  He did finally make some critical comments, however:

[Director Paulus] keeps the conversation on a constant simmer and Taylor always has a zinger on hand when things start to get too much like the Sunday morning talk shows.  [Myung Hee] Cho's spare set design is a fine canvas for the projections by POSSIBLE and Lisa Renkel . . . .

Since we're clearly in for a wild political summer—I write this on the morning after the first presidential debate, as panic grips Democrats across the land—some, looking for theatrical escape, may find N/A to be a little too much like a ninety-minute session with Politico or The Hill.  But Correa is asking questions that should concern us all and Taylor is a show all by herself.  Democracy may be in crisis but at least we can laugh about it.

“Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are perfectly cast in this intelligent and illuminating comedy . . .,” reports Jonathan Mandell in his opening sentence on New York Theater.  “Opening on the night of an unprecedented debate between a President and a former President,” he adds, “the play is itself something of a debate over issues, strategies and priorities that directly apply to the state of the nation now.”

“At the same time, ‘N/A’ aims to entertain.”

Mandell finds that Correa achieves the goal he wrote about in the program (quoted above), “with N and A exchanging views on issues like health care, climate change, and immigration, but ultimately arguing over the best way to effect change.”

The review-writer cavils slightly, saying, “If “N/A” offers little of [Saturday Night Live’s] brand of satiric silliness, the play is threaded with a comic looseness.”  Mandell adds,

Both Congresswomen are undeniably sharp, but it seems unlikely that the real Pelosi and AOC engage in such witty banter, which in my experience is rare to encounter outside a TV show.  Coincidentally or not, much of the production’s design recalls a TV studio, at least a political one, with a barebones set and computer graphics of colorful stars with a “whoosh” sound in between scenes.  

He backs off slightly, acknowledging that “it’s hard to object to the laugh lines in the play, which temper—and are tempered by – the serious discussions . . . .”

It doesn’t hurt that both Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are able to deliver the comedy without compromising their credible portrayal of these actual women . . . .

In the end, Mandell has reservations:

“N/A” may not be a political play for the ages.  As the playwright himself acknowledges, it’s only “lightly imagined.”  It doesn’t quite go anywhere.  The ending feels almost arbitrary; nothing is really resolved.  But isn’t that exactly where we are right now?

Darryl Reilly of Theater Scene, dubs N/A a “witty and absorbing two-character fantasia” and says “it believably imagines Pelosi’s contentious relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Generational and ideological clashes abound.” 

Reilly describes the play as “a lively 75-minute battle of opposing wills amidst the passing scene” and reports that “Diane Paulus’s snappy physical staging achieves visual verisimilitude” while “Myung Hee Cho’s spare Lucite-themed scenic design perfectly represents power offices with a museum-style dimension, and her luxurious costume design authentically duplicates Pelosi’s regal red skirt suit and Ocasio-Cortez’s stylish black ensemble.”

He writes that “N/A is a strongly performed and stimulating entertainment” with Taylor delivering “a grand performance using her own distinctive honeyed vocal cadences, rather than attempting a Pelosi impression,” while “Villafañe’s charisma, sleek physicality and animation, accurately capture Ocasio-Cortez’s persona; youthful idealism is movingly articulated.”  Reilly concludes that “Ms. Villafañe’s and Taylor’s marvelous histrionic teamwork puts N/A over as a thoughtful take on contemporary American politics.”

Remarking on Correa’s program note that N/A was “heavily researched and lightly imagined,” Culture Sauce’s Thom Geier laments, “Would that it had been more deeply researched or even more imaginatively executed.  As it stands, the show clearly tips the balance toward the octogenarian in this battle of the wills . . . ,”

Geier expresses misgivings about the playwriting, objecting,

There’s a superficiality to the portrayals here, one that seems to be borne of Wikipedia bios, quotes from speeches and interviews, and yes, even, social media posts.  Despite Diane Paulus’s crisp direction, the characters too often seem like animatronic figures from Disney’s Hall of Presidents rather than flesh-and-blood people. 

On Off Off Online, Colin Macdonald declares that “Mario Correa’s N/A . . . is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing . . . .”  “One doesn’t need to be a political junkie to appreciate N/A,” Macdonald advises, “as its ideas and conflicts are laid out clearly, though there are some Easter eggs for overconsumers of political news . . . .”

The OOO reviewer continues,

Diane Paulus’s precise direction avoids the stasis that can sometimes afflict two-handers: the way the actors sit, orbit one another, and where they stand all seem to symbolize their power struggle—no movement feels slack or accidental.

“A strength of Correa’s writing is the ability to locate humor amid the debates,” finds Macdonald, although “[t]here are moments when the play’s debates feel repetitive . . . .”  The review-writer concludes, “The tug-of-war is engrossing, funny, and ultimately moving, with two fine-tuned performances that evoke the namesake characters but are not crude impressions.”

On "Re-Imagining" 'Porgy And Bess'

On 5 November 2010, the American Repertory Theater announced the “re-imagination” of the classic 1935 Gershwin-Heyward musical, Porgy and Bess. I didn't offer an opinion on the project at that time, though I reported the announcement to interested friends and colleagues, but I'll confess now that I had trepidations about fixing something that didn't seem broke to me. My feeling was—and is—that the original is a masterpiece as it is and I don't see any need to fix it. I figured we'd see when the reviews came out in September 2011—I guessed the New York Times would cover the Cambridge opening even though it was due in New York on 17 December (for a 12 January 2012 opening)—how well playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, composer Diedre Murray, and director (and ART artistic director) Diane Paulus succeeded, but the impulse seemed both misguided and unnecessary—an exercise in, as Stephen Sondheim puts it, arrogance.

Some time ago I ran an article on ROT confessing to being a Broadway Baby (22 September 2010), having been introduced to the Broadway musical when I was very young. I've had a special attachment to the genre ever since, especially the classics and great oldies. The ones that were before my time—like South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, and others—were introduced to me through my father's cast album collection (which I now have), and Porgy and Bess was one of those. I have no objectivity, no distance when it comes to those old-time shows (most of which I only saw on film in my pre-teen years, as I did the 1959 release of P&B). They're all just wonderful, and the whole idea of bowdlerizing is anathema to me, painful to contemplate. In fact, when I read that Parks was doing this rewrite, I felt a little the way I felt about Julie Taymor's work on Spider-Man: Parks was indulging her own ego because of her recently attained status as a star in her field. I hoped she wouldn't take the fall Taymor took, but I never cared about Spider-Man, whereas I do have feelings about Porgy and Bess. Though I wish Parks and the others success, I do wish they'd chosen some other project to redo and left Porgy and Bess alone.

Adaptations, as experience has proven, can yield really good theater. In 1983, Peter Brook stripped Carmen down to what he called the essentials (80 minutes); it was well received by theater critics but less so by opera and music reviewers. (He did that again with Mozart’s Magic Flute in 2010.) Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and their collaborators, reconceived Romeo and Juliet and we got West Side Story, one of the greatest musicals of all time. Of course, Lerner and Loewe adapted Pygmalion and gave us My Fair Lady—and so on and so on. Almost all musicals, the great and the lesser, were born by adapting a straight play or some other material—including Porgy and Bess itself, which began as a novel and then a drama.

But reconceiving plays even without rewriting can have profound, and not always felicitous, results. In 1985, I saw a Much Ado About Nothing directed by John Neville-Andrews at Washington’s Folger Theatre that was set in the 1930s aboard the S.S. Messina, making it seem more like Anything Goes than Shakespeare. It wasn’t actually bad, but just silly. (How did Don John escape from a ship in the middle of the ocean?) In 1997, Washington’s Arena Stage presented Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed and designed by Romanian avant-gardist Liviu Ciulei. The director turned one of Ibsen’s prototypical realist plays into a symbolist production to disastrous consequences: nothing fit and all of Ciulei’s adaptations reeked of imposition. Arena later produced a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire staged by Hungarian director János Szász which appeared to have been updated to the time of the presentation (2001) and performed in tune with Artaud’s theater-of-cruelty theories rather than Williams’s lyric realism. Again, the style and the text fought against one another. As I always note, however, when some director makes a mess of a script: the original's always still there for revival. No one's destroyed it. (A lesson Arthur Miller apparently didn't get in 1984 when he stopped the Wooster Group from doing their L.S.D., a travesty of The Crucible. I know he had the right to do that. I wonder if he was right to do it.) But making it different isn't the same as making it better, and if that's what Parks and her team say they were doing—improving the original—then I have to object.

(This kind of approach always reminds me of something my father used to tell me about the German translations of English literature he read as a schoolboy here in New York. They were annotated übersetzt und verbessert—“translated and improved.”)

I obviously can't address the production itself, not having seen it yet. (I’m writing this before it’s opened in New York City.) And I won't deny Parks and all the right to adapt or even bowdlerize a work, including one by the likes of the Gershwins. It's not, as someone once said to me, painting a mustache on the “Mona Lisa,” after all. (Speaking of which, even that’s been done, in a manner of speaking: In his 1919 poster of the “Mona Lisa,” Marcel Duchamp drew a beard and mustache on the model’s face—but the Dadaist did it only in his poster. Colombian artist Fernando Botero also painted his 1963 take on the Mona Lisa as a fat, grotesque girl. In both cases, though, da Vinci’s original masterwork remained in the Louvre, unharmed.) What I want to go into is the arrogance of the adapters’ rationalizations and the implications that the original can't communicate to today's audiences.

According to the ART announcement, the plan was backed by the Gershwin and Heyward estates. (George Gershwin wrote the score of P&B; DuBose Heyward wrote the libretto and collaborated with Ira Gershwin on the lyrics for the musical version. Heyward also wrote the 1925 novel Porgy, which he and his wife, Dorothy, adapted for the 1927 straight play of the same title, the source of the musical.) The Gershwin representatives objected only to the idea, proposed early in the process, of mixing some outside Gershwin songs into P&B, but that was dropped. The aim, as Diane Paulus explains it, was to turn what they saw as essentially an opera into a commercial musical play: ''The Gershwin estate was interested in a team that would take this amazing classical work, that people know as an opera,” the director affirms, “and turn it into a musical.” The musical piece was, indeed, labeled by the original collaborators as “an American folk opera,” and, as a spokesperson for the Gershwin Trust asserts, “It has had, and continues to have, a successful life in opera houses around the world,” but I, for one—I can’t speak for anyone else—never think of P&B as an opera like Carmen or La Bohème. Yes, it’s been staged by opera companies, but so have Guys and Dolls and A Little Night Music, among many, many others. In fact, opera companies, including both the Met and the New York City Opera, which have no reason to do Broadway’s job for it, have been presenting musical plays for decades, so that’s hardly a definitive criterion. Hey, many musical plays (as well as operas) have been broadcast on television. Does that make them TV shows? Of course not, that’s just silly.

(TV has experimented with the musical form for years, going back at least to the ’60s and The Monkees on NBC from 1966 to ’68 and The Partridge Family from 1970 to ’74 on ABC. Cop Rock on ABC in 1990 actually modeled its structure on the Broadway musical; it was followed in 2007 by Viva Laughlin on CBS and Fox’s Glee in 2009. Were they musical theater? No, they were still TV shows. Of course, only two of these were even remotely successful—and none qualified as high art. I can think of only one actual musical play conceived specifically for television: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella on CBS in 1957. That was a true cross-over—though it, too, was eventually bowdlerized by its own medium.)

Additionally, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and several other of the composer’s musicals have more singing than spoken dialogue, coming close to operatic in that respect. Are they really operas in sheep’s clothing? I recently saw a terrific revival of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (see my ROT report of 22 October 2011): it’s even called an opera. So is it? I’m sure it’s been produced by opera companies in the past, but the BAM version was from the Berliner Ensemble—not an opera company. Is that definitive? Not really, but it’s suggestive. The 1964 French movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has no spoken dialogue in it—it’s all sung in recitative. Is it an opera? It’s had stage adaptations (in English, and not terribly successful), but I don’t know of any live opera presentations either in French or any translation.

What all of these are, I say, are unique (or nearly unique) theatrical or film experiments, innovations in musical theater or musical film, that stand on their own as successful works of genius. Porgy and Bess is like that: it’s not really an opera, despite its subtitle; but it’s not just a musical play, either—it’s one of a kind. (There are lots of things like that in the arts—and probably other fields, too.) As far as I’m concerned, those pieces all work on their own terms and don’t need to be defined so they fit into narrow, preconceived categories. Because they don’t is no rationale for revising them, editing them, changing them. They’re square pegs: they’re not going to fit in any damned round holes. The only way to make them fit is to cut away bits that don’t conform to the predetermined shape. Then they aren’t what they were anymore. Is that what we want?

When I was in grad school, I had a teacher who was a dramaturg. She’d met a young playwright one of whose early scripts was being developed for production at the theater where my teacher then worked. She admired the young writer for her idiosyncrasies and the quirky turn of mind she displayed in her writing—she was surprising and unpredictable. The playwright began to have some success and her plays began to be produced around the country, and one, which I’d read in manuscript, was coming to New York in a production from a respected regional rep company. My teacher had seen the production there and urged us to see it when it came here, but warned us that the director and producer at the rep theater had “taken out all the wrinkles.” The quirkiness had apparently frightened them, so they made the play conform to more standard structure and dramaturgy. As a consequence, the spark had gone out of the script. The production of what had been a provocative and quirky play was lackluster and wan.

When Elia Kazan made Tennessee Williams change the ending of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the 1955 Broadway première, he may have assured the play’s commercial and critical success—but he altered or obscured the play’s original meaning and made Williams terribly unhappy. Their long and productive collaboration (six plays and two films) began to deteriorate after Cat and Williams published the play with two endings, his original one, less hopeful and reassuring and more ambiguous, and Kazan’s “commercial” one, more direct, acceptable, and comfortable. (Just to demonstrate that original concepts hang around, the 1958 film adaptation of Cat, starring Burl Ives, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor, had the Kazan ending, but I saw the stage version at the then-new Actors' Theatre of Louisville in December 1969 or January 1970 that was directed by ATL's founding artistic director, Jon Jory, and starred his father, Victor, as Big Daddy and his mother, Jean Innes, as Big Mama and used the alternative Williams ending.)

Square pegs for round holes, see?

When ART announced the new production and adaptation, which the theater is billing as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess to differentiate it, I suppose, from the original one (though I don’t know what happened to Heyward’s contribution), Paulus explained that the Gershwin estate “wanted to make it more fully realized in terms of characters. They were eager to have a writer bring it to the audiences of today.” This is where I start to have problems. If all the producers want is to get younger spectators who don’t know the play into the theater, that’s actually a fine goal. But aren’t there ways to do that other than reconceiving the play and the characters? That’s essentially marketing—an outreach job for the dramaturg and the press agent. But Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori (who’s also won Obies and a MacArthur “genius” grant) asserts: “we're . . . crafting a piece that speaks to contemporary audiences,” declaring that the original doesn’t, and Tony-nominated director Paulus promises to make “the characters in the story more fully realized,” as if they hadn’t been three-quarters of a century ago on the Broadway stage or half a century ago on the Hollywood screen. Audra McDonald, who plays Bess, concludes that “the opera has the makings of a great love story too that I think we’re bringing to life.” Has it been dead and buried all these years, then? Then composer-musician Diedre Murray, an Obie-winner and Pulitzer finalist, proclaims: “We want to move the story of Porgy and Bess forward on its continuum, re-envisioning it for a modern perspective.” P&B is a classic, like a Shakespeare or a Sophocles: by definition, a classic transcends era and period and continues to speak to audiences through the ages. If you need to bring it to the attention of naïve audiences, show them what a wonderful and fulfilling piece of theater it is, Yes. But if you feel you need to bring it down to some lowest common denominator, to make it simple to understand and keep the 30-minute attention spans of today’s adolescent TV spectator occupied, then I shudder! I shudder at the poverty of your imagination and commitment to the art in which you’ve presumably chosen to spend your life—and I shudder for the arrogance and benightedness of your soul. Paulus also declares: “[W]e want to bring Porgy and Bess to life on the musical stage in a way that feels essential, immediate, and passionate.” I never realized that it had been dead, insignificant, distant, and cold all these years!

This is not to say that P&B is easy. It fell out of favor in the ’60s and has always suffered from charges that its portrayal of poor African Americans in depression Charleston, South Carolina, is offensive. Less worrisome, it’s also seen by true Southerners as culturally inaccurate. (I’m going to assume that readers are either familiar enough with P&B’s plot not to need a synopsis, or can find one easily on the ‘Net.) The roles are nearly all black, which was a problem for segregated theaters in the Jim Crow era of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. (Washington’s National Theater permitted integrated audiences when the play toured there in 1936, but reverted to segregated houses afterwards.) Personally, I’m not convinced that part of the impulse to “fix” Porgy and Bess now doesn’t come from a certain resentment on the part of black (and female) artists like Parks and Murray that three white men were responsible for a story written in a stage interpretation of the black vernacular of the day and a score written in imitation of black rhythms and traditions. As the New Yorker’s Hilton Als remarks, it was a situation “in which white composers and lyricists presented their ideas of blackness to one another.” (I’m not musically astute enough to know how well Gershwin did with the music—though I do know that he was known as an superb student of various musical styles—but many African-American singers covered the songs in the ensuing decades, often turning them into hits on various charts.) The musical’s popularity resurged after 1976, when the Houston Grand Opera presented a highly-regarded revival. (It won the best musical revival Tony when it transferred to Broadway—the only Tony the play’s ever won.) Difficulty, however, often comes with great art, including the classics in all genres. We don’t go around rewriting Shakespeare willy-nilly just because he’s hard to do or to follow. (Well, okay—some people do. But that doesn’t make it necessary or right.)

According to Patrick Healy, the New York Times reporter who attended some rehearsals in Cambridge in August 2011, Parks rewrote scenes, created biographical elements for the characters, composed dialogue to replace the musical recitative, and even replaced the ending with one that suggests more hope. (On that last note, Michael Musto in the Village Voice suggests some humorous changes that might be made to other well-known musicals to spiff up their conclusions. The one that tickled me the most is: “A Titanic where they avert the iceberg and keep pouring the cocktails?”) Actress McDonald, winner of four Tonys, explains that the new version “tries to deal with the holes and issues in the story that would be very, very obvious to a musical-theater audience” and a trustee for the Heyward estate speaks of “balancing the original work’s intentions with a story that is maybe more realistic for a present-day audience.” According to earlier announcements, some of George Gershwin’s score has been re-orchestrated as well. “It’s always easy to make something different out of it,” warned James Levine in 1985 when he was preparing to conduct the first Metropolitan Opera performance of Porgy and Bess. “But the trick with any masterpiece is to make use of what the genius gave you.” Healy reports that ART’s P&B company is already anticipating some resistance and, according to reviews of the Cambridge opening, some of the ART changes were later reversed.

Paulus speaks of the characters, too: “In the opera you don’t really get to know many of the characters as people, especially and most problematically Bess . . .,” who, in McDonald’s words, is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Norm Lewis, who plays Porgy, reports that the new script provides details about how Porgy was crippled and develops the character’s desire to walk normally. (Porgy also walks with a cane in the adaptation instead of riding in the iconic goat cart of the original version, substantially changing the visual dynamic of the finale when Porgy rides off to New York City to find Bess as he and the cast sing “I’m On My Way.”) The director’s first decision was to hire Parks to “excavate” Bess in particular. From what, I wonder? It sounds as if Paulus found the character (and, by extension, the plot and the other characters, too) buried beneath tons of debris. (I’ve just written a short report on the restoration of a long-abandoned building in downtown Manhattan. Over the years, the 1882 structure was sheathed in false walls and ceilings from the 1940s and ’50s. The renovation architects plan to do a lot of excavation to uncover the original Beaux Arts detail. Is that the analogy Paulus is drawing?) As Paulus sees it, Bess isn’t “understandable” or “fully rounded.” Parks calls Porgy and Bess, the two lovers at the center of the story, “cardboard cut-out characters” and claims that “fleshing them out” is “what George Gershwin wanted” and “if he had lived longer,” he’d have “made changes, including the ending.” As one acting teacher of mine would have said, We don’t have Gershwin’s phone number. How the hell would Parks know that? Did Gershwin leave secret instructions that tell some unknown writer 76 years in the future what he’d do if he hadn’t died at 38 two years after the début?

Oh, wait! I know: she held a séance. Ohhh, Ouija board . . . .

That changed final scene bothers me, too. According to reports, Paulus’s idea is to show that Bess, who’s leaving for New York City, and Porgy have a connection and to indicate that it’s their destiny to reconnect. So Parks wrote a scene in which Bess tries to persuade Porgy to go with her (in the original, she’s trying to get away and just splits with Sportin’ Life), and then, in the last moments of the play, when in the original version Bess was already on the boat (that’s leavin’ soon) for New York, she and Porgy share a look that’s supposed to intimate that connection. Not only is that a wholly Romantic stage picture, way out of line with the play that Heyward and the Gershwins wrote, but it defies their clear intent. They wanted an ambiguous ending—that’s why Bess leaves unannounced and Porgy doesn’t know where she’s gone. (“Where’s My Bess?” doesn’t make a lot of sense in the new scenario—Porgy already knows where she’s heading.) Instead of leaving shortly after Bess, as the changed ending has it, so that we can infer that he’s only a few steps behind her, Bess has a much greater head-start in the 1935 play—and we know that Porgy’ll be damned lucky to catch up to her by the time he makes it to New York City (if he even manages to—on that goat cart). We’re not supposed to walk out of the theater knowing Porgy’ll meet up with Bess in New York. We’re supposed to walk out not knowing. This is a big difference Paulus and her team contemplated. That’s not just tweaking a little. It’s grabbing hold with both hands and ripping the heart out. That’s Kazan with Cat—though Kazan got Williams to do the rewrite: he didn’t do it himself later. Where do you get the chutzpah to do that? If Parks is in contact with George Gershwin’s ghost, my guess is he’d slap her face for that! Or at least take out a cease-and-desist order.

Now, I suppose my reaction to this effort to iron out all the wrinkles of Heyward and the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess can be dismissed as the rantings of an old fogey. I can live with that. I imagine that Paulus, Parks, and Murray would disparage me as a “Gershwin purist,” as McDonald calls people like me, out here with “their arrows in their bows, ready to shoot.” Okay. I’ve copped to being a geezer before now. I wouldn’t be alone in this case, though. Among the more illustrious (and knowledgeable) protestors (in addition to Michael Musto in the Voice) is no less a personage than Stephen Sondheim, composer and playwright of a few contemporary classics of the musical stage himself (Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, to name just three). I’m going to report a little of what he wrote, after Patrick Healy’s 7 August report on the production appeared, in a letter to the New York Times, published on 14 August 2011, because I totally agree with the composer’s opinions. In fact, I can't find an argument against Sondheim's points.

First, Sondheim was disturbed by the omission of Heyward’s credit from the new title of the ART revival. Why is the sole librettist and co-lyricist being ignored this way? “More dismaying,” Sondheim writes, is the new creative team’s “disdain” for the original work. Of Diane Paulus’s assertion that we don’t get to know “the characters as people,” the playwright complains: “Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.” When it comes to the “backstories” that Paulus has asked Parks to supply, Sondheim explains, “She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in ‘realistic’ details is likely to reduce them to line drawings.” That, like the notion that the play speaks to audiences beyond its era, is part of the definition of a classic piece of art. What do we know about Lear’s backstory, or Tartuffe’s, or Alceste’s, or Faust’s. (We know a little more about Oedipus’ or Antigone’s biographies because they are the subjects of entire myths over centuries of a culture.)

On the matter of making the play easier for an audience to follow, Sondheim laments Paulus’s lack of trust in the spectator. “I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers,” the composer says wryly. “If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to ‘excavate’ the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?” I couldn’t agree more!

As for Audra McDonald’s sense of Bess in the original play, Sondheim responds to the actress’s estimation that Bess isn’t always “full-blooded” by pointing out, “She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly,” and of McDonald’s claim that the ART adaptation is bringing out the hidden love story, the playwright declares derisively: “Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in ‘Porgy and Bess’ that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?” Parks’s invocation of Gershwin’s spirit elicits the same reaction from Sondheim that it did from me—though more eloquently, perhaps. His dismay at the altered ending, which he suggests would necessitate replacing Porgy’s plea, “Bring me my goat!” with the cry, “Bring me my cane!” adding, “Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.” (Sondheim’s so much cleverer than I am. Which may be one reason he’s a playwright and I’m not! My only thought was that composer Murray might be tempted to splice in a chorus or two of “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane.”)

By labeling us sticks-in-the-mud “Gershwin purists,” which apparently Sondheim is, too, the writer notes McDonald can defuse any criticism. In defense of himself and the rest of us, Sondheim indulges in a little sarcasm:

[W]e all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

Just as I stated earlier, Sondheim affirms he isn’t prejudging the production (which, of course, hadn’t opened at the time he wrote his letter), but is only condemning the “attitude” of the adapters. He praises the casting of the leads and, like me, wishes the adapters good fortune. But he makes this disclaimer:

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting.

Producer (and creative director at Jujamcyn Theatres) Jack Viertel admonishes that “revivals succeed best when artists take the essence of the original work, add to it subtly or stage it inventively, and make the show live anew without betraying the original.” I think that’s what Sondheim is suggesting—and it’s definitely what I’d have wanted, in the vein that Molly Smith “modernized” Oklahoma! at the Arena last fall without “wholesale rewriting” (see my report on ROT, 17 October 2011).

Sondheim’s suggestion for the new title, based on the distinction he sees between the two endeavors, is neither The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, nor The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess. “Advertise it honestly as ‘Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.’ And the hell with the real one,” Sondheim insists. “Perhaps it will be wonderful,” the playwright offers. “Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.” My sentiments exactly!

The response to the response, however, is sort of interesting in itself. A friend who gave me a heads-up about Healy’s 15 November 2011 column in the New York Times says of the stance of the adaptation team and their producers, “They practically refer in it to Sondheim as if he were Lord Voldemort—‘he who shall not be named.’” In fact, Healy quotes Paulus as asking, “Are we not saying his name?” and producer Jeffrey Richards replies, “It can be said.” Defensive much? According to Healy, some of the most objectionable changes the team made to the original script have been dropped, among them the hopeful ending, and Paulus is adamant that it was the team’s own decision to do so, not a response to the criticisms of “Mr.-Whomever-we-are-not-talking-about.” The reversals came, the director insists, from “learning about the work” so that “we found its strongest version.” What it sounds like to me, though, is that after trying to rework the play with some preconceived ideas in their heads, born of some kind of philosophy or agenda, it turned out that the best version of the play was the one that Heyward and the Gershwins wrote in 1935 after all. It’s water seeking its own level. Turns out those old guys (who weren’t actually all that old at the time) knew a thing or two about making musical theater. And Sondheim, who knows a few tricks himself, had the ART folks’ number all along! You go, guys!

To be sure, when Ben Brantley reviewed the Cambridge début of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess in the New York Times (2 September 2011), he remarked that the bruited changes weren’t “nearly as egregious as they were rumored to be,” probably because many, especially the planned new ending that was cut in previews, were softened or dropped by the time the play opened. Brantley does emphasize that this production is Bess’s play and that Audra McDonald is the strongest actor on the stage and that nothing else in the production has her power or cohesiveness. (Paulus and Parks have acknowledged that the emphasis on Bess may have resulted from the number of women artists involved in the adaptation.) “Ms. McDonald’s performance aside,” writes Brantley, “all the new stratagems to specify and anchor the show’s themes, people and plot have instead made it oddly abstract and diffuse.” The direction, says Brantley, “lacks focus,” so “the story lacks urgency.” In other words, one of the very goals Paulus set for the adaptation failed; I wonder if this was the result of the creators’ original intent fighting against the imposed reinterpretation and ultimately defeating it. Another planned innovation, the substitution of interpolated spoken dialogue for the operatic recitative, “can often feel arbitrary,” in Brantley’s estimation. The square pegs seem to have just resisted being pounded into those round holes. Commenting on the current spate of “revisals,” revivals whose scripts and production concepts have been heavily reworked, Jack Viertel warned of “the dangers of taking a show that has always worked a certain way and saying, ‘I believe it can work my way.’”

In Variety, Frank Rizzo writes, “While entertaining, engaging and exceptionally well-acted, something is lost, too, in the scope of the score. The work's new passions—while musical-theater ‘real’—are now earth-bound, making it more ‘folk’ than ‘opera,’” sacrificing focus on the music to emphasize the “truth in the storytelling.” (One example: When Clara sings “Summertime” in the opening, she’s carrying a real baby!) The restored original ending was judged “pitch perfect” by the Arts Journal’s David Patrick Stearns, reinstated, he says, not because it’s sacrosanct or because Sondheim excoriated ART over its excision: “Put simply, the old ending works better . . . and so solid that it still works when cluttered up with some angsty new writing.” Rizzo adds that the new, peppier orchestration, while it doesn’t seriously affect the lighter numbers, diminishes the deeper ones like “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “I Loves You, Porgy” because the old operatic way of singing them resonates more soulfully. “This sort of mistake is often made by theater directors who are new to opera,” Rizzo explains. “They think of music as theatrical information. But it’s not. It’s music, and it has powers that we don’t fully understand.” In the New Yorker, Hilton Als supports almost all the adjustments and says the performance “left me breathless.” In ART’s hometown paper, the Boston Globe, Don Aucoin assures theatergoers and us “purists” that Sondheim’s concerns were mostly unnecessary because while ART made some adjustments, “Paulus and adapters Suzan-Lori Parks and Dierdre [sic] L. Murray are largely faithful to the spirit and the structure of the original.” Overall, the reviews I saw of the 1 September 2011 Cambridge opening of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess are somewhat mixed but generally positive, with occasional reservations. Only Brantley in the New York Times is essentially negative. My sense, however, is that what the reviewers object to is the remaining alterations and the positive response, along with nearly universal praise for Audra McDonald’s work (she was especially appreciated for her combination of excellent acting and superb singing), comes from the elements of P&B that were left unchanged or reverted back to the original concepts.

The misconceived production of a new play can kill it, as almost happened with Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke after the 1948 Broadway outing, closing after a scant three months. (The play’s rep was revived when José Quintero restaged it Off-Broadway in 1952.) The account of the young dramatist whose play was smoothed out by the rep company before coming to New York made me think of some of the principles by which a dramaturg is expected to work. One is to be the playwright’s advocate. There isn’t a dramaturg listed for ART’s re-imagining of Porgy and Bess but Diane Paulus certainly served as one de facto. Where was her advocacy for Heyward and the Gershwins? The estates might have been looking over her shoulder and approving of her work, but no one, it seems, was looking out for the originators’ artistic interests. No one without a serious conflict of interests. (Literary estates are sometimes less concerned with protecting the legacies or intentions of their departed charges than in seeing their works revived. It’s how they earn money.) In fact, the participating artists seem to have treated the original creators as adversaries. Another dramaturg’s rule, lifted from the Hippocratic Oath, is: “First, do no harm.” The ART docs all operated because they could; no one looked out for the patient’s ultimate welfare. (To continue the medical analogy, these adapters also behaved like stereotypical surgeons, electing to perform surgery as the first option even when less invasive but perhaps equally effective treatment was available from the acting and directing departments.) Their goals were not to make the play a better rendering of what it was—if that were even possible or necessary—it was, for each participant, a variation of making it suitable for ART’s artistic profile, saleable to some notion of the company’s audience, or appropriate for some vision of the 21st-century theater scene. Nowhere was the work of art honored. The production team working with that young writer didn’t try to make the script the best expression of her intent; they guided her to rewrite it into the play they wanted her to write. In the same way, the P&B adapters turned Heyward and the Gershwins’ script into the Porgy and Bess they’d have written. (Claiming it’s what George Gershwin would have done is just absurd.) In the end, I fall back on the one thing Audra McDonald said with which I can agree: “[T]he opera will always exist to be performed.” Happily, whatever becomes of the ART adaptation, however well-intentioned and however successful the result, the original Gershwin-Heyward version remains, and we can always return to the well. The mustache on this “Mona Lisa” can be removed with no lasting damage.

[I should note that this column was written before the New York production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess opened (17 December 2011 for previews; 12 January 2012 for the press). Not only have I not seen the performance, but the local reviews haven’t appeared yet. (Among the New York City press, only the New York Times covered the opening. Against the paper’s usual policy apparently, Brantley went to Cambridge because of the controversy, especially in response to Sondheim’s letter, which had played out in the pages and on the website of the Times over the year since the 5 November 2010 announcement of the “re-imagining” of P&B.)

[Readers may have noted that I avoided referring to the original P&B as an “opera” (though I may have done so once or twice). As I said in the article, I see it as a one-off, something unique unto itself as far as its genre or taxonomic category is concerned. Let me quote the New York Times’ music critic Donal Henahan from his review of Peter Brook’s La Tragedie de Carmen at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1983: “‘La Tragedie de Carmen’ is a peculiar hybrid, a bird that makes noises like an opera but looks like a play and may be neither . . . .” Henahan has precisely captured my feeling about the 1935 version of Porgy and Bess. Henahan went on to suggest that Brook’s adaptation was principally “a celebration of a director's ingenuity.” I’d revise that to say that P&B was principally a celebration of a composer's, two lyricists', and a librettist’s geniuses.

[I should also note for clarity and preciseness that the other adaptations that I named above, West Side Story and My Fair Lady, weren’t merely reinterpretations of earlier classics (Romeo and Juliet and Pygmalion), but the creation of entirely new works of art. Cabaret wasn’t merely a revision of I Am a Camera or even Berlin Stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific wasn’t a simple adaptation of Tales of the South Pacific. As I noted, too, Porgy and Bess was itself such an adaptation: a musicalized version of the Heywards’ play Porgy, which was in turn a stage adaptation of DuBose Heyward’s novel of that title. They were new artworks that stood on their own, without reference to their predecessors.]