Swings

[I like to post articles that define, describe, or explain the work of theater pros who aren’t generally known or understood by lay people (whom one of my teachers liked to call “civilians”).  On 14 January 2014, I posted “Stage Hands,” Equity News descriptions of the work of stage managers and dance captains; in “Two (Back) Stage Pros” (30 June 2014), I republished two articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post that profiled set designer Eugene Lee and wig-designer Paul Huntley.  Below is a collection of pieces (and random comments) from the January/February 2016 issue (vol. 101, no. 1) of Equity News, the newsletter of Actors’ Equity Association, about swings.  You don’t know what those on-stage pros are or what they do?  Well, then . . . read on!]

WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

EMILY ROGERS:  “When I tell people that I’m a swing, the response I usually get is a blank stare—and, if I’m lucky, that’ll be followed up by a ‘huh?’” [Rogers has appeared Off-Broadway in Jasper in Deadland and on tour in If/Then.]

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EQUITY TEAM SWING!!

 “Unsung Heroes”

by Kate Shindle, President of Actors’ Equity Association

This month [on 13 January], Equity celebrated the first-ever National Swing Day (and if any non-theatre people out there are reading this, calm down—to quote Inigo Montoya [a character in William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride and Rob Reiner’s 1987 film adaptation]: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”) The celebration was the brainchild of our 2nd Vice President, Rebecca Kim Jordan, who has spent most of her considerable tenure at Equity fighting for what we call Chorus Affairs. Since Equity’s 1955 absorption of what was originally a separate union called Chorus Equity, chorus and principal constituencies have been represented within our Council by designated officers—as are stage managers. Although we all try to be mindful of the greater good of the membership, it’s never a bad thing to have reminders of what is good for ensemble members. Or middle players. Or ASMs. Or, in this case, swings.

To me, swings are among the most fascinating creatures among us. These performers—who I tend to think of as superhuman—are collectively responsible for covering every role in a musical. It’s one thing to understudy a single character; I’ve done that and it ain’t easy. You have limited rehearsal time, you sit on the sidelines a lot, and when you do go on, you are often asked to stick as closely as possible to another actor’s performance, so as not to disrupt the usual flow of the show. But swings go a significant step further than this. Whereas I only ever had to learn one character’s lines, blocking and music, a swing has to know those things for five (or ten, or 20) different people. All of whom often sing together in harmony, dance together in formations and have specific offstage traffic and costume changes. When you swing a big musical, you are responsible for multiple ensemble tracks, which you have to call up from memory at a moment’s notice. You have to know which harmony each performer sings, so that you don’t throw off the balance of the music. You have to know the traffic in musical numbers, which can be wildly confusing when some dancers go left (for example) and others go right. You may have to move set pieces. You may have quick changes. You may cover principal roles. And you have to do all of this, on very little rehearsal, so that it appears absolutely seamless to the audience.

It’s basically my personal idea of a waking nightmare.

But swings are a special breed of performers. Obviously it takes major chops to play numerous roles, often of varying ages and backgrounds, as well as a significant brain to maintain that kind of information. Being a swing also requires huge dedication to the well-being of the show, because a) you don’t know if you’ll ever go on, and b) if you do go on, and you’re good, your chances of getting promoted actually diminish. A reliable swing is like gold to producers and stage managers, so when another actor leaves the show, it’s much easier to train a new person to take over that one track than it is to promote and replace a swing who covers five, six or seven tracks. Being a swing takes talent, and it’s under-the-radar talent that can go unrecognized.

Which is why I was so delighted to see—on Twitter and in the press and at the Broadway theatres and everywhere else I looked on January 13th—the absolute joy our community took in celebrating the most undercelebrated members of our casts. Over and over, it was enthusiastically acknowledged that without swings, our shows would simply not go on. Over at the Richard Rodgers, Lin-Manuel Miranda took time out of his pursuit of total world domination to tweet about each swing individually and their value to Hamilton. Wicked made fan art. Infographics bounced around the internet with terms like “MVP” front and center. It was pretty awesome.

We should actively remind ourselves to recognize our unsung heroes. In a culture that is, by any reasonable measure, remarkably and consistently star-obsessed, it’s amazing to have a day dedicated to some of the hardest-working and least-acclaimed people on our stages.

Hug a swing, everybody. And don’t be afraid to notice what he or she does for your show.

[Katherine Shindle, born in 1977, was Miss Illinois in 1997 and  then Miss America in 1998.  She’s an actor, singer, dancer, and AIDS activist, and the author of the 2014 memoir, Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (University of Texas Press).  Shindle was elected president of Actors' Equity in 2015.]

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WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

RANDY AARON: “The last person that I told I was a swing was my sister—and she had no idea what it meant. Her response: ‘What the hell does that mean? It’s not kinky is it?’” [Aaron’s Broadway appearances include Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance.]

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“Swing? What’s a Swing?”

by Rebecca Kim Jordan

Well . . . . In a musical:

1: A person who literarily understudies all of the chorus and sometimes more!

2. Usually knows all the staging of the entire show.

3: Can, but doesn’t, usually call the show.

4: Can tell if the lights have lost their focus, and 5: Knows every dead spot sound-wise on stage.

Seriously—this talented, uber-focused individual covers most of the vocal parts and choreography in a musical, often covering many more people than fingers on a hand.

I have been doing research as to why a swing is indeed called a swing—to no great end.

It’s one of those showbiz-isms that stuck!

But by the dictionary’s definition, a swing means to:

“Move or cause to move back and forth;

Move by grasping a support;

Move quickly around to the opposite direction;

Move or cause to move in a smooth curving line;

Move or cause a move in thoughts and or opinion.”

Yep. That defines it. I get it; the operative word is move. A swing is definably, and obviously, on the move.

Being offered the job is often met with “I wanted to be in the show,” “I guess I was their last choice,” “I must not be as good,” but the truth is, you will be in the show—as a matter of fact, you’ll be in all of it.

A swing is never the last choice, but rather, one of the most important choices. And, if done correctly, you are one of the best. As a swing, you’re versatile and, hopefully, one of the calmest people in the theatre, as a swing’s job is never really done.

A lot goes into putting a musical together. What keeps it together is an intricate relationship between actors, musicians, stagehands and the nuance of a skillful call over the PA system from the stage manager. But swings, they are the how it can be done eight shows a week.

Swings have the company’s back.

[Rebecca Kim Jordan, Equity’s Second Vice President since 2012, is an actress as well as a Broadway director and choreographer.  She’s the chair of the union’s Advisory Committee on Chorus Affairs (ACCA).

[Jordan should have consulted Wiktionary for a definition of ‘swing’ that states: “In a musical theater production, a performer who understudies several roles.”  The derivation of the term in theater seems to come from its use as an adjective in labor jargon (courtesy of Dictionary.com and the American Heritage Dictionary): “acting to relieve other workers when needed, as at night.”]

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WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

SATOMI HOFMANN:  “When I am a swing the conversation usually goes like this: Them: ‘So, what do you do in the show?’ Me: ‘I’m a swing.’ Them: ‘Oh. As in swing…er?’” [Hofmann was seen on Broadway in The Phantom of the Opera.]

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“Who Am I Anyway?”

by Laurent Giroux

I was never expecting to be a swing, but it proved to be an opportunity that opened doors for my career.

My first job as a swing was for Bob Fosse’s Dancin’. I covered nine men and 38 specialties. And before accepting my first swing gig, I asked my friend and “swing veteran” Debbie Lyman for advice. “Swinging a show can be a great job or it can be hell on a stick, depending on how you look at it,” she said. And she was right! It was both. Don’t get me wrong, it was tough, especially in the beginning (and the fact that I was on pretty much every night for two and half years), but that challenge kept me from doing the same track each night.

Years later I was asked to swing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This time, I jumped at the chance. I swung three dancers, five singers, two character actors and (understudied) one of the leads. As if that wasn’t enough, I was the assistant stage manager and the assistant dance captain. I was told that I probably might not go on for months, but instead, in true swing fashion, I went on two days later. As fate would have it, I went on for four of my tracks in previews and the female swing performed every track she covered before the show’s opening date.

So what has swinging done for me? The job prepared me (without even knowing it) to become the actor I am today. And as an actor, I am always aware of everything around me on stage; I am known for being able to block myself in scenes without being told where to go. As a director once said to me, “You always know where to go, when to move, how to take the stage.”

Swinging gave me that valuable tool.

If you are new to swinging, remember this: Stage managers and dance captains are your best friends and crucial allies. I have been lucky to have amazing SMs and DCs throughout my career. I’m not sure I would have survived swinging without them.

So what advice can I give? Well, swinging ain’t for the faint of heart. But if you like an amazing challenge (and occasionally an evening off [if you’re lucky]), it’s a fantastic job with many unforgettable and rewarding opportunities.

[Laurent Giroux has appeared in Pippin, Ambassador, Chicago, Dancin’, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood on Broadway, and The Threepenny Opera and The Baker’s Wife in regional productions.]

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WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

SAM TANABE:  “When I tell people I am a swing, they usually assume I understudy just one person. They are then baffled when I explain that in Allegiance, which I’m currently in, I cover the entire male ensemble: young and old, Asian and white.” [Tanabe appeared recently in Allegiance on Broadway.]

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“Saving the Show”

Three former Equity swings talk about the rewarding, challenging, always on your toes job

Theatrical Band-Aid. Ultimate, costumed chameleon. Production lifesaver. Unsung hero.

Working as a swing is no easy feat. One of the cast’s greatest secret weapons, an Equity swing can step on stage in a moment’s notice. Even more, a swing can be on stage in any pair of shoes—literally.

With shows like Chaplin, having had 20 assignments for swings, or Jersey Boys (averaging 18 swing assignments for male swings) or Chicago (averaging 17 assignments for female swings), the contracted position is crucial to several shows across the country.

“Swings are the saving grace of any production,” said member Rommy Sandhu, who first served as a swing in A Christmas Carol. “They possess the ability to fill in to almost any spot onstage, to create a seamless performance for the audience, to adapt to different styles and partners in the flash of a program insert.”

A swing’s primary role is to cover the chorus; however, for some swings, principal coverage is an additional duty. Each character, or each assignment, is known as (industry-speak) a “track.” And depending on the show, a swing could cover any number of tracks. Sandhu once covered 22 tracks for a show, both male and female. And though he joked it was strange, he noted that it was totally manageable.

When it comes to the job, strong nerves, a sharpened pencil (maybe four) and a pad, a stress-management system and a working cell phone are just some of the tools to be successful.

“Pay attention to everything and everyone (stagehands, too),” said Greta Martin, whose first swinging gig was in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, “at all times as much as you are able, and of course, do your homework—know your parts. That goes without saying.”

“Do your research,” said J. Austin Eyer, who first swung in Curtains (he went on to swing for that show on Broadway for three years) and author of the recently released Broadway Swings: Covering the Ensemble in Musical Theatre. “Be in the moment. Things can be very exciting if you look, listen and connect to the people around you. Being a swing promotes a necessary collaboration and patience for the actors around you.”

For Eyer, swinging helped him cultivate a steady career on Broadway; more than half of the shows he worked were as a swing. For Sandhu and Martin, the job has taught them to see the whole picture, understanding how each element and each character mesh together. The position has taught all three performers to be flexible, both personally and professionally, understand—and laugh at—spontaneity and appreciate the tedious nature of details. (That is making stage charts, memorizing all choreography, jotting down each and every set and pop move and completing several tracking sheets.)

In addition to the theatrically-clerical duties of the job, the role of a swing can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

“You wonder if you’ll be in the show opening night or when the show is archived for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, if you’ll get to be on the cast album, the Tonys or The Morning Show,” Eyer said. “Sometimes you forget that you are actually a performer.”

For others, there is the stigma that being a swing meant they “weren’t good enough.”

“On the contrary,” said Martin. “It was because you were good at many different aspects of being in the show that they didn’t know what to do with you and didn’t want to lose out on your talent.”

The talent of a swing is clearly recognized as a key part of the cast. A swing, naturally, is often a triple threat, getting the opportunity to keep his or her dancing, acting and singing chops sharp while covering his or her several tracks. The surprise and anticipation of the “who” a swing might play that night might mean that he or she will be dancing heavily, belting loudly or sobbing as a specific character.

Swings might have to quickly space out a scene during intermission, try that lift in the wings, give that monologue one last shot in the minutes leading up—it is, to say the least, certainly not dull work.

“The key to happiness onstage and off as a swing or fulltime ensemble is to enjoy your life and find pleasure in the day-to-day tasks,” Sandhu said.

“It’s a tough job,” Eyer said. “I encourage you to reach out to past swings and take solidarity that you are one of a long line of swings that kept the curtain up. You are the unsung hero of the theatre.”

[Rommy Sandhu has appeared in Broadway in The Life, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma!, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Bombay Dreams, Children And Art, and Mary Poppins; Off-Broadway in Make Mine Manhattan; and in regional productions of Diner and The Full Monty.  Gina Martin appeared on Broadway in Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Oh, Kay!, and Guys and Dolls, and Off-Broadway in St. Louis Woman and Do Re Mi.   J. Austin Eyer’s Broadway credits include The Secret Garden, Curtains, and Billy Elliot (also national tour); Off-Broadway, he choreographed My Big Gay Italian Wedding (twice); and in regional theater, he’s done Irving Berlin's White Christmas (twice) and Curtains,]

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WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

STEPHEN CERF: “When I tell someone I’m a swing they think it either has something to do with an actual swing, like on a playground, or they think I’m telling them I’m a swinger. I’m pretty sure I’ve had to fully explain what I actually do every single time.” [Cerf currently appears in Motown The Musical on Broadway; previously, he was seen in Jersey Boys on Broadway and Nevermore Off-Broadway; he’s toured with Monty Python’s Spamalot, Rock of Ages, Jersey Boys, and Motown the Musical.]

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When I think of a SWING, I immediately think . . .

We asked members on social media to tell us what they think of when they think of an Equity swing. We heard,

Indispensable

Trust

Honor

Now?!?!

Unorganized Chaos

#OMGWhatHarmonyPart?

Self Belief

Organized Chaos

Stressful

Anticipation

Frustration

Adrenalin

Responsibility

Invaluable

Focus

MVP

Smartest in the cast

By the seat of your pants

Who am I now?

. . . and of course,

“When you throw your keys in a bowl and go home with a different wife.”

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WHEN YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU’RE A SWING, WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY THINK YOU DO?

PHYLICIA PEARL:  “Most of the time I get blank stares or a rather lackluster ‘Oh . . . congrats,’ because people have no idea what a swing is. When I explain that I cover most of the roles in the female ensemble of The Lion King, people are either in awe that I know so much or just ask me, ‘who plays Nala?’” [Pearl is currently on Broadway in The Lion King.]

'Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954' (MoMA)

When my friend Diana asked me at the Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art what it is that I like about his paintings, the best I could come up with was two vague statements.  The first is simple to say but impossible to define in any concrete terms as it’s purely aesthetic: I simply find his work, especially his later canvases up through the famous “drip paintings,” beautiful.  What does that even mean, though?  I can’t say, except to suggest that they please my eye in a certain way that moves me.  That’s the best I can do.  How do you define or explain beauty—after all, it really is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it.  What’s beautiful to me may not be to you or anyone else.  How do you explain that?  I can’t; can you?  So Pollock’s painting are beautiful to me: they make me happy; I smile when I look at them. 

Susanne Langer (1895-1985), a philosopher of art and aesthetics, defined “beauty” as “expressive form,” which she maintained “do[es] something to us.”  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” Langer admonished us, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  She continued, “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous.”  Furthermore, Langer asserted that our responses to art are “intuitive,” and therefore can’t necessarily be explained, a condition we’ll see afflicted me in my reaction to Pollock’s paintings.

My other response was harder to describe, much less to define.  I said that Pollock’s work excites me.  It’s dynamic, energetic, explosive, almost kinesthetic.  His paintings make me feel infinitely animated—I don’t really know a word for it: in motion, active.  But it’s not physical—I don’t go running around the galleries like a Tasmanian devil or something.  It’s visceral.  I actually feel as if my insides are roiling, but not like I’m sick—like I’m exhilarated.  Could that be an adrenaline rush?  Can art get your adrenaline pumping?  I suppose it can, since art triggers emotions and emotional responses can trigger adrenaline, can’t they?  Maybe that’s it then.  (There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the Stendhal syndrome, named for the French novelist who first described it in 1817, in which someone is overcome with a form of ecstasy upon viewing a piece of art to which he or she has an intense personal response.  You don’t suppose . . .?)

I’m not altogether certain you’re supposed to explain, at least not fully, a response to art.  Music is almost entirely an emotional experience, so why shouldn’t painting and sculpture be emotional—or psychological—in their effects?  Pollock himself wrote: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.”  Diana, who turned out not to care much for Pollock’s art (I asked why she agreed to go with me to MoMA; she was curious, she said, and thought I might help her “understand” Pollock some), later when we made a short stop at the permanent collection on the fifth floor (Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Rousseau, and so on), Diana explained her appreciation of several of the pictures based on the artists’ use of various painting techniques—line and focus, and color and balance.  She’s a longtime student of the Art Students League (ironically, where Pollock also studied) and an amateur painter.  I, on the other hand, have no training in art—or even “art appreciation”—and whatever I know of art theory has been picked up haphazardly over the years of just looking at paintings, sculptures, and drawings—and occasional reading.  (“The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer, and “the real [artistic training] is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling,” which is what Langer called art.)  I’m the quintessential “I don’t know anything about art; I just know what I like” guy. 

In any case, I didn’t help Diana at all.  What I see as dynamism—Pollock himself described his painting as “motion made visible memories arrested in space”—Diana sees as randomness and chance, which she dismisses as “not art,” which she insists requires control and selectivity.  Leaving aside that I don’t necessarily see that art can’t be random, at least in part at any rate, I disagree that Pollock’s work wasn’t controlled and selected.  An element of chance did enter into his work, but it didn’t operate exclusively or even dominantly.  Indeed, the artist himself declared: “I can control the flow of the paint.  There is no accident.”

We may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness,” Langer also admonished us.  Our response to a piece of art may be instinctive, but the philosopher explained that it can be corrupted, because “the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.”  After all, “the function of art,” she declared, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.”  Additionally, Richard Kostelanetz, an artist himself as well as a critic of the avant-garde, submitted that since “audiences and critics would sooner acknowledge the familiar than explore works of art they cannot immediately comprehend . . . a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”  One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  Langer instructed that “if academic training has caused us to think of pictures primarily as examples of schools, periods, or . . . classes . . ., we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.”  I think this may be what prevents Diana (and many others who share her opinion of Pollock) from appreciating Pollock’s work anywhere near the way I do.

Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 at MoMA (22 November 2015-1 May 2016) is entirely composed of works from MoMA’s collection and includes 58 pieces, among them rare engravings, drawings, lithographs, and silkscreen prints along with the paintings.  Collection Survey covers essentially the whole of Pollock’s short career (he died in 1956 in an alcohol-related single-car crash at the age of 44), from 1930 (a painted wooden cigar box) to 1954.  (The artist painted two canvases in 1955, Scent and Search, and none in 1956.)  From one perspective, it traces the artist’s development from figurative work, visibly influenced by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Joan Miró (1893-1983), to deliberately non-representative paintings (and experiments in other media), ultimately to his drip paintings, the culmination of his distinctive style and the art form which distinguished Pollock from his contemporaries and set American Abstract Expressionism apart from European art.  In 1943, at an exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century (1942-47) of young American artists, the famous de Stijl modernist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) remarked of Pollock’s paintings, “I think this is the most interesting work I've seen so far in America. . . . You must watch this man.”  Pollok went on to become the first American painter to gain an international reputation and is even today arguably the most famous American artist.

Paul Jackson Pollock (1912-56) was born on 28 January 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five boys.  He grew up in Arizona and California, where his family lived a peripatetic life, moving from ranch to ranch, town to town,  and in 1928 Pollock began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.  Plagued by disciplinary problems, Pollock was already drinking heavily by the time he turned 15.  In September 1930, 18-year-old Pollock followed his older brothers Charles (1902-1988) and Frank (1907-1994) to New York, and registered at the Art Students League, where Charles was already studying, to work under his brother’s teacher, the Regionalist painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who encouraged him throughout the decade.  In 1937, Pollock began therapy for his drinking under the care of a Jungian psychoanalyst; he would go through several therapists in his lifetime.  Though most didn’t do him much real benefit, he was affected by Jung’s theories of the subconscious and the significance of signs and symbols and this insight became evident in his art. 

By the early ’30s Pollock knew and admired the murals of Mexican painters David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and Diego Rivera (1886-1957).  He traveled throughout the U.S. during the ’30s, but spent most of his time in New York and he settled there permanently in 1933, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with the now-married Charles.  (Brother Sande, 1909-1963, moved to New York City in October 1934 and he and Jackson shared an apartment.  Sande eventually changed his last name to McCoy—his father’s birth name before being adopted as a child—to get around the ban on one household collecting multiple  Works Progress Administration paychecks.)  Jackson Pollock worked on the WPA Federal Art Project (1935-42) and in Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York (1936).  (In 1931, Pollock watched Rivera paint his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center.)  The artist also first met artist Lenore “Lee” Krasner (1908-84), a founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, who would eventually become his wife, in 1936, but they did not meet again for six years.

The artist exhibited Birth (ca. 1941) in American and French Paintings at McMillen Inc. in January-February 1942.  Also exhibiting in the show was Lee Krasner and, impressed with his work, she sought out Pollock; Krasner began to support and promote Pollock’s work and introduced him to influential figures in the New York art scene.  (More outgoing than the introverted Pollock, Krasner, a native New Yorker, was one of those people who just seemed to know everyone worth knowing.  Among these was Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist with whom Krasner was studying.  He, in turn, introduced Pollock and Krasner to playwright Tennessee Williams, who, in 1969, wrote In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel which features an artist character who resembles Pollock.  There’s even a scene in which the artist discusses color theory in terms reminiscent of Hofmann.)  In August, after Pollock’s brother Sande and his wife moved to Connecticut, Krasner moved into Pollock’s East 8th Street apartment.  At the end of that year, Pollock took a job at a printmaker where he learned the technique of silk-screening; the job lasted only a short time, but Pollock would use the skill in 1943 and ’44 when he branched out from painting to experiment with other expressive forms.

The artist participated in his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artists for Victory,  in December 1942-January 1943; on 20 May 1950, Pollock would sign an open letter (published in the New York Times) in which 28 artists (18 painters and 10 supporting sculptors) accused the MMA of “contempt for modern painting” and refusing to participate in the upcoming juried MMA show, American Painting Today – 1950.  (On 23 May 1950, the New York Herald Tribune published an editorial response entitled “The Irascible Eighteen” defending MMA, giving a name to the group of protesting artists.  In its 15 January 1952 issue, Life published a photo of 15 of the original signatories, including Pollock, under the headline, “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” establishing the name “The Irascibles” for the painters.)  

In 1943, Pollock briefly worked as a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (renamed the Solomon R.  Guggenheim Museum in 1947).  In May and June that year, the artist’s work was included in the Art of This Century’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, an exhibition of young American artists that attracted considerable attention.  In July, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) gave Pollock a contract that was extended until 1947 that paid him $150 a month as an advance against sales, permitting the young artist to devote all his time to painting.  This was followed in November by Pollock’s first solo show, at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century; Guggenheim would eventually house four solo Pollock exhibits at the gallery.  In May 1944, MoMA bought The She-Wolf (1943), Pollock’s first piece in a museum collection.  That summer, Pollock and Krasner spent the season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Hofmann ran a summer art school.  (Tennessee Williams was also spending summers in Provincetown, surrounded by several artists, models—many of them dancers—from Hofmann’s school, and sundry others from the art and theater world.) 

Before 1947, Pollock’s art manifested the influence of  Picasso, Miró, and Surrealism, and in the early ’40s, he contributed paintings to exhibitions of Surrealist and Abstract art.  By the mid-’40s, though, Pollock was painting in an entirely abstract manner, freeing himself from the constraints of an easel by tacking unstretched canvas to the floor.  “On the floor I am more at ease,” he would explain later.  “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”  In 1947, his “drip style,” marked by the use of sticks, stiffened brushes, or palette knives to drip and spatter paint, as well as pouring paint directly from the can (or simply punching holes in the can and letting the paint dribble out), emerged.  Pollock’s drip technique, also called “action painting,” was derived from the Surrealist focus on the subconscious and the notion of automatic drawing (“automatism”).

Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, for ROTters who don’t already know, is an art movement—but not a unified style—that began in the United States around 1940 with artists of European origin like Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Arshile Gorky (1904-48).  It emphasizes the act of painting, as expressed in the textures and colors of the media used, and the connection between the artists, who found universal themes within themselves, and the media.  By the late 1940s, a second phase of the movement began, the principal expression of which was “gesturism” or “action painting,” which stressed the texture of the medium and the physicality of the act of painting.  (The first strain was color field painting, emphasizing unified color and shape.  Some of these artists are Sam Gilliam, b. 1933; Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010;  Morris Louis, 1912-62; and Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011).  Pollock, the best-known exemplar of this form of art, vigorously splashed, dripped, and splattered paint on the canvas.  (Time magazine dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” because of his technique.)  Other artists from this school included Mark Rothko (1903-70), Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-1962), and Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

In a 1952 essay in ARTnews in which he coined the label “action painting,” Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), one the two most influential art critics in the U.S., described the form:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

As Bradford R. Collins, a university professor of art, observed in his chapter on post-World War II American and European art in Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, what attracted Pollock most to his drip technique was the sense that he was “fully absorbed in action,” which sensation transferred to the spectator “because of the mesmerizing way the delicate skeins of paint effortlessly loop over and under one another in a pattern without beginning or end.”  That seems to explain, at least in part, my response to Pollock’s paintings as I tried earlier to describe it: I vicariously feel the energy in the painting that the artist expended in creating it.  From my own  perspective—that is, from inside me—this makes sense, even if it sounds a tad mystical when put into words.

In March 1945, Pollock had a solo exhibition of 17 canvases at the Arts Club of Chicago; some of the pieces from the show went on to the San Francisco Museum of Art, giving the artist national exposure outside New York City.  On 25 October 1945, Krasner and Pollock were married and moved to a farmhouse in The Springs, East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island.  Eventually, he turned the property’s barn into his studio, which figured in many photos and films of the artist at work with his canvases spread out on the floor.  From December ’45 to January ’46, Pollock exhibited for the first time (of five) in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—known as the Whitney Annual (precursor to the current Whitney Biennial, launched in 1973).  In April and May of 1947, Pollock’s Mural (1943) was included in MoMA’s Large Scale Modern Paintings.  The 11 October 1945 issue of Life magazine included “A Life Round Table on Modern Art” which put Pollock among such modern masters as Picasso, Miró, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and de Kooning.  The following 8 August, Life published “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” by Dorothy Seiberling (b. 1922) that included photographs by Martha Holmes of Pollock at work. In October ’47, the most influential art critic in the country, Clement Greenberg (1909-94), declared in the British magazine Horizon (October 1947): “The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is . . . Jackson Pollock.” 

Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock international exposure when six of his works were included in a display of her collection at the Venice Biennale in May-September 1948; with four additional pieces, the collection traveled to Florence in February 1949 and to Rome the following June.  In November and December 1949, Pollock exhibited an untitled painting in The Intrasubjectives at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York, a seminal show in the evolution of what would eventually be called Abstract Expressionism.  In July through August 1950, Hans Namuth (1915-90) took his now-famous series of some 200 photos and extensive film footage of the artist at work in his Long Island studio.  One of the canvases the painter completed while Namuth was shooting was the iconic One: Number 31, 1950, arguably Pollock’s most famous and recognizable drip painting.  Some of the photos were published in ARTnews in May 1951 and in the 1951 issue of Portfolio.  In November ’50, Namuth filmed Pollock painting on glass—so the photographer could shoot some of the work from below.  The film, shot outdoors and in color, was shown at MoMA in June ’51. 

Guggenheim organized Pollock’s first European solo exhibition at the Museo Correr of Venice in July and August 1950 with a show of her own collection of over 20 pieces.  Venetian art critic Bruno Alfieri (1927-2008) attacked Pollock’s work in L’Arte Moderna for what he described as “chaos”; “absolute lack of harmony”; “complete lack of structural organization”; “total absence of technique, however rudimentary”; and “once again, chaos.”  This was, however, what Alfieri confessed was only “superficial impressions, first impressions,” and continued:

Pollock has broken all barriers between his picture and himself: his picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting.  Each one of his pictures is a part of himself. . . .  The exact conclusion is that Jackson Pollock is the modern painter who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern art. . . .  Compared to Pollock, Picasso . . . becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.

(Time excerpted the negative passages from Alfieri’s review in an article entitled “Chaos, Damn It!,” in its 20 November issue and Pollock responded in a letter to the editor, published on 11 December, declaring: “No chaos damn it.”) 

In March 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and in November, art critic Clement Greenberg arranged the artist’s first retrospective at Bennington College in Vermont.  In April and May 1953, four paintings by Pollock were included in 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains, an exhibition organized and circulated by MoMA’s International Program.  The show opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne and traveled to Zürich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo.  Despite his increased popularity and renown in Europe, Pollock didn’t obtain a passport until July 1955, and he never traveled outside the U.S.  By the spring of 1956, he hadn’t painted anything new in a year-and-a-half.  After several years of abstinence, he’d been drinking heavily again since the fall of 1950 and his depression had deepened; his and Krasner’s marriage was deteriorating badly, and when she took off for a vacation in Europe in July ’56, he stayed home in The Springs.  While Krasner was away, Ruth Krigman (1930-2010), a young, aspiring artist with whom Pollock had begun an affair, moved into the farmhouse.  On 11 August, the painter was killed in a one-car, drunk-driving accident when he drove his convertible into a tree in East Hampton; Krigman was with him in the car but survived, though a friend of hers who was visiting was killed.  Krasner returned from Europe immediately for her husband’s funeral. 

You could say that Pollock led a tumultuous, if short, life.  And maybe that’s what made his art so turbulent.  One reviewer called his work “a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.”  But if, like me, you just let it move you, the pure emotionality of the action painting, the intricacy of the lacy lines, the astonishing endlessness, boundlessness of the paintings—I’m speaking of his late work, though the early- and mid-career pieces like 1934-38’s The Flame or The She-Wolf of 1943 tend in this same direction—the lack of formality won’t amount to much.  Perhaps because he was one of the first American artists of any stature who never went to Europe to study or work, Pollock’s art showed few signs of the European refinement of Picasso, Miró, and the other continental Expressionists and Surrealists who were the vanguard of contemporary art.  He acknowledged an impact of his upbringing in the American west which can be seen and felt in the roughness and rawness of his earliest paintings in contrast with his European models—some of which was born of his familiarity with the Mexican muralists and the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton whose style was a sort of brawny social Realism.  When Pollock finally found his own style, namely the drip painting, that American vitality took the form of the dynamism and energy that make his canvases so stirring.  At least to me—for not everyone agrees even today, 60 years after his death.  Art critic Robert Coates (1897-1973), who coined the term “Abstract Expressionism” in 1949, dismissed  Pollock’s work  in 1948 as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless” in the New Yorker. 

Collection Survey, organized by two curators from MoMA’s prints and drawings department, Starr Figura and Hilary Reder, comprises 16 of MoMA’s 18 paintings, including One: Number 31, 1950, going back to the museum’s first purchase, The She-Wolf.  The rest of the show is made up of drawings and different kinds of prints, none of which was I familiar with before this.  Pollock’s reputation as an artist, based almost exclusively on his paintings, was one of an American frontier machismo, but the drawings and the etchings, lithos, and screenprints, were something of a revelation.  In contrast to the muscularity of the oils, the drawings and prints are positively delicate—not refined, to be sure, for they still display the raw energy that Pollock exhibits in the paintings, but full of the tracery and lines that might have been foreshadows of the strings of paint in the drip art to come.  Several of the etchings are examples of how Pollock could also rework and redesign these media.  There are, for example, three versions of one etching, all from around 1944, on which the artist made alterations with each printing.  Called simply Untitled (1) with the subtitles state I of III (of which there are two editions) and state II of III, Pollock inked the copper plate differently for the two versions of state I, giving each run a different feel even though the engraved pattern is identical.  In state II, Pollock added some small lines to the plate before a second run.  If the oils are subject to chance and happenstance (though far less, I think, than Pollock’s detractors assert), the prints demonstrate how much care, planning, and thought the artist was capable of—suggesting  to me at least, that he exercised control in his work in general.  (According to Carolyn Lanchner, born 1932, a former curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Pollock began his paintings “with random markings,” but “his ensuing process was one of . . .increasingly controlled moves.”)

The early paintings, like She-Wolf, The Flame (1938), Bird, Circle (both 1938-41), and Stenographic Figure (c. 1942) clearly show Pollock’s emulation of Picasso and Miró.  (His 1941 Mask is an even clearer demonstration of Picasso’s influence.)  But as you move into the mid-’40s and beyond, the influences become less obvious—though still present—and Pollock begins to come into his own artistry.  The engravings of 1943 are precursors of his drip technique (obviously impossible to execute literally on an engraved metal plate), showing the swirling lines and delicate tracery that are the hallmarks of the drip paintings.  Curiously, however, the 1944 etchings, displayed with the original plate from which they were printed, hark back to his early period again.

Returning to his painting with 1944’s Gothic we can again see the beginnings of his pure abstraction, even though he still held onto aspects of the figurative work he was doing earlier in the decade.  There are faint echoes of Picassoism—the museum’s label points out vague similarities to Pablo Picasso's  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—Pollock apparently admitted that the painting was based on the Picasso—which the curators say Pollock saw at a MoMA exhibit.  In There Were Seven in Eight (ca. 1945), Pollock started with a figurative image and then overlaid it with a web of thin, black lines in order to, as the wall label asserts, “veil the image.”  There Were Seven is also an example of Pollock’s experiments with non-traditional paints and pigments, as he used not just oil and casein but enamel house paint, which would become a common medium for his drip works.

In Shimmering Substance from 1946, Pollock’s first totally non-representational painting, the artist squeezed the paint directly from the tube onto the canvas and then smeared it with a palette knife and, perhaps, his fingers into swirls and loops that prefigure the drip work, though he hadn’t yet used that technique.  By the time he painted Free Form that same year, he was experimenting with dripping the paint; it’s likely Pollock’s first attempt to use the technique that would make him world famous.  After painting the whole canvas red, the artist flung and dribbled diluted oil paint with a stick or stiffened brush to make black and white tangles and pools of paint.  (While Shimmering Substance and Free Form are of fairly common dimensions for a contemporary painting, this work came within a year of the Pollocks’ move to The Springs and a contemporaneous work not in the exhibit—it’s part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection—Eyes in the Heat, at 54″ x 43″, was certainly a work the painter did in his new barn studio with the canvas spread out on the floor.)  With Full Fathom Five, his Shakespearean-titled painting of 1947, he had established his drip style—even though X-rays have revealed a figurative base painting beneath the abstract dripped tracery and the green covering that evokes the ocean depths referred to in the lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest from which Pollock’s title was adapted.  (Full Fathom Five was also one of Pollock’s last works to bear a descriptive verbal title; he began numbering his painting around 1948, wanting to further distance his art from any representational association.  He wanted viewers to look at the art and “receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.”  Krasner later explained: “Numbers are neutral.  They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.”)

With Number 1A, 1948 (1948), Pollock was well into the drip work, which had by then become synonymous with the painter.  But the new technique didn’t meet with universal acceptance: when Number 1A, 1948 was first exhibited in ’48 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, his new dealer after Guggenheim closed her gallery, it went unsold and Parsons added the letter A to the titles of the unsold paintings for a 1949 show to distinguish them from new work.  (MoMA bought Number 1A, 1948 from the ’49 exhibit and, in 1968, also Pollock’s monumental—8′ 10″ x 7′ 5⅝″—One: Number 31, 1950.  The museum now owns nearly 100 works by Pollock.)  

Once having moved into the territory which he alone occupied, Pollock’s renown and popularity increased geometrically.  If he isn’t our most famous artist today (and arguably he is), he was at the turn of the post-war decade of the ’40s, with magazine covers and interviews and the Namuth photo spread and his documentary film.  Unfortunately, both for him and Krasner and for the rest of us, the artist’s personal demons began to overwhelm him at the same time.  Pollock began to move away from his drip technique in 1952, returning to brushwork and quasi-figurative painting—but he only made 10 paintings from 1953 until his death in 1956.  One of the 10, Easter and the Totem (1953), is a remarkable inclusion in Pollock’s oeuvre, with its echoes of Picasso and, most integral, Matisse (who the curators note had been the subject of a retrospective at MoMA in ’52).  In 1951, Pollock wrote in a letter to a friend of his return to “some of my early images”: “think the nonobjectivists will find them disturbing.”

The last piece in Collection Survey is White Light, the only canvas he completed in 1954 and one of the last of his life.  It’s a return to the pre-drip technique of 1946’s Shimmering Substance, with paint squeezed onto the canvas directly from the tube and then brushed and smeared to manipulate the wet paint to create a marbling effect.  With ’53’s Easter and the Totem, White Light was the start of a potentially new phase—but it never developed, a promise never fulfilled.  Pollock changed American art forever, a bridge from the pre-war half of the 20th century with its overwhelmingly European dependence and the second half of the century that became singularly American—but we can never know where he might have gone after he changed the world of painting.  Like the end of Collection Survey, which just sort of stops in mid-paragraph, Jackson Pollock’s immeasurable presence simply disappeared leaving unanswered questions and undelivered messages.  Pollock’s influence has been long-lasting, informing the work of such diverse artists as Colorist Helen Frankenthaler, who took up drip-painting herself; the Happenings of Allan Kaprow  (1927-2006), which led to performance art (another interpretation, perhaps of “action painting”); and the work of sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1939).

As sad as that is, however, Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey is more than worth a couple of hours.  The artist was—and is—too important to American culture for a retrospective of the kind MoMA put together from its own holdings (and how magnificent would it have been if the museum had gone whole-hog and borrowed works from other collections; the Goog, in particular, owns some spectacular Pollocks) for it not to be fascinating and illuminating.  I spent over an hour in the three second-floor galleries of the Prints and Illustrated Books division devoted to Collection Survey.  I’ve explained on several occasions that when I would see an exhibition with my mother—and she would have loved this one: it’s just the kind of show she enjoyed most—we expressed our pleasure by selecting some of the pieces we’d like to come back for on a “midnight shopping trip.”  I’d have loaded the back of a van with almost every work in this show.  Even that little cigar box!

[Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 is the first art show I’ve seen since my mother’s death last May.  Art museum-going was a sort of special treat she and I liked to share with one another: I saved shows to see when I knew Mom was coming to New York City for a visit and she did the same when I was planning a trip down to Washington, D.C.  No one else did art exhibits quite the way we two did, so we preferred to do that together.  I wasn’t sure I could do the Pollock with someone else or without Mom, knowing that it would have been her kind of excursion.  (Going to the new Whitney, which is in my cruising range now, is a little the same because we talked about seeing the new building when it opened before she got too sick to manage the trip to New York, much less a visit to a museum.  The last art exhibit Mom and I saw together was Italian Futurists at the Guggenheim in the summer of 2014.  Her last trip to New York altogether was in the fall of that year.  After that, traveling was too hard for her.) 

[I soon got caught up in the Pollock artwork at Collection Survey, but for a few minutes before I got engrossed, while I was waiting for the free entrance tickets and as I was going up to the second floor, I was having trepidations about my decision.  Even as I was starting out taking in the art, which soon overwhelmed any other thoughts, I was thinking about what Mom would say about the paintings and drawings and what I’d have said to her if I had to tell her about the show.  (Some of that is what informed the above report—couched in somewhat more formal phraseology, perhaps.)  I made it through the experience without any noticeable distress, even if afterwards I began to wonder again what Mom would have made of Collection Survey.  I guess it’ll take a while longer—after all, my father’s been gone for just over 20 years now, and I still think, ‘What would Dad have said about that?’ or ‘Dad would have loved that!’]  

'Prodigal Son'

It’s been my observation that playwrights who write plays about their own lives, autobiographical plays, nearly always indulge in the conceits, first, that they are unquestionably worthy of that focus and, second, that every iota of their lives is significant.  I think of Arthur Miller and After the Fall and A. R. Gurney and What I Did Last Summer—and now Prodigal Son by John Patrick Shanley (2005 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Doubt; 1988 Oscar for Moonstruck).  When my friend Diana asked me after the show why a playwright would want to write such a play as Prodigal Son, I said that I always felt as if the writers had something they needed to write through, for their own benefit—writing, as I’ve noted before, can be cathartic—but that I also always wondered why they felt it was necessary to inflict it on the rest of us.  Shanley’s Prodigal Son, even at only 95 minutes, is an apt example of what I mean.

The world première of Prodigal Son, which Shanley, 65, wrote last year, started previews on Stage I at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center home on 19 January and opened on 9 February; it’s slated to close on 27 March (after a week’s extension).  Diana and I caught it on Friday evening, 19 February.  The play’s overtly autobiographical, as Shanley, who’s long history with MTC includes 10 previous productions, states in the program: “It’s a true story for the most part.  The changes I’ve made have been to simplify, or to make a point.”  Except for the young character who stands in for the author, Shanley affirms that “most of the names remain unchanged, or only slightly altered.” 

Prodigal Son covers the years 1965, when young James Quinn (Timothée Chalamet), then 15, meets Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry), headmaster and founder of Thomas More Preparatory School in Harrisville, New Hampshire, at a diner in Keene for what amounts to his admissions interview, to 1968, the year Jim graduates from Thomas More at 17.  An Irish Catholic kid from a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, Jim’s a scholarship student at the boys’ Catholic prep school, after having been expelled from Cardinal Spellman High in New York City.  He’s an obviously extremely intelligent boy, and what Jesse Green in New York magazine called “a questing soul” (stop me if you’ve this before) with a head full of poetry who’s a voracious reader of such diverse authors as Heraclitus of Ephesus, Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche), T. S. Eliot (The Wasteland), H. Rider Haggard (She), Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), and others whose names and works get dropped throughout the play.  Jim displays a talent for writing and critical thinking.  But he’s angry and confused, picks fights with other students (often, apparently, the freshmen), drinks, steals (both from other students and local shops), lies, possibly smokes pot; except for his roommate, Austin (David Potters), the nephew of Headmaster Schmitt, Jim’s made an enemy of every student in the school.  Schmitt describes the boy as “the most interesting mess we have this year” and asks English master Alan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard, 2001 Tony for The Invention of Love) to befriend him because Hoffman’s so good with the troubled boys.  (Does that strike anyone else as ominous foreshadowing—or is it just me?)

I guess it’s no spoiler to say that Jim becomes a thorny problem for Headmaster Schmitt, who comes off as such a liberal-minded educator at that meeting in Keene when he answers Jim’s question about why he’d accept him at Thomas More with his academic record and his expulsion from his previous school.  Schmitt explains that he finds something in the boy and thinks he should have a second chance.   Now he seems to be looking for justification to expel Jim, whose escapades always leave no evidence even though everyone seems to know who the guilty party is.  (My own experience at private schools where the headmaster is also the school’s founder/owner is that court-worthy proof is hardly necessary to expel a troublesome student.  It didn’t help me.  Wait, did I say that out loud?)  Of course, if Schmitt, whose wife, Louise (Annika Boras), who teaches Jim and one other student (whom we never meet) honors English in tutorials at the Schmitt house, is an advocate for Jim, had thrown the boy out at the first—or even second—opportunity, there wouldn’t have been a play.  (Hmmm . . . .) 

At any rate, Jim survives at each juncture by swearing firmly that he didn’t do whatever he’s suspected of until just before graduation when he’s accused of having gotten drunk the night before a final exam for Schmitt’s religion class, causing him to miss the test because he was . . . er, sick.  The inquisition into this allegation goes on for several days during which he has a counseling session with Hoffman.  (Hoffman says he believes Jim’s denial of the drinking, but when the boy confesses, his teacher blurts out that he had figured that.  Really?  Is Hoffman a liar?  A vacillator?  Forgetful?  Has Shanley forgotten what his character’s said earlier?)  In the course of the session, Shanley reveals that Hoffman and Schmitt both have buried secrets, each hinted at once in an earlier scene (as if to justify the subsequent revelation) but dropped in here like little bombs, having only the slightest repercussion on the play’s dénouement but reverberating in the background as if to make the two teachers—and, by implication, Louise Schmitt—seem more complex. 

At one point, Hoffman suddenly reaches out and places his palm on Jim’s scalp in the most awkward bit of blocking I’ve seen in a long time.  (I whispered to myself, ‘Phrenology?’)  That gesture becomes an even more awkward feeling of Jim’s face, at which point Jim jumps up and shouts, “What are you doing!”  (Not an inapt question under the circumstances.)  Now, I know what was supposed to be going on—but this bit of physicalization Shanley devised (the playwright also directed the MTC production) was just plain weird.  That’s not even considering that it came out of nowhere (aside from the ominous hint back in the earlier scene).  I mean, who does that—feel someone’s scalp and then his face?  That’s not a pass, is it?  Maybe Hoffman was channeling Annie Sullivan!

I guess it goes without saying that Jim survives the inquiry and Schmitt’s self-examination and graduates.  We don’t see that because the last scene in the play, which starts off as a final showdown in the headmaster’s office the day before graduation, turns into a series of soliloquies by each of the characters recounting their futures.  It wraps up the plot, but it hardly concludes the drama.  Why does Schmitt let Jim off after he confesses to breaking Thomas More’s zero-tolerance no-drinking rule?  Why is Jim so angry?  It’s more than the fact that he comes from the Bronx, but we never learn what his trouble is.  What does Louise Schmitt (whom Shanley especially mentions in his author’s note) find in this difficult teenager?  We have to take it on faith that she sees something, but we’re not allowed to learn what. 

Schmitt tells Jim that he founded Thomas More because he wants to create “extraordinary young men.”  Beside being a little arrogant, are we supposed to then assume that Jim Quinn, AKA John Patrick Shanley, became one?  Maybe I’m alone in feeling that writing an autobiographical play in which you declare yourself extraordinary—we don’t see it; we’re simply left to believe it—takes a large portion of chutzpah.  (Okay, maybe that’s not the most apt word to use for a play in which all the characters are Catholic.  Hubris just seems so . . . tragically Greek.)

I guess you got that I have huge reservations about this play.  (ROTters may already know that I’m not Shanley’s biggest fan.  I think I made that clear in my report on Storefront Church, posted on 16 June 2012.  I didn’t see Doubt on stage, but I found the 2008 film pat and contrived.  Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which I saw in Washington in 1985, also struck me as set up and artificial.)   There wasn’t one thing that went on on the MTC stage that Friday night that I believed for an instant.  I’ll accept Shanley’s word that the events in the play are real—at least as far as he can recall half a century back—but that “making a point” business he allowed himself to justify some alteration must have done him in.  Even the acting was unconvincing, a fault I lay directly at the feet of Shanley since he directed the cast—and I’m sure these actors are all capable of much better (especially Leonard, whom I’ve seen before to much greater advantage). 

I’m not sure what could have been made of the situation Shanley lays out in Prodigal Son; true or not, it’s such a cliché I despair that any dramatist could have come up with a truly engaging script.  Furthermore, despite the highfalutin language Shanley puts in the mouths of his characters—especially Jim Quinn, who speaks more like a 30-year-old grad student (and a pretentious one at that) than a teenage prep-schooler—he never gets beneath the superficial and obvious to let us in on what’s extraordinary about them.  Mr. and Mrs. Schmitt, Hoffman, and Austin are all ciphers about whom we learn almost nothing, and Jim’s little more than a mouthpiece for some empty verbiage from Shanley, what he would like to imagine now at 65 he ought to have said back when he was 16 or 17.  But the language aside, Shanley never shows us what his characters, these people the author tells us were the making of him, are capable of—he just tells us.  Shanley even has one character say of the dramatist’s younger self: “You have a remarkable mind”; I’m unconvinced.

As director, Shanley fares no better than he does as author.  I’ve voiced my problems with playwrights who direct their own work before, and the MTC staging of Prodigal Son fits perfectly into that category.  Shanley paid more attention to the words the actors are saying—that is, what he wrote—than he did to any believable characterization.  If his cast weren’t as talented as they are, the production would look like soap-opera acting at best.  Every character falls into the cliché or stereotype for his or her role.  (It’s coincidental that in his 1985 review of Deep Blue Sea in the Washington Post, David Richards wrote that “it is possible to believe the actors on a stage and not believe the play in which they’re appearing.” In the case of Prodigal Son, however, I didn’t believe either.  In fact, I didn’t believe the actors believed it themselves.) 

Just as I’m doubtful any director could have saved Prodigal Son from being unconvincing as drama, I’m also uncertain any actors could have made these puppet figures more believable.  The situations they’re in and the lines they have to say subvert any real chance at verisimilitude as far as I can see.  Shanley hasn’t given them an opportunity to redeem their roles.  No one fares any better than anyone else, but a great deal of attention has been paid to Chalamet as Jim.  Ben Brantley in the New York Times, for instance, says Chalamet has “enough easy charisma to confirm his status as a rising star.”  I barely remember his appearance on Showtime’s Homeland in 2012 and I never saw his other performances (Interstellar, 2014), but I found his work here unimpressive and unoriginal, using all the hackneyed behavior of every troubled, volatile teen since J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in 1951’s Catcher in the Rye and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).  If this 20-year-old actor is anywhere near as promising as his reviews suggest, then I have to blame director Shanley once again for sabotaging his performance at MTC.  (I’ve already mentioned the peculiarity of Leonard’s portrayal of the English master, Alan Hoffman.  It’s ironic that Leonard came to prominence playing another troubled student at an exclusive boys’ school in 1989’s Dead Poets Society.  I recall that being a poignant and daring performance.)

The technical production was fine, though given what I think of the whole megillah its kind of expensive gift wrap for a middling present.  Santo Loquasto’s fragmentary set, with sliding panels for walls and platforms for floors of different rooms, is swaddled in the branches of a copse of birches, lending the set the feel of a New England countryside.  The schoolhouse is a small, dollhouse-sized model way upstage, like a painting by James Kinkaid (if he painted large mansions instead of little cottages); the warm, yellow lights glow invitingly, despite the turmoil that we know goes on inside.  This is all washed appropriately by Natasha Katz’s mood-setting lighting, casting shadows over some scenes from the tree branches as if they were some kind of watchful spirit.  Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s late-’60s clothing, though unspectacular (it is a Catholic school, after all—no hippies or bohos here) was suitably unobtrusive.  Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel back in the play’s period) provided music that, while unremarkable, set a nice atmosphere for the goings-on.

The press coverage was less harsh than my assessment, but generally put more store in the production and performances than in the script.  Elisabeth Vincentelli virtually dismissed Prodigal Son in the New York Post under a sub-head of “Skip It”: “‘Prodigal Son,’ is . . . vague. . . .  [E]verything about it is generic, from the by-the-numbers bad-boy rebellion to the young protagonist’s . . . poetic aspirations to the teacher with a secret . . . .  ‘Prodigal Son’ flirts with big themes—religion, sexuality, feminism, literature—but never ventures beyond a light make-out session.”  With a “Bottom Line” slug that included the characterization “bizarre vanity from Shanley,” Newsday’s Linda Winer opened her notice by stating, “Without identifying the 90-minute memory play as autobiographical, we could have been left to ourselves to fall in love, or not, with the troubled but brilliant 15-year-old protagonist from the Bronx and not have to deal with Shanley’s admiration for his fascinating, handsome, poetic young self.”  Winer praised Chalamet as a “gifted actor [who] is giving a breakout performance” and affirmed that Leonard is “so good . . . that we wince at the cliché Shanley’s memory forces him to become.”  She even asserted that Shanley “ably directs” the production. 

In the New York Times, Brantley characterized Shanley’s “painful” play, “a hymn to the impossible, combustible and brilliant young thing he once was,” as “the sound of a raw adolescent ego screaming for attention.”  Brantley applauds the playwright for not just recalling his teens “so vividly that he hasn’t just written about it; he has also rendered it as if . . . he were still writhing in the stinging throes of his midteens.”  The play’s “inescapably all about Jim” even though the other characters “are given problems and secrets of their own,” but the playwright “deals rather perfunctorily and inconsistently” with them.  A “subtle probing of mixed motives and shaky certainty . . . is seldom in evidence” in Prodigal Son, observed Brantley.  In the end, the Timesman pivoted and lamented that “the man that Jim would become seemingly has yet to achieve the distance to make this struggling artist-in-the-making worthy of a play of his own.”  Matt Windman, in amNew York, described Prodigal Son as “raw and choppy, with long gaps in time between some scenes, meandering discussions of philosophy and a heavy reliance on direct narration.”  Windman added, “At times, it resembles a heavy-handed takeoff of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’” though in the end, “it is an engaging and candid coming-of-age piece.” 

The New York Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz, calling the Prodigal Son a “satisfying play,” noted, “Over an hour-and-a-half, themes that have occupied Shanley as an adult are seen emerging here.”  Dziemianowicz felt that Shanley’s direction “skillfully guides” the cast, whom the Newsman praised with special mentions for Chalamet and Leonard, though he had some reservations about the physical production.  In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout stated simply, “Finely directed by the author himself and exceptionally well acted by a five-person cast led by Timothée Chalamet, ‘Prodigal Son’ is a heart-sore portrait of adolescent turmoil that bears the stamp of hard-earned truth on every scene.”

In the Village Voice, Miriam Felton-Dansky described Prodigal Son as simultaneously “[h]eartfelt and frequently well observed” and “teeter[ing] between restraint and emotional overload, eventually (and unnecessarily) succumbing to the latter.”  Felton-Dansky found that the play’s final development “grows surreal, becoming a kind of stagy séance in which Shanley resurrects the dead so as to bare their long-ago souls.”  When Jim learns of Hoffman’s secret and demands details, the teacher refuses to tell the tale.  The Voice reviewer commented, “If only he (and Shanley) had meant it.”  In the “Goings On About Town” column in the New Yorker, the review-writer admonished that Shanley has painted his younger self “perhaps too admiringly,” though the capsule review dubbed Chalamet’s performance “incandescent.”  “But the playwright shouldn’t have directed his own work,” lamented the reviewer, the result of which is that “the pace is often stilted.” 

As if reading over my shoulder, Jesse Green of New York magazine warned:

A playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now puts before us.  When the play turns out to be less than thrilling—as was the case, for instance, with A. R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer—the disproportion between the setup and the result risks bathos, if not ridiculousnsess.

Green continued that Shanley’s “propinquity to danger,” meaning his tendency to “take dramatic fiction as close to the electrified fence of narcissism as possible without getting electrocuted,” is what “animates and partly defeats Prodigal Son.”  “Trying to climb that electrified fence,” continued Green, “has apparently shorted some of Shanley’s circuits.”  On one hand, Green wrote, the autobiographical play “displays all of his mature talents for moral inquiry, rich dialogue, and compelling scene-making” and on the other “like its biblical namesake, is also a mopey and vexing testament to the confusions of self-regard.”  By the time Prodigal Son nears its end (I don’t say conclusion), Green complained that “the play has reached a murky depth of perplexity from which . . . it can’t seem to find its way back to the surface.”  The man from New York expanded on this deficiency:

I don’t even know whom I’m criticizing when I say, in teacherly fashion, that the work is promising but undisciplined; is that Jim’s fault, or Shanley the playwright’s, or Shanley the director’s?  (This is one of those cases that confirms the conventional wisdom of not directing one’s own work.)  Another intelligence, not so in love with the author’s, might have helped him prune deadwood, focus the narrative, avoid the whirlpools of narcissism, and possibly even eliminate the interstitial narration that too directly pleads for indulgence. 

Green’s conclusion is: “It seems that Jim and John [that is, Shanley] both take Thomas More’s example too much to heart, telling too much truth, or what they imagine to be truth, for their own good.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Melissa Rose Bernardo asserted that in Prodigal Son, “Shanley crafts a captivating warts-and-all portrait of not only a budding artist but also an average teenager struggling to find himself.”  The play, Bernardo states, “recalls all of our mouthy, insecure teenage meltdowns” and brings “us back—for a brief, but intense, emotion-packed 95-minute trip.”  In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney, calling the play an “unsatisfying new work” and a “wordy text,” characterized it as “an opaque portrait revealing little beyond the author’s romanticized self-image as an embattled hero.”  Though “beautifully acted,” Prodigal Son “lacks drama, and Shanley’s solution to that feels forced.”  “The writing doesn’t match the elegance of the production,” asserted Rooney, especially in that final revelatory scene, which the HR reviewer called “a mess.”  Praising the technical production, especially Loquasto’s set, Katz’s lighting, and Simon’s music, Rooney declared, “The chief reward is the acting.”  Time Out New York’s David Cote called Shanley’s play “a keen, passionate portrait of the author as a poetry-spouting romantic punk” and describes it as “pure, splendid Shanley: shaggily idealistic and always scratching a philosophical itch underneath jokes and banter.”  Prodigal Son “is lean and cool-headed,” wrote the man from TONY, “but it contains one or two emotional explosions that cast the previous action in a new light.”  Shanley directed “with a tender hand” and Loquasto’s set was “spare, efficient.” 

In Variety, Marilyn Stasio complained that Shanley “lavishes an inordinate amount of attention” on his stand-in, Jim Quinn, although the writer “has done an excellent job of directing.”  Despite the complexity Stasio found in the role of Jim, she felt that “Shanley makes little effort to delve deeper into such a troubled character” which is where she believed the “real but largely unexplored drama lies.” 

The on-line press was essentially an echo of the print outlets.  David Gordon of TheaterMania, after praising Chalamet’s “true star-is-born performance,” reported that the MTC production, while “still extremely moving,” “hasn't entirely realized its full potential.”  Overall, said Gordon, Shanley’s play, “both on page and in production, never completely rises to the level of curiosity we feel about its protagonist,” spending too much of its length on “exposition or . . . mood setting” so that “it doesn’t offer particularly new insights.”    On New York Theatre Guide, Margret Echeverria noted that Prodigal Son, which she described as “beautifully crafted,” asks if we “remember fifteen” and decided that “yes, we remember fifteen and, despite that warning, we’re charmed; we come willingly.”  BroadwayWorld’s Michael Dale drew a distinction between “coming of age stories where you identify with the awkward struggles of the protagonists and recognize a little of yourself “ and those “where you wish they’d just grow up already.”  Prodigal Son, said Dale, “leans a bit towards the latter.”  As director, Shanley treats the play “as a soft and sentimental memory,” wrote Dale, and added, “The action is sparse, the tension is mild and the plotting always seems more or less familiar.”  Citing the script’s line characterizing Jim Quinn as an “interesting mess,” the BWW reviewer declared that Prodigal Son “is neither interesting . . . nor messy enough to make an impact.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray described Prodigal Son as a “curiously cursory new play” in which memory “is at once crystalline and cloudy” and in which the playwright “discovers . . .  Well, not much, as it turns out.”  Acknowledging that the “dual portrait” of Louise Schmitt and Alan Hoffman “is not without merit,” Murray declared that “it’s tough to escape the fact that . . . Jim is not particularly interesting at the head of his own story.”  The development, however, in the supporting characters “doesn’t remotely feel like revealing anything.”  Shanley’s writing and directing, said Murray, are “formulaic” and it seemed to the TB blogger that the playwright “cares little for connecting” the separate incidents of the play.  The reviewer also missed the “crucial character points” that show Jim’s growth: “There’s something frustrating in watching a year pass by in a blink but no discernible change or growth appear in those who ostensibly endured much during that time.”  Murray asked, “What are we supposed to take away from this?”  “Nothing,” he answered.  Murray is the only reviewer I read who had reservations about Chalamet’s performance, finding that the actor “holds his anger too close to the surface, and draws upon it more readily than the other emotions that ought to be writhing inside Jim.”  Concluding that the play “doesn’t make for riveting drama,” the TB writer decided that neither the playwright nor his character were “able to convince us that their joint past is a puzzle we are, or should be, desperate to solve” and “like its central figure, Prodigal Son is forever striving to be more and having to settle for less.”

CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer called Prodigal Son “a compelling, well cast memory piece” which “[w]hile not without humor, . . . is neither light entertainment or a romance.”  “Prodigal Son . . . is interesting and likable,” said Steven Suskin of Huffington Post.  “It is also uneven.”  “After an effective opening,” observed Suskin, the pace slackens until “near the midway point, the pace finally picks up.  Shanley gets back on track, and the rest of the evening is markedly more interesting.”  The HP writer gave a pretty cogent analysis of how I felt about this theater piece (including my feelings about playwrights who direct their own work):

The overall results are more than workable, but one suspects there’s a considerably stronger play in Prodigal Son than what we see at City Center.  The trouble with writing autobiographical plays is that the author can be overly concerned with what actually happened, the way it happened; this sometimes leads to accurate reporting but less-than-scintillating dramaturgy.  That’s where the director comes in.  It could well be that Prodigal Son would benefit from the prodding of a director other than the autobiographical playwright, who might be too rigidly staging the events just like they were lodged in memory—and rejecting cuts that would strengthen.

Most writers, dramatists included, use bits of their lives, families, backgrounds, and hometowns as grist for their writing.  Tennessee Williams did it all the time; Neil Simon did it a lot.  A. R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang, and Richard Nelson do it in almost every play, and Shanley has done it in Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church.  But the plots and characters, though drawn from real life, are fiction—some more than others, granted.  When the playwright needs to make a dramatic point, she doesn’t have to shoehorn it into a factual sequence, throwing everything out of balance.  In a fictional play, the writer is free move bits around and even cut them with impunity.  (Unless, of course, the writer is one of those who have trouble cutting anything they’ve composed.  Then he needs an editor or a dramaturg to help him be ruthless.  “Kill your babies,” one of my teachers admonished us.)  It’s ten times harder to do when the details are true and the subject is the writer’s life.  If it happened, the writer feels, it has to be in the play.  A couple of the reviewers of Prodigal Son thought that Shanley had fallen into that rabbit hole.

As for the playwright who serves as his own director—in my experience there’s no remedy for that.  Unless one or the other is a (certified) theatrical genius.  I believe that’s quadruply true when the play’s autobiographical: when the writer, the director, and the main character are one and the same, the playwright will always win disputes, hands down.  Then the audience (and sometimes the actors) lose.