[Back on 16 March, I posted the first of two parts of “From My August Wilson Archive,” a collection of old reports on Wilson plays I’d seen before I started Rick On Theater. (In fact, I posted Part 1 on the blog’s eighth birthday.) In that post, I made passing mention of a production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! that I’d recently seen at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage because the production of the Wilson play, Seven Guitars at the Signature Theatre Company, contrasted with the Arena production in one very significant aspect. I said of Awake “that the cast didn’t seem to be living in the play’s world.” I’ve decided to post the Awake and Sing! report, written on 13 February 2006, to illuminate that remark.
[The original pre-ROT report
contained discussions of several events from around the time I saw Awake
and Sing!, and I’ve elected to leave the
additional material in this post—all except the evaluation of another Arena
production I saw then, the staging of Damn Yankees, which I used in Part 2 of “Faust Clones,” posted on 18 January 2016. I’ve left the other discussions in this post
for the curiosity value.].
There have been a couple of
things on stage worth noting that I missed, but for the most part, the 2005-06
season in New York City doesn’t seem to have offered much of interest. The
Brooklyn Academy of Music didn’t even have enough things I wanted to see to
warrant a subscription. (You need four “events” to constitute a
subscription; otherwise, you have to buy individual seats, which are often hard
to score.)
I’ve
had to be in D.C. twice this winter, however, and I did catch a show at Arena
each time. Arena used to be a pretty exciting place, presenting new plays
that went on to become important additions to American theater (Moonchildren, Indians) or productions
that bordered on the experimental (Andrei Serban’s Leonce and Lena—one of his first gigs in the
States, Yuri Lyubimov’s Crime and Punishment).
Since Zelda Fichandler left to take over the graduate acting program at NYU in
1984 and after Doug Wager, her successor, was replaced by Molly Smith in 1998,
it can still be a pretty good regional company, but its selection of material
is often more on the side of audience-pleasers than
experience-stretchers. (My mother, a long-time subscriber to Arena, has
complained about Smith’s choices since she took over and has threatened to
drop her subscription altogether. Mother has cut back and no longer
subscribes to the company’s entire season—there’s a four-play subscription
available, instead of the whole six-play bill.) So, along with several
movies during the holidays (Syriana,
Pride & Prejudice,
and Munich), we
went to the Arena on New Year’s Eve to see Damn
Yankees.
(As noted, see Part 2 of my article “Faust Clones,” 18 January 2016.)
(By
the way, I don’t normally do film commentary on ROT, but I’ll say now that I found Syriana, despite all its good reviews and
Oscar buzz, to be confusing, disjointed, and unintelligible. Maybe a reel
was missing. Munich
was pretty good as a film—as opposed to history—if a little simplistic.
The scene in Brooklyn, near the end of the movie, that put the World Trade
Center in the background across New York Harbor, was a tad obvious.
Though I do wonder how that was filmed—computer-generated imagery, I guess.)
I
did a few other things of interest in D.C. over the holidays. I finally
got to the new National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall and we went
to a somewhat related exhibit at the Renwick Gallery (part of the Smithsonian
devoted to American art and crafts) of the Indian portraits of George Catlin (1796-1872). The Corcoran
(which used to be housed in what is now the Renwick—William Wilson Corcoran
built the building originally to display his art collection) had a
retrospective of the D.C. artist Sam Gilliam who is a friend of my mother’s and
several of whose works we own (I have one; my mother has three). My mother had been to the opening Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective on 15 October 2005, but I hadn’t seen the show yet. (We
also paid a visit to G Fine Art, the new gallery Gilliam’s wife, Annie
Gawlak, has just opened on 14th Street in the Logan Circle neighborhood, a
newly-gentrifying section of the city—but she happened to be out that
day.) Oddly, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective didn’t include any
works that resembled any of ours. (The one I have is a mate to one my
mother has, but her other two are vastly different from each other and from the
third piece. Gilliam is very prolific and innovative. He
experiments with lots of media and varies his application as the medium
demonstrates its properties. [I have a
later post that discusses Gilliam’s art in more detail: “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011.]) I
maintain that a show can’t really be a true retrospective if it omits several
examples of the artist’s stylistic experiments. (There were other kinds
of works I know Gilliam did that weren’t represented as well.) Still, it
was a very interesting show, with lots of works that I didn’t know about.
The
NMAI, which I’ve mentioned before (I saw an exhibit, The First American Art,
in May 2004 in New York City at what is now a satellite museum of the one on
the Mall but was the original—and originally private—Museum of the American
Indian before the Smithsonian took it over and then built its new facility), is
a fascinating but difficult place. As
many of the critiques have suggested, the building and its surroundings are
perhaps the most interesting part of the museum, but the exhibits are oddly
organized and laid out. I understand
from reports I’ve read that there are continuing disagreements about how to
display and even select what is exhibited about native cultures—different
tribes and different representatives have dichotomous agendas—but the result is
that there are a lot of things displayed and lots of text that make following a
strain very hard in any kind of limited time.
It’s obviously the kind of place that demands several visits to get even a
handle on the material. On the other
hand, if you just wander through the place, looking at the items not so much as
artifacts with explanations but as art, taking in the aesthetics of whatever
catches your eye, there are lots of things that are truly beautiful.
Of
course, you understand that Indian art, especially the art of the Pacific
Northwest, has always appealed to me tremendously, so I’m prejudiced going
in. But when I go to a museum, I like to
read the panels and try to put the exhibits into a context—even if it’s not a
PC one—and that’s hard at NMAI because there are so many individual items and
so much text, and the texts are often multi-topical. (The major exhibits are separated into
themes, but to me they are hard to distinguish and isolate which makes finding
a through-line difficult and, ultimately for me, unsuccessful. What, for instance, distinguishes “Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World” from “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories” from “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities”—the three permanent
exhibits when I was there? Not only do
they seem to overlap a great deal, but each section of the exhibit, devoted to
one tribe or people, interpreted the theme differently from the others. If you ignored the exhibit title/theme, and
just looked at each display separately and learned what was interesting about
that part of one tribe’s world, it was really interesting, though.) This doesn’t mean, however, that the museum
isn’t a really interesting addition to the Smithsonian complex and well worth
spending time in. I think it’s worth
acknowledging that the American natives want a chance to tell their own story
instead of turning it over to a bunch of Anglo anthropologists to do it for
them. [My brief report on The First
American Art predates ROT,
but I’ve posted one other pertaining to NMAI: “Fritz Scholder” (30 March 2011), which covers an exhibit that spanned
both the New York branch and the now-main museum in Washington.]
George Catlin’s Indian Gallery at the Renwick, opened
on 24 November 2005 for permanent display, is the bulk of his original
collection of Indian portraits and western scenes from the early 19th
century. Determined
to record the “manners and customs” of Native Americans, Catlin, a
lawyer-turned-painter, traveled thousands of miles from 1830 to 1836 following
the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
I don’t believe he had any formal art training, and his paintings are
all a little on the “naïve” side—although some of that impression may be due to
the style of the period, which wasn’t long on perspective or proportion, as I
recall. Catlin was convinced
that westward expansion spelled certain disaster for native peoples, so he
viewed his Indian Gallery, as he called his portraits, as a way “to
rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs.” He visited 50 tribes living west of the
Mississippi River from present-day North Dakota to Oklahoma.
Caitlin displayed his Gallery as what we’d
call an “anthropological” exhibit today or as a kind of educational
entertainment (P. T. Barnum was a promoter at one time), and he hoped that the
federal government would buy the portraits as a collection and preserve them
for posterity. After Catlin went into
debt (he was actually imprisoned), he sold the collection to a businessman who
donated the Gallery to the Smithsonian after the artist died. The Renwick exhibition included Native
American artifacts collected by the artist that have not been shown with the
paintings in more than a century. I
guess it’s no surprise that the pictures are better as artifacts than as art,
and there are hundreds of paintings arrayed along all four walls of one gallery
at the Renwick, four rows on each wall, reaching all the way up to the ceiling,
so it was hard really to look at each frame as a painting anyway. It was more like examining a “rogues’ gallery”—it
got enervating after a short while. Let’s
just put it this way: I was glad to have seen the exhibit, but I don’t feel the
need to see it again. The NMAI is a
different story—I would like to go back when I can take more time in each
section, maybe doing one section on one day, and then returning some other time
for another part of the exhibit. [I
have, in fact, been back to the Heye Collection, as the New York City branch of
NMAI is called, numerous times since 2004.]
Clifford
Odets’s Awake and Sing!,
directed in the Kreeger (the proscenium theater) by Zelda Fichandler in her
first return visit in many years, was another play I’d never seen, though I’d
read it. It presents a couple of basic acting problems which Fichandler
didn’t get her cast to overcome entirely. First is the time-and-place
milieu—the Bronx of the Depression ’30s—and the second, intricately tied to
that, is the immigrant-and-first-generation Jewishness of the play’s atmosphere
and characters. I’d have thought that Fichandler would be the director to
get these underlying dynamics into her company, since she lived in that world
herself as she notes in her essay in the program. We saw the show on 1
February [2006], and maybe the cast hadn’t had enough time to really absorb the
whole milieu since the production opened on 20 January, but they all seemed to
be playing at it
rather than in
it. It wasn’t really part of what the characters were living—it was
like a costume they had put on, as opposed to clothes they wore every
day. Old hand Robert Prosky, also making a return visit to Arena to play
family patriarch Jacob, came closest—but he was more like an old-world East
European than an old-world East European Jew. (His socialism was more
convincing than his Jewishness. I don’t know if Prosky’s Jewish—I recall
that he’s not—but if he is, he’s like me: a secularized, totally assimilated
Jew. I was once fired from an acting job because I wasn’t Jewish
enough! Oy.) [Both Fichandler and Prosky have died since I
wrote this report: Fichandler in 2016 at 91 and Prosky in 2008, just shy
of 78.]
My
response to the play as a whole was that it was nice to get to see it on stage,
but that the theatrical experience was less satisfying than the
socio-historical one. I got to see an Odets/Group
Theatre classic from 1935, but I didn’t get to see a vibrant evocation of
a particular 1935 Bronx world that has disappeared. It’s the difference
between going to the Thorne Rooms at the Chicago Art Institute or the Period
Rooms at the Met and traveling back in time. It wasn’t that the actors
weren’t trying, or even that they didn’t understand—at least I don’t think
so. These were all good actors, even excellent ones. They just didn’t
get it. It wasn’t inside them, somehow—and it needed to be. That’s
what actors do in period plays. The cast has to find what Uta Hagen
called a “substitution,” which is a pretty standard acting technique for most
Stanislavsky-based training. Of course, it isn’t the “era” itself that
the actor absorbs, but the adjustments people make, the individual choices they
make, for which each actor must find personal and contemporary substitutes,
that come together to give the audience the impression the cast has “recreated”
a milieu. But you have to understand the period and place in order to
find those adjustments. I think the cast of Awake and Sing! did the first—they understood
the time and place—but they hadn’t found the individual adjustments that made
the behavior real. That’s my take anyway.
I
was reminded of a scene I remember an acting-school classmate doing in one
scene study class. I don’t remember the play, but it was a contemporary
piece back in the mid-’70s, and the character the actor was working on was a
college student in the late ‘60s. One of his concerns was the impending
draft—the Vietnam war. Now, I was older than most of these guys, and I’d
gone through that era. I knew that for us, the draft was a Damoclean
sword, hanging over us all every day. Especially for us guys, it was
ever-present and colored every thought, every move, every decision.
This actor, barely into his 20’s, didn’t get that. In his head, he
understood, but not in his gut. That’s what was missing in Awake and Sing!. It
wasn’t a bad production, or off center or misdirected. It was just a
little more Epcot Center than Old Europe. As some publicist used to
say in another context: It wasn’t real, but an incredible simulation.
Before
I left New York City the second time, however, I did see the latest work of a
young director, Erin Woodward, I’ve been watching. She’s the daughter of my college friend Kirk
(who’s contributed hugely to ROT) and
I’ve said I always make it a practice to see shows by people I know.
I also think Erin’s shaping up to be an interesting director, so I want to
watch her progress. In this case, Secondary Education was the
first production of a new company Erin assembled back in October 2005,
DramaticAmbush. She said back then that “DA
will focus on cultural and social questions in our communities” and she developed
the troupe’s first piece with New York City public high school kids—as the
title suggests. It was an assemblage of
short scenes all evoking moments out of their school lives—some funny, some
Kafkaesque—including a biographical monologue each cast member delivered. (The actors all played multiple characters in
the various scenes, even crossing genders, but the monologues—called “Confessionals”
and using the actors real names in the titles in the program—were apparently
based on their actual experiences, each one focusing on a specific impact the
episode engendered.)
Secondary
Education
has obviously been developed by improvisation and ensemble play, but it is
rehearsed and choreographed in performance.
The performance, though, maintained a sense of improvisation. I
was especially taken with the ensemble physical work in several
largely-wordless scenes, especially “Overcrowded” (about . . . well, just what
the title says it’s about) which looked like a mélée, with each actor
doing whatever came to his or her mind, but was actually carefully
choreographed or it would have been total chaos. It had to be choreographed or the actors
wouldn’t have been able to do the intricate work with each other so smoothly
otherwise, though it still looked like “accidents” and unplanned contacts were
going on. (Individually, an actor who did a bit with a shoulder bag that
seemed to have a mind of its own, Missaelle Morales, accomplished an inspired
physical comedy gag—in the vaudeville tradition.)
As a début effort, Secondary Education
was a wonderful theater experience. It had a roughness (à la Peter Brook)
that was genuine and exciting—as if it was all happening right in front of
us. I
assume the company didn’t know each other from before, so the creation of such
a cast that worked together so well and seemed to feed off one another was a
great coup. I liked that none of the characters were “types,”
that this wasn’t just the “Sweat Hogs Live On Stage.” Neither was the
perspective on the world of high school clichéd even though some common
encounters were portrayed. Perhaps some
of the actors could have differentiated some of the characters they play a
little more—but not if that means they become “stagy.”
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