28 November 2019

“Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!”: John Simon (1925-2019) - Part 1


[John Simon, former theater reviewer for New York magazine for almost four decades (among other gigs), died in Valhalla, New York, on Sunday, 24 November.  He was not a theater writer for whom I had a great deal of admiration—and I wasn’t alone in this sentiment.  In his New York Times obituary, Robert D. McFadden characterized him as “one of the nation’s most erudite, vitriolic and vilified culture critics, who illuminated and savaged a remarkable range of plays, films, literature and art works and their creators for more than a half-century . . . .”  Andrew Sarris, film critic for the Village Voice, called Simon “the Count Dracula of critics.”

[Simon also had no compunction about savaging actors and even other reviewers in terms that McFadden found “often meanspirited.”  It was this trait that most offended me: the gratuitous insulting of an actor for her appearance or his voice.  (As you’ll see below, he disparaged actor Mandy Patinkin, who, for those who don’t know it, is Jewish, for his “bulky, hulking head, further swelled by a mass of raven hair, [that] makes him look rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stürmer.”  In the same review, Simon also skewered Christopher Reeve and Alfre Woodard using references to their backgrounds; his remarks about Woodard werent just nasty, they were racist..

[Probably, though, Simon’s worst offense as a critic was, as McFadden put it, that he felt that “the arts in America were in decline, or at least in a state of perpetual confusion, and he insisted that his mission was to raise standards through unflinching criticism.”  In his 1974 Drama Review essay “Criticism: Four Faults,” Michael Kirby asserts:

There are critics who actually propose that they are establishing esthetic standards.  (. . . [T]his is obvious arrogance.  It implies that their standards are correct and are superior in some respect to the standards of others.)  Even when no claims are made, the results are the same: the values of one person reinforce or contradict—thereby possibly changing—the values held by others.  Individual taste is forced toward the norm or kept there”

[Kirby, a former New York University professor of Performance Studies and editor of TDR,: “Under fascism, one person or party rules; standardization and conformity are imposed by dictate,” so he decries Simon’s self-proclaimed mission as a “fascism of taste.” 

[As it happens, I had a brief brush with Simon when I was in the criticism game myself.  In the late ’80s, I was a stringer for the New York Native and in March 1989, I was assigned to review The Winter’s Tale, part of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s Shakespeare Marathon (staging all of Shakespeare’s plays over ten years).  My review and John Simon’s New York magazine notice came out on the same date. 

[I was aghast at what Simon said about the work!  I was so angry—I had already dumped my subscription to New York because of his reviews—I decided to write not only to Simon’s editor, Edward Kosner, but the editors of as many New York periodicals as I could think of.  (I wasn’t alone: a slew of theater folk also wrote to publications and denounced Simon’s bigotry and slurs.)  At the end of my letter, I expressed my disgust with the review and the writer and urged “my brother journalists and critics to join me.”

[In recognition of Simon’s passing, I’ve put together some of the documents of that contretemps, starting with his New York review and including my original letter to the editors, along with some other responses to Simon’s column.  There are more than I anticipated, so this will be a multi-part post; Part 1 contains Simon’s review of The Winter’s Tale, plus my review from the Native and columns from a few other papers.  Part 2 will go up on Rick On Theater on 1 December.  Please comeback to ROT for the continuation.]

LAPINING AWAY
by John Simon
New York
3 April 1989

[Simon’s review of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale appeared in New York (then owned by Ruoert Murdoch) on pages 79-80 on 3 April 1989.]

With its eighth production in the Papp Shakespeare marathon, The Winter’s Tale, the Public Theater has finally succeeded in going private.  Everyone here seems to be doing his own thing, and these foolish things played end to end spell catastrophe.  Take first the idea of the director, James Lapine, to set a play whose characters have mostly Greek and Roman names, and who consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, in the eighteenth century, which takes it as far from its intentions as from us.  That rationalist century was as irrational as any, but it made a grand show of enshrining reason as its goddess—for which there is no parallel either in Shakespeare’s world or in Lapine’s head.

I imagine the director chose the settecento setting to accommodate both a huge and a hugely irrelevant reproduction of a Guido Reni painting and a character from the commedia dell’arte, Harlequin, whom he apparently associates with Longhi and the eighteenth century, and whom he turns into a sort of stage manager.  This intruder not only hands the cast costumes from an onstage trunk but also puts on a dumb play à la Hamlet in which to catch the conscience of another king.  (For these inserts, you have to cut out gobs of text; but who cares about that, right?)

Worse, Lapine (best known as director or co-creator of recent Sondheim musicals, as well as those of William Finn, about whom more anon) has presumed to write a new beginning for the play, a practice that, unfortunately, has a precedent at the Public.  Accordingly, the entire play is turned into a fairy tale told by little Mamillius to his mother, Queen Hermione—which effectively robs it of all its drama.  Granted, The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s so-called romances; but what makes them, or any romance, exciting is the ability to make the fairy-tale world real.  Lapine’s liminal, antidramatic irony trivializes everything, not least the subsequent death of Mamillius.

And then some.  Parts of the play are gussied up as a contemporary musical comedy—with music by the aforementioned Mr. Finn and his usual orchestrator, Michael Starobin—which has nothing to do with either Shakespeare’s or Lapine’s chosen period, but does fit in with Lapine’s musical-comedy staging, what with, for example, the auxiliary characters often seated on a pair of stairways going off right and left from an upstage platform.  Sitting behind a translucent red curtain and half-lit by Beverly Emmons, the flashy lighting designer, these characters look like a cross between the front-stoop sitters of Street Scene and souls in a window-dresser’s hell.  Luckily for them, they get time off when Autolycus takes a protracted pee where they customarily sit.

Now for the perverse casting and worse acting.  No one here speaks verse as verse (that nicety has been pretty much abolished at the Public), but more important, no one even speaks beautifully.  Instead, we get various kinds of palaver, from prosy to preposterous, that remain utterly unintegrated.  The chief disaster in a close contest is Mandy Patinkin (who should have retired on his Evita laurels, to be fondly remembered ever since) as Leontes, the jealousy-maddened king of Sicilia.  Patinkin talks in a flat New York-accented voice, periodically, and usually inexplicably, lapsing into an inaudible whisper or bursting into an incomprehensible roar.  Since, as he himself has said, and briefly demonstrates, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he tends to keep them behind his back, as if he were handcuffed or an international financier.  This, combining with his bulky, hulking head, further swelled by a mass of raven hair, makes him look rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stürmer.  When, however, he stretches out in a vaguely boot-shaped chaise longue, you’d think him a road company Marat getting ready for Charlotte Corday.

His timing is particularly off, but no more so than that of his fellow king, Polixenes, played by Christopher Reeve, the Superman whom trick photography projected into our skies and onto our screen and stage.  He does not so much speak his lines as gargle with them, in some sort of artfully snotty Ivy League accent, while strutting and striding in his best Skull and Bones manner.  I kept hoping he would transform himself at least into Clark Kent, but no such luck.  Even more bizarre is the Paulina of Alfre Woodard, visually a cross between Topsy and the Medusa, aurally (at any rate in the first half) a pretty fair impersonation of Butterfly McQueen.  If Miss Woodard weren’t black, one might suspect her of racism; as it is, one suspects her merely of not having the foggiest notion about how to play a classical role. 

Perdita, a radiant Proserpine figure, in whom beauty and natural nobility combine into a symbol of the mercies of Providence, requires an actress of salient loveliness and charismatic grace.  Sixty years ago, E.M.W. Tillyard complained that “the part . . . is usually taken by some pretty little fool or pert suburban charmer”; what would the eminent Shakespearean have made of Jennifer Dundas, who, though decidedly little, foolish, and suburban, doesn’t even manage the rest of that reprehended repertoire?  As Antigonus, Graham Brown uses his tissue-paper-over-the-comb-like voice as if he were a big, bleating flugelhorn gone bonkers.  You’d think even the bear who devours him would find him unbearable.  MacIntyre Dixon and Tom McGowan are routine clowns, but Rocco Sisto’s Autolycus is not an “engagingly lighthearted rogue” (Robin May’s phrase) but a greasy, leering, and cold-blooded creep.  As two minor lords, Albert Farrar and Peter Jay Fernandez contribute major damage; Jesse Bernstein cannot even make Mamillius moving.

Under better direction, Graham Winton (Florizel), James Olson (though miscast as Camillo), and Michael Cumpsty (too bad he has to camp up the role of Time) could have done respectably.  Yet the greatest waste is that of Diana Venora, a fine actress but not your ideal Hermione.  She is best in tough, outspoken, witty—even abrasive—roles, and has the perky face and streetwise voice to go with them.  As (sometimes literally) the picture of pure, abused womanhood, she would need more directorial help than she gets here.  Lapine even cuts her crucial last speech.  Rob Besserer moves and dances sinuously as Harlequin, but remains an interloping busybody.

John Arnone is a clever set designer and his present décor would do handily for some other play—although the Bohemian scenes work well enough in this one, too.  His Sicilia, alas, lacks austere grandeur.  Beverly Emmons provides her usual exaggerated lighting effects, and Franne Lee, who specializes in rags and motley, offers mostly that by way of costumes—perhaps appropriately, given that onstage-trunk provenance.  Still, it would be nice if the prince’s and the rogue’s costumes were sufficiently different to alter the wearers’ status when they exchange them, and if the actors were remotely the same size.

In the end, I think I figured out why Lapine imposed that inapposite Reni painting, Nessus and Deianeira, on us.  His entire concept is a Nessus’ shirt, torturing the play to death.  Lapine’s Winter’s Tale is a tale, all right, albeit not one told to Hermione by her son.  Rather, it’s a tale told by an idiot, with unsound sound and puffs of misplaced fury.  Lapine has said, “I’m drawn to dreams. . . .  They’re ineffable.”  I think he is raptly contemplating (to quote Eliot) “his ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” inscrutable dreams.

[McFadden characterized Simon’s prose style as writing that “danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric”—I’d have said he was infected with the William F. Buckley Syndrome—the compulsion deliberately to choose a $50 word or an arcane reference when a $5 word or accessible allusion is available, just to show off.  You can see what Simon’s obituary writer meant.

[I’ll try to interpret some of the more obvious references in Simon’s Winter’s Tale notice—but I won’t catch all of them.

Guido Reni (1575 -1642)  – an Italian painter of the Baroque period; he painted religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects, one of which is The Abduction of Deianeira (1617-21), also known as Nessus and Deianeira.  The painting illustrates the mythical story (told in Sophocles’ play Women of Trachis) of the centaur Nessus on whose back Deianeira, the beautiful wife of Heracles, rode across the river Euenos. Nessus decided to abduct and rape Deianeira, but Heracles, on the bank of the river, heard Deianeira’s cries and shot Nessus with a poisoned arrow.  In revenge, Nessus told Deianeira that his blood was a charm to ensure that Heracles would be true to her forever and she believed him even though it was commonly known that a centaur’s blood was poisonous.  Deianeira collected Nessus’ blood, and one day, afraid that Heracles had taken a lover, she gave him a tunic soaked in Nessus’ blood.  When Heracles put the tunic on, the poison cooked him alive, and to escape the unbearable pain, he built a funeral pyre and threw himself on it.  Simon alludes to this myth at the end of his review.
Longhi – I’m not sure if Simon’s referring to Alessandro Longhi (1733–1813) or Pietro Longhi (1701–1785 or 1702–1785), both Italian painters of the period.  I suspect he means Pietro Longhi, who was the more prominent artist and who’s more likely, as a genre painter, to have painted actors or stage characters such as Arlecchino (the Italian name for the commedia character Harlequin).
Street Scene – a 1929 play by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that’s set on the front stoop of a New York City brownstone and in the adjacent street.
his Evita laurels – Patinkin appeared as Che Guevarra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita in its Broadway première.  The play opened at the Broadway Theatre on 25 September 1979.  As for the other references to Patinkin, he is Jewish, which is what makes the reference below so hurtful, but he’s actually from Chicago, not New York City.
Der Stürmer – as Simon writes, a notorious Nazi periodical published in Germany from 1923 to the end of the Third Reich.  A weekly tabloid newspaper, it was vehemently anti-Semitic and was famous for its insulting and degrading cartoons of Jewish people.
Marat getting ready for Charlotte Corday – Jean-Paul Marat (1743-93) was a French revolutionary who, because he suffered from a skin condition, only found relief by soaking in a medicinal bath.  He was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday (1768-93) on 3 July 1793.  I assume Simon is also making reference to the 1963 play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually just called Marat/Sade) by German playwright Peter Weiss (1916-82), which tells this story.  The Royal Shakespeare Company did a landmark production of the English translation on Broadway in 1965-66.
Christopher Reeve – The actor, born in 1952, was paralyzed by an horseback-riding accident in 1995, just six years after this performance; he died in 2004.  He was, indeed, an Ivy Leaguer—he attended Cornell University—but had no connection to Skull and Bones, which is a secret society at Yale University.  He was an experienced stage actor long before he was cast as Superman in 1978.
Alfre Woodard – The references to Topsy and Butterfly McQueen are particularly egregious.  Topsy is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a young slave girl, and has become a racial stereotype of the “pickaninny.”  Butterfly McQueen (1911-95) was an African-American actress who famously played maids to wealthy white women, such as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's maid, in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.  In that part, McQueen spoke in a high-pitched, squeaky voice and always seemed flustered or frightened.  Simon may not have felt Woodard had any idea how to perform a classical role, but the Actors’ Equity Association felt differently: AEA awarded her the 1989 Joe A. Callaway Award for her performance in The Winter’s Tale.  (The Callaway Award is given to an actor, selected by a panel of critics, for the best performance in a classical play in the New York metropolitan area.)
E. M. W. Tillyard (1889-1962) – an English classical and literary scholar.
Robin May – I’m sorry, but Simon’s got me here; I have no idea who this is.  (Possibly Robin May, 1929-96, an actor who became a writer and journalist specializing in theater, opera, and the American west.)
“his ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” – as you might guess, a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which was later transformed into the 1981 musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948).  The passage is from the poem “The Naming of Cats,” the last lines of which read:
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
        The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
        Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
                His ineffable effable
                Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

[As for the rest, you’re on  your own I’m afraid.  Just like Simon’s readers in 1989!]

*  *  *  *
WINTER PLEASURES, SUMMER DOLDRUMS
Rick
3 April 1989

[This is my own review of Winter’s Tale from page 25 of the New York Native of 3 April 1989.  The column covered two plays; “Summer Doldrums” refers to the second presentation, Adjoining Traces by Randy Buck at the 45th Street Theatre in the Theatre District.  (It’s a play about the summer of 1946, when Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers shared a house on Nantucket while he worked on the script of Summer and Smoke and she adapted her  novel The Member of the Wedding into a stage play.  I have deleted that half of the column because it’s not relevant to this post.)]

James Lapine’s production of The Winter’s Tale is the best Shakespeare I’ve seen in a very long time.  Running three hours plus intermission, the performance is so engaging it seems shorter than some recent one-act offerings I’ve sat through. 

Lapine, best known as Stephen Sondheim’s collaborator and director for Sunday in the Park With George and Into the Woods, mounts the story with energy and honesty.  Despite the famous problems with Winter’s Tale, stumbling blocks for literary scholars, Lapine puts on stage a piece of theater that moves its audience alternately to tears and laughter.  Even given the improbable plot, it is impossible not to be caught up in it.  There were quite a few damp eyes among the audience during the final scene, an astounding response to Shakespeare.

There are no startling directorial tricks or innovations here.  Lapine’s production is straightforward and simple, calling for essentially realistic acting from his cast.  His most noticeable adjustments are to clothe his company, according to the program, in late-eighteenth-century dress (though it looks early nineteenth) and to start the play with the scene, repeated later in its proper place, in which Hermione coaxes Mamillius to “sit by us, And tell’s a tale.”  The costumes, by Franne Lee, give an attractive look to the production, but have little other effect.  The new prologue, however, ends with the appearance of Harlequin (Rob Besserer) who passes out costume bits—sashes, robes, a bear’s head—from a trunk, resolving some of the play’s bumpiness by setting it up as a child’s story (“a sad tale’s best for winter”).  Harlequin’s reappearance at the end of the first act and briefly, behind a scrim, at the end of Act Two, reminds us that we’ve been watching a story.

The device is nice, but what really makes this such a good production is the acting.  Lapine’s cast, drawn essentially from the Joseph Papp Repertory Company, is solid to the last character, creating one of the most even ensembles I have seen on a NYSF stage.  Even fifth-grader Jesse Bernstein (Mamillius) works simply, engaged in each moment even when he is not the focus.  Other standouts in the company are Mandy Patinkin, who makes the difficult role of Leontes, even his mercurial shift from paranoid jealousy to abject penitence, credible and sympathetic; Diane Venora, whose sweet Hermione draws tears from spectators’ eyes; Alfre Woodard, a powerful and stalwart Paulina; and Rocco Sisto, whose Autolycus, a delightful singing rogue, cannot help picking a pocket or lifting a broach at any opportunity.  Other members of the strong cast, including Christopher Reeve (Polixenes), James Olson (Camillo), Tom McGowan (Clown), Graham Winton (Florizel) and Jennifer Dundas (Perdita), provide frequent pleasure, too.

*  *  *  *
PAPP DEMANDS SIMON’S FIRING
“Broadway Beat” 
by Dana Maychick
New York Post
30 March 1989

[Readers of Rick On Theater may notice a slight disconnect in this article (and several following ones): its publication date precedes the date on the cover of both Simon’s New York review and my own in the Native.  How can there be a response to the review before it’s on the newsstands?  Well, it’s actually simple to explain—though not to justify: both New York and the New York Native dated their issues ahead of the calendar—so issues with a cover date of Monday, 3 April, were actually published on Monday, 27 March.  I know, it doesn’t really make sense—but that’s the fac’, Jack.  Live with it!]

Claiming flourishes of “racism and anti-Semitism,” New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp has called for the firing of New York magazine’s theater critic John Simon over his review of Papp’s latest offering, “The Winter’s Tale.” 

Yesterday, New York magazine Editor and Publisher Ed Kosner refused—through his assistant—to comment.

“What Simon says is an insult to blacks and Jews and all fair-minded people.” Papp said yesterday.  “It goes beyond cruelty, Simon’s favorite weapon, directly to bigotry.  And it’s a reason for the magazine to fire him.”

In his scathing review of “The Winter’s Tale” in the April 3 issue of New York—the most negative among predominantly positive notoces—Simon compared black actress Alfre Woodard to several black caricatures of blacks [sic], including the pickaninny character Topsy from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Butterfly McQueen, the actress best known for her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara’s squeaky-voiced slave Prissy in “Gone With the Wind.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has asked that Simon be severely chastised.  “It’s beyond my comprehension that this kind of stuff is still going on,” said spokesperson Hazel Dukes.

Simon also wrote that actor Mandy Patinkin looks “rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stuermer,” Julius Streicher’s Jew-baiting, Nazi newspaper which often depicted Jews as grotesque, misshapen human beings.

A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith said he will review the matter with the officers of the organization.

Papp went on to  characterize Simon as “perverted.  He hates to see ethnicity.  He hates to look at black people, anybody who’s different.  His philosophy is close to Nazism: it’s as if physical purity is all he looks for.  I’m really disgusted by this.["]

“Mandy has this wonderful, open face,” Papp  continued.  “It’s a Jewish face, yes, a Semitic face.  What’s wrong with that?  Look at Simon himself.  He’s hardly the ideal Aryan.  He may not be Aryan at all.  He may be a denying, self-hating Jew.  And he should look in the mirror.  He looks like the picture of Dorian Gray two years after the deterioration.  And it’s funny, because he’s always dating these 16- and 17-year-olds.”

The mud-slinging continued when Simon was asked to comment.  The critic called the producer a “madman” and “a total wash-out.  He says I should be fired?  Ha!  He’s a great impresario but he should stick to that.  When it comes to taste, he has none.  That productions of Shakespeare in this country should largely rely on what he gives us is a travesty.”

Our phone conversation was interrupted when Simon had to take a call from his magazine.  He called back and agreed to explain his review.

“What I was saying, in essence, is that Patinkin is too ethnic to play the role of Leontes.  You can’t play the king of a Greek or Roman kingdom if you look too ethnic.”  As for Alfre Woodard, “she’s a terrible actress,” Simon said.  “And blacks do not belong in parts for white actresses, unless they can pass for white.  That’s wrong—historically and sociologically and logically.”

When asked if he were, in fact, Jewish himself, Simon said, “I’m not.  No, no.  But I don’t want  that discussed.  My Yugoslavian-ness should have nothing to do with it.”  He called Papp’s comments about the choice of his dates “ludicrous.  Furthermore, it’s not true.  The fact is that the woman I’ve lived with for the last two years is 38.”

[Simon was born in Yugoslavia (when it was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) of Hungarian descent in 1925.  He came to the United States at 16 in 1941.  At the time of the above article, Simon was about six weeks shy of 64 years old.]

*  *  *  *
MORNING REPORT
by Aleen McMinn
”Calendar”
Los Angeles Times
3 April 1989

[The story of John Simon’s review of Winter’s Tale and its consequences was picked up across the country, including the West Coast.  Here’s a report from Los Angeles, followed by one from San Francisco.]

STAGE

A top New York drama critic has received harsh notices after suggesting that actors in a new production of Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” are too Jewish and too black for the bard.  Colleen Dewhurst, Actors Equity president, and the play’s producer, Joseph Papp, have both demanded that New York magazine critic John Simon be fired for his remarks.  In his review of the play, which stars Christopher Reeve, Simon said that actor Mandy Patinkin looked like a cartoon Jew and that actress Alfre Woodard resembled Topsy, a character in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has asked Simon to apologize to Woodard and to every black actor in America for the review, which it described as “dripping with racism.”  Simon, whose reviews have often provoked controversy, insists Shakespearean roles not written specifically for blacks should not be performed by them.

*  *  *  *
JOHN SIMON REVIEW IS CALLED ‘RACIST’
“Personals”
by Leah Garchik
San Francisco Chronicle
4 April 1989

New York magazine’s John Simon, the Ivan the Terrible of drama critics, said that one star looked too Jewish and another too black in Joseph Papp’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”

Simon said that Mandy Patinkin looks like a caricature from the Nazi publication “Der Sturmer,” and co-star Alfre Woodard looks like Topsy in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Colleen Dewhurst, president of Actors Equity, called Simon “a dangerous man and said he should be fired, a view shared by Papp.  Simon fired back, saying that Dewhurst was angry because he had “on occasion” given her “less that adoring reviews.  I’m afraid actors are not generally known for their intellect.”

The New York branch of the NAACP said the review was “dripping with racism” and asked the critic to apologize.

Ed Kosner, editor of New York magazine, defended the writer and said that Simon has had a history of differences of opinion with Papp.

[There's more to come.  I hope you'll return to ROT for the rest of this series on the late theater reviewer, John Simon.  Part 2 will be posted on Sunday, 1 December.]

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