'The Trip to Bountiful' (2005)

[At the end of his New York Times review of the current revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West 43rd Street, Ben Brantley mused about the 2005 staging by the Signature Theatre Company which starred Lois Smith as Carrie Watts.  Brantley had reviewed that production, too, and I saw it and wrote a short report on the performance.  Both Brantley’s and my responses to that revival were quite different from his assessment of the Broadway production which opened on Tuesday, 23 April (and is scheduled to close on 7 July), and I thought it would be interesting to look back at my account, written four days after I saw the performance, of the earlier presentation.  Of that production, Brantley recalled in the Times on 24 April: “The 2005 Signature Theater revival of ‘Bountiful,’ starring Lois Smith, left me drenched in tears.”

[Bountiful started its life as an hour-long teleplay. Foote originally wrote it for Fred Coe, producer of NBC’s Goodyear TV Playhouse, an anthology series alternatively titled the Philco TV Playhouse (because the sponsor varied).  It aired on NBC on 1 March 1953 with a cast headed by the legendary Lillian Gish.  (Foote’s first choice for the lead actress, though, was Shirley Booth, later TV’s Hazel from 1961 to 1966 who’d just won an Oscar for 1952’s Come Back, Little Sheba.  She turned down the role because she said she wasn’t ready, at 46, to play an old woman.  Gish was 60.)  Also in the TV cast were Eileen Heckart (Jessie Mae), John Beal (Ludie), Eva Marie Saint (Thelma).

[A few months later, the Broadway début of The Trip to Bountiful opened in a Theatre Guild production at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 3 November 1953 and ran for 39 performances before closing on 5 December.  Carrie was again played by Gish and Jo Van Fleet (who’d had a small part on television) was Jessie Mae under the direction of Vincent J. Donehue (who also staged the TV version).  Van Fleet won a featured actress Tony and Eva Marie Saint got a Theatre World Award for her performance as Thelma.  Signature’s Trip to Bountiful, which launched the theater’s two-season 15th anniversary celebration, opened at the Peter Norton Space on 4 December 2005, after starting previews on 15 November, and closed on 11 March 2006.  The revival was staged by actor Harris Yulin and costarred Foote’s daughter (and frequent interpreter), Hallie Foote, as the daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae.  The sets were designed by E. David Cosier, the lights by John McKernon, the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, and the sound by Brett R. Jarvis and Loren Toolajian (who teamed to compose the original music as well).  The production won 2006 Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Revival, Outstanding Director (Yulin), Outstanding Lead Actress (Smith), and Outstanding Featured Actress (Hallie Foote); the 2006 Obie Award for Outstanding Performance (Smith); the 2006 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play (Smith); and 2006 Drama Desk Awards for Best Actress (Smith) and Lifetime Achievement (Horton Foote).]

The Signature Theatre’s Trip to Bountiful, which I saw at the Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street near 11th Avenue on Friday, 9 December 2005, was quite excellent all around, and Lois Smith’s performance was superb.  I’ll describe it in a moment, but first, let me relate a true New York theater moment I had.

After the show, I made a pit stop in the men’s room.  When I came out, a line had formed and about three people from the door, I spotted Edward Albee.  Now, that alone is a New York theater moment—like the time I saw Colleen Dewhurst sitting alone, smoking in the upstairs lobby of the Uris Theatre (now the George Gershwin) during the intermission of Sweeney Todd.  But there’s more. 

As I was walking past the line, I heard the guy in front of Albee, whom I didn’t recognize at all, saying to him, “Someday I hope to do Virginia Woolf justice.”  Well, my initial instinct was to make a comment like “I kinda thought somebody already had” as I passed by, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.  So I did. 

I have no idea who the guy talking to Albee was.   Was he a director or a play reader or what?  No idea.  (It’s more fun to imagine . . . .  If the guy was a director, maybe he didn’t know that Albee himself had staged a Broadway revival back in 1976 with Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara.  I imagine the playwright feels he’d already “done Virginia Woolf justice,” don’t you?)  The man looked youngish—say mid-30s or so—and I wasn’t even sure that Albee knew him.  I don’t know if Albee’s like Woody Allen and doesn’t like to be approached in public, but he looked a little uncomfortable.  Since I was just passing by on my way out, I may have caught only a momentary reaction and be misinterpreting the whole scene.  Albee didn’t say anything, in any case.

(Actually, that wasn’t the only New York theater moment I had that evening.  As I was walking my dog, Thespis, before I left for midtown, a large gaggle of young people passed me on my block.  They looked like they were in high school, but I’m betting it’s college: I live near NYU and the New School, both of which have residence halls or classroom buildings within a two-block radius of my apartment.  Anyway, just as they were going past, one guy in the middle of the bunch asked out loud, “What do you know about Ionesco?”  A little guy in front—he really did look like he wasn’t out of high school yet—turned around and announced, “Ionesco?  I love Ionesco!”  At which point, he walked backwards right into a woman trying to make her way down the sidewalk.  If it had been Samuel Beckett, they’d have fallen into a heap on the pavement.  But they didn’t.  Just a brief pinball effect.)

And now, the play: 

Readers know, I imagine, that I have long come to distrust Ben Brantley’s opinions in the New York Times.  I truly think he lives in a bubble of his own imagination.  He nailed this one, however.  (Even a stopped clock . . . .)  Diana, my theater companion, remarked that this play of Foote’s comes close to Tennessee Williams, though I don’t feel the lyricism of Williams’s writing.  Foote’s words are far more literal and realistic, but there is a kind of mysterious force at work in Bountiful that may have disappeared in Foote’s later, more prosaic treatments of his Texas homeland.  [I wrote this, of course, long before I saw Signature’s magnificent production of Foote’s three-part Orphans’ Home Cycle.  ~Rick]  In any case, the 1953 play (made into a film starring Geraldine Page in 1985) is tender and poignant—perhaps a little too sentimental for today’s cynical world, but clearly heartfelt and genuine.  (I’m not sure, but Bountiful may have been Foote’s first play—or his first to achieve significant attention.)  I’ve never seen it before (not even the film), so I may be wrong, but my sense is that its success depends greatly on how the actress playing Carrie approaches the role—and, of course, how well she handles it.  If she’s too mawkish or spacey or eccentric—a possibility—the play takes on a strident tone, as if we’re being forced to sympathize with a truly difficult person—like we’re being manipulated.  If the actress gets the idea right but can’t pull it off with subtlety and honesty, we just won’t believe it.  Lois Smith, as Brantley said, is a marvel on both counts.  Her sense of being imprisoned in the Houston apartment and besieged by her insensitive and selfish daughter-in-law (Hallie Foote, the author’s daughter), is palpable, but not overstated.  This is not Blanche Dubois grown into old age—Smith’s Carrie is just an old woman with a bad heart who’s made some sad choices in life and now just wants to go back to the place where she was happy, probably to die.  The fact that Jessie Mae, the daughter-in-law, pretty much treats her as an unwanted house pet—Jessie Mae won’t let Carrie sing hymns in the house because they get on her nerves—only makes this all the more credible.  Carrie’s not eccentric or crazy—which is what Jessie Mae calls her, the only thing she does that actually makes her husband, Ludie (Devon Abner), angry—just a little sentimental in her old age, and suffering from terminal cabin fever. 

Carrie has a history of running away, trying to get to Bountiful, whenever she’s left unwatched and alone in the cramped two-room apartment—she sleeps in the living/dining room—in Houston, and this infuriates Jessie Mae, who confiscates Carrie’s pension checks as much to keep her tied to the apartment as to pay for her own visits to the beauty parlor and her Cokes at the drugstore.  (Ludie has just gotten a real job after a long unemployment due to an unspecified illness.  Jessie Mae not only doesn’t work, but doesn’t seem to do much housekeeping, either; Carrie does the dusting and cooking, it seems—despite her bad heart.)  I actually rooted for her to break loose, and when Jessie Mae reveals that a pension check, due that morning, seems to be missing from the mail, you just know that Carrie has glommed onto it and is holding it in reserve for a break-out.  When Jessie Mae decides to take a chance and leave Carrie at home while she meets a friend at the drugstore for a Coke—she can’t get a beauty parlor appointment until 4 p.m., and she just can’t sit around all that time—I root again that Carrie’ll get away this time, just as she does, in fact.  As Smith plays her, Carrie just deserves to get back to Bountiful once before she dies.  (It may be a bit contrived that, first, the bus doesn’t go to Bountiful—you can’t get there from here!—and, second, it turns out that the town has in fact simply died when the last inhabitant, Carrie’s girlhood friend, whom she had hoped to stay with, died a few days before.  Contrived, but perfectly apt: the dream she has, after all, is also a chimera.) 

The fact that Carrie charms everyone she meets, except for her daughter-in-law, from Thelma (Meghan Andrews), a young woman traveling on the same bus, to the ticket clerk (Frank Girardeau) at the town nearest Bountiful where she gets off to the sheriff (Jim Demarse) who’s been ordered to hold her until Ludie arrives to take her back to the big city (the sheriff ultimately drives her out to her old farm in Bountiful and stays with her until Ludie comes) is only proof that Carrie’s really just a dear lost soul.  Smith captures this absolutely perfectly.  There’s not an eccentric, peculiar, or idiosyncratic element in her performance—it’s just solid and real.  She’s not even especially sad or pathetic; she’s just a little driven.  Once she gets “home,” you can see that she’s satisfied her itch, even though she knows she can’t stay, even to die.  She’ll go back to Houston with Ludie and Jessie Mae and obey all the rules her daughter-in-law lays out—because she’s been home and seen the sky and the soil and the birds.  That’s all she ever wanted—and now she’s content.  Ludie may have learned something, too, by coming home—he remembers everything Carrie had been telling him about his boyhood there, even though he pretended not to have.  But Jessie Mae hasn’t, and you can guess that she’s in for some surprises back in Houston.  (Ludie had been contemplating asking his boss for a raise at work that morning, and we learn that the boss was pleased to give it to him.  I took this as a suggestion that he’s getting back his self-confidence, and something of the spine he must have inherited from Carrie.)

Hallie Foote does what I take to be a good job on Jessie Mae.  It seemed to me she was written as an unchanging single note, and Foote manages to pull off the once or twice she appreciates Carrie without making it seem contrived (by Horton Foote) or begrudging (by Jessie Mae).  As selfish as she is, this suggests that there’s a human being back there, though it’s not much.  If Foote’s portrayal is one-dimensional, I think it’s the play’s fault more than the actresses (or director Harris Yulin’s).  Ludie, too, is appropriately meek and submissive.  Not abject: there’s some indication here also that he’s not only what we see here.  I don’t know Devon Abner, the actor who played the role (he seems to be mostly a writer for stage and screen), but I don’t think that the character’s one-dimensionality is his fault, either.  (This is why I say that the success of the play depends so much on the actress playing Carrie.  Even the best director couldn’t do much with the other roles, and the script is the script.  Not that Yulin did anything wrong at all.)

E. David Cosier’s set (lit by John McKernon) was kind of nice, too.  It sort of reminded me of a pop-up book in a way.  Bountiful is a long one-act (an hour and 50 minutes without intermission), so each scene is like a new page of the story in a sense.  Each time the scene shifted, the old set moved off and the new set moved on, courtesy of electrical motors with low-tech assist (that is, stage hands or actors moving set pieces on dollies).  It isn’t in the least innovative, but it worked, and, as I said, it was like each time you turned the page, a new scene popped up.  (Well, okay—popped in.  Let’s not quibble over prepositions.)  I never felt I was being made to sit too long, though, and I have at other, shorter shows.

I guess the summation is that while The Trip to Bountiful isn’t ever going to be earth-shaking theater (it’s more like William Inge than Tennessee Williams, I think), it’s lovely, truthful, and, in this production, nicely done.  After so much bad theater over the last couple of seasons—bad plays or bad productions or both—this was more than a pleasure.  And Lois Smith, whom I only know from TV (mostly) and film, was a true delight.  She’s too young for the role to have been written for her (she’d only have been about 23 when the play was written)—but if Horton Foote had come around to see this performance, I suspect he’d have wondered if he hadn’t been clairvoyant half a century ago.

*  *  *  *

The press response, with one glaring exception, was nearly ecstatic, particularly about Lois Smith’s portrayal of Carrie Watts.  In 2005, I didn’t do the review survey that I customarily do now, so I’ll recap the critical reception here.  The only wholly negative review was Bob Kent’s in Variety, which noted that “the new revival of ‘Trip to Bountiful’ at Signature Theatre Company is regrettably flat and underwhelming.”  Kent acknowledged, “At times this production nails exactly the right bemused observational tone” but continued that “director Harris Yulin’s production remains stubbornly average.”  The Variety review-writer did observe, “By herself, Smith nearly makes this a worthwhile ‘Trip,’ but concluded that “it feels more like a faintly tiresome holiday gathering.”  No one else I read agreed, it seems.

Since I started this revived report with Ben Brantley’s 2013 Times review (and alluded to his earlier one above), I’ll continue with his notice of the 2005 STC restaging, which he called “beautifully mounted.”  Yulin’s direction, said the Timesman, “finds the emotional authenticity” of Foote’s script that makes it “seem newborn.”  Praising all the elements of the physical production, Brantley made special mention of the set design: “What follows the opening scenes has an almost mystical seamlessness, as Mr. Cosier's sets float on and off the stage.”  (By the way, Brantley’s remarks in his review of the 2013 Broadway revival about being brought to tears were rendered thus in 2005: “[T]his production . . . finds the emotional authenticity in a 1953 drama often remembered as a tear-jerking chestnut.  This is not to say that you should attend the show without an ample supply of handkerchiefs.”)  In New York’s Daily News, Howard Kissel wrote, “The production . . . is pure joy.”  Having compared Foote’s dramaturgy to Chekhov’s, Kissel added that Bountiful “has been given a radiant revival by the Signature Theater Company” in which, “under Harris Yulin’s skilled direction, every moment resonates deeply.”  Calling the production “genuinely moving,” Sam Thielman of Long Island’s Newsday especially complimented Cosier, who’s “set shifts quickly into various instantly recognizable configurations.”  Dubbing the STC revival of Bountiful “touching,” the New York Post’s Frank Scheck declared, “Foote’s play is a marvel of economy, one in which numerous important themes are conveyed through the simplest of situations and dialogue” which “Director Harris Yulin has staged . . .  expertly.”  After observing that “there are stretches of obvious exposition and a melodramatic monologue or two,” David Sheward of Back Stage summed the revival up by pronouncing it “a journey well worth taking.”  Sean O’Donnell of Show Business asserted, “Director Harris Yulin successfully weaves a quiet tapestry of nostalgic yearning in a production that is nothing short of breathtaking” and that the performance “resonates long after the curtain has fallen.” In Time Out New York, Robert Simonson affirmed simply, “Yulin, Smith and company have achieved something of quiet excellence.”

The cyber press was pretty much in line with the paper-and-ink reviewers.  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray wrote that “director Harris Yulin has lovingly interpreted Bountiful for the rich new Signature Theatre Company revival” and Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp said the “beautiful new production” was “a trip worth taking” that’s “remarkably timely.”  TheatreMania’s David Finkle reported that STC’s revival of Trip to Bountiful “is to be cherished” and that ”Harris Yulin has directed the play with compassion and tenderness.”  On nytheatre.com, Martin Denton described the production as “lovely, immensely satisfying, and . . . just about flawless,” a “fertile, generous, and lush a theatrical experience” that’s “about as perfect a production as one could wish for.”  Michael Dale of BroadwayWorld dubbed Signature’s revival “beautiful and tender,” having been “delicately directed with a selectively lazy touch by Harris Yulin.”  “Go and be enthralled,” he urged. 

It was the acting, though, that got most of the press attention, starting with TONY’s Simonson, who declared, “As for the rest of the ensemble, any aspiring actor seeking an object lesson on what can be made of a small role need look no further.  Even the nonspeaking actors shine—a tribute to the thoughtful, seamless rhythms Yulin has wrought.”  TheatreMania’s Finkle wrote that the production, especially the final scene, “is exquisitely acted by all” and, pronouncing the STC revival of Bountiful “acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town,” the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout added, “I doubt you’ll ever see it acted better, especially by Ms. Smith.”  As befits an actor’s journal, Sheward asserted, “Director Harris Yulin has assembled an ensemble of sensitive performers who inhabit Foote’s frustrated souls,” in Back Stage and Brantley of the Times found that the “supporting cast . . . never strikes a false note.”  And though most of the cast was singled out for mention in all the notices, Newsday’s Thielman praised Hallie Foote, who “wisely underplays one of her father’s least likeable characters,” and Kissel correctly observed that the actress “manages to catch  the humor of the daughter-in-law without making her an easy villain.” 

“But the evening ultimately belongs to Smith,” reported the Post’s Scheck, adding that “the actress seems to sum up the entire human experience in her memorable performance.”  The Postman declared, “Lois Smith creates magic of her own” as “the veteran actress delivers a performance that is at once heartbreaking in its pathos and uplifting in its spirit.”  Newsman Kissel described Smith’s singular performance as “incandescent,” specifying that the actress “does not minimize how difficult Carrie can be, but she also captures the poignance of precarious old age.” Asserted Thielman, “Smith’s sweet, sad senility as Carrie Watts gives Horton Foote’s ‘The Trip to Bountiful’ the tang it needs,” adding that in the end, “Lois Smith brings a real sense of loss to her part, making it sting as she discovers, bit by bit, that Bountiful, Texas, is barely on the map anymore.”  Back Stager Sheward characterized Smith’s work as “luminous,” and WSJ’s Teachout praised her acting as “so beautifully straightforward that you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on her.”  “Luminescence,” which is what David Finkle said Smith brought to her performance, seemed to have been a leitmotif in the reviews, though BroadwayWorld’s Dale used a near-synonym when he wrote that Smith “sparkles as Carrie.”  The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold wrote that “Lois Smith proves herself . . . with a performance that manages to be simultaneously feisty and moonstruck,” concluding that “Smith makes her unfulfilled goal as transcendent as Don Quixote’s knight-errantry.”  Feingold ended his praise of Smith with a gratuitous jab at our then-ruling family: “To watch her mingling of crab and saint is to feel a little of the wonder that Texas used to mean before the fake cowboys of Kennebunkport invaded.”  (I just had to include that little dig!)  While Talkin’ Broadway’s Murray quibbled about Smith’s portrayal in contrast to Lillian Gish’s, Sommer called her performance “solid gold” on CurtainUp. 

In his review, the Times’s Brantley also called “that fine actress for all seasons” Lois Smith’s acting “luminous,” but he seemed possessed by her “cerulean stare.”  As if mesmerized, he confessed, “I had never before realized how blue and bottomless her gaze is.”  Later, Brantley observed the Smith’s eyes “brim with the expectation of a child on the morning of her birthday” and even compares the lighting of John McKernon and the music and sound design of Loren Toolajian and Brett R. Jarvis with “the glow in Ms. Smith's gaze.”

*  *  *  *

[There’d been speculation, including some in the press, that STC’s revival might have a Broadway run in its future.  James Houghton, the company’s artistic. director, sought a Broadway theater for a transfer of Bountiful after its run at the Norton Space but none was available.  Having already extended the revival at the Norton as long as possible, Houghton rejected a transfer to a larger Off-Broadway house because the expense was too great for the potential box office benefit.  As a result, a rep theater show that was both popular and well-received critically didn’t get a chance at a broader audience.

[The Signature Theatre Company’s 15th Anniversary Season was divided into two parts.  In 2005-06, the company staged plays by previous writers-in-residence: Foote’s Trip to Bountiful and John Guare’s Landscape of the Body.  In 2006-07, STC scheduled the delayed August Wilson season that had been postponed when the playwright died in October 2005.  Previously, STC presented its first Horton Foote season in 1994-95, including Talking Pictures, Night Seasons, The Young Man From Atlanta, and Laura Dennis.  But Foote is the only playwright to whom Signature has devoted two complete seasons, mounting that monumental three-part, nine-play autobiographical opus, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, in 2009-10.

[I got to see Lois Smith on stage again subsequent to this marvelous performance when I saw STC’s presentation of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion, a translation and adaptation from Pierre Corneille, in June 2011 (see my blog report posted on 1 July 2011).  Smith played the sorceress, Alcandre, usually a male role, in the final presentation of STC’s Kushner residency.  I got to see her briefly after the performance—playing opposite her as Pridamant was a former teacher of mine, David Margulies, so I waited by the stage door to say hello to him—and I got to tell Smith how much I liked her work in Bountiful and even in HBO’s True Blood on TV.]

“Revealing Glimpses Into Minds Most Mad”

By Ben Brantley

[In this article from the New York Times’s arts section (on 11 July 2011), Times theater reviewer Ben Brantley describes several portrayals of madness in the New York stage during the last season. My having been an aspiring actor, this kind of description always intrigues and interests me and ROT being ostensibly a theater blog, I figured it’s a good forum to rerun Brantley’s observations for the edification of both readers who are theater folk and those (poor, benighted) folk who aren’t. I hope you all agree and enjoy the chance to visit the article again. ~Rick]

“Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.” That well-turned observation was originally made about one Prince Hamlet, and doubtless it’s useful advice regarding future heads of state. But the dictum applies equally to those who tread the stage. Few things test the mettle of an actor—or separate the artists from the hacks—like the simulation of a whopping case of mental illness.

On one level, conveying the idea that you’re out of your mind is a piece of cake (three layers, heavily frosted, lots of candles), in the same way that portraying drunkenness is. You or I could do it. Widen the eyes as far as possible, gnash the teeth until they threaten to crack, shake like a leaf in a hurricane and—voilà—you’re a certifiable basket case for public consumption. (For drunkenness, substitute: slur the words, squint the eyes and lean to one side until you almost fall over.)

For centuries, this overwrought approach was widely considered great acting and frequently rewarded with prizes. (Just check the list of Oscar winners over the years.) Such performances, after all, are as dramatic as all get-out, the kind that frighten little children (or, worse, make them dissolve into giggles).

What they don’t do, as a general rule, is lure you into the mind of the afflicted character, or make you realize what a vague line divides the so-called sane from the insane. Audiences can rest comfortably as they watch such displays, thinking, “Well, that’s not me, is it?” What get beneath the skin are the interpretations that make you feel the seductiveness of an escape from reality (or into an alternative reality), in which madness starts to seem like a viable existential choice.

Such thoughts came to my (more or less sound) mind frequently during the past year, which offered plenty of examples of good actors losing it. (And no, I’m not back on the subject of Lindsay Lohan.) This summer alone has provided two sterling portraits of women in states of breakdown that were very different but both entirely persuasive: Joely Richardson’s take on a politician’s bipolar wife in Michael Weller’s “Side Effects” and Carey Mulligan’s interpretation of a young woman succumbing to schizophrenia during a family vacation in “Through a Glass Darkly,” Jenny Worton’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 movie. (Both plays recently ended their New York runs.).

Ms. Mulligan, who is only 26 and a movie star in the making, may well turn out to be one of the great actresses of the 21st century. She is an artist who combines extreme delicacy with matching clarity, so that even when she’s onstage (and you are many yards away from her), you feel as if you were watching her doing the emotional equivalent of needlepoint in close-up. I first saw her as Nina in “The Seagull” at the Royal Court Theater in London (and later on Broadway), where she managed the final breakdown scene with a credibility I have never witnessed elsewhere. (Let’s face it, it’s not easy repeating variations on the lines “I’m a seagull! No, I’m an actress!”)

In “Through a Glass Darkly,” her character, Karin, has recently been released from the hospital, where she was treated for delusions, and she has joined her husband, father and brother on an isolated island to recuperate. From the very beginning, you sensed this woman was torn between the conflicting calls of familial responsibility and a self-contained fantasy world. What was astonishing was how authentic Ms. Mulligan made the world of illusions seem to us.

Long before she erupted into what might be described as anything like derangement, we could sense from her movements — suddenly, slightly speeded up, then slowed to near-paralysis — that she listened to a different internal metronome than anyone around her. And you could read the sensory reality of her phantoms—you felt they had textures, voices and smells all their own—so legibly in her facial reactions that it almost seemed possible to follow Karin into her private universe. She brought to mind what the director Peter Hall said of Vanessa Redgrave after seeing her in “The Lady From the Sea” some 30 years ago: “You could see right through the skin to the emotions.”

Ms. Richardson, as it happens, is Ms. Redgrave’s daughter. As an actress she may be less conspicuously open than her mother or Ms. Mulligan, but she possesses a sharp and affecting lucidity of her own. Her character in “Side Effects,” Melinda Metz, is bipolar, and she doesn’t wear her illness all that visibly at first. But as she interacts with her staid, loving and frightened husband (a pitch-perfect Cotter Smith), Melinda, like Karin, seems to be moving to a rhythm that is subtly out of sync with that of the everyday world she inhabits. At times, her reversals of tempo and of mood are so abrupt and intense, they’re scary.

But they are also kind of exhilarating. And that’s the beauty of this performance. We understand why Melinda chooses not to take her medications (and lies about it). Off them, she may spiral into really high spirits that are dangerous to her husband’s career (not to mention the furniture). But unedited and unshackled, she is fully alive in a way Mr. Smith’s character never can be, and you know why he remains so attracted to as well as terrified by her. Any of us who experience irrational fluctuations of feeling from time to time will see a heightened mirror of ourselves in her, and we start to question what defines mental illness.

Sometimes, of course, a more classic scenery-chewing madman is just what the, uh, doctor ordered. In the title role of “Diary of a Madman,” adapted from Gogol for a production seen last winter at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the prodigiously gifted Geoffrey Rush played insanity as stark, raving stand-up comedy, to eerily entertaining effect.

At the other end of the spectrum was Edie Falco’s portrait of Bananas, the hallucination-prone, apartment-bound wife in this season’s Broadway revival of John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves.” If Mr. Rush’s interpretation of madness might be said to have been in Technicolor, Ms. Falco’s was in MRI shades of gray, an exercise in somber, clinical exactitude. I’m not sure this interpretation always suited Mr. Guare’s whimsical writing, but it was certainly fascinating to watch. On the other hand, I was never entirely able to identify with her or Mr. Rush’s characters, as I could with Ms. Mulligan’s and Ms. Richardson’s.

Of course, there was at least one other outstanding portrait of madness in extremis in recent months, that of Derek Jacobi in the last acts of “King Lear,” also seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Shakespeare’s use of madness—including the feigned madness of our friend Hamlet—occupies its own cosmic level in world literature. That’s a topic for another day.

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 4

[This is Part 4, the final installment, of my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272).]

After treating the matter of reviewers closing productions with poor notices, Kirk raises the question of reviewers who know people connected to the production and fear their notices might hurt their friends and acquaintances. It’s hard, perhaps, for reviewers not to become engaged in the social whirl of the arts they cover. That’s probably more true in smaller markets than in large ones like New York or L.A., but there’s a danger here, too. I remember reading an article about New York Times chief reviewer Ben Brantley, who I thought had taken a pretty extreme action to avoid that--he literally absents himself entirely from the New York social scene. According to the report, he lived outside the city (though he may have moved in since then) and apparently doesn’t socialize with anyone connected to theater. (I thought this was extreme not because Brantley avoids the social aspects of the biz—that may be difficult but wise—but because, not living in the city he covers, he loses perspective on the atmosphere—political, communal, economic, cultural—that surrounds and informs the art about which he writes.)

The Times doesn’t permit its theater reviewers to participate in any awards program (editors and other journalists may, and I don’t know if reviewers in other arts are similarly enjoined) because the editors don’t want their reviewers even to appear to have conflicts of interest. A few years ago, Critics Quarterly (the newsletter of ATCA, which Kirk would insist ought to be called Reviewers Quarterly . . . or, maybe, Reviewers Review) did a series of articles, plus letters from members, concerning reviewers who got involved in other aspects of theater such as playwriting or acting. Some members felt this was a good way to learn more about the business, by seeing it from the inside while it was working. Others were vociferous in their opinions that this placed the reviewers in danger of becoming too personally acquainted with the artists they would be called on to criticize. I no longer was trying to act when I was writing reviews, but I still knew actors, directors, designers, and stage managers who were working in New York and there were theater companies run by friends and former colleagues producing plays I might have to review. The situation only arose once or twice, and I raised the potential conflict with my editor, but I was surprised when he said he didn’t really care. (I think the real situation was that he didn’t have that many writers on whom he could call and he couldn’t replace me.) It was very hard to be objective and I had to question myself very carefully when it came to writing about the people I knew, even slightly.

Interestingly, there’s an organization in New York City that was established essentially to address this situation. The Players, on Gramercy Park, was founded by actor Edwin Booth (in his last home, where his room is still preserved as he left it) to allow actors to meet the important citizens of the city on a social basis. He thought that members of his profession ought to know the people who supported the theater and the city’s movers and shakers in all fields, politics, finance, merchandising, letters, and so on, should know the theater artists who were so important to New York’s culture. (Theater was, at the time, the popular entertainment, much as movies and TV are today.) That is, all the professions except one. No reviewers could be members of The Players. Booth didn’t think it would be wise to put actors in the same room with the writers who from time to time may have said uncomplimentary things about them. Now, the all-male membership has been integrated in recent years, but the prohibition against reviewers still holds. (By the way, the organization is called The Players, not the Players Club.)

When he writes about reporting on the play’s plot, Kirk proposes, “We can ask, what happens to the characters? Do they grow, change, move from point A to point N?” This is very close to the question dramaturgs learn to ask when analyzing a script for their artistic directors: Who does the play happen to? It’s a way of determining which character is the focal one (which may not be the same as the lead role or the literary protagonist). It’s an interesting question to ask, even for a reviewer.

When it comes to the perspective of the spectator, Kirk reminds us that “not everyone in the theater sees—or hears—the same show.” It’s a fact of live performances that no two people see the same show and no two performances are the same. No matter where you sit in a movie theater, you see essentially the same movie as everyone else (barring sitting behind a pillar or a very tall person). But with a live performance, especially theater or ballet, there’s an element of Heraclitus’ tenet: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.” The corollary is that no two people can step into the same river because the water where one stepped is not the same as the water where the other did. (Besides, no two people’s experience of that river will be the same, either. That’s true of movies and television, too, of course.) The trade-off is that in live theater, I can choose where I want to look. In film and TV, the camera, under the director’s control, does that for me.

Kirk asserts that theater pros feel “that opening nights are the worst performances” of a play’s run. Openings are still the traditional night for reviewers and the press, despite the scheduling of “critics’ previews.” (No matter when the reviewer sees the show, the notice traditionally appears the day after opening.) I was never a first-nighter, so I had the luxury of seeing the performances after the play opened and settled down, and even now, I generally avoid opening nights. To be frank, openings are more social events than artistic ones and the company’s emotions are high and tight. Friends and family are in the house; agents and managers come to see their clients; the producers, backers, and investors and their invited guests are there for the festivities; non-reviewing press—editors, feature writers, cultural reporters—are covering the “news” event. Everyone backstage is on edge, you can bet. (When I first started to perform, I couldn’t eat before a performance. When I got more used to the experience, that was no longer so—except on opening nights.)

In addition to the emotional tension, there are the various production issues that affect the performance. It’s a truism in theater that no planned rehearsal period is long enough. You always need another week. In many shows, the first time everyone has gone through the entire play with full tech and costumes the way it’s supposed to be seen by the audience is the final dress rehearsal. On opening night, there will be acting and directing problems from both nerves and from not being quite ready yet. In new plays, it’s not unusual for new lines and even new scenes to be inserted within days of opening; new songs can be added to musicals. Because of the labor-intensivity of the rehearsal period plus the union regulations, technical adjustments are often brought in at the last minute: costumes don’t fit quite right yet, set pieces haven’t been tested, lights aren’t focused right. (I once actually went on stage with a set still wet with last-minute, improvised “paint”: pea soup!) No, opening night is not a typical performance. It’s more like the first time a cook makes a new recipe—it’s not really ready for primetime.

Still, I remember an occurrence that remains one of the strangest of which I have ever heard in theater. In 1997, The Scarlet Pimpernel opened at the Minskoff Theatre on 9 November. It received mediocre reviews or worse. New producers stepped in and bought out the old investors, closed the show on 1 October 1998 for retooling, and reopened it on 4 November. Talk about not being ready on opening night!

In debating whether reviews are “art,” Kirk paraphrases Will and Ariel Durant’s definition of art: “significance expressed with feeling through form.” (The quote is from Writing Reviews, not the Durants.) I’d like to add another, very similar definition from Susanne Langer, another philosopher: “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” As you can see, it’s nearly the same language. Let me add here another of Langer’s statements that I have found revealing—because it’s a comment about “beauty” in a context we should consider when viewing many new kinds of art. (This harks back to the remarks Kirk and I made about standards and new art not resembling the old.) Langer writes: “Beauty is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”

Beauty, I think Langer’s saying, ain’t always pretty. She also defines beauty as “expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some way. “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes. This interpretation of beauty, which may owe something to Heraclitus’ view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we’d regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure. Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness.” 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.” It’s noteworthy that Marshall McLuhan calls “good taste,” often substituted for “beauty” in the judgment of traditionalists, “the first refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most obvious resource of the insecure.” Richard Kostelanetz, whom I quoted earlier, also submits that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”

In his discussion of “good art” and “great art,” Kirk remarks, “I could write a play that conforms to all Aristotle’s principles and has no value at all—indeed, many have.” First, let me reiterate here, in the words of Susanne Langer, what I said about poor art earlier: “There may be poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition. . . . . The result is a poor and helpless product, sincere enough, but confused and frustrated by recalcitrance of the medium or sheer lack of technical freedom.” Langer takes a harsher line with “bad art,” but making poor art is not a criminal act. Now, I’ll draw a literary parallel between what Kirk wrote about writing a mediocre play that follows all the rules and an old play to which I once introduced Kirk, Plots and Playwrights by Edward Massey.

The plot concerns Caspar Gay, a successful Broadway playwright wandering Greenwich Village looking for “an inspiration” for his next play. He meets young short-story writer Joseph Hastings in front of a boarding house. Gay explains his desperation, and Hastings suggests that there’s a play on every floor of the house and the two writers challenge one another. Hastings composes small dramas based on the intimate, but revealing, stories of the residents of each floor of the house, one scene for each apartment. Gay’s output, on the other hand, is complex and predictable, a contrived melodrama about all the house’s residents in improbable relationships. Hastings reacts in disbelief to Gay’s creation, and the famous playwright responds, “But it will run a year on Broadway.” “My God,” cries the enlightened novelist, “it has.” And that’s what can happen when you merely follow all the rules!

I do want to take small exception to one thing Kirk writes. Actually, I want to expand it a bit. The author notes, correctly, that “some works are simply better than others.” I’d add, “. . . for some people.” As Kirk continues, “Our criteria and judgments about art will always be subjective,” so each of us will see and feel things no one else will, and vice versa. Hence, art I think is great may seem mediocre or even awful to you and art you love may leave me cold. (Furthermore, taste, like the truth, changes over time. But let’s not get into that.) I’ll admit here that I don’t much like Harold Pinter’s plays. I’ll acknowledge that he was probably a genius, but his plays always just confuse me and leave me frustrated. I don’t enjoy those feelings. Obviously, though, mine’s a minority opinion since he won a Nobel in lit in 2005. As my father liked to say, De gustibus non disputandum est: There’s no accounting for taste.

When it comes to defining who’s an artist, Kirk quotes some lines from 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Allow me to add another voice, William Shakespeare:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Further, Kirk adds that someone who writes, plays, or sings isn’t automatically an artist: an artist needs “to create something that changes the way people feel, hear, and think.” Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck declared, “An actor who brings back from his adventures a moment of communicable penetration is a hero, the light of our lives.” It is perhaps noteworthy that the people who make commercials don’t call the performers who appear on the screen “artists”: they are simply “the talent.” I guess even the producers of TV commercials don’t figure it takes an artist to sell toilet paper or cars.

When Writing Reviews gets to contemplating how a reviewer actually goes about composing the review, Kirk addresses the question of whether or not to take notes while viewing the performance. (The question is less pertinent for non-performing arts, such as book or art reviewing, for obvious reasons.) His conclusion comes down on both sides of the question: “Take notes when you have to.” I’ve tried both ways, and a third in the middle (taking notes without looking at the pad!), and I end up in Kirk’s corner on this. You have to pay attention to what you’re watching and any distraction lessens your attentiveness. On the other hand, there are details that you recognize as potentially telling, like, say, a line of dialogue or a particularly revealing movement or gesture, and you know you can’t remember them for long without writing it down. Sometimes I’ve been able to keep the thing in mind long enough to jot it down in the lobby at intermission or right after the performance, which kind of splits the difference, but there’s no definitive answer for everyone; some people’s memories are just better than others' and some bits of performance are more memorable than others. You have to go with what works for you under the circumstances.

By the way, in an earlier paragraph, Kirk advises that “it is difficult for anyone . . . to take in an entire show at one sitting.” This is especially so if you’re taking notes while you’re watching. The trade-off is that if you don’t take the notes, you might not remember later what you did manage to “take in.” Going back, as some of the pros Kirk invokes suggest, is a good way to solve this dilemma, but that’s time consuming and, if you’re footing the bill for the extra tix, expensive. It also can get in the way of meeting deadlines. (TV reviewers have a much easier job here: they are usually provided with recordings of the program, several episodes if it’s a series, and can both pause the video to make a note and go back and re-watch parts or all of the show.)

I want to comment on something Kirk wrote near the end of Writing Reviews because I've always remembered it ever since I heard it. (I don't always follow the advice very well, but I do remember it!) In the "Reviewing your review" section, Kirk tells the reader to ask, "Can you say things more directly, cut out useless words, eliminate the unnecessary?" (That’s writing advice, of course, not just review-writing advice.) A teacher of mine used to say, "Kill your babies," meaning be willing to cut the things you like the most when they aren't really helping. Be ruthless, she meant. I often wish I could do that—but I have too much "ruth" I guess. But I hear her say that whenever I edit my work—especially when I come to something I know I should cut . . . but don’t want to.

Finally, one of the last observations of Writing Reviews is the statement that though we may “see a lot of bad art” over our lifetimes, “we’ll also experience things that enrich and possibly change our lives . . . .” Intentionally or otherwise, Kirk’s speaking of all kinds of art, not just theater or the performing arts. I could make a short list of the works of art, performances, texts, and visual art, that have moved me or showed me something so that I’ve never forgotten it or the experience. But I want to close out these comments by quoting an artist who made this point very clearly in his own way. I’ve written about the Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat before (ROT, 28 September), and I quoted this then: “If an artist draws a subject over and over again in different ways, then he will learn something. The same with someone who looks at drawings—if that person keeps looking at many drawings, then he will learn something from them too.” A wise, wise man.

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 3

[This is Part 3 of my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272). There will be four parts in all.]

On a less heated topic than reviewers' personal prejudices, Kirk notes that it’s almost impossible for a spectator to tell who’s responsible for what in a production. That’s true in general--though you can make a pretty good stab at who designed the sets and costumes. Because the program usually tells us. To be serious, though, a wise reviewer will know that the director probably had a great deal to say about the production design--and in some cases, so will the producer. Earlier I mentioned the formation of the American Directors Institute to try to help explain the work of stage directors to the public and even other theater professionals because so few people outside the rehearsals really know what the director does. I was only half joking when I said you could easily tell who designed the sets and so on, but the same is true of the acting. The actors are ultimately responsible for what they do on stage, but they worked with the director (and sometimes even the playwright) while they were developing the work that we end up seeing in performance. Theater is called a “collaborative art.” Nothing happens on the stage during the performance of a play, not even those monodramas I mentioned earlier, that hasn’t been shaped by many hands. I wonder how many people realize, for instance, that the character’s costume can have a tremendous effect on the actor’s work, both physically and psychologically. So can the set design and construction. Lines have been changed because of an actor (especially in TV); whole songs have been added or cut because of an actor’s work. Acting decisions can change because lines have been changed earlier or later in the script. We discuss a play as if the actors made all their own choices in a vacuum, that the designers all worked alone in their studios, and that the director . . . well, who knows what the director did. But it’s not true--it never was and it never will be. That’s precisely why no two productions of the same play are ever the same. (No two performances of the same production are the same, either, but that’s a different phenomenon.) That’s what makes theater such an exciting art form--at least for me. (It’s also why I used to love rehearsing. Performing was a reward, but rehearsing was where all the creativity happened and everyone you worked with was part of it. It was exhilarating.)

Aaron Frankel, the acting teacher whom I’ve mentioned a few times (because he had all these neat little aphorisms that have stuck with me) used to quote Martha Graham: "Don't come on stage to give; come on stage to take!" It sounds selfish and egotistical, but what I understand it to mean, for an actor, is that you take in what the other actors are sending you, you let it inform your performance, and you respond to it. Then the other actors respond to what you send out in turn. The most difficult actors with whom I worked were the ones who came to the theater with their performances all canned and ready. They were all closed off. I couldn’t change their performance no matter what I did on stage with them--they just barreled through with their plan. I’d have no choice but to do the same thing, and then we no longer had a live play but a kind of live-action video game. If we did it well, maybe no one in the audience would notice, but it wasn’t any fun to do.

Even if, as Kirk points out, you see two performances of a production with the same director and different actors, you can’t be sure whose contribution you’re witnessing. Sensitive directors will reconceive a character based on the contributions of an actor and rework the part even as the overall production concept remains essentially the same. Sometimes, the kit-and-kaboodle gets shifted because of the presence of new actors. If you read the re-reviews of continuing shows written when there’s been a cast change, you can sometimes see that old shows can learn new tricks. When Eileen Atkins replaced Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius in Doubt, reviewers noted how different the play had become as a result of the new approach to the role. No one said that Atkins’s interpretation was better than Jones’s, but the difference was marked. It’s not really part of the same point, but now and then those changes can improve the production. Not too long ago, when the revival of Annie Get Your Gun was running on Broadway, Bernadette Peters (whom I saw do the role pre-Broadway in Washington a few months earlier) actually didn’t get such good notices. (Truth be told, she was a tad old for the part.) But when Reba McEntire replaced Peters, reviewers felt that McEntire suited the part better and the show was better for the change.

Writing Reviews also addresses the issue of “inside information.” Kirk warns that reviewers who put forth that they know things we outsiders don’t are often wrong, to begin with, and even if they’re not, the inside dope doesn’t really have anything to do with the experience at hand, namely the performance. In one example, Kirk writes, “Reviewers often claim to know why an artist did something, when even the artist may have no idea,” and he relates a story about John Lennon playing bass on a Paul McCartney song. Lennon played badly and one reviewer claimed it had been sabotage even though, as Kirk notes, Lennon was “simply a lousy bass player.” This all reminds me of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, whose plot centers on research a scholar is doing about Lord Byron. Using the family archives at a country house where Byron had stayed in 1809, the researcher puts together the evidence about what Byron was doing at the house and interprets it to determine a plausible scenario. But Arcadia is divided into two interwoven narratives, the other one being the same house in 1809 and we get to see what actually went on then. It turns out, despite the parallels between the facts in 1809 and the ones revealed in “the present day,” that the researcher has interpreted the evidence completely wrong.

One of Stoppard’s favorite themes is How do we know what we think we know? It is the central theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and part of the point of Jumpers and even Travesties. His characters almost always get the facts right but the conclusions wrong. One of his most fun arguments in Jumpers, in a speech about the existence of God that I used to use for auditions, goes this way:

Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. But it was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, . . . that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. Furthermore, by a similar argument he showed that before reaching the half-way point, the arrow had to reach the quarter-mark, and before that the eighth, and before that the sixteenth, and so on, with the result, remembering Cantor’s proof, that the arrow could not move at all!

An ideal example of perfect logic leading to an impossible conclusion. As reviewers and consumers of reviews, we need to be skeptical of such reasoning and the information on which it’s founded.

As a sort of addendum to this discussion, Kirk makes the point that his admonition about inside information also holds true for determining that “a work of art is a direct reflection of the artist’s life . . . .” Almost all artists use elements of their biography to inform their work, though that doesn’t make every artist’s work “autobiographical.” Some is, to one degree or another: Arthur Miller’s After the Fall is clearly a reflection of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe--though it isn’t an account of that marriage; most of Horton Foote’s characters are based on his family and neighbors from the Texas town where he grew up, but the plays don’t tell the history of his family. Kirk invoked Tennessee Williams as an example, and though Williams used aspects of his life in almost all his writing, especially early in his career, his plays aren’t autobiographies. (Knowing something about Williams’s life can help some in understanding some things about the plays, but enjoying them doesn’t depend on being a Williams expert.) At the end of that discussion, Kirk cautions us not to treat Williams’s plays “as chapters in Williams’ memoirs.” Of course, he’s absolutely correct. The plays (and poems and short stories) are self-contained works of art, no more accounts of the playwright’s life than The Lord of the Rings was an account of Tolkien’s life. But I want to add one remark, only slightly relevant (and perhaps not even that): Williams’s actual Memoirs, his published autobiography, is largely regarded as heavily fictionalized. Williams told so many tales about his background, starting with his name (actually Tom) and the year of his birth (actually 1911, not 1914 as he put out for many years), that I suspect he began to forget what was a yarn and what was true. My point? Not only can’t Williams’s fiction be taken as fact, but even his fact can’t be taken as fact! (I’m just sayin’.)

Kirk also addresses the issue of reviewers asserting that they can somehow glean how other people (including the artists themselves as well as other viewers) feel and what they think. Just recently, for example, in his review of the Brighton Beach Memoirs revival, Ben Brantley committed this fault when he said of one actor that “her performance is so subdued and inward-looking that when [she] finally erupts, you don’t believe it” (I added the italics). How does Brantley know what I will believe if and when I see the play? How does he know what anyone else, even his fellow spectators that night, believes? He can’t. He can only know what he himself believes. He has no business speaking for anyone else!

I took this problem up on ROT as well. What I proposed is that reviewers write in first person so that they are less tempted to make universal statements and maintain the perception that they are writing about themselves and their own impressions. (Brantley could have written, “. . . I don’t believe it.”) The problem is, of course, that editors and publishers seldom allow writers like reviewers to write in first person. Opinion columnists, and I maintain that that’s really what reviewers are, are perfectly free to write that way, but reviewers rarely are. It’s harder to do when you can’t use the grammatical first person, but the alternative approach has to be to make sure the “first-personness” of the review is rhetorically clear. (In which case, Brantley could have written, “. . . it’s hard to believe.”)

In a section about clever remarks, put-downs, and personal insults in reviews, Kirk invokes a famous reviewer “who most consistently writes in terms of insults”; he doesn’t name the writer, but most of us probably know who he is, and since ROT isn’t as vulnerable to retribution, legal or otherwise, I will name him: John Simon. I had a bit of a contretemps in print with Simon back in 1989, precipitated by his review of The Winter’s Tale at the New York Shakespeare Festival. I won’t repeat Simon’s revolting remarks about the actress Alfre Woodard, who played Paulina in the production, but I will characterize them as racist and mean, referring to her hair (which was a wig) and her vocal performance. Simon invoked the vilest racial images to make his points. (Simon also said some very insulting things about Mandy Patinkin, who played Leontes opposite Christopher Reeve’s Polixenes, making reference to some scurrilous Nazi caricatures of Jews.) Almost the entire theater community rose up in protest, with several columnists writing rebukes and well-known theater figures like Colleen Dewhurst, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson writing letters. I also wrote a long letter to all the press outlets in New York; it was published in a substantial excerpt in the New York Post (12 April) and in its entirety in the New York Native (22 May), where I published my reviews at the time. I wrote: “Invoking negative racial and ethnic stereotypes to make small points about coiffure or vocal technique . . . is completely outrageous in this supposedly enlightened time. Cruelty of this kind, regardless of the point Mr. Simon may have been trying to make, is inexcusable in our society.”

Simon’s review came out on 3 April. I had also written a review of the play which appeared on the same date but since the Native was a weekly, my deadline was long before I ever saw Simon’s notice. I had liked the production. On 19 June, however, my review of another NYSF production, Cymbeline (part of NYSF’s then-ongoing marathon of all Shakespeare’s plays over about a decade), came out in the Native and unbeknownst to me, the editors had put a banner headline on the front page of the edition saying, “Hey, John Simon: We Loved Cymbeline.” Simon had obviously panned Cymbeline (12 June)--it was a controversial production under the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis--but the banner was clearly more directed at my difference of opinion with Simon over Winter’s Tale. In any case, New York didn’t run my letter and I never heard from Simon in any way. I’m sure I was beneath his notice. (That’s all right. He’s beneath my contempt. One of his earlier reviews soon after I moved to New York City--I forget now which one--so incensed me that I cancelled my subscription to New York and have never gone back to it.)

By the way, in a later section on “The newspaper’s mistakes,” Kirk points out that “reviewers often are not responsible for headlines” and other accompaniments to their columns. That’s true not only of reviewers but almost all journalistic writers; there are editors whose job it is to oversee the composition of headlines and such. (Most of my reviews did appear under headlines of my own devising, however.) I not only had no hand in writing that banner about Cymbeline that baited John Simon, but I didn’t even know about it until the issue came out. Since my deadline was often 10 days before the issue date, I’d written my copy before Simon’s negative review of Cymbeline hit the stands. (As I said, I no longer subscribed to New York magazine and didn’t seek out Simon’s reviews anyway; I wouldn’t have known about his response to the play until someone told me about it.)

Following this discussion in Writing Reviews, Kirk also raises the issue of “color-blind casting,” another problem John Simon has. I raised an objection to his shortsightedness and benighted attitude in the same letter, but a few years later, in 1991, the magazine The World & I, published by the Washington Times (owned by the Moonies), ran an article, “Nontraditional Casting” by David H. Ehrlich, which took the same viewpoint as Simon--that roles should only be cast with actors of the same race specified for the character. (If no race is specified, the role is presumed to have been written for a white actor.) I wrote another long letter to the editor of The World & I, and though they never published it, the author of the article called me. I didn’t want to get into a debate with him, so I just suggested that his editors run my letter and we could have our conversation in print. What the arch-conservative publication didn’t print included this statement:

[W]hat Mr. Ehrlich’s essay, reduced to its most basic terms, really says is that African-American actors (and Hispanic, Asian, disabled and women actors, by extension) are fine, as long as they keep to their places. Let them do August Wilson and Spike Lee, and the occasional Othello (but not Iago); however, they had better stay away from White Plays. If that sounds like saying black people are OK as long as they do not move next door to me and marry my sister, you get full marks.

(The comment above about Othello and Iago was in reference to a production of the Shakespeare tragedy by the Folger Theatre Group, the forerunner of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which cast Avery Brooks as the Moor and André Braugher as his ancient. Ehrlich had trouble with this pairing.)

In a related section, Kirk inveighs against reviewers who have an obsession with something and “drag it into review after review.” Kirk’s talking about general idées fixes, like Clive Barnes’s reputed preference for anything British, but sometimes they’re more transitory. As I wrote recently in an August posting on ROT:

I remember back in ’98 when Footloose opened on Broadway, Ben Brantley panned the show and ever thereafter, at every opportunity he had in subsequent columns, Brantley ran the play down in the most derogatory terms he could get away with. He seemed obsessed with this play and the low opinion he had of it.

I don’t know what was going through Brantley’s mind at the time, of course, but I kept thinking that he was actually trying to close the show. Despite Brantley’s efforts, however, Footloose (which I didn’t like much myself, though it never offended me) ran for a year-and-a-half and 709 performances. It was nominated for four Tonys and didn’t win any of them, so maybe Brantley could take some pride in that dubious accomplishment.

And speaking about closing shows because of reviews, in a section called “Worrying about effect,” Kirk addresses the matter of how reviewers cope with the sense that they may be influencing people’s futures. I just want to point out that this very question was the subject of my essay "The Power of the Reviewer," which I mentioned above. My conclusion, by the way, was that the power of reviews to close productions was largely an untested assumption and that there were many viable strategies that producers could use to combat mediocre press. (I related one earlier: the hoax David Merrick pulled--he liked to put things over on the press--that may have helped extend the run of the poorly-reviewed Subways Are for Sleeping. But there are more legitimate tactics as well.) And Kirk is right when he reports that some reviewers “deny that they have any economic effect at all.” In a 1969 survey (the last time I looked, there weren’t any newer ones), only two-thirds of reviewers (of all arts, not just theater), said they had an economic impact. On the other hand, another survey found that 60% of spectators questioned said that reviews were of minimal importance to their choices. A 1977 study by More magazine (now defunct) attempted to find a correlation between the quality of the reviews and the length of a play’s run. The results weren’t conclusive, but they found, “When the critics expressed a strong negative [i.e., a pan] or positive [a rave] opinion about a play, there was a marked correlation with the length of run.” (I had some reservations about this study, which I expressed in the essay.)

[Come back in a few days for Part 4 of my commentary on Writing Reviews. There’s still more to say.]