"Decorum in the Digital Age"

by Philip Kennicott

[On 11 February 2014, I posted an article by ROT contributor Kirk Woodward called “Reflections On Theater Etiquette” in which my friend discussed some of the ways that performers should behave while they’re working.  On 3 May 2015, the Washington Post ran a collection of articles by arts journalists on proper behavior by patrons in public spaces, including the theater.  I’m posting the introductory article by Philip Kennicott and the theater article by Nelson Pressley as a sort of delayed companion to Kirk’s piece.  The articles originally ran in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post.]

“Change in etiquette usually comes slowly, just as changes come slowly in the dictionary,” Amy Vanderbilt wrote in her book on manners, published more than half a century ago. Vanderbilt was wise not to qualify her statement. Change usually comes slowly. But look at the etiquette of public space today, and one finds everywhere great and rapid change.

Technology has scrambled the lines between public and private. Cellphones make our most intimate conversations available to anyone within earshot, while headphones create zones of pure solitude even in the midst of the liveliest crowd. Smartphones and tablets allow us to spend time with art without ever leaving the office, while sophisticated new robots enable the house-bound to participate in live events remotely. Last year, the National Symphony Orchestra invited a Beam “telepresence robot” into a side box, so that a disabled man in California could see, hear and interact with the musicians at a performance.

The democratization of art and the desire to make it more accessible also has fundamentally changed how we expect people to behave in social spaces once governed by sometimes elaborate rules. The nature of those rules — are they simply the arbitrary residue of class and snobbery, or are they pragmatic guidelines for ensuring everyone can hear, see and enjoy the experience? — continue unabated, but with a twist.

Perhaps we are entering a new age of radicalism individualism, in which the very idea of enjoying public space together is giving way to something more anarchic and carnivalesque. Silence was once prized as a mark of success in many public spaces, including libraries, museums and concert halls; the vibrancy of many of those spaces, today, is measured by noise, hubbub and laughter.

And yet etiquette also is remarkably resilient, reforming in new ways, often spontaneously. Taking a selfie in a museum may be disruptive to others, and antithetical to the experience of art, yet given the option, most people will avoid walking through the line of sight and ruining someone else’s photograph. If the power goes off in a nightclub, it’s astonishing how quickly audiences will tune in and scale down their conversations to hear the unamplified music. The silence in the Quiet Car on Amtrak is more strictly governed by ordinary passengers than the stereotypical librarian of old who rode herd on unruly students a century ago.

The two most significant forces shaping our planet today — rapid urbanization and the wholesale destruction of our environment — will only increase the rate of change in etiquette. For one thing is certain: We will live in more crowded spaces, and we will increasingly live indoors, cocooned in climate-controlled zones with a few billion of our closest friends. If etiquette is simply an elaboration of the Golden Rule, or Kant’s categorical imperative — always act in such a way that you’d be happy to have everyone do as you do — then it is certain to undergo as profound and as rapid a change as we have ever experienced.

The critics of The Washington Post spend much of their lives in theaters, museums, restaurants and nightclubs, but also on buses and trains, in airports and libraries, and all the myriad public spaces of ordinary life. What follows is a report from the field, an attempt to register the changes — or not — in etiquette from a cross section of the social world. Some have chosen to codify their own rules for an evolving social realm; others have taken a more sociological look at the forces underlying old arguments about rules and manners. Yet others have wrestled with their own internal conflicts about etiquette, about the “should” and “how” of passing down rules to new audiences.

And our conclusions? None at all. But a few themes emerge. Dance critic Sarah Kaufman sees a correlation between the intensity — and rarity — of the artistic experience and collective good behavior. Dance can’t be reproduced at home on the stereo or television, so when we encounter it in the flesh, we are completely absorbed. Film critic Ann Hornaday surveys a very different medium, where audiences often forget that they aren’t in their own living room. She also points out something fundamental about etiquette: We are better at practicing it than enforcing it, and confrontation is almost always counterproductive.

Food critic Tom Sietsema regularly patrols the unruly world of eating in public, where people can be astonishingly thoughtless. Among his observations is a basic insight about character, and behavior: “Think good thoughts,” he says. Because, in the end, empathy and a blithe spirit will always yield a better experience for everyone. Classical music critic Anne Midgette wrestles with her feelings about rules, in an environment that often feels to outsiders horribly rule-bound. There are no easy answers, she says, because the passionate desire to share music with others often leads music lovers to “lapse into a rhetoric that comes off as at once defensive and bossy.”

Theater critic Nelson Pressley provides a history lesson in rowdy behavior, and insight into what it’s like on the other side of the proscenium, where actors have their own passionate feelings about audience misbehavior. Pop music critic Chris Richards offers rules for the world of amplified music, crowded clubs and a naturally more freewheeling environment. But he sees the individual clubgoer just as much a part of a collective experience as anyone at the symphony hall. “Is your behavior helping the collective energy flow more freely, or is it clogging things up?” And thus we see the basic impulse to keep etiquette alive and well in an arena designed to be antipodal to the formal, hierarchical experience of art.

In the end, that is the fundamental paradox of art and public space: We go there both to be free and to submit (through the embodiment of experience in art) to the consciousness of others; to find and lose ourselves; to be out in the world yet to escape the crushing banality of so much of the culture we have created. Art often seems incidental to the larger world of commerce, politics and celebrity, but it teaches us the most essential lesson of living well together, how to modulate our own ego and desires in the face of something larger, more important and lasting.

“THE SHOW MUST GO ON, CIVILLY”

by Nelson Pressley

Our era’s curse is the cellphone, but theaters have a long tradition as rowdy places. In ­17th-century France, Molière had to tolerate cocky, talkative VIPs who insisted on sitting on the stage. That was common in London, too.

Food, especially fruits and nuts, used to be sold inside theaters, which meant audiences had something to throw at the stage whenever they felt like expressing a bit of ­high-velocity criticism.

And prostitutes! Let’s not forget the working women who used to drum up business in the stalls and galleries.

“Fifteen years ago our theaters were tumultuous places,” Denis Diderot wrote in 1758, fretting that guards — yes, it came to that — were turning unruly Paris stages into “resorts more peaceful and respectful than our churches.”

Our own mayhem is subtler — except, maybe, when an actor leaps from the stage to attack a heckler, which happened over the summer in California. Santa Clara’s Repertory East Company was performing Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and someone in the audience began making homophobic comments about the repressed character Brick. The actor playing Big Daddy took after the heckler and was fired for it. The performer playing Brick quit in solidarity. The rest of the run was scrapped.

Then there was the notorious 2013 University of Mississippi incident with a largely student audience ridiculing the gay figures of the “The Laramie Project,” which chronicles the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The jeering not only shattered etiquette but also challenged civil rights; the scandal quickly went national, with widespread backing for the actors.

“All of a sudden, there was a sense of empowerment in the cast, where they felt the support of the greater community,” the show’s director told the Jackson Free Press. “The performances were just electric.” Civility won.

“Performance is a time to think inwardly, not a time to share your thoughts aloud,” instructs the etiquette guide posted by the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, in Indiana, and, for people who have paid good money and invested valuable time only to be irritated by chatterers (let alone snorers), this bedrock principle can’t be restated often enough.

Still, that’s just scratching the surface of potential distractions. The guides alert us:

“Come clean,” advises New York Show Tickets in a note to both the dirty tourist and the Manhattan gym rat. “Try to make time for a shower before arriving at the theater.”

From the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend, Ind.: “Please consider the people that will be seated behind you when choosing whether or not to wear a hat or what hair style you choose.” Also, with alarming grammar: “Take care of personal needs (drinks of water or restroom) because you should not leave your seat until the intermission or until the performance ends.”

Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company teaches audiences, “React to what’s happening on stage.”

They have yet to include this gentle guidance: Please do not throw up on Washington Post critics. (It happened there.)

Surely, everyone knows it’s rude to rattle wrappers during a show, yet a minor Twizzlers incident upstaged Al Pacino during a 2013 New York performance of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” and prompted the breathless headline, “The Great Fight Way: Broadway Audiences Are Behaving Badly, and Someone Is Going to Get Hurt.”

But the particular bane of our age is the cellphone. In April, Madonna reportedly texted through the second act of the hit off-Broadway musical “Hamilton,” prompting the show’s star and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda to ban Madge from backstage. Hugh Jackman stopped one of his 2009 Broadway performances of “A Steady Rain” with Daniel Craig and stood hands on hips as he told an audience member to turn the bloomin’ thing off. Actress Laura Linney has said that casts now discuss ahead of time what to do when the inevitable cellphone incidents occur.

The most sensational option, of course, is to go ballistic, a la Patti LuPone.

“I have to say this: We have forgotten our public manners,” an inflamed LuPone told a crowd after stopping a performance of “Gypsy” to have a picture-taker thrown out. This was in 2009, when LuPone became the poster diva of “Don’t do that! Don’t make me stop this show!” Only months after “Gypsy” closed on Broadway, she interrupted another performance in Las Vegas to cross-examine an audience member using a phone. When the New York Times characterized the star’s behavior as a trifle touchy, LuPone fired back in a letter.

“This has been going on in my career for 30 years since I starred in ‘Evita,’ and, you’re surprised I stop shows now?” she wrote.

Thirty years predates the “smart” phone, which still hasn’t learned modern theater audience etiquette. (“People” appear to be a poor app for that.) That underscores the bigger point: We are an intuitively restless species. In a crowd, someone is always distracted or out of step. Theaters used to be raucous because they were public squares, places to display one’s privileged self sitting on the stage or to shout as you stood in the pit. The distractions are different now because we’ve evolved into electronic palmists anxious to instant-share and nervous about ever disconnecting.

LuPone’s “Gypsy” tirade is a masterpiece of performer’s pique. On YouTube, you can hear LuPone revving into “Rose’s Turn,” her energy in full throttle, when suddenly she shouts the orchestra to a halt. In a voice that could crack an ocean liner’s hull, she roars at a picture-taker in the audience, “How dare you! Who do you think you are? Get them out!”

The cheers are Olympian. The audience is fully behind her. It had to be said.

The irony that LuPone’s righteous tirade is preserved by an illicit recording? Priceless.

[The other opinion pieces on proper behavior in public places were “Poking Holes in Notion of Anything Goes,” a consideration of etiquette in museums by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s art and architecture critic; “Maintaining Sense of Harmony,” a discussion of correct behavior at a pop concert by Chris Richards, pop music review-writer; “A Blockbuster Idea for Citing Infractions,” an article on etiquette at the movies by Ann Hornaday, a Post movie reviewer; “Dining Out with Good Taste,” an examination of good manners in a restaurant by Tom Sietsema, the Post’s restaurant reviewer; “Caught up in the Performance,” an article on proper conduct at a ballet by dance critic Sarah Kaufman; “To Do and Not to Do,” a consideration of what’s proper at a classical music performance by Anne Midgette, the classical music critic for the paper.]

Philip Pullman’s 'His Dark Materials'

by Kirk Woodward

[Frequent ROT contributor Kirk Woodward returns now with a slightly different piece of writing.  In “Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” he gives us a critical analysis of the fantasy series of his title, comparing it for illustrative purposes with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, with which His Dark Materials shares some aspects.  Kirk’s not only a writer himself, but he was an English major in college and reads across the spectrum extensively, so he has a well-formed basis to make observations.  He’s also what he calls a “committed Christian,” so Pullman’s well-known opposition to organized religion and distrust of the Church—the writer’s said in an interview that he was raised in the Anglican Church and is as Christian as they come . . . except that he doesn’t believe in God—would be a natural subject for Kirk to examine.  I can assure ROTters that “Philip Pullman” will be worth the read and may well spark a few discussions.  (Don’t hesitate to comment, Readers.  Both Kirk and I will be interested to hear what you all find to say in response.)]

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, is the Beatles of literature, and Philip Pullman, author of the fantasy series His Dark Materials, is her Rolling Stones. The comparison is apt in many ways. Rowling’s sales far exceed Pullman’s, and everyone else’s, but he has strong popularity. His work, like that of the Stones, is on the darker side. Supporters of each use the strengths of their champions to bash the other. And both Rowling and Pullman maintain good relations with each other, as did the Beatles and the Stones. Rowling has spoken with enthusiasm about Pullman’s work. Pullman is more reserved about Rowling – he says he’s only read the second (and weakest) Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 1998 – U.K./1999 – U.S.), and that only because he had to, as a judge for an annual book contest, but he has also spoken positively of Rowling.

His Dark Materials (Northern Lights, published in the U.S. as The Golden Compass, Scholastic, 1995; The Subtle Knife, 1997; and The Amber Spyglass, 2000) is the kind of fantasy a former schoolteacher like Pullman might be expected to write. It’s not only a work in three volumes, but it contains a number of “books” within those volumes. There’s a “book” on ecology and the environment, terribly appropriate for these times, involving the changes in climate and their effect on animals (the polar bears). There’s a “book” on scientific procedures, centering on Dr. Mary Malone, formerly a nun, now a physicist; this is the least exciting material in the series, but it is full of respect for the patient work that researchers do. There’s a “book” on the nature of animals that has value for anyone who thinks about the subject, because Pullman makes it clear that animals have their own ways of being conscious. There’s a “book” on string theory. And so on.

There’s also a book on religion. Obviously this is the most controversial part of the series, since Pullman has stated a number of times that he is an atheist, and his dislike of organized religion is both well known and evident. I have a problem with Pullman on this aspect of his series, but not because of his attack on religion.  I don’t think that it goes remotely far enough. A writer in the New York Times Book Review called his position “closely reasoned.” The reader may judge from the following:

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.

I used to be a nun you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.

These passages do not strike me as “closely reasoned.” They are essentially insults, although I suspect that many “religious” people would without hesitation agree that organized religion has been responsible for much slaughter, torturing, and mental dictatorship. Institutions have a way of defending themselves, and religion is no exception. The Church has often behaved the way Pullman says it does, perhaps without so much melodramatic twirling of moustaches, but nevertheless indefensibly.

And a “religious” person would not necessarily object to Pullman’s presentation of the Authority (the name in the books for the Church, or possibly for the Roman Catholic Church); as someone said to me, “It’s nothing like the God I believe in.” I suspect this may be why the former Archbishop of Canterbury recommended the books, suggesting that they might be useful in religious education classes. Undoubtedly the Archbishop has firsthand knowledge of the weaknesses of organized religion, especially the fanatical kind. (Pullman’s denunciation of religion appears to deal specifically with Christians; one wonders whether he would include the Jews, the Buddhists, and the Muslims in his indictment.)

But if religion is so bad, what’s the alternative? I’m afraid that the only principle I can find in the books, besides the idea that the church is bad, is that very young teens should be allowed to have unprotected sex with each other. I can imagine screams from Pullman’s defenders objecting that he never says that his young characters Lyra Belacqua, a twelve-year-old girl fated to bring about a massive correction to the world she lives in, and Will Parry, whom Lyra encounters along the course of her adventures, have sex, and Pullman has said the same thing. Literally he is correct: he doesn’t explicitly say the two characters have been sexually active. But I doubt that few readers would take these passages any other way:

I heard, . . . I was awake and I wanted to tell you the same and now I know what I must have felt all the time: I love you, Will, I love you –

The word love set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm, honey-fragrant hair and her sweet, moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit.

Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.

. . . .

They looked dazed, as if some happy accident had robbed them of their wits; they moved slowly; their eyes were not focused on what they looked at.

They spent all day on the wide hills, and in the heat of the afternoon, they visited their gold-and-silver grove. They talked, they bathed, they ate, they kissed, they lay in a trance of happiness murmuring words whose sound was as confused as their sense, and they felt they were melting with love.

. . . .

He felt her tremble, and then under his hands the delicate bones of her back began to rise and fall, and he heard her sob quietly. He stroked her warm hair, her tender shoulders, and then he kissed her face again and again, and presently she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and fell still.

Now calm down, everyone. . . . This is the language of the bodice-rippers. At a minimum, Pullman has given himself “plausible deniability.” If he is merely suggesting that teenagers should be free to hug and kiss, well, the church has never had much luck preventing that. And the encounter of the two tweens is presented in the books as a world-transforming event, one toward which all history has been moving. It’s hard to imagine that a night of mere snuggling could accomplish so great a goal, or that the church would seriously bother to oppose it.

The truth is that as a writer Pullman tends to pull his punches.  He wants to have things both ways; for example, he doesn’t want to say that the kids in his story make love, but he certainly wants us to feel not only that they do, but that they ought to, as a liberated and liberating activity.  Even in his presentation of death, he is able to give those who would like to believe in immortality the feeling that in some sense such a thing just might exist. To quote:

I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you. . . . We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams. . . . And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight. . . .

At one level Pullman in his writing will compromise to keep his readers happy. What he really feels in private, of course, is unknowable.

Frequently fantasy (as opposed to imagination) visualizes a world without God, a fact that in my opinion – my own biases show here – can explain why fantasy books such as Pullman’s, and other creations such as electronic fantasy games, tend to be so consistently gloomy. Pullman’s materials are indeed dark. Why not? One would think that if we could invent a world without that repressive old God telling us what to do, we’d be a great deal happier. The reverse appears to me to be true: without a God to provide lasting consequences for behavior, there are no consequences, so anything goes (cf. Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire). Much fantasy conceives of the “natural” world as a world of deterministic forces, in which nothing lasts. As a result, it seems to me, contemporary fantasy is frequently morose and full of foreboding. (This is not the case with the Potter books, which clearly point to the survival in another world of those who have died, for example, Harry’s parents. Similarly, the fantasies of the Star Wars films offer The Force, another indicator of a reality greater than the everyday.)

We may now ask whether Pullman’s or J. K. Rowling’s books are “better.” This is clearly an apples-and-oranges question. However, some things can be said. Open a book by Pullman and one by Rowling at random, and the differences immediately become clear. The two are working two different sides of the street. Rowling is by far the more contemporary and “realistic” writer, and her specialty is dialogue, which is consistent with and characteristic of the characters it reveals. Her school kids sound like real school kids talking.

Pullman’s specialty is epic and the well-turned narrative phrase. His dialogue slips in and out of credibility along with his characterizations – his heroine, Lyra, in particular is often simply unbelievable for her age. But as a prose stylist he is magnificent, and his Homeric similes are particularly impressive. The kind of writing Pullman does is the kind more likely to win critical praise and prizes, since anyone can see that it’s Literature, but that is not the last word in a value judgment.

In the matter of plotting, it seems to me that Rowling is simply superior to Pullman. He invents and piles on incidents with determination, throwing in everything he can think of, but an accumulation of detail is no cure for a story that is not particularly dynamic. The plot of His Dark Materials tends to rely on the search for certain objects, thrust into the story at arbitrary times. The Potter books, interestingly, also involve the search for objects, but those searches are required by the overall narrative, while other objects could be substituted for the Golden Compass or the Subtle Knife, both of which exist to make the plot possible, not to embody it.

One may compare Pullman’s plotting to the forward thrust of the Harry Potter stories on all levels, from subplot to book to series. The enthusiasm to see what happens in the next Potter book comes from the fact that there is a “next” that is required by the story, and not simply more incidents to come. The war against heaven and Lyra’s coming of age are not sufficiently differentiated from other events to be more than hooks to hang a story on. The result is that the reader can simply be worn out by the accumulation of incident from time to time – at least this reader was.

Similarly, there is no question in what way Lord Voldemort, in the Potter books, is evil. Pullman doesn’t make much of an effort to distinguish between the forces of the Church and the forces of (in Pullman’s terms) good, except to tell us that the Church and its minions are evil and repressive and the people fighting it are on the side of the good. Where this distinction of good and evil comes from, if there is no God, is hard for me to see, but are there no other differences between the Church and its opponents, besides the banner each is fighting under? The differences between the sides are largely matters of weaponry – Zeppelins, gyrocopters, so what? Lord Asriel, the leader of the rebellion against the Church, is as unattractive a figure as Metatron, the archangel fighting to maintain the Church’s supremacy – both are remote and ruthless. Is there really a reason to pick sides?

We often talk about “good writing” as though it were one kind of thing that can be identified in anyone’s work. Clearly this is not the case. We need to ask what the writer is trying to achieve, and whether or not the writer achieves it. Accurate answers to these questions will bring us closer to a fair evaluation of the author’s work. In his recent book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate Books, 2012), having engaged in a great deal of public dispute on matters of religion, Pullman may present his case more clearly. It seems to me, in the cases discussed here, however, that Rowling is able to achieve her objectives, and Pullman is not. If His Dark Materials really is a stick to beat religion with, one wishes it were a better stick.

Appropriation in the Theater

A quick check with the Dramatists Guild in New York confirms that the magpie culture of borrowing and re-appropriation that drives current pop music is largely alien to playwrights, even when one work is in creative conversation with another.  Unlike Hollywood screenwriters who get paid but lose copyright control to the studios, playwrights—usually poorly paid—at least retain copyright.  If a playwright were to try a freewheeling, blurry-lined adaptation of, say, Tony Kushner’s early 1990s “Angels in America” or Ntzoke Shange’s 1975 “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” without first licensing the rights, odds are pretty good that would be stealing.

So wrote Washington Post theater reviewer Nelson Pressley in a comment about the repercussions from the Gaye v. Thicke and Williams copyright-infringement verdict on 10 March.  I just posted an article about plagiarism in the arts, “What Constitutes Theft in the Arts?,” which focused on pop music (see 5 May on ROT).  That seems to be where most of the copyright-infringement charges turn up and, as Pressley remarks, there aren’t many cases of alleged plagiarism in the theater.  Derivation, yes; actual theft, not so much.

I imagine that there have been instances of charges of plagiarism and copyright infringement levied against playwrights in the past, but I can’t recall reading of any in recent memory (and, trust me, I’ve been around and about for a fair number of years).  There’s a related case, but not of copyright infringement, in the film industry from 1989.  Chris Costner Sizemore, the woman on whose story the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve was based, sued 20th Century Fox when she learned that she’d signed over the rights to her whole life story when she agreed to the making of the film.  Fox insisted that she couldn’t sell the motion picture rights to a memoir she’d written (A Mind of My Own; Morrow, 1989) because the studio owned the rights to Sizemore’s entire life, not just the period covered by Three Faces.  Fox lost the suit, but this wasn’t about theater and it wasn’t a copyright-infringement case.

In a case a little like Sizemore’s, but this time in the stage world, David Hampton sued playwright John Guare for $100 million in 1992 with the claim that Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation had infringed on Hampton’s copyright on his personality and his life story.  Though Hampton’s criminal activities were, in fact, the basis for Guare’s successful 1990 play (it was nominated for 1991 Drama Desk and Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prize; it won the 1990-91 OBIE Award, the 1991 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the 1993 Laurence Olivier Award), the case was dismissed.  The charge against Guare was copyright infringement (although I’m not sure anyone can copyright a personality or a life story), but this wasn’t a case of plagiarism since Hampton didn’t have anything written that Guare could have stolen.  Further, the suit was clearly frivolous, intended merely to pressure Guare and his producers and publishers to avoid the expense of a trial.  Hampton had previously been convicted of harassing Guare with threats and phone calls demanding money.  Fox had been serious in its suit against Sizemore—serious though arrogant; Hampton was just audacious.

This dearth of litigation among playwrights and stage producers (who, since they don’t own the copyrights to the scripts they produce, unlike film producers, don’t have much standing to sue anyone anyway) doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of borrowing, adapting, and appropriating in the theater.  It’s ubiquitous and goes back to pretty ancient times.  I doubt a season just in New York City alone doesn’t pass without at least one adapted or derived play on the boards; nationwide, I can’t imagine that there isn’t at least one in production somewhere at any given time.  Many of our greatest and most popular plays are versions of something else that came before and even if you eliminate non-theatrical sources—movies, novels, even TV shows nowadays—the list would be endless.

The traditional American musical has mostly been an adaptation of a straight play.  In fact, in its earliest incarnation, the musical theater was almost always the result of the musicalization of a straight drama or, more likely, comedy.  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) was based on the play Green Grow The Lilacs by Lynn Riggs (1931); Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady (1956) was adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, and Stephen Sondheim was based on several classic Roman comedies by Plautus; Purlie (1970) by Gary Geld, Ossie Davis, Peter Udell, and Philip Rose was a musicalization of Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961); and Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles (1983) was based on the French play of the same title by Jean Poiret (1973).  Add in shows adapted from films (Carnival!, 1961; Woman of the Year, 1981), novels (South Pacific, 1949; Camelot, 1961), TV shows (The Addams Family, 2010; Cinderella, 2013), and even newspaper and magazine features (Pal Joey, 1940; Guys and Dolls, 1950), and the list is endless.  But none of these, regardless of quality or ultimate critical evaluation, are copies—derivative, perhaps, but all of them are original works of theater.

She Loves Me (1963) is a perfect case in point which even comes with an expanded web of connections.  The musical with book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick is, first, adapted from the 1937 Hungarian play by Miklós László that’s known in English as Parfumerie.  (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, of course, had been previously responsible for Fiorello! (1959)—my very first Broadway play—and would ultimately create Fiddler on the Roof (1964).  Joe Masteroff would go on to write the book for Cabaret in 1966—itself an adaptation of John van Druten’s 1951 I Am a Camera, which was adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 collection, The Berlin Stories.)  Parfumerie wasn’t produced on a U.S. stage until 2009 when it was presented as The Perfume Shop by the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, in an English adaptation by E. P. Dowdall, László’s nephew.  (A Toronto staging of an adaptation from Canadian writers Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins was also produced that year at the Soulpepper Theatre Company.)  As far as I can learn, the play’s never been presented in New York City.  (I'm not sure the script is even available in English.) 

Before the musical adaption, Parfumerie was the source for a still-popular romantic film comedy starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, entitled The Shop Around the Corner (1940), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  That movie was itself musicalized as In the Good Old Summertime (1949), directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson, with the setting shifted from 1930s Budapest to turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago.  That film adaptation was followed several decades later by the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan 1998 romcom You’ve Got Mail, directed by Nora Ephron from her own script which reset the tale in contemporary New York City and turned the letters the secret lovers send each other into e-mails.  (The shop also changed in each incarnation: in Parfumerie, it’s obviously a perfume shop; in Shop Around the Corner, it’s a gift shop; in Summertime, it’s a music store; in Mail, Hanks and Ryan run rival book stores on the Upper West Side.) 

Finally, at least so far, the MGM straight motion picture, whose script was by Samson Raphaelson and Ben Hecht, was re-adapted (and translated into French!) by Jean-Jacques Zilbermann and Evelyne Fallot in 2001, when it was staged by Zilbermann as a non-musical play, La boutique au coin de la rue (“The shop at the corner of the street”), at Paris’s Théâtre Montparnasse, where it won five Molière Awards (the French equivalent to New York’s Tonys). 

On New Year’s Eve in 2006, I saw a performance of She Loves Me at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.  (I also saw the Broadway revival in May 1994, produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Boyd Gaines, but I never wrote a report on the performance.)  Directed by Kyle Donnelly, the Arena production of what executive director Stephen Richard characterized as “an endearing story of letters and love” starred Kevin Kraft as Georg Nowack and Brynn O’Malley as Amalia Balash (the characters called Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak in Shop), and was, of course, staged in the round.  She Loves Me, which Arena artistic director Molly Smith called “a nearly perfect musical,” is old-fashioned in the vein of My Fair Lady or The King and I (getting a major revival right now at New York’s Lincoln Center).  An “homage to one of the greatest romantic ideals, finding a soulmate,” as production dramaturg Michelle T. Hall put it, She Loves Me “courts all the different facets of love: boyish crushes, erotic affairs, married love, broken hearts, and the most elusive of all, true love.”  It’s charming and fun, even if the songs, which Smith described as “completely character-driven” and “expressions of the characters’ feelings and situations,” are not especially memorable (I no longer remember them, a scant nine years later). 

Alluding to the letters of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the love sonnets of Shakespeare, and the fictionalized proxy love correspondence in Cyrano de Bergerac, Hall positioned the musical “in the tradition of epistolary love affairs.”  She also quoted director Donnelly in an oblique comment on the up-dated e-correspondence of You’ve Got Mail: “There is something so tangible, visceral and immediate about a letter.  It can be tucked away and pulled out to read at a moment’s notice.  You hold something that the other person touched, created, and e-mail just doesn’t compare.”  Like the play’s format and structure, the romance at its center is also old-fashioned; outside of the exchange of letters, Georg and Amalia clash like Much Ado About Nothing’s Benedick and Beatrice.

Arena’s production of She Loves Me, which included no stars or actors whom I knew, was even, solid, and much more than just competent, though no performance stood out in the ensemble.  Director Donnelly made good use of the Fichandler’s arena platform—I always feel that staging a musical in the round is particularly hard—and everyone’s voice was strong (they were miked, as usual these days) and vibrant.  I especially liked Arpad’s one solo number, “Try Me,” his self-promotion.  Clifton Guterman, the young actor playing the delivery boy-who-would-be-a-clerk, may have looked a tad older than a teenager, but his tenor was youthful and his enthusiasm in selling himself (and the song) was delightful.  But in the end, this was an ensemble production (though its past includes stars: Barbara Cook as Amalia Balash in the original Broadway run along with Jack Cassidy, who won a Tony as the self-serving Steven Kodaly; and near-stars: Boyd Gaines, who won a Tony as Georg Nowack in the 1993 Roundabout/Broadway revival, and Louis Zorich, “Mr. Olympia Dukakis,” as Mr. Maraczek); the cast as a whole did a very nice job.  (By coincidence, one of the cable channels ran both The Shop Around the Corner and then In the Good Old Summertime the week before I saw the stage musical.  That was kind of fun, though the station unhappily didn’t run You’ve Got Mail as well, and it illustrated many of the aspects of theatrical adaptation.)

Alongside musicalization, the most common form of adaptation in theater is probably translation.  Every translation of a play, usually accomplished by another playwright or other theater professional or a writer from another genre, is a form of adaptation, even when the translator’s intent is to render the original author’s text as directly as possible.  Many translations are also deliberate adaptations, from simply transferring the setting from the original one to one based in the culture of the new language or an up-dating of the play’s time period to even more extensive changes.  A case in point is Nora, a new German version of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll House by Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a Berlin company, which I saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre in November 2004. 

Nora is the standard German title for Doll House (1879), but this was more than just a new translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—and less than a full adaptation.  The pay was reset in the 21st century, both in look and in language (some of the music in the production was by Pharrell Williams), but everything from the original was still in this version—the Helmers were still Norwegians (that is, they weren’t transported to Berlin or something); Torvald was still a banker; Nora was still a stay-at-home wife; they still had three kids; Rank (still a doctor), Krogstad, and Kristine were all still there in the same relationships as Ibsen put them in; and, most significant, Nora had still secretly forged her father’s signature on the loan agreement with which she had borrowed money to pay for her and Torvald’s trip to Italy when he was ill.  There were a few minor changes—there was no nurse in this version, and Helene, the maid, had become Monika, an au pair from Africa. 

The Schaubühne did make some more significant changes to the text/story to make it seem more current, however, and some of them seemed to have diluted the original dramatic impact.  One wasn’t very large—though the meaning was more significant than it might seem: Rank wasn’t dying of cancer; he’d gotten AIDS from having been omni-sexual in his youth.  Now this may not seem like much of an alteration, but it struck me as weakening Ibsen’s point—which is, itself, a little hard to buy today also.  Ibsen believed, as did many in his day, that moral corruption is manifested later in physical illness—and could be passed on, like a hereditary disease, to the children.  This was a pseudo-scientific belief in the late 19th century, and Ibsen used it in a more prominent way in Ghosts, of course—where Osvald’s father’s sexual profligacy is inherited by Osvald as syphilis.  What’s the difference between this and the new version?  Well, as I see it, cancer isn’t a disease we generally blame on willfully unhealthy behavior—especially in the 19th century when no one knew about the connection to smoking and other carcinogenic activities.  So, if Rank has cancer and he blames it on his corrupt youth, then it must be some kind of moral retribution since the youthful behavior didn’t directly cause the cancer.  However, if he has AIDS because he had unprotected sex with infected men and women, his illness is a direct result of his willful behavior.  (Because the adaptation was set in the 2000’s, he can’t even use the excuse that no one knew what caused AIDS when he engaged in the behavior.)  Unless you subscribe to the notion that AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality or promiscuity, the moral element was erased from the situation.  (As I said, this aspect of the play is hard to play today, but it only works at all if the play remains set in the 19th century when people actually believed this theory.)  This was somewhat more significant than just as an element in the Rank-Nora subplot—the same theory was applied to Krogstad, who was considered to be morally corrupt and therefore a danger to his family, especially his children.  It was this moral corruption that permitted Torvald to reject Krogstad and forced Krogstad to blackmail Nora with the letter and loan document he left for Torvald at the end of the play.  It was also this belief, which Krogstad explained to Nora, that impelled her to leave her children when her transgression had been revealed—she couldn’t stay in the house with them for fear that she’d infect them with her corruption.  Without this motivation, she didn’t have to leave, and the play’s ending became a purely selfish act and had no dramatic strength.

Now, if all that’s true, then the other, really big change in this version had even greater repercussions.  According to the New York Times review, the company wanted to restore the shock Ibsen’s original audience felt at the end of the play.  (According to theater history, there were even riots in Europe when Doll House opened and Nora leaves, it was such a unheard-of action.)  Without reading the review, you’d never guess what Schmidt-Henkel had done.  He had Nora shoot Torvald before she left.  And it wasn’t just one quick shot—she unloaded an automatic pistol into him, even as he was writhing on the ground, half in the giant fish tank that was a prominent part of the starkly modern apartment set.  Okay, this was shocking, but it changed the whole dynamic of the ending, and made Nora into a straight-out murderer rather than a distraught but enlightened woman who acted out of what she believed was selflessness.  First, for her departure to be justified, she still had to believe that by staying, she endangered her children.  That’s hard to do in the 21st century, but with the “evidence” of the physical manifestations of mortal corruption no longer as clear as it was in Ibsen’s original, it’s even harder.  Second, since Torvald’s only real fault was still that he didn’t leap to Nora’s defense when he learned of her forgery on the loan document—just like in the original, he feared for his position at the bank and that Krogstad would now be able to manipulate him.  Perhaps even more today than in Ibsen’s time, this came off as a supremely egocentric posture, and that made him a chauvinistic pig, as we used to say—but it was hardly a capital crime.  It justified leaving him—maybe enough today not to need the matter of corrupting the kids—but hardly shooting him.  So, instead of being a brave and selfless woman, Nora was a fugitive from a murder charge—and maybe even nuts.  This alone changed the entire meaning of the play.  The shock may have been restored, but it was shock for its own sake, as a theatrical effect, not based on dramatic necessity. 

I suppose that was enough to make the translation/adaptation questionable, but there were other problems I had with this show.  I know that Europe is behind the U.S. in enfranchising women, especially in the marketplace, but they’re not 50 years behind.  (After all, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and England have all already elected female heads of government—we haven’t yet.)  It’s hard for me to accept that a woman as self-consciously modern as Nora here—the costume she wore to the Christmas party wasn’t some peasant outfit so she could dance a tarantella; she went in complete punk get-up, blood smears and all, and did a techno dance (of which the Germans were fond, I believe)—could be so bereft of options that a) she had to forge her father’s signature for a loan and b) she couldn’t resolve the problem by some more rational means than either leaving or, even more drastically, shooting Torvald.  The whole idea of the “doll-wife” (and that expression was still in the German text, by the way) was a throw-back, even in Europe today.  In fact, moving the whole thing up to the 2000s seemed to make everything a little incredible—contrived, I guess.  Instead of an indictment of a social problem that the playwright saw as universal, this version made the whole thing a play about a seriously dysfunctional couple and their dysfunctional friends.  (I ought to add, too, that the very idea today that a sick man had to go to Italy to recover—and that this was his only remedy—was hard to buy also.  Germans still believed in “taking the cure”—going to a health spa for mineral baths—at least when I was living there a half-century ago, but needing to go south for one’s health was still pretty much an anachronism—more like Death in Venice in 1912 than 21st century.  It was another aspect that really had to remain in Ibsen’s own time to work.)

There was some problem with the acting—I presume Thomas Ostermeier’s direction, really—too.  The actors were good, and I didn’t have any problem believing them in their roles/situations most of the time (outside of the problems of the script above), except that every so often they went off their rockers emotionally for no apparent reason or motivation.  One character might all of a sudden shout (or bark) at another, or another character would behave as if he were in the grips of an epileptic fit or some other odd physical condition and throw himself about the stage violently.  (The final shooting was sort of like this.  Nora had the gun—she was contemplating suicide—but she’d put it away and had even gone off into her room off stage.  Then she came out, pointed the gun at Torvald for a few seconds, and started pulling the trigger again and again.)  Now, maybe I missed something in the German text or in the translation (titles), but I don’t think so.  (I really wished my German were good enough not to have had to refer to the surtitles as much as I did—even though I knew the play fairly well, having taught it.  I did want to see what the translator did with the text.)  It didn’t help matters that the performance was two hours and ten minutes without an intermission—and the Harvey Theatre’s seats are not soft!

Anyway, it was disappointing, but not actually bad.  I pretty much concluded that updating Doll House isn’t profitable—you lose too much that isn’t made up in the modernization—but it was interesting to see the attempt.  It also made me reconsider the original—and how good Ibsen was at constructing plays to say what he wanted, such that trying to make them say something else in part destroys them.  (I saw a 1997 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Arena in which Liviu Ciulei turned the dramatist’s famously realistic play into a symbolistic staging.  It simply didn’t work.)  Ironically, I also concluded that though Ibsen must remain in his own period for the plot to work, the drama—the point, the message, the theme—still communicates to a modern audience.  I mean, we may no longer believe in the nonsense of moral corruption = physical decay, but if we accept that they did, we can still see Ibsen’s point about trust and respect and honesty within a marriage.

We know that Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots from other writers.  Copyright protection didn’t exist in the 16th century, so he and the many other writers who used someone else’s ideas for their own works were on safe legal ground, and because Shakespeare’s final products (leaving aside, please, any argument that he wasn’t the true playwright) were so magnificent most of the time, no one has much cared in the centuries since.  But appropriation was nevertheless common even in the Renaissance (and long before as well: consider how may versions of Oedipus exist in Greek and Roman theater).  Shakespeare composed The Taming of the Shrew between 1590 and 1592 and there were almost immediately adaptations and derivatives on the stages of England and western Europe.  (Probably the best known stage adaptation is Cole Porter’s 1948 musical version, Kiss Me, Kate, which I’ll mention shortly.  The most radical was probably 1973’s The Shew by Charles Marowitz whose Hamlet collage, a 1964 deconstruction, became an international theater phenomenon; his Shrew was composed in much the same way.)

Probably the oldest Shrew variation is The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, a sequel written by John Fletcher (1579-1625) in about 1611.  (The script was first published in 1647, 22 years after Fletcher’s death.)  Characterized by Matt Wolf, a London theater reviewer for Variety, as a play “that virtually no one knows,” The Tamer Tamed (as it’s commonly called) was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries after the Restoration, often more so than its source, but dropped off the stage for about 200 years until 2003 when the Royal Shakespeare Company revived it; I saw it when the RSC came to Washington’s Kennedy Center later that same year with a repertoire that comprised both the Fletcher and its Shakespearean basis.  (I didn’t see the RSC production of Shrew, but I have seen it many times, including one at Shenandoah Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia, in May 2003, staged in the troupe’s reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars theater—see “Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia,” 18 November 2009 on ROT and “Shenandoah Shakespeare,” 21 November 2009—and then again at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre in November 2007.)

I have trouble with Shrew to start with.  Okay, I know we’re not supposed to judge a work from the past by current standards, but I’ve never really been able to get around Petruchio’s treatment of Kate in order to “tame” her.  (The STC production piled on because director Rebecca Bayla Taichman posited the idea that Shrew is all about marriage as commerce.  Baptista auctioned off his daughters.)  I’m not sure this analogy will go over real well, but I’ll float it anyway: I once had a dog who got uncontrollably violent when he met another dog.  I spoke to a trainer and her analysis was that I had two choices.  She could break him entirely of his hostility, but he’d be spiritually crushed.  Or she could make him manageable; he wouldn’t be out of control but he could never be let alone with another dog off his leash.  We decided that the second option would be best for the dog (and for me)—but Petruchio seems to have gone for option one.  And for far less cause.  (Now, I’m not really comparing a woman to a dog—please don’t start that—though Petruchio does use animal-training techniques to tame Kate.)  I also understand that Shrew is a comedy—but if you play it entirely for laughs, then you make fun of what amounts to domestic violence.  If you make Kate so shrewish that she seems to need taming, in order to try to justify Petruchio’s behavior, then she ends up not just a strong-willed and independent woman but a truly insane one.  If you play her as a sort of protofeminist (which I maintain is what Shakespeare wrote, though she, of course, is way out of her time in the Renaissance), then Petruchio’s actions are all unwarranted (and even, by our standards, criminal).  Those aren’t really funny situations.  So, maybe I’m just a stick-in-the-mud, but I’ve never been able to reconcile this dilemma.  I don’t have the same problem with the racism of Othello or the anti-Semitism of Merchant, but the sexism of Shrew defeats me. 

As for Tamer Tamed, think Lysistrata meets Shrew—20 years on.  Katherine has died—RSC director Gregory Doran suggested that she’d died “from exhaustion”—and Petruchio has fallen in love again.  His new bride, Maria, refuses to consummate their marriage unless Petruchio changes his ways.  That’s enough to relate . . . because it’s awful.  (I’ve never seen a Jacobean play that was remotely enjoyable: The Duchess of Malfi, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Venice Preserv’d—they’re all grim.  Yech!)  There’s a word often used to describe bad theater, and it’s very apt for Tamer: leaden.  It just lay there lifeless.  The RSC tried so hard to animate it—the reviews all focused on the performances—that they ended up just looking manic, as if they were trying desperately to bring a dead body back to life.  There’s not a single line of poetry or even memorable prose; not one attractive, or even sympathetic, character; and a one-joke plot (all the women are denying all the men sex) that reduces everyone to a cipher.  I couldn’t even keep most of the characters straight—but that was mostly because I didn’t really care.  Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even clever.  I repeat a caveat I’ve used numerous times: often an unknown or neglected play is unknown and neglected because it’s bad!!!  This adaptation didn’t improve on the original; why RSC decided to dredge it up is a mystery to me. 

In 1999, a Broadway production of Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (with book by Samuel and Bella Spewack) opened at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld), directed by  Michael Blakemore and starring Marin Mazzie as Lilli Vanessi/Kate and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Fred Graham/Petruchio.  The revival, the first since the 1948 début, went on tour after it closed in New York and I saw it with Rachel York and Rex Smith at the Kennedy Center in Washington in July 2001.  Kate is a backstage story about a touring troupe putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Shrew; it’s supposed to have been based on the off-stage lives of the husband-and-wife acting duo Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who were said to have had a tempestuous relationship when they weren’t on stage.  

Unfortunately, I never wrote up any notes on this show and the only comment I remember making was that Rex Smith was just not a powerful stage persona, leaving a rather large hole in the center of the production where he’s called upon to portray two notoriously chauvinistic males: Petruchio from Shrew and Fred Graham, the director and lead actor of the touring company.  (To soften Fred’s benighted sexism, director Blakemore and uncredited play doctor John Guare made Harrison Howell, Lilli’s new beau since she and Fred separated, into a true MCP of an army general, with a nod to Douglas MacArthur—sunglasses and all—instead of the mere stuffed-shirt politico of the original script.) 

Unlike the Petruchio of Shrew, however, Fred’s far less a problem for me since, first of all, Kate is a musical comedy of the old school and no one is seriously endangered—the comic mobsters notwithstanding—and second, he’s hardly as hard-core as Petruchio and all he’s really up to is winning Lilli back—in his (ahem) fashion.  (Kate is, after all, not just a musical comedy, it’s a romantic comedy.  People don’t get hurt in a romcom!)  Of course, irrespective of production styles and individual performances, Kate is still the very first winner of the Tony for Best Musical and contains Porter’s most beloved stage score, with such perennial faves as “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” “So In Love,” “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and “Wunderbar.”  (There are even several wonderful tunes from Shakespeare’s text, like “Where Is the Life That Late I Led” and “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.”) 

One of the most peculiar theatrical derivatives I’ve seen in my theatergoing life was Richard Schechner’s The Prometheus Project in December 1985.  Of course, anything Schechner, one of the founders of the 1960s avant-garde theater scene in New York and around the country, does is decidedly . . . well, unconventional.  Prometheus was a work performed in four movements plus a coda, conceived and directed by Schechner and presented by the Wooster Group Visiting Artist Series at the Performing Garage (previously the workspace of Schechner’s Performance Group, Wooster Group’s predecessor). 

Schechner, whose work hadn’t been seen in New York for five years, returned with his version of the Greek classic tragedy Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus (c. 525/524-c. 456/455 BCE).  The Prometheus Project expounded Schechner’s belief that nuclear firepower is Prometheus’ gift gone awry, and that nuclear destruction is the epitome of man’s violence, which also includes torture and sexual abuse.  The performance attempted to tie all this together and make us recognize our victims. 

To create visions of destruction and brutality, Schechner (who was one of my professors at NYU) and his performers combined movement, gesture, light, speech, and music.  These images were woven into the stories of Prometheus, chained to a mountain for stealing fire, and Io, turned into a cow and forced to wander the earth for rejecting Zeus.  The movement and gesture images were more affecting than the language images, which were unexciting and unconvincing.

Most striking was “Tomoko,” the opening movement, starting with slides from Renzo Kinoshita’s Pica Don depicting Hiroshima before, during, and after the bombing.  When the lights came up, the actors performed every-day tasks in slow motion while cellist Mollie Glazer played Bach’s Kol Nidre.  This segued into Becke Wilenski singing Bach’s oratorio, “Hear Ye, Israel.  O, how hast thou heeded my commandments.”  The scene was compelling, and drew attention to each action, each gesture.      

The succeeding segments were less focused and depended heavily on language and speech.  “Annie” gave us a very excisable porn show by veteran sex educator, former prostitute, stripper, and porno actor Annie Sprinkle, whom we were supposed to see as a victim.  It was during this scene that Schechner’s manipulative inclinations showed themselves.  Two actors dressed in trench coats, slouch hats, and dark glasses—the kind that stereotypical viewers of porn movies or strip shows are supposed to wear—took positions facing the audience, seated on bleacher-like risers at one end of the performance space.  The idea seemed to be that these “men” were there to witness our attendance at a porn show.  But, of course, we didn’t know the scene would take place and there was no way any of us could actually have left if we’d wanted to without disturbing all the rest of the audience and walking across the performance area.  So Schechner was trying to have it both ways—make us captive and unwitting spectators at a sex show and at the same time essentially point at us accusingly for being there.  The conceit actually pissed me off—it seemed dishonest.

In “Io,” while female performers ran back and forth imitating Io’s flight, two women told apparently true stories of abuse by men.  The last movement was “Prometheus” in which a nude Mahmood Karimi-Hakak was ritualistically bound and then recounted the story of his own torture.  Following a moment borrowed from Endgame during which Prometheus was released, the coda presented the entire company looking at us as two readers described a post-holocaustal world.      

Somehow, none of this came together.  Whenever the language began, the performance dragged and paled.  Schechner’s not partial to words, and his mostly novice performers were incapable of making them sound genuine.  After the stirring first movement, The Prometheus Project slackened disappointingly.  (I don’t know if Schechner took this show on a tour—it began in a workshop of college students, who made up most of the cast, and the director-creator may have presented it to other student audiences around the country—but I’m unaware of any revivals of The Prometheus Project in New York City since 1985.)

[Many of my remarks above were taken from past performance reports that predate ROT and even some of the e-mail reports that inspired the blog.  My comments on the Arena Stage revival of She Loves Me were drawn from a report I wrote on 17 January 2007 covering a visit to Washington over the year-end holidays that year, and the section on Nora was based on a 15 November 2004 report.  My brief remarks on The Taming of the Shrew at STC were taken from my 29 November 2007 report, and the comments on The Tamer Tamed were from a report written on 13 January 2004.  (You remember that I had no archived remarks on the Kennedy Center revival of Kiss Me, Kate.)  The discussion of Schechner’s Prometheus Project was actually a short review I wrote for Stages after seeing the performance but which was never published; Stages reduced my remarks to a brief mention in a general survey article in the March 1986 issue.]

What Constitutes Theft in the Arts?

When I was in college, Lee Kahn, the school’s theater director, used to like to tell us, “The first rule of theater is theft.”  He said that so often that when I began to teach acting and theater myself, I passed his bit of wisdom on to my own students.  What Lee meant, of course, was that as theater artists (the rule didn’t apply just to actors), we should carefully watch other artists, especially the good and great ones (another actor’s admonition, though not one that Lee inculcated, is “Only steal from the best”), and take from them what we find useful and effective (or, maybe, just neat!)—a kind of surreptitious apprenticeship.  Painters do that, too, of course.  You can sometimes see young artists in museums copying the great masters to learn their techniques. 

When I was trying to teach myself how to write, I emulated the styles of writers I admired.  Of course, I didn’t really sound like myself when I did that consciously: I was a poor imitation of good writers, not a genuine writer myself.  I probably still do that—less consciously, I hope—but I think, at least to some extent, I’ve absorbed what I’ve picked up so that, as one of my acting teachers put it, my technique has simply become part of my way of working, no longer artificial and assumed, but an innate part of me.  It’s like the way someone takes on an affectation, a bit of artificially assumed manner—such as an accent with which he wasn’t born or a level of diction he never learned in school—until slowly it actually becomes part of his habitual make-up.  It’s not an affectation anymore, it’s just behavior. 

Musicians, songwriters, and composers follow a path not unlike actors and writers.  Somewhere there’s a line that demarcates emulation, tribute, or homage from outright theft—permanent “borrowing.”  Now, Milton Berle, always accused of recycling other comedians’ jokes, notwithstanding, however, I’ve never heard of an actor actually being accused of (much less charged with) plagiarism.  But writers (remember Doris Kearns Goodwin?) and composer-lyricists can fall prey to the P word and its often very hard to tell where “fair use” leaves off and misappropriation begins.  (I’ve worked for one editor who prohibits any but the most necessary quotations because his publishers won’t pay for them and he doesn’t want to cross the line into improper use.  I couldn’t even quote from the Hart Crane poem from which Tennessee Williams took his title Summer and Smoke, although I’ve always understood that in literary criticism, “fair use” meant writers could quote, with proper attribution, any pertinent statement.)  Sometimes, in a courtroom where the dividing line is under question, the search for it can be downright ludicrous. 

In the most recent prominent case of a charge of plagiarism, the family of Marvin Gaye, who died in 1984 (shot to death by his father), claimed in 2013 that songwriters Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams copied portions of Gaye’s 1977 pop hit “Got to Give It Up” in their release “Blurred Lines.”  The Gaye family sued Thicke, Pharrell, and rapper Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. (known as T.I.) who’s featured on the song, for over $25 million in damages for copyright infringement.  On 10 March, the court ruled that Thicke and Pharrell, but not Harris, were guilty of improperly using parts of Gaye’s song and the judge ordered them to pay $7.4 million in damages. 

The verdict has raised many questions and generated vocal responses on both sides of the issue, from those who praise the ruling and those who vehemently disagree.  The Washington Post ran a compilation of short comments by members of its arts and culture staff on plagiarism in fields other than pop music (visual art, fiction writing, stand-up comedy, classical music, and theater) in response to the “Blurred Lines” verdict.  As Peggy McGlone writes in her introduction to the collection, “The recent verdict by a federal jury in Los Angeles may have settled one case, but it has ignited a larger debate about creativity and ownership and how to sort out the co-opted from the copied.”  McGlone, the Post’s local arts reporter, wryly remarks, “Blurred lines indeed,” and observes in the end, “While artists borrow, sample and appropriate frequently, the answer to the question ‘Did they steal?’ is usually no.” 

It can be a prickly question, even when reduced to the simpler-seeming legal issue of copyright infringement.  “There’s no history of art without borrowing, appropriation and in some cases theft,” says Washington Post art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott.  (He was writing about visual art, but his comment is applicable to all the arts.)  Some aspects of a performer’s art can’t be copyrighted.  Lyrics, tunes, even distinctive looks (with respect to costumes, hair and makeup, and even physical appearance; Jackie Onassis successfully sued Christian Dior in 1984 for making a commercial with a look-alike when Onassis refused), but not style—whatever that is.  Take, for example, the 1989 case of Bette Midler against the ad agency Young & Rubicam and the Ford Motor Company. 

In the 1970s, Ford started a TV commercial campaign which featured the singing of well-known singers.  If the original artists didn’t want to make the ad, Young & Rubicam hired a sound-alike to duplicate the song and the singer’s style for the commercial.  When the ad company approached Midler to sing her distinctive cover of “Do You Want to Dance” (from Midler’s 1973 début album, The Divine Miss M), she declined and Young & Rubicam brought in an imitator.  Midler, who (like Jackie Onassis) never makes commercials, took Ford and the ad agency to court in Midler v. Ford Motor Co., but she didn’t sue for copyright infringement because, while copyright law protects the song and her actual recording itself, it doesn’t protect imitations.  (Ford had obtained a license to use the song, so they were on legal grounds there.)  The singer claimed, however, that the imitation was a misappropriation of her identity because the version of the song as she recorded it was unmistakably identified with her, giving a different meaning to “identity theft.”  (The legal issues of this case are complex, but this is not the forum, nor am I competent, to discus them.)  Though Nancy Sinatra had lost a similar suit against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 1970 for their use in a tire commercial of “These Boots Were Made For Walkin’,” a song strongly connected to her, Midler won her case on appeal (the original trial court had denied her claim).  She had sued for $10 million but was awarded $400,000; however, Madison Avenue was put on notice. 

Because these cases often concern plaintiffs or defendants who are performers, the court cases can get . . . well, interesting is a neutral way of describing them.  (“Bizarre” would probably be more accurate.)  For instance, in a 1989 case, comedy writers E. J. Novak and Debra Studer, a husband-and-wife team, sued NBC, the producers of Saturday Night Live, for copyright infringement in Novak v. National Broadcasting Co., Inc., claiming the network and SNL had taken material the duo had written in 1985 for a local program called Video Vault on independent station WOR-TV (New York City channel 9 and now known as WWOR) and reused it in six 1985 and ’87 sketches about, among other topics, the mobster Lucky Luciano, Attila the Hun, Frankenstein, and “The Fifth Beatle” (fictional oboist Wingo Murray).  Novak and Studer, who pursued NBC on this issue for over four years, ultimately lost their suit—but not so much on the merits themselves (although the judge found legal reasons to dismiss their cause), as the fact that the comedy writers pissed the judge off in court and in documents they filed. 

Novak and Studer’s principal error was that unlike most plaintiffs and defendants in plagiarism cases, they didn’t hire lawyers to represent them: they pleaded their own case at trial.  (NBC was represented by a white-shoe Manhattan firm.)  This decision led the plaintiffs to turn the courtroom into what the judge called a “playground for comics.”  After two years of polite exchanges between Novak and Studer and the defense attorneys, in 1989 they wrote the lawyers a note addressed to “Dear Laurel and Hardy” because of their physical appearances.  When the attorneys complained to the judge, Novak countered, “Their inconsistency and lack of consideration, even by attorneys’ standards, transcends the boundaries of law and enters that funny little netherworld we call—the Rudeness Zone.”  He then sent the defense team another note greeting them simply as “Stan” and “Ollie.”  In his turn, Novak complained to the judge, “The sight of Mr. Jones [one of the defense lawyers] rolling toward us in anger is a terrifying experience reminiscent of scenes from either ‘The Honeymooners’ or ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’”  “‘Legal humor’ may or may not be an oxymoron,” observed the New York Times.  “But attempts at it can prove costly.” 

The judge took such exception to Novak and Studer’s verbal antics, he not only decided against them in the lawsuit, but assessed them $3500 in court costs (over $6800 today).  The Times reported that Novak alleged in an interview that he and his partner “were victims of pernicious linguistic discrimination.”  “We could have said, ‘Your Honor, according to habeas corpus writ dictum, this was dilatory and deceitful,’ but I’m not a lawyer,” said Novak. “We used humor where they used legalese.”  He added that the only people who were actually hurt by his language were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, “because they were compared to these lawyers.”  However amusing and clever Novak and Studer were, they essentially scuttled their own legal boat when they took their professional tactics into what the Times labeled “the generally unfunny world of litigation.”

Possibly the strangest case with respect to courtroom demeanor was the 1985 copyright infringement suit brought against Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.  Reggae singer-songwriter Patrick Alley sued Jagger for copying his song “Just Another Night,” which he said he’d recorded in 1979 and released on his 1982 album, A Touch of Patrick Alley, for Jagger’s own song of the same title (titles aren’t copyrightable) from the Stones frontman’s first solo album, 1985’s She’s the Boss.  The court in White Plains, New York, decided in 1988 that Jagger hadn’t stolen Alley’s song.

Patrick Alley v. Mick Jagger itself was relatively straightforward, but the presentation of the evidence offered in court was . . . I’d say it was unique.  In addition to presentation of transcriptions of the lyrics of both songs (by dueling experts, of course), as you would expect, according to the report in the New York Times, the testimony consisted of music, both live and recorded.  During the weeklong trial, a Juilliard instructor played the piano; Sly Dunbar, a Jamaican studio musician, performed on drums; and Jagger sang from the witness stand bits of his recordings “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar” and “Miss You.”  Predictably, taped recordings of Alley’s “Just Another Night,” a minor-key reggae ballad, and Jagger’s identically-titled up-tempo rock song were played in court as well.  Jagger also played work tapes to show the development of the song, and attorneys on both sides sang snippets of the two compositions.  Jagger signed autographs during breaks in the trial, and on the day before the verdict was rendered, when the jury deliberated for 3½ hours, fans broke through a courtroom door and tried to reach the Stones singer-guitarist. 

While the rest of the case was just what you’d expect in a copyright infringement trial for a piece of music—similar in most ways to other musical plagiarism cases such as the 1971 suit against Beatle George Harrison alleging that he copied the Chiffons’ 1962 charter “He’s So Fine” for his own 1970 hit “My Sweet Lord” (Harrison lost, but the judgment was small); Michael Jackson’s successful 1984 and 1993 defenses of his song “The Girl Is Mine” (recorded in 1982 in a duet with another former Beatle, Paul McCartney), first against Fred Sanford, writer of the song “Please Love Me Now,” and the second against songwriters Reynaud Jones and Robert Smith; and the case against the Bee Gees, also in 1983, charging that they’d stolen 1977’s “How Deep Is Your Love” from Chicago songwriter Ronald Selle’s 1975 song, “Let It End,” a suit which the group initially lost in the jury trial before the judge overturned the verdict and found for the Gibbs—the proceedings in court have always made me feel that the Jagger trial should be staged as a theatrical performance.  I mean, really: singing lawyers!  (Not to mention reggae and rock ’n’ roll music—it’s got hit written all over it!)  Can’t you just picture it?

The most absurd case of alleged plagiarism in the pop-music world, however, has to be the suit brought against John Fogerty, the principal songwriter of Creedence Clearwater Revival, in San Francisco in 1988.  As we can see, most cases of artistic theft are brought by one artist (or sometimes just a rights-holder) against another and the charge is invariably that the defendant has stolen intellectual property from the plaintiff.  In the Fogerty suit, the plaintiff was Fantasy, Inc., a company that owned the rights to Fogerty’s compositions for CCR from 1967 to 1972; the defendant was, of course, Fogerty.  But the charge was that the songwriter had stolen not from another songwriter, but . . . from himself.  Really?  Can you even do that?  How the hell can someone rationalize a charge like that?

But that’s what Saul Zaentz, owner of Fantasy Records (a division of Fantasy, Inc.), did.  He charged in Fantasy, Inc. v. Fogerty that Fogerty had plagiarized his own 1970 CCR hit “Run Through the Jungle” to produce his 1985 composition “Old Man Down the Road,” released on his 1985 comeback solo album, Centerfield.  Since Fantasy owned the rights to “Run Through the Jungle,” but not “Old Man,” written after CCR broke up in 1972, Zaentz could claim Fantasy’s copyright to the older song had been infringed—if he could, in fact, prove that Fogerty used the CCR hit to create his comeback number.  If the court bought Zaentz’s argument, it would mean that Fogerty had plagiarized himself.  Now, I have no legal training (despite the fact that I have lawyers all over both sides of my family, from uncles to cousins and now to those cousins’ children), so maybe it’s even possible for a court to entertain such a charge.  But in the rational world outside the courthouse, the one I live in, this is an absurd concept. 

One of Fogerty’s lawyers pointed out, “What similarities there were between the two songs were the result of Mr. Fogerty having written both of them,” which seems a no-brainer to me.  The attorney added, “Both of them came out of the same musical vocabulary,” and the songwriter pointed out at a news conference after the court case that the work of composers, writers, and singers exhibits the hallmarks of the artists’ individual styles.  In fact, I’d assert, that very similarity among an artist’s works is what constitutes her or his “style.”  It’s what we recognize immediately when we hear a song by a composer or singer we know, read a passage from a writer with whose books we’re familiar, or see a performance by an actor whose movies, TV shows, or plays we’ve seen before.  (In fact, it’s what analysts who do computer comparisons with a newly-discovered work and a known piece of writing rely on to determine if the new discovery is the product of the known writer, like, say, Shakespeare or Dickens.  It’s those similarities that make up the style the scientists line up to measure the degree of match.)  It’s not copying, at least not in a conscious way, it’s the innate characteristic of one artist’s art.  We recognize a van Gogh painting at a single glance because of the similarities it reveals to all the previous van Gogh paintings we’ve seen.  If artists are barred from using this stylistic attribute of their creativity, then that creativity will be severely impaired—if not destroyed entirely.  (Perhaps Zaentz and Fantasy had this in mind as a consequence of their action: to prevent Fogerty from creating new songs that would compete with the CCR catalogue they owned.)

In the end, the jury found that Fogerty hadn’t stolen from himself and Fantasy lost the suit.  I’d insist that Fogerty, or any artist, can’t steal from himself: it’s a metaphysical impossibility.  Fantasy appealed and lost again.  Fogerty sued the company for payment of legal costs in the suit, and after the trial court denied his claim and the Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, the singer-songwriter pursued Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. to the Supreme Court and won in 1994—almost a decade after Fantasy, Inc. v. Fogerty was brought.  Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. was a precedent for awarding court costs to the winner in a copyright litigation, whether the plaintiff or the defendant, especially where the suit had been brought or defended frivolously or in bad faith.

The fact, whether recognized by the courts or not, is that emulation in the arts is not just common, but necessary.  Kennicott writes in the Washington Post, for instance, that without appropriation, “there’s almost no art to talk about.”  Shakespeare and Chaucer, observes Ron Charles, a Post book reviewer, both borrowed material for their literary masterpieces.  Artist Fernando Botero created his own Mona Lisa in 1977, derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, painted in the early 16th century.  Pyotr Tchaikovsky appropriated  “La Marseillaise,” written and composed in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, for his 1812 Overture in 1882.  “Good artists borrow,” writes Post classical music critic Anne Midgette, attributing the line to Igor Stravinsky, “great ones steal.”  Copyright law, however, only protects exact words, musical phrasing, and images, so none of these examples would fall if haled into court.  What Post theater reviewer Nelson Pressley calls “the magpie culture of borrowing and re-appropriation” is a cornerstone of most artistic creation, whether it’s done to make a point, a comment, or an homage. 

Sometimes, the borrowing is part of a lengthy, attenuated conversation: Midgette describes how Dmitri Shostakovich quoted a passage from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow (1905) in his own Seventh Symphony (c. 1939-40) and then Béla Bartók picked it up and used the line again in Concerto for Orchestra (1943), each use a comment on the previous incarnations.  In theater, where Pressley says outright appropriation is rare, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) gave birth to Bruce Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park, which picks up where Raisin left off and focuses on new issues and situations; Clybourne and Raisin then generated Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2013 Beneatha’s Place, both a sequel to Raisin and a reply to Clybourne.  No matter how or why these and other creations are developed, they’re wholly independent works of art that have never been—nor should be—labeled plagiarism. 

Let me amend Lee Kahn’s admonition to his theater students: “The first rule of art is theft.”