'The Government Inspector'

Mistaken identity’s been around as a plot focus for a long time--certainly since Oedipus mistook his father for a highway robber and his mother for a grieving widow.  Of course, that boo-boo ended in tragedy—and the fall of the entire House of Thebes.  Sometime later, writers started using the gag for comedy rather than tragedy and we ended up with stories like The Comedy of Errors (two cases of mistaken ID’s).  Often Shakespeare liked to use disguises to help set up the mis-recognitions, specially dressing gals up as guys—which was especially weird in Elizabethan times since the girls were played by boys in drag to begin with, so you ended up with a dude in drag pretending to be a chick in trou.  Talk about your identity crisis!  (Usually in those plays—Twelfth Night, As You Like It—the girl-dressed-as-a-boy falls in love with some guy and he starts having feelings for him/her and before Mike Pence can show up, the secret identity is revealed.  Never mind that it’s two guys to begin with—which was humongously frowned-upon in the 16th and 17th centuries.) 

Anyway, we’re still using that gag today.  Watch any sitcom long enough and you’ll catch an episode that centers on a mistaken ID.  I particularly remember an episode of the Britcom Fawlty Towers in which hotelier Basil Fawlty, played memorably by John Cleese, finds out that a hotel inspector is coming incognito and, of course, Basil picks the wrong man to fawn all over, while neglecting and insulting the actual reviewer at every turn.  Of course, as with nearly anything with John Cleese, it was hilarity elevated—or sunk—to the max. 

Hey, wait!  I know that one.  Isn’t that ripped off from The Government Inspector?  Sure it is—Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 farce, sometimes also called The Inspector General.  It’s practically the same story, reset some 150 years later and moved from a small town in the Russian provinces to a small hotel in the English countryside—but the same exact premise.  Oh, as Gogol might have said (if he’d lived to be 166—and got a TV that received BBC in Russian):  Znayu ya vashego brata!!  “I’ve got your number, John Cleese!” 

Well, as someone or other said, There’s nothing new under the sun.  Someone else also observed that there are only so many plots and we just keep recycling them with little tweaks.  So Cleese and his writing partner, Connie Booth (who also played the chambermaid, Polly) based “The Hotel Inspectors” (1975) on The Government Inspector, Gogol’s farce about an über-corrupt mayor in a provincial backwater who learns that an official from Saint Petersburg is on his way incognito to suss out dishonesty and incompetence.  The local innkeeper figures it must be one of his guests who arrived unannounced from the capital and has been taking notes on the diners in the inn.  So, for the rest of the play’s two hours and 20 minutes, Mayor Anton Antonovich and his equally venal family members, the other town officials, and the county’s landowners all try to bribe, cajole, and seduce the stranger, Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov, so he’ll overlook the mess the town around him is in. 

The problem is, of course, that Hlestakov (spelled Khlestakov in some other translations), just about as doltish as the locals, not only isn’t the inspector from Saint Petersburg, he’s a total nobody, a minor clerk in a meaningless ministry who’s so broke he can’t even buy his girl a nickel coke.  (Oops!  Sorry.  That’s Most Happy Fella, another plot that revolves around mistaken identity!  My bad.)  I mean, pay his inn bill and he’s just about to shoot himself—if he can just get himself to look good doing it—when the Mayor and his entourage burst into his room and start throwing money at him.  Hlestakov has no idea why everyone wants to give him money—but he’s more than happy to accept that and more.  You see, young Hlestakov is something of a con man his own self.  (One source on Russian lit describes the character as “the liar, the shallow imposter, the vulgar symbol of universal emptiness”—sound like anyone you know?  But the book was published when Donald Trump was about 12, so he couldn’t have been the author’s template!)  He’s also not above taking advantage of the situation when both the Mayor’s wife, Anna Andreyevna, and his daughter, Marya Antonovna, throw themselves at him and arrange assignations with him.  Hlestakov’s been impressing everyone with his erudition and class—when everyone else is a low-bow moron, it’s easy to be the smartest in the room—and before anyone can find out who he really is, he absconds—in the Mayor’s cherished troika, mind you—for his father’s hut in a nearby hamlet where he’d been heading when he ran out of money.

Of course, the real government inspector reveals himself in the end.  I won’t say who it is and spoil that surprise in case prospective theatergoers don’t twig to it before the dénouement (or haven’t read the play beforehand), but I will say that the people of Gogol’s town in the boondocks all get what they deserve and are left with broken dreams of the glory and wealth that Hlestakov—who gets clean away, by the way—promised them.  As the town officials and the Mayor's family stand stunned, the Mayor predicts that “centuries from now they’ll still be laughing at us.”   In Gogol’s comic indictment of tsarist bureaucracy and officialdom, there’s not a single admirable person, no one who’s side we can take, no one we can root for—and yet, as if to prove Gogol, adapter Jeffrey Hatcher, and Mayor correct, the audience at the Duke guffawed throughout the entire play nonetheless. 

If any of you knows The Government Inspector (or The Inspector General) and my description of the play above varies from what you’re familiar with, that’s because the production on which I based my synopsis is an adaptation by playwright Hatcher (Never Gonna Dance, 2003-04, book; A Picasso, 2005; Scotland Road, 1998; Three Viewings, 1995) as staged by the Red Bull Theater at the Duke on 42nd Street.  Hatcher wrote the treatment, based on Gogol’s original, Revizor, for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2008; artistic director Joe Dowling directed the première.  (Subsequent productions were mounted by Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 2009; Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2012, and by the Furious Theatre Company, resident company at the Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California, also in 2012.  It’s also popular with college and university theaters.)  Hatcher’s text was published in an acting edition by the Dramatists Play Service in 2009.

Gogol (1809-52) began writing Revizor (the Russian word for ‘inspector’) in 1835.  He’d apparently begun an earlier play on tsarist bureaucracy in 1832 but abandoned it in anticipation of official censorship.  He wrote to Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the great Russian poet who was a sort of mentor to the younger writer, asking for an idea, “an authentically Russian anecdote” which he could turn into a stage comedy.  Pushkin sent him a description of a incident that had actually happened to him in 1833 in which the poet himself had been mistaken for a government inspector.  The Government Inspector was published in 1836 (and revised in 1842 for a later edition); the Russian press protested loudly and Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) had to step in to get the play staged at Saint Petersburg’s Aleksandinsky Imperial Theater (April 1836); it was staged in Moscow at the Maly Theater in May 1836.  The petty bureaucrats and corrupt politicians he lampooned so assailed the playwright, he eventually went into self-exile, remaining outside Russia for 12 years. 

The play’s been revived many times around the world in many translations and adaptations.  Productions were mounted on Broadway in 1923, 1930 (staged by Jed Harris with Dorothy Gish as Marya Antonovna), 1935 (as Revisor, performed in Russian by the Moscow Art Players), 1978 (directed by Liviu Ciulei with Theodore Bikel as the Mayor), 1993-94 (from Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre, with Randall as Khlestakov and Lainie Kazan as Anna, the Mayor’s wife).  The play has been adapted for film many times in various languages; the only English-language film is a 1949 musical adaptation, entitled The Inspector General, directed by Henry Koster starring Danny Kaye for Warner Bros., a severely bowdlerized version that is reset in Napoleonic France.  In 1958, the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a television adaptation of the play (available on video).  The BBC broadcast a series based on the play in 1976.

The first recorded Off-Broadway staging is the current Red Bull production, which began previews at the Duke on 14 May and opened to the press on 1 June; the revival is scheduled to close on 24 June.  Diana, my frequent theater companion, met me at the theater in the New 42nd Street Studios west of Broadway for the 7:30 performance on Tuesday, 30 May, the production’s penultimate preview.

Red Bull, which apparently does only one full production a season (they do readings and other programs, such as the Short New Play Festival), seems to have something of a following, though I know nothing about them (I’d heard its name here and there, but that’s all).  The company, which one reviewer characterized as a “sort of alternative classical theater company” which “has made a niche out of producing rarely-seen historical plays that similar companies won’t dare touch,” was founded in 2003, taking its name from one of the leading theaters in Elizabethan London. The original Red Bull Theatre, built in 1604, continued to present illegal performances, especially drolls (short farcical sketches incorporating songs, dances, physical comedy, and witty language), after 1642 when the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell closed all the theaters.  (The theater was raided several times during the Puritan interregnum for performing plays and actors were arrested for working there.)  According to the modern troupe, the original Red Bull was the first theater in London to reopen after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  The Red Bull Theatre burned down in 1666, one of the last theaters to fall during the Great Fire of London.

“Embracing this rejuvenating spirit,” the current company states as its mission, “the Red Bull Theater aims to be in the vanguard of new classical theater for the 21st century, creating a home for plays of heightened language and epic expression in evocative performances.”  The company focuses on exploring and creating “heightened language plays.”  (Berger apparently has a fondness for the grim and gory dramas of the Jacobean period—decidedly not among my own favorites.)  Since it débuted with William Shakespeare’s Pericles (2003), the Red Bull, which is a peripatetic theater without a permanent home, has produced such classic plays as The Revenger’s Tragedy (2005-06); Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2007); Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (2008), and The Witch of Edmonton by John Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley (2011), along with modern language plays such as Jean Genet’s The Maids (2012), Loot by Joe Orton (2014), and Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep (2014).  According to its own publicity statements, Red Bull has received awards and nominations from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, Drama Desk, Drama League, Off-Broadway Alliance, and the Joe A. Calloway (Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation) and OBIE committees.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, born in the Ukraine on April Fool’s Day, was a descendant of Cossacks.  (His 1835 novel, Taras Bulba, is a heroic tale of a 16th-century Cossack chieftain, filmed in 1962 with Yul Brynner in the title role and Tony Curtis as one of his sons.)  His father, Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky, a member of the so-called petty gentry (who had the privileges and status of nobility but didn’t own serfs), was an unpublished Ukrainian-language poet and playwright and, as a child, Gogol helped stage plays in Ukrainian in his uncle’s home theater.  Unpopular with his classmates at the Prince Bezborodko Gymnasium of Higher Learning in the city of Nezhin (now Nizhyn Gogol State University), they nicknamed him the “mysterious dwarf” because of his physical and social peculiarities.  He was secretive, had a tart tongue and a wicked talent for mimicry, and apparently took delight in being different from his fellows—but the gymnasium started the student on his road to writing.  Upon leaving school in 1828, Gogol took a low-level, low-paying clerkship in the tsarist bureaucracy in Saint Petersburg (much like his character Hlestakov in The Government Inspector).  The would-be littérateur brought with him to the capital a romantic poem (Pushkin’s forte) he’d written, a long narrative of a rural German life called Hans Küchelgarten (the name means “Johnny Chickenyard”), which he self-published under the pseudonym V. Alov.  It was roundly derided by critics and editors, and the young poet bought up and burned all the copies of the magazines in which he’d paid to publish the piece.  

After failing at his first post, Gogol took a second government job at which he also failed.  Then he took up teaching at a girl’s boarding school in 1831, the same year he published the first volume of collected stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, based on Ukrainian folk stories; volume two came out the next year, firmly establishing the young author as a Slavophile writer.  The collection became an immediate success, bringing the young author to Pushkin’s attention.  This success made him welcome among Russia’s literati.  In 1834, Gogol took up his second teaching position,  Professor of Medieval History at Saint Petersburg University, a post for which he had no qualifications and quickly proved himself no better at higher learning than he’d been at government work; the writer lasted only one year.  (He satirized himself in one of his own stories!)  That year, however, Gogol put out two more books: Mirgorod, more short stories, and Arabesques, a collection of essays.  The works the writer published between 1832 and 1836 moved Russia’s literary critics to consider him a Russian rather than Ukrainian writer. 

During this period, Gogol also published two plays, Marriage and The Government Inspector, launching the theatrical aspect of his writing career.  As I’ve already noted, The Government Inspector was taken up by Tsar Nicholas I, who requested the first production in 1836.  The audience was stunned, and the resultant controversy, which completely surprised the 27-year-old Gogol, divided Russian society into Government Inspector revilers and defenders.  Ultimately, the response of the government bureaucrats—“Everybody is against me,” he complained—drove the author to leave Russia and he spent the next 12 years traveling in central and western Europe.  (Of a frail constitution, Gogol suffered from severe hypochondria, among other complexes, both real and imagined.)  Upon Pushkin’s death in 1837, however, Gogol was accorded the great poet’s status as the leading Russian writer of the day.  His novel Dead Souls, considered his masterwork, and the first edition of his collected works were both published in 1842, and six years later, the writer returned to Russia, settling in Moscow.  Dead Souls, intended to be the start of a larger, three-volume project, sealed Gogol’s reputation as the great satirist of Tsarist Russia.

In 1852, Gogol died at age 42, the result in large part of extreme asceticism under the guidance of a spiritual “elder” (known as a “starets,” literally an ‘old man’).  The writer became deeply depressed and began burning some of his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls.  Taking to his bed, Gogol refused to eat and died in great discomfort.  His remains are buried in Moscow.

It’s remarkable that the total farce that is The Government Inspector came from the same pen as Dead Souls, a morbid, grim but naturalistic satire.  (Gogol wrote the 1842 novel  Dead Souls; the famous stage production directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky for the Moscow Art Theater in 1932 was an adaptation by Mikhail Bulgakov.  The ‘souls’ in the title is the word Russians used to refer to serfs, not considered fully ‘persons,’ and Chichikov, the novel’s main character, “buys” deceased souls to show on paper that he owns hundreds of serfs to increase his standing in the community.)  The adaptation by Hatcher, which runs two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission (Gogol’s original is a five-act play), is contemporary without updating the action or the references (though there are some double entendres that suggest current events and figures)—however, Hatcher does play loose with the language and sexual innuendos that I doubt would have passed the censors in 1836 Russia.  

Red Bull’s Government Inspector is pretty good and well handled.  Farce isn’t easy, but the company does all right.  Diana left at intermission, but I don’t know if she didn’t like it, or was just anxious about her departure for Chicago the next morning.  (She kept comparing the production to Saturday Night Live, but I don’t know if she meant that’s good or bad.  I went off SNL years ago, but I have no idea how she feels about the show.)

The rest of the audience at the Duke was extremely receptive to all the humor, verbal and physical.  They behaved almost like a claque!  Still, I have to say that the cast is pretty adept at the style—occasionally, they seem to be trying a little too hard—and the leads, Tony-winner Michael McGrath (for Nice Work if You Can Get It, 2012, Best Featured Actor in a Musical) as the  Mayor and, especially, Michael Urie as Hlestakov, are excellent.  Urie, who looks like he should be playing young leading men, is particularly adept at the physical comedy; he does a marvelous drunk scene at the end of act one.  Not long ago, I complained about a comedy performances that the actors played the comedy too lightly when I thought they’d be funnier if they approached their characters as if they were in earnest.  The Government Inspector works that way a little, too, and director Berger keeps his company in check enough that they all seem to be taking their lives, their circumstances, and themselves seriously.  We know they’re fools and buffoons; they don’t.  If the actors play the buffoons as buffoons, making faces and silly gestures like clowns . . . well, you get Danny Kaye’s film version.

The Government Inspector is another in a string of ensemble shows I’ve seen this season—have I unearthed a pattern?—and each of the performers has at least one terrific turn in a scene with no more than one or two other characters.  (Ryan Garbayo and Ben Mehl as the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber of  landowners, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, for example, are never seen out of each other’s company—the two come off as a poor man’s Harpo and Chico without the horn, the accent, and the wiles—so their scenes with the Mayor or Hlestakov always include at least three actors.  Of course, that’s a big part of the gag, and Gogol set it up that way—which is why their names rhyme; both their given names are Pyotr Ivanovich.  Another part of the joke is that, although they’re not related, they even look alike—and Garbayo and Mehl, with their identical facial hair, could pass for brothers on stage.)  When the company is all together on the rather narrow playing area—the cast numbers 14 actors playing 24 characters—they often convey the impression of disorganized chaos; other times, they perform what in the army we used to call a group grope.  Seven company members play 17 parts and they make them astonishingly distinct—some of which is from the excellent work of costume designer Tilly Grimes and hair and wig designer Dave Bova.  Especially successful in this deception are Arnie Burton, who plays Osip, Hlestakov’s servant, as a sullen, slovenly, malcontented serf and the Postmaster as an affectedly loose-lipped and habitual snoop; and Mary Lou Rosato (taking the honors for playing four characters), whose Grusha, the Mayor’s family’s maid is a more kempt female version of Osip, and the Waitress at the inn which she plays on her knees as if she were a very short woman.  (There’s even a joke that capitalizes on her stature.)  

(One silly sidelight:  Back in 2014, I saw a Classic Stage Company production of David Ives’s adaptation of a French classic comedy, The Heir Apparent—see my report on 25 April 2014—in which David Pittu also played a character on his knees.  I wondered if  Rosato and Pittu know each other or if Rosato saw Pittu’s performance.  Some coincidences are just too perfect to overlook!)

There’s one odd staging choice—which may have been unavoidable.  Alexis Distler’s serviceable set (lit brightly by Megan Lang and Peter West) is on two levels and on the lower level is the Mayor’s office on stage left and Hlestakov’s room at the local inn, stage right.  A curtain covers one while the other’s in use.  Above is the interior of the Mayor’s house where all the rest of the action occurs after scenes one and two of act one.  So for two-thirds of the play, we’re looking at the top level of the set, with a closed red curtain below.  The seats are pretty steeply raked, so the upper stage is close to eye-level of row D, where Diana and I sat, so it wasn’t a hardship—but it was kind of odd.  I wonder if reversing the sets would have been any better.  Is it easier to ignore a closed-off upper stage than a closed-off lower one?

As I reported, I don’t know if Diana didn’t like the play—when she left, she said, “I can pretty well tell what’s going to develop,” which isn’t necessary an apt way to approach a farce.  Seeing how the playwright and the director and actors handle the developments is what you miss.  In a farce, it’s not just the plot but the antics and how they’re executed that we’re supposed to judge, no?  Diana, for instance, witnessed the impromptu party at the Mayor’s house at the end of act one, which, in addition to Urie’s inspired drunk scene—he gets increasingly inebriated and out of control until he literally collapses on the floor and ends up hanging off the edge of the upper stage with a look on his face that’s reminiscent of that ubiquitous photo of a cat hanging from a line—but she missed the scene at the opening of the second act in which Hlestakov is importuned by both the Mayor’s wife, oversexed and convinced of her attractiveness, and his daughter, like a sullen and  petulant teenager, in the same room at the same time or the scene that follows where all the town officials hide in the same closet and then come out one by one (or, in Bob- and Dobchinsky’s case, two at a time) to offer the young imposter bribes.  The audience, as Diana remarked somewhat astonished, ate this up (a standing O, of course)—but I enjoyed it, too.  Not as uproariously as the others seemed to, but more than well enough.  (I have never had any objection to plays that are just fun—though, of course, The Government Inspector is a commentary on the tsarist bureaucracy—well, Russian, since that country’s had inept and corrupt officials running rampant in every political regime, including the present one.)  

Show-Score rated The Government Inspector’s critical reception an 82 off of a sampling of 30 reviews.  The breakdown was  95% positive, 4% mixed, and 3% negative notices, with the high score being one 95 (ZEALnyc), with six 90’s (including the New York Times); the lowest-rated review was a single 40 (Front Row Center), the only negative notice.  My survey will include 15 reviews.

In one of Show-Score’s 90-rated reviews, Diana Barth remarked in the Epoch Times that when the curtain falls on Red Bull’s The Government Inspector, “We have been greatly entertained.  But mightn’t we also be a bit uncomfortable?”  She asked of the performance: “Is it possibly a mirror of ourselves?  And of our governing officials?”  Barth dubbed the production “a hilarious comedy, beautifully cast and acted” with a “spiffy two-level set” and “excellent costumes.”  The ET reviewer also had high praise for Urie (particularly the drunk scene, “the highpoint of the production”) and compliments for Mary Testa’s Mayor’s wife and Talene Monahon’s daughter.  In am New York, Matt Windman described Hatcher’s adaptation as “freewheeling” and Berger’s staging as “big, brash and buoyant.”  It is “a high-energy, fast-paced production with gleefully over-the-top performances and door-slamming slapstick comedy,” Windman affirmed. 

“Few plays, though, have taken [mistaken identity] to the mad heights occupied by Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Government Inspector,’” observed Ben Brantley in a pre-opening blurb in the New York Times, adding that the play “infuses scathing satire with giddy surrealism.”  In his regular review (rated 90 on Show-Score) a few days later, Brantley called the play a “rollicking 19th-century satire of bad behavior in the Russian provinces” being given a “buoyant production” that “generates the kind of collective enthusiasm in its audience that you associate with home-team football games.”  He reported, “The pleasures afforded by this breakneck show—. . . featuring a virtuosic cast led by a path-clearing cyclone of silliness called Michael Urie—are as old as the days when cave dwellers discovered that human stupidity was really kind of funny, as well as potentially tragic. ”  The Timesman asserted that from the “freewheeling but spiritually faithful adaptation” by playwright Hatcher, you “might think that [its] worldview is a little too close to real life these days.”  In that party scene at the end of the first act, Brantley noted that the celebrants are all drinking the local wine (fermented in a spittoon!) that Hlestakov describes as “[v]iscous and yet so bubbly,” which “isn’t a bad description for this show as a whole,” the review-writer added.  He also acknowledged that Urie’s drunk show is “one of the most exquisitely controlled displays of uncontrolled drunkenness I’ve ever witnessed.”  Part of the responsibility for this is Berger’s direction, of which Brantley wrote:

But Mr. Berger. . . has staged his “Government Inspector” with a subversive straightforwardness.  While there’s plenty of hilarious Marx Brothers-style anarchy here, all the performances are dead serious in their ridiculousness, capturing the big, self-preserving egos beneath the small-town madness.

“And what a team Mr. Berger has assembled to execute that mission,” the Times review-writer exclaimed.  In his other piece, Brantley described them as “a doozy of a cast, which includes such masters of mayhem as” Burton, DeRosa, McGrath, Testa, and Monahon.  (He admitted he “felt remiss in not mentioning every cast member.”)  Brantley made special mention of Urie as the “lamest of lamebrains,” declaring, “His Ivan is [a] distinctive comic creation, a dimwitted narcissist who nonetheless makes thinking on his feet a self-contained slapstick ballet.”   He further proclaimed, “Mr. Urie establishes himself as a bona fide leading man, in the tradition of great physical comedy performers like Kevin Kline.” 

In the “Goings On About Town” column of the New Yorker, the reviewer reported that Hatcher “retains the original framework” of Gogol’s original 1836 play, “but gives the jokes a zingy modern spin.”  Dubbing the Red Bull production “raucous,” the unnamed review-writer observed that director Berger “freely mixes in bits from the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Woody Allen.”  The notice had top praise for actors Urie (“charming as hell”), Burton (“superlative double duty”), McGrath (“bluffs and blusters to the hilt”), and Testa (“earns big laughs just by changing the pitch of her voice”).  Adam Feldman of Time Out New York warned, “A play that depicts a politician as a greedy, vindictive, incompetent boob desperate to ingratiate himself to the leader of Russia . . . may no longer sound like comedy”; however, he continued that “humor is doled out generously in” the Government Inspector revival as “zippily adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher.”  The man from TONY described Distler’s set as evoking “a cartoon in the Sunday funny papers” and reported that the “talented cast of 14 commits hard to fill out its panels.”  He concluded, “Although the play’s lampoon of corruption is wide-ranging, it is tempered by the jovial spirit of farce, which feels like a mercy.  There’s a lot to be said for shouting, but sometimes you just need to laugh.”

In the low-scoring review (40) on Front Row Center,  Tulis McCall (who posted the same notice on New York Theatre Guide) proclaimed, “There are two delicious reasons to see Red Bull’s The Government Inspector”: Michael Urie and Arnie Burton.  She gushed over Urie’s act-one performance—“He is quick.  He is nimble.  And if there had been a candlestick he would have jumped over it”—but then backed off.  “Urie does appear in the second act, but because his scenes depend on the actors with whom he is partnered, the steam runs out quickly,” McCall lamented.  “No one, with the occasional exception of Mary Testa, who knows from timing, seems to have a clue what is happening.”  She blamed director Berger for a production that “feels flat and heavy” and, except for Urie and Burton, a cast that “seems to be playing in what we thin[k] of as the broad style of 19th century melodramas.”  She asserted, “There is no nuance, no inner life, no spark.”  Hatcher’s “text as written is either a poor translation or the original was as dull as a box of rocks.”  Like me, though, the FRC reviewer found, “The two-storied set is awkward to look at, and confines everyone to the equivalent of a long hallway.”  She returned to Urie and Burton, however, for additional and abundant praise.  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that the Red Bull revival of The Government Inspector “is loaded with laughs; but, like all good comedies, even those going way over the top, it's underpinned by all too real relevancy.”  Hatcher’s script is “smartly modernized and streamlined” and Berger’s production “land[s] every joke and double entendre.”  In direct contrast to her colleague at FRC, Sommer raved, “What a cast!  What a clever set!  What witty plot and humor supporting costumes!”  Though she did find the comedy “perhaps a tad too TV-sitcomish,” the CU reviewer felt that “for all the vaudevillian shtick, the terrific actors manage to keep their characters’ excesses within the realm of relatable reality.” 

TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart, calling The Government Inspector “uproarious” and Hatcher’s adaptation “irreverent and highly watchable,” affirmed that the Red Bull company “captures Gogol’s mischievous frivolity.”  Stewart heaped deserved praise on the whole cast whose “physical performances stand out,” and reported that director Berger “creates [an] atmosphere of lunacy through a surprisingly compelling mixture of slapstick comedy and operatic design” for his “zippy” production.  On Broadway World, Michael Dale labeled Gogol’s play a “rip-roaring classic” and Berger’s revival “a gloriously silly mounting.”  Hatcher’s adaptation is “punchline-laden,” but Berger “loads up the evening with terrific sight gags and wacky antics performed by a top shelf cast.” 

“Hilarity reigns in this madcap revival of” The Government Inspector, wrote Darryl Reilly on TheaterScene.net; “It’s a Mel Brooks-style presentation with coarseness, slapstick, pratfalls and gags galore.”  Hatcher’s adaptation is “frothy” and “jocularly crammed with one-liners, zingers, anachronisms and double entendres” and Berger’s staging is “fast-paced” and “an exuberant amalgam of physical and verbal virtuosity combined with visual flair.”  Singling out all the principals for special praise, Reilly labeled the ensemble “dynamic,” adding that they “all excel with their loony turns.”  The review-writer for TheaterScene.net concluded, “This highly entertaining Red Bull Theater production is a wonderful opportunity to experience the play’s timeless splendor.”  Joel Benjamin characterized the Red Bull revival of the play on Theater Pizzazz as “a pleasantly chaotic production” given an “outrageously farcical staging.”  With “a cast of gung-ho actors who have no fear of being over-the-top silly,” each of whom he compliments, Benjamin found that “Berger might have pulled in some of the high spirited performances.”  Nonetheless, the TP reviewer concluded that “the overall mood was consistent and the pacing remarkable.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller asserted that Gogol’s comedy “has been given the full ‘Marxist’ treatment by Red Bull Theater” and Berger—but he assured us he meant Groucho, Harpo, and Chico (what, no Gummo and Zeppo?), “whose style of zany buffoonery is echoed in the show from start to end.”  Miller pointed out that “everything here is thoroughly and unabashedly soaked in slapstick, farce, and low comedy.”  Having set up the premise, Berger’s Government Inspector “quickly descends (or ascends) into full-blown madness and mayhem.”  The TB review-writer summed up with: “All in all, Jesse Berger and Red Bull Theater have put together a marvelous romp of a production, which boasts richly comical performances by its wild and woolly cast” and ended by recommending, “If you are in the mood for good, silly fun, The Government Inspector will more than fill the bill.”  Ron Cohen of TheaterScene.com (not to be confused with TheaterScene.net, above) called the Red Bull revival of The Government Inspector “a rollicking good time” and labeled the production an “exuberant mounting” of the play.  Hatcher’s “sprightly” adaptation “keeps things in 19th Century Russia, but gives the dialogue a bright contemporary spin” and director Berger “demonstrates a grand flair for comedy in his appropriate anything-for-a-laugh staging” with a cast of “superlative farceurs.”  Cohen singled out several of the principal actors for individual praise, especially Urie and McGrath, but affirmed, “Just about everybody contributes to the hilarity.”  The review-writer observed that “the bits come so thick and fast, you don’t have time to ponder the misfires,” but he had this advice to theatergoers: “Grin and bear them.” 

The Huffington Post published two notices for The Government Inspector; the first one is from Steven Suskin, who quipped:

And now we have graft, greed, bribery, cupidity and all-round corruption.  No, not in our local city hall; nor the halls of various congresses and executive branches, neither.  At least not specifically.  The vile misdeeds are purported to take place in Russia, although our present-day leader’s buddy-in-chief needn’t take offence or send out “fake” reviews from fake drama critics. 

That’s, of course, because it’s all in the 19th-century farce, The Government Inspector.  “Gogol’s satire remains razor-sharp . . .,” reported Suskin, “and Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation . . . contemporizes the humor while keeping the action in Gogol’s dusty old provincial town.”  The Red Bull production is “resplendent” and the actors “[a]ll feast on the festivities, and the pleasure is ours.”  Suskin lauded the entire cast and reported that Berger “does a thoroughly assured job, wrangling his clowns and keeping the laughter percolating.”  He labeled Hatcher’s adaptation “canny” and concluded, “All in all, the Red Bull Inspector General [sic] is bright, funny and as refreshing as a bowl of cold summer borscht crowned by two dollops of sour cream.”  (A note to Suskin, however: Russian borscht is a heavy soup of meat and vegetables, served hot as a whole meal.  That cold soup, presumably the one made from beets—it’s, ummm, Polish!) 

In HP’s second review, Michael Giltz, after giving a short disquisition on why stakes are high in comedy, called Berger’s The Government Inspector an “amiable, too-soft revival” that “remains this side of great, despite some strong lead actors and a classic text.”  Giltz felt that “an essential tension, the desperation that drives the best comedy is lacking.”  The problem?  “Quite simply, the cast is having too much fun.”  According to this HP writer, “It means we have fun too, but not as much as we’d have if every member of the cast feared for their life.”  Essentially Giltz asserted that everything comes too easily for all the characters in the play, and that while “a sense of anarchy builds, . . .  the sense of characters under siege does not.”  In the end, when the reveal happens, the “comedic feeling of ‘My God, their every sin has been witnessed’—or even ‘uh-oh’—does not arise.”  He applauded the principal actors, but added that “everyone else . . . fades into the background.”  (Giltz split over Burton—“good” as Osip, “bad” as the “tired gay cliche of a” Postmaster.)  He blamed Berger for “the too-friendly atmosphere,” though he liked the “tech elements”—except the two-tiered set because the lower level was abandoned and unused for so much of the play.  (The reviewer wanted to see both levels in use at the same time at some point.)  “Never let them see you sweat,” admonished Giltz, is bad advice for comedy—and he asserted, “Unfortunately, the cast of The Government Inspector remain as cool as cucumbers.”  (Though several reviewers mention the Fawlty Towers episode about which I wrote a bit at the beginning of this report, Giltz was the only one I read who actually drew a comparison between that TV episode and this production of The Government Inspector—and Red Bull’s Government Inspector came out the worse!)

'Venus'

Plays are often about more than one thing, often beyond their mere plots or even what the dialogue signifies.  Good plays are usually about many things, sometimes even subjects unintended by the authors.  Great plays are always about lots of things, covering themes outside the time, place, and milieu of their plots and settings, and continuing to reveal new ideas and meanings at every reading or performance.  Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays fall into this last grouping, and Venus, her 1996 play based on a real person’s life more than 200 years ago, is different, and potentially richer not just with every production, but with each performance during a production’s run.  In the introduction to an interview of Parks in the program for the 1996 première at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, the editor writes that “her plays resonate far beyond their singular subjects.”  In “A Playwright of Importance,” an article about Parks’s writing (posted on ROT on 31 January 2011), Kirk Woodward declares “that all worthwhile plays, even apparently abstract ones like some of Beckett’s, take us through the specific to the general.”  In an interview published in Signature Stories, the theater company’s audience magazine, Lear deBessonet, director of a new production of Venus, confessed, “I read her work in college and was completely rearranged by it” and labeled the play “complex” because of the way the playwright approached the subject. 

Parks, the current Residency One playwright at the Signature Theatre Company, is having her second production of four within the year-long residency with Venus, following The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World last fall (see my report posted on 1 December 2016).  (The remaining two Residency One plays, Fucking A and In the Blood, will be presented in August-September under the umbrella title The Red Letter Plays as the inaugural productions of STC’s 2017-18 season.)  The revival of Venus, the first in New York City since the première, began previews in the Irene Diamond Stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center on 25 April and opened on 15 May; the production was scheduled to close on 4 June.  Diana, my STC subscription partner, and I saw the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 26 May, our final play in the troupe’s 2016-17 season on Theatre Row.

I saw Venus in its New York début at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival (now called just the Public Theater) in May 1996.  The co-production, under the direction of Richard Foreman (who also designed the sets), with the Yale Repertory Theatre, premièred in New Haven, Connecticut, from 14 to 30 March 1996, then transferred to the Public’s Martinson Hall from 16 April through 19 June.  The production, originally commissioned by New York City’s Women’s Project in 1995, won Parks the 1996 OBIE Award for Playwriting.  In 1998, Parks herself directed a staged reading of Venus at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, and the Yale School of Drama mounted a production from 27 February to 3 March 2007 with a director and cast from the MFA program.   

That 1996 première of Venus was the first play of Parks’s that I’d seen.  (Before Signature’s Last Black Man, I saw Parks’s Broadway début, 2001’s Topdog/Underdog, for which she won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Playwriting Award, and Theatre World Award, in March 2002.)  Needless to say, Foreman’s staging of Parks’s writing made the play twice as experimental and the more fascinating to me.  I have no record of the 1996 production but I recall being very excited while I was there and when I left; images of the performance have stuck with me for 21 years. 

(I wondered how Parks felt about the Foreman staging.  He surely took over her play to some extent and put his stamp on it—it was full of his signature techniques of the time, most noticeably the strings with which he crisscrossed the set; a pulsating red light that hung above the stage; and posters, signs, and pieces of scenery inscribed with the names of the play’s characters.  Did she feel the director had hijacked her creation?  In an interview published in the Public’s program, the playwright said that the question reminded her of a physics question:

what happens when the immovable object meets an irresistible force?  The answer is everything.  That’s my answer, just the beauty of the word—everything happens.  There is no limit.  Richard is fearless, both with his own plays and also in the production of plays he hasn’t written.  Fearless, with a will of iron, but also incredibly kind.  And he has a really good understanding of the play.  So there’s no limit to what can happen.

(But that may have been a dutiful expression from a playwright, still relatively unknown beyond professional theater scene, in the proprietary publication of her play’s producing theater, whose artistic director, George C. Wolfe, had mentored her earlier work and brought Foreman and her together for this project.  In another statement, Parks wrote: “Foreman’s near-faultless eye for stage pictures . . . ultimately tries to do too much, ge[t]ting mired in its complicated journey.”  Working with him, she said in a statement in TheatreForum, was “like being a dead playwright.”)  

I wish I had made some kind of written account of the Public Theater production so I could make a real comparison between the two experiences, but I have only my 21-year-old recollection to go on.  I can say with assuredness that the two versions were very different.  Lear deBessonet’s staging at STC is far more clear-cut than Foreman’s—if that’s even a term you can use about a Parks play!  (In 1999, Parks told an interviewer, “Venus was more straightforward than Richard [Foreman] made it.”)

Unlike some of Parks’s early plays, such as The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, written only seven years earlier, Venus has a story, the heavily fictionalized tale of the last six years of the life of Sarah (“Saartjie”) Baartman (ca. 1789-1815), a young Khoikhoi woman with an enormous posterior (a mark of her tribe).  I won’t do a detailed précis of the play; Baartman’s biography is well-recorded in many places both on line and in print.  The playwright says that the inception of Venus arose when she was writing another play in which Baartman was a minor character.  At a cocktail party, she overheard director and Parks’s longtime collaborator Liz Diamond talking about a “woman with a big butt,” and she “realized that’s who should be at the center of the play.”  After researching Baartman, “freaks” and freak shows, and autopsies of people like Baartman, she was still having trouble getting a handle on “the right way to tell the story.”  It finally came to her: one line she heard, “He gave me a haircut.”  From that, Parks “knew what I wasn’t getting right.  I wasn’t getting the intimacy right.”  And then the play came together for her.  The writer knew right then how to tell the story, who the characters were, the order of the scenes, the structure of the script—and she wrote the play in about a week. 

Parks wants people to know, however, that Venus “is based on fact but it’s all fabricated.  It’s based on fact—. . . based on pieces of research that I did in the library about her and other ‘freaks.’”  She explains:

So it’s an amalgam, it’s her story and I sort of brought in other stories of other people who were objects of interest, ridicule. It’s not the history channel.  It’s an examination of the way things had happened to her which were unfortunate, the way she tried to have a better life and it didn’t work out, and the way we love now, in which there are so many similarities.  The way we try to improve our lives and end up failing. 

The story of Venus begins in 1810, when Baartman (Zainab Jah) is lured away from her job as a servant in the house of The Man (John Ellison Conlee) in the Dutch Cape Colony, now part of the Republic of South Africa, by The Man’s Brother (Randy Danson) to tour Europe as a natural phenomenon (aka: “freak”) and make lots of money.  (The Dutch colonists labeled the Khoikhoi people ‘Hottentots,’ today considered a derogatory name, in imitation of two characteristic sounds, hot and tot, of the click language of the Khoikhoi.)  Upon arriving in England, however, Venus is sold to a sideshow run by The Mother-Showman (Danson) and becomes a star attraction known as the Venus Hottentot.  (The slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire in 1807.) 

Scantily clad, Venus exhibits her “singular anatimy,” bringing in crowds for the side show owners and raking in money, of which she sees very little.  Europeans are drawn to her as a curiosity, and the men find her an object of prurience and lust; for an additional fee, a spectator can “stick my hand inside her cage and have a feel.”  (Foreman’s 1996 production was less sexualized than deBessonet’s version, and, indeed, the script because, as Parks observed, Foreman “was not comfortable with the play’s unseemly aspects.”)  Soon becoming adept at displaying herself and understanding what the people want from her as a curiosity—Parks’s Venus is complicit in her own exploitation—she negotiates for more of the take and then tries to break out on her own, but can’t overcome the social strictures of the times.  Eventually she’s purchased by an aristocratic French doctor, Georges Cuvier, represented in the play by The Baron Docteur (Conlee), who falls in love with her. 

Despite having a wife whom he all but abandons, the Baron Docteur keeps Venus as his mistress until he begins losing his professional reputation and social standing.  He’s constantly challenged by his Grade-School Chum (Danson), “the one who used to pull the wings off of the flies,” and then locks Venus away until, after a tragically short life, she dies of what may have been gonorrhea, though her exhibitors blame exposure to cold temperatures because of her skimpy attire.  (Historically, after her death, Cuvier dissected Venus’ body before an audience of scientists, and her remains, along with a plaster cast of her body, continued to be exhibited for years.  Saartjie Baartman’s body was finally returned to South Africa in 2002 where she was buried with honor and she has become a historical icon.)

Parks invented the affair between the Baron Docteur and Venus.  Cuvier and Baartman never had any kind of relationship; all he did was dissect her remains after her death and publicize his “findings.”  But Parks maintains that Venus is a play about “love”: it’s partly why she chose Baartman as a subject and why she named the play Venus, after the Roman goddess of love.  Director deBessonet the Public Theater’s Resident Director and Artistic Director of Public Works, asserts that Parks “talked about the fact that Venus is a love story,” though what she means by that specifically is open to interpretation, I think.  Throughout the play, Venus asks, “Love me?”—but whether she’s beseeching the spectators (both us and the diegetic audience within the play) or the Baron Docteur is situational—and the Baron Docteur constantly professes his love for Venus—though, of course, he subjects her to anatomical examinations by his scientific colleagues, he’s essentially letting her die so he can dissect her, he twice aborts a child of which he’s the father, and he’s probably given her a venereal disease that he allows to go untreated and which certainly at least contributes to her death.  For the Love of the Venus is a love story, of sorts—however twisted—but it represents not the Baron Docteur and Venus but the doctor and his wife in a reconciliation.  The question Venus raises, then, is whether romantic love is really just a form of exploitation, a means to a less lofty end, and who’s manipulating whom. 

Even this summary sounds a little more straightforward than Parks’s structure really is.  For one thing, in addition to the two main characters of Venus and the Baron Docteur, plus the supporting characters played by Randy Danson (the Mother-Showman and the Grade-School Chum), Parks created the figure of The Negro Resurrectionist (Kevin Mambo), a kind of carnival barker-cum-Brechtian commentator-cum-Our Town-style Stage Manager-cum-balladeer (with songs composed by Parks), who wanders through the play dressed all in black, including tails and a top hat (which makes him look slightly Dickensian), providing information in the form of “Footnotes,” announcing the scene titles, or leading the seven-voice Chorus.  That Chorus (Birgit Huppuch, Adam Green, Tony Torn, Julian Rozzell, Patrena Murray, Hannah Cabell, Reynaldo Piniella) variously represents the Human Wonders of the sideshow, the crowd of Spectators, members of the Court in which Venus is examined, the group of Anatomists to whom the Baron Docteur delivers his findings, and the cast of the play-within-the-play, For the Love of the Venus, a sort of parodic commentary on the Baron Docteur’s and Venus’ relationship as portrayed by a Bride-to-Be, her Young Man, and his family. 

Scenes of For the Love of the Venus are enacted irregularly throughout Venus (announced by the Negro Resurrectionist) in an exaggerated style and in 18th-century costumes and perukes as if it were a Restoration drama.  They are performed on whatever configuration of the set the larger play is using at the time, and the sole audience for them is the Baron Docteur.  He, in turn, is watched from a distance by Venus.

The dialogue is largely written in Parks’s idiosyncratic blank verse, with some passages in rhyme and occasional lines ending in rhymed couplets.  In addition to her practice of writing the text in words spelled out the way they sound, rather than the way they’re conventionally written—an idiosyncrasy that won’t be apparent to a spectator—Parks also divides her script into an Overture and 31 scenes (one of which is subdivided into 10 lettered smaller scenes).  The scenes are numbered in reverse order, Scene 31 to Scene 1, as if they are counting down to the story’s outcome.  (The Overture announces Venus’ death and then the play flashes back to the saga’s beginning, so we know how the story ends.)  These peculiarities, too, wouldn’t be noticeable to a playgoer except that the Negro Resurrectionist announces some scenes by number and title.  (Scene 16, “Intermission,” set “Several Years from Now: In the Anatomical Theatre of Tübingen,” is the Baron Docteur’s lecture on his “Dis-(re)-memberment of the Venus Hottentot” after her death.  It’s based on Cuvier’s actual dissection notes published in 1817.)

I think Parks is amazing, and Venus was, indeed, an interesting and engaging experience at the theater.  Diana dismissed Venus because she said it didn’t explore anything new or revealing about its subject, which I’ll identify for now as cultural exploitation, objectification, voyeurism, and, of course, systemic racism, European superiority, and imperialism.  (This story is about Europeans and Africans, but the implication for, say, Americans and Indians or Aussies and Aborigines, and so on, is clear.)  I disagree with Diana, but even if she’s right, the way Parks tells the story is startling and provocative, as well as moving.  I may be a sucker, but that counts for a lot in my theater criteria.  Well-executed theatricality, either in production or in dramaturgy, can get me off, irrespective of message, theme, or point.  

Furthermore, if what Parks is writing about is so inconsequential and has been fully explored and expressed, how come we’re still experiencing it and suffering from it today, not just in this country, but in the entire world (make that “Whole Entire World”)?  Some stories need to be told and retold; some points need to be made and made again.  Athol Fugard kept writing about apartheid over and over until it fell—and he’s still writing about its repercussions and its legacy.  August Wilson wrote ten plays about black life in America, much of them recovering the same issues, problems, and injustices, and we’ve named a Broadway theater after him.  Sometimes audiences hear a story—but they haven’t listened.  Parks is right to keep telling it—until everyone gets it.  As my friend, playwright and sometime reviewer Kirk Woodward, said to me, “‘didn’t say anything new’ is about my least favorite ‘critical’ comment of all.  Is that a criterion at all, and if so, why?  And how does [Diana] think plays ‘say’ things?  By thinking up new ideas?  Like what?  ‘Love your neighbor’?  ‘Respect each other’?  How about all those new ideas in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare?”  We revive plays, even though the story’s been told and the points have been made, because we need to hear them again.  That’s another thing about great plays.

A lot of the same playwriting techniques I wrote about in the Black Man report are evident in Venus, especially Repetition & Revision, or “Rep & Rev,” as Parks calls it, so there’s no contending that it comes from the same author or the same authorial impulse.  There’s so much to cover in the script and the production of Venus, just considering it all will be Herculean.  The dramatist’s general philosophy is clearly invoked throughout Venus, as it is in most of her work, but if I try to discuss it all even in passing, I’ll be writing a dissertation, not a blog post!  So I’ll restrict myself to the production and mention the larger implications of the play only briefly and let readers look at the scores of other sources for in-depth discussions of Parks’s themes and techniques (including my Last Black Man report, found at http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-death-of-last-black-man-in-whole.html, which also includes a brief bio of the playwright). 

Lear deBessonet’s staging, which runs two hours and 15 minutes with one intermission, is far simpler than Foreman’s.  The first part of the play, which moves from southern Africa to England to France, is centered on a kind of scaffold-like assemblage—Ben Brantley likened it to “a European indoor circus” in the New York Times—within which are established the various locales of the plot: the Cape Colony house where Baartman works, the room in London where she lives while working at the sideshow, and so on.  When the Baron Docteur moves Venus to Paris, the set becomes a more representative suggestion of their bedroom—except that a row of disembodied (prop) heads encircle the white-painted set staring down from above, suggesting spectators in an operating theater or preserved specimens in an anthropological lab.  To reinforce the resemblance to a circus, hanging over the stage are two concentric rings of lights which sometimes descend to become, essentially, a circus ring.  (The scenery is designed by Matt Saunders, with lighting by Justin Townsend.)  All told, Signature’s Venus is less theatrically exciting than the Public’s 21 years ago, but it’s also more Parks’s art than an amalgam of hers and the director's.  (I probably wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t seen deBessonet’s rendering.  That’s another quality of great plays: they can support many interpreting artists’ visions.)

Emilio Sosa’s costumes divide into three groups.  First are realistically designed dresses and suits for characters played by John Ellison Conlee (The Man, The Baron Docteur) and Randy Danson (The Man’s Brother, The Mother-Showman, The Grade-School Chum); even Venus’ clothes (when she’s dressed) are essentially realistic 19th-century attire—although Zainab Jah wears a strategically designed, flesh-colored “fat” suit, which she dons on stage at the start of the performance.  Sosa, however, has pushed the women’s dresses further into the 19th century so that their silhouettes resemble that of Venus, with a protruding rear end—enhanced by hoops, voluminous undergarments, or bustles—a style that didn’t reappear in Europe until after Victoria became Queen of England 20 years after Venus’ death.  The second group of costumes are those of the characters played by the Chorus: the Human Wonders, the Anatomists, the Spectators, and so on.  These are more fanciful and paired with brightly-colored wigs of a rainbow of unnatural hues.  (Sandy MacDonald of Time Out New York described the chorus members as “Crayola-coiffed,” which is apt.  Wigs, hair styles, and make-up were designed by J. Jared Janas.)  Third are Sosa’s costumes for the characters in For the Love of the Venus, which, as I noted, are exaggerations of Restoration-era garb—an earlier period in which women’s silhouettes were augmented at the hip with farthingales as wide as the women were tall (even with towering wigs, which Sosa also employs here).

Like Last Black Man (and several other productions I’ve seen lately), Venus is an ensemble play.  Zainab Jah’s Venus and John Ellison Conlee’s Baron Docteur have central roles in the script and they have multiple scenes together, often one-on-one, but the play as a whole is an ensemble piece.  The key is that all the performers have to be top-flight actors who all draw from and feed into one another’s portrayals as the play, not the performances, determine who gets the spotlight.  This director deBessonet and her cast accomplish magnificently.  Further, deBessonet and the company all handle Parks’s difficult text fluidly and with complete mastery (only three members of the Chorus list previous Parks experience in their program bios; even the director doesn’t name a Parks play on her résumé).  Jah, seen last year on Broadway in Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, is the only cast member who doesn’t have to shift from one character to another (though Conlee does only once at the very beginning of the play); however, she does develop several personae from Saartjie Baartman to The Girl to The Venus Hottentot, and even in the last guise, Jah displays different personalities as she becomes more self-knowledgeable and worldly wise.  The actress balances all her personae smoothly and artfully.

Of course, none of this is depicted in realistic acting, rather in a more presentational style befitting a vaudeville sketch, say.  (As exaggerated as the acting of the main narrative is, the performance style in For the Love of the Venus is even more stylized.)  The Negro Resurrectionist of Kevin Mambo mostly remains outside the story—he has a recurring role as a former body snatcher—and his performance is entirely presentational as he addresses the audience like a kind of MC. 

(‘Resurrectionist,’ it should be noted, is another word for ‘body snatcher,’ but an alternative definition is “One who brings something back into use or notice again,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.  This aligns with Parks’s concept of “re-membering,” the reclamation of lost black history and the return of people of African heritage into the historical record from which they’ve been erased.  It also signifies reassembling the black people who’ve been dismembered, both metaphorically and, as Baartman’s story shows, actually.  This idea is further invoked in the title Parks gives to Scene 16, the Baron Docteur’s lecture: “The Dis-(re)-memberment of the Venus Hottentot.”)

Show-Score gave Venus an average score of 73 based on a survey of 28 critics’ reviews, with 75% of the notices positive, 18% mixed, and 7% negative.  The high score was a single 90 (Theatre is Easy), backed up with six 85’s; Show-Score’s lowest rating was 40 (This Week in New York Blog, Lighting & Sound America—the only two negative notices).  My round-up will cover 18 reviews.

In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz called the STC production of Venus “an absorbing revival,” which “puts [Parks’s] own fictionalized and stylized spin” on a story he dubbed “sicko stuff.”  Dziemianowicz reported, “The storytelling is highly theatrical.  The script flows with poetry, music and moments that pop” as it “goes from gritty carnival sideshow to fancy French domestic setting.”  DeBessonet “guides a fine ensemble,” with “evocative staging.”  Matt Windman of am New York characterized the “excellent revival” as a “disturbing and disorienting” drama which “is pageant-like, intellectual.”  The AMNY reviewer proposed, “Whether the play’s bold and self-aware theatricality . . . adds to or detracts from the impact of the storytelling is up for debate,” but concluded that “thanks to superb production values and an absorbing and ambiguous performance from Jah, who keeps you guessing about the extent to which Baartman controls her own fate, ‘Venus’ works over the audience like an intoxicating spell.”

Long Island Newsday’s Elisabeth Vincentelli dubbed Venus a “Dream-like telling of a nightmarish true story” in her “Bottom Line.”  Vincentelli warned that the play “is no period-perfect petticoat affair” because Parks is “the most poetically minded of major contemporary American playwrights.”   The playwright’s “hybrid of fact and fancy,” which has received “a vivid, visually striking revival by” director deBessonet, is a tale through which “resilience, humor and love run.”  Venus “never devolves into a treaty on racism and colonialism,” asserted Vincentelli, because “Parks creates a distance from the story’s fundamental sadness” through “extreme stylization”; the production “has a surprisingly light touch.”  With special praise for Jah’s “balance of pathos and dignity," the Newsday reviewer acknowledged that “the production benefits from an excellent ensemble.”  In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness proclaimed, “Venus is about a legendary rear end.”  The play, in which “we see . . . not a depiction of the real Baartman so much as an overtly sexualised representation of a quasi-mythical figure,” “has a keen provocative edge,” wrote McGuinness—in terms of “cultural and psychological analysis.”  The FT reviewer, though, continued, “As drama, Venus is less successful—because its steady fixation on Baartman’s sexual objectification becomes repetitive over the course of two hours, and because the script never quite replicates the bleak poetry of” Last Black Man.  He added that director deBessonet’s “pacing also seems too uniformly ponderous while the ensemble’s delivery can sound hectoring.”  McGuinness continued by stating, “Baartman endured endless sexual exploitation. All we have to do is sit and watch. Perhaps that shouldn’t be too easy.”

Brantley of the Times denigrated STC’s Venus as a “patchy revival” (while quipping about Jah’s “fulsomely padded body stocking” and making references to Kim Kardashian’s “traffic-stopping body”).  In contrast to the 1996 première, Brantley asserted, “This latest reincarnation has a new clarity that illuminates both the script’s prescience and its flaws” and deBessonet’s direction reveals the play “to be an unexpectedly traditional piece by the standards of Ms. Parks.”  The Timesman explained: “Though it abounds in the distancing devices of Epic Theater—anachronisms, songs, historical footnotes, a multifarious chorus—‘Venus’ now seems like a surprisingly conventional cousin to Bernard Pomerance’s ‘The Elephant Man.’”  (Brantley was but one of the several reviewers who saw a similarity between Venus and Pomerance’s 1977 play about another 19th-century anatomical outlier who became a public curiosity.)  Though the Times review-writer described Matt Saunders’s set as “handsomely designed . . . with a color palette out of Sarah’s Africa,” he felt that deBessonet’s staging “never achieves a compelling unity of vision, or the hypnotic flow of Signature’s recent revival of” Last Black Man.  He blamed the deficiencies “partly [on] the script, which alternates among pointed Brechtian didacticism, incantatory repetition, naturalistic dialogue and an artificial play-within-a-play.  It’s an approach that demands a lot of its performers.”  Lauding Jah’s performance as Venus, Brantley judged that, “for the most part, the talented cast . . . doesn’t yet match the stylish precision of its surroundings.”  (An editorial note: as his phraseology suggests, Brantley saw the play in a “critics’ preview,” which are essentially dress rehearsals before an audience; I saw the performance more than a month after the production had opened.) 

In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section, the unnamed reviewer reported that Venus “constructs and deconstructs Saartjie Baartman” but added, “For all the play’s looky-looky theatricality and audacious language, Parks’s ultimate goal is to afford Baartman her own dignity and desires, to plumb the heart and the mind inside that body.”  As for the production, the New Yorker writer summarized: “Though deBessonet’s production sometimes chafes against the script’s stylistic variety, Zainab Jah . . . gives a poignant, spirited performance, with John Ellison Conlee as her anatomist lover and Kevin Mambo as a baleful narrator.”  TONY’s MacDonald declared, “In the two decades since its Public Theater debut, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus has lost none of its power to unsettle and appall.”  In fact, said MacDonald, it’s “gained in shock value” and the STC revival “is devastating.”  The reviewer from TONY warned, “If the first act seems mannered and arch, beware: You’re being set up.” 

Michael Dale, labeling Venus “devastating” on Broadway World in deBessonet’s “perfectly cold and tense production,” applauded Jah for “[b]alancing pathos, power and enthusiastic sensuality.”  The play is “aggressively unsentimental” and “the tragedy is heartbreaking.”  On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter called the production a “visually elaborate but notably uneven” mounting of a play Leiter labeled “overlong . . . and frequently lifeless.”  The blogger explained:

Much of it is juvenile and lacking in wit, and its structure as misshapen as the woman whose story it dramatizes.  Poetic dialogue mingles uncomfortably with the prosaic.  Fortunately, it gets a finely nuanced performance from Jah, who brings charm and intelligence to playing this unusual, abused, enslaved, yet determined woman.

“The talented deBessonet’s effortful production can do little to blanket the play’s weaknesses,” added Leiter.  He was also disturbed by Parks’s literal depiction of Venus’ appearance, which he inferred “is perhaps meant to make us feel complicit in her exploitation when we gaze at her.”  The review-writer continued, “It does, however, feel as though it’s Parks herself who’s complicit in her exploitation.  Some might prefer seeing the Venus Hottentot depicted without prosthetics—or at least such a realistic one.”  As for the ensemble, Leiter felt it’s comprised of “fine actors,” but that “you may still wish the curtain could be drawn on them.”  He complained, “Exaggerated costumes, brightly colored wigs, clownish overacting, and cross-gender campiness can’t hide the doomed struggle to create an appropriately satirical environment.”  In his “Bottom line,” Leiter asserted that “this Venus is one Hottentot not hot to trot.”  (Leiter’s review received a rating of 50 on Show-Score.)

Elyse Sommer dubbed the STC revival “a visually stunning and finely cast new production” which “features a large cast and showcases the author’s penchant for a non-linear, somewhat hard to follow, time traveling structure” on CurtainUp.  Despite this, Sommer acknowledged, “Venus . . . is not all that hard to follow.  However, it’s painfully hard to watch.”   Calling deBessonet the production’s “ideal director,” the CU reviewer praised Jah as “magnificently heartbreaking,” while Mambo “is outstanding” and Conlee “eerily charismatic.”  Sommer concluded, “For all its colorful staging and fine acting, Venus can’t quite escape coming off as a rather obvious history lesson, but one, especially Parks’ many fans, won’t want to miss.”  On  TheaterMania, Hayley Levitt described Venus as “challenging” and “unnerving,” adding that it’s “by no means a pleasant, easy two hours of passively absorbing the scenery.  It requires active spectators, which, ironically . . ., is exactly what makes Venus so discomfiting.”  Levitt explained how

audiences who were ready to acknowledge the depravity of this story are transformed into the depraved spectators who facilitated it.  This, among other emotional and intellectual ambiguities, make Venus incredibly difficult to sit through, and yet, they are also what make it such an intriguing work that has inspired extensive analysis since its original premiere.

The TM review-writer applauded the case, singling put Jah (“superb”) and Conlee (“excellent”), and concluded by questioning:

To listen and become one of Baartman’s appalling posthumous voyeurs—or to turn a deaf ear to a piece of history?  Parks does not seem content ignoring history, and yet, her body of work leaves open many questions about the correct way to engage with it.  The only way to start answering those questions—for yourself at least—is to sit in the discomfort and pay attention.

Howard Miller of Talkin’ Broadway characterized Venus as “a three-ring circus of a play” which “asks much of its audience.”  Parks’s play, reported Miller, sees Venus’ story “through multiple lenses that set things whirling head-spinningly in diverse directions, encompassing naturalism, satire, surrealism, absurdism, choral recitations, random pieces of a play-within-the-play, and political, historic, and medical discourse.”  Though he found Jah’s performance “tough, proud and clear-eyed,” the TB reviewer felt that “over the course of the evening, things become rather less coherent through the disruptive insertion at seemingly random intervals of” the play-within-the-play and the “footnotes” delivered by the Negro Resurrectionist and the Baron Docteur’s lecture, both of which Miller dubbed “tangential.”  “These deliberate interruptions” the reviewer asserted, “jolt the narrative and remind us of the artifice involved in the play’s design, even as they encourage us to mull over the play’s broader themes.”  He summed up his evaluation by stating: “There is an ironic, Brechtian tone to much of the proceedings, but the dizzying and clashing styles challenge our ability to immerse ourselves in Saartjie’s all-too-human story.”  Miller’s conclusion was that Venus “is a decidedly challenging play to pull off without losing its focus, and director Lear deBessonet has not been entirely successful at balancing all of the jarring elements.”

On TheaterScene, Joel Benjamin opened his notice (considered “mixed” by Show-Score at a rating of 65) declaring, “The problem at the heart of Venus is that its author Suzan-Lori Parks does not, fundamentally, trust the strength of her central figure.”   Labeling the play “bizarrely overwritten,” Benjamin found that “the inherent emotional power of this figure goes missing, as if Parks is purposely avoiding an Elephant Man redux by showing off every theatrical gimmick in her playwrighting [sic] arsenal.”  The playwright’s “over-the-top stylistic distortions prevent our getting close to and feeling for this poor creature,” explained the TS review-writer.  Coming perilously close to telling Parks to write a different play (something to which I strenuously object in a review), Benjamin wrote, “Instead of delving into Venus’ psychology and the racial attitudes of the times—sadly still an important issue—Parks diffuses the potential power of this story by mounting a giddy carnival sideshow, full of exaggerated[l]y cartoonish characters.”  He further disparaged the For the Love of the Venus diegetic play as “ridiculous” because it “mocks Venus’ painful story.”  The affair with the Baron Docteur, said Benjamin, “turns the play into a nighttime soap” because Parks “turns [Venus] into a spurned lover instead [of a mistreated woman], diminishing her in the process.”  With praise for the “luxuriously appointed production” and “an adept cast” headed by Jah, the reviewer found that director deBessonet “does what she can to bring to life Ms. Parks’ unwieldy vision, but the flamboyance of this production and its unwieldy structure overwhelm her efforts.”  He felt that “Parks works too hard with little more than superficial results,” asserting, “There’s a lot there to savor but most of the superficial decoration helps only to avoid what should have been a moving portrait.”  Benjamin’s final assessment was: “Although Venus takes a little-known incident and attempts to turn it into a weighty treatise, Suzan-Lori Parks’ extraordinary talents for once failed her.”

Tami Shaloum calls Venus “thought-provoking” on Stage Buddy, observing that the STC revival is staged by deBessonet in “a highly stylized manner. . . performed almost entirely like a sideshow.”  With a performance by Jah that’s “a spectacularly humanistic portrayal,” our Stage Buddy reported, “Venus has a dark and difficult subject matter that Parks treats with utmost humanity, and the beauty of the language does much to counterbalance the brutality of The Venus’ life.”  Warning that Parks “does not write for the passive observer,” Tulis McCall of New York Theatre Guide affirmed that Venus “makes you sit up and pay attention—even if you don’t want to.”  McCall reported, “Each performance is finely tuned, and the direction of Lear DeBessonet brings the entire production to full throttled life.”  The review-writer added as a caveat, “Whatever the facts, it is this element of the story that brings us into Sarah’s heart and makes the outcome all the more shattering.”

On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora reported that the revival is staged “with flair and confidence, capitalizing on its numerous styles—including Brechtian story-telling, vaudeville, and surreal absurdism.”  Similarities with other works aside, Rocamora asserted that “in the end, Venus is a unique creation by a unique playwright with an urgent voice.”  The Huffington Post’s Steven Suskin labeled Venus “an intriguing and arresting work” in which “the playwright’s incisive, probing imagination matched with clearly inborn theatricality is very much in evidence.”  Praising the cast, the TP review-writer affirmed that deBessonet . . . does a masterful job” of staging the sideshow-like production.  “What strikes us most, though, is the sheer theatricality conjured twenty years ago by Parks,” proclaimed Suskin: “the magic comes not only from the dialogue but from the entire world which the playwright has envisioned.”  It culminates in “a fascinating evening.”

On WNBC television, the network-owned station in New York City, Robert Kahn dubbed the STC presentation of Venus “an adventurous revival” that “features carnival-like and sometimes too-cluttered direction by Lear deBessonet.”  Kahn summed up the play’s impact:

Empowered?  Feminist?  Pragmatic?  In control?  Jah’s Venus is all those things in degrees, in spite of the choices she makes, and the choices that are cruelly made for her.  In this revival, the Hottentot’s lifelong adult imprisonments are almost—almost—besides the point.

[The description and period photos and illustrations of the Hottentot Venus have always brought to my mind the figure of an ancient goddess described in James Michener’s The Source, a 1965 novel set at a fictional archeological dig near Akko in northern Israel.  Discovered at level 14 of Tell Makor (tell, or tel, is Arabic for ‘hill’ or ‘mound’ and in archeology designates a site of a buried ancient dwelling; makor is Hebrew for ‘source’), which contained the ruins of the 23rd century B.C.E. Canaanite town, the clay statuette represented another incarnation of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, known as Astarte, the Canaanite goddess of fertility and sexuality.  (Her name had several variations among other peoples of the region.)  Here’s how Michener depicts the figure:

She was six inches high, nude, very feminine, with wide hips and hands cupped below circular breasts.  She was erotic and plump, delightful to study and reassuring to have in one’s possession.

[The novelist also observes that the pagan Astarte was “a permanent temptation to the Hebrews,” just as the Hottentot Venus was to the European men of the 1810s.]

Pops and Diz

by Kirk Woodward

[As ROTters will know, my friend Kirk Woodward is a long-time jazz enthusiast.  (See “Some Of That Jazz,” posted on 7 June 2015.)  Kirk’s not only a fan, but as a musician and composer himself, has the musical knowledge to know what the instrumentalists are doing and analyze his own responses.  That makes his discussion below of the contrasts and similarities between two jazz greats, Louis Armstrong (“Pops”) and Dizzie Gillespie (“Diz”), whose styles varied but who played together occasionally and respected each other’s art, all that more revealing.  I don’t have the background to write cogently about music (among other topics),so I’m always on the look-out for contributors who can cover what I can’t.  Kirk, in addition to being my friend for more than 50 years, has been my go-to guy on music, not limited to jazz, since I launched Rick On Theater over eight years ago (at his suggestion, as it happens).  In “Pops and Diz,” I think you’ll see why.  Even if you’re not a jazz fan, I’m sure you’ll find his descriptions of the playing of Armstrong and Gillespie, two of America’s greatest musical artists, enlightening.  (Pay particular attention to his analysis of the two musicians playing together on “The Umbrella Man”:  you can almost hear them riffing!)]

In a sense a work of art is a capsulated form of the time in which it was created – but the “capsule” often omits important information, such as the author’s intentions in the piece, the circumstances in which it was created, the events that motivated the piece, and so on. For example, we have Shakespeare’s plays but essentially no information about his writing process except what little we can deduce from the plays.

In our electronic age, such artifacts don’t have to be literary – they can also be visual and auditory. One example is a scratchy kinetoscope of a duet, on a TV jazz special called the Timex All-Star Show broadcast 7 January 1959, between the jazz trumpeters Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993). The video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqkoKIEESBs.

Louis, often nicknamed Pops,  and Dizzy or Diz, whose real name was John Birks Gillespie, represent two eras in jazz, and actually there is a third era between them – all in a space of about thirty or forty years, which demonstrates how quickly changes can take place in music.

Armstrong played magnificently melodic improvised music, and brought out the role of the soloist in jazz – ironically, considering that much of Dixieland is ensemble jazz. Armstrong influenced the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge (1911-1989), who in turn was Dizzy Gillespie’s primary early stylistic influence. In his autobiography, To Be, or not . . . To Bop (1979, Doubleday Books), Gillespie confirms this:

 . . . at one time, every trumpet player in the world, everybody who wasn’t in a classical band, had to be influenced by Louis Armstrong. Louis not only influenced trumpet players, he changed the modus operandi of music by inventing the solo. He came from King Oliver, and then he went out, and Roy Eldridge came from Louis Armstrong. I came from Roy Eldridge.

Armstrong’s musical approach is often called “Dixieland” and Gillespie’s, “bebop,” with “swing” coming between the two styles.  The terms, of course, can’t help being somewhat reductive; both men were greater than their styles.

I never heard Louis Armstrong in person; many of his performances can be seen on YouTube. I saw Roy Eldridge once at a jazz festival, and once at the old Jimmy Ryan’s jazz bar in midtown on Manhattan’s west side (now closed), where I asked him to play his famous specialty song “I Can’t Get Started,” and he did.

As for the jazz style known as bebop, Wikipedia says:

Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States, which features songs characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisations based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody.

Bebop, pioneered by musicians including Gillespie on trumpet, the brilliant Charlie Parker (1920-1955) on alto saxophone, and the highly individualistic Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) on piano, had a rough time gaining popular acceptance, and Gillespie’s outgoing, boisterous personality helped the music overcome resistance – for example, Armstrong’s, as we shall see – and enter into and influence the mainstream of American music.

I was fortunate to see Dizzy Gillespie in person three times. I saw him at an outdoor concert in 1969, on the bill with another great trumpet player of the next generation of jazz, Miles Davis (1926-1991), although they didn’t play together that night. I also saw him, along with Thelonious Monk, at one of the Giants of Jazz concerts in Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, and at an evening of Latin-influenced jazz, one of Gillespie’s specialties.

Armstrong and Gillespie had much in common. They were both African American, both born in conditions of poverty; both had flamboyant personalities, both found the trumpet a perfect instrument of expression, both mastered their crafts to an extent previously unknown, both influenced untold numbers of musicians, both became enormous popular favorites.

But Armstrong could not reconcile himself to the complex bebop style of jazz, and said so, including in his act for a while a song that made fun of bebop musicians as “poor little lambs who have lost their way” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWjBZ8ZmI4s). Gillespie and others fired back, not just on musical elements but on Armstrong’s performing style. (More on that below.)

So when I found the “Umbrella Man” duet between Armstrong and Gillespie, I wondered what kind of personal relationship it represented. Had they met before? Were rehearsals tense? Was it actually evidence of a battle?

The song “The Umbrella Man” was originally a mawkish English ballad written by James Cavanaugh, Larry Stock, and Vincent Rose in 1924. The 1959 broadcast version is anything but mawkish.  The band, with Gillespie on trumpet, is also made up of: Les Spann (1932-1989), guitar; Sam Jones (1924-1981), bass; Lex Humphries (1936-1994), drums; and Junior Mance (b. 1928, and still with us, although he has now retired), piano. The three minute number goes like this:

(First chorus) Gillespie kicks off a fast waltz tempo with three quick stomps of his heel, and plays a fluid, straightforward introduction. He sings the song in a relaxed, offhand style, interrupted four times by Junior Mance screeching the umbrella man’s cry. Each time Dizzy looks askance. A transition to 4/4 time leads to:

(Second chorus) Gillespie begins a sprightly improvisation on the melody, looking over briefly to see if Armstrong has entered, which he does, playing fluid fills in response to Gillespie’s first two phrases. Armstrong plays four measures in his classic style, and Gillespie four in his, using at least twice as many notes as Armstrong. They finish the chorus with Armstrong playing second trumpet to Gillespie’s lead, Gillespie playing in a light-hearted Dixieland style, and Armstrong accompanying him flawlessly.

(Third chorus) Gillespie and Armstrong “trade eights,” alternating eight measures each. Armstrong gives Gillespie a long “Yeah – h – h – h – h!” during Gillespie’s first solo. Each plays in his own characteristic style, Gillespie dazzling, Armstrong majestic.

(Fourth chorus) Gillespie sings the song and Armstrong scats responses to each line, practically bouncing with pleasure. Gillespie inadvertently spits slightly on Armstrong at the line “He’ll fix your parasol” and Armstrong responds, “Your parasol is juicy, boy!” turns and wipes his face, scats again, and says, “Oh, turn that way.” Gillespie wipes his mouth just before he sings “It looks like rain” – “Yeah, man!” Armstrong says. 

They continue the song-and-scat through the rest of the chorus. (The “Swiss Kriss!” Armstrong includes in his scat is the name of his favorite laxative!)  Armstrong demonstrates again in this piece, as he so often did, that his scat singing is as memorable an aspect of jazz as his trumpet playing. At the end of the number Gillespie returns to the trumpet while Armstrong continues to scat. Jackie Gleason (1916-1987), the host of the TV special and a jazz fan and occasional orchestra leader as well as a comedian and actor, looms in the background as Gillespie and Armstrong slap palms.

This video artifact is a joyous celebration, a remarkable achievement, and a sure cure for a gloomy mood. So what was in fact the relationship between the two men? The answer, it appears, is that they knew each other well and were friendly. In fact, Gillespie’s autobiography includes a lovely photograph of Armstrong, Gillespie, Bobby Hackett (1915-1976), and Jimmy McPartland (1907-1991), the latter two also outstanding horn players, together at a party at Gillespie’s house.

Gillespie, a serious student of music, was always respectful of musicians from other “schools.” In his autobiography he maintains:

when [Armstrong] started talking about bebop, “Aww, that’s slop! No melody.” Louis Armstrong couldn’t hear what we were doing. Pops wasn’t schooled enough musically to hear the changes and harmonies we played.  Pops’ beauty as a melodic player and a “blower” caused all of us to play the way we did, especially trumpet players, but his age wasn’t equipped to go as far, musically, as we did. Chronologically, I knew that Louis Armstrong was our progenitor as King Oliver and Buddy Bolden had been his progenitors. I knew how their styles developed and had been knowing it all the time; so Louis’ statements about bebop didn’t bother me. I knew that I came through Roy Eldridge, a follower of Louis Armstrong. I wouldn’t say anything. I wouldn’t make any statement about the older guys’ playing because I respected them too much.

And Gillespie prided himself that

Louis Armstrong criticized us but not me personally, not for paying the trumpet, never. He always said bad things about the guys who copied me, but I never read where he said that I wasn’t a good trumpet player, that I couldn’t play my instrument.

However, Gillespie did criticize Armstrong’s performance style, as did others who thought Armstrong was “playing up” in a humiliating way to white audiences. Gillespie writes that

I criticized Louis for other things, such as his “plantation image.” We didn’t appreciate that about Louis Armstrong, and if anybody asked me about a certain public image of him, handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism, I never hesitated to say I didn’t like it. I didn’t want the white man to expect me to allow the same things Louis Armstrong did.

But Gillespie acknowledged that in some ways he did the same sort of thing:

Hell, I had my own way of “Tomming.” Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation.

And he ultimately came to a different understanding of Armstrong’s behavior:

Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile. Coming from a younger generation, I misjudged him.

This understanding made it possible for Gillespie to admire Armstrong’s great talent despite the differences in period styles:

Nowadays in jazz we know more about chords, progressions – and we try to work out different rhythms and things that they didn’t think about when Louis Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play strictly from the soul, just strictly from his heart he just played. He didn’t think about no chords – he didn’t know nothing about no chords. Now, what we in the younger generation take from Louis Armstrong . . . is the soul.

So the two men’s TV appearance was in a sense a logical event:

Pops and I played together publicly for the first time on January 7, 1959 on the Timex All-Star Jazz Show, televised on CBS. Pops’ acceptance of this engagement sort of showed he accepted the olive branch we “boppers” had held out, and it showed he recognized that there didn’t have to be any competition between Dixieland and modern jazz.  But to let it be known that neither of us had given up his own brand of jazz, Pops and I played “The Umbrella Man” and battled it out, “Dixieland” versus “modern.” It was much more fun arguing with music than with words.

Gillespie says their appearance was “the first time” they played together publicly. I haven’t found references to other times. However, Gillespie writes that he and Armstrong intended to record an album together – Gillespie hoped there would be more than one, actually – but that the manager they shared at the time, Joe Glazer (1896-1969), refused to let it happen.

That would have been an album to cherish. Another event one wishes had been recorded was an evening in New York in which Armstrong became sick and was unable to finish a night club appearance. Gillespie wrapped up his own gig, went to the other club, and played Armstrong’s set in Armstrong’s style. What an event that would have been to see and hear.

In any case, we fortunately have the grainy kinescope of “The Umbrella Man” to thrill us over and over with a moment when two musical giants came together, with deep affection for their craft and for each other, and created a few moments of great art and even greater joy.