Everybody Rise

The playwright Richard Greenberg is a writer deserving of accolades. He has written over 25 plays, including hits like Take Me Out; beautiful scripts with lesser productions like Three Days of Rain; and the occasional flop like Breakfast at Tiffany’s which closed earlier this month. Happily, the praise bestowed on his new Broadway play, The Assembled Parties, has been nearly unanimous. But it felt unfinished to me, an amalgam of clever scenes and empathetic characters that had lost their way.

The Assembled Parties is a story about long-held secrets between family members, first in the early 80’s and later in the early aughts. Our attention is centered on the Bascovs, a refined, upper-class Manhattan family whom you would envy for their good looks and sprawling apartment if they weren’t so nice and welcoming. Julie Bascov, the beautiful mother played by Jessica Hecht, is a former actress who at 50-something hasn’t lost an ounce of youthful appeal. Her lilting voice and enunciated syllables suggest a well-bred upbringing, the same advantages she offers her two sons, Scotty and Timmy. We meet Julie before Christmas dinner, preparing crudités in the kitchen with Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), a bright but nervous law student and friend of Scotty’s who is staying with the Bascovs for the holiday.

It’s important to mention that everyone we meet here is Jewish. And while religion itself isn’t central to the play, it’s noteworthy that Christmas is the backdrop for this family gathering. It speaks not just to Julie and her husband Ben’s secularism, but also to their Jewish ancestry. (More on that in a minute.) The Bascovs’ dinner guests are Ben’s sister Faye, her husband Mort, and daughter Shelley, who are distinctly more Jewish…or rather Jewy, which implies the stereotypes without the religiosity. Jeff’s family (whom we don’t meet) seems to be more observant and less well-off, the combination of which deepens his awe of the Bascovs. A phone conversation to Jeff’s parents indicates that they’re spending the night with Chinese food and a movie, the recognizable cliché of Jews at Christmastime.

These multiple shades of Jewishness provide much of the comedy in Act I. Whether or not you pick up on the cultural references, you can’t miss Shelley’s Brooklyn-inflected accent, or Faye’s Yiddish-infused speech, which Judith Light nails at every turn. Faye is the opposite of Julie: she is salted herring to Julie’s caviar.

As the guests arrive and the Bascovs prepare dinner, we see the stage rotate to reveal more and more rooms in their palatial apartment. Ultimately, we arrive at the dining room where our appetites have been whetted by the many mysteries that hide behind the comedy: infidelity between spouses, long-standing rivalries, a brazen girlfriend we only hear about, and a ruby necklace whose ownership is in question.

The focus amid the din is Julie, and it is testament to Greenberg’s writing and to Hecht’s performance that we fall in love with her so immediately. Jeff visibly does too, and when he jokes with Scotty and says, “I’m in love with your mom,” it’s done with deliberate bro humor to mask any signs of sincerity. It’s easy for us to feel as Jeff does – we’re enamored by the Bascovs even as we don’t know them.

When the curtain rises after intermission, it’s clear that Julie Bascov (now in her 70’s) has slowed down with time. The set no longer rotates, and Julie’s lightness has become slow with older age. (Hecht’s ability to change her entire demeanor, posture, and walk over a 15-minute intermission is remarkable.) Jeff, whose relationship with the Bascovs has been ongoing if sporadic, has returned for another Christmas dinner. He is more resigned to life, less enchanted by law, and still, it would appear, in love with Julie.

Because the mysteries of Act I hang in the air, every conversation in the second act seems to hint at their revelation. This is where the play falls short. The secrets are revealed, but they don’t affect the story. What we learn is interesting but not reality changing. This play is ultimately Julie’s story: how she encounters every setback and challenge with positivity and grace. But I wish it had been Jeff’s story: the outsider looking in for twenty years. How he has loved Julie all this time while she loves him as a son.

The bigger issue I had with the play is why Greenberg portrays a Jewish family at Christmas dinner, not once but twice. Jewishness circles the play like tinsel and ornaments around an evergreen, but Greenberg doesn’t elucidate an important point: that there are distinct differences between prosperous German Jews like Julie and shtetl-associative Jews like Faye. It’s not simply for laughs that Julie is personified by sophistication and Faye by neuroses. Perhaps Greenberg assumes the audience will pick up on the reference points, but I think most will miss them. To have this play be more than about Julie’s charm – a topic many critics singled out in their praise – we need to understand why her culture and history matter. Conjoined with Julie’s gracefulness is her denial of anything bad: how she waves off bad events, people she’s lost, and any trace of her real heritage. We love Julie but we can’t get close to her. It’s an interesting but unresolved idea that Greenberg leaves on our plates as the play ends. An hour later I was hungry again.

For the April issue of American Theatre magazine, I interviewed actor Mark Rylance about his new play, Nice Fish, currently making its world-premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. At the time of the interview, the play was still in development, so we talked mostly about Rylance’s inspiration and the play’s language.

Nice Fish blends dialogue written by Rylance with monologues (or rather, poems) by Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. A longtime fan of Jenkins’ work, Rylance has quoted such poems at dinners, events, and – most famously – at the Tony Awards in 2008 and 2011 in lieu of acceptance speeches. Watch his 2011 Tony speech HERE.

Nice Fish portrays ice fishermen in Minnesota on the last day of the fishing season. In addition to co-writing the script, Rylance also co-directs with his wife, Claire van Kampen, and stars in the production. Here is an excerpt of our conversation:

I watched an interview that you gave after winning your second Tony award where you were asked if the acceptance speech was your own composition. You replied that you couldn’t write something that good.

(laughs) Probably not.

What was your initial inspiration to combine your words with Jenkins’ words?

I think the initial inspiration came when I noticed Robert Bly’s forward to Louis’ first book of poetry, and Robert identified what he felt was an adult voice running through the poems and also a child’s voice. One voice that was cynical and another that was imaginative. That was the beginning, and I thought maybe these two fisherman might say these words to each other. I don’t know where I got the idea of ice fishermen…. Oh that’s right, there was a funny recording I heard about Minnesota people and how they talk in non-sequiturs. They don’t pick up on what the other has said. Maybe it’s the isolation of the long winters or something.

How much did that Midwestern sensibility tie into your own adolescence in Wisconsin and thinking back on your childhood there?

That’s what it’s about for me. That’s the memory I play on. The long winters in Wisconsin. When I was doing Boeing Boeing [on Broadway] we did a workshop with Matthew Cowles, Christine Baranski’s husband, and I playing the two fishermen. It was about 45 minutes long with just Louis’ poems, no other dialogue. From that I set about wanting it to be a fuller evening with three acts. And then I started to write and imagine the other characters.

Is the non-sequitur style of conversation retained in this version?

Yes, to some degree. Their speech picks up some detail of what the other person has said. One person might be talking about a girlfriend and saying, “I waited for her outside the red house where she lived,” and then he might go on for a few sentences about her. And then the other speaker might say, “I lived in a red house once.”

That almost has an absurdist air to it.

There are absurdist turns in Louis’ poems, it’s true. The ingredients are so recognizable that you don’t see the absurdist thing coming. It’s an ongoing process to make my dialogue marry with his language. For instance, he never swears in his poems, and I’ll sometimes put that in to make something more dramatic, but I’ve just recently taken all that out.

Is it clear when the dialogue shifts from your words to his poems?

Well, hopefully it blends. But the poems tend to be a one-minute speech about something, whereas my dialogue goes back and forth.

I like the idea of collaboration. I like the fact that Shakespeare collaborated. And I expect the collaboration to carry on when the actors join. Most of them are local Minnesotan actors, so I think they’ll correct me on my syntax.

What do you think people think of when they think about ice fishing? What does it mean to a local audience?

I wanted to create [Nice Fish] in Minnesota so that people coming to the play would know about ice fishing and that environment. There’s something magical about being suspended on eight or nine inches of ice. There’s the sense that it won’t last. Hopefully we’re reflecting something truthfully, recognizably.

I’m hoping that the play is more universal than just for a local audience, but this is certainly their environment and their sense of humor. That Northern sense of humor has been in my ear a lot. I remember a Minnesotan man once saying to me, “If a man from Wisconsin tells you a joke, you don’t laugh until a week later.” They’re very dry.  I certainly found that when I came to London, my humor was not recognizable.

But your point about why people go out on the ice and build these little huts. What are they escaping for and what experience do they want to have? These are all quite useful things.

Are you hoping to have a set that evokes a realistic setting or a metaphorical setting?

I hope the set will be like Louis’ poems. They’re made up of real things, but they have the ability to be surprisingly expansive. It’s a wonderful setting – this icy lake with trees in the distance. As we’ve worked on it, I’ve realized that the character of Mother Nature is very expressive in my imagination – wind and snow and aurora borealis. I certainly remember that about the Midwest as compared to London. One is much more aware of the elements.

Do you find your accent returning when you come back to the Midwest?

Yeah, I do. Not just the accent, but a character in me too. I get a flash of being eighteen again. It was a big thing to leave the Midwest at eighteen and come to London, having very little conception in our family that any such thing would ever happen. But we all thought we were English. We used to have tea parties on the fourth of July. When I came to England I knew so little about the rest of the world. Everyone was quite politicized and well read in London. Coming out of high school, I wasn’t awake to very much at all apart from Shakespeare and plays that I had done. So when I go back to the Midwest, I feel an enormous weight come off my shoulders.

How do you make the classics feel fresh? One option: find innovative ways to stage them. Another option: expand the definition of “classics”. The fact of Classic Stage Company’s continued relevance, appeal, and durability within Off-Broadway theater is due to a smart combination of the two…not to mention casting Peter Sarsgaard, Bebe Neuwirth, and John Turturro.

In 2011, I interviewed artistic director Brian Kulick on the eve of CSC’s world-premiere of Unnatural Acts, a based-on-real-events portrayal of Harvard’s underground gay community in the 1920’s. Co-conceived by director Tony Speciale and collaboratively written by members of the Plastic Theatre that same year, the play seemed like an unusual selection for a theater dedicated to classic drama. So I asked Kulick how he defines the term. He responded, “A classic is a play that refuses to stop resonating.”

In Kulick’s hands, CSC is benefitting from that broad interpretation. Currently on stage is Stephen Sondheim’s Passion – the first New York revival of the musical and the first musical ever to be staged at the downtown theater. Frequent Sondheim collaborator John Doyle directs this production, though instead of having actors play instruments (as in previous Doyle-Sondheim productions), the nine-member orchestra is perched above the stage.

The placement of musicians doesn’t ostensibly have anything to do with Passion, but I found it to be another example of CSC’s continued reinvention. Because there is no room onstage to set up an orchestra, CSC converted its second floor office space into an “orchestra pit” and broke through the walls to expose the area to the audience below. Seeing an elevated orchestra heightens the audience’s awareness of the musician as storyteller, particularly for a narrative composer like Sondheim. Space constraints lead to a new musical format = creativity borne out of necessity.

Director John Doyle’s work also benefits from this format. Doyle is often referred to as a minimalist, but I don’t believe that’s his exact intention. It’s more that he gets to the heart of the story and dismisses the pomp that can accompany big musicals. A few weeks before seeing Passion, I went to a panel discussion at WNYC’s Greene Space with Stephen Sondheim. John Doyle, and the lead cast members of the show. Doyle remarked that what is taken to be his creative style in actuality stems from spending years directing small-budget shows where money was scarce. “I got used to working with minimal resources,” he said. “I do everything I can not to get in the way of the story.” That method has stuck with him. The set in Doyle’s revival is a bare black marble floor with two gilded mirrors and light sconces against a back wall. The sparseness transfers our focus to the characters.

This production shows the beauty of Passion – how love transforms its shape and how it transfers its recipient. The cast, Melissa Errico, Judy Kuhn, and an amazing Ryan Silverman were transporting without falling into melodrama. It wouldn’t be surprising if musicals become a regular occurrence at CSC; this version of Passion is an auspicious first go at it. I would agree with Kulick that any great work of art refuses to stop resonating. Evidently, it pays to dust off the classics.

What The Laramie Project aspires to is remarkable. An enacted investigation into the killing of gay college student Matthew Shepard, the play and its performers achieve what Juilliard President Joseph Polisi once called “the artist as citizen”, the use of art to advocate for a better society.

Just five weeks after Shepard was brutally beaten on October 6, 1998, the Tectonic Theater Project, led by director Moisés Kaufman, went to Laramie, Wyoming to ask questions and collect information, forging a work of art that has arguably become the most comprehensive study of Shepard’s murder. On stage now at BAM and performed in repertory with The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, the full work offers nearly five hours of first-person accounts, performed by Tectonic company members, that shed light on the local community, the perception of gays, and the redefining of hate crimes.

The Laramie Project is so widely acclaimed and its subject matter is so inherently heartrending, that I was surprised by how lackluster the production was. There are many powerful revelations in the work – about the trial, the transition of Mrs. Shepard from private mother to fearless advocate, and the way the media tried to downplay homosexuality as a primary cause of the crime. But each one was presented as a direct address to the audience, as though reading quotations from an article. The breadth of interviews was impressive. But where was the play? It somehow got lost in the documentary.

Blending research with provocative storytelling is an incredible challenge. The best recent example I’ve seen is How to Survive a Plague, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the AIDS crisis and the pursuit of effective treatment among activist groups. Director David France presents an overwhelming amount of historical data and documentary footage, but he finds a soul within the film as well. It felt disappointing both nights at BAM that a work so well-assembled, based on events so heartbreaking, would come across as dryly as it did.

Christopher Shinn, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, pinpoints desire as the missing element in The Laramie Project. For a study so in-depth about a gay man, the play doesn’t discuss desire in the gay community – attraction, relationships, sex both intimate and casual. That absence propelled Shinn to write a new play as “a response to all [The Laramie Project] avoids”, he told me. The new play, Teddy Ferrara, is currently onstage through March 3^rd at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The play, which confronts gay college students who come to terms with the suicide of a withdrawn gay freshman, seems to be linked to the suicide of gay college student Tyler Clementi in 2010. But Shinn’s ambitions are more expansive. He explores gay sexuality in all of its complexities, from the dynamics of committed relationships to the expectation that gay men will cheat. “It asks the audience to enter on the level of desire,” Shinn says.

Of course, the narrative of Teddy Ferrara is vastly different from The Laramie Project. But talking to Shinn about how The Laramie Project inspired him to write a new play affirmed what I felt was missing, despite the Tectonic Theater Project’s many talents. The people we meet in Laramie are certainly impassioned; it’s just the storytelling that isn’t.

This past weekend I saw Outcry at JACK, the storefront performance space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Written by Thais Francis, the show is an expression of grief and anger at the innocent black men who have been killed for no other cause than racial profiling. My friend Kelley Girod who produced the show termed it “more of an event than a play.” Slain figures like Emmett Till (killed in 1955) and Trayvon Martin (killed in 2012) find themselves in the same place. Heaven, maybe.

The show runs through February 17^th and is worth seeing. While the script gets clumsy at times, and Thais is inclined to use diary-worthy lines like, “when it’s real, it’s forever”, the idea to combine the lives and deaths of these innocent souls is powerful. Also powerful was seeing great diversity in the audience. It’s not common at the theater.

Kelley, a black playwright and producer, has thought a lot about what attracts black audiences. We talked after the show about Broadway productions that have appealed to people of color and the various reasons why. Most notable are the plays that focus on black characters (like The Color Purple), especially when they feature prominent actors (like The Mountaintop). There are also shows that happen to have a black celebrity (like Chris Rock in Motherfucker with the Hat). Interestingly, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess had a surprisingly small African American turnout. Maybe the opera struck prospective audiences as being dated. Or maybe Audra McDonald’s celebrity is only a draw for audiences that already love musicals.

For four years, Kelley has produced The Fire This Time Festival – a presentation of plays by writers of African and African American descent. The initial idea was to support – and create an outlet for – black writers. And to combat the idea that a black playwright “has to write a play that has black themes, like overcoming slavery,” she says. “If the play is written by a black playwright, then it will relate to a black experience in some way.” As a result, The Fire This Time covers a wide variety of subjects, some racially themed, others not at all. It keeps the festival eclectic, though Kelley admits that a show like Outcry has an easier time raising funds. There is a greater sense of urgency for investors precisely because the black themes are so prominent.

When I saw Motherfucker with the Hat and noticed how many black people were in the audience, my thought was that it stemmed from the desire to see Chris Rock on Broadway. And that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps the presence of black actors – famous or not – is the strongest factor. Regardless of the narrative, audiences of any race want to see an element of themselves onstage.

Nathan Englander’s first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, is one of my favorite books ever. I’m not sure if ‘Jewish American Literature’ is still a real genre in the Henry Roth sense of the term, but, if so, Englander is surely a Jewish writer. For someone who is said to have left religious practice years ago, he still has a deeply Jewish soul. And the threads of Jewish thought and identity are looped into every story he writes.

The Twenty-Seventh Man, his first story in that collection and now his first play, onstage currently at the Public Theater, is a requiem for the great Yiddish writers in post-WWII Russia who were selectively sentenced to execution by Stalin’s regime. In a jail cell that feels believably stifling, as though “lack of air flow” was part of the set description, we meet Englander’s imagined luminaries, each a Jew and each a legend of the written word.

As the writers discuss their work, their language, and the cause of their incarceration, a new prisoner arrives, this one a near teenager whose name – Pinchas Pelovits – strikes no familiar chords as a recognizable writer. Pelovits, the twenty-seventh man to be selected, is unlike the others: he is anonymous and unpublished. But he is, he assures us, a writer. His presence in the cell is the mystery of the play, and as the other men curiously question his identity, Englander brings to light how writers measure their worth: by sustaining the lifelong ritual of writing and by creating an audience of readers. Pelovits’ elation in sharing the same room as the writers he most admires is the poignant paradox of the work. It is his one chance to share a story of his own with them.

The story Pelovits writes in prison is my favorite part of the play, and I almost wish I could make everyone in the audience read Englander’s original story before seeing the production because the story needs time and potentially a reread to resonate. What Englander arrives at is that the dead cannot be remembered – their lives and their actions have no sanctification – unless those who live make their memory significant. It’s an idea whose brilliance is almost eclipsed by its simplicity.

Barry Edelstein’s direction – maybe his last at the Public Theater and certainly his last in New York for a while as he sets up a new home at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre – was so arresting that the audience seemed to hold its breath collectively after the play’s final scene before applause took over like a welcome catharsis.

Englander’s writing has kept me company a lot this year. I read his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as soon as it came out, and I used his new translation of the haggadah on Passover. The haggadah had received some mixed reviews, but what I loved about it was the way Englander made some of the most ordinary and familiar phrases come alive. One example was “eloheinu” which is typically translated as “our God” but which Englander translates as “God of us”. In doing so, he offers a new lens through which to view the human/God relationship, transferring any sense of ownership away from us. Whether or not that phrase works for you, it likely makes you think. It makes the speaker take pause and reconsider the meaning of familiar words. That ability is evident in so much of Englander’s work. He encourages us to rethink the things we know. Isn’t that what the best writers do?