Inspirations and Holy Encounters

Maybe it's the onset of cold or the early darkness of autumn evenings, or maybe it's all the tremors of terrible news coming from the Fed and from Wall Street, or maybe it's every single article in the newspaper: for whatever reason, I keep talking to close friends about seeking inspiration and about how we're all keeping ourselves going amid busy jobs and worries about money and anxieties about how to find the time for the relationships, hobbies, and down time that do inspire us. I'm struggling as much as anyone to keep up with what I need to do and what I want to do, and to do it all without neglecting the people who are important to me. Amidst all of this, I've been lucky to stumble upon some unexpected jolts of pure inspiration lately, and if you'll pardon me, I'd like to write about them so I can hold onto them and also share them—and to invite you to share what inspires you, either lately or perpetually.

It warms my heart that a living genius like playwright Adrienne Kennedy is enjoying a revival in New York City, and that Charles Isherwood reviewed it so lovingly. I don't live close enough to New York anymore to see it, but knowing that it's happening and reading this review inspires me.

It warms my heart that another living genius, Todd Haynes, is rolling out his new film to such a rich and ardent reception by critics and early audiences, the kind of reception that should have greeted his last musical-fantasia masterpiece. This article about Haynes from the New York Sun, written by a good friend of mine from college, enlivens me both because of Haynes' candor and eloquence within the piece and because of the eager support and articulate admiration that the article extends to him. I'm Not There opens in Chicago a week from today, and I simply cannot wait.

In an added and wonderful wrinkle, which began as a frustrating wrinkle, I had to work during the Chicago preview screening that happened last week, where Haynes appeared in person for an audience Q&A. Thankfully, the work itself was invigorating that evening—I am lucky to have a job that gratifies and inspires me—but I was still feeling sorry for myself about missing a one-to-one encounter with a personal hero. So, calling on my inner Eve Harrington, I took a bus after work to the cinema where he was finishing his Q&A, bought a ticket for a movie I wasn't going to see so I could get past the usher, planted myself outside Auditorium #9 as people started filing out, and totally cornered him at the escalator, long enough to tell him that he is a personal hero to me, that I teach queer cinema classes at a university, and that my students invariably love Dottie Gets Spanked and Safe and Velvet Goldmine and Superstar and admire his hard work in creating them. The ensuing handshake was maybe my favorite handshake in my whole life. (And afterward, because I am a cheap rat, I got my unused ticket refunded. Sorry, Michael Clayton.)

A few weeks ago, as the Chicago Film Festival wound down, I had comparable luck (and comparable Eve-ishness) and managed to introduce myself to (The Lovely) Laura Linney at the closing-night screening of The Savages. I was initially so caught-off guard by my good fortune that I couldn't think of anything to say to her, though I did geek out and realized a dream of double-hand waving at her in the same way she does to Mark Ruffalo from inside the restaurant at the beginning of You Can Count on Me. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. She was wonderfully cordial and approachable—she even started the conversation, since I was so obviously unable, and she signed my DVD!—but I was even more moved by her response to a question I put to her during the post-screening Q&A. I prefaced to her, so I'll preface to you: I am so touched and gratified by how devotedly this actress commits herself to stories about unique, complicated, reorganized, fractious but tender families that aren't the families we typically see on screen—in You Can Count on Me, in The Squid and the Whale, in Jindabyne, and now in The Savages—and by how adept and precise she is at communicating entire and unbelievably specific histories with her screen siblings and children and relatives. I truly don't understand how she conveys all this depth of information, these lifetimes of mutual knowledge and bonding, so I asked her whether she prefers to spend more rehearsal time than normal with actors to whom she will have to relate persuasively as family, or whether she likes instead to be surprised by these actors (since her screen families do tend to be full of surprises). I also wanted to know whether she likes to collaborate with the actors or the screenwriter or director on forming articulated, comprehensive backstories for these characters or if it's more creatively exciting for her to go only on the evidence of the script, to hold in mind whatever makes sense to her about the characters' histories, and to assume that her fellow actors are doing the same thing. Here's what she said, and I love it:

I do think some actors have a particular process that they prefer to use and that works for them on every project. I don't. I like that each piece of work is different. Sometimes, my process is completely textual, and I can do the exciting job of sitting down with every line and every action and saying, 'Okay, why this? Why does that make sense? How does that fit?' And as you probably know, sometimes the answer is in another line, but it might also be in an action the character takes earlier or later in the script, or it might be somewhere else between the lines. Sometimes the process is textual because it's all you've got; I've been on projects where maybe I haven't liked the actor so much who I have to have a family relationship with, but it's okay, because the writing has enough to go on. [Ed.: !] But at other times, things do happen collaboratively or spontaneously on the set, or you engage in a different back and forth process based on the people you're working with and the mood of what you're doing.

Because you mentioned those movies, I do want to tell you that I am very, very lucky, because my two fictional brothers [Mark Ruffalo and Philip Seymour Hoffman] truly are two of my favorite people in the whole world, and if you knew them you would see why. And now I feel like you do in a family, like you have a sort of invisible string connecting you to that person wherever you are and whatever you're doing. And I love that audiences for those films think of us that way, too. It can actually be dangerous for the acting: I felt like they were my brothers, and you can sort of fall into that easy relationship and just relate with them as people instead of keeping it about who you're playing. So you need to be vigilant.

And really, despite what I said earlier, all of those four movies you named were wonderful experiences for me, and the scripts were so great that I'm sure that's why everyone chose to do those projects, including this one [The Savages]. So – thank you!

Of course I was thrilled to be "talking" with her, even across a stage/house divide and from within a huge public audience, but I was also inspired by the generous length and detail of her answer; by the idea that people I admire really do interact and take care of each other with the kind of sensitivity and mutual joy that I feel when I watch those movies; and, too, by her willingness to take each experience as it comes and bend her own rules rather than sticking to comfort zones or insisting on A Way To Do Things. It's a lesson I've thought about a lot in the weeks since, and I'd love to emulate the flexibility and adventure of her work life as well as her personal grace and the evident blend of seriousness, responsibility, playfulness, and passion that she brings to what she does.

This is as gushy and fanboyish as it gets around Nick's Flick Picks, but like I said, 'tis the season when a little gush won't hurt anybody. In response to another recent conversation, I don't agree with the conventional wisdom that critiquing movies or artworks entails a contempt for them or an air of superiority toward them; I think if you love movies, you take it personally when they're shoddy or misused, and more than being entertained, you are grateful and rejuvenated when they're good, and you want to be able to say why, specifically, this is so. Still, having said that, it's true that I don't always make the time (and do any of us?) to express that feeling of giddiness and awe and eager impressionability that we feel in front of our role models or in front of work that stirs up our spirits.

Setting aside, then, what's been "good" or "bad" in the movies lately, when have you felt encouraged, gratified, enthused, appeased? Who has said something, in print or on air or in person, or stuck with a project, or nailed a role, or challenged themselves in a way that resonated with you and made you glad, gave you energy? Who or what do you read for this kind of inspiration? (For example, the abundance and detail and inclusiveness of the posts at GreenCine are a constant spark to me to learn more, see more, think more carefully, and share more broadly.)

Chime in below: we can all use the tips. And go see The Savages! And be there for I'm Not There, though I expect I'm preaching to the converted on both points.

(Photos © 2007 New York Times/Gerry Goodstein; © 2003 WireImage/Jason Nevader; and personal archive)

Finding 'Never Land'

For the flatmates of D––––– St.

Phyllis Nagy's Never Land is the best play I have read so far this year, or at least the most interesting. I picked it up based on The Webloge's vehement recommendation of Nagy in general; Never Land, as I understand it, is not her favorite among Nagy's works, but it's one of only three that my university library owns, and you've got to start somewhere. If, however, the correct implication is that Nagy's other plays are even more ambitious and unsettling, then I've got a new name to add to my list of favorite modern playwrights.

Never Land takes place in the south of France and concerns itself with the three Jouberts: Henri, a middle-aged Frenchman who works at a perfume distillery, though neither his head nor his heart is much there; Anne, his tart and witty wife, loyal throughout his string of failed enterprises but longing for her own, different life; and Elisabeth, their thirty-something daughter, comfortable bathing in front of her parents in the very first scene but adamant in keeping them from meeting her fiancé. The first scene of the first act is the only one where les Joubert reserve the stage to themselves, all together and unaccompanied. The bulk of Nagy's three-act script showcases the Jouberts' strained relations to four other characters: their married friends the Caton-Smiths, petits-bourgeois from England; Albert Montel, the jocular owner and foreman of the parfumerie where Henri works; and Michael Carver, an African-American employee of a nearby casino, and Elisabeth's lover. The last scene of the last act, in a bitter symmetry, will again focus solely on the Jouberts, though a crucial series of entrances and exits will keep them from sharing the stage all at once, or ever again.

The most obvious theme of Never Land is the pathetic and oddly Sisyphusian way in which Henri dreams of abandoning his homeland for England. This longing so encases the other aspects of his character that Nagy's dramatis personae describes Henri only as "a middle-aged Frenchman who only speaks perfect RP." Henri's Anglophilia elicits both pity and discomfort, from his intimates as well as Nagy's audience, as he reprimands his daughter and his boss for addressing him in French, insists on referring to the wine he drinks as "tea," and even goads his dinner guests through impromptu recitals of skits from Fawlty Towers (where Henri, oddly, plays a Spanish character). It is a hot, passionate thing, Henri's craving for England, even when it courts absurdity and incites plunging melancholia. Doubtless, Nagy's play communicates something different to readers better-versed than I in the particulars of English-French relations, although the elliptical register of her setting and dialogue, all of them strongly redolent of subconscious urges and psychic states, all but neutralize the specificity of France and England within the logic of the play. The Jouberts live on the top of a high, muddy precipice, while the admittedly sheltered Caton-Smiths describe their neighborhood in London as a rare bulwark against the encroaching emptiness and lawlessness of Britain. Uniting all of the characters, though none too chummily, is a desire for geographic distance, mirroring a desire for personal solitude. This is not one of those plays about "alienation" where modernity's castaways hunger for a closer connection. Instead, Nagy's characters, already divorced each from the other, including spouses in lasting marriages, including couples from their friends, including parents from their children, can be roused to trembling aggravation at the slightest hint of companionship.

Working out a heady array of formal inroads to this sad and often angry emotional territory, Nagy fills her script with interesting conceits that are never quite systematic: they permeate the play, but not always in the same way, and not in a way that actors, directors, or audiences will easily put their finger on. Though Nagy subtly quotes at least one O'Neill title in the play and conjures his ghost in many other ways, her characters' curious and almost unpunctuated soliloquies do not separate public behavior from private obsession in quite so clean a way as the monologues in Strange Interlude or Mourning Becomes Electra do. The "(Beat)"s peppered all over the script are not necessarily pauses, and despite surface appearances, the story and the characters in Never Land differ from Pinter's example as much as they invoke them. Pinter often does what Henri does at his job: he distills essences, condensing subtle strains of meaning and feeling into overwhelming atmospheres, as a means of both defining a place and implying where else its inhabitants wish they were. Nagy, though less innovative in her style, is more complex in her tones and admixtures. Never Land sees its characters as discrete, if not altogether incompatible, and the different kinds of disunion that define their psyches and plague their relationships do not boil down into any universal statement. Indeed, it would defy Nagy's point to court any such goal. Rather, by shuttling us amongst comedy, eroticism, and panic, she all but changes the mood and rhythm of the play with every new scene, and she refuses the audience any ironic superiority over her characters' knowledge or self-knowledge. She does not shy from outsized staging effects—a huge vat of boiling fragrance, a thunderous rainstorm—but these are neither so predominating nor so numerous as to disguise her primary interest in her people.

And it is in people, not in any one person, that Never Land maintains its deep, disturbing fascination: in how they flee each other, even in the very midst of seduction; in how they send each other on errands they would rather not commission upon themselves; in how parents sometimes dispatch their own children before moving onto the business of more fully reckoning with each other, or with themselves. These group phenomena seem to me to suit Nagy's style much better than her recent film Mrs. Harris, now playing Stateside on HBO. That script, directed by Nagy's own uncertain hand in a medium she understands much less well than she does the theater, boasts an array of complicated ideas about Jean Harris but shockingly few about her underwritten and dissonantly acted allies and adversaries. Working only on the evidence of these two works, I admire the audacity of her writing: so enviably gifted with elucidating imbalance, estrangement, and disappointment within unexpected life stories, she all but consigns herself to accusations of unevenness—her pitfall as a writer as well as her forte.

Never Land wavers a bit for me whenever the character of Michael shows up, possibly because the script limns his Americanness a bit more rigidly than it does the Frenchness of the Jouberts or the Englishness of the Caton-Smiths, and the rigidity in this case stems not from the characters, but from the play. Nonetheless, Michael comprises the only uncertain note within the utterly persuasive and absorbing discordance of a brave, tricky script, full of speeches and exchanges that are credibly playable in any number of ways. Its portrait of an endangered marriage and an inchoate anxiety with life in toto comes impressively close to the high summit of Albee's A Delicate Balance. The dark, rumbling melodies it both hears and repeats inside words like "menace" and "miscalculation" are equal to the best moments in Mamet, in The Cryptogram or Glengarry Glen Ross. But Nagy is not Albee, or Mamet, or Pinter—or Churchill, or Beckett, or Kane, or Dorfman, or Parks. She aligns herself with the overriding concerns of modern British and American drama but doesn't simply repeat them, and with compelling strokes you don't see coming or don't grasp until much later, she corners her readers into a rich and under-explored terrain of modern introspection.

Praisin'

I spent a lovely afternoon at Hartford Stage attending a matinée performance of their terrific revival of A Raisin in the Sun, and giving an invited lecture at the end of the performance. Even before that alarm clock sounds and the action begins amidst deceptive sleepiness, this is a strong production: the set is superb, cheerfully dingy if that makes sense, and deftly detailed. The actors are a strong group, especially Billy Eugene Jones' lucid but empathetic take on Walter Lee, who says some terrible things and is too easy to dislike in the hands of lesser interpreters (and, perhaps, too easy to like in the form of Sidney Poitier). Lynda Gravátt and April Yvette Thompson are also standouts as Lena, the play's dowager empress, and Ruth, Walter's subtly incisive wife. In fact, only Albert Jones, who is much too eager to telegraph the superficial vacuousness of the gentleman caller he plays, sounds a wrong note in this impressive and engaging ensemble.

The real star, though, as it should be, is Hansberry, an utterly underrated playwright and enormously promising intellectual who died at age 34, as her criminally short-shrifted play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was closing its unsuccessful Broadway run. Hansberry was a brilliant writer, an inspired sketch artist and painter, a librettist, a witty correspondent, a real in-the-trenches activist, a proud Marxist (and this in the 1950s, before she had any celebrity to insulate her from attack, and when celebrities themselves weren't insulated anyway), an associate editor of Paul Robeson's radical leftist magazine Freedom, a reputed bisexual and dues-paying member of the Daughters of Bilitis (offering regular columns to their journal, The Ladder), an aspiring novelist, and an articulate grasper of global systems and political complexity. She thought and understood at the same level as James Baldwin or Tony Kushner, and she was able to get her audience to think at that level, too. Raisin is her most conventionally realist work, but it is layered, ambiguous, and fine-tuned as few American dramas are—it's better, I think, than anything by Miller—and hearing its impeccable dialogue and its stunning syntheses of familial, racial, local, sexual, sociological, and international tensions ring through the electrified air of a sold-out theater is a great way to pass a day.

And a lucky day it is, if you live in Hartford, or near it, since the show has been extended an extra week, through March 26. So pony up!

Theater 1, Film 0

Okay, so I'm officially back in Hartford after a month away. There is nothing in my fridge or pantry, there is next-to-nothing in my checking account, and there are only five days before the next semester gallops apace. How is any of this possible?

I did get to spend a good long weekend in New York City on my way back up here, during which I saw five movies, but none of them were as good as the production of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro that Derek and I saw at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, up on St. Nicholas Ave and 141st. Admittedly, Funnyhouse of a Negro is probably my favorite American play, top five easy, and yet it's so rarely staged that I probably would have been tickled by any production. But director Billie Allen, the star of the original 1964 off-Broadway production, has done exquisite justice to the rich figures, the starkly beautiful language, the brutal historical kaleidoscopes, and the frightening Artaudian cruelties of the piece. How many American plays are this rich in narrative and character but also invite, even require, such stunning attention to movement, voice, sound, masking, and makeup? The full cast of actors—not just the brave lead actress Suzette Azariah Gunn but, even more so, the exemplary artists who embody her historically-derived alter egos—are in stunning control of the text and its ritualistic choreographies. The piece is perfectly suited to the small, dark space of the Harlem School for the Arts, and the play's heavy demands on the lighting and tech crews are fully met across the board. New Yorkers and nearby outliers, you have until Feb. 12 to buy a ticket and better your life.

In the wake of this event, the movies I caught were bound to be also-rans, although Michael Haneke's Caché (which I was lucky to catch with Nathaniel) works very proficiently as a paranoid thriller and a probing character study. Eventually, the thematic implications become a bit cut-and-dry, not as textured as what Haneke achieved in The Piano Teacher or as chilling as his underrated Time of the Wolf. Still, Haneke's images retain their formidable obstinacy, somehow implying that they are staring you down much more forcefully than you are staring at them. Watching the movie at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is sort of a kick, because the social caste that Caché critiques is basically the same one plunked down in front of it; I was fascinated to sense the moments when the audience's enervated glee paled into a kind of nervous disavowal of the film.

In other news, I found Duncan Tucker's Transamerica to be a rather winning experience, without too much of the mushy sentiment that adheres to adjectives like "winning." The actors are good, even when creaky story-motivations require some surmounting, and the pressure to affirm the heroism of the protagonist or to simplify the perspectives of the people who surround her is much less than this kind of movie often demands. Moving down the ladder of value, Merchant-Ivory's The White Countess boasts a very strong performance by Ralph Fiennes, a bewitching sound mix, a typically good score by Richard Robbins, and a preposterous screenplay that keeps threatening to sink the whole thing. If Ivory had directed the verbal repetitions, stock figures, and clunky social collage so that they felt more purposefully irreal—as in some of screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro's more dreamlike novels, like The Unconsoled—then things might have hung together. Unhappily, The White Countess starts as a polished film with quaintly banal notions of history, before lowering itself into the truly unpardonable dialogues and contrivances of its finish.

It gets worse from there. Mrs. Henderson Presents sells out its virtues to its inanities in an even more galling way than The White Countess does, because at least what works in The White Countess is unexpected, idiosyncratic. Mrs. Henderson Presents is much more conventionally dispiriting: a period comedy with luscious costumes and make-up and an agreeable song score, all vainly recruited into the kind of movie that espouses nude vaudeville as a soulful protest to the indignities of global war. Judi Dench's protagonist isn't a character so much as a machine for prodding guffaws at her faux-outrageous quips. Jennifer Aniston puts much more effort into her lead turn in Rumor Has It, but without the slightest wisp of anything to play, she can only sell individual lines and moments. There isn't a single thing tying this movie together except its uniform garishness of tone, look, and scenario, all of them bordering on the lewd. You know the kind of "romantic comedy" where you wish the beleaguered boyfriend would file a restraining order against the protagonist instead of reconciling with her? This is that sort of gig.

Tim R. has correctly diagnosed me as an "Oscar completist," which is the only reason I would pay to see a movie like Mrs. Henderson Presents, and why I'll almost certainly squeeze in Memoirs of a Geisha, Casanova, and, God help me, The Producers before the nomination announcements January 31. (Note: "Oscar completism" transcends the high-profile categories and requires seeing anything short of The Polar Express or Bicentennial Man that might swipe even an Art Direction or Original Song nod.) The only major milestone of 2005 still to arrive to my eyes is Terrence Malick's The New World, which finally opens in Hartford this Friday—quite possibly in a re-edited version, given that the film was yanked from all of its metropolitan screens early this month and that rumors have run rampant about Malick and/or the studio tinkering with the tepidly-received epic. As a dyed-in-the-wool Malick devoté, I'm hoping for the best. In any event, my Top 10 list for 2005 will be posted once I've seen it, with the Nick's Flick Picks honorees in all categories soon to follow.

Where I'm Blogging From

With apologies to Raymond Carver, and to any of you reading, my wee but loyal party of chums. I am neither a) dead, b) near-dead, c) undead, nor d) trapped under something heavy. I am just finishing my last night of a three-week stay at my mother's house, helping her convalesce from a recent illness. Happily, all signs are looking good for her at present. Meanwhile, through diaphanous spiritual algorithms possibly unique to middle-class suburbia, it seems that a woman's health improves in direct proportion to how many household chores you can do in her stead and how much yard work you can perform at her behest. Helping to prepare meals and outfits, encouraging her through physical therapy workouts, etc., were helpful at the time, but appeared positively minuscule compared to the moment on New Year's Day when two fellows appeared unsolicited at our doorstep and volunteered their services to clean and flush the gutters surrounding the roof. This event was greeted as something akin to a cracking open of the heavens. And nothing apparently says I love you like raking a backyard that has, of necessity, gone untouched throughout a heavily deciduous autumn. Having spent an entire two days filling 68 of those 30-gallon Glaad bags—the ones with the plastic yellow drawstrings that look like police-emergency tape—I finally attained something of The Zone described to me by certain marathon-running acquaintances. Call it a raker's high.

All of this plus a last-minute job interview that went deliciously well (Chicagoans: prepare for a long-in-coming visit!), a bout with a nasty bronchial cough, an 81-year-old grandfather undergoing sudden surgery (he's fine), the delicate choreographies of post-divorce Quality Family Time, a worrisome addiction to my older brother Nathan's PlayStation version of Galaga, and a household where dial-up is the only internet option but the phone-line has to stay clear all day for doctors, well-wishers, and pinch-hitters from the office.... all this and no broadband makes Nick a dull blogger.

You can see on the sidebar that I did at least squeeze in some movies, mostly with Nathan. Syriana, a film which I felt I had no need to re-visit, actually got much more legible and more interesting on a second viewing, and I'm wondering about the degree to which I might have undersold it. I'm considering an upgrade to B+. Werner Herzog's indifferent documentary The White Diamond only throws into further relief the superior qualities of Grizzly Man; Graham Dorrington's tetchy inner conflicts aren't a patch on Timothy Treadwell's flamboyantly embodied contradictions, and The White Diamond is diverting without raising any great questions. Most recently, Woody Allen's Match Point proved to be a weirdly anaesthetized experience, creepily absent of ambient noise, and marred by bovine lead performers who repeat lines and looks quite frequently. Altogether, the film tends to steep almost everything that works or almost works in a thin tea of everything that doesn't. I'm doing my best to extend benefit of the doubt, but I still think Tim R. has nailed it here.

I've also been reading. Ed Bullins' We Righteous Bombers, a pseudonymously written adaptation of Camus' The Just Assassins into the militant idioms and cultural contexts of late-60s Black Power politics, is a sprawling and complicated play, fertile with a kind of theatrical imagination that excites even on the page, though its multiple characters, layered realities, projected images, and Genetian betrayals would be most absorbing in performance. Look for it in Bullins' own anthology New Plays from the Black Theatre. I'd love to say the same for August Wilson's Radio Golf, the last play in his famed 10-part cycle devoted to the 20th-century social history of African-Americans, especially in Pittsburgh. Read it for yourself in the November '05 issue of American Theatre magazine, but—as much as one hates to speak ill of the recently deceased—it's a sadly disappointing piece, limned within very proscribed arguments about ownership, political viability, and preservation of traditions within an upwardly mobile segment of the black middle class. The characters, unfortunately, just don't convince, the scenario pales beside the messier but more confident yarns of the other plays (Jitney is the only other clunker), and one can't help feeling, or at least I couldn't, that the ailing Wilson had to finish this play too fast if he was to finish it at all. If the play gets you down, hop back into Ma Rainey's Black Bottom or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or Seven Guitars and feel better.

Finally, I'm a little over 100 pages into Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and on balance, I'm really enjoying it. I am not much buying the dialogue that issues forth from any of the younger characters, and the Howards End parallels often feel too forced; the transliteration of Leonard Bast's unintentionally nicked umbrella into a brief wrangle over swapped Discmans creaks like a poor transmission. But there's wonderful and quite funny narration throughout, the unfolding of extra- and intra-marital intrigue is succulently paced, and as much as it irks me that novels about academia are almost inevitably satires (does no one really believe in it anymore?), Smith's comic observations are trenchant and specific instead of just twee. She's particularly good at the absurd frictions between intellectual solipsism and the worlds outside that tower: "The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century, none of it had surprised Howard as it had surprised others, but each new example he came across—on the television, in the street, and now in this young man—weakened him somehow. His desire to be involved in the argument, in the culture, fell off. The energy to fight the philistines, this is what fades."

I admit, though, that these later sentences froze my blood a little: "Christian, under [the wine's] influence, looked properly young for once. You could see him permitting himself some partial release from the brittle persona that a visiting lecturer of only twenty-eight must assume if he has ambitions of becoming an assistant professor." Now, technically, I am a visiting assistant professor of only twenty-eight, but still, I am now going to be so on-guard against brittle party behavior that I am probably doomed to exhibit it. Thanks, Zadie.

More to come from that book on the train tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, in a few days' time, I'll be back at my normal station, ensconced in Hartford and glued to my laptop. More to follow then—just in time for this blog's one-year anniversary on Wednesday. À bientot!

Play with Me!

I love reading plays. Truth be told, I love reading them even more than I love seeing them. Don't get me wrong, I love a great production, but following a great script, reading it, re-reading it, reading as different characters in my kitchen or in bed or in the tub, poking around all the possible production choices, whipping up entire revivals in my proscenium imagination.... can't get enough.

Y'all know about the New Year's resolutions I make every year to see 24 Anglo-American movies and 24 international ones that had previously eluded me. I never come close to reaching them all, although in better years than this one, I manage about half. Anyway, I do the same thing with 24 plays, no more than one by the same author. (Also with 24 novels, but we won't get to that till another post.) I've only scratched six from my list this year—again, blame my dissertation, the new job, etc.—but I read many more than that. My favorites, in no particular order, were:

• Jean Genet's The Screens, which was timely as all get-out as well as being astonishing in every other way
  
  
• John Guare's Landscape of the Body, which I read well before I knew about the upcoming Signature production
  
  
• Tug Yourgrau's The Song of Jacob Zulu, which so bravely avoided easier ways out of its story
  
  
• Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, whose thrilling Broadway production was almost exactly what I'd envisioned from the script, except the wobbly Goldblum and Ivanek perfs
  
  
• John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, a deserving Tony winner in any other year, whose Broadway production was notably unlike what I'd envisioned
  
  
• Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing), which was a hoot and a holler to perform, twice, while I baked
  
  
• August Wilson's King Hedley II, which at long last debuted in print from TCG
  
  
• Bertolt Brecht's Edward II, which I thoroughly enjoyed even before seeing Creative Mechanics' delicious Off-Broadway production this past September.

Anyway, what I need now are recommendations for what else I should be reading. With plenty of readers who love the thea-tah and know it 1000x better than I ever will—I'm looking atchoo, ModFab, those are your ears burning, Webloge—I'm looking to have my mind blown by new stuff, provided it's in print. What are your favorite plays? What tickled your fancy recently? What are you reading now? Come one, come all, classics and newbies.

Making it harder: I've still got all the 2005 plays I didn't get to moving onto the 2006 list, so these authors are already spoken for: Bullins, Calderón, Chekhov, Churchill, Congreve, Fornès, Ibsen, Kane, Kramer, Lorca, O'Neill, Orton, Racine, Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Wilder, and Yew.

Now, I know y'all are still up to it. Throw down some titles and make your case. Get everyone talking drama, no matter what Mary J. say. Here are some hints—I'm definitely on the market for a good Soyinka or Fugard, or a Pinter that will challenge the impressions I've formed from The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and The Room. Extra points for any good African-American drama, since it'll come in handy for my Spring 2006 seminar. My absolute favorite playwrights are Adrienne Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Caryl Churchill, and Bertolt Brecht, if you need some guidance on taste.

Now: ready, steady.... go!

Picked Flick #74: Vanya on 42nd Street

As though synthesizing my last two choices, here is another filmed play that filters the antiquarian through the lens of the contemporary, or else vice versa, and it stars the modern American cinema's pre-eminent Woman Who Lies to Herself in one of her most exquisite performances.

Nonetheless, even a Julianne Moore disciple can't start a write-up of Vanya on 42nd Street with a nod to Julianne, or even to Louis Malle, whose movie this is, or even to André Gregory, whose minimalist workshop production of Uncle Vanya is the subject of this loving, sublimely attentive film. If you're talking Vanya on 42nd Street you have to start with Chekhov, a playwright so very resistant to screen treatment and so very easy to misconstrue in areas of tone, delivery, and intent. The infamous question of how Chekhov could possibly have considered plays like Uncle Vanya to be comedies is the task of a talented troupe to unravel, a rare feat to which this film makes us so thrillingly privy. Translated by David Mamet with economic brilliance, Chekhov's play achieves such concise pscyhological insight with so sure and light a hand that it can almost make you blush, and yet for all of the characters' many endowments—Dr. Astrov's charisma and his ethical grasp of nature, Sonya's work ethic and sad-eyed resilience, Yelena's exquisite beauty and stunning indolence, Vanya's sour wit and impatience with pretense—they are none of them much armed with a capacity for change. As the script transcribes an arc from one domestic arrangement to a different and notably smaller one, nearly all of the characters' hopes and plans continue to exceed their grasp, almost by definition. "Comedy" thus appears to name their steady commitment to ideals they can't well afford or attain, and their rueful awareness of this very dilemma, to which, in private moments and with the right ears to bend, almost all of them confess.

Capturing such a delicate lacework of feeling and compromise is difficult enough, but Malle does more than document a stirring production. He subtly tailors a form of Chekhovian direction that alights just as softly but lucidly on its subjects. From the piquant prologue of the actors' arrivals and chitchats, Vanya gorgeously idles into its own opening lines with a simple cut and a gliding camera move; the effect is similar to how Bergman introduces his Magic Flute, and the emotional rewards that follow are comparably rich. Cinematographer Declan Quinn, refining his own techniques in line with the scrupulous actors, adduces the angles and auras of each face with total perfection, carrying Astrov from hardy to dissipated or Sonya from plain to luminous in no time at all. The seeds of his smart, observational cinematography in Leaving Las Vegas, Monsoon Wedding, and In America are already flourishing here, not least in how he incorporates the darkened theater itself into his compositions, choosing exactly when and to what extent each character emerges from absolute shadow. These camera regimens indicate just how cinematic this Vanya is despite its unfussy, unfurnished groundedness in theatrical art. Close-ups, gingerly inserts, and other privileged views of the actors do as much to convey the characters as their trained vocal precision and consummate faith in their material. "No, one would not describe this family as happy," confesses Moore's Yelena, but has this actress ever laughed so much and with such fine degrees of implication in any other film? Her chuckling, abrupt admission that she would have enjoyed marrying a younger man is a sublime Chekhovian moment, as is Larry Pine's garrulous, principled, but self-absorbed defense of the Russian forest. Another glory is Wallace Shawn's deft application of his unique, adenoidal delivery to a killjoy character who nonetheless requires our sympathy, even though he has no obvious claim on it. Shawn finds and defends those claims, working as seamlessly as everything else in the film—except, of course, when Malle or Gregory wants us to notice and consider the seams, the determinate environment, the historical and cultural distance that suddenly feels so much less distant. In a year whose other breakout movies (Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Natural Born Killers) were such virtuosic plunges into wild aesthetic surfaces, Vanya on 42nd Street is, in the words of Pablo Neruda, as bright as a lamp, as simple as a ring, remote and candid. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #81: A Streetcar Named Desire

Is there a more poignant character arc in American drama, in American literature, than the disintegration of Blanche DuBois? Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, her wounds and anxieties, even her dreams, are those of Gothic fiction: frittered estates, fabled suicides, eleventh-hour suitors, secret histories. Meanwhile, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, her sister and brother-in-law, united by consonance, alliteration, and carnality, have more tangible concerns, like a pregnancy Stella doesn't mention, a ritual poker night Stanley means to safeguard, and, bien sur, the Napoleonic Code. Tennessee Williams' play, among its multiple and ingenious geometries, positions Blanche and Stanley as nearly parallel vectors, moving nonetheless in opposite directions. It is somehow heroic that Blanche, with Williams' help, sustains her romanticism, her "enchantment," as long as she does—even with a paramour as stolid as Karl Malden's Mitch, a walking sack of flour. It is similarly heroic, for quite a long time, that Stanley manages to insist on the proud vulgarity of his petty fiefdom, even as his cohorts offer to stand for the ladies and dance to their radio, as the sisters DuBois share a laugh and later a derogatory confidence at his expense, as prospective parenthood dares to soften him into a stabler companion-provider. Williams is brave to venture these two as complementary egos, each creating worlds within worlds, as Blanche's steamy baths and Stanley's stinking shirt carve a two-room apartment into separate universes.

But A Streetcar Named Desire is not, finally, a relativist play. It stands fully behind Blanche when she names deliberate cruelty as the one truly unforgivable thing, and as her inventions and self-insulations grow more threadbare—who but a desperate woman could even imagine a figure like Shep Huntleigh?—her cold fate is sealed. Elia Kazan films her lowest moment so that we hover over Blanche, her face and body upside down in the shot, rolling back her eyes in high-angle so as to acquire some sense of whom she's talking to. Blanche, as she herself might put it, is utterly boulversée, her blazing imagination finally bereft of all billows. With more severe lighting, it would be a Bergman shot, but it is better for being a Harry Stradling shot: as in the rest of the movie, the low-contrast grayscale here is the color of cobwebs while still assessing incredible visual detail in every frame.

Streetcar is to me what The Wizard of Oz or The Ten Commandments or It's a Wonderful Life or Top Gun are to others: a movie and a story that have always been there, past which it's difficult to remember. I read the play in 7th grade and simply never stopped, and Kazan's version has become such an iconic counterpart to the play that it's hard to separate the two, despite their overt differences. In fact, these disparities are interesting: something as simple as following Blanche immediately to the bowling alley to find Stella, instead of letting her nip her liquor and calm her nerves alone for a few beats in the Kowalskis' tenement, changes the whole energy of the character. She doesn't even have her little spat with the upstairs neighbor Eunice, which is especially surprising because Kazan is noticeably preoccupied with Eunice and her husband Sam as an implied parallel narrative. We even cut upstairs to their apartment a few times, once when Eunice is alone, and she is the last character we see in the movie. That I had forgotten these and other variations entirely speaks, I'm sure, to the memory-filling power of the headline performances and the uncanny perfection of the play. Vivien Leigh gives probably the best performance to ever win the Best Actress Oscar, somehow making Blanche "work" even within Kazan's aggressively realist screen poetics. It doesn't hurt her work at all, and in fact it probably helps, that we do have a sense of watching Leigh construct the performance as she goes—the odd accent, the stiff turns of the neck, the ingenious acting she does with all of her outfits and props. Watching Blanche create herself for such a long span is an ideal lead-in to watching Stanley, Mitch, New Orleans, modernity, the world take her apart. Brando only improves as I get older, reacting no longer to the notoriety of the performance but to its exorbitantly confident, lived-in quality, the hyperfamiliarity with the part that allows him to muffle key lines with no loss to Stanley or to the piece. Hunter and Malden never entirely win me, but the production is so grounded in its superior qualities that what's merely good in it becomes elevated by extension. There's nothing rattle-trap about this Streetcar. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Denis, the Menace?

Denis O'Hare is a name that movie fans should care about, even though in terms of Denis' career, the play is really the thing. A Tony winner for Take Me Out and a standout in revivals of Cabaret, Assassins, and Sweet Charity, Denis was most prominently featured on screen as one of the annoyed neighbors in Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming's wonderful ensemble dramedy The Anniversary Party and as the guy at the bottom of the ravine in Garden State. (He also played the doctor studying Sean Penn's heart in 21 Grams, so imagine how much secret knowledge he has about me!)

Anyway, you may have read about Denis and his boyfriend Hugo getting arrested and detained this week as terrorist suspects at a Virginia airport. And, reading the article, even setting aside the implied inanity of the charges, you may have wondered how come boyfriend Hugo is the one who got handcuffed and dragged around even though Denis is saying that he's the big-mouth, and how come Hugo is still the one being hauled into court. Perhaps looking at this picture of the happy, longtime couple clarifies something about their pairing, and something about Hugo in particular, that goes unmentioned in the newsbyte but somehow makes all the details cohere in a sad, infuriating, but recurringly American way. <SIGH>

R.I.P. August Wilson

August Wilson died today at age 60, the premature victim of a rapidly advancing cancer of the liver. Wilson's health has been in severe decline over recent weeks, bringing much sadness to the American theater community and quietly extinguishing plans for his one-man show, a live memoir of the writer's life, which would have opened this season at the Signature Theatre.

What Wilson leaves behind, and it's a formidable bequeathal, are his wonderful plays. The cover art I have reproduced above represent my favorites among Wilson's famous 10-play cycle, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars, which works better than any of the plays, I think, as a summary of Wilson's poetics and themes. These three are closest to my heart, though Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and King Hedley II are strong stuff, and what works in his two Pulitzer Prize-winners, Fences and The Piano Lesson, works really well, despite my reservations about those plays. Soon enough, last year's Gem of the Ocean will become available from a publisher, and hopefully Radio Golf will see the light of day on Broadway, even though Wilson was always more of a critical fixture than a popular favorite.

A contentious and sometimes intractable figure, he was also creative and determined in seeing his ideas through to an American stage that badly needed him, and continues to need him. When I teach my seminar in African-American drama this spring semester, Wilson will loom large alongside Joseph Cotter, Marita Bonner, James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Charles Gordone/OyamO, Ed Bullins, Lorraine Hansberry, and so many other participants in one of the American theater's proudest and most under-sung traditions. Thanks to August for enriching the repertoire so deeply; you will be missed.

High Drama

In yet another winning pick from the ClassicFlix collection, I enjoyed Dudley Nichols' three-hour adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which I've reviewed in full here. O'Neill is an incredibly strange and difficult playwright, but also an indispensable one, and the thing that impressed me most about Mourning Becomes Electra—besides the fine acting by Michael Redgrave and Raymond Massey and the priceless camping of Katina Paxinou—was that director-screenwriter Dudley Nichols flat refuses to tame the weirder impulses and transparently Athenian ambitions of O'Neill's piece. Mourning Becomes Electra at least hails from an era in Hollywood filmmaking when famous works of the stage still prompted a good number of movies—whereas now, W;t and Angels in America unfold on cable TV and the isolated cinematic transplant like Proof seems heavily embattled. Still, even the best American plays have always had trouble getting their richest, fullest layers onto the screen. Look at what Richard Brooks did to Cat on a Hit Tin Roof, and even when the bowdlerizing was fascinating, as in the gonzo screen version of Suddenly, Last Summer, it still doesn't serve the play all that well.

Mourning Becomes Electra is long, dense, formal, demanding, and uncomfortably furious in its emotions, as is the play. It is inconsistently effective, and you can spot plenty of room for Nichols to have shaped up his adaptation a little—Rosalind Russell, in particular, is a problem, and murkier lighting and a location shoot would have helped. Still, there's an integrity and a conviction to this piece which I appreciated.

Elated to see a play that survived to the screen with its essential character intact, I also gave the DVD of Closer another spin, and the film has only improved in my mind from when I saw it theatrically last December. Spiky, unpredictable, and daringly histrionic, this is a film that really puts itself out there, demanding our patience and our interest with a series of break-ups and betrayals but refusing to divulge any of the connective tisssue of romance or commitment that intercedes between all the backstabs and crying jags. Closer is not a great play but it's a very good one, and the impeccable cinematography and art direction—crucial in giving the film the elegant sheen it needs as counterpoint to all the brutality—transition perfectly onto smaller screens. Jude Law and especially Natalie Portman both get better on second look, and Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, who already stunned in the theater, reveal new sides of their performances. Away from the hype, the breathlessness of awards season, the desperation with which Sony was coveting a Best Picture nod, I am hpoing Closer is finding more converts on DVD. I am also hoping that more good, punchy, distinctive plays will make the move into cinema without sacrificing what's distinctive about them. (To whomever out there has inevitably optioned Doubt, I'm speaking to you.)