Georgia Review

American Theater Watch, 2003-2004

Author(s): Gerald Weales
Source: The Georgia Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (FALL 2004), pp. 697-704
Published by: Georgia Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41402509
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Gerald Weales

American Theater Watch, 2003-2004

When Nilo Cruzs Anna in the Tropics won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, both the play-
wright and his play seemed to many commentators to have come out of nowhere,
even though Cruzs earlier work had been seen in a number of regional theaters. The
surprise lay in the fact that the critics who chose Anna knew it only on the page. Speak-
ing of the jurors to an interviewer in American Theatre (September 2003), Cruz said,
"They listened to the script. They didn't see the play, which is great. They read it, and
they listened to the words- this is what Anna is all about." When the play was mounted
in September at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where I saw it, with a production
that went on to Broadway, the play's admirers - both the reviewers and pleased play-
goers-insisted on the power of the language. I was in the minority. Despite Cruz's
fondness for metaphor and for descriptive passages that are double-edged, I found the
language (and the action for that matter) at once grandiose and pedestrian.
In a way, this play, set in a cigar factory in 1929, is about words since it is about
a lector, a man hired - as the custom was then - to read to the illiterate workers. Juan
Julian, imported from Cuba for the job, chooses to read Anna Karenina , and his hand-
some presence and the words of Tolstoy disrupt the family of Santiago- apparently
the only workers in his factory, or at least the only ones we see. Santiago's younger
daughter, identifying with the romance of Anna's affair with Vronsky, displays a
barely controlled and unrequited passion for the lector; her sister, reacting toward
Juan Julian's gentleness and against the macho abruptness of her husband, begins an
affair that ends with the murder of the lector. In the end, the wounds within the fam-
ily close over the absence of Juan Julian, but nothing is the same. It is neither Tolstoy
nor the lector, but history, that works the real change in Santiago's factory. Set at the
tag-end of the great period of cigar-making in Tampa's Ybor City, Anna in the Tropics
has a subplot - the quarrel between Santiago and his brother about the machines that
will eventually come and displace workers and lectors alike- which marks a disruption
greater than the family turmoil.
Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel has accumulated an impressive number of
prizes, and the playwright has won the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for
an American playwright in midcareer. An article in The New York Times (4 April 2004),
mostly about the titular costumes, suggests that the protagonist was loosely based on
Nottage's great-grandmother who, like Esther in the play, sewed intimate apparel for

[697]

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698 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

clients after she came to New York from Barbados. Whatev

ment contributed to the play, the impressive thing about the w
life, vitality, and personality to anonymous portraits of socia
with the projection of a 1905 photograph that suggests the work
Hine- the first an unknown seamstress at her sewing machin
wardly posed bride and groom.
The plot, if reduced to a sentence or two, seems a simple
worked at her machine for years to accumulate enough money
has resisted local suitors only to succumb to an epistolary cou
a laborer digging the Panama Canal; the marriage becomes a d
her husband, her savings, everything but her persistence, as the
back again at her machine. The texture of the piece, however
Esther with the other characters- the rich and lonely white cu
illiterate Esther s letters and reads the answers she receives; th
friend of Esther who wears Esther s creations and steals her
Jewish cloth merchant who is oddly closest to Esther, as can
caress the bolts of cloth they both admire.
Arthur Miller s Resurrection Blues , an uncharacteristic work
production at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was first per
in 2002. It is a satiric comedy a little short on laughs, but wi
conceit. In an unnamed country in South or Central Americ
been going on for thirty-eight years, a young revolutionary,
of as the Messiah, has been captured and is to be crucified. A
agency offers millions of dollars for exclusive rights to the c
of the rebel, whom the audience sees only as a bright light, cha
everyone involved- his friends, his former enemies, the tel
come to film the event. All declare their love for him but plead
to remain alive only in the minds of the people. Saint Joan lite.
The children in the back seat in Paula Vogels The Long C
are three charming puppets, mildly naughty witnesses to the
their parents in the front, to their charges of indifference and
act, the puppets have morphed into live actors, the grown ch
been disastrous - Stephen dead of AIDS, his sisters incapable o
The first act is very effective, the second less so since, by im
sins-of-the-parents drama too predictable for a playwright as
even the shadow-puppet effect of graphic sex can invigorate the
concluding half of the play.
Charles L. Mees Wintertime is set in a summer house in the dead of winter.

A young man brings his girl to the presumably deserted place only to encounter his
mother and her lover (who emerge from a hot tub), his father and his male lover, and

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 GERALD WEALES 699

a gaggle of other neighbors and passing eccentrics. Th

accusation and counteraccusation. There is a presumed
Characters put on funny costumes and bare their botto
deal of Sturm and a load of Drang, but in the end everyt
one except the father, who is left alone staring out at
was first performed at the La Jolla Playhouse in Califo
conflicting productions in the East at Princetons McCa
Theater where I saw it, is a romantic comedy touched
suggests. As is usual with Mee, there is a combination o
dragging tedium which recalls his own description of his
they're broken, they don t work so well, and I move on,
to live" ( PEN America , Winter 2000/01).
The Signature Theatre in New York features the work
season. This year it was Bill Irwin, an unusual choice s
clown, an actor, a pantomimist than as an author, alth
in which he has starred on Broadway over the years. T
custom with the Signature dramatists- but the meat of t
The Harlequin Studies consisted of a group of sketches
figures- Harlequin, Pantalone, the Captain- staged as
ing academic lecture. It was an amusing piece, familiar
for the much darker, much more complex work that
Rumination Irwin and the other performers appear as
in the story of George L. Fox, a nineteenth- century per
of Humpty Dumpty in the full-length musical pantom
and his creation became one in the eyes of his fans.
As the play begins Irwin is applying the white mak
not, of course, the nineteenth-century white lead tha
Fox s decline into madness), talking directly to the aud
tion of voice, becoming Fox. We go in and out of Foxs
his ambition, his victimization at the hands of the ma
his marriages, his closeness to his talented but less ded
dependence on George Topack - a black actor who pla
a post-Civil War sketch and stayed on as Foxs dresser
dementia during the 1870s, he began to rant from the
he was, and Topack, wearing a monkey suit, would bound
to bring him back to the show at hand. Eventually, no
of Topack could reach Fox, and he died in an asylum in
Mr. Fox is not simply Irwin's rumination on the lif
but his take on theater itself, on inevitable endings, the
Fox seems to be saying to Topack that it is now his tur

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700 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

to blackface- a not exactly historically correct comm

were also popular when Fox's Humpty Dumpty was
is useful for the part of Mr. Fox offering Irwins own
he is not as limber as he was thirty years ago when
Circus to other stages. In the Signature newsletter (Sp
for a farewell to certain kinds of physical work." From

I saw a great many other plays this season, some of

words than I can give them in this dull catalogue of un
said.

Wendy MacLeods Juvenilia is a kind of Les Liais

western undergraduates, in which an ostensibly soph
the seduction of a presumably prim black student only
sad-funny time for everyone.
In Richard Greenberg s The Violet Hour a machin
out a manuscript from the future, promising bad t
things who, trying to escape the predictions, reach d
In Joan Holdens Nickel and Dimed , based on Bar
same name (subtitled "On (Not) Getting By in Ameri
not as the understanding investigator the play inten
cut and run whenever her secret identity becomes t
Oren Safdies Private Jokes , Public Places is a sat
jurors- one tightly traditional, one calculatedly casu
dent for not tailoring her project to fit their narro
amusing for being staged at New Yorks Center for A
A radio advertisement for the production of In t
InterAct Theater in Philadelphia reduced Naomi Wal
in 1994, to "Two soldiers find love while serving in Ku
that, if you have gay-bashing fellow soldiers, love can
Michael Hollinger s Tooth and Claw , with its roots
sets up a conflict between a dedicated scientist and st
versus family men- in which there is right on both
stumbles too often over blocks of research that com
lectures.

In Bruce Grahams According to Goldman (i.e., s

successful Hollywood writer teaches his technique at a
to take over the script of a movie-obsessed student on
ideas are no longer viable in the contemporary film
The protagonist in Dick Goldbergs ambitious Go
sexual and religious passion in a repetitive bildungsr

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 GERALD WEALES 7OI

lated sex scenes (including a masturbatory en

excessive explanation, much of it from a to
The much publicized struggle over wh
Barnes Collection- a stew of art, race, clas
rise to Thomas Gibbons Permanent Collect
member of a Barnes-style museum/school f
integrity of the institution while the spirit o
Dr. Albert Barnes - hovers ironically over a
men victorious.

Lillian Groags Midons (Or the Object of Desire) is a farcical mishmash, set during
the Crusades with contemporary overtones (Sinatra jokes), which works very hard and
with minimal success to be funny in what the author has called "comic book" style.
Nicholas Wardigos Editorial Decisions , winner of one of the awards given by
the Brick Playhouse - a new small Philadelphia company- is a mistaken -identity
comedy that manages to make some sharp satirical points about machinations in the
publishing business. The Brick was less successful with another award winner, Tom ,
Dick, and Harriet , by two former Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, Shankar Vedantam
and Donald Drake, in which the suburbanizing of former radicals dissolves in a bath
of sentiment.

This has been a particularly good season for musicals. There have been revivals not
only of standards like the much admired Wonderful Town , which I have not seen this
time around, but of more intriguing works. The Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman
Assassins- a skin-crawlingly appealing ballad musical about the killers and would-be
killers of presidents ("Every now and then / The country / Goes a little wrong") - made
its way to Broadway, where it found its audience in a way it did not during its initial
off-Broadway production in 1991, and where it won the 2004 Tony Award for best
revival of a musical. The Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia staged the most recent
incarnation of the William Bolcom- Arnold Weinstein Casino Paradise - a pared-down
version of the original, commissioned by the Prince (then called the American Musical
Theater Festival) in 1990. It now tells its exuberant story of greed, spoiled idealism, and
mocking regeneration almost completely through its songs. Having seen still another
production of Hello , Dolly! the night before I began to put these words to paper, I could
even be enticed to sing to the Sondheim and Bolcom musicals, "Its so nice to have
you back where you belong."
Revivals aside, there have been a number of new musicals - some very good,
some flawed but fascinating. Jeanine Tesori, who did the music for Tony Kushner s
Caroline , or Change , says in an interview in The New York Times (16 December 2003),
"Its a great piece of theater that functions somewhere between a play, a musical, and
an opera." (I know, I know, you can t be between three things, but consider her point

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702 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

rather than her grammar.) She says her "music serv

rules." A partially autobiographical piece set in Kush
Louisiana, in 1963, it concerns the relationship betw
hold maid - who is not at all the sentimental, one-of
Southern fiction and memoir. Caroline is a taciturn,
in the basement laundry room- which is where we
best surreal tradition, the washing machine and the
She is regularly joined there by the motherless boy
less because he cannot accept the woman that his w
who finds in a shared cigarette with Caroline a clos
actual.

The "change" of the title is first of all the coins w

his pants pockets and which his stepmother tells Car
him. But the changes multiply: There is the break bet
her appropriation of his birthday twenty dollar bill
her to walk away from the job that she needs, and
his stepmother. There is the ferment among Souther
sented by Carolines daughter and fueled by the assa
Finally, and dramatically most important, the chan
"How Long Has This Been Going On?" in which she b
exterior to display a tentative willingness to understan
she lives.

Embarrassments , the newest musical by the very

Klavan, collaborators on Bed and Sofa (1999), borrows
lection by Henry James. Explaining the title in Open S
Theater (which commissioned the piece), Klavan in
of the title word in a double sense- both mortifica
appropriately enough for Henry James, "an embarra
The piece intermeshes two stories- one about Jam
is an account of the staging of James s play Guy Do
success; his distress at what happens to his work in t
response to the play compared with the reception o
which opened the same week; and finally his being h
ing into the safety of his prose. The other half of the
James short story, "Nona Vincent," which is itself a t
wright nurtured by a sophisticated older woman w
sacrifices his play - for the attractions of a comedy st
drama. The irony is that James, as the author of "Non
atrical scene and its denizens in a way that James th
what is happening to him.

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 GERALD WEALES 7О3

As someone who knows English theater of t

nitpick a little - to say, for instance, that Geo
the play and performed the title role, was a g
bombastic caricature in evidence here. Then, t
H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett, in the theate
until one stops to remember Shaw s wonderfu
Domville and An Ideal Husband , which is hap
of Our Theatres in the Nineties. To be fair to
biographical accuracy or fidelity to "Nona Vin
and moving double fable of life upon the wick
music.

The Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman Bounce , which I saw at the Kennedy

Center in Washington and which looks now as though it will not find its way to New
York, is a far cry from their work on Pacific Overtures and Assassins. It is a noisily
conventional musical comedy based on the lives of the Mizner brothers - Wilson, the
celebrated con man, and Addison, the creator of the garishly gorgeous Boca Raton,
Florida. Sondheim has been dazzled by the Mizners for years, trying several times
to get them on stage. This time, he and Weidman posit a sibling rivalry that extends
across the brothers' long lives and beyond (we see them first after death, still quarrel-
ing), though they are physically together only when they join forces and voices in the
opening and closing number "Bounce," which expresses their family philosophy never
to let themselves be beaten by circumstances. The comedy is very broad, the music
as jaunty as the theme, and the show an amusing way to spend an un-Sondheimian
evening. What it lacks is substance in the depiction of the brothers and the societies
in which they flourished and failed; Alva Johnstons dual biography The Legendary
Mizners (1953) remains the better place to meet the siblings.
Cy Coleman's The Great Ostrovsky , with a book by the novelist Avery Corman,
is a stereotypical visit to Yiddish theater in the 1920s. The titular hero is a predictably
flamboyant actor/producer whose fame rests on his musical versions of the classics.
The overplotted story includes a failed seduction, an identity confusion, and of course
Ostrovsky s loss and recovery of his theater, a development that makes him swear to
give up his audience-winning musicals for straight performances of modern classics.
The opening number, a song-and-dance version of The Dybbuk , is particularly trying.
The other songs - both solos and comic or sentimental duets - sound pretty much the
same and, despite an occasional echo of klezmer, pretty much Coleman, but without
the appeal of City of Angels or Sweet Charity. The best joke - one of the few in the
script - comes when the newly serious Ostrovsky stages Ibsen's A Dolls House. As
Nora is about to make her celebrated final exit, Helmer (an unregenerate Ostrovsky)
stops her with "a Jewish mother doesn't walk out on her children" and asks her to sit
down and discuss it over a cup of tea. Before the musical, which had its première at the

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704 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, goes on to oth

and their associates should sit down and discuss it o
Michael Ogborn, whose revue Box Office of the Da
after ten years, has come up with Café Puttanesca ,
show, co-written by Terrence J. Nolan, the artistic
Theatre, where the musical opened. This one is not goi
long. Set in 1948 in an Amsterdam café run by an
Europe after the war and by his Italian wife- who has
show consists of a postclosing party to which three pr
country, come to relax after a hard nights work. E
ally cute, sometimes touching- and there are group
minimal. The music is interspersed with recitations
icks which I found daringly naughty when I was ab
of wanting to make some point about comradeship
not want to press the point myself.
On the whole, as revues go, I preferred It Ain't Not
the Prince), in which a talented group of singers per
collectively traced the blues from its African roots to
On that note- those notes - lets bring these note

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