By Gwen Orel

I’m multitasking from East Durham, New York—up in the Catskills for the Catskills Irish Arts Week!  I will blog about that as well, with Q&As with musicians, concert reports and descriptions of the unique and beautiful scene here.   

Runners carbo-load; I theatre-loaded last week knowing it would be all music this week.

Although I saw it mid-week, I’m putting my rave about The Tin Pan Alley Rag first, because I love the show and just opened.  Read my feature in the Wall Street Journal Online here.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag

July 9th

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre

The Tin Pan Alley Rag runs through September 6.

I RECOMMEND THE PLAY.

The first musical to be done in this space (maximum occupancy 350) isn’t exactly a musical nor “a play with music,” but a “naturalistic musical,” as director Stafford Arima explained to me when I interviewed him and playwright Mark Saltzman for the Wall Street Journal.

When I firstsaw it, the play was bookended by old Irving Berlin waiting to see something (gradually you realize as the play progresses that it’s the opera Scott Joplin pitched to him in 1915). The show depicts a young Irving Berlin meeting a kind of has-been Scott Jopin in 1915, and two composers compare notes all night long (notes, get it?).

Now, the play opens in the thick of the hustle and bustle of Tin Pan Alley I had to be won over to this new version, but I was.  It was very moving when Berlin’s aging happens as characters from his past, alive again, come and hand him bits of old man gear.  My mother cried.

I took my mother this time.  That was part of my excuse for going again.  

It’s a jukebox musical!  From a time before jukeboxes!  There’s something magical about being involved in a story that suddenly becomes a “greatest hits” of tunes you love. When Berlin went into “I Love a Piano” I looked around and the whole damn audience was grinning.  Later on when he complained he hadn’t yet managed to figure out a Christmas song, there was a happy, knowing laugh (late, late in the show, you do hear notes of “may your days be merry and bright…”).

Egotists with chops are fun to watch.  Berlin, irresistibly arrogant Michael Therriaul,  and Joplin, proper and close to priggish Michael Boatman, have huge egos.  Neither intimidates the other.  It’s kind of great.  You might not want to date them but they are fun to watch.  Then again, you might.  Both men loved their sweet young wives who drew them out of themselves, then suddenly died (the downside of this is the temptation to fantasize about being a sweet wife who dies suddenly.  Maybe it’s worth it if someone wrote “Bethena” for you.) Berlin’s romance with his first wife, Dorothy Goetz, winningly played and gorgeously sung by adorable Jenny Fellner, hits the heart when she cheerfully vanishes into death during their honeymoon to the sound of Joplin’s melancholy, lovely “Solace.”  

The Tin Pan Alley Rag offers the kind of smart musicology that the (now-closed) 33 Variations can only dream about.  In the latter play, it’s hard not to think that Moises Kaufman had just read a book on Beethoven’s variations and how they work and couldn’t wait to spit that information out at you.  In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, the characters describe how their music works because they need to tell someone else on stage.  You learn what ragtime means (as Scott Joplin explains the difference between the marching left hand and the syncopated right hand to German conductor, maestro Alfred Ernst, played by James Judy), you learn how hit songs used to make their way to the public by watching scenes of “pluggers,” songwriters, singing a few bars to publishers, by watching Ted Snyder (Michael McCormick), Irving Berlin’s partner at the publishing house of Berlin and Snyder, make a deal with vaudevillian Mooney Mulligan (Mark Ledbetter), and you learn how songs were “broken” through a scene at Macy’s where Berlin and Snyder hawk the hit song Mulligan sang the night before.  We first meet Mooney coming offstage in blackface—artfully highlighting the norms of the times.   

There should be a Tony for Multiple role-playing actors.  They are the essence of live performance.  Forget the catch-all “character actor.”  Ledbetter sings, dances as Mulligan, puts on an officious Southern accent for composer’s assistant “Thaddeus,” and has a comic turn as a “plugger.”  Judy plays Southern publisher John Stark, as well as a German conductor, and others.  Randy Aaron, Derrick Cobey, Rosena M. Hill, Erick Pinnick, Tia Speros and Idara Victor also take salamander turns.    

 

Usher Alert #1:  Volunteer ushers may come cheap, but they come at a price.  Mom and I entered the house and didn’t even realize a man standing gazing out into space a few rows ahead of us was an usher.  We got our own playbills and were nearly at our seat when an usher nearer the front offered to help us.  Ushers?  Go up to the patron, don’t wait for them to fall across you.

Directors:  Please let the audience in.  I understand that Arima now thinks of the show as a “naturalistic musical,” and I understand that applause breaks the fourth wall.  But dammit, we’re dying to clap.  We laugh when Berlin explains “catchy don’t happen by accident,” and when he sees a young songwriter tapping his foot, tells him “that’s the money tap.”  We’re not silent, we’re right there, we have a role to play.  When we hear a song we love beautifully sung we want to share our approval—but the show moves on so fast we can’t clap.  When Joplin plays the “Maple Leaf Rag” for white publisher John Stark, an amazingly fair white man who didn’t rip off his composers (whatever their color), and the tune gets its name, we’re just dying to clap.

Years ago I dramaturged the play Denial by Peter Sagal (yes, that Peter Sagal, now the host of NPR’s ROTFLOL radio news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”  To me, he will always be playwright Peter Sagal).  There’s a scene in which a character gives a dramatic exit speech and then exits.  The audience applauded.  Director Jed Harris grumbled, “I hate that.”  He restaged it so the audience couldn’t clap.

OK, it can be distracting when an audience claps every time a famous actor enters or exits—as they do for Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit—but it’s also a bonding experience. It reminds us that we, the audience, matter.  That the people onstage are there for us.

If the reviewers don’t love this, they’re in the wrong field.  It’s just a fabulous theatrical entertainment, with a great imaginative story that could have happened, with beloved songs, great acting– it’s solid, happy, and very well done.  When Joplin describes scenes from his opera Treemonisha, they are enacted before our eyes.  From what we see, I’m not sure the world lost out by not seeing it sooner (his lyrics are iffy), but Idara Victor as Treemonisha  has a truly glorious soprano.  The piano playing is live, too (albeit not by the actors, but by Michael Patrick Walker, who also conducts, and Brian Cimmet, offstage).  You can’t fake the sound of live piano.

Relatives come in handy to soften up interviewees.  Mom, who went with me, was a pianist early in her life.  Ihad  mentioned her to Saltzman because he went to Cornell, and so did Mom, when she left her music major at the University of Michigan for the Cornell Hotel School. I passed him in the house (playwrights and directors are usually in the house during previews), and introduced my mother, and he said right away, “Hotel school!” 

Critic person shout-out:  bumped into critic Simon Saltzman (Outer Critics Circle, among others) at intermission.  I spent happy hours at the ATCA (American Theatre Critics Association) conference in Sarasota, Florida with him and his wife Lucy-Ann this past April.  He asked to meet the playwright not mention that he’s a critic—but Mark said right away, “oh, the writer!”  Mark and Simon have the same last name, you see.  Could they be related? Both families seem to have a music gene—Simon described someone (can’t remember if it was a father or uncle) who played on the Cunard line all during the depression (and never experienced the Great Depression).

Venue Comfort #1:  the Laura Pels Theatre has a nice theatre bar, with tables and chairs, food and decent liquor too.  I always forget it’s there.  It makes a difference.

Program Propriety #1:  Happy to report that the Literary Manager is where he/she should be in the Roundabout’s program:  in the first group of “Artistic Staff, which is under the bolded big wigs at the theatre.  Literary Manager is the fourth line down.  Readers aren’t listed at all, but since they aren’t exactly staff, that seems fair to me.

Favorite lines and moments.  Write if you have your own!   (comments and emails earn a FP, famous person, shout-out in the next Inner Monologue):

Catchy don’t happen by accident.

That’s the money tap.

I’ve got one that’s Jewish and Irish!

You owe it to your talent to move beyond all this.

Money!  Money!  Money! –That’s the Tin Pan Alley Rag.

Getting the words so they don’t bump into each other—that took all night.

**

Europeans

Tuesday, July 7th

Potomac Theatre Project  (ptp/nyc, as this branch is now known)

(in association with Middlebury College)

Atlantic Stage Two

Europeans runs through July 26th. 

I RECOMMEND THE PLAY.   THOUGH.

Famous Person Shout-Out:  I was New York Times writer Neil Genzlinger’s guest.  Press Agent David Gibbs recognized me and thoughtfully handed me a press pack too.  ”That must have really confused him,” Neil said.Neil had seen and really liked their production of another Barker play, Scenes from an Execution, last summer.  Barker is one of those great 80s-90s Brit playwrights, like Edward Bond, that just aren’t done a lot over here.

Howard Barker’s play Europeans is running in rep with Neal Bell’s adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel Therese Raquin, running at Atlantic Stage Two, produced by the Potomac Theatre Company/NY.  

Rental Reps are Confusing.  Especially when they run in a theatre’s second space which is not at the same space as its first (Atlantic is on 20th Street, Stage Two is on Sixteenth).  You can get confused when you go to Theatermania to figure out what you’re seeing—if you plug in the wrong title you’ll think you have the wrong day.  They weren’t on the Atlantic site, because, I guess, they are rentals.

Get Me to the Play on Time:  Always have the cell phone of the person who invited you to the theatre.  That’s another famous person shout-out if you’re paying attention.

Curtain Times Should Standardize.  I hate 7:30 curtains.  They make me nervous. They’ve become so popular that now when I am going to an 8 p.m. show I check and check and check on my calendar that I have it right.  In William Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs there’s a line about how theatre in New York starts at 8:30.That would give everyone a chance to eat before the show.  Stomachs grumbling loudly all around you are distracting.  Even when they’re not your own.  I had two mini éclairs at La Bergamote (highly recommended) so I know it wasn’t me.   

A Word About Rep.  ”Rep” comes from “repertory.”  A “repertory” or “repertoire” should be all the things in your bag of tricks that you can trot out.  In the Czech Republic, companies really do run “in rep”—companies learn a show, then play it a few times a month, alternating with older shows in their repertoire, for years.  There’s nothing like that here except, perhaps, in opera.  Berkeley Repertory Theatre is not a repertory company.  Seattle Repertory Company is not a repertory company.    

So far as I know there is not a true rep company in the US.  Do you know of one?  Post if you do!  There are economic reasons as well as pragmatic ones for this (Czech companies, for example, are on a payroll yearlong, like salaried folks).  

Usher Alert #2.  Like ticket pick-up lines and curtain times, the lack of norms is confusing and irritating.  As a critic, I kind of like it when there’s a little flyer with my name on it on my seat, though it’s not necessary if seats are numbered.  Atlantic (or were they Potomac?) had ushers do something new, though:  they behaved like waiters.

“This young man will show you to your seat.”

“How many in your party?”

“Two.”

“What’s the name?”

“Genzlinger.”

“First name?’

Is there really likely to be more than one Genzlinger reviewing the show that night?  Seriously. 

The nice young man tried and failed to get us to our seats two or three times before he figured it out (we were on the aisle next to a pillar).  Once there, he pulled up the flyer.  This is the theatre usher equivalent, I guess, of a waiter putting your napkin on your lap for you.   

Usher Alert #3.  Yes, two for one show.  The nice young man had his cell phone glued to his ear while he was seating us.  Most likely it was being used as a walkie-talkie (remember those?) to communicate with the house manager but it looked bad.   Neil suggested he was talking to his girlfriend and telling her he’d be done in fifteen minutes.  

Back to the Play.  It’s an epic—that’s the term the Brits use for plays with a lot of episodes instead of one big throughline.  Barker’s 1990 play is set in Vienna in in the late 1600s after a ravaging invasion of the Turks.  Its investigation of culture clash, despair and xenophobia feel fresh.  In the program, critic George Hunka situates the play as an example of what Barker called “Theatre of Catastrophe,” which was an attempt toexamine the irrationality underlying human behavior that leads to war and destruction.  But it’s also very funny.  Epic dramas have large casts.  They often have stylized languageViolence.  Sex.  Ptp/nyc’s cast is large and able, with striking costumes by Julie Emrson.  The set, designed by Mark Evancho, who also did the subtle, not overwhelming projections, is a rare beast:  evocative beams that really do lend themselves equally to multiple places (a palace, a church, a town square).  Director Richard Romagnoli makes judicious use of underscoring too, sound design by Allison Rimmer, original music by Peter Hamlin.

I didn’t envy Neil’s task of getting a review of the two and a half hour, large cast play done in 300 words.  Thankfully, since his review is up, I can just quote his review here:

In the play, written in 1990, Mr. Barker drops in on the aftermath of the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683. Leopold (Brent Langdon), the Holy Roman Emperor — here, a buffoon whose main interest is having his portrait painted — is ecstatic that the siege has been broken through the heroism of General Starhemberg (Robert Emmet Lunney).

Around these two real-life characters Mr. Barker interweaves fictional narratives involving a mutilated rape victim (Aidan Sullivan), her sex-hungry and just plain hungry sister (Megan Byrne), an exceedingly unobservant priest (Robert Zukerman, who is hilarious) and others.

Critic Person Shout-Out:  Sam Thielman from Variety was sitting in front of us.  Sam and I bonded a while back over our mutual dislike of Naomi Wallace’s anti-Semitic caricatures in The Fever Chart:  Three Visions of the Middle East.  I reviewed it for Back Stage.

Sam was there with his lovely wife Pamela, who is a script-reader at the Public Theatre, so she knows my friend the lovely and talented Liz Frankel, Literary Associate at the Public, who referred me to a job as a Story Editor a few years ago.

Sam wrote in his review:

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to write a play this bleak and then call it “The Europeans.” But that’s Barker’s point: Destruction on a massive scale seems to be something of a human habit. When Starhemberg tells Leopold that he and the Viennese had been reduced to eating dogs, Leopold simply says, “Dogs, have you? And not the last time dogs will stand in for pastry.”

Act One is stronger than Act Two, and at times the sudden shift from a kind of verse to really prosaic language for humor is overplayed.  Barker also likes anachronism—there’s a reference to jazz, there’s use of a flashlight—but it doesn’t really lead anywhere.  

Megan Byrne as Susannah gives what a “brave” performance—”brave,” Neil and I have decided, is code for nudity, mimed sex, vomiting or other bodily functions enacted or revealed onstage.  Byrne mimes having sex with Orphuls, the corrupr priest, and she masturbates (facing upstage) while eating one of his lovenotes.  She’s the sister of the raped and maimed Katrin, bitterly comic Aidan Sullivan with whom General Starhemberg, forcefully enacted by Robert Emmet Lunney,  falls in love (he seems to be dealing with post traumatic stress disorder, as well as generalized mommy issues).    

Female bodies are seductive, even to straight women.  That’s good and bad.  As the play wears on, though, even I was distracted by Byrne’s cleavage.   It’s to Byrne’s credit that one remembers her performance at all.

That everyone was somewhat crazy was fascinating but by the end of Act Two it also robbed events of any meaning.  When Starhemberg hints that he’s going to give Concilia, the child of Katrin’s rape, back to the Turks, he could be taking a long view of global connections, succumbing to violence, or just acting randomly.  This is a directorial problem, in the end.

But I’m still recommending it, unlike David Sheward of Back Stage (another Critic Person Shout-out!  we bumped into him on the sidewalk).  He wrote in his review:

The characters come across as symbols rather than flesh-and-blood people. Each has suffered at the hands of the oppressive Turks and cannot cope with the relative freedom offered by the conquering Austrian Empire. But because we don’t get to know them as individuals, their physical and mental pain has no resonance. We don’t identify with them, and their multiple miseries soon become tedious. 

Sheward was talking more easily than we were, having ridden the elevator.

Venue Comfort #2.  In the Basement.  We walked up four flights of stairs, four flights of very industrial stairs, concrete and steel, rather than wait for the elevator.  It extended the end-of-the-world grimness of the play (though I suspect Barker meant his ending to have a glimmer of hope about it) but trust me, wait for the elevator at Atlantic Stage Two.

Meta-theatrical Atmosphere Alert #1.  Ever notice how the play you’ve just seen sometimes creeps into the atmosphere?  Not only the stair-climbing but New York itself seemed eager to perform. 

On this hot summer night, we passed The Bikini Bar—where a girl in a yellow bikini standing outside reassured a young man that yes, she spoke Russian, and then they carried on chatting.

At Penn Station on 31st and Eighth a man in a kilt played the bagpipes.

Many people were sitting on the steps of the Post Office.  Why?    I get that it’s a nice night and apartments get stuffy, but… the Post Office on eighth avenue is the best you can do on a balmy night?  

Forget Vienna in the 17th Century, said the city.  Look at me, look at me, look at me.

**

Twelfth Night

July 8th

The Public Theater Presents Shakespeare in the Park, The Delacorte, Central Park

Before I go into my rant about the Public, let me say straight up that it was great. 

I RECOMMEND THE PLAY (it’s closed, but if you time-travel or have an opportunity to see it on video, do it).

 I’ve seen Twelfth Night seven or eight times and is in the top two (the other is an “island” version American Conservatory Theatre did back in the 80s, when I lived in San Francisco).  Anne Hathaway surprised me by having real Shakespearean chops, surprising for someone who has never performed Shakespeare professionally and who is known for ingénue film roles.  Viola in Twelfth Night is an ingénue, but there’s verse and comic timing and vocal projections and all kinds of things I didn’t know she could pull off.  She also sings like a bird.  On top of that, she’s tall and narrow enough that she could actually pass as a boy.  Eighteenth-century costumes by designer Jane Greenwood had grace and charm, and looked terrific on the pastoral set (literally, hills and trees onstage) by John Lee Beatty (Gwen shout-out:  I wrote the entry on Beatty for the Oxford Encylopedia of Theatre and Performance).

Theatre Music Appreciation.  There’s an Irish-y (not really Irish, but some jigs, and Swift’s session leader Chris Layer plays uillean pipes) band on stage for much of Act One.  The band HEM wrote much of the music, and a recording is in the works.  Let’s see more such recordings, please. When the play began my brother Stephen (I used to call him AOB for Adored Older Brother, but he didn’t like it really) could not stop humming “We Are the World” (the Michael Jackson death-a-thon was the day before).  After the show ended, he could not stop humming the final tune.   

The clowns—Andrew Aguecheek (Hamish Linklater) as a humble fop in particular—were the best I’ve ever seen.  I never grew tired of their predictable gags.  It didn’t hurt that comic chameleon David Pittu played Feste, Olivia’s fool, either, and that Jay O. Sanders played Sir Toby Belch.  And Julie White as Maria displayed such fun feistiness that you could understand why Olivia keeps her around, even after her mean prank on pompous steward Malvolio (Michael Cumpsty).    In addition, Raul Esparza’s lovesick Orsino had charm, Stark Sands gave Sebastian nobility, and Audra McDonald’s Olivia, for once, had sexual heat (often the role is played as just a besotted older woman) and dignity.

 

Now for the rant.

Shakespeare in the Park is not free.

If you go to the Public’s site,  you’ll see they now have a warning about using professional line-sitters.

Last year the New York Times had an article about people hiring line-sitters on Craig’s List (technically, not buying the tickets, which are free). The Public Theater’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis told the Times that the line-sitting itself was a kind of communal experience:

 “In our commodity-obsessed money culture, that’s a vital civic touchstone. Some things shouldn’t be measured in dollars.”

That’s all great, if you’re a student, or an artist, or unemployed, work flexible hours, and on live in Manhattan so you can be on line at 5 a.m.  If not, these tickets are not only not free, they’re not accessible.  Unless you’re a summer employee of a law firm that gives to the Public, or a sponsor, or…You get my drift.  These tickets are not free, unless you’re Someone Who. At minimum wage, each ticket costs over $50.  It’s easy for Eustis not to “measure in dollars” what other peoples’ time is worth.

Disclaimer:  I took a class called “Dramaturgy for Playwrights” from Oskar Eustis at the (now defunct, fondly recalled) Eureka Theatre in San Francisco.  His title was “dramaturg.”  I learned to ask “what are you waiting to see happen?” and “what’s the story question?” Back then, Oskar referred to me as a “cute chick in a miniskirt,” teased me about having gone to Stanford (he’s an auto-didact, like Tom Stoppard and Irish Friend, i.e., IF), and called himself a “red diaper baby.”  He had a mane of golden hair, a smart viking from Minnesota and I thought he was a god of the theatre.

Oskar, what the hell?  How can it be a “civic touchstone” to exclude the working man?   

I hired a line-sitter from Craig’s List. I can’t get to Central Park by 5 am from New Jersey without staying over somewhere, and Wednesday was the only day I had free to see the show, which was closing Sunday.  My line-sitter flaked out on me.   I posted an ad on Craig’s List and got very, very lucky.  

Line-sitters are a sign that capitalism works.  Line-sitters can make over $100 in a day.  There’s nothing illegal about hiring someone to run an errand for you, and busy, working, elderly, infirm people can have a chance to see great theatre too. Since they aren’t going away, perhaps the Public should consider finding a way to regulate it. 

My money was well-spent.  IF (Irish Friend) waited in line for returns two nights in a row to take his theatre-loving teenage daughter and did not get in.  This is Just Wrong.

Program Propriety #2.  When Oskar was called Dramaturg, it was a pretty new profession in this country (OK, that dates me, but I got carded on Friday, so I’m down with it), and very prestigious.  Morgan Jenness, Shelby Jiggetts, John Glore—these were powerful, important people.  Dramaturg was someone who cared about the script, who worked with playwrights.  Now, though, the Public lists its “literary associate” towards the end of its staff in the playbill.   I don’t see anyone with the title “dramaturg.” Huh?

The Public Theater produces and develops new work—it even appointed its first “Master Writer,” Suzan-Lori Parks, whose name and title are in capital letters in “The Public Theater Staff” at the back of the Playbill.  So why is the literary staff is on the second page, listed after the “director of information technology?”  That’s after development, marketing, communications, capital pprojects and government relations, finance, director of Joe’s Pub, music theater initiative, Director of Shakespeare Intiative, Director of Production and facility management. 

Program Propriety #3.  Yes, twice for one show.  There’s nothing about Shakespeare in the Playbill. Joe Papp created Shakespeare in the park for the people, but you won’t get info on him here.  The synopsis gives no history of the play. The Playbill does include an essay by London-based critic Matt Wolf contextualizing this starry production with other Public productions, with quotes from Eustis.  There are also inserts about upcoming Public productions.  My brother asked me where the play falls in Shakespeare’s timeline (it’s 1601, so smack in the middle; you can read the entire play, since it’s in the Public Domain, here on Gutenberg) and I said, oh, it’s in the program I’m sure.  It isn’t.  

Outdoor Theatre Observation #1.  Things fly overhead  It was a lovely summer night—moths flying around in theatre lights posed as fireflies.  Hawks and the occasional goose flew overheadalong with were very noisy planes—one that circled around in an alarming way – that all paused for intermission

Outdoor Theatre Observation #2.  Audiences are different outside.  I’m more tolerant.  I like having my coke with me, for one.   The woman next to me was texting someone during the show, and it was annoying rather than infuriating.  She stopped for clown business.  Ushers walked around telling people not to take pictures, even of one another (Union rules forbid it, but audience members don’t understand why their civic experience is curtailed that way). 

Viola of course was written for a boy—in Shakespeare’s day women were not allowed to perform—so in the play we never do see her come out triumphantly as a girl at the end.  I was happy that director Daniel Sullivan showed her, though.  She couldn’t have looked more joyous in her white Jane Austen-ish gown as she flung her arms in the air and danced with her Orsino.  That final dance was more infectious than any hippies from last summer beckoning to the audience.  People hummed the tune.  

**

Mother

July 10, 2009

The Wild Project (195 East 3rd Street)

I RECOMMEND THE PLAY.  THOUGH.

 

Lisa Ebersole has an amazing ear for dialogue.  She blew me away with her play Brother in 2005.  I raved about it for Back Stage and when her play was published by Samuel French they quoted me in the cover. 

“American theatre has found a rare new voice in Lisa Ebersole, who wrote, directed, and performs in the short, tense drama “Brother.”  Every beat is fraught with interest and impact. Ebersole presents a world that is both recognizable and entirely her own.”

I have not met Lisa, except on Facebook, but shortly after my review came out she ran into my friend Natalie Picoe (she’s now a filmmaker finishing a fantastic film about her father, The Poker Detective.) and Natalie mentioned something about seeing the play after her friend Gwen recommended it (Lisa also acts in her plays, making her a very recognizable writer, though it also may contribute to the slow progress her writing career has been having) and Lisa said “you mean Gwen OREL?  My parents LOVE her!”

Playwright-Critic Etiquette.   Don’t send thank-you notes.  Do accept friend requests.  Do gush to mutual friends.  Don’t twitter mean things about us like Alice Hoffman (Gawker link). 

Mother stars Buck Henry and Holland Taylor—two well known heavy-hitting actors from film and television.  Henry you may remember from appearances on Murphy Brown; he also wrote the screenplay to The Graduate.  Taylor won an Emmy for her role on The Practice, and has done a lot of film and television too, as theatre.

Taylor was featured on Theatermania, in a piece written by editor Brian Scott Lipton:

“I don’t think they’re madly eccentric, just different in their own way,” says Taylor about the family in Mother. “But I also think they have the kind of family dynamic that exists in all families; there’s a certain kind of squabbling between the children and a certain kind of well-worn groove of bickering with the parents. Yet, there is unquestionably the bond of love that overrides everything in this family. I think the play shows how delicate the connecting lines are in a family — how easily they can be frayed — while there’s ultimately enough strands to weave the kind of web that holds a family together. It’s really wonderful writing.”

But my question is—why aren’t there stories about EBERSOLE HERSELF?  I hope they’re coming!  at least they’ll be one here on Cityscoops; I’m doing a Q&A with the playwright tomorrow.

In a period where the gender disparity between male and female playwrights made the news, after a Town Hall meeting featuring the year-long study of Princeton undergraduate star economist Emily Sands, which received a long article in the New York Times, and then a follow-up piece on women directors, why is this emerging female playwright less the story than the stars in her play?

“There is discrimination against female playwrights in the theater community,” said Emily Glassberg Sands, who conducted the research.

Because, folks, talk (and news talk) is cheap.  At least the show is being reviewed, although not, at the Times, by Brantley or Isherwood.  I just hope a female critic covers it too, for somebody.  Because lack of female critics hurts female playwrights too.  I don’t think only women should review plays by women.  But I also don’t think only men should review plays by women.  If this were a new play by a young man with two heavy-hitters in the roles, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts the writer would be part of the story.

Back to the Play.  Though not quite as strong or as finished as Brother, it’s worth a trek downtown to see it.  What Ebersole (yeah ok, I’m using her first name when I’m thinking about gender, and her last when thinking about her work, and what that says about me I am not sure) has is a voice that is striking and recognizable.  Her storytelling and dramaturgy could use some work, and though she’s pretty and personable, I’m not convinced she’s the best actress for this piece—she seemed to be working in a different style than the others on stage.  

Meta-theatrical Atmosphere Alert #2:  I got carded at Croxley Ale!  Ok, that’s just a gloat.  As I wandered in and prepared to sit at a low table a young woman grabbed me by the arm and said EXCUSE ME CAN I SEE SOME ID!  She made my day.    The group of young women sitting near me were all trading happy stories about being beaten as children and how much good it did them.  One woman described how her mother would say “go ahead, call 911, you’ll go to foster care and be with people who don’t love you.”  Then she laughed.  She turned out so much better who never got smacked.  One woman was made to kneel on the reverse side of a bathmat before being hit with a belt.  She laughed.  Happily.

  If I didn’t know better I’d suspect some kind of stealth marketing.

Venue Comfort #3: This is a really nice venue, and the first time I’d been there.  Comfortable seats. The play is set in a dining room at a swanky hotel in West Virginia, between Christmas and New Year’s, as a family with two adult children tries to have a happy meal.  

Getting Theatrical With It:  Onstage seating put some audience members at restaurant tables too, drinking complimentary prosecco (which the family drink as well).  The program is arranged like a menu, which is also a nice touch, though it was a teensy bit confusing.  I’m a sucker for creative touches like this.  Yes, put the audience on stage.  Get creative with the program.  

Usher Alert #4:  no names on the seats, this time, but seat assignments written on the “menu”

Back to the Play.  The play reveals itself slowly—you don’t realize at first that the young man and woman are siblings, not a couple, until they both refer to Mom and Dad.  Mom comes to dinner without her shoes—both my brother Stephen (my plus one, and very appropriate for this) and I thought for a bit that the family lived there (no, they were just staying there).  There are references to “the bunker”—Stephen told me there really is a hotel outside D.C. that has a bunker in case of nuclear alert, but it’s never explained in the play so there’s a period that goes on for awhile where we seem to be in a science fiction world.  This feeling is heightened even more by a strange subplot in which Lisa has apparently been kidnapped by “The Wilsons,” a family they have known and had complex feelings of dislike, attraction and envy for, for many years. But the Wilson kidnapping gradually seems just an excuse for characters to leave the room so that we can have a series of two-person scenes.  

Directors Notes:  since the family are sitting at a table throughout, most of the movement onstage comes when characters re-enter a room and sit in a different chair.  I have never seen people chair-hop at their own table.  Maybe this family does, but it seemed forced to me.

 Holland Taylor  plays a difficult, dynamic woman who somehow centers the family—yet I still don’t know why the play is called “mother.”  It could just as easily have been called Father.  I’ll ask Ebersole when I talk to her.

 

 There were a number of loose ends:  why does the brother bring up this dinner to chide his father about never having talked to him about sex; what is the mother referring to when she apologizes to her adult daughter for leaving on a plane when the daughter was two?  —with no clear “story question” we can’t help investing these conversational bits with weight.

Stephen asked me, “has she been listening in on our family dinners?”  The family onstage was nothing like ours, and yet they seemed so recognizable too.  That’s huge.  That can’t even be taught.

Gender Disparity Alert #1:  Female playwrights often write about families, and some writers suggest that that keeps their plays in the “small” vein.  But men have families too.  My brother chortled really loudly.  Can we just dispel the notion that women are more interested in family than men?  Where does that come from, anyway?  Isn’t Death of a Salesman essentially a family drama?  Yes, it;s about work, but it’s just as much about a father with sons and a wife who knows that Attention Must Be Paid.

Favorite moments:

Dad pauses in the middle of talking to say “Oh I love this song” about a muzak “Little drummer boy” playing in the restaurant.

When the brother reveals he’s dating a married woman, mom is upset, but dad says “I’m relieved it’s a woman.”

Late in the play (it’s only 75 minutes, but feels a bit longer due to its lack of real urgency)—we learn that dad has lost the family money.  As Mom picks on him, daughter defends him and brother defends mom, the shifting loyalties, guilt and love hit close to home.  

Gender Disparity Alert #2:  With a talent so palpable, why isn’t Ebersole in the circuit of writers who are developed, commissioned, scouted—a talent this big should have had the opportunity to work with the best dramaturges in the best new play programs.  Truthfully, this is a question that is larger than gender, it’s a question of class in theatre.  It’s very very hard to “break in” if you don’t come from a writing program, if you don’t break in at the right age and with the right kind of work.   But once you’re in, you’re in.  Imperfect though the play is, it has more merit and weight than a lot of flashy, clever pieces I’ve seen by writers who go on to big careers writing for Showtime and HBO series to pay the rent.

It’s “who you know” in theatre too.   It always will be– even with the best of intentions we can’t really develop or read blindly, at least not beyond one play.  So there will always be some degree of sexism, racism, ageism.

But I can still bitch about it.

And maybe that will even do some good.

Last 5 posts by Gwen Orel

• Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at B.B. King's - October 7th, 2009
• Don't Miss: Irish legend Andy Irvine with rising star Irish guitarist John Doyle at the Irish Arts Center, Sept. 9-13 - September 8th, 2009
• Does Al Stewart think we're too stupid for historical folk rock? (catch him at the Rubin's Naked Soul Series, 8/21) - August 21st, 2009
• Catch up with American troubador John Gorka at the Rubin, 8/7 - August 6th, 2009
• Q&A with Fiddling Groundbreaker Mark O'Connor - August 4th, 2009

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