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January 12 – The unlikely partnership of Wally Shawn and Scott Elliott continues with the New Group’s revival
(at the Acorn Theater on W. 42nd Street) of
The Fever, a one-man play written and performed by Wally and directed by Scott. It’s a 1 hour and 40 minute monologue by a character known as The Traveller. Sitting on the floor of the bathroom in a hotel room somewhere in Central America in the middle of the night, he experiences a dark night of the soul, brooding about his life and especially his relationship to money, his economic class, poor people, world politics, and the death penalty. Typical for Wally Shawn’s plays, the character is slippery – at times he evokes identification and sympathy, other times you draw away from him, you’re constantly having to gauge your distance from him. He fanatically examines what he’s observing in great detail, whether it’s his internal experience of being at a cocktail party or ruminating over the meaning of the expression “commodity fetishism” as it turns up in Karl Marx’s
Capital. At the core of the piece is a moral wrestling match that many of us experience walking down the street in New York every day. You see a homeless person begging on the street – you think, “I’ll give him some money” – a voice inside you say, “Why not give him ALL your money?” – you retort, “I can’t give him ALL my money…” In
The Fever Shawn carries that internal dialogue on to the nth degree. It could devolve into liberal hand-wringing but it never does, because Shawn’s prose is so carefully wrought and his performance stays absolutely present. Shawn’s work always makes audiences uncomfortable, and this play is no exception – some people will find it very hard to take. But I thought it was excellent.
When Wally first did the play in 1991, he performed it in friends’ apartments for invited guests. Then he did it for a run at the Public Theater, in a very sparse production – one or two wooden chairs, no special lighting, very Brechtian. This production at the New Group is VERY different and quite beautiful. For one thing, there is a set, a slice of a well-appointed cultured New Yorker’s apartment with a comfortable armchair, lamps, and a bookcase. But there are also crucial lighting and sound components to the show. It opens with a tight spot on Wally’s face, his low back-of-the-throat voice miked, all of which establishes an essential connection to Beckett’s dark, philosophical, existential plays. The lighting and sound levels shift throughout the evening, sometimes there’s no miking at all, and this gives texture to the monologue – you recognize the various layers of emotion and thought inhabiting this character’s mind. The performance is quite spectacular. Watching the various gradations (and degradations) of character flickering through his face and his voice, I had a lot of appreciation for how seriously Wally has taken the art of acting, even if he’s usually cast in roles that use only a fraction of his talent. This performance is especially a showcase for his voice, which has been used for comic effect in animated films recently, but here has a gravity and exquisite depth I’ve never encountered before. I give Scott Elliott a lot of credit for whatever ways his directorial eye contributed to Wally’s performance.
Shawn has altered and revised the play in small ways since it was first performed. I had such a clear memory of the final lines of the play –
Forgive me, forgive me, I’m still falling – that I was shocked when this production ended without them. I had to go back to the published text to make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me. I re-read the chapter on
The Fever in W.D. King’s fascinating book on Wally Shawn,
Writing Wrongs, in which he likens the play to Euripides’
The Bacchae and talks about the redemptive or at least cathartic effect of the final passage…and I wonder if Wally perversely went back and removed that passage because he specifically doesn’t want to redeem the character or to provide a catharsis for the audience. I think he wants us to remain unsettled – again, a very Brechtian proposition. You’re not meant to agree with the play (and, so soothed,
to forget about it immediately) but to argue with it.
Wally Shawn is an unusual figure in American culture. The gap between his amusing comic persona and his literary/theatrical/philosophical persona is enormous, and as someone who knows his writing well and admires it, I’m always fascinated to watch him interact with the public. For this show, he has invited the audience to come onstage and
sip champagne with him for half an hour before the show starts. I heard him telling somebody that there’s no particular conceptual meaning to this pre-show activity – he just prefers it to sitting alone in his dressing room waiting for the show to start. I heard one woman ask him if Andre Gregory had anything to do with this show. Another said to him, “Somebody told me you spend a lot of time at the post office mailing packages.” The sight of well-dressed theatergoing New Yorkers holding champagne flutes on a classy living room set reminded me of the party scenes in Wally’s play
Marie and Bruce, and that prompted me to ask him about the movie that’s been made of that play, starring Matthew Broderick and Julianne Moore. I’m afraid I touched a nerve by bringing it up, though, because Wally looked slightly pained telling me that the movie remains in limbo awaiting a distributor since it played at Sundance two years ago (three years ago?).
January 13 – Considering what a big fan I am of Tom Stoppard’s plays, including
Part One: Voyage of The Coast of Utopia, I was surprised at how many objections I had to
Shipwreck, part two of the trilogy (at Lincoln Center
Theater). This was supposed to be the most audience-favored play of the three, because most centered on the romantic relationships of the Russian thinkers (Alexander Herzen, Nicholas Ogarev, etc.). I found the play amazingly un-engaging, remarkably cynical, and dramatically choppy – people rushing in and out announcing various historical or philosophical points of view as if reciting them from index cards rather than inhabiting characters and interacting as people. I don’t know if it was just because I was tired and had had a glass of wine with dinner, or if the actors were tired on a Saturday night after a long week, three months into a three-play repertory, but the performance seemed distinctly off. Jennifer Ehle, who was so good in
The Real Thing and Voyage, seemed drab and distant (not to mention that she’s forced to wear a hideous red wig), and Brian O’Byrne was doing an awful lot of empty speechifying as Herzen. Really, most of the actors were working at less than top capacity, with the exception of Amy Irving, playing a very different character than she did in
Voyage (she was also wearing a not-quite-as-bad red wig – what up with that?).
Stoppard’s attempt in this play is to portray the personal daily existence of these Russian intelligentsia
living on the sidelines of major political upheavals in 19th century Europe, which is admirably ambitious and a tall order – on this occasion, it definitely feels like he’s trying to cram too much into one play. But afterwards, relieved of the uncomfortable experience of watching an off performance, I was able to replay and relish some of the ideas the play chews over, especially Herzen’s remarks about history’s indifference to the wishes and desires of political thinkers, and the German poet George Herwegh’s perverse defense of apathy as a form of political activism consistent with Stoic philosophy. (David Harbour as Herwegh also wears a hideous wig. This show definitely falls in the category of the Bad Hair Play.) I found myself annoyed at Stoppard’s relentless ridiculing of visionary thinking (Karl Marx appears as a comic relief figure, with much sport made of the fact that for all his defense of the proletariat he’d never mingled with the working class himself), which is one of the ways his deeply conservative politics shows up in his plays. I get that he’s portraying the at-times risible volatility of opinionated young literary-minded guys. (Belinsky, the character somewhat overplayed by Billy Crudup, informs Turgenev, played by Jason Butler Harner, that he’s going to be one of Russia’s great writers, “and I am never wrong!” Turgenev points out, “You said Fenimore Cooper was a great as Shakespeare.” Belinsky: “I wasn’t wrong, I was just ridiculous.”) Still, it’s a good exercise being forced to reconsider the Russian Revolution as a 20th century political landmark
and to mull the ways it not only failed to benefit Russian citizens but set up the horror that was Stalinism. No matter what, Stoppard keeps me thinking.
January 14 – The Big Voice: God or Merman? is a very awkwardly named show about two gay guys writing an autobiographical musical about writing a musical. Unlike the charming
[title of show] by the very cute Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell,
Big Voice is a lumpy, quite mawkish show featuring two figures you see all the time in life but hardly ever onstage: Jim Brochu is a big fat gray-haired campy queen, and Steve
Schalchlin is a skinny guy with a face gaunt from the havoc wrought by years of taking HIV meds.
I liked that. It was probably my favorite thing about the show, which is amateurish in both good and bad ways – homey and unpretentious, unpolished and unsophisticated. The story is pretty fascinating, and they tell it reasonably well. They both grew up in religious households – Brochu is Catholic from Brooklyn, Schalchlin is Baptist from Arkansas – and had somewhat torturous coming out experiences. Brochu’s life was very affected and certainly blessed by the fact that one of his father’s best friends was Ethel Merman’s father; a series of close encounters with the Merm baptized Brochu in the healing power of Broadway musicals and helped launch his career as a performer. Schalchlin loved writing songs from an early age, and it was a gig playing in the lounge of a cruise ship that led to the two of them meeting in 1985 and becoming lovers. In the early ‘90s, Schalchlin was diagnosed with AIDS and nearly died, an experience that the two of them turned into a musical called
The Last Session, about a songwriter with AIDS who wants to commit suicide. The show was moderately successful, which caused its own turmoil, and the HIV meds Schalchlin took had side effects,
as he says to Brochu, “that turned me into an angry abusive drama queen – like you!” These two are remarkably honest and funny about their ups and downs, breaking up and getting back together, and for that alone the show has value. The songs are melodic and serviceable although pretty generic middle-of-the-road pop. This score is more tolerable than
The Last Session, which I remember being unbearably corny, like one Celine Dion power ballad after another.
Big Voice is performed at the Actors Temple on West 47th Street, which is an actual synagogue. Going to the show is a little like going to gay church, with all the advantages (community) and disadvantages (slight ickiness) of that. If you go to the show, be sure to check out the photos of the two guys when they were younger posted over the door as you leave.
see previous entry here
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