Sunday with Sondheim

After enough time with the books and articles and interviews and biographical revues, listening to Stephen Sondheim talk takes on the familiar aura of a liturgical reading. I think I joked to my friend after last year’s Harris theatre talk about The Book of Sondheim, First Merman, chapter two. Gathering early on a Sunday morning for today’s Chicago Humanities Festival Q&A with Sondheim and Chris Jones did little to take away from the sense of a rite. Happily, there were a few new discussions and perspectives.

  • Asked about the way time has softened criticism of his work for being un-hummable or emotionally cold: “You just have to outlive your critics.”
  • The new book features four chapters on the various versions of Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show. He thought about adding a final chapter to the book that would be his Molly Bloom soliloquy, the entire thought process of writing a couplet. He instead chose to attempt this on a larger scale, working through the process of a show from writing through workshop into production and final revision.
  • Jones asked about Sondheim’s fraught relationship with his mother and the conversation turned to those critics who try to organize thematic threads through the oeuvre. Sondheim denied any conscious relation between his mother and, say, Gypsy. But this seems to be one of those areas where his insight is less acute when self-directed. Problematic mothers are more than incidental to his works: A Little Night Music, Sunday, Into the Woods, Road Show.  His other example was the critics who discuss the role of the outsider as significant within his work. Hamlet and Oedipus were outsiders too, he blithely offered, saying that outsiders are central to any art. He offered A Little Night Music as an example of his work that is clearly not about outsiders. But his outsiders are a specific, consistent breed. They may not be social outsiders, but are people placed at a remove by an inability to emotionally connect. This is almost a constant: Anyone Can Whistle, Passion, Company, Sunday, Assassin. Valid readings could be made of Sweeney and Merrily too in this context. Even Night Music features an entire cast who are “outside” – i.e., not connecting – because they misdirect their desire.  But this has always been a topic he sidesteps.
  • A lyric he never got right: from Sunday, “let others make that decision, they usually do.” What he really was attempting to say was “they inevitably do,” but has never been able to find a satisfactory word that scans in the line.
“
The music is primarily introduced extra-diegetically, functioning as outside commentary to the scenes. Within their respective operas, the Mozart/da Ponte arias respond to specific dramatic contexts. Here, relating only to the general mood or theme of a scene, they are deprived of that agency and become generalities. “Porgi, amor,” for instance, is admittedly vague in its text. But within Figaro it is the lament of the Countess arising out of emotions driven by a sequence of events. Here, coming to us second-hand and voiced by an unidentified third party, the emotion, at which the preceding scene has already arrived, is all that remains. The aria becomes an extension of a moment, rather than the moment.

“Satyr is what closes on Saturday night” 

This piece I wrote went up today.

Saint George and the Dragon. In case we don’t remember the story: there’s a city, outside of which lives a horrific dragon. To stop him from terrorizing the city, the citizens periodically deliver their younger members as sacrifice. One day, George, knight in shining armor, arrives to save them from their oppression. He is baptized, takes the sign of the cross as his protection, and rides out to slay the dragon. He does, of course, peace is restored, and the people go on to healthy, normal, well-adjusted lives. But let’s consider this story from another vantage. What if we discard the knights and dragons? What if this is a story about Christian modernity imposing itself upon—wiping out really—a native pre-modern system of beliefs? The dragon as the embodiment of all the druids and witches and wild, uncontrolled, earthly paganism that grew up out of the land. Saint George riding in on the productive rationality of a new era. For those of the modernist persuasion, this isn’t a bad deal. Rationality, productivity, order: not bad things for your patron saint to represent. However, to the adherents of the pre-modern this is the end of a way of life - collateral loss in the inexorable march of Civilization onwards. Such is the moment at which we encounter “Rooster” Johnny Byron at the start of of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. He lives alone in his trailer, inhabiting—squatting, really—a patch of woods at the edge of what has during that time become a nice, prosperous subdevelopment. One imagines rows of freshly-painted McMansions. A fixture in the village for decades, he’s known by all for better or worse, barred from every pub and the go-to for drugs and drink. As the dawn breaks, two policepersons are serving him yet another notice of complaint after yet another raging party the night before. When he finally emerges from the trailer, he runs through what appears to be a hangover-curing routine–cold water, raw eggs–while trying to piece together the blackout part of his night. He’s amazed to discover that he’s led the assembled in a cheering assault upon his flat-screen television, the pieces of which now lie scattered about the stage. This is our hero, this wild, reckless, drunken fool of a mess. The Times and other reviews made much of Rooster’s self-mythologizing. He is a man of stories. He tells of being born to a virgin, fully-developed, hair and all, with a bullet clenched in his teeth. He tells of meeting one of the giants while wandering the countryside at dawn and being given a drum to call for their help in crisis. Others tell stories, too. Of his brilliance as a stunt jumper. Of the time he died and, after the paramedics gave up, simply came back to life. But these stories aren’t merely indications of his Falstaffian larger-than-life persona, Mr. Brantly; Rooster is myth itself. Whether the stories are true or not matters little. He believes them. Somehow he gets you to, as well. And belief is the key to their life. His stories are legends and he is the dragon - the last holdout of that uncontrolled, expansive, and, yes, dangerous ancient magic. The destroyed television is a marker for what proceeds: his drunken antics are unconsciously purposeful, the sleek functionality of the flatscreen destroyed in the ecstacy of the bacchanal, wild antagonism against the encroaching modern. The play, in its oh so Aristotlean way, spans a single Saint George’s Day, the festivals and parades commemorating the knight’s victory a ticking clock on the last of Rooster and his wood - tomorrow the bulldozers come to evict him before the land gives way to more cookie cutter-clean housing estates. Modernity will come to plow under its opposition. It may not seem like such a bad idea to get rid of this nuisance with the loud music and drugs, the tax evasion and squatting. Raise some property values and improve the view while they’re at it. Why not; even the gang that hands round Rooster can’t respect him. They’ll take his drugs and liquor, but they’ll also piss on him while he’s passed out. And yet, they keep coming back. They can’t articulate it, but Rooster offers them something more than just escape - he provides connection and understanding for people who find themselves at odds with the world. A doddering, old professor, mind half gone, who finds his stories and mistaken identities indulged. The young man hoping to fill an interior emptiness on an Australian walkabout, given blessing as he departs, though it’s clear he’ll never make it to Australia. Rooster extends the same expansive acceptance he gives his stories onto their dreams and needs, creating a refuge for the parts of them that don’t quite fit into a rational world on the march, the parts to which this world has lost the ability to respond. These people all have within them a deep, unspoken sense of what’s been lost in the flattening, the standardization that comes with modernity. Rooster is the remaining possibility of what might have been. Naturally, the possibility of alternatives is a threat to the dominant order and the dragon must be slain. While the official machinery of the city prepares to move its bulldozers into place, Rooster receives a savage beating from individual enforces of the order whom he has dared offend. The bulldozers will still come, but the ultimate defeat arrives in the beating, the violence not of systemic action, but of individuals so thoroughly enveloped in the system that they have taken its mission of conquest upon themselves. The people have abandoned and forgotten the old order . Even the ones who come to its moments of escape will kick it to the ground as soon as their needs are sated. Rooster was defeated from the start. Director Ian Rickson makes perhaps his one overstep here, driving Butterworth’s text home a little too forcefully. The beating culminates in a branding, a large X burned into Rooster’s skin. But this X can also be read as the Saint George’s cross, the red intersecting lines on a background of white skin. Broken, bloody, and marked, Rooster frantically but steadily beats the giant’s drum, a mystical dying plea into the darkness. The dragon, awful and necessary, howling as it falls to the onward march of the knight’s crusade. View high resolution

Saint George and the Dragon. In case we don’t remember the story: there’s a city, outside of which lives a horrific dragon. To stop him from terrorizing the city, the citizens periodically deliver their younger members as sacrifice. One day, George, knight in shining armor, arrives to save them from their oppression. He is baptized, takes the sign of the cross as his protection, and rides out to slay the dragon. He does, of course, peace is restored, and the people go on to healthy, normal, well-adjusted lives.

But let’s consider this story from another vantage. What if we discard the knights and dragons? What if this is a story about Christian modernity imposing itself upon—wiping out really—a native pre-modern system of beliefs? The dragon as the embodiment of all the druids and witches and wild, uncontrolled, earthly paganism that grew up out of the land. Saint George riding in on the productive rationality of a new era. For those of the modernist persuasion, this isn’t a bad deal. Rationality, productivity, order: not bad things for your patron saint to represent. However, to the adherents of the pre-modern this is the end of a way of life - collateral loss in the inexorable march of Civilization onwards.

Such is the moment at which we encounter “Rooster” Johnny Byron at the start of of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. He lives alone in his trailer, inhabiting—squatting, really—a patch of woods at the edge of what has during that time become a nice, prosperous subdevelopment. One imagines rows of freshly-painted McMansions. A fixture in the village for decades, he’s known by all for better or worse, barred from every pub and the go-to for drugs and drink. As the dawn breaks, two policepersons are serving him yet another notice of complaint after yet another raging party the night before. When he finally emerges from the trailer, he runs through what appears to be a hangover-curing routine–cold water, raw eggs–while trying to piece together the blackout part of his night. He’s amazed to discover that he’s led the assembled in a cheering assault upon his flat-screen television, the pieces of which now lie scattered about the stage. This is our hero, this wild, reckless, drunken fool of a mess.

The Times and other reviews made much of Rooster’s self-mythologizing. He is a man of stories. He tells of being born to a virgin, fully-developed, hair and all, with a bullet clenched in his teeth. He tells of meeting one of the giants while wandering the countryside at dawn and being given a drum to call for their help in crisis. Others tell stories, too. Of his brilliance as a stunt jumper. Of the time he died and, after the paramedics gave up, simply came back to life. But these stories aren’t merely indications of his Falstaffian larger-than-life persona, Mr. Brantly; Rooster is myth itself. Whether the stories are true or not matters little. He believes them. Somehow he gets you to, as well. And belief is the key to their life. His stories are legends and he is the dragon - the last holdout of that uncontrolled, expansive, and, yes, dangerous ancient magic. The destroyed television is a marker for what proceeds: his drunken antics are unconsciously purposeful, the sleek functionality of the flatscreen destroyed in the ecstacy of the bacchanal, wild antagonism against the encroaching modern.

The play, in its oh so Aristotlean way, spans a single Saint George’s Day, the festivals and parades commemorating the knight’s victory a ticking clock on the last of Rooster and his wood - tomorrow the bulldozers come to evict him before the land gives way to more cookie cutter-clean housing estates. Modernity will come to plow under its opposition.

It may not seem like such a bad idea to get rid of this nuisance with the loud music and drugs, the tax evasion and squatting. Raise some property values and improve the view while they’re at it. Why not; even the gang that hands round Rooster can’t respect him. They’ll take his drugs and liquor, but they’ll also piss on him while he’s passed out. And yet, they keep coming back. They can’t articulate it, but Rooster offers them something more than just escape - he provides connection and understanding for people who find themselves at odds with the world. A doddering, old professor, mind half gone, who finds his stories and mistaken identities indulged. The young man hoping to fill an interior emptiness on an Australian walkabout, given blessing as he departs, though it’s clear he’ll never make it to Australia. Rooster extends the same expansive acceptance he gives his stories onto their dreams and needs, creating a refuge for the parts of them that don’t quite fit into a rational world on the march, the parts to which this world has lost the ability to respond. These people all have within them a deep, unspoken sense of what’s been lost in the flattening, the standardization that comes with modernity. Rooster is the remaining possibility of what might have been.

Naturally, the possibility of alternatives is a threat to the dominant order and the dragon must be slain. While the official machinery of the city prepares to move its bulldozers into place, Rooster receives a savage beating from individual enforces of the order whom he has dared offend. The bulldozers will still come, but the ultimate defeat arrives in the beating, the violence not of systemic action, but of individuals so thoroughly enveloped in the system that they have taken its mission of conquest upon themselves. The people have abandoned and forgotten the old order . Even the ones who come to its moments of escape will kick it to the ground as soon as their needs are sated. Rooster was defeated from the start. Director Ian Rickson makes perhaps his one overstep here, driving Butterworth’s text home a little too forcefully. The beating culminates in a branding, a large X burned into Rooster’s skin. But this X can also be read as the Saint George’s cross, the red intersecting lines on a background of white skin. Broken, bloody, and marked, Rooster frantically but steadily beats the giant’s drum, a mystical dying plea into the darkness. The dragon, awful and necessary, howling as it falls to the onward march of the knight’s crusade.

On The Book of Mormon

(June 13, 2011)

The Tonys weren’t bad. More significantly, they weren’t worse than last year. Seemed for a while there that we were stuck in a big downward spiral. But the Beacon didn’t dwarf everything, the show didn’t drag too much, Harris and Jackman’s number was fun, and even that Memphis performance was better than 2009’s touring Mamma Mia cast.

And yet I still wanted to punch a bunch of people in the teeth. Because I had to hear over and over again how Book of Mormon is “changing the face of Broadway” and “revolutionary” and “shaping musicals for the next 10 years.” Bullshit.

It’s an incredibly traditional show. Some of it has a conscious eye to the past: the Rodgers and Hammerstein parodies in “Joseph Smith American Moses” and “I Believe,” the tortured key change that “You and Me” lifted from Wicked. By and large, the score follows conventions that have been with us for fifty years. An early I Want song. A big ensemble number to introduce the setting. A first act finale reprising the major musical themes. Sure, the love story is only perfunctory, but writers have been jettisoning those for years; what’s more, it’s a buddy comedy - the love story is only ever secondary to the bromance in the genre anyway.

Even the content is familiar. Yes, it’s probably the most profane show to win the Tony, and certainly the first one that spends so much time on the clitoris. But sticking toes outside a matinee audience’s comfort zone is hardly a great leap forward. Even the show’s eventual conclusion is old hat: the stories religion tells us may not be strictly true, but they are created by and respond to people’s needs. That’s Feuerbach. Revolutionary, in 1848.

That it’s such a traditional show is, I’d venture, why it’s become such a hit. The familiar format assures the audience’s comfort. There’s a big build in “Turn It Off,” right where they’d traditionally go into a tap break, and they do. In the middle of the first act, we get a quiet I Want moment for a supporting character, see “Little Lamb” in Gypsy. Expectations are set up and met, reminding you that you’re ultimately in safe territory. So when something “shocking” is tossed out, say the reveal in “Hassa Diga Eebowai,” it’s like your grandmother saying “fuck.” Naughty, but ultimately kind of cute.

Book of Mormon deserves its Tonys. The creators clearly know how the form works and had the skills to succeed in it. But don’t tell me they’re reshaping anything. To do so denies a debt to and, more importantly, the vitality of a long and marvelous tradition.

More on Follies

(May 6, 2011)

fuckyeahstephensondheim:

stephenrettger:

“The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” Donna McKechnie. 1996 BBC radio concert broadcast.

Donna McKechnie is the only actress I can think of to play all three major female roles in Follies. She played Phyllis here, 1996. 1998, she played Sally at New Jersey’s Papermill Playhouse. 2002, she first played Carlotta at LA Reprise.

I’m not sure what qualifies Carlotta as the third “major role” — is she really all that much more important than Stella or Hattie or Emily or Vanessa? But it’s a great recording.

I.
The original casting impacts this statement. DeCarlo was one of the names. She did all the same interviews. She bowed with the four. And subsequently, the role has always been cast with a bigger “name” than Hattie or Solange or the rest.

II.
More to the point: Carlotta has a unique role in the dynamics of the show, more closely related to the four than the other follies performers.

i.
The story of the main four is of broken dreams and unfulfilled expectations. Carlotta is the foil: successful, evidently happy enough. (This is also why she needs to read as their contemporary and not their mother.) The four’s problem arises because they bought into the dreams the follies, standing in for the post-war American Dream, promised: Loveland and happy endings. “I’m Still Here” disavows that approach. You don’t love tomorrow? Love hasn’t seen you through? Roll with the punches - don’t expect it to and you’ll survive. She illuminates by contrast.

ii.
The other follies performers provide the context. The performance numbers, recreations of their acts from decades past, set up then lead us through the fall of the follies’ promises. The Montage: simple love that will get through anything, adventure, determined belief in success. The Bolero: romance, passion, sex. We’ve grown up a little, but here we start to see how fleeting it’s all going to be. The fluid movement of the younger couple highlight the inability of the older couple to reach the same heights. “Who’s That Woman,” the contortions and justifications one makes in order to keep pursing love – a coldness and cynicism begins creeping in. “One More Kiss.” The only one with specifically European influences; the only one that explicitly acknowledges what the others cannot: the blissful picture-perfect happiness we’ve been promised must fade. By the time we tumble into “Loveland,” we see this dream for what it is: a blithe rejection of reality. Sally and Ben and Buddy and Phyllis are incapable of reconciling to this. The other follies performers create, together, the background.

iii.
“I’m Still Here” fittingly walks a strange line between performative number and character monologue. Carlotta talks about having a follies number, begins singing and for a while we could be hearing the number. But halfway through it starts becoming increasingly personal and bringing in history that could apply to the character and her life after the follies. It’s ambiguous, but crosses between diagetic and non-diagetic performance in a way the other follies characters, aside from the four, do not.

So Carlotta stands somewhere between the leading four and the others, less central than the quartet but with more individual significance than anyone else. 

On a Seder

(April 20, 2011)

My friend’s Seder last night. Always, as in years past, sharing tradition with close friends is a moving experience and the question-and-explanation structure works well in gentile-majority groups like this one (speaking as one of the goyim). But the very adapted Haggadah he had us using this year struck me in the profound immediacy it lent the ceremony. Some came from a recitation of modern plagues, our political characterization of the four children, the abundance of contemporary parallels drawn through the course of the recitation. But the depth of the connection arose out of a focus on Israel, “not a place of inevitable return,” but as a state of mind and being. A spiritual destination. Egypt not just as an historical moment of oppression but as the symbol of everything globally and personally that prevents arrival at that long-sought harmony. Which is really what it should be about.

The moment that I kept returning to today was the preparation of the Elijah cup. We passed the glass around, each pouring in some of our wine with a humble wish for the year ahead to bring us all closer to Yerushaláyim: a little more compassion, a little more bravery, a little more responsibility, a little more mindfulness, a little more peace.

Lohengrin, Lyric Opera, half-formed thoughts

(March 27, 2011)

A question of values impacts our understanding of the action. Gracie thought Lohengrin’s demands upon Elsa ridiculous: “Do everything I ask and I shall esteem you above all women.” But it’s not really that. His condition that she never ask his name or home, the concerns surrounding his condition, it’s all about honor. He arrives to defend Elsa’s honor, no questions asked. In return, he demands that she not question his honor. The problem is not whether or not he can defend his background, but that it is a blow to his honor even to question. Likewise, Telramund’s motivation to destroy Lohengrin is all about losing his honor in the duel. Without that he’s Snidely Wiplash. But what does honor mean to us now? Fuck up? Get a reality show. Fuck up on the reality show? Get a magazine cover. Honor, as it exists in the opera, has vanished from our vocabulary. So of course Lohengrin seems absurd. We need that lens.

Elsa’s a little confusing, too. Naturally she would have some misgivings here, but she swings so easily from agreeing not to question Lohengrin to letting Ortrud shatter her confidence. They key moment in her change occurs when Ortrud suggests that Lohengrin might leave, never to be found again. What we see in this moment is that at the core of Elsa’s concern are her abandonment issues. She’s without family. She’s only just lost her brother, and mysteriously at that. The thought of another loss is what gets to her, makes her susceptible to Ortrud.

The first act put me in mind of McCarthy-esque hearings. Elsa as the “free spirit” who thinks a little differently. The court as starched and pressed 1950s America. Lohengrin as the outsider defender. This frame wouldn’t sustain well through the rest of the piece. Also, parallels Peter Grimes: outsider put on trial by the community, only one friendly voice for support. In a different look at the role of the outsider, Tony joked that they want to see Lohengrin’s birth certificate. Wagner’s Birther opera.

What is the role of the chorus here? They’re instantly changeable. One minute they’re suspicious and appositional. Two bars of character response and they’re now behind the singer. In the Horowitz book, Sondheim speaks to the problems of a chorus–they can speak with once voice–and here those problems are amplified because that one voice has no constancy.

Perhaps this is a problem with middle-period Wagner. He hasn’t yet fully let go of operatic conventions: he is led by convention to use a chorus, but doesn’t shape it as a particular force, instead as merely a reflection of whatever point of view we’ve just heard. He sticks also within a traditional sequence of ensembles and choruses. The second act could easily have ended after the ensemble if we didn’t have to throw that chorus in there to top it off. We hear him harmonically beginning to make the leaps into Ring/Tristan/Parsifal territory even though dramatically he’s still bound within these very formalized structures.

Fanciulla Del West, Lyric Opera

(Feb. 5, 2011)

  • Fanciulla del West last night.
  • I didn’t really know the piece at all going in and that always adds to the experience. It’s easier to give in to the music when I don’t know where it’s headed and I can buy into the tension when I don’t know exactly when Minnie will come riding to the rescue.
  • It was Hal Prince’s 1978 production. His designers were Eugene and Franne Lee, who would go on to do Sweeney, and the look is strikingly similar. An expanse of mountains fills the rear of the stage, like the Sweeney’s London factory set, while the playing area for the first two acts is confined to saloon and then house set pieces, like the Fleet Street shop unit. Order dwarfed by, and at times threatened by, the wilds of nature. (Minnie’s moral order threatened by the wilds of passion.)
  • Hadn’t seen Voigt live since her 2009 Isolde. Last night, her opening high notes were a little scary. (It makes me worry for the Walküre hojotohos) But she was much securer once she warmed up.
  • Minnie is a necessarily religious character; the opera is about redemption. Here, Voigt came across as sisterly and safe with the miners and then soft and frightened with Johnson. She played it well. But, it would be interesting to see a production in which Minnie starts off harder and colder, not soft but having actively stunted her passions to survive as a woman alone in the West, and eventually warms and discovers them when she falls for Johnson. It would give more scope to her redemption narrative, to match his.
  • Giordanni’s top rang. His lower range was underpowered. Vratogna was probably the strongest of the three throughout his range. The vocal comparison made Rance the more charismatic of the rivals. But, then, I’ll always pick the baritone.
  • The supertitles needed work. A particularly unpoetic translation: the flat melodrama of “He’s the first man I ever kissed; I can’t let him die!” got a big laugh.
  • Also, avoid mentioning inches in any line that names Dick Johnson.
  • The Indian maid. What was that? Not only is she there for two minutes of “White lady tells us to get married and stop living in sin and when marry we’ll get beads and whiskey!” but they costumed her like the Land o’ Lakes Indian. Single feather and all. And a teepee and a papoose. Yikes.
  • Between the sharp-shooting and the Indians, Voigt will be ready to tackle Annie Get Your Gun at Glimmerglass.
  • The music is a change for Puccini. It doesn’t have the same long melodic lines and pauses for contemplative arias that you find in Boheme and Butterfly. The lines were more fragmented and approaching something angular. But then Trittico and Turandot return to the lush sweeping sound. So I wonder if this was his musical idea of America. Certainly the open fifths and galloping rhythms of stereotypical Americana were there. But I also wonder if this choppier sound is how an Italian perceives English.
  • Think I’m going back for Lohengrin this Friday. I’m in love with the opening phrase of James King’s “In fernem Land.” So gentle. Haven’t heard Botha before.

    Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Steppenworlf

    (Dec. 13, 2010)

    It’s exciting to have your expectations thrown out the window.

    I got a little worried as we started into the Steppenwolf’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Saturday night.   It’s a piece I’ve spent enough time with—the text and productions and recordings—that I’ve developed a mental ur-production against which I can’t help but compare any other.  Do we agree who these people are, how they relate, what the piece is all about?  Usually this is a road to dissatisfaction.  It’s a problem.

    Very quickly, it was very apparent Tracy Letts and Amy Morton were not my George and Martha.  Which, damn, because I really wanted to like this show.  I did.  I started into that mental routine: Does this make sense?  Is this coming from the text?  And, yes? Yes!  It did!  It was!

    I’ve come to appreciate George and Martha’s fight throughout the night as a sort of routine they act out.  The well-worn, familiar games of two intelligent people who need to amuse themselves somehow.  They really are fighting, of course, but they know these steps, for the most part, know their expected parts.   They’re playing tennis.  Using the guests as their balls.  Martha takes a dig at George.  George hits back.  They know what to expect.  The guests grow grossly uncomfortable.  And the old folks like that.  Games. Sick games that let them vent their frustrations in the weird cushioning of familiarity. This is largely informed by the third act: the ease with which they pick up their “lines” in the houseboy game, Martha’s indication that George’s back is nowhere near broken. Dueling for show: their public games.

    But they have private ones, too, which serve a different end.  The visible failures can be bandied about; George’s lack of advancement, Martha’s dipsomania – anyone can see those; those are fair game.  The private games are about the darker places.  Two smart, lonely people, unable to have a child invent one, a shared necessary lie.  They both know its’ a fiction, know that there is no physical child, but filling the emptiness demand they contradictorily believe in this shared fiction.  They’ve spent twenty years telling stories about the child, sometimes using him as a weapon against one another, knowing that there is no child, but making him central to their relationship.  When Martha mentions him, that’s the real betrayal.  The would-be infidelities are nothing next to this.  The dirt of the battles is nothing.  But this is exposing the real guts.  It’s the line that once crossed gives George no choice but to end this game.  Even if it was a slip.  If this is how the child will be treated, their relationship must let go of its necessity to move on.

    SteppenWoolf wasn’t this at all.

    The direction’s greatest strength was a constant awareness of the power relations among everyone on the stage.  Almost from their first moments, George and Martha at odds.  Martha’s “Don’t you know anything” laced with the first drop of bitterness that would grow into the second act.  George significantly put off by the surprise news of guests.

    The relation to the guests was perhaps the production’s most unexpectedly gratifying insight.  George and Nick’s conversations during the first two acts are hostile.  Here, that hostility clearly grew out of not just the conflict between their respective fields of letters and sciences, but as part of a larger systematic conflict: Nick’s wave of the future threatening to do away with George specifically.  This is still familiar territory.  Letts took it the extra mile.  His professorial manner was perfection and when facing Nick, he employed it to the hilt.  His provocations and taunts were born not just of goading the guest, but of a need to one-up him, demonstrate his continued professorial dominance, put the young competition in its place.

    If Letts was the hyper-intellectual fighter, Any Morton’s Martha was the wild, emotional, instinctual animal.  Her plan of attack was never thought beyond its next move, going after whatever seemed her victim’s easiest vein.  These were not shared, understood games.  Martha tells George, “You make me puke;” later we’ll realize she means it.  Here the cue is taken from the second act, the private moment when Martha admits to George that she’s snapped and is done trying to make it work.  They’re properly at war.

    Nick and Honey become weapons.  Martha knows Nick makes George nervous, so she dives into George’s failings to tear him down.  Nick wants to win, too, and enjoy the chance he’s provided.  George tries to strike back, but up through most of the second act, he’s losing ground, and nearly losing it.  At times, when the attacks were wounding deeply, Letts could do no more than sit with his head in his hands, trying to hold it together.  He strikes out, at Martha, at the guests, back at Nick’s apparent domestic bliss, but this doesn’t win him the upper hand.  Martha starts kicking him around and keeps kicking.  Here is where Morton is best.  She towers as Letts droops, rising up on a note of dangerous savagery, radiating pleasure in her success at manipulating him.

    Finally, it goes too far.  Martha beats him down, airing with his failures.  He needs to win.  When she tells him she no longer cares about him and threatens to prove it with Nick, George has figured out his tactic.  He can play a long game.  He can sit by and let her instead of giving her the jealousy she’s trying to provoke.  He’s probably seen something like this before.  The games become shared inasmuch as he figures out what she’s up to.  The houseboy lines aren’t a routine, but him having figured out where Martha’s headed and moving to cut her off.  It takes on the same form as his competition with Nick, a need to take the path to outrun his opponent.

    And he has his trump card.  The baby.  Here, the sense is that this is not their comforting fiction so much as Martha’s.  A fantasy that George can play along with, but which is really her necessity.  When she finally goes too far—the book, the failure, one blow too many—he has to resort to this.  He lets her walk right into her own downfall. Her belief in the lie was fine while it remained private, but she’s shared it and given him justification to end it.  When George “kills” the son, that final moment when Martha knows it cannot be undone, she lets loose with a wail and collapses.  He’s broken her. Tamed her.  He’s won.

    I wouldn’t have expected such a final unbalance to work, but it does thanks to Letts. It’s his show.  He is deeply in tune with the politics of every moment and can switch from retreat to command of the stage in a moment.  Mindblowing and wonderful.  As we reach the end, it’s not the sky clearing as day breaks after the storm; we’re left with the survivors among the rubble, unsure where to go from here.

    Cover Stories, Printworks

    (Dec. 12, 2010)

    A recommendation for all the Chicagoans: go check out Cover Stories: The Art of the Book Jacket at Printworks in River North. 68 artists’ jackets designs for favorite books. (Through February. And it’s free!)

    A few personal highlights:

    • Heather Accurso, Animal Farm
    • Jeanine Coupe-Ryding, To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Melissa Jay Craig, Leaves of Grass
    • Louise Lebrougeois, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
    • Gladys Nilsson, Dracula
    • Karen Savage, Madame Bovary
    • Diane Simpson, The Great Gatsby

    Robert Schultz’s Death in Venice and Christopher Schneberger’s Lolita were hung near one another and in both was visible the artists’ discomfort with the books’ young romantic characters.  (I’m tempted to, at least in the case of Tadzio, describe him instead as object rather than character, for doesn’t Aschenbach’s attraction stem from the opportunity to project onto the blank slate born of youth and distance?)  Lolita and Tadzio are both presented in their late teens or early twenties.  This is understandable in the case of an image the artist must eroticize, particularly given the need for a real model in Schneberger’s photograph, but left me wondering if, consequently, these were the best works for these artists to tackle.  The unpalatable aspects of these books are consciously central; in the artists’ evasion of engagement, the authors were underserved.  By contrast, Balthus’s Girl With Cat has long struck me during AIC visits, in the subject’s aggressive posing, as a suitably discomforting cover for the Nabokov.

    The media ranged from photo to prints to embroidery (above).  Quite a few incorporated collage.  Jay Craig’s Leaves of Grass used fiberous grass-like material in an approach that was literal without being corny.  Simpson constructed her Gatsby cover out of squares of high-gloss paper that looked like pool tile.  The most engaging collage incorporated text.  A bird silhouette in Coupe-Ryding’s Mockingbird cover was filled with a passage in handwritten script.  Audrey Niffenegger’s Alice in Wonderland falls down a rabbit hole constructed of lines cut out of the printed text.  The medium is natural for a book design, and served to forefront the artistic power of these words.