Bard for the DNC

Two Shakespeare plays about soldiers behaving badly are being performed during the Democratic National Convention week in Boston.

Tolstoy Is Long Gone

By Bill Marx
Originally published July 22, 2004

The newly released National Endowment of the Arts study, “Reading at Risk,” found that over the past 20 years the percentage of Americans who read imaginative literature — poetry, plays, and novels — has dropped 10 points, from 56.9 in 1982 to 46.7 in 2002. The decline rate among those aged 18 to 34 was a nose-diving 28 percent. Predictably, the very cultural industries that contributed to this deplorable situation, and made big bucks doing it, responded to the disturbing news with expedient hypocrisy, blaming everyone but themselves.

Profitable Nowhere

By Bill Marx
Originally published July 15, 2004

The same year Marlon Brando was born, 1924, Eleonora Duse, one of the greatest and most influential stage actresses who ever lived, died at the age of 65. While reading considerations of Brando’s career over the past two weeks, the coincidence jumped to mind because, amid all the predictable encomiums to the actor’s many great performances, there was scant mention of his disrespect for the art of acting and how harmful his stance has been for the American theater.

The critical blather about Brando ranged from hyperbolic inanity (“the best actor who ever lived”) to reasonable evaluations (“he was the finest actor of his generation”). The half-baked Freudian effusions of Method acting mavens, for whom Brando is a poster boy of the epiphanic inarticulate, couldn’t fend off perceptive charges that the actor’s once revolutionary turns in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront” have dated. What’s more, as early as the 60s Brando displayed the sure fire sign of artistic senility — self-parody. Admirers insist that the actor’s incandescent peaks, especially his emotional breakdown in “Last Tango in Paris,” make up for the many miasmic valleys.

What isn’t nearly as easy to forgive is Brando’s lifelong dismissive attitude for the art and craft of acting. He began his career on stage and, by all accounts, was a charismatic powerhouse. But after the success of “Streetcar,” Brando quickly exited Broadway for Hollywood, a place he openly disdained, never returning to the theater. Over the decades in Tinsel Town he frittered away his talent and considerable influence by taking up roles in films directed by mediocre directors, occasionally publicly boasting about million-dollar paydays for little work. For every “Godfather,” he made three or four bombs. Worse, Brando’s journey to a profitable nowhere has become the standard path for many of America’s most promising actors, who leave the theater as soon as possible for film.

The career of Eleonora Duse suggests what Brando could have accomplished had he honored, rather than patronized, his profession. Duse’s life was as chaotic as Brando’s, but for all of her grand diva storms and affairs with married men, she was a restless creative spirit who never forgot that with genius and fame comes the responsibility to foster artistic excellence.

Weary of performing in melodramas the public loved, Duse tackled the controversial plays of Ibsen. She also egged on dramatists, such as her lover Gabriel D’Annunzio, to write serious scripts for her. Duse starred in a silent film she directed herself, but her loyalty to the stage never wavered. Performing without makeup in simple costumes, discarding stock gestures in the quest for psychological truth, Duse was the first modern actor, the indispensable inspiration for, among others, the makers of the Method, from Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg to Stella Adler, who taught the young Brando.

Brando died overweight, his artistic force spent, fodder for the nostalgia of critics and gossip about whether or not he was broke. Ironically, his last screen appearance will be as a voice in an animated cartoon. Duse died of influenza in Pittsburgh on the last leg of a grueling American tour. At the time, her lungs were so weak she needed the use of an oxygen tank when she walked off stage. Still, the actress managed to project into huge theaters without microphones, wowing theatergoers, including Charlie Chaplin, who wrote that “her technique is so marvelously finished and complete that it ceases to be technique.” Duse’s dedication to her ideals is a reminder that there is more to performing than a paycheck.

The Last Banana Peel

By Bill Marx
Originally published July 8, 2004

One of my favorite British playwrights, Peter Barnes, died a week ago from a stroke at the age of 73. He was undervalued in his homeland and grievously neglected here, aside from recognition of his ferocious first play “The Ruling Class,” which was made into a 1972 film starring Peter O’Toole. A vaudevillian visionary, Barnes specialized in a post-Holocaust, neo-absurdist comedy that rattled audiences of all types: here was a Jewish playwright who had the chutzpah to set a farce in the death camps of Auschwitz.

In an introduction to a volume of his plays, Barnes writes that he was born in Bow, London, but spent most of his childhood in “a downmarket seaside resort on the east coast, where my parents worked in amusement arcades on the pier.” His early memories were of “deck chairs, Punch and Judy booth and sand artists who could draw, with a pointed stick, elegant pictures in the wet sand, usually of a patriotic nature.” Barnes’s scripts are iconoclastic, ungainly sand castles: epic attempts to fend off the horror of mass graves, intimations of temporality, and the spread of authoritarian mentalities with circus hijinks and low humor, an irreverent marriage of pratfalls and pogroms. In “Red Noses,” which won the Olivier Award for Best Drama in 1985, a band of performers find work telling jokes during the Black Death in France, sending sufferers off to oblivion with a punch line.

Not only did Barnes dismiss dishwater realism, but he also took no notice of fashionably abstract alienation. The latter may explain why the playwright never caught on, despite his many theater awards and accolades from critics, monologues performed by such performers as Laurence Olivier, and productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Barnes explored what he saw as “the outer limits of farce where everything is pushed to extremes of pain and cruelty, which is the very source of the comic and the tragic.” This paradox is rooted in deep love-hate for the world as it is, coupled with a commitment to dramatize the odds for the survival of kindness amid thriving malevolence. In other words, Barnes’s entertainments were too slapsticky for the highbrows and too mocking for the lowbrows.

On a practical level, Barnes made things difficult by specializing in large-cast historical dramas, overflowing with a rich language whose agglutination of multilayered puns and ornate metaphors fuses the earthy lyricism of Ben Jonson with the nonsensical zest of S.J. Perelman. Barnes’s pseudo-Jacobean masterpiece “The Bewitched,” revolves around how an idiot, his public image manipulated by advisors, ruled Spain in the 17th century. Aside from a superb production of “Red Noses” at the Trinity Repertory Company, none of Barnes’s major plays, to my knowledge, have been produced in New England. I challenge companies here and elsewhere to take a crack at them.

It is a risk because audiences like their comedies tame and Barnes, who championed the brutal farces of Jonson over the tender tussles of Shakespeare, always roughhoused. Of American writers, Barnes is closest to novelist Stanley Elkin, whose black humor boasts similar linguistic pyrotechnics, philosophical savagery, and unsentimental concern for history’s losers. For Elkin, God gives us pain and death because He never found His audience. It is this radical doubt, even of the saving grace of laughter, which runs through Barnes’s best work. Like Elkin’s God, Barnes has yet to find an audience who gets his genius.

A Heroic Skepticism

By Bill Marx
Originally published July 1, 2004

This Sunday marks the 200th birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer whose work has never been neglected. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe or Herman Melville, each rediscovered as the result of a crusade, Hawthorne has never needed to be promoted nor defended. He has always been central to American literature, particularly today, at a time of war. But why?

Entertaining the DNC

Boston’s arts community is determined to be part of the Democratic National Convention’s party.

By Bill Marx
Originally published July 14, 2004

The Democratic National Convention taking place in Boston from July 26-30, 2004 means a lot to local businesses, including show business. A number of cultural events with a political spin will run during the week of the convention, from visual art exhibitions to plays and stand-up comedy festivals. Here’s a short guide to entertainment during the DNC:

Most people think of political theater as shows that preach to the converted. And there will be some of those didactic exercises taking place in the streets around the Democratic National Convention. But there will be at least three other varieties of socially engaged theater available around town as well.

First, there’s theater that is not overtly political, but resonates with contemporary issues. Once the DNC announced its Boston dates, the Publick Theatre rearranged its schedule so that during the convention it would present William Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” a sharply sardonic look at the siege of Troy. The production’s director, Steven Barkhimer, says the Bard’s play about a war that has worn down the spirits of its combatants has much to say about Iraq. But he quickly adds that Shakespeare’s complex drama will supply neither Republicans nor Democrats much cheer. Barkhimer points to speeches that question whether the possession of Helen was worth all the death and epic destruction.

Aside from political theater by default, there is also political theater that goes Right or Left, for the jugular. For some performers, issues are fodder for laughs. Stand-up comic Jimmy Tingle is throwing what he calls “The Un-conventional Comedy Convention” through July, including comedians Lewis Black, Barry Crimmins, and Will Durst. For Tingle, the DNC puts politics on the front burner, so it is a perfect time for satirists to stoke the flames even higher. Tingle also thinks the purpose of the jokes is not only to laugh at the political scene, but to go places where the timid mainstream media fears to tread.

Finally, political art can make its point by lampooning all things political. Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA is presenting an interactive exhibition called “Participatory Democracy.” The work of five local artists, the installation treats the process of voting, from marking a ballot to media exit polls, as a form of circus entertainment. A canned video presentation instructs voters on what they are going to experience, which includes tossing darts at paper ballots hung on the wall, taking part in surreal exit polls, and voting by Skee-Ball game. Candidates include the bearded lady, the contortionist, two-headed Ed, and the Great Incumbo.

According to artist Natalie Loveless, the tongue-in-cheek setup wants to make people think about the absurdities of the current voting system and its manipulation by politicians and the media. Loveless admits that not everyone is pleased with the installation’s vision of democracy as a carnival.

For the DNC, the arts community is taking no chances: conventioneers can take in cultural events that treat politics seriously or dismiss them as a joke. At the Boston Center for the Arts, a stage production of “A Clockwork Orange” raises the specter of social engineering. At the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, The Flying Karamazov Brothers will perform “Life: A Guide for the Perplexed (Convention Edition).” Given the troupe’s earlier shows, this will be chockablock with ingenious puns amid some impressive juggling. Whatever the delegates choose to attend, the arts are determined to be part of the DNC party.

Serious Page Turners

Two award-winning novels about captivity and heroism make for incisive, rather than disposable, beach reading this summer.

By Bill Marx
Originally published June 24, 2004

I recently glimpsed this advertisement on the wall of a Boston subway car: “Chance of Reading on Vacation: 1 in 46 – “War and Peace”; 1 in 3 – a box of Imodium A-D.” Alas, it probably gives an all-too-accurate-account of summer reading habits. With the current events in Iraq in mind, I have an alternative: two novels about captivity, heroism, and barbarity that have just won prestigious international literary awards.

Memoirs of life in captivity often contain descriptions of unbearable physical torture, but it is the inner struggle to survive that inevitably takes precedence. Prison writing generates an awareness of death: a contemplation of our own deaths, the deaths we impose on others, and the deaths imposed on us by others. Fiction offers an imaginative register of what’s squeezed out of the soul under unbearable pressure. These two novels serve up responses to the elemental question: how does it feel to be in hell-on-earth?

“This Blinding Absence of Light” won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction. Written by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, who emigrated to France in 1961, this superb book deals with desert concentration camps, catacombs of tiny underground caves in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political foes until September 1991, when international pressure forced the horrific prison to close its doors. Twenty-two men were held, in some cases for over two decades, in lightless stone rooms about ten feet long and half as wide with five-foot high ceilings.

A four-inch hole was provided in the cells for human waste: “there, in the depths of the humid earth, in that tomb, smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice and his reason.” Ben Jelloun calls his book a novel, though it is based on testimony a survivor of the camps gave the writer. Beautifully translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, “This Blinding Absence of Light” presents a lacerating vision of human degradation that is also surprisingly surreal and lyrical, a study of tender perseverance amid crushing absurdity.

Winner of the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction prize, the Spanish novel “Soldiers of Salamis,” written by Javier Cercas and translated by Anne McLean, explores the terrors of captivity in a more oblique way. A character in the book, a wayward journalist named Javier Cercas, attempts to solve a 60-year-old historical mystery. Near the end of the Spanish Civil War, a unit of retreating Republicans was ordered to kill its prisoners, a group of Franco supporters. Rafael Sanchez Mazas escapes the firing squad, only to be found by a Republican soldier who, for some reason, spares his life. Mazas goes on to become a minister in Franco’s government; the soldier who spared his life is forgotten.

Both “This Blinding Absence of Light” and “Soldiers of Salamis” are resonant meditations on the subterranean interactions of catastrophe, memory, and civilization, suggesting that human decency is history’s most effectively hidden captive.

Free the Movies

By Bill Marx
Originally published June 17, 2004

American culture is a paradox, summed up in Bruce Springsteen’s song, “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the “Chicago Reader,” has written extensively on how “the media-industrial complex” works tirelessly to limit our access to foreign or esoteric films via corporate strangleholds on distribution and marketing. As Rosenbaum has a new book out, “Essential Cinema,” I took the occasion to ask him for an update on the cineplexing of the national mind.

Surprisingly, Rosenbaum turns out to be optimistic about new ways to escape the miasma of the mainstream. The critic is cheered by the possibilities presented by the slow but steady march of technology: DVDs and internet sites make the history of movies available to anyone, anywhere. For Rosenbaum, film availability is increasingly “no longer bound by national boundaries,” which means there are ways around the bottleneck that media conglomerates place on what we can watch.

In his superb 2000 polemic “Movie Wars,” Rosenbaum drew a depressingly detailed picture of “the rise of corporate cultural initiatives bent on selling and reselling what we already know and have, making every alternative appear more scarce and esoteric …” What has happened since? “Access to films has changed quite radically and wonderful things are becoming available. Costs that are prohibitive in terms of striking 35-milimeter prints are not prohibitive in making a new print of something onto DVD. One of many examples I could give: I recently received a DVD in the mail made up of early films by French filmmakers, including Resnais, Rivette, Godard, Truffaut, and Melville, some of which had never been available in any form before. The prints were beautiful and the DVD was produced in Korea with English subtitles!”

The catch is getting the word out. “Even though all these movies are available now,” argues Rosenbaum, “most people don’t know it’s available and don’t know the value of it.” In that sense Rosenbaum’s latest book, “Essential Cinema,” is part of a struggle to widen our artificially limited sense of international film, and revolves around the critic’s bracingly eccentric film canon, a list of 1,000 movies made up of his personal favorites (“My Son John”) as well as more familiar artistic and historical milestones.

Of course, Rosenbaum still takes swipes at entertainment conglomerates that treat the public as dolts. And in “Essential Cinema” he continues to have little patience for the fumbling of critics in high places: “But if the Denbys, the Janet Maslins, and the Anthony Lanes are supposed to be our urbane guides to the state of world cinema, “Irma Vep” is at best only one example of the sort of films that elude their grasp.”

Rosenbaum repeats a suggestion he made in “Movie Wars”: as so much of mainstream movie criticism is about “leading people away from good things,” it should be phased out. What excites Rosenbaum is the in-depth criticism written for DVD releases and for the web. He points to Masters of Cinema and DVD Beaver as websites that feed a growing cult of viewers serious about the future of film as an art rather than a business: “Sometimes it’s better to attract a smaller group of people intensely than a large group of people blandly.”

Get Real

By Bill Marx
Originally published June 10, 2004

“Sin: A Cardinal Disposed” opened in Boston last night. Based on the sworn testimony Cardinal Bernard Law gave in the Catholic clergy abuse scandal, Chicago’s Bailiwick Repertory production comes, by chance, at an illuminatingly embarrassing time for the Church. The Pope recently gave the stonewalling Law a cushy job as archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. The arrival of “Sin,” and the success of other docudramas, raises a provocative question: why is reality more engrossing than what is on our stages?

Another drama, “The Exonerated,” which played successfully in New York and toured parts of the country in 2000, was constructed out of the words of death row inmates in U.S. prisons who were found to be innocent and then were released. London theaters have also hosted many docudramas, such as David Hare’s “The Permanent Way,” based on political or corporate corruption. Deborah Lake Fortson’s new play “Body and Sold,” which receives its world premiere in Boston tonight, is also a docudrama. The script explores the malign world of international sex trafficking based on interviews with runaway and kidnapped teens in Bombay, Calcutta, Minneapolis, and Boston.

Why did Fortson create a docudrama rather than a fictional play? “Because there is so much dramatic reality in the news and people are eager to talk about it,” the playwright responds. “Audiences are grateful when they see something like this on stage rather than on TV. In the theater they can have a forum discussing what they think about a play like mine, which exposes a part of the world they didn’t know was so corrupt and difficult.” She is philosophical, if exasperated, that, even though the number of children sold for sex around the world is rising alarmingly, “Sin” is garnering much more attention in the press than “Body and Sold.”

But isn’t “Body and Sold,” like so many docudramas, preaching to the converted by trashing easy targets? Who will defend sex traffickers? Fortson claims her play, which is performed by a multicultural cast, touches on larger issues: how the increasingly globalized economy merchandises human beings. And unlike “Sin,” Fortson argues, her piece takes its documentary materials into stylistically imaginative directions. Her hybrid is made up of “images, movement, and music. Real scenes are mixed in with fantasy.”

On the one hand, it is refreshing that plays such as “Sin” and “Body and Sold” deal directly with the abuse of power via current issues and controversial personalities. But what’s troubling about the docudrama genre is that it fits, all too snugly, into American culture’s chronic distrust of the imagination: that is why nonfiction books sell so much more than fiction. Reality TV, in all of its diseased mutations, is the rage — so is it surprising there’s a vogue for Reality Theater? Alas, elbowed aside by today’s more garish reality programming, the based-in-fact TV-movie of the ’80s and ’90s has been reborn in the theater.

Still, I can’t help but give the fashion for docudramas the benefit of the doubt, if only because it may nudge playwrights, producers, and directors into a collision with the tumult of the present rather than a collusion with the formulas of the past.

Middlebrows Unite

By Bill Marx
Originally published June 3, 2004

Nowadays, it is considered elitist to talk about how particular works of mediocrity unwittingly dramatize the compromises of an era. Back in the ’50s, a few critics aptly punctured Archibald MacLeish’s ballyhooed “J.B,” lambasting the play as nothing but an American corporate stooge. Still, it is worth talking about a new script that is representative of the intellectual cowardice of the times, especially if it is an homage to selling out that also tickles the fancies of the critics.

Rinne Groff’s “The Ruby Sunrise,” which is receiving its world premiere at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, claims to salute “the persistence of vision.” The play takes a sentimental and admiringly comic look at a pair of artists who trim their imaginations to fit the demands of the market. Thus, “The Ruby Sunrise” is an example of what it celebrates: middlebrow achievement, complete with stock laughs and tears, preaching that fudging the truth is no crime.

It is 1927 and a young woman, Ruby Sunrise, struggles to build a television in a barn in the heartland. She becomes pregnant instead. The story switches to the ’50s. Ruby’s child, Lulu, works as a script adviser in a major network during the Golden Age of Television. She teams up with, and falls for, a talented scriptwriter. They write the story of Ruby the neglected pioneer, but the Communist blacklist and corporate censors block their TV script. Through their “persistence of vision,” the pair overcome their blues and pen a hokey drama filled with distortions and campy feminist inspiration. When it is broadcast, Ruby wafts out of the spirit world to congratulate her delighted daughter.

Groff has written a play that says you can create junk and feel damn good about it. This is reassuring to those, in and out of the arts, who feel that compromise is honorable, perhaps even desirable. Groff salutes Ruby’s and Lulu’s individualism, but the daughter’s teleplay is designed not to rock any corporate boats. Popular art inevitably cranks out lies, argues Groff in her play, and that is fine for her as long as glimmers of inspiration appear amid all the nonsense. As for art, Groff suggests schlock is a perfectly respectable creative direction.

Groff’s hymn to the merits of sugarcoating left critics at Boston’s and Providence’s major newspapers filled with praise. “Masterful at juggling big ideas” ran one review. Why the enthusiasm? I think, when it comes to producing good new American plays, the record of New England’s regional stages is spotty, to say the least. But there are plenty of critics who aren’t comfortable with that tough perspective or beg to differ. Thus many reviewers find lots to praise, whether the script deserves the huzzahs or not. The understandable wish to see exciting new plays encourages critics to stick fig leaves on the emperors with no clothes.

But the critical response to “The Ruby Sunrise” is not just another example of grade inflation. These days, perceptions of the real are routinely spun to meet the expectations of the powerful. Intelligence agencies give ideologues the truths they want. University researchers give funding corporations the truths they have paid for. Regional theaters are anxious to give conservative subscription audiences the truths that comfort them. “The Ruby Sunrise” is a parable for our times: it says it is laudable to create crap wrapped up in an entertainingly innocuous package, as long as your heart is in the right place.