Now I’m asking here: is there some value to having a break-out of culture coverage? A dedicated home for theatre blogging? What?

If the consensus between the TAC folks and my reader is to discontinue the separation, then most likely I’ll stop posting to Shakesblog, though the blog will still exist as an archive. I’ll remain absolutely committed to expanding the arts and culture coverage here at TAC, though, so if you don’t think the separation makes sense but you think there’s some other way of highlighting that kind of coverage that would be helpful, throw the ideas my way.

In the meantime, I’m going to experiment with merging and see how the stats change (or don’t). My latest review, of Daisy Foote’s Him, was just posted to the main blog. Enjoy!

My abiding affection – and awe – for the Book of Job is not news to regular readers of mine. So I went into the play with a mix of excitement and trepidation – eager to see this beloved book brought to life, anxious that the adaptor’s take would do violence to the work. Unfortunately, my anxieties were well-founded.

The play begins with the sound of bleating sheep. Job, played by the mellifluously deep-voiced Sean McIntyre, passing judgment on malefactors, as would be his right and duty as a patriarch of the ancient Near East. A poor thief is pardoned because of his need, and given ample food for his family – then warned not to sin again, lest his hands be cut off. A mourning woman who has rejected her dead husband’s brother’s suit of marriage because she is still grieving is welcomed into the house – she defies custom for a noble reason, and so is not punished. A rapist (Bradley Anderson) who attempts to pin the blame on Job’s own son, Joshua (Jaspal Binning), is sentenced to death by stoning, the wronged girl’s father granted the honor of casting the first stone. Through all this, Job is sober, serious, eager to be merciful but unflinching in his doom when mercy would add to injustice; his sons, wife, daughter, and the rest of his household are deeply respectful of his judgment.

From here, we move to heaven, for the famous bet. In this cosmology, God (the impish Ugo Chukwu) and Satan (Stephen Stout, a dead ringer in looks and affect for Bill Hader) are brothers – affectionate in their sibling rivalry – and God has two sons, Jesus (a charmingly vain Grant Harrison) and, of all beings, Dionysus (a dim-witted Eric Folks), whose rivalry is less affectionate, but that’s just because they need another couple of thousand more years to grow up. The contrast between the playfulness, and the lack of concern with justice, evident in heaven, and Job’s deeply serious attitude toward life, is striking and intentional.

The bet is made. Satan goes down to earth to take away God’s favor from Job. And here’s where the first big divergence from the text takes place. Because, in the biblical text, catastrophe comes on Job from outside – his flocks are wiped out by fire or marauders, his house knocked down by a great wind, crushing his family, and so forth. But in this play, the horror comes from within. Satan, staring mildly at Joshua, watches him turn from an obedient son to a man possessed by a drunken lust for his own sister, who he proceeds to murder, and then rape (both about as graphically as possible). He’s caught in the act by his brother, Matthew, who, in turn, takes his vengeance by shoving a broken staff up his brother’s anus – “how do you like it?” – and slitting his brother’s throat, then running off into the fields to take his own life. Thus does Job lose his family.

His wife, unable to accept that Job considers God just, concluding that Job must be a moral idiot to think his kids deserved to die this way, spits in his face and leaves him. Left alone, Job is prey for the men on whom he perpetrated his justice in his earlier life. A thief whom Job once punished by cutting off his hand returns, with his son, to gouge out Job’s eyes and castrate him (again, graphically), finally shoving him to the ground and taking his chair and staff.

This divergence is more than trivial. The author’s intention, I suspect, was to make the horror more visceral – infuse what he saw as an overly-decorous biblical text with the rawness of Greek tragedy, an unquenchable human thirst for incest and murder. Or perhaps he feared that a modern audience couldn’t imagine blaming God for a fire or an earthquake – we know that natural evil is, you know, natural. I also suspect Bradshaw wanted to complicate the idea of justice itself, to suggest – by means of the men who take revenge on Job – that what looks like justice to the powerful looks more like oppression to the powerless.

But the changes suggest, very strongly, that Job is, indeed, at fault for his terrible condition. His wealth, his sight, his manhood are taken not by strangers but by men who think he wronged them. His children are destroyed not by strangers but by each other – and where does Joshua’s terrible impulse come from? Satan? Well, that raises other rather large theological problems, doesn’t it? And if from himself, then what does that say about the health of Job’s house, if he was completely unaware of what terrible evil was growing inside his son?

It is precisely because the biblical Job’s afflictions so plainly come from God that he can plausibly ask, why me? But how could anyone, faced with such horrors sprung from himself, not blame himself first? Job’s laments – which are taken from the biblical text – are movingly cried by Mr. McIntyre, but the story by then has ceased to make psychological sense.

In the biblical text, Job’s comforters tell him to search himself for his sin, and he retorts that he can find none, which shocks them – and convinces them that this very arrogance is his sin. In the play, Job’s comforters are more bored with his whining than shocked at his “blasphemy” (of course, Job never does blaspheme – he never calls God unjust, merely demanding an explanation that he can understand of how such treatment is just).

And God feels much the same. Up in heaven, Satan (who has dropped out of the biblical text by this point) readily admits he lost the bet, and God, praising him for being big enough to admit it, demands no payment. The whole thing has very much the whiff of the bet between the Dukes. And then God puts on an intentionally silly black robe and white mask, and descends to speak to Job out of the whirlwind. The speech is also taken from the biblical text, with particular emphasis on the sheer preponderance of God’s power to humble anyone. (This God spends negligible time on the extensive passages rhapsodizing His creation.)

In any event, Job repents, and, God gives him everything back, including his sight and his manhood (no such miracles take place in the biblical text), and we see Job newly enthroned in wealth and righteousness. Except for the righteousness part. This post-theophany Job has an eye for comely ladies, and fairly delights in dealing out punishments to malefactors, shrugging, “it’s God’s will” before chopping off the hands of the very thief had earlier pardoned.

What are we to make of this?

The obvious message is that God is a tyrant interested only in the scent of sacrifices (Chukwu’s God does a little victory dance every time someone kills a sheep or goat for Him, just as Satan does a little victory dance every time someone kills or otherwise wrongs a man), who crushes Job for questioning him and rewards him when he toadies properly. And Job gets the message, becoming a cruel and capricious tyrant himself in turn.

This isn’t a crazy read of reality. We may, indeed, be governed by a capricious tyrant – who can say? And people – indeed, whole nations – convinced they have been wronged, have set out to emulate those who wronged them, whether it’s their fathers or their social superiors or their historic enemies.

But on the whole it’s a pretty shallow reading of the book. The danger is that what’s intended as a progressive attack on a biblical text Bradshaw sees as advocating a kind of spiritual fascism – by showing just how ugly such a vision is – winds up endorsing that very thing. God is God. If you say, “God is a tyrant only interested in approval and obedience,” then you’re saying that is the essential nature of the universe. And you can’t rebel against reality itself, except the way Job’s wife (in the biblical text, not the play) suggests: curse God and die (that is to say: commit suicide, and leave this evil world behind entirely). If you’re not going to do that, then you might as well internalize the logic of the system, to your own profit.

Which is precisely what Bradshaw’s Job does.

I just got back from experiencing Elevator Repair Service’s Shuffle at the Brooklyn Public Library (part of the Brooklyn Beats festival), and all I can say is: boy, I wish Alan Jacobs had been there with me. Either he’d have loved it or he’d have explained to me why I should hate it.

I had seen one ERS production before, their tour-de-force show, GATZ, an eight-hour (including a dinner break) marathon “reading” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What was most powerful about that show, beyond the power of the book itself, was the way in which it enacted not so much the book itself as the significance of the experience of reading, and reading a book far from our own experience.

To digress for a moment (since I never reviewed GATZ), that show was set in a grubby basement office of some low-rent business, where male and female office grunts go about their dreary daily lives. This particular morning, the computers aren’t working, and so one employee decides, rather than simply wait for the opportunity to work, he’ll start reading The Great Gatsby, which happens to be in his filofax. Only, he reads it out loud. And, bit by bit, the rest of the cast gets drawn into the action, taking on one part after another in the drama.

The thing is, they don’t exactly wind up playing these parts, because they remain themselves – grubby office workers. And the correspondences between their “office” personalities and their “Gatsby” personalities are complex. Tom, for example, is played not by a to-the-manner-born pompous rich guy – there is none such in this underground outfit – but by a blue-collar type. And yet, the identification sticks – we feel this guy thinks he understands Tom, thinks Tom is his kind of guy – a man of sense and a man of hungers – a real man, like himself. Gatsby is played by a tall, huge-headed fellow who, for the first chunk of the book, seems simply annoyed that the rest of the office is caught up in this Gatsby nonsense, and then suddenly, at the right moment, he enters into the fantasy, and when he finally reveals who he is -

“This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—-” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.” For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

- it’s a real coup de theatre. Of course he’s Gatsby. Of course there’s a whole other dimension to this physically imposing and kind of scary fellow who keeps himself aloof from the rest of the office. He’s got a whole new universe a-borning under that dome of a head of his. He’s Gatsby!

This dynamic powers the show, which was, for me anyway, not so much about the book as about why we read a book like that, how we, who are so little like the East and West Egg sets on the surface, internalize these characters and make them into ourselves (rather as Gatsby remade himself). You could play the same game with Madame Bovary or Don Quixote or Pride or any other book that speaks deeply to us even across an apparently unbridgeable gap in terms of social context.

Well, they did, but the two books they picked were The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury. I haven’t seen those two ERS shows, but they – with GATZ – form the essential precursors to Shuffle. Because what they’ve done with Shuffle is take these three  prior shows and hand them over to William S. Burroughs to have a go with his scissors, and then attempt to “stage” the results.

I mean that pretty literally. They’ve chopped up these three novels, put the various lines – dialogue, description, whatever – into a computer program which spits them out in a not-exactly-random-but-not-exactly-sensible order, assigning them fairly randomly to different actors, who then run around the library clutching books with embedded smart phones, attempting to “act” these bits of prose as soon as the computer spits them out to them – playing them to each other, to the audience, to the books in the library; whatever’s to hand.

Some of the results were quite poetic. There were a series of catechistic bits – repeated “whys” answered with “because” phrases, repeated “whos” answered with a variety of names – that were reminiscent of the catechistic chapter late in Ulysses. Sometimes an actor would just wander off, describing a woman, or a man, from a collection of descriptions culled from dozens of characters across the three books – calling out different members of the audience around to fit (sensibly or ironically). Other bits were dramatic. Sometimes two actors would turn their apparently nonsensical dialogue into a fierce argument, or an entire group would erupt in mutual frustration. Or, sometimes, what you got was pure comic nonsense, as when the computer sped up the “dialogue” between two women at a laptop who frantically grabbed one book after another to signify “reading” their line, making it completely impossible to actually hear anything, or do anything but giggle at the Lucille Ball-esque absurdity of this mode of “acting.”

But that last was not the dominant mode of the evening; most of the time, you could hear the lines, and there was a real attempt to “play” them, somehow. The effect was radically different from GATZ, because there was no sense, any longer, that we were dealing with distinct characters. Rather, all that was left was the cadence of language, radically divorced from its original context, and what kind of mood that language could produce, all by itself, in the actor and in the audience. And, strangely, it continued to work, in a fashion. It worked best when I recognized it – which, having seen GATZ within the last few months, I was much better able to do with the Fitzgerald than with the Faulkner or the Hemmingway. (That is to say: I could often – though not always – tell who the author of a particular line was, but with the Fitzgerald I frequently had some idea where in the book the line was from, and the original context, which was not the case with the others.) When the line was familiar, I had the sensation you get when you make or get a literary reference – the distinct pleasure of repurposing language and thereby making yourself the author of the Quixote. When I didn’t recognize any context, I was left only with the music of the language which harmonized surprisingly well between these quite different authors.

Shuffle is more of a stunt than an enduring work of art, but it’s a cool stunt, that hopefully will lead to further, more serious experiments. Because we need such experiments. This theatre company is well named, because our elevators – what bring us up, through text and live performance and the interaction between the two – are in need of repair. And anything that startles us into a recognition of how inevitably penetrated we are by language – and how pleasurable is that recognition when the language is good – brings us up, if just to a slightly higher floor.

First things first: yes, I saw it in 70mm. Film snobs everywhere are arguing about whether this choice was brilliant or pointless, but from my perspective the significance of the choice was simply that it made it possible for the film to be really big. And there’s something about monumentality in and of itself. Vir Heroicus Sublimis really doesn’t look like much at all, unless you’re up close and personal. See? So, similarly, a close-up of Joaquin Phoenix’s curled lip is one thing, but when his face is the size of Jefferson’s on Mount Rushmore, a curl of the lip feels like it heralds the collapse of civilization.

On the other hand, precisely because of the impact of sheer scale, I’m second-guessing my initial awed reaction. How much of that was a reaction to the movie as a movie, as opposed to the experience of it as an overwhelming fact?

On yet a third hand, maybe experiencing an overwhelming fact has the right to be, you know, overwhelming. And this movie is chock full of overwhelming experience, overwhelming images and overwhelming performances.

But let me backtrack a bit. What is this movie about?

Well, that’s a good question. Ostensibly, it’s about a kind of therapy cult loosely modeled on the early years of Scientology. A man, Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), suffering from shell-shock layered on top of a more deeply disordered personality, bounces from one job to another amid the abundance of late-40s America. Fleeing his latest disastrous human encounter, he stows away on board a ship in San Francisco where a party is going on, only to discover, the next morning, that the ship is skippered by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-described “writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher” and, incidentally, the founder of a novel form of therapy, known as “The Cause” (the movie’s counterpart to Dianetics). Dodd takes an instant shine to Freddy, and so begins Freddy’s journey into the inner circle of the cult, and into a movingly affectionate relationship with Dodd.

But Anderson doesn’t really have any interest in cults, what leads someone to found one, or join one, and has even less interest in Scientology specifically. You would expect that a movie about a cult would show the titular Master to have a profound psychological hold on his followers, but this is not the case in “The Master.” Virtually every member of the cult, from the socialite who lends Dodd the boat, to another socialite from Philadelphia who is puzzled by changes introduced in “book two” of Dodd’s works, to Dodd’s son, who believes his father is making everything up, to another follower who declares that “book two” stinks, and should have been a pamphlet – virtually everybody involved in “The Cause” seems to be perfectly lucid and, moreover, perfectly willing to be critical of Dodd, at least out of his earshot. Not very cult-like.

Moreover, the principal character of the movie is so deeply strange, so “aberrated” in Dodd’s words, that we think, at first, what we’re going to see is one man’s search for a cure for his intolerable condition. This could certainly make for an interesting movie. Quell is an alcoholic, like his father. His mother’s a schizophrenic. He’s addicted to “potions” made from antifreeze and photographic chemicals and God-knows what else (Dodd’s initial bond with Quell is based on enthusiasm for those potions). He’s disturbed sexually, seeing genitalia in a series of Rorschach blots, confessing to Dodd that he had sexual intercourse repeatedly with his aunt, having simulated intercourse with a sand woman he creates at the beach and (in one of the most striking visual sequences of the film), stripping the clothes from all the women at a party in his mind’s eye, turning the scene into a kind of cocktail party sur l’herbe. And yet he’s plainly terrified of actual sexual encounter. So he’s got “issues,” as they say, and this could be a movie about how he overcomes them.

But, of course, Anderson doesn’t believe for an instant that a crackpot system like “The Cause” could possibly provide such a cure. And the various forms of “processing” that Dodd puts Quell through don’t obviously improve his condition at all. So . . . what then?

The movie came together, for me, in a scene, somewhere in the middle, when Dodd and Quell are placed in adjoining cells in a Philadelphia jail, Dodd for embezzling funds from a rich socialite’s charity, Quell for scuffling with the cops when they came to arrest Dodd. The screen is split down the middle by the bars between their respective cells. Hoffman stands on his side, his hand resting with an almost Mannerist delicacy, observing as Phoenix erupts in furious rage, smashing his head and shoulders on the underside of the upper bunk, pulverizing the latrine with blows from his foot, shredding his shirt and the legs of his pants and writhing like a panther in a straight jacket.

And then Dodd says something like, “this fear of being confined has been with you for millions of years; it was implanted in you by an invading force” – and Quell interrupts, cursing, accusing Dodd of making it all up, and the two men commence cursing at each other. Quell throws in Dodd’s face that his son has no respect for him; Dodd retorts that nobody likes Quell, nobody at all, “except me. I’m the only one who likes you.” And, though he goes on to say, “and I’m done with you,” they both begin to calm down, and the next time we see them together, free, they are rolling on the lawn, laughing in each other’s arms, like father and son.

That bond between surrogate fathers and sons has been Anderson’s principal emotional interest since “Boogie Nights,” and the shared loneliness of these two men is the powerful core of the film. And this film would have been a strong one if it was just about that bond, and how it warps their relationships with everybody else. That’s the movie that Amy Adams, who plays Dodd’s wife, Peggy, is in. She is powerfully jealous of Quell and her husband’s love for him, which is obviously deeper than his love for her, and his need for him, which is a warmer thing. Peggy is the kind of strong woman they say is behind every great man, who believes in her husband more than he does and hates his enemies more than he does, but Adams gives us a very clear idea of just what a horrible job that is to have in a marriage, and just how ugly is Dodd’s need for her, a need for her to be exactly this ugly person that he can then dismiss as too extreme, not enlightened as he is. Right after the nude party of Quell’s fantasy (and, by the way, Adams’s facial expression in that one scene deserves an Oscar all of its own), Adams gets a scene alone with Hoffman, at the sink in their bathroom, when she shows him just who is the real “Master” here, in the most fundamental and brutal way a woman can, but the move smacks of desperation, not a certainty of her position.

But the movie as a whole is not, ultimately, about a relationship triangle, which is why the prison scene, in which Adams is absent, struck me so forcefully. What struck me, suddenly, was a reading of these two men as two sides of a disordered being, the same being.

Dodd’s mantra is that it is “not only possible, it is easy to eliminate all negative emotions.” We are not animals – we are spirit beings, inhabiting these mortal vessels for a short time. Quell, on the other hand, is a “poor animal,” as Dodd calls him, repeatedly. It’s not just that Quell doesn’t have any control over his emotions, or his sexual urges, or his very body; he shows no signs of having an interiority, a mind, at all. A soul he has, plainly; he feels a great deal, and deeply when he does. But he has no intentions, no real awareness of what he is doing even as he does it. From Dodd’s perspective, Quell is Caliban to his Prospero.

Quell’s “abberation” is obvious, to himself as well as to Dodd, but the nature of Dodd’s aberration only became clear to me in that prison scene. Dodd, precisely because he has lost touch with what Quell is so closely – too closely – connected to, his own embodiedness, has convinced himself that he is truly unconfined, the king of infinite space. And, as such, he cannot abide the existence of other minds, because they remind him of the confinement (what he asserts Quell is so afraid of) of his his own.

Dodd needs Quell, misses him when he is gone, cannot let go of him even though he is an obvious danger to “The Cause.” There’s a marvelous family dinner scene where wife, daughter and son-in-law all call for Quell to be banished, insinuating that he’s working for “some other agency,” accusing him of their own lusts, and pointing out, correctly, his penchant for violence, and asking whether, perhaps, he isn’t beyond help. But of course he’s beyond help. Dodd loves him because he is his missing piece, and because he is the only being, because he is mindless, who will never be a threat to him. And yet, if he cannot be Quell’s master, he will, he promises, be his mortal enemy in the next life, and show him no mercy.

The movie is set in 1950, at a moment of exceptional disconnect between mind and body in American culture, when mechanistic models of the mind became popular and “well-adjusted” was the way we described the mentally healthy. Anderson is saying something about that disconnect, about the madness and tyranny of the disembodied mind, and the loneliness of the body that cannot know itself. If I’m right that Quell and Dodd are, like Jekyll and Hyde, different sides of the same cultural personality, then the whole point of bringing Scientology into it isn’t to explain cults but to expose the cult-like nature of our own efforts at self-mastery, at least in our own crazy culture.

The movie ends, surprisingly, on a gentle note. This Prospero, unlike Shakespeare’s, does not drown his book, but publishes a sequel (bizarrely dug up in the Arizona desert). And this Caliban doesn’t curse his master for learning him his language, but puts that language to good use – the only use this or that Caliban really cares for: getting laid. The movie ends with Quell picking up a girl at a pub in England, and turning one of Dodd’s “processing” scripts – “you must answer these questions immediately, without blinking” – into a kind of teasing while they are having sex. Something has finally been mastered, but whether it is Dodd or Quell, or the language of self-mastery itself, I couldn’t say.

I can think of several relatively recent really good movies which explore the suffering and shattering of identity caused by divorce (The Squid and the Whale) or adultery (Eyes Wide Shut, The Secret Lives of Dentists). But even in these movies, if I’m remembering them correctly, the couple or at best the nuclear family exists in a world of its own. That’s not a criticism–the claustrophobic or fever-dream nature of all three of those movies is part of their impact. But the role of friends and the broader society in creating and sustaining a marriage isn’t really portrayed. I’d be interested if any of you all can recommend recent, not-awful movies in which that role is explored. It doesn’t have to be an entirely positive view of society’s involvement in marriage–I think A Separation would count–just a view in which it’s not taken for granted that families or individuals are isolated in their time of crisis.

This is something I mentioned in my discussion of Sarah Polley’s film, “Take This Waltz.” It’s notable in that film that the Michelle Williams character – who leaves her husband – has no “people” of her own, while her husband, the Seth Rogan character, is surrounded by family and friends. Indeed, so far as we can tell, the Williams charter’s only friend is the Rogan character’s sister. In my view, this choice was dramatically necessary, because if the Williams character had told anyone that she was leaving her husband for a rickshaw driver, they would have tied her to a chair to stop her. But it did make for a suggestive contrast, the fact that the one who has no “people” flees the only “people” she has – her husband.

Anyway, it’s a good question, and I wonder whether movies aren’t the ideal medium for exploring this territory. Most movies are single-protagonist quest narratives of one sort or another. Not all, but most. And narratives like that don’t lend themselves to exploring the network of society’s fibers. A movie is more likely to pit a protagonist against society. There’s also the question of time scale. Most movies play out over a relatively short span of time. (Though, obviously, there are exceptions.) Exploring how a network of friends and family support – or pull apart – a marriage sounds like it would require a longer span to do right.

The first recent work of art that came to my mind that directly addresses Tushnet’s question is Donald Margulies’s excellent play, Dinner With Friends. It was made into a movie for television, but I haven’t seen it, and I hear it isn’t very good. But the play is a marvelous and complex exploration of the interaction between friendship and marriage.

A recent movie that comes to mind is Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” though I don’t know that that movie is about how the penumbra of friends and family affect this marriage so much as how this marriage manages largely to avoid being affected by the emotional storms that rage in that penumbra. That’s its weakness as a film – it comes off as smug, because a happy family surrounded by unhappy people inevitably comes off as smug. But it definitely is a “family and community” film.

In a very different way, The Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” is also about a marriage embedded in a community. I paired it with “Tree of Life” because of the Job connection (got to get back to that pairing thing, by the way), but I could also have paired it with “The Godfather, Part II” for the family-community thing. The movie is a satire, but among the things its satirizing is precisely what Tushnet is interested in exploring.

“The Last Station” is supposedly about Tolstoy, man and phenomenon, but his ideas are treated so superficially by the movie that what it winds up being is a portrait of a marriage more than anything else. And the tensions that tear it apart have everything to do with the conflict between the husband’s extra-familial identity and his role within the family. The Tolstoyan “community” isn’t exactly what Tushnet is talking about, but I still think it squeezes in.

How about “Rachel Getting Married“? A movie that depicts a whole series of successfully healing marriages that nonetheless cannot heal the original nuclear family – indeed, that pull that family ever further apart, and away from the trauma that original broke it. A lot of people didn’t like this film, but I thought it was very powerful – and part of what made it powerful is that “family” is on both sides of the equation. It’s what provides comfort and solace to Rachel’s sister, mother and father. But what they are getting comfort and solace from is the pain that Rachel caused them – and she is also, inescapably, part of the family, even though the proliferation of families contributes to her progressive isolation.

Then there’s that book that begins, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s not out yet, so I don’t know whether the new movie version is any good. (The casting and director leave me skeptical.) But it certainly fits Tushnet’s bill.

And of course there’s the screenplay I’m currently marketing. Know any producers, Eve?

The catalog title was tantalizing. Would we be going on a roller coaster ride through the Theater of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Oppressed, and so forth? Or would we do a multicultural version of a theatrical Grand Tour, taking in Noh and Ta’zieh, along with the Western tradition from Aeschylus to Punch and Judy.

Instead, we read nine plays by Horton Foote.

I was bored out of my mind. Which just goes to show what an obnoxious little twerp I was.

Foote’s writing is frequently described as decorous, and indeed he depicts a society in which decorum is a prime value. But this is not, I think, what makes Foote or his characters distinctive. What distinguishes them is not their decorum, but their directness. These are characters – over and over again – who actually, in spite of or perhaps because of the conversational strictures of their world, say what they actually feel.

Horton Foote’s theatre might well be described as Theatre of the Direct, and as misdirection and its unraveling is the readiest way to apply a restless intelligence, one thing bright young snots like I was can’t appreciate is simplicity and directness. But grew into that appreciation with time. Foote is the anti-Mament, whose work appears to be blunt on the surface, filled with foul-mouthed in-your-face confrontation, but is all about misdirection and self-delusion, speech designed to hide its true aims from the hearer, even from the speaker, sometimes even from the writer of the speech.

That simple directness is a characteristic of all of Foote’s work, and it is a primary reason to seek him out. And those who would do so can find three short works of his on stage for one more week,  at 59E59, a cycle of one-act plays all set in the town that gives the production its name, Harrison, TX.

The three plays are not linked, except by the town in which they take place. The first is a light comedy of manners, set in 1928. Dolores (Hallie Foote, the author’s daughter) is at her wits end trying to set her antisocial niece, Sarah Nancy (Andrea Lynn Green) up with a boy. Any boy. She has arranged a blind date (Blind Date is the title of the piece) between Sarah Nancy and a young man, Felix (Evan Jonigkeit), the son of a childhood friend and a perfectly suitable match – he used to play football, he sells insurance, he can recite the names of all the books of the bible in under a minute. Sarah Nancy, needless to say, won’t play along, and much of the comedy comes from Dolores’s increasingly desperate interventions to save the hopeless date.

The play is slight, but what it’s about, it seemed to me, is the evolving relations between the sexes. Sarah Nancy isn’t shy and damaged like Laura in The Glass Menagerie. She’s just sullen and blunt. Dolores stands for graciousness, a particularly female virtue in this play, as her husband, Robert (Devon Abner), prefers to be honest, even to bluntness. If he’s hungry, he says so. If he thinks somebody can’t sing, he says so. He’s polite enough not to say it flat out to a stranger’s face, but he isn’t going to fault Sarah Nancy for doing so, for telling the simple truth. Sarah Nancy is going to have to figure out how to get on in the world without telling gracious white lies all the time – she’ll have to learn to hold her tongue, at a minimum, which she does by the end of the play – but we get the sense that she, rather than Dolores, is more typical of the future aborning, for better or worse.

The second play, far more sharply dramatic, revolves around a complacent manager of a cotton mill, C. W. Rowe (Jeremy Bobb). A man has come to see him, a man who has come before, many times, and Rowe is sick of it. He tells his bookkeeper, Pinkey (Mr. Abner again) to get rid of him, and gives him five dollars to make him go away. In the course of conversation, it comes out that Pinkey is in debt, which Rowe can’t fathom, and he proceeds to lecture Pinkey on thrift and proper husbandry, a lecture to which Pinkey submits meekly.

But the man in the vestibule won’t go away, and Rowe finally lets him in. It’s a former employee, McHenry (Alexander Cendese), who lost an arm working Rowe’s machinery, who’s come for his arm back – and when Rowe won’t give it to him, he pulls a gun on him. Rowe offers him more money, a new job, anything, but McHenry, like Inigo Montoye, wants something he can never have back – in his case, his arm. (The play is called, The One-Armed Man.) And nothing McHenry can say, not even his half-remembered prayers, can save him.

Listening to Rowe, I felt like I was still in Tampa at the Republican National Convention. But this isn’t a Clifford Odets play. The point isn’t that Rowe is a bad guy, who treated McHenry unjustly. The point is that you can be completely direct, completely clear, and there are some things you just can’t get, and can’t reconcile yourself to not getting.

That theme carries over into the last, most complex play of the evening, The Midnight Caller. The setting is a boarding house for spinsters, one, Alma Jean (Mary Bacon) self-satisfiedly so, another, Miss Rowena (Jayne Houdyshell), unhappily resigned to being so, and the last, “Cutie” (Ms. Lynn Green again) quietly desperate not to remain so. They form the chorus, by turns catty, consolatory and covetous, to the drama initiated by the arrival of two new boarders: Mr. Ralph Johnston (Mr. Bobb again), a divorcee from out of town, and Helen Crews (Jenny Dare Paulin), a woman with a “history” as they say, who’s fled her mother’s house after a final row.

Needless to say, Helen and Mr. Johnston wind up an item. But Helen’s past hasn’t gone away. Her old beau, Harvey Weems (Mr. Cendese again), can’t accept that she’s given him up (because of his mother’s opposition, and because he returned to the bottle), and he comes around, every night around midnight, to wail Helen’s name. Harvey’s finally locked up for his own good (he tries to hang himself when he finally gets that Helen has moved on), and Helen and Mr. Johnston leave for Houston to be married, but even this doesn’t silence his voice, which can be heard, faintly, all the way from the town jail as the play closes.

This last play is set in 1952, a quarter century later than the first two plays, though written a quarter century earlier (it was written only a few years after the setting, while the first two one-acts were written in the 1980s). And it feels like a younger man’s play, less-focused and with more business. But because of its placement in this production, it reads as a depiction of how the society depicted in the first two acts has evolved. The settled world of arranged dates with gentleman callers and an unshatterable workplace hierarchy has become more fluid. But men still will ask for, cry for, demand at the point of death the thing they’ve lost, and still don’t get it.

Into The Woods, I’ve always felt, is an egregious example of the frequent Sondheim problem of a story that falls apart into general bickering followed by therapy. In other hands, the premise – a bunch of fairy-tale characters, having reached their ever-afters, discover that ever-after isn’t all that, and have to find their own way to true happiness – could work charmingly well, and in other hands it did. But in Sondheim’s hands, what you get is a charming setup that does a very good job of simply telling four fairy tales – “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rapunzel” and “Cinderella” – intertwined with a story about a Baker and his Wife who want a child and can’t have one unless they placate the witch who has put a curse on them. And then, in the second half, the widow of the giant Jack killed comes down, like Grendel’s mother, seeking revenge for the death of her husband, and begins squashing people, and the surviving characters cry and point fingers at each other and wonder whether their narratives have any purpose anymore for an hour, before deciding that, yes, they’ll kill the giant and then, well, figure out what the remaining purpose of their narrative is. Basically, the second half of the show is a single joke: what if a bunch of fairy tale characters started acting like characters out of Company? This, great drama does not make.

The current production at the Delacorte – running for a few more days – deals with this problem by making the fairy tale characters relatively “real” from the beginning rather than stock archetypes. This is partly done through costuming – Red Riding Hood wears a red bike helmet, for example – and partly through characterization. These sometimes go in conflicting directions. The Baker, for example (Denis O’Hare, whose performance I found perplexingly inert) seems to take all the fairy tale stuff going on around him as patently absurd – “oh, look – a cow as white as milk” he says with mock-incredulity on meeting Jack, while the Witch is portrayed with fury and pain (and great vocal power) by Donna Murphy. Though their approaches don’t mesh well, they are both trying, I believe, to invest their characters with reality, to make sure they were, from the beginning, more than mere fairy tale characters.

This pays dividends in the first half, but it creates problems in the second, as the single joke of the show no longer works, and so we have nothing to distract us from the characters’ dithering. The transformation of the Giant’s Wife (voiced juicily by Glenn Close) into a physical presence on stage – a quite terrifying giant puppet reminiscent of the mother from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” – has a powerful initial emotional impact, but this is undermined by the jokey quality of her dialogue. And it actually makes the dithering even more absurd. We see the giant. She sees them. What’s all the business about giving her another character about?

The other major alteration of this production was a significant improvement, but one with real costs in terms of continuity. A frame story is established in which a Boy (Jack Broderick the night I saw it) has run away from home after a fight with his (single) father. He holes up in the woods and, to amuse himself, begins telling himself fairy tales, using toys as props. The Boy thus becomes the Narrator of the story. This conceit pays off massively at the end, as the boy reappears at the end of the play, and is found by his father – who turns out to be the Baker, a single and very anxious father ever since his Wife was squashed by the Giant’s Wife. Their reunion, which plays out under “Children Will Listen” in the Act II Finale, brought tears to my eyes.

But it doesn’t make much sense, continuity-wise, as the Narrator was fed to the Giant’s Wife earlier in Act II, and killed.

Of course, if the whole thing – or, rather, all of Act II is a dream of the Boy, then continuity doesn’t matter. Indeed, if it’s all his dream, then the Giant’s Wife becomes the return of the dead mother, a terrifying female death. Which is pretty cool. But when you dream your own death, you usually wake up, and anyway why is the kid dreaming all of these grownups whining about their problems?

I suggested to my companion at the show that a better solution would have been for the Giant’s Wife to eat the Boy, and for him to emerge from her belly when she is killed. Then the adults wandering about aimlessly become a consequence of his death – the loss of their future – and the death of the Giant’s Wife is plainly about killing the ghost of his own mother, and thereby returning to life. But I still don’t think it would exactly work – the fact is, the second half of the show just doesn’t work that well for me.

There were things I enjoyed, though. The kids’ playground set – particularly the creation of the beanstalk from green childrens’ umbrellas. Sarah Stiles’ delightful characterization as Little Red Ridinghood, and Chip Zien’s as the Mysterious Man. The weakest links in the production performance-wise were, unfortunately, Gideon Glick’s vocally inadequate Jack and both the Baker and his wife (Amy Adams), who had little chemistry and didn’t seem integrated generally into the rest of the production.

[T]he debate over McAnuff’s merits as a classical director is a flashpoint in a larger artistic argument that has been raging in the Anglosphere since the actor-manager model of putting on plays disappeared after the Second World War: Who is more important to the vision of a production – the director or the playwright? Should theatre’s primary allegiance lie with authors or, as in the film world, auteurs?

I want to resist this framing. The master is neither the word nor the image, neither the intentions of the playwright nor the innovations of the director. The master is the story, understood as the revelation of character through action, and everything else – both words and images – must serve that.

The wonderful thing about live theatre is that no production is definitive – as soon as tomorrow, an different approach to a text can give us an entirely new story. And the wonderful thing about the classics is that they are not going anywhere – Shakespeare and Chekhov and Brecht and Ibsen and O’Neill and so forth are strong enough to survive any ill-conceived interpretation. Not in an individual production, necessarily, but to fight another day in the next production. So the “cost” of experiment is borne primarily by the theatrical company itself. And for that reason, I think the right response to the question, “how should Shakespeare (or other classics) be directed?” is Nestruck’s: “lots of different ways.”

The real question is how an individual director should approach a text – how, given where their native strengths lie, they can best tell a story with the play. I’m not always convinced that even the directors themselves always realize where those strengths lie, and I’ll give a couple of examples with respect to the directors that Nestruck is writing about, the outgoing and incoming Artistic Directors at Stratford.

McAnuff is often noted as a director who uses his actors as props, part of a visual scene that he’s constructing. But on the strength of half a dozen Shakespeare productions I’ve seen him direct, I’m not convinced that this is where his strength actually lies. My two favorite classical productions of his tenure, his 2010 As You Like It and his 2011 Twelfth Night, were visually stuffed with a myriad clashing conceits. But that didn’t bother me. First of all, these are comedies, and you can effectively approach a comedy as a grab-bag of comic moments and find visual counterparts to them. I didn’t mind the flying refrigerator in Twelfth Night, and I thought the costumes made perfect sense because the world McAnuff set the play in was, basically, the world of rock, and the costumes looked like nothing so much as the sorts of things the Beatles might have played with wearing in their last couple of years as a band. And, indeed, while many critics noticed McAnuff’s visual tricks, what struck me as much more important was auditory, specifically: the use of music. McAnuff turned Twelfth Night into a rock musical, and, moreover, made music a central metaphor for the zaniness of love that is the play’s center, which is right out of the first speech of the play:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

Most important, though, the production made emotional sense. The key decision McAnuff made wasn’t to have a flying refrigerator, but to have Feste be another man (along with Malvolio and Duke Orsino) in love with Olivia. This interpretation significantly shapes the play, recenters it on Olivia (where frequently it focuses on Viola), lends weight to Feste’s songs and illuminates the visual concept as well (since Feste is the spirit of music in this production).

In other words, McAnuff knew what story he wanted to tell, and while not every detail was part of telling that story (I could have done without the tennis court and the golf game), the most important of them were – and that story was strong, specific and compelling.

By contrast, this year’s Henry V is much more visually coherent. And there are some striking moments of pageantry (particularly the march of sails across the channel). But I found myself unmoved by it, because it wasn’t, primarily, telling a human story. I could see what McAnuff was trying to say about the play – that this is a patriotic pageant on the surface, but that under the surface there are compromising details – but first, that’s not a very interesting or original thing to say, and second, it’s not a story. Nestruck talks about quietly effective moments, and there were some – I thought Aaron Krohn made an interesting and persuasive Henry. But I didn’t think the production framed and supported those moments; I thought, too often, that it crushed them, because it wasn’t, fundamentally, telling a story through them.

I had a long conversation with another director about the play, trying to get a handle on my frustration with this production, and he said something very interesting to me. You have to take the chorus literally. What the chorus says is: there is no way we can possibly show you the battle of Agincourt. It’s impossible. So what are we going to do? We’re going to have to ask you to use your own imaginations. When we talk of horses, you, the audience, have to think you see them. That’s really the opposite of McAnuff’s approach to this play, which I think explains a portion of how it went wrong for me.

Now, that approach sounds like it means “just do the text – paint a picture with words.” And yes, painting with words is a lot of what goes on in Henry V (which makes it all the more unfortunate that McAnuff underscores his play so heavily – sometimes you can’t hear the poetry, and always the emotions are flattened by the overt signaling of the underscoring). But it can’t mean just that – it’s not a radio play. So the challenge for a director is to awake that imagination – not to show the audience Agincourt, but to make the audience think it sees it. And that will require visual cues – things actors do, potentially with props, that trigger visual hallucinations on the part of the audience.

Now: Cimolino. Given that present as someone who cares first and foremost about the text, I find it striking that one of my favorite productions that he directed was last year’s Grapes of Wrath, and substantially because of the visual style of that production. (By contrast, the use of music for transitions was at best innocuous and at worst distracting.) The visual style was spare – the backdrop consisted of a wash of sunset color – but that starkness was precisely what made it so effective. The few elements – the jalopy that brings the family from Oklahoma to California, the river they swim in on the way, the downpour in which Rose of Shannon is delivered of her stillborn baby – were all the more electrifying because they stood out against that blank backdrop. It was a phenomenal production, and it was the work of a director who was thinking not, “how can I let the text speak for itself” but “how can I tell this story most effectively.” In this case, that required a certain kind of visual drama.

By contrast, while I liked much about it, I have found myself less enthused by this year’s Cymbeline than many critics have been, substantially because, at the end of the play, I still didn’t know what story Cimolino was trying to tell, what, held this hodge-podge of a play together. That’s not because Cimolino didn’t try to pull it together – he did. Cimolino did not simply let the text speak for itself, because that’s impossible, as impossible as talking about a book reading itself. He did have an interpretation of the play, and that interpretation is expressed most directly in the framing, entirely Cimolino’s addition, of King Cymbeline’s dream. The play begins with Cymbeline in bed, surrounded by the other characters, and he speaks the first line of the play – “You do not meet a man but frowns” – which, in Shakespeare, belongs to a random gentleman (the line is repeated a moment later in its original context), and then cries for his daughter – “Innogen!” – and is whisked off. And then, at the end of the play, after declaring his universal peace, Cymbeline finds himself again center stage, surrounded by the other characters of the drama, all staring at him as he stares around, bewildered.

So, clearly, Cimolino wanted to say that this play “belongs” to the title character, and to recenter the play on him. And that’s an interpretive act – and one accomplished primarily visually (though not expensively). But, unlike with McAnuff’s Twelfth Night, this recentering on Cymbeline was not accomplished by the establishment of a novel emotional relationship between characters. And for that reason, to my mind, it wasn’t really accomplished at all, and no amount of powerful acting by Geraint Wyn Davies – and he delivered plenty of that – could, by itself, bring the story home for me.

Cimolino, in other words, used a visual to tie together his production and for me – though not for most critics – that didn’t exactly work. But not because it was a visual choice, but because I didn’t know, from the play, what the emotional underpinning of that moment was. If I were advising Cimolino, I’d say he didn’t do enough to establish that meaning, that he needed a more substantial departure, perhaps an entire dumbshow, to fully bring the his interpretation of the text home.

Earlier on, I said the goal of a director should be “telling a story with the play.” I mean that “with” in at least three senses. First, “with” the play rather than “about” the play – a production is not a thesis; it’s an experience, and we shouldn’t be alienated from the material. Second, “with” the play rather than “against” the play – productions that ignore the text, and simply tell the story they want to tell, are usually disasters. But third, “with” the play rather than “of” the play. Because every production is an act of interpretation, and every act of interpretation is also an act of creation. Each production is a unique play, and each must have its own story. The text of the play is material to be used to tell that story. Hopefully, you’ll use that material well rather than poorly, but you have to use it to tell your own version of the story, because that is the only version you can possibly tell.

So the implicit identification of “visual” with “directorial” and “verbal” with “textual” productions is, I think, misconceived. “Visual” doesn’t mean “with big production values” – actors can paint incredible pictures with nothing but their bodies. And a production can consist of nothing more than actors speaking text and still be disastrously out of harmony with that text – far and away the worst production of a Shakespeare play I ever saw was one of these, a Richard Maxwell-directed production of Henry IV part 1. Even with a company of actors who are trained as well as Stratford’s are in speaking the verse, it takes a directorial vision to tell a story with that company.

Cimolino has demonstrated many times that he has that vision. I expect to see that vision on display in next year’s Merchant of Venice and (especially) his Mary Stuart. He shouldn’t sell his own role short by calling for a crabbed traditionalism that, in truth, has never characterized his own productions in past, and that I don’t expect to characterize them in the future.

That was what was so exciting to me as a young writer and filmgoer about reading Kael. You always had the sense that she deeply felt the connections between art and life. The movies weren’t just about the movies, and aesthetics, and entertainment. They were about, well, everything. Kael’s judgment, as James points out, was often flawed, but overall she was so good at what she did that you wanted to read her reviews even of movies you had never seen and probably never would, just to see what she had to say about it.

James is surely correct to say that a Pauline Kael isn’t possible today because movies don’t hold their place at the center of our popular culture that they once did. I rarely go to the movies anymore, and can’t say that I care about them. I can’t think of a single film I’ve seen in the past five years that had the human depth and emotional resonance of the television series “Friday Night Lights.” I find that I don’t even want to go to the movies anymore, because it’s such an effort, and the movies have disappointed me so often that I have ceased to care. It’s like all of Hollywood has become Woody Allen’s career: rolling on, even though there’s no apparent vision, spirit, or point to the work.

Well, I’m not going to defend the big Hollywood studios, which have mostly decided video games are better business than movies. And I’m not going to knock on some of the great television that’s out there. But if what you go to the movies for is “human depth and emotional resonance” than there is no reason for you to stay home.

Indeed, I would argue that there’s a whole generation of rising writer/directors who are particularly attuned to those most central aspects of storytelling. Who are centrally interested in telling stories about people, deep and serious stories. I am acutely interested in seeing the next movie that Derek Cianfrance or Sarah Polley or J. C. Chandor or Jeff Nichols or Sean Durkin make – or, if you want to go with folks who are a bit more seasoned, Noah Baumbach or Richard Linklater or Steven Soderbergh or Ang Lee or Alexander Payne. These are just people off the top of my head, who have made movies in the last five years that I thought were worth recommending people see. The common thread between them is that they care about getting the interiority of their characters right, and having this interiority drive their stories. Which, for me, is pretty much what narrative art is about.

Are their movies “events” in the way that movies were in the past? No. That’s partly because the place of movies in our culture has changed. The only “event” movies that remain are entirely phony artifacts of marketing. In a very real sense, as the movies have gotten bigger (noisier, more expensive, aimed at a global audience), movies that care about “human depth and emotional resonance” have gotten smaller, more domestic. The moviemakers I have the most respect for these days are trying to make the cinematic equivalent of Joyce’s Dubliners rather than the cinematic equivalent of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, but Dumas’s work has unquestionably garnered a larger audience, both in its time and since. I don’t think that’s a knock on Joyce or Dumas, nor is it a knock on either the monumental work of the past or some of the great work being done today in cinema. It is a difference with both economic implications and implications for cultural impact, but it’s not a reason to avoid the movies.

If you’re looking for movies that are “about everything” in an explicit sense, there have been at least two in the last five years that are (in my opinion) emphatically worth giving a place of honor in your cinematic library: “Synecdoche, New York” and “Tree of Life.” (One of Rod’s commenters mentioned the same two films.) But those kinds of movies have always been rare. “The French Connection” wasn’t about “everything.” “Taxi Driver” wasn’t about “everything.” Heck, “Singin’ In The Rain” wasn’t about “everything” – not in that sense.

And one more thing, about movies that are “about movies.” I’m as annoyed as Dreher is about movies that are only about other movies, but not, I suspect, for the same reason. The problem isn’t that this is some kind of self-referential inside game – that’s a game great art frequently plays. Shakespeare’s plays are almost always, on one level, about the theatre itself; great novels from Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond have frequently been, in part, about the novel itself; and you wouldn’t want to have to count the number of great poems that are at least partly about poetry. But when art is only an inside game, that means it isn’t about anything real, and, specifically, it isn’t about emotional reality. And at that point I lose interest in it. The Coen brothers make movies that are substantially about their cinematic heritage, and when they are at their best or even just very good, their movies beat with a human heart. I don’t really feel that’s the case with the work of, say, Quentin Tarantino, which is why I don’t much care for his work.

“Movies” have changed since Kael’s day, inevitably, and they will continue to change. But the recorded image isn’t going away, and neither is narrative art, and movies (and television) are where these two things come together. So they aren’t going away either. And so those of us who care about either or both of those things shouldn’t give up on them.

(Postscript apropos of the title: I actually thought “The Kids Are All Right” was just okay, but it was good enough for me to care what Lisa Cholodenko gets up to next. But, in a larger sense, it’s a reasonable synecdoche for what movies can, and still do, do well, and that is tell stories about people.)

Pirates of Penzance. The show has clearly gotten tighter, and Sean Arbuckle’s performance as the Pirate King in particular was much stronger this time around than it was on opening night (and C. David Johnson’s performance as Major General Stanley advanced from woeful to perfectly adequate). But my feeling about the production didn’t really change. Director Ethan McSweeny had a number of interesting conceits – the backstage opening, the steampunk pirates, the maids as adventurous Victorian reformers – but these aren’t followed up on effectively (indeed, are often abandoned altogether) and there was a general feeling that he didn’t trust the audience to understand the material without underlining.

42nd Street. As with Pirates, I felt that Arbuckle’s performance sharpened from opening week, and if anything the show charmed me more than second time around than the first. Just delightful.

Henry V. I was seated much closer the second time around, so I don’t know if it was a different vantage or a different performance, but it was even clearer to me on re-viewing that the problem with this production – and there is a problem – has little to do with Aaron Krohn’s performance. His was a thoroughly convincing portrait of the King as “shallow Hal” – the problem is that the production doesn’t provide a proper framework for understanding the performance that he delivers. I had some fascinating conversations with some veteran actors and directors about the play while I was up there, and hopefully will get a chance to go into our discussions at another time. As a production, this was my least-favorite Shakespeare of the season.

Cymbeline. There’s a theme to these re-viewings – performances that I was ambivalent about the first time around sold me the second. Cara Ricketts’s Innogen struck me as rather juvenile the first time around; second time around, she was a woman, and a powerful one. I found myself wondering whether I’d been paying attention the first time I saw it. She fully holds her own with both Graham Abbey and Tom McCamus, who I felt were the standouts originally. On the other hand, I remain unreconciled to director Antoni Cimolino’s attempts to center the play on the figure of Cymbeline, and for all that Geraint Wyn Davies plays the king with both force and gravity, I still didn’t understand who he was, or what the play ultimately was about if it’s supposed to be about him.

Much Ado About Nothing. This was my favorite of the three Shakespeares the first time around, and it’s still my favorite, which puts me a bit off-market compared to the other critics. (Cymbeline seems to be the critics’ choice this year, and it’s certainly worthy of acclaim.) Indeed, I got into heated (but friendly) discussions with other patrons who couldn’t warm to Carlson’s Benedick, but the bitter quality that is so often present in his work seemed to me to suit Benedick’s character perfectly – indeed, to harmonize better with Beatrice, and with the mood generated by the young lovers’ plot, than the more-typical caddish Benedick generally does. I can understand complaints some have about the staging – that big staircase plays hell with sight lines – but this is very much a production worth seeing, if you can.

That’s it. And now here’s a rundown of my write-ups for this year’s season:

At the Festival Theatre:

42nd Street
Henry V
The Matchmaker
Much Ado About Nothing

At the Avon Theatre:

The Pirates of Penzance
A Word Or Two
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

At the Patterson Theatre:

Cymbeline
Elektra
Wanderlust

At the Studio Theatre:

The Best Brothers
Hirsch
The War Of 1812

Plummer, on a stage dominated by a spiral staircase composed of books, recites bits of poetry and prose that have meant an especially great deal to him over the years. The show is structured around the notion that these texts ornament his life, and progress as he does. We start with A.A. Milne and Lewis Carroll, progress through Auden and Wilde, Shakespeare and Shaw (a surprising amount of Shaw), hang around with literary lions Plummer himself knew, principally Dylan Thomas and Archibald MacLeish, and end with Plummer meditating, through a range of authors we’ve already encountered, on his own inevitable (and, at nearly 83, unavoidably sensible) demise. Plummer’s protean performances are, at their worst, engaging, and at their best they are powerful indeed – highlights for me were the Song of Songs (Plummer’s teenage encounter with the Bible’s dirty bits), Othello’s death speech, a speech by Shaw’s Satan to Don Juan from Man and Superman, and Auden’s Herod complaining about the birth of Jesus in For The Time Being.

That last, one of my favorite bits from the show, is probably a good entry point for the questions that nagged at me, through it and afterward. Plummer does Auden in dark glasses and a queen-y Southern accent, all of which goes marvelously with lines like these:

Why should he dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I’ve read all the official documents without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare He allow me to decide? I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven’t had sex for a month.  I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy.

But he ends his recitation not be explaining what the poem meant to him, but by saying, “why am I doing this in a Southern accent?” – as if this choice were mere whimsy. It’s a charming move, and warms the audience to him (as if it needed to be warmer); we think, “how modest and casual he’s being with us – he’s just having fun!” But it also pulls us away from the very text Plummer claims to want us to to be deeply engaged with – and, more so, pulls us away from him, and his investment in that text.

And this is what nagged at me all through the production. Plummer talks of love, and of lust, but we never learn his feelings, in any specificity, towards any particular person, or even in any particular experience. The evening isn’t structured as autobiography – he wants the texts to speak for themselves – but they need to hang on something. A snippet of The Song of Songs is just a snippet. If it’s not hanging in the work itself, and it’s not hanging on a life, Plummer’s life, that we can discern the contours of, then it just hangs in the air, like the circular window that overlooks the book staircase in this production.

I assume the reluctance to create a full-fledged “Christopher Plummer” character for this production was driven by a desire to avoid making this a memoir show, to make it a show about the words, and not the speaker. But I, personally, couldn’t avoid noticing it was Christopher Plummer up there, apparently talking to me, and that this Christopher Plummer seemed to be avoiding telling me anything important and specific about himself. Childhood boredom in church, the carbonated hormones of adolescence, and the terror of age and death – these are universals, but we approach them through specific instances that resonate with us, and Plummer denied us those instances.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that the angel of this show, the text that hovers over it from beginning to end, is Lewis Carroll’s parody of Wordsworth, sung by the White Knight to Alice, the poem the name of which is called “Haddock’s Eyes,” but the name of which is “The Aged, Aged Man,” and which itself is called “Ways and Means,” but which really is, “A-Sitting On a Gate.”

At the start of the show, we get the opening of the poem:

I’ll tell thee everything I can;
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
‘Who are you, aged man?’ I said.
‘And how is it you live?’
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.

And at the end, we return to -

that old man I used to know-

Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo-
That summer evening long ago

A-sitting on a gate.

In between, in the poem itself, the young man, who is desperate to learn from the aged man how he lives, is continually distracted from the lesson the old man teaches by absurd fancies of his own invention – how to dye one’s whiskers green, how to live on batter, and so forth – and therefore fails to the aged man’s equally absurd secrets to life. In the original Wordsworth poem that Carroll is parodying, the young poet, encountering a leech collector, is distracted not by his own schemes but by the man himself, the figure he presents of age and toil, and how this reminds him of his own fears of age and death:

XVI

The old Man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

XVII

My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
–Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,
My question eagerly did I renew,
“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”

Plummer starts off his life feeling like the young man of Carroll, avoiding the aged man’s absurd lessons by pursuing his own absurdities, and in his age feels he has become the aged man, muttering as if his mouth were full of dough and snorting like a buffalo, but failing to communicate his secrets to the rising generation of theatre-goers, distracted as they are by Twitter and whatnot. But I, in the audience, felt a bit like Wordsworth’s young poet, wanting to hear from Plummer how he lived, and found myself distracted, as he demonstrated precisely how to me – going through his theatrical changes before my eyes – by his person, a person I could not get an adequate fix on. And so his words, which are all he wanted me to focus on, too often trickled through my own head, like water through a sieve.

But for all that, they are glorious words.

This year, that middle zone is occupied by The Best Brothers, a two-hander written by and starring Daniel MacIvor, receiving its world premier at Stratford’s Studio Theatre. It bears comparison to both For The Pleasure and The Little Years. Like the former, the play is about a son losing his mother – in this case, two brothers, surnamed “Best,” whose mother, “Bunny” has, at the opening of the play, just been crushed by an obese drag queen who fell off her float in a gay pride parade. And both are structured as memory plays, the dead mother conjured up by the living son(s). Like the latter, a key character never appears onstage – not the dead mother; she shows up plenty, played by each of the sons in (drag) turn, but her dog, Enzo, late love of her life and, we learn about halfway through, responsible for her death (the drag queen lost her balance waving at Enzo). And both are about the pain of the less-favored child – Hamilton Best (MacIvor), though the older and more accomplished of the brothers, nurses a lifelong resentment at what he sees as blatant favoritism by his mother toward his younger brother, Kyle (John Beale). But The Best Brothers lacks the scope and profundity of those other plays, in large part because it is so simultaneously condescending towards and gentle with its protagonist.

The story is a simple one. Bunny having died, tragicomically, her sons need to arrange a funeral on the one hand and for the disposition of her dog on the other. The funeral turns into a farce, with Hamilton first upstaged and then enraged by his brother’s intrusions into the decorous send-off he had orchestrated. Enzo wreaks similar havoc in Hamilton’s personal life, first tearing up his brand-new $200,000 kitchen, which precipitates the termination of his marriage. When he has suffered enough from his attempts to maintain some semblance of order in the wake of his mother’s humiliating death, we get a drip-drip of revelations from his apparently hapless brother: their mother was already dying (of cancer) and so was really spared suffering by her sudden death rather than having been cut off before her time (this explains Kyle’s rather blase attitude toward her death when he first learns of it); she withheld this information from Hamilton because she feared he couldn’t handle it; and it was her idea that Hamilton inherit Enzo. By the end of the play, Hamilton has made his peace with his true position in the family: far from being the omnicompetent one, it’s Kyle who has his stuff together, practically and emotionally, and Hamilton who needs to learn – from Enzo, agent of chaos – how to love without controlling.

All of which is fine, and an unobjectionable if somewhat anodyne message. But somebody once said: if you want to send a message, go to Western Union. I have a problem with plays that single out one character to “learn” something, and arrange the rest of the characters to be his teachers. And that’s very much what happens here. Kyle not only doesn’t have an arc, he doesn’t really participate in the drama at all. Nothing Hamilton says can get to him, and whatever he feels about the passing of his mother, he goes through it offstage and never really lets us in on what it is. That’s plausible, of course, but it makes him a less-interesting character, good only for one-liners and to provoke emotional reactions in his brother.

Ditto in spades for Bunny, who speaks to us from beyond the grave through her sons, telling the story of how she came to acquire Enzo. Except that she never really lets us in, never gives us a glimpse of true interiority. Her loneliness and need for something to love is asserted, not demonstrated; most surprisingly, she says next to nothing about her relationship with her two sons, and does nothing to provide an additional perspective on them beyond what we get from their own scenes. Instead, she performs, and unfortunately she isn’t as charming a performer as she thinks.

The only character to show any depth of feeling – much of it expressed as hostility, yes, but at least it is feeling – is Hamilton. The whole play, he’s been surrounded by people who withhold affection from him – he complains about this characteristic in his mother, but it’s equally evident from his brother, and his off-stage wife leaves their marriage on a note of exceptional coldness. And I’m supposed to believe that he’s the one who needs to learn how to love, and that these people, and their psychotic pooch, are the ones to teach him.

Color me skeptical. What they call love looks an awful lot to me like detachment – amused detachment, yes, but detachment nonetheless. And from where I sit, a love so limited shouldn’t happen to a dog.

Cylla von Tiedemann / Stratford Shakespeare Festival / Facebook.

Sophocles has long been my least-favorite of the major Greek tragedians, and Antigone and Elektra are two major reasons why. I have never been able to get close to these sexless worshippers of the dead father.

Part of the difficulty I have with Elektra specifically is that the family tragedy at the heart feels too familiar. We don’t, these days, go around sacrificing our daughters to gain a favorable wind, or butchering our husbands when they return from ten years waging war across the sea. But our families do tear themselves asunder, leaving children as partisans in the post-divorce war of recriminations. I can’t help but read a tragedy like Elektra’s in these terms, and so can’t help but want to shake her and say: there’s no honor in winning vindication for the father you see as more truly wronged, in defeating the mother you see as his murderess. Just get out of her house!

It follows that I have never been able to reconcile myself to the playwright’s apparent identification of Elektra’s (and Antigone’s) absolute demands with some abstract conception of justice. I understand, of course, that Sophoclean tragedy stems from the opposition of two principles that hold themselves out as absolute – like justice and authority. That’s his great insight, that good things, even absolutely good things, not only don’t always go together but stand unalterably opposed to one another, and it’s an insight we still have a great deal of difficulty accepting, in drama and in life. But I prefer a Sophocles infused with a Euripidean spirit. I yearn for some kind of resolution, even if farcical. The greatest lineal descendent of Elektra on the English-language stage is Isabella, from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and if you look at her extraordinary and, in many ways, absurd journey back to life and love, you get some idea of what I yearn for when I meet her Sophoclean forebear.

So I went to the Patterson theatre last night in a state both of excitement and of trepidation. Stratford’s current production of Elektra (the Germanic spelling is their choice), directed by Thomas Moschopoulos, was rumored to be an exceptionally faithful updating of the tragedy – faithful to Sophocles’s own conception of the theatre, that is, updated in order to bring that conception home to a modern audience rather than to conform to our own prejudices. Could such an approach win me over to a playwright, and a character, I often find myself avoiding?

It just about did.

Before the show begins, the chorus roams the audience, chatting with the patrons, filling them in on the background of the tragedy. The stage is dominated by a table covered with a diaphanous sheet. Then, the play begins, the sheet is pulled off, to reveal that the table is in three parts, each section dominated by a dismembered hunk of a statue of Apollo, and curled up fetally against the god’s broken torso, infantile in white underwear, is Orestes (Ian Lake).

It’s an arresting image of the birth of vengeance, and, as his companion, Pylades (E.B. Smith), lifts him from his stony bed, his tutor (Peter Hutt) announces that very theme: he was reared to avenge is father’ death, and now the time has come. Orestes swoons, and Pylades bears him up – the two do a kind of dance around the stage as the tutor intones his obligations. Finally, Orestes comes to himself, and makes a plan (one that Pylades looks skeptical of): he will counterfeit his death, to lull any possible suspicions on the part of his mother or her husband, and then he will come and kill them stealthily. It’s not the most honorable way to kill, perhaps, but the honor, Orestes explains, is in the action itself, the righting of an ancient wrong; the how is secondary to the why. Orestes is already the synthesis of opposites, marrying cunning to high principle, marrying words (the province of his tutor) to action (the mute physicality of Pylades).

Hearing Elektra coming, Orestes leaves, rather than be discovered – but the way this is presented is to have Orestes seize the face from the statue of Apollo’s head, use it for a mask, and bury himself in dirt in a box at the foot of the stage. It’s a marvelous moment, merging so many meanings. The statue of the god is also his broken father, who, it appears, gave him birth, like Zeus, without requiring a woman’s assistance; assuming the mask is assuming his father’s face; his burial is a further identification, as well as a signifier of his apparent death.

This opening sets the tone for the rest of the play. Ritualized, highly symbolic actions and behaviors, are married to a text that is exceptionally direct, even brutal, and written in an accessibly modern idiom. But that text itself is delivered in a fashion that accentuates the ritual quality of speech. Sophocles specified that certain speeches were to be accompanied by music; Moschopoulos has his actors chant these, accompanied by the thumping of hands on tables, or on the actors’ chests, or the drumming of staves on the floor. The chant is at its most effective when the tutor recounts the death of Orestes in a chariot race – the audience is on the edge of its seat, the first time, in my experience, that the Greek convention of reciting action that has taken place off-stage has actually worked, successfully conjured up the scene retold. (The irony being, of course, that the scene is entirely fabricated – a critique of drama itself, that.) But the chant works wonderfully throughout the play, making the un-chanted speeches seem all the more conversational and, as a consequence, persuasively real.

So we are given a theatrical context in which to understand the character of Elektra (Yanna McIntosh). This highly ritualized space is precisely the world she is comfortable in, conforms to her notion of absolute justice. But the order of her world is broken, and all she can do is call attention, over and over, to that brokenness. McIntosh comes onstage, her beauty smothered in a baggy, moth-eaten black sweater, black Frankenstein boots and square glasses. She would make herself a weapon, against the falseness of beauty, and having done with remaking herself she has set to work on the rest of the world, defacing it furiously with a black sharpie. The chorus of women who follow her are acutely sensitive to the harm she’s done herself in pursuing her monomania, but she scoffs at their comforts. What do they want her to do, become like her weak and cowardly sister, Chrysothemis (Laura Condlln)?

Condlln provides McIntosh with her first antagonist, and it’s a decidedly unequal match. Condlln plays Chrysothemis as very much the woman Elektra imagines her to be – shallow, vain, and most of all, cowardly. She says that she’s only being sensible, making the best of a bad situation and bowing to an authority too powerful to oppose, but Elektra cuts through this easily, using her own words against her (reading them off the table where she scrawled them moments before – a fine working of the otherwise ritualized sharpie into the action of the drama). If Chrysothemis hates her murderous mother and stepfather as much as she claims to, then her “sensible” behavior is built on shame, on belying those very feelings, being false to herself. How can she find comfort in comforts bought at the price of sacrificing her own truest feelings, unless she is as shallow as Elektra thinks she is? To this, Chrysothemis has no real answer, and she is won, provisionally, to Elektra’s cause.

Her next, and principal antagonist, is a far greater opponent. Clytemestra (Seana McKenna – again, the spelling is the one Stratford chose) emerges from between the massive double doors at the top of the long Patterson runway like Madonna in her maturity: blonde coiffe, dark glasses, head scarf, born aloft by two long-haired hunks in what look like giant aprons. McKenna has excelled in the Greeks over the years – I recall in particular her Andromache from four years ago and her Medea from years before that – and the moving case she makes for the righteousness of her execution of her husband initially wins the audience (and the table-thumping chorus) to her side. This, indeed, is the original Aeschylean perspective on the tragedy – that Agamemnon got what he deserved, and then his murdering wife got what she deserved in turn, and now her murdering son is pursued by the Furies and how are we going to break the cycle of vengeance? But that’s not where Sophocles is coming from. Clytemestra’s confrontation with her daughter is interrupted by the arrival of Orestes’s tutor in disguise, bearing his gripping tale of Orestes’s death. The news poleaxes Elektra, who rolls under the table moaning her new and final grief, but Clytemestra’s reaction is more complex. Initially, she, too, expresses grief. Yes, Orestes was her sworn enemy – but she was still his mother, she can’t hear of his death with gladness. But she quickly gets over this feeling, and rejoices that her daughter will now no longer pose any threat, and she dances off stage with her hunky helpers singing, “now things are different.”

For me, this was the first false note in the play. I completely believe that Clytemestra would exult that her daughter had been so thoroughly defeated. But that dance was simply a bridge too far, and belied that moment of lingering maternal affection that initially greeted Orestes’s death. I can’t say that the choice is false to Sophocles’s vision, because Sophocles wants us to see Elektra as wholly righteous, precisely so that we see how ugly we can be made by utter righteousness, by the exclusion of other values, and to bring that point home Clytemestra must be irredeemably evil. But it’s one moment where I have trouble accepting Sophocles’s vision, precisely because of its abstraction and inhumanity, too close to Elektra’s own. I prefer the spirit of that moment at the end of “The Grifters” when Anjelica Huston first seduces and then (accidentally) kills her son so as to assure her own survival. Huston’s sobbing as she gathers up the money over her son’s dying body struck me as true to the character of a mother who would kill her child to save herself – the sorrow remains real even if it fails to deter. But that’s a Euripidean, not a Sophoclean, bit of cinema.

The remainder of the play concerns the return of Orestes, and the great recognition scene between brother and sister. McIntosh and Moschopoulos opt against playing up the incestuous overtones of the brother-sister relationship, which is in keeping with this production more generally and therefore a good choice. We are left with Orestes’s pure pity for the wreck of his sister, and Pylades’s mute exasperation that Orestes would let that pity potentially undermine their entire enterprise. Clytemestra’s death off-stage is unfortunately rendered less-visceral by her amplified voice, but we quickly forget this when her blood-drenched body is brought onstage by Orestes to confront her husband, Aigisthos (played with exquisite smarminess by Graham Abbey). Aigisthos is dragged bodily offstage to meet his own doom, and the final image is Elektra, alone with the fruit of her long labor, the corpse of her mother.

It’s an enormously powerful production, and true, as I say, to Sophocles’s vision. So why do I say it “nearly” won me over? Because I don’t know, in the end, what Elektra is thinking in those final moments. In the end, she is still closed to me, which no doubt is just how she would wish it.

You would probably think, “wow, Sarah Silverman and Dave Chappelle are collaborating on an off-broadway show? This I gotta see.” Or, if your disposition is more timid, at least check out on Youtube once the clips begin appearing.

But unfortunately, the above is a description of the least-successful scene in Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman’s limp comedy, Bullet for Adolf, currently running at New World Stages in Manhattan.

The play is about . . . well, that’s the problem: the play isn’t about anything. Nominally, it’s about who stole a pistol that might have been part of an assassination plot against Hitler. But the theft doesn’t happen until the end of the first act, and there is nothing important actually riding on its resolution. It’s set in mid-80s Houston, among a group of stoner friends who work together at a construction site (working for said Nazi, a bricklayer), and is supposedly a nostalgia piece about that period in history (endless video montages of the events of that time beat that point home) but doesn’t actually have anything to say about history, and is actually about that time in life when you drift, out of school and not yet pursuing a career, with no particular responsibilities or commitments to hold you down.

Including any responsibilities to the audience. To, for example, have a story. Or, failing that, a theme. Or even a topic.

Instead, what we have are a variety of plausible caricatures – ably embodied by a talented cast – slinging one-liners at one another. Some of the one-liners are pretty good. But they never rise beyond the level of sitcom humor, and more to the point, they never connect to anything larger than the moment itself. They don’t build. They don’t make a play.

And the problem with the Nazi, and the pedophile humor, and the daughter’s gay boyfriend, and the black-power-spouting lust-object, and the placenta, is that, in the absence of any meaningful satiric context, they aren’t funny. They’re just desperate lunges for something beyond the sitcom. They don’t shock – they aren’t real enough to be shocking. They just embarrass.

I won’t pretend there’s no pleasure in the show – as I said, the average quality of the one-liners is pretty high, and the actors are all good at what they do. But this play is a perfect illustration of the writing-class cliche that you and your friends hanging around being funny together do not constitute a comedy.