Blue Moon – the Film

The last days of lyricist Lorenz Hart weren’t pretty ones. He’d penned the lyrics for numerous Broadway hits including “Blue Moon,” Ship Without a Sail," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Falling in Love with Love," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "He Was Too Good to Me," "I Could Write a Book," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "Isn't It Romantic?" "It Never Entered My Mind," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Thou Swell" and "With a Song in My Heart." He was overflowing with ingenious phrases, tending toward the humorous, the satirical, and the self-depreciatory, making him the perfect collaborator for the often shmaltzy tunesmith Richard Rodgers, six years his junior. 

But Larry was unreliable, difficult to work with. He drank, he slept in, he missed appointments. When Rodgers proposed a new musical called “Oklahoma!,” Hart rejected it, considering it utter cornball. So Rodgers moved ahead with a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who hadn't written a hit since Showboat, a decade earlier.

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater focuses on one particular evening: the opening night of Oklahoma! Hart attends the show with his mother, then hurries down to the bar nearby where the reception is set to take place. In the course of the evening he chats with the worldly-wise bartender, the young soldier at the piano, and E. B. White (who happens to be sitting at a table nearby.) He tells the bartender about his “girlfriend,” a attractive coed twenty years his junior, and the language gets crude. She’ll be arriving soon. Hart has promised to introduce her to Rodgers.

Guests start to trickle in from the theater, including Hammerstein and Rodgers himself. By this time Hart has had a few drinks, and he’s getting slightly manic. He congratulates Hammerstein, then Rodgers, things remain cordial, and Rodgers even goes so far as to suggest a new collaboration with Hart, an update of the duo’s first show, now fifteen years in the past.

OK, Hart replies, but why not do a new show? A satire about Marco Polo. Four hours long. “We’ll skewer everything and everybody …. “

It’s painful to watch the evening unfold. Ethan Hawke inhabits the role of Hart with all the exuberance and pathos he can muster, but it’s never fun to watch an alcoholic head down that slippery slope to inebriation. Andrew Scott, in the role of Rodgers, nails the complex blend of gratitude, affection, courtesy, and distaste that the songwriter feels for his one-time mentor, collaborator, and friend. And Margaret Qualley is perfect as the worldly-wise yet strangely innocent ingénue who’s truly fond of her much older and much more famous friend, though she doesn’t care for him “in that way.”

It isn’t difficult to guess who’s going to get the girl.

But that's not the point of the film. Linklater wanted to bring to life a fascinating and dreadful moment in the history of American popular culture, and in that he's succeeded. 

It almost makes you want to stream Oklahoma! again. 

___________________

For deeper insights into the art and milieu of the Great American Songbook, I would highly recommend Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. For an almost academic look at the lyricists of the era, including forty-odd pages on Hart himself, it might be worthwhile checking out The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia.   

 

Six Characters in Search of an Author - Park Square Theater

It's a play I have always wanted to see. It's a landmark of modernist literature, but I knew I'd never read it. The new Wonderlust production updates the premise by incorporating elements of reality TV to the narrative. Though I haven't seen the original version, I can say that this one works. It's firing on all cylinders, and I suspect the lines of interaction pulling the two dramas together heighten many of Pirandello's original effects.

Premise? Effects? The central conceit of the original play involves a theatrical rehearsal that's disrupted by the arrival of six characters who are not in the production. They announce that they're from a different play that's never been completed. They're searching for an author to bring their stories to completion.

In the current adaptation, a director is preparing for the final episode of a Reality TV show called "The Maze," which is to be filmed live in a few hours. The three remaining contestants, having avoided elimination in previous episodes, are characterized by their colleagues as the Dude, the Jerk, and the Flirt. They've gotten on one another's nerves in the course of their many weeks spent inside the Maze, and their repartee tends to be shallow and cutting, but they're all determined to bear one another's company long enough to win the million dollar prize money.

When these strangers from a distant era unexpectedly arrive, things begin to get interesting. Is this just another test to winnow out the remaining contestants? The director claims not. The stories this family of misfits tell about one another, and their bizarre need to reconnect with an author—any author—is one curve ball too many.

The director of "The Maze" insists he can't help them. He's not a writer. His show doesn't have a script. That's the whole point. It's "real." But the intruders show no signs of leaving the set, and as they argue with one another about who did what to whom, and when, he decides there might be some material there he can use.

The intruders are relieved to find someone finally taking an interest in their plight, but they're dismayed when they discover that although the director plans to use their stories, they won't be acting the parts themselves. At this point the challenge of reconciling divergent points of view and separating "reality" from commercialized cant grows greater still.

Considered on their own terms, the fragmentary details we learn about the family drama are melodramatic, while the characters holding "The Maze" together are basically clueless, but these two very imperfect worlds inexplicably seem to illuminate one another, and the addition of multiple TV screens and twitter feeds on the set further heighten the razzmatazz. 

The actors are uniformly competent. There are sometimes eight or ten people on stage at the same time, engaged in several conversations simultaneously, and it's clear that a good deal of effort was spent on perfecting the play's timing.

I left the theater pondering the issues Pirandello had in mind when he wrote it: What makes a character "real"? Is a life ultimately defined by its best or its worst moment? Are the impressions we form of others a part of their character, or of ours?

But for the most part, I was simply amused by the non-stop flood of ironies, intricacies, jokes and jibes, encased within a challenging but eventually coherent plot. In short, a modern classic, successfully post-modernized. 

*   *   *

We were invited to a pre-performance meet-and-greet sponsored by Rain Taxi Magazine, and we enjoyed chatting with Eric Lorberer, who introduced us to one of the play's managers. We also chatted with Paul Von Drasek, a retired sales rep from Penguin Books who shared some tales about the security issues the publisher faced during the Salman Rushdie era. An old friend from the Writers' Union, Alicia Conroy, was also in the crowd. She's teaching the play in her literature class at Normandale Community College, and she filled us in on how the new production compares with the original.

I think that may have helped.

Tom Stoppard - The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard is well-known as a playwright of ideas. He's woven such things as rock and roll, Russian history, and existential philosophy into the dialog of his plays, while doing a pretty good job of keeping his scripts buoyant and his tone slightly racy. But it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Stoppard writes plays about people who have ideas. The ideas involved are seldom resolved and sometimes not even examined much in the course of a given drama. They often serve merely as decorative elements, giving his often brainy characters something to banter about while the machinations of the plot grind on.

The success of Stoppard's productions depends to a large degree on how closely the fields of banter at which his characters excel dovetails with the action. In Arcadia, the fields are rich—landscape gardening and Romantic poetry—and the interactions between ideas and events genuine and illuminating. In Stoppard's newest play, The Hard Problem, which finished its run recently at the National Theater in London, stimulating banter abounds, but the subjects are less interesting and their application to events on stage more strained.

The milieu in which Stoppard has chosen to set The Hard Problem is neurobiology. The question around which the drama is based, at least according to the marketing campaign, is this: "If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?" But the characters in the play have nothing much to say about that subject. The drama actually focuses on (spoiler alert) a bright and attractive young woman named Hilary who gave up a child for adoption as a teenager, and is now nursing a variety of sorrows as a result of it. She enters the world of nuerobiology largely as a coincidence. Much of the drama turns on conflicts between that reductive world and Hilary's more fertile and probing intellect.

In The Real Thing, one of Stoppard's previous plays, a playwright is accused by his wife of giving short shrift to the female character in order to display his own wit. That is certainly the case in The Hard Problem. Hilary's tutor (and soon-to-be lover, as the play begins) Spike, delivers long speeches about evolutionary science, and how a mother will behave so as to maximize her offspring's chances of survival. But Hilary is a mother, and little of what Spike is saying rings true to her.

Later on, Hilary's rival for a position at a small and prestigious think tank, a man named Amal, who has already received a slew of academic distinctions, delivers long speeches about how computers have surpassed the human brain. Hilary has the superior insight. "I wonder what a computer is thinking when he's just waiting for his chess opponent to make a move." But she isn't given much stage-time to elaborate it.

In short, there is little genuine dialogue between points of view, and as the play develops across half a decade, we begin to wonder why Hilary continues to hang around with such arrogant jerks.

A major subplot of The Hard Problem deals with hedge funds. The owner of the think tank Hilary works at makes his living outguessing his colleagues and scamming the markets with the help of behavioral research his institute produces. Amal takes a job with the firm, but makes the mistake of publishing a paper about over-valuation of the market. His observations happen to be true—but the paper threatens to undermine his boss's plans to sell the market short.

The play receives an enormous boost from Olivia Vinhall, who, in the part of Hilary, exudes vulnerability and wonderment, sorrow and goodness. Perhaps Stoppard recognized that the meat of the play consists in a battle not of words but of personalities, the most appealing of whom is driven by serious but inarticulable questions rooted in awareness and emotion, rather than easy answers rooted in fashionable but reductive scientific theories.

The Hard Problem runs a hundred minutes without intermission, and the time goes by in a flash. (I saw it in a simulcast at St. Anthony Main.) That's good news. But I look forward to the sequel, during which Hilary moves to New York to study philosophy at NYU, gets a proper boyfriend, and starts an avant garde theater group to explore the spiritual dimension of human interactions across genders and generations. Maybe Stoppard himself would agree to giving a guest lecture? 

Birdman - the Movie

An edgy film about the theater. An arty film about art. Imaginative. Almost Godardesque.  The opening credits could have been copied from Pierrot le Fou. Maybe they were?

A soundtrack that's mostly played on a trap set? The Sound of Music this ain't.  Long takes with handheld cameras in confined spaces, difficult to get your bearings. Who are we rooting for, here?

Doesn't it remind you a little bit of Arthur Penn's Mickey One? 

Michael Keaton, serious actor turned Hollywood superhero, now finds himself on the tail-end of celebrity and wants to reestablish his artistic integrity on the Broadway stage. The fact that he not only wrote and stars in the play, but is also producing and directing it, lends an aura of willed self-importance to the enterprise that could easily be taken for delusions of grandeur. (Think—Steve McQueen doing Enemy of the People.)  

Keaton is naturally fraught with anxiety and anger as opening night approaches, and the fact that he can levitate himself four feet off the ground while he meditates doesn't help him much. Yes, suspension of disbelief starts with the opening scene. Which is good.

But the meat of the film, which might almost have been a play, consists of a small group of talented performers interacting in a heated environment of ego and insecurity, artistry and desperation, as opening night approaches.

Zack Galifianakis, who plays Keaton's lawyer, manager, and best friend, ballasts the film with his common sense enthusiasm and trust. Emma Stone plays Keaton's mixed-up daughter, who recently got out of treatment and hangs around the dressing rooms, running errands and smoking cigarettes. 

Naomi Watts, one of two lead actresses in the play, suggests that Keaton hire her erstwhile boyfriend (Edward Norton), after Keaton fires one of the principal actors just a few days before the opening. Norton is well-known on Broadway, both for his dramatic intensity and his cocky unpredictability.

Throw in Keaton's ex-wife and the second lead actress (who announces early on in the film that she's pregnant with Keaton's child) and you have an enormous potential for tense, two- and three-way conversations and confrontations in the halls and dressing rooms backstage.

Theater-dramas tend to be amusing. They have a can't-lose narrative arc leading up to irrevocable triumph or disaster of opening night. Such works as A Chorus of Disapproval, Orson and Me, and the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows come immediately to mind. (So does Katherine Hepburn in Stage Door, though I can hardly remember it.)

  

One problem with Birdman is that Keaton isn't terribly likable, and it's hard to tell if he's even a very good actor. He's tormented by the voice of Birdman, the superhero he once played, who tries to convince him that no one cares about traditional theater; it's an utter waste of time. Thus the entire film simmers not only with latent violence and but also with incipient insanity—qualities that the jumpy camerawork tends to reinforce.

As the film progresses tender moments crop up more frequently, but we never really get the feeling that thing are going to be "all right." It's hard to imagine that even a resounding Broadway triumph will be enough to assuage Keaton's demons for long. 

Yet I walked out of the theater saying to myself: "Wow, that was something!" I'd been wrung through the wringer and then hung out to dry.

The film doesn't say anything new about art or life, but there's a lot of art and life in it.   

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

It's a remarkable play, much easier to enjoy than to produce, I’m sure.

It isn’t that easy to describe, either.

It’s based on parallel plot-lines both of which involve a lot of talk about mathematics, poetry, and the contrast between classical and romantic temperaments. The stories unfold roughly two centuries apart, but in the same house. The scene shifts back and forth at irregular intervals, though the action usually stays put for a quarter-hour at least. 

When the MC announced at the beginning of the performance that the play ran to two hours and forty minutes, I groaned inwardly in disbelief. We’d been out biking all day through the spectacular autumn leaves on the Root River trails near Lanesboro, and suddenly the idea of capping off the evening at the local Comonwealth Theater seemed like a very bad one.

Never has a play set entirely within a single room flown by so fast.

Two of the protagonists of the modern-day story are literary scholars—though strangers to one another as the play begins. One is intent on discovering exactly what took place in the house several centuries ago, when Byron may have visited and perhaps killed one of the estate’s guests in a duel. 

The other scholar, Hannah, is the fiancee of the house’s current owner, Valentine Coverly, who's hard at work on some equations that will expose arcane relationships that recur repeatedly in the natural world—as recorded, for example, in the estate’s grouse-hunting records. These equations bear an uncanny relationship to notions worked out two hundred years ago by a young woman named Tomasina who lived in the house. Her notebooks survive.

Affinities and antagonisms abound in both worlds, and the play’s appeal also derives from the resolution of questions raised in the course of it: Was Byron there? Did he kill someone? Who was the mad hermit in the garden? But viewers are likely to draw even greater pleasure from the sophisticated conversation and frequent soliloquies that bubble through the production.

For example, the precocious young student Thomasina at one point exclaims, during her Latin lesson, that she hates Cleopatra, because “the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!... How can we sleep for grief?” 

Her tutor comes back with an eloquent defense of how knowledge is preserved:  

“By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?” 

Our mathematical Valentine, a descendant of the family who owned the estate in Byron’s day, has some of the best lines:

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” 

Or

“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.” 

Valentine bears graciously the crass intrusion of the thoroughly-modern academic Nightingale, who is eager to publish his theory of Byron’s duel. In fact, Valentine even helps the man by pointing out that Byron’s name appears in the game book—thus proving, at least, that he was there at the time of the incident.

But Nightingale is no fool. He can defend his position cogently, and even aggressively, and he can deliver a philosophical salvo with the best of them.   

“If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you."

After which he eloquently recites Byron’s celebrated poem—

 'She walks into beauty, like the night
of cloudless climes and starry skies,
and all that's best of dark and bright
meet in her aspect and her eyes…” 

 Nightingale inspires the enduring enmity of Valentine’s fiancée Hannah, not only because he wrote a scathing review of her last book, but also because he’s an arrogant sexist pig. Yet Valentine’s younger sister Chloe, who is no match for Hannah intellectually, takes a fancy to Nightingale immediately, and she gets in a few pithy comments too. For example:

“The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.” 

I came into the theater with one advantage over some members of the audience. By sheer coincidence, I had recently been reading a book called Ubiquity: the Science of History or Why the Universe is Simpler than We Think. This book describes precisely the kind of equations that Valentine is working on and that Tomasina intuited, two hundred years ahead of her time, though she lacked the computer technology to test her insights. The book’s analysis of “critical state universality,” as it applies to earthquakes, avalanches, grasshopper populations, stock market crashes, epidemics, and other disasters, is more or less the same as Valentine’s analysis of grouse populations on his ancestral state. (It’s interesting to note that when the book came out in paperback, it carried the shorter but more accurate subtitle, Why Catastrophes Happen.)

Do we need to understand all of this to enjoy the play? I don't think so. Though it does help to know that the theories being bandied about are reputable, and beyond that, perhaps integrate the worlds of Newtonian physics (classically true but generally irrelevant) and that of landscape gardening, poetry, and illicit trysts in the gazebo. 

It strikes me that we probably understand less than half of the things Shakespeare’s characters say. Does it matter?

Am I saying that Stoppard is a sort of Shakespeare update? Yes, I am. The dialogue is complicated, heady, and fast-paced. Also more than occasionally rhapsodic and heart-felt.

Which brings me to the Commonwealth production itself, in which director Leah Cooper emphasizes pacing rather than comprehensibility. That’s a good strategy. Even if we understood everything that was being said, it would be difficult to hear the rapid-fire dialogue about a third of the time. Every member of the cast brought great energy to their roles, though Anna Lee Murray, as the youthful Tomasina, deserves special mention for effectively conveying the precocity of a sweet teenage girl who might also be a genius.

Digging a little deeper into the cast, Nightingale (Scott Dixon) was a whirlwind of bad and good qualities, an entertainment dynamo; Hannah (Adrienne Sweeney) projected a subtle blend of intelligence, accommodation, and fragility (with hints of frigidity, too...as they used to say); and Hodge (Gary Danciu) was acerbic, libidinous, and crisply polite. Lady Croom (Catherine Glynn)? Perfectly hospitable, self-centered, and edgy. And so on.         

When Arcadia was revived in London in 2009, the Guardian ran a story musing whether it might be the greatest play of our age. They describe the plot and underscore the play’s enduring significance a lot better than I can.

It's interesting that Stoppard chose the word Arcadia to serve as his play's title. As you probably know, Arcadia is a province on the west coast of the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece, which was taken up during the Renaissance as a rustic paradise. The issues of landscape gardening in the play (which I did not have the time to describe in detail) raise the question of whether classical restraint (Newton) or romantic excess (Byron) are better suited to paradise. But Stoppard would never be as didactic as that, and I get the impression that his notion of paradise is one in which this issue is flamboyantly, conversationally alive and under intense debate, with both points of view delivering some compelling arguments in their defense.  

Centennial Showboat - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Minnesota Centennial Showboat crew typically mines two thin but highly entertaining veins of art down on Harriet Island in St. Paul—the vintage popular song and the vintage melodrama. If you’d happened upon such stuff unexpectedly in Vicksburg or Davenport in the course of a family vacation, it would become material for a lifetime of fond reminiscences. But the Showboat has been putting on such entertainments for more than half a century—with a few well-deserved breaks for floods and fires—and we tend to take it for granted.

Their latest production, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, lacks existential ennui, is devoid of gender-bending twists, and explores no new ground theatrically. No one imagined that it would. Yet the place begins to exert its charm the moment you get out of the car and stroll down to the banks of the Mississippi in the evening light, with the Jonathan Paddleford steamboat bobbing in the foreground and the lights of St. Paul glittering from the far side of the river.

At what other venue can you spend the intermission sipping a beer as you watch giant logs float toward you down the river from Fountain Cave, Hidden Falls, Fort Snelling, and other places upstream, speculating on how big a “boom” they’ll make when then disappear beneath your feet and then crash into the Showboat’s metal hull?

But “the play’s the thing.” Right? Well, not exactly. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of those parlor dramas, with lots of entrances and exits and a paper-thin plot. If you’re expecting something on the order of Benedict Cumberpatch as Sherlock Holmes, you’ll be disappointed. But the Showboat players do a very good job of carrying through with the tale, hamming things up only slightly, exhibiting a degree of finesse in their comic timing, and letting the audience do the rest with its cheering and hissing at all the right places. 

Within the  constraints of the idiom, Christian Boomgaarden succeeds in evoking an element of fiendish insanity in his portrayal of Mr. Hyde, and Nike Kadri might also be singled out for her comic turn as a maid being interrogated by the police.

Then there are the vocal interludes, which make up at least half of the production’s running time. The songs are from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, I would guess. The painted backdrops are impressive, the harmonies are rich, and the solo voices aren’t half bad. The tunes have nothing to do with one another, and absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Some are hilarious, others are infused with an almost childlike glee. I especially enjoyed "The Art Olio," a number set in old Persia during the course of which Bear Brummel attempts to rhapsodize while being caressed far too many of Katherine Fried's hands.

Other songs carry titles such as “The Naughty Little Clock,” “Eve Wasn’t Modest,” and “The Saga of the Two Little Sausages.” 

As I listened to the one that raises the question “who ate Napoleons with Josephine when Bonaparte was away?”, I was reminded of a scratchy 78-rpm record about a half-inch thick we used to listen to. It was the width of a dinner plate, but there was only one song on it: “Who Played Poker with Pocahontas When John Smith Went Away?” Someone ought to research the connections between the two songs. (I’m sure there’s a Ph.D. thesis in there somewhere.)

Among many other details let me mention just one or two: The costumes on display during “The Calendar Parade” number are a sight to behold; and the color of the potion Dr. Jekyll drinks from a glass beaker at a crucial moment in the drama is the perfect mad-scientist green, midway between chartreuse and pea soup. A variety of little comic touches--for example, the changing mirror in the upstairs laboratory--ensure that though the story line is often predictable, it is never dull. 

We emerged into the night, carrying the energy and enthusiasm of the production like a warm glow. We'd been exposed to a large vial of infectious fun....  

A Different Shakespeare

Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

It’s a question that won’t go away. Why not? Because many who have read, seen, or acted in the plays can’t believe that a semi-literate, mean-spirited corn-merchant from a rural backwater could have produced the most compelling and erudite drama in history.

Countless tenured academics and popular biographers, not to mention the folks who benefit from the billion-dollar tourist trade at Stratford-on-Avon, have a vested interest in casting ridicule on attempts to re-examine the question. Yet doubts about authorship of the plays date back to the eighteenth century, and John Quincy Adams, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Vanessa Redgrave, and Derrick Jacobi are only a few of the literary and theatrical luminaries who have felt that the corm merchant from Avon was not a playwright. (The evidence suggests he could hardly write his name, much less write a play.)

Scholars, too, have weighed in on the question, with J. Thomas Looney presenting the first well-reasoned argument almost a hundred years ago in defense of  Edward DeVere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, as the “real” Shakespeare. In 1984 Charlton Osburn gathered together all the main threads of the argument in his well-written The Mysterious Mr. Shakespeare. The question was given a pop-culture twist not so long ago in the fictionalize film, Anonymous (2010) which brought widespread exposure to the authorship question while also offering further material for academics to ridicule.

Now, in Last Will. andTestament, Lisa Wilson and Laura Wilson Mattias have followed the main threads of the issue in a well-paced 85-minute documentary. The talking-heads format features eminent scholars of the conventional persuasion, including Stanley Wells, as well as tweedy literary types who propose an alternative. The film is enlivened by fifteen minutes of costume-drama footage from Anonymous, scattered here and there, and the musings of Redgrave, Jacobi, and Mark Rylance (former artistic director of the Globe Theater in London) on behalf of DeVere certainly add to the sparkle.

The Wilson sisters have done a good job of avoiding most of the highly speculative detours and subplots to which Oxfordians are sometimes prone. What we are left with, in a nutshell, is this: There is no contemporary evidence linking the man from Stratford with the plays of Shake-speare (as it most often appeared at the time). Nothing about his life is interesting. And neither Wells nor any the other Stratfordian scholars involved have any real evidence to bring forth in defense of their candidate—except tradition.

The second half of the film examines the life of Edward DeVere, which makes a far better story, questions of authorship aside, than the "must-have-done" and "probably-went"s that pepper the official story . He translated Ovid (Shakespeare’s favorite Roman poet) at 13, and was captured by pirates and left for dead on an island. (So was Hamlet, you may recall.) He was raised by a domineering guardian of Polonian fatuousness, spent a good deal of time in Italy, owned the Globe Theater, was considered by many as the heir apparent to Queen Elizabeth—and even signed his name as such without being hauled in on charges of treason.(Why not?)

The film will make its official premier in Austin in a week or two, and it will be available on pay per view soon afterward. Meanwhile, you can study up on the pros and cons of the Oxfordian position on Wikipedia. Seeing this choice little film, made by two former Minneapolitans, is sure to whet your appetite for more.

    

Edward DeVere for Me

I had a pass to see a sneak of the new Shakespeare movie, Anonymous, but our Happy Hour ran on too long, got a little too happy, and besides, the ramps at the West End Kerasote complex are a mess. The film fleshes out, in more ways than one, the increasingly popular notion that Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, actually wrote the plays we now associate with the Bard of Stratford.

I read a few of the early reviews, which were generally unfavorable. I’m not surprised. But along with the reviews, there has also been a steady dribble of condescending ink being spilled about how absurd it is even to suggest that the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays might still be in question.

I think it ought to be more widely known that there is very little evidence to suggest that the man from Stratford with whom many of us associate the plays actually wrote them…or anything else. In fact, every bit of genuine documentary evidence we have about the man could probably be listed in a three-page Word document. Much of the biography that academics take as established fact will be seen, on closer inspection, to have been largely spun from whole cloth and then transformed in time from supposition to unassailable truth. At a famous inquiry at the Folger library in 1949, one scholar was asked to present a single bit of documentary evidence from the playwright’s own time linking the man from Stratford to the authorship of the plays. After a good deal of hemming and hawing, he admitted he could not. And unlike other playwrights and scholars of the Elizabethan era, not a single one of the books he owned (if he owned any) has ever been unearthed. Strange.

This is a tiny bit of one side of the argument put forth by the Oxfordians: We know almost nothing about the man from Stratford, though millions of hours of research have been extended in search of it. On the other side of the coin, the Oxfordians point out that the correlations between the life of Edward De Vere and the plot of Hamlet, for example, are far too uncanny to be ascribed to coincidence.

Anyone who’s interested in the details can take a look at the Wikipedia article about the Oxfordian theory. The only point I’m trying to make here is that the Oxfordians are far from being the crack-pots we read about in the newspapers. Not all of them, at any rate. No less eminent a Shakespearean interpreter than Derek Jacobi stands among them. In particular, the patient, painstaking, and well-reasoned book by Charlton Osburn, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, spells out the arguments honestly and in masterly detail.

Aside from all that, my discovery of DeVere solved another problem for me. I could never understand why all the books I’d tried to read about the Man from Stratford were so boring. It’s because they’re full of speculative nonsense. “He must have walked along this….” Or “We can presume he sold his shares in the manner of…..” The man from Stratford was himself, as far as we know, very boring.

No one ever said that about Edward DeVere.

A Doll's House

The Guthrie is staging Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in an adaptation by Chicago playwright Rebecca Gilman. We went. It’s a mildly engaging play to watch, scene by scene, but the characters are shallow, they never really develop, and in the end the pieces don’t add up to much.

The one thing everyone remembers about Ibsen’s play is that the heroine, Nora, leaves her husband—a shocking event to many audience-goers when the play was first produced in 1879. That event has become almost a commonplace, of course, yet unfortunately Gilman has failed to find any contemporary turn of events to generate the same effect. In fact, through most of the play the heroine, Nora, is portrayed as so ditzy and irresponsible that when she does decide to leave her husband, it seems like yet one more irrational lurch of a personality that’s been out of control for decades. The references to Enron, Star Trek, Flashdance, Target, and Madonna elicit chuckles from the crowd, but the overall impression I got from watching the play is that Gilman thinks people nowadays are far more superficial than they were in Ibsen’s time.

Considered in another light, the play could be taken as yet one more example of the errant notion (which has been a core tenet of “high art” for decades) that there’s something aesthetically interesting in exposing the rampant materialism of “modern culture.”

We do hear echoes here and there of the moral dilemmas that interested Ibsen. For example, Nora borrows money to pay for her husband’s rehab (a good act) but doesn’t tell her husband of its shady origins, nor of the extra ten grand she tacked on to feed her mania for interior decorating (a bad act). But the characters lack the nuance and gravity to bring these complexities home and in the end they remain dramaturgical props rather than compelling realities on stage.

All the same, it can be fun to go to the Guthrie, especially in the midst of the blinding thunderstorms that passed through the city last night. We had the pleasure of picnicking with friends before the performance in an open-air gazebo on Boom Island. (The sandwiches from Be’wiched Deli were outstanding.)

The lingering effects of the storm made themselves felt this morning, when Hilary went down to switch the laundry and found the basement floor covered with water. After she’d gone to work I got the Wetvac out, moving cardboard boxes aside, shifting old picture frames here and there, disposing of manuscripts that I turned into books years ago. Such expeditions into the heart of the basement are also expeditions into the past, of course, and there was an element of nostalgia bordering on sadness as I contemplated various hobbies that have long since gone by the wayside. Here the bright lights for the Super-8 movie camera, there the plastic containers of fabric dye for the quilts Hilary used to make. Under the stairs sits the carboy I used for making my one and only batch of red wine decades ago. And look! A box of plastic margarita glasses in the shape of saguaro cactuses. A journal of a trip to Greece, the pages now pretty well fused into a single lump. A black-and-white wash drawing of a dilapidated barn that I did as a freshman in college. A backgammon board my brother gave me years ago. A turntable, a very large box of tape cassettes, some 45s from my teen years (including the Beach Boys, the Yardbirds, the Dovells, and Doris Troy!), a squash racquet (wooden), some snowshoes (wooden), a parallelograph (look it up), and a stove-top waffle iron. And that’s to say nothing about the paint cans, the potter’s wheel, or all the books.

It’s been an interesting life. Nothing very dramatic about it, but (with all due respect) it seems far richer to me, even soaking wet, than anything I saw on the Guthrie stage last night.

Ibsen in Lanesboro

Many adults carry an image in the back of their minds of a place—a beautiful place—that’s semi-rural, attractive, calm, slow-paced, and neighborly… and they’re going to move there someday. But it can’t be inhabited by farmers, penny-pinching shopkeepers out of a Balzac novel, Bible-thumping conservatives, and other assorted hicks. No, it must also display breeding and intelligence. An artist’s colony, if you will. Yet rooted and organic. The kind of town we saw in the TV series Northern Exposure, where the local DJ was an ex-con who spouted Kierkegaard.

For myself, I love the city. But I also love to head out into the countryside. And on a spring weekend, with the wildflowers sprouting and the birds heading north up the Mississippi, there can be no better destination than Lanesboro, Minnesota, a beautiful town tucked beneath the cliffs with the Root River flowing through it and a community theater that’s far better than average for a town of 778 souls.

The Commonweal Theatre has held an Ibsen festival annually for the last fourteen years, and we had arranged to see this year’s offering, John Gabriel Bjorkman. I’d never heard of that play, and now that I’ve seen it, I can see why. I’m not saying it was bad. I found it interesting and entertaining and sometimes dramatic. But how many plays by Ibsen do we really need to keep afloat?

We stayed at the Scandinavian Inn B & B, ate dinner at the Peddle Pusher Café, and attended the pre-performance art lecture catered by Kari’s Scandinavian Restaurant. (The restaurant itself, which adjoins the theater, was packed with professors from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and their spouses, who’d come up to see the show.)

In an effort to enhance the play’s “relevance,” the accompanying literature stressed the greed of the title character, who ruins the lives of countless investors in his struggle for wealth and power, but this emphasis misses the point of the play entirely. John Gabriel Bjorkman wasn’t a greedy man. He had no interest in money per se. No, Bjorkman was a visionary and a megalomaniac, who felt that only he had the wherewithal to harness all the mining, shipping, railroad, and manufacturing potential of Norway. To generate the required capital would require some creative (and fraudulent) bookkeeping. The play deals with the aftermath of the collapse of Bjorkman’s schemes and his lingering effect on the several women who were attracted to his charismatic energy but subsequently cast aside in one way or another as he relentlessly pursued his dream of industrial mastery. Simple greed never figures into the story.


In the title role, artistic director Hal Cropp nails the character of Bjorkman, with his seething energy and utter obliviousness to the effect his schemes have had on other people. Adrienne Sweeney is also very effective as the long-suffering sister-in-law and former lover, who, to complicate matters, also served as a surrogate mother to Bjorkman’s son for many years. David Hennessey plays Sancho Panza to Bjorkman’s Quixote with true sensitivity and poetry, and is certainly the most likable character in the play—and probably the wisest. The one weak link in the cast is Siobhan Maya Bremer, who (unfortunately) plays the central role of Bjorkman’s embittered wife. Her portrayal is wooden, her delivery flat and harsh, her understanding of the role skin-deep. It may be that she is simply too young to play the part of a woman who’s been shamed by both her husband and her sister and all but abandoned by her son.


The next morning we chatted with the Amish women selling quilts and baskets in the town park—their horses were tethered in the woods nearby—and then dropped in briefly at the Sons of Norway Hall where people in colorful vests were exhibiting their woodcarvings and rosemaling. We skipped the documentary film about Bernie Madoff and the lecture “Confronting the Temptations of Greed, Money, and Power in Our Society” and went bird-watching at nearby Forestville State Park. The rue anemones were in bloom, and also the Virginia bluebells. The stream was dotted here and there with fishermen in waders, and the local trout society was giving lectures in the pavilian on sink holes and Oneota limestone. But the only warbler we saw was the myrtle. Not a bad bird. But always the first warbler, undistinguished, arriving in droves...

Theatre Pro Rata

I’d never heard of Theatre Pro Rata. I didn’t know where it was or who was in the company. I went because I wanted to see the play. Is that so strange?

The play in question being The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Or so they say. No one really knows who wrote it. The play has been described as the first Elizabethan tragedy, which seems ridiculous, considering how murky the chronology of the era is. It dates from the early 1590s, though the evidence is scanty. Yet in 1589 Thomas Nashe was writing: “Yet English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences…; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets of tragical speeches.” Such remarks (and there are others) discomfit Shakespeare scholars who like to date Hamlet to 1601. So while some speculate that The Spanish Tragedy might have been a source for Hamlet, it could just as well have been the other way around. In any event, few dispute that the Elizabethans revived the tragedy as a theatrical form, which had been moribund since Roman times, and The Spanish Tragedy is a classic example of the genre: It seemed like something I ought to see.

The theatre itself (The Gremlin Theatre) is located near the corner of Raymond and University, in the vicinity of the Raymond Gallery, Jay’s Café, and Blue Moon Studio. There’s a pet store down the street where you can buy large snakes and perhaps even an iguana. The tickets are on a sliding scale from $14 to $41, and when you hand them a twenty they’re courteous enough to ask if you want change.

I arrived late due to an accident near the Lowry tunnel, and though I had a copy of Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born in my pocket, I stepped into the theatre just a moment before the curtain rose. (There is no curtain, but you know what I mean.) It looked to be a young crowd, many of them theater students and friends of cast-members, no doubt; the three post-adolescents seated directly behind me were actors or technical people who kept up a constant stream of anecdotal theater-chatter as I hastily scanned the program, looking for I know not what. I was thankful that one of the trio had been resting his foot on the back of the seat directly in front of him since he arrived, attempting to preserve his sight-line, and thus inadvertently keeping it open for me. It was a good seat.

As for the play itself, it took a little while to build up a head of steam. The actors were all fairly young and for the most part their voices were not commanding, even in such a small theatre space. To be fair, it isn’t easy for a bunch of twenty-somethings to generate atmosphere when they have to stand around in economical costumes during the opening scene of a play pretending to be seasoned warriors and diplomats, delivering lines like “Tell us about the battle,” nodding at one another and illustrating military stratagems with dominoes. (I saw the Guthrie production of Macbeth recently, and though the costumes were better and the voices deeper, it had the same problem in the early going—bringing gravity and authenticity to the small-talk of kings and courtiers that we’ve only just met. The Guthrie production benefited from an elaborate ten-minute battle-sequence with soldiers descending on ropes wielding machine guns before the play got going.) But as the play wore on, we got to know everyone, their parts became richer, and it seemed that they themselves could feel the thinness disappear. Of special note were Keith Prusak as the noble Hieronimo and Clarence Wethern as the conniving Lorenzo. Valerie Rigsbie was also top-flight from beginning to end, in several parts, though it seemed she had been dropped in from a different century.

The story of The Spanish Tragedy is complex enough to get lost in, which is good. I won’t describe it in detail. A ghost and his companion, Revenge, are lurking in the shadows throughout, and though it seems they could easily have been dispensed with, then we wouldn’t really have been seeing the play. Besides, the ghost has fine soliloquies at both ends of the drama and his leering presence does add to the strangeness of the proceedings.

Meanwhile, the focus of the play changes midway, shifting from the amours of Bel-Imperia (who loves Horatio) and the machinations of her brother Lorenzo (who prefers the noble Portuguese captive Balthazar to be her husband) to the grief and rage of Horatio’s father Hieronimo following the murder of his son. The play has a mad scene, a feigned mad scene, a play-within-a-play, a ghost, and (as I mentioned) a character named Horatio, all of which may remind us of Hamlet—although these elements are not arranged in the same way, nor do they serve the same purposes. It also has beautiful lines we wish we could remember, but won’t, because, unlike Hamlet, we haven’t seen the play ten times. For example, at one point, after hiring an underling to commit a murder and then arranging for the woman to be caught in the act, Lorenzo (who has already arranged for Horatio’s murder) offers a chilling defense of his actions.

Thus must we work that will avoid distrust;
Thus must we practice to prevent mishap,
And thus one ill another must expulse.
This sly enquiry of Hieronimo
For Bel-imperia breeds suspicion,
And this suspicion bodes a further ill.
As for myself, I know my secret fault,
And so do they; but I have dealt for them.
They that for coin their souls endangered,
To save my life, for coin shall venture theirs:
And better it's that base companions die,
Than by their life to hazard our good haps.
Nor shall they live, for me to fear their faith:
I'll trust myself, myself shall be my friend;
For die they shall, slaves are ordained to no other end.

In the end, The Spanish Tragedy is simpler and more direct than Hamlet, in both speech and action, which is both a good and a bad thing. I think it might have benefitted from a few yards of scarlet cloth to simulate all the blood. And the first act might have been more intelligible had it been made clearer that Lorenzo’s preference for Balthazar over Horatio had a class basis. (But I probably just missed something.) Considered on its own terms, The Spanish Tragedy is a rollicking good time, with romance, suspicion, nobility and knavery, shootings, hangings, knifings, and six dead bodies on the stage as the final curtain drops. (There is no curtain, but you know what I mean.)

I spoke with artistic director Carin Bratlie at intermission, and she mused whether this production might be a regional premier. We can be thankful that Theatre Pro Rata took on the challenge, and made such a rousing success of it.

Now I almost wish I hadn’t asked for change.

Out Damned Spot!

Joe Dowling’s new production of Macbeth at the Guthrie, with its trim yet evocative sets, breakneck pace, talented cast, and avoidance of dramaturgical foofarah, remains riveting from beginning to end. Young Eric Heger’s Macbeth impresses us with his valor, his ambition, and also his conscience in the early going, and Michelle O'Neill as Lady Macbeth is deliciously ruthless in a strangely modern way. (Maybe it’s the shiny red dress.) The fumbling awkwardness leading up to Duncan’s murder (off-stage) is painful to watch … and everything’s downhill from there, of course.

Meanwhile, Bill McCallum plays the loyal sidekick Banquo to perfection; the murder scenes involving children drive you to the point of squeamishness and alarm—which they’re designed to. The tension between a large number of people trying to act normal and a few headstrong individuals following through with the ghastly logic of their ill-fated deviation from the norms of hospitality remains strong almost to the end.

The weakest parts of the play involve the three weird sisters. They don’t jibe well with the mid-twentieth century dress and there’s no bubbling cauldron anywhere in sight. (Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen Barbara Bryne and Isabel Monk in a few too many productions.)

The usher greats you at the door as you enter with: “The play is 2 hours and 9 minutes long, and there’s no intermission.” In other words, it will be like sitting through a medium-length movie, a little harder to hear, perhaps, but with much richer language.

Home, we pull out the play and begin to reread the lines…