City on Stage

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No dainty kid glove affair

February 3, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

I wound up today’s lecture on the varieties of 19th-century NYC theater with a long quote from one critic’s recollection of the opening of A Glance at New York, the play that made Mose the Bowery B’hoy a household name, made b’hoy red-flannel fashion an instant craze, and launched Mose’s career in American folklore. The account of opening night comes from William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851), a theater history of the preceding 15 years, published only three years after Glance’s debut and two years after the notorious riots at the Astor Place Opera House. Northall recalls A Glance at New York’s impact on the venue in which it premiered, the Olympic Theater, and on New York’s theater scene in general:

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could resist the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. …

The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

Northall’s account differs slightly from the apocryphal but widely circulated story of Mose’s first appearance on the stage, in which an audience of rapt workingmen break into uproarious approbation on seeing one of their own stride on stage. Instead, he offers a story of a Bowery audience’s take-over of a respectable theater. Bowery audiences had already controlled their own theater spaces — most notably the Bowery Theater itself — for more than a decade. Though city officials hoped the Bowery Theater would help gentrify the neighborhood and provide civilizing social uplift for poorer patrons, they misjudged, and working-class audiences made that space their own, to the dismay of some officials and elite onlookers.

The growing class divisions to which Northall nods weren’t merely confined to theater spaces. Class-based riots erupted throughout the 1830s and 40s. But the theater became a special site for wearing your class politics on your sleeve: literally, in the sense of fashion and taste. B’hoys soaped their locks and dressed like Mose, promenading on the Bowery; the genteel set daintily applauded the construction of the Astor Place Opera House (pictured), a new spot for refined entertainment, built at the head of Lafayette, a street created expressly for the purposes of exclusive real estate. (The new street also bisected an old entertainment spot, Vauxhall Gardens, where Glance at New York concludes.)

In spite of the rosy cross-class friendships at the end of Glance, the class tensions in these plays—and the competing styles of masculine behavior among audiences—would culminate in one of the most famous episodes in New York theater history: the Astor Place riots of May 1849, only a year after Glance premiered at the Olympic and three after Fashion played to friendly audiences at the genteel Park.

The riots, which have been written about by dozens of historians (most recently Nigel Cliff, whose book I haven’t yet managed to read) were the culmination of an ongoing rivalry between two leading Shakespearean actors. William Charles Macready was an Englishman, Edwin Forrest an American. The two had different acting styles that appealed to different audiences. Macready was refined, aristocratic, and appealed to wealthy, genteel New Yorkers: the Park set. Forrest typified the Bowery style: rough, forceful, and patriotic. He was something of a teen idol for the Bowery B’hoys. Philip Hone—the mayor who had dedicated the Bowery in 1826—considered Forrest “a vulgar, arrogant loafer, with a pack of kindred rowdies at his heels.”

The two actors had a longstanding feud. Forrest had toured England to poor reviews, which he blamed on Macready. He struck back by hissing Macready during a performance of Hamlet. British newspapers came down hard on Forrest, who defended himself, in true Bowery fashion, by asserting his right as an audience member to express his dramatic criticism on the spot.

In May 1849, the two actors performed in New York in competing performances of Macbeth. Forrest took a dig at Macready by emphasizing Macbeth’s line, “What purgative drug will scour these English hence?” This led to several minutes of sustained applause from his audience. The same night, Macready performed at the two-year-old Astor Place Opera House, whose dress code included white kid gloves for gentlemen, a detail that particularly pissed off the b’hoys. Forrest’s friends and fans still managed to infiltrate the opera house and showered Macready with vegetables, glass bottles, and chairs during his performance. The pit and gallery from one house, in essence, had taken over another that belonged to a higher class. In other words, the whole city had become a theater like the one Irving’s Jonathan Oldstyle had portrayed earlier in the century.

At his next performance, nearly 15,000 people gathered outside the Opera House, most of them spectators. Inside, the crowd again showered Macready with eggs and tomatoes. Outside, the crowd began to throw bricks through windows and tried to break down the theater doors, which had been barricaded. The militia fired into the crowd, killing over 20 and wounding over 100 others. It was the first time American militia had fired on American citizens.

86 people were arrested. They were primarily workingmen, many of them butchers, like Mose. The papers picked up on the class politics and framed the event as stemming from working class resentment against “aristocratizing the pit.” The episode allows us to see how theater politics were one manifestation of larger public issues, and how they fed into larger public issues as well.

More on the response to the riots by writers including Irving and Melville sometime next week.

My quick account of the riots here is cobbled from a lot of sources: the longstanding classic is Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot (1958). Philip Hone’s account, quoted above, is reprinted in Phillip Lopate’s anthology Writing New York. The title of this post comes from Walt Whitman’s recollections of the Bowery Theater in “The Old Bowery” (1892).

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Lost Lounge by Split Britches

December 15, 2009 in City on Stage by Cyrus | No comments

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Split Britches: Peggy Shaw (top), Harriet Weaver

One of the theater troupes featured in “Staging Lesbian and Gay New York,” Robin Bernstein’s contribution to our forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City, is Split Britches. Bernstein recounts how Lois Weaver, a non-Native member of the Native American company Spiderwoman Theater, “fell in love with Peggy Shaw, a butch lesbian member of [the troupe] Hot Peaches.” According to Bernstein:

Shaw left Hot Peaches to join Spiderwoman for Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images 16 (1979), but soon Shaw and Weaver both left Spiderwoman to strike out on their own. The ensuing personal and professional partnership between Shaw and Weaver became one of the most fecund in New York’s theater history. In 1980, the two collaborated on WOW (Women’s One World), an international women’s theater festival that was staged in the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place. The tremendous success of that festival, which included thirty-six performances fro 1 m eight countries, led to the founding of the WOW Café, a permanent East Village theater space that continues to foster innovative theater.

Shaw and Weaver would eventually join forces with Pam Verge, Naja Beye, and Deb Margolin to create Split Britches, which, Bernstein writes, “combined a Spiderwoman-inspired sense of free-associative play and raunchy humor with a sexy, campy centering of butch-femme and “eclectic combinations of fastidious attention to realistic detail with bizarre flights of surrealistic fantasy. Split Britches innovated a method of playwriting rooted in fantasy, desire, and improvisation.”

Shaw and Weaver are performing their latest play, Lost Lounge, right now at Dixon Place (161A Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Delancey). According to their promotional materials, the show is a “tribute to the people who hold out and to the places they gather to sift through what is lost and found when delicate memory is confronted with hard won progress.”

Remaining shows are Wed. – Sat., December 16, 17, 18, 19 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 for seniors and students.

Time Out recently featured an interview with Weaver, in which she describes the pair’s technique: “What we do is we take the perspective of a lesbian as a given, and then we think and talk about other things.” In the case of Lost Lounge, that means exploring how “memory is tied up with landscape, and what happens when you lose your landscape—how identity is tied into place and how it feels like we’re losing part of our identity by losing those places.” The place Weaver has in mind is the East Village. No wonder EV Grieve featured a post about the show!

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Under the Gaslight

November 24, 2009 in City on Stage by Bryan | 1 comment

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Here are three reasons New York history buffs should be rejoicing that Metropolitan Playhouse is reviving Augustin Daly’s sensational melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867):

1. It’s the play that defined “sensation” for the New York stage. The debut run, at the Worrell Sisters’ New York Theatre, Broadway at Waverly Place, saw 47 performances. The signal moment — the original train-tracks rescue — originally aimed for extraordinary realism. In “sensation plays” from the Victorian era, audiences hoped to be transfixed by a single, sublime moment on stage: a fire scene, a shipwreck, a volcano erupting. I’m eager to see how this defining element of the genre translates into the Metropolitan’s much more intimate space. I doubt we’ll see a train rush by; I’m hoping to be caught up in the moment nonetheless.

Under_the_Gaslight-Poster-cepia-Resized.jpgPlus a train-tracks bonus: in this protoype for the melodramatic rescue scene, it’s a worthy, lower-class man tied to the tracks, only to be rescued by our heroine, who appears lower-class but is really of aristocratic blood. And virtuous! (Probably because she thinks she’s low-born.)

2. It’s a great “City on Stage” play, one I write about in my chapter in our Cambridge Companion (forthcoming next spring, as we’ve reminded our readers repeatedly). Daly was a major figure in 19c New York theater (and eventually in London) — both as a playwright and as a manager. Gaslight offers a terrific look at class-issues in the years just following the Civil War. Its settings include Delmonico’s and country estates on Long Island, and though it never questions the equation of money and virtue — the truly virtuous are those most deserving of wealth — it does seem to target the brutality of the upper classes, suggesting that not everyone born into wealth deserves it. Upper-class society is compared, by one character, to a pack of Siberian wolves. It’s kind of Gossip Girl for the nineteenth-century stage; the heroine would be the equivalent of Dan Humphrey in drag. That is, the play both revels in the lavish life of the upper-classes and offers a set of qualified critiques.

3. Fans of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) will remember that the heroine got her start on stage in a community production of this play, out in the mid-western hinterlands of Chicago. The narrator refers to it as “Augustin Daly’s famous production, which had worn from a great public success down to an amateur theatrical favourite, with many of the troublesome accessories cut out and the dramatis personae reduced to the smallest possible number.” The Metropolitan’s version, then, may be more akin to the regional production Carrie starred in than to Daly’s original (with all the “accessories”), but I’m confident the crew the Metropolitan has assembled, including Amanda Jones (who sparkled in The Contrast), will outstrip a late-nineteenth-century Chicago Elk’s Lodge by miles.

The play is in previews at the Metropolitan through the end of this week; opening night’s the 28th. It runs through December 10. Cyrus and I (and our colleague Tom Augst) have tickets for Sunday afternoon, Dec. 6, if you’d like to join us. I’ll be sure to report back, though by that point only a few performances will remain.

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More Thoughts on Metropolitan Playhouse’s The Contrast

October 12, 2009 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

The-Contrast.jpgRoyall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), currently on stage at Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village, is best known to literary historians and theater buffs as the first play by an American writer to be professionally staged. Written by a young New Englander who was visiting New York City on government business, the comedy of manners sets up several contrasts: between the new nation and the mother country, between country and city, between New England and New York.

Critics commonly treat the play as a brief for Revolutionary republicanism: an attack on British “luxury” as effeminizing and a plea for young Americans to cultivate homespun virtues, fashion, and
entertainment. In making such arguments, the play would seem divided against itself, since the theater itself was taken by some old-guard republicans to be one of the chief European vices that needed to be stamped out.

During the Revolution, the Continental Congress outlawed all “shews, plays, and other expensive diversions.” New York’s major theater troupe, the American Company, most of whom were natives of Great Britain, left for the British West Indies, where they stayed for eight years, waiting out the war. The British, who eventually came to occupy New York City
for the duration of the Revolution, continued to sponsor amateur theatricals (with British soldiers staging plays of their own). When the American Company returned following the evacuation of the British, the New York City council denounced them for performing “while so great a part of this city still lies in ruins, and many of the citizens continue to be pressed with the distresses brought on them in consequence of the late war.”
Tyler, whose native Boston would not legalize the theater until 1794, was treading a thin line in writing for the stage.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that The Contrast is so preoccupied with theater conventions themselves. The play mines the idea of theatrum mundi–”all the world’s a stage,” in Shakespeare’s formulation–to its fullest comic potential in a series of situations in which the play comments on the conventions of the theater itself and draws extended comparisons of society to stage acting. The most exemplary of these moments involves the prototypical “Stage Yankee,” Jonathan, a country bumpkin from Massachusetts in town as an attendant to the Revolutionary War officer Colonel Manly.

Jonathan explores the city in company with two local servants, Jessamy and Jenny, while Manly finds himself caught up in a seduction plot involving his sister, Charlotte, and then falls in love himself with Maria, a novel-reading sentimentalist who’s become dissatisfied with Billy Dimple, the affected fool her father wants her to marry. While the romance plots and subplots unfold among the upper-class characters, the unsophisticated Jonathan — played to full comic effect at the Metropolitan by Brad Frazier — accidentally finds himself in New York’s John Street Theater, the very theater in which The Contrast premiered. Jonathan mistakes the playhouse, though, for a church — unwitting commentary on similarities between stage and pulpit — and when the curtain goes up, he assumes he’s somehow peeping on the family living next door. When Jessamy and Jenny ask him later for details about what he saw, his confusion is apparent: “Why, I vow they were pretty much like other families,” he says of the people he saw on stage. “[T]here was a poor, good-natured, curse of a husband, and a sad rantipole of a wife.” He goes on to offer details that would make it clear to Jonathan’s audiences, on stage and off, that he was describing a performance of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s extraordinarily popular play, The School for Scandal (1777), along with John O’Keefe’s The Poor Soldier (1783), both British imports. The actor who originally played Jonathan even winds up commenting on what would have been his prior performance in the latter, in some stuttered lines about “Darby Wagall,” a conflation of role and actor.

Though audiences today need program notes or footnotes to make sense of some of these references, Tyler’s initial audience would not have, which is precisely the point and the source of Tyler’s humor. The inside joke does depend, however, on the audience’s refusal
to suspend its disbelief, or to differentiate between the theater and real life–on its ability, that is, to see the actor and his character on stage at the same time. (At the Metropolitan, director Alex Roe has his actors interact directly with audience members, making plain that they are implicated in the play’s social satire.) The line between stage and “real life” has been stretched precariously thin; this idea would become a staple in theatrical representations of New York over the coming century.

Jonathan’s experience at the theater helps us see one of the many “contrasts” the play stages: between a sophisticated theater audience (represented on stage by Dimple, Jessamy, and Jenny) and a bumbling rube, Jonathan, the intellectual and cultural victim of the theater’s ignorant opponents. What does it mean, then, that the play aligns its own knowing audience–the people who understand the jokes–with derided characters like Dimple and Jessamy, who go to the theater only to turn their backs on the
performers and watch elite women in the boxes “play the fine woman to perfection”?

LetCharweb.jpgTo the extent that Jonathan represents audience members he is a rather poor and unsophisticated one here and elsewhere. Jonathan continually misreads the city, assuming that Jessamy is a member of congress, that a theater and a brothel are both churches, that the theater’s stage is a neighbor’s house, and that a prostitute is a deacon’s daughter.
But Jonathan does get something fundamentally right about the theater’s relationship to life: that the theater is like life in some ways. If his peep into the “neighbor’s household” convinces him that Sheridan’s characters are essentially like any other family, the observation implies that most members of society are caught up in various kinds of performance themselves. The Contrast’s opening scene makes much the same point, in Charlotte Manly’s account of a walk on the Battery, at the bottom of Broadway, before an audience of admiring soldiers and beaux. Broadway, which ran close to the sites of both the John Street and the Park Theatres, from very early on was the site of fashionable promenades, becoming a contested territory in the nineteenth century as multiple social groups wanted to display their taste.
Tyler, poking fun at such pretension, makes visible something that would remain
a part of New York’s characterization as a city all the way to the present: the
popular conflation of the city with the theater itself.

Tyler’s play shows how manners or politeness help institutionalize divisions based on
class, sex, and race. For Tyler, social theatricality poses a problem, to be sure, but most particularly when members of the servant class seek to climb above their stations. We are to understand it as dangerous, for instance, when Jessamy recites Lord Chesterfield’s advice (from his oft-reprinted if controversial Letters to His Son) on how to behave in polite society. Even Jonathan, whose rural simplicity is sometimes understood as “native worth,” is marked as an outsider to metropolitan manners and, in the process, kept in a lower-class position. Two virtues, as it were, for the price of one. At the same time, Manly’s ability to perform his role as a natural aristocrat and to
appear artless and sincere while doing so offers just one example of the cultural work such a play could perform in the name of patriotism. The Contrast’s conclusion–the promise of a wedding between New England and New York landed gentry, all done by Federal authority and isolationist rhetoric–leaves those who can’t comprehend theatrical and social cues (or who can’t afford to pay to learn them) out in the cold.

DimpleManly1web.jpgMuch of what I’ve just written seems positively sterile in the face of the vibrant, humorous staging of the play at the Metropolitan. This production keeps its emphasis on the satire of urban social mores in ways that make the play seem incredibly contemporary rather than a period piece. (In fact, I couldn’t stop comparing it to the TV teen drama Gossip Girl in its relentless satirization of New York’s moneyed classes, whether they be openly vacuous or self-righteously unmaterialistic and moral.) The decision to have the cast appear in tanktops and rather plain skirts and pants (with the exception of the clownish Jonathan, who appears in pajama pants) calls attention to the play’s critique of fashion in ways that quaint period clothing simply could not have done. But the biggest surprise for me, having read and taught the play a dozen times, was how thoroughly unprepared I was for the play’s rich and constant humor. Cold War critics, this production suggests, were completely snookered by Colonel Manly’s patriotic platitudes. He seemed boring or priggish, sure, but no one really talked about him as the object of Tyler’s satire in the same way Tyler was clearly sending up the Anglophile fops and coquettes, Dimple and Charlotte, or the class-climbing servants, Jessamy and Jenny. But in this production — and I suspect in the original as well — Manly and his sentimental counterpart Maria are shown to be as much the objects of Tyler’s satire as anyone else in the play. Manly’s declamations (as delivered by Rob Skolits) are meant to ring hollow and self-serving — to the point of hilarity, given his inability to see his own blind devotion to republican cliche. Maria Silverman’s performance as Maria leaves no doubt (from her first entrance singing a popular tune about a stoic Indian chief — her model of manly behavior) that Tyler was lampooning her rather than making her a virtuous alternative to the foolish, fashion-obsessed Charlotte, played pitch-perfect by Metropolitan veteran Amanda Jones.

The Metropolitan’s cast and director have unlocked a hilarious streak in this play too long overlooked by literary scholars. They’ve changed the way I will read and teach it in the future. This is a rare opportunity to see a piece of American and New York City theater history brought to new life in a way that doesn’t feel stuffy and dated. I can’t recommend enough that you get out and see it before it ends November 1.

More on The Contrast and New York history at Inside the Apple.

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Royall Tyler’s The Contrast at Metropolitan Playhouse

October 9, 2009 in City on Stage by Bryan | 1 comment

JonDanceweb.jpgOur good friends at the Metropolitan Playhouse have mounted a brilliantly directed production of Royall Tyler’s 1787 play The Contrast — the first play by an American playwright to be staged by a professional company. It debuted at the John Street Theater downtown, the city’s principal theater prior to the opening of the Park in 1798.

I’ll have more to write about the play and its significance — and about this staging — later. For now I’ll just say that the folks at Metropolitan have found much more humor in the play than I’ve ever read there, having taught it a dozen times and written about it in my contribution to our forthcoming Companion. Lines I never noticed before are side-splitting. The main performances are outstanding. So mind the main chance: get out an see it. It’s a rare treat to have the opportunity.

If you’re inclined to listen to me ramble about it, I’ll be talking with the audience following the matinee this Sunday. Info on tickets here.

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Leaves of Grass Unbound (and Uncovered)

August 18, 2009 in City on Stage by Cyrus | No comments

leavesOG.jpgWe’ve just heard about what promises to be an eye-opening stage adaptation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It’s playing at the cell, a theater space located at 338 West 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

You can find out more at http://www.leavesunbound.com, which describes the show as “chamber theater meets dance theater meets congregation meets celebration — without irony or clothing.” Yep, that’s right: the chorus performs in the nude. According to the director, Jeremy Bloom, the production “celebrates
the bare human form as an intersection of nature and industry.”

Leaves of Grass continues through August 29, with performances Thursday through Monday at 8:00 p.m. and additional performances at 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Running time is about an hour. 

The video below will give you a sense of what the show is like.

Twelve Hours for Twelfth Night

July 18, 2009 in City on Stage by Cyrus | 2 comments

shakespeare_park_2009.gifLast weekend, I waited for twelve hours, first outside and then inside Central Park, for tickets to see the final performance of the Public Theater’s production of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte Theater, featuring Anne Hathaway in the role of Viola. Like many people, I’d put off going to wait on line because of the rainy weather in June, and I’d had no luck with the “Virtual Line” — an online lottery in which (I’m told) about 50 tickets are distributed to each performance. Last year, the friend with whom I typically go see Shakespeare in the Park actually received tickets to see Hair via the “vline” (alas, on a night I couldn’t make it), but generally speaking the odds are ridiculously slim.

I was thwarted twice earlier in the week in my attempts to get on line. On Wednesday, I arrived at about 7:00; the line stretched inside the park from the Delacorte up to the equivalent of about 4 blocks north, making the chances of receiving tickets remote if you were just joining the line. And when a park worker decided to force people to move at the end of the line, which had snaked around onto the bridle path, the ensuing chaos led me to give it up for another day.

I returned on Friday, this time at 5:50 a.m. before the park officially opens, and I discovered that people had been waiting on Central Park West outside the park starting in the wee hours of the night. By the time I found the end of the line, it had grown to five blocks long and around into the transverse at 86th Street. In fact, there were so many people that I didn’t manage actually to join the line once it was inside the park: we were told that the line had reached its “legal limit,” and a police cruiser had parked after the last legal person to make sure that no one else could join. Someone near the front of the line had a cardboard sign that read: “Waiting since 11 p.m. last night.” Many of the people in the front of the line didn’t look like they’d be attending the play: there’s been a brisk trade (conducted via Craig’s List and eBay) in line-waiting for the production. When I checked, people were willing to wait on line to procure 2 tickets for the fee of $150.

It became a point of pride for me to get the damn tickets, particularly when I read some Facebook postings from a friend who had seen the production on “a perfect night.” The outdoor Delacorte is a wonderful venue on a beautiful summer night, set as it is in front of a pond with Belvedere Castle looming in the distance.

Just before I set off at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night, I checked online and found a posting from someone who claimed to have gotten on line at 9:30 p.m. and was offering his tickets for $250.

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Even in New York in the Eighties

May 1, 2009 in Books, City on Stage, Teaching by Cyrus | No comments

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Emily the Nurse (Emma Thompson) and Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) in the film adaptation of Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols.

I wanted to share one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America with you. Bryan mentioned it in lecture on Wednesday. It’s the beginning of Part II: Perestroika, Act Four: John Brown’s Body, Scene 6.

It features Prior Walter, one of the play’s protagonists, who is dying of AIDS, his nurse-practitioner Emily, and Hannah, who is . . . well, you’ll see.

Night. Prior, Emily (Prior’s nurse-practitioner) and Hannah in an examination room in St. Vincent’s emergency room. Emily is listening to his breathing, while Hannah sits in a nearby chair.

EMILY:  You’ve lost eight pounds. Eight pounds! I know people who would kill to be in the shape you were in, you were recovering, and you threw it away.

PRIOR: This isn’t about WEIGHT, it’s about LUNGS, UM . . . PNEUMONIA.

EMILY: We don’t know yet.

PRIOR: THE FUCK WE DON’T ASSHOLE YOU MAY NOT BUT I CAN’T BREATHE.

HANNAH: You’d breathe better if you didn’t holler like that.

PRIOR (Looks at Hannah, then): This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother.

(Little pause.)

EMILY: Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.

The scene is an example of the play’s humor, but it also reinforces an important idea that runs throughout the play: the idea of cosmopolitanism.

New York emerges in Kushner’s play as a cosmopolitan space of transformation. It’s all about learning to embrace difference and change. Bryan cited one of my favorite concepts these days, what the philosopher Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination,” in opposition to the idea of cultural purity. Bryan suggested that in a play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the idea of contamination as an inevitable and perhaps even necessary part of cultural change has an even greater force than it might if considered in the abstract.

Here’s what Appiah says about contamination in an article from the New York Times (“The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006), which was adapted from his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006):

Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into
contamination; change is more a gradual transformation from one mixture
to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance
from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural
boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and
values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don’t say that we can’t
change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom
do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative
judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it’s rarely
because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts
and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done – or
what we plan to do – are typically made up after the event,
rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good
deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just
because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we
cannot become accustomed to doing things differently.

Angels in America is all about learning to do things differently, and the play understands the transformative power of conversation. The play, after all, ends with a conversation — or rather two. The first conversation the conversation among four friends who have come together against all odds: Prior, the AIDS survivor; Louis, his ex-lover; Hannah, his ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother; and Belize, a gay African American male nurse who serves as the moral compass of the play. The second conversation is between Prior and us, the audience: it’s the one that ends with the blessing that Bryan cited in a previous post.

And I think it’s important the Prior uses the word “citizens” in the moments before he utters that blessing: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”

What Prior is evoking is the idea of the world-citizen, a fundamental concept for cosmopolitan theory. It’s the idea that each of us has a fundamental obligation to humanity as a whole. The time has come, Prior is telling us, to step up and be cosmopolitan, to be citizens of the world, to take responsibility for the way in which the world spins forward. That, in my reading, is what the play’s final line — “The Great Work Begins.” — ultimately signifies.

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Meryl Streep as Prior’s ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother, Hannah.

We’ll Miss You, Natasha

March 19, 2009 in City on Stage, People by Cyrus | No comments

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Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming in the 1998 revival of Cabaret

I’m in mourning today for Natasha Richardson, who passed away suddenly yesterday after an accident during a ski lesson at Mont Tremblant north of Montreal. She was, as an Associated Press article put it yesterday. “a proper Londoner who came to love the noise of New York.”

I’d been thinking about Richardson lately after seeing a version of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at the Metropolitan Playhouse last fall. I’ll always regret missing the 1993 revival of the play in which she starred along with Liam Neeson, Rip Torn, and Anne Meara. Now more so than ever. (I’m hoping it’s been preserved on videotape at Lincoln Center, so that I can view it for, ahem, research purposes.)

Her performance in the edgy Broadway revival of Cabaret eleven years ago remains a vivid memory. Directed by Sam Mendes and featuring Alan Cumming as the Master of Ceremonies and Ron Rivkin as Herr Schultz, and Denis O’Hare as Ernst Ludwig, the production evoked a sleazier version of Berlin nightlife than more elegant vision in Bob Fosse’s original, marvelously translated onto the screen with Liza Minnelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey. My family and I were fortunate enough to have a stage-side table at the “Kit Kat Club” (Studio 54), and we were riveted. Indeed, my poor father seemed more than a little discomfitted by the fact that the tickling boas and wiggling derrieres of the chorus girls were, well, right in his face.

You can get a sense of the production from this YouTube video of Cumming performing “Wilkommen” at the Tony Awards:

Richardson’s “Sally” was more damaged and fragile than Minnelli’s, a wonderful reinterpretation of the role that made you forget (at least momentarily) Liza’s iconic performance.

Here’s what Ben Brantley had to say about Richardson in his review of the production:

Sally Bowles has just stepped into the spotlight, which is, you
would imagine, her very favorite place to be. Yet this avidly ambitious
chanteuse recoils when the glare hits her, flinching and raising a hand
to shade her face. Wearing the barest of little black dresses and her
eyes shimmering with fever, she looks raw, brutalized and helplessly
exposed. And now she’s going to sing us a song, an anthem to hedonism,
about how life is a cabaret, old chum. She might as well be inviting
you to hell.

Not exactly an upbeat way to tackle a
showstopper, is it? Yet when Natasha Richardson performs the title
number of ”Cabaret,” in the entertaining but preachy revival of the
1966 Kander-Ebb show that opened last night, you’ll probably find
yourself grinning in a way you seldom do at musicals these days. For
what Ms. Richardson does is reclaim and reinvent a show-biz anthem that
is as familiar as Hamlet’s soliloquy.

She hasn’t made the
number her own in the way nightclub performers bring distinctive quirky
readings to standards. Instead, she has given it back to Sally Bowles.
Ms. Richardson, you see, isn’t selling the song; she’s selling the
character. And as she forges ahead with the number, in a defiant,
metallic voice, you can hear the promise of the lyrics tarnishing in
Sally’s mouth. She’s willing herself to believe in them, and all too
clearly losing the battle.

For pleasurable listening, you
would of course do better with Liza Minnelli, who starred in the movie
version. But it is to Ms. Richardson’s infinite credit that you don’t
leave the theater humming the tune to ”Cabaret,” but brooding on the
glimpses it has provided of one woman’s desperation.

He concluded by calling her performance “an electrifying triumph.” You can get a dim sense of Richardson’s Sally from these two recently uploaded YouTube videos:

I had the good fortune to see Richardson again in her next Broadway role, as Anna in

Patrick sMarber’s play Closer, with Anna Friel, Rupert Graves, and Ciarán Hinds. My memories of that production are almost equally vivid, and as a result I’ve never been particularly inclined to see the film version starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen, and Julia Roberts in Richardson’s role.

The last time I saw Richardson was in the role of Blanche Du Bois in the 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Street Car Named Desire. In stark contrast to her Sally, Richardson’s Blanche was glamorous and lovely (Brantley called her “radiant”) — indeed too glamorous and lovely for some who prefer their Blanches faded, ravaged, and completely delusional. Richardson didn’t inhabit the role of Blanche in the way that she inhabited Sally, but it was a thought-provoking and often moving performance that emphasized Blanche’s deep well of sexuality. I always regretted that John C. Reilly was cast as Stanley and then directed to create a character that in many ways was the antithesis of Marlon Brando’s portrayal: Reilly’s Stanley struck me as an iteration of the character he’d played three years earlier on the screen in Chicago, the sad-sack Amos Hart. I love Reilly as an actor, but how marvelous it would have been to see Richardson playing against a Stanley who exuded Brando’s sexual charisma and air of violence.

Richardson’s passing is a great loss to the world of the performing arts. She will be missed.

[The photo at the top of this post is from www.natasha-richardson.org.]

Maggie at the Theater

February 26, 2009 in Books, City on Stage by Bryan | No comments

We spent quite a bit of time on this passage from Stephen Crane’s Maggie in lecture on Wednesday:

Evenings during the week [Pete] took [Maggie] to see plays in
which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of
her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in
pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing
aged strangers from villains.

Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers
swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir
within singing “Joy to the World.” To Maggie and the rest of the
audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they,
like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves
in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition.

The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness
of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the
maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this
individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme
selfishness.

Shady persons in the audience revolted from the
pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and
applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere
admiration for virtue.

The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the
unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with
cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his
whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery
mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.

In the hero’s erratic march from poverty in the first
act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all
the enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which
applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches
of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those
actors who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every
turn by the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most
subtile distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was
immediately aware if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him
accordingly.

The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of
the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and
the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with
tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering.

Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. The theater made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory.

I love his description of Maggie’s desire for some sort of upward mobility, though we’re painfully aware already that her hopes are most likely to be dashed. And so the scene comes to illustrate something of the false promise of consumer society. In lecture, Cyrus talked about this as related to poor folks who vote against their class interests and put Republicans in office — simply on the promise that they, too, may be rich one day, and if they were, they wouldn’t want government overtaxing them. (We’ll see if such attitudes shift once the recession we’re in really settles in. My guess is that more and more voters will come to back plans to tax the wealthy to fund things like universal health care.)

But back to the nineteenth-century city. I’m struck that Maggie’s situation is rather different than the one for middle-class theater-goers a couple decades earlier. For one, the display she’s watching isn’t simply a depiction of working-class triumph over oppression: it’s the promise that the meek will inherit all the wealth the city has to offer. It’s the promise of moving up in the world, not just having one’s virtue vindicated. It strikes me that this is rather different than what middle-class viewers get out of a play like The Poor of New York, by Dion Boucicault, popular from the late 1850s to the 70s. First staged in 1857, in the midst of an economic panic, the play was based closely on a French melodrama from the previous year, The Poor of Paris, and subsequently was staged in London and as elsewhere as The Poor of London, etc. The transportability of the play reminds us that “mysteries of the city” fiction and other peeps into urban underworlds emerged in Paris and London either in advance or around the same time they did in New York. Poe’s story “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” set in Paris, was based on a real New York murder case. Realist fiction, like the rising profession of journalism, aimed to expose what had previously remained in the city’s darkest corners.

A huge gulf separates the middle-class melodrama of The Poor of New York and Maggie, however. Unlike Boucicault, Crane is careful to show the effects of a rising culture of consumption (including the effects of melodrama like Boucicault’s) on the lowest members of society, whereas for Boucicault, the truly poor are members of the middle class who have become disinherited in the economic downturn.

Here’s what I have to say, in my piece for our Cambridge Companion, about that play and another like it, Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (the play that launches Dreiser’s Sister Carrie’s ambition to become an actress at the turn of the century):

Sensation plays contained no direct assault on money or fashion. Rather, the most virtuous are uniformly shown to be deserving of wealth, even if economic misfortune has stripped them of it. The real crime in these plays lies in social cruelty, not inequality. When Laura, the heroine of Gaslight, is temporarily thought to be low-born, the ladies of New York’s old money families are “insulted by the girl’s presence” and conspire to exile her.  Her fiancé, though he compares society to a pack of wolves, finds himself unable to defend her in the moment of her exposure. Still, he accurately diagnoses the problem: “Laura has mocked [society] with a pretense, and society, which is made up of pretenses, will bitterly resent the mockery.” In the world of sensation plays, there is no attempt to undo or resist society’s theatricality; it has long since been taken for granted. Either one is born for the role or not. Resolution comes for Laura and her lover only because her aristocratic lineage–which she deserves because she is virtuous–is eventually proven. (Her virtue alone would not have earned her the happy conclusion.) A similar end comes to the hero of The Poor of New York, who has meanwhile complained that the “most miserable of the poor of New York” are not the permanently impoverished but rather those who have lost fortunes in the recent economic downturn; these true unfortunates are bound by politeness to “drag from their pockets their last quarter to cast it with studied carelessness to the beggar at home whose mattress is lined with gold.”

Though Boucicault aimed at realism in one sense — his sensation play featured a highly realistic tenement fire, one of the drama’s major draws — it’s clear that his interest in the realities of class-based experience in the city, in the actual poor of New York, is nothing like Crane’s. Rather, considering the two together seems to seal the deal that the cultural workings of theater at century’s end served precisely to numb the poor to their plight by making them consumers of the theater as much as anything else, of goods that promise to lift you up. In the theater Maggie imagines a fantasy of wealth just waiting to trickle down and be inherited. What chance could she have in such a world?

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