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Historic wood windows on Staten Island [HDC Newsstand]

Celebrate the Poe bicentennial for Halloween with Queens Players [h/t liQcity]

Parrot Safari coming up in Brooklyn, Nov. 7 [Brooklyn Parrots]

Saturday is the last day to catch The Provenance of Beauty, a bus tour/theater outing through the South Bronx. The show is sold out, but stand-bys apparently do get in. [review @ Urban Omnibus]

Tickets: $50 Supporter, $100 Friend, $200 Patron. Click here for more information and to purchase tickets. Click here for directions to the Amphitheater.

O’Neill, in fact, is a little late for these guys, whose previous productions include nineteenth-century works such as Mowatt’s Fashion, Dunlap’s Andre, Boucicault’s The Octoroon, Stone’s Metamora, Herne’s Margaret Fleming, or turn-of-the-century plays like Zangwill’s The Melting Pot and Fitch’s The City. The Metropolitan folks have long prided themselves on showcasing American theater before O’Neill. Last night what we saw was a bit like O’Neill before O’Neill.

The pieces we saw were “Before Breakfast” (1916), a one-woman monologue set in the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia; a Melvillean/Conradian sea-piece called “Ile” (1917), in which a monomaniacal whaleship captain pushes his men — and his wife, who’s along for the voyage — to the edge in his mad dash for 400 barrels; “The Movie Man” (1914), a satire on Hollywood’s investment in foreign war — in this case the Mexican revolution — in which a couple American filmmakers head south as embedded journalists of sorts in search of the perfect war footage (and a little sex on the side); “The Web” (1913), a tragicomic prostitute/gangster sketch set, presumably, on the Lower East Side, not far from where Stephen Crane’s Maggie would have lived; and “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill” (1940), a humorous and moving monologue on mortality spoken posthumously by O’Neill’s dog.

The texts for all of these and more are available online from the O’Neill eText Archive. Alex Roe, the Metropolitan’s Artistic Director (who pulled off a fantastic performance as “Blemie,” the dog, in the final monologue), wonders whether some of this material belonged to the trunk of plays O’Neill supposedly had with him when he first showed up in Provincetown.

The promotional material for the show had pegged “The Web” as the most “New York” of these plays, and it was easily the most energetic and rewarding. (Keri Serato, who played female roles in two of the other pieces as well, only fully came to life here, and delivered fantastically as the consumptive dame, and David Patrick Ford as a gangster on the run helped her push the role to its potential.) But I was pleasantly surprised by all the sideways glances at Village bohemia in “Before Breakfast.” As “Mrs. Rowland,” Sidney Forter gave a riveting performance — over half an hour spent talking to her husband, who’s supposedly shaving off stage, while she prepares his breakfast. He never answers, in spite of the fact that she moves from idle early morning chit-chat (between sneaking sips from a flask she keeps hidden) to a withering tongue-lashing for his failure to hold a job (a Harvard grad who’s knocked up the daughter of an Irish grocer, he’s slumming in the Village as a poet) and for his affair with a rich-girl fellow slummer who’s been duped by his poetic talk. In this sketch and in “The Web,” O’Neill takes potshots at wealthy New Yorkers with benevolent intentions, reformers who depend on vice for a sense of their own morality. Here the noble Harvard grad who’s heroically married the lower-class girl he impregnated lives a bohemian dream that begins to crumble on itself long before the action’s through.

I’ve seen half a dozen or so plays at the Metropolitan and always feel rewarded for having made it out. No one else does this kind of work. But last night was unique in at least one way: Usually I’m aware that the plays I’m watching — Stone’s Metamora, for instance — were designed for enormous nineteenth-century theater spaces, not the intimate 60-or-so seater you find at the Metropolitan. Last night’s material, though, was clearly written for  the “little” theaters of the early twentieth century downtown scene. They seemed perfectly suited to the space, which in several of the pieces came to feel as claustrophobic as a captain’s quarters in an ice-bound whaler or an LES tenement filled with TB, crying babies, and shouting neighbors. It’s unusual to feel transported to another age’s production plan — the sort of space where you set up a few tables and chairs, gather some like-minded folks together, and put on a play you’ve written for all your smartest friends.

Just as he framed Sister Carrie (1900) as something of a period novel — though set just a decade earlier — Dreiser frames the sketches collected in Color of a Great City
as memorials to the “phases” of the city that “most arrested and appealed” to him as a young man, but were “fast vanishing or are no more”:

For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic than than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparkling, personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890-1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,–I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period–unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day.

I’m struck by a couple things, reading a passage like this one from his Foreword. Certainly the Lower East Side of the early twenty-first century would seem downright genteel when compared to the post-Five Points world he had encountered a hundred years ago. But this type of lamentation remains a familiar one. (Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul? a recent cover of Time Out NY asked, as if for the first time.) Is it simply that we’re at the tail end of a long gentrification process that spanned the entire 20th century? Or, acknowledging that economic disparities still abound in New York, even in Manhattan, is there something about the persistence of poverty — not to mention the durability of ethnic enclaves and even some old architecture –  that should cause us to question the tone of resignation in Dreiser’s Foreward and the certainty with which so many observers from his time to the present declare that Manhattan just isn’t as vital as it once was, say, ten or twenty years ago?

I find suprising things downtown every day.

UPDATE (later that day …): A very recent example of the lamentation for a more interesting, gritty, vital, and affordable New York can be found in the publicity for the new Berman and Berger edited collection, New York Calling, just out from Chicago:

New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors,
the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of
other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist
even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were
reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime,
filth and frustration, simply split.

Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous
metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its
skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an
improvement on its grittier––and more affordable––predecessor? Taking
us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen.

I wonder, is this lamentation constant through the last century (and perhaps even longer)? Or is it cyclical?

(Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing New York Calling to my attention.)