a poor player

On the northwest corner of 14th St. and 7th Ave. is a narrow hole-in-the-wall donut shop called The Donut Pub. It consists of nothing but a small counter and maybe 20 red stools lined up against the counter. The donuts are run-of-the-mill; crullers, jelly, creme, glazed, old-fashioned. No fancy flavors here. The coffee is is industrial-strength brew served straight from the Bunn brewer to you in a paper cup. The sizes of coffee are small, medium, and large. They ask if you want it light and sweet. The biggest luxury in the place is that they use either half-and-half or whole milk; don’t ask for soy milk or 2%. The place has been in existence since 1964. It’s my kind of place, and one of the few remaining places in the City of New York that I can remember existing more or less as it was during my high school/college/post-undergrad days of traipsing about Manhattan.

After my evening in the Vineyard Theatre I paid a visit to the pub. I spent a very pleasant hour with my Apple Krumb Crueller and coffee (I asked for decaf but got regular), reading The Expense of Spirit by Josh Fox. Sitting around me were some of the everyday denizens of the city: a slightly overweight security guard, gun on her hip; two or three 60ish men with caps and copies of the New York Post; one well-dressed man with a West African accent who apparently knew the owner; a twenty-something couple who dashed in and out for take-out. I presumed that none of them had been to the theatre that night.

While I was sitting and sipping the coffee, I began to sense that the evening’s events were coalescing into an experience which was giving me some sort of further insight into my theatrical tastes and sensibilities. I’m sort of a theatrical mule, if you will: while I can appreciate the intellectual theatre represented by something like The Internationalist, I seem to have a preference for plays such as The Sunset Limited or The Expense of Spirit. The former has the wit, sophistication and verbal brilliance which appeals to the “horse” side of the mule, while the latter have down-to-earth characters and a work-a-day feel which appeals to the “donkey” side of the mule. A strange way to explain all this, I know; but perhaps not so strange when you stop and consider I am the hybrid result of a 1951 marriage between two unlikely New Yorkers, one Irish and one Puerto Rican. It seems that in so many ways my sensibilities in life often reflect a yin-yang dynamic. So it was that after my Vineyard theatre experience I sought the comfort and solace of The Donut Pub.

I offer these thoughts as something of a context in which to view my reactions to the shows I saw over the Nov.17-19 weekend in NYC and to the overall NYC experience. If you can understand a person’s sensibilities it makes understanding their reactions that much easier, I think. So, to the plays themselves:

Antigone – This was the production presented by QED Productions at the Hudson Theatre Guild and lit by Lucas Krech of Light Que 23. Overall I found it a pretty good production. The new translation of Anouilh’s work was by Zander Teller, and as far as I could tell it flowed nicely. The set consisted of nothing but a bench center stage, and a back wall with one long, thin window. Minimalist, to be sure. Lucas’ lighting reflected that same sense of minimalism. It appears he used very few instruments in the plot, as I found myself more than once glancing to check out how many instruments he actually used and whether that was a result of low inventory or artistic choice (maybe a combination of both). The stage was well lit but not brightly lit, as if there was always a cloudy timeless mist I had to peer through. I thought it was an interesting mix of mood and visibility. His opening sequence cast these long triple shadows on the wall for each character, as if it were the shadows that spoke of the largeness of the themes and the characters. I very much got the feel of the lighting being artistic without being “artsy” or calling undue attention to itself. I grew more and more over the course of the show to like the sense of ambiguity which the light seemed to evoke in me.

The acting and directing were good in the sense that it was all competent, but I can’t say that overall the show was one which totally captivated you. Too often the cast let the audience off the hook with the awkward turn of a phrase which induced chuckles where they should not have been. The Nurse was not very good, nor was Ismene. For my tastes, Antigone was played too much on one level, and while the young lady seemed to have a facility for crying, I think after awhile it became annoying and too close to whining. Creon had a good command of the stage, and his monologue describing the real lives of Eteocles and Polynices was excellent. The long scene between Antigone and Creon, the crux of the play, was well done, but again, a little too much on one note for me. I would like to have seen direction which moved the characters to different emotional places rather than constantly taking one single emotional note. The only actor who seemed to have the ability to work at different levels was the First Guard, who provided an abundance of comic relief while towards the end moving to someone who had some sympathy with Antigone. Overall I think the production was successful in communicating the themes of the play, but I did not walk away having a moving, powerful experience. One small side note – the small part of The Page was played by a Fredonia theatre graduate of 2004, which I did not know before walking into the production. It was sort of fun to walk cold into a show and discover an alum on stage.

The Sunset Limited – This new work by novelist Cormac McCarthy (All The Pretty Horses) was, for me, the highlight of the trip. It’s a transplant from Steppenwolf, and featured Austin Pendleton as “White” and Freeman Coffey as “Black.” The play is basically a 90-minute philosophical debate as to why White, who has been saved by Black from jumping in front of the Sunset Limited, should not go out and try again.

Apart from the fact that the characters are only named White and Black (they never call each other by any names in the play), the setting is naturalistic in style. The set itself is a New York tenement kitchen, and has no more floor space than will fit a kitchen table and two chairs, a visual metaphor of the intellectual boxing ring these two occupy. Black is a born-again Christian and former murder convict who saw the light after a particularly brutal knife fight. White is a depressed college professor who has given up hope in civilization. Pendleton and Coffey are superb in the roles. Pacing, timing, characterization, rhythm – everything about the performances was first-rate. I felt in all respects it was the one play I saw where everything came together for me. It was a play which could resonate in anyone’s world, and even though it treaded the toughest metaphysical ground you can find (life or death), it did so without ever going above anyone’s head. I would not think there could be an audience member from any walk of life who would see this show and say, “I don’t get it.”

I picked this show on a whim because it featured Austin Pendleton, who in my book is an actor’s actor. I was staying in NYC with an old undergraduate friend of mine who had taken numerous classes with Austin, and we went to see the show together, because he had never actually seen Austin perform live on stage. We got a chance to speak with him briefly after the show, which was a thrill. I could not stay long because I had to get crosstown to the EATFest at 5:00 PM.

I did some research after seeing the show, however, and found that it got mixed reviews, especially the script. There seemed to be no denying that the production values were first-rate, but the script was criticized basically for not having a dramatic arc. Apart from the fact that we lose more playwrights these days because critics pound on their scripts, I think many of those who criticized the script missed the mark, much in the same way as Waiting for Godot was misunderstood. The character changes in the play are subtle but very dynamic, and I think the actors did an outstanding job of bringing that across. You can palpably feel Black getting more and more desperate to keep White from going out and trying again, while White continually steels himself against the onslaught of good intentions. When White first tastes the food he is offered and says, “This is good,” you could see in his eyes that urge to relent, as if tasting the goodness of the food might turn him to give up his intent to kill himself. You can feel Black’s despair at the end as White finally leaves the room. Someone who would say that this play has no dramatic arc would no doubt miss the drama in a baseball game with the final score of 1-0 and a total of five hits. This is only McCarthy’s second play, but what he’s done in terms of very finely tuned subtlety of plot and action is a tribute to his ability to cross genres. All in all I found myself captivated by the entire production. In less capable acting hands I think the work would have suffered greatly, because it takes a subtlety of performance to bring out the nuances in the script.

EATFest Fall 2006 – This was a short festival of one-act plays which I attended because one of my touring colleagues from the American Shakespeare Center was in the first show. The whole event took about 70 minutes or so. The Emerging Artists Theatre is located in the old Mint Theatre space on 43rd St., a space I remembered from a former Fredonia theatre faculty member Kelly Morgan, who was part of starting up the Mint. I had taken a collection of graduating seniors in 1993 to do a showcase in that space.

There were four short one-acts in the production, and each was in its way traditional. The first play was about a husband and wife returning for some family gathering of the husband’s. She is pregnant and believes her child is an “immaculate conception,” and the husband has to tell an old buddy about this. The second play was a cute little piece about an woman whose husband died three months ago and has come into a mattress shop to replace her mattress. The third play was a pretty maudlin piece about the World Trade Center, depicting three scenarios of people preparing to die in the towers. The fourth piece was a depiction of a “Noises Off” community theatre production where many things go wrong in a drawing-room murder mystery scene. Not really much more to say, as production values were generally makeshift, acting and writing OK but not much above graduate-school level, and direction sparse.

The Internationalist – The subject of the most recent NYC Blogger’s Night, I don’t think there is much I can add other than my own reaction. Overall, I found the production values of the highest order, with beautiful set, lights, sound and costume, the acting mostly classy, and the direction and concept spot on. But while I was most appreciative of the script and its linguistic brilliance, I found it sacrificed deep character development for that brilliance. I came away with a sort of cold feeling after the show.

This show, for me, was indicative of the struggle I seem to face every day as I think about the direction theatre should take. The brilliance of it was not lost on me. I really appreciated the innovative choice of using gibberish as the foreign language, and the actors were most adept at its use onstage. I also like the sort of intellectual detachment the play had at its core. Every character seemed to be all about business. There was an enormous amount of polish in every aspect of the show. And yet, I can’t quite say that I liked it. I appreciated it, but I did not like it.

The reason I did not like the show was because I could never get away from feeling that the whole production was saying to me, “You’re a liberal, sophisticated theatregoer who will really like the wit and style of this piece.” I’ve noticed lately that during their pledge breaks, public broadcasting never ceases to remind me about how intelligent I am and how I appreciate intelligent programming and how they have the intelligent programming I need and want. It’s that sort of intellectual self-righteousness that seems to permeate middle-class liberal thinking that left me cold. This is not a play which Arthur Miller’s “common man” would ever understand. It is “urban community” theatre at its best. The “horse” side of this theatrical mule certainly appreciates and understands this type of theatre, and even likes parts of it very much (the scene with the prostitute was the best – complete with smoking on stage!), but the “donkey” side (or should I say the “ass” side) could not really get next to it much. It should be noted that a mule, on the outside, tends to look more like a donkey than a horse.

The Bronx Balmers – This show, with a new script by Jerry Handelman and produced by Off The Leash Productions at the Times Square Arts Center, was a complete surprise. I had no idea that amateur theatre was still alive and producing in Manhattan. I was intrigued by the title, a takeoff on the nickname for the New York Yankees (The Bronx Bombers), and the promo material talked a little about baseball and the Bronx of 1969. The plot basically centers around two Jewish families about to move from their Bronx neighborhood, and a daughter who returns home with a baby born out-of-wedlock, whose father happens to be Puerto Rican.

The script itself was in many ways quite good. Its plotline was a bit scattered and unfocused, as if the playwright really hadn’t decided whose story he wanted to tell. But in many ways the dialogue was crisp, funny and at times dramatic and insightful. The writing had a Neil Simon air about it, and was liberally sprinkled with Yiddish terms and plenty of local Bronx references. The writer at one time worked for CBS when they owned the Yankees, and clearly was harking back to those days in the Bronx and in NYC as a whole where the average Joe still held sway, and blue-collar workers still lived and worked in New York. The characters had that odd combination of being stereotypical and yet completely human and real. I would love to see this script given better production values.

In a word, the production itself was amateurish in every aspect. Looking at the biographies of the actors you would have thought you’d get something better, and yet the whole production had that feel of a play which should have been produced in a synagogue somewhere in Westchester. The set and lights were awful, the acting was spotty at best, costumes were thrown together, the direction no more than solving traffic problems. The whole show had an air about it which indicated a collection of good-hearted and enthusiastic people people “putting on a show.” Had it not been for the overall quality of the script there would have been no redeeming values in this production.

And yet, the show really made me happy. What was plainly clear was that these were people who loved this show, believed in this show, believed in the characters, and wanted to bring it to life for others to see. It was the exact polar opposite of The Internationalist; nothing about this show was slick or professional. One of the all-time standard plotlines in literature is that of the amateur who bests the professional in the end thanks to his/her heart, pluck and desire. I am always glad to see amateur theatre, because often it’s in that arena that you’ll see the most love for the purity of the event itself. Knowing that there are still amateur productions right in the heart of Manhattan gave me the most joy and the most hope over the weekend. This was a good production to end the excursion.

I’ll take another post to talk about the New York experience itself. This has gone on long enough, but there is still much to observe about audiences, atmosphere and attitude. In my 40 years of living in and visiting NYC, much has changed. I hope it will be worth it to speak about those changes in general, as I think it’s as important to talk about the background and context in which today’s theatre is being made as it is to talk about the productions themselves. -twl