Lots of Shows

In the last few weeks, I've seen a lot of theater. It felt like the old days. Back then, I saw things three times a week. I eagerly awaited the New York Times special section on The New Season. I circled things that I didn't want to miss. At some point, I lost bandwidth. Most things I saw were bad, or average. I felt like spending more time at home. But lately, I've been out in the world again, taking it in. I'm reminded how much theater can be a conversation--how it can be the leaping off point for having conversations. Hooray for New York theater! (And TDF!)

John Leguizamo's Ghetto Klown

This is Mr. Leguizamo's fifth solo show, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything left to tell. He's a fantastic performer--his energy is the driving force here, his charisma--not the material, which, if you've seen his solo works before, you've already heard most of this. It's really a great show, funny, charming...I just wish it were a little deeper, a little more....everything. After two hours of great, the show ends with a mixed-up phone call bit that felt, to me, kinda lame. But...it's still great! Right?

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures

The new Tony Kushner play is so fucking exciting, so much fun, and deeply moving. In (very) short, it's about a guy who calls his family around him so they can vote on his impending suicide. As with any Kushner work, it's about everything else--desire, family, betrayal, love, hope, and yes, capitalism and socialism. The second act reaches a near unintelligible cacophony of arguing, and I remember thinking that very few other plays have felt so alive on stage to me. And nobody--Nobody--does hope like Kushner. Back in January, I saw the Signature Theater's revival of Angels in America, which is maybe, despite its subject matter, one of the most hopeful works of the 20th century. But, this play, I felt, is less hopeful. I felt like the playwright is older, more weary, less sure. And that was perhaps the most devastating part of the "play." It's 4 hours, deeply sad, sometimes hilarious, full of messy characters you find hard to love. Go.

The Other Place

Laurie Metcalf stars in this new play by Sharr White at the Lucille Lortel, for the MCC Theater. I'm so glad Ms. Metcalf has been on stage so much in the last few years; she is an actress of incredible strength and transparency. What's true in this play is really the question--and, in the end, I found myself asking the question of the playwright whose decision-making I question a bit. There is a scene at the end which plays a bit too MOTW for my tastes--and feels a bit like he's trying to rescue the play from an unhappy ending, which is what is really called for here. But, the set is beautiful, the actors are great, Ms. Metcalf is extraordinary.

The Book of Mormon

It's as good as they say it is. If you're looking for a night of big laughs and beautiful, precisely-executed musical theater, then rush out. (If you can get tickets.) You can find 100 other reviews about how great it is--and it is really great, Tony's galore come June, you watch. But I will say a few other things 1) it's not half as offensive as it should be, or could be. In the end, I think the writers settled for a musical that will make tons of money and tour forever. They're smart enough to play to a Broadway audience in a Broadway house, not a midnight-in-the-village audience, know what I mean? 2) The two leads, though wonderful alone, are missing something in their scenes together...their duo-chemistry is a bit deflated. 3) You can only do a musical about the Mormons because punchlines about them aren't in bad taste because they haven't been persecuted throughout history. You can't do "The Torah" or "The Koran" and say how insane all the mythology is, you'd be thrown out of town for racism and anti-semitism. It helps that Mormons are (generally) white, too. But...ultimately, I think the writers all know this, and they've made a big, hilarious, sometimes-moving--and here's the important part--new and original--musical.

from Wendell Berry

In Wendell Berry's fantastic essay "In Distrust of Movements," he manages to say clearly what I have been thinking for years, but have never been able to articulate as wisely and wittily. The essay is primarily a discussion of the intersection between the food movement and all other movements, but also speaks to the tendency to reduce action and activism to too-specific ideals.

He writes:

People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behavior.

News of the Week

--Sometimes I find myself standing in my living room, looking over the shelves, reaching for a book I've read ten times, twenty times. This week, I pulled down Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital, which I first heard about from a Booksense76 newsletter--do those still exist? I wrote this post a while back about her, which popped into my brain when I decided that I had already said all the things I was about to say again. One of the things I wrote then was that her work is: "a response, a reaction, a dialogue with the entire scope of art and artforms: music, opera, poetry, painting." This is true, even more than I remember it. Oyster is complicated, difficult, incredibly rich with language and room and intellect. And I love it.

--I hate teenagers on the bus. I realize that the only time they have to be themselves is the short, unsupervised hour between when school ends and when they arrive at home. So, in a way, the bus is the pinnacle of their real experience with each other. I'm just depressed that the way they talk to each other is so cruel, so destructive. (I do not remember my teenage years being like this. Were they? Was it because I had a group of weirdo friends who made theater together and drank wine at the teacher's house?) Everything to them is about saving face, about being in the middle, not too much of anything. They don't even listen to each other, they just talk, make grand statements about the lesserness of each other. It's disguised by the talk of phones and shoes and what she or he said, and how they said it. Am I a grumpy old person cursing the kids for stepping on the lawn? All of it makes me feel very alone. And I hate it.

--Charles Busch and Julie Halston, and a victorious cavalcade of other fantastically talented people are performing in "The Divine Sister," down at Theater for the New City. They say it's totally sold out, but you can get on the wait list. Do try. It's extraordinary. I think what I find most refreshing about Charles's work is that every one of his plays, when you take away everything, all the references and laughs and over-the-top everything, his work is about finding who you are, and loving who you are, and making the past right, and owning yourself in whatever way you have to. It's theater like nobody else is doing right now, or has ever maybe, and I don't know how the walls of that little theater can ever contain all the joy that they create together. And I love it.

Ugly in Art

This was posted in the mail area of an apartment building in Greenpoint.

From Eileen Myles

Most likely, we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas. It's like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It's immancence. It's trying to be here.

--From the essay, "Iceland" by Eileen Myles

Things My Upstairs Neighbors Must Have Recently Acquired

-Trampoline.
-Pony.
-Bowling lane.
-Half-dozen semi-retired Irish step dancers.
-Chain-gang.
-Carpenter stilts for a two-year old insomniac.
-Visit from the Harlem Globetrotters.
-Landmines.
-Sack of Anvils.
-Night School of Continuing Education for Overweight Men Majoring in Jackhammering.
-Balrog.
-Living-room parking spaces for earth-moving machines.
-Semi-precious stone quarry.
-French Hotchkiss H-39 tank.
-New dumb insults which you scream at your wife in other languages.
-Large heavy objects that want to crash to the floor over and over.
-Even heavier objects that you thought couldn't get any heavier.

Baser Drives

From Jon Raymond's story "Young Bodies," in his new collection "Livability:"

"They remained side by side. Bryan's body was as still as a statue. Kendra was too humiliated to close her eyes. What kind of person refused a blowjob? What kind of superior asshole did he think he was? She had asked nothing from him. She only wanted to know he was human. She wanted to know that he had a dick, and baser drives, like everyone else. The last thing she wanted was his pity, but that seemed to be what she'd gotten. She never should have told him her father drove a cab."