(West Side Story: The Citizen Kane of
American theater – the summit to which every piece of theater before was
leading, and every piece since was a reaction. The one-off moment when America’s
three greatest young theatrical talents: Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and
Stephen Sondheim, put their titanic egos aside to make a musical together. The
result was a sublime achievement on a level that in so many ways has never been
equaled in the history of America – a seemless fusion of dance and song, a
perfect melding of grand opera with popular idiom, and most importantly, a piece
that speaks to the entirety of the American experience; both native and
immigrant, on a level that no other piece of theater ever equaled, and perhaps
never could. It gives the poorest and crassest of America’s residents a high
dignity that humanizes them to people who’d cross the street to avoid these
characters. And yet, it’s also totally ridiculous… with gang members speaking
in a mixture of slang that probably dated already in 1957 and bad love poetry, and
constant breaking into abstract highbrow ballet whose movements make no sense
as often as they do. Such is the unfortunate, confused, ridiculous plight of
American theater, which still hasn’t found sure footing 236 years after the
founding of the country.)
Friday night was as good a night as a person
will get from American theater today. August Osage County is probably the most
endlessly praised, talked about and commented upon American play since Angels in
America, and with good reason. It is a play that seamlessly plants the most
painful, debased aspects of human existence within a Himalayan mountain of
comedy. I can’t think of any American movie in the new millennium that exposes more
of the dark crevasses of human existence. For more than twenty-four hours after
I saw it, the twisted, macabre mood of this play remained very much with me.
But there’s something about this play that feels utterly synthetic. There isn’t a single scene in this script that doesn’t feel cribbed from some other play which all of us who’ve sat through high school and college friends’ ill-advised attempts at artistic greatness have seen before: The fucked-up intellectual family in a claustrophobic house, the realist chamber drama, characters who grapple with the terrifying silence of secrets, grappling with addiction, infidelity, incest, racism, and pedophilia. Just in America, we’ve again and again praised as masters playwrights who’ve covered all these same issues on stage - O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Sam Shepard, and even before it came to America we can watch all sorts of similar discussions in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov. There is something about the issues discussed in this play that feels so endlessly rehashed, so totally completely indebted to its predecessors, that I (no expert on theater) find it nearly impossible to pick out what’s original from everything I’ve seen before. Another matriarch addicted to painkillers? Another precocious teenage girl falling for a sociopathic predator? More families beating the shit out of each other? More breaking dishes? More incest? More relatives gone missing? More half-century long family secrets? The whole thing plays like an encyclopedia of every shock we’ve experienced in the last 150 years of world drama.
The production too was as good as we were probably ever going to get in nearly anywhere in America today outside New York, LA and Chicago. Yet the whole night relied upon our good faith to continually suspend disbelief from minute to minute. There were some truly fabulous actors on stage, but among the thirteen different principles, there were thirteen different accents in spite of the fact that 11 of these characters were supposed to hail from the same hometown. All three of the sisters (Chekhov anyone?) were superb, yet all three were clearly ten years too young for their roles and far too pretty. The father was supposed to be a bookworm whose books dominated the house with their oppressive weight, yet his erudition was represented by a single lonely bookshelf. Rather than give us the great music of Oklahoma during the scene changes (like Woody Guthrie or Wallis Willis or Wanda Jackson…a lot of W’s in that state…), or even something ironic like Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, the transitions were accompanied by African drumbeats, as though to hit us over the head with the fact that this family exists in a primitive state of nature… I can’t be the only person who read something uncomfortably close to racism in that. All the characters constantly commented that the mother never turned on the air conditioning and the house was constantly 90 degrees, yet the entire four-hour play was accompanied by the blasting hum of an air conditioning unit, keeping us all quite comfortable in a 70 degree theater. The cumulative effect was not to transport you to Oklahoma but like a great staged reading in which you had to take on faith that if people tried harder, they could make a truly great night for us. Instead, it felt like a troop of talented amateurs, utterly adrift without a competent director to combine their talents into a coherent vision. It’s an experience that makes you sad for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve tried doing theater at various points in
my life – as an actor, as a director, even as a theater musician, and I’d be
lying if I said that I didn’t usually regret the experience. I don’t know if it
was always true of actors, but I can’t deny the fact that I neither much like
most theater people or that most theater people don’t much like me; and to talk
about why, I have to traffic not only in empirical evidence but in stereotyping.
I don’t know if it was always true that actors and singers were known
throughout world history as grade-A narcissists (they were probably too poor
and ignored for most of history to be thought of that way), but that is the
abiding stereotype of them today, and I wish I hadn’t accumulated so much
evidence to bear that out. It’s not to say that I don’t’ know many actors and
singers who aren’t perfectly nice people who pay their taxes and wouldn’t burn
heretics if given the chance; but whether it was enduring the tantrums of
actors and singers because I asked them to do something one too many times, or
watching another director chew out an actor as a ‘liar’ or a conductor telling
his singers that he wants to ‘kill’ them, or watching so many of these same people
make make inappropriate scenes in their personal lives, I can’t
deny there is something creepily self-centered about so many stage animals that
make me prefer leaving their company to others who like them more – or at least
ditching them to hang out with the techies. The claustrophobic vulnerability
required in life as a contemporary actor seems to make people who become
actors a bit nutty, or maybe they were already nutty and just needed an outlet
for it. For a person like me who’d prefer to be less nutty than he already is, he would
do much better to take up painting or join a band or an orchestra. It’s
much easier to get along with artists and instrumentalists than singers and
actors – acting and singing is based on showing off your ‘person’, whereas
playing an instrument or painting a canvas requires the humility to say that
you need an extra tool which your body does not already have to create
something beautiful. Perhaps this lack of humility is also inherent in writers,
but at least I can hide behind the fact that I’m also an instrumental musician.
I have no idea what causes narcissism in
people; is it inherent in a person’s genes, or does the environment of a
person’s upbringing provide for it? And if so, is it too much pressure in a person's upbringing or
too little? And maybe I’m completely wrong about theater people and just
trafficking in the kind of offensive stereotyping that would make them angry
(not that that wouldn’t delight me…). But what I can’t ignore is the fact that
there are two competing strands in American theater that seem to speak to
precisely this sort of narcissism of which I’m speaking.
(Somehow,
when you no longer believe in American optimism…Rogers and Hammerstein doesn’t
make much sense, does it?)
Fundamentally speaking, I can see two
traditions in American theater that are alive and ‘well’ – music theater and ‘straight’
theater. Music theater, for all its exceptions, seems to have very deep roots
in escapism – do Rogers and Hammerstein musicals have anything to do with the
realities of Oklahoma, Siam, or the South Pacific? Does Andrew Lloyd Webber
(British as he is…) appear to have any real knowledge of Argentina, The Bible,
or alley cats? If you find yourself particularly drawn to these pieces, and
many, many people are, you’re being drawn to a world of imagination – and
frankly not the world of a particularly fascinating imagination. There are more
exciting escapist visions; better researched, more excitingly done – anyone
who’s seen a Kander & Ebb musical (Chicago & Cabaret) knows that
there’s nothing wrong with escapism if you mean to escape to somewhere
interesting.
(A Long Day’s Journey Into Night – take your
suffering like a man!)
But then there’s the world of plain,
‘straight’ theater. I can’t imagine that somebody didn’t come up with the title
‘straight theater’ as a way of implying that music theater is effeminate. And
perhaps even now such a stereotype works all too well, because so many
‘straight’ American plays require you to sit in your seat and take your dose of
suffering like a ‘man.’ In such a tradition, we’re introduced to the
sadomasochistic abusiveness of characters from Eugene O’Neil, the false hope of
Arthur Miller’s protagonists, the sexual repression of Tenessee Williams’s, the
savage ironies of Edward Albee, and the still more savage ones of David Mamet.
Each of these writers are tragedians, but not in the Greek sense in which a
great man falls from his height – because in America it’s only a tragedy if you
never were great. In America, the most tragic state is to be a small person,
and then realize how small you are. In such plays, there is very little
catharsis as the Greeks would define it. We pity Oedipus and Orestes for how
far they’ve fallen; they were once superior to us, and are now our inferiors –
and that creates a certain awed distance from them which we can no longer have.
Neither Willy Loman nor Blanche DuBois have any height to fall from – at no
point in their lives were they living anything but the nightmare in which the
play began – and their nightmares are all too similar to ours. By the end of
these plays, we don’t feel purged of our demons, we feel inflamed by them. If
life is only joyless heartbreak, then why do we even go to the theater? For O’Neill and his descendents, the theater
becomes a prison of inward focus; a queezily intense, claustrophobic place
which perhaps is a perfect reflection of the kind of environment that makes
people crave the stage in the first place. So many of these plays are monuments
to empty drama – making us feel tension almost past the point of exploitation,
and it becomes tension without release. You leave Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet
feeling elated from spasm after spasm of tragic delight – you leave Long
Day’s Journey Into Night wondering how you’ll ever get out of bed the next
morning. Again, there are exceptions to
this rule. Anyone who’s ever seen a high school production of Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town knows that the inconsequential, suffocating lives so often portrayed on the
American stage can have purpose and true dignity. In a different way, the same
is true of Angels in America, or the Pittsburgh Cycle, or Porgy and Bess, or A Raisin in the Sun, or The Music Man, or even The
Crucible (if you squint…).
In either the case of musical theater or
‘straight’ theater, it would appear that America produces a brand of theater so
myopic, so inwardly focused on either the suffering of the self or escaping
from it, that its achievements can’t help but be miniscule compared to American
achievements in movies, television, popular music, perhaps even novels and
poetry. In spite of these exceptions, or perhaps
because they’re mere exceptions, American theater has produced neither much
great music nor a great linguistic outpouring, or even enough memorable characters. So
many of the great American playwrights seem to flame out after just a few plays,
not even capable of writing three plays which are accepted worldwide as
unimpeachable masterworks. Eugene O’Neill has The Iceman Cometh and A Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, and after those two everybody starts debating which
of the others are great. Tennessee Williams got The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar
Named Desire before everybody started debating exactly where he began to
decline (I think it started in Streetcar…). Arthur Miller has Death of a Salesman
and The Crucible, and All My Sons has lots of champions, but then… Lorraine
Hansberry had A Raisin in the Sun, and died before she wrote a worthy followup. No two theatergoers seem to agree on which the best Sam
Shepherd plays are. And no two theatergoers agree on whether David Mamet is any
good at all. Some feel Neil Simon is trivial, everybody's forgotten about Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, and most have never heard of
Horton Foote or Lanford Wilson (I’m pretty sure I don’t even know a play of either
of theirs, I just know they exist…). Compared to all those master creators we have from movies, from television, from the best in rock
and jazz, American theater provides us with preciously few insights into human beings, preciously
little music worth remembering, and preciously few characters vivid enough to take with us into
our lives. Aside from all the others from Britian’s peerless theatrical
tradition, England has hundreds of
characters merely from Shakespeare which no one will ever forget having met
them for the first time. Norway and Sweden, countries with one-sixtieth our
population where the claustrophobia we find in American drama was truly earned,
we have all those characters from Ibsen and Strindberg: Hedda Gabler, Peer
Gynt, Brand, Emperor Julian, Soleness, Nora, Hilda, Jacob Hummell, Miss Julie,
The Stranger, Laura, and all their surrounding galleries… but among the
similarly living, breathing, unforgettable characters embedded in a larger American consciousness, we
have Willy Loman, Amanda Wingfield, Blanche and Stanley, the Stage Manager in Our Town, George and Martha, maybe Roy Cohn, David Mamet’s fuck patois… and that’s about it.
The comparison with England is particularly
sad. In the land of Shakespeare, it can’t be denied that theat(re)er simply
means means more to them than it does to us. It is the very foundation of their
cultural identity as much as movies are the foundation of ours. And it also
can’t be denied that the greatest plays on the British Isles, whether the
English bedrock of the human condition which Shakespeare is (or his
contemporaries like Marlowe or Jonson), or the Irish-English comedy of ideas
that is Shaw and Wilde, have an open-air scope of the world which nearly any
American play I can think of cannot possibly touch.
Last Friday night, I was in London, at a
production of Julius Caesar by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was truly a
production of the world – Julius Caesar done with an all-black cast as an
African dictatorship. Julius Caesar is, to say the least, an imperfect
Shakespeare play, with at least as many dull scenes as there are that catch
fire. The action seemed endlessly rethought, with Caesar conveying his belief
in Cassius’s potential treachery in front of all his subjects and portraying
Brutus and Cassius’s fractiousness as a civil war within the civil war (as so
many third-world civil wars become). The result was something that could only
happen with a director in charge who has a bottomless command of Shakespeare’s
text, and actors who took what they were doing with the utmost seriousness and
integrity. The results spoke for themselves, and the makeup of the audience
spoke of that wonderfully. A full half of the sold-out audience was black, and with as
much diversity in age as color. This was truly Shakespeare for everybody,
intended to convey a universal message which you did not have to be of any
particular creed to understand. How many times do you see such a diverse
audience for any show of any type in contemporary America?
Perhaps the problem isn’t American theater,
perhaps the problem is theater itself. Perhaps the whole idea of theater has
become so weighed down over the centuries by realism, by scenery, by the
demands of production value, by the demands of professional actors and theater
workers, that it simply can’t take the same flights of imagination which we see
in King Lear, in Tartuffe, in The Simpsons…
The theater of Shakespeare’s time was
infinitely more flexible. There was no scenery to change and the actors were
mostly tradesmen who were simply happy to be onstage or working behind the
scenes. There was no way of describing action or atmosphere without words, and one scene could begin at the very second
another ended. The stage jutted out so far into the audience’s purview that
solilioquies could be delivered in a much more intimate manner than today’s
stages allow for (unless the stage is miked…). The Shakespeare plays were not
just plays, they were complete entertainments – meant to service everyone from
those who craved sublimity to those who preferred vulgarity.
It was a complete dramatic, poetic experiment of a type that was only possible
because an artform was being birthed – and there were few if any rules as yet
to be followed. By the time of Moliere, there was scenery and an insistence on
Aristotle’s rules of unity which made it virtually impossible for comedy and
tragedy to intermingle. By the time of Ibsen, Shakespeare’s romantic notions of
drama had grown so sclerotic that the best dramatists had to do away with soliloquies,
blank verse, and diversity of action. Instead of watching a whole story, we
watch lives unfold in their most dramatic moments. We still dine on this model,
and the end result is that theater, like classical music, still subsists on
models invented in the 19th century.
Even in England, they’re still chewing the comedy
of ideas which George Bernard Shaw formed from one of Ibsen’s limbs. English playwrights
can out-intense Americans at the claustrophobic drama game – watch Harold
Pinter or Alan Ayckbourne if you want to see how intense Brits can make things
onstage (be prepared). But among the elder generation of British dramatists,
there is a bevy, a veritable gaggle, of dramatists who traffic primarily in
ideas: Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Peter Shaffer, Ronald Harwood, David Hare, Alan
Bennett,,. It’s not exactly an approach to drama that seems to be granted a much
longer life than it already has, but it’s healthier than ours and shows that
book learning still has a place on their stages even if it doesn’t on our’s.
Is there any hope for American theater? Have
there been any truly great creators of it whose total you could stack against
the greatest dramatists of history, or the greatest filmmakers among their
contemporaries? Well…yes, probably two, one of whom is great enough that perhaps all this grousing is completely unnecessary. Two is a paltry number, but for the ‘posterity’
game, two may be all that’s needed to add a fourth name to the SMI (Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen) Index.
Leaving aside David Mamet who is as much a
moviemaker as he is a playwright, there are only two theatrical writers who to
me have managed beyond dispute to build a career of masterful play after
masterful play out of all the wreckage which surrounds them.
(In case you’re wondering what people 300
years from now will regard as the classic of narcissistic upper-middle class
urban alienation, it’s probably Company. A claustrophobic American drama which
suggests that life may be beautiful all the same.)
One is Stephen Sondheim – a theatrical
creator on the level of Shakespeare and Mozart who built a world apart from the
movies that let him use Broadway as a laboratory to grow human beings realer
than real humans. Is Sondheim truly on their level? Well, maybe…. for
linguistic command he may be the one stage writer of all time who can box in Shakespeare’s
ring, and even if his musicals are generally not made of the same life-or-death
stuff as Shakespeare, their characters do feel extraordinarily real. But his most amazing quality is that he’s done all this during
the most fallow possible period. Sondheim has taken the insipid banalities of
music theater and created something miraculous out of them – a complete
entertainment that challenges intellectually, inspires serious pathos as much humor,
and provides dozens of memorable characters (especially his women…Joanne,
Desiree Armfeldt, Sally Durant Plummer, Dot, the Witch, and Fosca), any one of
which could become as iconic as Sweeney Todd and Mamma Rose in another fifty
years. History may show that he is the new way forward for drama – and dramatists,
who now have more to do with song lyricists than prose, have at least as much
to chew on for as long as they have with Ibsen. Posterity has an odd way of
connecting people who should never be connected, and Sondheim may be remembered
as the shadow-twin of Bob Dylan. Both of them were far, far more impressive
lyricists than they were composers, and their music – so to speak - is nothing
but a glove on which to fit some of the most complicated, poetic, mythical
lyrics that will ever be written. The
themes of Dylan’s music generally look toward the future and toward the folk
music of the forgotten man, Sondheim looks nostalgically toward a world of
sophistication now forgotten and wistfully remembers the gin-soaked urbanities of
the 20’s cocktail bar. Oddly enough, because he was shielded from the frustrations
of the movie industry, his impact may one day turn out to be larger than any
American moviemaker of his time. And yet even Sondheim found the circumstances
in which he created theater to be so difficult that for the last twenty years
he’s barely produced any new musicals – he's now in his early eighties and long since
unable to summon the fortitude to keep going at the blistering pace he once
set. In a better world, we’d have had twice as many Sondheim musicals as we do
now.
(The Piano Lesson. An American answer to The
Cherry Orchard set among a black family in The Depression)
The other is August Wilson, whose achievement
is in some ways more astounding than Sondheim’s. Sondheim was the son of
Manhattan socialites with a degree from Williams College who became a writer of
musicals because he grew up as the next-door neighbor of Oscar Hammerstein.
August Wilson was a high-school dropout who educated himself by going to the public
library. But the rather condescending calculus of overcoming adversity doesn’t
do him justice. What makes Wilson amazing is the gallery of characters: Boy Willie
and Wining Boy, Troy and Cory Maxon, Bynum and Loomis – caught in historical forces
past anything within their control. The fact that these characters are black
frees them from the confines of ‘proper’ English language, allowing them to
express themselves with a memorable distinctness that is entirely missing from
Wilson’s white counterparts. Wilson is the modern master of American plays, and
while it’s good that he lived to complete the Pittsburgh cycle, it’s a shame he
couldn’t write any more afterwards.
But the fact that there are so few with a consistently awesome achievement makes it all the more sad when compared to the larger worlds of movies and TV. While O’Neill, Miller and Williams were exploring the suffocating inbred air of the single-room chamber drama; Welles, Hitchcock and Hawks were taking the entire world into their gaze. Whereas Mamet, Neil LaBute and Tracy Letts are perpetually stuck on shock mode, we have series like The Sopranos and Mad Men for which shock is just one weapon in an encyclopedic arsenal. Whereas Shakespeare could get through seven scenes in twenty minutes, we’re lucky now if we get through the prologue in that amount of time.
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