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Updates to this journal are now available here.
Welcome!
On Stage, an online journal of theatrical news and opinion by Post-Gazette theater critic Christopher Rawson, is normally posted at least twice a week.
You can also find his newsy print column, In the Wings, which includes box office figures, every Thursday.
Your responses, comments and questions are welcome -- just drop an e-mail to crawson@post-gazette.com.
Progress report
NEW YORK -- Friday, the PG ShowPlane group saw the new musical, "Tarzan," next in the line of Disney blockbusters (they hope). I didn't go because there are still changes being made before the May 10 opening, so I'd have to come back to review it later, anyway. At today's morning gathering over coffee, the group told me they liked it a lot, especially the astonishing opening sequences of shipwreck, drowning, rescue and the appearance of the animals, along with the creative bungee-cord flying. So now I'm looking forward to it -- that's how easily I'm swayed by word-of-mouth.
In fact, the group opinion was positive for all three shows we've seen -- "Ring of Fire," "The History Boys" and "Tarzan" -- though I've already expressed my reservations about "Ring of Fire" (below). And they did have some difficulty with "History Boys": Some said they couldn't hear, although, sifting the evidence, I'd say it had more to do with the difficulty of the accents, because there was agreement that their ears adjusted as time went on.
Most impressive to me is the variety of other shows group members are seeing on their own. "Barefoot in the Park," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," "Faith Healer," "Jersey Boys," "Lestat," "Spamalot," "The Color Purple," "The Drowsy Chaperone" and "The Threepenny Opera" -- each had its patrons, as well as Julia Roberts in "Three Days of Rain" (toughest ticket in town, just ahead of "The Pajama Game") and Conor McPherson's "Shining City," an arcane choice.
Last night instead of "Tarzan," I saw Odets' "Awake and Sing!," a Depression-era classic that was so beautifully revived at the Pittsburgh Public Theater a few years ago (although I heard some audience came expecting a musical, because of the title!). The fine cast is led by the great, now grizzled Ben Gazzara and by Zoe Wanamaker, daughter of Sam Wanamaker, founder of the recreated Shakespeare's Globe in London.
This afternoon I'm off to meet actor/writer/singer Billy Porter and see Martin McDonagh's bloody comedy, "The Lieutenant of Inishmore." Then the group re-convenes tonight for "Pajama Game," with director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall talking to us all about it afterward.
Happy and hung over
NEW YORK -- That's how I feel today, hung over from yesterday's excitement, which was indulgent, familial, intellectual and visceral. The intellectual kick was from Alan Bennett's "The History Boys" with the original London cast, including all those appealing young men, and the visceral from the head-spinning opening night party for "The Wedding Singer," which lasted far into this morning. I'm working now on a story about the party for Monday's PG [http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06121/686436-325.stm], and the "History Boys" review will come along eventually.
The indulgent and familial came earlier in the day. After writing a story to send back to the PG, I rushed to join the PG ShowPlane group for a very good lunch at Paris Commun in the West Village, following their walking tour of Greenwich Village with local historian Joyce Gold. And what a gorgeous spring day! On such a crisp, sunny midday, with all the tulips and flowering trees peaking, there can't be any prettier, more enticing city in the world than Greenwich Village.
My indulgence was to wander down Christopher Street (the song of that name from "Wonderful Town" providing a jaunty mental soundtrack) and sit in a parklet here or an outdoor caf? there, feeling that maybe the world's problems aren't so great after all.
But the greatest indulgence was the familial -- picking up my granddaughter Ella after school and walking with her eastward through the Village, with nothing more pressing than deciding which Italian groceria to stop at for gelati. Not even ice cream and fruit trees are better company than a happy 8-year-old.
Tonight I take on a family of a different kind: the Bergers, the archtypal Bronx family undergoing Depression-era stress in Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing!"
Broadway bustle and Johnny Cash
NEW YORK -- The fuss over the Pulitzer Prize will have to wait -- this is my second day in Manhattan with the Post-Gazette spring ShowPlane, and I'm too caught up in the bustle of a theater season reaching its peak to deal with the failure to recognize last year's best play.
Yesterday afternoon I saw "The Wedding Singer," the latest of many musicals adapted from recent movies -- that review will be in the paper Monday -- and last night I went with the PG group to "Ring of Fire," the Johnny Cash musical. That belongs to another burgeoning craze, Juke Box Musicals: shows based on a composer's or singer's songbook, with a book written to fit the songs rather than vice versa.
Normally, I'd be expecting to review "Ring of Fire," too, but word has just come that it's closing at the end of this week, after only 38 previews and 57 performances. As Shakespeare (or rather Lysander) says, "ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!,' / The jaws of darkness do devour it up: / So quick bright things come to confusion." So there won't be time for a formal review.
But I guess I can still say "Behold!," because "Ring of Fire," if not exactly bright, is certainly not negligible, and there might be some afterlife in store. Its problem is structural, which is to say, in the book, the most usual place to search for any musical's problems. In this case, there really isn't any book at all, which means there's no apparent structure other than a vague (or vaguely perceived) progression from youth to maturity to older age and death. This is embodied mainly in the three couples who play Johnny and June Carter Cash as, roughly, young, mature and older. (Not really old: No one on stage seems remotely as old, weathered and warn as Johnny Cash came to seem, more's the pity.)
But aside from the welcome narrative drama provided by individual songs, which this basically Broadway cast is well equipped to portray, the show is just a concert that only sporadically develops the larger narrative or musical momentum that can build audience engagement.
The performers are certainly engaging enough. My favorites were the younger couple, Jarrod Emick (memorable still from the 1994 "Damn Yankees," but with many more credits, including playing opposite Hugh Jackman in "The Boy from Oz), and Beth Malone, who is just a shade cuter than cute. Emick has the most soulful Cash-like sound in the show. Also strong is the middle couple, Jeb Brown and Lari White. But as I say, Jason Edwards (partnered by Cass Morgan) lacks the gravitas that made the older Cash such a powerful icon. Eight others provide strong vocal and instrumental support; there is one joyous number where all 14 play guitar simultaneously.
The chief creative force behind the show seems to be director Richard Maltby Jr., who is canny enough to think of other ways of packaging this material for further use. But he's also smart enough to have known that it needed better structure to start with.
Critical self-doubt
Happy Birthday, Bill! I'm sorry not to have had a chance to sample the Shakespeare ceremonies today in Schenley Plaza, but knowing they're there makes a sunny day even sunnier.
I've already received a few e-mails of agreement about today's commentary (www.post-gazette.com/pg/06113/683867-325.stm) taking the Pulitzer Prize Board to task for not giving a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for drama. I'll see what other fallout there is and get back to this in a day or two.
But first, I want to anticipate e-mails of disagreement about my two reviews of monologue plays set to appear tomorrow (Monday), of "I Am My Own Wife" (www.post-gazette.com/pg/06114/684573-325.stm) at the Public and "Talking Heads" (www.post-gazette.com/pg/06114/684580-325.stm) at City. If I were a curious reader and not just the critic, I'd seize on what looks like a flaming inconsistency, more vivid because the two reviews run side by side.
To summarize crudely, the Public review faults "I Am My Own Wife" (in which one actor plays 30-some roles) for being more narrative than dramatic, while the City review makes no such objection to "Talking Heads" (in which two actors deliver a series of half-hour monologues).
This apparent inconsistency occurred to me as I wrote, but I didn't have space to tackle the issue in the City review, so I'll try to explain. I think the difference is that Alan Bennett ("Talking Heads") is an exquisite dramatizer of character who can make unknowing self-revelation dramatic. As his ladies deliver their serial monologues, time passes, things happen and conflicts are plumbed. The "Talking Heads" pieces may be small, but they are delicious little plays.
Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife" is much more ambitious, with a big double story to tell, but it feels recounted, not brought to dramatic life. Of course the means of telling are theatrical, an acting tour de force. But Bennett's melancholy or self-deluding Englishwomen are more alive.
And yet "I Am My Own Wife" won a Pulitzer Prize. Well, more on the Pulitzer to come. And more on monologues, too, with "Golda's Balcony" opening Tuesday at the Byham and "Burton" (that's Richard) to come at Open Stage.
"Sweeney Todd," Stephen Schwartz and the Mailbag
Here's an odd conjunction. Tuesday I published my very admiring review of John Doyle's spare and electric Broadway revival of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," where the cast of 10 is also its own orchestra. That same day I was at CMU watching composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz ("Godspell," "Pippin," "Wicked") conduct a master class, as I reported in today's In the Wings. And the very next day -- we're up to Wednesday, now -- I received this nice, lively e-mail disagreement:
Boy, I completely disagree with you about the "Sweeney Todd" ... I was especially anxious to see Patti LuPone -- and Mark Jacoby -- I found the entire cast to be excellent and I was surprised by their ability to play musical instruments so well and under such difficult circumstances.
Still, the instruments ruined the show for me. I was completely distracted. I found myself wishing they would put them away and just act. I was also distracted by actors moving scenery (or what little there was). Much of the drama and shock value of the murders was lost as they put on blood-stained coats and remained on stage. Please, give me a second floor barber shop and barber chair. Let the body disappear, never to be seen again. I hated it -- I hope this doesn't become a trend.
I have disagreed with you on other shows, especially "Wicked," which I think has great and clever music. But never have I disagreed with you as much as with "Sweeney Todd." In any case, I do enjoy reading your reviews even when I don't agree with you.
Bill Walter, North Huntingdon
Good message! But it was odd, because just the day before I had actually raised the issue of the orchestra-less "Sweeney Todd" with Stephen Schwartz, and he had expressed the very same objection as reader Walter. It's just a gimmick, Schwartz said; it was interesting for about 15 minutes, and then he wished they'd just go back to doing "Sweeney Todd." Without knowing it, he made a point-by-point refutation of everything in my review. The gimmick keeps us from losing ourselves in the story, he said (whereas I think we know perfectly well theater is artifice and we get caught up anyway). He even objected particularly to the cello duet between Anthony and Johanna, which I had called "an aching duet of despair on dual cellos ... all the more transporting because performers, cellos, music and words become one, right before our eyes."
Although I stand by my review, I didn't argue the point with Schwartz. I yield to his musical knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily make him a better audience. But I was happy to tell reader Walter about his agreement with Schwartz, made odder by his reference to my review (two reviews, actually, Broadway and tour) of Schwartz' "Wicked." Maybe I'll come to appreciate that score more over time, but I'm not changing my mind about this "Sweeney Todd," which already has bowled me over twice.
Schwartz did say he thought Doyle's similar version of Sondheim's "Company" might work better, because that's a more presentational show. Of course I hope this "mode" remains the exception, not the rule -- I still want to be able to hear scores realized by proper orchestras most of the time.
As to that, another reader addressed my joking question, "Should the musicians' union be up in arms?" by reporting that the performers get paid twice, both as actors and musicians. She also noted that this mode allows a musical to be staged in a Broadway theater without an orchestra pit, which might relieve the theater shortage.
Obviously we'll be hearing more about this.
Prison Camp
A prison camp is the unlikely setting of Vincent Delaney's "Bird Island," a very viable comedy/drama given a free reading last night in the Public Theater's series of new plays, "Public Exposure." The play's unlikely title (the only thing I'm sure I'd change) refers to a small farm town in Minnesota where, during World War II, there really was a camp interning German soldiers, one of many such camps throughout the upper midwest.
Ted Pappas directed a very appealing cast of Joe Domencic (the most gung-ho Nazi), Dana Hardy (his American immigrant sister), Tony Bingham (the least gung-ho prisoner, a violinist by trade), Joel Ripka (17-year-old Hitler Youth), Brian Barefoot (hapless American guard), and Lara Hillier (19-year-old farmer's daughter, and you know what they're like). OK, that last is a joke, but the characters are all young and national misconceptions and barriers do break down under the impact of proximity and shared boredom.
It's inappropriate to review a play in an early workshop like this, but surely there's no harm in my expressing admiration for the basic believability of the characters and the naturalness of Delaney's comic insights. The addition of a play (Moliere's "The Miser") staged by the prisoners is a bit self-conscious, but it yields some telling emotional parallels. This is certainly a play with a future.
In addition, I can't have been the only one in the audience who couldn't stop thinking about the prisoner of war camps we are running now. Then, there was a concerted effort to get German prisoners ready for a democratic future; do Guantanamo and other American camps now follow that policy?
And what about us, the audience? We found ourselves sympathizing with the German prisoners, easily separating them from the hatefulness of their leaders. The playwright also uses them as outside observers to comment on some American failings. But I suspect few of us would extend that empathy to prisoners in our more recent wars, or give them this kind of hearing. Is that a measure of our racism or just of the passage of time?
It's a good theater evening that can entertain while also posing some hard questions.
Come to the Cabaret II
This is what the CLO Late Night Cabaret was designed to do!
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Karen Dryer |
Last night the cast of the touring "Annie" strolled across the street from Heinz Hall to put on an 11 p.m. cabaret, and it was a gas, with the added attraction that Pittsburgh native Karen Dryer was the music director and also played and sang. If you happen to read this, you might want to know she's performing her own songs tonight at the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern (at the Bloomfield end of the Bloomfield Bridge) from 11 p.m. till 1 a.m. You could even go after catching "Off the Record: The Cabaret" (10 p.m. at CLO Late Night Cabaret), which is what I hope to do, if I can stand all the excitement.
Late night Pittsburgh -- It's a concept that has come and gone over the years, I know, but the CLO Cabaret is particularly well positioned to harvest performers who come through town with PNC Broadway tours or CLO shows. Apparently the "Wicked" tour cast had a cabaret show, too, but if they did it here, it was early in the week and few noticed. Let's hope the CLO and Trust keep making these connections -- the "Annie" group shows what fun it can be.
And they certainly weren't inhibited by the child-friendly nature of their vehicle; indeed, I didn't see any of the darling orphans in attendance. There were a few risqu? numbers, particularly a gay "Hawaiian Wedding Day" piece ("give new meaning to Diamond Head" goes one lyric) sung by Chad Jason (a costumer) with backup by three guys wearing coconuts, a la "South Pacific." Jennifer Evans, who plays one of the Boylan Sisters, sang a mouth-watering "Gorgeous" from "The Apple Tree"; Mickey Fisher and Julie Cardia did a non-traditional "Sarah Browneyes" from "Ragtime"; and Antoinette DiPietropolo was a cute bundle of attitude in "Men, They're All the Same." (Where's that from?)
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J.A. Trombetta Click photo for larger image |
One high point was David (Drake) Chernault's very assured "Trouble" from "Music Man," with much of the show-bizzy audience chiming in as the townspeople chorus. Another was Alene (Miss Hannigan) Robertson's knowing anthem to her hometown, "Chicago."
And, of course, Karen's own song, "Just Can't Say Goodbye." She's best known in Pittsburgh as frequent music director for Ken Gargaro's PMT, but she's also at home at CLO Late Night, where she had her own cabaret night last year (see John Hayes' preview "Jazz singer to entertain at Cabaret 03/08/05).
Karen got the "Annie" tour because she played keyboards for the CLO's "Tommy" last summer, under music director Keith Levenson. He then hired her for "Annie," where she's associate conductor/keyboards. The tour launched last August in Seattle, takes a break this summer, and then resumes in September. When it makes it into 2007, it can finally call itself the 30th anniversary tour.
Beyond that, Karen is hoping to spend more time on her own songwriting, whether in Nashville, New York or wherever. I guess Pittsburgh has lost her for now. But we can track her progress at www.karendryer.com -- and I see she'll be back April 29 at Square Caf? in Regent Square.
Thanks also to my tablemates last night, Gavan Pamer and Deana Muro, always good company and full of info about songs and singers. Gavan has worked with several of them, including Roberston who he says is "the queen of Chicago theater" and played "the best Mama Rose I've ever seen" (opposite Jeff Howell's Herbie) at the West Virginia Public Theater.
Odd bits
Actors' wisdom has it that you should never share the stage with animals or children, because they'll steal the scene every time. But what about when a child has to share the stage with an animal, as in "Annie"? In my experience, I'd say it's the animal that wins every time -- at least when it's a dog. And that's no reflection on the fine Annie of Marissa O'Donnell now at Heinz Hall.
But speaking of that national tour, isn't it approaching some ethical line when Mackenzie Phillips is advertised as Lily St. Regis and even listed as one of the four stars on the Heinz Hall program cover, but we discover she's out of the show for a week's vacation?
Having picked up Alan Bennett's "Untold Stories" in the process of writing about his play, "Talking Heads," for today's preview article, I can't put it down. Here's a choice 2001 journal entry from a grungy cafe in Inverary, Scotland:
I ask for baked beans and toast. "We don't do baked beans on toast," says the unsmiling girl. "But you do baked beans?" "Yes." "And toast?" "Yes." "But no baked beans on toast?" "No." I can't help but laughing but she doesn't see this as a joke.
What's remarkable is that this doesn't make Bennett think of the famous scene between Jack Nicholson and the waitress in "Five Easy Pieces." Of course, Bennett didn't trash the place -- he just left and ended up somewhere equally drab, trying to eat a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich.
"Tomorrow"
That insistent tune was holding my brain hostage last night as I departed Heinz Hall at the end of "Annie." As I always do, I glanced over at PNC Park and, seeing the lights were still bright but the stands empty, I looked up and down the street for faces happy or sad, to tell me how the old home team had done against the Dodgers.
But "Annie" is a little bit too long to let out at the same time as a ballgame (and a little too long for other reasons, too). So I just assumed we'd lost, because it had been 0-3 in the first inning when "Annie' began. "Tomorrow," I thought. "We'll get them tomorrow."
Oh me of little faith.
As to my review of "Annie," be assured that I thought just what you'd expect me to think. It's not as though a tour starring Conrad John Shuck, Pittsburgh's official Daddy Warbucks, is going to hold many surprises. But if you do want to see the review, you'll have to wait until we publish it ... tomorrow.
Dr. Goddess
If you read my interview last Thursday, you know Dr. Goddess is the somewhat serious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek stage name and internet moniker of Kimberly Ellis, Ph.D., Hill District native and performer.
I almost called her a performance artist, but I'm wary of that term, which is falling into disrepute or at least pretentiousness. Having just yesterday been to Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre to see Kim's one-dynamo show, "Dr. Goddess," sub-titled for the occasion, "a homegirl's homecoming," I can testify that she's an authentic hip-hop poet, impersonator, dancer, actor and certified stage presence.
The last surprises me the least, because I've stood face-to-face with Kim often enough, discussing this and that and often her uncle, August Wilson, to have felt the force of her personality. But I didn't know she could harness it to such good purpose on stage. I expect this has something to do with the shaping direction of Eileen J. Morris. However she's done it, she's a force.
The quality I like best is her quick turn from one character to another. She has the mimic's gift for the sudden detail that summons character, and the physical plasticity to bring it off. I especially like the moments when her carefully planned performance seems to crack open and to show an improvisatory energy.
I was surprised to discover what an expressive dancer she is. I guess that's partly my prejudice talking: Kim is a big woman and dancers usually come small. But her size gives her grace emphasis. And as one of her poems says, she has "a cute ass face"; but what that doesn't say is how her face opens up to channel her youth and optimism.
Her poetry has an agenda, of course -- how could it be otherwise with August Wilson's niece? Like these excerpts from "If Revolution Were an After-Thanksgiving Sale":
... We would run to the checkouts with coupons that would guarantee us
10% off old men hounding teenage girls, 30% off domestic violence and 50% off child molestation
... brothers and sisters would make mad dashes down the aisles of love ...
Or this gloss on "extreme makeover":
Extreme
Makeover
Time to take over
This culture
In extreme ways.
When push came to shove, though, I didn't think I was the best person available to review "Dr. Goddess!" It deserves someone more in sync with the cultural environment on which her work is such a pungent commentary. So tune in Wednesday for a PG review by Philip Stephenson. "Dr. Goddess" has six performances to go, April 14-16; call 412-394-3353.
Come to the cabaret
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Tim Menees Click poster for larger image. |
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In addition to recovering from London and diving into the high school musicals maelstrom (with results you can find on our high school musicals page), another reason I've let my journal sag the past weeks is that I've been working on "Off the Record: The Cabaret." It's a brisk retrospective of the first five years of the annual spoof of Pittsburgh news and newsmakers.
It opened at the CLO Late Night Cabaret last Saturday in what was basically a dress rehearsal for a small audience. The real opening was last night, and it was a lot of fun. Of course, you can't take my word for it, since I'm the producer, but the response was enthusiastic. Sala Udin was our guest host and the audience, partly thanks to a pre-show party given by Linda Dickerson, included Lynn Cullen, David Johnson and Nancy Polinski, Joan and Jerry Apt, Paul Greeno, Ted Hoover ("it's my job," he said), Ruth Ann and Bill Molloy ... and I guess this is starting to sound like Seen.
The cabaret plays three more Saturdays at 10 p.m. Guest hosts to come are Rick Sebak, Ken Rice and Lynn Cullen. See you there?
Momentum '06: new plays at different stages
City Theatre's fourth annual new play weekend, a treat for the theater addicted -- marathon, sprint and glut, all in one -- featured readings of four new plays, ongoing productions of "Opus" and "Pyretown" and a miscellany of panels, workshops and parties. I had to drop in and out for brief snapshots, since other Pittsburgh theater also needs attention, but I'd rather I could just move into City Theatre for the 74-hour event.
Momentum '06 started with the Frankel Awards, which have evolved since 1994 into recognition of those who help support new plays, which is, of course, City's main mission. Architect and longtime, key City board member Leonard Perfido accepted his award by videotape, one of those modern oddities that makes me realize how old I am. One insightful remark: he recalled working on City's then-new South Side home with longtime artistic director Marc Masterson, saying Marc was really a property developer at heart. And how else do you create a theater, as Marc did?
First lady of Pittsburgh theater?
But actress Helena Ruoti accepted her Frankel Award in full, quirky person. She is the first actor so honored -- the award has gone mainly to supporters. At the podium, Helena did a funny routine about not reading the sheaf of paper on which she'd written an account of her life in art, a routine that was probably as impromptu as it seemed. She has a surface ditheriness that can disguise her shrewd mind, but nothing hides her comic control of the moment and the depth of her commitment to theater.
Most movingly, she spoke of the people who long advised her to "get aht of tahn," to leave Pittsburgh for the challenge of a larger theatrical pool, where she would certainly have achieved success. But she stayed in Pittsburgh, doing some two dozen productions at City and a substantial number at the Public, among others. And about staying here, she said this:
"People get to know your stuff -- and that can be a challenge, too. People can call you on your 'stuff.' But under Marc Masterson and Tracy Brigden, you are asked to check your bag of tricks at the door. And that's a challenge, too."
Helena was introduced by Dee Jay Oshry, who said that from the first sight of her with City Players in 1978 "it was clear we were in the presence of the first lady of Pittsburgh theater." The historian in me demurred: I remember admiring this wonderfully funny, inventive new actress in that early City Players season at what would later become the Hazlett Theatre on the North Side. But Helen Wayne Rauh then still reigned as the FLPT. (Interestingly, she also turned down chances to move on to New York.) And her successor FLPT, I would say, was Lenora Nemetz, who did have New York success and who certainly hasn't relinquished any claim to that crown, witness her recent daring appearance in Quantum's avant garde opera, "The Voluptuous Tango."
But there's some truth in Oshry's accolade. Helena has earned her eminence here. I'd say she and Lenora currently share the FLPT distinction. If Pittsburgh had a Sarah Bernhardt handkerchief (see below under Feb. 14), they'd have to share it.
First citizen of Pittsburgh theater
About this title, I'm in no doubt. As far as I can tell, I was the first to bestow it on Richard E. Rauh, when the New Works Festival gave him its 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award. We have many other generous philanthropists of theater, such as Phil Chosky and well, too many to name without leaving someone out. But Richard has not only put the Rauh name on four theaters and a theater school, underwritten Cabaret Pittsburgh, subsidized the visits of London's Globe and supported much more, he's also been a constant theatrical presence as teacher, kibitzer, reviewer and actor. That's a citizen, not just a funder.
At the opening night of "Dancing at Lughnasa," the University of Pittsburgh honored Richard for endowing a faculty position for a teaching artist in residence, now held by "Lughnasa" director Holly Thuma. Pitt's Buck Favorini spoke about Richard with characteristic eloquence, pointing out that Richard has established this position "in perpetuity." He quoted Horace's promise to his patron, Maecenas, that "I will build you a monument more lasting than gold," then turned to Richard and promised that Pitt would "honor your family name and the muse that captivates us all in perpetuity."
Back in Pittsburgh
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A forbidding sign in the lobby of the Savoy Theatre. Click photo for larger image. |
Leaving London, I bring back the memory of a portentous sign in the Savoy Theatre lobby -- maybe a motto for all live theater in our new millennium.
Back home, jet-lagged and all, I'm going to have to play catch up -- "Completely Hollywood! (abridged)," "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" and "Pyretown" all opened while I was away. They were reviewed by other PG critics, but I'll want to see them while keeping up with all that's coming.
That "all" includes high school musicals, now in high season. I'll go to five, as I do each year, and please don't ask me to do more. We plan to produce lavish photo spreads online.
The man of the millennium
This is the final day of the PG Critics Choice tour, so we'll be rushing around trying to do whatever it is each of us can't bear to leave undone. For many, this being Saturday, that means stall-shopping on ever-colorful Portobello Road.
My own chief regret is to have visited so few museums. But I never miss my London favorite, the National Portrait Gallery, where I usually offer my group a guided tour of the 16th to 19th centuries. For myself, there are always favorites to visit, new things to discover and special exhibits to enjoy.
This spring's chief special, celebrating the 150th birthday of the NPG itself, is "Searching for Shakespeare," running through May 29. It focuses on the famous Chandos portrait, the Droeshout engraving, the Gerard Johnson post-mortem effigy at Stratford-upon-Avon and a small group of other portraits that have been connected to Shakespeare at different times. The exhibit surrounds these with a treasure trove of documents about Shakespeare's life and times -- not enough to silence the anti-Stratfordians on the authorship issue, but plenty for pro-Stratfordians like me to worship.
In preparing the exhibit, the NPG conducted a fresh review of the evidence which pretty well removes all possible portraits from serious consideration except those three, leaving the Chandos (attributed to John Taylor) as still the most likely to have been painted from Shakespeare's life. This is fitting, since the Chandos is NPG1, the very first portrait given the gallery when it was founded in 1856.
Elliott Kulick
In addition to Martin Jarvis and Ann Kaufman (see below), a third Pittsburgh connection on this trip was Elliott Kulick, a native of Monessan who has made a pretty improbable life journey from that steel town to the upper reaches of establishment London. I was put in touch with Elliott by a Pittsburgh relative, Ann Kwallasser, because, among much else, he's a theater producer who had a hand in the West End and Broadway transfers of Nicholas Wright's impressive "Vincent in Brixton" (2002, 2003).
As a student, Elliott served as a page in Congress. He went to the University of Chicago and also studied some drama at Carnegie Tech. He then read law at Oxford, where he was involved in the university's famous dramatic society. From law, he segued into international mergers and finance, and he serves on several boards dealing with international relations and development. He has a particular interest in southeast Asia, about which he co-authored a book ("Thailand's Turn -- Profile of a New Dragon").
Pretty good for a kid from Monessen. You can measure how well he's done by his London club, where we met to talk -- the legendary Reform Club, named for the early 19th century movement to reform Parliament. It's one of those grandiose piles on Pell Mell that don't even identify themselves with a sign. He was a charming host and I told him we have a far more active professional theater scene in Pittsburgh than he would remember -- so if anyone wants to stage the Pittsburgh premiere of "Vincent in Brixton," we have an in!
Each night
It takes a lot out of you, running around London all day enjoying theater, history, art, bookshops, street markets and such. So each night, after the nearby Museum Tavern was closed, I'd stick my head into the bar at the Radisson Marlborough (our very convenient hotel) and discover some portion of the Critics Choice group still enjoying themselves. Call it our on-going group seminar on London life and theater -- it's one of my favorite parts of these annual trips.
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Kaufman and Kaufman
Yesterday, we enjoyed another Pittsburgh connection: a "platform" appearance by Anne Kaufman at the National Theatre, on the Olivier Theatre stage where George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's "Once in a Lifetime" would be lavishly performed that night. She is, of course, the only child of the Pittsburgh-born Kaufman (1889-1961), the greatest American comic playwright.
Although never a Pittsburgher herself, Anne has been a good friend to Pittsburgh, visiting when the Public Theater used to give its Kaufman Awards and happily turning out last fall for our big Pittsburghers in Times Square photo. (In the picture used in the masthead for this journal, she's wearing a red beret, just above the megaphone I'm wielding. Here's a bigger version)
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David Suchet, Anne Kaufman and Laurence Maslon at the National Theatre. Click photo for larger image. |
At the NT, Anne was paired with Laurence Maslon, an NYU professor who edited GSK's plays for the Library of America. He praised her for exercising "great acuity, fidelity and intelligence" as executrix of her father's estate; as they talked, she showed all that plus a quick, dry wit and a willingness to call a spade a spade.
About "You Can't Take It With You," sometimes cited as the greatest American comedy, she said it was "an odd play for Moss and my father to have written. It's about family and love and things you wouldn't have expected my father to know much about, but I guess he did." In America, she said, "it's considered universal," but it doesn't work as well in England, where it's "considered too sentimental." (That may be because it's sentimental about America. Maslon wisely compared it to Noel Coward's "Cavalcade," which has a reverse reputation.)
Of "Once in a Lifetime," Anne said it was written when neither GSK nor Hart had been to California and was thus "a fantasy that turned out to be totally real -- almost prophetic in its view of the idiocy of Hollywood."
When Anne was taken to see "Once in a Lifetime" in 1930, when she was 5, she is supposed to have said, "I would like to meet the man who made the train noises." She recalled that when it was staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company 30 years ago, the blowhard movie mogul was played by the same man now doing it at the NT -- David Suchet, better known to Americans as TV's Hercule Poirot. Suchet beamed from a side box, where he was sitting with other cast members.
Anne was asked how her father would feel about his play being revived by England's NT 70 years after its NY premiere. "I like to think he would be moved," she said, admitting that "moved" isn't a word often associated with him. "He'd be pleased. He'd be 'chuffed.'"
"I think he loved Moss," his only child said. "I think he was the son he would have loved to have."
She called her father's deft dialogue, "just the way we speak now, if we're funny enough." She noted many GSK connections with London, where he also worked as a director, and she and Maslon cited a number of his famous anecdotes and bon mots -- even though she noted that the Algonquin Round Table era was before she was born.
At some point Anne made reference to some Pittsburghers in the audience and lots of our group clapped, causing Maslon to say, "who's minding the store in Pittsburgh?"
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Wyndham's Theatre, Charing Cross Road, London. Click photos for larger images. |
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Georgina Rich and Martin Jarvis, backstage. | |
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Martin Jarvis (blue shirt) and admirers from Pittsburgh. | |
(Read Christopher Rawson's reviews of the plays he saw in London.)
Tuesday's group dinner was at Brown's, a new/old brasserie on St. Martin's Lane, handy to a half-dozen theaters. We were on our way around the corner to Wyndham's to see "Honour," a play that I chose solely because it stars Diana Rigg (many decades ago known as "the thinking man's crumpet," mainly on TV's "The Avengers" but always also as a very good actress) and Martin Jarvis (whom Pittsburgh enjoyed as the title character in "By Jeeves" at the Public).
What I didn't tell the group in advance was that the urbane and gracious Jarvis, whom I'd been able to chat with during that time in Pittsburgh, had invited us all backstage after the show to squeeze into the greenroom and have a drink. I couldn't believe his generosity, but I ran over to the theater during dinner to check, then returned to share the good news.
"Honour" proved predictable but thought-provoking, with admirable acting, so the 24 of us were in very good spirits as we crammed into the green room, a tiny space with a couple of sofas and chairs and glasses of wine for all. When Jarvis appeared, many wanted to tell him how much they'd enjoyed "By Jeeves." Then we commiserated with him about the waves of opposition his character feels coming from the audience over his betrayal of his wife. Said wife then showed up in the person of Rigg to chat with us a bit, and we also had a visit from young Georgina Rich, making her West End debut as their daughter -- not bad company.
London theme park
On our bus ride into London from Gatwick on arrival yesterday, our handler, Vivian, a friend after many years of similar service, was full of the latest journalistic gossip and obsessions -- the royals, cabinet minister on the ropes, price of houses, what it was going to take to stage the Olympics in 2012, Tony Blair -- and I realized that, if anyone was still wondering whether there will always be an England, they needn't: there will. If such things can stay the same year after year, why not?
I'm here with the Post-Gazette's Critics Choice theater tour, 23 strong, to enjoy what I call the London theme park of theater, pubs, royalty, history, rain, art, bookshops, pubs, theater, street markets, Indian restaurants, umbrellas, tea time, theater and pubs, not necessarily in that order. Oh, and walking tours. And newspapers. And did I mention pubs?
I didn't plan anything for the group on arrival day, since people react differently to jet lag. Myself, I always resolve to don my sleep mask the moment US Airways takes off (sadly, from Philadelphia now, not Pittsburgh), denying myself the airline food and movies, but I always end up eating anyway. I even watched the Johnny Cash movie, in homage to the Oscars we were missing at that very moment. So I'll spin through London all week in arrears on my sleep, but as Dr. Johnson said, "He who is tired of London is tired of life," and I'm sure he meant that to include the tiredness of jet lag.
Walking my group down to the nearest tube stop to buy our tube and bus passes, I discovered that staffing problems meant you couldn't buy them there that day. After a genial discussion with a guard, I was advised to write a letter of complaint to the head of the London Underground -- that would be the brother of the PG's Jim O'Toole. Possibly I will, but I do like the new Oyster system that reads passes electronically, and I admire that teenagers ride the system for free.
I did take myself to a play that first night -- what's jet lag to a pro? It was Theatre de Complicite's "Measure for Measure," at the National Theatre, an interpretation almost diametrically opposed to that of Mark Rylance and the Globe company on their recent Pittsburgh visit. Before the Globe, I would have said such seamy darkness and moral ambiguity was right on, but now I'm not sure. Well, more on that when I write my London reviews.
The first day I also took myself off on London Walks' "Legal London" tour of Lincoln's Inn (the setting for much of "Bleak House" -- I do watch some TV) and the Middle and Inner Temple. Among the high points were the Lincoln's Inn Chapel and the Temple Church. As that latter name should suggest even if you haven't read "The DaVinci Code" and discovered it's one of the book's important sites, it has had a large upswell in tourist attention. Vivian had already told us that Westminster Abbey has sent all London guides a long list of the book's factual inaccuracies, which does seem to be the major London response, sensibly so.
Our capable guide was Gillian, and she was sorry she couldn't help me with a long-time wish to get inside Middle Temple Hall, the actual building where Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" premiered in 1602 and where Rylance premiered his own "Twelfth Night" 400 years later, that same production we saw the following year in Pittsburgh. The hall is still used as a dining hall for lawyers, and I could have gotten in if I had just lied and said I was a member of the legal profession. But I'll figure out another way. I did get inside another venerable institution, when a good friend invited me for a post-show drink at the Garrick Club, every one of its high walls is layered with theater paintings and memorabilia.
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Who notices rain on a walking tour of Westminster? Click photo for larger image. |
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Today, our second, I had to race around picking up theater tickets, but I also went on our group's private London Walks tour of "The Westminster Nobody Knows." With dozens and dozens of different tours scattered through the week, London Walks is one of the city's great attractions, mainly because of the personality and expertise of its guides, most of whom are former (or "resting") actors. Today's guide was the very emphatic and funny Peter, lively enough to distract us from an intermittent cold rain and able to pull out the right literary quote at every twist of his tour of the St. James's area. He even quoted at length about link boys from John Gay's poetic tour of London, "Trivia," a poem I thought I was one of the few to know.
Tonight our group is off to dinner, a play and a special post-play treat.
Off to London
I'm racing to Pittsburgh International, off to London with a couple of dozen theater-goers on a PG Critics Choice tour. My plan is to send back brief daily reports, but amid all the theater, museums, pubs, royalty, street life and history of that great theme park that is London, will I actually find the time? Would you? We'll see.
Last night I finished a busy week in Pittsburgh by squeezing in two shows, Prime Stage's "Great Expectations" and Barbara Russell's solo cabaret, "Looking Both Ways," at the CLO's Late Night Cabaret, though to make the second I had to leave the first just before the death of Magwitch -- oops!). Reviews of both will appear as soon as I get my laptop set up in my London hotel.
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Joe Manganiello and proud mom Susan on the set of "Close to Home," the day after the Super Bowl. Click photo for larger image. |
Barbara's show is on the set designed by Cletus Anderson for the CLO's new cabaret, "Forbidden Broadway," now in previews. (I don't get to review it until March 16.) Dropping in before a preview to admire the set, I ran into indefatigable theater-goers Edna Enelow (I think everyone calls her Fluffy) and Susan Manganiello. Susan caught me up on son Joe, Mt. Lebanon High School and CMU '00, who did theater here (Quantum, Starlight) and made his Hollywood debut as the insolent Joe Flash in the first "Spider Man" movie. Later this month, he'll appear in a new "Close to Home" episode; he's Tori Spelling's love interest in her TV show, "noTORIous"; he recently did a "CSI"; and he's cast in the third "Spider Man" movie, as well.
So off I go. It's lousy timing -- we'll be flying when the Oscars are on, and I'll have to follow Pitt's fate in the Big East tournament from London. But London does have its own attractions.
Back to the Future: "Jane Shore" and Chuck Wein
The most unusual theater opening last week was Nicholas Rowe's "Jane Shore," a 1714 "she-tragedy" staged by the Duquesne University Red Masquers. They followed it up yesterday with a one-day academic conference on "Women and Performance in the 18th Century." Unfortunately, the only session I had time for was a panel I moderated presenting the "Jane Shore" cast, but they were very entertaining in discussing the challenges and pleasures of doing a formal, wordy tragedy so unlike theater they're used to.
The pros on the panel were Mark Thompson (Gloster), Jay Keenan (Dumont) and director John Lane; students were assistant director Lacy Cunningham, self-denominated "English lit nerd"; Pat Plunkett (Hastings); Eric Frankenberg (Catesby); and Joe Jasek (Bellmour).
Asked about the language and the elaborate 18th-century costumes, Thompson noted the humor of his having, after a career strong in mime, to say "the longest sentences in the world." Keenan joked that Rowe is so repetitive "you could leave out 30 or so lines, skipping from one speech to the next, and no one would notice -- so memorization was a bear." Plunkett called it "one gigantic tongue-twister ... and they kept adding stuff to my costume!" Jasek agreed that if you forgot a line, the alternatives were silence or iambic improv, and "you've never heard a dressing room so quiet as when we're trying to put all nine pieces of costume together."
Frankenberg said he could hear his friends laughing at his costume. But the costumes helped: "You have to be as uptight as the script requires to wear them," he said. Cunningham admitted she's sewn on a lot of buttons "and laughed at guys who don't know how to put on nylons. ... Even if you don't speak English, it's worth coming to see the wigs." She defined masochism as "strapping girls into corsets."
Keenan loved his costume: "The wardrobe mistress has to make sure I don't wear mine home. It's the only way to dress -- and I look much better in hair." The almost equally hair-challenged Thompson agreed that he liked having hair, even though his wig looked like Frank Zappa.
As you can see, it wasn't a dry academic conference at all.
Chuck Wein
Norman Roth, faithful Pittsburgher in New York exile, called to point my attention to a picture of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 19. The third person in the photo is another Pittsburgher, Chuck Wein, a Warhol film colleague and a classmate of Roth's at Taylor Allderdice (1956). Here's a snippet of Wein autobiography culled from the Internet:
"Edie and I were mock elitists in fellowship ... . I was her roommate, shrink, astrologer, and Tarot instructor. I spent the Sixties adventuring in the Far East, managing bizarre nightclub acts like Rosita the python lady, a French drag queen and two over-the-hill Australian strippers. I spent '62 in Copenhagen stoned on absinthe. In '63 I sat at the Cafe de Paris in Tangier long enough to be asked to cover the Algerian/Moroccan border war for the English papers. I attended Harvard in the Leary acid-experiment days. ..." For all of which, Allderdice obviously prepared him well.
Pittsburgh and Broadway
What a theater week it was -- "Wicked" at the Benedum, "Contact" by the Point Park kids at the Playhouse and "Nathan the Wise" at CMU, all excellent, as my reviews detail. Especially inspiring is the conjunction of these two big, wildly different shows at our two theater conservatories. At Point Park, Tome Cousin turned 37 performing students plus crew into a real company, with alternating casts and swings, discipline, joy, zest, the whole package. At CMU, Mladen Kiselov and brilliant design supported a robust production of a great 18th-century play that speaks directly to today's sectarian intolerance.
"Nathan" is having a further impact through a live telecast to CMU's Doha-based campus in Qatar. The performance to be broadcast, free to Pittsburghers, will be at 11 a.m. March 11. Gregory Lehane is directing it for TV. The live broadcast will be followed by a live talkback session between Qatar and Pittsburgh attendees. Tickets can be reserved at 412-268-2407.
As to "Contact," director Cousin had hopes of librettist John Weidman coming to see it, but I don't know if he did. "I don't think they're aware of the potential 'Contact' has for training cross-disciplinary performers," he says of creators Weidman and Susan Stroman. (The preview is all about this, "Tome Cousin throws his boundless energy into Point Park production," February 23, 2006) The Point Park show will live on in a couple of ways. At least one of the undergraduate performers will go with Cousin to stage a professional production at the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk. And Cousin is currently working on an MFA in new media art and performance at Long Island University, and to cover his long absence from classes while he was directing here, he's been documenting the "Contact" process on video. (By the way, Cousin hopes to be back in the fall, workshopping his new show about Harlem Renaissance photographer James VanDerZee at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.)
It made me feel lucky to be a Pittsburgher, having these two schools adding such performance pizzazz to our other theatrical resources. And there's a bit of a connection to "Wicked." I'm not aware of any Pittsburghers in the touring company, but as I noted in my In the Wings column, on Broadway Glinda is played by CMU grad Megan Hilty, and when she was out last weekend, the understudy who went on was Point Park grad Megan Sikora. In fact, when I first saw the show when it opened, Kristen Chenoweth was out, and her understudy that night was another Point Park grad, Melissa Bell Chait, aka McMurray's own Missy Bell, a veteran of PMT and seven years with the CLO.
Playing the Wicked Witch in Pittsburgh is Stephanie J. Block, with whom I did an interesting preview phone interview.("Actress followed different roads to Oz," February 21, 2006). We also talked about a shared enthusiasm, "James Joyce's The Dead," which she performed in regionally. So to welcome her to Pittsburgh, I sent her one of my precious copies of the CD of the PICT production, hoping she'll enjoy it as much as I do. Although not licensed to be sold, it's the only recording of the show available and a real treat.
Speaking of Broadway, did you notice the general raves for Kathleen Marshall's production of "The Pajama Game" with Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O'Hara? Of course you read it here, first, down below on Feb. 14: "Connick and O'Hara are a sizzling pair, both cute and erotic. When they finally kiss, you can feel the heat. Who expected 'Pajama Game' to have so much sex in it?" That was based on an early preview. I can't wait to get back and review it properly.
August Wilson Month
That's what February has seemed like. There was the third annual "August in February," Feb. 13, with more visibility than ever because of the participation of James Earl Jones. There was the Feb. 17 naming of the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. And there was the very select, very intense "Art for August," Jan. 27-Feb. 24, in which 13 local artists responded in many media to Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of 10 plays.
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| Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Vanessa German with "1839 Wylie Avenue" at the exhibit "Art for August." Click photo for larger image. |
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In Mary Thomas' review ("Reflective exhibit by 13 artists honors playwright August Wilson," Feb. 21, 2006), as here, you can see the piece that moved me the most, Vanessa German's "1839 Wylie Avenue." It's telling, given the abused history of the Hill, that that address is now a vacant lot. But it's also the address of the house where the 285 year-old Aunt Ester lives in "Gem of the Ocean," Wilson's 1904 play which the Public Theater will stage this spring. And it's the house over which the development wars rage in Wilson's 1997 play, "Radio Golf," which just closed in Seattle and is about to open in Baltimore, on its way (we hope) to Broadway next year.
German's piece represents Aunt Ester herself, or at least much that she stands for, with its formal turn-of-the-century gown and quilting motif, its bustle made up of baby shoes (Ester's many children), and the wooden tabernacle in its chest which opens upon a mirror -- in which, of course, we see ourselves. It's as if we have looked into Aunt Ester's capacious soul, which is exactly what happens in "Gem of the Ocean" (and also offstage in "Two Trains Running").
There are also shamanistic objects at the figure's wrists, such as feathers and keys. The latter echo details of Aunt Ester's costume, as designed on Broadway by Constanza Romero, the playwright's wife. At the exhibit-closing reception last Friday, Wilson's sister, Linda Jean Denoya, made a connection for me between those keys and the tragedy of the title character in "King Hedley II," who attains the keys to the kingdom -- forgiveness -- just as the violence of life breaks over him.
Among other Wilson friends and family at the reception were his sister Freda Ellis and her daughter, Kim Ellis, an academic and performer who will do her one-woman show here in April. "Art for August" was a wonderful idea. I wish it could have continued longer, but I doubt the idea will die.
The month has given us other, related exhibits. At the Carnegie, Mark Clayton Southers has curated "Documenting our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project, Part Two," an exhibit of 214 Pittsburgh Courier photos selected from 6,000 of the 80,000 the museum is cataloguing. (There was a similar sampler exhibit in 2003.) Southers, of course, is artistic director of the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, but he was invited to create this exhibit because he was also a Courier photographer.
There is another exhibit of historic photos of the Hill in Pitt's Frick Fine Arts gallery. Last week, Larry Glasco, the historian of black Pittsburgh, gave an intriguing slide lecture about the multicultural history of the Hill, including plenty of images and information about August Wilson territory. Glasco's work is a counter to the tendency to think of the Hill as overwhelmingly black, which may derive from the focus of the nine Pittsburgh Cycle plays set there.
This month even gave me a chance to honor Wilson's work with a program at Pitt's Hillman Library. It was the day of the big Super Bowl celebration, but actors Eileen Morris, Jonas Chaney and Tre Garrett were still willing to join in reading scenes from the 10 plays while I provided a brief narration.
Perhaps it has felt like August Wilson Month to me mostly because I'm now teaching a course in the Pittsburgh Cycle at Pitt. Also, this was the first Black History Month since Wilson's death. But the fascination with his work will continue, most immediately with three of his plays scheduled to be produced here later this year.
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Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette A scene from "Two Trains Running" with, from left, Art Terry (Wolf), Shanae Sharon (Risa), Ben Cain (Holloway) and Nathan James (Sterling). Click photo for larger image. |
I had the good fortune to be present for the four August Wilson scenes at the Feb. 13 matinee and then see them again with four additional scenes that night. Certainly the most moving was the scene from "Jitney," especially the confrontation between Becker and Booster, father and son, played by Sala Udin and Ben Cain. My heart was in my mouth at the controlled passion with which the father berated the son for throwing his life away, and I can't have been the only one thinking of the echoes of the family tragedy in Udin's own life.
James Earl Jones didn't have that local perspective, of course, but according to the Trust's Janis Burley Wilson, he said Udin had him in tears, both times he saw the scene. Talking about it later at the press conference announcing the naming of the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, Udin acknowledged his pleasure at the compliment. "And he called me 'young man'!" he said of Jones, with a big smile.
The "Joe Turner" excerpt was also strong, solving the problem of starting a scene already under way by having Bynum and Bertha (Doug Pona and Teri Bridgett) begin convulsed with laughter, which you just can't resist. It forced the audience into the moment. Cain reprised his looming Herald Loomis from last summer's "Joe Turner," alongside Vanessa German's clear, simple Martha. In fact, Cain was in three of those first four scenes.
Jay Jones was a sharp, edgy Levee in the intense "mother-**" scene from "Ma Rainey," and Charles Timbers generated chills with the horrific Rev. Gates story. Only the "Two Trains Running" scene felt lumpy, with pieces of too many plotlines to unravel. There were five directors to praise and many more actors, since it was really a large cast of local all-stars. Art Terry and Don Marshall gave their all by stepping into additional roles with a day's notice. Artistic director Mark Clayton Southers can be proud of what he started two years back. And Janis Burley Wilson, representing the Cultural Trust, reported a nighttime audience of more than 1,100.
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Larry Rippel Click photo for larger image |
Before the student matinee of "August in February" on Feb. 13, James Earl Jones met with some students from Perry Traditional Academy, as I reported the next day. Here are some lines from the poem read then by Perry student Sterling Freeman (and isn't that a wonderful August Wilson name?). The quoted passages come from Wilson's plays:
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Larry Rippel Janis Burley Wilson of the Cultural Trust with student poet Sterling Freeman. Click photo for larger image. |
"Who can you be, if you can't be who you are?"
Wise quotes from a famous man ...
Poet, playwright, musician of words
"Words are free," free as leaving blood on the page
Little traces of you left behind
DNA forming characters that we wish we had met,
Characters we felt that we'd known all our lives
"Some people build fences to keep people out. Others build fences to keep people in."
"It ain't nothing to find a starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself."
Your "Fences" brought more people into your yard
The giant yard that is Pittsburgh
Your home, our home, now the world's home
You "confront[ed] the dark parts of yourself,"
Teaching us to confront ours.
You said, "Your willingness to wrestle with demons will cause your angels to sing."
Angels sing each time your plays are read and seen
Even as we, here on the ground, mourn your passing
"Everyone has to find their own song."
Thanks for letting us join in yours while we learn to play our own.
Christine Rendulich helped represent Verizon, which made Jones available. Christine Peterman was the Perry teacher whose students made such a good showing.
In welcoming Jones, Mayor O'Connor remembered taking his son to see "Field of Dreams" and crying, because he lost his dad young: "I would almost give my right arm to have played catch with him."
Based on his own knowledge of Wilson, mainly from when he starred in "Fences," Jones praised Wilson as a poet: "His plays are about black Americans ... [but] in his poetry, you can't tell where he's from. [He's] a great universal writer."
Wilson created people, he said, "you wish you could have known." Some of them might seem like those who, if you saw them on the street, "you'd roll your windows up. But August wrote people ... [to make] you want to roll your windows down."
It's a while since playwright (and many other things) Suzan-Lori Parks was here for the Drue Heinz Lecture Series, but she's still vivid. You can get a sense of her from my Feb. 5 preview piece, but her presence was special. Mainly, she talked about her life as a writer, and she read a few things and sang a song, accompanying herself on the guitar, as few writers do.
As far as we know, she was the last to interview August Wilson, just five weeks before he died. "It's great to be in August Wilson's city," she told the Carnegie Music Hall audience: "He's still here."
As a girl, she was advised into a chemistry major because she couldn't spell, but then in a required English course she read Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," and although "I couldn't tell anybody what it was about, I fell in love with the book. I remembered myself."
Some observations on writing:
When to start writing? "You never miss your chance. The best time to start writing is [always] right now."
"Maybe when you win a Pulitzer you can rest on your laurels" (though of course Wilson didn't -- and she hasn't either).
Being a writer is like being married: "You don't let it coast."
She finds writing is "a process of getting out of the way so the writing can come through."
She started as a playwright by talking a bar into letting her stage a play there and putting up the $200 for expenses herself.
The easiest time she ever had writing a play was with her Pulitzer-winning "Topdog/Underdog": "I wrote it in three days. I could have written it faster if my hands hadn't cramped."
Writing "is kind of like having your house full of relatives; it's not like hanging out with your friends."
"Writing isn't comfortable -- it's like having the flu."
"Directors often want to do a number on your play -- I think of it as No. 1 or No. 2."
Afterwards, Parks generously signed books and talked as long as people lingered. Among much else, she told me that Theatre Communications Group is planning to issue August Wilson's complete Pittsburgh Cycle "in beautiful, slim, elegant" volumes.
Beautiful certainly describes the spirit of Suzan-Lori Parks.
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2006 Theater Hall of Fame inductees: Standing: William Ivey Long and John Lithgow. Seated: Graciela Daniele, Donald Seawell and Sada Thompson. Click photo for larger image. |
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Face it, I haven't gotten into the online rhythm yet -- analog life still looms too large to make space for digital. But I keep thinking I'll catch up.
First, back to the Theater Hall of Fame. I covered the induction pretty fully on Feb. 1, leaving out a few of the more pointed digs, such as William Ivey Long's tweaking of Fran and Barry Weissler ("I'm their house costumer; where are they?"), or Liz Smith's comment about Long's favorable profile in that Sunday's New York Times: "William, you escaped a hit from Alex Witchell -- I salute you!"
But I never described the partying. Because this was the Hall's 35th year, the Hall's creative producer, Terry Hodge Taylor, staged both a pre-induction champagne cocktail party in the Gershwin Theatre lobby and a more glamorous than usual post-induction dinner at the Essex House.
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Actress Rosemary Harris, producer Terry Hodge Taylor and actress Marian Seldes. Click photo for larger image. |
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Among the partyers, in addition to inductees and presenters, were such Hall members as Frances Sternhagen, George Grizzard, Barnard Hughes (with wife Helen Stenborg), Rosemary Harris and Estelle Parsons; Hall executive committee members Jeffrey E. Jenkins (CMU grad and "Best Plays" editor, with wife Vivian), Price Berkeley, Irma Oestreicher, Kathleen Raitt and Jane Hewes (representing husband Henry, eminent critic emeritus and Hall member); and such other theater notables as actor Jonathan Pryce, Louise Hirschfeld (caricaturist Al's widow), lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Stephen Flaherty's writing partner) with her husband Neil Costa, Pia Lindstrom and Elaine Lane (widow of composer Burton).
Over cocktails, I made my compliments to that actor's-actor, Sada Thompson, telling her that she counted as the Pittsburgher among this year's inductees, because of her years at Carnegie Tech and her work at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. But I'm looking forward to following this up with a proper interview, asking her to reminisce about those early years. Jeffrey Jenkins pointed out that her acceptance speech was characteristic in being all about other people, not about her at all.
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Costume designer Jane Greenwood, critic Jeffrey E. Jenkins and actor George Grizzard. Click photo for larger image. |
I also had a chance to talk with Gordon Davidson about August Wilson. Davidson was producing "Radio Golf" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles when Wilson fell sick. He said he had been instrumental in having Wilson's home city of Seattle, where "Radio Golf" closes Feb. 19, added to the other cities (Baltimore, Chicago and Boston) where it would be produced after L.A. -- on the slim chance that Wilson might live to see it staged there.
Small quiz: In accepting his Founders Award, Donald Seawell thanked some of the famous Broadway stars he worked with: "Bob, Roger, Alfred, Lynn, Kate, Kit, Lynn and Larry." (I think I took that down right.) Can you fill out the names? Send me an e-mail. ...
New York shows
Among the shows I saw that weekend was "Beauty of the Father" at Manhattan Theatre Club, a poetic but rather static study of love by Nilo Cruz, who gave us the wonderful "Anna in the Tropics." The fantasy figure of Federico Garcia Lorca was the play's chief attraction, in addition to its wonderful way with images. I look forward to seeing it again some time.
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Theater Hall of Fame members Frances Sternhagen and Sada Thompson in New York. Click photo for larger image. |
I also saw "Talk of the Town," an original musical about the Algonquin round table wits, staged in situ at the Algonquin Oak Room, with Penn Hills' Stephen Wild playing McKeesport's Marc Connolly. It's still running, on Sundays and Mondays only, and I'll publish a review soon.
Best of all, I couldn't resist getting an early look at Kathleen Marshall's revival of "The Pajama Game," starring Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O'Hara. It was just the second week of previews -- the opening is Feb. 23 -- but the show was already running smoothly. It was also popular: We arrived for a Saturday matinee, were disappointed to hear it was sold out and at the very last minute were able to buy a great pair on the aisle.
Best of all, Connick and O'Hara are a sizzling pair, both cute and erotic. When they finally kiss, you can feel the heat. Who expected "Pajama Game" to have so much sex in it? It's enough to make you reevaluate the 1950s.
Sarah Bernhardt handkerchief
One of the special pleasures of New York right now is an exhibit on "Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama," at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. 92nd Street, through April 2.
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Donald Seawell and Zoe Caldwell at the Theater Hall of Fame induction dinner in New York. Click photo for larger image. |
The exhibit starts smashingly with a giant video of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch," noting that her toothpaste commercial was seen by more people than saw Bernhardt in her lifetime! The daughter and niece of Jewish courtesans, "the divine Sarah" (1844-1923) was baptized a Catholic but scandalously caricatured for her supposed "Jewishness." Primarily, though, she was worshipped for her skills and celebrity, and the exhibit includes not only portraits and rich objects of adulation but even a brief description of her art, as in some early movies that illustrate her practice of enacting emotion with a combination of (in this order) a look, a gesture and then speech.
My favorite description was by a New York Times critic of her Cleopatra: when she "drew her coils around Marc Antony, circling ever nearer with the venom of her wiles, [it] was a revelation of things scarcely to be whispered." Those were the days of critical effulgence!
The exhibit's most moving artifact is something I'd never heard of, a handkerchief embroidered with "Sarah" which has been passed down from Bernhardt to a distinguished line of American actresses. At the opening of "I Am a Camera," Helen Hayes gave it to Julie Harris, who passed it on to Susan Strasberg after "The Diary of Anne Frank," writing, "It is passed on for luck and happiness." The current owner is CMU grad Cherry Jones, who loaned it to the museum -- evidence, I guess, that we really can consider Jones the reigning lady of the American stage.
OK, I won the bet. Where's the salmon, Misha? I know it'll take you a while to catch and smoke it, but I'm ready and waiting. Thank you Steelers!
As I said, one of the pleasures of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was re-seeing "The Bird Sanctuary" and catching up with feisty, generous Elizabeth Franz. She now has this real cute short hair cut, such that you want to run your hands through it -- and she invited me to go ahead, and I did, and it felt great.
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Greg Thornton as Col. Wiley "The Fox" Johnson and Gavin Lawrence as Simon Cato in "Pure Confidence." Click photo for larger image. |
I saw "Bird Sanctuary" three times when it was at the Public Theater last spring, so I had a good base from which to observe differences. It's definitely funnier in Alabama, played more robustly. Franz thinks that's because the cast was able to spend some time with playwright Frank McGuinness. But it still packs an emotional wallop: on this occasion, I felt it especially when Stephen tentatively rests his head on his estranged mother's lap. In Pittsburgh, I'd felt it more a minute later, when, after struggling with herself, she allowed herself to stroke his head.
ASF artistic director Geoffrey Sherman says the only negative response to "Bird Sanctuary" has been over Stephen's homosexuality -- Montgomery is a pretty conservative area. Franz says someone told her, "you could have censored it for us," and she replied, "no, it's time to be grown up."
Sherman, who's still in his first year as head of ASF, describes it as "a classical theater with a strong bias to new work." Much of that new work comes under the heading of the Southern Writers Project. Sherman is English born, and after a couple of decades in the U.S., still has his English accent. Asked how it plays in Alabama, he allowed as how it was probably better than having Yankee accents, like us visitors. In fact, he points out that "someone from my background running a theater here [may be able to] discover stories better as a foreigner" -- especially those involving racial politics and guilt that he doesn't feel he's part of.
The three readings of new works I saw were "Four Spirits," by Sena Jeter Naslund and Elaine Wood Hughes; "Gee's Bend," by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder; and "Sanctified," by Javon Johnson (more on him to come) with music and lyrics by Ron Metcalf. Along with the fully staged "Pure Confidence" by Carlyle Brown, they all speak to African-American heritage and/or the crisis of black-white relations. I didn't see the full reading of "Sanctified," because I had to leave early for Pittsburgh on Super Bowl Sunday, but of the others, I think "Gee's Bend" is ready to start playing the regional; theater circuit. It's a lovely story of the quilting tradition and strong women in a small black town, given remarkable truth and resonance by a very young white playwright.
"Pure Confidence," which was co-commissioned by ASF and Actors Theatre of Louisville, is about Simon Cato, a skilled black jockey both before (as a slave) and after the Civil War. It has a brilliantly sustained, lightly cartoonish Act 1, in which Cato manipulates his owner to everyone's satisfaction, but a darker and more documentary, static Act 2.
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Public Theater veterans Barbara Broughton and Larry John Meyers at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Click photo for larger image. |
Pittsburgh's Larry Meyers shines as a bewiskered bigot in Act 1 and a prim, smarmy hotel manager in Act 2 -- both funny portraits.
Gavin Lawrence, playing Cato, was at City Theatre in "Birth of the Boom" (1998) and "Spunk" (1995), and Kelly Taffe, playing his wife, is vivid from playing Marta in Athol Fugard's "Sorrows and Rejoicings" at City in 2003. Greg Thornton, who plays the slave owner, Col. Johnson, is a St. Vincent grade with fond memories of Father Tom Devereux.
"Greg has great St. Vincent stories," Meyers writes. They watched the Super Bowl together and Thornton regaled him with memories of the Steelers at St. Vincent in the '70s -- "Bradshaw, Swann, Blier, et al, coming to the plays." Thornton's wife recalls that "Lambert, Ernie Holmes, and one other guy I can't remember physically picked up her Vega and moved it over a crowd of fans blocking her way to the laundromat. Those were the days. Maybe these are, too." (Yes, they are.)
Back to artistic director Sherman, who also believes strongly in giving new or newish plays that all-important, often-evasive second production, which explains the presence of "Bird Sanctuary." Joining the cast to understudy all three women was Barbara Broughton, who did three Public Theater plays in 1989-90, "George Washington Slept Here," "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" and "Eleanor," and who is married to frequent Public lighting designer, Phil Monat.
Hayley Mills
I was particularly pleased to talk with Hayley Catherine Rose Vivien Mills (great name!) because my expected interview in Pittsburgh fell through when her father died and she had to leave "Bird Sanctuary" for a week. Strangely, her mother, the novelist Mary Hayley Bell, died in December, just before she began work on "Bird Sanctuary" again.
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Hayley Mills in Alabama. Click photo for larger image. |
Her mother's best known work was "Whistle Down the Wind," which became a movie in which young Hayley, just 15, starred in 1961. But I first remember her in the very affecting "Tiger Bay," a 1959 film with Horst Buchholz and her father, the great (later Sir) John Mills. He, I remember best from David Lean's 1946 "Great Expectations," playing opposite Alec Guinness, as he did memorably again in Ronald Neame's 1960 "Tunes of Glory."
Hayley (she invites first name familiarity) cites Richard Attenborough, who called her father, "the first real English movie star" -- before Laurence Olivier. "People can shoot me down if they like," she says, but "I'm just quoting Lord Attenborough," who said Mills put "his reality and whole persona on the screen," whether as captains and lords or as ordinary soldiers. "He was a natural, instinctive screen actor, and he remained a star until he died," at 97, still acting in his final year.
"Some are made and some are born," she says, "and he was born." She says she had her parents so long (her mother died at 94) "that one thought one always would have them" -- she just couldn't make herself believe they'd ever not be there, even though her mother's final years were hard.
"Character-wise, I'm more like my dad" -- more optimistic -- "but in looks, I'm more like my mom. Though I do have his stupid stomach -- I can't eat anything."
Asked about the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical version of "Whistle Down the Wind," in which the story is transposed from England to the American south, she was reluctant to criticize the composer, for whom she has "great admiration," but she does wonder at the change in the young girl she had played, who Lloyd Webber made more "sexual, a whole different thing."
As to "Bird Sanctuary," if a New York production "is meant to be, it will. I'd love to see what happens -- we've all been involved with it for such a long time."
Hayley is a charmer, very open and direct. Realizing that I'm a critic, she said, offhandedly, "I don't read reviews, so I can't give you a kiss or a smack ... [or worry] am I any good or does the whole thing suck?"
More to come ...
Sorry about that -- it's been a long time between On Stage postings. I returned from the Theater Hall of Fame induction in New York (story on Wednesday) just in time for the City Theatre opening of "Hearts Are Wild" (review coming Monday), then set off immediately for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. That's where I am now, at a theater critics gathering occasioned by the ASF's Southern Writers' Project, a full weekend of play readings and productions.
There are several Pittsburgh connections here, as there are everywhere, and I don't mean just the occasional Steelers pennant or scarf in the airport. Chief among them is "The Bird Sanctuary," the Frank McGuinness play about the dysfunctional Irish family that had its American premiere at the Pittsburgh Public Theater last spring. It's here now in a full-scale production on the ASF mainstage, with the same set, same director (Kent Paul) and the same cast, led by Elizabeth Franz and Hayley Mills, with Martin Rayner and Diane Ciesla. Only the young man is different, being played here by Westley Whitehead.
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Elizabeth Franz and an admiring critic at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Click photo for larger image. |
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I had a good visit with Franz before seeing the show, and she told me that coming back to the play after six months has been very fruitful: "It's lived inside of us to the point that we own it now." That happens when you give something time in which to sink in, grow and breathe, she says. "And something has happened to each one of us since we've been together," so all that enters into it, too.
The whole cast also had a chance to meet McGuinness. Franz had been in Dublin with him before the Pittsburgh production -- it was her and director Paul's tenacity that brought the production about. But the rest of the cast hadn't met McGuinness, who for various reasons had not been able to come to Pittsburgh. Right after Christmas they started rehearsing in New York (Whitehead started a week earlier, to catch up), except for Rayner, who was still doing "A Christmas Carol" somewhere. Then McGuinness came over to spend some time with them. "It made such a big difference," Franz says. "He's so embracing, without pretense." After a few days of rehearsal they did two showcase run-throughs for potential New York producers, so they're hopeful that a New York run is in the offing. But Franz isn't holding her breath: "I've been there before," she says, referring to the slippery business of trying to get a New York production off the ground.
Franz remembers when she was in Montgomery before -- in the 1950s, at the time of the bus boycott and the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, which she re-walked recently on a day off, re-experiencing some of the emotional tremors. Indeed, you feel here that you are at one of the epi-centers of a great social revolution that is still going on. Right near our hotel in central Montgomery are the spot where Rosa Parks held her seat on the bus, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church and parsonage, where Martin Luther King presided, and a Civil Rights Memorial beside the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There's also the capitol of the Confederacy and the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as its president. And today, in the aftermath of Coretta Scott King's death, we heard about the fires in six Alabama churches. One of today's plays was also on this same theme, summoning up the spirits of the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In it, one character quotes Faulkner: "The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past."
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Billy Porter's little sister, MaryMartha E. Ford. Click photo for larger image. |
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I'll have to put off a fuller report on the ASF and the Southern Writers' Project until I get back to Pittsburgh and have time to do it right. First, there are those other Pittsburgh connections. Playwright/actor and Pitt grad Javon Johnson is here, working on his new play with music, "Sanctified." Pitt grad Derrick Sanders is here from Chicago, to support Javon and look for material for his Congo Square company. Larry John Meyers is here, too, acting in "Pure Confidence," a play I'll see tomorrow. And I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Mary Martha Ford, Billy Porter's sister, a smiling dynamo who is ASF company manager.
So I still owe you my backstage report from the Hall of Fame, complete with snapshots.
ON TO DETROIT
I'm leaving Montgomery early, to be back in Pittsburgh for the Super Bowl. In anticipation, I did my civic duty and called my Seattle equivalent, Misha Berson, theater critic of the Seattle Times, to challenge her to a Super Bowl bet. After a little discreet trash-talking, we got down to business. Since I was the challenger, I suggested Misha set the bet. She wanted to wager a salmon, she said, but she doubted there was anything that good in Pittsburgh for my counter-offer. I said I could put up a case of kolbassi, but it really didn't matter, because I wasn't going to lose. I suggested that I could put up some good Pittsburgh coffee from La Prima, as long as she wouldn't presume to match it with some of that stuff from Starbucks.
My real proposal was that the loser would have to wear the winning team's jersey the next time she went to review a play, but it would have to be at some mainstream theater -- I didn't want her hiding her Steelers garb out in the redwoods somewhere. She wasn't up to that. It's been raining 90 percent of the time in recent months, she said, and a Seahawks loss would result in "suicides in droves"; she was afraid the jersey might put her in danger. On the contrary, I would have thought Seattleites would have been proud of her, since the Steelers jersey would be proof she had been willing to put her body on the line for the Seahawks.
Our negotiation petered out in awkward laughter. I think the bet we agreed to is her salmon against my offer to wear a Seahawks jersey. I'll let you know how this all turns out.
Back soon ...
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Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll (center), with the cast and creative team of "The Exonerated" at Playhouse REP. In rear, left to right: Christina Maria Acosta, Doug Mertz, David Cabot. In middle, left to right: Doug Pona, Robert Turano, Joshua Elijah Reese, Tommy LaFitte, Knoll, Bill Moushey, artistic producing director Ronald Allan-Lindblom, director John Amplas. In front: Rebecca Harris (in orange), composer Thomas Doswell (stooping).. Click photo for larger image. |
It's a mark of the seriousness of subject in "The Exonerated" at Playhouse REP that Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll came to the opening on Jan. 25. She serves as chair of the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, so this wasn't just another case of a politician glad-handing at a funeral or parade. She also presented a couple of honorary proclamations to the company and to Point Park University's Innocence Institute, founded and run by Bill Moushey, which collaborates on the production.
The lieutenant governor even took her shot at theater criticism, dubbing the show "very moving and overwhelming." My own more belated review appears Thursday.
Pittsburgh pride
Unhappy word came this week that Timothy J. Doyle, McKees Rocks native and Duquesne University grad, died at his home in California. Among other accomplishments, he learned Chinese and coached the Chinese skaters in the Olympics. He was also a very funny guy, judging by a poem he wrote many years ago. I print it here as a timely addition (in a somewhat different key) to the flood of Pittsburgh pride in these days of Steelers success. Many will catch the overall debt to Walt Whitman, not to mention to Shakespeare's John of Gaunt.
Pittsburgh
By Timothy J. Doyle
Pittsburgh, city of a million dreams, gypsy child of the wild raging Monongahela, I like you.
Oft times as a boy in McKees Rocks I dared to gaze across that crick called Chartiers, upon thy bright lights, and I heard thy voice beckoning me, "c'mon, hey, c'mon," But I resisted thee.
Yet, as a young man thy charms grew stronger and thy voice grew louder and it kept callething me, "Go now to the city. Hurry, thy streetcar cometh." O, and I could resisteth thee no more so I packed up and wenteth.
O, my first days with you, Pittsburgh, were strange. When I first seen thy teeming population, I was ascared. But I grew accustomed to thee and soon I learned that you love the artist.
But, alas, the day cameth when I thought I had outgrew thee and I deserted thee and sought the suburbs.
Yet, I cannot find no peace without thee. They hear not the poet's song in Wexford.
They scoff at me and say, "forget thy verse, mow thy lawn and redd up thy house. Don't cry us no sad songs about stuff."
O, that Federal Street rag.
Pittsburgh, I must come back to thee. Just to touch my feet on Market Street and gaze upon thy Liberty Tubes.
A great poet once said, "The world's a play and we're all in it." O, if the world's a play then the stage must be this shining haven, this ragged shore, this bunch of fun, this hunk of good, This Pittsburgh!
Coda
To which I add, in my own voice, Go Steelers!
My next journal entry will come from New York, where I'm headed for the annual Theater Hall of Fame induction. I'll be back soon ...
Credenza, hall tree, chaise, highboy, lowboy, ottoman (have you ever read John Updike's funny poem?), davenport, armoir, night stand, dry sink, chiffonier, chifforobe ... the names are evocative and endless, suggesting the fascination and intimacy we form with these silent servants. And what about chairs, from overstuffed to high, recliner to captain's, Morris to director's to Windsor ... ?
This musing arises, of course, from Quantum Theatre's "The Human Chair," which doesn't break any records for high drama but certainly inveigles its way into one's thoughts. See it, and you are likely to think differently about chairs. Still under the play's spell, I'm wondering if chairs are the most human of furniture. Desks and chests hold our messes and secrets; tables support work, games and food; beds enfold us in sleep or provide a platform for coupling.
But chairs -- well, they have arms and legs, they fit themselves to our bodies (or vice versa), we identify with them ("Dad's chair," "my chair"), they sag from our continued acquaintance over the years, they bear us as their burden. With them, we are generally more promiscuous than with beds -- that is, like most, I have one regular bed, but I have about five chairs that I sit in every day, and another half-dozen with which I am intimately familiar. But do they express me? Does my presence tell on them, or theirs on me? ... I couldn't get these thoughts enough together for my review, but I'm working at it.
Ruby Dee
Sunday I'll have an interview with Ruby Dee, looking forward to her appearance next weekend on behalf of New Horizon Theater. I asked her about August Wilson, and found her very measured response interesting:
"We [she and husband Ossie Davis] always went to see his plays. We admired his work. He had an eye fixed on the kind of people he wanted to write about, not going outside that. His view was steady and it was his: He took a slab and a slice out of African-American life and followed it through the history, the segment he felt summed up black people in America. The world has lost a dedicated writer, with a clarity that's unmistakable."
The mailbag
In December, Maryellen Kelly of Duquesne University and husband Tim Baker took a theater trip to New York. They saw "Spamalot" and "Avenue Q," then walked around Sunday afternoon. As people were queuing up for the matinee of "Jersey Boys," they took a picture of the August Wilson Theatre marquee. A handsome young man asked them why, and they explained they were Wilson fans from Pittsburgh, come to show their respect.
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