The Big Picture and the Closeup

The thing about really great farces is that once they wind up, they become like three-ring circuses, with physical comedy (pratfalls and double-takes), character-based comedy, and the sheer geometry of exits from impossible situations being closed off, one by one, contributing to constant hilarity and nearly non-stop laughter. Of course, even in the case of the most beautifully-constructed farces, this requires a deft directorial touch, because the whole thing is always a soufflé of improbable coincidence, of characters missing unmissable cues, of perfectly-timed entrances and exits, of unbelievable ingenuity preventing inevitable disaster, of insults taken where none were intended, of passes made and, against all probability, not rebuffed. And keeping soufflés from falling is hard work.

Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not.

It seems quite possible the Supreme Court could act in such fashion as to lavoid announcing a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. And there is a reasonable chunk of the commentariat encouraging the Court to do just that. In my view, such a sidestep would be a big mistake becauseIt would put the Court in bed with stupidity, a place the Court can ill afford to be these days.

Court reporting was a strange job, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring and frustrating. I had “theme songs” for both moods. For the more wistful one, there was Carly Simon’s Libby. For times when the life seemed a gradually-unfolding adventure, there was the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love.

This is not great drama or great comedy, but it is an enjoyable evening of theater. Of course, in the end none of it matters if Powers does not deliver, but no one can deny that she knocks it out of the park. It may be a tinier park than some, but knock it she does.

I knew now that I had a susceptibility. I might never act on it, but I had it. What I did not have, it soon emerged, was a job.

Fiddler traffics in the safest kind of nostalgia, reminiscences of a world no one would want to return to. It’s a lovely flirtation with a way of life that is safely dead. Naturally, none of that would have mattered, had the songs not been so infernally catchy, the dancing not so athletic and exotic, the sentimentality not so powerfully schmaltzy, and the love-stories, even perfunctorily sketched, not so appealing.

True, the conclusion that Tom is gay, closeted, and alienated thereby from his family is not absolutely compelled. The failure of the script to “go there” arguably leaves room for actors and directors to interpret. But any other conclusion than that Tom Wingfield, like Tom Williams, is gay would be misinterpretation. And it is a misinterpretation with consequences.

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere Published in the Hopkins Review, Winter 2013, New Series 6.1   Take a healthy organism, deny it the environment in which it grows, and it may seek a new environment and new ways of propagating. Serious American theater […]

In my mind’s eye, I’m walking that two-block long stretch of 31st Street in blistering, shimmering, soul-annihilating heat. And instantly, the song that comes to my mind is Santana’s Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation. Never have I heard a number that so vividly conveys sheer atmospheric heat.