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Kicking at the Hippodrome: Nearly Perfect KINKY BOOTS

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 30, 2015

That you’re going to have a wonderful time at Kinky Boots is something I don’t have to tell you. If you’re a theatergoer with a pulse, you’ll have heard about the musical’s great success (six Tonys, two-and-a-half years on Broadway). And you’ll probably know that it was crafted from a movie that was itself all but a perfect musical, but for the absence of dedicated songs. You’ll also know that Kinky Boots‘ book is by Harvey Fierstein and the songs by Cyndi Lauper. With credentials like that, it would be inconceivable that the result could be other than bliss. All the rest is simply a bunch of details.

Still, it is the reviewer’s job to dwell on details, and it is the time for Baltimore reviewers to do the detailing, since the national touring company has touched down in town for a week at the Hippodrome.

So here goes. Take the basic problems presented in Brassed Off, Local Hero, and The Full Monty, i.e. the deindustrialization of Britain and resulting working-class unemployment, observe those problems with the wry humor of those films, add drag performers from La Cage Aux Folles, a sensitive trans person of color from The Crying Game, a “love thyself” theme from Hairspray, and a romance between factory boss and subordinate straight out of Pajama Game. Stir well, and voilà!, you have a tale of a band of shoe workers and their manager who resist the oblivion that awaits British manufacturing by switching from ordinary cobbling to fabricating a line of sexy boots for drag performers. You know going in that the saving of the factory will be the personal salvation of the factory’s saviors. The fun lies in how this inevitable comic outcome emerges.

Fierstein has done a fine job of machining down the movie’s already well-turned version of the story. He’s dropped a couple of plot developments that probably are better dropped, transformed a relatively unspectacular arm-wrestling contest into a boxing match that has great visual and comic potential, made the ingénue role far more interesting, and otherwise mostly let well enough alone. Lauper’s bright, still 80s-sounding musical palette reminds us how much joy there was in pop of that era. (Though I wish they’d kept the first big drag number from the movie, the songWhatever Lola Wants from Damn Yankees.) The choreography, by Jerry Mitchell, is nothing short of sensational. (My favorite bit was a deservedly drawn-out number performed by various members of the ensemble on moving conveyor belts.)

And the cast is perfect. The lead drag queen and heroine, Lola, portrayed in this incarnation by Kyle Taylor Parker, is a singing and dancing sensation, never fazed by skyscraper heels or the plot’s demands for shifting wardrobe genders. I particularly like his duet with the chief straight white guy, Not My Father’s Son. Steven Booth acquits himself well as Charlie, the aforementioned straight white guy. And you can’t take your eyes off Lindsay Nicole Chambers as Lauren, Charlie’s love interest, the character most altered from the movie; her collection of hesitancies, tics, and gushing add up to a dramatically compelling portrait of a young woman with a growing crush on her boss. Nor can one neglect to mention Joe Coots as Don, the conventional bloke most challenged by the swishy black trans person introduced into the factory environment. You know a bromance of sorts is nonetheless in the offing, but Coots makes you care.

Looking past the big roles, the ensemble is wonderful, especially the “Angels,” the six-member song-and-dance team that backs up Lola. But the little dramatic roles are beautifully filled as well.

The only flaw – and to be fair it’s a big one – is the sound design. Lord knows it’s hard to produce Broadway-quality sound on a tour, but the sad acoustic truth is that when a chorus gets loud, the consonants tend to get lost, and when that happens, comprehension will suffer. Management stuck a sizeable collection of us critics up in the middle balcony, so I can’t speak for the rest of the house, but I can tell you that the critics of the middle balcony were complaining amongst each other about the inability to make out the lyrics in the choral numbers. Candidly, you could do worse than download the album and give it a listen before coming to this show.

But do come. You’ll have a wonderful time.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photograph.

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Diverse and Parentless at the Turn of the Century: RAGTIME Revived at Toby’s

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 23, 2015

There is no such thing as the Great American Musical any more than there is such a thing as the Great American Novel, but if there were, Ragtime, in revival at Toby’s in Columbia, would have a plausible claim to the title, at least on the strength of the book. Ragtime is fictional, of course, but with a large admixture of American history and an even larger admixture of meditation on what America means. If it doesn’t cover everything, like the 1975 E.L. Doctorow novel on which it was based, Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally, music byStephen Flaherty and Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens) still touches on more, and says more, about the American condition than any other musical I know.

The first thing it talks about is white America’s dream of innocence. The opening tableau is a gathering of the gracious white Protestant citizens of New Rochelle, dressed all in white. Their happiness seems to reside directly in their isolation. “There were gazebos and there were no Negroes,” they rejoice. “And there were no immigrants,” the chorus adds. The prologue (“Ragtime”) suggests that these isolations are about to take a tumble, as the ragtime music the white folks exult in is seen to emanate from black Harlem, and socialist Emma Goldman (Coby Kay Callahan) is seen stirring up the immigrant factory workers. (A full disclosure that is more of a brag: the historical Goldman was this reviewer’s distant relative.) As the chorus is augmented by crowds of blacks and crowds of Jewish tenement-dwellers, as well as various luminaries, including Harry Houdini (Ben Lurye), Booker T. Washington (Anwar Thomas), Henry Ford (David James), and J.P. Morgan (David James), it is clear that the new century will be full of both conflict and dazzlement. And that amazing combination is indeed the animating perception of the musical.

The action then turns to one family of the initially innocent New Rochelle Protestants. Young son Edgar (Jace Willard on press night), through whose eyes much of the action is observed, sees a family with such an abundance of resources and energy that Father (David Bosley-Reynolds) can afford to sail away on an expedition with Admiral Peary to the North Pole and leave Mother (brilliantly sung by Elizabeth Rayca) to her own devices. Father’s exuberance and confidence and adventurousness are positives, even if they exist by virtue of inattention to less good things about our country. But there will be a reckoning with them.

On his outbound voyage, Father’s ship passes that on which Tateh (Josh Simon) an immigrant from Jewish Eastern Europe is sailing to America with his daughter Little Girl (Ella Boodin on press night), having left Tateh’s wife behind. A father abandoning his family for the nonce, passing a father without his wife (in the book it is clearer he has abandoned her too, though perhaps for cause): the coincidence underlines a recurring theme: for all the energy and exuberance of this country, it correlates with the loss of or absence of parents.

Another parentless child quickly appears, a black baby found abandoned in the garden, whom Mother decides to take under her wing. This de facto guardianship is quickly succeeded by another, that of Sarah, the baby’s mother (sung by the astonishing Ada Satterfield), and then it becomes apparent that a ragtime performer named Coalhouse Walker is the missing father. Better yet, Coalhouse seems bent on reuniting with Sarah and reconstituting the family. Walker is played and sung by the dominating Kevin McAllister, the only Equity member in the cast, an actor who is utterly plausible as the personification of both ragtime and (eventually) black rage.

So the America depicted here is a place of quests: Father’s for the unknown horizon, Tateh’s for a land where he and his daughter can prosper, Coalhouse’s for reuniting with Sarah and raising his son in a world where blacks are regarded and treated as equals. To these quests might be added two more: Younger Brother’s for some ideal he can build a life around and Mother’s, a quieter one, to nurture a family, whatever contours her decency and generosity cause it to assume. And all of these quests are played out among the novelties and sensations of an exuberant American decade: among the things which will figure in the plot are Henry Ford’s Model T, J.P. Morgan’s library of priceless incunabula, the notorious charms of uber-courtesan Evelyn Nesbit (Julia Lancione), and the antics of escape artist Harry Houdini.

But it is not all fun and cheer. In particular, as audiences probably know coming in, Coalhouse’s quest and to a lesser extent Younger Son’s, will fail tragically, in ways that resonate today, with Ferguson-like police violence against people of color, followed by failures of justice that can only be interpreted as racially-motivated.

In the end the parentless children and the partnerless parents left behind fuse into an actual family, which may be viewed as Doctorow’s prophecy that in America all groups will converge. This vision is still more aspirational than historical. But it is a prophecy in keeping with the sense of optimism that underlies even the depths of the tragedy. And it makes for good musical theater.

Which leads us to the question how good a musical is it? It is, to repeat a term, dazzling, and the Toby’s production, directed by Toby Orenstein and Lawrence B. Munsey, does not stint on the dazzle, whether it be Evelyn Nesbit on a red velvet swing (seen above) or in a full-scale disappearance illusion. But dazzle alone, even when abetted by a first-rate script, doesn’t quite make for greatness. Mine may be a minority opinion (the show won the Drama Desk Best Musical award in 1998 and the Tony award for the best score), but I think the musical falls short in its songs, all of which are serviceable, but none of which is transcendent. Flaherty and Ahrens are certainly journeymen with a long string of hit shows, but you look at their joint oeuvre and it’s all … serviceable. Comparing their songs to say, the work of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey (If/Then) or Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening) or Jason Robert Brown (The Last 5 Years), you can hear the difference. Greater artists can do more, can move you more, can create echoes among the songs in a show that the audience will consciously or unconsciously process. Here there is little you’d even wish to hum, the title song excepted.

But go anyway; you’ll have a good time. This production reportedly revives productions Toby’s has done to popular success that garnered Helen Hayes Award nominations. Obviously the Toby’s team has a crowd-pleaser that also has a lot to say.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit Jeri Tidwell.

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Litigation Isolation

Caruso, by Lucio Dalla, performed by Josh Groban (2003), encountered 2004

Buy it here | See it here | Sheet music here | Available on Spotify

For a couple of weeks in 2004, I was about as alone as I’ve ever been in my adult life, before or since.

Back to Back

The situation gradually morphed from a threat into a certainty. From 2003 going into 2004, I had two big cases going: cases which, if I wasn’t able to settle them, would end up in trials that could last a week each. One was in Philadelphia, the other in Annapolis. The trials had been scheduled a few weeks apart, so I figured, between the likelihood I could settle at least one and the fact that they were supposed to go down at different times, I could count on dealing with them separately and sanely.

But counting on the likelihoods turned out to be like the hope of everything working out okay in a Greek tragedy. The cases didn’t settle; though it seemed to me my clients had the stronger hand in each case, in neither could I get the other side to see it that way. And then a pregnant lawyer on the Annapolis matter, the one that had been set to go earlier, gave birth a little sooner than expected, delaying trial of that case to the Monday after the Philadelphia trial.

In consequence, I suddenly found myself looking at trying cases in two consecutive weeks of August. Out of town. (Annapolis is just far enough away from Baltimore that you don’t want to commute when you’re putting in the kind of effort that a full-on trial requires.) I asked the judges to accommodate me by moving the cases further apart again, but it was “no joy” on either of those requests.

Outside My Comfort Zone

There are lawyers who do over and over what I was doing then: handling cases that are geographically dispersed, with witnesses all over the country, putting forth on the fly the required intellectual effort and organizational skills and oratory and writing and witness preparation to the extent that for extended periods there is nothing else in their lives. Lawyers like that are called trial lawyers.

I, on the other hand, was what’s called a litigator, which counterintuitively meant that I seldom tried cases. So, while I was holding my own, barely, in the logistics of my struggles with these adversaries, all of whom had larger legal teams than I did, I found myself far outside my comfort zone in terms of impact on my life.

By now my older children were grown, but I had a teenager at home and a wife who was busy enough with her own career that my leaving so much of the day-to-day family business to her was causing friction.

Swordsman

But I had no choice. I felt like a swordsman in a fight for his life; you may want to attend to other things, but if you allow your attention to waver, you die. And so you focus on the one big thing to the exclusion of all the others, even the ones which are in the grand scheme far more important to you.

My posture, then, was simultaneously liberating and constricting. Good trial work requires great concentration; being both freed up and forced to narrow one’s attention in that fashion is in some ways a wonderful thing, an intellectual and indeed spiritual adventure of the first order. But there were reasons I was a litigator rather than a trial lawyer. I was a homebody by nature, a wool-gatherer, a nurturer, a man of many avocations. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t do any of those things.

All I could do was keep putting one foot ahead of the other. I kept trying to assemble a calendar of all the tasks I had to complete in order to present or defend against two solid weeks of testimony, and no matter how I manipulated the agenda, I could never fit everything in and still leave time to sleep. So inevitably, like every other litigator in every other trial, I approximated the effort required for some tasks, and gave myself unstintingly to others. And yes, of course I slept. On a battlefield triage and occasional oblivion are both necessities.

A Shopping Expedition

As I have said, the Philadelphia trial that should have been second came first. For five days, almost without break, I shuttled between my hotel room in Center City (the Westin on 17^th Street I think) and the courtroom a couple of blocks to the east in Philadelphia’s Beaux Arts City Hall. In my memory it was cloudy or rainy the whole time; this probably wasn’t quite true, but if not, it was nearly so.[1] Local counsel, a charming woman who lived in a restored downtown neighborhood, had me over to dinner one night, but apart from that one act of mercy, I was socially on my own.[2] I have no recollection of dining with anyone else, nor do my charge account records correct my recollection.

I have forgotten a great deal about the ordeal. But not all.

What I remember most is a brief shopping expedition I treated myself to as a break on the second day of the trial, and bought a CD at a nearby Borders. Yes, Borders, now a feature of America’s commercial past but at that moment a shining and wonderful distraction, one with which I had a small personal connection.

Readers of these pages know that I hail from Ann Arbor, and so did Borders, although by 2004 it was a huge international chain of book and music stores. In the previous couple of decades, my parents, both great bibliophiles, had become big fans, as the tiny store grew and came to purvey an astonishingly wide stock of books.[3] Philadelphia’s Center City branch of the store, was located in the space left by a defunct department store.[4] Borders had brought the space back to spacious and vivid life. I wanted to borrow some of that vividness for my mentally if not physically drab hotel room, and a new CD was the best way to import it.

Painfully Cries Out

The album I hit upon was Josh Groban’s Closer, which I bought largely on the strength of the jewel box cover art (pictured above), and the awareness that he had become a Big Thing while my back was turned.

After bringing the disc back to my room, to play as I continued to prepare for the trial, I soon realized that I had picked an exceedingly contrarian choice for my situation and my mood.

You might call Groban’s genre “popera.” The young man had an operatically-trained voice applied in an operatic way to pop material. Even the cheerfuller songs came across as dramatically gloomy, the way opera tends to be. Don’t take my word for it; here is part of Aaron Latham’s review on Allmusic:

The best tunes bookend the disc as the atmospheric opener, Oceano, sets an ominous tone while the mysterious Never Let Go is a welcome collaboration with Deep Forest that allows Groban to successfully move away from the saccharine ballads and grow as a vocalist. However, there is still plenty of romance included for the PBS crowd as When You Say You Love Me painfully cries out like a rejected Celine Dion cut and the Celtic-infused bombast of Secret Garden’s You Raise Me Up plays like the sequel to his debut’s most famous song, To Where You Are.

“Painfully cries out” – yeah, that’s about right. Somehow, even when it was happy, it was sad.

The song that spoke most to me in my isolation was Caruso, Lucio Dalla’s song. I couldn’t translate Italian to any great extent, but I got the gist: the opera singer, alone beside the water, with his regrets.[5] I didn’t have that many regrets at that point; the loss of a marriage, and of a father and stepfather (all written about in these pages) were about the worst, and far fewer and less painful than some of my contemporaries were racking up. Still, in my isolation and subject to the incessant responsibilities of the trial, the gloomy melodrama of that song and indeed the whole album, were just the thing.[6]

Ineluctable Cocoon

My efforts bore fruit. I had been right about having the stronger case in both matters, though I’ll take some credit for steering them in the right direction so that the juries in both cases saw things as they should have. We ran over on the first trial, and I had to go back to Philadelphia on the Monday that I should have been in Annapolis picking a jury. The Philadelphia judge got on the phone and made my excuses to the Annapolis one, and in consequence I gave my closing argument to the Philadelphia jury, warning them with regret, that I would not be there to hear their verdict, but that local counsel would have to take over for me. I told them truly that I had enjoyed their company. (When you’re effectively by yourself for so many days, the silent interchange of looks with a jury passes for companionship.) And then I got in my Hyundai and headed south on I-95.

I got the phone call with the good news on my cell before I was out of Delaware; it had taken the jury less than an hour to reach its verdict. But there was no time to rejoice, no time to process it at all. My partner was in Annapolis picking the jury for me, and the judge wanted me there as soon as humanly possible either to start the trial or at least go through pretrial motions. And I was encountering serious traffic congestion and worrying about making a bad impression on both the judge and the jury by getting there late and inconveniencing everyone.

In short, I never left the litigation cocoon. En route from one trial to the other, I drove within a mile my home in Baltimore and never veered off course, just kept on going.

Grateful for It

There are far worse forms of isolation. To go from the Center City Westin to the Annapolis Loew’s, from one courtroom where you are first chair to another courtroom where you are first chair, is in many ways a not inconsiderable pleasure, especially when you are winning, and sense it, in both proceedings. And yet it was lonely, and that loneliness cannot be gainsaid either.

As I write these words, in the twilight of my litigating career, I am very grateful for those two weeks, which certainly were its pinnacle. Yet I am even more grateful that my life did not repeatedly thrust me into situations like that, as it might have done had I been a more celebrated lawyer.

Still, play that music for me, and I am thrust back instantly into the complex feelings I had when, for two weeks, my mind had room for the thrust and parry of two trials, and very little else.

__________________

[1] I still have the umbrella I bought the Saturday before the trial, and remember taking it with me every single day to the trial.

[2] She had a husband who, like me, was a Penn alum. (I think he actually had graduated in my class, though I hadn’t known him in college.) Looking back, it’s strange that of my college friends, the few I’ve had contact with in later years that is, all left Philadelphia, even the one who came from Philly originally.

[3] The end came in 2011. In 2004, however, I would have thought the chain too big to fail, even though I think I was aware of its acquisition by K-Mart, and K-Mart’s subsequent bankruptcy.

[4] It was in what had been known as the PNC Building, which, in earlier years had been the home of an annex of the Wanamaker’s department store. The Wanamaker’s occupancy had been in the years even before I became a student in Philadelphia. (When I was a student, Wanamaker’s was in a nearby building, at this writing the home of the Macy’s that had absorbed Wanamaker’s.) But in 2004 the air of department store still clung to the Borders space. To children raised in my era, there is something magical about old urban department stores, some amalgam of Santa Clauses and decorated store windows and smart fashions and electric trains – not to be confused with the sterile mall-based stores which are their successors.

[5] The Italian lyrics are here. An English translation is here.

[6] My charge records reveal that I bought another CD at the same time, which would have prompted a different kind of gloomy satisfaction, Beyond Brooklyn, a collaboration of flautist Herbie Mann and reedman Phil Woods. Herbie Mann may not have been the most profound musician every to play jazz, but, as readers of these pages know, he had meant a lot to me. This album, recorded when Mann knew he was in the final extremities of the cancer that killed him in 2003, contained his very last cut, Time After Time, reportedly made for his wife. It is the best rendering of that song I know.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for cover art

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Priestley’s Savage AN INSPECTOR CALLS Shows Continued Topicality At Everyman

Chris Genebach and Deborah Hazlett

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com September 14, 2015

The extreme contemporary topicality of J.B. Priestley‘s 1945 play An Inspector Calls, in revival at Everyman Theatre, was inadvertently underlined before the play even started on press night. In the now-nearly-obligatory “welcoming remarks” segment before the show, which is all about classism, Founding Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi made what was apparently intended to be a comically self-deprecating remark, introducing himself as “the janitor.” A high-status individual having fun by contrasting himself with low-status individuals: right on point. My wife remarked to me that if she’d been a janitor, her blood would have been boiling; janitors do important work which does not receive the respect it deserves.

This is not to knock Lancisi, a man whose generosity is well-known and widely-respected, but simply to point out the insidiousness of classism, a force so strong to this very day that even Lancisi slid into it for a moment, despite the fact that classism is exactly what An Inspector Calls denounces, and this denunciation was probably the exact reason Lancisi supported staging this play as the start of the season.

I was struck by how much of the subject-matter of An Inspector Calls resonated today, despite the play being a product of the 1940s set just before the First World War. For instance, there is Priestley’s approach to what we now call a “living wage.” The action occurs in the dining room of Arthur Birling (Bruce Randolph Nelson), a North Midlands industrialist. A few years before the action commences, Birling had fired a young employee named Eva Smith for leading a strike for a small wage increase. Birling lives in “Brumley,” an obvious stand-in for Bradford, the British textile mill capital of that era. In other words Birling is T.S. Eliot‘s archetypal “Bradford millionaire,” a crass, self-righteous, recognition-hungry windbag who finds all the justification he needs in the notion that his only duties are to make as much money as he can and protect his own family, be the consequences for others what they may. The script makes clear in pitiless detail what the consequences were: the un-unionized factory wages of that era (like un-unionized working class wages today) put savings, medical care, and self-advancement almost out of reach to their recipients. Eva Smith’s resulting destitution – and other factors – apparently have led her to take her life.

A complementary up-to-date theme is the frequently unconscious nature of privilege. The extended Birling family have each played some separate part in Eva Smith’s downward course – and each was unaware not only of the others’ roles, but also of the extent of the destruction each person himself or herself visited on the unfortunate woman. But all will be revealed, thanks to the irruption into their midst of a police inspector who appears to be investigating Eva Smith’s death. Thanks to a look at Eva’s diary, Inspector Goole (Chris Genebach), already knows the answers to all his questions, yet his method, bullying confirmatory confessions out of the family members, is great theater. Until the advent of the Cockney-accented Goole, the King’s English-speaking Birlings mostly fancy themselves honorable, kind, and praiseworthy. In reality, they are the beneficiaries of a caste system which, as Priestley depicts it, is a citadel against the poor, whose poverty is an inevitable outcome of the rules that the caste in the citadel impose. Goole exposes the unsavory truths of this arrangement, destroying all the Birlings’ illusions of innocence in the process – perhaps, though the play also makes clear how evergreen and hard-to-eradicate such illusions are.

It’s difficult to get much deeper into the themes of the play without destroying some of the surprises to be found in the second act (Priestley wrote it as a three-acter, but Everyman presents it in two). Suffice it to say there are some plot twists with big thematic implications. Though the revelation of the role of each family member in Eva Smith’s downfall is technically a series of surprises, it is soon obvious that we shall run through that series, even though the details of each family member’s role may not be as obvious in advance. Still, no spoiler alerts are needed as to the general idea. The later twists, though, are not as foreseeable, and certainly took me by surprise. And those I shall not spoil. But it also means I can’t discuss them, which is frustrating, because there is much there to discuss. I understand that the play is a staple of upper school literature courses in England, and no doubt it is exactly this discussable quality that makes it so.

All the serious content does not detract from the fact that much of the play is often quite funny, and often a little creepy in the British thriller manner, though in the final analysis I don’t think the thriller label quite fits. Actually, it’s hard to say exactly what label fits. But it is quite a play, and one I am sure the theatergoer will be digesting mentally for a long time after the curtain calls.

Everyman’s cast does a great job with it, too. Nelson is so much a known quantity in Baltimore that all I need say of it is that this is another memorable performance by an utterly reliable actor. But the entire company turns in work at that level. Genebach as the eponymous inspector, is all balding, mustachioed menace, alternately genial and terrifyingly threatening. The performers enacting the Birlings, his antagonists, make them foils demanding of his mettle. Deborah Hazlett as Birling’s wife Sybil, makes a believably formidable defensive wall out of stuffiness and obtuseness. Josh Adams, as the Birlings’ son Eric, convincingly evinces an alcoholic confusion so profound it blinds him to most of the implications of his own behavior. Sophie Hinderberger, as Eric’s sister Sheila, the only one who comes to see matters clearly, displays well the challenges of her character’s unique position, a sort of one-eyed queen in the land of the blind. And Jason Foreman, as Gerald, Sheila’s somewhat errant fiancé, enacts an interesting dance between denial and acceptance. Praise as well to Olivia Ercolano, as a maid with few lines, but one important bit of business: clearing a table while the family are frozen in what might be taken as a paralysis of indecision at how to process what has been revealed to them about themselves. In wordless fashion, Ercolano conveys how different her character’s life is from those of the family she serves.

Nor are the actors the only ones who provide grist for Priestley’s busy thematic mill. Timothy R. Mackabee‘s set design, an elegant Edwardian dinner table surrounded by what feels like infinite space but is in fact a wall of semi-reflective mirrors backed with chintz wallpaper on which monstrously large patterns are printed, provides a striking metaphor for the world of the play – a metaphor even more striking when, at the end, the chintz panels slide slowly but ineluctably upwards, leaving nothing but the mirrors, in which the family must now more clearly see themselves. And of course, as should be evident from what has been said already, Noah Himmelstein‘s direction seems to have translucently transmitted what Priestley was trying to tell us. Sometimes the absence of evident direction is a sign of achievement in that endeavor; this was, I think, one of those times.

What Priestley produced, then, was a classical British one-set well-made drawing-room dramedy that was simultaneously savage and revelatory. It is hardly surprising that the play was first staged in Moscow, as no West End theater would make space for it in 1945. And yes, as this nugget of history might suggest, it’s a little Bolshie in its tone and message, thank goodness. If Noel Coward and Bertolt Brecht had collaborated, they might have given us this very play.

Not to be missed.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photograph. Photo credit: Stan Barouh

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The House Always Wins – And Often Excludes

Published in the Daily Record September 22, 2015

The casino industry is designed around the principle that every game is openly rigged in favor of the house. Some publicly-acknowledged feature designed into each game assures the casino that over a large number of wagers the house will consistently win more than the bettor does. The casino industry relies on people’s strange willingness to accept these odds.

Rigging Right Back

Of course there is also an industry of those trying to play at better odds. Some merely seek what is known as an advantage, a feature of legitimate play which alters the odds: card counters at blackjack are the most widely known. But true cheaters, commonly known as hustlers, do not abide by the rules of the game at all. They toss dice so that they won’t tumble, or alter the placement of chips after the roulette ball has fallen, or mark cards, or secretly league with the dealer to obtain information about hidden cards before the cards are turned. While casinos quite openly rig the game in their favor, hustlers counter-rig the game in secret.

The hustlers’ secrecy naturally makes it impossible to obtain accurate figures about the scale of what they do. If the hustle is successful, after all, the casino won’t even know it’s been taken, let alone generate statistics about the resulting loss. But even estimates are hard to obtain, and one senses that the casino industry is suppressing what information exists. Still, the potential impact seems to be huge. There was a recent case in Connecticut, for instance, where a group of South Koreans used a card-switching device and beat the casino for $870,000. This appears to be the tip of a very large iceberg. As readers of the popular and extremely well-informed James Swain novels about casino hustlers know, casinos, for all their wealth, believe that cheats can literally bankrupt them. They do not view cheaters as mere annoyances or a cost of doing business; to casinos, cheaters are reportedly an existential threat.

Exclusion: The Ultimate Countermeasure

To protect against that threat, the industry and gaming control commissions (which have a vested interest in the casinos’ success) spend millions of dollars to ensure the “integrity” of the games. Casinos notoriously keep “eyes in the sky” monitoring every hand, every roll of the dice, every action of the players and the dealers and croupiers. It may well be, though, that their most important weapon is exclusion: the ability to tell any member of the public that he or she is persona non grata, and to make that disinvitation stick throughout a chain of casinos, throughout all the casinos in a state, and/or throughout the entire industry.

But that is where the casinos enter constitutionally suspect territory. While barriers to entry vary from state to state, in most jurisdictions, the holders of gaming establishment licenses have received valuable and rare public authorizations to be in the business at all. There may have also been various kinds of public financial help, direct and indirect. For instance, in Baltimore, there was an interesting revelation that the city’s one-and-only casino had obtained the city’s subsidy in the form of a detail of policemen (recently increased to nineteen in number) who were diverted to work the casino and surroundings, which took them away other forms of service to the public.

Why No Due Process?

Now assume that a citizen of Baltimore whose taxes helped pay for that detail, or a citizen of Maryland which gave that casino one of only six licenses in the state, is excluded. Typically the only “process” that citizen would receive would be a directive by management to leave, and, if the citizen failed to comply promptly or sought to return, the citizen would find himself given the bum’s rush by security or even, as I understand happened in at least one instance,[1] courtesy of the Baltimore police whose salary he helps pay (and local law enforcement frequently assist in exclusions in other states). The Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency would not hold a hearing to determine whether the citizen had actually done anything wrong.[2] There is no legal means by which that citizen could force the casino to readmit him. The casino is not required to have or articulate any reason, good, bad, or indifferent, to justify the exclusion of a taxpayer who helps make its existence possible.

The casinos’ public argument against any kind of due process for the excluded would be at least twofold: a) a casino is a place of public amusement, and places of public amusement are not like common carriers, and are not required to admit all comers; and b) the taxpayer is benefitting by the hefty taxes the casinos pay in exchange for their right to exist – and that is all the taxpayer is entitled to in exchange for his share of support.

Catering to the Segregationists and the Wealthy

The first argument correctly articulates the law, but it is a law of dubious antecedents. At ancient common law places of public amusement were required to admit all comers.[3] This changed, where it did, largely in response to two forms of pressure: the desire of proprietors of places of public amusement to exclude racial minorities,[4] and the desire of gambling venues to exclude perceived cheaters without being forced to go through the niceties of due process.[5] One motive, then, has been flatly unconstitutional for the last fifty years, and the other was the (successful) wish to eliminate what had been a common-law right. Should a change in the law that came about solely to assist racial segregation and increase the profits of the very wealthy still stand?

The second argument seems to be politically sufficient for the time being, but its constitutional sufficiency depends entirely on the success of that first argument. Reinstate the ancient right of the public to enter a place of public amusement, and there would be a need for and a right to due process to protect it. No one’s individual right should be surrendered in exchange for tax bounty to the public.

What Hearings Might Show

There is another argument the casinos are less willing to make publicly, but I suspect it is the real heart of the dispute.[6] If a suspected cheater were able to demand a hearing, she might well prevail because the casino had acted on suspicion rather than proof. And card counters, whose actions are not illegal, might have to be tolerated, as they are in New Jersey.[7] Accountability would certainly drive up the casinos’ costs, and could result in a lot of unprovable cheaters being able to demand admittance, which could render the casinos flatly unprofitable.

Could is the operative word. We have a public policy controversy here that we lack the facts to resolve with much confidence, because of the secrecy of the hustlers – and the secrecy of the casinos. We can’t know what the economic consequences of accountability might be. A state with the political will might be able to compel the development of better knowledge, but in the end a change would still be (pardon the obvious joke) a gamble.

Meanwhile the excluded can take this faint comfort: they’re being kept out of a mug’s game. In case you haven’t heard, the house always wins.

_______________

[1]. A story about police arresting someone who tried to enter with a handgun is here.

[2]. Based on a careful review of the Maryland regulations and on answers to questions I as a member of the audience put to Robert Fontaine, Esq., Counsel, Maryland State Lottery & Gaming Control Agency, at a panel discussion of which he was a member at the Maryland State Bar Association meeting June 11, 2015.

[3]. See, e.g., Donnell v. State, 48 Miss. 661, 681 (1873); Grannan v. Westchester Racing Ass’n, 16 A.D. 8, 8, 44 N.Y.S. 790 (App. Div.) rev’d on other grounds, 153 N.Y. 449, 47 N.E. 896 (1897); State v. Walker, 1850 WL 2919, at *5 (Ohio Com. Pl. July 1850) (member of public can only be expelled from place of public amusement for cause). The legislative history of the nation’s first civil rights act, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, showed awareness of the state of the common law with respect to places of public amusement. See the remarks of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts: “Theaters and other places of public amusement, licensed by law, are kindred to inns or public conveyances, though less noticed by jurisprudence. But, like their prototypes, they undertake to provide for the public under sanction of law. They are public institutions, regulated if not created by law, enjoying privileges, and in consideration thereof, assuming duties not unlike those of the inn and the public conveyance. From essential reason, the rule should be the same with all. As the inn cannot close its doors, or the public conveyance refuse a seat to any paying traveler, decent in condition, so must it be with the theater and other places of public amusement. Here are institutions whose peculiar object is the ‘pursuit of happiness,” which has been placed among the equal rights of all.” Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 382-8. (I am indebted to Robert Nersesian and Thea Marie Sankiewicz of the Nevada bar for these citations.)

[4]. In Maryland, the state’s highest court upheld the exclusion of blacks from an amusement park as late as 1961 on the grounds that the park, though a place of public amusement, was a private business under no obligation to admit all races. Drews v. State, 114 Md. 186 (1961). That case was reversed, but only because of the state action involved when the police assisted the park owner in ejecting the African American customers. Griffin v. State of Md., 378 U.S. 130 (1964). The change the Drews court had wrought in the common law was not noted.

[5]. In Maryland, for instance, the crucial break from the common law seems to have occurred with Greenfield v. Md. Jockey Club of Baltimore, 190 Md. 96 (1948), where the issue was whether a racetrack could exclude someone it apparently suspected could be engaged in illegal gambling behavior (most likely a bookie competing with the legal pari-mutual betting). The departure from the common law was barely noted amidst a flurry of other arguments, but language imported from out-of-state cases in effect endorsing the concept of the proprietor of the track as a private businessman free not to contract with and free to revoke a ticket already issued to a potential customer without articulating a reason why was buried in the discussion.

[6]. Space does not permit me to mention other issues that giving the excluded a right to a hearing would raise, including considerations of voluntary exclusion and, in many states, questions of Native American sovereignty.

[7]. See Uston v. Resorts Int’l Hotel, 445 A.2d 370, 372-75 (N.J. 1982).

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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The Weird Jurisprudence and Constitutionalism of Senator Cruz

A different version of this piece was published in the Daily Record August 18, 2015

I write about policy in this column, not politics, but sometimes a focus on policy inescapably draws one’s attention to politicians. This is one of those times. Nearly sixteen months before the next election (thanks to our agonizingly long presidential campaigns), one of the candidates, Ted Cruz, has sought to distinguish himself by his comment-worthy arguments about jurisprudence and constitutionalism. Unfortunately, the comments must be critical.

On paper, Cruz is eminently qualified to talk jurisprudence and constitutional policy. He’s a Harvard Law grad whose professors were reportedly dazzled by his intellect, a law review editor, a former Supreme Court clerk, and a former Texas Solicitor General. One would expect something substantial from him, whether one would agree or disagree with what he says. In reality, though, Cruz has proven in recent months to be an unceasing font of balderdash.

“Liberty is in the Balance”

Let’s start with Cruz’s commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in King v. Burwell. The petitioners there attempted to kneecap Obamacare by persuading the Court that the phrase “an Exchange established by the State” in the enabling legislation[1] referred only to health insurance exchanges established by state governments. Had that interpretation prevailed, taxpayers in any state that had failed to establish its own exchange and left the exchange establishment process to the federal government would not receive the tax credits Congress had clearly intended for them. Of course the United States is, in common parlance, a “State” as well. (State Department? Reasons of state? Church and State? Stateless person?) So the phrase was obviously ambiguous.

The Supreme Court, doing what courts for hundreds of years have done when examining ambiguous statutes, construed the ambiguity. It held that federally-administered exchanges were also established by “the State” within the meaning of the statute. This construction was in keeping with a time-honored cardinal rule of statutory construction that courts should effectuate the intent of the legislature that had passed the statute – an intent as to which in this instance there was no legitimate dispute. The only suspense was whether the Court might go along with Obamacare’s foes and declare a “gotcha” and contravene Congressional intent merely because of an ambiguous turn of phrase.

When the Court refused to do that, Cruz thundered: “This must stop. Liberty is in the balance.” He characterized this business-as-usual decision as “redefining the meaning of common words.”

“Redefinition of an Institution”

Of course Cruz was far more upset at the Supreme Court’s action the following day in the Obergefell case, which held that states must license and recognize same-sex marriages. The Court’s action there, Cruz said, “required all Americans … to accept the redefinition of an institution ordained by God and long predating the formation of the Court.” Even setting aside the hyperbole, the statement is inaccurate. The Court did not “require all Americans” to “accept” same-sex unions; it just blocked state governments from preventing or disregarding them.

As discussed in last month’s column, the Obergefell court recognized it was overriding popular will in many instances and the legislative enactments of many states, but held that as it was dealing with “fundamental rights,” it was within its proper province in doing so. It is the very definition of fundamental rights that they trump electoral or legislative action. I have not found any writing of Cruz’s in which he acknowledges the fundamental rights doctrine, or in which he specifically responds to Justice Kennedy’s analysis applying that doctrine to same-sex marriage. But he is nonetheless incensed on behalf of the state legislatures whose enactments the Obergefell Court invalidated.

Truly Wacky

Even before the Obergefell ruling, Cruz was trying to derail the Court’s action on same-sex marriage. Back in April, he had proposed a “Protect Marriage from the Courts Act” that would have deprived federal courts of the jurisdiction to consider constitutional challenges to any state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman. By cutting off access to federal courts that might say otherwise, this legislation in effect would have rendered Congressional protection for state laws protecting “traditional marriage” superior to any Supreme Court ruling, in effect substituting the legislative branch for the judicial branch, at least for this purpose. In this area, it would have made the Supreme Court unable to protect constitutional rights or direct the development of constitutional doctrine. Truly wacky stuff.

After Burwell and Obergefell, Cruz went further, proposing retention elections for Supreme Court justices. He wrote that the Court was unaccountable, that the existing constitutional remedy of impeachment was not a workable way to enforce accountability, and that therefore the Constitution should be amended to make justices recallable by retention elections.

Anti-Minoritarian

That proposal would be an end run around the entire constitutional order. Federal judges sit “during good behavior,” i.e. for life, absent serious misconduct. The trouble with allowing popular will to shorten that tenure is that this would render the Court, like the Legislative and the Executive, a political branch.[2] And as stirring as the notion may be of having every key player in government be electorally accountable, one effect is that it tends to reinforce majority rule. Unmitigated majority rule is only a great thing if you do not happen to be in a minority: if you do not happen to be a gay person who wishes to marry, or a black who wants to vote in southern states affected by the Voting Rights Act, legislation Cruz is on record as opposing, or a woman threatened by domestic violence who wants the protections of the Violence Against Women Act, whose renewal Cruz voted against. As Obergefell demonstrated, we need a branch of government that is not politically accountable; it is needed precisely to protect us from the anti-minority policies Ted Cruz’s ilk always seem to push.

It is no answer to point out, as Cruz has done, that many states elect their appellate judges without ill effect. As Cruz should know, popular say in the tenure of appellate judges is not a universal success. A recent demonstration is the electorally-fueled return to office of dismissed Alabama Chief Judge Roy Moore, who has openly rebelled against the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution over both First Amendment and same-sex marriage issues. (Cruz, not surprisingly, joins Moore in viewing compliance with Obergefell by court clerks as optional.) But even where electoral say on appellate judges works better, it works in large measure because the U.S. Supreme Court still holds the whip-hand over state courts when it comes to interpretation of the all-important federal Constitution. State courts must still bow to that interpretation, and it serves as the primary safeguard of minority rights in this land.

“Lawless and Radical”

It is not merely the bizarre quality of Cruz’s views; it is the vehemence with which he expresses them. Thus, President Obama’s recently-announced EPA regulations on power generation are not merely a “lawless and radical attempt to destabilize the Nation’s energy system” but also “flatly unconstitutional.” No doubt troubles Cruz’s outrage.

The fact that we as a nation have never lived in a world where courts didn’t construe statutory ambiguities, where legislative fiat didn’t yield to fundamental rights, where Supreme Court justices weren’t protected from political repercussions, or where the government couldn’t address national emergencies like global warming, is of no moment. Cruz knows all.

_______________

[1]. 42 U.S.C. § 18031(f)(3).

[2]. A point made by George Will, no flaming liberal in politics or jurisprudence.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Strong Production, Profound Show: INTO THE WOODS at Toby’s

 Posted on BroadwayWorld July 21, 2015

As these pages evidence, I’ve reviewed quite a few productions at Toby’s Dinner Theatre over the years;[1] its current revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine‘s Into the Woods is the strongest of the lot.

For whatever reason, dinner theater may not always receive the respect it deserves; as an experience half-thespian and half gastronomical, it is theater for the masses, and relies on the services of journeyman performers rather than great stars. But none of these traits stand as an impediment to high standards or thrilling performances. This rendering of Into the Woods is a case in point. The show is a heavy lift: it calls for a large cast of dramatic leads who can both act and sing – and the score is complex, demanding well-trained voices and perfect timing. And even with these qualities, the cast is called upon for more: mere Broadway pep and razzamatazz will not put it across. This is that rarest of musicals, a work of profound drama. The actors must teach as much as they sing and dance and emote.

The profundity comes in what might on the surface be a surprising place: the folklore passed on from parents to children under the deceptively superficial name of fairy tales. Fairy tales are timeless because the kitchen drudge who yearns to become a princess, the little girl vanquishing a wolf encountered on the way to grandmother’s house, the simpleton who sells the family cow for a handful of magic beans, and their kindred, are archetypes of each of us, at various moments in the trajectories of our lives. As such, there is actually nothing superficial about them. By mashing up these stories, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book author James Lapine demonstrate the common dynamics in these tales that enable them to speak so powerfully to us.

As most theatergoers know, the stories start with a common sense of longing. As we discover Cinderella (Julia Lancione), the Baker and his Wife (Jeffrey Shankle and Priscilla Cuellar), Red Riding Hood (Sophie Schulman), and Jack (of Beanstalk fame) (Jimmy Mavrikes), the common phrase in their song is “I wish.” To pursue these wishes (to go to the festival, to have a child, to visit granny, to sell the cow), they are compelled to enter “The Woods,” which are far more than any mere geographical Black Forest. These are simultaneously the place where anything can happen (like the dreamlike forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and a metaphor for early encounters with risk and growth that come into each of our lives. Mostly, things go well for the heroes and heroines, as befits their status in the tales about them. They not only succeed, but they learn much about the world and themselves, leading to some degree of mixed emotions. As Red Riding Hood summarizes her encounter with the wolf: “And he made me feel excited/-Well, excited and scared.” Ditto Cinderella fleeing from her prince: in this version of the story, there is no short-lived pumpkin coach whose expiration forces her to leave the palace, but she simply finds herself unable to process immediately the erotic promise of the encounter and needs to break it off for the moment.

As we proceed, we also learn that these tales are not only about young people finding their mates or coming to terms with their sexuality or starting their families. They are about age as well as youth, especially the familiar dance of closeness and separation between parent and child. This is most poignantly true of the Witch (Janine Sunday) and Rapunzel (Katherine Riddle). What Rapunzel sees as the mother interfering with her independence and her relationship with her Prince (Justin Calhoun), the Witch sees as protecting her daughter from a terrifying and deadly world. They are each wrong – and right.

Act I of course ends with all problems resolved, and all the heroes and heroines successful, as the ancient tales ordain. But Act II is where the real genius of the show goes to work. Like Act II of the Fantasticks, but far more richly, it takes as its premise the obvious truth that every happy ending is the beginning of another tale, and that when you have nowhere to go but down, down is where you have to go. Lapine and Sondheim ask themselves and us what these same archetypal characters could tell us about ourselves if they were allowed to play out their strings further, beyond the happy endings. The answers to that question are what make this musical one of the great evenings of theater.

The characters are all compelled by circumstances to go back into the woods, and this time they encounter there such things as infidelity, divorce, the death of parents, the loss of children, abandonment, catastrophe – and overarching this the absence of a narration (the narrator, played by Russell Sunday, becoming a casualty of a lethal giant) or any other authoritative guidance as to the choices that need to be made. As one of the characters observes: “The path has strayed from you.” The unsettling conclusion: “You decide what’s right / You decide what’s good.”

This is all incredibly sad and confusing, not to mention frightening, and yet as the core of surviving characters gels, so does the indomitability of the human spirit they evince. This story too, it is suggested by the moving final number,Children Will Listen, should be told our children.

To me, this is Sondheim’s greatest musical. As great as he is and abundant as are his gifts, he can and frequently does misfire. But here, supported by Lapine’s flawless script, Sondheim (unlike the characters) never goes astray. The music is stirring and intelligent, with motifs constantly recycling in ways that directly illuminate the action. The lyrics are supple and studded with dazzling wordplay, whether it be one-liners (“If the end is right, it justifies the beans”) or tongue-twisters: (“If it were not for the thicket-” “A thicket’s no trick.” “Is it thick?” “It’s the thickest.”)

This production also emphasized for me the precision required even when the wordplay is dialed back. In the thematically most important song, No One Is Alone, Cinderella and Little Red Ridinghood are in the center of Toby’s theater-in-the-round space and Jack and the Baker are on a balcony a considerable distance away. Cinderella addresses Ridinghood, and the Baker addresses Jack. Yet somehow the two isolated conversations must evince not only perfect coordination but intricate vocal harmony, first between Cinderella and the Baker, and finally among the four voices as a quartet. When this number succeeds, the number of dry eyes in the house will diminish noticeably. Directors Toby Orenstein and Mark Minnick saw to it that the interplay looked effortless.

This was more than Toby’s usual polish; the recruitment of so many lead-quality actor/singers for a single show was really impressive.

As is so frequently the case at Toby’s, there was one fly in the ointment: the sound. There seems to be a limit to what can be done with the acoustics of the room, but oftentimes the lyrics get lost. And this was not a matter only of my senior citizen ears; I had equipped myself with a sixth-grade companion, and he reported the identical difficulty. (I understand that Toby’s is planning a replacement facility in the next couple of years; I can’t wait.)

And speaking of bringing youngsters along, it was a pleasure to see the house full of them. It is an interesting thing to expose a young audience to this show. Act I, the happily-ever-after part which recounts the familiar stories that youngsters probably know already, is not a problem, of course. But Act II might seem like a different animal; it isn’t. I saw no diminution in the children’s attention. The adult material is presented mostly metaphorically or lightly (Cinderella’s Prince’s infidelity with the Baker’s Wife is the most risqué, and even that is far from graphic), and the deaths of various wanderers in the Woods all occur offstage. Grownups should be prepared to have some serious conversations with their young charges, but there is little here either to scandalize or terrify. Just to help you grow. Which is kind of the point.

________________

[1] And I’ve also reviewed this show before. This review owes a lot to an earlier one, but whom better to plagiarize than oneself? In any case, there are some revisions in my views reflected above, and a lot unique to this rendering.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo Credit: Jeri Tidwell Photography.

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Linguistic Marriage Counseling and Character Acting in a Comic Soufflé: THE FULL CATASTROPHE at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Tom Coiner and Helen Anker

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 20, 2015

For a weightless and elegant good time, it would be hard to beat The Full Catastrophe, by Michael Weller, based on a novel by David Carkeet, now in production at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV. There is not one thing in the story to tether it to reality, or trouble us with any true sense of its characters being in any kind of jeopardy, and the presentation of the whole farrago, under Ed Herendeen’s direction, is smooth and amiable.

Imagine marriage counseling being conducted by a multinational corporation under the guidance of an eccentric multimillionaire whose technique is to embed a linguist in the home of the distressed family, who is under strict instructions to open an envelope a day and follow the directions written there. The linguist is something of a refugee from a promising relationship with a graduate student who happens to bear a striking relationship to the wife in the marriage (both portrayed by the versatile Helen Anker), so placing him in the marital household is a case of out of the frying pan into the fire for him.

Identifying the problems in either relationship is not challenging in this fantasy world. Instead, Weller resorts to a convenient comic conceit, ascribed to the eccentric billionaire, that at the heart of every marriage is something generically described as “the Horror.” This seems to be defined as “A fear that one’s love isn’t strong enough to weather a true crisis.” Perhaps to a commitment-phobic character like Jeremy the linguist (Tom Coiner), and even to the couple in whose lives Jeremy is intervening, that might prove true, notwithstanding the considerably larger variety of horrors at the heart of some marriages – and the absence of any horror at the heart of others – in real life. Setting aside the billionaire’s intentionally tendentious theory, in dramatic terms the actual problem with the couple, Beth and Dan (Helen Anker again and Cary Donaldson), seems to be nothing more than seven-year itch-style restlessness and garden-variety anomie. Drop a stranger into a situation like that, and the dramatic issue is more likely to be (and in this case is) the extent to which the inevitable attraction between the stranger and the wife does or does not upset the apple cart.

As already stated, this is a comedy, so it gives away little to say that the apple cart survives the challenge still upright. Likewise, it’s a safe bet that Jeremy will develop some insight that will enable him to rekindle something with the graduate student, perhaps with a nudge from the deus ex machina plutocrat. The point of this exercise is not where it ends up but how it gets there, not the destination but the journey.

This particular journey is marked throughout by funny and appealing character acting, starting with Robbie, the couple’s 10-year-old son (young scene-stealer Sam Shunney), a preternaturally sophisticated youngster who is often several steps ahead of his elders in grasping the obvious. To these should be added Roy Pillow, the eccentric plutocrat, a barker-out of gnomic pronouncements that are sometimes on target, but sometimes more than a little ridiculous (Lee Sellars), and “Everyone Else” – all members of this sizeable ensemble being exclusively portrayed by T. Ryder Smith, a posse of character actors in one. We see him as an executive secretary, a barroom floozy, a clueless sports fan, an understanding bartender, and a waiter. (Combined with his multiple impersonations in WE ARE PUSSY RIOT, playing in repertory with The Full Catastrophe, he proves himself a true paragon of his craft.) These vivid character sketches help the time pass so enjoyably we are apt to ignore how little substance and how much air there is in this soufflé.

As a soufflé, and a dessert soufflé at that, this play is best consumed at the end of one’s visit to this year’s Festival, after sampling the weightier and more nutritional fare. It is a fine way to see this year’s strong Festival out. (Ending with a preposition, a practice which Jeremy the linguist approves of.)

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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A Fashion-Tinged Shaggy Dog Story: EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Libby Matthews

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 20, 2015

It would be tempting to describe Sheila Callaghan‘s Everything You Touch, now appearing at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, as a screed about feminine body image and the oppressiveness of fashion. But the play is hardly didactic enough to fit within that summary. I think it is better to call it simply a shaggy dog story that occasionally contains elements of a feminist critique of fashion.

This is a shaggy dog story starring a shaggy dog, Jess (Dina Thomas), a fashion-challenged young woman, overweight, with sticky hair and a computer nerd would-be boyfriend. “Maybe she scratches her ass,” read the stage directions. Living in New York, she is called back to the South to visit a dying mother, a mission she does not want to perform, and so delays for some days holed up in her apartment with – well, whom exactly is left to be discovered. But he has all the characteristics of her father, Victor (Jerzy Gwiazdowski), a designer who approaches fashion as what we would call today an “extreme sport.” Here is the father in the 1970s addressing a model: “I want to see what television and film and a book and poetry can’t deliver. Immediacy. Fervor. Wreckage. When the model spits with rage, I want to feel that spittle. I want to smell your sweat. I want to taste your bile. I want my blood to boil. And I want to feel too overwhelmed after the experience to speak. This, to me, is the power of fashion.”

Victor certainly achieves wreckage; the model he addresses in this fashion promptly kills herself. And Victor himself has died not very long after giving this speech. So then what is he (if it is he) doing in the bed of a daughter who was not even born when he spat out these words? Well, that’s a story, actually two stories, of father and daughter, forty years apart, both stories awfully shaggy and canine. I do not intend to spoil the fun by divulging too many details.

Let me say just this. The fun is in the telling. Despite the strong suggestion in the script that Jess is better off keeping her distance from the dehumanizing world of fashion, a world in which a woman like Victor’s “muse,” Esme (Libby Matthews, pictured above), seems to exist for the sole purpose of scorning other women, there is a certain grudging celebration going on of fashion’s aesthetic and principles. The runway show near the show’s beginning fits with Victor’s grandiose and threatening ideals, but the off-kilter and semi-industrial outfits on display in that show are fun to watch, and obvious labors of love. (The notable costumes are by Peggy McKeown, and on the evidence of a program note, a sizeable contingent of collaborators.) And when Esme, the muse, suggests a fashion line for the upcoming season, you have to smile: “A G.I. Jezebel cabaret show. Military tailcoats, metal-epaulettes, shrapnel holes. Rusty bullet belts, sequined camos. And… septum rings made of hanging garnets! Nosebleed chic!”

There are two challenges to Esme’s aesthetic, however. One is schlumpy Jess, who turns out to be a refugee from Victor and Esme’s approach. The other is Louella (Marianna McClellan), a hayseed from Little Rock whose take on fashion is a drive toward the accessible and conventional, an approach summed up as “Dillard’s” (appropriately, since the chain is headquartered in Little Rock). And somehow the struggles among these three outlooks converge in Jess’s delayed voyage to see her dying mother.

From the standpoint of production values, this seems to be the biggest of the productions being mounted at Shepherdstown this season, between the costumes and the size of the cast (11, including an ensemble of actresses who, when not portraying fashion models, double as furniture and elements of the set). The overall effect is a bit like a fireworks display, with loud fun things happening more or less continually. It is not profound, a quality seldom looked for in shaggy dog stories, but the tale at its heart, a whimsical family drama, is sturdy enough, and perhaps the place where a more genuine feminism is lurking than may be found in the odd evocation of fashion. It was the right play of the lot to make the biggest deal of.

The leads are all superb, and the direction by May Adrales seems attuned to Callaghan’s stated objective of a play “racing out ahead of you” that “you have to catch.” Particularly at the conclusion, as a number of things are becoming clear, there is still a sense of not quite knowing where one is, whether we are in a flashback or in the present or in a projection of the essence of the present. And then suddenly we find ourselves in a brief conversation between Jess and the nerd who may be her boyfriend and we realize the strange journey is at an end, but we can barely catch our breath and digest what we have seen before curtain calls are upon us. We are stuck assembling it all in our heads as we walk out. It is a credit to both solid writing and directorial pacing.

One peeve. There was much smoking in the play. I was parked in the front row and by the end of the play felt as if my lungs had been fumigated. I’m assuming the actors were using real cigarettes, but if they weren’t, they were drawing on something equally noxious. At this point there is no excuse for using anything but fake cigarettes on stage. For the sake of the audiences later in the run, I hope management makes it stop.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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Scofflaw Playwriting, Standout Acting: ON CLOVER ROAD at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Tasha Lawrence and Lee Sellars

Posted on BroadwayWorld July 16, 2015

The main rules of stage thrillers are simple. Agatha Christie knew them. Ira Levin knew them. And these rules are really not negotiable if you want to write a successful stage thriller.

One: There must be an objective state of affairs. Of course the audience won’t understand it at the beginning, but at the end the audience must be able to look back, after all the shocking reveals have shocked, and after all illusions have been stripped away, and see that the basic facts apparent at the end were true all the time and are still true. In other words, this is representational art, neither abstract nor experimental nor magical.

Two: The ending must resolve all mystifications, ambiguities and dilemmas.

Those are the big ones. There are a couple of others, like you can’t kill off the character the audience identifies with, at least until the end. But mostly it comes down to those two main rules.

Steven Dietz‘s On Clover Road, receiving a premiere at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, manages to break both big ones. This is not a good thing. While it would be difficult to describe Dietz’s departures from these rules in detail without entering spoiler territory, let me be as specific as I can. A major development which seems irreversible is somehow reversed without explanation, as if by magic. The system of double-crosses critical to any thriller becomes impenetrably complex. And the ending could mean any of three things that I could count. Dietz, a journeyman playwright, should know better.

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln (as the joke goes), how was the play? Answer: It has its moments. The action, from the shadowy world of religious cults and deprogrammers, takes place in the ruins of a derelict motel, where distraught mother Kate (Tasha Lawrence) has been brought by Stine (Lee Sellars), a supposed specialist in reuniting abandoned parents with cult-brainwashed youngsters. Stine intends (so he says) to abduct Kate’s daughter from the cult’s commune and work with her here. The shockingly scuzzy room, a monstrosity in decaying plywood, is well realized by David M. Barber, whose recreation of a working auto repair garage in last year’s North of the Boulevard was equally impressive. The room almost becomes a character in its own right. And what the set tells us immediately is that something is terribly wrong with Kate and Stine’s scheme. So does a financial fact revealed in the early going. In the course of the play, we find out what that something and several other somethings are.

In an interview in the program notes, Dietz announces the ambition of building on a thriller template “a drama that has the emotional resonance of a woman trying to reunite with her daughter.” I think in that sense Dietz succeeds, minimally. Amidst the cruelty and the carnage that ensues from Kate’s entry on her quest for her daughter, such a drama may be glimpsed. We develop some real insight into how the daughter might have fallen under the cult’s spell, specifically the mother’s possible part in that happening. “Might” being the key word.

“Might,” not “did” because a thriller is not really the right vehicle to explore such issues very deeply. In a thriller, where every statement may be a deliberate lie, insightful remarks and accusations shrieked in the heat of a confrontation, the staples of serious family drama, may not be what they seem, and are certainly not reliable, less so here because even the thriller template is unreliable. (See Rules One and Two, above.)

The two things we can be fairly sure of are Kate’s desire to reclaim her daughter and her determination to stay alive as she does so. Tasha Lawrence does a fine job in bringing out both the grit and the terror involved in Kate’s pursuit of her quest. It is a meaty role, and she makes the most of it, dragging the audience’s sympathies along with her character even as the latter’s failings and weaknesses are exposed.

Conversely, the things we can be least sure of are Stine’s agenda and his motivations. As the play progresses Stine becomes a paragon of untrustworthiness, and Lee Sellars is quite believable at it, if that makes any sense, barking out grim deprogrammer talk that sets up the distance Kate and the audience are to keep from him: “And now your feelings are hurt. You’ll come to thank me for that. We can be much more effective as a team if you hate my guts. If you can’t stand the sight of me.”

But standout performances stand out only so far with a thriller so inconclusive. This play is an official “rolling premiere” of the National New Play Network, meaning it will be produced at least twice again in the next twelve months. The Network’s website acknowledges as part of the agenda of rolling premieres is “making adjustments based on what is learned from each production.” I hope what is learned here first is adherence to Thriller Rules. If corresponding adjustments are made, there may be more hope for the family drama component as well, though of that it is impossible to be certain. If the underlying problem is not fixed, though, I would expect audiences to be so upset with having their legitimate expectations trifled with they will never embrace this play.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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