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With SOUL, Stax Lives Again at Center Stage

Posted on BroadwayWorld May 12, 2018

Soul: The Stax Musical, the world premiere of which is the final offering of Center Stage’s 2017-18 season, follows closely the major historical facts about the regrettably short life of Stax Records, the influential R&B label. For a company that abruptly disappeared into bankruptcy in 1975, its oeuvre and the history have been surprisingly thoroughly curated, and no visit to Memphis, the label’s home, is complete without a pilgrimage to the intersection of College and McLemore, the site of the converted movie theater that was the label’s headquarters over its entire trajectory, and is now a museum, bookstore, and anchor for a music-oriented college prep school adjacent to the site.

In light of the completeness of the musical and documentary history, simply retelling the history was the obvious choice in crafting this show. Every jukebox musical must choose one of three basic strategies: tell the history of the music and musicians (Motown), recreate or imagine a performance (Rain), or make up a new story using the songs (Rock of Ages). The actual story here has the virtues of availability (thanks to the curators of the Stax heritage), compactness (the company went womb to tomb in only 18 years), unexpected characters (white folks who founded a black label), conflict (mostly on the business side, less on the creative), great singers and musicians (lovingly recreated), and wonderful music for them to perform (by artists like Booker T. & the MGs, Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, the Staples Singers, and Carla Thomas). What would be the benefit of taking any other route to bringing all this to the musical stage?

Actually, there is another answer, although I think it would come in a distant second: in the hundreds of tracks Stax recorded, there are all sorts of songs, particularly about love, that could have been strung together to frame a story. (For instance, consider the possibilities in two of the late-period numbers, The Soul Children’s I’ll Be the Other Woman (1973) and Shirley Brown‘s imagined address by a rightful wife to that other woman, Woman to Woman (1974).) Maybe someone else will do that.

But if we’re impatient – and what audience isn’t? – when decent simulacra are obtainable, we don’t want to experience songs revamped to fit imaginary characters. No, if we’re honest, we want the same songs we (or our parents or grandparents, as the case may be) grew up with, every note of the horn arrangements, and the original singer’s voice, imparting each smidgen of intonation and pacing that the original singer added to the song. We want impersonation. And in this production, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, we get nearly that.

The historical frame is perfect for catering to that simple but demanding taste: You want to see Otis Redding singing (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay? Fine, we’ve reached 1967 in the story, so here he is! And damn, doesn’t he sound good?

Given these permissive parameters, the book, by Matthew Benjamin, is free to amble amiably from one hit to the next in chronological order, and to give us such hits as Soul Man, Try a Little Tenderness, Walking The Dog, Walk On By (the Isaac Hayes, not the Dionne Warwick, rendering), Mr. Big Stuff, Respect Yourself, and Hold On, I’m Comin’. And the performers are simply amazing in recreating the sound, and often the look, of their historical originals.

For instance, if there was much daylight between Ricky Fante’s intonations of Dock of the Bay and those of Otis Redding, I didn’t sense it. And while Boise Holmes‘ voice might be a bit more tenor-ish than Isaac Hayes‘ glorious bass-baritone, the impersonation is still startling, particularly given the physical similarities.

And when we get to appearance, the startling-ness continues. With proper makeup and costuming, Robert Lenzi‘s resemblance to co-founder Jim Stewart, Warner Miller‘s to part-owner Al Bell, and Rick Fante’s to Redding, are all ringer-worthy.

This is not to say that everything is strictly historical. For instance, the opening number of the show, Sweet Soul Music, is an ensemble rendering of Arthur Conley and Otis Redding‘s reworking of a Sam Cooke song that was not recorded at Stax’s Memphis Studio and Conley did not release on Stax. But hey, when you’re instantly plunged by it into the wonder that was Stax, who’s counting?

I would be remiss not to mention the outstanding performances by Harrison White and Allison Semmes as father-and-daughter performers Rufus and Carla Thomas. Which is not to slight the rest of the cast, too numerous to acknowledge individually, or the half-glimpsed members of the eight-piece band, nor the period-inflected choreography of Chase Brock.

In short, as John Lennon sang on the other side of the water the same year Sweet Soul Music was a hit: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.”

For Baltimore audiences, this show is more than an entry into the jukebox musical stakes, to be shelved with Motown and Memphis or Director Kwei-Armah’s own Marley(which premiered here three years ago); this is the local swan song, at least for the moment, of Kwei-Armah, who is returning to his native England. Local audiences know full well how much we owe him for his seven years as Artistic Director at Center Stage. His arrival was a shot of Naloxone for a Center Stage that seemed to be slipping into a coma. Everything seemed brighter and more vivid under his directorship, even the shows that didn’t completely work. His emphasis, as well, on including non-white and gay playwrights, performers and audiences, changed the tone of the enterprise to a joyful cacophony. He leaves gargantuan shoes to fill.

Copyright Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Bill Geenen.

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Uncategorizable, Brilliant, and Profound: Bernstein’s CANDIDE at the Washington National Opera

Posted on BroadwayWorld May 6, 2018

It’s hard to know how to categorize composer Leonard Bernstein‘s Candide, now in a Washington National Opera revival (based on a 2015 Glimmerglass Festival production) at the Kennedy Center.

Musically, Candide is half-light opera, half-musical. Some of the numbers require classical voice training, while some could and probably should be sung by Broadway-style performers. The chorus needs Broadway-style dancing abilities but has to back up the operatic numbers vocally.

Dramatically, the label “light opera,” while appropriate enough for the music, seems way off when applied to the subject matter or the treatment. When you hear the first few notes of the rollicking overture, you know Bernstein is genuflecting hard to Johann Strauss. Yet this is a story in which the principal characters are bayoneted, hanged, maimed, raped, prostituted, ravaged by disease, and enslaved, among other things, a story which, thematically, takes the characters and us right to the edge of the Nietzschean abyss and gives us a good long sobering look into it – not the sort of thing Strauss or Gilbert and Sullivan ever did. As in the song Auto-da-fe (“What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe!”), the juxtaposition of cheery music and grim subject-matter is deliberate.

Complicating matters still further is that there is not one Candide but multitudes. The original work, which premiered on Broadway in 1956, had Broadway orchestration and a book by Lillian Hellman and lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche and Dorothy Parker(and others). Bernstein went on to craft (and then revise) a score for symphony-sized ensembles (like the near-symphony-sized Washington National Opera Orchestra). Independently, there have been lots of other sets of books and lyrics. Hellman’s book is no longer performed today; instead the foundation is generally a 1973 book by Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim, with the additional twist that there are at least two versions of that – and that the current production is a 1999 revision of those revisions by John Caird. Are we confused yet?

No one tinkers this way with shows that started out perfect to begin with. Clearly Candide has its problems. Yet the brilliance of the piece from first (as witnessed by the original original-cast album) to last (as witnessed by today’s rendering) frequently takes one’s breath away. With only the oft-performed operetta-like Overture, the coloratura aria Glitter and Be Gay, and the magnificent finale Make Our Garden Grow and no fixes whatsoever, the work would still be assured immortality, problems be damned. And to me, the most important of these is the finale.

One reviewer of an earlier production commented that he never heard the finale without tears. I am the same way, and was that way even with my official reviewer’s notebook clutched in my hand. Why? The answer takes you to the heart of the show, to the heart of what makes the show most different from the 1759 fable by Voltaire upon which it was based.

Voltaire’s principal stimulus was the desire to lampoon what he saw as the inaccuracy and pointlessness of the philosophical and religious outlooks that (in his view) plagued European and European-colonial society. With an unnecessary heavy-handedness brought on by his reflexive anti-clericalism and his genteel anti-Semitism, he (in his mind) dispensed with any claims to philosophical truth in either Christian or Jewish doctrine by depicting churchmen who are venal and voluptuary and a Jewish banker who is cruel – and voluptuary. With more wit and subtlety Voltaire skewered Leibnizian optimism with his portrait of Dr. Pangloss, who teaches his students that ours is the best possible universe; Voltaire’s refutation was to show in an over-the-top way how cruel, arbitrary, and distressing life can be, including all the previously-mentioned violence inflicted on his principal characters. His protagonist, young student Candide, originally an adherent of Pangloss’s philosophy, comes to regard all philosophizing as a waste of time, and turns his life over to farming, to making his garden grow.

Bernstein and his collaborators, especially after Hellman was dropped, were after something deeper. Candide (sung here by tenor Alek Shrader) is on a quest for the meaning of life. He and his close associates Cunegonde (Emily Pogoreic), the Old Lady (Denyce Graves), Maximilian (Edward Nelson), Martin (Matthew Scollin), and Cacambo (Frederick Ballentine), are in addition to Candide’s personal quest, collectively striving to achieve a good life, which (it turns out) necessarily implies that one’s life be both free of illusion and fulfilling. Dr. Pangloss (Wynn Harmon) promises to provide the key to succeeding in both quests, and of course is humiliated in the process because his optimism is utterly inadequate juxtaposed with the horrors of which both man and nature are capable. In light of this inadequacy and in the absence of other viable ways of establishing that life has meaning, Candide chooses an existential course of forging his own meaning in the dignity of farming and hard work. In other words, Candide’s ultimate choices are close to religious ones, and if we were in any doubt about that, Bernstein’s music for the finale would tell us. As contrasted with Voltaire’s somewhat superficial cynicism, communicated with chilly humor, Bernstein’s finale is profoundly disillusioned, profoundly sad, profoundly determined, and yet in the strangest way hopeful too. That is why we cry when we hear it. (This production’s finale is captured in the photo above.)

This is not to say that it is easy to get to that point. A personal story: I and my family were introduced to the music by some friends of my parents who had us over for brunch one Sunday a year or two after the original cast album came out. They played part of it for us. I believe it was two months later that the wife of that couple hanged herself. I’m not suggesting that Bernstein’s music drove her to it, of course, but I would not be shocked if part of what did was her own look into the Nietzschean void that this work also evokes. This show could plausibly have provided theme music, as it were, to that look and to her ultimate choices. It is not either weak stuff or tame; it will affect your mood.

Afficionados of Bernstein (whose hundredth birthday celebrations this year have occasioned this revival) will know that the religious quest of Candide and his companions is part and parcel of Bernstein’s own religious quest, one he returned to repeatedly through much of his most important work, whether we’re talking about Jeremiah, Kaddish, the Chichester Psalms, or Mass. Continually, we see how man’s inhumanity to man leads Bernstein to question how there could be a God, and how Bernstein nevertheless cannot really let go of faith, or of a belief that life has meaning and norms that are outside ourselves. In connection with another project years ago, I interviewed conductor Marin Alsop, a Bernstein protégée, and asked her if she thought Bernstein had ever resolved this conflict in his own mind, and she opined he had come down on the side of faith. I do not have my own answer to this question.

I was interested, however, to see in the composer’s daughter Jamie Bernstein’s program notes, the following: “…[T]he music is telling us something more: the soaring chorus seems to be telling us that growing our garden is a metaphor for the flowering of mankind itself!” And she adds that well-known cynic Lillian Hellman did “sign off on the musical’s finale, … and that makes me think that … Hellman … would ultimately be in agreement with the composer’s expression of purest optimism.”

As a drama critic, I lack the tools to critique the operatic end of the performance. To my ears, the singing all seemed splendid, and the large orchestra, conducted by Nicole Paiement, did well too (a couple of what sounded like trumpet fluffs aside). As a dramatic performance, it was – how to say this? – a full exploitation of the opportunities the book provided. I am not the first to observe that the second act has its longeurs, and that the catalogue of horrors goes on too long and becomes repetitious. But I thought Wynn Harmon‘s turn as Pangloss and also Pangloss’s creator Voltaire was wonderful. Denyce Graves kept me laughing with bits of accent and funny business as the Old Lady. Emily Pogoreic’s singing blew me away. And Alek Shrader was moving and amusing as the lead. I loved Jennifer Moeller‘s costumes, particularly the feathery and sparkly gold Las Vegas-y things the inhabitants of Eldorado wear. So I was quite ready to forgive the overlength problem.

In sum, highly recommended.

Copyright Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Scott Suchman.

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AN AMERICAN IN PARIS Leaves a Trail of Stardust at The Hippodrome

McGee Maddox and Allison Walsh

Posted on BroadwayWorld May 2, 2018

Of course director Vincente Minelli’s 1951 movie musical An American in Paris is a landmark of popular culture, perhaps the apogee of the MGM musicals. But one suspects that director and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and book author Craig Lucas, the creative minds behind the stage updating of that movie, now perched through Sunday at Baltimore’s Hippodrome, weren’t totally feeling it. And going back and watching the movie, neither was I. I was surprised at all the things that looked wrong on the screen, and it was clear to me, when I first saw the stage adaptation, that Wheeldon and Lucas had fixed many of those very things I spotted.

Clearly, Minelli and his collaborators had set out to capture some of the exuberance that infected Americans in postwar Europe, and I think that those who love the movie are partly responding to that sense of glamour. As it happens, I myself enjoyed a bit of the privileged life of postwar Americans in Europe, albeit as a small child, in 1952 and 1953. And yes, there certainly was a glamour to it. But that experience also gave me enough insight to state that what the movie presents is more false than true. The moviemakers missed the way Europe was still reeling, trying to clear away rubble, restart industry, and resettle various diasporas, all amid massive poverty. Americans living there were uneasy beneficiaries of the ruin their military might had partly inflicted. In France, as Mary Louise Roberts has revealed in her book What Soldiers Do, Americans during what amounted to an occupation had drawn much resentment for their debaucheries and their rapes of Frenchwomen. The Third Man, with its profiteering, corruption, and strong suggestions of prostitution, is a much more accurate cinematic snapshot of the mood of that period than An American in Paris. The Americans were still overlords, economic and military. There might have been a few penniless bohemians among them, like Jerry, the character Gene Kelly portrayed in the movie (one of my father’s childhood friends, most likely gay, had run away to Paris to live like that), but it would have been hard to disassociate most of the Americans in Europe from the spoils of victory.

Thus the notion one would get from the movie, that to be American in that Europe was to be adored and easily accepted, was an oversimplification. The movie did not do well in France (to MGM’s surprise), largely, I suspect, because to the French that oversimplification was not appreciated. Wheeldon and Lucas have intelligently darkened things, by emphasizing the horrors of the war and the German occupation (barely touched on in the movie), by depicting post-war reprisals against collaborators, and by explicitly making the character of Lise (the war orphan gamine heroine, portrayed in the movie by Leslie Caron) a Jew who had survived the war because she had been sheltered by the gentile family of Henri, her now-betrothed. (In the original’s script, Lise’s parents had only “worked with the Resistance.”)

Another thing just wrong with the movie which no one seems to comment upon, but which seems just as obvious to me, was the palpable age difference between Kelly and Caron. The day the movie was released, Kelly was and looked 39, and Caron was and looked only 20. Kelly had lost none of his athleticism, but his was no longer a young man’s profile. The notion of him romancing a very youthful woman half his age was putting a good face indeed on Kelly’s appeal. Meanwhile, the supposedly too-old-for-Jerry rich woman, Milo, played by Nina Foch, twelve years Kelly’s junior, looks far more age-appropriate for him than he for Caron. In the current musical, there is no such gap between McGee Maddox, today’s Jerry, and Allison Walsh, today’s Lise, pictured together above. Each looks youthful and in the contemporary argot, hot. As the picture shows, they belong in the same frame. (Nearly the same can be said of Kristen Scott, who looks only a touch older as Milo, the rich woman.)

Likewise, in the movie, the supposed wrongness of the projected match between Lise and Henri, here portrayed by Ben Michael) has no obvious explanation (even if you discount an age discrepancy between Caron and Georges Guétary not much smaller than that between Caron and Kelly), nor does the fact that Henri ultimately yields and lets her go to Jerry. The musical strongly suggests, however, that Henri is gay, although the script does not quite resolve the point. But that suggestion makes Henri’s decision to release Lise from their engagement much more explicable.

The most celebrated part of the movie is the 17-minute ballet sequence at the end, in which Jerry chases Lise though scenes suggested by artists Dufy, Renoir, Utrillo, Rousseau, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec. It reportedly cost MGM half a million 1951 dollars to make. I know we are all supposed to admire it for various reasons, but to me the artwork and design combine to make that quarter-hour an endless evocation of the feeling also induced by kitschy Ferrante-and-Teicher album covers of the era. It’s about as exotically foreign as French vanilla ice cream. As that ballet is reimagined on today’s stage, there is still borrowing from French artwork, but it seems more postwar by far; especially one can see the influence of Mondrian. The effect may be a trifle more austere, but the kitschiness is banished.

In sum, then, Wheeldon and Lucas have dodged a lot of the bullets that damaged the 1951 production, for all the acclaim the original may have received. But the modern recasting of the work salvages almost everything that worked well. The sturdy keel of both productions was George Gershwin‘s music and the songbook he created with his brother Ira Gershwin, although they have made somewhat dissimilar selections; only four numbers from the movie, including the two balletic George Gershwin pieces An American in Paris and Concerto in F, and the nightclub show number, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, make it into the musical. And where the choices differ, I prefer Wheeldon and Lucas’s, especially I Got Rhythm, which is shown being recrafted from a moody piece into a lively one, much as Jersey Boys uses a song to show the creative process that led to the Four Seasons’ distinctive sound, or in the biopic Delovely, we watch while Cole Porter instructs a singer how to remake Night and Day from a hard-to-sing trifle into the haunting thing it is.

The handling of I Got Rhythm, successful as it is, does nonetheless highlight about the only disimprovement I could spot in the adaptation, the loss of Oscar Levant. Afficionados of the movie will no doubt count Gershwin friend and proponent Levant’s performance as one of the things they loved best. Playing a composer named Adam who was to all intents and purposes Levant himself, Levant exhibited a rapport with Kelly that was utterly magical, and most particularly in the very song, Tra-La-La (This Time It’s Really Love) which most corresponded to I Got Rhythm in the stage musical. The rapport was not merely the tight integration of Levant’s piano-playing with Kelly’s tap-dancing; it was the effortless-seeming way in which Kelly’s part of the act sometimes impinged on Levant’s (Kelly, for instance, lying atop the grand piano, hitting some of the higher notes from above while Levant was tickling the lower ivories), or vice versa (Levant getting pushed momentarily from his piano stool to do a song-and-dance riff with Kelly). Maddox and Matthew Scott (today’s Adam) share the stage well together, but they don’t even try for such elevated schtick.

The musical might best be described as a contemporarily idealized version of the film, a rendering of what the film might have looked like in an era more inclined to be honest about the American role in postwar Europe, the toll of anti-Semitism in France, and homosexuality. Also it is more an artifact of this era’s norm in which musicals aspire to be integrated narratives that resemble plays more than variety shows. The story works a lot better as a real story.

And so, what is moral of the story? It seems to be that life is a ballet, and that true love is the unmistakable chemistry of two souls as right for each other as a prima ballerina and her male counterpart. And the corollary is that, if you’re not one of that blessed pairing, as Milo, Henri, and Adam are not, you need to recognize it and just get out of the way. You’ll at least be able to breathe in the trail of stardust the lovers leave behind.

And what a trail of stardust the whole musical leaves, both for the characters and the audience! There are the sets and lighting, already mentioned, which dazzle in their nimble evocation of the wonders of Paris, with a side-step into a fantasy nightclub that seems to be Radio City Music Hall, complete with spangled leggy chorines and dudes in top hats and tails. There is the dancing of the athletic Maddox and the graceful Walsh. (How many performers out there can claim true balletic chops, skill at acting and singing – and the aforementioned hotness?) And the word “dazzling” seems to have been coined for Gershwin’s music, generously ladled over the entire enterprise, and beautifully performed.

Only here through Sunday. So dance on over.

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

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The Catonsville Nine: Deserved Honor

To be published in the Daily Record May 11, 2018

There were two pieces in a recent Baltimore Sunday Sun about the “Catonsville Nine,” a group of Catholic anti-war demonstrators who seized and burned draft records in Catonsville in 1968, fifty years ago this month, and went to prison for it. One story told how the Nine were recently acknowledged with a state historical plaque near the site of their demonstration. In the other, an op-ed piece, Stephen H. Sachs, former U.S. Attorney for Maryland, later Maryland Attorney General, the man who supervised the prosecution of the Nine, though he credited their courage and conviction, faulted their behavior and called them “self-righteous.”

Sachs is a colleague most Maryland lawyers, including myself, hold in great esteem. However, he does that esteem no favors with these remarks.

Attacking the Draft

In 1968, the Vietnam War was being prosecuted by a government that already secretly knew to a near-certainty it could not be won. Popular support had been maintained only by the government’s lies about the prospects for victory, and slipped irreversibly below 50% shortly after the Nine’s demonstration. It is now well known that the only reason President Johnson kept it going was to avoid the nation’s losing face. And it was costing, on average, over a thousand American lives and countless Vietnamese ones each month. An undeclared war carried on simply to save face is unforgivably immoral and arguably illegal. And there was no way the war could have been waged without the draft. It followed that an attack on the draft was a direct attack on a clearly immoral and possibly illegal war.

Of course, a war’s immorality does not justify all possible responses. But Sachs finds the Nine’s legal theories dangerous and their characters wanting. And on both counts he is wrong, and, worse than wrong, blind to the dangers in his own approach, then and now.

The Dangers of Nullifying Nullification

The Nine hoped to be acquitted by a jury, in the teeth of both the evidence and law. Jurors have the power and the right to do this, a practice known as nullification. Nullification has been a part of American jurisprudence at least since the 1735 sedition trial of New York journalist John Peter Zenger, in which his lawyer was permitted to argue to the jurors that they had the right to acquit him, even though the prosecution had proved its case. The jury did acquit, much to the annoyance of the Crown, and thereby speeded the eventual and welcome demise of sedition laws in the republic which succeeded the colonial government that had tried Zenger.

Nullification is an important social safety valve where prosecutorial discretion is questionable, for instance when it might violate a community’s conscience to penalize illegal behavior, and the prosecution insists on trying to penalize it anyway. Despite nullification’s value, courts and prosecutors hate it. By 1968, many courts had sought to curtail it by forbidding defense lawyers to inform juries that they had that power.  Obviously, a jury not informed about nullification may not know it can nullify, and for that reason alone may fail to do so, disabling the safety valve, to society’s detriment. Sachs and his team unfortunately prevailed on the Fourth Circuit to bless this unwise interference with the jurors’ right to know a legal principle vital to their deliberations.

Sachs has a point that jury nullification has occurred in defense of bad causes as well as good ones. But that has not happened, one suspects, nearly as often as laws that have lost their legitimacy have continued to be enforced, nor as often as legitimate laws are enforced in ways that nonetheless violate the conscience of the community. Misguided prosecutorial discretion is a much greater menace to us all than jury nullification.

Civil Disobedience: Legal Standing Is No Prerequisite

In the background of the Catonsville case was the problem of standing, the power of the protestors, who were not personally being subjected to the draft or sent to war, to raise the possible illegality and the clear immorality of the Vietnam War as a defense. The biggest justification for a standing requirement is that a person not directly involved in a dispute may not have the motivation or facts to litigate it. But that only makes sense where someone else with a closer involvement is able to maintain the action. This was not the case with attempts to litigate the legitimacy of Vietnam; draftees who fought attempts to induct them personally were always prevented from litigating that point.[1] In this context, attacks on draft boards, which violated other laws, as a way both to make a point and get into court, seemed like a reasonable alternative, even if the attacks were carried out by non-draftees.

In any case, the absence of legal standing does not deprive an action of the status of civil disobedience, which is effectively what Sachs would make of it. (Sachs seems to consider himself qualified to say what was and was not civil disobedience, while exhibiting no awareness of the complex technical debates around the term.) He says the Nine did not engage in civil disobedience, by contrast with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King because, in part, the Nine did not face a “personal choice between the demands of government and the demands of conscience.” This is not completely accurate. To make their point, King and Gandhi broke laws they could have sidestepped, just as the Nine did.[2]

Sachs also writes that “no law of doubtful validity was being applied to” the Nine – though it seems that the laws protecting the property of the Catonsville draft board were, formally speaking, no more nor less valid than the tax law Thoreau violated, the public safety laws King violated, or the sedition laws Gandhi violated. Anyway, formal sufficiency aside, the validity of the laws was indeed doubtful – to the extent they were being used to support the Vietnam carnage.

Most especially, Sachs faults as both reprehensible and inconsistent with civil disobedience the Nine’s choice to seek exoneration via jury nullification. This criticism is the hardest to fathom. If in 1968 judges were not going to address the War’s validity, it made good sense to turn to juries. The effort would have been pointless without the Nine’s seeking acquittal, because it could only be through jury nullification and hence acquittal that they could push aside the judicial roadblock to consideration of the basic question they wanted adjudicated. Seeking exoneration by a jury was an intelligent, if ultimately unsuccessful, tactic to bypass judicial intransigence.

Self-Doubt?

Finally, as a stick to beat the Nine, Mr. Sachs trumpets the virtues of “self-doubt,” which he says the Nine lacked. If Mr. Sachs thinks self-doubt is so important, one wonders why none is displayed in his op-ed, even at a moment when the verdict of history seems to call into question how he exercised his prosecutorial discretion. Or is self-doubt only for defendants, and moral certainty reserved for prosecutors?

A U.S. Attorney entertaining self-doubt might have considered legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s thoughts on civil disobedience published in June 1968, prompted precisely by draft protests: “A prosecutor may properly decide not to press charges … for dozens of … reasons…. One is the obvious reason that [draft protestors] act out of better motives than those who break the law out of greed or a desire to subvert government. Another is the practical reason that our society suffers a loss if it punishes a group that includes—as the group of draft dissenters does—some of its most thoughtful and loyal citizens.”

The Nine were thoughtful and loyal citizens (two were veterans, four were present or former clergy). Knowing that they would probably land in federal prison, they took concrete steps to halt a war machine that needed halting, and to enlist juries in the effort. For this, they deserve our respect.

_______________

[1]. See, e.g., U.S. v. Hogans, 369 F.2d 359 (2d Cir. 1966); Ashton v. U.S., 404 F.2d 95 (8^th Cir. 1969), cert. denied (relating to case decided in 1968 or earlier).

[2]. It is true that Thoreau was arrested for passively violating a “governmental demand” to pay taxes, but Gandhi and King repeatedly did things to get themselves arrested. King defied orders not to hold protests, and violated laws against obstruction of sidewalks. Gandhi was often arrested, but his first conviction was for sedition, for taking the affirmative step of advocating that others engage in civil disobedience against the British Raj.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for photograph. Credit: William L. LaForce, Baltimore Sun. Source: http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/index.php/thomas-melville-antiwar-protester-one-catonsville-nine-dies-86/ .

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A Different Sort of Heroics

Published in the Daily Record online edition April 12, 2018, in print April 13, 2018

Lawyers blessed with intelligence, integrity and an enterprising spirit can usually make significant money. And lawyers who eschew the bigger financial rewards to pursue public service can still reasonably aspire to prominence if not wealth. Both kinds of careers are enviable. But there is a special kind of felicity in being able to combine these paths, doing well while also doing good, especially the kind of good that embodies some kind of conviction personal to the lawyer.

A Special Kind of Felicity

Such a practitioner was Lawyer Hugh Clarke, about whom I wrote in these pages a couple of years ago, a rural attorney who became a leading practitioner in and legislator for Heywood County, Tennessee, but who always represented the African American poor for whatever they could pay, one of whom, blues singer Sleepy John Estes, memorialized him in a song that survives to this day. And such was Gilbert Roe (1864-1929), a successful Manhattan lawyer who advocated for a wide variety of free-thinking luminaries in the first three decades of the previous century. I’m talking about clients like Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, John Reed and Eugene Debs, some of the leading lights of journalism, social reform, and radicalism in that era.

Roe, the subject of Defending the Masses, a new biography by University of Baltimore law professor Eric Easton, was no radical, even though the names of these well-known clients might suggest as much. Instead, Roe was a progressive Republican (not such a contradiction in terms then), a disciple and friend of Robert La Follette, Wisconsin governor and senator and presidential candidate. He developed a sophisticated New York business litigation practice, representing victims of insurance fraud and swindled investors. The radical clients like Emma Goldman apparently came Roe’s way for the simple reason that he had a modern conception of the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment in an era before that conception had achieved any currency.

Roe was a passionate adherent of the right to advocate peacefully against the existing social order, and willing to help out those who engaged in such advocacy. This kept him quite busy, because the foes of such advocacy were legion: Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock was on the lookout for smut (a category that extended to birth control education and discussion of abortion); Red-baiting prosecutors sought to protect the prerogatives, wealth and untouchability of the capitalist class, by going after that class’s critics for sedition (not to mention deploying armies of goons to suppress unionism); and warmongers, led by the Wilson White House, treated as treasonous any challenge to the waging of the First World War or the conscription required to make that war possible. Judicial and popular acceptance of impunity for any kind of speech which did not pose a “clear and present danger” as we now understand the phrase still lay in the future while Roe was at work.

A Dismal Win/Loss Record

It must be said that Roe was singularly unsuccessful in his efforts to protect the free speakers he defended. His client the socialist publication The Masses was driven out of business because its access to the mails was cut off despite Roe’s efforts. Socialist and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, in whose appeal from a sedition conviction Roe filed an amicus brief, went to prison for denouncing the draft. Teacher Benjamin Glassberg, a public school teacher who had taught his students that Bolshevism might not be an unimitigated evil, lost his job and Roe could not get it back for him. And so forth. This dismal win/loss record stands as testimony, not to Roe’s lack of skill, but to the temper of the times. Twenty years later, with the same clients and the same issues, his win/loss record would have been much better. In the years between, Justice Holmes’ “clear and present danger” test, originally deployed as a sword against dissent (articulated in the affirmance of the conviction of a socialist for circulating antiwar literature in wartime), began to be transformed into a shield for dissent.

Roe never put himself personally in harm’s way. He was not so much an advocate of left-wing causes as an advocate for the freedom of others to espouse those causes. The muck-raking journalists, the birth control educators, the draft resisters Roe represented: these might well engage in civil disobedience and be ready to face imprisonment, unemployment and/or disgrace for their views. Roe was content to mount what defenses the law and the times permitted, and to work with a network of network of similarly-minded colleagues to develop theories and best practices in defense of free speech.

Division of Labor

So there was a clear division of labor; the clients alone would take the risks, exposing themselves to the possible consequences, and Roe, win or lose, would try to protect the clients from those consequences if he could. Many of the clients were passionate about their causes, temperamental and irritable. Yet if Easton’s book is to be believed, none of the clients objected that Roe should have flown closer to the flames himself.  Roe seems to have been loved by the majority of the clients he took on for such reasons, and he certainly got personally close to many of them. Emma Goldman was a guest at his house; he marched in suffragette parades; he received affectionate thank-yous from school teachers drummed out of their jobs for being “un-American.” Yet in his personal life he remained a comfortably bourgeois Republican lawyer enjoying comfortable domesticity.

Lawyers cannot soar too close to the flames themselves, because doing so may jeopardize their ability to protect others who do so.

It would be a false comparison to pit the career paths of the brilliant protestors Roe represented against Roe’s more sheltered and more conventional one. There are different sorts of heroics. Posterity benefits equally from access to birth control, the opening of horizons accomplished by socialist thinking, and the Progressive heritage of good government on the one hand, and from the practical laying of the legal groundwork for free speech doctrine on the other, without which the other things may not come about at all. Though it may not have been apparent at the time, few lawyers are as fortunate as was Roe to have the times and their inclinations come together so productively.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Same As The Old Boss: Center Stage’s Grim, Industrial ANIMAL FARM

Melvin Abston and Tiffany Rochelle Stewart

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com March 12, 2018

Few of us leave high school without first having been exposed to George Orwell‘s 1945 allegorical novel Animal Farm, and for good reason: the book is short and simple yet also deep, perfect for initial forays into critical reading. Like most allegories, Animal Farmsports a plain, uncluttered surface, but reveals great riches just below. Hence the tale of Farmer Jones, the initial proprietor of the eponymous farm, and of his various animals, displays a close resemblance to the history of the Russian revolution and its aftermath. The animals’ uprising starts with a noble and inspiring ideology, soon challenged by the emergence of a commissar class, the exploitation of the very proletariat the revolution is supposed to serve, show trials, revisionist history, breathtakingly dishonest propaganda, ill-conceived industrial projects, a cult of personality around the supreme leader, cynical exploitation of the personae of revolutionary heroes, etc. And then, beneath that amusing if discouraging set of correspondences, there lies a critique of authoritarian regimes generally, of both the left and the right.

It gives little away to say that, in Orwell’s grim assessment, revolutions of the left and right alike seldom deliver permanent democratization of politics or foster a true economic commonwealth. As The Who sussed it out 26 years after Orwell, the new boss will always end up looking pretty much the same as the old boss.

But because this perception is now probably more widespread than it was in either Orwell’s era or that of the Who, the challenge in re-presenting this material, as Center Stage is doing now, is to give us something neither obscure (many of us are not greatly conversant with Russian history of a century ago) nor obvious. Working with a 1996 script by Ian Wooldridge, but probably more importantly with direction by May Adrales(whose bold and flamboyant work I have seen in the biggest and most demanding shows in two recent seasons at the Contemporary American Theater Festival), Center Stage and its producing partner for this show, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, have manifestly tried to restore a shocking quality to the story.

One thing they have done is replace the farm setting with what looks like a run-down industrial abbatoir. Theatergoers will likely remember Andrew Boyce‘s white-tiled but crumbling set with smudges that could be dried blood even if they would be hard-put to explain what this setting does better than a barn or something more typically farm-like. Although in the book, the butchering of animals clearly happens away from the farm, here hewn-open carcasses are also design elements.

I think Izumi Inabi’s costuming (for the most part dun-colored jumpsuits and animal masks held in the performers’ hands) was part of the effort to make it vivid, though in that regard it seemed self-defeating to me. The masks are frequently stumbling blocks in the effort to determine what animal is being enacted (some species’ masks look more vulpine than whatever they’re supposed to be), and the drab coveralls rob us of supporting detail. The program notes say Inabi was trying to differentiate animals with various sorts of fabric choices, but if that worked, it did so only on a subliminal basis.

Erasure also threatens the characterizations, perhaps not deliberately, owing to heavy use of doubling and tripling of roles within the 8-member cast, assigned totally disregarding gender. This often leaves one frequently scrambling to follow which character is speaking. (I’m not alone in this perception; it was a complaint of at least one critic in Milwaukee, where the show ran first.)

Though annoying, this is not altogether terrible. In fact it has a definite upside; the overall effect, be it deliberate or inadvertent, is to emphasize the collective impact of the unfolding horror, which is a point of some value.

This adaptation de-Britishizes the tale as well, to coin a term. Orwell’s animals are clearly English, characterized with little touches that mark them as such, and mark their creator as a British satirist and polemicist. Apart from singing an anthem about “Beasts of England,” these animals seem more American than anything else. For instance Squealer (Tiffany Rochelle Stewart), a pig whose job it is to propagandize for the porcine junta that steals the revolution, is given annoying mannerisms delivered in a flat Great Lakes accent, that clearly mark him/her (?) as American middle management.

The universalizing of the tale, even beyond what Orwell intended, may be a legitimate project, at a moment when we seemingly see efforts to perfect similarities to the porcine takeover of Animal Farm in Russia (where the revolution that overthrew Communism has been nearly obliterated by Putin’s mafia), in China (where Deng’s counterrevolution against Maoism is being smothered by a regime singularly devoted to suppressing all free political speech), and even in the United States (where – well, I don’t even have to go there). But if we hand Animal Farm the megaphone, particularly an Animal Farm that has to some significant degree moved beyond the work it adapts, we ideally would hear something that provides new insight into our current perplexities. Word that the powers that be lie and lie and lie is not exactly startling in a world of Russian troll factories and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It’s hardly Orwell’s fault that he could not foresee our own independently-forged familiarity with the social, political, and human phenomena he was writing about. But it doesn’t make his particular fable one we urgently need to see enacted.

Because of all these choices by the creative team, then, the true selling point of this production is not so much a reimmersion in Orwell’s masterpiece as a reminder, if we needed reminding, of the collective nausea that overtakes us in one of those periodic moments when totalitarian assaults on truth, justice and human dignity are winning.

And it does not hurt at all that, as is typical of Center Stage, the performances are all great. I’ve already mentioned Ms. Stewart, who makes you want to do to her principal character, Squealer, what Squealer, doubling as executioner, does to the hapless defendants in the show trials. (Conveying extreme hateability requires talent.) Other standouts include Stephanie Weeks as (among others) Old Major, the boar whose prophecy resoundingly catalyzes the revolution, Deborah Staples as Clover, a horse who cannot contain her doubts about the revolution, and Melvin Abston (pictured with Ms. Stewart above) as Napoleon, a coldly amoral operator who emerges as the top pig in the revolutionary scrum. But the entire cast is competent and, perhaps owing to the previous run in Milwaukee, extraordinarily tight.

The cast is also typical of Center Stage in that not a single performer has ever played on this stage before. I have mentioned more than once this company’s reliance on a New York casting agency and its very spotty reliance on local talent. As Center Stage goes through a changing of the guard at the Artistic Director level, I hope we can see a change in that regard too. Surely a company that once nurtured the talents of Terry O’Quinn and Christine Baranski by giving them multiple roles, allowing them and local audiences to grow in tandem, is capable doing similar things again. We should.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for production photo. Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow.

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There Are Tides

Published online by the Daily Record March 9, 2018; published in the Daily Record March 12, 2018

A columnist must write concisely. Concision forced me to omit much from my previous column, When the Other Folks Give Up Theirs (January 19), in which I discussed the mechanics of white privilege. I got to tell readers that privilege can be rolled along from one generation to another, as educational or financial capital, and that historically, at times when much educational capital has been formed, blacks were excluded from the process. I documented my point with tales from my own white family. But I didn’t get to talk about timing, and that’s an important part of the story.

Catching Waves

There are ebbs and flows. In my own family, for instance, it was not a straight-upward trajectory from my immigrant grandparents to myself and beyond, to my grandkids. Sometimes we’ve gone up, and sometimes we’ve had to wait.

In the previous column, I mentioned my dad’s father. He did indeed, as I wrote, prosper in business and send his son to Harvard. But it was a near thing. True, my grandfather came to the country in the last century’s first decade, and by the end of the Roaring Twenties was a company president living in a mansion in Far Rockaway. He grew wealthy –  at a moment when wealth was comparatively easy. Easy – and fragile. If you look at successive editions of the New York City directory for his street, you’ll see something remarkable at the moment the Great Depression hit. Not one family that had been there in 1928 was still in residence by 1933. The Depression cut through it like a scythe. My dad was a college junior when the market crashed. My grandfather’s company failed, and he was never wealthy again.

It was bad; my granddad could not afford to send my father to college for his senior year. But educational capital came through. My dad had already gotten far enough, maybe just far enough, so that scholarship and teaching money became available. So, even absent family financial support, my dad was able to stick around Harvard long enough to earn his undergraduate degree and a doctorate. He went on to some very lean years of college teaching, at times at multiple institutions.

And then the next wave began to swell. My father was brought out of academia to work in the Labor Department during World War II, and in the State Department after the war, aiding European economic recovery. And after that, the doors of academia reopened to him at a moment when academics were beginning to enjoy some real prosperity.

Awaiting Collective Inebriation

On my mom’s side, the story was similar. My grandmother left rural Prince Edward Island, apparently because her family’s general store collapsed and there was no work, and married an accountant who went to work for a bank. I did not mention last time that the accountant had been a college man (Bowdoin ‘07), so the commitment to education was already there. And, as I reported, their daughter, my mom, went on to acquire an elite education of her own. But again, it was a near thing. It was a depression; my grandmother saved everything, for instance a legendary drawerful of dimes; elderly relatives came to the house to die; hobos asked for and received handouts at the back door. My grandfather never got poor, but he never got rich.

And while my mother had the education, comfort usually eluded her until her fifties. After she married my stepdad, in 1954, times were tight for many years. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan the year they were married, for the annual salary of $4,400. Even adjusting for inflation, that was a paltry sum. He spent many years having a wretched time managing money, often savaged by finance companies. What saved him and my mom in the end was the prosperity that came to college campuses in the 60s and 70s, largely the result of federal spending. By the end of his life, he bragged frequently about how he could and did pay every bill on the day it came in. He had caught the wave historian David Kennedy described to author Thomas Friedman with these words: “It was the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history – the country was giddy with pride and opportunity.”¹ Friedman noted that the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households [increased] by 2.8 percent a year” from 1948 to 1973.

So the American reality my family lived out was that money is transmutable into education, and education into money, and that in the normal course of events the locus of that privilege may move back and forth between the one and the other as the times require. Families with education could (and mine did) ride waves, like the Roaring Twenties or the above-mentioned moment of collective inebriation, and then wait between them. That was one normal course of events in white families.

But moving back and forth is tougher for families that can’t obtain good educations. And up to my generation, the family history discussed last time suggests the best educations, the ones available where I and my forbears studied, were, practically speaking, reserved for people with European ancestors. Blacks were thus largely denied whatever advantages such educations might have afforded them in catching either of the big waves that had benefitted my own family.

Ebb Tide

Formal segregation of education started to die in 1954, of course, but we all know how slow the demise really was – and how incomplete it remains. And in retrospect true integration of the educational system was an urgent task for blacks in 1954, because there was a great tide of prosperity flowing then, into which education might help them dip – and a contrary ebb tide, a great redistribution upwards rather than downwards, coming in 1980.

The recent redistribution was carefully chronicled by economist Thomas Piketty in his epic 2014 work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, who summed it up as an explosion of income inequality.² During that explosion, Piketty noted, the upper decile of our society improved its share of all U.S. national income by 15 points. It was an ebb tide for most Americans, a high tide for a few.

Black income does grow; indeed it seems to be growing at a faster rate than white income. But the white head start remains. In the words of the Pew Research Center: “Households headed by a black person earn on average little more than half of what the average white households earns. And in terms of their median net worth, white households are about 13 times as wealthy as black households – a gap that has grown wider since the Great Recession.”

Leave it to Shakespeare to put it best: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”³ White privilege is, in part, a heightened ability to survive and prosper among variable tides. Education is where that ability mostly starts. Black America has historically lacked, and still lacks equal access to it.

________________

1. Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late (2016), at Page 394 (Kindle Edition).
2. Piketty, op.cit. at 294 (“income inequality has exploded”).
3. Julius Caesar, IV:iii 224-27.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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A Lackluster Script Spoils THE GRADUATE at Dundalk Community Theatre

Dyana Neal and Stephen Edwards

Posted on the Baltimore page of BroadwayWorld.com February 26, 2018

In 1963, a young Californian from a family of means, recently returned from four years at Williams College in Massachusetts, brought out a novel about a young Californian from a family of means, recently returned from four years at a college that could have been Williams. The book, of course, was Charles Webb‘s novel The Graduate, an adaptation of which by British playwright Terry Johnson is currently on view at the Dundalk Community Theatre. (On Broadway from 2002 to 2003, the play ran for a respectable 380 performances.)

To judge by the Wikipedia entry on Webb, the author was or became alienated from his family and from traditional paths to success; in later years he has reportedly pursued an idiosyncratic lifestyle some might find bizarre. Again, there seems to be a correspondence between author and character.

And that may help explain the strangeness at the heart of The Graduate. Like what is reported of his creator, protagonist Ben Braddock evinces no interest in advancing his career, no desire to engage in the social niceties expected of him by his parents, and no sense of accomplishment in his stellar undergraduate successes. And no matter how many times Ben is asked to explain his rudeness and anomie, no meaningful explanation comes back. One infers that Ben’s creator Webb was suffering from a similarly inexplicable – not to say irrational – alienation from his roots and history, and could not dramatize anything more cogent because he had no cogency to offer. The novel’s version of the character is thus stuck being a rebel without a well-articulated cause.

The Graduate was nonetheless made into a very successful movie in 1967, with a screenplay by comedian Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, and laser-sharp direction by Mike Nichols. The creative team did two things to conceal the incoherence at the story’s core. First, they gave Ben a speech in the middle to Elaine, his love interest, in which he comments that he feels he is “playing some kind of game, but the rules don’t make any sense to me. They’re being made up by all the wrong people.” To anyone in that era, this language, though vague, sufficed to evoke what was then called the “generation gap.” Young people of that day, like this critic at the time, were apt to feel that their parents were “the wrong people” to make up the rules. In addition, Mike Nichols had the perspicacity to insist on the folk/pop duo Simon & Garfunkel to provide most of the music. The singers’ street cred as troubadours of the youth movement, together with that one little speech, made it possible for young to see Ben as an avatar of a generation that thought its parents as wrong about the War, about sex, and about civil rights, and stuck in a hopeless materialism. (Perhaps the most famous line in the show, not from the book, is the recommendation by an oldster to Ben that he pursue a career in “plastics,” the word being synonymous in that day and age with shoddy manufacture, and when you called a person “plastic,” it was a damning putdown. So much for parents and their values!)

But in terms of character construction, this facile explanation was only lipstick on a pig. There was plenty of rejection of parents in the book and in the movie, but neither Ben nor Elaine was taking any general or generational position, or meaningfully rejecting parental values. (Ben, for instance, simply leaches off his parents for awhile, or lives off the proceeds of earlier leaching; Elaine is still finishing her undergraduate degree at Berkeley. No one is talking about going off freedom riding, demonstrating against the War, or denouncing materialism.) So this was not about the values at issue in most people’s generation gaps. What made the story work, to the extent it did, had little to do with values, and indeed, little to do with the pose of surliness toward elders that is Ben’s default. Instead, the mainspring is the strictly personal drama of Ben, Elaine, and Elaine’s mom, Mrs. Robinson. If Ben had not been disillusioned or had been polite, this story would have worked much the same way, and would have worked as well.

In passing it should be noted that Elaine has no more convincing depth to her than Ben does. She is blown by every passing wind, and apparently constantly falling in and out of love with Ben, in conformity with plot requirements rather than in response to any well-imagined interior life.

Ben’s character may be a phony pastiche, and Elaine’s a confusing cypher, but in Elaine’s mother Mrs. Robinson, Webb and the moviemakers laboring after him struck gold. Bored, lecherous, alcoholic, deeply dishonest, vengeful, and possessed of a twisted motherly loyalty, she is real and vital and scary as hell. (It did not hurt either that she was brought to life by Anne Bancroft in the role of her career.) In limning Mrs. Robinson, Webb did nothing less than address a gap in the fictional canon. Most young men encounter someone like Mrs. Robinson in their growing years, but her type had and has seldom been written about (Phaedra being the big exception, having been dramatized by such notables as Euripides, Seneca, and Racine). Certainly no one has ever pictured the type so well. Her initial imperious and bullying pursuit of Ben while steadfastly denying that she is doing any such thing is a bravura performance, the damage she subsequently wreaks is credible and a little tragic, and the ultimate comeuppance she receives brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. Readers and moviegoers, including this one, are ready to forgive every other flaw in The Graduate because Mrs. Robinson is such a wonderful villain.

There is another problem with dramatizing the book that bears mentioning here: the deadpan transcription of the dialogue. When I read the book as a high schooler, I puzzled over whether it was supposed to be funny or not. Buck Henry and Calder Willingham certainly thought it was, and the movie plays as a highbrow satire of a materialistic society in the eyes of its critical and somewhat ungrateful children. But the book does not insist on being taken as a comedy.

Terry Johnson‘s dramatic recasting of the tale, which owes something to the book and more to the movie, goes one step further, and presents the material as a sex farce. This choice is a disaster. Though there are some farcical touches, mainly fueled by Benjamin’s efforts to keep the affair with Mrs. Robinson a secret, the material lacks and indeed cannot be reconciled with any classic farcical structure. Sex farce is driven by concealment, usually of adultery, to be sure, but when the adulterous affair is with a self-destructive, narcissistic gorgon, the stakes grow too high for farce. And the unmasking of the concealment, usually the denouement of a sex farce, usually solves underlying problems without severe collateral damage to anyone. Here the unmasking completes the destruction of a marriage, wreaks havoc with the business and social relationship between Ben’s family and Elaine’s, and has only one positive feature: the fact that Ben and Elaine end up together.

How do you fix the mismatch between material and treatment? If you’re Terry Johnson, apparently, you dumb things down. You take some of the meanness out of Mrs. Robinson, giving her a sisterly drunk scene with her daughter, and add a hint of reconciliation between her and the young lovers at the end. You give Elaine more agency, too much, and have her (on second thought, after first crying about it) getting chummy with the stripper who had humiliated her (a wasted Rachel Verhaaren). You throw in a scene that seems like a bunch of unfunny cheap shots at the Sixties (an expected psychiatrist who turns out to be a guru with dysfunctional furniture). And you add a scene to the end, after Ben and Elaine’s elopement, that adds nothing to the unsettledness of the endings of the book and of the movie. Further, largely to cut down on the number of scene changes (probably), you disturb the order in which the dramatic cards are played. One thing you cannot say against either the book or the screenplay was that the writers didn’t know how to build a dramatic structure. Some of the plot development suffers because of Johnson’s rejiggering. For instance, Mrs. Robinson’s initial seductive campaign ought to be played out in two spaces: Ben’s family’s house and the Robinsons’ home; these spaces should feel different, with the second one much more dangerous. And that doesn’t happen here. Likewise, the funniest line in the movie (“Are you here for an affair, sir?”) doesn’t happen, presumably because the setup for it would have required more staging.

I’ve necessarily avoided to this point talking about this particular production. I greatly admired Dundalk’s recent rendering of The Bridges of Madison County, which struck me as a community theater hitting well above its weight, in singing, staging, scenery, and overall performing talent. I cannot say the same of this outing, though with the Johnson script it would be hard to do outstanding work. That said, Dyana Neal’s Mrs. Robinson is pretty much perfect. She has the intimidating stare, the commanding manner, the resolute lack of curiosity about any aspect of the world aside from sex, tobacco, and alcohol, the maternal protectiveness, all down pat. If Anne Bancroft is looking down from heaven, she probably approves.

Benjamin posed a major casting challenge in the movie: everyone involved recognized that putting a relatively short and recognizably Jewish actor like Dustin Hoffman in the role was going to change the dynamics. In a sort of reverse from The Merchant of Venice the love plot felt a bit like a Jewish Lorenzo stealing a Gentile Jessica from her family. But the book reads as an all-WASP affair. As Buck Henry acknowledged, the original Ben was probably meant to be a tall and blond and athletic, which nebbishy Dustin Hoffman was not. Stephen Edwards fits neither the blond god nor the nebbish pattern physically, and he plays the character (who in the book is usually taciturn, and has a fairly tough affect in the movie) as a distressed adolescent, prone to all the hand-wringing that you get in the youthful protagonist of a sex farce. It just doesn’t work well.

Elisabeth Johnson is fine as Elaine – which is to say that, being faithful the incoherency imposed on her by the script, she barely ends up portraying a character. It isn’t fair to an actress to make such demands.

Even the set is a mistake, though one that seems to echo the Broadway original: a vast beige/pink room surrounded by enough louvered doors for two sex farces – even where the plot would call for solid doors. Benjamin frequently finds himself in tight places, and the set fails the minimal requirement of conveying this literally or metaphorically.

Finally, what of the nudity? Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson put this show on the map by standing naked for twenty seconds in a hazy blue light that revealed very little, and the same effect is tried here, which, for my money, was and is a mistake. No one is promoting gratuitous nudity, but these days audiences can handle it where it is appropriate. And the moment when Mrs. Robinson stands naked before Ben, the first moment she verbally acknowledges that she is in fact trying to seduce him, should be shocking, not just titillating. Mike Nichols knew this back in 1967, although he was able to shoot it in such a way that Anne Bancroft‘s or a body double’s absolutely forbidden bits did not seem to be on view. Since you can’t do camerawork like that on the stage, you should simply but really show it. Nor is this all. The stripper’s bidirectional twirling tassels effect from the movie is an important plot and character device which I don’t think can be pulled off unless the bustier is – and here it isn’t. This was not an audience which would have blanched; I saw white-haired grannies chuckling at suggestions of oral sex.

So sadly, I’d have to recommend that, if you’re up for revisiting The Graduate, buy the DVD or reread the book, both of which are still available, and wait for Dundalk Community Theatre’s customary high standards to reassert themselves next time around.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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A Community’s Accomplishment and the Homosexual Gaze: ALL SHE MUST POSSESS at REP Stage

Keri Eastridge and Grace Bauer

Posted on the Baltimore page of BroadwayWorld.com February 10, 2018

There are, in the end, only two kinds of accomplishment in life: obtaining gratifying experiences and leaving behind deeds and objects of value. All She Must Possess by Susan McCully, receiving a world premiere at The REP in Columbia, is about a quiet woman and a somewhat noisier community who collaborated in both kinds of accomplishment.

The woman, Etta Cone (1870-1949), together with her sister Claribel (1864-1929) was an important acquirer of works of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne, among others, building a collection of 3,000 pieces that the Baltimore Museum of Art describes as “the crown jewel” of its holdings. And her life was blessed and enlarged by her inclusion in poet Gertrude Stein‘s circle in Paris, a circle whose members included artists whose works she and Claribel collected. Her relationship with Stein most likely included a brief spell in 1905 as lovers, teasingly touched upon in the play, a connection disrupted by the 1907 arrival of Alice Toklas in Stein’s life. All She Must Possess is perhaps at its most touching depicting Etta’s getting on with life and continuing with her collecting after rejection and mistreatment at Stein’s hands, and after the death of Claribel.

The play does not suggest that the collection was Etta’s work alone, but rather depicts it as the emanation of the entire community, including not only Etta (Grace Bauer), but Claribel (Valerie Leonard), Gertrude (Valerie Leonard again), Gertrude’s brother Leo (Nigel Reed), Alice Toklas (Teresa Castracane), and the artists, for whom Matisse (Nigel Reed again) stands in as representative. It was out of that community’s joy in creation and discussions of it (Expressionism vs. Cubism, for instance) that the collection, a thing of transcendent value, is shown as having emerged, with Etta’s role as being the primary shaper of the final product. But the play is generous in giving all of these participants in the joint creation some “screen time” in which to demonstrate their contributions to the enterprise, whether it be Leo’s joie-de-vivre, Matisse’s artistic exuberance, Gertrude’s self-assuredness in exploring the limits of what speech can do, or even Alice’s bitchy possessiveness as Gertrude’s helpmeet.

There is more to the play, however. It is also a work of meta-theater in which a character called only The Writer (Keri Eastridge), a 21st-century lesbian, transparently something of a stand-in for playwright McCully, confronts and interrogates a spiritual predecessor (illustrated above). That predecessor cannot be said to be a totally satisfactory interviewee, as when Etta playfully refuses to be specific about what may have happened sexually between herself and Stein. This matters much less, the play seems to suggest, that what ended up adorning the walls of the sisters’ Baltimore apartment and later those of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Having started the meta-theatrical hare, McCully also loses control of it, in what I take to be a bit of Pirandello-esque fun surrounding who is in whose play, which is not badly done but does not seem to belong in this play.

What insight emerges comes less from what is said between The Writer and Etta and more from the characters’ interplays with the works of art sometimes projected within frames at the back of the set. We get a sense of the effect upon Etta (and one presumes upon Gertrude) of Matisse’s Blue Nude, originally acquired by the Steins, and later by the Cones, a work immediately criticized upon its appearance in part because of the androgynous nature of the body on display. Indeed, the nude comes alive on the wall (portrayed by Teresa Castracane again), and Etta’s longing for the Nude to look up and establish eye contact and presumably other contact is interestingly established in the Blue Nude’s seductive speech. The androgynous nature of Michaelangelo’s sculpture Night also figures in the play’s exploration of the intersection between art and the homosexual gaze, both Michaelangelo’s and Etta’s.

The centrality of the male and the female homosexual gaze to what The Writer seems to be gleaning from her encounter with Etta underlines what I think was a mistake in the casting of the play. This was the choice of Valerie Leonard to bring us Gertrude Stein, who was not only a gay icon but specifically a butch icon, a perception attested to by many queer critics and scholars. Leonard first appears and continually reappears in the play as Claribel Cone, a tall, queenly character of conventionally female appearance, apparently deliberately to contrast her with the far less regal or conventionally feminine Etta. From side-by-side photos, the contrast of the historical Claribel with the historical Etta does not seem so profound, but this is theater, and liberties may be taken. However, with minimal time to switch costuming, hairstyle, or makeup, Leonard cannot easily transition back and forth from her portrayal of Claribel to that of Gertrude. She tries to move with suggestions of corpulence when being Gertrude, but that alone is not going to evoke Stein’s stunning appropriation of conventionally male appearance, key to her iconic appeal and probably to both the historical Etta’s and the dramatized Etta’s sense of attraction to her. (To say Leonard cannot do the impossible is of course not to impugn her considerable skill as an actor. But even in an era of nontraditional casting, the immutable corporeality of a performer sometimes matters a lot.)

While the play therefore does not hit every mark for which it aims, it hits far more than enough of them, particularly in the way it traces the trajectory of Etta’s failed romance with Gertrude. And for Baltimore-area audiences, the play serves as a vital reminder of an indelible piece of our heritage: a locally-situated collection assembled by a small community including four emissaries from Baltimore (Cones and Steins) to the great world outside.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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No Escape from the Hall of Mirrors in THE DEATH OF WALT DISNEY at Single Carrot Theatre

Posted on the Baltimore page of BroadwayWorld.com February 5, 2018

The ahistorical insinuations begin before we even reach the auditorium, as we are marched down a hallway with a lemming stenciled on the side, which will prove to be a reference to the staged suicides of lemmings in a 1958 Walt Disney nature documentary; the only problem is, as the Snopes fact-checking website tells us: “it is not known whether Walt Disney approved or was aware of the activities of … the principal photographer for the lemmings sequence.”

When the audience arrives in the auditorium, the set immediately previews a clear falsehood: stylized icicles and simulated vapor prefiguring the cryogenic postmortem freezing of Walt Disney‘s head – which is a part of the play, but never happened, though Disney did think about it. (Disney was cremated.) The play lurches along like this, from calumny to calumny.

Lucas Hnath‘s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, now being presented by Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre, is various things, but one of them is an extended act of character assassination of America’s mid-century showman bearing only a wobbly relationship to the man’s history or his achievements. So far as this reviewer can determine based on a perusal of a standard scholarly biography, Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006), most of the worst stuff about Disney in this show (and there’s a great deal) does not spring from what is actually known about the historical Disney, but from rumor, surmise, and Hnath’s imagination.

Yet Disney has living descendants, not to mention still-living audience-members (myself among them) who as children enjoyed and were stimulated by his works. While I am not suggesting that Hnath, a creative writer, should be held to a biographer’s standard of care, there does seem to be something callous and careless about trashing in this fashion a memory about which many still care.

If there is a justification for this extreme affront to the truth, the justification can only lie in what the artist does with it, what it makes it possible for a playwright to do.

The first thing that can be claimed for the basically misleading portrait of Disney, which depicts him as an overbearing bully, is that it certainly resonates with today’s preoccupation with public figures who are overbearing bullies. We do spend a lot of time nowadays talking about men who always place their own priorities first, grab all credit from other members of their team, show themselves allergic to accepting any blame for failures, lack personal loyalty, and have an insatiable need to be adulated – all traits of Hnath’s fictive Disney. (There is a limit; not even Hnath tries to depict family man Disney as a dissolute voluptuary, a trait common to so many of the public figures being outed nowadays.) But the play premiered in 2013, before today’s dialogue, and so that degree of topicality was lucky rather than planned.

We must instead justify Hnath on this score, if at all, simply in his depiction of a type, conjuring up an imaginary Disney who illustrates Hnath’s point (much as Shakespeare, like other Tudor propagandists, conjured up a largely fictitious Machiavellian bogeyman in Richard III the better to explore that type). Viewed that way, the play’s liberties with the truth may be justified.

The Disney depicted in the play (Paul Diem) is simply what we would now call a control freak, and to that end he is willing to spare nothing and no one, including himself. He wants to and does control the seating of the audience as it files in. He wants to control his brother Roy (Mohammad R. Suadi) and his daughter (not identified by name, possibly to avoid libel complications, as she was still alive at the time of the play’s first staging) (here portrayed by Meghan Stanton) and his son-in-law Ron Miller (Eric Poch). He wants to control his environment, and is traumatized by the experience of a strike by his employees. He wants to control urban life, the germ of his idea of Disney World and EPCOT, in which the residents are envisioned as being without political rights. He cannot abide the notion of a single tree being anywhere other than where he wants it.

He even wants to control his death.

That last stab at control is central to the play’s action, in fact it could be characterized as being the play’s action. The foreground of the set is a table around which the four cast members are reading the text of the play as at a public reading; the play they are reading is, however, apparently written by Disney himself, so he is simultaneously the author of the play and the subject of it – and he seems also to be the auteur/editor of what one might call the play-without-the-play, that is, of the performance of the four cast members reading the play; we know this because he is continuously making cuts to that performance, which are met by instant advancing of the scene, frequently in mid-line, even when he is talking himself.

WALT

cut to

There’s this Guy in Irvine

cut to

He freezes the bodies

He freezes, well, just the head and

No, it’s not gross, it’s beautiful,

it’s beautiful, it’s

cut to

Not that I’m dying anytime soon

cut to

Not that I’m dying anytime

cut to

Not that

cut to

No, just

cut to

the future

Anyone who finds this “cutting” annoying or tedious is likely to have a hard time with the play, particularly given that, as shown below, there are similar effects in the dialogue. While I found it excessive, it must be said that there is a crude kind of poetry to it. And I would add that it is poetry with a point: it reflects what the stream of thought in such a person might well be like – unwilling to stay put to watch any detail fully fleshed, impatiently jumping to the next detail in search of an ever elusive bigger picture.

It becomes apparent that Walt’s effort to write about his demise, to force it into the role of conversational subject rather than himself becoming that death’s object and thereby losing the ability to write about it, is part of his struggle, and part of the reason he keeps reaching for the clicker with all those “cuts tos” in a futile effort to rejigger things in a way that will avert the conclusion. His motto is “Unless you’re one of the most important people who ever lived, what’s the point?” But there remains no point if you have no consciousness left to enjoy your importance. Hence the sight near the end of doomed Walt struggling to slow down and stretch out indefinitely the experience of his own final moments.

The hall-of-mirrors effect of a play within a play within a play in which one character is struggling and failing to break out of the hallway is meta-theatrical with a vengeance, very much the kind of thing audiences look to Single Carrot to handle. And the troupe surely rises to the peculiar occasion. Paul Diem looks a bit and presents a bit like the avuncular Walt Disney children of my generation saw on Sunday nights. He and Suaidi as Roy manage amazingly well with the difficult split-second dialogue, which often looks like this:

WALT.

visiting relatives

ROY.

nice, it must

WALT.

not really

ROY.

kinda lonely

WALT.

no

ROY

just

WALT.

cut to

And they all say,

well he just does cartoons

ROY.

they?

WALT.

say

ROY.

about

WALT.

me

ROY.

okay

This takes an ear and great discipline to pull off. Stanton and Poch also shine in smaller roles with similar challenges. And coaching such dialogue must have been equally taxing for co-directors Genevieve de Mahy and Matthew Shea, especially since, with a stripped-down script that calls for little in the way of blocking, scenery, costumes, or any of the normal paraphernalia of stage production, the words are mostly what you get.

Whether this is your evening of theater or not will therefore depend not upon the quality of the performance, which is impressive, but upon the play itself. If the presentation of a generic bully confronting the void while expressing himself in jerky and poetic fragments is your cup of tea, this will be the play for you. And I do not write this dismissively. Even with my reservations, it was for me.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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