The Big Picture and the Closeup

 Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

The Joint is Jumpin’ at Spotlighters with AIN’T MISBEHAVIN

Tylar Montgomery in Ain't Misbehavin'

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com on January 27, 2012

A frequently-revived classic of the modern musical stage, as the world knows, Ain’t Misbehavin’ (now in revival at Baltimore’s Spotlighters Theatre) is a revue of songs by Thomas “Fats” Waller (1904-1943), composer, pianist, and singer, one of the geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance period. The revue “reviews” no fewer than 31 of his gems, mostly comic, a few deeply touching. The show has roots as a 1978 cabaret (designed to transport the audience back to the uptown and downtown venues that Waller haunted), which then got moved behind a proscenium when it went to Broadway. That hybrid heritage gives the show some flexibility to move either way; this production, played (like all Spotlighters productions), in the round, of necessity emphasizes the cabaret feel, though it does not, like a recent production I saw, intermingle audience and performers.

In the Round May Be In the Wrong

And it must be said that with an audience on all four sides, the acoustics of the space pose a challenge the production does not totally meet. Some of the songs, especially in the first act, are indistinct, at least to middle-aged ears, because the combination of a singer pointing away from you and a pit band playing loudly at your ear is not ideal for discerning lyrics. I have thought for some time that when the Spotlighters do musical theater, they should mike the performers and tell the band to play pianissimo.

That said, this is a fine youthful cast, showcasing a number of talents from Morgan State University. Tylar Montgomery, puictured above, sometimes channeling Nell Carter, gives us pleasing reminders of Carter’s plangent voice. The high point of this production is Montgomery warbling MEAN TO ME. Phillip Burgess, while not boasting the bang-on vocal impersonation of Fats that Ken Page did on Broadway, does a fine and boisterous non-Fats rendition of songs like HONEYSUCKLE ROSE and YOUR FEET’S TOO BIG. Ann Bragg, Christopher Jones, and Dana McCants all shine in their individual moments (Jones takes VIPER’S DRAG downtown), and the company is gorgeous in its big ensemble number, BLACK AND BLUE.

In Just Five Words

Almost everyone gets to repeat Waller’s signature line: “One never knows, do one?” Properly delivered, that gives you the essence of Waller, jumping bathetically from pseudo-British affectation to irregular-verb-sparse Ebonics in the space of five words. Somehow every rendition of the line in this performance takes you by pleasing surprise.

There’s a cultural statement in that line, obviously, a statement underlined by some of the songs in the show, most notably BLACK AND BLUE: “I’m white inside,/ But that don’t help my case. / ‘Cause I can’t hide / What is on my face.” Waller celebrated blackness, to be sure, but simultaneously partly internalized white pretensions. In an era when he had to enter some of the places he played by a side door, it would have been inhuman to resist completely the allure of white privilege. It’s all on view in his song LOUNGIN’ AT THE WALDORF, which contrasts the kind of freedom and looseness he could enjoy performing in Harlem with the stiffer, whiter milieu of the Waldorf Astoria, for which he had a certain ambivalence. As the lyric critically puts it: “They like jazz, but in small doses.” Nonetheless: “Ain’t it swell doin’ swell with the swells in the swellest hotel of them all?” You don’t need to be a perfect Waller impersonator to get that ambivalence across. One of the strengths of the show (assembled by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr.) is that it doesn’t whitewash (if I may use that word here) this part of Waller’s legacy.

It’s All Here

Or any other part of Waller’s legacy. It’s all here: the flirtatiousness (HONEYSUCKLE ROSE), the exuberance (THE JOINT IS JUMPIN’), the rub-your-nose-in-it celebration of debauchery (‘T AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS IF I DO), the celebration of its opposite, domesticity (TWO SLEEPY PEOPLE, KEEPIN’ OUT OF MISCHIEF NOW), the romantic side (SQUEEZE ME, I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE), and the downright comic abusiveness – with again the racial subtext (FAT AND GREASY, YOUR FEET’S TOO BIG). And even if you don’t know Waller or this show, you know these great songs. No wonder this revue was a hit; no wonder it keeps being revived.

If you haven’t seen it in a while, this revival is guaranteed to put a grin on your face.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for image

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

 Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Shall We Dance and Think About Privilege and Race? THE KING AND I at Toby’s

Heather Marie Beck and David Bosley-Reynolds

Published on BroadwayWorld.com on January 24, 2012

To all accounts, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were dragged somewhat reluctantly by their wives into the project that became The King and I (1951). And when Rodgers and Hammerstein did become involved, they focused more on the piece as a vehicle for the talents of Gertrude Lawrence and for lovely songs and spectacle than scoring points in any serious national discussion. But sometimes the discussion finds you.

The excellent revival of The King and I at Toby’s Columbia provides an opportunity to reexamine a show most of us think we know. Viewed from 60 years on, the musical seems like a logical next step, after South Pacific (1949), in the authors’ consideration of racial privilege and segregation, a topic then coming to a boil in the United States. (Truman had integrated the Armed Forces only three years before, and some of the cases shortly to be consolidated as Brown v. Board of Education were already wending their way through the courts.)  Broadway held a much bigger place in the popular culture and the national discourse then than it does now. So Rodgers and Hammerstein could not possibly have failed to weigh their contributions to that discourse, or to be ignorant of the impact those contributions would have.

Everyone is “The Other”

Just like South Pacific, The King and I addresses the American racial discussion only by indirection.  In the earlier work, the focus is on miscegenation, and the “other” race is Micronesian (the planter’s children) or Vietnamese (Bloody Mary’s daughter), in neither case African American. In The King and I, the focus is on privilege, and the un-privileged “others” are women, Southeast Asians, even whites – in fact everyone who is not the King himself is in a non-privileged status at some point vis-à-vis the King. Even the King, it emerges, is un-privileged and suspect next to the monarchs of the European colonizing powers.

In this drama that turns completely on group identity and privilege, U.S. race relations are explicitly dragged in only as a critique of gender relations in the Siamese court, via the Uncle Tom’s Cabin pantomime and ballet. But every status disparity, whether between men and women, Thais and Burmese, a king and his subjects, Simon Legree and Eliza, or Queen Victoria and King Mongkut, is shown an enemy to human potential and happiness. It is hard to imagine a musical in which the baneful effects of privilege are more fully limned and pilloried.

The relevance and power of this denunciation could hardly have been lost on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s contemporaries, no matter how indirectly it was expressed.

As the world knows, The King and I is built around the tale of Anna Leonowens, a British governess hired by the King of Siam in 1862 to teach some of his wives and children. Leonowens (in her two memoirs that were the source of Margaret Landon’s novel about her, which in turn was the source for The King and I) presented herself as a symbol of British breeding and enlightenment, bringing civility and a progressive view of gender roles to an utterly patriarchal court. Even historically, this was a slight gloss; Leonowens was of mixed Indian and English parentage, and of low birth – facts she was at pains to conceal. But her feminism was real, realer in fact than Rodgers and Hammerstein gave their character credit for.

Your Grandmother’s Feminism

What Rodgers and Hammerstein gave us was your grandmother’s feminism (well, many grandmothers’ feminism): female freedom defined primarily as the freedom to cleave to a man of one’s own choosing, after the relationship derives value from a conventional romance. Some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greatest songs, all in this show, extol that kind of love: HELLO, YOUNG LOVERS, MY LORD AND MASTER, and I HAVE DREAMED. The King’s unsentimental view of gender relations seems more perceptive in some ways, and probably nearer what the historical Leonowens would have appreciated, but it denies women the right to choose a mate. And the horrifying treatment of Tuptim, the Burmese concubine whose lèse majesté consists simply of insisting on romantic autonomy after having been given to the King, makes clear that this freedom is nonetheless fundamental and indispensible, akin to Eliza’s and Uncle Tom’s need not to be slaves. It may not be the whole cause, but the cause is lost without it.

The King may revel in the tyranny of his privilege, but it is still Rodgers and Hammerstein’s choice not to make a villain of him, any more than they would want to demonize the segregationists who bought tickets to sit in their audience. They may enshrine an Uncle Tom’s Cabin ballet in the heart of the dramatized debate, but they are not about to present the King as a latter-day Simon Legree.

Love for the Oppressor?

Instead, the King is given many allowances, because he is striving to better his country and is in some ways as much a prisoner of patriarchy as his concubines. That is the burden of his chief wife Lady Thiang’s song SOMETHING WONDERFUL. I do not think any modern musical could present that song that way; it would sound like an abused wife singing a paean to her spouse.  But within this 1951 artifact of a show, it works. Likewise, the King is softened by Rodgers and Hammerstein; in the end, he cannot bring himself to lash Tuptim though according to his received ways he should (by contrast the Tuptim in Anna’s memoir was publicly tortured and then burned alive – after Mongkut had first promised Anna he would spare her).

The conflict of progressive and retrograde messages in this show (How much love can you give a well-intentioned oppressor? Is it feminist to fight for the right to choose a man whose regard is vital?) gives rise to a powerful temptation in modern stagings, which is to sweep all those 20^th-Century conflicts under the rug, and simply tell a powerful story of love affairs and children and pluckiness, shot through with heavenly music. And this particular production, directed by Shawn Kettering, does succumb to some extent.

Resist the Sentimental Wash

Fortunately, the show has a way of forcing these issues back to the fore, most notably in the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet, here choreographed beautifully by Tina DeSimone (based on the Jerome Robbins ballet seen on Broadway and in the 1956 movie). In the ballet, patriarchy and racism take on an urgency that is not to be gainsaid.

In any case, even seen merely on a superficial level, the show connects, when presented well.  And this production, as I said before, is excellent. David Bosley-Reynolds’ portrayal of the King especially holds the attention.  (Half the time he sounds uncannily similar to Yul Brynner who originated and inhabited the role for many years.) Whether soliloquizing or dancing the polka with Anna (Heather Marie Beck, whom I admired in Xanadu), he leaves you hanging on every word and gesture.  Beck carries the tunes well, with perhaps just a hint of shrillness, and swings a mean hoop skirt.  Julia Lancione’s Tuptim and Jeffrey Shankle’s Lun Tha (Tiptim’s lover) harmonize beautifully and look lovely together. (Look out for Lancione’s powerful high notes.) And Crystal Freeman makes what can be made of the aforementioned SOMETHING WONDERFUL. Dancer Tegan Williams is exceptional as Eliza in the ballet sequence. The costumes by Florence Arnold are lavish and eye-catching.

Do go.  But when you do, and the conundrums of race, class, and gender that lie just beneath the surface beckon to you, think about them; do not drown in the sentimental wash, although, especially at the end when the King lies dying and a roomful of desperate tykes beg their teacher not to desert them, drowning will be difficult to resist.  Rodgers and Hammerstein designed the ending to reduce you to tears, and they knew what they were doing.  Resist anyhow. Think instead.

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

 Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Whether to Re-Up on Marriage – FIFTY WORDS at Everyman

Published on BroadwayWorld.com January 23, 2012

Clinton Brandhagen and Megan Anderson

When marriages go critical, as marriages will from time to time, the scenes and fights that embody the crisis will seldom be straightforward affairs.  As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys in Fifty Words, his recent off-Broadway success receiving its inaugural Baltimore production at Everyman Theatre, the emotions that will have led to the crisis were inevitably complicated things, and the crisis’ unfolding will be consistent with those emotions.  Except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together, however tenuously, in near-equipoise with the forces pushing them apart.

In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part.  To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.

There are two ways a dramatist can approach this reality.  He/she can make of the complexity a dramatic structure unto itself – one in which there is no truth but the struggle between the parties, and in which each mode the parties have of relating to each other, whether it be hugging on the one hand or screaming and throwing things on the other, is just another form of struggle for mastery, no more distinct, at bottom, than thrust is from parry.  That was Edward Albee’s approach in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Fifty Words, though facially somewhat similar, actually takes the opposite tack, namely to treat seriously the contradictory emotions of the participants in the scene, to make the scene no more (or less) dreadful or dramatic than such a scene would be in real life, and to show the parties’ incoherence and ambivalence for what it is: the natural result of the messy lives lived to bring them to such a moment.  It is a canny approach, because few of us will attain much maturity without having lived through such scenes, and the shock of recognition will be considerable.

The subject being a fairly universal experience, the two characters in this two-character play are Everymen of a sort – at least of the sort who inhabit New York brownstones and send their children to private schools.  Adam (Clinton Brandhagen) is an architect, Jan (Megan Anderson) a former dancer turned freelance data-miner.  They are likeable, even endearing, without being terribly distinct.  Their nine-year-old son Greg, never seen onstage, may be slightly neurotic and/or afflicted with mild ADD.[1] What ails Adam and Jan’s marriage likewise is fairly typical: the inevitable fading of sexual novelty, the disappointments and pressures of their careers, the stresses of parenthood, and an affair Adam has been having which, not very coincidentally, chooses the night of their son’s first out-of-home sleepover to become known.

Even before Adam’s affair tumbles out of the closet, we see the ambivalent way they treat each other, in love but not always loving, finding it difficult to connect.  Once the mistress is acknowledged, however, the contradictions reach a fever pitch.  She throws things that break; she gets a splinter in her foot; he helps get the splinter out; they make love; she orders him to leave the home, etc.  He extols the way the mistress looks out for his feelings (as opposed to Jan, who he asserts does not), but then seems willing to promise whatever is necessary to revive the marriage – begging the question why, at least a little.

Whether the marriage actually will be saved is not revealed by the fadeout, though the play ends on a hopeful note.  But it is evident that if the two of them remain together, it will not be so much the saving of the extant marriage as effectively a third marriage for both of them, succeeding the hotly sexual early infatuation and the stage in which they built up a home and a family.

Marriages, Weller seems to be saying, are actually multiple successive events, for which a couple must consciously re-up every few years.  The title refers to the supposed number of words in Eskimo for snow (though I have also heard that this lexicographical multiplicity is an urban legend), and to a suggestion by one of the characters that there should be a similar number of terms for love (perhaps one for each iteration of a marriage).

I’ve not seen the various productions of Fifty Words (New York, Toronto, and Chicago, at least), but it seems that the play has undergone some changes since its 2008 premiere.  Everyman gives it a solid rendering with two veteran company members doing the honors in workmanlike fashion, fully and convincingly inhabiting two average professional-class New Yorkers living through a garden-variety crisis.  You believe in these characters from the outset, without finding either of them very remarkable, which I think is exactly right for this play.  Director Donald Hicken keeps the action humming and the emotions real.  And the set by Timothy Mackabee is a marvel, a straight shot through the fuselage of a brownstone with everything from a fridge to board games on display.

______________

[1]  One reader has suggested that I missed cues that the son’s condition is actually Asperger’s.  Could be; that is, it could be that we’re meant to think that.  What I read into it was that the parents were being bombarded with a lot of worrisome but ambiguous information of the sort that not always, but usually signifies merely that a child is having a rough patch, and, at worst, is probably at the benign end of the spectrum of horribles.

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

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theme Songs Page | Previous Theme Song | Next Theme Song

Finding the Main Line

Reasons for Waiting, by Ian Anderson, performed by Jethro Tull (1969), encountered 1970

Buy it here | See it here | Lyrics here

A hymn whose tune I like better than I do its lyrics contains the unfortunate line: “We are the young, our lives are a myst’ry.”  I think what the versifier had in mind (other than a rhyme for “history”) was the notion that young people cannot know what life will have in store for them.  But most of us use the word “mystery” to denote not an unknown outcome but rather a known set of facts that calls for an as-yet unknown explanation.

Yet when you’re young, there are times when the word “mystery” as most of us use it almost fits.  The facts of your life feel as if they should tell you what to do next, but you can’t make out what they’re saying.

The gorgeous Ian Anderson song Reasons for Waiting infallibly calls to my mind a moment of such frustration in my youth.  Or, more accurately, a time-out from that frustration.

When I hear it, I see myself sitting on a train.  Let me tell you about that moment and that trip.

Two Cars, Philly to Harrisburg

It was a beautiful morning, and I was traveling in a two-car train from Philadelphia to Harrisburg.  I had to take the trip on account of my car, that priceless gift from my dad within the previous year.  The only problem was that my dad and the car came from New York, and I didn’t.  I was a Michigander attending college in Pennsylvania.  So the time had come – and passed – for me to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles about re-registering it.  I’m pretty certain I’d neglected switching the car’s registration until the New York registration had lapsed, and in order to get the problem fixed I had to go at once to the only office that could deal with the problem immediately – in the state capital.  Hence Harrisburg, rather than Philly.  Hence train, rather than car.

Why had I neglected it?  OK, start with the fact that I had no more judgment and maturity than your average college student.  And like an average college student, I had to do a reasonable amount of coping on a daily basis.  I was holding down a very ambitious college curriculum and carrying on a serious love affair.  But I was also distracted by three big questions: what graduate school to apply to, what to do about the possibility I might be drafted, and whether to get married.  And obviously the resolution to any of these questions was tied up with the resolution of both of the others.  All of these things provoked anxiety; all of them called for grown-up powers of analysis I didn’t possess yet.  My mind was going in circles trying to figure them out.

Locum Refrigerii

And so in the midst of all this, one little bit of coping, the car registration, was allowed to slide too long.  Like most overdue tasks, this one came with a price: a day of downtime to get to Harrisburg and back.  If that day taught me a lesson, however, it had nothing to do with the consequences of negligence.  Rather it concerned the occasional moments of grace that drop into our lives, days where downtime unexpectedly becomes time out from one’s cares.

There was a phrase in my old Missal that captures what that day became: locum refrigerii, lucis, et pacis: a place of comfort, light and peace.[1]  For one gorgeous, sunny day I was forced to stare out the window of a cozy two-car train at some of the prettiest creation Pennsylvania has to offer, and I was so entranced by the unfolding scene that I largely forgot about being anxious.

The  train followed along the Main Line, that agglomeration of the old Main Line of Public Works of Pennsylvania comprised of canals, roads and rail, and more particularly of course the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line to Pittsburgh.  Over the roughly 120 years that this rail line had been used, it had carried commuter trains for some of Philadelphia’s most elegant suburbs. I passed stations named Merion, Narberth, and Haverford, Villanova, Rosemont, Devon and Paoli.  And then, after a while, the suburbs gave way to Lancaster County’s broad fields.  As this was either advanced autumn or early spring, the vegetation was spare enough so I had an unobstructed view.  And finally, after a while, the line took me along the broad Susquehanna before depositing me near the Capitol.

I have a penchant and something of a gift for finding my way around strange cities, and I located where I was supposed to go quickly, and transacted my business without much trouble.  Shortly thereafter, I got on another train and reversed the route.

Faith in Impossible Schemes

And through much of that morning and afternoon, Reasons for Waiting was cycling through my head. It’s a peaceful song, despite the frequent appearance of strings.  The lyrics evoke a lover contemplating his lady, apparently asleep, perhaps in bed with him, perhaps only remembered (the lyrics grow abstract as they describe the time and the place of the lady).

And the lyrics conclude with a hope that the beloved has “faith in impossible schemes/ that are born in the sigh/ of the wind blowing by.”  Despite the mention of weeping and the “impossible” nature of the “schemes,” and despite some bruising jazzy interludes where Anderson’s gruff flute-work suggests conflict, the song remains serenely confident that the lady will say yes to whatever projects or commitments the singer may propose.

A Flourish of Flutes

The optimism of the song is assured by the strings and especially by a repeated flourish played by Anderson on the flute, backed by Marin Barre on another flute.  It appears at the beginning, middle, and end of the song.  If you remember one thing about Reasons for Waiting, it will be that incurably lovely flourish, perfect for accompanying the passing of suburbs and fields in all their own loveliness.

I was really sorry for the day to end, and to be consigned again to the less serene frame of mind in which I was spending that year.  Yet I couldn’t help thinking, then and now, that I was on a quest to discover the main line of my life, and that for a day at least, I had experienced what finding it might be like.

Previous I Read The News Today Entry | Next I Read The News Today Entry

Net Worthlessness: Congressional Wealth and the Unstable Right

A recent report by Peter Whoriskey in the Washington Post on the rising wealth of members of Congress contained a number of surprises, and some food for thought.

That Congressmen and -women are getting richer is not one of the surprises, to be sure.  Anyone paying attention knows that our legislators are the product of a system built around money.  So it comes as no shock that they might accumulate some of it.  For instance, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi reports personal wealth in excess of $101 million; Sen. John Kerry is worth double that and then some.  Nor is it much of a surprise that over time Congresspeople might get to keep more of the money that comes their way.  Between 1984 and 2009 the average net worth of members of the House of Representatives (excluding home equity) has more than doubled – at the same time that average household net worth of the public at large has receded slightly.

Bought Cheap

More surprising is that the average wealth of a member of Congress is still kind of paltry, less than three-quarters of a million dollars.  One would think the spoils would be greater than that. Many of us would be happy to have a net worth of three-quarters of a million dollars, but still, considering the vast sums of cash sloshing around in American politics, that average seems low.

In part it can be explained by the fact that there are a lot of members with negative net worths, likely the result of pledging assets to secure campaign debt.  Outliers can drag an average down.

Partisan Intensity

Still, it seems as if all that money is buying something – and that is the second big surprise.  Over the same period, between 1984 and 2009, the partisanship of Congress has increased in a curve whose profile to an uncanny degree mimics that of the net worth curve.  This partisanship is measured by an algorithm called NOMINATE (for “Nominal Three-Step Estimation,” if you must know), maintained by an academic named Keith Poole.  It seems to be the most respected metric of these things.

If you buy into the premise that throughout the length of American history there has been essentially one polarity in American politics – call it Left and Right – NOMINATE can tell you where any member of Congress has been on that polarity, based on almost every vote he/she has taken.  And what NOMINATE tells us is that seldom has Congress been more composed of consistently Left and Right members.  In other words, if they vote Left on one issue, they will, to a greater degree than is typical in American history, vote Left on other issues as well; and the converse holds true if they vote Right.  At the moment, these forces are roughly balanced, which partly accounts for all the gridlock you may have noticed.

Corporate Cash

Up until the 2010 Citizens United decision, individuals were the biggest contributors to Congressional campaigns, PACs a distant second, and corporations were excluded from directly donating, at least in the periods just before elections.  Held back by the floodgates of federal election law, until Citizens United opened them up, corporate money had to choose indirect routes to reach Congress at the most inconvenient times.  And perhaps it was that indirection that left Congress in a position where it still had an identifiable and viable Left, being as corporate money is usually associated with the Right, and individuals contribute across the spectrum.

Hold that thought about corporate money, though.

In the wake of Citizens United, we could expect that if corporate money is freer to influence elections, the balance in Congress would shift rightward – at least if the single-polarity analysis of NOMINATE is correct.  But there are reasons the single-polarity assumption might not hold true forever, because it’s doubtful that Right can continue to mean what Right means today.

Doomed Dixiecrats

A little history.  Consider the Dixiecrats during the New Deal.  They tended to vote for the Rooseveltian programs to regulate and stimulate the economy, which in the politics of that era was the Left position.  But they nearly completely checkmated any progress toward racial justice; maintenance of the privileged status of whites was the Right position.  Cumulatively, this combination of stances would have put Dixiecrats in the middle on that NOMINATE graph, as they voted Left on some issues and Right on others.

You could argue that the inconsistency of the Dixiecrats made them centrists, or you could say that there was in fact more than one polarity out there.  I leave that dispute to the experts.  But however you characterize it, that inconsistency left the Democrats standing for essentially contradictory things.  The party of that era was an inherently unstable compound.  And finally it disintegrated over the the apostasy of President Johnson, a Dixiecrat who broke with the South and made civil rights legislation finally happen.  This led to the Republicanization of the South.

Two generations later, however, the unstable coalition is on the Right.  It consists of two groups who, like the constituents of the New Deal Democrats, have little inherent reason to be in the same party.  Their interests, objectively viewed, are not aligned, though party voting discipline currently obscures this.

What Are These People Doing in the Same Picture?

For instance, corporate Republicans are injured by the social conservatives’ hostility to immigration.  It interferes with the education and retention of bright foreigners in the technical and financial sectors, and with access to cheap labor in agricultural and service sectors.  A recent dust-up over anti-immigrant laws in Alabama is a harbinger: corporate America took on the state and forced the socially conservative governor to blink.

Similarly, hostility toward government solvency and functioning looks like a corporate issue, but really is a social conservative issue, except where it comes to regulation.  Business needs a government able to maintain an educational and transportation infrastructure, and willing to bankroll scientific innovation.

Meanwhile social conservatives throng “the 99%.”  They may have bought into the notion that the gross disparities in distribution of wealth in our society is the correct working of a fair system.  But the very American families social conservatives so value are under financial siege because of that distribution.  Hostility to government regulation, to economic planning, and to efforts to combat climate change are not good for social conservatives.  It’s hard to foster family values in your home when your home is under water, figuratively or for that matter literally (as will happen to many coastal conservatives if climate change continues).

Money Will Have Friends Everywhere

It is a reasonable guess that corporate interests, being clearer sighted, will do most of the shifting if the Republican coalition comes undone.  It’s not as if much shifting would even be required.  Can anyone doubt that corporate money is in some fashion behind the wealth of the members of Congress named above – both of whom are Democrats?  Or that it has something to do with the prosperity of both parties’ lawmakers?  Of course, corporate interests would have to reckon with Democrats being the party of regulation and taxes.  But they may well decide to go with keeping their enemies close for a while.

If they do, we can expect to see those Congressional net worths continue to climb, even as current extreme party unity lessens.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

Previous I Read The News Today Entry | Next I Read The News Today Entry

Theme Songs Page | Previous Theme Song | Next Theme Song

The Age of Dross Begins

The King Must Die! By Bernie Taupin and Elton John, performed by Elton John (1970), encountered 1970?

 Buy it here | See it here | Lyrics here

Icarus, by Ralph Towner, performed by the Paul Winter Consort (1970), encountered 1971

 Buy it here | See it here | Sheet music here

The albums piled up in the room of my housemate Otts, the music editor of the arts supplement to the campus paper.  In fragmentary but decided fashion they told the tale: The three-minute song was growing obsolete.  Singer-songwriters were now artistes, with all the pretensions that went with the role.  Monaural AM was no longer a reliable place to hear the good new stuff.

The musical Age of Gold in which I had grown up was just about over.  Whatever the merits of whatever was coming next, it wouldn’t be the gold I still wanted.  Wanted so badly, in fact, that I was willing to squint extra hard to see it in all the new vinyl that came sluicing into our house.

But of course when you squint, you are apt to see things that aren’t, strictly speaking, uh, there.

But Then Again No

One artist who turned up on Otts’ floor at this juncture in whom I ended up trying hard to see the gold was Elton John.  And he was some kind of gold isotope: he had the voice and the mannerisms to deliver a song, as well as the ear to compose catchy melodies.  The trouble was, his lyricist was Bernie Taupin.  That is sort of like Beethoven trying to be a great composer while limited to writing for the kazoo.

When John’s first significant album came out, I really tried to look past the lyrics.  That first number, Your Song, as a melody, was everything a pop love song could be.  But the awful lyrics were right there:

No, what?  Or is the no there just to rhyme with show, which itself caps off a verse referencing a skill completely irrelevant to the singer’s aspiration to show the beloved how much he loves her?[1]  If not, name the task for which sculpture is inadequate but for which potion-making could be considered an improvement?  If Taupin were a lyricist, but then again no …

I could go on.  The thing was, I was still listening to the album a lot because of John’s magnetism as a singer.  But it kept not being utterly wonderful.

Ostlers, Mercenaries and Other Pointless Imagery

The song that ended the album was the one I played the most: The King Must Die!  To a student reading Chaucer and Shakespeare as I was at the moment, the medievalism and renaissancery of the lyrics, not to mention the dramatic central situation suggested by the title, was enough to hook me.  Yet I kept not loving it as much as I wanted.  Coming back to it 40 years later (and I include the beginning lyrics in an endnote so the reader can come back to it too),[2] it smacks me in the face: Who’s talking and who’s listening?  Stanzas 1-4 seem to be addressing a “king,” although there’s a strong hint he may simply be an everyman.  Stanza 5 sounds more like a response by the king.  But there are no clues in the music or the delivery.  In any case, the king seems to be in an ominous (in the literal sense of the word) situation.  But the omens seem wide of the mark: “Tell the ostler that his name was / The very first they chose.”  Well, so what?  Ostlers aren’t kings, and usually aren’t even addressed by kings.  What’s so bad for the king that someone chose the ostler?  Chosen for what?  And why are mercenaries singing in cloisters?  Shouldn’t it be monks?[3]  And if you must worry about mercenaries, isn’t it actually more reassuring to have them singing in cloisters than besieging your towns? In any case, the dramatic gravity of the music, underlined by Paul Buckmaster’s masterful arrangements, is utterly unearned.

At this point it would be a reasonable objection that Dylan did lots of the same thing.  I admit it, it’s true.  I’ve even written about that strain of Dylan right in this blog.  It’s just that Dylan was a genius who could get away with that sort of thing.[4]  And for that matter, Chaucerian touches worked well for Procol Harum in A Whiter Shade of Pale, even though there, as here, they didn’t add up to much.  But then that song was deliberately mysterious and impenetrable; that diverting talk about millers and hosts was meant to be disorienting, along with psychedelicisms about the ceiling flying away.

As I say, I listened to the album a lot, but interestingly, when I look back, I see I wrote at the time that: “with big new stars, like, say, Elton John, it’s impossible to determine, from their albums alone, whether they deserve their status or not, after you take into account the hype and arranging in back of them.”  So I guess I never quite convinced myself, even though now the source of my discomfort has little to do with the hype.

Reviewing Against the Grain

The comment I just quoted came from a review I wrote (at Otts’ suggestion) of the Paul Winter Consort’s Road album.[5]

Today, Paul Winter and his saxophone and his ensembles are shelved with the New Age musicians.  I tried to write about them as if they were to be considered along with rockers, likening the album to Sgt. Pepper.  My license to draw the comparison was the strong use of classical music elements in both, and the willingness of both albums to draw inspiration from anywhere.  But I tried to sell Paul Winter to my audience as if he and his consort were some kind of act to compare with, for instance, other acts mentioned in that issue of the paper: Laura Nyro, Richie Havens, the Youngbloods, Seatrain.

I wasn’t smart enough to take in that there were things out there besides classical, jazz, and rock – and that eclecticism didn’t necessarily lump an act with rockers.  This was my introduction to a new flavor, but my musical taxonomy wasn’t up to it.

I wasn’t wrong, though, about finding it fascinating, powerful music.  My Theme Song from the album – which has become Paul Winter’s own theme song, even though it was written by the guitarist in the Consort, Ralph Towner – was Icarus. The mythical Icarus, the fabricator of wings, flew too near the sun and paid with his life for his presumption.  Towner’s Icarus, so far as I can make out from the song, just discovers how intoxicating it is to fly.  The music is all about soaring, not falling.  There are wistful minor chords, to be sure, but just to make your breath catch as he upshifts into the major.

Not Bad for Not Rock

It is one of the great melodies, and covered in subsequent years by artists of all stripes.  I am particularly fond of a cover by Towner himself with a couple of other guitarists, of which there is a fine YouTube video here and of a cover by jazz pianist Stef Scaggiari.

A wonderful thing, but not rock gold, because not rock.  Maybe the reason, apart from my naivete, that I tried so hard to sell it to my contemporary 1971 readers as some kind of rock substitute was that if I had acknowledged it was something different and sui generis (at that time, anyhow), I’d have to acknowledge I was getting somewhat to one side of the popular tastes of the day, going back to being a bit of a wonk, as I’d started out.  Maybe, except for this: there is nothing wonkish about that sublime melody.  Listen to it, and you’ll want to soar too.

 The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column | Next Big Picture Column

Unnecessary Roughness

Published in the Maryland Daily Record December 5, 2011

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff would probably be happier with some of the state agencies I regularly deal with than he was last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  He refused to endorse a settlement of an enforcement action by the SEC, in part because the defendant, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., wasn’t required to admit the allegations against it.  In my own practice, I tend to encounter the opposite problem.  My state regulator adversaries seldom agree to a disposition of an enforcement action without an admission of guilt by my client.  Rakoff thus attacked a kind of administrative prosecutorial discretion I’d like to see more of.

Why The Judge Was Mad

The allegations against Citigroup are pretty bad.  It’s said that when in 2007 Citigroup held a load of mortgage-backed securities it well knew to be dubious, Citigroup arranged for some allegedly independent but secretly paid-off expert to tout the vitality of these stinkeroos, tricking investors into taking them off Citigroup’s hands.  Citigroup then sold short against the very securities it was about to dump.  After the securities did what Citigroup knew they would do, i.e. tanked, the final score (allegedly) was Citigroup: $160 million profits, Investors: $700 million losses.

Rakoff was annoyed with the settlement because Citigroup was charged only with negligence, not fraud (only its employee was charged with fraud).  Investors can’t sue for mere negligence.  Moreover, the settlement would have forced the disgorgement of Citigroup’s profits plus interest, but would not have necessarily landed a single penny back in the pockets of the investors.  Third, and most upsetting to the judge, the settlement would have had zero collateral estoppel effect.  The settlement would have given investors suing Citigroup no established factual basis for their own fraud actions. They would have had to have proved their cases from scratch.

Of course, Citigroup also promised never to do in future what it neither admitted nor denied having done in the past, and agreed to be enjoined.  That agreed injunction was Judge Rakoff’s way in; as every litigator knows, an injunction can only be granted after the court takes the public interest into account.  And Rakoff found that the public interest would not be served if Citigroup admitted nothing, particularly if the investors were not made whole.

Why The Judge Was Wrong

I wish Rakoff had stayed with his first two gripes, which I think were legitimate.  The timidity of SEC in undercharging Citigroup and in not trying to build restitution to defrauded investors into the settlement seems unfortunate.  But saying that there was a public interest in admissions went too far.

For one thing, the whole point of a settlement is to leave something on the table for each side.  For a person or company at the receiving end of an administrative enforcement action, that something can take the form of facts not admitted.  It is a natural quid pro quo.  Usually, the agency will get the sanction it seeks.  And usually, not admitting facts protects against grave practical consequences.

Nothing Collateral About Collateral Damage

Typically, the consequences when facts are admitted are collateral.  The statutory sanction the agency seeks and will typically receive in a settlement (delicensure of a professional, fines and disgorgement for a corporation, and the like) will be direct.  But if facts are admitted, the damage to the regulatee will go on in ways not contemplated by the agency’s own organic statute.

For example, even if the professional is re-licensed someday, he or she may be unable to obtain, directly or indirectly, federal reimbursement – which in many practices, including medicine, is a death sentence.  A government contractor may be debarred, another kind of death sentence.  Admitted facts may lay a company like Citigroup open to huge claims through collateral estoppel.  Risks may become uninsurable.  Financing may become unavailable.  Individuals may be deported.  And above and beyond these consequences, there is the damage to reputation and to pride.

Typically, as noted, the agency’s founding statute charters it to pursue none of these consequences.  Yet administrative prosecutors and/or regulators who insist on found facts are knowingly inflicting them.

Blood Lust

This unnecessary roughness, I maintain, is not in the public interest.  That interest, established by thousands of disciplinary statutes, should begin and end with the linkage articulated in those statutes between specified misbehavior and specified sanctions.  Those sanctions are the only consequences in which the law establishes a public interest.  With those sanctions achieved, the establishment of the facts of the misbehavior – at least by the prosecutor or agency in question – is not important.

Why then is it pursued?  Often, I believe, from the conscious desire to inflict those collateral consequences, a blood-lust to stigmatize.  I’ve seen prosecutors self-righteously bent on taking errant professionals “off the road” to greater extents than the laws they are supposed to enforce warrant.  And I’ve definitely seen regulators afraid of being tagged as the ones on whose watch some malefactor got off insufficiently stigmatized.

Am I saying then that the public has no interest in finding out what really happened?  For instance, is there no public interest in getting to the bottom of Citigroup’s alleged mammoth pump-and-dump?  No, I think the public does have an interest, and a Congressional hearing or a journalistic investigation would be an appropriate way of vindicating it – not to mention what comes out of private lawsuits.  But prosecutions, administrative or otherwise, serve a different aspect of the public interest, namely in protecting the public by sanctioning certain kinds of misbehavior.  The fact-finding function is purely incidental to that service.

No Incentive To Settle

Practically speaking, if the incidental fact-finding is not allowed to be dispensed with in settlement, it leaves most regulatees very little reason to settle.  If the administrative prosecutor or the regulatory board insists on the statutory sanction plus admissions of all facts, the settlement is nothing more than a surrender.  And why should the regulatee who can afford a legal defense just surrender – at least when there remains the faintest chance of a successful defense?  The inefficiency of the resulting trial in terms of the time and cost to both sides (one financed by taxpayers, let’s not forget) is considerable.

In fact, even the word surrender may not always capture the essence of the prosecutorial overkill.  Many professionals, once charged with misconduct, cannot merely unconditionally surrender their licenses; boards will not even accept the surrender without admissions being made.  It becomes a strange conditional surrender, in which, contrary to the usages in warfare, the victor sets the conditions.  Unless the professional gives the demanded admissions, the professional must withstand an administrative trial he or she does not even wish to contest.  This is show-trial time; this is madness.

Enough With The Mea Culpas

One can applaud Judge Rakoff for trying to make SEC get a backbone.  If the SEC had insisted on restitution, one can guess Rakoff would not have harped on admissions.  But the SEC didn’t do that, drawing the judge off-base.  It would be unfortunate if this high profile case further increased the respectability of the practice of shaking down regulatees for admissions when the regulators are already getting, practically speaking, everything they wanted.

They should be encouraged to take yes for an answer, without a particularized mea culpa attached.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

 The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column | Next Big Picture Column

Religious Writings Page | Previous Religious Writing | Next Religious Writing

The Poor You Have Always In Your Face

For many a year, I’ve walked past or, when behind the wheel, rolled by.

As we know from Matthew 26:11 and John 12:8, the poor we have always with us.  And I do mean always. Living and working downtown in the city, it’s inevitable that several times a day I’ll encounter people asking for a handout.  There will be hand-lettered corrugated cardboard signs, and people telling me they just need a few bucks to get home, and mothers asking for help feeding their kids, and folks trying to talk with accents and vocabularies that make them sound like solid citizens who’ve just been robbed or lost their purse but will promptly repay any funds advanced.

Never An Easy Mark

Even before I stopped giving entirely, I was never an easy mark.  I hate being lied to, I hate people impinging on my space, I don’t like being distracted as I drive.  I want to be left alone.  So there was almost no way to ask me for a handout that did not push my preexisting buttons.  But I finally found it too exhausting dealing with even the few who picked their way through the minefield of my peeves.

I only wanted to help out those who really needed help, and I didn’t want to marginalize them further by increasing their habits of dependency.  In the modern phrase, I wanted to steer clear of a moral hazard.

No Disclaimers

I don’t buy the narrative about poverty that it’s the exclusive result of bad and pernicious life choices (drugs or single-parenthood) about which the rest of us need feel no concern or responsibility.

Surely the Number One cause of destitution is lack of jobs.  And our economy has diverted so much money to the wealthiest that it significantly diminishes what is available to pay those who seek work, and hence decreases jobs.[1]   Even if we are not part of the gilded 1%, we benefit from the entire economic setup.

And there are others who cannot work because of things done to them in our name. In pursuit of national security, from which we all benefit, we often injure our soldiers and sailors so badly in body and mind they may never be reliable functionaries in the world of work.[2]

My own success, in other words, may be predicated upon things that also contribute to the failure of others.  Can I disclaim all responsibility for these things?  I think not.

Many of the people who ask are apparently unemployable, afflicted with obvious schizophrenia or amputations that would make many kinds of work impossible.  And there again, I am my brother’s keeper.

But That Said …

Yes, it’s never simple.  Some of the people whose same wheelchairs roll up to my car every morning seem to have a great work ethic; it just seems like the wrong kind of work.  Could the schizophrenic medicate down to a state that would allow her to hold down an office job?  Maybe.

Nor can I ignore that continuing unwise choices are generally at least a part of the history of the people who accost me for money as I walk down the street.  If I knew that my contributions would only finance food, clothing, shelter, health care and child care and not drugs, I’d be much more inclined to be generous.  But how can I know?  When the panhandler approaches, there’s no grant application and no time for due diligence.

Unconsciously, then, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to help only the truly helpless, and I can’t know who they are.

Due Diligence By Proxy?

One way to ameliorate the problem is to rely on gatekeepers, welfare administrators who do some of the due diligence I cannot, by testing the means of the allegedly needy, and certifying them as such, and upon charitable organizations which help the poor (often limited to the poor thus certified) in my name.  And in fact that is the way I personally have chosen to discharge my responsibility to the homeless and hungry.  Well, that and a little bit of charity work and some pro bono.

But it is not a comfortable or a satisfying choice. I know enough about gatekeepers and the interactions of the poor with them to know how humiliating the process often becomes.  If you want a rent subsidy, for instance, you may find yourself asked not only to reveal all aspects of your personal finances, but also to apply for child support even if you don’t want to ask the father for it, attend work training for which you may not be fitted, and cast out from home and hearth any children of yours who may be involved in drug crime.  If you want help with your mental illness you may be medicated down to a state in which terrible secondary symptoms like tardive dyskinesia afflict you, and life loses all savor.  If you want a bed for a night, you may be forced to participate in prayers you do not believe in.

Naturally, all of the demands made by gatekeeper types are colorably for the poor person’s good; they are designed to see that the pauper becomes more compliant with social norms (which generally works out well for the poor person), and for assuring that the donor or the state’s money is not wasted.  Worthy goals all.

Yet if you are poor and you go to gatekeepers, you lose control and you lose dignity.  It is small wonder to me that so many of our disadvantaged choose the risks and rigors of the street rather than stoop to being regulated this way.  How badly do I want to help force a pauper into the gatekeepers’ regimen?

Something Personal

Anyway, something more personal seems demanded.  Whether the demand comes from simple humanity, the Christian God[3] or Allah,[4] I know there is something good about the personal encounters I have been shunning.  A son of mine, who spent two years feeding the poor on Friday nights, could tell me personal details about every panhandler in the neighborhood.  He knew them, their names, their histories, their personalities.  He said it was quite enriching for him, and I have no doubt it was for them too.  I’d hate to spend my whole life being shunned by people like me.  And I hate being the one to shun.

Before I toughened up about handouts, there was a guy who’d approach me from time to time.  I knew his name.  He’d joke with me as he lightened my purse.  Then something happened to him.  Something went out in his eyes; he no longer recognizes me, or asks for a handout when we pass on the street.  I miss him.  And I’ve missed the me who gave him money.

After a Thanksgiving which made me particularly conscious of my blessings, I therefore decided to make a change.  The day after, I happened on man sitting on a low wall.  He was so strung out, he could barely croak a request.  I reached into a pocket for some change, and in so doing, accidentally dropped something, which he retrieved.  The next moment each was handing something to the other and saying thank you at the same time.

It wasn’t dramatic, but I felt a point being made.  I haven’t begun to solve all the dilemmas, but I can’t go on with the never giving thing.  ‘Tis the giving season.

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

The MET’s American Buffalo: Worth An Antique Nickel

Jeff Keilholtz as Teach

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com November 1, 2011

About 35 years ago, there arose a new movement on stage and screen that I’ve privately always called American Fauvists, not so much in honor of that early 20^th Century band of French painters as of what their name portended: a calculated savagery.  The people I call American Fauvists set out to portray savagery as they encountered it in the contemporary scene: characters who were economically marginalized — even if on occasion they appeared to be securely positioned in big corporations, characters who were highly articulate but unlearned, and given in consequence to colorful obscenity and elaborate threats, characters who were not truly civilized, not truly humane, unable to treat their fellows empathetically or honestly, and given to violence.  Auteurs presenting us with these stunted souls included Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarrantino, Neil LaBute and David Mamet.

One of Mamet’s early efforts in this vein, American Buffalo (1975), is now in revival at Maryland Ensemble Theatre (aka the MET) in Frederick.  Its three characters are so inconsiderable they prove unable to execute a heist; indeed it is revealed by the end that the window of opportunity they had thought existed for them to pull of their “job” never actually opened – may have never actually existed, in fact – and the double-cross that had so alarmed them was only a figment of their imaginations.  In both their schemes and their apprehensions, they have been completely off-base.  The play is thus a sort of Waiting for Godot of heist comedies.

But in their inconsiderableness, the three characters, Don (Tad Janes), Teach (Jeff Keilholtz), and Bobby (Clayton Myers), generate a rich froth of pungent dialogue (phrases like “in the event something inevitable occurs”), violence, and angst.  The fun of the play is in watching them scheme and fight and insult each other, which, in retrospect is not only what the play is truly about but all that turns out to have happened by the time of the final blackout.  This may seem a peculiar way for an audience to pass a couple of hours, but it is actually quite a rewarding one.  We’ve gotten to know nothing about stealing coins (the title refers to a rare and valuable nickel), but we’ve certainly gotten to know them, in all their florid shallowness.

Being so far out of town, the MET may not be familiar to Baltimore theatergoers, but they ought to make its acquaintance.  It is a very professional troupe in an intimate space.  Their performance space is not theater in the round, exactly, like Baltimore’s Spotlighters’ stage, but describable as theater in the semicircle, and about as up-close as the Spotlighters.  That lack of distance can be disconcerting to an audience if the performances are, let us say, of community theater quality.  Where, as here, they are something more, the proximity draws you in, and makes you excited to be part of the action.  If there are no blemishes to see or be embarrassed by, you don’t mind being right there.

This cast is blemish-free.  As Don, the proprietor of a store selling used antique knickknacks, Tad Janes exudes profane, aggressive authority that seldom wavers.  Clayton Myers’ Bobby, the youngest of the crew, vulnerable partly because of an obvious heroin problem, but also unreliable for the same reason, calls for an unusual blend of innocence and shiftiness, and Myers makes a fine untrustworthy puppydog.  Jeff Keilholtz’s Teach is delivered with consistent believability: all tightly coiled venom, probably psychopathic but just possibly redeemed by the code of personal loyalty he espouses.  He also keeps us off-balance with surprising comical bursts of falsetto.

I’m leery, as Director Peter Wray is not, judging by his notes in the program, of drawing any moral from this tale of losers passing the time.  Wray quotes someone talking about the “ethos of Big Business” and its effects “upon the human soul.”  I see little evidence here of the presence or impact of Big Business; these are small-timers, and what makes their souls as small as their business, I think, is America itself, a place where there is no state religion nor any religion or code of ethics at all which anyone is required to internalize. Here you are free to be a scheming psychopath while talking a blue streak; no one will stop you.  And while Mamet is clearly pointing out how amusing people who do this can be, I do not see much evidence he thinks we can learn much from them; the encounter is all.  Fortunately, it is enough.

Wray’s apparent shortcomings as a critic, however, do not affect the clear-sighted way he delivers Mamet’s vision, or his comedy.

Highly recommended.

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

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review

Actor’s Nightmare, With Wisecracks: Barrymore at the REP

 Posted on BroadwayWorld.com October 31, 2011

With apologies to Christopher Durang, who nearly appropriated the phrase “actor’s nightmare” with his hilarious play of that name, “actor’s nightmare” is actually a phrase in wide use, at its root referring to the anxiety dream that comes at one time or another to almost anyone who’s ever trodden the boards: you’re supposed to go onstage but have no idea of your lines.  In real life, few actors would let themselves encounter this situation – which is why it’s only a trope in nightmares.  But it did happen to the legendary actor John Barrymore, who by the time of his death in 1942 at age 60 had lost his memory for lines, perhaps owing to his prodigious thirst for alcohol, perhaps secondary to the effects of Prohibition-era booze, much of which was dangerous, or perhaps from other causes.

The loss of this skill, critical for stage actors, became the peg on which dramatist William Luce hung his 1996 play Barrymore, now being revived at Columbia’s Rep Stage.  In Luce’s conceit, Barrymore (here portrayed by Nigel Reed) has rented out a Philadelphia theater for a single 1942 evening (evidently the eve of his death, or close to it) to attempt a revival of his career, and the play takes place during his long night of rehearsing with a prompter named Frank (D. Grant Cloyd).  But it is apparent that however brilliantly Barrymore can put across a line or two, he cannot do a whole speech.  He is given, I think, one coherent delivery, of the “to sleep, perchance to dream” soliloquy from Hamlet, primarily, no doubt, so that the audience does not doubt that Barrymore had once been great, but this is delivered in a manner that suggests it is a recollection of a performance, not a part of the rehearsal.

Clearly, stuck as he is in his actor’s nightmare, Barrymore is at the end of a career and a life.  So this show, sort of an opened-out one-man show about a celebrity (a genre unto itself) becomes a retrospective on the life and art of the man.  To all appearances, it had been a riotous life, full of wine, women and public acclaim, as well as ample contacts with other celebrities (including members of his own well-known acting clan).  So there’s a lot to work with.  Still, there’s a problem with the play.  Playwright Luce faced a dilemma and never resolved it.

On the one hand, Luce could have produced a sort of gossipy as-told-to biopic about Barrymore’s hijinks and those of his circle.  Or he could have told the story of an actor confronting mortality, which is an excellent on-ramp to exploring an important and universally-encountered experience.  But he tries to combine them, and this proves quite an unstable combination.  At least on the evidence of this play, Barrymore was not a very thoughtful or perceptive fellow.  True, the character is candid and impenitent about his alcoholism and his swordsmanship (of both the literal and the colloquial varieties), but all his self-awareness is smothered in wisecracks.  The closest he comes to acknowledging any downsides is in discussion of his four marriages, but this too devolves mainly into wisecracks.

Two gags from the show underline the relentless superficiality of this treatment.  Early on, Barrymore says men aren’t old until regrets take the place of dreams.  Later, though, he says that his great regret is he couldn’t sit in the audience “and watch me perform.”  If that’s his big regret, then deep down he’s shallow (in Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey’s phrase).

And at the end, he makes his final exit with a joke about daiquiris which is not remotely appropriate to the occasion: the exit is clearly a metaphor for his demise, and the joke has nothing to do with it.   Of course there is no absolute requirement that depictions of the last gasp of a dying thespian actually come to grips with the sadness of life or death.  But this play has still chosen to flirt with the theme.  Many of the interactions with Frank the prompter stir the consciousness of mortality.  The fact that Frank has command of all the lines and Barrymore can recall almost none of them is itself a stark reminder of Barrymore’s losses, but it goes further: at times Barrymore muses that perhaps Frank is death or death’s emissary.  Indeed, it is possible to interpret this play as occurring entirely inside Barrymore’s mind, in which event the case for Frank’s role as memento mori would be all the stronger.

Yet that hypothesis is largely undercut by the playwright as well.  Death is a character in many dramatic productions (think of the chess-player in The Seventh Seal or the mysterious woman in Cocteau’s Orpheus) and one of the characteristics of such a character is the absence of the characteristics that stem from a human past.  Frank, on the other hand, we learn lives unfashionably outside Manhattan with his mother, is gay and draft-classified 4F because of it, which is way too much detail for a conventional Death figure.  Most of all, he evinces a fanboy’s determination that the show go on: he is frustrated almost to the point of leaving by Barrymore’s lack of  cooperation, by his lapses into raconteurism and his failure to commit to pulling it together so he can resurrect his career.  He wants Barrymore to live long and prosper, not to succumb to the blandishments of death.

No, it must be accepted that the play is something of a mess.  Which is not the same as to say that it does not go over well.  The audience certainly had a good time, laughing at all the potty-mouth humor (of which there is plenty), and lapping up the impressions Barrymore delivers of his brother Lionel Barrymore, of George Bernard Shaw, of Louella Parsons, and many more.

The big reason for the audience’s enjoyment, however, is the performance of Nigel Reed as Barrymore, who absolutely inhabits the legendary old ham’s persona, grandiose and gross and catty and orotund.  A strong physical resemblance to the man does not hurt either. D. Grant Cloyd does a fine job in the deceptively important role of Frank the Prompter, much of it spent dimly lit, sitting very still, but delivering dead-pan zingers from time to time that move the action along.

I think it’s fair to say that the Rep, under the direction of Steven Carpenter, has squeezed everything good that can be squeezed out of this play.  It’s just a shame there wasn’t a little more substance there to squeeze.

Barrymore, by William Luce, directed by Steven Carpenter.  Through November 13, at Rep Stage, Smith Theatre, Horowitz Center, Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD 21044.  Tickets $22-$33.  443-518-1500, www.repstage.org.  Adult language, description of sexual situations.

Read more: http://baltimore.broadwayworld.com/article/BWW-Reviews-Actors-Nightmare-With-Wisecracks-Barrymore-at-The-Rep-20111031_page2#ixzz1cVOk3BQ7

Theater Reviews Page | Previous Theater Review | Next Theater Review