Let Me Down Easy

Friday evening I went to see Anna Deavere Smith’s one woman play, Let Me Down Easy. I’ve always been drawn to Smith’s previous work. I’ve enjoyed the clips I’ve seen of both Twilight and Fires in the Mirror, read the scripts of both, worked with congregations on staging excerpts from each, and had detailed discussions around the topics each raised. I’ve listened to Smith reading her book Letters to a Young Artist and found many of her reflections insightful. Friday night was the first time, however, that I actually saw her perform live. The meticulous way in which Smith captures an individual by capturing their speech syntax, their way of holding their carriage, and their small probably unconscious fidgeting has always impressed me, but watching her in person, the physicality of the way in which she defines each person is even more amazing than on film.

I’m not sure what the exact focal topic of the show was meant to be. The playbill said that Let Me Down Easy began as a commission for the Yale School of Medicine, which makes a lot of sense given the twenty vignettes presented. Among the stories we have are Lance Armstrong, touching briefly on his battle with cancer while focusing on his career and why he was able to win the Tour de France so many times; former Texas governor Ann Richards talking about how she had to hold onto her chi as she fought her illness; supermodel Lauren Hutton talking about the medical care she received in her early 50s after being in a devastating bike accident; Ruth Katz, a dean at Yale Medical Center, who discusses how badly she was treated at Yale Hospital until a resident discovered who she was; and heavyweight champion Michael Bentt talking about “seeing light” and then learning from doctors that he can never fight again.

But there are also stories from folks like Elizabeth Streb, the intensely physical “Extreme Action” choreographer, about how she had planned to set herself on fire in a controlled way that got out of control and Eve Ensler, talking about the connection between food and life and how was Tina Turner was really able to “be in her vagina”. And then there are characters that strongly call up the need for better health care—a mother who talks about a horrendous experience she and her daughter had while the daughter was receiving dialysis, a rodeo rider talking about the health care he was given after a riding accident, and the director of an orphanage in Johannesburg that cares for dying children.

Perhaps the ambiguity in focus is meant to be there. The title comes from the opening monologue in which Smith channels Jim Cone, Union Theological Seminary’s professor (and does such a wonderful job of it that she had me chuckling at how she’d captured his pomposity in both the resonance of his voice and his mannerisms). Cone explains that the phrase ‘let me down easy’ is a phrase that captures a heart broken by a lack of justice and connects it with both African-American theology and jazz. When asked if it could also be about dying, Cone pauses then says that, yes, it could, much like “swing low, sweet chariot” can be a song of justice coming or of dying.

That’s make sense. There are several memorable portraits where where broken hearts (often from lack of justice on health care) and dying often overlap. One that stood out was of the physician that was working at Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. She speaks of how she was determined to show her patients, who were the poorest in the area, that they deserved and would get the same kind of care while at Charity that wealthier patients received elsewhere. And then, as Katrina hits and FEMA ignores Charity while evacuating the other hospitals, her heart breaks as she wakes up to te reality of the situation.

This physician was one of the three portrayals that stood out from the others for me. The other two were of a musicologist from Notre Dame, who talks about Franz Schubert’s weaving of his dying into his music and of her love for him and Lorraine Coleman, Smith’s aunt, who tells of seeing her dying sister and the last thing she said to her but who also talks about how when they were poor and had no gloves, her mother would put her children’s hands under her arms to warm them. Coleman laments how now, in her old age, she’d like to be able to put her hands under her mother’s arms one more time.

By her actions and speech patterns, Smith does a great job of transitioning from character to character. She does so on a stage that, when I first sat down, seemed fairly stark—a couch and coffee table, a dining room table, and some mirrors are the basic set. As the play went on, items (jackets, trays with food, etc.) were brought on to introduce a new character and then put down somewhere on the stage as Smith transitioned to the next portrait. After a few such transitions, I became aware of how amazing the actual set was. The way the mirrors were positioned, for example, meant that, at least from where I was sitting, each mirror presented a part of the room in such a way that you only saw items from an individual character in it and were able to get a visual snapshot of that character’s story. It added a whole new depth to the presentation.

Next to Normal

Sunday evening we went with a group of friends from out of town to see the play Next to Normal that’s currently at the Booth Theater and is one of the nominations for Best Musical of 2009. The play is by no means your typical musical but, or perhaps because of that, I think it deserves the award.  The basic story and song lines revolve around Diana, a bipolar mother who lives with the memory of her son who died as an infant, and the cost of her illness and grief in the lives of her husband, her daughter, and herself.    As Diana goes to therapists, flushes the prescribed meds down the toilet, tries to kill herself, and undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, Alice Ripley manages to take not just her family but also the audience on an emotional roller coaster ride. Aaron Tveit as the ghost son brings a huge amount of energy to a role that I would have thought would come across as unbelievable but, with his alternating sweet and evil character, works well.  Some of the lines in the dialogue are too mundane, rattled off like platitudes, and the ending is—at least to me—anything but satisfactory-- but songs like “I Miss the Mountains” and “I Am the One” more than make up for that, capturing the pain being felt, the damage being done, and the issues of freedom and duty the family struggles with.

The staging of the play is amazing.  The set is the outline of a house with walls that slide and flip and light up to change settings and moods.  And the music –which goes through a range from classical to country western to baby room’s music box—also helps capture the mood swings that the family –and the audience with it—goes through.  Despite the attempt to wrap up the issue at the end in an neater package than the issue allows, the play allows the audience to walk away with many of the confused feelings that everyone coming into contact with Diana experience.

 

Hair

Last night we went to see Hair in previews at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. The place was packed with folks of almost all ages—some sporting 1960’s type tie-dyed T-shirts and beads. I hadn’t seen the musical when it played in 1967-8—I was too young—so this was my first chance to see it in live performance with a professional cast. The staging made great use of aisles and doors as ways to involve the audience—nice for example, having Burger (Will Swenson--on the right in the picture above) come over to put his arms around me as he sang part of one song, the songs and dancing were high energy pieces that made it across the decades well, and whatever they used to get the smell of weed going through the hall—hard to believe it was pot itself—made it even more realistic. I enjoyed the performance a lot. While it clearly didn’t have the controversy it would have had playing to the 1960’s audiences who would have had a stronger reaction to the cursing, drugs, sex, treatment of the American flag, and nudity, it served instead as both a walk down memory lane and a critique of American society then and now.

It was a chance to remember what it felt like to wear bellbottoms or elephant bells with contrasting cloth added into the bottom seams, how much sexier men look with long hair, and how questioning authority played such a big role in day-to-day teen life. And, in the next to last scene, when Claude (Gavin Creel) came on with his hair trimmed and his military uniform on, it was also a chance to wonder how many of the older folks in the audience had at some point in the years since the 70s, made that same kind transition from free and wild to tamed and tailored during the forty years since.

Buddy

Last evening we went to see “Buddy” at the Westchester Broadway Theater. The show is based on the career and songs of Buddy Holly. Since I’d never seen Holly in person, I don’t know what kind of job Pat McRoberts did playing him, but he seemed to have a lot of skill and energy as he sang songs like “Peggy Sue” or “Rave On”. Somehow I’d missed most of this music growing up; I was a baby when Holly died and, I guess because I didn’t have older brothers or sisters around playing the music of the time, never had any occasion to listen to Holly’s songs. I found myself surprised at how closely these “early rock” songs seemed to be to modern country music.

The part of the show that I enjoyed most was the recreation of the Crickets’ appearance at the Apollo theater as the first white act to perform there. I’m sure that the final numbers staged to be like those in Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom were meant to be the highlight of the show, especially since they brought on actors to play both the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens for that scene. Friends had told us ahead of time how amazing that scene was, especially the actor playing Ritchie Valens, but I didn't find it particularly noteworthy. Of the entire play, it’s not that but the Apollo Theater scene that I’ll remember.

Ta!

Saturday we drove down to Princeton to the McCarter Theater for the world premier of Edward Albee’s Me, Myself, & I. Never having been to the McCarter before, I found myself pleasantly surprised. The setup of the theater was such that all the seats in the house seemed to have great views of the stage and tickets cost less than half of what a Broadway production usually does.

The play itself was quintessential Albee, raising issues of identity by focusing on an extremely dysfunctional family. The curtain rises on a very simple set—a large bed with nothing around it—on which is sitting Mother, played magnificently by Tyne Daly, and a lump, which we soon learn is Doctor, her lover of the past 28 years. Into the room comes OTTO to announce that he’s leaving home to become Chinese (because “the future’s in the east and I want to be in on it”) and that his brother otto no longer exists and has been replaced. We quickly get the basic identity story line: 28 years ago, Mother gave birth to identical twin boys whom she named OTTO (who matching his name is the loud “evil” twin) and otto (the kinder, more sensitive twin). Despite raising them (along with Doctor after receives the news of the twins and leaves), Mother still can’t tell them apart and needs to ask “Which one are you? Are you the one who loves me?...I never know who you are… Are you the one who hates me?” The rest of the play is made up of a series of short, hysterically funny black-out scenes, each ending with a crashing gong, as otto tries to confirm that he’s really still alive and mother and doctor explore the basis of family and identity.

While I found the ending less than satisfying, the play as a whole works very well and Daly’s acting is a delight. She carries off her character as funny, self-centered, vulnerable, childish, and at times very prejudiced. And Brian Murray, who plays the doctor who should have been an English teacher, is a great sparring partner for her. The Zoo Story will always remain my favorite Albee, but –perhaps thanks to Daly’s acting—Me, Myself, and I will be right up there with The Goat as a next favorite.

Phantom

Last Wednesday, Kathy and I took Becca and a friend to the Westchester Broadway Dinner Theater to see Kopit & Yeston’s Phantom. The food there is always mediocre at best—my filet of sole was so hard that I couldn’t even cut through a lot of it—but I’ve never seen this version of Phantom (rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera) performed anywhere else. Kopit & Yeston’s rendition of Leroux’ Phantom story—written just before Webber wrote his—is a touching version, humanizing the phantom, Eric, and providing interesting background connections with the Opera itself and the people who work in it. On top of that, the scores and lyrics are much better than Webber’s. I love, for example, the way in which the William Blake poem is put to music and used to capture some insights into who Eric truly is.

I’d last seen this play performed more than 10 years ago, also at the Westchester Broadway Dinner Theater. The set—a strong point in WBDT productions—was basically the same as it had been then. Sandy Rosenberg played La Carlotta in an entirely different, but equally humorous, way than Meg Bussert did back in the 90s. Richard White’s earlier version of Eric was much stronger than that of Aaron Ramey, who tends to ham up his death by flopping around on the stage. Still, if you ignore the bad food that comes with it, I’d choose this performance over Webber’s stage production or film any day!

One Down, One Up

On Friday evening I went to see the movie Lions for Lambs, the film Robert Redford directed which stars (along with Redford) Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. Reviews I’d read had agreed that it was heavy on a liberal view of the war against terrorism, but had given ranged in evaluations from it’s being “a well-made movie” asking “many important questions” to it’s being a “preachy, immobile” film. What I was hoping for in the film was that it would begin to examine the issues with a depth beyond the two party Republican-Democrat, hawk-dove position – either something more along the lines of a “Wag the Dog” type film or a new way to approach the current political situation.

What Lions for Lambs turned out to be was more of a series of talking heads –Cruise (a young conservative) lecturing Streep, Redford (playing a college professor) lecturing a student—with some scenes showing an attack on Afghanistan interspersed, all in an attempt to deliver a tired, liberal message that has already been presented too many times. The acting wasn’t great. Cruise didn’t even stand the way those who have graduated from West Point do, much less present any depth to his conservative position. And when Redford asked the student he was lecturing in his office why the young man had stopped attending class and why he wasn’t more actively involved in the political science discussions and in volunteering, I kept wanting to answer for him “because you’re a rambling, boring old fool who has no connection with the realities of today’s world and so why would I waste my energy on you or what you’re suggesting I do!” Each time Redford took a breath and began a new part of the (one-sided) conversation, I had all I could do to hold myself in my chair rather than, on behalf of the student, walking out of the lecture and the theater.

Luckily, as I left the movie theater, I kept in mind that on Saturday afternoon I would be going down to Manhattan’s Second Stage Theater to see Peter and Jerry, a play in which Edward Albee pairs two of his one acters—Homelife, a piece written in 2001, with Albee’s first real play The Zoo Story (perhaps my all-time favorite Albee work, though much more recently written The Goat is a close runner up), written in 1958. Albee and his caustic wit would surely cure me of the blasé feeling I carried away from Lions for Lambs.

Homelife in many ways seemed to me a toned down version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a husband (Peter) and wife (Ann) politely exploring how their lives spent in an Upper West Side bourgeois setting have been civilized, predictable, complacent, and—when push comes to shove- much less than satisfactory, at least for the wife. Ann explains to her husband that he is "gentle, and thoughtful, and honest, and good -- oh, that awful word!” and that she yearns once in a while to experience the chaotic, animal madness she hopes still survives somewhere inside this bland, nice man she’s been with for years. Albee means for Homelife to explain and deepen the character of the “vegetable” Peter who is fairly silent through most of The Zoo Story. While I’ve never felt the need for such an explanation—leaving that to the details Albee provided in the Zoo Story such as the pipe and Peter’s job publishing texts had always seemed enough for me—it makes what was a subtext of the older play much more explicit.

Does it work? It does, though Homelife is much weaker than the strong writing in The Zoo Story. And, though Bill Pullman (who I thoroughly enjoyed back in 2002 as the lead in The Goat, playing Peter in both acts) and Joanna Day (Ann) are both excellent actors, Dallas Roberts as Jerry takes the day. At one point during the beginning of his story-telling of “Jerry and the Dog”, the cell phone of someone in the audience went off and Roberts stopped, keeping up the energy of his semi-psychotic, prowling character while glaring toward the sound until the ringing stopped. Because of Roberts’ powerful acting and the much more highly charged interactions in The Zoo Story, Act 2 of Peter and Jerry is what makes the performance memorable and worthwhile!

Cyrano

Saturday evening we went to see Kevin Kline in a preview of “Cyrano” which was based on Anthony Burgess’ translation of Rostand’s classic. The acting was great, the play (as, from my perspective, the original piece by Rostand) mediocre. I found myself waiting in the first act for the one good exchange coming-- between the Comte de Guiche and de Bergerac in which the Comte says that when you fight with windmills they may “swing round their huge arms and cast you down into the mire” and Cyrano adds “or up, among the stars!”

In the second act--mercifully shorter-- I waited for Cyrano’s wonderful lines toward the end:

“ What's that you say? Useless? Useless? But one does not fight merely to win! You have it wrong... One fights for far more than the mere hope of winning. Better, far better to know that the fight is totally irreparably, incorrigibly in vain!... Are you there too, Stupidity? You above all others perhaps were predestined to get me in the end. But no, I'll Fight on, fight on, fight..."

But before we could get to those lines, there were staging difficulties and the play actually stopped for a while so things could be fixed. Watching the tech guys out struggling with the large curtain that had gotten caught was the most interesting part of the evening! Other than that, not much stood out from the play (though in truth I was dead tired and that could have had an effect on how I felt about what I was seeing). Opening night is November 1^st so I’ll be interested in hearing what the critics think then.