Friday September 21, 2007
ARTS ROUNDUP. As long as I'm being arty-farty, I shall continue with the arts and the farts, with random observation from recent intake:
A Midsummer Night's Dream in Central Park. Pepys was right: it's a pretty stupid play. But it's sure-fire outdoors with good actors on a warm night. The lovers are the weak link, and for all their energetic ripping of ladies' garments I would have preferred some equally energetic tearing away of lines. Maybe Martha Plimpton's Helena was my problem. I had only seen Helena played as a mope before, and while Plimpton's tartness brought energy to her interminable lines, it lost the sympathy and sweetness that is the character's secret weapon. The twinned morganatic pairs were much better -- Keith David's Oberon, done up to look like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, was stolid and poetic, which suited because Oberon has great poetry and David has a great voice, and David's heaviness gave Oberon's fourth-act tenderness ("Her dotage now I do begin to pity") great power. And Shakes in the Park never stints on the clowning, so the rustics got to ham it up and keep us groundlings awake. Loved the goth fairy children, too, but next time, can we please have Mendelssohn?
Steal This Movie. I have to say it's fun to see the two leads from "Grounded for Life" as major hippies. But Vincent D'Onofrio's Abbie Hoffman is very like Vincent D'Onofrio's Law 'n' Order guy with long hair, denim, and drugs: I kept expecting him to arrest somebody. This item succeeds mainly as a posthumous curio, inspiring wonder that once upon a time one could sneak into the Stock Exchange and throw around dollar bills. Though I'm sympathetic to well-rendered nostalgia, I would have preferred that this movie follow the discursive method of Steal This Book or Woodstock Nation, which weirdly anticipated the style of blogs. (I would have especially appreciated the cinematic rendering of "God, I'd Like To Fuck Janis Joplin.") Then, for a pleasant change, we could have thousands of posts about how Vincent D'Onofrio is Fat.
Eugene O'Neill: Collected Shorter Plays (Yale University Press). Hadn't read them in a while and had a hankering. The Glencairn plays are like short stories for the stage, little projects with which the student of Professor Baker found his stage-legs. They're slight, stiff, disarmingly easy to get down, and clearly based on personal experience. It's amazing to contemplate that, two years after the last of these pleasantly stagey affairs, O'Neill wrote The Emperor Jones -- and, two years later, The Hairy Ape . It's as if O. Henry had suddenly become -- well, Eugene O'Neill. Where did this poet come from? Whence the grand scale? It's been decades since I read the Gelb biographies, but my forgetful guess is that, once he got a sense of his own stage power with the Provincetown Playhouse productions, O'Neill felt confident enough to start appropriating literary influences. It wasn't theft because it didn't sound like anyone else's stuff; the themes may have been cribbed from German Expressionist playwrights, but the argot of the Glencairn plays grew organically into the great soliloquies of Jones and Yank. This is a nice reminder that the development of any popular artist relies on the slipstream of influences that surround him, but if he is to get very far he must also contrive to bring along something that is wholly his own.