Tynan's Anger

I love Brighton Beach Memoirs. I believe it is a sincerely underrated play dismissed by snooty old/dead theater critics who consider Neil Simon a sitcom writer.

I have exceedingly fond memories of the play; performing monologues from it in the 7th grade was the highlight of my acting career.

I was thrilled when I heard that David Cromer, the best director in American theater, thought the same about Brighton Beach Memoirs. I was thrilled that Cromer's Broadway revival got excellent reviews.

But if its failure causes Broadway producers to stop pandering to the blue-haired crowd with straight plays, it may be the best thing to have happened to American theater in decades.

Labels: american theater, brighton beach memoirs, broadway, neil simon, old people, Producers, theater criticism

Until I saw The Actors Company Theatre’s production of Bedroom Farce, I had never seen a staging of any play by Alan Ayckbourn. Such a statement is probably the reason why TACT decided to stage one of Ayckbourn’s greatest plays, Bedroom Farce. Despite the fact that he is one of the greatest living British playwrights, Ayckbourn’s work is almost never staged in the U.S. You can probably count the number of people in America deeply familiar with Ayckbourn’s work on a few sets of hands, and most of those fingers would represent British ex-pats. Watching Bedroom Farce, a classic, smart British comedy with an equally smart production, I was thrilled to have the privilege of finally seeing Ayckbourn. I also wondered whether any attempt to make Ayckbourn a bigger name in the States could possibly be successful.

Ayckbourn, still going strong at the age of 69, has often been called the British Neil Simon. A better parallel would be to call him this generation’s Noël Coward. Bedroom Farce is more akin to a postwar Private Lives, a funny, endearing examination of marital struggle that takes a simple structure and injects it with enough wit and genuine human emotion for it to reach a higher level than standard mainstream theater.

Each of the four couples in Bedroom Farce has its own crosses to bear, and each character displays alternating degrees of repression and emotional violence. Exploring the dynamics of repression and unleashed emotion was a Coward staple, but Ayckbourn’s particular innovation was to have the degree of these personality types differ within each character based on each situation. Ayckbourn is one of the best living playwrights exploring the inconsistencies in individual behavior, often mistaken for hypocrisy. The result in the case of Bedroom Farce is the kind of social comedy that, while still lighthearted and rather silly, reaches a higher plane of real human emotions that most so-called farces miss.

It’s understandable how frustrated Ayckbourn fans must be to see his plays staged in the U.S. so rarely. Thankfully, TACT’s production of Bedroom Farce, under the helm of director Jenn Thompson, doesn’t miss a beat. Set designer Robin Vest masters a vintage Ayckbourn dramatic space consisting of three beds for four couples on various planes of the stage. Every cast member seems in tune with his role, and no one in the cast or crew holds the show back in the slightest. If the goal was to give Ayckbourn a staging that fully showed off his talents to an American audience, TACT has succeeded tremendously.

The main problem with the production, which is of no fault of TACT, is that the play simply did not resonate with the audience at Theater Row the same way it must have at its original West End staging in 1977. The sarcasm of Scott Schafer’s hobbled, middle-aged Nick got the most laughs, and coming in close second was the Mark Rylance-like buffoonery of Mark Alhadeff’s Trevor. But the real emotional and comedic centers of the play, Trevor’s mother Delia (Cynthia Harris) and his wife Suzannah (Eve Bianco, who may have given the best performance of all), seemed more like peculiarities to an audience expecting a full-on farce.

While I loved the play tremendously, I could immediately see the reasons why Ayckbourn hasn’t become a larger star in America. All the intelligence, all the emotional tugs, and all the deeper intellectual themes that could stay with an audience beyond the theater are hidden in Ayckbourn’s deeper, subtle wryness. This wryness requires thinking in more general terms, and is a cultural trademark of Britain. Yet it doesn’t resonate at quite the same level with brasher Americans. The result is an audience with a prevalence of smiles, but a lack of laughs at what is supposed to be a very funny play. Perhaps Americans have a much harder time mixing comedy and flat-out farce than the Brits. There’s no need to blame Ayckbourn for the cultural disparity that has held back his American success, but then again, there’s no need to blame Americans for that either.

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Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Jenn Thompson; scenic design by Robin Vest; costume design by Martha Hally; lighting design by Aaron Copp; sound design by Stephen Kunken. Photos by Kunken.

Starring Larry Keith (Ernest), Cynthia Harris (Delia), Scott Schafer (Nick), Margaret Nichols (Jan), Sean Dougherty (Malcolm), Ashley West (Kate), Mark Alhadeff (Trevor), and Eve Bianco (Susannah).

Produced by The Actors Company Theatre at the Beckett @ Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd st. Runs through November 8th. Tickets can be purchased at Ticket Central. This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: 2008-2009, alan ayckbourn, american theater, bedroom farce, england, neil simon, new york, the actors company theatre, theater review

(This article was originally posted on blogcritics.org)

On Monday, below the fold on the front page of the New York Times Arts section was a review of Superior Doughnuts at the Steppenwolf Theatre. It would make sense that the review was featured this prominently; it was Tracy Letts' first play since August: Osage County won just about every theatrical award known to man.

Charles Isherwood's review of the new play was decidedly mixed, cautiously recommending the play despite considering it "insubstantial and sweet, with virtually no nutritional value" (for what it's worth, Isherwood was not a fan of Letts' more risqué pre-August work such as Killer Joe and Bug). But what the review actually said was insubstantial. What was more important was that the New York Times, the paper of record, particularly for the theater press, was strongly emphasizing a play from Chicago in the same position it normally places Broadway or prominent off-Broadway plays. That would have been virtually impossible four years ago.

When I was considering colleges, I knew I needed to have theater in my life. My trust in Chicago theater was built not by front page reviews of individual shows, but by annual features about Chicago's lively theater scene that usually crammed 20 plays into 1000 words. When I got to Chicago, I finally saw some of those plays that had previously been nothing more than paragraphs in my mind. My first plays in Chicago were the Second City revue Red Scare, the Neo-Futurists' legendary Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, a production of Equus by the Hypocrites Theatre Company, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Court Theatre. I would later build connections at all four of those theater companies.

I quickly realized that compared to New York, the production values were laughable, especially in some of the smaller theaters. Yet, I also learned that theater need not follow the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and all-the-rest model. In Chicago, anyone can put on a play at virtually any time, be it in a squatters residence in Pilsen that's lucky to get six people a night, a converted art gallery where opening night is canceled because of paint fumes, or in an early 20th century lakeside parlor with the worst acoustics imaginable.

None of this should sound unfamiliar to anyone conversant with either or both cities' theater cultures. Yet, as those who have followed American theater over the past year or so know, the disparity between the two is shrinking. Chicago paradoxically used to be the most segregated major segment of American theater. While its grassroots model of theater was an inspiration, there was also virtually no interaction between Chicago theater and the rest of America. Today, all you need to do is look at some of the more heralded productions in New York of late (August, Orson's Shadow, The Adding Machine, the plays of Chicago native Sarah Ruhl), to see that Chicago's role in American theater is as prominent as it has been since the late 70s and early 80s, when Goodman Theatre product David Mamet and the Steppenwolf both first emerged.

It's not just a one-way relationship either. Most successful New York productions are now invariably given major treatment in Chicago. True, most transfers have been immense disappointments (the worst possibly being the Steppenwolf's version of The Pillowman, which featured none other than Tracy Letts and Jim True-Frost in its cast). In other cases, however, the Chicago productions did more with less than would ever be possible in New York theater. My frustration at missing the Broadway revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer was alleviated by a superb production of the play by Uma Productions. Not only did that production feature a nearly flawless if less-heralded cast, it also made the experience more real by directing you to the patched-together basement space—like the space where a "real" faith healer would perform.

In some cases, Chicago performed what equates to a miracle in the theatrical world: reviving the fortunes of a play that failed on its first run in New York City. InFusion Theatre Company's production of Kate Robin's Intrigue with Faye featured a sparser set and a markedly less famous cast, but its actors had something that Benjamin Bratt and Julianna Margulies lacked: chemistry.

In the summer of 2006, Wicked's run on Broadway in Chicago had reached what was supposed to be its closing point. Its producers then decided to forgo the bigger media market in Los Angeles and stay in Chicago because of the show's overwhelming popularity. Broadway in Chicago was finally a success. This fact had many Chicago theater enthusiasts, myself included, in a frenzy. The fear was that this would create a top-down theater model like New York and kill the grassroots spirit of Chicago. That fear ignored the fact that when you can rent a theater space for under $1000 a month, anything can happen with the right people. It's that kind of open-mindedness that has blasted Chicago into New York's staler theater scene, and has seen both cities reap the rewards.

There's still no place like New York for American theater. Less than 48 hours after graduating from the University of Chicago, I found myself attending Ensemble Studio Theater's one-act Marathon, with work by playwrights no less prominent than Neil LaBute and actors whose credentials topped those found in most elite Chicago theater companies. And this was in a theater on the second floor across from the Police Athletic League and hidden behind a virtually abandoned car repair shop in Hell's Kitchen.

From whichever perspective you take, however, the creation of even the slightest cultural diffusion between the two scenes has dramatically improved both cities—and American theater in general. Some New York theatergoers seem impressed by how many good plays are coming from Chicago. I'm more impressed by how good American theater has gotten overall, whichever world I was considering at the time.

Labels: american theater, chicago, new york, univeristy of chicago

This Thursday I will be seeing This is How It Goes as part of the Profiles Theatre's year long Neil Labute festival. I must say, however, that I will be going into the theater with a bit of a chip on my shoulder against Neil LaBute. He recently railed against American theater in The Guardian, in a column both crudely written and poorly argued. He argues that though theater is not dying, American dramatists are "small writers in America...writing tiny plays about tiny ideas with two to four characters, so that we get produced and nobody loses any money." He also accuses American playwrights of "shying away from politics." He then comes out with this brilliant paragraph:

Let's face it, most writers are pussies. We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it. We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's "in the public domain" or "true", and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain.

The fact that the same person who wrote The Shape of Things can spurt out a paragraph like this saddens me, never mind the fact that he ignores the incredible diversity and talent that's coming out of American theater. Has he even seen August: Osage County, or anything by Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Will Eno, or Jose Rivera?

Maybe he was writing the column to self-flagellate, as he notes:

On many levels, I think we playwrights are failing - and again, I include myself in this. I tend to write about small groups of men and women (friends, lovers, co-workers, family), locked in some kind of gender struggle. These are the politics that interest me, and I scour over them like Herman Melville's Bartleby sitting at his little wooden desk. In the course of a decade of writing, however, I have also tried to look at religion, race, art, national tragedy and a host of other social ills. Am I a naturally political writer? Not at all. A writer like Tony Kushner strikes me as someone far more naturally gifted at bringing the private and public worlds of his characters to life: he may be the most obvious link between the British writers I've long admired and contemporary America. But I have a capricious streak in me that likes writing about the unexpected, messing about with what my audience might want to see or hear or experience - and I think of these as positive qualities.

If you admit to reasons for not writing HUGE FUCKING DEFINING POLITICAL DRAMA, then where's the beef? It should also be noted he just mentioned an American playwright who, wouldn't you know it, rights good political theater, making his argument seem even more pathetic.

Ironically, right before I read this column, I was looking over my collection of John Heilpern essays and found a column entitled "The Anglophile New York Times." That column took issue with a published conversation of the New York Times theater critics on the superiority of British theater. Heilpern rightly called it "a vaudevillian act" that displays "a craven need to overcelebrate [British plays] at the cost of the American theater." He noted that London is constantly overripe with "old" plays and noted the lackluster quality of British transfers, especially when compared to American playwrights of the time like "Tony Kushner, the Wooster Group, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danny Hock, Ellen Stewart's La Mama, Margaret Edson, Savion Glover, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, or the staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch." In short, LaBute's argument is not new, nor has it suddenly acquired any credibility.

George Hunka quickly responded to LaBute's bogus claims, and makes him LaBute look like a fool (and sounds a lot more reasonable as well). He correctly notes:

1) "In the body of his essay, though, he approvingly cites Christopher Shinn, Wallace Shawn, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, David Rabe and Amiri Baraka as fellow countrymen he admires and looked up to as a student in that hard-scrabble, tough-talking environment, the MFA program at the University of Kansas. Half a dozen for the Brits; half a dozen for the Yanks. So there doesn't seem to be any playwright gap, at least not in Neil's world."

2) "On the same day that Neil's article appeared, however, an email arrived in my inbox from a New York theatre company ironically called The Fire Department. It promoted an upcoming show, At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq. The show is a collection of scenes about just those larger issues of the day that Neil feels are being neglected by American dramatists. The scenes include work by Obie-winning playwright José Rivera and by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, whose devised play The Exonerated (about capital punishment in the US) was produced to considerable popular and critical acclaim several seasons back."

3) "If Neil still wants to meet me after school behind the gym, that's fine. But he's not the only playwright these days who "writes about [subjects] of some importance ... with honesty and courage." He's not even the only American playwright who does so. And I'm guessing, by the way, that Britain has its share of shitty playwrights too."

Basically, it's sad to see one of America's premier playwrights loudly and rudely denounce himself and his peers in an article that seems like it was written at 2 a.m. after too much wine and getting an email about The Little Mermaid. Let's hope this doesn't precipitate a Mamet-like decline.

Labels: american theater, george hunka, neil labute