Theater Review (NYC): An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

Staging Ibsen presents one of the biggest conundrums for contemporary directors. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Rene Descartes, and even Bob Dylan, Ibsen suffers from the fate of many revolutionary artists and thinkers who see their breakthroughs grow stale in hindsight do the work of their followers. Ibsen’s fate in this regard is particularly pronounced; all modern dramatists can, arguably, be considered his followers. Contemporary stagings have a hard time making 19th century drawing room dramas with well-made-play tendencies seem truly modern.

In the case of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s staging of An Enemy of the People, however, any hint of modernity is shed in favor of the farcical, childish, and just plain stupid. Using a nearly half-century-old translation of Ibsen featured in one of the standard published editions, it’s hard to convey anything modern - this is still a world of pocket watches, smoking hats, “Pah’s” and “egads.” By playing closer to the 18th than the 20th century side of the play, the Phoenix Ensemble has sapped Ibsen of his strengths and cut out any chance for an interesting production. Instead, they’ve created a watered down, supposedly more digestible version of An Enemy of the People, a play that fights against the very notion of watered-down convictions.

The Phoenix Ensemble has a focus on elementary school education, and I suspect that the group chose to focus on the more childish sides of the play in order to attract more kids. At the production I attended, however, the youngest audience members were at least well into high school. Even if the farcical side of the play may attract kids, this production's intentional, gaping sense of the pre-modern 19th century world will turn away as many children as it will draw in. Perhaps more damaging, however, would be how this play could actively turn away those just beyond elementary and facing a critical period in a theatergoer’s life. If a young teen, newly acquainted with skepticism, were to see this production after hearing of the play's purported importance, I fear he’d never become a regular theatergoer.

The irony of such a safe, facile production is that Ibsen’s text demands of its audience the exact opposite of a feeling of safety and ease. An Enemy of the People is about a righteous man who doggedly refuses to back down from his ethical righteousness in spite of every conceivable obstacle thrown his way. Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the character at the center of the play, is a man of science whose sense of right and wrong clashes with the political demands of his community. He fights to shut down the highly profitable but highly unsanitary town baths not because of any political bias, but simply because it is the right thing to do.

It’s that same unflinching sense of duty that induced Arthur Miller to adapt the work in the wake of McCarthyism. Ibsen had tapped into the spirit of "truthiness" over a hundred years before Colbert. The political parallels to the current era, be it stem cells, off-shore drilling, or what have you, are obvious, perhaps too much so. These parallels make the play vulnerable to staging by intellectually careless companies; it seems that the Phoenix Ensemble has followed through on that vulnerability.

At the center of Ibsen’s modern cynicism in An Enemy of the People is Dr. Stockmann’s attack on the stupidity of the solid majority of his town in Act IV, but in this production the speech has a very different impact than Ibsen intended. Anti-populism, expressed by a man beaten down by political reality, was not a new theme—Plato made the same point with his philosopher-kings—but it flew in the face of every common sentiment of Ibsen's time. No one, in the 1870s or today, has known how to deal with the conundrums Ibsen raised. Unfortunately, when you apply this argument to a New York setting, the connotation is of comfortable New York art patrons who look dismissively at people living anywhere else in the country (in Jesusland, as a popular internet map refers to every non-dark blue American state).

This bastardized elitism is not the only element of this Enemy of the State that violates Ibsen’s spirit. Rather than show any realism or nuance in the plays’ characters, the Phoenix Ensemble’s production features almost nothing but caricatures. Particularly vulnerable is Jospeh Menino’s Mayor Stockmann, who lies somewhere between the Grinch and Mr. Burns. He makes Lionel Barrymore’s realism as Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life seem like Marlon Brando’s. The other perpetrator is Michael Surabian’s Aslaksen, who might have driven me to violence if he had said the word “moderation” in that same intentionally pronounced manner one more time. If there’s any hope to be found, it’s in Kelli Holsopple as Dr. Stockmann’s fiery independent daughter Petra. Ms. Holsopple is the only actor who seems to understand that realism is the entire reason why Ibsen gets staged anymore.

With an already turgid translation that should have never been used for any staging after 1980, director Amy Wagner has her cast rush through the text without letting anything sink in (at two hours and 40 minutes, I’m sure the rushed delivery was intended to shorten the play to under three hours). Rushed, nearly inaudible delivery is bad enough with a contemporary play; it’s even worse when “egad” and “Pah” are not even close to the most antiquated terms used.

So while there are certainly political parallels to the present in The Enemy of the People, the most pressing parallels of the Phoenix Ensemble’s revival are to the contemporary state of theater itself. In an era when few companies will dare risk offending an audience and losing ticket and subscription sales, we’re seeing a lot more productions like this Enemy of the People. It's all too common that revivals of aggressive plays go against the originals' aggressive stance with populist, bumbling productions. To make Ibsen really relate to a modern audience, we need some brave soul to go crazy with the text, someone who is not afraid to distort Ibsen into something much newer. We also need a director who is willing to make sure there is not a pocket watch to be found. It seems no one else wants to take the risk of offending one’s contemporaries, so let me offer my uncensored, journalistically dangerous suggestion to the Phoenix Ensemble that, like Dr. Stockmann, spares no exclamation points: GROW SOME FUCKING BALLS!!!!!

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An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Amy Wagner; translated by Rolf Fjelde; set and lighting design by Maruti Evans; costume design by Suzanne Chesney; sound design by Elizabeth Rhodes (music composed by David Nelson). Photos by Gerry Goodstein.

Starring Laura Piquado (Mrs. Stockmann), Josh Tyson (Billing), Joseph J. Menino (Mayor Stockmann), Tom Escovar (Hovstad), John Lenartz (Dr. Stockmann), Brian A. Costello (Captain Horster), Kelli Holsopple (Petra Stockmann), Jack Tartaglia (Morten Stockmann), Dmitri Friedenberg (Eilif Stockmann), Angus Hepburn (Morten Kiil), and Michael Surabian (Aslaksen).

An Enemy of the People runs through September 20th at the Connelly Theater. It is performed by the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble.

This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.

Book Review - The New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen

A punk rock coffee table book sounds like an oxymoron; one of the most dangerous, confrontational, aggressive genres of music being something to look over with tea from your friends at church? If Bob Gruen’s New York Dolls Photographs is on any coffee tables, some would say, it should be next to tea laced with PCP or with syringes and broken, bloodied guitar strings in place of crumpets and toast.

Counterintuitively, however, this makes sense. Unlike most classic punk, proto-punk, rock ‘n’ roll-what have you bands, the New York Dolls go beyond just music. They have a look: a highly imitated and misinterpreted drag show that would later be adopted by countless bands, great and terrible. They have a scene: the band was the bridge between the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s 1960s racy art scenesters and the mohawked crowd of the 1970s’ CBGBs.

Perhaps most importantly, they have a spirit, an ethos that is at least partly a perception of their lack of an ethos. All the Dolls did was play trashy, bastardized versions of songs people had been playing 20 years earlier (or longer, if you count the blues like this band would). But that lack of elitism was the key, that belief that if you’re an outcast, individualistic weirdo, you can still play rock ‘n’ roll as well as (or better than) Clapton or Zeppelin. The overwhelming sense of rock as freedom, as the ultimate democratic institution, is the hardest thing to convey about the band in a book of photographs.

For his part, Gruen, who had a particularly close relationship with the band, does his best to convey that spirit, and probably does as good a job as anyone can do. But if a picture is worth 1000 words, it seems somewhat weird that Gruen can only really convey that spirit in choice quotes by the likes of Richard Hell, Morrissey, Tommy Ramone, and Debbie Harry. The images are certainly stunning, and the band’s natural photogenic qualities are striking. But the images in New York Dolls Photographs have a hard time portraying the band as something more than a group of simple musicians who just wanted to get dolled up, and could still show off their manliness while dressed in women’s clothing.

It seems like such a strange contradiction. Images are more powerful and universally relatable than words, but to truly convey the intellectual impact of the New York Dolls, words are much more powerful. Through Gruen’s beautiful photography we can fully grasp the Dolls’ image and perception, it’s place in history, it’s sense of community, and its more lighthearted, almost silly qualities.

But to fully get why the New York Dolls are one of the most important bands in all of rock and roll, you need words — words from authoritative sources at that — to come close to conveying that meaning. This is not a new problem; even Aristotle and Plato consider the contradictions between knowledge, passion and their expression in media. In terms of how early 1970s proto-punk is seen in 20th-century, post-postmodernist eyes, however, we get a result that is maddeningly incomplete at no fault of its own.

Of course, missing in both images of the bands and discussions of their legacy is the backbone of the New York Dolls: their music. If images convey the presentation, and articles like this can covey the so-called importance, it’s up to the music, both on the eponymous first album and its often overlooked follow-up Too Much Too Soon, to convey the primal energy, spirit, and passion (pathos, if you will). That’s another side of the Dolls that can’t be conveyed in a book of photos; pictures of live shows are no substitute for the sublime opening of “Personality Crisis,” the legendary drum beat of “Trash,” or the fury of David Johansen’s singing and Johnny Thunders’ shredding in “Babylon.” You won’t get it from this review either. But the fact that the New York Dolls are outstanding in whatever medium you choose is no small feat. That kind of impact is something that very few artists, let alone drugged-out rock bands, can ever hope to accomplish.

One more note that doesn’t follow any other point: if Heath Ledger’s Joker was influenced by Johnny Rotten, and Rotten and the Sex Pistols took their image and spirit from the New York Dolls, it follows by the transitive property of rock that the Dolls were the original Why So Serious band. It’s impossible to look at Gruen’s photos of the band dressed as gangsters named the Lipstick Killers and not think of Ledger’s joker.

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This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.

Theater Review (NYC): A Perfect Ganesh by Terrence McNally

Normally, flights of fancy in legitimate theater are a dangerous prospect. They can get too confusing or absurd for an audience to follow, and unless you tread carefully, your writing can end up seeming lazy. When you set the ground rules that Terrence McNally sets in A Perfect Ganesh, however, your opportunities for being fanciful are virtually limitless.

The overwhelming theme of A Perfect Ganesh is pantheism; the play emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans to each other and to the rest of the world, and how blind Westerners can often be to the lives and environments of even those closest to them. When, in the opening monologue, we meet Ganesha (Gary Mahmoud), the Hindu god who is “in your kiss” as well as “in your cancer,” we allow ourselves to see a whole, free-flowing unity in everything that happens in the next two hours. To criticize inconsistency in A Perfect Ganesh would just be bad karma.

To contrast Ganesha’s world to our own, McNally gives us perhaps the pinnacle (some would say lowpoint) of the Western sensibility—two wealthy ladies from Greenwich, Connecticut. Kitty and Margaret think India offers a respite from a lifetime of trips to the Caribbean. Soon, however, we learn of larger spiritual longings that plague these two. They have come to India to heal, both for emotional and physical purposes. Both have suffered tragedies that have caused irrevocable damage to their souls, and both get lost in their attempts to recover the good spirits that the women are too damaged to find again.

A Perfect Ganesh, which deals with homophobia quite prominently, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1994. It lost to Albee’s Three Tall Women, perhaps a safe pick after another gay-themed play, Angels in America, had won the Pulitzer the previous year. McNally would go on to win back-to-back Tonys for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class. As a result, A Perfect Ganesh has slipped through the cracks.

As the WorkShop Theater Company’s revival proves, however, not only is Ganesh one of McNally’s best plays (it may even be his best), but it’s one whose relevance has only grown stronger. In an era where America has become increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, where sections of America have grown hostile to other sections, and where spirituality has been squeezed out by technical and socioeconomic demands, A Perfect Ganesh is a crucial reminder of just how close to each other we really are, yet how distant we can often seem.

Unfortunately, the WorkShop’s revival leaves something to be desired. In a play where ethnicity, dialects, and characters change constantly, it’s crucial that actors are able to handle all the shifts, and communicate them to the audience clearly. In Peter Sylvester’s production however, it’s unclear whether slips of the tongue are due to intentional language divides or actors simply missing their lines. A play with such majestic themes could also use a more expansive production, and while the problem can’t be blamed on WorkShop’s modest space, the production still feels too cramped and neurotic for the play to feel completely natural.

The production values mar what are otherwise some excellent performances. In particular, Mahmoud, who maintains his Ganesha mentality through multiple characters, commands the stage with his voice, his pinpoint-precise facial expressions, and a confidence that never drops despite all obstacles. As Katharine, Ellen Barry truly stands out as a Connecticut housewife with white-trash roots who, unlike her cold, bitchy fellow traveler Margaret, is unafraid to let herself get lost in emotion and wonder at the new world she’s seeing.

As Margaret, Charlotte Hampden does very well playing up the Connecticut stereotypes, but has a harder time expressing her character’s more human side. Margaret is always shut off, and her unflinching inability to open up is a necessary element of the play. But when she recalls some legitimately tragic experiences, it would be nice if we could see some trace of human emotion.

Nonetheless, it is a credit to the WorkShop Theater Company that it reminds us of a forgotten McNally classic, and that it reintroduces a play dating from deeper into the Culture Wars, one that showed us that even when hostilities at all levels of humanity are at a high point, we’re more connected than we initially appear. McNally used the power of live theater to harness that closeness; it’s up to us to take it with us after we leave the theater.

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A Perfect Ganesh by Terrence McNally. Directed by Peter Sylvester; set design by Aaron P. Mastin; costume design by Cynthia D. Johnson; light design by Duane Pagano; sound design by Peter Carpenter. Photos by Sylvester.

Tynan's Anger Joins BlogCritics

To paraphrase Woody Allen (via Groucho Marx via Sigmund Freud), I wouldn't want to be a member of any sinister cabal of superior writers that would have me as a member. I'll make an exception for that of blogcritics.org, of which this blog is now a member. I started them off with the most intellectually oriented post that could even qualify as a blog post, which, not coincidentally, was the last paper I ever wrote at the University of Chicago. It will be up soon, and subsequently published on this fine blog. I'm up for anything that keeps me writing, so I welcome the challenge. You can totally expect a button soon enough.

(UPDATE: Button now added! -->)