Tynan's Anger

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

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10. Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.


9. Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.


8. Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.


7. Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.


6. Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.
   

Labels: adam rapp, angry young man, conor macpherson, Katurian, martin mcdonagh, red light winter, rock 'n' roll, shining city, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Pillowman, tom stoppard, Topdog/Underdog

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. This first month starts with the best lines from English-language plays this decade. I have admittedly taken a more mainstream angle on this list, because my aim is to gauge which lines will resonate the loudest for the longest period of time in the future.To recap, here's the list from Part 1:

10. "Not many people know this, but the Führer was descended from a long line of English qveens." – The Producers

9."You the cowboys and I'm the Indians. See who wins this war." - Radio Golf

8. "Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable." - Rock 'N' Roll

7. "If you let a standing army stand too long...it will find something to do." - If You See Something, Say Something

6. "Did I send you to the most expensive university in the world to teach you how to feel conflicted, or to learn how to manipulate great masses of people?" - Urinetown

Without further ado, here's lines nos. 5 through 3.

5.

“I have come (with no little excitement) to understand that baseball is a perfect metaphor for hop in a democratic society” –Mason Marzac (Denis O’Hare), Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg.

Take Me Out was not Greenberg’s best play this decade (nor was it his worst), but it was his most successful. Part of the reason is Greenberg’s willingness in Take Me Out to go off the deep end to extend a metaphor to where it resonated at the highest level, tonal consistency be damned. O’Hare met Greenberg’s challenge with a brilliant unflinching delivery that practically chiseled his name on the Tony statue, but the line made Broadway a viable art form for sports fans, and made baseball understandable to gay men who treat opera as their sport of choice. As a side-note, the play, which debuted at the Public Theatre in 2002, came on the heels of rumors that Mets star Mike Piazza was gay. While Take Me Out’s protagonist Darren Lemming was based on Derek Jeter, it would be a later Yankees addition, Alex Rodriguez, who would provide more drama to the back page of the New York Post than we would hear about from Clive Barnes and Michael Riedel combined.

4.

“Because for reasons only known to himself, the bulldog of a policemen chose not to put the stories in the burning trash, but placed them carefully with Katurian’s case file, which remained sealed away to remain unopened for 50-odd years…a fact which would have ruined the writer’s fashionably downbeat ending, but was somehow…somehow…more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. “ – Katurian (Billy Crudup), The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh.

The myth of McDonagh’s one creative spurt in the early ‘90s that produced all his plays is in part self-perpetuated by McDonagh himself, even though in interviews he will admit that he constantly tinkered with his plays after that one spurt. The last line of The Pillowman, the only McDonagh play to leave the shores of Ireland, used an imaginary totalitarian dystopia to make a surprisingly heartfelt plea for the creative process. After a series of horrific stories, some imagined by writer Katurian and some occurring to Katurian, The Pillowman ended with a line that, by, generalizing “the writer,” could work just as easily for Katurian and McDonagh within the play’s framework. Creativity of McDonagh’s kind is rare, and it’s even rarer for such a creative voice to succeed so tremendously while moving far out of its comfort zone. What particularly struck me about this line was McDonagh’s self-professed willingness to sacrifice structural consistency for spiritual consistency. Who said McDonagh doesn’t have a heart?

3.

“Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on. “ – Hector (Richard Griffiths), The History Boys by Alan Bennett.

One of the greatest living British playwrights, Alan Bennett crafted The History Boys as a slick swan song for an older, more wistful aim of education in Britain in particular. It worked just as well in America, where the cut-throat world of top-notch education lost that wistfulness decades ago. As delivered by Richard Griffiths in a Tony- and Olivier-award winning performance, Hector’s undying devotion to knowledge in the larger sense is what draws him spiritually to his students, and what loses his relevancy in a world driven on determining the bottom line. This line summed up the gradualist spirit of growth that could only come from a British mind, which makes the sentiment, a fish out of water even in today’s theater world, the greatest line from a British play this decade.

Come back tomorrow for best 2 quotes from English-language drama this decade.

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• The Top 10 Quotes from English-language Drama This Decade: 10-6 (tynansanger.com)

Labels: alan Bennett, alex rodriguez, Billy Crudup, Denis O'Hare, derek jeter, History Boys, martin mcdonagh, Mike Piazza, Richard Greenberg, richard griffiths, Take Me Out, The Pillowman

That's me with Martin McDonagh, possibly my favorite contemporary playwright in the world, and currently promoting his first feature film In Bruges. My interview with him will be published in the February 8 issue of the Maroon. It was pretty entertaining, so watch out for it.

Labels: in bruges, martin mcdonagh, photo

Perhaps I should have expected this, but I still find it frustrating as a Martin McDonagh fan: the buzz coming for In Bruges, from Sundance and otherwise, all seems to be comparing Martin McDonagh to Quentin Tarantino (such as here, here, here and here). I guess when you're coming from a film perspective, QT is who you think of when you think of smart dialogue + violence. But anyone who's versed in McDonagh's theatrical work would find the comparison quite strange and misguided.

To be fair, I have seen In Bruges, and McDonagh doesn't fall into the trap of making it too theater-like: it's a living, breathing movie, and a good one at that, if a bit strange. The Chicago critics I saw it with were laughing throughout at McDonagh's dialog, and seemed genuinely taken off guard by how fresh it sounded. I would have been surprised if it was any less fresh.

But other than the mix of impressive banter and gun violence, the similarities between McDonagh and Tarantino end. For one, In Bruges is strictly linear, which goes against an absolutely essential Tarantino touch. There's also a distinct Cockney/Irish gangster flair to McDonagh's dialogue, while Tarantino's dialogue is as rough and tumble American as it gets. There's a macabre and surprisingly humanist touch to In Bruges. I don't need to remind you of Tarantino's lack of taste, (well maybe a little). If the film was based entirely on its trailer, I'd say the comparison's legitimate. But the trailer is deceptive; there's a lot more complexity to the film than the Shoot 'Em Up, Smokin' Aces model in which the film is stupidly being marketed.

Labels: in bruges, martin mcdonagh, quentin tarantino

Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson have spoiled Broadway theatergoers of late. McDonagh's one creative outburst back in 1993 has fueled four incredible Broadway shows in The Beauty Queen of Lenane, The Lonesome West, The Pillowman, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Along with McPherson's The Weir and Shining City, it would seem the words "Irish" and "Broadway" could do no wrong. The Seafarer, McPherson's latest National Theatre transfer (which he also directed), may be the weakest of all seven, but it still has enough of the black Irish wit that made audiences fall in love with the new Irish playwrights in the first place. As a result, the production I attended tonight got a larger ovation than it probably merited.

The Seafarer centers on a deal with the devil in the form of a stranger named Mr. Lockhart (Ciarán Hinds), and James "Sharky" Harkin (David Morse), a recovering alcoholic with a bad temper and a sour view on life. The concept of selling one's soul to the devil has been played out (ahem) to death, so to make such a matter seem vital calls for extreme creativity and enthusiasm both from the playwright, technical staff, and actors. Mr. McPherson's premise for the transaction, Sharky's soul, a rematch of a game of poker 25 years ago, is somewhat novel. Yet, the initial indication of other-wordliness is a weak flicker of the lights and an even weaker clamping of the chest by Mr. Morse. Morse's performance is otherwise solid, but his lack of enthusiasm in this moment is an unfortunately important lapse.

Another flaw is the amount of time it takes to get to this major premise. We do not meet Mr. Lockhart until near the end of the first act, and most of the first act is filled with the drunken antics of Sharky's brother, the blind and senile Richard (Jim Norton), and friend Ivan (Conleth Hill). While Norton and Hill play decent drunks, The Seafarer proves once again that drunkenness alone cannot carry a play for an extended period of time.

Once we get to the meat of the play, however, the play takes a turn for the better. The humor of Richard and Ivan, which was cheap in the first act, feels more genuine when balanced with the gravity of Sharky and Mr. Lockhart's interaction. Mr. Hinds, too gets to show off his considerable performing chops, none displayed better than his chilling description of hell (which provides the source of the play's title), a monologue that is without a doubt the highlight of the play.

Throughout the play, the Irish meter and humorously bleak view of life that Broadway audiences have grown fond of is on full display. That, along with the fact that the play ends strongly, most likely explains the standing ovation. But there's not much here that McPherson or McDonagh haven't done better before, which may leave the uninitiated to wonder what the fuss was about in the first place.

Labels: conor mcpherson, irish drama, martin mcdonagh, the seaferer, theater review