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. Today, I am continuing with the top 5 historical characters.

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5. Willy Brandt (Democracy, Michael Frayn)

   Before there was Clinton, there was Willy Brandt, and in his case, the stakes were exponentially higher. In Michael Frayn's tale of conflicting allegiances in East and West Germany, where for all his flaws, Brandt was exactly the politician both sides of the Iron Curtain needed, Brandt's accidental, almost farcical political self-destruction is made all the more more frustrating.

4. George W. Bush (The Strangerer, Mickle Maher)

   Depicting the almost universally reviled (in the theater-o-sphere) current President as an existential anti-hero is about as daring as political playwriting got this decade, but the almost tragic resulting consequences for our opinions of Bush, America, and the theater couldn’t have worked without that kind of risk-taking. The sense of adventure that is celebrated in Chicago predictably confused audiences in New York, but Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck twisted current events and universal human strife by playing to experimental theater’s greatest strengths.

3. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (I am My Own Wife, Doug Wright)

   Every heroic political and culture figure inevitably has some dirty laundry in their closet, and in the still somewhat underrated 2004 Pulitzer Winner, a pre-Little Mermaid Doug Wright knew that the ostensible hypocrisy that shocked post-Unification Germany was much more offensive than anything about Charlotte’s sexuality. I Am My Own Wife, aided by a deadpan performance by Jefferson Mays, turned Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's story into a reflection of the audience's own struggles with ethical consistency, all while still keeping Charlotte hopelessly sympathetic.

2. Orson Wells (Orson’s Shadow, Austin Pendleton)

   Backstage plays appeals to theater nerds first and foremost. Pendleton avoids this problem by taking Wells, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, one who Kenneth Tynan would flatly say is a better artist than Laurence Olivier straight to the ego-maniacal Olivier’s face, and putting him in the exact moment when his reputation fully disintegrates. Orson's Shadow a stunning examination of how not even the greatest artists know how to cope with their own genius, and, more generally, how no one, not even Orson Welles, could get by on talent alone.

1. Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan)

   There’s not much that can be said for the role that hasn’t been said already, so let me just list the number of people Frank Langella beat out for the Tony award: Live Schreiber in Talk Radio, Boyd Gaines in Journey’s End Brían F. O’Byrne is Coast of Utopia, and Christopher Plumber in Inherit the Wind. Any one of those actors could have won the Tony any other year in one of the most stacked awards categories of any kind in recent memory, but Langella beat them all, with all the help from Peter Morgan’s savagely honest portrayal of Nixon that didn’t downplay his sins in the least (it may have even amplified them), but also depicted just how addictive presidential power can be to everyone who surrounds it. For someone who has seen nothing but Nixon parodies, Langella made it believable that a man that corrupt and with that little personality could command that much respect. Even with one of the worst presidents of the 20th century, there were a lot of good things about America that died with Watergate, and many of them were inherent to Morgan and Langella’s Nixon, bringing Frost/Nixon closer to The History Boys than anyone ever thought imaginable.

Labels: charlotte von mahlsdorf, Democracy, Doug Wright, Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon: A Play, George W Bush, Michael Frayn, Orson Welles, Peter Morgan, richard nixon, the strangerer, Willy Brandt

(This review was originally featured on Blogcritics.org)

The Strangerer is a 90-minute attempt to murder Jim Lehrer that goes nowhere. The premise of a theater-loving, existential hero Bush is absurd, and the format of reinterpreting the first 2004 Presidential Debate only adds to the absurdity. What is the point of committing such a pointless, arbitrary act for the purposes of theater? The point, my fellow Americans, is that the premise of The Strangerer demands it, a fact of which playwright Mickie Maher was only too self-conscious.

This experimental work of meta-theater, which coyly plays with the fundamental conventions of theater and examines the theatricality of life outside the black box, has arrived Off-Broadway in New York on the strength of its almost unilateral raves by Chicago critics. Its fate will be a litmus test for the future of creativity in New York theater. For as enticing a labyrinth of themes as the play presents to theater-minded New Yorkers who know what they’re looking for, it will be an alienating, exhausting bore for just about anyone else.

The same was said, of course, when Waiting for Godot opened. The Strangerer also alludes to a particularly experimental production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that provided the fictional inspiration for this version of the Bush/Kerry debate. It’s a fitting parallel for a play that continues in the grand tradition of a Beckett/Albee baffler, a format that has drawn as much praise for its structural innovations as it has criticism for its obtuseness.

But the play’s got creativity up the wazoo to back up its weighty goals. It takes the presidential debate format, one of the most overtly staged and artificial contemporary theatrical practices, and turns it into a wildly unpredictable and constantly shape-shifting event. It inverts our commonly held beliefs about figures we've known for years. The absurdity of the evening raises the question: how far from The Strangerer does the subtext of an actual debate actually stray?

On the political end, it’s taken two of the most important world figures of the past decade—figures whose mannerisms have caused us to tune them out instead of challenge them—and forces us to listen to them speak as nakedly as possible. It’s the longest 90-minute play I’ve ever attended. No matter how aware you are of the intellectual nuances of the play, The Strangerer’s sheer banality in its first half begs you to tune out to some degree. The twist is that the actual dialogue of the play directly attacks the audience for doing just that. It’s very hard to tune out a mockingly narcoleptic Kerry (played by Maher himself) and a Bush (Guy Massey) who, despite using the same grammatical weaknesses we’ve heard for the past eight years, has explicitly promised to commit a murder before the night is over.

Yet, the play’s early boringness is precisely what will turn some attendees away. The play’s creators, who do not include a director, underestimate just how adept an audience is at zoning out. Some critics in Chicago called the play nearly flawless, but in order for a play to be perfect, I don’t think it can by its very nature induce its audience to engage in exactly the kind of activity (or inactivity) it purports to oppose. If the play fails with a much less intellectual and insular New York audience than it had in Chicago—and the show I attended had multiple empty seats—it will be because of its creators’ hubris.

That doesn’t discount the fact that The Strangerer, which takes its name and inspiration from Bush’s brief encounter with Camus two summers ago, remains one of the better existential comedies of recent memory. The debate on the method of murder is undeniably farcical, and features props of switchblades, guns, kerosene, cyanide, a pillow, and a Balinese kris meant for ritualistic murder. But the play is rife with contradictions inherent in theater, not to mention in general human existence. What is the value of excessive, unapologetic performance, and what gets lost under the guise of maintaining an air of mystery? Is it worth living a boring, neutral life? How can an act that is horrifically destructive be considered entertaining?

Questions like these abound in The Strangerer, and the play answers none of them. Its ingenuity is virtually unparalleled in today’s mainstream New York theater. The question is whether Theatre Oobleck’s faith in its audience pays off.

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Through August 2. The Strangerer was written by Micky Maher. It stars Maher (Kerry), Guy Massey (Bush) and rotates Colm O'Reilly and Brian Shaw (Lehrer). Set design by Maher. Lighting Design by Martha Bayne. Sound Design by Chris Schoen. Tickets can be purchased at Telecharge. The play runs 1 hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

Labels: barrow street theater, george bush, guy massey, john kerry, micky maher, the strangerer, theatre oobleck