The problem with comedies

 

 I did a close reading of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in college when I was assigned a scene from it for an acting class, and decided that it really shouldn't be a comedy. Like most Americans, I like my comedies to be funny: I've never really accepted the classic definition of a comedy as a story with a happy ending (preferably a wedding or two). In the case of Measure for Measure, I thought the story so grim (a major plot point has a young woman pressured to have sex with Vienna's ruler to save her brother's life) that its happy ending seemed forced and inappropriate. A more consistently written Measure, I thought, would have turned out tragically, perhaps with a Hamlet- or Macbeth-style bloodbath.

When we know everything will turn out all right, it's hard to credit the emotional struggles through which characters must journey on their way to that happy ending. That's clearly the case with the Hebrew midwives whom Pharaoh told to kill all baby boys (Exodus 1:15-16). In just a few verses, they deceive Pharaoh by turning his own deceitful premise against him and so are rewarded by God (Exodus 1:17-21). I'm tempted to think of them as plucky, clever and indefatigable, but upon reflection I'm not sure why. Their bravery is remarkable, but is made remarkable because they didn't know they were living in a comedy: for all they knew, Pharaoh would kill them when he discovered they hadn't killed any babies.

In some sense, of course, this wasn't a comedy because Pharaoh simply takes his genocidal impulses public in Exodus 1:22: "Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, 'Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.'" I can't imagine anything about the episode seemed comic to Shiphrah and Puah. From the beginning, they must have been terrified that Pharaoh would see through their paper-thin deception. Then they had to live with even greater fear of what he might do to them once he had made his murderous intentions known to the world. Yes, God had given them families, but how long would they keep their own heads?

Perhaps that's the root of all anxiety: we don't realize we're living in a comedy. Jesus tells us anxiety is the sin of unbelief in Matthew 6:25-34, and it's one of the sins from which repentance is particularly difficult and signally uncommon. That may be because our time horizon is too short. We worry about tomorrow and the day after, forgetting that the deus ex machina which literally saved many a Greek hero and figuratively rescued the cast of Measure for Measure is an overly literal foreshadowing to the comedic end to this cosmic drama which we are all acting out.

Maybe we need more unfunny comedies. Life in a fallen world is rife with dread and struggle, and all too often we think that means it must therefore end badly. American Christians are particularly loathe to acknowledge the immense suffering of living in a fallen world because they fear that portends a tragic end. This is wrong, of course: I can say that God is good and my life is bad without any tension or contradiction. The Bible does have a few funny bits, but overall it's extremely unamusing. Nonetheless, its account of history is entirely comic.

Read this way, we can understand the experience of all believers from Shiphrah and Puah to our fellow congregants to ourselves, and how to survive that experience. We can get through the horrors of this life not on a reserve of innate cheerfulness, but on the basis of a Christian hope in the truths of comedy.

"The Who's Tommy" at the DCPA

I may be the only person introduced to the Who by Pete Townshend's solo work, but that's what happens when your parents' musical tastes run toward West Coast cool jazz and show tunes and you're the oldest kid in your family. My attention was caught by tracks from The Iron Man: The Musical on Washington D.C.'s classic rock station; when I bought the album, I found the Who's tracks less interesting than Pete Townshend's performance of "A Friend Is a Friend." I went on, as only an obsessed teenager can, to collect all his solo albums and carefully analyze and annotate every song. It was only after some years that I decided I should probably pay some heed to the music he wrote for his band as well.

Tommy needs no explanation (and there's no point explaining it to the people who might need it explained). The Who's legendary concept album has again been revived as a stage musical, this time by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Theatre Companion and I found cheap tickets and so brought along Thing 1 for a show the other night; the latter is now at the perfect age (14) to be introduced to the incomparable rock'n'roll genius of Pete Townshend, and was appropriately impressed by the music and lyrics. Tommy's plot, while convoluted, is relatively easy to follow. At the same time, its philosophical points are comprehensible only through a close reading via the lens of the rather incomprehensible Meher Baba, so I had no concerns that Thing 1 might be led down the perfidious path of eastern mysticism.

As Thing 1 observed, this production of Tommy is better characterized as an opera than a musical, as there are only a few lines of spoken dialogue. Some of the album's songs were dropped, while others were rewritten or given additional lyrics to better fit this version of the story. I had no complaints on that front other than with "1921," which makes no sense in that this production is set after World War II, whereas the original was set after World War I. (During "1921," I was so confused that I though I must have been misunderstanding the actors. I wasn't.)

Once one gets past the fact that one is watching a musical, rather than listening to the Who, the performances in this production are uniformly strong. The three actors playing Tommy at different ages appeared together on stage more than once, enabling the audience to participate in Tommy's hallucinatory take on his reality. Given my druthers, I'd have preferred to see the musicians, who were hidden from view. I imagine they might have distracted from the action, but I find it exceedingly difficult to listen to "Pinball Wizard" without watching a guitarist.

This production of Tommy proves the material's strength: one need not be a fan of the Who in order to be thoroughly impressed.

Batman vs. Emma Stone

I've been hearing the movie musical is making a comeback, especially after the recent success of La La Land. I suppose it's possible, but I have my doubts.

Stage theatre and film are both constructed on "the suspension of disbelief," the convention whereby the audience pretends it doesn't know the people they are watching are pretending to be people who don't know they're being watched. Said suspension is more easily done at the movies, where the projected image necessarily alienates the viewer from the persons viewed. It's a tad more complicated at the theatre, where the physical, embodied presence of actual persons makes the "play" part of play-acting all the more obvious.

Over the last century, this epistemological fact has resulted in popular spectacle, once a staple of the stage, moving over almost entirely into the cinema. Because we nearly automatically surrender our disbelief in front of the screen, we are willing to believe almost anything, up to and including spectacle the like of which simply cannot exist in real life. Take, for example, the truly wondrous moment in Captain America: Civil War when the Winter Soldier grabs hold of a moving motorcycle, reverses its direction in midair, mounts it and speeds back in the direction whence he came. Now, I haven't take a physics class since high school, but I'm pretty sure that scene violates all three of Newton's laws of motion. Nonetheless, I stood up and cheered because it was SPECTACULAR.

A generation ago, the spectacle of choice was the movie musical. No, ordinary people in mid-twentieth century America were no more likely to break into song and dance than those of our day, but that's not the point. The emotional experiences of film characters were such that singing and dancing were the only available means by which to express themselves. This seemed so commonsensical that every major Hollywood actor had to appear in a movie musical. (Exhibit A: Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. Oh, the humanity.)

Times have changed, and not for the better. Instead of a street crowd breaking out into a synchronized dance number, we think it far more plausible that cars chase each other through crowded Los Angeles streets and freeways at dizzying speeds while their drivers make accurate shots, one-handed, with PISTOLS. Talk about suspension of disbelief. This genre has evolved, thanks largely to Marvel Studios, into the superhero picture. Now genuinely respectable Marlon Brando-caliber actors (looking at you, Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Hopkins) are all flying into the air and doing battle with villainy and nefarious conspirators who have secretly riddled the state's security apparatus.

In other words, the niche once occupied by the movie musical now belongs to the superhero/action film. Emma Stone and Damien Chazelle don't have to win over skeptical audiences. They have to take on Batman.

Peter Shaffer

I feel mildly insincere proclaiming my great admiration for a playwright’s work when I’ve really only carefully studied two of his works. But as both those works are undisputed masterpieces, I think it only right to note Peter Shaffer’s death last week by discussing Equus and Amadeus.

I can’t remember whether I saw the film or read the play (I believe in my college freshman English class) first, but I do know that the reading was when I was struck by the struggle of Amadeus’ lead character, Salieri. In exchange for musical gifting, Salieri had offered God piety and devotion, and so felt betrayed when the “obscene child” Mozart manifested an effortless genius which Salieri could never hope to attain. Salieri’s plot to avenge himself against God by destroying Mozart demonstrated a zealous adherence to the principle of justification by works seen only by the Pharisees and the counter-reformation’s inquisitors. That Shaffer could draw an entirely human portrait of such a man was itself a demonstration of apparently effortless genius.

Equus preceded Amadeus. Again, I can’t remember when I first encountered it, although I know it was during my university days when I was particularly preoccupied with how questions of theology and faith are worked out in the arts. In Equus, the only way a boy crippled by guilt and shame can think to save himself is by attacking a god of his own creation. In both Equus and Amadeus, the lead character locates the source of his turmoil not in himself or in his sin, but in the God who is his ultimate judge.

Shaffer’s characters toil beneath the gaze of a pitiless God, with no whisper of hope that he might have delivered himself over for the forgiveness of some. Nonetheless, Shaffer understood that humanity is, fundamentally, homo adorans. Our lives are measured, then, not by our accomplishments, but by our service and worship to the God who is.

Animal Crackers

A revival of Animal Crackers

 closes out the Denver Center Theatre Company's season, running at the Stage Theatre through May 11. Sadly, no, the actual Marx Brothers do not rise from the grave. Happily, it features some crackerjack tap-dance numbers (I'm a sucker for a good tap routine) and is backed by an excellent swing combo, present on stage throughout. It's Groucho Lite, but a little Groucho is better than no Groucho at all.

Shadowlands

The Denver Center Theatre Company presents Shadowlands, William Nicholson's play about C.S. Lewis's brief, late in life marriage, in the Space Theatre through April 27. Being as Lewis was a scholar, sometime Christian apologist, thoughtful analyst of culture and a writer of admirably clear style, the classically-educated Mrs. Curmudgeon elected to join me in attending a performance last week.

As I have come to expect, the Denver Center production staff oversaw a remarkably professional, if not especially creative, staging of this play. When a play is staged in the round, one can be sure he will get an actor's back at some crucial moment or other; this time out, our seats had the misfortune of missing the face of either Lewis or his eventual bride, Joy, during nearly every one of their scenes together. Nonetheless, I think I can say Graeme Malcolm inhabited C.S. Lewis, or at least this version of Lewis, rather convincingly, even if Kathleen McCall as Joy Davidman was somewhat less lacking in conviction. The other stalwarts of the Denver Center Theatre Company acquited themselves as well as ever.

But as I say, a thoroughly professional production is to be expected from the DCTC. Thankfully, such a staging allows for and invites a careful consideration of the play itself. Or perhaps not so thankfully in this case.

C.S. Lewis's stature amongst 20th century Christian writers cannot be overstated. In my hard-shell Calvinist opinion, he was out of his depth as a theologian, but his understanding of culture, and where a society determined to cut itself loose from all Christian moorings would end up, was remarkable for its insight and foresight. "Prophetic" is a woefully overused adjective, but I can think of no better for his The Abolition of Man. In a different, fictional vein, what I consider his best and most beautiful book, Till We Have Faces, is a lovely account of the Gospel's power to produce repentance and faith.

That being so, one expects a presentation of his most intimate encounter with human joy and grief to be set in the context of Lewis's consistent personal testimony of Christian hope. Instead, Nicholson begins with a Lewis absolutely confident he can explain Christian suffering, only to end with a Lewis utterly undone by the experience of it. "Shadowlands" is a Lewisian term for this present life as a preparation for the life to come: now is merely a shadow of a much greater and more substantial reality. At the play's end, after the death of his beloved, Lewis no longer says we live in the shadowlands. Instead, he says there are only shadows.

Whatever one thinks of C.S. Lewis, he was unquestionably a Christian man who, after his conversion, bore a consistent Christian testimony. Shadowlands turns a Christian man into an existentialist. Regardless of any other merits it might have, that fact makes this not a very worthwhile play at all.

Hamlet

No, I'm not going to complain about weaknesses in the script this time.

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, receives its umpteen-millionth production at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Stage Theatre (through February 23). After I saw it two weeks ago, I thought I might be helped in sorting out my thoughts by viewing the 1990 film version of Tom Stoppard's existentialist deconstruction of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

This may not have been my best idea.

At least that's what I thought at first. However, as he demonstrated in his masterful script for the wonderful Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard understands the Bard's creative mind about as well as any other thespian out there. For all its absurdity, Rosencrantz... can be read as an actor's attempt to make sense out of a rather challenging script. So much of Hamlet's plot is utterly mystifying. Why does Hamlet play mad? Its only obvious product is to drive Ophelia herself mad, and consequently to suicide, which product serves no purpose of Hamlet's and is rather apparently at odds with his professed love for her. Moreover, as Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern) asks, how is it that Claudius takes the throne after his brother's death when the prince and heir apparent is quite obviously of age to assume the crown? And those are just the beginning of the play's problems, the multitude of which in turn raises the question posed by Theatre Companion: why, exactly, does this play sit at the center of the English-speaking theatrical tradition and the Western canon itself?

Live theatre has the ability to resolve any number of apparent problems with a script simply because the spoken and performed word has an interpretive power not inherent in the printed word. During this performance, I was struck by the powerful and vivid description of depression Hamlet gives in the first act, and also by just how funny he is. Plot and extremely grim ending aside, Hamlet himself comes across as a fully realized human being, so much so that all the other characters become rather flat by comparison. Of course the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are little more than cardboard cut-outs, but the same could be said for Polonius, Gertrude, and Claudius. Only Ophelia in her madness competes with the prince for our sympathy and empathy.

Once again, kudos to the excellent staging. Judging from the costumes, this production is set sometime in the mid-1920s, but that time period seems hardly relevant to the action. Lightly rusted scaffolding at the back of the thrust stage serves as Castle Elsinore's exteriors and interiors, and the torso of a collapsed statue of King Hamlet to stage right, along with a wall of portraits in which the faces are all obscured, visually represent the metaphorical rottenness in the state of Denmark.

Nearly every production of Hamlet is edited for length, so the difficult bits may have been removed from this one. (It's been so long since I last saw this play that I stood no chance of noticing what may have been left out.) Nonetheless, I thought the plot, as a whole, flowed rather seamlessly and logically. Even the bit with the players staging the death of Gonzago made sense, even if it is largely a waste of time. (Seriously: the circumstantial evidence for regicide is so overwhelming that even the thin reed of a ghost's testimony can bear the weight of a damning case against Claudius.) In other words, were it up to me to avenge the death of Hamlet Sr., I would likely have chosen a different strategy, but I suppose I can more or less understand why Hamlet Jr. chose his.

Having said that, Fortinbras' closing speech praising Hamlet still strikes me as entirely unwarranted, but maybe I'm missing something in the prince's character obvious to everyone else. I just can't get over the fact that a good 95% of the deaths in this play are entirely unnecessary, and most are attributable to Hamlet's miscalculations. Not to be judgey or anything.

One last note, sincerely not meant to be as snarky as it will sound: while Aubrey Deeker handed in a robust and manly performance, his actual hairline came nowhere near meeting the expectations raised by this production's promotional materials.

black odyssey

Finally.

Regular visitors to this virtual space will know Theatre Companion and I have been sorely disappointed with the new plays mounted by the Denver Center Theatre Company this season. Our most frequent question following these productions has been "Why?" Why, of all the new plays being churned out by all those MFA-holding playwrights throughout this great land of ours, produce these mediocrities? Why, if these mediocrities are the best a producing artistic director can find, not revive one of the classics from the great American stage canon? Why subject a hopeful theatre-going public to works which make a strong argument against any public funding for the arts?

Why, oh why?

It was thus with some trepidation I escorted Mrs. Curmudgeon, who holds a master's degree in  the classics, to the world premiere of black odyssey (now through February 16 at the Space Theatre). In Marcus Gardley's new work,

Classic Greek characters and themes meet modern African-American culture in this twist on Homer’sThe Odyssey. Centered on a black soldier’s homecoming, this compelling new play fuses modern reality, humor, and song with ancient myth.

One can easily imagine how this might go badly wrong: the Odyssey's narrative stretched to the breaking point along with the audience's patience for overly wrought Negro spirituals. Instead, the playwright and cast nailed it. Gardley's Ulysses, as did Homer's, tries to make his way home after a war only to find himself manipulated by the gods ("Deus" for Zeus and "Paw Sidon" for Poseidon) and faced by traps at every turn. (An actual chess board hangs over the stage and is lowered for the gods' debates.) By making his Ulysses Lincoln an orphan, Gardley superimposes on the quest for home a simultaneous quest for identity and personal history, a history which is interwoven with the African-American experience in these United States. In this way, Gardley makes Ulysses Lincoln a black everyman as the staging of his journey becomes an appeal to the African-American community at large to hold on to and perpetuate its historical memory.

The cast is stellar, drawn from across the country: nearly every actor has a deep background on stage and screen, and all have marvelous singing voices. (This probably reflects the fact there just aren't that many all-black professional stage productions around the land.) The play does have weaknesses: the symbolism of the statue from the Lincoln Memorial, which came on stage in the second act, was entirely lost on me, and while Ulysses Lincoln served in the U.S. Navy, he was involved in land combat operations and consistently refers to himself as a "soldier." As Mrs. Curmudgeon pointed out, Nella Pee's vacillating loyalty to Ulysses toward the end of his odyssey was a disappointing departure from the steadfastness of Homer's Penelope. (However, this vacillation was motivated by a desire to provide a father figure to her son, Malachi; sadly, the struggles of single motherhood are a common theme in the modern African-American experience.) Also, Homer managed to work in a dog.

Nonetheless, this production delivers the goods. Here's a new play which tackles a big, big American subject through the frame of an ancient and universal narrative and makes the mystifying particulars of both Greek myth and African-American culture accessible and pellucid to a broad audience. It's a triumph: finally, a new play worthy of many more productions. I look forward to taking my black daughter to see one someday.

The Legend of Georgia McBride

In The Legend of Georgia McBride, receiving its world premiere from the Denver Center Theatre Company (now through February 23 at the Ricketson Theatre), a down-on-his-luck Elvis impersonator accidentally finds work as a lip-syncing drag queen with the stage name Georgia McBride, and in the process discovers his true artistic talent and a way to support his young bride and their growing family.

Yes, that smoke you smell is Western civilization going up in flames.

My readers in the queer community (of whom I am sure there are many) may be forgiven for thinking my low opinion of this show was, to coin a phrase, predestined by the fact I am a reactionary old-school presbyterian curmudgeon. However, my criticisms were only reinforced by those of my more alternate lifestyle-friendly Theatre Companion, and generally had to do with a weak script and awkward performances.

First, however, a note of praise for the DCTC's production department, which throughout this season has showcased each play with admirable staging choices. The Ricketson is a traditional proscenium-arch stage: for this show, set pieces were moved into the foreground of an otherwise bare stage with a full view of a mildly-cluttered backstage. Scene and costume changes, accordingly, took place in full view of the audience. (The open backstage design is, of course, something of a conceit; actors went off into the wings for changes into different characters.) This understated design suggests appearance and is extremely malleable and introduces identity as a theme in the play.

Unfortunately, the script fails to live up to the set design. The dialogue is often realistic and occasionally amusing, and the characters, by and large, believably human. None of what they go through, however, is sufficiently compelling to be put up on a stage. Casey, our young hero, discovers he's pretty good at lip-syncing while wearing a dress. While some may find this kind of act amusing, it's certainly not art, and so the play fails at its ambition to explore the nature of artistic striving and triumph.

The first scene of the second act features a faux Rosa Parks moment in which a gay drag queen chastises Casey for dressing up as a woman onstage while being straight in real life. This might have been an interesting development had the unusual dichotomy of a straight drag queen exploiting the queer community for personal gain and ambition been explored, but instead the theme was dropped immediately. In fact, the play eventually devolved into litte more than a stage version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Fun for those looking for that sort of thing, but really: worthy of a professional production in the capital of the Rocky Mountain Empire?

The performances were extremely uneven. Matt McGrath, who proved remarkably good at tap-dancing in heels, struggled with his lines as drag queen Miss Tracy Mills (although he did much better as Casey's older brother Beau). A week into the production, and still not off book? I wondered if he was at fault when late in the second act Jamie Ann Romero flubbed some lines as well; perhaps the script was still being worked on. Not sure if that's better, at least from the audience's perspective: isn't that what previews are for?

Leaving the Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex, I noticed playbills for one of those "women-only" productions which present songs and skits designed specifically for the estrogen class. Were I a woman, I would be offended by such attempts to pander to my gender, treating me as a mere representative of a class and not a person with a unique experience and narrative. I think The Legend of Georgia McBride might be similarly offensive: a lazy effort at play-writing confident it will find ticket-buyers among a small minority thrilled simply to see drag queens on a real stage in a real theater.

Apparently, I need to coin a drag equivalent for "blaxploitation."

What preceded Jesus' silence

Peter Leithart's "Truncating the Politics of Jesus" puts me in mind, curiously enough, of a student-directed production of Godspell back in my university days. My directing professor nailed its failure eloquently: "This show was more about singing and dancing than it was about the Gospels." (This was a public university, by the way.) At this remove of years, I don't think the young, evangelically-minded director was to blame; instead, Godspell itself envisions Jesus as a likable fellow who enjoyed good times with his twelve best friends and others. The problem with this conception is that it makes the Crucifixion utterly inexplicable: what religious or civil authority would want to kill off someone whose most provocative action was to do little more than ask what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Sadly, this quietist version of the Gospel has come to dominate American evangelicalism, which continues its historical trend of affirming the interests of the broader culture in general and the agenda of those currently in power in particular. As Leithart helpfully observes, Jesus himself was neither meek nor mild: "What preceded Jesus’ silence in Pilate’s Praetorium were several years of inflammatory non-silence. ...If we don’t follow Jesus at the beginning, we’re unlikely to have an opportunity to follow him to the end." You have to take up your cross in order to submit to your crucifixion.

Contrary to expectation, age has not mellowed my preaching: more and more frequently, I find myself stridently declaiming against current public policy and mores, and against the silliness of too many of my co-religionists. To borrow a line from the evangelicals, it's what Jesus would do.

Jackie & Me (42)

Jackie & Me (playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Space Theatre through December 22), is an adaptation of the second novel in author Dan Gutman's series for children in which young Joey Stoshack has the power to visit baseball greats during times past by holding a baseball card. In this installment, Joey goes back in time to Jackie Robinson's rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

According to the production notes, the adaptation of the first novel in the series was produced by a children's theatre company, and this play clearly is intended for a similar audience. As one might expect from the genre, Joey meets a baseball great, learns an important moral lesson, and goes back to his life a person changed for the better. The trope is tired and trite, but relatively harmless when applied to Honus Wagner. In this case, it has the unfortunate effect of turning Jackie Robinson into the magical negro who is significant because of the character development he inspires in the play's white protagonist. Once again, the narrative of persons of color is mediated through a white perspective. (As part of his time-traveling gift, Joey magically becomes African-American. Yes, it was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch a white actor pretend he was black.) Set alongside the premiere of Just Like Us, Jackie & Me makes one wonder whether the DCTC wouldn't do well to attend one of those consciousness-raising seminars to which major corporations subject their executives.

Once again, I question the DCTC's production choices. While this play makes for fine children's theatre, that's not what the DCTC is. What family can afford to take their children to a show which charges $50 a seat? (I suppose I can picture such a family, which, given the close relationship of race to class in this country, probably would need a white mediator in order to appreciate a facet of the black experience.) With the fine company and excellent resources available to it, the DCTC would be better advised to choose more challenging adult fare, even if it's not from a new or minor playwright. Please don't tell me there are too many professional productions of Shakespeare or Mamet these days.

A far more thoughtful examination of the same historical period is the recent film 42 (now available on DVD). It has the decency to treat Jackie Robinson with dignity, tracing his story from his own point of view and not from that of a white interpreter. It's not a great movie, but nonetheless a worthy sports film which capably sets Jackie Robinson's rookie year in its historical and cultural context. Thereby, it demonstrates his significance for both baseball and race relations in these United States.

While we're on the subject of history, Jackie & Me features a galling moment of ahistorical nonsense. Unfortunately, in order to discuss it, I may offend some of my readers, so feel free to quit your browser now. In one scene, Jackie Robinson shows Joey a stack of hate mail, which includes several death threats towards Robinson and his young family. However, they clearly feel the worst of these letters is one which calls Robinson a "nigger," a word which young Joey is barely able to make pass his lips. (This is its sole pronunciation in the play.)

Now, I happen to have a black daughter, and that's not a word I want directed at her or any other person of color. However, "nigger" has taken on its greatest power to offend only in the last decade or so. In Jackie Robinson's time, it was an unwelcome epithet, but hardly taboo or unexpected. To import today's delicate sensibilities to an earlier era is not only silly, it destroys the ability of the past to speak clearly to the present.

Here's what I mean by that: when one reads The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, one is shocked by many of the characters' racism precisely because it is commonplace, unremarkable, and, to the characters themselves, entirely invisible. A plain presentation of the past allows us to see just how alien its environment is to us. That, in turn, prompts us to reflect on the differences between our time and theirs, and perhaps even encourages us to question what atrocities are invisible to us in our day. (In all seriousness, what do you think future generations will think of the thousands of abortions perpetrated in this country each year?)

I took Thing 1, now aged 10, to this production, and he seemed unfazed by the dramatic unveiling of "the 'N' word." Believe it or not, there were warnings posted in the lobby, but he was able to accept the moment as just another element in the torrent of abuse which Jackie Robinson in particular, and all black people of his day in general, faced on a daily basis. I think my son would have been better served by an unvarnished and unsantized presentation of the full ugliness of the racism his sister's people faced in this great country not too long ago. It's a reality with which all my children will have to contend, as all our nation's people still do.

The Most Deserving

The Most Deserving, by Catherine Trieschmann, receives its world premiere by the Denver Center Theatre Company (at the Ricketson Theatre through November 17), but I'm not sure why. It's described thusly in DCTC promotional material:

A small town arts council has $20,000 to award to a local artist with an “under-represented American voice.” Should they choose the teacher/painter of modest talent or the self-taught artist who creates religious figures out of trash? This comedy explores how gossip, politics and opinions of art can decide who is the most deserving.

Comedy is a marvelous form for social commentary, which one hopes The Most Deserving might be. At least, that's what I and Theatre Companion hoped, but while that appeared to be what the first act was setting up, the second act descended into a farce, in which almost all the characters abandoned correspondence to real human motivation and emotion and instead just acted as silly as possible. Granted, it was funny, but not as funny as a truly dedicated farce can be. 

The playwright's choice to move into a farce also destroyed any possibility of social commentary. For example, the play builds to a vote on the recipient of the $20,000 award; however, by the time the vote comes, the characters' plausibility has been so degraded that their votes are incomprehensible. The actors all handed in competent performances and demonstrated good sense for comic timing; the evening passed quickly and was entertaining; but in the end, the play has no point.

Why? This is the United States of America, with more MFA programs and budding playwrights than I can count. Not very many new works get produced, relatively speaking. Is this the best the DCTC could find? Live theater is not only expensive to attend, it's expensive to produce. I wish the DCTC had found a play which aimed to do more than merely make a couple hours pass by.

Just Like Us

Just Like Us is receiving its world premiere by the Denver Center Theatre Company (through November 3 at the Stage Theatre), but I have a hard time imagining it will be produced again (except perhaps by a company of very, very earnest high school students). Though competent as a play and as a production, it fails artistically because of its political orientation, and politically because of a deadly artistic choice.

Just Like Us is an adaptation of Helen Thorpe's book of the same name, and tells the true story of four young women in Denver from high school prom through college graduation. The parents of all four are Mexican immigrants of dubious legal status; two of the girls are legal residents and the other two do not "have papers" (a regular refrain in the show). We're told at the beginning (and in the publicity material) that their different statuses lead to divergent lives, but it's hard to see how that's the case: all four graduate from extremely respectable local universities. The divergence is not in outcome, but in experience, as the two "illegals" go through much more anxiety along their academic journey.

As a resident of metropolitan Denver throughout the period covered by the play, I was naturally struck by references to various events and locations. (One very strange note: three of the young women matriculate at the University of Denver, and the other at Regis University. With that, the fourth drops out entirely until the final scene, without any explanation whatsoever, as though she had moved to Boston. Seriously? The schools are 10 miles apart and maybe a 30 minute drive.) I could barely remember a number of local controversies which loomed large in the protagonists' lives, which very much illustrated the different worlds we respectively inhabit.

Just Like Us is an advocacy piece, arguing that the legal status of all migrant workers in this county should be regularized. It attempts to give opposing views a voice (Tom Tancredo actually appears as a character!). However, all these moments are bracketed, and not so subtly invalidated, by arguments from the show's dominant perspective. As an old-fashioned populist and humanist, I happen to agree with this point of view, at least in broad outline. However, political sympathy cannot excuse emotionally and intellectually manipulative moves in a work of art. Humanism demands that people be presented and treated with integrity as human beings, even if they happen to hold what one deems incorrect policy positions.

  In that regard, the play takes an ensemble approach which does not flesh out many of the characters; with annoying frequency, the actors are called on to make public policy statements (very) thinly disguised as dialogue. The exception is Marisela (in a standout performance by Yunuen Pardo), whose experience dominates and anchors the entire show. Less successful is Helen Thorpe, the journalist who documented this story in newspapers, radio, and ultimately a book. As a stage character, Helen Thorpe is the narrator who explains the Mexican immigrant community and experience to the audience. Mary Bacon does not quite bring Helen to life, but this failing lies more with the script than the actor. She is given very few moments of genuine human interaction, and instead has to deliver long chunks of journalistic exposition directly to the audience.

This brings us to Just Like Us's major artistic failing. It purports to give a voice to young illegal immigrants of color and notable accent, but its dominant voice is white and unaccented. Given that theatre tickets run from $50-60, playwright Karen Zacarías may have felt her audience would need a guide to an alien world of poverty and ranchero nightclubs. To Zacarías's credit, a closing scene has Marisela confront Helen over the latter's judgment of the former's choices and whether she had become properly "American." However, this scene does not exculpate all that comes before, as the audience was never given unmediated access to the lives of Marisela, her family and friends.

In the end, Just Like Us falls into the same soft paternalism of Mississippi Burning and The Help. Instead of inviting white, (often upper-) middle-class audiences to enter a truly different world, it reassures them that, so long as they vote in the correct way and give to appropriate causes, they (unlike less enlightened white people) are true friends to the oppressed and downtrodden. The character of Helen Thorpe may have been challenged, but the affluent audience was comforted.

Not to become overly theological, but this is the ultimate end of a humanism unmoored from its Christian roots. In the Incarnation, our Lord identified with those beneath him, with a people oppressed and downtrodden by sin and death. Liberalism unwilling to acknowledge, let alone submit to and imitate, the Incarnation cannot remain genuinely humanistic for long.

Death of a Salesman

Attention must be paid.

In the program notes for the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of Death of a Salesman (through October 20 in the Space Theatre), Dan Sullivan suggests that putting Arthur Miller's signature work on a pedestal is to disrespect it because he fears that when a play is a classic, callow youth will not take interest or pay attention. Perhaps Mr. Sullivan has been in the criticism game a little too long, as he seems to have forgotten that callow youth are not to be catered to by serious artists, or by critics who are judging a work's place in the canon. And in the canon of 20th century American theatre, Death of a Salesman stands astride the earth as a colossus (a metaphor I deploy with full knowledge of its irony). If callow youth choose not to pay attention, it's their loss.

Watching the DCTC production last week, I had a hard time judging the quality of the production. Dustin Hoffman is my generation's Willy Loman, and I never quite adjusted my expectations to Mike Hartman's lanky figure; which is not to say his performance was lacking. With the rest of the cast, he hit all the notes just right. I want to say the script is so perfect it couldn't be botched up, but anyone who's spent more than one evening at the theatre knows that anything can be ruined by a sufficiently dedicated incompetent. Linda Klein was a fine Linda, but John Hutton was notable for the gravity he brought to the mythic figure of Willy's older brother Ben. As Biff, John Patrick Hayden anchored the second act with a compelling distress which never descended into hysteria. Attention must also be paid to Michael Santo's pitch-perfect rendition of Charley.

Speaking of the second act, Theatre Companion and I could not help noticing murmuring among the audience as certain members realized Willy Loman's suicide was imminent. Seriously? What adult who can afford to buy a ticket to a professional production doesn't know how Death of a Salesman turns out? Because Dan Sullivan notwithstanding, it is a classic, one to which callow youth do well to pay attention. I was as callow as they come when I watched Dustin Hoffman's Willy struggle with John Malkovich's Biff back in 1985, but I was profoundly affected. It's probably been a couple decades since I last visited the script, so I was pleasantly surprised by the dialogue's naturalism and versimilitude. One of the benefits of live theatre is the ear catches things the eye misses when reading a script, and I was struck by how many characters call Willy Loman "kid" in the second act (always in a completely unaffected manner), one of Miller's more suble indicators of Willy's diminishment in the world around him. Of course, that easy facility with dialogue and subtext is part of the reason this is a classic: plenty of self-conscious serious works have failed to leave any impression because they failed to capture any sense of real human beings living real lives.

I love Death of a Salesman for many of the reasons which make it such a landmark in the canon. I love Arthur Miller for sticking it to Aristotle and all the other hide-bound traditionalists by making a man of common birth ("Loman" ["low man"] being a fairly obvious indicator) a tragic hero. Now that I am not such a youth (my callowness being a subject for discussion at a date to be indefinitely postponed), this reacquaintance caused me to reconsider the nature of Willy Loman's tragedy. I used to think Miller was telling us to pay attention to the common man, the low man who had led a life of productive work even if he had nothing to show for it at its end. I used to think Willy Loman was a tragic victim of the capitalist system and employers indifferent to a lifetime of service.

Now, deep in the throes of middle age, I realize Arthur Miller is a far better playwright than that. Willy Loman is a fool, a man who claims to be well-liked but knows he is not, a man who claims a noble character for himself and his sons which is radically at odds with the petty one he has created, a self-proclaimed family man who cheats on his wife and consequently crushes the spirit and all the youthful potential of his eldest son. Willy Loman does not fall victim to invincible and cruelly indifferent external forces: he boxes himself into his ignoble end by a lifetime of ignoble choices.

Arthur Miller recognizes this hubris for what it is, and tells us this, therefore, is a tragic hero, to whom attention must be paid. Miller reminds me, once again,  why I love the stage and the screen and books, and also of the necessity of the humanities. The humanities, especially the arts, are necessary because they recall to our attention the human, the human person before us. Willy Loman cannot be admired or held up for imitation, but he is a human being. As such, he has an inherent dignity: although he doesn't know it, he bears the image of his Creator and, for that reason alone, is worthy of a major play and is worthy of our attention.

Attention must be paid to such a man. To not pay attention is to deny our humanity and, perhaps, to deny our faith.

Thanks, public radio!

Not content to allow KUVO to be the only local public radio station wooing the Presbyterian Curmudgeon with grand prizes, Colorado Public Radio awarded me two tickets to all the shows in the Denver Center Theatre Company's 2013-14 season. That works out to ten, and other than A Christmas Carol (to which I will send the curmudgelings in my stead as I simply cannot bear another production of "this holiday favorite"), I hope to offer at least a cursory review of each in this space. Live theater is prohibitively expensive on a pastor's salary, and I don't want to let this marvelous providence go unappreciated or under-exploited.

Richard III in Denver

I'm largely in agreement with Lisa Bornstein's review of Richard III in today's Rocky Mountain News (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/12/comedy-upstages-villainy/), although I think she is far roughter on Andrew Long in the title role than is warranted. I saw the show on Tuesday, and I walked away thinking, as Bornstein notes, that the show very much belonged to the women. The strongest moment of the production was the scene between the three queens in the second act; and although it's been at least a decade since I've read or seen this play, I tend to think its power comes more from the lines as written by Shakespeare than from the relative weakness of the remainder of this particular staging.

If nothing else, I was once again struck by the wonder of Shakespeare's dialogue, even when character development is somewhat absent. (Actors playing the two murderers may have more to work with than those playing Hastings.) The man could, indisputably, write; it's impossible to imagine a better way of phrasing what his characters have to say. Every time I lay out hard-earned cash for a Shakespeare play, I wonder if it's worth the expense. Every time, I walk away knowing it was.

One last note for those intimidated by Elizabethan English: at a performance, one is never confused as to what the words and lines mean; instead, one's understanding and appreciation for the possibilities of our language is only increased. Yet another reason Shakespeare is immortal.

The word of the day is "recomforture"

Also "recomfiture," meaning "new comfort" (as defined in the Shakespeare Lexicon by Alexander Schmidt, p. 949). Contextually, "to receive renewed comfort."

Ex. "Every year, Girl Scout Thin Mint ice cream has been my recomforture."