AND suddenly — when no one was expecting it — Broadway woke up.
The season that just ended with the announcement of the Tony nominations was, by its conclusion, so fully alive and functionally adult it felt as if some brain-freezing, senses-numbing spell, cast perhaps by a singing witch from a Disney show, had at long last been lifted. New Yorkers who had more or less abandoned the theater as a necessary cultural pursuit started sounding like Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity,” who, after discovering that sex could be fun, murmured, “I never knew it could be like this.”
After all, the area around Times Square had become known, and accepted, as a spic-and-span theme park where you dropped C-notes to watch overdressed karaoke festivals, rote imitations of popular movies and uneasy but glamorous movie stars reciting lines. Yet within a scant three months there opened one show after another — all modest in presentation, but fierce in impact — that kept raising not only the neighborhood’s intelligence quotient but its emotion quotient: “Exit the King,” “God of Carnage,” “Hair,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “Mary Stuart,” “Next to Normal,” “The Norman Conquests,” “reasons to be pretty” and “Waiting for Godot.”
And that’s only in the last three months, an abundance that apparently overwhelmed the nominators for this year’s Tony Awards, who made some of the gravest omissions on record. This multitude of meaty choices for Broadway audiences harkened to a time, largely believed to be mythical, when the theater existed to stimulate and challenge instead of lull and comfort, boldly taking on subjects usually left untouched in polite conversation (death and existential loneliness, for starters). Which means the voters bestowing the Tony Awards on June 7 will have the hardest choices they have had to make in decades.
How did this happen? This was the season of the 21st century’s first American recession, a time when a slew of long-running hits closed in short order (in January) and big theaters seemed destined to sit uninhabited while not only New Yorkers but also tourists stayed home, hoarding pennies and watching demicelebrities dance without grace on television. I certainly wasn’t hoping for much. My 15 years as a theater critic for The New York Times had taught me that Broadway was not, to put it bluntly, the first place to look for original and vibrant theater.
Maybe, if you were lucky, you got two or three first-rate productions and a scattered assortment of accomplished performances. For years the kind of seasonal wrap-up I’m writing now would find me singling out and embellishing memorable moments in acting while lamenting the depersonalization of the musical and the death of daring in drama.
As recently as January I would have thought that, come May, I’d be writing that same old piece again. I had already been given my seasonal quota of epiphanies in the fall with the Royal Court Theater’s elegant and elegiac rendering of “The Seagull,” the best production of Chekhov I have ever seen, and a rousing, discreetly probing study of all-American greed by Horton Foote, “Dividing the Estate.” As for musicals, there was “Billy Elliot,” a hearty London import about a ballerina boy from coal-mining country (based on a movie, naturally). I had seen these productions in earlier incarnations, so I was expecting them to be good.
What I hadn’t expected was how much they would set the tone for what was to follow a few months later. “The Seagull,” directed by Ian Rickson, was infused with a delicate emotional complexity, poised on the brink that separates comedy from tragedy, as it elicited the full weight of Chekhov’s vision of human solitude. (The show, which closed in December, remains for me the season’s high point, with Kristin Scott Thomas giving the best performance by an actress this year. Its exclusion from the Tony nominations shows how meaningless the awards generally are as measures of artistic merit.)
“Billy Elliot” was, among other things, a study in economic desperation and how families can be fractured by hard times. So, for that matter, was “Dividing the Estate,” which saw a Texas clan reduced to civil war at the dinner table over their dwindling finances.
Dwindling finances were much on the minds of Broadway producers after this winter’s closing of a host of popular musicals, including “Hairspray” and “Monty Python’s Spamalot.” But necessity is the mother of any number of virtues — thrift, ingenuity and even imagination — that hadn’t been all that evident in New York theater.
This season has been replete with stories of producers pulling rabbits out of woefully empty-looking hats, including the reorganization of the financing for the Broadway transfer of the Public Theater’s production of “Hair” when the original backing fell apart. And after a spanner was thrown into the smooth-running machinery of Neil Pepe’s revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” — when its leading man and main box-office draw, Jeremy Piven, ducked out early on his contract — the producers quickly came up with not one, but two highly accomplished substitutes: Norbert Leo Butz and William H. Macy.
To see all three actors play Bobby Gould, a Hollywood studio chief who inconveniently catches a slight case of conscience, was to appreciate depth in a character that had seemed profoundly shallow. And in drawing attention to the other (excellent) cast members, Raúl Esparza and Elisabeth Moss, as they adjusted to each new Bobby (reinventing their characters each time), this revival reminded us that it is actors above all who furnish a stage and make a play breathe.
They can even make audiences pay attention to ideas that are anything but comforting. Bobby and his sycophantic associate, Charlie Fox, s****** over a potential bad-movie property: a brooding metaphysical novel about the end of life as we know it. Not a subject, they agree with disdain, to put rumps into seats. Yet this year it was often plays about comparably somber and far-reaching subjects that took over the theaters left empty by escapist musicals.
Death, and how to embrace it, is the subject of two starry shows now running: Moisés Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” starring Jane Fonda as a terminally ill musicologist who dances with Beethoven’s ghost, and, more improbably, “Exit the King,” Eugène Ionesco’s seldom-seen absurdist play about a monarch (played with vaudeville genius by Geoffrey Rush, directed by Neil Armfield) doing his best to avoid the grave that awaits him.
The year’s hit comedy, Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” directed by Matthew Warchus, finds two seemingly civilized married couples drawn into an increasingly physical argument that forces them to see themselves as lonely, primitive creatures, only out for themselves.
Even Diane Paulus’s inspired revival of “Hair,” a show remembered as a celebration of flaming youth, showed new respect for the shadows in the work and its sense of the evanescence of quick bright things. Arthur Laurents’s soft-hearted new production of “West Side Story” focused on the raw adolescent pain within its doomed love story.
And kindly remember that this was the season when what may be the greatest play of the 20th century returned to Broadway for the first time in more than 50 years: “Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett’s stark, magnificent comedy about two hobos staring down eternity in search of existential answers that never arrive. Starring Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman and John Glover, Anthony Page’s lucid and vigorously entertaining revival is eliciting serious laughter from its audiences. So is the triumphant imported London revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests” (also directed by Mr. Warchus), a sex farce about losers in love (or lust, anyway) that in its poignant conclusions about wistful and disappointed lives feels like the perfect bookend for a season that kicked into gear with “The Seagull.”
Never in my memory has the line between silly and serious been so consistently and effectively blurred on Broadway. Historically this may be just the moment for such a richly ambivalent sensibility. With the end of the two-term administration of an unpopular president and the inauguration of another who is asking for a hard new clarity in looking at economic and social problems, it suddenly seemed all right — heck, it seemed positively cathartic — to laugh again at grave matters on Broadway. It feels fitting that the first solid hit of 2009 was “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush,” a show in which the comedian Will Ferrell effectively asked audiences to clear their systems of any lingering hostility toward the former president.
Other works explored societal subjects less clownishly but just as engrossingly. Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Schiller’s “Mary Stuart,” about the rivalry between Elizabeth I and its title character (gloriously incarnated by Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer), uses hot-blooded melodrama to consider coolly the dehumanizing properties of politics. Bartlett Sher’s radiant revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” August Wilson’s masterpiece, presents a cosmic portrait of a dispossessed race in search of a home, yet does so with the deceptive ease of breezy storytelling. And “reasons to be pretty,” the Broadway debut of the caustic dramatist and filmmaker Neil LaBute, turns contemporary mall-culture language inside out to explore the natural cruelty within the way we speak today.
All these shows, by the way, are notable for the austerity of their presentations (three of them used brick walls as backdrops), which may be a concession to inflated production costs and shrinking purses. But the starkness also has the effect of reconfirming theater’s essential priorities, and especially the centrality of the actor. In overproduced musicals like “9 to 5” and “Guys and Dolls” all the flashy scenery, and the self-conscious winking that accompanied it, seemed evasive, like a gaudy smoke screen disguising a hollow center.
Where the theater — as a live art in the present tense — beats out its narrative brethren is in its ability to elicit undiluted, instinctive emotion from those who watch it, together and alone in a crowd. The best new musical of the season, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s “Next to Normal,” is an uncompromising portrait of the pain felt and caused by a bipolar suburban mother (played brilliantly by Alice Ripley) who is being treated with medications that numb her beyond caring. “Give me pain if that’s what’s real,” she sings. “It’s the price we pay to feel.” After years of self-induced anesthesia, Broadway has remembered that feeling, in heightened ways real life only occasionally affords, is what theater is about.
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Also, related: Charles Isherwood writes an appreciative article on "Joe Turner", calling it the best production of the season.
Rejoice! ‘Joe Turner’ Came Back
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD Published: May 13, 2009
ACHIEVEMENT can be measured in any number of ways, with only the more public and publicized yardsticks involving red carpets, unpaid-for designer dresses and the doling out of baubles to put on the mantelpiece. On a cool, cloudy Wednesday afternoon recently I was reminded that at the theater simple silence can be the most telling reward of all.
Hundreds of high school students were pouring into the Belasco Theater for a matinee performance of the Lincoln Center Theater revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Boisterous and feeling loose in an audience composed primarily of fellow students, they shouted greetings to one another from across the theater as they settled in. Teachers made the usual pleas for the kids to unplug themselves from their electronic assistants. When the show began, the energy level bubbled and roiled a little dangerously. I steeled myself for an afternoon of potential irritation and disruption.
And yes, whoops and catcalls greeted the moments in the play when romance blossomed between the dispossessed men and women sharing a boarding house in 1911 Pittsburgh. The students flew into a tumult of happy teasing when the two youngest characters in the play, on the cusp of adolescence, exchanged pledges of affection and a kiss or two.
But these lively displays of ragging were invariably followed by silences, by rapt attention to the moments of fierce conflict and lyrical monologue. During the play’s climax gasps erupted when the tormented Herald Loomis tore open his shirt and took a knife to his chest. (The loudest and most anguished, incidentally, came from a nonstudent in the audience, Anthony Page, the British director of Broadway’s current “Waiting for Godot.”)
There followed a silence as acute and tense — as alive — as any I’ve heard in a theater. And the tumultuous applause that rolled toward the stage when the curtain came down felt as natural as surf beating on the shore. It was not a polite gesture of good manners but an expression of overflowing excitement and pent-up energy in cathartic release.
The Broadway season that just closed was certainly extraordinary in some ways. As the economic collapse gained force last fall, a ferocious spate of winter closings seemed to foretell a lean spring. More than a dozen shows shuttered in January — nine on a single day — as consumers snapped their wallets shut and tourists hustled home to monitor their waning 401(k)s.
But by the spring a sizable herd of new productions had rushed into the void. Stars temporarily idling as the Hollywood economy seized up swanned onto Broadway in unusual numbers, providing the kind of box-office insurance producers find hard to resist. By the Tony-nomination cutoff point for the 2008-9 season almost every theater on Broadway was occupied, and competition was unusually fierce.
Look beyond sheer volume and beyond the superabundance of fine play revivals — that category could have been filled twice over with respectable nominees — and the quality of the season does not seem spectacular to this observer. Playing devil’s advocate with my colleague Ben Brantley, I’d argue that with only a single new play of true distinction, Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate” (originally written almost two decades ago), and a lackluster crop of musical revivals (the joyous reawakening of “Hair” being the sole exception), the Broadway year was just better than average — if a lot bigger than anyone had a right to expect.
There were 43 new Broadway productions this season, the most in more than 25 years. But any season that includes a revelatory resurrection of an American masterpiece qualifies as one to cherish. And Bartlett Sher’s reimagining of “Joe Turner” meets that criterion handily. Amid all the fine work on Broadway this season, for me this production towered above the rest, “shining like new money,” to borrow a line from Wilson, achieving the synthesis of a writer working at his peak, a director’s sympathetic vision and a gifted cast’s unified commitment that can result in a truly transcendent theatrical experience. I have already seen it twice and hope to see it again. I am almost willing to wander Times Square wearing a sandwich board to spread the gospel of its glory. (The production runs only through June 14.)
Wilson, who died in 2005, never lacked for critical love and Tony respect. All but one of the 10 plays in his 20th-century cycle appeared on Broadway (the exception was “Jitney”); all of those were nominated for best play, with “Fences” taking home the prize. Six won the best play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle — a record not likely to be bettered. His work has been produced widely at regional theaters.
And yet Wilson’s plays have rarely been bona fide commercial hits; most of the productions didn’t make money during their Broadway runs. Although “The Piano Lesson” was filmed for television, and “Fences” has long been in development as a movie, Wilson was largely overlooked by Hollywood — which suited him just fine. He was an artist committed to theater and to staking a strong claim in it to explore the African-American experience in all its complexity.
After sitting in thrall for three hours at “Joe Turner,” in that theater packed with teenagers — kids who clearly were having as much fun as they would have at the latest “X-Men” sequel — I found it hard to fathom why people are not falling over one another to get tickets. It has been a busy spring for play revivals of course. But I suspect Wilson’s interest in history, and specifically in African-American history, makes some imagine that his plays are homework, assignments to be dutifully undertaken once a year or so, like book reports for Black History Month.
That is hardly the case, as Mr. Sher’s production amply illustrates. Wilson’s plays are powerfully, consistently, almost ravishingly pleasurable theatrical experiences. Rich in poetry and humor, in potent but true conflict and wisdom, they dig so deeply into human experience that you emerge as from a hair-raising ride on an old wooden roller coaster, knuckles white not with fear and adrenaline but with that similar rush you get only rarely from aesthetic encounters, the sense of having journeyed through a lifetime of feeling in a matter of hours.
Certainly the plays depict the often harsh realities of black experience in America in the decades when racism was an omnipresent force in the culture, and sometimes enshrined in law. The story of “Joe Turner” is grounded in particularly brutal aspects of the African-American life in the dawning years of the 20th century. Herald Loomis, embodied with a quiet, captivating ferocity by Chad L. Coleman in the new production, lost seven years of freedom to forced labor although he committed no crime.
He arrives at a boarding house in the black Hill District of Pittsburgh with his daughter, Zonia (Amari Rose Leigh), in search of the wife he has not seen in many years. There he is counseled by the amateur mystic Bynum Walker (the great Roger Robinson, the only Tony nominee in a cast that all turned in Tony-worthy work), a tramp and healer who possesses a “binding song”: a magical knack for uniting people who belong together. And he comes in contact with more men and women seeking a place of refuge and a way station on life’s wearying road: the young laborer Jeremy Furlow (Andre Holland) and the two women Jeremy is attracted to, the sensitive Mattie Campbell (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and the cynical Molly Cunningham (Aunjanue Ellis).
This sketchy outline is just the barest framework of the play — like saying “Hamlet” is about a Danish prince who hates his stepdad. Mr. Sher’s production breaks away from the strict naturalism normally imposed on Wilson’s writing (and suggested in the playwright’s precise descriptions of setting) to open wide the play’s beating heart. The abstracted set design is a bold stroke and a masterly one, executed with sensitivity by Michael Yeargan. The events in the play take place simultaneously on a literal plane and a spiritual one, and it is this amplitude that gives the play its stature and its power.
Mr. Wilson communicates the plain realities of the hardship that the men and women in the play endure, and the toll it takes on their spirits. But he saw with equal clarity the redeeming beauty of their endurance and the dignity of the human search for self-realization. For the men and women of “Joe Turner” the unified self is most often found in companionship with another. As Bynum puts it in one of the play’s most resonant lines, his purpose in life is to make his mark “on the way people cling to each other out of the truth they find in themselves.”
The search for a home in the world — a refuge in another soul — is obviously not a quest limited to any subset of humanity. Nor is the physical or spiritual dispossession that the characters of “Joe Turner” suffer. (In a sense America has recently experienced cultural dispossession on a national scale, and continues to do so.) “Theater asserts that all of human life is universal,” Wilson once wrote. He made the same argument in every line of his work, and perhaps most powerfully and most transportingly in this majestic play, so wonderfully restored to contemporary life this season.
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