In memoriam

In memory of Bea Arthur, I would like to remind you of this excellent NBC 60th Anniversary celebration clip, which I posted almost 2 years ago. The clip has since been removed from YouTube (NBC won't let us have any fun!), but maybe you can recall what it was like to watch Nell Carter, Alfonso Ribeiro, Charlotte Rae, Soleil Moon Frye, et al. sing "Family" from Dreamgirls. Nobody came closer to making it work than Bea did. You see her enter, set down her bag of "groceries," turn to the camera and sing, "We are a family, like a giant tree..." and you think, wow, Bea Arthur could do just about anything with dignity and flair. What a treasure. RIP.

On Caryl Churchill's "Play for Gaza"

[Cross-posted from dotCommonweal.]

I'm a week late in issuing this recommendation, but I encourage you to read the cover story from the April 13 issue of The Nation, "Tell Her the Truth" by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. Kushner is a major American playwright (he won the Pulitzer for his two-part drama Angels in America), and Solomon is a perceptive theatre critic and the coeditor, with Kushner, of Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Paliestinian Conflict. Their article in The Nation is a careful study of British playwright Caryl Churchill's controversial work Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza.

Churchill is unquestionably a political provocateur. But it would be a serious mistake to leave it at that, for she is also a towering talent. Her plays (among them Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and A Number) fearlessly take on politically sensitive issues in all their uncomfortable ambiguity. At the same time, they tend to push boldly against established theatrical conventions. In recent years Churchill's plays have been especially spare and unsparing. I saw Far Away, a darkly fanciful meditation on the devastating effects of war, in London in 2001. The performance was 45 minutes long, but I have never seen a play whose impact was so direct and lasting. I get chills even now when I think of it.

Kushner and Solomon's article is valuable, I think, for several reasons: first, it directly confronts, and attempts to move past, the neuralgia that surrounds, and interferes with, any discussion of the situation in Israel and Palestine. Second, it clearly and carefully explains how a work of art, and especially a work of theater, can contribute to such a discussion, if it is permitted to function as art and not as a political tract. In this I think the article shares some ground with Cathleen Kaveny's recent piece for Commonweal about The Vagina Monologues and how Catholics might fruitfully respond to the popularity of that play on college campuses. A major difference, of course, is that (at least in the judgments of Kaveny and Kushner and Solomon), Churchill's work, unlike Ensler's, is an artistic achievement worthy of high esteem. This gives way to the third good reason to read the piece from The Nation: Kushner and Solomon's insightful reading of Seven Jewish Children as a dramatic text.

Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

Of course, the distress aroused by Seven Jewish Children has been, in many cases, completely detached from the actual content of the play. And reporting on the controversy tends to depend on unhelpfully rigid viewpoints (for example, a recent headline from the New York Times: "Readings and Talks for Pro-Gaza Playlet"). From Kushner and Solomon's article:

The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative.

One of the remarkable features of Caryl Churchill's recent plays is the scarcity of stage directions -- what Kushner and Solomon refer to as Churchill's "relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control." In this case, she has left everything but the words to the discretion of the artists who produce and perform the play.

The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is.

Churchill has been accused of writing a one-sided political tract, but in fact she has placed a great deal of faith in the insight and interpretive powers of directors, actors, and audiences.

Any director and company approaching the play will have to decide whether and how the audience will be made aware of the radical degree to which the written text has insisted, through its lack of character identification or stage action, on collaboration. Surely it's essential to understanding Seven Jewish Children that against the specifics of the script, the playwright, relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control, engineers a far-greater-than-usual slippage among text and performance and audience reception, producing an unusually large amount of room for variant readings.

If that sounds intriguing, you can download the play (in .pdf form, from the Royal Court Theatre website) and read it for yourself. It is brief -- only eight printed pages -- but there is much more to it than the controversy over its performance would suggest.

Also, torture

This morning I wrote a dotCommonweal post recommending Mark Danner's New York Review of Books article "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means." It's not a cheerful read, but I do think it's essential to understanding the situation we're in as a country, how we got here, and what's riding on the choices we make going forward.

Andrew Sullivan has been another valuable source and aggregator of information on this topic, especially since yesterday, when Obama released the "torture memos." So I've been checking in today to read Sullivan's roundups of reactions around the Web, and was quite surprised to find that the most recent one includes me! I assumed I'd have to provoke another fight with a New Yorker staff writer before I'd get the attention of the Dish again. I'm certainly no expert on law or foreign policy, but the Danner article (and his previous one, which I linked to at dotComm) helps to fill in a lot of necessary background.

What's your NPR name?

Steve Inskeep... Kai Rysdal... Dina Temple-Raston... There's a hypnotic, even totemic quality to the names of National Public Radio personalities. What about you? If you reported in the field for Morning Edition, how would you sign off? Your boring old actual name probably can't compete. But thanks to the efforts of Lianablog (linked from the NPR culture blog Monkey See), there's an easy way for you to build your very own NPR-worthy name.

Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

Genius! From New York, this is Molelie Ross-on-Wye. Back to you...

Come on, come on, push!

For me, this video captures something of the joy of Easter -- and the arrival of spring. (Make sure you have your sound turned on.)


Little D Hatching Out of the Egg from Class 1-208 on Vimeo.

Happy Easter!

You keep using that word...

Does anyone else remember hearing that The Office was going to have a spinoff series? I think this was announced after last season ended. At the time they said the new series would premiere following the Super Bowl... Is this ringing a bell for you?

At first I worried about what this new show would do to the original. Specifically, I worried that this "spinoff" would follow the further adventures of Ryan. It became plain sometime last season that the show's writers (or at least B.J. Novak) believed Ryan, the onetime temp, was a much, much more interesting character than he actually was. On the other hand, I thought, Oh well, a spinoff starring Ryan is a show I don't have to watch, so that's a plus. But then I heard nothing more, and I forgot all about it... Until I started seeing ads, while watching The Office, for Parks and Recreation, the new documentary-style sitcom that premieres tonight. And I thought, wait a minute, is this that "spinoff" they were talking about? If so, I thought, it seems pretty plain to me that they made that announcement before they had any real idea of what they planned to write. Because this show is obviously not a spinoff. For one thing, Rashida Jones -- aka Karen from the Stamford branch of Dunder Mifflin -- appears in Parks & Recreation playing an entirely different character. That's against spinoff rules (Law & Order notwithstanding). In fact, it's a direct contradiction of the third definition of "spinoff" in the American Heritage Dictionary: "Something derived from an earlier work, such as a television show starring a character who had a popular minor role in another show."

I bring all this up because I just read Alessandra Stanley's review of Parks & Recreation in today's New York Times. Here's how it begins:

The czar had a winter palace and a summer palace, city mouse visited country mouse, and “Green Acres” was the rustic reversal of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

Spinoffs, like second homes, can be refreshing, and some have been quite popular even when they are not based on a geographic move like “Frasier” but a shift to the opposite sex, as in “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.” Above all, it’s important to remember that NBC’s “Office” is itself a spinoff of sorts, an American adaptation of Ricky Gervais’s original British series.

Is it just me, or does Stanley seem not to understand what a "spinoff" is? I know she has a reputation for getting things wrong. But still: she writes about television for a living, and yet she seems to believe that Green Acres was a spinoff of The Beverly Hillbillies, which it wasn't. Unless she's applying the second AHD definition: "Something, such as a product, that is derived from something larger and more or less unrelated; a byproduct." But a television review should probably be sticking to the industry's particular meaning of the word, no? (In fact, Green Acres was related to Hillbillies in much the same way that The Office and Parks are related -- more on that later -- but it was a spinoff in the technical sense of another show, Petticoat Junction -- or so Wikipedia says.) The "second homes" comparison is a pretty classic example of the NYT's tendency to forget that not everyone summers in the Hamptons (do you ever get the feeling they're doing it on purpose, just to toy with us?). But: city mouse and country mouse? What the... They're two different characters in the same story, for heaven's sake. Allow me to help out: Mork and Mindy. Joanie Loves Chachi. Lou Grant; Rhoda; Phyllis. Those are spinoffs. Your examples -- with the exception of Frasier -- are not spinoffs. And neither is Parks and Recreation.

Stanley was apparently trying to set up an "indoor/outdoor" theme so that she could go on to write this:

So there is really nothing shameful about an outdoor version of an indoor comedy. NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” which begins on Thursday, is charming and funny in its own right and in its own way, even though it relies on the exact same mock-documentary format and deadpan parody as “The Office.”

First of all, I am of the opinion that a professional writer should never employ the phrase "the exact same." But perhaps the copy editor who should have fixed it was busy trying to figure out what "the czar" has to do with anything. Anyway, if you're wondering whether the review ever clarifies the relationship between The Office and Parks, I'll spare you the suspense: it doesn't. (For the record, that relationship seems to be some shared creative personnel and proximity in the NBC schedule.) The rest of the review is a slightly painful exercise in free association about women in sitcoms (and in politics, for some reason) -- an attempt to articulate why Amy Poehler's appearance in this one is groundbreaking. The longer you read, the less you're convinced that it's saying anything coherent. I don't recommend it.

I must have missed the customary flattering arts-section article about the show (by Dave Itzkoff) that ran a couple weeks ago. It clarifies things a little -- especially in its (intentionally sarcastic?) headline, "It's Not 'The Office.' The Boss Is a Woman."

Ask almost anyone at “Parks and Recreation” what the new series is about, and the answer, first and foremost, is that it’s not a spinoff of “The Office.” But the similarities are pervasive. Like Steve Carell’s character, Michael Scott, on “The Office,” Ms. Poehler’s Leslie Knope is a clueless if well-intentioned middle manager who undermines her own ambitions and misuses street slang. And a glance at the “Parks” creative roster — from its producers, who helped create the American version of “The Office”; to the writers who were hired from their “Office” spec scripts; to the actor, the director and the editor who were all recruited from that show — will tell you that “The Office” is an undeniable part of the new show’s DNA.

Fair enough. But maybe the article ought to note that the "spinoff" misperception likely stems from the fact that NBC announced, a while back, that they were planning to roll out a spinoff of The Office. You know?

In fact, as Itzkoff tells it, what they were really planning could more accurately have been described as "to replicate The Office's success."

While [The Office's U.S. adapter Greg] Daniels and [The Office producer Michael] Schur spent months batting around ideas, they were also lining up cast members, including Rashida Jones, an alumna of “The Office,” and Aziz Ansari, of the sketch show “The Human Giant,” who were given few details about the project. “They were like, ‘It’s either going to be a spinoff of ‘The Office’ or a totally separate thing,’ ” Mr. Ansari said. “It could have been like, ‘Yeah, so it’s about you and Vin Diesel running a day care center together, and then at night you’re vigilantes, and you fight crime.’”

For what it's worth, I'm not really planning to watch Parks (even when I'm home, which I won't be tonight -- Holy Thursday and all). The commercials are a bit too "like The Office, but not as funny" for my tastes. But I expected The Office to be terrible, so who knows? As long as it's not about Ryan the Former Temp, I might give it a shot.

Oy vey

As I mentioned, I saw Irena's Vow this week. The play is based on the true story of Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman who saved the lives of several Jews during the Shoah, making it an obvious topic of interest for Commonweal! You'll have to wait for my take to appear in the magazine, but in the meantime I'd like to call your attention to the interview with Tovah Feldshuh in today's New York Times. There's a lot to love about this article, but I was especially taken with the last two paragraphs:

[Feldshuh's] only impediment with “Irena’s Vow,” she said, was trying to understand the Catholic belief in Jesus as God incarnate.

“In my tradition,” she said, “it’s forbidden to engage in idol worship, and I wondered how I would approach Irena’s idea of Christ, and that he is the son of God. In her modesty she believed she had help, she felt surrounded by the Christ. I tend to think more along the scientific terms of a universal energy force.”

Sometimes it's interesting to learn all about how actors approach their character work. And sometimes...it's better not to know.

Inner City Pressure

Seen on the uptown 1 train last week: Greg! "Grig" Greg, from the New Zealand Consulate on The Flight of the Conchords! Pretty exciting. I was going to link to the show's website, but it's dismayingly lame. (Two words -- well, two abbreviated words: Fan vids.) So I won't. You might enjoy the MySpace page, though. And speaking of obsessive fans with too much time on their hands: did you know Mel has a blog?

Oh, and, uh, "Grig" is really Tony Award winner Frank Wood (Best Featured Actor, Side Man, 1999). So that's pretty cool also.

Things the ladies sitting behind me at last night's performance of Irena's Vow said out loud while the show was in progress

[When Tovah Feldshuh entered] "There she is."

[In the middle of a scene] "You know who she reminds me of?" [lengthy exchange about which actress on which TV show Feldshuh reminds this lady of. Finally:] "The girl from Another World, that's it."

"I knew he was gonna say that."

"Ohhhh, she can't keep the baby."

"He loves her."

[After a character onstage says, "On one condition..." and pauses meaningfully] "...Marry me." [A bad guess, by the way.]

"You get the gist." [?]

"Oh no, he's not gonna kill himself!"

All of these come directly from my notes on the show. Since the four ladies behind me were speaking as loudly as any of the actors in front of me, I figured I might as well write down their contributions to the script. (Which don't accurately reflect its content, by the way--no spoilers here.) I have not included the many, many exchanges that went like this: "What?" "[Someone else repeats whatever was just said onstage]" "Oh." And there were also several moments when something very mildly interesting happened in the play, and the women behind me reacted with a loud "Hm" or "Oh" -- but all four of them would do this in succession, so that I and everyone around me heard, "Oh. OH. Oh. Ohhhh."

Instead of telling people to turn off their phones -- which never works anyway (someone's phone rang during this show and they didn't even try to turn it off! It rang six or seven times!) -- I think preshow announcements should say, "If you should have a thought during tonight's performance, please remember that it's OK not to vocalize everything that comes into your head. In fact, when you're in a theatre watching a live performance, you're encouraged to keep your thoughts to yourself." Spread the word! Tell your friends!

You can talk at home for free

Why did the woman in the row behind us feel the need to narrate everything that was happening onstage to her teenage son? He could see and hear. He seemed to be of average intelligence. And it's not like In the Heights is all that hard to follow. Sure, there's a lot of Spanish, but this woman didn't seem to know any Spanish (thank God). She was describing the most obvious things, and doing so out loud. And I mean loud -- not even in a normal conversational tone, but louder, since she was trying to make herself heard over the show that was happening onstage. For me, the final straw came during "Benny's Dispatch," when Benny made reference to the "GWB" and I heard this woman shout, "...THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE." I was like, Lady, I'm sure you're very proud of yourself for knowing the lingo, but it's not crucial to the plot, so maybe you could refrain from showing off to your child until the show is over.

Of course, when I say that was "the final straw," all I mean is that's when I decided not to feel bad about turning around and giving these people a dirty look. But as you might have guessed, they weren't the type to notice or respond to dirty looks (and they were getting a bunch from the people sitting much closer than I was). Quite frankly, I'm not sure this lady realized there were other people present. So the patter kept up, all through the show. And I kept thanking God that In the Heights is such a loud show. Although, once I thought about it, I realized I'm not sure where to draw the line between cause and effect: was it the volume of the show (and the actors' mics in particular) that made this woman feel like it was OK to yell whatever came into her head? If she'd been doing that in a quieter theatre, the whole audience would have been shushing her after the first ninety seconds. On the other hand, maybe consistently noisy audiences are the reason the show's volume is turned up so high. This possibility occurred to me as we settled in for the second act, and I could hear a woman across the aisle open a bag of chips (why in the world would a theatre sell people chips?!) and start munching loudly. Then her cell phone rang, and she had to rummage through her bag to turn it off, making the bag of chips go crinkle, crinkle. Then back to eating. And then the phone rang AGAIN. I was just about ready to throw my program at her when the orchestra really kicked in... and after that I couldn't hear her anymore.

Speaking of obnoxious behavior at musicals, The Onion has a truly harrowing account of a situation I think we can all relate to: Oh No, Performers Coming Into Audience. Shudder.