A Wicked Good Play

This combination of joy and sadness—this is the core of truly beautiful music.  Just as it is the core of drama.  Of life.

I saw a stage performance of Jon Maran’s Old Wicked Songs ten (or more) years ago, shortly after it first appeared in the mid-90s.  I know that I found the play thoroughly compelling when I saw it, and I was not disappointed when I picked it up to read this weekend.

Old Wicked Songs is a two-character play.  Stephen Hoffman, a twenty-five-year-old American concert pianist, comes to Vienna to study.  Stephen has lost his way and his will as a performer, and he hopes that a new teacher will inspire him.  Professor Josef Mashkan—who is not the man with whom Stephen hoped to study—is a teacher of voice in his late 50s; he hopes that teaching Stephen to work with a singer will help him to better get in touch with his own music.  Mashkan plans to teach Stephen using Schumann’s Dichterliebe song cycle (and the music features prominently in the play).

Because it is 1986—and because Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi intelligence officer—is running for the presidency in Austria, the play raises issues about the past (both personal and collective), about the Holocaust, and about Austrians’ complicity in the extermination of the Jews.  But the play is really about these two men—their stories, their struggles, their conflicts.

Sometimes a play appears to fanfare and accolades, but then it becomes forgotten within a few seasons.  Sometimes such a fate is completely justified, but that is certainly not the case with this piece.  Old Wicked Songs is a beautiful, thought-provoking piece of theatre, and I would love to see it on the stage again.

 

Searching for Hope in Darkness

Lynn Nottage, the author of Intimate Apparel and Crumbs from the Table of Joy, scored this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her new play, Ruined.  The play is powerful on the page, and I hope that its critical success in Chicago (where it premiered at the Goodman Theatre) and in New York will lead to productions in other cities throughout the country.

Set in and around a brothel in war-torn Congo, Ruined explores the lives of four women affected by the violence that surrounds them.  Mama Nida, the owner of the brothel, is a tough woman determined to do whatever she must in order to survive.  She walks a dangerous line, as she is willing to entertain both government troops and rebel militiamen in her bar (on different evenings, of course).  Josephine, one of Mama Nida’s girls, dreams that a travelling diamond merchant (one of the brothel’s customers) will one day whisk her away to the metropolis.  It seems clear, though, that the merchant’s talk of running away with her is just that—talk.  Salima, one of two new girls, finds a type of refuge in the brothel.  She was kidnapped, raped, and held captive by soldiers for five months; when she returned to her village, her husband and her family turned their backs on her.  Sophie, the other new girl, is the “ruined” woman of the title—she has suffered a horrible attack and mutilation at the hands of soldiers (although it is never revealed if those soldiers were members of the government or members of the rebellion—and, the characters in Nottage’s play seem to suggest, there may not be much difference between the two).

Nottage’s play, which is based on extensive interviews that she conducted with refugees in Africa, sheds light on issues that are probably unfamiliar to most Americans.  Because Nottage focuses on the very moving stories of these women, though, the play never becomes preachy or political.  For now, give it a read; when it comes to town, reserve a seat!

 

Is it Just Me…

…or is Yasmina Reza’s new play, The God of Carnage, overrated?  I know, it won the Tony Award for Best Play this year.  (It didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, though; that honor went to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.)  I know, I read the script.  (Reading a play is not the same as watching a performance of that play.  Reza’s play Art is, for me, much better on the stage than it is on the page.)  But to me, this script is about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

The play has four characters—two married couples—who meet to discuss an act of playground violence that involved their sons.  Of course, that’s merely a way for Reza to get to other issues:  Marital problems.  Corporate corruption.  Civility.  Morality.  Pet murder.  Onstage vomiting.

Would I go to see a production of The God of Carnage?  Probably…if someone else bought me a ticket.

 

Have you read Donald Margulies?

I saw Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends in the studio theatre at the St. Louis Rep several seasons ago.  (It was probably shortly after the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000.)  It was a good production, but I soured on the play a little after seeing the HBO version (which starred Greg Kinnear and Andie MacDowell, two actors I don’t generally care for).  I picked up the script this week, and it’s really more powerful and resonant than I remembered.  The play has four characters–two married couples who have been friends for years.  When one of the husbands decides to end his marriage, though, his decision has ramifications not only for his wife and children but also for his relationship with their friends.

Because I enjoyed this piece so much, I picked up a collection of Margulies’s other plays.  I read What’s Wrong with This Picture (about a teenager and his father dealing with the death of the boy’s mother, who literally returns from the grave—literally! not as a ghost—to care for her husband and son).  I understand what Margulies is doing, but the concept doesn’t entirely work for me. 

Much more interesting is Sight Unseen (about a successful American artist, his ex-girlfriend, and her British archeologist husband).  The play raises great questions about art (What is art? What is good art? Who decides what art is good? What is it worth? What power does it have? What does it mean for an artist to sell out?) and relationships.  Structurally, this play effectively uses one of the same techniques that Margulies employs in Dinner with Friends (which he wrote later), moving through time to take the audience (or the reader) from the characters’ present into their pasts.

 

Two Plays

Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius is a play about stamp-collecting.  Yawn, right?  No, not at all!  Rebeck, who (in addition to writing numerous plays) has written for such television shows as Law and Order and NYPD Blue, has crafted a fast-paced drama about two step-sisters who have discovered a pair of extremely valuable stamps among their deceased grandfather’s collection.  The older sister want to keep the stamps as a memory of her grandfather, while her younger sister wants to sell them to a shadowy and short-tempered collector.  Family tension, crosses and double-crosses, violence…David Mamet meets Tracy Letts.

God’s Ear, a new play by Jenny Schwartz, is an unusual and abstract look at a family dealing with the loss of their young son.  Characters move in and out of time and space, a mother and her daughter speak in cliches that become poems, and both GI Joe and the Tooth Fairy make extended appearances.  The words of this script on the page can’t possibly capture what a performace of those words must look like.  The child of Sarah Ruhl and Edward Albee.