Tag Archives: Theatre

October 6, 2011 · 7:34 am

Humor Abuse: See It at The Seattle Rep

I’m not really a clown kind of guy, but years ago, back in the 80′s, I spent a memorable evening of theatre in the presence of one of the best.  Avner the Eccentric, he called himself, and I remember laughing as hard as I have ever laughed that night.  You know the kind of laugh I mean: eyes narrowed and tears flowing, you just can’t smile any bigger, your inner 10-year-old is clamoring to be let out, and your abs just hurt, and even as you laugh, you have the presence of mind to say, “I haven’t laughed this hard in a long, long time.”  That’s a “thank you” moment, and that night, I thanked God for Avner.

So now, after last night, it’s thank God for Lorenzo.

With Humor Abuse at The Seattle Rep, Lorenzo Pisoni (writer and actor) and Erica Schmidt (director) have crafted a quiet little masterpiece, a finished cabinet of a play.   By that I simply mean that it brings the kind of joy detailed finish work brings, as opposed to the overwhelming grandeur of a giant house.  With self-effacing humor, seeming incredulity, and frankness that never descends into meanness (how I cherish that spirit these days), Lorenzo lovingly critiques the world of his “clown dad” Larry, holding up the mirror to his old man (and himself) in such a way that by the end, we’ve all fallen for both father and son.  I say fallen…Lorenzo, as expected, does most of the falling himself.  Funny to say I could watch guys like him fall all day long.

Lorenzo apologizes up front for his lack of funniness, which of course, we laugh at.  I confess I get a bit worried, because I know what it’s like to not be funny.  But he’s lying, of course, as clowns are no doubt wont to do, the arts of deception and false perception being among their chief tools.   So now, safe with the knowledge that little comedy would be forthcoming, we get coaxed into a little boy’s circus world.  With stories of juggling and hat tricks and monkey suits,  Lorenzo teases us into chortle and chuckle and knee-slap and finally, with fins and ladders and stairs and balloons and a woman from the audience in a little black dress, we are, by the end of the evening, back in that fabulous place of teary, bent over howling breathlessness, again saying thank you.   And then…and then…a final moment, so beautifully crafted.  Our hearts, so open with all that laughter, receive a a bit of well-earned astonishment.  Even wisdom.

This is what honoring your story looks like.   My impression is that Lorenzo, in sharing the shadows of his father’s all-too-human navigation of somewhat remote and anonymous pain, has himself landed in a place we all recognize.  Upon examination, looking back, we stand flummoxed and astonished at our mysterious families, all at once sentimental and honest, both horrified and whimsically philosophical about it all.  There are so many secrets for all of us, aren’t there?  Our parents end up as regular, amazing folk, just like us, their lives full of injury and damages and running and finally, they break their backs (sometimes literally) chasing their ghosts and dreams.  And so we reflect and consider these people who raised us, spending a lifetime of energy putting our stories together in ways we can not only make sense of, but beauty of.   In the end, telling the truth the way Lorenzo does it, is an act of love.  So much love.

And to top it all off, Lorenzo is just really good at what he does.  Delightful…simple as that.

Go see this performance if you get the chance.  Oh, yeah, one more thing: a final”hat’s off” to all those in the design of the space.  Loved it.  The lighting was fabulous.

Thanks, Lorenzo, not so much for the laughs, but for the magic…

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July 12, 2011 · 8:29 am

George Bernard Shaw and the Fight for Pygmalion

Charlie Murphy as Eliza Dolittle in The Abbey Theatre's recent production

“Don’t talk to me of romances; I was sent into the world to dance on them with thick boots–to shatter, stab, and murder them.” — George Bernard Shaw.  (His Collected Letters)

The basic facts are these: George Bernard Shaw wrote the play on which the musical My Fair Lady is based  99 years ago, in 1912.   According to Wikipedia’s entry on Pygmalion (and the footnotes on this look pretty good), the idea for Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts first came to Shaw in 1897, and the play was written specifically for one of the leading actresses of the time.  The production history of Pygmalion, oddly enough, began with a German language production in 1913, followed by a New York production the following spring.  The London production opened then a month later, in April of 1914.

What is clear is that Shaw had no intention of allowing Henry Higgins and Eliza Dolittle to finish Pygmalion or My Fair Lady as lovers.  At the end of the play (and Shaw wrote several endings over the years trying to keep this as clear as possible), Eliza declares her independence from Higgins, and leaves him.   What is equally as clear is that from the beginning, audiences have fought him over it.   According to a very recent thesis written by New Zealand PhD Candidate Derek John McGovern (I’m still making my way through it, but it’s pretty interesting stuff…you can find it here), the process of audiences and actors colluding to get Higgins and Eliza  together began as early as the first London production, in which lines were ad-libbed that would move the characters toward the affair that everyone seemed to hope they would have.   In a moment I would have love to have watched, Shaw went back to the 100th performance of Pygmalion and was horrified to see that the producer/director, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, had “sweetened” the ending, something about Higgins tossing Eliza a bouquet from a window.  He told Tree, “Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot.”

Shaw fought the idea of a Higgins/Eliza marriage for the rest of his life.   Part of the problem, according to McGovern, was Shaw’s use of the word “romance” in the title.  He was referring to something other than romantic love.  In Shaw’s famous prose “sequel” to the play entitled “What Happened Afterwards”, Shaw clarifies what he meant by “romance”:  ”Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable…”  The idea here is tied to the ideals of Romanticism, which is something different than was is popularly conceived of as “romance.”   As the quote above demonstrates clearly, Shaw hated “romances.”   (Thanks to McGovern for pointing out that quote.)

In Shaw’s “sequel,” Eliza marries Freddie, but maintains a strong relationship with Higgins as a major force in her life, which strikes me as realistic, strong, and exactly right.  According to McGovern, Pygmalion is “one of the great English Comedies of the twentieth century–notable not only for its brilliantly drawn characters, wit, satire, and subversiveness, but also for its underlying concerns of socialism, feminism and gender.”   Shaw wrote and rewrote not only the stage versions, but also created several screenplays in which he attempted to contractually tie directors to his intentions, but the film versions of Pygmalion (apparently, I haven’t seen them–though I’d love to) all keep the romantic love alive.

No wonder the ending of My Fair Lady is now so uncomfortable.   As an audience, we still get sucked into wishing Higgins would change his ways so he and Eliza might make some sense together, but we don’t stay there.   We’ve caught up with Shaw, and can finally see what he was getting at.   We celebrate Eliza’s triumph, yet we also see that the price to her has been enormous.  For her to stand up to him and declare her independence seems exactly right to us, and for her to return to a romantic relationship with Higgins seems absurd after being treated as she’s been, especially when his own “conversion” or “awakening” is nothing more than the fact that he’s “grown accustomed to her face.”  Does Higgins’ behavior change?  Not one bit, nor did Shaw want it to.  But it also makes sense to me that she does not throw Higgins out of her life completely, but remains (by choice) tied to this huge personality who has been a mentor, teacher, and in his own strange way, a friend.

I like this quote from the McGovern paper in which he cites a critic who observed that Pygmalion is “an Ibsen-inspired tale of a woman’s escape from class and gender oppression to a position of economic and personal freedom.”

I’d like to see that production.

I’d like to direct it…

•••

Here’s a link to the play, for those who’d like to read it.  Pygmalion at Project Gutenberg.

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July 11, 2011 · 9:10 am

Thoughts on “My Fair Lady”

[Caveat:  I wrote the following over the weekend before I'd had much a chance to read up on Shaw's take on things.  Now I know more.  Tomorrow I'll return to this theme.  What follows in this post is uninformed and rambly, but I'd still be interested in seeing a production that came at the play from this perspective.]

Emilie Faith Thompson and Allen Fitzpatrick in the Heritage Theatre Festival's production of "My Fair Lady." Photo Credit: Michael Bailey

This past weekend, I had the good fortune to experience the musical My Fair Lady at the Heritage Theatre Festival in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my son Daniel Berryman played the role of Freddie.  He was pretty spectacular, I thought (hey, I’m his father), but that’s not the point.   The point is that My Fair Lady is a bang up show, and a puzzle.

And all of a sudden, I find myself wishing I had the chance to direct it.

Not that there was anything wrong with the production I saw; on the contrary—it was really, really good.  Allen Fitzpatrick (another fine Seattle actor) was stellar as Henry Higgins, Charles Sutherland’s Colonel Pickering was great, Kenneth H. Waller as Alfred P. Dolittle was a delight, and Emelie Faith Thompson gave us a lovely Eliza and sang beautifully.  A smaller role of note: Lydia Horan’s portrayal of Mrs. Pierce was superb, challenging Higgins with real power.  And of course, the guy playing Freddie captured me completely.

But by the end of the second viewing on the same day, it was the play that really caught my attention.   My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which a British gentleman who specializes in speech gives a cockney, flower-selling “guttersnipe” of a girl a shot at middle and/or lower-upper class life by way of correcting her speech and manners.  He does it by means that are militant, near abusive, and profoundly effective.   At the end of the play, the girl is truly transformed.   But then she’s discarded, and in a well-deserved fury, Eliza leaves the Professor, at which point he has a bit of remorse at losing her.  His awakening is ambiguous at best.  Since this is a musical, we all sort of think that Eliza loves Henry, but frustratingly, we never actually see much evidence of it.   The two of them get one bit of celebration—including a dance—after she finally gets the “Rain in Spain” speech right, but after that…pffft.   And then, inexplicably, in an ending that infuriates and confounds almost everyone, Eliza returns to Higgins in order to…? What?  Is she going to be his lover?  His assistant?  His housemaid?  Who knows?

Here’s the problem.  The book for this musical is, in my humble opinion, pretty spectacular.  This is George Bernard Shaw (nearly–the adaptation by Alan Jay Lerner apparently lifts a lot of the text straight from the play), for goodness sake.  I haven’t yet compared the texts of Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, but Higgins is deliciously verbose, witty, and caustic as he skewers the ideals and manners of the Empire.   And the confusion of poor Eliza as she achieves her “elevation” is (if you really think about it) heart wrenching.  I can’t help but believe (like I said, I haven’t really researched, so correct me if I’m really wrong) that Shaw was using the romance primarily as a vehicle on which to hang his sharp and insightful social criticism.

We tend to ignore the fact that this musical seems strange to our sensibilities.   Let me float a hypothesis: while the lower and upper classes are certainly differentiated, that difference is neutralized by the ever-present stylistic smile.    What we know in our hearts is that if, at the end of a performance at the Seattle Opera, the well-heeled patrons were to come pouring out only to be greeted, hounded and confronted by beggars and the cardboard carrying homeless aggressively looking to score a handout or the sale of a fake Rolex (please pardon the stereotypes—I’m referencing the action at the top of the play), the tension and fear would drive a whole new appreciation of the stakes of what Higgins proposes when he brags he can change the “guttersnipe” into a princess.

To a postmodern culture, while economic advancement (in an egalitarian kind of way) drives much social activism, to suggest that one need adapt language and manners in order to “rise” in the world is patently offensive.   Who is to say Eliza needs changing?  On the surface of things, we no longer believe that a person’s worth and standing should be based on the kinds of trivial nonsense Higgins spouts about the English language.   And surely we don’t have a class system as England does and did.

Oh, no?

In 2011 in America, the incomes of the upper classes and middle/lower classes are spreading further and further apart.   Intellect and educational opportunity are still battlegrounds (without judgment, I observe that reading the magazines of Newsmax.com and Mother Jones are very different intellectual experiences).  The dual realities of Eliza’s rage at being treated as nothing more than “baggage” and her notable desire to raise herself out of hand-to-mouth poverty are palpable even today.   And how about the whole notion of language and how it relates to the majority class and what it means to be an American?  But these street-level realities have real bite to them, just as Shaw’s work does.   But in My Fair Lady, the bite goes away until Eliza comes back to Higgins at the very end, and we are confounded.

But think about this: the relationship of Higgins and Eliza is economic if it is anything.   What happens if they each become class symbols and Shaw’s idea is for us to see that relationship is often economic?  Surely that’s not so today?

Oh, no?

I’m probably just being the guy people accuse me of being, the guy that over-thinks things (it’s just a musical, Jeff…c’mon!) but I can’t help but wonder what you might get if you gave the My Fair Lady world a bit more bite?

Would be fun to see…

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May 28, 2011 · 9:32 am

Two Pennies Left: Why The “How” of a Thing Matters

The Two Pennies Flower

FYI, up front, this post is not about flowers.  It is about content and form in art-making, conversation, and relationship.   It’s about the connection of human essence and identity to the fundamental, structural realities aesthetic forms demand.   It’s about the challenge of creating art wherein form and content create a unity of power and affect.   And perhaps, it about why I secretly churn when joy over rich content obliterates the discussion of that richness delivered in middling form.

In an age of rising global concern over injustice, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and emergency responses to tsunamis, tornadoes, and political upheaval, the old Chinese Proverb (that I would love to have some real history on) seems a bit ludicrous, especially if you take it in an old-fashioned literal sense, as if it’s a levitical law.  I’ve seen this proverb at least three ways.

  • When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
  • If you have two pennies, spend one on bread to give you life, and one on a flower to give meaning to your life. –
  • If you have two pennies, spend one on bread and the other on a flower.  The bread will sustain life.  The flower will give you a reason to live.
Most websites I saw as I googled this (“two pennies bread flower”) put up a picture of a flower, stuck the quote underneath, and left it at that, figuring the reader gets the point.  But whenever I trot out this idea out, I inevitably get pushback from the literalists in the group who think it’s ridiculous.  50% for beauty?  If you had a $100 million dollars to give, you’d have us slice off $50 mil of it for…what?  Flowers?  Paintings?  Music? Bright color fabric instead of feed sacks?   Spend money teaching one person to dance, and let three others die hungry?  Ungodly, wasteful, and selfish.  Absurd, really, as sentiment tears usually are.

Sound like anybody you know?

Stay with me here: this came to mind this morning while reflecting on the importance of the “how” of a thing.   It’s a personal thing, I know: read about us INFP’s (Myers-Briggs again), and you’ll discover that often, to us, the answer to the question at hand is far less important than the tone and atmosphere of the interactions taking place–in other words, the “how” of the conversation is just as important as the “what.”  Equally important.   Sometimes more so. 

For me, content=what, form=how.  Art happens when the two come together in skillful, multi-layered fashion.  Some artists begin with the “what” (the bread, the idea, the content), and then struggle with the “how” that actual materials demand, be they words, play structures, or pigments.   Others begin with the “how” (the flower, the paints, the colors, the lines and shapes), manipulating them on a path of discovery that leads to ideas and content–the what–in a process that becomes so unified that it’s nearly impossible to tell where the how ends and the what begins.

I like the first rendition of the quote above: When you only have two pennies left in the world…speaks of essence, foundations, fundamentals of being human.  At the end of things, in final breaths, in desperate, nail-biting times, we are content and form, mostly broken in both places, often trying to dance our fading hearts and meanings on sore and bleeding feet.  But if you give me salve for my feet and warn me that I must give up dancing, you show little understanding of my me-ness.   My dance-ness.

When in the theatre, I often thrill at messages given, and shake my head at forms they come in.  Truly, I am as interested in forms as I am messages.   Sometimes–and here I confess my heretical nature–I think I might just as soon see a questionable message in strong form as a good message in lousy form.   Even as I type those words, I balk at them a bit, and know I’m not 100% serious about it, because bad ideas delivered in beauty can wreck and destroy.  On the other hand, and we all know this, ideas of the “good” delivered poorly often change lives for the better.  God’s arrival via bad art is an everyday occurrence.  How many passionate artists are honest enough to say they wish that wasn’t true.

Here’s the rub: “hows” are hard.  Great delivery of “hows” is very hard.   Isn’t a good “what” enough?  To mean well, to speak life-giving ideas, to even garner praise from people who, because of culture, education, and preference, have a hard time telling one “how” from another…isn’t that enough?  After all, as I’ve mentioned, good gets done either way, doesn’t it?

There are more things in heaven and earth, though, than we dream of.  Shakespeare’s tipping of the hat to the mystery of how sacrifice and beauty work on us as we pursue them is profound.   We long to know the good, even the best ways of living, and as artists, we seek to express, communicate, inspire, and compel.  To do it, we have to grapple hard and long with ways of doing things, with material, with forms and structures.  We hammer and stretch, build and wreck, thrill and strain under heavy lifting, and all the while, as we long for the great moment of aesthetic unity in which artistic power engulfs an audience, transformation is already engulfing us.

Bread and flower, destination and journey, flesh and spirit.

Content and form.

The -ness of the human lies in these unities, and the soulful physical labor to bring these tensions into a taut and graceful dance is the birthplace–not of great meaning alone nor great form alone–but of that which we call great art.

The night of theatre that changed my life?  One in which I did not understand one word spoken.

But, oh, did I get it.

I’ll take the bread and the flower…

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May 22, 2011 · 8:18 am

Theatre Spiked Sunday Morning: On Experiencing “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”

Mike Daisey (photo by Kevin Berne)

Race.  Labor.  Civil War.  Apple.  Corporate responsibility, art, and Christ.  The present moment, Sabbath, friendship, taking on the world.  Somewhere in China, men, women, boys, and girls, each having singular, personal names just like we do, sacred mysteries all (see yesterday’s post), will go to work today, and the only thing keeping them from flinging themselves off the top of the building where they work is a suicide net.  This after they’ve reportedly signed the no-suicide clause of the contract necessary before they could get the job.   Back in America, blacks, latinos, Jews, and all manner of minority groups will face a day where put-downs, insults, glass ceilings, and injustices galore will greet them as their children play outside, and as the injustice wagon gets pulled around the planet, the skin colors and histories and particular hatreds change from country to country, but the I-hate-you-for-no-good-reason-except-that-you’re-not-me circus goes on.  The history of peoples, businesses, nations, ethnicities, and religions moseys on.   And in an etherland neither seen nor much believed in, perhaps the ghouly harbingers of rage, cruelty, and hatred sit on haunches thigh-deep in sin, evil, wrong, and gut-busting despair, enjoying their perch atop the high reaches, cackling and chortling at the fools of dirty earth.

Where’s a rapture when you need one?

It’s Paul’s letter to the Colossians for my Sunday morning get-my-head-in-the-game time, but Mike Daisey keeps running around in my consciousness hollering and gesturing and slamming tables, railing at me about Steve Jobs, the laptop I’m typing on, and the likely teenage hands that put the whole computer together by hand in a 12 hour shift.   I say running around–Daisey’s actually just sitting in one spot, roaring away, a tiny piece of profuse sweat and spit hurling himself at a world colossus riding a whirlwind.   Daisey is John the Baptist converting the old guard one offender at a time, infecting all us lesser sinners with a virus, as he puts it, that will not go away.

I’m talking about The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a monologue performance (I’ve done some of those) by Mike Daisey closing today at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.   Add it to the handful of performances I’ve seen in my life that will lock themselves in my mind and experience as the essence of what the theatre is about, what it’s here to do, and how it accomplishes it. Not to mention the fact that my love affair with all things Apple has been laced now with an angst I’m not altogether happy about, but am thankful for.

Daisey’s work is not for everyone, and will certainly not have much appeal for many conservative types, religious or not.  F-bombs sail into the audience with great regularity, serving all manner of purposes from shrill comedy to blasting outrage and contempt. And if he was just getting paid to make me forget my troubles and dragging me through mud to do it, I’d complain.  But this man is on a mission–a startling, compelling, well worth doing, mission.   He’s an old-time abolitionist, a rabble-rousing labor organizer, a man kicking corporate America in the place where it hurts most.

To make a long story short, Daisey is creating a troubling triangle between 1) the business genius and personality of Steve Jobs and the Apple Kingdom (and folks like him), 2) Shenzhen, China, and a 430,000 worker factory that hand-assembles many of the Apple products (and to be fair, the electronic products of about half of everything bought in the U.S., and 3) you and me and our blindness as consumers complicit in life-destroying labor practices around the world.

Brilliantly conceived, powerfully delivered, and disturbingly effective, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs created a congregation out of us disparate ticket-holders.   Perhaps we weren’t ready to run from the theatre and smash our iPhones (after all, I do need to check the weather, post some photos, and yes! tweet about the play I just saw! ), but the young factory hands (that will become damaged discarded hands from the industrial repetition strain inherent in assembling these laptops and iPads in the process line) will be in our consciousness for a long time.   The image Mike Daisey wanted us to leave with, that made us laugh, perhaps too uncomfortably, was a bit over the top.  Or was it?

Blood oozing up through the keys on the keyboard.

I suppose my pump had been primed by the work on the Civil War that is informing my own playwriting just now, not to mention seeing Brownie Points Friday night at Taproot (Another play addressing injustice and race, but more on that play later.)  Daisey’s reporting of the labor practices in Shenzhen reminded me so much of the conditions of slavery before the Civil War, and what some have called the neo-slavery after.   Do things never change?

There was even a handout at the end.   Really?  A handout?  A “what-to-do-next” handout?  Yes, and it made complete sense. There were four suggestions, and I suppose with the blog piece, I’ve taken part in one.  But the point to notice is that the force of what we’d just seen made it completely reasonable that action was expected, and we knew it.

If it was just agit-prop, I’d complain.

As it turns out, my Sunday morning is spiked with the headiness of what great theatre can do.

Are you sure you really want to talk faith and art…

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