What rhymes with Marty?
Marty is the much-anticipated musical version of the 1955 film. It’s written by Rupert Holmes (book), Charles Strouse (music), Lee Adams (lyrics) and Paddy Chayefsky (original screenplay). All of these Tony and Oscar winners, plus the cachet of John C. Reilly in the title role, mean great expectations. I saw a preview production.
I’ve not seen the movie Marty, and it never interested me much until I saw this new musical play based on it. This is a good thing, I think. This is, however, the only good thing.
The Web site indicates the time prominently.
ACT I: 60 minutes
15 minute intermission
ACT II: 60 minutes
The same information is provided scrupulously in the playbill. Alas, only the time for the intermission is honored, and you will feel that fact: Long solos that say nothing that couldn’t be said in one look. Rhymes that never get beyond wife/life and star/far. Plodding pace. One great moment of humor and theatrical success when Marty’s mom is infected with her sister’s bitterness. More plodding. Happy ending.
Marty doesn’t sing a single line that you can remember on the way out the of the theater — this is a downfall of music and lyrics alike. I did notice, however, that Marty frequently refers to himself by name. I don’t know why he’s such the illeist, but it gets old fast. All of these songs should be scrapped and replaced with one song that rhymes our beloved butcher’s name with a certain juvenlie adjective. That would be, in comparison, a blast of fresh air.
Brakethrough [sic] play!
Melissa James Gibson’s [sic]: “fatuous farrago” or “modern-day, urban Chekhov”? It was in any case the most buzzed about thing Off-Off Broadway last year. I missed the production at Soho Rep. I also like to think that nothing of enduring value could escape my critical hawkseye, but it’s been on the shelves at Drama Books for a month now and the raw evidence is completely damning: I missed the New York premiere of the most exciting and inventive play to be written in years. [sic] has the accessible trappings of a sitcom about artsy New York singles trying to make it on multiple levels, and it’s as unburdened by plot as the best/worst Woody Allen movies. But that’s all a fiendish ruse to distract from its entrancing poetry.
John Simon, in the first and most alliterative of the reviews I linked you to, would have probably dismissed Gibson’s text as hackneyed e. e. cummings if he had read it before he saw it. And people like Simon, resolutely suspicious of innovation in all its forms, play a valuable role in society. They keep us from being inundated by garbage, after all. But in making up our own minds, let’s do the work Simon is usually willing to do when he writes about poetry and examine a few lines from the play.
In the following snippet, Babette, an avant-garde visual artist, attempts a phone conversation with a gallery owner who displays her work and doesn’t want to talk to her:
Hi So I’m trying to Buy Some Time
so
Well has the fur vase sold I know there was
water damage but
and the glow-in-the-dark telephone table
What about the lamp covered with those
charming depictions of midcentury coal mining
agitation Well
are you sure you’ve displayed it Prominently Enough
oh can you call wait a second
The desperation in this one-sided dialogue is palpable. The tentative monosyllable in her introduction, followed by an ambiguous reference to time running out, followed by another cautious monosyllable sets up the insecurity Babette feels about her situation. In the lines that follow, her situation is hilariously revealed to be one of relying on the sale of artworks ranging from hopelessly dilettantish to ham-handedly didactic. The despair is again emphasized by the unpunctuated phrasing of her questions, which bring in interrupting qualifiers like “but” and “well” to maintain the attention of her unreceptive listener. The audacity in Babette’s then asking if her marginal artworks have been prominently displayed and then in her immediately asking someone she is pestering to hold show a surprising combination of delusion and toughness – at which point we have been given, with marvelous economy, a portrait of a recognizable and intriguing character.
Gibson’s a poet, all right. We’ll see if she can keep the style fresh and write sustainable plots. For now, the theater is blessed to have her.
Medea redux
(Quick note: Medea is Euripides’ tragedy about the betrayed and abandoned wife of Jason, the hero of the Golden Fleece epic. After being approached by Jason, who demands she turn over their sons to be reared by the princess-wife he has replaced her with, Medea plots and carries out an act of revenge that involves the death of nearly everyone dear to Jason.)
I saw the Deborah Warner-directed, Fiona Shaw-starring Medea at Brooklyn Academy of Music the other night. The crowd laughed riotously through much of it (yes, it’s a tragedy) and showered applause on it afterwords. I’m sure this was mostly due to Ms. Shaw, who merges brashness and humility in an empathy-commanding role that is upstaged only by the terrified child in the play’s harrowing climax (the which image may, for better or worse, haunt me the rest of my life).
Hard to say, then, how much of the production’s clear win with its audience was due to an ultra-contemporary acting style that pushes “accessibility” with the subtlety of a falling piano. We are informed shortly after the lights go up that this is Not Your Father’s Medea as a designer-jeaned chorus member declares the plight of the heroine with stammering hysteria worthy the Acting Studio c. 1960. Right before Medea’s entrance, another chorus member holds a pantomimed mike to her lips and delivers a couple of her lines as a passionate snatch of R&B. When Medea herself comes on, her line “Hello, ladies of Corinth. It is I,” is heard as “What are you staring at? It’s me. Duh.” After Jason enters to demand Medea hand over the children, he sighs and slaps his faded-denim-covered thighs virtually every time her mouth opens in the manner of a sitcom lunch-pail dad having a marital tiff. Lines are unceasingly halted mid-phrase to indicate uncertainty and disgust (What do you. [Hands flail.] Intend to do to me those boys are mine!), or muttered as throwaways to indicate sarcasm (accounting for much of the laughter – like most seasoned actors, Shaw knows how to be funny at the expense of a line’s inherent power).
The premise of this and innumerable other productions of contemporized classics is that old plays need the dust blown off them, that they need an injection of new life to keep them relevant and accessible. I mostly agree with this. But this also requires resuscitation of those elements that give a play the enduring quality of a classic. I don’t read Greek, but Euripides’ verse has to be good for something. The anxiety of the BAM/Abbey Theatre Medea (and the “translation” it uses) is that heightened speech will alienate audiences, and hence needs to be vulgarized or delivered at a spitfire pace to save it from itself. But the elevated quality of Euripides’ speech is precisely what makes Medea’s bizarre and extreme plot bearable to watch. Its spoken poetry not only entices the ear, it prepares us to enter a realm where lust, jealousy and despair will follow an unrelenting trajectory into betrayal, murder, and infanticide. It prepares us for a realm where the extreme is routine – and purposefully so. The mission of tragedy is not merely to shock and titillate, but to enable a viewing of emotionally devastating events through a structure that counter-balances them. To obscure or ignore the heightened speech and staging which comprise that necessary structure is to leave an audience with something unfocused, indulgent, and less emotionally penetrating.
Director Warner seems to know this. The tone changes completely in the critical climactic scenes. The messenger who recounts the murder of Jason’s new bride brings a snowballing dread to his tale by giving weight and shape to every word. The chorus, anticipating a mother’s slaying of her young sons, keens accordingly as an ominous chord swells and one of them performs an exorcism dance. And the actual climax, while occurring offstage, is alluded to with a sudden sleight-of-hand whose terrifying, heartbreaking impact is a triumph of ingenious stagecraft. (It has to be seen to be believed.)
The Abbey Theatre’s international success with Medea is therefore a mixed blessing. The power of its most crucial scenes makes for indispensable theatergoing. Its path-of-least-resistance approach to the remaining play may nonetheless send yet another signal to producers that classics cannot reach a sizeable audience without pandering to the laziest of sensibilities.