Clybourne Park: A Hollow Hope

The quest for the great American race relations play continues with the Broadway debut of Clybourne Park. Bruce Norris, the playwright behind this 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, has said that he wrote this play in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Indeed, the first half of Clybourne Park is set in 1959, the same year Raisin debuted on Broadway. Clybourne Park discusses race through the lens of gentrification. Though Norris should be admired for highlighting these issues on a national stage, the one-note portrayal of many characters in this play ultimately raise the question of whether it's even possible for a white playwright (like Norris) to shed light on race relations in a non-cliched, meaningful way.

Clybourne Park was critically applauded when it was first produced Off-Broadway. In addition to the Pulitzer, the Times called it "a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy." Funny, it is, but damningly insightful I take issue with. Clybourne Park starts out promisingly in 1959 as a white couple, Bev and Russ, (Christina Kirk and Frank Wood) prepare to move out of their quaint, single family home. Their day is interrupted as some neighbors, Betsy and Carl (Annie Parisse and Jeremy Shamos), come to warn them that word on the street has it that the buyers of the house are "colored." Carl goes on to try to convince Russ to sell to the neighborhood committee for moral reasons. After all, once one black family moves in, the white families will flee, driving down housing prices. Things get awkward as Carl insists on asking Bev's black maid, Francine (Crystal Dickinson) for her opinion.

Much of the racial tension in this first act is subtextual, perhaps reflecting the repressed emotions of the era. This works since it leads to room for ambiguity. Russ and Bev do decide to sell the house to the African-American family, but it's unclear how much of their decision is based on their colorblindness. Underlying their decision is the pain of their son's recent suicide upon his return from Korea where he was accused of killing civilians. The revelation of this secret adds some depth to Russ and Bev, and some insight to their current situation. Unfortunately, Bev is prone to some physical tics, which I found distracting. These physical tics are clearly attributable to the director and not the actress, but I can't figure out for the like of me why the director would want Bev to wave her hands around over her head every time she speaks. She also jerks her head back every time she's about to open her mouth. Maybe she is supposed to be drunk? Nonetheless, this first act is a complete story all to itself with well drawn main characters who have believable motives.

But the second act is rather useless once the initial conceit is exposed. As the curtain rises, it's 2009. We see the same set, but this time with graffiti covering the 50's wallpaper. Six people--the same actors in different roles--sit around in chairs. They are discussing the gentrification of the neighborhood--particularly two characters' impending desire to renovate the house into a McMansion. Isn't this neat, you think. In 2009, white people are trying to get into the same neighborhood that black people couldn't break into fifty years ago. The ensuing escalating arguments about race then show how conversations about race stay the same, even as political correctness has taken over. Message conveyed in about five minutes, the next forty-five are filled with gratuitous jokes that come at the expense of reducing each of the six characters into a stereotype.

Most stereotyped is the renovating white couple (Parisse and Shamos). She is the Whole Foods liberal armed with politically correct platitudes. "Half my friends are black," she remarks. Shamos plays the angry white man pissed that he can't say the N word when black people say it all the time. He spends most of the time trying to tell a racist joke, much to his wife's chagrin. Their black counterparts (Dickinson and Gupton) are no better. Dickinson plays a self-righteous protector of African-American culture. Gupton's character is the snide deflector of tense racial conversation. christina Kirk's deadpan portrayal of a one-upper lawyer is the most credible. When some characters mention a retarded man they know, Kirk responds "My niece has Asperger's." The banter is fun, but ultimately covers much of the same material that other plays about race address.

Earlier this season, The Submission by Jeff Talbott ran at the MCC's Lucille Lortel theater. This play about the consequences of a white man submitting a play under a black woman's name addressed issues of affirmative action and white privilege. In The Submission, Jonathan Groff played the playwright who was fed up with what he saw as affirmative action for women and minorities. He held many of the same attitudes as the white characters in Clybourne Park. Why couldn't he say the N word when black people can? His foil, the black actress he hires to pretend to be the playwright (Rutina Wesley), judges him for the distince lack of slavery in his family.

When it comes to race relations, these plays leave me wondering if it's possible to tell a meaningful story without resorting to angry white man, and angry black woman stereotypes. Is there a way to do it without resorting to once edgy racial jokes that have had their corners softened by overuse? Clybourne Park doesn't transcend these constraints. I won't be waiting with bated breath for a play that does.

Death of a Salesman

The Mike Nichols production of Death of a Salesman is the best Broadway play I expect to see during my time in law school. After waiting for two hours, I successfully rushed a pair of thirty dollar student tickets this past Friday.

I had heard good things about the production, but didn't expect to connect to the material in a very meaningful way since I am a Miller novice. After seeing the terribly staged mid-century play, Look Back Jin Anger, a couple days ago, I was worried that I was in store for athree our snoozefest. sitting down in a partial view box seat with my friend as the curtain went up, I was also skeptical of the casting. Though I love Philip Seymour Hoffman, isnt he a bit too young to play Willy Loman, the sixty year old salesman drifting into senility? His sons, Biff and Happy, the inheritors of his hopes and dreams, are portrayed by the too-young looking Andrew Garfield and Finn Wittrock.

But ten minutes on, I was hooked. Philip Seymour Hoffman carries his heft around convincingly as a man who has eaten unhealthily for thirty five years as a traveling salesman. He first enters the stage, muttering "boy oh boy" quietly, after returning early from a failed sales trip. There's no sense that he's aware of an audience, but rather is just inside his own head. When his wife, Linda (Linda Emond) hears him shuffling around, she comes and persuades him to go to bed in the manner of the lifelong partner who just wants to make things easier for her husband near the end.

As a first time viewer of any production of the play, I was also drawn in by the writing and the plot. set in the 1940s, Miller's story is eerily resonant today. People of Willy Loman's age were the most susceptible to losing their jobs during the recent recession, no matter how loyal they were to the firm for the past thirty five years. I know many Biffs today--though generally from more affluent families--whom, having been raised by the school of self esteem, now find themselves unable to do anything. But the story is both general and specific.

Despite the global issues it addresses, Death of Salesman focuses on one specific family. Though everyone can relate to Willy's tendency to ask what could have been had he taken a different road, his plight is unique. We see Willy's life and motives through the hallucinated conversations he has with his brother (John Glover), a man who had gone to Alaska to make his fortune off the land. Now Willy, overweight and tied to the trappings of a middle class existence--- nice house in Brooklyn, a refrigerator, and other appliances--he wonders if should have gone the way of the other Loman and inhabited a new frontier.

The play's success must ultimately be attributed to the Mike Nichols, the director. Though I'm new to Miller, there were several scenes that were conducive to melodrama. Many scenes where people could be yelling at each other are toned down to reveal several notes of both disappointment and anger. The only person who overacts at times is Andrew Garfield, who shakes his head in anger a few too many times in the final twenty minutes of the play.

Death of a Salesman is a must see show. My only regret is that I hadn't seen other productions to compare it to.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: An Emo Musical

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (or BBAJ as fans are already dubbing it) is a musical that could have been written by emo comparative literature and history graduate students. History dominates the musical's content while comp lit guides its structure. On the history side, BBAJ is ostensibly about the rise of Andrew Jackson (Benjamin Walker), the seventh president of the United States. It includes some accurate, yet little known facts. Did you know Jackson's wife was technically still married when the two of them got married? The characterization of John Calhoun (Darren Goldstein), Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay are more amusing for those who remember them via AP US History. Van Buren and Clay are Yankee fops while Calhoun just cares about owning slaves. Most of the narrative history is presented by the storyteller (Kristine Nielsen), who appears to be a contemporary history teacher.

On the comparative literature side, BBAJ is one long, self-aware metaphor. It's super meta in that's it's cognizant of being a story about the Nineteenth Century told during the Twenty-First. Walker as Jackson talks directly to the narrator. Songs make references to Twentieth Century thinkers Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag. The lyrics helpfully tell us "she hadn't been born yet." On top of this, the production also parodies the emo sensibility. Whenever Jackson loses an election, or something doesn't go his way, he crosses his tight-legged jeans, tucks himself into his jacket and sulks in the corner. He and his wife Rachel initially bond over a bout of blood-letting. At one point, after Jackson's first failed presidential run, Cher's "Song for the Lonely" comes over the speaker system. A disco ball is busted out while Walker mimes slitting his wrists for several minutes.

Subtlety is not the goal here. Through such ribald storytelling, we are hit over the head with the comparisons between Jackson's presidential and current events. "Populism, Yeah Yeah," the opening number, draws parallels to the Tea Party. Jacksonites complain that Washington DC only represents Northeastern elitists while leaving frontiersmen like Jackson to fend against the Indians by themselves. Later, Jackson loses the election through the "Corrupt Bargain," which gave John Quincey Adams--"I should be president because my father was"--the presidency for promising Henry Clay Secretary of State. When Jackson emerges from political exile, going on to win the election of 1828, he finds that populism may not be the best strategy. After all, people voted for him so that he could make decisions for them. The question over the merits of direct democracy Jackson's final conflict.

Unfortunately, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson loses momentum in its final moments. It simply suggests to the audience that there are downsides to populism without exploring it further. Jackson also commits his most treacherous actions towards Native Americans towards the end with a bit of forced self-reflection.

Now playing at the Bernard Jacobs theatre after premiering Off-Broadway last year, BBAJ draws crowds of young hipsters dressed up for a rock concert. Much of the musical does sound like a rock show. As opposed to other contemporary "rock operas" like Next to Normal, the music here is not continuous. Indeed, the soundtrack is only a little more than 30 minutes. Instead of telling the story, the songs here seem to serve as interludes that are an excuse to blare loud music and turn on low-level, colored house lights. While lacking depth, this style is highly entertaining.

Benjamin Walker's commanding presence as Andrew Jackson is the best part of the BBAJ. He hams up the emo parts unselfconsciously. Though he doesn't have a great singing voice, he does have a powerful one. His speeches and jokes truly endear Jackson to the audience. But at the end, we are still left to decide Jackson's legacy as either one of the greatest presidents of all time, or a murderer.

Time Stands Still is Far from Static

Two restless souls--he a foreign correspondent, she a photojournalist--come back to their Brooklyn apartment after she gets hurt on the job in Donald Margulies' new play Time Stands Still. After a successful Broadway run through Manhattan Theater Company in the 2008-2009 season, it is now back after a summer hiatus. Sarah Goodwin (Laura Linney) has just woken from a coma after a roadside bomb flung her from her car, simultaneously killing her translator, Tariq. Wearing a leg brace and facial scabs, she limps around the apartment while her partner Jamie attends to her. But Sarah is also quick to shrug off special treatment, allowing her editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), and his new girlfriend Mandy (Christina Ricci). When they ask about the explosion, Sarah replies, "Occupational hazard," in a typically practical manner.

After the first two scenes, we may feel that we have all four of these characters figured out. Sarah is a cerebral world-saving workaholic; Jamie is her perfect counterpart as a romantic journalist; Richard is suffering from a midlife crisis, which involves getting together with Mandy, an unintellectual event planner.

Slowly, through incremental, well-paced steps, Donald Margulies reveals the back story behind Sarah's stoicism and Jamie's obsequiousness. Margulies peels back the layers of their personalities to reveal that things aren't as simple as they first appear. Margulies has mastered the art of exposition through convincing dialogue. It's not surprising that Time Stands Still earned him a Tony nomination for best play last year. Just like how a real couple might not dive into everything that they did while apart for work, it takes Sarah and Jamie some time to warm up to each other here.

When they do, things they want to say to each other seem to explode out of their mouths. Jamie proposes they get married after eight years of living together. He claims it's a good idea for hospital visitation rights while giving off the hint there's something lingering beneath the surface. Perhaps it's Sarah's affair with her translator, Tariq, which she reveals in the next line. Perhaps it's Jamie's own breakdown after seeing children explode in front of him, causing him to leave Sarah with Tariq in the first place. Is Jamie trying to redeem himself? Is he just insecure? And where does Sarah's hesitancy come from?

Margulies provides the answers to these questions in the second act without hitting the audience over the head with the characters' motivations. There are no sudden epiphanies or revelations. Rather, the characters figure themselves out at the same time as the audience. Sarah and Jamie realize that their real problem may be that they simply want different things. Jamie, to settle down, but Sarah to keep traveling. At the same time, Sarah's starting to question her own motives for her profession.

In one of the most moving monologues in the play, Sarah tells Jamie how she kept shooting film despite a woman's protests after an explosion in Mosul. "What I did was so wrong it was indecent...They didn't want me taking pictures. That was a sacred place to them...I live off the suffering of strangers." Meanwhile, Mandy is the perfect counterpoint to Sarah's worldviews. Looking at Sarah's pictures, Mandy starts to get upset. "Why didn't you help them?" she wants to know. Indeed, why don't we help the millions of poor people in the world, is one of the questions Time Stands Still asks us to consider. But the more important one is how does our answer to that question effect our relationships?

Many Laughs but Few Thoughts from La Bete

David Hirson's La Bete got off to an inauspicious start when it first premiered on Broadway in 1991. After a few previews, it only made it two twenty-five performances. Perhaps this was because it's entirely in iambic pentameter and set in Seventeenth Century France. But now, it's going for its second Broadway run after a successful West End revival. Its run was so successful that the producers brought it straight to Broadway this fall without a break. La Bete made it to everyone's most anticipated fall theatre list from New York Magazine to Vogue.

Sitting in the last balcony row of the packed Music Box Theatre during a recent weekday performance, the laughter all around me affirmed the show's newfound popularity. People seemed to love the nearly forty minutes worth of jokes and play on words that opened this two hour production. Indeed, there is something delightful about the cognitive dissonance of hearing contemporary, dirty jokes in a play told in rhyming iambic pentameter set three hundred and fifty years earlier in France. Maybe it's because it makes us modern audiences feel smarter. Also making us feel smart is the whole irony of a play about plays.

The farcical gist of La Bete is that the esteemed playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce) gets a new player, Valere (Mark Rylance), foisted on him by his patron, the Princess (Joanna Lumley). Elomire is a man of ideas who writes "serious" plays. He has no tolerance of vulgarity for vulgarity's sake. Just look at him working when the play opens. Surrounded by a huge library of books, we see him scratching away with his quill in a somber corner desk. His solitude is quickly ruined by Valere, the Princess's recommendation who looks like he has been sleeping on the street. Valere quickly launches into a monologue about his thoughts on art as he tries to persuade Elomire that he's the perfect addition to his acting troupe.

Mark Rylance's Valere is the main reason to see La Bete. His 25 minute opening diabtribe comes off as what a naturally self-absorbed person would say. Without skipping a beat, he goes from asking Elomire if he's talked too much about himself right back to talking about himself. If ADD had been diagnosable in the Seventeenth Century, Valere would have had it. Valere flits from Cicero to The Bible as topics of conversation. Rylance uses his body--in addition to words--to produce a comic effect. Before Valere's arrival, Elomire warns that Valere spits as he speaks. Sure enough, Rylance arrives eating and spitting simultaneously. After all this food, Valere develops some gas. He finally relieves himself in Elomire's bathroom, straining and talking through a half-open door.

However, once Rylance's performance is over, things get serious. The Princess shows up to order Elomire to accept Valere. Except, you see, Elomire, the Princess, and Valere all have different ideas of what "art" ought to be. Hirson gives the Princess and Elomire lengthy speeches where they spell out their different beliefs. Though delivered in iambic pentameter, this part is quite unsubtle and boring. Elomire and the Princess state the positions that you'd expect from a wealthy 17th Century patron and a well-known 17th Century playwright.

Less boring--but still cliched--Hirson allows Valere to perform a play within a play that spells out his beliefs about the state of art in 17th Century France. Again, no surprise here. His play seems to criticize the formal artistic establishment. Finally, only in the last ten minutes of the play does Hirson introduce a key point of tension: Will the troupe's players go with Valere or with Elomire? Though the troupes make a pretty clear decision, the audience is left with an unclear message. Hirson does not spend enough time explaining either actors' opinions or art or where these opinions come from. This leads to an abrupt, and somewhat unsastisfying ending. Luckily, we are consoled by the remembrance of the first half of the play and its clever laughs.

A Little Night Music

In A Little Night Music, Bernadette Peters doesn’t look a day over her 1985 self from Sunday in the Park with George. Peters, replacing Catherine Zeta Jones, plays Desiree Armfeldt, a middle-aged actress who seeks to rekindle a relationship with an old love after they see each other during one of her plays. But Desiree has two obstacles. First, Fredrik Egerman is now married to an eighteen year old, Anne. Second, Desiree has another lover—a married dragoon with a huge ego. Desiree’s decision to seek Fredrik’s affection takes her through the recesses of her memories, embracing nostalgia at every moment. The audience is along for this walk down memory lane. Peters’ strong, yet aging voice, is perfect for the role. We can hear all her regret in her wizened rendition of “Send in the Clowns.” She pauses at just the right times, and sheds real tears when she thinks she is losing Egerman. “Aren’t we a pair? Me with my feet on the ground; you in midair,” she reflects.

Desiree is not the only nostalgic character in A Little Night Music. Her mother, Mrs, Armfeldt, is played by the fabulous Elaine Stritch. In “Liaisons,” she hilariously recollects her past lovers—most of whom are now dead—and asks where they are now. It makes us wonder where our long lost friends are as well.

A Little Night Music builds a serious theme in that typically Sondheim way: through song lyrics and less through the libretto. Sondheim is a master of telling stories through multi-part songs with overlapping lines. The last song of the first act, “A Weekend in the Country” has each character revealing their motives for spending a weekend at Mrs. Armfeldt’s as the invitation is passed around. We learn that the dragoon is scheming to toss out Fredrik, while Anne schemes to keep an eye on her husband. The piece predicts the ensemble title song of Sondheim’s later musical, Into the Woods. That ten minute first number introduces all their characters and situations entirely in song, without a line of plain dialogue.

At the same time, A Little Night Music is not one of Sondheim’s masterpieces. While its music is consistently interesting, its shortfalls lie in its plot. Many of the songs seem only tangentially related to the plot. While “Liaisons,” advances the show’s themes, it doesn’t really advance the plot. A solo piece in the second act, “The Miller’s Wife,” sees Petra, the Egermans’ maid, preaching about enjoying one’s youth before settling down and getting married. But this is Petra’s seemingly only purpose in the show. Though she serves as a contrast to the virginal Anne, she doesn’t add anything to the texture of the show, even from an instrumental perspective.

The main thing preventing A Little Night Music from being great is its sudden ending. The tone shifts dramatically in the last ten minutes of the production, leading the audience to question the entire show that it just saw. When two characters run off together, throwing two others together, the theme of regret and a life poorly lived are completely gone as four characters begin seemingly new lives.

Chances, though, are that few people are seeing A Little Night Music for its plot or lessons. We're there to see Bernadette Peters. Her singing is remarkable, but her acting is a bit detached. It's as though her real-life role as a middle aged stage actress makes her character blend together with her real-life self. Desiree is difficult to separate from Peters. Still, Peters' nasal voice is perfect for deadpanning memorable lines from "You Must Meet My Wife" and other songs. A Little Night Music is overall quite memorable, even if mostly because of Peters' star power.

Next to Normal Provides Deep Catharsis

By intermission, there was nary a dry female eye surrounding me in the audience of last night's performance of Next to Normal at Broadway's Booth Theatre. It wasn't surprising that Tom Kitt's musical about the effects of a mother's bipolar on her family and self would have such an effect. After all, it did win the 2010 Pulitzer for drama, an accolade that is seldom bestowed on musicals. But Next to Normal is not your typical musical. It doesn't seek to transport you away from your problems to Oz, or the African jungles. Nor does it allow you to indulge in your favorite artists such as Frank Sinatra, Franki Valli, or even Green Day. Rather, Next to Normal forces audiences to dive inward and plumb the depths of their own emotions. In this way, it's more similar to a play than a typical musical.

Next to Normal is set in a typical American suburb during contemporary times. It opens with a "Just Another Day," where the mother, Diana (Marin Mazzie), sings "They're the perfect loving family, so adoring/And I love them every day of every week." Of course, this is the first sign that they're not the perfect loving family. The opening number ends with Diana making sandwiches on the floor. Her daughter Natalie (Meghann Fahy) storms off to leave her dad (Jason Danieley) to deal with this latest outburst. But this is no Desperate Housewives cliche of the soccer mom driven crazy by an boredom and routine. We soon learn that the source of Diana's angst is her son's death--sixteen years ago. She now imagines her son (Kyle Dean Massey) as a seventeen year old stomping around the house.

The major plot here, then, is how Diana treats her illness, and whether or not she can let go of the major cause -- her imagined son. Along the way, York also incorporates criticism of the medication of mental illness.The darkly funny piece entitled "My Psycho-pharmacologist And I," follows Diana through seven weeks of trying drug cocktails. In the background, the other characters sing "Zoloft and Paxil...Xanax and Prozac...these are a few of my favorite pills!" After seven weeks Diana tells the doctor, "I don't feel like myself. I don't feel anything," to which the good doc replies "Patient stable.

But Next to Normal is not a groundbreaking critique of the pharmaceutical industry. Its strength lies in its emotional depth and clarity. The two major relationships are between Diana and her husband Dan, and between Diana and Natalie. Diana's husband has been supportive all these years, but now must confront the fact that he may be enabling his wife. The chemistry is palpable between real-life couple Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley throughout. Most poignant is a duet in which Dan explains why he's stayed with Diana through all these years of mental illness. It's entirely believable by this point that a husband would stay so steadfastly by, driven by a complex mixture of love and commitment. The duet asks audiences to think of their own commitments. Is there anyone you would stay by through decades of mental illness?

The relationship between mother and daughter is rarely explored in this way in musical theater. Natalie has essentially been ignored for her entire life as her mother obsesses over her dead brother, and her father obsesses over her mother. Now when her classmate Henry (Adam Chanler-Berat) wants to date her, she cannot handle all the attention. How Natalie juggles her hatred, and her longing for her mother at the same time is beautifully shown through her defensive persona. Natalie is given many sarcastic lines, which Fahy delivers well. It's enough to remind the audience of their own insecurities as well.

Next to Normal has been criticized for being too serious. This is a good thing. I hope that this production's seriousness will inspire more thinking-person's musicals on Broadway.