cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
I’ve been doing some very satisfying housecleaning, including going through a lot of old photos. Among them I found this set of snapshots documenting not only Jenny Holzer’s 1993 installation called “Marquees” (produced by Creative Time) but also pre-Disney 42nd Street.
Adding to the archive I’m creating at HarryKondoleon.com, I’ve just posted online the review that I wrote for the Soho News in 1980 of his one-act play Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise, one of his best and most-produced works.
This was his first full production in New York City (while he was still a student at Yale Drama School), my first exposure to his wicked wit and attention-getting language, and the first attention he got from the New York press. He wrote the play for a class taught by Arthur Kopit. The assignment was to write a play with three characters named A, B, and C. As I synopsized in my review:
Carl confesses to his best friend Alvin that he’s in love with another woman besides his wife, Adel; Alvin assures him that’s okay for a widower, not knowing that Adel survived her latest suicide attempt and not knowing that Carl’s paramour is his own wife, Beth. Adel arrives in disguise, wrists bound, and swearing vengeance. “Carl is the source of everything evil in the world!” she cries. “Adel, calm down,” soothes Alvin, “you’re beginning to distort things.”
You can read the complete review online here.
I’m going through a moment of revisiting the work of Spalding Gray, watching the movie versions of his monologues for the first time and fielding correspondence from people writing about his early work. I just dug out a column I wrote for the Soho News in 1980, the year I first met and got to know Spalding, in which I talk about a reading he did of a piece called Seven Shots from a Family Album.
“I’ve never encountered writing that so carefully balances comedy, horror, and eroticism. Gray articulates primitive sexual fantasies in a way that is direct, imaginative, and psychologically accurate where, say, Henry Miller’s writing is merely pornographic and John Rechy’s is hostile.”
I can’t remember now whether he ever published the work, but you can read my report online here.
One of my favorite movies of the year so far has been My Dog Tulip, based on the book by J. R. Ackerley, a somewhat obscure but much-admired gay man of letters in the last half of the 20th century. Watching it twice, thinking about it, and talking it over with friends has sent me back to the review I wrote in the Soho News in 1981 of what was then the newly-issued paperback edition of Ackerley’s novel, We Think the World of You. The novel has since been made into a fine little movie starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman. My review is one of my favorite things I ever wrote. I happened to have personal connections at the time to the artist Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood‘s longtime partner, who I knew had made one of his famous portraits of Ackerley, and I landed what I thought was a major coup by getting Bachardy to let us publish his picture (see below) with my review.
On the sad occasion of Jill Clayburgh’s death from leukemia at age 66, I’m reminded of the one time I went to her house. She wasn’t there. I went to interview her husband, the playwright David Rabe (above, with Jill and their daughter Lily), for the Soho News when he was directing his own play Goose and Tom-Tom at the Public Theater. That production never opened, though the Public did later finally put up a different version. This interview catches Rabe before Robert Altman did his excellent film version of Streamers and before Hurlyburly brought Rabe back into mainstream attention, first with the star-studded stage production, then with the Hollywood movie version, and eventually with the revival by the New Group just a couple of years ago. You can read my story online here.
another eye opens 