November 9 – The Public Theater has been running an aggressively political season this year, starting with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson opening on Broadway, then Lisa Kron’s In the Wake and Lawrence Wright’s The Human Scale, and soon to come The Great Game — Afghanistan. A late addition to the schedule was Richard Nelson’s The Hopey Changey Thing, a play audaciously set on November 2, 2010 – that is, election day – which is also the same night the production (directed by the author) opened at the Public Theater. Talk about a high-wire act! I admire Nelson for being willing to write a play with a short shelf life in order to capture — for the theatrical record, as it were – some of the conversations and issues in the air right this minute without waiting to view from the cool distance of history. How current is it? The first line of the play is “Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo! Fuck you, Kirsten Gillibrand, and the horse you rode in on, whose name is Chuck!”
The speaker is Richard (Jay O. Sanders), a lawyer in the State Attorney General’s office, holding court in the kitchen of his sister Barbara’s house in Rhinebeck. Unmarried Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) teaches high school and looks after their Uncle Ben (Jon deVries), an actor who’s recently suffered a heart attack and has amnesia. They have two other sisters, Marian (Laila Robbins), an elementary school teacher in Rhinebeck who helps look after Ben, and Jane (J. Smith-Cameron), a recently divorced writer who lives in Manhattan with her new boyfriend Tim (Shuler Hensley) and does everything she can to avoid spending time in the depressing company of Barbara and Ben.
Three sisters, a brother, an elderly dotty uncle…Chekhov anyone? Nelson lays out this family dynamic in a blatantly schematic manner, assigning each character a single trait and having them always and only live out that role. Richard is the blowhard lawyer, Barbara is the long-suffering “old maid” who can’t stand conflict in her vicinity, Jane is the insecure one who sides with Richard in any family conflict, and Marian is the bossy unpleasant one who says whatever she thinks and is rabidly attached to the Democratic party line. I can’t help contrasting “Hopey Changey” with Lisa Kron’s play, which eschews obvious Republican-bashing and portrays characters thinking deeply and independently about political issues. Nelson’s up to something else, presenting characters who are not ostensibly mouthpieces for the author’s opinions but the semi-informed and semi-clueless, semi-smart and semi-defensive liberals whose opinions are formed by an attachment to the New York Times and the Huffington Post as middle-American households might be driven by Fox News. These New Yorkers see themselves as the center of American culture in a way that’s both patronizing and ignorant. Marian holds people in rigid party-line categories. Barbara claims never to have met anyone from Texas, and her sibs chime in with writing off that state as populated only by yahoos. Richard didn’t vote at all in the election – he admired his former boss, Eliot Spitzer, and despises Cuomo – and Jean did her me-too act.
As the characters talked about Sarah Palin, the election, the wars, campaign financing, Obama’s performance as president, I found myself going back and forth – outraged when I didn’t agree with them, absorbed when I did. Ultimately, I found the play thin and not especially illuminating. (For one thing, Uncle Sam, I mean Uncle Ben’s illness was so metaphorical, Susan Sontag must be spinning in her grave.) Nevertheless, I’m impressed that Nelson was able to get the play up and running at all. He certainly was able to amass a cast of excellent veteran actors, whom I was happy to see even if they were playing limited generic parts. And if the family aspect of the play is modeled on Chekhov, the political aspect is pure Brecht: if you don’t like the world, change it.
November 11 – Andy is a big fan of Radiolab, the WNYC-FM program and podcast whose hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, weaving storytelling and science into sound and music-rich documentaries. So we went to a live show at Greene Space in the West Village, where the hosts were trying out material for a forthcoming show on the subject of symmetry. I found their approach disconcertingly random, more trivia-mongering than persuasive argument, but they had John Cameron Mitchell as a musical guest to sing “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch – a lovely song and lovely performance, even if I reject Aristophanes’ thesis that we are born with a longing for our “other half” that turns into love. We went out for dinner at Trattoria Toscana on Carmine Street with Andy’s friend Steve Kass, and David Hollander joined us after a concert at Lincoln Center.
another eye opens 