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Culture Vulture: The Best of 2021

December 30, 2021

YEAR IN REVIEW

My cultural round-up has usually centered on theater. This year theater finally did come back and hooray for that but late in a year otherwise unusually dominated by TV and movies (I logged 158 on my watchlist). It’s hard to know how to make any kind of ranked list – Best Things Of The Year – but my #1 discovery was AROOJ AFTAB, the queer Pakistani-born Brooklyn-based singer whose gorgeous album Vulture Prince nabbed her a Best New Artist Grammy nomination and whose show at Pioneer Works was my first indoor concert since the Before Times.

LAURIE ANDERSON’s six Norton Lectures wandered deeply and widely over history, literature, science, politics, and personal reminiscence.

Television has never been my go-to but I felt deeply fed by watching all four seasons of the Australian series Please Like Me, and I have The New Yorker’s Alex Barasch to thank for making me curious and then a big fan of creator and star Josh Thomas (his second series, Everything’s Going To Be Okay not so much). I generally resist the big shows everyone loves and talks about (will I ever watch Succession? Doubtful) but I broke down and watched Ted Lasso, shocked by how good the writing and performances were; ditto The White Lotus and Hacks.

Documentaries I always have time for, and this year the music docs were stellar. Questlove’s Summer of Soul made going back to the movie theater rapturous. Also great: Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground and Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers. In a category of its own was Peter Jackson’s revisiting The Beatles: Get Back, eight hours of bliss for this Beatlemaniac. I’m a latecomer to Frederick Wiseman’s long slow masterpieces but this year his City Hall blew me away with its portrait of Boston city government and charismatic mayor Marty Walsh (now running Biden’s Department of Transportation). Hulu’s Pride series impressed me by going above and beyond familiar (white) faces and names in front of and behind the camera.

Also in another category was Can You Bring It, the documentary about BILL T. JONES, the dance company he created with his late partner Arnie Zane, and recreating the AIDS-era piece D-Man in the Water. Jones also created one of the finest live performances I saw this year, deep blue sea at the Park Avenue Armory, a fierce mashup of Moby Dick and Martin Luther King, Jr., with a cast of 100 dancers and state-of-the-art visual design.

I saw lots of feature films, online and on the big screen, my favorites being Nomadland (with stunning performance by Frances McDormand, above), Zola, The French Dispatch, and Judas and the Black Messiah. Art-house streaming services turned me on several great unheralded foreign films: Aquarius, directed by the Brazilian master Kleber Mendonça Filho, with an astonishing lead performance by Sonia Braga, and Arab Blues, a French-Tunisian comedy by first-time director Manele Labidi.

SARAH SCHULMAN (above) figured heavily in my cultural year, first with Let the Record Show, her exceptionally thorough and well-written history of ACT UP, and then the Criterion Channel allowed me to catch up with Stephen Winter’s 2015 Jason and Shirley, in which Schulman and Jack Waters give mind-boggling performances as documentarian Shirley Clarke and Jason Holiday, the subject of Portrait of Jason. Another book that excited me this year was Paul B. Preciado’s essay collection An Apartment on Uranus, which also served the function of making me track down the powerful, legendarily transgressive film Baise-Moi by Preciado’s former partner Virginie Despentes.

Between the pandemic shutdown and the post-George Floyd racial reckoning, whose work gets shown and how we get access felt quite transformed this year. The best live theater I saw were two highly experimental pieces – Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., performed by the ever-great Deirdre O’Connell (above) directed by Les Waters, and Tina Satter and Half Straddle’s Is This a Room, with an unforgettable frail-tough performance by Emily Davis as government whistle-blower Reality Winner (below in white shirt) — that wound up playing in rep! on Broadway! Another live triumph: Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah at the Public Theater, sharply staged by Candis B. Jones on Adam Rigg’s spectacular set with five strong performances. Streaming allowed me to catch Kristin Wong’s excellent solo show Sweatshop Overlord after its run at New York Theater Workshop.

Almost always in a category of his own, WALLACE SHAWN distinguished himself playing Lucky in Scott Elliott’s remarkably effective Zoom version of Waiting for Godot and had the good fortune to have Lili Taylor perform his monologue The Fever at the Minetta Lane. But one of the absolute best Things of the Year was the release of two exquisitely produced theater-of-the-ear six-part podcasts (available online for free) of Shawn’s dark drama The Designated Mourner and his surrealist comedy Grasses of a Thousand Colors, performed by the original New York casts (including Shawn himself) directed by Andre Gregory with phenomenal sound design by Bruce Odland.

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Performance Diary: Wally Shawn fever

October 22, 2021

Most people who aware of Wally Shawn know him as a funny face in movies like The Princess Bride or a funny voice in animated films like Toy Story. A subset of the population associates him with My Dinner with Andre, Louis Malle’s 1981 film of Shawn and director Andre Gregory sitting in a restaurant talking about life and death and art; apparently, a whole new generation has caught onto this film thanks to references on The Simpsons and TikTok parodies, and it’s been cited as progenitor to the world of low-budget mumblecore movies. Shawn’s most substantial contribution as an artist, however, is his body of work as a playwright. He hasn’t written that many plays, and they’re not performed that often. When they do, it’s a cause for celebration and attention.

Currently onstage at the Minetta Lane Theatre is the one-person play The Fever, co-produced by Audible (which plans to release it as an audiobook) and the New Group, whose artistic director Scott Elliott is one of Shawn’s primary champions in the theater world and who staged this production, which stars Lili Taylor. Tiny, whip-smart, and super-appealing, Taylor previously appeared in Shawn’s play Aunt Dan and Lemon, also directed by Elliott for the New Group. The Fever is a tricky, intellectually thorny, emotionally challenging piece (the complete text is available online here), and Taylor (below, photographed by Daniel Rader) dives deeply and bravely into this exercise in thinking out loud.

Originally performed in 1990 by Shawn himself, The Fever is a 1 hour and 40 minute monologue by a character known as The Traveller. Sitting on the floor of the bathroom in a hotel room in the middle of the night, “in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken,” she experiences a dark night of the soul, brooding about her life and especially her relationship to money, her economic class, poor people, world politics, and the death penalty. Typical for Wally Shawn’s plays, the character is slippery – at times she evokes identification and sympathy, other times you draw away from her. You’re constantly having to gauge your distance from her. She fanatically examines what she’s observing in great detail, whether it’s her internal experience of being at a cocktail party or ruminating over the meaning of the expression “commodity fetishism” as it turns up in Karl Marx’s Capital.

At the core of the piece is a moral wrestling match that many of us experience walking down the street in New York every day. You see a homeless person begging on the street – you think, “I’ll give him some money” – a voice inside you says, “Why not give him ALL your money?” – you retort, “I can’t give him ALL my money…” In The Fever Shawn carries that internal dialogue on to the nth degree. It could devolve into liberal hand-wringing but it never does, because Shawn’s prose is so carefully wrought and Taylor’s performance stays absolutely present. Shawn’s work always makes audiences uncomfortable, and this play is no exception – some people will find it very hard to take. But I respect it tremendously.

Writing the play coincided with a political awakening for Shawn. He first started performing it in people’s living rooms before taking it to theaters all over New York City and then in England. Taylor is not the first woman to undertake the role, Clare Higgins played it onstage in London in 2009, and Vanessa Redgrave made a film of The Fever in 2004 (directed by her son, Carlo Gabriel Nero) that softened the edges of the play. (Shawn approached the amazing Kathy Baker to do the play onstage in New York and/or Los Angeles, but she said no.) I appreciated the beguiling levity Taylor brings to the performance; Shawn wrote a charming opening scene for her to greet the audience and set the stage.

I still cling fondly to the memory of the last time The Fever was produced in New York, when Scott Elliott directed Shawn in a beautifully nuanced staging that explicitly conjured a connection to the existential starkness of Samuel Beckett’s monologues that I’d never previously perceived in Shawn’s work. (During the pandemic, Elliott created a Zoom version of Waiting for Godot, in which Shawn gave an astonishing performance as Lucky to Tariq Trotter’s Pozzo, with Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo as Didi and Gogo.) In the intimacy of the Minetta Lane, Taylor occasionally spoke so softly that passages got lost, including the powerful last couple of lines. All the more reason to anticipate the audio version when it’s released by Audible. Shawn himself recorded the play in 1999 for a 2-CD package released in 2006 that is now out of print, but apparently some used copies are available online through Amazon.

Speaking of audio versions, a huge mid-pandemic gift to theatergoers in general — and Wally Shawn fans in particular — arrived this year in the form of six-part podcast versions of his plays The Designated Mourner and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. These productions reunite Shawn with director Andre Gregory and the original New York casts of the plays. In collaboration with sound designer and composer Bruce Odland, they’ve created exquisite “theater of the ear” to match the best Broadway original cast recordings (especially those of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals).

David Hare first staged The Designated Mourner in London with three actors sitting at a bare table and filmed that production, which featured Mike Nichols in the title role. In New York, the play ran for a few months at a 30-seat theater in a disused gentlemen’s club in the Wall Street area, exquisitely directed by Andre Gregory and performed by Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg (extraordinary writer and Shawn’s longtime companion), and Larry Pine. That production was revived in 2013 at the Public Theater (a co-production with Theater for a New Audience), and that’s the production captured for the podcast edition.

Some people, including myself, consider The Designated Mourner to be one of the most profound pieces of writing created for any medium in the last 20 years. It is a bleak, dread-inducing meditation on the decline of Western civilization delivered through monologues by three inhabitants of a politically repressive country where intellectual freedom has effectively been persecuted out of existence. To indulge in Wally Shawn-like hyperbole, I would go so far as to say that the world would be a better, though not necessarily happier place, if all students, teachers, politicians, fornicators, and Netflix subscribers put down their magazines, turned off their cel phones and TV sets, and read, re-read, studied and discussed The Designated Mourner for the next year. Written 25 years ago when it seemed like a dystopian fantasy, the play depicts all-too-recognizably the inexorable drift toward anti-intellectual authoritarianism that we’re viewing today not just in Russia and China but in Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, and that roguest of rogue nations, the United States of America.

Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a different animal altogether. First produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London (where My Dinner with Andre also got its start), Grasses made its American debut at the Public Theater as part of the same deal with Theater for a New Audience. It’s a big, long, crazy, intense three-act fantasia about a famous scientist named Ben who’s overwhelmingly fixated on his penis – the sort of thing that never happens in real life — and his relationships with three different women (his wife, his mistress, and his girlfriend, named for three shades of red: Cerise, Robin, and Rose) and a mysterious shape-shifting cat named Blanche who may be the shamanic double of Cerise and/or possibly God. It’s set in some apocalyptic near-future when some initially successful experiments with increasing the world’s food supply have gone dreadfully wrong. And the stories that Ben and his playmates tell – addressing the audience directly, as is usually the case in Shawn’s plays – teem with images of animals. Eating and fucking. Dick and Pussy. Humans and animals. Wally himself plays the main character, known as Ben or the memoirist, who says things like, “When I was a boy, parents never masturbated in front of their children. In fact, children never masturbated in front of their parents! And God knows children would never make out with their parents or fuck them, ever, because that would have been seen as utterly shocking…So, you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing – I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines, and newspapers. I can’t get over it. Ha ha ha!”

In London, Miranda Richardson played both Cerise (live and aglow with flecks of glitter oiled into her skin) and Blanche (exclusively on film, often with a red ribbon tied around her neck); in New York, those roles were played by Julie Hagerty. A surprising presence was Jennifer Tilly as Robin, who brings a fascinating and unpredictable mixture of vulgarity and enigma to the role. And Emily McDonnell, a young actress from the Richard Maxwell downtown theater world, played Rose. (Pictured above) This strange strange play, which is a bizarre combination of fairy tale, fever dream, and The Story of O, is quite unlike any other play I’ve seen before, except that it bears a distinct family resemblance to other wild, linguistically pungent, sexually transgressive, disturbing and disorienting Wally Shawn plays (Our Late Night, Marie and Bruce, The Music Teacher, The Designated Mourner). The audio version is a wild ride, alternately hilarious and grotesque, poetic and appalling, outrageous and riveting.

Critics and commentators have often noted that Shawn’s plays tend to gravitate toward long monologues, sometimes elaborate storytelling, sometimes deeply internal reveries, imparting a literary, novelistic flavor. That’s what makes the audio versions really work – there’s very little action that you’re missing. I’ve saved the best news for last: these podcasts are available for free from Apple Podcasts. Check them out and let me know what you think.

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Culture Vulture: Caryl Churchill, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Wallace Shawn, the Wooster Group, James Baldwin, and Leonard Cohen

March 1, 2017

I love artists who give themselves permission to throw out the rule book for their given form, who take for themselves the freedom to do whatever they want.

escaped-alone
Caryl Churchill is one of those. No two of her plays have much in common except in their rich, dense language and their wayward inventiveness. Escaped Alone, which began life at the Royal Court Theater in London and just finished a brief run at the BAM Harvey, runs 50 minutes long and takes place in a neo-realist backyard, where four women who are neighbors chatter about nothing and everything, and some kind of liminal space (two vertical planes defined by red LED rectangles), from which one of the women describes the aftermath of a global catastrophe. Into this framework Churchill pours torrents of thoughts, fantasies, worries, political commentary, and poetic musing. (My favorite: reminiscing about looking at clouds from an airplane window, one character wonders what Julius Caesar would have thought about this sight.) James Macdonald, Churchill’s director-of-choice these days, does a stellar job, as do his four strong performers (above: Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, and June Watson).

everybody
If anything, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is even more outrageous than Caryl Churchill in the glee he takes dismantling theatrical conventions. I wouldn’t say Everybody (currently onstage at Signature Theatre) is a great play, but it’s fascinating, entertaining, erudite, and original, and it’s nothing like any of his previous plays (the ones I’ve seen were An Octoroon, Gloria, and War). Adapted from the 15th century morality play Everyman, the show doesn’t do anything in a normal or predictable way, starting with the announcement at the top of the show to turn off cel phones, etc. Four actors play set characters; five others participate in a golf-ball lottery that tells them what roles they will play at the performance you see, one of them being the title role. So five actors have to pretty much memorize the entire play and be able to roll with their assignments on a moment’s notice. A prompter stands by, and Lakisha Michelle May – my Everybody – did have to call “line” 5 or 6 times but she did so without breaking stride. The abundant cleverness never paid off in earth-shattering insight, but there’s a dance sequence that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Lila Neugebauer staged the hell out of the show, with a good game cast that also included Jocelyn Bioh, Brooke Bloom, Michael Braun, the adorable Marylouise Burke (as, hello, Death), Louis Cancelmi, 9-year-old Lilyana Tiare Cornell, revered veteran David Patrick Kelly, and – as Love – the lovely Chris Perfetti.

evening-at-the-talk-house
Then there’s Wally Shawn, who always goes his own way. His plays are not so different from each other but they’re very different from other people’s plays, with their long monologues, unreliable narrators, language and actions that emerge from the shadowy depths of the human unconscious. Evening at the Talk House (currently at the New Group, in its home at the Pershing Square Signature Center) bears a distinct family resemblance to The Designated Mourner, representing a genre we might call Theater of Anxiety. After decades of close collaboration with Andre Gregory, Shawn has found another exceptional collaborator in Scott Elliott, who does an incredible job creating moment-by-moment theatrical life out of what could be a quite stagnant, talky script. Like the best plays reflecting the world we live in, it’s nobody’s idea of a fun night at the theater, but truthful art is important to me, even when it’s dark and upsetting. I was impressed to watch the entire cast work quite outside where they’re comfortably known, from Matthew Broderick in the central role of Robert (with echoes of his performance in the film of Marie and Bruce) to John Epperson (Lypsinka in mufti) to Claudia Shear to Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker to Shawn himself and his longtime compatriot Larry Pine. Annapurna Sriram was the only cast member new to me, strong and indelible in a cast of legends.

Not to mention the Wooster Group and its fearless director, Elizabeth LeCompte, masters of creating a theatrical universe with its own eccentric, exciting rulebook. I saw The Town Hall Affair when they first showed it last year, but as I’ve learned through long exposure to this exceptional company it always pays to go back and see the work again, as I did this week, because it’s so layered you can’t possibly take in everything at once. The first time you’re just absorbing the central narrative, which always has something bouncing off of something else – in this case, the Wooster Group recreating a 1972 Theatre of Ideas symposium organized so that Norman Mailer could “discuss” women’s liberation with Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling, which they bounce off of Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s documentary film Town Bloody Hall, with scenes from Mailer’s own weird little home movie Maidstone lurking in the background and excerpts from Johnson’s Lesbian Nation framing the whole thing.

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The Wooster troupers are in fine form, with Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos splitting the role of Mailer, Maura Tierney returning as guest artist to play Greer, and Greg Mehrten manifesting magnificently as Trilling. But Kate Valk dominates the stage playing Johnston as a goofy intellectual free spirit in a silky long red wig. Every detail of the production has gotten deeper, richer, more precise, funnier and yet more pointed and profound in the year they’ve been honing the piece. Return visits allow you to tune into the intricate layers of sonic and visual material that LeCompte packs into the composition – the jazz piano (is it Cecil Taylor?) that underscores Valk/Johnson’s opening monologue, Shepherd double-tracking the women’s speeches in barely audible whispering into a mic. Second time around I connected Valk’s spectacular inhabiting of Johnston’s delivery of her stream-of-consciousness remarks with her incredible facility with Gertrude Stein’s text in the Wooster Group’s 1997 House/Lights. And Mailer’s insanely smug, self-amused, nonsensical spewing looks very different considering who’s in the White House now. Speaking of which, when Johnston mentions “White House briefing,” Valk charges forward with her podium, in a hilarious split-second reference to Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live. Oh, the layers, the layers, how I do love them….

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I also saw a couple of excellent documentaries about equally titanic sui generis artists. I Am Not Your Negro is both an incredibly stylish film and a powerful portrait of James Baldwin, whose incisive and deeply personal writing and far-seeing commentary has increased in value exponentially since his death in 1987. Director Raoul Peck not only selects astonishing swaths of riveting footage of Baldwin speaking – casually, publicly, oratorically, fiercely, studiedly, always eloquent, even in silence – but also surrounds it with incredibly fresh, witty, devastating samples of pop culture and newsreel coverage of Baldwin’s time and our own.

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Almost equally riveting are the sentences that pour out of Leonard Cohen’s mouth in Tony Palmer’s long-lost, recently restored documentary Bird on a Wire, for which the director followed the singer-songwriter around Europe during a month-long tour of Europe in 1972. This is no slick, smooth greatest hits compilation. The tour constantly teeters on the verge of disaster, with horrible sound problems, cranky audiences, and increasingly frayed nerves among all the musicians, culminating at a final concert in Jerusalem that ends abruptly halfway through the set with Cohen and crew backstage in tears. Yet the music Palmer captures is often ethereally beautiful, with often rough and improvised variations on recorded versions of the songs. And time after time, we see Cohen speaking to the audience during shows or being asked the most inane questions by idiotic interviewed, and he comes out with all manner of direct, soulful, deep, unpredictable statements. You can watch it on Vimeo here, and I hope you will.

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Quote of the day: IBSEN

July 31, 2014

IBSEN

Q: Say Henrik Ibsen comes back from the dead for one evening to have dinner with you. What does that conversation look like? Are there particular questions you’d have for him?

Wallace Shawn: Obviously I’d be flattered that Ibsen would take the trouble to do that, but I think I’d very quickly conclude that he had somehow misunderstood who I was, and as the hour for the dinner approached, I would undoubtedly become more and more anxious. Ibsen was comfortable at home with his wife. He was comfortable in the company of very young women in their teens or early twenties. He could occasionally be comfortable in the company of young men who admired him and who knew how to accompany him without bothering him with conversation on the long walks through the countryside that he enjoyed. And he was sometimes comfortable, if there was plenty to drink, with larger groups of men whom he’d known for a very long time, though such evenings often ended in unpleasant quarrels.

What he would not have looked forward to was a long dinner with one other man his own age, a man he didn’t know who also was a writer. Ibsen certainly did not enjoy discussing his plays, and when others offered their opinions and insights about them, he was usually annoyed and would often irritably rebut the views that were being presented to him. He absolutely hated shallow discussions of trivial topics, and he was not someone who read a great deal, so any attempts on my part at amusing remarks about the celebrities either of his period or mine were sure to displease him, and any hope of soliciting his views on the writings of Philip Roth or Selma Lagerlof was also doomed. The truth is, there was almost nothing I could offer him that would be something he needed or particularly wanted.

The only subject that might conceivably have brought

the two of us together was actually the art of acting. Ibsen was a connoisseur of acting. He loved good actors, and so do I, and I do think we might have had a very relaxed and enjoyable and quite un-self-conscious conversation if we’d been able to discuss different actors whose performances we’d both admired, to describe to each other performances that one of us had seen and the other hadn’t, to exult in the greatness of these great men and women. For as long as we stuck to that topic, it could have been very interesting and a lot of fun.

— TCG’s Individual Member Wire newsletter

  wally shawn IMWire

Henrik_Ibsen

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Performance Diary: Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at Town Hall and GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLOURS

November 27, 2013

gaiman palmer
11.23.13 – Andy is a huge fan of writer Neil Gaiman and singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, so he bought tickets for their double-bill at Town Hall as soon as they went on sale. The two met when Palmer, formerly half of the Dresden Dolls, asked him to write material for her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? Before long, they were a pair and are now married. In this charming, chatty, intimate concert, we heard a little about their courtship. Early on, in a conversation about the dearth of contemporary torch songs, Gaiman announced that he’d written one called “I Google You.” He sang it for her, twice, and a few days later she sent him a link to a YouTube video of her singing it in concert in San Francisco. For the Town Hall gig, they opened the evening singing a duet on “Making Whoopee,” paving the way for considerably more singing from Gaiman than I expected (and less reading of his work than I would have liked). He’s a Brit and characteristically modest; she’s an American, more brash and with, let’s say, a bigger personality. Weirdly, she often reminds me of my friend, the San Francisco-based performance artist Keith Hennessy (weirder still, I think it’s the powerful legs). Saturday night also happened to coincide with the premiere of the 50th anniversary broadcast of Doctor Who, the long-running British TV show for which Gaiman has contributed a few episodes, so there was a fair amount of fanboy-geekery running between the stage and the audience. The inevitable special guests included Aussie burlesque chanteuse Meow Meow backed by Lance Horne (on loan from La Soiree downtown) and Arthur Darvill, who plays a minor character on Doctor Who and ran over after finishing his show as the lead in Once.

11.25.13 – I can’t pretend I understand what Wally Shawn’s play Grasses of a Thousand Colours is about. When I flew to London to see the world premiere at the Royal Court, I managed a pretty succinct summary of the play in my Performance Diary:

grasses-of-a-thousand-colors-86857
It’s a big, long, crazy, intense three-act fantasia about a famous scientist overwhelmingly fixated on his penis and his relationships with three different women (his wife, his mistress, and his girlfriend, named for three shades of red: Cerise, Robin, and Rose) and a mysterious shape-shifting cat named Blanche who may be the shamanic double of Cerise and/or possibly God. It’s set in some apocalyptic near-future when some initially successful experiments with increasing the world’s food supply have gone dreadfully wrong. And the stories that Ben and his playmates tell – addressing the audience directly, as is usually the case in Shawn’s plays – teem with images of animals. Eating and fucking. Dick and Pussy. Humans and animals. Andre Gregory’s staging unfolds on a simple stationary set – a long white sofa and two standing lamps – and it interpolates strange little bursts of film that surrealistically mangle the sense of time and place. Wally himself plays the main character, known as Ben or the memoirist, who says things like, “When I was a boy, parents never masturbated in front of their children. In fact, children never masturbated in front of their parents! And God knows children would never make out with their parents or fuck them, ever, because that would have been seen as utterly shocking…So, you see,  for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing – I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines, and newspapers. I can’t get over it. Ha ha ha!”…

whitecat1
In an endnote to the published text, Shawn mentions that certain elements from the play derive from a 17th century story by Madame D’Aulnoy called “The White Cat.” I don’t know that story, but I will look it up as I continue thinking about this strange strange play, which is a bizarre combination of fairy tale, fever dream, and The Story of O. It’s quite unlike any other play I’ve seen before, except that it bears a distinct family resemblance to other wild, linguistically pungent, sexually transgressive, disturbing and disorienting Wally Shawn plays (Our Late Night, Marie and Bruce, The Music Teacher, The Designated Mourner).

Besides Wally in the central role, the London cast included Miranda Richardson as Cerise, Jennifer Tilly as Robin, and Emily Cass McDonnell as Rose. Seeing it again at the Public Theater, with Julie Hagerty in the Miranda Richardson role, I found that I had no particular advantage the second time around, nor did I find it especially enjoyable to sit through again. (I was somewhat affected by sitting next to Andy, who is a game theatergoer in general but found the play an ordeal.) I admired Andre Gregory’s production less than I did the first time around – for one thing, Jennifer Tilly’s performance has coarsened over time to a one-note bray.  I had mixed feelings about Julie Hagerty, who was definitely wispier than Miranda Richardson. I enjoyed most the freaky dream-like film sequences in which she appeared as “Blanche,” although my strongest takeaway is her deliver of the line, “Last night, as I was urinating on him…”

Clearly there are layers and layers of mischief going on throughout the production, signaled by tiny gestures of sound and movement – every time Ben (the main character) takes a sip of the green potion on his lecturer’s podium, his energy immediately shifts, never predictably. As I explained to Andy and my friends Melissa and Maribel, as we walked to dinner at Noho Star afterwards, my best guess about  the play is that it represents a particular literary phenomenon – Shawn, an excellent brainy and theatrically savvy playwright, has given himself the challenge to follow his imagination, his psyche, his dreams in creating a work that relentlessly and categorically defies the viewer’s attempt to interpret it as any kind of coherent narrative reducible to meaning. Like the craziest, scariest fables and fairy tales ever written, it is a story that exists in relation only to itself.

Oh, one major difference in the production at the Public Theater was that instead of a second intermission, after two and a half hours, we got a five-minute pause, during which an insane array of snacks was handed out in the foyer adjacent to the Shiva Theater – a paper cup containing 5 almonds, a hard-boiled egg, a Lindt chocolate ball, and a silver cup containing a swallow of cranberry juice – served by a chubby whiskered lad wearing a cat mask.

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