Under the Radar:  Undergraduate Student Films (11/23/09), Review of "The Norman Conquests" (5/27/09), and Thoughts on New Plays and Playwrights (5/12/09)

Under the Radar:  Undergraduate Student Films

11/23/09: 

I got to be a part of a swarming army of 20 and 21 year-olds behaving magnificently and poorly.  At their worst they were undisciplined and disrespectful.  Their priorities were egocentric and they seemed to have no sense of the joy of actively partnering on something bigger than the self.  But at their best they were sublime, bringing joy and passion to the location, more serious about "getting it right" than anyone had ever been before them since the world began, knowledgeable about the latest, most extravagant toys of their trade and how to use them,  mindful of the distinctions between the roles of the various members of the team and supportive of each other.  Exactly as my fellow theatre students and I did 40 years ago, their very inexperience led them to believe in the uniqueness of the highly derivative work they were executing.  And at moments, it rose above, well above, the derivative.

That is ultimately where undergraduate films need to be: etudes where inexperienced folks make mistakes from which to learn.  And I and other more experienced people from all the crafts involved have to be willing to observe and advise.  That ought to be the real reason for working on these projects.  The reel footage is a serendipity.  The filmmakers are the thing.

5/27/09:  "The Norman Conquests":  Render unto the Brits that which is British

["The Norman Conquests" closed on July 26, 2009 after 84 performances -- it could have run for as long as the Old Vic's cast was willing to put up with being away from home.  It won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.  Amanda Root, Stephen Mangan and Paul Ritter were all nominated for Best Performance in a Play.  For the record, I did get to see the third leg of the Trilogy, "Round and Round the Garden" and it was a fitting conclusion.  I loved it.  I wrote this after having second the second.]

I'm only 2/3 of the way through the Trilogy, but it's so wonderful that it seemed selfish not to share it now.

We have this silly conceit in these parts that we and the English speak one language.  Some notable Brits have derided that view.  Bernard Shaw once quipped that we were two peoples separated by a common language, but others, for example Winston Churchill -- partially due to his American mother and in part because he badly needed our help at some points -- seemed to go even further toward calling us one great tribe.  Nothing could be further from the truth and nothing proves it so well as the terrific current revival of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy of successful stand-alone plays collectively called "The Norman Conquests".  

All three plays, "Table Manners", "Living Together" and "Round and Round the Garden" involve the same people at the same moments in time in different parts of the same country house.  The house belongs to a family of two sisters and a brother.  He is married to a shrill judgmental harridan from hell.  One of the sisters is married to Norman who is marching to an unimaginably different drummer than all the rest.  While Norman's wife earns the bacon as a successful career woman, he is a transparently under-motivated assistant librarian.  He loves people and wants to help them be happy, particularly his sisters-in-law and, from time-to-time, his wife.  This goes badly for many reasons and causes consternation to all including a friend-of-the-family vet who may have designs, in his own unique way, toward the unmarried sister.  There is also the unseen mother living upstairs in the house -- a glowering, demanding, needy presence.  These are seriously damaged people.

Why all this should be funny isn't clear.  But it is hysterically so.  Apparently it has been since Greek and Roman times; these same situations, same archetypal people, have been funny because they are extremes of nature and behavior, the seeds of which all people have always found within themselves.  Why this play doesn't feel the burden of dating from 1974 (let alone from 174 BC) is because it is in touch with human traits which don't belong to a place or time.  Why it works so well is because Alan Ayckbourn uses the language of the English to brilliant, uproarious, satiric effect. 

All three plays, "Table Manners", "Living Together" and "Round and Round the Garden" involve the same people at the same moments in time in different parts of the same country house.  The house belongs to a family of two sisters and a brother.  He is married to a shrill judgmental harridan from hell.  One of the sisters is married to Norman who is marching to an unimaginably different drummer than all the rest.  While Norman's wife earns the bacon as a successful career woman, he is a transparently under-motivated assistant librarian.  He loves people and wants to help them be happy, particularly his sisters-in-law and, from time-to-time, his wife.  This goes badly for many reasons and causes consternation to all including a friend-of-the-family vet who may have designs, in his own unique way, toward the unmarried sister.  There is also the unseen mother living upstairs in the house -- a glowering, demanding, needy presence.  These are seriously damaged people.

Why all this should be funny isn't clear.  But it is hysterically so.  Apparently it has been since Greek and Roman times; these same situations, same archetypal people, have been funny because they are extremes of nature and behavior, the seeds of which all people have always found within themselves.  Why this play doesn't feel the burden of dating from 1974 (let alone from 174 BC) is because it is in touch with human traits which don't belong to a place or time.  Why it works so well is because Alan Ayckbourn uses the language of the English to brilliant, uproarious, satiric effect.

This production was plucked full-grown from the brow of the Old Vic in London and deposited here at the Circle in the Square on 50th (between 8th and Broadway) for a limited run.  It was nominated for a TONY for the Best Revival of a Play.  The producers are talking about extending the engagement but see it soon if you can.  It isn't clear that the extension can be pulled off at all or at least with the same actors.  The star of these proceedings is clearly Ayckbourn himself but these actors are doing sublime work that Americans actors can't  (how's that for a sweeping generalization!); at least I've never seen it done. Farce is un-American.  English farce is all but impossible for Americans.

In these plays the farce comes from the music and the meter of the language.  These actors don't pause to build for the climatic laugh; they end a thought on a rising pitch which seemingly continues to rise above the human hearing range, they follow with a breath deep enough to support topping the previous with the next hunk of words, all without ever breaking their dead-pan stare at the object of their scorn, confusion or derision, and they're off.  It isn't joke telling. It's quite wonderful.  Ayckbourn isn't the Brit Neil Simon; he is as one of the cast members put it, the Poet of Dysfunction.

To single out any actors from such a superb ensemble is probably pointless.  I've seen the first two plays with the same large group of people and concensus has been that Amanda Root as the shrill sister-in-law Sarah, Paul Ritter as the brother, and Stephan Mangan as Norman are the creme de la creme, but everyone was doing wonderful things and entirely up to their jobs.

The minds of those of us old enough to remember probably have a firmly imprinted memory of the PBS video production from 1978 with a supremely attractive Tom Conti as Norman.   So attractive was he that of course every person watching either wanted him or wanted to be him.  There was nothing mysterious in all three of the women in the play finding him attractive.  Mangan's Norman, is (I'm told) somewhat attractive physically, although no young Tom Conti.  He however downright creepy.  We men in the audience don't wistfully wonder what it would be like to be as free of the bounds of convention as the eternally adolescent Norman.  Instead we find it somehow laughable in a kindly way that we still harbor a "Peter Pan" fantasy within ourselves at all.  The women in the audience wouldn't be likely to go near him on a bet, even if they do recognize some attraction to the sense of impending romance and ruin that he carries about with him.  As a result, we are forced to step back even as we are laughing helplessly and recognize that it is only these terribly damaged people who are, or ought to be, conquered by the very broken but unbowed Norman.

"2009 BFA Playwriting Showcase"

5/12/09:  Cliche of the day "New plays are the theater's lifeblood".  Working with the undergraduates of the NYU/Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Department BFA students from the class of 2009 has been a great experience.  I feel like I've been part of the process of giving a transfusion to the fabulous invalid, as the theatre has been periodically called, and ensuring that the ongoing rumors of its death are still somewhat, if not highly, exaggerated.