While most ten-best lists are posted at the end of the year, I prefer to send mine along at the beginning, when the world, culturally at least, is still a bit of a tabula rasa, and one’s mind is still floating along on the memory of what we, as audience members, experienced, and how those experiences left us wanting or fulfilled while simultaneously reminding us of what we look forward to seeing in the coming months.
I’m not very different from you—I like to be amused and moved, and I resent being bored or condescended to when I go to the theatre. (My idea of what constitutes “theatre” is fairly broad, and includes dance, rock concerts, art shows, television, films: any place where spectacle makes us feel more alive as thinkers.) Sometimes, though, even bad theatre—like the majority of musicals that went up on Broadway last season, or the recent revival of “The Maids,” starring Isabelle Huppert—can be inspiring. Poorly conceived or executed shows sharpen our critical eye and lead to rigorous discourse: Why didn’t this or that work? Did all the elements—actor, script, director, set—not come together? Was one thing better than another? Was any of it relevant to who we are now? Herewith, a collection of some events that had special relevance for me in 2014.
The revival of “Angels in America,” at BAM
Directed by Ivo van Hove and featuring members of his Toneelgroep Amsterdam. With a soundtrack comprised of old recordings by David Bowie, contemporary music’s greatest dramatic singer, and with a minimalist stage designed by Jan Versweyveld, van Hove relieved “Angels in America” of its pyrotechnics, and got to the heart of its theatre by treating this circus of human behavior as a real and surreal thing made even stranger by a terrible time in human history—the age of AIDS. At certain points during the piece, old ghostly film footage of downtown New York and Fire Island, where pre-AIDS homosexual men gathered (van Hove himself is openly gay), would play on a screen at the back of the stage, like something recalled in a moment of indescribable agony, and sweet sadness. Those were the days. And the nights.
Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner at the Kennedy Center Honors
An occasion of real joy and historic importance. I first met Tomlin and Wagner in 1998, when I was reporting a story about Richard Pryor for this magazine. Back then, Los Angeles was a rather segregated place, and the now-married artists suggested that we meet at a restaurant I’d never heard of—and that turned out to be integrated. Their consideration of others—and otherness—was apparent to me from the beginning. In 1969, Wagner’s script, “J.T.,” the story of a black kid growing up in Harlem, was produced on television. In the story, the title character finds a pocket of tenderness in a hard world. I was nine when the show aired, and it changed everything for me; it was the first time I’d seen a story on TV that was not too far from my own, and one that wasn’t framed as social science.
Apparently, Lily responded to the program as well, because it inspired her to reach out to Jane to ask if she would like to help work on her character Edith Ann, a precocious kid. Jane agreed; they fell in love and have been together ever since. Jane then went on to write Lily’s amazing Broadway shows—“Appearing Nitely” and “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” which she also directed—and also the truly innovative television shows that need to be collected and widely distributed. When I read that Lily was being honored by the Obamas, I booked my hotel room and said that I would check coats to be at the event. It was an opportunity to thank Lily and Jane for their extraordinary, life-changing work—“J.T” was just one piece of Jane’s that encouraged me to be a writer; Lily is paramount among those performers who opened my eyes to the craft—and thank them for supporting other gay men, too, like Vito Russo, who wrote some of his ground-changing work, “The Celluloid Closet,” in a house Lily leant to him.
The program itself was one of the more rousing and emotional I’ve attended. There was something incredibly intimate about it—not sentimental but filled with sentiment. It got off to a rousing start when Al Green, also an honoree, was saluted by Mavis Staples and other legends. When Lily’s segment came on, I was knocked out by the archival photos. There she was, the skinny daughter of a poor, Southern-born couple who immigrated to Detroit for a better chance. In one picture, the teen-aged Lily is seen posing on the hood of a car, her leg raised high: circumstances would not limit her—she was already a star. And like any great star—that is, a person who is self-aware and generous simultaneously—Lily’s gestures during the Kennedy center event were inclusive. She kept reaching for Jane’s hand during the ceremony, trying to pull her forward during all the sweet applause. But Jane, ever the writer and director, kept pulling back, out of the spotlight, until Lily simply took Jane’s hand, kissed it, and raised it. During the post-ceremony dinner, I told the two genius ladies that that gesture meant so much—especially to the gay people like myself who never thought they’d live to see anything as unequivocally open and real near the White House. How marvellous of Lily to take Jane’s hand and kiss it. Jane laughed, deflecting attention a little more, and said, lifting her arm a bit, “Well, I’m very glad, then, that I let her have it!”
Two stars on Broadway: Karen Pittman in “Disgraced” and Stockard Channing in “It’s Only a Play”
“Disgraced” ’s author, the Pakistani-American Ayad Akhtar, won the Pulitzer Prize for this ninety-minute, intermission-free piece. For the most part, Akhtar’s scripts amount to what I call journo-plays: he makes theatre from a newshound’s perspective. This doesn’t mean that his work can’t be literature, but his scripts are undermined by his “ripped from the headlines” aesthetic, which is also weirdly parochial. Karen Pittman, a featured player in the cast—she played the ambitious wife of a man who was having an affair—lifted the drama up with her sense of freedom and play. Despite the predictability of her dialogue, Pittman lived so much in the unplanned moment that she seemed surprised by what she had to say, and looked so glamorous and capable while saying it.
The only thing that Stockard Channing’s character wants to know in the current revival of Terrence McNally’s 1986 comedy is how she can evade the authorities and get high while also hoping she survives another turkey. She plays Virginia Noyes, an actress with an ankle bracelet and a coke habit, who is poised on the verge a comeback that may or may not happen. She becomes our gateway into McNally’s bubbling, poisoned pool of unmitigated self-regard and self-dramatization. Dressed in black and Hoover-ing drugs off a fur coat, the legendary performer is in control of her character’s broadness in all senses of the word, and the pleasure she imparts is that of a pro who loves giving pleasure as well as being a source of it.
The Charles James Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum
Costuming gets short shrift in the theatre, but it can have so much to do with how we see a character and how a character moves. (Ann Roth’s poor costumes for “A Delicate Balance” contribute to Glenn Close’s closed-off, self-regarding performance: her shoulder pads are poised for battle against any other actor in the ensemble who may merit attention.) Walking through the wide-ranging show with the New Museum curator Richard Flood this past summer, I was reminded of what I’d missed during the previous theatre season: designers who used the script to take off with their own ideas rather than just adhering to what needed to be done for the gig. (The only design genius I’m certain of among young theatre artists is Machine Dazzle, who creates phantasmagorical costumes and sets for performers like Taylor Mac based on his feeling for what the actor wants to convey.) I was fortunate enough to write about James for this magazine in 1998, but I had yet to see a retrospective of his work. It was while looking at James’s baby clothes that I finally saw the grandness of his intention, which had a great deal to do with imposing a kind of thematic order on the lawless privileges of the very rich.
Ken Burns’s epic documentary “The Roosevelts”
Since childhood, I have been fascinated by F.D.R.’s foreign policy, which has so much shaped the way we live now. That, along with certain policies at home—Social Security, etc.—and his complicated alliance with the brilliant Eleanor, helped to expand my views on the meaning of marriage. Burns got all that and more: the couple’s link to Eleanor’s uncle Teddy, Eleanor’s craving for intimacy, and F.D.R.’s belief that the world at large should love him. It’s an incredible American narrative, shaped by a master documentarian’s sense of pacing.
The Filmmaker :: kogonada
I love any movie about movies, and I especially love documentary footage in narrative films—the real images that inspired the story we’ve just watched. (I felt most overcome while watching “Milk” and “Selma” not during the movies proper but when the filmmakers inserted images recorded during the periods their films covered.) The Nashville-based film artist :: kogonada makes short films for Criterion that are so quiet and rapturous that you feel a jolt when they’re done: they are over before you want them to be over. Whether exploring Robert Bresson’s relationship to hands or neorealism, :: kogonada is a philosopher of the lens—his own and those of others. His inspiration is what has come before, which he makes new through his live thought and editing as action.
Okwui Okpokwasili’s “Bronx Gothic” and Edgar Oliver’s “In the Park”
These outstanding artists each told stories in poetic prose that was some of the best writing I read or heard all year, and brought back the reality that language is a living thing. Using their bodies to shape autobiography and myth, Okpokwasili and Oliver, although visually different, dug deep into the stage’s earth to channel emotions and information that startled us with their weight, diversity, and longing, and their sense that life is short and that there’s shame in not living it.
“Our Lady of Kibeho,” by Katori Hall, and “Generations,” by Debbie Tucker Green
I thought it interesting that two of our better contemporary playwrights produced some of their strongest work about Africa—a real and imagined place for people of African descent living in other parts of the world. I wondered if, by going back to the source, as it were, Hall and Green wanted to explore a pre-diasporic world in which their characters were in the majority and thus not so “different.” What added to the strength of these young artists’ work was the romance underlying both. While I missed the fact that the British-born Green’s short work had to do with the scourge of AIDS in South Africa when I wrote about it a bit a while back—it became clearer on rereading the brief text—I’ll defend my feeling that it was also about love, and about the hazards the body faces when it comes up against desire.
“100% Lost Cotton,” by Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill
In staging what was ostensibly a fashion show in support of the clothing line Opening Ceremony, the director Spike Jonze devised a presentation that was operatic and awkward—it was intimate and big in scale, and as uncomfortable to watch, at times, as a new item of clothing can be to wear. Working with a script that he co-wrote with Jonah Hill, Jonze had wonderful actors such as Catherine Keener, Rashida Jones, and Bobby Cannavale perform a comedic piece about the fashion industry, which was sometimes broader than it needed to be. (How can you make a parody of a parody?) Still, that was just a way of testing the parameters of the stage: Should the actors play it big or little? It was edifying to watch them struggle with that. And their anxiety over not making the correct shape in front of the audience added to the event’s experimental but richly subsidized feel.
“I Remember Mama”
Directed by Jack Cummings III, this twenty-five-character elegy was here performed by ten actresses, all over the age of sixty. The set was littered with memory: photographs, old books, scribbled-upon papers. As the exceptional and real performers worked their alchemy, one sat with bated breath, believing the inspiration could not go on. But it did, going higher and higher until the production as a whole reached a rarely felt level of spiritual and aesthetic perfection. First staged in 1944, John Van Druten’s adaptation of Kathryn Forbes’s novel was a sentimental wartime favorite when it first came out. Cummings did not forsake the play’s sweetness, but, by virtue of his cast and innovative staging, the director also described the unsentimental drive that goes into making a contemporary family—which is to say, an ensemble.
New York City Ballet afternoon program, May 11, 2014
The all-Balanchine program at the New York City Ballet featured an underperformed Ravel work that reminded us why Balanchine is important to return to annually: to see what cannot be explained. The mystery of Balanchine’s genius cannot be explained, but it can be observed, and the generosity of the New York City Ballet dancers—they want to be the best, the fastest, but they also want to share—inspire a communal feeling in the audience. You don’t want to join them onstage, but you do want them to know that they’re being seen, not just by applauding but by becoming that much more aware of your own body and your neighbor’s.
“One Thrilling Combination,” Central Park, June 23, 2014
Every summer, New York’s Public Theatre puts on a fund-raising event in Central Park that is modest, stellar, and gemütlich. This year, to honor, in part, the late Marvin Hamlisch, they did a staged-reading (and dancing and singing) version of “A Chorus Line,” which was narrated by a number of luminaries. One of them, Marsha Mason, talked about her connection to the show’s powerful director, Michael Bennett, who died of AIDS in 1987. In between the memories, we heard the music and the voices, and saw some of the original cast members. The live performers’ bodies had thickened—whose hasn’t?—but they still put on their game faces to perform for an audience they wanted to love and be loved by.
Certain performers
Sometimes, at the close of the theatre season (and sometimes after I’ve seen a film or a television program of note), I like to spend time with the afterimages in my head. Here are a few that entertain me still:
Tavi Gevinson in “This Is Our Youth,” saying “All right!” when she and Michael Cera start to dance to Frank Zappa.
Michael Cera just standing in the middle of the stage, not looking up or down.
Kieran Culkin’s character in the same play, high on ambition and spite.
Khandi Alexander as Olivia Pope’s mother on “Scandal,” swooping in on a nasty family scene between Olivia and her father and making it nastier by grabbing a glass of wine off the table and taking a sip, then saying that the one thing she missed behind bars was a glass of really good wine, taking another sip, and exiting.
Clare Higgins in “A Delicate Balance,” when she arrives at her friend’s house, her face a kind of horror show of loneliness and panic.
Ean Sheehy as Edgar Allan Poe in “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace,” a very sexy portrayal of a genius lost in his own spiritualism and daydreams.
Tim McMullan as Pavel in “Fathers and Sons,” at the Dormar in London. So much pathos and comedy in one portrait of pretension and fear amounted to a show of its own.
The cast of “The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise,” by Toshiki Okada introduced a new way of making theatre and performing. I can’t articulate it, but I think that’s the point: to experience it and to have the minimal script make you feel suspect about your own language.
Hattie Morahan as Nora and Caroline Martin as Kristine, along with the other fabulous cast members of the Young Vic’s production of “A Doll’s House.” Ibsen would have seen his women differently after watching this show, so well directed by Carrie Cracknell, whose vision focussed on the world of women’s intimacies with one another, and the lies they must tell in order to protect them.
Alex Hurt, in “Scenes from a Marriage,” drew you to him because there was something hidden in all that he did. He’s steps behind Adam Driver as the go-to-guy in the unusual-leading-man department.
Describing various people and situations in his hometown of Nyack, New York, Wyland June’s excitement and specificity reignites my interest in storytelling, and the people that are the source of the stories. Wyland is twelve years old.
Alex Sharp, starring in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” is a fresh openness full of heart.
Carey Mulligan, in “Skylight,” at the Wyndham in London, gives a serious performance by a star who favors the truth of the moment over flash; as a result, she gets better and better without seeming in the least self-important or earnest.
The cast members of Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men,” all of whom made the best out of a difficult situation, which is to say being straight white men without apology.
Corresponding with MC Paul Barman, a performance in itself: the one-of-a-kind rapper/thinker’s inspired wit and energy about the world around us will result in new work, and soon, which is terrific news.
Michaela Martens as Mrs. Klinghoffer and Jesse Kovarsky as the young Palestinian assassin Omar, in “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Martens sings and acts as though she’s pulling the earth through her feet; she dispensed with operatic artificiality to bring a realism that seemed out of place in the form, given its grandness. But, by drawing us in, Martens let us see the world of the characters more closely, showing that they were living less with the “issues” than with life. And it was by virtue of his excellent movement—his mime—that the Jewish-born Kovarsky exhibited the internal terror of the terrorist who performs “bravery” out of a confusing mixture of adrenalin, twisted sentiment, and fear.
