Santa, baby, next year please: can we get Arthur Kopit’s brilliant “Discovery of America” on the boards? Will you deliver—I’ve been asking for years now—a few good sets of lyrics in musical shows which aren’t movie retreads and which carry appropriate intellectual weight? And no more infernal all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays unless we can have their equal in folly: all-white productions of August Wilson. And, since I’ve been a good boy, could I get more bravery from producers and from playwrights to take the theatre beyond sexual politics to the soiled workings of the public realm? Is more thought, more visual excitement, more joy too much to ask?
But, don’t think I’m not grateful for this year, Santa. You were very kind. On both sides of the Atlantic these days, life has become so grim and the public discourse so sour that it’s no small comfort to kick back and remember the joy and eloquence of the last twelve months. It almost feels like abundance. (Remember abundance?)
1. Michael Grandage’s “King Lear.” The best of Grandage’s Shakespeare productions: swift, limpid, and forensic in its dissection of the text. The hurly-burly of family betrayal was played out on Christopher Oram’s gorgeous rough-hewn arena, a wooden box of planks painted in turbulent swirls of white and grey. There was nothing on which the eye could settle except the actors—especially the seventy-two-year-old Derek Jacobi, giving his finest performance of a distinguished career. Here, pink-skinned and white-bearded, he exuded an air of royal indulgence and hauteur. When Lear does go mad, he is all the more powerful in this production for not being a roaring loony. Instead of ranting into the storm, Jacobi whispered his words—an affecting demonstration of the mind splitting off and burrowing inward. The performance, like the production, was an illumination.
2. Rupert Goold’s “Romeo and Juliet.” By my lights, Goold is one of the smartest and most daring of the new crop of British directors; he’s a great showman with a sharp critical eye. This sensational production gave new vigor to Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy. A five-minute opening rumble clarified the blood feud between the Montagues and the Capulets and also established flame—its antithetical powers of purification and destruction—as the play’s ruling metaphor. Fire was projected onto walls, flourished from torches, belched from beneath the black stage floor, and was invoked in warnings to the young lovers, who burn with passion.
3. Sarah Ruhl’s “Stage Kiss.” Ruhl seems to be going from strength to strength. She wrote this play, which I saw at its début in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, just before giving birth to twins. It’s full of buoyant hopefulness and wry wisdom about homo sapiens’ wayward heart. At once a knowing sendup of the hazy half-truths of stage naturalism and a goofy meditation on the nature of desire and sexual fantasy, the play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable to the audience. As a satire of theatre and theatricals, it’s right up there with Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” Here, two former lovers, He and She, actors who parted bitterly about fifteen years earlier, find themselves, on the first day of rehearsal for a revival of a nineteen-thirties boulevard melodrama, cast as former lovers. In between rehearsing scenes, they relive the humiliating moments of their own turbulent past. In a sense, “Stage Kiss” is a ghost play in which both the play-within-the-play and the rebarbative lovers keep the past present. With a deft, withering touch, Ruhl exposes the gears of dramatic exposition. Fantasy and convention, she seems to be saying, are part of life’s meaning and its joy. The play is scheduled to be produced this coming year in New York. Not to be missed.
4. Geoffrey Rush in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman.” In this extravagantly exciting show (directed by the gifted Neil Armfield from an excellent adaptation by David Holman), Rush played Poprishchin, the supercilious, demented, red-headed low-ranking civil servant driven crazy by envy. Rush’s ungainly pale body subverted every aspiration to poise. He staggered around his room like a marionette, his long hands flapping at his sides. The performance was a series of wonderful protean transformations. During the course of the evening, as his desperation increases, Rush became a gobbling turkey, a baboon, a peacock, a dog, and, finally, on “April 43rd,” King Ferdinand of Spain, underscoring his royal signature with a Baroque flourish. The evening was a thrilling exhibition of stagecraft, character, and the psychology of madness. A kind of kinetic poem.
5. Stephen Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet.” This mature, rueful comedy sets out to marry grief and gladness, and achieves it. Elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, the episodic tale followed its main characters into the choppy white water of sorrow. The luckless Lebanese-American Douaihy family, distant relatives of Kahlil Gibran, live in a rundown section of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where all is definitely not well and may never be. Through a series of narrative jumps, the oblique dialogue teases the audience as Karam tries to capture both the process of suffering and the comedy of how we cope with it. Superbly acted and well-written; if I had a vote for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, Karam would have it.
6. Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem.” Over a series of twelve months, Rylance turned in two of the greatest performances Broadway has seen in recent memory. Last year he was the extraordinary motor-mouth Valere in “La Bête”; this year he trumped that great performance as Johnny (Rooster) Byron, the wild man at the center of Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.” “Rooster” is a Dionysian force of nature—a kind of poet of the primal—whose revelry is pitched not just against authority but against the tedium of modern living. Deep and daring, Rylance’s performance defied the tropes of critical language. It was unprecedented, really. He made the audience believe not only in giants but that he was one. A transcendent evening for me. Right up there with Pearl Bailey in “Hello, Dolly!,” Zero Mostel in “Rhinoceros,” and Dad in “Waiting for Godot.”
7. Tennessee Williams’s “Green Eyes.” In Williams’s centennial year, this gorgeous little 1970 one-act, sensitively directed by Travis Chamberlain, was a fine homage to the playwright’s genius: short, eloquent, complex, and entirely satisfying. Williams lives so fully, so freely, in the imaginary company of his characters. Here, in the paranoia and frustration between a Vietnam vet and his young wife, married on leave from the front, Williams’s dialogue flowed with uncanny surprise, catching in its resonance all the psychosexual tension in the alchemy of desire. The play, which takes place with the newlyweds in a New Orleans hotel room, was performed for fourteen people at a time in a New York hotel suite—a sort of no business show-business. No matter, it was expertly done and incidentally put paid to the canard that after the mid-sixties Williams had lost his gift.
8. Frank Loesser’s “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” After all the glib palaver about “The Book of Mormon,” which is really a racist reworking of the old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road movies, it was tonic to sit in the company of Frank Loesser, who can really write a witty lyric and a good melody, and Abe Burrows, who really knows how to tell a good musical story. The optimism of the show, even its gentle satire, seems light years away from our current brutalist moment. Every nanosecond of this production was eloquent with craft and wit. Rob Ashford’s choreography was particularly fresh—he had his well-drilled ensemble leaping on mailroom boxes, crawling like desert-island castaways for their morning coffee, and squaring off in a hilarious football scrum. Daniel Radcliffe as J. Pierpont Finch, the upwardly mobile window washer, and John Larroquette, who played his boss, J. B. Biggley, with perfect dopey severity, worked superbly together. In fact, I enjoyed myself so much, and found the show so edifying about the values of a time long gone, that I paid cash money to see it again.
9. Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.” No time spent in Tony Kushner’s company is wasted. His capacious mind requires capacious forms. This latest melodrama took place in the Brooklyn townhouse of a seventy-two-year-old former longshoreman and Communist Party activist, whose family has gathered to discuss his wish to kill himself. Kushner spices up the fare with dashes of Marxism, contemporary theology, Communist Party history, the labor movement, and gay activism. Out of this bubbling mélange came an unexpectedly powerful and bittersweet taste of our post-imperial moment.
10. Martha Clarke’s “Angel Reapers.” This kind of dance/theatre doesn’t usually find its way onto my dance card. But Clarke’s study of the Shakers was thrilling to watch; it’s stayed with me. “Till by turning, turning we come ’round right,” the Shaker anthem “Simple Gifts” goes. The hour-long show felt fresh, original, and right: the syncopation of the dancers, their streamlined shapes, the ferocious struggle to maintain balance, and, of course, the grace, both physical and spiritual. The piece seemed to get to the core of the Shaker experience without words. As much as I’ve read about the Shakers, until “Angel Reapers” I’d never made the connection that Clarke does about repression as the source of their genius. The beauty of Shaker minimalism draws its power from containment, the tension to express an essence. The play demonstrates how this spirituality was the ascetic expression of sexuality projected into objects.
The Best of the Rest: As the demented housebound wife in John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” Edie Falco turned in an unexpected and wrenching comic performance. As the object of psychosexual desire in “Venus in Fur,” Nina Arianda rocked in the uptown reprise of her legendary downtown début. A Tony Award for Best Actress or I’m a Dutchman. David Rockwell’s white-box set design for “The Normal Heart” was a memorable piece of environmental sculpture. And a final tip of the hat to George Wolfe and his costume designer, Ann Hould-Ward, in “A Free Man of Color,” for conjuring up of Napoleon’s doomed French fleet by actors wearing battleships atop their tricorne hats. This surreal scenic moment perfectly evoked the play’s literary-historical American dreamscape.
Illustration by Jim Stoten.
Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.
