That Face by Polly Stenham

That Face, the British play which opened last night from the Manhattan Theater Club, is about a dysfunctional family. Mom is an alcoholic and also probably insane. Dad is gone, in Asia with his new family. And the two teenaged children have to deal with the situation. Henry, the older of the two, is his mother's caretaker and companion, while Mia is a boarding school rebel.

I saw the play twice, once at its invited dress rehearsal and once last night at opening night. The first time, I was impressed with the the theatricality of the play, even as I felt that the reason I was aware of its theatricality, as separate simply from it, was because it was somewhat contrived. The play opens on a scene during which an unconscious girl sits in the middle of the stage, bound and gagged, as her boarding school housemates argue about how best to torture her. It creates a good deal of suspense and I noted that, impressed. Likewise, I noted the way that the pseudo-incestuous relationship between Henry and his mother created uncomfortable suspense that propelled the play forward. In a scene in a hospital, the constant threat that someone might come in and find our characters in a compromised position created suspense; I noted it. In the final scene, a huge dramatic blowout among the four characters in the first time they have shared a room in years, Henry is dressed in his mother's nightgown, his mother's jewelry and his mother's make-up. "You look ridiculous," remarks his father in the middle of the drama and he does. And it's a shrewd move on to the part of the playwright. But the first time I saw it, I didn't feel much because I basically felt like I could see through to the bones of the thing. It hadn't come alive yet.

Last night, I felt much differently. Last night, as I watched the show, three weeks more rehearsed and with the intermission removed, I was much less aware of the devices and much more aware of the emotions and the real drama. This time around, it seemed much less a story of extremes pumped for their dramatic value and much more a universal story. When the final scene unfolded and everyone was in misery, I had the sense that it was every divorce I was watching unfold. The children blaming themselves and their parents; the mother needing too much; the father wanting too little.

It was an interesting lesson in scheduling. In the future, I will think twice about going to a play when it's in previews.

NOTE: I wrote this before the largely poor reviews came out. I wonder when the reviewers went. They must have gone in previews, but I wonder whether it was closer to the Invited Dress or to Opening Night.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

(As a caveat, I didn't see August: Osage County, I just read it. I picked it up at the amazing Samuel French bookstore when I was in LA last week.)

If I were a professional reviewer who saw everything and had the burden of deciding the fates of theatrical runs and giving advice to people making plans to attend a show in the near future, I might very well have given August: Osage County a review as august as many of the ones it received. However, since I have the privilege of being a blog reviewer, with no such burden, my only duty is to give my opinion of the merits of the play in the larger context of dramatic literature. Which in this case is: Eh.

I think that August: Osage County can best be understood as a kind of theatrical version of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres or Michael Cunningham's The Hours. It is not original so much as it is a lively re-interpretation of an old and much beloved classic, in this case A Long Day's Journey Into Night or something like it. Of course, its aim is much lighter than Tennessee Williams, or at least I hope it is. And there begin my major problems with the play. What is it? There's not enough fun for it to be send-up. This is not Tom Stoppard's Jumpers. There are no pies thrown, no paint spilled. And yet there's too much irony for it to be a genuine update of an American classic, or even a genuine attempt at a new addition to the family drama canon. It then functions as a kind of entertaining cliffsnotes, the exact show that you want to see on a Friday if you've been at a Tennessee Williams festival from Tuesday until Thursday. To that end, I admire it for knowing its audience, since who can afford to go to theater these days except for the theater-obsessed, but I still have higher hopes for contemporary theater.

Which brings me around the my specific complaints about this play. I don't like a play where every third line is one of the characters calling another one of the characters out for bad behavior. "Jesus!" "You're in rare form today, Vi." Do you have to say that?" "Do we have to do this now!" "Can't this wait?" "Settle down, mom." "Barbara!" "Bill!" "Mom!" "Christ!" This seems to be another important instance of the fact that the play is dumbed down. Very rarely do these exclamations illuminate the people who say them, or the situation. Rather they serve as signs to the audience that we are watching a Very Dysfunctional Family here. If the behavior is really that shocking and if the characters are really that dysfunctional and out of touch, shouldn't it be the audience that is crying out "Jesus!"? All of the exclamations dial down the drama and make the play feel pre-digested, even more so than it already does. In my opinion, it does this because the family is not as genuinely dysfunctional as Letts wants it to be. All of the dysfunction, from the pill-popping pioneer woman mother to the philandering professor son-in-law to the incest to age-inappropriate liason, is totally generic. If there were a dictionary in which you could look up "family dysfunction" and then cross-reference it with "American theater," this list would be right there. This is not a real family with real dysfunction. But it is not a send-up of the dysfunctional family drama. So what is it? I laughed when I read that Barbara, the oldest daughter, screamed "EAT THE FISH, BITCH!" but does that great American theater make? Eh.

That said, one thing in the play did really strike me and really stay with me. During one of the dinner scenes, Jeanne, the 14 year-old-girl whose rebelliousness generally felt very rote and unspecific to me (unforgivably, no 14 year-old girl in 2009 would say "I don't remember it too hot" meaning that she didn't remember it too well), tells the rest of the family why she is a vegetarian. She says it's because when animals are about to be killed, they are afraid and their bodies produce chemicals as a result of their fear and that to ingest meat is to ingest the animal's fear. I thought that line was brilliant, both in its terrifying saliency and in the context of a family drama where everyone feels a constant sense of mortal fear, as well as a nagging feeling that they might be being eaten alive. I also approved of the fact that the thought was simply laid out by a character who was in no other way particularly shrewd. It struck me as the key to the play, as Samuel Beckett once said that Lucky's incomprehensible speech in "Waiting For Godot" was the key to that play, or as Harold Bloom has said that Barnadine's short scene is the key to "Measure for Measure," one of the most puzzling and interesting of Shakespeare's plays, in my opinion.

Along the same lines, after Jeanne explains her position on meat, Jeanne's mother Barbara totally undermines, it, claiming that Jeanne isn't actually a vegetarian. Jeanne protests, claiming that her mother is a liar, but the issue is never resolved. Barbara has incentive to lie, but there's certainly enough evidence to suggest that Jeanne is lying just to be provocative. Even the wisest sentiments are subjective, vulnerable to seeming untrue by being uttered by fools. Therein lies much of the ambiguous power of theater and to me it was the most powerful moment in Tracy Letts' play and one of the only actually ambiguous moments.

On Reviewing

As biographers often write a word about biography that is usually of no interest to anyone until possibly after completing the book and looking for a couple last salacious details, so I would like to say a word about reviewing before I begin this blog, the purpose of which is to review plays. One night a couple years ago, I was sitting on my bed in my apartment on the East Side of Los Angeles, reading from a pile of books that I had picked up at the Central Public Library downtown. I had been reading Charles Bukowski and had then moved on to a book about Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. It was getting close to when I wanted to turn off the light and I was basically only skimming for salacious details when suddenly I sat up and gave myself some advice: "It is always better to be Sontag than Kael." Kael was the populist, perhaps more courageous in her attitude toward enjoying low culture not as camp but simply as it was meant to be enjoyed, purposely at odds with what she saw as "the trap of condescension" that pervaded much of contemporary American criticism. Sontag was brilliant, ever serious, the purist and it was she who defined the dialogue. Kael is a name increasingly unknown among people my age (b. 1983) and Sontag is a name emblazoned upon the intellectual history of the 20th century. Most people who know both writers will agree that Sontag was a Critic and Kael was a critic. But even as I said those words to myself, I think I knew that the writing was already on the wall. I have never succeeded in defining an insider outlook, or even in agreeing with one. In all likelihood, the majority of this blog will be devoted to exposing the cracks in the paint of the well-reviewed as well as defending trash that everyone else hated. I generally accept this contrarian streak of mine, but it is not without regret that I embark on this endeavor, knowing that it is always better to be Susan Sontag than Pauline Kael (leaving aside for a moment the plight of being Camille Paglia).