Theater Review: Betrayal

There is no sex in Betrayal. In other words, the play’s intimate scenes between couples both marital and extramarital include nothing more than a few kisses. Here’s one scene between Emma and her husband Robert: He kisses her, she responds. She breaks away, puts her head on his shoulder, cries quietly. He holds her. And another between Emma and Robert’s closest friend, Jerry, who has become Emma’s lover: Emma and Jerry standing, kissing…he continues to hold her…. And later: she caresses him, they embrace. These are the stage notes written by playwright Harold Pinter in the script of his play, Betrayal. For a play about infidelity, the action is notably more verbal than physical. There’s certainly no clothes ripping or urgency sex between the illicit lovers as one might expect. Unless, of course, the reason for this affair is not primarily sexual. It’s an interesting take. After all, there’s more than one way to cheat on a spouse.

And yet, the affair between Emma and Jerry does not contain much emotional desire either. What represses Pinter’s play is his characters’ self-absorption. By writing them as self-interested partners, Pinter limits the degree to which they might probe substantial ideas about loyalty and love. The absence of that comes as a disappointment. Heartfelt desire – for someone or something – is one of the most compelling emotions to be found in drama and in life. In this play, the characters do not genuinely love or even crave one another. In fact, the only striking aspect is how minimally Emma and Jerry’s affair incorporates physical urges. What it seems to draw from is the need for companionship outside of a marriage that conjures boredom and resentment. The marriage of Robert and Emma is indeed pained. Aside from the moment when he kisses Emma, Robert’s treatment of his wife ranges from cold and removed to disparaging and abusive. Much of that treatment occurs after he learns Emma has cheated on him, but the writing gives the impression that he never cared for her that much at all, so much so that the tender scene where he holds her stands out as an anomaly.

Which brings me to Mike Nichol’s production on Broadway. That scene between Emma and Robert is directed as an aggressive foray into sex. The tender moment detailed in the script lasts but a second, and suddenly Robert is unzipping Emma’s pants. Similarly so, the kiss between Emma and Jerry escalates to unabashed, clothes-still-on fornicating. What’s going on in this production? Does Nichols read the script as conveying more physicality than the words dictate? Or does he want to titillate his audience by having two men make out with the stunningly beautiful Rachel Weisz, who plays Emma? Perhaps disappointingly, the prurient intrigue among viewers to watch Weisz “cheat” on her real-life husband Daniel Craig (Robert) is mitigated by a lack of passion between her and Jerry (Rafe Spall). Their conversations are too nervous to be overturned by the heat of sexuality. There is one scene that delivers true sexual desire however: the moment when Emma and Jerry’s affair begins, also known as, the last scene of the play.

Pinter’s approach in Betrayal is to move backward in time so that we progress from the affair’s end toward its beginning. It’s a clever decision that pays off only if the final scene (the affair’s conception) illuminates something new about these characters. But it’s more like, “Oh, this is the night when the affair started.” There is no discovery, neither in the script, nor in Nichol’s production. Jerry finds Emma attractive, she complies with his advances, and so it goes. 

While it seems like a producer’s dream to have Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig perform Pinter, this is not a play in which one peels back layers to reveal deeper truths. Weisz, Craig, and Spall are all capable actors who do much with limited material. And of course, Weisz and Craig are so physically beautiful, they can hold a viewer’s attention through stage presence alone. The subject matter of Betrayal appears rich with dramatic possibilities. But real emotion needs to be at stake. Nichols adds in sex to convey that feeling. But sex without emotion is empty. The director who so brilliantly brought us The Graduate, Working Girl, and Closer surely knows that.  

photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Theater Review: Daniel Kitson's Analog.ue

This performance marked my first experience seeing the much-acclaimed monologist, Daniel Kitson – a favorite at St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO. Except, it wasn’t exactly a performance, and Analog.ue doesn’t quite display Kitson’s talents as a monologist. The script is heard by way of prerecorded audio, projected from twenty-three tape recorders. Each recorder plays a fragment of the story, and it is Kitson’s role in every performance to play them in perfect order so that the story is told seamlessly. It’s clear that Kitson means to say something about how we craft and retell stories. Though, in the show’s opening, he confesses that there is no significance to his using twenty-three recorders. That line made the audience laugh, but it made me wary of the artist for admitting so readily that his artistic process is at least partially accidental. 

Analog.ue opens on an expansive black stage, alit solely by two lamps projected toward the back wall. We see Kitson’s silhouette amidst a cluster of vintage-looking reel-to-reel recorders. The image is striking and rather beautiful. Kitson then begins (and proceeds for the duration of the show) to pick up his recording equipment and either tote it easily or hoist it laboriously depending on its size and weight all the way downstage toward the audience. Finding a desirable location, he sets down each one, unravels the cord, plugs it in, and thus begins the next segment of the story.

The story in question has two parallel characters: one, an old man named Thomas whose memory is fading. His wife Gertie encourages him to record all of his thoughts and memories before they’re lost, which he does on a single fall day in 1977. The second character is Trudy, a modern-day woman fatigued by the mundaneness of her life, whose story travels backward toward her birth, also in 1977. Kitson makes humorous mentions of the quotidian events of Trudy’s life, but they don’t add up to anything bigger. There’s no tension in her life, just boredom. One segment features Trudy’s feelings about yogurt. It’s “fine”, she concludes. Not good or bad, but fine. That expression, sadly, describes my feelings about Kitson’s script. The only anticipation in the story is for the moment when Trudy and Thomas’ worlds might intersect. They do but rather simply and without much consequence.

What impressed me far more than the story was Kitson’s physical work on that stage. The way he methodically organized the speakers and reels across the floor; the precise timing he displayed in switching between reels so that no lapse in storytelling occurred. His hard work was visible. He was creating something in real time. It reminded me of the Israeli production Nalaga’at – a work that explores life for deaf and blind individuals. In the show, the actors – all deaf and blind themselves – bake bread onstage while a voiceover narrates the hardships and poignancies of navigating the world tactically, rather than visually and aurally. The actors mix yeast and flour, knead the dough, and bake the bread in a working oven onstage. It is real and palpable and sensory. Kitson’s work here is quite different but, like Nalaga’at, it offers a new conduit for storytelling. Analog.ue is a live show and it isn’t a live show. It is a story and also the meticulous crafting of a story. I find that approach compelling and original. The only shortcoming was that Kitson’s form greatly eclipsed his content. 

Photo credit: Pavel Antonov

An Interview with Lisa Kron

When Alison Bechdel published her graphic novel Fun Home, a memoir exploring the complex relationship she had with her enigmatic father, the accolades came in droves. Among those captivated by the book was Lisa Kron, the Tony-nominated writer and performer who is known to weave personal memory into her own work.

Kron is now the book writer and lyricist on her first musical, an adaptation of Fun Home, opening tonight at the Public Theater. I caught a preview performance of the show last week and was amazed by nearly every element: the score (Jeanine Tesori), the staging (Sam Gold), and the rich cast of actors. But what was most brilliant was how creatively the graphic form was reimagined as live theater. Without wanting to place an academic lens on the work, it is, in my view, the highest form of adaptation: completely original yet faithful to the book in every scene.

Below, my conversation with Lisa Kron, on reworking a masterpiece:

Much of your work draws on your own personal and familial experience. How do you compare the experience of adapting someone else’s memoir?

I have never thought of my work as memoir. I’ve used personal material, but I’ve done it in order to explore some idea. Living with Fun Home now for five years, I’m astonished everyday at what a – and I don’t use this term lightly, it’s a masterpiece. [Alison] and I have both exploited personal material in order to give the audience – or in her case, the reader – some kind of experience. We’re making something that we hope will feel like the experience of the book, Fun Home. But in order to do that, we had to do an incredible amount of conflation and invention. And gratifyingly, Alison has said that it feels real to her even when she knows it didn’t happen that way.

That’s a great compliment to receive from her.

Yeah, it was relieving! And it’s true that you cannot be reverent about a thing you’re adapting. You have got to reinvent it. There’s an initial impulse to do a one-for-one substitution. Instead of this thing, we’ll do this thing. And there’s a desire when something is so beautifully made to try to replicate the whole thing. And anybody quickly realizes you can’t do that. I had to read that book for two years before I could dismantle that structure in order to see what was happening. So that I could see the components and put it back together in a different form. The spine has to exist differently in a musical.

Alison had given an interview where she talked about the book being a labyrinth. Musicals, on the other hand, have to be a machine in some ways, with a very specific structure. Did you try to maintain that labyrinth form?

The second time I read it, I thought, there are no scenes in this book. There’s this voice that is key to the book, then there’s a child from age 4 to 19. So how do you cast that? I’ve always loved musicals, but once I started working on this, I started looking at them with a different eye, and it’s absolutely true that if you don’t have that clear engine…. Jeanine and I had a conversation with George Wolfe and he was saying, “You have to be so clear. The person has to want one thing, and it has to be a life and death thing, and you have to say it really clearly, and then you can be as complicated as you want.”

What do you think makes a good book writer?

I guess a sense of structure. And if you’re not writing lyrics, a lot of humility. I have loved working on the lyrics for this.

Alison has said that her images and her text function on two levels of storytelling. How do you transition in storytelling when you’re writing a song from when you’re writing dialogue?

We’re hopeful that this will feel – as the book does – that there’s a straightforward drive to it. The book hinges around these huge life-changing events, but apart from that the characters are leading their lives and they don’t know that these big things are going to happen. They’re also emotionally repressed people. So it’s writing songs for people who don’t know what their emotions are and a book in which there are virtually no events. Like the juxtaposition in her book, we also have juxtaposition: of past and present, of what’s spoken and what’s sung.

It seems that one of the cool things about entering the musical world is that suddenly you’re connected to all of these talented composers and performers.  

Musical theater people are incredible. It makes you feel so remedial as a human being. You know there’s that game people play where they say, if you could choose a superpower, what would it be? I think now I would say music: to be able to sit at the piano and do what Jeanine can do. It’s not just that dialogue is set to music. The music does a whole other thing. And what happens between those two elements is the most thrilling thing I’ve experienced in the theater. The most extraordinary plays will have moments that lift off, but they’ll never do it the way music does.

An Interview with Greg Pierce

Greg Pierce made waves in 2012 after his play Slowgirl, the inaugural show at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre, opened to enthusiastic reviews. Unknown to most theatergoers at the time, Pierce was also at work on a new musical with John Kander, the celebrated composer of Cabaret, Chicago, and The Scottsboro Boys.

That creative partnership may seem surprising at first : Pierce had never worked on a musical before while Kander is a multiple Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winner (one award short of an EGOT). But the two have quietly been in contact for years, beginning with their introduction at an Oberlin alumni event. Pierce, a dedicated fiction writer at the time, began sending Kander his short stories to read, and several years later, after the passing of Kander’s career-long partner Fred Ebb, Pierce received a call from Kander with a proposal: a new musical that they would write together, intimate and narrator-driven. A short story onstage.

I sat down with Greg Pierce to talk about The Landing, his first musical with Kander, currently on stage at the Vineyard Theatre through November 10th. (My article on playwrights who became book writers for musicals – featuring Greg Pierce – is in the October ’13 print issue of American Theatre.)

Tell me a little about The Landing.

The Landing is three one-acts. They’re completely different stories but thematically connected. John and I were interested in narrators that were outside the story, characters who can be simultaneously inside and outside the action. John had just finished The Scottsboro Boys and he wanted to do something really small. He said he wanted to do something that could be done in your living room. He knew my short stories, so he said, “What do you think about doing a musical that feels like a short story onstage?”  

Does the style of music vary from one act to another?

Yeah. John was interested in different kinds of forms where music keeps going underneath speech, and then someone sings part of a song, and then there’s a scene and they finish the song later on. So it’s almost like an operetta. It doesn’t feel like, “Now we’re in a scene, now we’re in a song.” It’s more of a melding of those styles. There’s a ton of music in the show and music almost goes throughout. It’s dictated by what the moment needs for us. It was always: here we are, this character needs this thing, how do we musicalize that.

Was this your first time writing lyrics?

Yeah. John signed on thinking that he’d be writing lyrics or that we’d be writing lyrics together. We started writing Andra [The Landing’s first act] and I had an idea for a song and wrote a bunch of lyrics. And then I wrote the next one, and John said, “Why don’t you just do lyrics.”

I’m so curious about your collaboration with John Kander. Because he’s such a luminary in musical theater, are you able to confidently put forward ideas?

We’ve worked together five years now, and now it’s very easy. We’re candid with each other.

How do you say, “I don’t think that idea works.” Was that a hurdle to get over?

Yeah it completely was. But there’s no ego when you’re working with John. Ideas go out there and they’re the ideas, not related to am-I-good-or-not. He’s an incredibly good listener and he’s really excited about the ideas that will work best, not who’s coming up with them. We’re starting to have a shorthand. If I come up with something and he’s not feeling it, I can tell. We don’t have to go down that alley which takes a lot of time.

The idea of a short story onstage is interesting.

Yeah, that’s totally fascinating to me. To have a narrator who can comment on the action in a literary, novelistic kind of way. I think there’s space for that and I don’t see it a lot.

Marsha Norman often talks about writing from your “stuff”, which essentially means the emotional context a writer has, the issues a writer grapples with. Do you think The Landing brings out your “stuff”?

I think it does. I don’t know if I can say concretely what those things are, but when I’m in rehearsal, I feel like I’m watching a part of John and a part of me, and that’s one of the most satisfying things about the piece. It’s a real melding of who we are. Somebody came up to me after Slowgirl and said, “I saw [the workshop of] The Landing and I saw Slowgirl…you’re spiritual, aren’t you?” Nobody had ever said that. I’m not religious.

You have a mezuzah on your door, though.

That’s not mine, actually. (laughs)  I’m not Jewish. I just got this apartment like six months ago, and that was the former owner’s. But I felt a little funny about it, like, do I take this off? But then I looked down the hallway and there are mezuzahs like every other door, so I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

Well, you can consider your home blessed.

Yeah. Nice, thank you.

Anyway, sorry to interject. So how did you react to that comment? Did that feel flattering?

Totally flattering. But I also don’t want to examine too closely what themes keep appearing [in my work], because I don’t want to be aware of it. I just want to focus on the story.

What are the qualities that you think make someone a good book writer? Are they complementary to the qualities that make someone a good playwright?

I think they’re complementary. It’s a similar scale, which is writing a compelling scene that engages us and leads to the next part of the story. The unsuccessful books that I’ve seen are simply linking songs. I think a great book writer can write a great scene but also knows when to sacrifice that scene to a song.

Since you’re also the lyricist on this project, do you have greater agency to create those emotional highs and lows?

Yeah, if you’re writing the book and lyrics, I think it’s easier to navigate that. And it’s also easier to scrap a scene or to sacrifice the scene because you know you’ll have some hand in that moment.

Do you see book writing as an inherently supportive role?

I’m so interested in book writing, so it doesn’t feel that way to me. I think it’s tricky for those great playwrights [who write the books for musicals] because you have to swallow your ego a bit. And sometimes part of your job is to play the back foot to the music. It has to be a quieter presence. It’s understanding that people might not walk away from a musical thinking, “God, that text was fantastic.”

Can you think of some shows where the book really works?

I love Assassins. Cabaret. West Side Story. But sometimes when I think back on those musicals, if I haven’t seen them in a while, I can’t actually remember if I loved the book itself. I just love the show, the totality. Maybe that’s what makes a musical, that these roles are working in tandem.

I remember [director] Anne Bogart once saying that when you see a great production, you will have no idea what the director did.

Yeah, I think that’s so true. I really do. And sometimes you’ll see a musical with a great book with character moments that sound so specific, and then they start singing and the lyricist could be great with words but not as good with character voices. I think writing lyrics in a character’s voice is very hard. So the story doesn’t carry as well as it does in the book because now we’re in lyric-land where things are clever and there’s intricate rhymes, but they’re not characters anymore.

Tell me about the writing process. Does the method differ from how John worked with Fred Ebb?

How John and I work together is very different from how he worked with Fred. He and Fred were always in the same room. Fred was improvising lyrics and they’d come out of a work session with a song. John and I don’t write like that, mostly because my brain doesn’t work like that. Whoever has the first impulse for a song, whether a melody or a few lines for a chorus, will write that and we’ll bring it in, and play around with it, then take it back to our separate spaces. Also we both have iPhones now which is so amazing. John lives upstate, so he’ll write a snippet and put it on his voice memo and text it to me. And then I can play it over and over and keep experimenting with it.

The Landing is a new musical. Why do you think adaptations have become so much more common for musicals these days?

I think part of the reason is that musicals are strange. It’s strange when people start singing, so when there’s a story you already know, you have that as an anchor. I wish there more opportunities to do an original musical, especially Off-Broadway. Because I see workshops of them and there are so many people who have great ideas and not enough companies that can afford to do it.

But when you know a story, it can be thrilling to see it interpreted musically. One of the great things about musicals is that you can sort of stop time and be with that person in a very emotional place.

Right, in a straight play it’s harder to have that moment just linger.

Annie Baker is very good at letting those moments linger.

Yes! It’s true, she is. Has this project changed your perspective on musicals? What do you think about the viewpoint that musicals are mostly for entertainment?

When I was younger I thought that plays are for this thing and musicals should do this thing. And as I get older, I see the range and now I think there’s room for everything. I think 42nd Street is amazing. Last night I saw Savion Glover. It was totally mind blowing. So I wouldn’t say that musicals need to do one thing. That said, I really love stories and I really love characters. I think there’s a lot of space to explore.

Photo credits: Ben Esner; Robert Caplin 

Mr. Burns and the Mixed Experience of Weird Theater

Following the mass-scale catastrophe and grid collapse that sets in motion Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, five survivors who find one another in a wooded clearing attempt to grasp what remains of a recognizable world. They compile details to ascertain what happened, read off names of loved ones, and tell funny stories as a healing mechanism. That last act of catharsis is the creative impulse behind Mr. Burns, now running at Playwrights Horizons and extended through October 20th. The play opens with the characters clustered around a camp fire, retelling the narrative of the Simpsons episode, “Cape Feare”, a spoof of the film Cape Fear, which itself was a remake of the earlier film, Cape Fear. The experience of watching these characters retell the episode, complete with uncanny Sideshow Bob impersonations, has obvious appeal for Simpsons fans.  But the scene holds much more symbolism: at its essence, it is an homage to oral storytelling – the oldest of rituals: layered in narrative, varying with each telling, and as meaningful an art form as the stories themselves.

I love what Mr. Burns sets out to do. Playwright and Civilians co-founder Anne Washburn is an exceptional talent, and the first act of Mr. Burns was near perfect, as I saw it. The central character of the first act is played by Matthew Maher – a gifted, hilarious, and touching actor who made The Flick (at Playwrights Horizons last year) one of the most memorable plays of the season. His recollections of detailed plot points and reenactments of Simpsons characters were in fact essential to Washburn’s script development and are wonderful to watch, culminating in a punch line that his character cannot recall. Yet the humor is set off by palpable eeriness, heightened each time the characters remember where they are.

When a stranger stumbles onto the campsite, the group raises found weapons before accepting him as nonthreatening. Laying down their guns, they pick up notebooks and each begins to read a list of names – family members, friends, and neighbors who have gone missing. I found this to be one of the most moving parts of the play, at once a search attempt and a surrogate memorial for those likely already lost. The weight of confusion and sadness is lifted when the newcomer recalls the forgotten Simpsons line. The play could have ended there as a complete work.

Each act of Mr. Burns might actually function as its own play. But the first act, as I saw it, would be the only effective one. I had expected that the show’s subsequent acts would embark on a more theatricalized reenactment of the Simpsons episode narrated in the opening act. But instead, the genius creation of Anne Washburn gets eclipsed by its weirdness. In the second act, the story jumps seven years into the future, wherein the characters attempt to recreate a Simpsons narrative where attention to their target audience through heavily scripted commercials – one oddly dialogue-heavy, the other featuring a campy montage of pop songs – trumps the Simpsons narrative itself. The third act, which leaps ahead 75 more years (for reasons that are unexplained) transforms The Simpsons into a musical and one that completely changes the story from the “Cape Feare” episode. Rather than Sideshow Bob, who plays the villain in that episode, Mr. Burns is now the adversary whom Bart must defeat.

Michael Friedman’s score, which fills the musicalized third act, is affecting and smart, but it doesn’t connect back to the first act in a meaningful way. Why does the musical section of the show eliminate nearly all correlation to the “Cape Feare” episode? It can’t simply be to show how narrative morphs over time. The poignant, clever story introduced in the first act is sadly and frustratingly derailed by the third. All of those threads about how stories heal, how shared laughter can unite strangers, and how narrative grows out of its earlier forms dissolve into an inchoate blur of songs and disturbing Simpsons masks.

Needless to say, it was bewildering to read reviews that lauded the complete show as “brilliant”. And yet, I respect the work for being intrepidly different . It's encouraging that a show like Mr. Burns can sell out an extended run at an Off-Broadway theater. It’s encouraging that Playwrights Horizons, and Wooly Mammoth Theatre before that, took a chance on such a bizarre creation. It’s encouraging that ticket buyers have an appetite for original work. It all means that adventurous plays are worth doing. Even the ones that get seriously weird by Act Three. 

Photo credit: Joan Marcus 

An Interview with Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman

On September 6th, Barry Manilow and his lyricist partner Bruce Sussman debuted a fully-realized production of a musical 20 years in the making. That show is Harmony, which depicts the rise and fall of the Comedian Harmonists – a six-member male singing group in Germany (half Jewish, half non-Jewish) who reached the height of success in the 1920’s and 30’s by blending complex harmonies with physical comedy.

I wrote about Manilow and Sussman’s creative process for Tablet Magazine. (Please note that I had nothing to do with the headline.) Below is a longer excerpt of my conversation with them. Read on for their remarks about inspiration, Jewish humor, and writing a score that sounds nothing like a Barry Manilow record.

Thinking about this period in Jewish history – Germany in the late 1800s and early 1900s – it’s really a study of the great contributors to science and the arts. It was the age of Kafka and Mahler and Freud. I would love to hear your thoughts about how the setting of Harmony creates the dramatic backdrop for this musical.

Sussman: It was one of the things that appealed to us most. That this is the period of Kurt Weill and Einstein and all of these amazing people who ultimately fled. And here we have this group of Jews and gentiles facing that decision of what to do.

Manilow: Maybe it was in the water or something because they were all at the top of their creativity.

Sussman: It was a petri dish of creativity. We had a [Holocaust] survivor come speak to the group the other night. She survived on the Kindertransport. I had done some homework and I found that on the Kindertransport, a total of 10,000 children, 4 of them went on to win the Nobel Prize. When the normal ratio is 1 out of 200 million. There was something in the zeitgeist that just inspired brilliance. And the irony is, that was antithetical to the whole national, socialist movement.

What I find so interesting is that Jews in pre-war Germany, unlike Jews elsewhere in history, had a real nationalistic pride. They wanted to be German. Do you think that American Jews watching this show get that tension between country and identity?

Sussman: We do have a narrative character whose drive centers on that question. When Ruth, my survivor friend, spoke, we spoke about the Anschluss [the annexation of Austria into Germany.] On March 11, 1938, she was an Austrian, and on March 12th, she was a Jew. So it’s there, it’s in the writing and we’ll see how many people get it.

Is this the first project in both of your careers that has a specific link to Jewish heritage?

Manilow: Yeah. This is one in a million. It’s all about the project. We went after a project that spoke to us.

Sussman: And people had approached us to write scores for their shows. And we went to several meetings and ultimately said, “If it’s gonna be a five year journey, it has to speak to us.”

Manilow: The only one that comes close is Fiddler on the Roof.

Sussman: Fiddler broke the glass ceiling about Jewish themes on Broadway. I remember Sheldon Harnick [the lyricist on Fiddler] said to me, he thought the Jews of the metropolitan area would keep it open for three years. What he didn’t anticipate is that it would speak so universally to Koreans and Italians and Japanese.

Right, it tapped into tradition as a whole ethos.

Sussman: And that was a late discovery on their part. It was Jerome Robbins who said, “Ah, I know what this show is about”, and the show was already up at that point.

Manilow: It’s interesting because Bruce and I need that before we start…what we’re writing about.

Sussman: The first thing we put down was, “This is a show about the quest for harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history.” Everything flows from that.

Had you not been inspired by the documentary [about the Comedian Harmonists], do you think you would have pursued something else about history or Jewish identity?

Sussman: Well, I’m a history buff. So, history – yes. Jewish – if it’s the right story. The Jewish stories tend to appeal to me the most. I was actually exploring another project that I thought wouldn’t have a Jew in it, and I researched and got to a critical point, and suddenly there’s a big old Jewish theme. And I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s just going to be there for me wherever I turn.

Manilow: And you know this is not a Holocaust musical. A lot of writers have gotten that wrong.

Sussman: Right. Obviously there are references and allusions to it, but this takes place in the approaching storm.

It’s interesting that all six members of the Comedian Harmonists survived the war and some went on to really prosperous careers. Does that lend a more bittersweet tone than what might be assumed to be a tragic one?

Sussman: Yeah, the whole narrative is seen through the eyes of one character. We’re looking from the vantage point of the one who lived the longest, Roman Cycowski. He happened to be the most successful in putting the pieces of his life back together, but he also carries a burden, and a fair degree of survivor guilt. So it is that tension that we’re exploring. There’s a bittersweet quality for him about remembering.

I’d love to hear about the score and the musical styles you drew from.

Manilow: I started by studying what they did. They only had about 20 recordings at the time. And they were great, they knocked me out. And they were funny. And they were jumping around and still in tune.

Sussman: I remember vividly when I sent you the first CD, and you were in your car driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, and you flipped out and called me on your car phone.

Manilow: And that’s the thing: how come we didn’t know this? That’s the point of our diving so far in. Because they were the first, they were the architects of the kind of group singing that we love so much today. How come we didn’t know them? So after I studied them, my job was to write an authentic sounding score that didn’t sound like a Barry Manilow record that paid tribute to the time and place. This was a style of music that I had never even thought about let alone written. So, it was about a year before I even put a note down.

Sussman: He immersed himself.

Manilow: I immersed myself so deeply into the 20s and 30s. I actually found the Nazi marching band theme. Creepy as it was, it was brilliant. And Bruce helped me to study the classical music that came out of that world. When I went to Germany to do a concert, I found the Shlagerparade [the hit albums of German pop music]. And I bought all of them. That’s where I began, immersing myself in the style of music that the public was listening to during those years. It’s really quite a score. I’ve never written anything like it. I think that if you didn’t know that I wrote it, my name would be the last name you would think of. It’s great to go that far. I was without a net.

Sussman: Which is the best way to fly when we’re writing.

Thinking beyond the productions coming up in Atlanta and L.A., does Broadway still feel like the destination?

Manilow: All I really care about is to see our play up again. I hope the audience likes it because I like it and Bruce likes it. And…what did Oscar Hammerstein say?

Sussman: Yeah, on the opening night of Oklahoma!, Oscar Hammerstein took a walk with his wife and said to her, “I really hope the audience likes it because this is what I like, and if they like it, I get a chance to write more."

Manilow: So this is where we’re at. I hope they like it, but it wont change my feeling for it. And where it goes, we’re not even thinking about it.

Photo courtesy of the Alliance Theatre 

Recap on TCG's "New Voices in the American Theater"

Last night brought me to WNYC’s Greene Space for a panel with three great playwrights – Melissa James Gibson, Annie Baker, and Amy Herzog.  The event, moderated by Village Voice theater critic Alexis Soloski, featured readings from the playwrights and one-on-one interviews with each writer followed by a broader conversation with all three. If the playwrights had just read from their plays (specifically [sic], The Flick, and 4000 Miles) and sent us home, it still would have been worth going.

I was happy to see that the audience had a sizable male population. And equally so that there wasn’t much time spent on the concept of “women playwrights”. About an hour into the evening, Soloski remarked, “I can’t help but notice that we’re all female.” And to her credit, the only part of the discussion that was gender-focused pertained to whether opportunities are changing for women playwrights (consensus: not on Broadway, but yes elsewhere) which is a more interesting conversation than had a moderator tried to connect women writers on the basis of gender.

One quality that does link these particular writers, however, is a pursuit of naturalistic language -- that imperfect vernacular that ultimately reveals a character truthfully. As Gibson stated during the discussion, “I think we’re all interested in the colloquial poetry of everyday conversation. It’s all right there for the stealing.”

Another common thread is the way these playwrights, each in her way, create subtle, secret moments that make the audience pay attention. Baker’s gift is with silences. In the script to Circle Mirror Transformation, her author’s note states that “without its silences, this play is a satire, and with its silences it is, hopefully, a strange little naturalistic meditation on theater and life and death and the passing of time.” Herzog sets one of the most powerful scenes in 4000 Miles in near darkness where the characters' silhouettes are detectable but their faces and expressions are obscured. She specifies that the stage should be actually dark, not simply “stage dark”. And Gibson sets her play [sic] almost entirely in doorways and hallways so that we might, as she writes, “watch the action unfold through a half-closed door or a partially open window blind. In this way, the visual perspective is at times as limited as the outlook of the characters.”

To me, this is challenging theater in the best sense.

There have been many articles recently about the need for theater to be less self-important, less about polite audience members listening to actors talk. Many have pointed to experience-based theater as the perfect antidote, like Here Lies Love (involving dancing and movement), Ivo Van Hove’s Roman Tragedies at BAM (encouraging live tweeting), and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (featuring food, vodka, and cabaret seating amidst the performers). These productions are, without a doubt, invaluable to making theater vibrant, and to making a wider circle than dedicated theatergoers take notice. But I hope it doesn’t diminish plays like Herzog’s, Baker’s, and Gibson’s that necessitate a quiet, attentive audience.

In a recent post from playwright and blogger Gwydion Suilebhan, he writes that live communal events like sporting events, parades, even church services are “so much better [than theater] at convincing people to sit in a shared, real space together at the same time.” I too love theater that creates a shared experience and agree with Siulebhan’s sentiment. But I think it’s important too – and the playwrights last night reminded me – that a shared experience in theater can happen when the house is quiet. I wouldn’t call those audiences polite. I’d call them engaged.

Photo credit: Rachel Reilich, Heather Weston

An Interview with Itamar Moses

If the mark of success for a writer is in being both prolific and versatile, then Itamar Moses finds himself in a uniquely auspicious moment in his career. Balancing work between playwriting and television writing (most recently on “Boardwalk Empire”), Itamar now ventures into musicals and will soon present the New York premiere of Nobody Loves You (a musical comedy about reality dating shows) and the world premiere of The Fortress of Solitude (a musical adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel about boyhood friends in Brooklyn).

I sat down with Itamar to discuss what he likes about musicals, how he works with composers, and why the best song lyrics are speakable sentences.

By now in your career, you’ve written several full-length plays and have written for two television shows. Did musicals feel like a natural next step for you as a writer?

I don’t see it as a linear progression. I would say it’s more like an expansion. I’m interested in a lot of forms, and once I’ve worked in a particular form for a long time – playwriting being the one I’ve worked in the longest – you start to chafe against the inherent formal constraints of what you’re doing. I think there’s an excitement in trying things that you’re newer at. It seems to be a way of recapturing that feeling you had when you were first getting into it.

The two musicals I’ve been working on recently came about very specifically. Nobody Loves You happened because Gaby Alter, the composer, is an old friend of mine. Like literally we grew up together and had Passover together. So when he ended up in New York, it was like, “Here we are living in Brooklyn, we should do something together.” And The Fortress of Solitude happened because Daniel Aukin managed to get the rights from Jonathan Lethem and approached Michael Friedman about doing the music, and the two of them called me. I thought I definitely want to work with these two guys and I had read the novel and loved it. So it was like, this adaptation is probably impossible, but I want to be involved in this failed experiment.

When people talk about great book writers, like James Lapine for Stephen Sondheim, what do you think people are referring to? What qualities make a great book writer?

You need to be well-attuned to the underlying story structure. Like if you could see through the surface of a play and see the numbers going by like it’s the Matrix. It’s a supporting role in a very literal sense – you’re building the foundation and scaffolding for the building. And hopefully by the time the building is done, the foundations are invisible and the scaffolding is gone, but because you did it right the building looks great. It has to be ego-less in a way that I think playwrights aren’t used to but which I think is healthy in a way. It’s like being a staff writer on a TV show. If I do my job perfectly, someone else is going to get an enormous amount of credit. I remember this quote, supposedly when he read the script for “Training Day”, Ethan Hawke said, “If I do my job perfectly, Denzel Washington will win an Oscar.” I think book writing is similar to that.

Do you have a favorite composer-lyricist combination?

I think Gaby is really good. His collaboration with me has been fruitful because early on I had a tendency to do stuff that was extremely clever, and Gaby brought me around to the point of view that there’s nothing more satisfying than a speakable English sentence that the character would say in that moment that also scans and rhymes. Someone I think is good at that is Joe Iconis who writes his own lyrics. Michael Friedman is a great lyricist too in a deceptive way. Michael’s lyrics are super smart because somehow the balance between the intelligence and emotion is exactly right so you never feel how smart his lyrics are or that they call attention to themselves.

But other than the people I personally know…

Rodgers and Hart, or Rodgers and Hammerstein?

Rodgers and Hammerstein. You know who’s amazing is the John Kander/Fred Ebb combination. When we were doing Nobody Loves You at the Globe in San Diego, The Scottsboro Boys was there on the main stage. So we went to see it and I remember Gaby said something like, “Those two guys may have written songs that don’t work, but they didn’t put any of them in their musicals.” And it’s true – every song those guys did together, you can hear the bat hit the ball and just watch home run after home run. And Sondheim obviously. I did read his book, “Finishing the Hat”, which is not really a book you read. You dip into it.

And display it prominently in your home.

Exactly. Next to Ulysses.

I’m sure Nobody Loves You gave you an education in reality dating shows. Was the idea of having a philosophy student who mocks reality shows always central to the story?

Yes. From our earliest conversations about the show, what Gaby and I were really wary of was setting up a straw man to knock down. Like, reality TV is ridiculous, so you could do a sketch about it where you’re just shooting at the target. But to do a full-length story where the audience cares about the characters, where they feel something as well as being entertained, you can’t do that. So that character, Jeff, the philosophy student, we were very cognizant that it was just as important to indict ourselves as it was to indict reality TV. And if what the show could actually do was demonstrate that the character who is the most “us” is guilty of exactly the same things that he’s accusing reality television of being.

Which is artifice?

Yeah. That the pose of, “I’m above this, and no one can see through this as well as I can” is just as much a performance as what’s happening on the shows. Or it’s a defensive reaction to not being as adored as you want to be. So that was our approach, to put our thesis right up front. There’s a rant that the protagonist has in scene two that says everything terrible we want to say about reality TV, so the point is to establish that up front and have him realize he might as well have been talking about himself.

Playwriting is inherently solitary before rehearsals begin whereas musicals are collaborative, especially when you’re co-lyricists. Do you think that having a friendship with Gaby was necessary for your first musical writing experience?

Not necessarily. I think with Gaby the thing we had to overcome was being too nice to each other. If your sensibilities are too similar that’s risky. There was that New Yorker article a while ago that had a Q rating for collaboration. It was like, if the people don’t know each other at all, that’s bad, and if the people know each other too well, that’s bad. There’s some peak in the middle where you need just enough conflict. So our challenge was to lower our Q by bringing in a director whom we hadn’t known as long.

Also I imagine there’s the risk of going too easily toward your inside jokes and common references.

That’s true, although neither of us are big into pop-culture references.

And yet this is your subject matter.

Right, but it’s a fictional show. There’s almost no references to specific celebrities, that’s not the way either of us writes. I would say the insideriness of our voice has more to do with a shared Northern California, Bay Area-ish sensibility. But because there are so many artists who come from there, it’s a recognizable voice.

Do you ever watch “Burning Love”? That’s a pure spoof of reality dating shows.

I’ve seen it. I’ve been nervous to watch too much of it because it looks really funny and I don’t want to feel like it’s eating our lunch! But you’re right, it’s just a straight-up satire whereas ours widens the lens a couple more degrees. We pull it back to show the behind-the-scenes workings of the show and the audience watching the show, so there are a couple angles.

Changing focus to The Fortress of Solitude, I read that you were very into sci-fi growing up. Did that interest tap into your willingness to take this project on? Sci-fi is certainly a thread in the book.

Yeah, there’s the thread in the book and in Lethem’s work generally of the person who throws himself into these fantasy worlds. Maybe that had to do with why I liked the book when I read it. But it also touches on a lot of the stuff I tend to write about: the core of it is a friendship between two boys.

I had met [Jonathan] Lethem over the years. We had a sort of inverse parallel path where he grew up here and then spent his formative artistic years in Berkeley, and I went the opposite way. When I was in high school he worked at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue, and a good friend of mine had dated his sister. He had published two novels and his third novel was coming out, so I remember being aware of this guy. He was in my personal and artistic firmament. I just felt connected to him and his work.

The language of the play is so rooted in time and place. How did you begin your adaptation of the work?

It’s just getting the music of how they talk into your head. I didn’t consciously think, “Alright, so how did people talk in the 70’s in Brooklyn?” I had the novel, and I had Lethem’s dialogue. In the early drafts, there was a lot of dialogue directly from the book and some of it’s still in there. That was the seed and everything grew from there.

When you get the rights to a novel, how does lifting quotes out of the text work? What’s permitted?

I think basically anything. But it wouldn’t behoove me to use every scene, lengthwise, first of all. Also storytelling works differently in a novel, especially this novel which has a tapestry-like flow. So how do you achieve that while also feeling like we’re experiencing discreet moments in time. I suppose I could have someone read the whole novel onstage, but what kind of theater company would do that? (laughs)

Where is the script in its development now?

We were developing it for a few years with CTG in Los Angeles. Then there was a dormant period where it didn’t seem like anyone was going to produce the show. It was sort of a wandering in the wilderness time for the piece. And then last summer we did a workshop at New York Stage and Film, and after that things came together very quickly with this partnership between Dallas Theater Center and the Public. It’s getting closer and closer but there are things we still haven’t solved. The next thing is we’re doing a PublicLab at the Public in September, and the Dallas Theater Center is going to do the world premiere next March, and then theoretically it comes back to the Public in fall ’14. So we have time, but we’re gonna use all of it.

Why a musical as opposed to a play with music?

Music is such a big element in the novel. The whole thing takes place against this backdrop of the changing musical styles coming out of Brooklyn during that time. We had to figure out what the rules were and how music operates in the show. The effect Michael is going for is how music actually operates in people’s lives. It’s linked to these moments, and the nostalgia of a particular moment is bound up with a song that was playing at the time.

The challenge for [Michael] was, how do we write music that’s identifiably of a particular era without just making us miss the real songs. Like, without making people say, “I wish he had just licensed a bunch of actual songs.” What he’s done, miraculously I feel like, is written music that feels like it existed but you forgot about it.

Jonathan Lethem has said that in order to write books that were quintessentially Brooklyn, he had to leave it. That he had this enhanced perspective by being away from it.

Right, because there’s too much. When you’re in the middle of something you want to write about, be it a place or experience, you feel this pressure to use everything. There’s an optimum distance, I think, where just the things that are necessary to something you’re trying to make are shining brightly enough at you to see them.

Tickets are available for Nobody Loves You at Second Stage. Visit 2st.com for show information. The Fortress of Solitude is scheduled to have its world premiere in March 2014 at Dallas Theater Center.

photo credit:  David Getzschman
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A Non-Ironic Sad Goodbye To "Smash"

The NBC show “Smash” hardly dropped a bombshell when it announced that the final episode of its second season would also be its series finale. The television show about a fictional musical’s tumultuous road to Broadway experienced its own tumult from the start, never finding the sizable audience it needed to stay in business.

Many who have written about the failings of “Smash”, like Charles Isherwood HERE, have commented on the show’s sloppy storylines and overabundance of producing talent which may have caused a few too many creative differences on set. Both may be true, and I agree with all of Isherwood’s remarks, except his eagerness to say farewell to the show.

“Smash” has had some pointless arcs and ridiculous musical segments, but it was a fun show that featured immense talent – the compositions of Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman and the voice of Megan Hilty among them. I enjoyed it the way I enjoyed Season One of “Glee” (a show that has astonishingly stayed on the air).

I think the difficulty “Smash” faced (and this is from someone who genuinely hoped it would succeed) was that it wanted to be mainstream and insider at the same time. It strived to find wide appeal with an aspirational Broadway story while winking frequently at the select viewers who knew the reference points. Like featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda at a party telling an anecdote about Jonathan Groff; like Michael Riedel waxing judgmental, like Jordan Roth popping up at a business lunch. The expectation, however, for a show that inserts so many real-life theater makers into each episode is that it will maintain a level of authenticity throughout. It was perhaps the theater equivalent of a show like “Entourage” in which Vince and his crew would inevitably run into Matt Damon or Harvey Weinstein at a Hollywood party. But “Entourage” more successfully straddled the mainstream/insider line, and its share of far-fetched story lines never plagued the show; its popularity was always about guys in L.A. living the good life.

Ultimately, “Smash” didn’t make it as a mass-market show about getting famous, and it didn’t make it as a small, cult-like show for a tightly knit knowledgeable audience. It sat in the gray area of entertainment. And yet, I can’t help feeling that the cancelation of a TV show about theater is a sad sign for theater. “Smash” has become enough of a punchline that it all but ensures other networks won't explore any aspect of the theater world.

If there’s one successful element to “Smash” that transcends the run of the show it’s the enhanced recognition of Megan Hilty. She will now be known as more than the replacement Glinda in Broadway’s ongoing production of Wicked. You can almost envision the ad campaign for Hilty’s next Broadway show: “Starring Megan Hilty from the hit TV show, Smash."

Theater Review: The Assembled Parties

The playwright Richard Greenberg is a writer deserving of accolades. He has written over 25 plays, including hits like Take Me Out; beautiful scripts with lesser productions like Three Days of Rain; and the occasional flop like Breakfast at Tiffany’s which closed earlier this month. Happily, the praise bestowed on his new Broadway play, The Assembled Parties, has been nearly unanimous. But it felt unfinished to me, an amalgam of clever scenes and empathetic characters that had lost their way.

The Assembled Parties is a story about long-held secrets between family members, first in the early 80’s and later in the early aughts. Our attention is centered on the Bascovs, a refined, upper-class Manhattan family whom you would envy for their good looks and sprawling apartment if they weren’t so nice and welcoming. Julie Bascov, the beautiful mother played by Jessica Hecht, is a former actress who at 50-something hasn’t lost an ounce of youthful appeal. Her lilting voice and enunciated syllables suggest a well-bred upbringing, the same advantages she offers her two sons, Scotty and Timmy. We meet Julie before Christmas dinner, preparing crudités in the kitchen with Jeff (Jeremy Shamos), a bright but nervous law student and friend of Scotty’s who is staying with the Bascovs for the holiday.

It’s important to mention that everyone we meet here is Jewish. And while religion itself isn’t central to the play, it’s noteworthy that Christmas is the backdrop for this family gathering. It speaks not just to Julie and her husband Ben’s secularism, but also to their Jewish ancestry. (More on that in a minute.) The Bascovs’ dinner guests are Ben’s sister Faye, her husband Mort, and daughter Shelley, who are distinctly more Jewish…or rather Jewy, which implies the stereotypes without the religiosity. Jeff’s family (whom we don’t meet) seems to be more observant and less well-off, the combination of which deepens his awe of the Bascovs. A phone conversation to Jeff’s parents indicates that they’re spending the night with Chinese food and a movie, the recognizable cliché of Jews at Christmastime.

These multiple shades of Jewishness provide much of the comedy in Act I. Whether or not you pick up on the cultural references, you can’t miss Shelley’s Brooklyn-inflected accent, or Faye’s Yiddish-infused speech, which Judith Light nails at every turn. Faye is the opposite of Julie: she is salted herring to Julie’s caviar.

As the guests arrive and the Bascovs prepare dinner, we see the stage rotate to reveal more and more rooms in their palatial apartment. Ultimately, we arrive at the dining room where our appetites have been whetted by the many mysteries that hide behind the comedy: infidelity between spouses, long-standing rivalries, a brazen girlfriend we only hear about, and a ruby necklace whose ownership is in question.

The focus amid the din is Julie, and it is testament to Greenberg’s writing and to Hecht’s performance that we fall in love with her so immediately. Jeff visibly does too, and when he jokes with Scotty and says, “I’m in love with your mom,” it’s done with deliberate bro humor to mask any signs of sincerity. It’s easy for us to feel as Jeff does – we’re enamored by the Bascovs even as we don’t know them.

When the curtain rises after intermission, it’s clear that Julie Bascov (now in her 70’s) has slowed down with time. The set no longer rotates, and Julie’s lightness has become slow with older age. (Hecht’s ability to change her entire demeanor, posture, and walk over a 15-minute intermission is remarkable.) Jeff, whose relationship with the Bascovs has been ongoing if sporadic, has returned for another Christmas dinner. He is more resigned to life, less enchanted by law, and still, it would appear, in love with Julie.

Because the mysteries of Act I hang in the air, every conversation in the second act seems to hint at their revelation. This is where the play falls short. The secrets are revealed, but they don’t affect the story. What we learn is interesting but not reality changing. This play is ultimately Julie’s story: how she encounters every setback and challenge with positivity and grace. But I wish it had been Jeff’s story: the outsider looking in for twenty years. How he has loved Julie all this time while she loves him as a son.

The bigger issue I had with the play is why Greenberg portrays a Jewish family at Christmas dinner, not once but twice. Jewishness circles the play like tinsel and ornaments around an evergreen, but Greenberg doesn’t elucidate an important point: that there are distinct differences between prosperous German Jews like Julie and shtetl-associative Jews like Faye. It’s not simply for laughs that Julie is personified by sophistication and Faye by neuroses. Perhaps Greenberg assumes the audience will pick up on the reference points, but I think most will miss them. To have this play be more than about Julie’s charm – a topic many critics singled out in their praise – we need to understand why her culture and history matter. Conjoined with Julie’s gracefulness is her denial of anything bad: how she waves off bad events, people she’s lost, and any trace of her real heritage. We love Julie but we can’t get close to her. It’s an interesting but unresolved idea that Greenberg leaves on our plates as the play ends. An hour later I was hungry again.

An Interview with Mark Rylance

For the April issue of American Theatre magazine, I interviewed actor Mark Rylance about his new play, Nice Fish, currently making its world-premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. At the time of the interview, the play was still in development, so we talked mostly about Rylance’s inspiration and the play’s language.

Nice Fish blends dialogue written by Rylance with monologues (or rather, poems) by Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. A longtime fan of Jenkins’ work, Rylance has quoted such poems at dinners, events, and – most famously – at the Tony Awards in 2008 and 2011 in lieu of acceptance speeches. Watch his 2011 Tony speech HERE.

Nice Fish portrays ice fishermen in Minnesota on the last day of the fishing season. In addition to co-writing the script, Rylance also co-directs with his wife, Claire van Kampen, and stars in the production. Here is an excerpt of our conversation:

I watched an interview that you gave after winning your second Tony award where you were asked if the acceptance speech was your own composition. You replied that you couldn’t write something that good.

(laughs) Probably not.

What was your initial inspiration to combine your words with Jenkins’ words?

I think the initial inspiration came when I noticed Robert Bly’s forward to Louis’ first book of poetry, and Robert identified what he felt was an adult voice running through the poems and also a child’s voice. One voice that was cynical and another that was imaginative. That was the beginning, and I thought maybe these two fisherman might say these words to each other. I don’t know where I got the idea of ice fishermen…. Oh that’s right, there was a funny recording I heard about Minnesota people and how they talk in non-sequiturs. They don’t pick up on what the other has said. Maybe it’s the isolation of the long winters or something.

How much did that Midwestern sensibility tie into your own adolescence in Wisconsin and thinking back on your childhood there?

That’s what it’s about for me. That’s the memory I play on. The long winters in Wisconsin. When I was doing Boeing Boeing [on Broadway] we did a workshop with Matthew Cowles, Christine Baranski’s husband, and I playing the two fishermen. It was about 45 minutes long with just Louis’ poems, no other dialogue. From that I set about wanting it to be a fuller evening with three acts. And then I started to write and imagine the other characters.

Is the non-sequitur style of conversation retained in this version?

Yes, to some degree. Their speech picks up some detail of what the other person has said. One person might be talking about a girlfriend and saying, “I waited for her outside the red house where she lived,” and then he might go on for a few sentences about her. And then the other speaker might say, “I lived in a red house once.”

That almost has an absurdist air to it.

There are absurdist turns in Louis’ poems, it’s true. The ingredients are so recognizable that you don’t see the absurdist thing coming. It’s an ongoing process to make my dialogue marry with his language. For instance, he never swears in his poems, and I’ll sometimes put that in to make something more dramatic, but I’ve just recently taken all that out.

Is it clear when the dialogue shifts from your words to his poems?

Well, hopefully it blends. But the poems tend to be a one-minute speech about something, whereas my dialogue goes back and forth.

I like the idea of collaboration. I like the fact that Shakespeare collaborated. And I expect the collaboration to carry on when the actors join. Most of them are local Minnesotan actors, so I think they’ll correct me on my syntax.

What do you think people think of when they think about ice fishing? What does it mean to a local audience?

I wanted to create [Nice Fish] in Minnesota so that people coming to the play would know about ice fishing and that environment. There’s something magical about being suspended on eight or nine inches of ice. There’s the sense that it won’t last. Hopefully we’re reflecting something truthfully, recognizably.

I’m hoping that the play is more universal than just for a local audience, but this is certainly their environment and their sense of humor. That Northern sense of humor has been in my ear a lot. I remember a Minnesotan man once saying to me, “If a man from Wisconsin tells you a joke, you don’t laugh until a week later.” They’re very dry.  I certainly found that when I came to London, my humor was not recognizable.

But your point about why people go out on the ice and build these little huts. What are they escaping for and what experience do they want to have? These are all quite useful things.

Are you hoping to have a set that evokes a realistic setting or a metaphorical setting?

I hope the set will be like Louis’ poems. They’re made up of real things, but they have the ability to be surprisingly expansive. It’s a wonderful setting – this icy lake with trees in the distance. As we’ve worked on it, I’ve realized that the character of Mother Nature is very expressive in my imagination – wind and snow and aurora borealis. I certainly remember that about the Midwest as compared to London. One is much more aware of the elements.

Do you find your accent returning when you come back to the Midwest?

Yeah, I do. Not just the accent, but a character in me too. I get a flash of being eighteen again. It was a big thing to leave the Midwest at eighteen and come to London, having very little conception in our family that any such thing would ever happen. But we all thought we were English. We used to have tea parties on the fourth of July. When I came to England I knew so little about the rest of the world. Everyone was quite politicized and well read in London. Coming out of high school, I wasn’t awake to very much at all apart from Shakespeare and plays that I had done. So when I go back to the Midwest, I feel an enormous weight come off my shoulders.

Photo credit: Mike Habermann

Classic Stage Company: Everything Old is New Again

How do you make the classics feel fresh? One option: find innovative ways to stage them. Another option: expand the definition of “classics”. The fact of Classic Stage Company’s continued relevance, appeal, and durability within Off-Broadway theater is due to a smart combination of the two…not to mention casting Peter Sarsgaard, Bebe Neuwirth, and John Turturro. In 2011, I interviewed artistic director Brian Kulick on the eve of CSC’s world-premiere of Unnatural Acts, a based-on-real-events portrayal of Harvard’s underground gay community in the 1920’s. Co-conceived by director Tony Speciale and collaboratively written by members of the Plastic Theatre that same year, the play seemed like an unusual selection for a theater dedicated to classic drama. So I asked Kulick how he defines the term. He responded, “A classic is a play that refuses to stop resonating.”

In Kulick’s hands, CSC is benefitting from that broad interpretation. Currently on stage is Stephen Sondheim's Passion – the first New York revival of the musical and the first musical ever to be staged at the downtown theater. Frequent Sondheim collaborator John Doyle directs this production, though instead of having actors play instruments (as in previous Doyle-Sondheim productions), the nine-member orchestra is perched above the stage.

The placement of musicians doesn’t ostensibly have anything to do with Passion, but I found it to be another example of CSC’s continued reinvention. Because there is no room onstage to set up an orchestra, CSC converted its second floor office space into an “orchestra pit” and broke through the walls to expose the area to the audience below. Seeing an elevated orchestra heightens the audience's awareness of the musician as storyteller, particularly for a narrative composer like Sondheim. Space constraints lead to a new musical format = creativity borne out of necessity.

Director John Doyle’s work also benefits from this format. Doyle is often referred to as a minimalist, but I don’t believe that’s his exact intention. It’s more that he gets to the heart of the story and dismisses the pomp that can accompany big musicals. A few weeks before seeing Passion, I went to a panel discussion at WNYC’s Greene Space with Stephen Sondheim. John Doyle, and the lead cast members of the show. Doyle remarked that what is taken to be his creative style in actuality stems from spending years directing small-budget shows where money was scarce. “I got used to working with minimal resources,” he said. “I do everything I can not to get in the way of the story.” That method has stuck with him. The set in Doyle’s revival is a bare black marble floor with two gilded mirrors and light sconces against a back wall. The sparseness transfers our focus to the characters.

This production shows the beauty of Passion – how love transforms its shape and how it transfers its recipient. The cast, Melissa Errico, Judy Kuhn, and an amazing Ryan Silverman were transporting without falling into melodrama. It wouldn’t be surprising if musicals become a regular occurrence at CSC; this version of Passion is an auspicious first go at it. I would agree with Kulick that any great work of art refuses to stop resonating. Evidently, it pays to dust off the classics.

The Soul of Laramie

What The Laramie Project aspires to is remarkable. An enacted investigation into the killing of gay college student Matthew Shepard, the play and its performers achieve what Juilliard President Joseph Polisi once called “the artist as citizen”, the use of art to advocate for a better society. Just five weeks after Shepard was brutally beaten on October 6, 1998, the Tectonic Theater Project, led by director Moisés Kaufman, went to Laramie, Wyoming to ask questions and collect information, forging a work of art that has arguably become the most comprehensive study of Shepard’s murder. On stage now at BAM and performed in repertory with The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, the full work offers nearly five hours of first-person accounts, performed by Tectonic company members, that shed light on the local community, the perception of gays, and the redefining of hate crimes.

TheLaramie Project is so widely acclaimed and its subject matter is so inherently heartrending, that I was surprised by how lackluster the production was. There are many powerful revelations in the work – about the trial, the transition of Mrs. Shepard from private mother to fearless advocate, and the way the media tried to downplay homosexuality as a primary cause of the crime. But each one was presented as a direct address to the audience, as though reading quotations from an article. The breadth of interviews was impressive. But where was the play? It somehow got lost in the documentary.

Blending research with provocative storytelling is an incredible challenge. The best recent example I’ve seen is How to Survive a Plague, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the AIDS crisis and the pursuit of effective treatment among activist groups. Director David France presents an overwhelming amount of historical data and documentary footage, but he finds a soul within the film as well. It felt disappointing both nights at BAM that a work so well-assembled, based on events so heartbreaking, would come across as dryly as it did.

Christopher Shinn, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, pinpoints desire as the missing element in The Laramie Project. For a study so in-depth about a gay man, the play doesn’t discuss desire in the gay community – attraction, relationships, sex both intimate and casual. That absence propelled Shinn to write a new play as “a response to all [The Laramie Project] avoids”, he told me. The new play, Teddy Ferrara, is currently onstage through March 3rd at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The play, which confronts gay college students who come to terms with the suicide of a withdrawn gay freshman, seems to be linked to the suicide of gay college student Tyler Clementi in 2010. But Shinn’s ambitions are more expansive. He explores gay sexuality in all of its complexities, from the dynamics of committed relationships to the expectation that gay men will cheat. “It asks the audience to enter on the level of desire,” Shinn says.

Of course, the narrative of Teddy Ferrara is vastly different from The Laramie Project. But talking to Shinn about how The Laramie Project inspired him to write a new play affirmed what I felt was missing, despite the Tectonic Theater Project’s many talents. The people we meet in Laramieare certainly impassioned; it’s just the storytelling that isn’t.

What Draws a Black Audience

This past weekend I saw Outcry at JACK, the storefront performance space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Written by Thais Francis, the show is an expression of grief and anger at the innocent black men who have been killed for no other cause than racial profiling. My friend Kelley Girod who produced the show termed it “more of an event than a play.” Slain figures like Emmett Till (killed in 1955) and Trayvon Martin (killed in 2012) find themselves in the same place. Heaven, maybe. The show runs through February 17th and is worth seeing. While the script gets clumsy at times, and Thais is inclined to use diary-worthy lines like, “when it’s real, it’s forever”, the idea to combine the lives and deaths of these innocent souls is powerful. Also powerful was seeing great diversity in the audience. It’s not common at the theater.

Kelley, a black playwright and producer, has thought a lot about what attracts black audiences. We talked after the show about Broadway productions that have appealed to people of color and the various reasons why. Most notable are the plays that focus on black characters (like The Color Purple), especially when they feature prominent actors (like The Mountaintop). There are also shows that happen to have a black celebrity (like Chris Rock in Motherfucker with the Hat). Interestingly, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess had a surprisingly small African American turnout. Maybe the opera struck prospective audiences as being dated. Or maybe Audra McDonald’s celebrity is only a draw for audiences that already love musicals.

For four years, Kelley has produced The Fire This Time Festival – a presentation of plays by writers of African and African American descent. The initial idea was to support – and create an outlet for – black writers. And to combat the idea that a black playwright “has to write a play that has black themes, like overcoming slavery,” she says. “If the play is written by a black playwright, then it will relate to a black experience in some way.” As a result, The Fire This Time covers a wide variety of subjects, some racially themed, others not at all. It keeps the festival eclectic, though Kelley admits that a show like Outcry has an easier time raising funds. There is a greater sense of urgency for investors precisely because the black themes are so prominent.

When I saw Motherfucker with the Hat and noticed how many black people were in the audience, my thought was that it stemmed from the desire to see Chris Rock on Broadway. And that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps the presence of black actors – famous or not – is the strongest factor. Regardless of the narrative, audiences of any race want to see an element of themselves onstage.

Art in a Damaged World

When your chosen field is the arts – creating it, performing it, or writing about it – the entire pursuit can feel reduced to luxury or whim after an event as horrific as the elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook. Because the arts are so inextricably linked to observing the world and people’s experiences in it, because telling stories is a direct conduit to creating empathy, there is the collective notion that artists do it out of love and a sense of purpose. But experiencing the arts is essentially a luxury. Even when the work portrays people coping with poverty or violence or hardship, those in the audience usually aren’t. Besides the occasional free installment, the arts are available to ticket buyers; they appeal to individuals whose basic needs have more than been met. I’m not sure whether there is a different role for artists following disaster. Generally speaking, they should be good citizens like anyone else. They should find ways to donate, to comfort, to advocate for better policy. But artists also have a unique opportunity to sustain the relevance of troubling events though their work. To make it meaningful to people, to not let those events fade into history.

On the morning of December 14th, before learning the details of the Newtown shooting, I heard a news program about a proposition that governor Rick Scott has made for state universities in Florida. He advocates that Florida schools offer lower tuition for business-oriented majors and higher tuition for majors that are deemed less so: English, history, political science, philosophy, and theater. Though a student pursuing philosophy will likely have a lower paying job than, say, a student pursuing finance and would benefit from lower tuition, Scott asserts that individuals who do not directly improve Florida’s economy should pay the price, so to speak. Needless to say, the news was disappointing to hear, not only because it seems unfair to force students to pay higher tuition for fields that interest them, but also because the proposition suggests that understanding the world, its history, its sociological make up, how people function, and how we understand one another has little value.

We could use more empathy, a state of mind that naturally emerges from reading fiction, seeing theater, even studying political science in that it broadens our awareness of different communities and populations. The Public Theater’s artistic director Oscar Eustis has spoken about the importance of empathy, saying, “What is necessary in theater is also what is necessary in a functioning democracy.”

People have all sorts of solutions to the gun debate. My thoughts are that 1) a gun should be at least as hard to obtain as a driver’s license, and 2) that our health system should treat mental illness as seriously as it treats cancer. My choice for third is a more vague proposal and more wishful: that we create a more empathetic society where people recognize the dignity in others, even with whom they adamantly disagree. The economy may benefit from individuals with finance skills, but the world benefits from tolerance.

When I first began my MFA program in theater at Columbia, it was just a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina. At our orientation, the dean spoke to the incoming class, remarking that it can be hard to justify having a life in the arts when there are so many basic human needs that first need to be met. He then said something that has stuck with me. “The arts are the last essential thing we need as a society. But they are essential.” There needn’t be any delusion that art solves the ills of this world. But neither should we underestimate its potential to inspire compassion, to restore dignity, to heal, to heal.

Theater Review: The Twenty-Seventh Man

Nathan Englander’s first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, is one of my favorite books ever. I’m not sure if ‘Jewish American Literature’ is still a real genre in the Henry Roth sense of the term, but, if so, Englander is surely a Jewish writer. For someone who is said to have left religious practice years ago, he still has a deeply Jewish soul. And the threads of Jewish thought and identity are looped into every story he writes. The Twenty-Seventh Man, his first story in that collection and now his first play, onstage currently at the Public Theater, is a requiem for the great Yiddish writers in post-WWII Russia who were selectively sentenced to execution by Stalin’s regime. In a jail cell that feels believably stifling, as though “lack of air flow” was part of the set description, we meet Englander’s imagined luminaries, each a Jew and each a legend of the written word.

As the writers discuss their work, their language, and the cause of their incarceration, a new prisoner arrives, this one a near teenager whose name – Pinchas Pelovits – strikes no familiar chords as a recognizable writer. Pelovits, the twenty-seventh man to be selected, is unlike the others: he is anonymous and unpublished. But he is, he assures us, a writer. His presence in the cell is the mystery of the play, and as the other men curiously question his identity, Englander brings to light how writers measure their worth: by sustaining the lifelong ritual of writing and by creating an audience of readers. Pelovits’ elation in sharing the same room as the writers he most admires is the poignant paradox of the work. It is his one chance to share a story of his own with them.

The story Pelovits writes in prison is my favorite part of the play, and I almost wish I could make everyone in the audience read Englander’s original story before seeing the production because the story needs time and potentially a reread to resonate. What Englander arrives at is that the dead cannot be remembered – their lives and their actions have no sanctification – unless those who live make their memory significant. It’s an idea whose brilliance is almost eclipsed by its simplicity.

Barry Edelstein’s direction – maybe his last at the Public Theater and certainly his last in New York for a while as he sets up a new home at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre – was so arresting that the audience seemed to hold its breath collectively after the play’s final scene before applause took over like a welcome catharsis.

Englander’s writing has kept me company a lot this year. I read his new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as soon as it came out, and I used his new translation of the haggadah on Passover. The haggadah had received some mixed reviews, but what I loved about it was the way Englander made some of the most ordinary and familiar phrases come alive. One example was “eloheinu” which is typically translated as “our God” but which Englander translates as “God of us”. In doing so, he offers a new lens through which to view the human/God relationship, transferring any sense of ownership away from us. Whether or not that phrase works for you, it likely makes you think. It makes the speaker take pause and reconsider the meaning of familiar words. That ability is evident in so much of Englander’s work. He encourages us to rethink the things we know. Isn’t that what the best writers do?

Theater Review: Modern Terrorism

Those who feel that theater doesn’t take risks probably haven’t seen Modern Terrorism. A four-door farce meets Jihadist suicide mission, the play is equal parts comedic and chilling. What it does best is portray how in the midst of plotting an attack, the habits of terrorists are familiar and so very much like our own. They rent Zipcars, make playlists, complain about FedEx, eat Rice Krispies, and reference scenes from “Star Wars”. The play’s subtitle, “They Who Want to Kill Us, and How We Learn to Love Them”, has resonance in those moments of familiarity. And while loving a terrorist may seem too outlandish to consider, playwright Jon Kern encourages us to spend time with them before we judge. The most affable one we meet in the sparse Ikea-furnished apartment that serves as their plotting cell is Rahim, a sweet-faced, good-natured young man who incongruously is the mission’s suicide bomber. Played by Indian actor Utkarsh Ambudkar (also known from the improv group Freestyle Love Supreme and a capella film “Pitch Perfect”), Rahim is driven more by a craving for approval than any overarching animosity toward Americans. Also plotting the mission is Yalda whose antipathy toward America began when her husband was accidentally killed by a drone on their wedding day. The third terrorist, Qala, a Somalian, stands apart from Rahim and Yalda because he acts out of visceral ideology rather than personal motivation. As a result, he’s the only character onstage who provokes more fear than empathy.

Much of the play’s comic relief rests on the only non-terrorist and the only white guy. Kern cleverly chooses to make the character who has the most in common with the audience a wayward stoner type: not quite the paragon of American exceptionalism. Jerome (or 3A as his extremist neighbors call him in an effort to dehumanize) stumbles upon their plot, and while acknowledging that he has become a liability, finds himself surprisingly enticed by the hyper-focused, ambition-oriented spirit of terrorists. He even makes himself useful to their operation by buying huge quantities of propane without raising suspicions. Because white crazies remarkably don’t arouse suspicion.

For his part, Jerome does dispense a few pearls of wisdom to his new compatriots. He notes that while terrorist acts shake us up as a nation, they don’t bring down the whole country. What does bring down the whole country, he posits? Goldman Sachs.

The play, for all its darkness, is really funny. Kern lightens the mood by mocking the very notion of suicide bombers. Rahim expresses the hope that nothing bad happens to him today so that he can die as scheduled tomorrow. Admittedly, some viewers may be put off by the show’s unbearable lightness. But I think it would be a mistake to think that Peter Dubois’ direction intends to ridicule a serious situation. There’s an air of absurdism to the work. We laugh amidst nervousness, between moments of held breath and heavy sigh.

Kern’s brilliance is his decision to place two key moments off stage: Rahim’s first bombing attempt and Qala’s fiery exit toward a swarm of police (the final scene of the play). In both cases, we don’t know exactly what happens. And I think that confusion is the whole point. Most of us will never understand a terrorist’s mindset. And it’s cathartic to leave the theater remembering that.

Theater Review: Annie

Attired in dressy clothes and perched atop seats priced at $100, the girls and boys in the audience at the Palace Theatre, where the third incarnation of Annie is currently in production, may not be personally acquainted with the school of hard knocks. Glancing around the theater at the show’s end, I counted the booster seats, which the theater supplies for its smallest audience members, and was amazed at how many little kids had the good fortune of seeing the show. The politics of 1930s Depression-laden America may fly over the heads of young viewers, but that’s beside the point. Annie is a foremost a story of wish fulfillment. And its big-hearted, big-belted songs are anthems of optimism.

I had forgotten how much political content the play held, from the ironic dedication to President Hoover, (“We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover”) to the manifest distinctions between the conservative Daddy Warbucks and the liberal FDR. The political milieu, which director James Lapine emphasizes both dramatically and comically, gave the production its necessary heft beyond Annie’s fantasy storyline. The only instance when the political element teetered too far into schlock was a scene featuring President Roosevelt’s cabinet in discussion of how to ameliorate the country’s economic woes. Annie begins to sing, “Tomorrow” and suddenly she’s standing on the desk in the oval office, thus motivating FDR to introduce the New Deal. He motions for his staff to join in song, calling in the direction of Mr. Warbucks, “You too, Republicans!” It was a hokey but comical moment that dipped precipitously into camp once the Secretary of the Treasury brought out the jazz hands.

Among the adults in the audience, it’s a safe gamble that nearly everyone knows the story and music, either from the original 1977 production, its revival in 1997, or its film version, released in 1982.  We have our expectation of how Annie will look and how Miss Hannigan will talk. The greatest accomplishment for Lapine is that he gets so much personality and nuance from each actor that, in less talented hands, might be reduced to caricature. The show doesn’t rest on Annie alone, but 11-year old Lilla Crawford, who fills the role, carries so much of the performance on her small frame. Her voice has clearly benefitted from vocal training while retaining that purity of emotion that happens when an actress connects to her lyrics. She also blends youthful earnestness with the necessary hardscrabble roughness that lends believability to her character. Spitting into her hand before shaking Daddy Warbucks' hand is a welcome touch, especially when he does the same.

The other cast members give equally multi-faceted performances. As Miss Hannigan, Katie Finneran projects more than a cantankerous orphanage keeper; she is a woman who clings to her last hopes of being happy and desirable to men. As Daddy Warbucks, Anthony Warlow conveys much more than a stodgy stiff-nosed billionaire; he is a man in search of meaningful relationships who carries the memory of his own scrappy youth. And the actresses who fill the roles of the orphan girls are more than Dickensian street urchins who sing about misfortune. They are little comediennes who will gladly steal a laugh as willingly as they steal Miss Hannigan's things. Emily Rosenfeld who plays the littlest orphan Molly is a miniature Mary Tyler Moore with a precocious knack for physical comedy, especially when she puts on Miss Hannigan’s bra and stuffs it full with scarves while singing “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile”.

Much of these nuanced portrayals owe thanks to Andy Blankenbeuhler’s choreography. You would never guess this is the same choreographer whose pop and locks are on display a few blocks away at Bring It On: The Musical. The breadth of his work is testament to dance as an element of storytelling.

What we love ultimately about Annie is that having wealth, while undeniably fabulous, pales next to having a family. The whole 5th Avenue penthouse/two-story crystal chandelier (which is impressive, by the way) is for our pleasure far more than it is for Annie’s. We believe that her greatest happiness is in having a loving parent. Though the opportunity for upward mobility in troubled times is something we too can all embrace. You too, Republicans.

From Experimental to Risky

Summer theater enjoys a certain freedom. The Tony awards season is long past, allowing a welcome remove from awards bidding and the politics that come with it. In other words, plays needn’t have a larger objective than to excite audiences. This is also the season of the theater festival. There are lots of them, the farther off Broadway, the better. In June there was ANT Fest at Ars Nova. In July, there’s the undergroundzero Festival; NYMF (dedicated specifically to musicals); and East to Edinburgh. August will bring the NYC Fringe, the largest festival of its kind in North America. All of these festivals celebrate art that is bold and risk-taking. Yet all seem to have a strange relationship with the word “experimental”, that oft-used, amorphous term that means anything from boundary-pushing to esoteric. Why are some artists, arts companies, and arts festivals reluctant to call themselves “experimental”, even when their work seems to fit the description? It may be that calling yourself “experimental” implies pretentiousness, but, more than that, I think it suggests that a work be known for its otherness. Paul Bargetto, the artistic director of the undergroundzero Festival, who admits to having a mixed relationship with the word, says that the term is used unnecessarily in American theater. In European countries, he says, what we call experimental theater is simply called “theater”. Or “theatre”.

Frequently, when we think of a work as experimental, what comes to mind are the ways in which its form diverges from the norm. Perhaps the show is performed in an unconventional, site-specific location; Or the performance blends multi-media like video or projections alongside the actors. Or the work eliminates the fourth wall between actor and audience, inviting the viewer to participate as a performer. But none of these are new inventions. The Wooster Group has incorporated video projection into its theatrical work for years. And the Living Theatre has embraced audience interaction since its founding in 1947. Are those experimental techniques still experimental?

I have found that “experimental” is as limiting a word as “risk-taking”, another term used frequently in the conversation about theater. Theater critics and bloggers often bemoan the state of American theater for not taking enough risks. If what they mean is that theater should be penetrative, not simply pleasant and entertaining, then I readily agree. Director, actor, and playwright Andre Gregory said this in an article in the Guardian last winter: “Passive theater doesn’t force you or seduce you or charm you into asking questions. [It] tells you what to look at onstage, and when you come out, you say, ‘Gee, that was good!’ or ‘Harry Sterns sang that song well!’ Active theater demands that you ask serious, challenging questions of your own life, the culture, and the society we live in.”

I would call that good, smart theater, which may or may not be “risk-taking”. The two best plays I saw this spring – 4000 Miles and Tribes – were thought-provoking and beautifully written and acted. The term “risk-taking” didn’t come to mind in either show, but I found both works to be transporting and powerful.   Tribes, in portraying a deaf man within a hearing family, explores the expansiveness and the limitations of sign language. It was incredibly evocative in a way I had never experienced onstage before. 4000 Miles examined an intergenerational relationship in a way that was poignant without ever once becoming saccharine.

I’ve always admired theater that assumes the audience is smart and perceptive. Ditto for TV shows and films. Maybe that’s the key, whether the show is a large Broadway production, or Tribes at the Barrow Street Theatre, or an undergroundzero show performed in a storefront space in Bushwick. Good theater assumes the viewer will be attentive enough to meet the work halfway, not simply sit back and receive.

Who Said “Girls” Aren’t Funny

If there’s one downside to the multitude of journalists and bloggers that saturate the cultural landscape, it’s the torrential downpour of declarations about new television shows that have barely gotten off the ground. Television, unlike film, can take its time, creating long and winding arcs for its characters that span seasons. But that doesn’t stop anyone from making sweeping statements about a new show after the first three episodes or even just the pilot. I present for you an abridged version of critics’ responses (and those who love posting in the comments section) about HBO’s “Girls”: “Its portrayal of sex is revolutionary!” “Who cares? It’s racist!” “It only portrays the privileged upper class.” “I know! It’s so true to my life.”

And it’s following this wave of praise and criticism that I deem this moment a good time to weigh in. While “Girls” aims to speak contemplatively about the self-searching of twenty-somethings, the show is first and foremost a comedy, one in which audiences will feel closer to the characters by laughing at them than by empathizing. I don’t think the show needs to assert how REAL it is. Those glimpses of real experience will peek through the comedic moments of Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, and Jessa who are naïve, entitled, clueless, and self-absorbed respectively. To the extent that we’ve been there, or if you’re twenty-four, maybe you ARE there, there’s the camaraderie of shared experience in the realm of guys, friends, and work. But the truisms portrayed in each episode only work if they don’t take themselves too dramatically. They only work if we know that Lena Dunham is laughing at the girls, and herself, along with us.

The show does have some great writing, and in the best scenes so far Dunham displays her knack for comedic rhythm. Taken from the scene where her character Hannah has an uncomfortable reunion with ex-boyfriend Elijah:

“I’m not going to let you have the last word.” “Nice to see you, your dad’s gay.”

As well as her penchant for witty observations like Marnie’s response to Hannah’s goth-like sexy outfit. “Is it some kind of solstice?”

But just as much – and particularly in Episode 5 this week – Dunham showcases raw dialogue and awkward guy/girl interactions that typify less scripted, less funny shows. When “Girls” comes across as trying to illuminate the experience of young women, it starts to blend in with any other show about girls making it in New York. But to be hilarious and incisive, it needs to be well crafted and deliberately funny, especially when we’ve seen Dunham do it so well.

Emily Nussbaum wrote a great piece in New York magazine that praised “Girls” as revolutionary, but it’s hard to think of it as such when the set up is so recognizable: a woman searches to find herself and love in the process in the city of New York. What feels actually revolutionary to me is Dunham herself. That she is the comedian who is willing to make herself the punch line. That she doesn’t fit most men’s and women’s perception of beautiful, but that’s no reason for her to play the comical best friend to the pretty star, like Rosie O’ Donnell to Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. No, Dunham is the star with a pretty best friend, and, she has every reason to believe that she deserves a great sex life and a purposeful career, even if she tends to embarrass herself in pursuit of both. Self-deprecation is, after all, a tenet of the comedian’s playbook. As Dunham says in a commentary segment on HBO’s site, Hannah has “a mix of complete self-confidence and no self worth: the trademark of most twenty-four year-old girls and most Jewish comedians.”

What I find refreshing about the creation of “Girls” –  where Dunham is the writer, director, and star  –  is the conviction that women can make it happen, on their own, at whatever age, with whatever God-given talents they have. Like Tina Fey before her, Dunham has the smarts, self-awareness, and confidence to write and play a character so misguided. Yet unlike Fey, or Liz Lemon specifically, Dunham’s Hannah expects that a guy will want her sexually and wants it just as much herself.

Every week, I await the next episode, but I always hope to laugh more than to contemplate. Maybe that’s simply because I’m looking at twenty-four in retrospect. But I think more so because a well-tread genre needs to feel new.