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June 23 – Went back to see Michael Winther’s “New Love Songs” at the Metropolitan Room, at the invitation of
David Zinn. Emmett Foster was also in the audience and told us about seeing Phoebe Snow the night before. Michael was in fine form, as ever. I liked that he told somewhat looser and funnier stories about Bill Finn than he did last time I saw the show, when Bill was in the audience. Michael loves to chat between songs, loves to chat about the songs. I like all that, but I especially like the subtle ways he acts some of the songs. I noticed it especially tonight when he sang Finn’s “Blue Movie, Parts 1 and 2,” otherwise known as “Blow Me” and “Kiss Me.” What could be just a fun laff-riot gets turned into a teeny one-act play, especially the latter, with several shades of unspoken gesture. He also surprised me by mentioning Harry Kondoleon, who apparently drove up to Williamstown with Bill Finn and Wendy Wasserstein to see Michael’s production of
March of the Falsettos (which Bill hated).
June 27 – The Marriage of Bette and Boo gets my vote for Christopher Durang’s finest play, and three cheers to the
Roundabout Theater Company
for reviving it. (Who’s picking plays there these days? They’re definitely revisiting some of the finest shows that played Off-Broadway in the 1980s.) But Walter Bobbie, who directed several of Durang’s short plays in recent years, has a tough row to hoe going up against anyone’s memories of the original 1985 production at the Public Theater, directed by Jerry Zaks. In that production, the cast was an exceptionally unified ensemble devoted to playing the play, with its crazy mixture of affectionate portraiture, social and religious satire, and heart-breaking semi-autobiography (emphasized by having Durang play the role of Matt, who narrates what the playwright acknowledges to be more or less the story of his family). Even though individual performances were priceless (I will never forget Olympia Dukakis in particular, as Boo’s mother Soot, who responded to each of her vile husband’s insults with a plummy yet girlish “Oh, Karl!”), they collectively hewed to the spirit of the play, without extra commentary. (The rest of the cast included Joan Allen, Mercedes Ruehl, and Kathryn Grody, who got to speak one of my favorite lines from the play: “Is the phrase ‘my own stupidity’ hyphenated?”) The new production sort of treats it as a Problem Play, addressing the Issue of Dysfunctional Families. And each of the actors clings tightly to his or her own neurotic character trait. But since this isn’t a naturalistic drama, that strategy doesn’t hang together very well. Still, I laughed my head off at what felt like, at the end of the show, one of the saddest plays I’ve ever seen. And there are some wonderful moments from terrific actors, including Victoria Clark as Bette’s chipper mother, an unrecognizable John Glover as Boo’s horrible father, and Terry Beaver, who plays the family priest with just exactly the mixture of vaudevillean theatricality, savage humor, and detailed character work that the play asks for.
June 28 – Tom, Greg, Mark and I watched Chris and
Don, the beautiful documentary about the extraordinary 35-year love relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Later, Mark and I trooped off to the Highline Ballroom for
Blowoff, the rock & roll dance party DJ’d by gay rocker Bob Mould (of Husker Du fame) and Rich Morel. David Hollander had clued me in to this event, which attracts a very hot crowd – well, my kinda hot, tending to middle-aged, hairy fags. I hadn’t been out dancing in a million years, so it was fun for a change, and great to run into other rock & roll fag buddies (Wayne Hoffman, Jay Blotcher, and Mr. David Zinn again, with his cute friend Will). The music never really took me to that ecstatic place, or maybe I’m just don’t enjoy the kind of restricted movement you have to adopt when you’re dancing shoulder-to-shoulder and continually apologizing for bumping into hot guys (porn star sighting: Jon Galt). It was kinda funny, though, seeing Bob Mould, whom I remember as a stocky baby-face guitarist, now balding and bearded and bespectacled, showing off his big hairy bod and flailing around at the turntable, acting anything but cool and remote.
June 29 – Kicking a Dead Horse is not a great Sam Shepard play, by any means, but it is a quintessentially Shepardian exercise. It’s a monologue, not unlike the shows he wrote with Joe Chaikin
(Tongues, Savage/Love, When the World Was Green). It openly pays homage to Beckett, one of Shepard’s literary heroes, with specific traces of
Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Not I, among others – the play literally takes place “astride a grave.” It also reflects Shepard’s recent fascination with Shakespeare, especially
King Lear. Stephen Rea plays Hobart Struther, an art dealer stranded in the high desert out West with a dead horse (there is it, right onstage), reviewing his predicament, his art life, his home life with the wife (all of which is recognizably related to Shepard’s personal life, at least recognizable by his, ahem, biographer). Whereas most of Shepard’s major plays feature two guys who are some version of alter egos in moral/mortal combat, here the one character has ongoing dialogues with himself (some of them reminiscent of Edgar’s “Poor Tom” scene in
Lear). I found it more fascinating as an example of Shepard rifling through his literary fixations than as a free-standing play, since it doesn’t really add up to much beyond
being one more existential treatise on the despoiling of the American West.
see previous entry here
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