Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Playgoing in Manhattan

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2008.0021

1934-421X

Ed Minus,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Playgoing in Manhattan Ed Minus (bio) Live theater continues to flourish in Manhattan—more plays than you can shake a fifty-dollar bill at, and more plays than theaters to accommodate them. It's not just old movies that are being turned into plays; old movie houses are being turned into legitimate theaters. . . . Well, more or less legitimate. How then to choose, given limitations on time, money, and patience? And another question: Are the critics less reliable than they used to be? Their numbers have increased—but in inverse ratio to discernment it seems to me. So I find that, over time and out of sheer necessity, certain empirical guidelines have evolved as a means of my coping with the onslaught. At present I have three rules: no solo performances, no plays with cute titles, and no Disney musicals. I break each of these rules periodically so as to test their validity and my own supple-mindedness. The Little Dog Laughed met with mild success Off Broadway in the spring of 2006 and moved onto Broadway the next fall. That's what I call a cute title; and the play itself has its cute moments, but far more moments that are acutely trite, contrived, and sophomoric. Furthermore the play involves an extremely grating Hollywood agent played, the night I saw it, by a self-indulgent actor whom I found both grating and ingratiating. One hears chronic complaints about the number of revivals on and Off and Off Off Broadway; but better even a mediocre revival of a good show than a new mutt like this one. The no-cute-titles rule stands for the time being. On the other hand, the parsimonious no-solo-performances rule may have to be permanently retired as a result of Wallace Shawn's one-man triumph in his own passionate theater piece The Fever and Vanessa Redgrave's mesmerizing transliteration of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Neither of these works is a play in the fullest sense of the word; but season in and season out we see plays, sometimes quite popular, that clearly warrant the label even as they drain it of appreciable value. And no one that I've read or spoken with has offered a truly satisfactory designation for The Fever and [End Page 162] The Year. Both works partake of recollection, meditation, reflection, conversation, provocation; but none of these words singly will quite do. Nor will monologue or soliloquy. Perhaps we can do no better than turn to points of origin. The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir, an account of Didion's struggle to cope with the death of her husband (Knopf, 2005). The published version of The Fever (Noonday Press, 1991) offers no identification on the jacket or title page, but appends a "Note": "This piece was originally written with the idea in mind that it could be performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve. The piece can be performed by a wide range of performers—women, men—older, younger." And it has been performed in just this way. How often? When? Where? By whom? Impossible to say. But I do know that Shawn himself has performed it "in homes and apartments." Unless I am mistaken it had not appeared in a theater prior to its brief-as-a-flower stay at an Off Broadway house (hovel?) in the spring of 2007. A few words about Mr. Shawn. Many readers might recognize his face more readily than his name, for he has shown up over the years in small or featured roles in more than a few movies (several of Woody Allen's if memory serves). As a younger man he had a cartoonish look, like a child's notion of a human-size jolly elf. He has aged out of that charming limitation and now looks more like the serious and original playwright and actor he in fact is. He wrote and, along with Andre Gregory, starred in Louis Malle's sui generis movie My Dinner with Andre. And in M. Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street (David Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya), Shawn, as Vanya...