Italics are mine

NYC Outings (2/2): Robert Schenkkan's play "All the Way"

Update April 14: It is worth mentioning that ERIC LENOX ABRAMS is making his Broadway debut too. Why someone who is so obviously extraordinarily talented hasn't made his Broadway debut before boggles the mind, but I'm glad to see it finally happened, and once he becomes a superstar we can all act very smug and hip and say that we saw him before he had made it big.

UPDATE April 3: This post has been updated with the correct name of the actor who gave the monologue after the funeral in the play "All the Way". That is ERIC LENOX ABRAMS who plays Bob Moses and David Dennis. All the actors were fabulous, but I provided the wrong name and I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this caused. As a side note, WILL HARPER JACKSON as Stokely Carmichael is also absolutely fantastic in his Broadway debut. Just go see the play and see for yourself how amazing these two are! 

The second show I saw last weekend (see my previous post for the first one) is Robert Schenkkan's play about LBJ, "All the Way", at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway. Much has been made of the fact that Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad holds the leading role, and that certainly helped the play move to Broadway after its sold-out run at Cambridge's American Repertory Theater, but let me take this opportunity to set something straight: the play is superb, and has a phenomenal cast. Sure, Cranston is remarkable, but the other actors are also masters of their craft.

Two particularly caught my attention: Brandon Dirden, who plays Martin Luther King, and -- the only one who got rousing applause in the middle of the play after the end of his spell-binding monologue -- Eric Lenox Abrams. You can tell your friends you're going to see "All the Way" for Bryan Cranston if you want, but by the time you come out, you'll be remembering Abrams the most. Watch him in the scene at the funeral for the murdered black civil right worker (a real case) and hear him shout his pain while he goes from the balcony to backstage and then back to the stage, never stopping his monologue of outrage that the murder of the black kid by white Mississippi men will remain unpunished, and you'll have to wonder what is wrong with the theater world if that man hasn't become a superstar yet. Remember that name: Eric Lenox Abrams.

You can read a review of the play in the Cambridge run here. The running time including intermission is almost three hours, but I didn't find it long. You'll enjoy the play more if you know the period - for instance people who knew of J. Edgar Hoover's personal life/orientation laughed a lot during the scene where LBJ talks with Hoover about the arrest of his male assistant for soliciting an undercover male officer in a bathroom (Michael McKean plays Hoover brilliantly), while I could hear others explain to their neighbors why all the laughter was for. I found the Southern dialects a bit off-putting, both for LBJ and his wife - it was sometimes hard to understand them and their voices didn't project very well in the theater, although at the end Cranston made an appeal for a charity run by Actors Equity, and his "normal" voice projected just fine. The set almost never changes but images of the places the actors are supposed to be in (an office in the White House, a motel room) are projected in the back of the stage. Initially I found it hard getting used to, because of the contrast with what was on set, but I found the use of the semi-circle with seated actors in the chairs (and light spots on them when it is time for them to talk) very effective, and the way that actors froze when the scene changed while they were still on stage quite remarkable. The use of the space, including the balcony and the aisles of the orchestra, was also very effective.

In summary, if you care about politics, civil rights and good theater, you really should make the time to see this play before it closes on June 29. And as a bonus, you will see famous actors, and actors who are sure to become famous. Below is a video segment from ABC News about the play. Catch it if you can. It is truly great theater: great play, great acting, great production.

NYC Outings (1/2): Paul Taylor Dance Company

Today's post is about the first of two shows I saw over the weekend: a performance of the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center (I'll review the second one, the play "All the Way" (about LBJ) at the Neil Simon Theater, in my next post).

Let's start with the enormous disappointment that the PTDC performance was. (Because every performance has a different program, you may have seen them in completely different dances, and I wish for your sake that those dances were better than the ones I saw.) I discovered this company when it came to Paris in June 2012 and then saw it at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in September 2012. I loved both shows, and eagerly bought a ticket for the NYC season in March 2013, for a performance I found underwhelming. Now that, one year later, I have bought yet another ticket for the NYC season and found it underwhelming again, I am really beginning to wonder if whoever picks the dances (Paul Taylor himself?) isn't enormously better at showing off the dance company on tour than it is at impressing its home audience. Maybe I just had bad luck in picking the show I attended. The company has about two weeks of performance in NYC while it dances only one evening or two on tour, so the focus in NYC isn't as much to awe audiences as to present a retrospective of all things Paul Taylor, for people interested in attending multiple nights.  

I saw Sunset, Marathon Cadenzas and Gossamer Gallants. The dancers in Sunset are woefully underused with the (brief) exception of one of the women - they spend most of their time on stage doing little jumps, nothing that looks particularly unique or impressive dance-wise, although the theatrical side of it is perhaps its redeeming feature. The dancers remain underused, although to a somewhat lesser extent, in Marathon Cadenzas, which had the potential for greatness. It is about a dance marathon where some of the dancers are singled out by the judge for solo parts - you know Paul Taylor still has all his mind in spite of his age when he makes Michael Trusnovec and his partner win, but unfortunately he still doesn't have Trusnovec, or any of the other dancers, do anything remotely impressive. (I don't even ask for anything spectacular. Just a bit of dance that shows the dancers' physical abilities.)

A lot of the show was gesture-based theater more than dance, and if that is why you came, then good for you, but I had come to see the dancers dance. Gossamer Gallants was silly, but at least there was real, difficult dance with a great storyline to boot. Paul Taylor - looking very frail - came on stage for the curtain calls afterward, which prompted a round of sustained applause and a number of people giving him a standing-o. He is truly a phenomenal choreographer. I still remember how much I loved Piazzolla Caldera in Paris. Maybe I'll have to catch PTDC again when they are on tour to find myself as enthusiastic about the company as I was when I discovered it at Chaillot in Paris almost two years ago. In the meantime, I'll certainly hesitate before I buy a ticket for their NYC season again, but I can't resist including this video excerpt of Piazzolla Caldera in this post - this is what the dancers can do.

Seth Godin on Thinking Backwards

This talk by Seth Godin at Creative Mornings/NYC is quite simply remarkable - every sentence is packed with wisdom. Godin absolutely deserves his reputation as one of the leading thinkers of our time, and his generosity in providing thoughtful, spot-on advice to New York City's creative crowd sets him apart. If you'd like to read some of Godin's books after watching the video, I highly recommend Linchpin: Are you indispensable?

Stefan Zweig, the Escape Artist

Sometimes I cut out articles in The New Yorker and The Economist and save them for later - when I will have time to read them, next weekend, I think, or perhaps next week, but never more than that - I want to read them, of course, and I always expect to read them soon, until it is early 2014 and I come across an August 27, 2012 article in The New Yorker, cut out but never read, about the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in 1942 in Petropolis, Brazil after fleeing the Nazis.

He is well known in Europe for being a master of the novella genre and also for the way he ended his life - a man of conviction who lost hope too early and never saw the end of the war. I read his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, in German the summer I interned near Frankfurt, and he has always had this aura of talented intellectual who stood by his principles and couldn't tolerate living in a world where Nazism had already caused so much destruction. What is interesting in The New Yorker article, published on the occasion of a new biography about Zweig, Three Lives by Oliver Matuschek, is that it pains a much more complex picture of the main protagonist. 

In the New Yorker account: "But Matuschek shows the extent to which Zweig's public facade masked a tormented and unpredictable private self. The Zweig that emerges isn't quite the moral authority he avowedly aspired to be. He's far more lively and human, and his frailties, rather than his noble aspirations, emerge as the source of his best work." And, a bit later in the article: "Matuschek gives a careful account of the strings Zweig pulled to get to Switzerland and to stay there until the end of the [first World] war, a catalogue that certainly complicates the steadfast image that Zweig projected."

Similar revelations continue: Zweig's exile from Austria in 1934 was apparently not only prompted by his having his house searched by policemen for weapons, but also because he sought to escape his first marriage. Later, he "was anything but outspoken" as a prominent literary exile, which "frustrated other writers of the time" such as Klaus Mann and Hannah Arendt. The 1930s saw him write one of his very best novellas, Chess Story (also known as The Royal Game), about chess players on an ocean liner bound for South America - one of whom, a great chess player who had once been jailed by the Nazis and spent time in solitary confinement, slowly succumbs to psychosis.

Of Brazil, The New Yorker writes: "It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to life there." Zweig was "deprived of books and like-minded colleagues", the climate was "bad for his spirits and for [his second wife's] fragile health" and the country was a "dictatorship with growing anti-Semitic leanings". He often used suicide as a plot element in his stories ("In his work, suicide is everywhere, and often closely linked to exile"), but his and his wife's deaths, when they became known, were viewed solely as a political act, for which they received a state funeral. Zweig himself had hoped for a burial "as modest and private as possible."

Writing in two languages: Nancy Huston

 When I was in high school I read Nancy Huston's novel La Virevolte published by Actes Sud (by now if you have been following this blog you know it is my favorite publishing house in France, and the picture for this blog is the original cover of the book in the original Actes Sud edition, before it was reissued). For some reason this novel became one of my most vivid memories of the time - that, Paul Auster's Leviathan and Albert Camus's L'Etranger remain the three books that stuck to my mind, perhaps because I couldn't wait to escape certain relatives and only had books as distraction before I moved to Paris.

I particularly liked Huston's Virevolte because it features a classical dancer as the main protagonist and the book uses great details and storytelling, in a way that was very different from the French novels I was reading at the time. (Leviathan is phenomenally good, though. And guess which publishing house publishes all of Auster's works in French?)

Back in my high school days I had been impressed by the fact that Huston had written the book in French herself, but I rarely remembered it in later years - I just knew I liked her book. More recently, though, I have been thinking about what it means for a writer to live in a country that is not his or her native one, adopting a new language and dealing with a lingering (or not so lingering) foreign accent, and her name came to mind.

Huston also self-translates her works into English - something I plan to do for my own books, into French, and I found myself surprised at the parallels between our own lives. I don't believe Huston is widely known in the US as a writer, perhaps because she has lived in France since 1973 (and because she is Canadian). I am sure she would have been far better known if she had lived in the United States and promoted her books more arduously here. But she is well-known in France, her adopted country that has awarded her the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens and the Prix Femina, and perhaps that is all that matters.