Let's Talk About Ghosts; Let's Talk About Set Design

The current revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is not, in my opinion, as bad as the critics think. While I found the mishmash of Southern accents and off-stage servants' chorus distracting, I also found a lot to like with this lush, not-terribly-subtle production. Mostly, I loved the set—a dreamy fantasy of life in the aristocratic south whose soaring windows wouldn't feel out of place at the Met Opera. Some critics complained that the massive space distracted from the intimacy that is at the play's heart, but to them I blow a raspberry. The set was gorgeous—it was the directing (and sound design) that's caused the play problems.

This morning, I spoke to designer Christopher Oram, the genial Englishman responsible for the play's scenery. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, and got quite passionate when I asked him about the choice, in previews, to experiment with having the ghost of Brick's friend Skipper lurk about on stage.

There was a lot of anger about it. It was anger! There was something vile that man wrote, reporting hearsay, but it created such a riot, an absolute riot, and after that it became very hard. A dozen reviews mentioned it, even though it wasn’t in the version of the play they saw. It became a bit of industry gossip, baggage those reviewers brought in when they saw the play.

The point is, Skipper is in the play. He’s mentioned constantly. He’s the third part of the triangle. Having him there really helped Scarlett and Ben [Walker, who plays Brick] establish the weirdness of their relationship. The removal of it didn’t change their relationship.

I’m saddened that one isn’t allowed to experiment. If we’d done it on opening night and it had been removed and we’d gotten the flak, then fair enough. But isn’t that the point of previews? With the Internet, literally the first performance becomes public property. This also makes the critics slightly redundant., if a critic brings that gossip, that baggage into the review.

As much fun as everyone had laughing at the idea of Skipper's ghost, I think there's something to like about a big-budget production having the good sense to admit it was wrong before opening night. No sense punishing a show that's already admitted a mistake.

Read the rest of the interview here. It's a good one.

The Age of Coziness, I Find, Is Impossible To End

I worked like gangbusters for most of January. Some mornings, I would bound out of bed, race to my computer, and type away with all the vigor of the Swedish Chef attacking a carrot. I tore through rewrites on two plays, and wrote a stack one acts that is currently teetering beside me, threatening to tip over and crush this buddy playwright before he has even had his coffee. Had I turned a page, as a typing-type person? Would I blow through 2013 at jaguar speed, completing a whole body of work in the time that it would usually take me to finish a single play?

Well, no. I hadn't counted on cozy-bed season. The temperature has plummeted this week, and now that New York is finally acting its season, morning greets me with a frigid bedroom. Rather than try to boost my heat, I have piled blankets upon my bed, giving my sleeping self the feeling of a Tsarist duchess rumbling through Moscow in a troika, swathed in sables, full of toddy, and bursting with warmth.

This makes it very hard to get out of bed. I snooze, snooze, snooze, growing cozier each time I drift back to sleep. When I do haul my rump to my desk, my brain is not with my work, but back on my pillow, wondering what nonsense it could be dreaming if I would just lay back down. And yet, I have to work. Yesterday I dealt with my daylong fatigue by being inefficient for three hours, before deciding to punish myself with a three hour walk in the freezing cold. The wind was so sharp that it gave me an ice cream headache. That's all right—I didn't need the brain anyway.

No moral here, except that I'm going to try to get as much work done today as I can make my fingers do. I'm seeing Cat On A Hot Tin Roof tonight, and while I'm quite excited to see what ScarCat can do, the thought of staggering down the R train steps fills me with whatever the junior varsity form of dread is. Hopefully her performance will be red-hot enough to warm up my cold head.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.