At BAM, John Turturro Stars In An Elegant Car Wreck

A couple of years ago, I interviewed John Turturro about his directing.​ Last week, I repeated the trick, this time talking to him about his acting. If you want to read about it, CLICK HERE NOW.

A sample:​

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, once a night, John Turturro has been climbing a steeple. To a quiet drumbeat, he goes hand over hand up the side of a tilting house, and when he reaches the top, he does not beat his chest like King Kong.

“I’m just trying to be careful,” he said last week.

His wife and friends watch from below, panicked and exhilarated, and the audience feels the same, joined together for a few minutes in the timeless tension of wondering whether or not a man is going to fall.

This finale of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which opened May 19 at BAM and plays there through June 9, is not exactly as Ibsen wrote it. In the original, the master builder of the title, Halvard Solness, climbs his tower off-stage, his progress relayed by those below, with thrilling dialogue like, “He climbs and climbs. He will soon be at the top now.” For this stripped-down production, director Andrei Belgrader puts the tower on stage, and keeps the worst of Ibsen’s dialogue off it. Five years ago, in BAM’sEndgame, Mr. Belgrader and Mr. Turturro were praised for finding unexpected humor in Beckett, and here they have worked a similar miracle: wringing life from one of the dreariest playwrights in the canon. This is a Master Builder for the gut, not the mind.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

Aw Man, I'm Gonna Miss Ed Koch

A lot of people are writing about Ed Koch today. Everyone who's doing so is more qualified than me, but nobody is more qualified than the man himself, who recently recorded an interview with the Times intended to be published after his death. Watch it. Enjoy the sight of a cranky, lively old man reminiscing about the '77 riots, the Village in the '60s, and Mario Cuomo's enduring prickishness. Key quote, on Rudy Giuliani:

"He was a good mayor, but he was a bad man. He was mean-spirited. . . . Rudy was not a racist—he was mean to everybody!"

If I'd been living in New York in the '80s, I have a hunch I would have loathed Koch. But as politicians age, controversy recedes, and all that's left is personality. As far as personality goes, Koch couldn't be beat. He was also the finest film reviewer this city has ever seen. His take on Once:

This film wasn’t Irish enough for me, but it is good and will have to do until the next one is made which I will rush to see. I saw it at the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema on East Houston Street in Manhattan. The majority of the people in the audience, mostly in their 20s and 30s, applauded when it ended. I snapped my fingers.

I interviewed Koch for a fairly dopey Observer article in 2011. I only got to use a paragraph of it, but we spoke for twenty or thirty minutes, and it was one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do as a reporter. Here's the bit that got printed:

A survey of some of New York’s busiest people suggested that, despite the appeal of such software, the simplicity of the notepad is irresistible. Ed Koch is never without one. “It’s about four inches long and two inches wide,” he said of his pad. As mayor he required his commissioners to submit monthly lists of success and failure—a kind of never-ending performance review—and now he uses lists to keep track of the various issues he pursues as a pundit, columnist and film critic. As of last week, he said, “the top of my list is Medicare.”

A politician with personality. You hate to see that go.

For Once, I Wrote Something Serious

A friend of mine at the Observer, unaware of the fact that my normal prose style is blithe foolishness, asked me to write something about escapism and national tragedy, in response to the Newtown massacre. Comedy is more my beat than tragedy, but escapism I understand.

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend’s stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

If your hunger for gravity isn't sated, read on. Or just scroll down and read more about The Simpsons.

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.

Quick Bright Things: At Classic Stage Company, Bebe and Christina Take on the Bard

So, one time I got to interview Bebe Neuwirth about Midsummer Night's Dream. The production was fantastic, and so was she. Big surprise, right?

Like an unimaginative lover on Valentine’s Day, theater companies like to throw around rose petals. It’s always the same: a single petal drifts from the ceiling, then a second, then a flurry. At the Classic Stage Company’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the petals start when Bebe Neuwirth’s Titania asks her fairies for a lullaby. What starts as a gentle shower turns into a deluge, as though the petals were being sprayed by a leafblower, and finishes with the fairies dumping grocery bags full of them onto their queen. The solemn cliché turns to satire, and the audience chortles as Ms. Neuwirth drifts off to sleep, to spend the next few scenes buried under a six-inch pile of petals.

“Last night I had a hot flash while I was under there,” the actress said during an interview with The Observer last week. “Fifty-three-year-old women readers will know that it’s no fun having a hot flash under a bushel of petals. I was laughing at myself, thinking, ‘Oh, wow. I hope none of these petals melt into my flesh.’”

Hot flashes aside, Ms. Neuwirth looks every inch the fairy goddess. As the production rockets from slapstick to sublime, she is its anchor—a woodland monarch who maintains dignity no matter how silly she gets. This strikingly funny take on one of the world’s most-produced plays, which opens April 29, is only the latest in a string of sharp productions by a company whose imagination, A-list casts and impossibly scarce tickets have, in the past few years, won it a place at the top of the Off-Broadway hierarchy. If CSC ever falls from grace, it won’t be Bebe’s fault.

Crowd-Source the Dragon: Qui Nguyen and His Vampire Cowboys Are Back

I love Qui. You like Qui. Here's 1,200 words about the guy, which I wrote for the Observer back in spring.

The dragon is called the Tiamat, and in last fall’s production of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, this firebreather closed the show. As the terrified heroine cowered in a spotlight, smoke filled the Flea Theater’s narrow stage. When the lights rose, there was the monster: a colossal five-headed puppet whose handlers were neatly concealed behind the fog. As a practical effect, the Tiamat was convincing enough to make one swear off CGI forever. As theatrical spectacle, it was a highlight of 2011.

Mr. Nguyen, whose name is pronounced “kwee gwen,” could have used any “random red dragon” in Monsters, but chose the Tiamat by polling his fans on Facebook. “I know what my audience likes,” he said last week over lunch at a Ninth Avenue diner. “And that’s part of how I work as an artist. I’m very crowd-sourcey.”

Knowing his fans, and giving them what they want, has secured a place in the Off-Broadway cosmos for Mr. Nguyen and his company, Vampire Cowboys. His plays are fast, funny, packed with combat, dance and genre play, and distinguished from other slick, tongue-in-cheek entertainment by their utter lack of irony. On Tuesday night his newest work, The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G, opened off Broadway in a coproduction with the Ma-Yi Theatre. Although it features all the Vampire Cowboy hallmarks—“ninjas, kung-fu, girl fights,” as Mr. Nguyen put it—it is the most personal work they have ever produced. Without forgoing the swordplay, the Vampire Cowboys are growing up.

There's more! Much more!