On Shakespeare Day, Eulogies From Hamlet & Marlena

It doesn't take much prodding for me to praise Orson Welles. The man was the original studio system martyr—a dynamo whose personality made him irresistible, and also made it impossible for him to get work. He was always fun to watch on screen—I mean, just look at that grin!—​but the man knew how to write, too. I've been thinking about Touch of Evil​ a lot lately. Not the famous opening tracking shot, nor the inexplicably less famous second tracking shot, but the ending, which never fails to give me chills.

​Orson's corrupt sheriff, a sinister fat man whose weight Welles was not more than a decade away from, lies face down, dead in a gully. Marlene Dietrich, the mealy-mouthed fortune teller who was the only person who liked him, watches on, stone faced, and delivers the finest movie eulogy of all time. "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

The ending's ambivalence ​recalls that of The Third Man​. The monster, both played by Orson Welles, is dead—killed by the only man in the world who loved him. Just in case he's feeling a little bit too good about his crusade, though, the dead man's woman makes sure he knows that he hasn't done anything great. Yeah, you killed the bad guy. But the bad guy was Orson Welles, dammit, and he was the most fun part of this movie!

But it also recalls a couple of Shakespearean eulogies, one of which I was reminded of this morning by Super Theater Twitter Guy Jonathan Mandell.​

"He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again." (Hamlet) Shakespeare, born 439 years ago today.

— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) April 23, 2013

​There are a lot of ways to deliver that line, which Hamlet uses to remember the murdered father whom he is about to kinda-maybe-sorta-think about avenging. Taken with Dietrich's Central European ambivalence, it offers the same, "I don't know—what's the point of mourning the dead?" shrug. If Hamlet is that ambivalent to his father, well, I get why he's not racing to the armory in search of an uncle killing sword.

I saw Julius Caesar​ at BAM a couple of weeks ago. It's a lush production, fuzzy at the start, but furiously clear by the time the murderin' starts. At the end, when the stage is covered with the traditionally Shakespearean corpse-pile, we get this eulogy, over the corpse of Brutus: "His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!'"

​I love it. I don't know how these all connect, exactly, and I won't force it. But I do know that if the best you can say for the dead is, "Well...he was a man," perhaps the eulogy business is not for you. The press release for Julius Caesar​ touted it as something revolutionary, but an all-black Shakespearean tragedy set in tropical climate is hardly new. Orson Welles did that with Macbeth​ in 1936, a reminder that while he may have been a few hundred years behind Shakespeare, he was decades ahead of everyone else.

Just for grins, I looked up the Times'​ original review of Welles so-called "voodoo Macbeth.​" It is, how shall we say, really fucking racist. Critic Brooks Atkinson—he of the eponymous theater—tells us that the cast in this "darktown version" of Shakespeare's tragedy "have conjured [a] weird, vari-colored raree-show out of the fine stuffs of the theatre and the ferocity of Negro acting." The costumes are "an idealization of Negro extravagance," and the staging is done "with an eye to the animalism of the setting." But though the play offers "sensuous, black-blooded vitality," it "has missed the sweep and scope of a poetic tragedy." This is my favorite bit (emphasis mine)​:

As Macbeth, Jack Carter is a fine figure of a Negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy. He has no command of poetry or character.

Oof.​ Just...oof.

There's been quite a lot of chatter lately—and probably for decades—about the death of theater criticism. Asked to eulogize the golden age of New York criticism, I can't give anything more than a Dietrichian shrug. What does it matter what you say about plays?

Need A Smile For Your Umbrella? I Know A Guy

Victor Hugo's 1869 melodrama The Man Who Laughs is best-remembered as a story about a smile. Its hero is Gwynplaine, a young boy condemned to a life in the circus after his face is carved into a gruesome, permanent grin. The character, famously played by Conrad Veidt in a 1928 silent film adaptation, is among the influences for Batman's Joker. It is not a long leap from Veidt, to Nicholson, to Ledger.

Through February 24th, the Stolen Chair Theatre Company presents an adaptation of Hugo's story, performed in the manner of a silent film. Completely without dialogue, it tells its story through creative staging, talented acting, and 102 projected title cards. It is not a parody of the genre; it is not a museum piece. Instead, it is one of the loveliest bits of theater New York has seen this year. This afternoon, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Jon Stancato about the Joker, his actors, and the prosthetic that keeps his laughing man smiling.

I saw this play on Saturday, and I haven't been able to get Dave Droxler, who plays Gwynplaine, out of my mind. You guys got really lucky with him, didn't you?

It's kismet. I can't imagine anybody better able to tackle the specific challenges of the role. He can break your heart and make you crack into laughter in the same second. To mimic Gwynplaine's permanent smile, the actor has to wear a prosthetic device which holds his face in that smile position. Stephanie Cox-Williams, our designer, has created a prosthetic that he can wear for ninety minutes. There's been a lot of talk over the years about how to create the Joker character, the man who laughs, and she's done a very good job creating something wearable.

Dave has basically no use of his mouth in the piece. He's without voice, and all of his expression has to come from his eyes and the movement of his body. 

How comfortable is that prosthetic?

I think Dave is a very, very generous soul, in that he tells me it's wearable because he knows I would be kept up nights if he didn't. The first few drafts of it, he would take off the piece, and the smile lines would remain on his face for a few days afterwards. He's such a soldier that he would say no, no, it's okay. But we worked with Stephanie to make sure that wasn't happening as often. The latex scars that run up the sides of his cheek help deflect some of that discomfort. We have a little spray water bottle that he uses to keep himself hydrated between scenes, because he can't close his mouth to drink. 

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I think he really, really enjoys the challenge that this creative limitation gives him. I think there's something really satisfying in knowing that Conrad Veidt and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger have all had to deal with this challenge in different ways.

Does Dave have a favorite Joker?

I'm not sure! I'll have to ask him. He posted a picture on Facebook of a figurine of the Jack Nicholson Joker standing behind the Heath Ledger Joker.

My favorite is the Mark Hammill one, from Batman: The Animated Series. But he doesn't have to wear a prosthetic.

In the 1928 Man Who Laughs, it had to be a silent film, because Conrad Veidt couldn't speak at all with his device in. It was an internal denture that kept him from moving his lips at all. Dave at least can comfortably mouth words.

But Veidt could take his out between takes.

Dave's stuck there for ninety minutes.

If your actor can't move his mouth and can't use his voice, how do you help him build an interesting character?

Luckily, we only worked with actors who were very adept at scripting their own bodies. I'm a movement-based director, but not a choreographer, and I can't come in with a vision of how everybody should be moving in this play. We bring in specific bits of the scenario, little plot points that need to be accomplished, and give the actors an opportunity to build the movement sequences themselves. Based on what they've done, we're able to refine it and say, this moment was really clear, this moment wasn't. It becomes an editing process.

We spent a lot of time exploring how to express very simple emotions with the body. We watched a lot of movies together. We read a lot of articles. We learned what was okay and what wasn't within a silent film. You talk about how directors shouldn't give line readings? I've been giving chin readings. There's something about the silent film aesthetic that can only be accessed with a lifted chin. There's something about the way the light and shadow fall on the chin. Every actor in the play got the same note from me again and again: "Chin up, eyes wider! Chin up, eyes wider!"

A big part of any silent movie is the title cards. Did you and the playwright, Kiran Rikhye, have any kind of rule of thumb about when a card was needed and when it wasn't?

She and I never had formal discussions about when an intertitle was necessary and when it wasn't. The script I had to work with was the series of intertitles and the staging written in between. Almost every rehearsal, she'd get a sense of when the intertitles no longer felt necessary, and when we needed another one. She was very careful not to overstep the bounds of what the medium is allowed to do.

I loved when you do close-ups, with the actor downstage, looking at the audience, his face lit in golden light. Those were the moments when I most felt like I was watching a silent movie.

What I love about those moments is, those are moments when we're most directly emulating a film trick. And it should completely fail, because this actor, instead of being forty feet tall, is just sitting there, five to six feet tall, in front of that down light. But they do feel that they are that big.

Well that's great! You've created a bit of magic. Even you don't know why it works.

What I said early on was that I wanted this to be magical, I wanted to create a sense of wonder in the audience with every lights-up. And the team brought that. I've now seen it dozens of times, and the magic never fades.

I Figured Out The Best Thing About Busby Berkeley

42nd Street was on TV this morning, and I watched it while I worked. I'm familiar with Busby Berkeley movies through random clips, which I sometimes put on just to marvel at the madness and the beauty of old Broadway choreography. But I realized, as 42nd Street tapped on, that I'd never seen one of his pictures straight through. It was a hell of a lot better than I'd expected. 

For one thing, it was funny—sexy and crude in the way that only pre-Code movies can be. The endless scenes of hoofers hoofing outdid All That Jazz. The party sequences made me want a highball, which is all you can ask of a roomful of fictional drunks. And the dance numbers shone, in context, much better than they do in the sad little prison of a YouTube window. Berkeley is famous for his hallucinogenic dance sequences, but I'd never considered how liberating they could be after an hour and fifteen minutes of semi-realistic Broadway toil. 

Escena final de 42nd Street de Lloyd Bacon

What I'd never noticed about the title dance sequence before is how gradually it moves past what is actually possible on a Broadway stage. Rather than leaping straight into fantasyland—the way that SIngin' in the Rain and An American In Paris do, say—it happens gradually. We start with a woman in front of a curtain, and then pull out to reveal a couple dozen dancers. From there, the scope gets bigger and bigger, until it becomes clear the reality of the film has broken down. Along the way, your brain argues with itself, trying to rationalize the increasingly impossible space. By the time the woman jumps out the window, chased by her homicidal husband, your brain simply gives up and explodes.

Busby Berkeley—the original psychedelic.

Dear God! Why Isn't Everyone Screaming All The Time?

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"Oh look. A body." Ginny Mayo, the dumb girl who talked.

A young woman is captured by gangsters and marched down an apartment building's stairs at gunpoint. When the police appear, the gunmen try to use her as a human shield. In a hail of gunfire, she's shoved face forward down the stairs, miraculously surviving as her captors are gunned down. Two minutes later, she's walking down the street with her best beau, cheerfully ruminating about the experience.

"You know," she says, "in his own way, I think saving my life was [the bad guy's] attempt to make things right."

This is the limp climax of Smart Girls Don't Talk, a 1948 Virginia Mayo job that I just caught on Insomnia TV. It's a classic bad ending, necessitated by the structural demands of an 80-minute thriller. We need a big shootout at the end, but everybody's gotta be smiling and lovey-dovey for the thirty-second final scene. Do you know how I would react if I were caught in the middle of a firefight? 

I would scream like a Godzilla-nibbled toddler.

Showing the reaction to trauma is a tricky balance. Subjected to the kinds of things that characters go through on stage and screen, real-life people would be reduced to a quivering pile of sweat, tears and shit. But no matter how frightened, your hero has to be back on his feet in a few minutes, ready to crack wise and keep fighting. 

I've always had a soft spot for movies that let their characters show fear. The car chase in Risky Business, for instance, is great not just because everything that features Joe Pantoliano is awesome, but because Tom Cruise—an ordinary boy in a terrifying situation—looks shit-scared. My favorite Bond movie is (no kidding) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, primarily because of the epic alpine chase that ends the film's second act. By the time Lazenby gets away, he is scared to death. This isn't Bond as Superman—it's Bond as human being. 

I like that.

(God the music in that scene is great. The dialogue, not so much.

Henchman: He's making for the village.

Blofeld: All right. We'll head him off at the precipice.

Positively crackling.)

Lots of terrible things happened to the characters in my last play. People got shot, emotionally abused, sexually trifled with and kicked in the shins. I wanted to be honest about how my characters would react to these horrors, but I couldn't have them shut down. Even though it's realistic, a shut-down character is a useless character. (See: Schuyler, in the last season of Breaking Bad, who spent the whole season too angry to talk, and basically turned into an inert mass of scowling jelly.) So by the second act, all of my characters were either in a very active form of shock, too stupid to realize what was happening, or sociopaths who were simply bemused by the horrors around them. Having them react to the trauma they were suffering made them more extreme characters, and made the whole thing a hell of a lot funnier.

If you're chugging through a script that's got action—and if you aren't, you should be—and your characters aren't scared to death by what's happening them, either your action isn't terrifying enough or your characters are inhuman. Life is scary. Life on stage or screen is even worse. React accordingly.

So there's your unsolicited playwriting advice for the day. As you were.

Hedy Lamarr ——— Nakedest Inventor of Them All!

I've always found that most classic film beauties—your Crawfords, your Hayworths, your etceteras—were at best interchangeable and, at worst, bland. While the men of old Hollywood never have trouble making an impression, their romantic leads were usually so underwritten, so overly made up, that they never had a chance. There are a few exceptions, however—Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Holliday, Veronica Lake—but most of them were so beautiful, so lively, that they were kept out of the really famous pictures, and aren't as famous today as they perhaps ought to be.

To that list, let's add Hedy Lamarr—the woman best remembered for being a punchline in Blazing Saddles. I wrote a post for Bullett today about Ms. Lamarr, an inventor who didn't mind getting naked on camera. On the sex scene from 1933's Ecstasy, which follows a nude romp through the forest in pursuit of a horse:

Though less thoroughly benippled, the ensuing sex scene is crackerjack. Lamarr and her stud kiss a bit, lie down, kiss some more, and then he drifts downward out of frame—what may be the earliest use of what would become an incredibly tired way of signifying oral funtimes. But while the camera would normally pan up and away, here it lingers on Lamarr, and we get to watch her go through the range of facial expressions induced by this rather intense blue collar orgasm. For her performance, Wikipedia tells us adorably, “The authenticity of passion was attained by the film director’s off-screen manipulation of a safety pin strategically poking her bottom.”

Click through for a link to what may be the oldest NSFW video you will ever see—excepting, perhaps, the really racist bits of Birth of a Nation, which I bet you wouldn't want your boss to catch you watching.

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.