The Hardest Working Man In Monologuing

Earlier this year, when monologuist Mike Daisey got himself into hot water for lying on National Public Radio, I was conflicted. Actually, no—I was giddy with the kind of spiteful joy that comes from watching someone successful take a big step forward, look down, and find they are ankle deep in shit. Plagiarism scandals amuse me endlessly, and while Mike's screw-up wasn't plagiarism, I found it compelling for the same reason: we like to see cheats caught.

Daisey apologized, saying that he should not have brought Steve Jobs to This American Life—not because it contained falsehoods, but because it was a theatrical work unbound by the constraints of journalism. That struck me as a cop out, for the show's run at the Public theater was billed as non-fiction, and the audience came to be told something true. Embellishing details was a betrayal of that trust, and the fact that Mike revised the show to remove the offending bits tells me that he understood this.

I didn't feel conflicted until I heard that the Public was bringing him back for a run of six original shows, starting in October. Screw that guy, I thought. He cheated, he lost, game over. But then I interviewed him, and I was happily reminded that artists—everybody, really—are much more complicated than the news media can comprehend. 

"At PS 122 I used to do a new show every Monday night," he told me last week. "I would give them these sort of evocative titles, but I wouldn't actually work on them until an hour before the audience was there. As they would come in, I would create the outline and perform the monologue. It was really pivotal into making me the artist I am now."

Daisey's extemporaneous style makes such speed possible, and the simplicity of his set-up, which requires nothing but a table, notes, and a glass of water, keeps it cheap.

"The work develops faster than it does in traditional American theater," he said, "in large part because we own the whole widget."

Even when off-the-cuff, Daisey's work seems scripted—polish given by a mind with an uncommon ability to quickly organize stories in a meaningful, often powerful way. Lots of people tell stories. Daisey is a storytelling machine.

It goes on like that. Mike Daisey screwed up badly, and to atone he is working as hard as he can at the thing he does best. Perhaps I was the last person to reach this conclusion, but the guy definitely deserves a second chance. I'm glad I wasn't too stubborn to give him one.

The Only Mystery Is Why I Kept Reading

Murder on the Orient Express, which I took out from the library last week in hopes of learning something about how to structure a mystery. (That reminds me—if anyone out there wants to produce an animal murder mystery called Death In The Monkey House, I'm really the guy you should call.)

After finding the first hundred pages delightful, the book turned into a slog, making me so angry that—in my typical breaking news style—I wrote an angry review about an 80 year-old classic. Behold!

I hate cozy mysteries. I don’t care who poisoned Lord Dalrymple, and it doesn’t matter to me how ingeniously Detective Chief Inspector St. John Woolybottom cracks the case. If a mystery contains a map of a manor house or an elaborate timeline of each suspect’s movements before and after the power went out, I will put it aside and reach for a thriller with some teeth. Chandler, Hammett, Crumley, Cain—these are the men I will take to my desert island. Dorothy L. Sayers can stay home and suck an egg.

But something has always appealed to me about Agatha Christie. I read And Then There Were None in middle school, staying up late at night and finding it made me very afraid of the dark. As tedious as clockwork mysteries are, she is regarded as the best, and The Best is always appealing. After years of ragging on manor house mysteries, I’m writing a play that parodies the form, and I’ve found that orchestrating a large cast of characters—giving everyone a motive, an alibi and a secret—is trickier than it looks. What, I wondered, might Christie have to teach me?

Read on, my pretties. Read on.

And because the article concludes with some Pink Panther talk, you'll want a little Clouseau.

Uploaded by Chris Lappas on 2009-09-11.

Theaters—Off, Off Off and On—Grapple With Sandy

Today I've got what I hope will be the first of dozens, thousands—millions!—of stories on Capital New York, a totally snazzy web site. It's also the first of what will be ongoing coverage on this blog of how the theaters, big and small, of New York City are responding to Monday night's hurricane. There's some good reporting here, and I'm proud of it. Hopefully in the next week I can do more.

The temporary home of St. Ann's Warehouse is on Jay Street, nestled in the heart of Dumbo, just half a block from the East River.

On Monday night, tropical storm Sandy soaked Dumbo, flooding Jane's Carousel and dealing untold damage to the neighborhood's bookstores, galleries and shops. As images of the disaster rolled in, St. Ann's executive director Andrew D. Hamingson scanned the pictures for a glimpse of his theater, and expected the worst.

"I'm a bit of a weather hobbyist," he said by phone yesterday, "so I was keeping a very close eye on the storm. It was a fitful night to say the least."

Tuesday morning, he drove to Dumbo to see the chaos for himself. Across the street from the theater, a parking garage was filled with 10 feet of water. Next door, a coffee shop's storeroom had flooded, creating a mire of very salty cold brew. But at St. Ann's Warehouse, the water had barely lapped at the door.

"I can't even tell you how lucky we feel," Hamingson said. "Actually, we sold six tickets during the storm. Who the hell is buying in the midst of the hurricane?"

There's way more. If anyone has news or stories about the hurricane, or information about theaters that are in trouble, message me on Twitter or email akers.william@gmail.com. Stay dry, folks.

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.

The Case of the Missing Novel: James M. Cain’s Lost Novel Finally Surfaces After 35 Years

Oh dear, I do love James M. Cain. And I'm pretty fond of Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime. Here's a story from September, when Ardai released a previously unpublished Cain novel—The Cocktail Waitress.

At the end of chapter two of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—published in 1934, the same year the Hays Code sanitized Hollywood—a drifter takes a job at a gas station and sees the owner’s wife for the first time. The two find themselves alone for a few minutes. He kisses her, and she begs him—“Bite me! Bite me!”

“I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.” What took the Twilight saga 1,700 pages, Cain got to in eleven.

A failed opera singer turned journalist, Cain became infamous for novels like Postman, Double Indemnity and Serenade, where raw lust compels ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes. By 1950, his best work was behind him, and he spent the next three decades sliding into obscurity. He died in 1977, so alone that he bequeathed his estate to his landlady.

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.

The 20s For The 21st Century

In April, Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara were in a pretty lousy show called Nice Work If You Can Get It. Before it opened, with none of knowing that the show wouldn't be great, I interviewed the two of them. They were supremely delightful.

Last week, in a rehearsal studio a few blocks from the Flatiron Building, the ensemble hoofed through “Fascinating Rhythm,” and Ms. O’Hara and Mr. Broderick told The Observer, in an interview, that it was the era that drew them to the show.

“Most people who do musicals like old musicals, whether they admit it or not,” said Mr. Broderick. “I like the flasks, the shoes. My costumes are so beautiful in this. It’s when there were real tailors. My god, how old do I sound?”

Besides looking like the ’20s, the show will sound like it. “There’s no American Idol here,” said Ms. O’Hara. The songs, most of which are well-known standards, “are going to be familiar in the same way that history is.”

“With a new twist!” said Mr. Broderick.

“A new twist,” she allowed. “The ’20s for the 21st century!”

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!