Lessons in quarrelling well from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde

We were brushing up on Julius Caesar ahead of seeing the play at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) this weekend when it dawned upon us that we had already witnessed one of the finest quarrels in all English drama earlier in the summer — and that we were about to witness the other.

And the closer we looked, the more we thought that the magnificent quarrels between Brutus and Cassius, in one play, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew (in the other play, The Importance of Being Earnest), had a lot in common. Himself pacific, conciliatory, and non-confrontational, Emsworth can only fantasize about quarreling as effectively as Brutus or as stylishly as Gwendolen. But we can take a lesson as well as the next person. Here’s what we’ve learned about the art of quarreling well.

Nurse your grievances and pick your moment

A satisfying quarrel doesn’t just happen; there’s always a back-story. Cassius doesn’t just happen to bump into Brutus on a dark night near Sardis (Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3); he comes looking for Brutus, full of his grievances, loaded for bear, and spoiling for a fight. “Most noble brother, you have done me wrong.” (In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, the high-minded Brutus has imprudently executed Cassius’s friend Lucius Pella for taking bribes from the Sardinians.)

And Gwendolen Fairfax doesn’t just happen to wander by the Manor House in Woolton where the object of her jealousy, Cecily Cardew, lives with Gwendolen’s new fiancee (The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II). She comes with daggers sharpened, fully intending to obliterate her supposed rival: “Cecily Cardew? What a very sweet name! Something tells me that we are going to be great friends. I like you more than I can say.”

Don’t start the quarrel without a plan

As Caesar himself saw, Cassius was a calculating man. (”He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” Act I, Scene 2.) But Cassius surprisingly fails to bring any plan of attack to Sardis other than to complain.

Michelangelo's Brutus

His adversary, on the other hand, is thinking strategically from the outset. Brutus buys himself time by having Cassius send his men away (”our armies . . . should perceive nothing but love from us”), and he nails down home field advantage by inviting Cassius into his tent.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily Cardew has no time to plan quarrel tactics, since she is not expecting Gwendolen. But she instantly recognizes Gwendolen as her enemy, makes a telling counter-thrust, and (like Brutus) takes control of the battlefield: “How nice of you to like me so much after we have known each other such a comparatively short time. Pray sit down.”

Drive your adversary mad with personal aspersions

Brutus knows that nothing will put Cassius off his game like a personal insult. Sure enough, telling Cassius that he has a reputation for an “itching palm” infuriates his fellow assassin:

“I, an itching palm?
You know you are Brutus that speaks this,
Or by the gods, this speech were else your last.”

Cassius knows he’s being baited (”Brutus, bait not me, I’ll not endure it”), but it doesn’t matter; he never gets in another solid lick through the rest of the quarrel.  Brutus keeps up the jabs (”Away, slight man!”) and calls Cassius a madman.

At the Stratford Festival's 2009 production, Sara Topham is Gwendolen, and Andrea Runge is Cecily.

The Victorians are better able than Cassius to maintain their composure under volleys of calculated insults.  Gwendolen and Cecily (temporarily under the impression that Ernest Worthing has engaged himself to both of them) are well-matched. Cecily alludes to Gwendolen as an “entanglement”; Gwendolen tells Cecily she is presumptuous.  The points remain even.

Escalate!

The most entertaining part of any well-conducted quarrel is the moment in which the combatants veer off on bunny-trails, take random postshots at each other, and reduce themselves to “did/did not/did too.” In Julius Caesar, Brutus knows how to hit the pugnacious Cassius where it hurts:

Cassius: When Caesar liv’d, he durst not thus have mov’d me.
Brutus: Peace, peace! you durst not so have tempted him.
Cassius: I durst not?
Brutus: No.
Cassius: What? durst not tempt him?
Brutus: For your life you durst not.

The Romans are even more eloquent a minute later:

Cassius: I denied you not.
Brutus: You did.
Cassius: I did not.

Meanwhile, Cecily twits Gwendolen by putting unwanted sugar in her tea and by giving her cake when she has asked for bread and butter. Gwendolen takes off the mask: “From the moment I saw you I distrusted you. I felt you were false and deceitful.”

Play the guilt card for a winning hand

No doubt recognizing that he is no match for Brutus at personal invective, Cassius resorts to the infliction of guilt. He whines to Brutus that he “hath riv’d my heart” and that “a friend should bear his friend’s infirmities,” and he complains “You love me not.” Brutus has only a weak retort: “I do not like your faults.” Cassius trumps: “A friendly eye could never see such faults.”

A minute later, Brutus, so masterly in the early rounds, throws in the towel. Cassius claims victory amidst the lovefest:

Brutus: When I spoke that, I was ill-tempered too.
Cassius: Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.
Brutus: And my heart too.
Cassius: O Brutus!

By the end of the second act of The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily and Gwendolen realize that their quarrel is really with their fiancees.  Combining their forces, their first tactic is to shower guilt upon Jack and Algernon.  The boys cower under the attack:

Cecily: A gross deception has been practised on both of us.
Gwendolen: My poor wounded Cecily!
Cecily: You will call me sister, will you not?
[They embrace. Jack and Algernon groan and walk up and down.]
Gwendolen: Let us go into the house. They will hardly venture to come after us there.
Cecily: No, men are so cowardly, aren’t they?
They retire into the house with scornful looks.

All in all, where will you find two more satisfactory quarrels?

American art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta

Till our recent baseball trip to the south, neither business nor pleasure had taken us to Atlanta. So between visits to Turner Field to see the Pirates play the Braves, we spent a pleasant, leisurely afternoon at the High Museum of Art. What we found was a marvelous facility, a worthy though unspectacular collection of American art, and surprisingly appealing galleries of contemporary art.

In gathering up treasures of European art, Atlanta seems to have come late to the party. Museums in the northeast are mostly built around large collections donated by such rich folk as Andrew Mellon, Robert Lehman, the Havemeyers, John J. Johnson, the Clark brothers, but Atlanta apparently had no such major donors. So the galleries of European art at the High Museum are fairly modest, even compared to what can be seen in northern cities like Hartford, Detroit, and Toledo that are now a lot smaller than Atlanta.

But while those northern cities were depopulating (and their art institutions were having trouble keeping afloat), the people of Atlanta built a fine, bright, new art museum for the art it did have (and presumably hoped to get). We liked it.

In collecting old masters, the High Museum, to its credit, went for quality rather than big names — although there is a Bellini “Madonna and Child.”. We liked a pair of paintings by Il Baciccio from 1700 illustrating the Genesis accounts of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and Noah’s sacrifice after the flood. From the nineteenth century, we doted on a pair of smaller Corots and thought a Pissarro landscape, Road to Marly, was the pick of a small group of French impressionist paintings.

At any rate, the High Museum’s collection of American art is very good, even without pieces by Homer or Eakins. We were struck by a John Singleton Copley portrait and by three remarkable early 19th-century portraits of native Americans by Henry Inman. And we found a few American artists that we consider particular friends. In our spare bedroom is a print of John George Brown’s best-known painting, The Berry Boy; the High Museum has a pair of delightful genre paintings that are surely also among his finest, Neighbors and The Deacon’s Visit. Another of our oldest friends in art (dating from our boyhood days as a stamp collector) is Samuel F. B. Morse (also known as the inventor of the telegraph) — and here was a portrait by Morse of his wife and children!

Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery has a spectacular rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge and its surroundings by the American impressionist Jonas Lie. But the High Museum has one too, a different view of the bridge titled Path of Gold. We don’t often see Jonas Lie; this was a rare and unexpected pleasure.

We are not always respectful of contemporary art. We’ve even been known to roll our eyes as we pass by galleries where plain black squares pose as paintings on the walls, and piles of cut-up tires masquerade as sculptures in the middle of the floor. But we must confess that we really enjoyed the contemporary art galleries at the High Museum, which are on the top floor and whose lighting benefits greatly from skylight windows. Many of the works are artfully hung so as to be seen from adjacent galleries. (The painting with the white and light blue stripes is by the Canadian artist Agnes Martin and is cleverly entitled Unitled #3. We kept wandering back and forth through these galleries and were sorry to leave them.

Condescending Yankee that we are, we initially assumed that the people of Atlanta called their museum the “High” to let the world know that it held nothing but the finest art, as distinguished, say, from sidewalk art. We were wrong; the museum was named after a Mrs. Joseph M. High who donated the museum’s original home on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street in 1926.

August Wilson’s Fences at GeVa Theatre in Rochester

Tony Todd (right) and Wiley Moore (left) as Troy Maxson and his best friend Bono.

It’s too late now to do anyone any good, because the show closed a week ago. But GeVa Theatre just put on a fabulous production of August Wilson’s Fences here in Rochester Unfortunately we couldn’t make it down to GeVa till the run was almost over. We would have loved to have seen it again.

The late playwright

This is surely one of the very best American plays. We say that not merely because the play (a) is set in Pittsburgh, near our childhood home in western Pennsylvania and (b) involves baseball. No, Fences is a masterpiece because of Wilson’s gorgeous flow of language and his sympathetic insights into human nature. What happens to the soul of a good man who is blocked from fulfulling his dreams? What if he finds himself resenting the promise and potential of his own son? How can a man who loves and honors his wife nevertheless end up in bed with another woman?

Troy Maxson claimed that Dodgers star Jackie Robinson wouldn't have been good enough to play with him in the Negro Leagues

Fences is the tragedy of Troy Maxson (Tony Todd), a former star of the Negro Leagues whose career ended before baseball was integrated. Now he works on a garbage truck, bitter about missing out on the fame and money enjoyed by younger men like Jackie Robinson — who, he says, wouldn’t have been good enough to make the teams he and Josh Gibson played on.

Clemente's 1959 baseball card

What Troy refuses to see is that times are changing. He tells his best friend Bono (Wiley Moore, who nails the role) that baseball will always keep the black man down. Why else, he asks, would the Pirates be keeping Roberto Clemente on the bench? In fact, by 1957, ten years after Robinson joined the Dodgers,  Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were among the biggest stars in baseball, and Clemente had been the Pirates’ full-time right fielder since 1955.

And Troy himself has won a victory in the struggle for racial equality. When he files a grievance against the policy that only white men could drive the garbage trucks (black men had to work on the ground), he and his wife Rose (Nora Cole) worry that he’ll simply be fired. Instead, his grievance is upheld and Troy is promoted to the cab of his garbage truck.

Rose is proud of their son, Cory (Jared McNeill), who has become a high-school football star and has been offered a college scholarship. But Troy is afraid that sports will be a dead end for Cory as it was for him. Or is Troy jealous that his son might achieve the success in sports that eluded him?  He refuses to sign scholarship papers for his son and insists that Cory keep working at the neighborhood grocery instead of pursuing football.

Tony Todd, with his unforgettable, modulated, gravelly voice, was a superbly physical Troy Maxson. He had his audience in the palm of his hand from the opening scene in which he and Wiley Moore (as Bono) drink whiskey and Troy brags about his wife and their vigor as lovers. Like Troy Maxson, Todd is a master storyteller; in one of the most unforgettable scenes in this show, Troy reminisces about his abuse at the hands of his own father. Todd is known for his movie roles (Candyman, The Rock), but he is a first-rate actor, and here in Rochester he left nothing of August Wilson’s script on the page.

In fact, the entire cast of this show was up to Todd’s standard, especially Nora Cole as Troy’s long-suffering wife Rose. This production richly deserves to be seen elsewhere — we thought it every bit as fine as the recent production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway, which we also saw and loved (see this post) — but as nearly as we can tell, it closed for good here in Rochester.

Cuddy

It was August Wilson’s general policy that his plays be directed by black directors.  We understand that GeVa Artistic Director Mark Cuddy obtained special permission from Wilson’s widow to direct Fences (which necessarily has an all-black cast) himself.

This exception for Cuddy didn’t get any particular public attention, so far as we know.  But the selection of another white man, Bartlett Sher, to direct the afore-mentioned production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway did stir up a fuss. The choice of Sher aroused the ire of some African-Americans — in fact, we ran across one blogger (here he is) who complained hysterically that this was yet another “openly blatant example” of “insidious and pervasive American racism.”

It didn’t seem very “blatant” to us, and personally, we didn’t think GeVa’s production of Fences was tainted by having a white director. Perhaps Mr. Cuddy can’t claim to fully appreciate African-American culture. But people are still people. Who would argue that Mr. Cuddy shouldn’t direct Chekhov because he didn’t grow up Russian?  Anyway, the themes of Fences are universal, not tied to the experience of being black in America. We don’t see why Mr. Cuddy and Mr. Sher should have been disqualified from directing two of the very finest American plays simply because of their race, and we’re glad Mr. Wilson’s estate agreed.

We also think this show succeeded so well mainly because of its superb performers, not because of Mr. Cuddy, whose direction was unobtrusive. Our guess is that Mr. Cuddy had the good sense not to interfere with Tony Todd and his fellow veteran actors, who plainly understood Wilson’s play and what to do with it.

Sunday in the Park with George at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Anthony Malarky and Julie Martell as Louis the baker and Dot

On our way home from Niagara-on-the-Lake, we tried to think how they could have made Sunday in the Park with George . . . well, more interesting. Better leads? Not the problem. Steven Sutcliffe and Julie Martell (as George and Dot) both had strong voices and acted well. We really didn’t think it was badly paced.

It was hard to pinpoint any particular problem with the Shaw Festival’s show. But we both had trouble staying awake, and so did other people around us. Rochester friends who saw the show a week later reported the same.

There’s an expression “as exciting as watching paint dry.” That’s not literally what we were seeing on stage, but it’s not much of a stretch between that and watching someone sketching a model and then watching him work on a painting, one tiny stroke at a time, in his studio.

Of course, this Stephen Sondheim musical does tell a story. And it revolves around one of the world’s most celebrated paintings, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (at the Art Institute of Chicago).

Seurat's large painting Bathers at Asnières is at the National Gallery in London

The first half of this musical play is a fictional vignette in the life of young Georges Seurat, whose first major work, Bathers at Asnières, was mocked by the critics.  George is now applying his innovative, dot-by-dot style to another, even more ambitious painting (ten feet wide) of Parisians enjoying the sun and the sights in La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine.

We meet George on the island working on a sketch for his new painting. His model (and mistress, who is in love with him) Dot is having trouble keeping still for him; she sings a song about how hot and uncomfortable she is. Colorful characters, including a mentally confused old lady (Sharry Flett) who turns out to be George’s mother, wander past George and Dot. They all end up in the painting, where Dot is the young woman on the right with a parasol.

Several years after the scenes in the play, in 1888, Seurat painted Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor, also in his pontillistic style. This smaller painting is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Back in George’s studio, Dot sings about how frustrating it is to have a lover who spends all his nights painting instead of paying attention to her and taking her to the Follies.  Out on the town by herself, Dot meets and is courted by Louis the baker, who is planning to emigrate to America.  Should she marry the steady Louis, who will take care of her even though she is carrying George’s baby, or stick it out with George? Meanwhile, George’s paintings continue to be unappreciated by the Parisian art world. We learn most of this through the show’s songs; there’s relatively little dialogue.

All this takes place in 1884. The second act, somewhat more lively than the first, takes place a hundred years later in 1984 (which, not coincidentally, is when the show was premiered on Broadway). The “George” in the second act (also played by Steven Sutcliffe) is the fictional great-grandson of Georges Seurat, who died in 1891 at the age of 31.

Twentieth-century George is an artist too; he creates Chromolumes, which are a kind of electrified sculpture and invention. Like his famous ancestor, he struggles with gaining recognition and funding for his work. At an art museum gala, George unveils and demonstrates his latest Chromolume, which is supposed to relate to Seurat’s masterpiece; with him is George’s very elderly grandmother, who is Dot’s daughter (born in America), and who tells the gathering about the people in Seurat’s painting.  At a reception afterward, George works the crowd, flattering potential patrons for his art. 

Of course Sunday in the Park With George won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and who are we to argue? And personally, we enjoyed Stephen Sondheim’s sophisticated score, which riffs off Seurat’s pontillistic style of painting with short jagged motifs and dissonant chords. This music is challenging, but we disagree with those who say the tunes in this show aren’t hummable and won’t stick in your brain.

But we must say that Sunday in the Park With George, taken as a whole, just isn’t compelling drama. The characters aren’t terribly interesting or sympathetic, and if the show’s creators meant to say something profound about Art and the plight of misunderstood artists, we failed to see that it was especially profound. For us the play had a kind of static quality. Much of the time nothing much seemed to be happening; halfway through the first act we were thinking about Waiting for Godot. The energy level rose during the whirlwind of the art museum reception in the second act; only then were we drawn, briefly, into the lives of the characters.

As for this particular production of Sunday in the Park With George at the Shaw Festival, which is well done, we have no complaints.

One of the very few other large-scale paintings by Seurat, titled The Bathers, is at the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A good portion of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is reproduced by Seurat in the background of the Barnes picture.

And we were tickled to see some of our favorite works of art on stage. As nearly as we can determine, the character Dot, Georges Seurat’s mistress, is not a historical personage, so we didn’t learn much more about Seurat or his famous painting than we already knew. But we do like Seurat, and we enjoyed the fantasy of being present at the creation. And we were amused by the end of the first act, when all the characters arranged themselves on stage in a tableux that recreates the painting.

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières is also seen on stage early in the first act. And in this show one of Claude Monet’s best-known paintings, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, also makes a cameo appearance in the arms of of a rich American who is carrying it onto a ship that will take him (as well as Dot and Louis the Baker) to America. The scene (improvised by the director and not in the script) represents, we suppose, the cultural drain of art masterpieces from Europe to America. As a matter of history, the use of Monet’s painting is a bit of a stretch; according to information on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Garden at Sainte-Adresse was purchased from Monet by one Victor Frat, apparently a Frenchman, before 1870. The painting did not come to America until 1926; the Met bought it at a Christie’s auction in 1967.

Rubens and the old masters at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota

The interior sculpture garden at the Ringling Museum of Art

This art museum junkie paused in his recent tour of major league baseball stadiums in the South (see this post) to visit what was a brand-new museum for him: the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.  This was, in fact, was the first time we had been to Florida at all. 

We were delighted to learn that the man after whom the museum is named owned the Ringling Bros. Circus.   Sarasota was the circus’s winter home, which explains why John Ringling built his home there. (He called his mansion “Ca d’Zan,” which of course reminded us of Citizen Kane and “Xanadu”. It was included with our admission, but we didn’t have time to see it.)

The Ringling Museum of Art is only one of several fine structures on a large campus, all of which is (we were told by the loquacious ticket-seller) now owned by the State of Florida and managed by Florida State University. Several buildings are devoted to circus history and circus artifacts, including Ringling’s private railway car, which is currently being restored in full view of visitors. (The railway car (above) is in the building pictured to the right; a friendly restorer working on the trim in the observation room seemed happy to talk to us about it when we stuck in our heads.) This is surely the only place in the world where one can view masterpieces of art in proximity to circus memorabilia.

The side of the art museum building is visible across the bridge.

A lot of retirees in Sarasota seem to have volunteered at the Ringling Museum; at any rate, we ran into them everywhere — smiling, cordial, and helpful, usually without waiting to be asked. After seeing the circus memorabilia, we found our way through the gardens and across the pond to the art museum building, which, we learned, was designed to resemble the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. It’s been open since 1931.

At the left in this gallery are portraits of Austrian Emperor Francis I and his wife, the Empress Maria-Theresa, painted around 1750 by the Swedish artist Martin van Meytens II

This building holds John Ringling’s personal art collection, as bequeathed to the museum, with a few additions over the years. We couldn’t help wondering whether Ringling personally sought out and selected works of art for his collection, or whether he relied on art advisors. In any case, he assembled a remarkably large collection.

We couldn’t help drawing a contrast with the Frick Collection, in New York City, which contains the art collection of the late Pittsburgh industrialist, and with which we are on intimate terms. Like Mr. Ringling, Mr. Frick concentrated almost entirely on the old masters. Our understanding is that Mr. Frick was very much a hands-on collector with definite tastes and affinities, who acquired new paintings very deliberately, and who did not keep works that did not give him lasting pleasure and satisfaction.  A regular visitor to the Frick Collection feels that he has come to know Mr. Frick through his tastes in art.

But one doesn’t get the same sense at the Ringling Museum. The collection is much larger, of course. But it also seems more indiscriminate, as if Mr. Ringling had simply commissioned someone to collect as many of the old masters as possible. For us, Mr. Ringling’s personality didn’t emerge from his collection.

Still, the Ringling has a great deal of marvelous art that is well worth going out of one’s way to see. Among the most striking are a number of major works by Peter Paul Rubens.  The Ringling Museum not only has several significant “normal”-sized paintings by Rubens, like “The Departure of Lot and His Family from Sodom” (above), but also, in a large special gallery, a set of half a dozen enormous canvases on Biblical themes collectively entitled “The Triumph of the Eucharist.” These deserved much more time than we had to spend.

Mr. Frick did not collect Rubens at all — he and Mr. Ringling collected some of the same artists, but not many.  Both collectors acquired notable portraits of King Philip IV of Spain by Velasquez, but while Mr. Frick never obtained a Poussin, Mr. Ringling acquired two. The collection includes quite a few paintings by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Italian artists that we did not know, not all of which seemed especially interesting. But we enjoyed first-rate works by Cranach the Elder, El Greco, Murillo, Veronese, Henry Raeburn, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and we especially liked a painting by Anton Raphael Mengs entitled “The Dream of Joseph.”

The Ringling Museum has a few European and American paintings from the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Mr. Ringling clearly had no interest in abstract art or in art of his own country — but the Ringling Museum does have a major early work by one of our favorite American artists, the regionalist Reginald Marsh, entitled “Wonderland Circus, Sideshow Coney Island 1930.”  No doubt Mr. Ringling the circus man was attracted by the painting’s theme.

After coming home, we found an article on the internet in the St. Petersburg Times suggesting that the Ringling Museum is experiencing funding difficulties because of the State of Florida (and FSU’s) financial problems.  The museum seems to be well managed, well attended, and well supported by the locals; it’s absurd that anyone should think of closing it.

Brief Encounters at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Love blooms in a railway coffee shop: Patrick Galligan and Deborah Hay in Still Life

The first of the several Noël Coward shows we’ll be seeing at the Shaw Festival this summer, Brief Encounters, is pure unadulterated pleasure, and we look forward to the others. The three one-act plays that make up this show rank with Coward’s very best work, and they are presented intelligently and sympathetically.

The title Coward gave to the nine one-act plays that he wrote in 1935 was Tonight at 8:30. He meant them to be performed as three separate shows of three plays each, but he didn’t specify how they should be grouped.

Thus, it was the Shaw’s Artistic Director, Jackie Maxwell, who decided that a sequence of Still Life, We Were Dancing, and Hands Across the Show should make up one show at the Shaw Festival (she also assigned herself to direct the show). The title she gave to this trio, Brief Encounters, seems a bit arbitrary, but these three very different one-act plays complement one another nicely.

Krista Colosimo, who is wonderful in the supporting role of Beryl in Still Life

The first and finest of the three is Still Life, a wistful story of a young married woman (Deborah Hay) and an idealistic young married doctor (Patrick Galligan) who meet by chance in an English railway station and let themselves drift into an affair. (Theirs is not exactly a “brief encounter”!) For as little time as we get to spend with them, we come to know the characters awfully well — not only the guilt-ridden lovers Laura and Alec, but also the middle-aged widow Myrtle Bagot (Corrine Koslo — sassy and delightfully vulgar), who runs the station’s coffee shop, her giddy young assistant Beryl (Krista Colosimo — just delightful), and Mrs. Bagot’s admirer Albert (Thom Marriott — marvelous), a porter, who provide comic relief. Working-class romances for Mrs. Bagot and Beryl serve as a foil to the main plot.

In one of our volumes of Coward there is a pared-down version of Still Life that has only three characters. But the Shaw Festival’s production, with Mrs. Bagot, Beryl, and their admirers, is so much richer.

Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo in Still Life

Is there any story, novel, or play that anatomizes a love affair and its stages quite so truthfully, painfully, and succinctly as Still Life? With a few deft strokes, Coward gives us the innocent first meeting of the lovers, their discovery of mutual sympathy, their “innocent” time together, their rationalizing, their secret liaisons and the exquisite pain of longing and guilt, and their inevitable confrontation with reality. As the illicit lovers, Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan approach their roles with delicacy and save the story from triteness. In the final scene, devastated by the end of the great romance of her life, Laura is interrupted by the intrusion of an insensitive chatterbox acquaintance; this is wonderfully rendered.

Still Life represents Coward the sentimentalist. We were reminded of (and we recommend) a favorite Coward short story, “Mr. and Mrs. Edgehill,” which has nothing to do with romance but which somehow evokes the same mood.

The second play, We Were Dancing, begins with a clever transformation of the set from a railway station to a South Sea island. (There is no intermission between the three one-act plays; instead, a break is taken halfway through We Were Dancing after a big song-and-dance number). This is the least substantial of these three plays in this show, but it has its delights.

The silver-haired Galligan

The play is a sort of light fantasy; Louise, a married woman on a South Pacific cruise (Deborah Hay again) falls in love with a stranger (Patrick Galligan again) while dancing under the stars; they decide to spend the rest of their lives together before they even learn each other’s names. Just before intermission, the show breaks out into a riveting “We Were Dancing,” delivered by a large dance ensemble. The contemporary arrangement of Noël Coward’s song works very well.

Deborah Hay and Patrick Galligan in a serious moment in Still Life

The final play, Hands Across the Sea, a satire of the London social scene of the 1930s, is pure farce. It takes place in the London apartment of Piggy (Deborah Hay again), a socialite who has just toured the far East and has met more people than she can remember. Her husband Peter (Patrick Galligan again) is a military officer whose duties are light.

Into their apartment come the Wadhursts (Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo again). Piggy met them in Singapore and invited them to visit her in London, but she has forgotten their names and doesn’t want to ask. In a side-splitting episode with Peter at the piano, he and Piggy sing in code to each other as they try to figure out who their guests are. The phone keeps ringing, Piggy’s and Peter’s friends keep wandering in and out, and everyone talks at the same time. We were all in stitches.

After seeing this show, we pulled out the battered copy of Tonight at 8:30 that we found on eBay last winter and read Hands Across the Sea. To our surprise, the lines, isolated one from the other on the printed page, hardly seemed funny at all. It required a stage, the right ensemble, and the right timing and delivery to bring them to life.

One of the show’s pleasures is seeing the same actors in two or three contrasting roles within the course of a two-hour show. Of these, the transformation of Thom Marriott from railway station porter (Still Life) to philosophical cuckold (We Were Dancing) to staid Englishman (Hands Across the Sea) was the most remarkable. We have new appreciation for his abilities.

Can it be that the ensemble was lip-syncing during the We Were Dancing big production number? We wondered at the time, but couldn’t believe it possible at the Shaw Festival, where it’s often hard to tell whether they’re even using sound reinforcement. Then a Rochester friend who saw this show a few days later said that he suspected lip-syncing too. Say it isn’t so, Jackie Maxwell!

We gave in to celebrity spotting after the show. Sitting in our car in the Festival Theater parking lot, we saw actor Ben Carlson, formerly a Shaw Festival star but now at Stratford, drive up in a small car. After a minute or two, Deborah Hay emerged from the building and climbed in. We’ve read that they’re engaged.

The great American art form: six baseball games in six days

Tim Lincecum, last year's Cy Young award winner

On our recent trip to the south, we focused on America’s two great original art forms: jazz and baseball.  Our trip was planned around baseball, but it’s so far between St. Petersburg, Miami, and Atlanta that we (father and son) still had still plenty of time for Count Basie, Oliver Nelson, Lee Morgan, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis as we drove along.

First stop was St. Petersburg.  We got there too late for tailgating and had to leave our burgers in our cooler and our grill in the trunk.

Oddly, the Tampa Bay Rays don’t actually play in Tampa; Tropicana Field is in St. Petersburg. From the outside it looks like a municipal convention center; inside, the place is an indoor shopping mall with a baseball field in the middle; behind the stands are more restrooms, food vendors, and souvenir shops than at any stadium we’ve ever visited.  But the place was comfortable, well laid-out, and, of course, nicely air-conditioned. If baseball has to be played indoors — and we’re not persuaded it ever should be, even in Florida — this is the way to go.  It’s far superior to, say, Toronto’s Skydome.

The local team isn’t the “Devil Rays” anymore, just the “Rays,” but as a sideshow the management still keeps a large tank of rays on the second level of the stadium. Not wanting to miss the first pitch, we put off our visit to the tank till after the game — but the aquarium closed as soon as the game was over, so we didn’t see them.

The Rays went to the World Series last year, so all its fans wear Carl Crawford, B. J. Upton, Carlos Pena, or (most popular) Evan Longoria jerseys. Unfortunately, Longoria (no relation to the actress) was held out of our game because of an injury. Gil Meche of the Kansas City Royals and Jamie Shields of the Rays both pitched deep into the game, and this exceptionally well-played contest was decided by a two-run home by Upton in the bottom of the eighth. Rays 3, Royals 2.

The scene from a causeway in the Naples, Florida area

Friday morning in Sarasota, we visited the Ringling Museum, then headed south and across the Everglades for the first of three games in Fort Lauderdale, where the Florida Marlins play. We parked in the tailgating section, got out our folding chairs and charcoal grill, then had to jump inside the car to escape a heavy, sudden downpour. The game started an hour late. Unable to grill, we had to buy ballpark hotdogs; the choices at the concession stands were very limited.

The name of the stadium was a puzzler. This was where the football team played and the signs outside said “Dolphins Stadium.” But inside, they were calling it “Landshark Stadium.” Finally, at the final game of the series, a guy next to us explained that 70s one-hit-wonder Jimmy Buffett had just paid several million dollars for the right to rename the stadium. Turns out that “Landshark” is the name of a new beer that Buffett is sponsoring.

Billy the Marlin really seemed to like his time up close with the scantily clad Mermaids. Cheerleaders at a baseball game are, of course, entirely unnecessary.

For our first game in Landshark Stadium, we found ourselves sitting in the best seats in the house: front row, 50-year line. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a football game. Literally no baseball players were in our line of vision as we faced forward in our seats (along the right-field line), and we had to turn our heads a good 80 degrees to see the infield and players like Giants’ first baseman Pablo Sandoval, of whom we became fans. We got better seats for the second and third games of the series.

The Marlins couldn't even get the picture ratio right on the big screen, so the skinny Mermaids all looked fat

This was unquestionably the worst baseball stadium we’d ever been in, and rain or no rain, we didn’t blame the local fans for staying home, which most of them did. Many of those who did come were wearing jerseys of long-gone Marlins stars — Gary Sheffield, Juan Pierre, Dontrelle Willis. On the positive side, we got a kick out the Marlins’ team song, which the p.a. played before every game. It was a hip-hop thing delivered by a rapper with a Latin accent, with a catchy “Let’s go Feeeesh!” refrain.

We finally got to grill our hotdogs and burgers in the Marlins parking lot before the Saturday game, just before the rain started. This time the first pitch was an hour and a half late. We stayed sweating in our car till the Marlins radio broadcasters told us the tarp was coming off the infield. It started raining steadily again in the fifth and never stopped, but they kept playing. Curiously, given a climate where it rains every day without fail around gametime, Marlins management has a “no-umbrellas” policy for patrons. The rain drove us from our seats and we listened to the last two innings on the radio.

On Sunday morning the weather looked fine, so we headed for the Keys and got as far as Key Largo, where, amidst perfect weather, we grilled more dogs and burgers on the beach and dipped ourselves in the Atlantic. The signs on Route 1 said “Crocodile Crossing Next 6 Miles,” but we didn’t see any. We were puzzled: aren’t alligators, not crocodiles, indigenous to Florida?

We cut short our grilling so we’d get back to Dolphins Stadium — er, Landshark Stadium — by the 5:00 p.m. gametime and made it with 10 minutes to spare. At almost exactly 5:00 p.m., the heavens opened and the rain came down again. This time, the opening pitch was two hours late.

But Giants ace Tim Lincecum (the anchor of our fantasy baseball team) was pitching! That day we saw more Lincecum jerseys in the Florida crowd than anything else. Lincecum wasn’t his sharpest; he walked four in his seven innings of work, and the manager left him in one batter too long, as he gave up a two-run homer in the top of the eighth, but he got the win. And we left Landshark Stadium fans of Giants first baseman Pablo Sandoval. He’s a bear.

All of these pictures of people in Lincecum jerseys were taken from our own seats.

As we are Pirates fans, the climax of our trip was to be a pair of games (Monday and Tuesday) between the Pirates and the Braves in Atlanta, where we were joined by the daughter-in-law. Little did we know when we planned the trip that Pirates center fielder Nate McLouth would be traded to these very Braves for three prospects just five days before we got to town. Like all Pirates fans, we loathe the Braves, making the sight of McLouth in a Braves uniform an especially bitter pill.

Unlike Tropicana Field and Landshark Stadium, Turner Field looks and feels like a real baseball stadium

McLouth himself apparently conquered his disappointment at being traded quickly enough; he hit a home run against Zach Duke in the opening game of the series on Monday — which went 15 innings before the Braves pushed a run across. In fact, the Braves won both games. We were consoled in part by the performance of Pirate rookie Andrew McCutchen in the Monday night game (he was called up to take McLouth’s place in center field), McCutcheon impressed the Atlanta fans mightily with a single, a double, and two effortless triples, not to mention his outfield range and throwing arm.

Pirate rookie Andrew McCutchen, about to hit a triple at Turner Field

And we were gratified at the generous numbers of other Pirates fans at Turner Field, mostly wearing Clemente and Stargell shirts. Several of them greeted us as we grilled chicken and asparagus in the stadium parking lot before Tuesday night’s game.

There are many reasons for men of good will to despise the Atlanta Braves; surely one of the strongest is the mindless chant that their fans sing while they do the infamous tomahawk chop. We noted dismally that the Braves still don’t know how melody of their own six-note chant. In the most familiar version, the third note in the chant (the fifth of the minor scale) is repeated, and the last interval of the chant is a fourth. But although the p.a. system at Turner Field played this version, it also played a subtly different version (we were told that it was a recording by the Florida State University Seminoles marching band) in which no notes are repeated and the last interval is a minor third. Our contempt was boundless.

After we left Atlanta, the Pirates took the final two games of the series. As of today, even without McLouth, the Pirates are only four games out of first place.

June 15, 2009

The Importance of Being Earnest at the Stratford Festival (a review)

The audience for the Stratford Festival’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the Stratford Festival came to laugh and was not disappointed.  Indeed, the evening we were in Stratford, Ontario, the patrons laughed so much that the actors must have wondered, on the few times when a line did not get audible chuckles, if perhaps they’d blown their lines. This is a fine production of what we think is the funniest play ever written.

No such thing as excess: Brian Bedford in Lady Bracknell's third-act costume

Brian Bedford directs this show and also plays Gwendolen’s mother, Lady Bracknell. This is not the leading role, but you wouldn’t know it from the round of applause Bedford got for his first-act entrance, when he flounced into the London flat of Algernon Moncrieff (Mike Shara). Bedford got another round when he returned in the third act in another over-the-top costume.  In drag or out, Bedford still has the most enthusiastic following of any actor at either Stratford or Niagara-on-the-Lake. And of course no one can deliver Oscar Wilde’s immortal lines better than he.

Yet it must be said that his voice in this show was not nearly as strong as that of the other actors. That wasn’t apparent when we last saw him as King Lear a couple of years ago. He’s not a young man. Perhaps his physical infirmities — one hears of back problems — are finally affecting his performances.

Shara and Carlson

Bedford was given an especially strong cast, beginning with Mike Shara as Algernon and Ben Carlson as Jack Worthing. (We can’t help noting with some alarm the regularity with which the Shaw Festival’s best actors desert to Stratford; we last saw Mike Shara hamming it up in Shaw’s Arms and the Man a couple of years ago.) We especially enjoyed Robert Persichini in his brief appearance as Algernon’s manservant Lane and Stephen Ouimette as Rev. Canon Chasuble.

Ben Carlson remedies his failure to propose to Sara Topham

The only problematical performance, as we saw it, was by Sara Topham as Gwendolen Fairfax. We remember with appreciation Ms. Topham’s Laura several years ago in The Glass Menagerie. As Gwendolen, however, she affected a high-pitched, sing-song voice that eventually grated rather than entertained. Properly understood, Gwendolen is a strong character (she is, after all, Lady Bracknell’s daughter), not an airhead.

This painting by the American impressionist Childe Hassam is at the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, Connecticut)

The candy-colored sets — three elaborate, completely different sets for each of the three acts — certainly caught our eye. The second act’s country house scene reminded us of an impressionist painting by Childe Hassam that we saw earlier this spring. The wife of our bosom didn’t like the sets, but we did.

According to the Stratford Festival’s website, The Importance of Being Earnest is a “critique of love, sex and social hypocrisy that remains stingingly pertinent even today.” This is rank nonsense; why do they say such things? This play isn’t relevant; it’s frivolous; that’s its appeal, and that’s why we wanted to see it again.

Naturally, we hoped to find something in the play that we’d never noticed before, and we did.  Somehow we’d never before picked up on Gwendolen’s line: “Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?  And I don’t like that.  It makes men so very attractive.”  How, in 1895, did Oscar Wilde get away with a line like that? 

Nothing about this production changed our mind from thinking that Oscar Wilde, and The Importance of Being Earnest in particular, must have made an early and lasting impression on P. G. Wodehouse, as discussed in this Emsworth post. 

However, we have an objection to register. No doubt to save money, this year the Stratford Festival is printing its programs on cheap paper stock, and the new programs are nearly twice as large as they used to be.

Doesn’t the management know that Stratford patrons save their programs from year to year? Our collection of Stratford and Shaw programs goes back years. These larger, mismatched programs don’t fit in the pile. Not only that, the programs were apparently prepared before any of the play’s costumes were ready, so the programs have no pictures of the cast in character. As visual records of the play for patrons, what good are they?

See this post for Emsworth’s thoughts on the Stratford’s very popular 2009 presentation of West Side Story (awfully good, Emsworth thought) and on the musical itself (still not one of Emsworth’s favorites).