Stage Voices

BOOK--IAN DONALDSON: ‘BEN JONSON, A LIFE’

When Ben Jonson died on August 16, 1637, “the crowd that gathered included ‘all or the greatest part of nobility.’ ” Shakespeare, in contrast, was “buried quietly in the chancel of his parish church in Stratford-upon-Avon, having earned a modest place of honor from his status as a wealthy and respected citizen.”  Jonson, “more visible” in his time, “more knowable, [as a] more coherent figure than Shakespeare”  was “a difficult, quarrelsome, vain pedantically learned, hard-drinking member of the wrong faith, tainted with a criminal record; a satirist of court manners accused in the past of sedition, a man with known enemies in the inner circle of James,” the new king. “In much the same way that the name of Byron or Dickens, in an age of speedier communication, would later resonate through Europe . . . . Jonson . . . emerged as Britain’s first literary celebrity” and first Poet Laureate.

ANNIE BAKER: 'BODY AWARENESS' (REVIEW PICK, SF)

 

(Robert Hurwitt's article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/4.)

It's Body Awareness Week at little, liberal Shirley State College in tiny Shirley, Vt., and the fervent lesbian feminist professor who organized it isn't happy about the female nude photographs displayed in the student union for the occasion. Even worse, in Annie Baker's hilarious "Body Awareness" at the Aurora Theatre, the highly suspect male photographer is a guest in her house. And her partner is considering posing for him.

A lot more is about to go wrong for Amy Resnick's delightfully dogmatic academic Phyllis and Jeri Lynn Cohen's no less politically correct but perhaps perilously more open-minded partner, Joyce. But much more goes right in director Joy Carlin's fine-tuned production that opened Thursday as the anchor of the Aurora's annual Global Age Project new plays festival.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/03/DDR31N0OVK.DTL#ixzz1m1yB3tsG

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BOOK: DEBBIE REYNOLDS MEMOIR TO MORROW

 

(from Lunch Weekly, 2/7)

Actress Debbie Reynolds' UNSINKABLE, the 79-year-old's "definitive memoir and tell-all," (she published a book in 1988, when we called them autobiographies, and says now, "When I read the optimistic ending of that book now, I can't believe how naïve I was when I wrote it"), to Lynn Grady at William Morrow, with Jennifer Brehl editing, for publication in 2013, by Dan Strone at Trident Media Group (world).

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BURT BACHARACH MEMOIR TO HARPER

(from Lunch Weekly, 1/24.)

83-year-old winner of three Academy Awards and eight Grammys, Burt Bacharach's ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART, covering his professional success and personal difficulties, written with Robert Greenfield, to Jonathan Burnham and Claire Wachtel at Harper, for publication in November 2012, by Amy Schiffman and Brian Lipson from Intellectual Property Group (World).

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BOOK: 'BACKWARD RAN SENTENCES: THE BEST OF WOLCOTT GIBBS FROM THE NEW YORKER'

 

(Terry Teachout’s article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 1/6.)

Sixty-one years ago last September, Wolcott Gibbs, the drama critic of the New Yorker, did something that by all rights should have earned him a place in the annals of chutzpah. He wrote a play—and it was a hit.

Mr. Gibbs's "Season in the Sun," a fluffy comedy that ran for 367 performances, is the last nonmusical play by an American drama critic to have opened on Broadway. Part of what made its success so surprising was that Mr. Gibbs, who covered theater from 1933 until his death in 1958, was one of the cattiest critics ever to sit on a Broadway aisle. Among other things, he suggested that the stars of a flop called "Anybody Home" "ought to be arrested for disturbing the peace." The fact that he then had the nerve to write a play of his own inspired Life magazine to run a story called "A Critic Awaits His Critics" whose anonymous author reported that "a highly expectant swarm of first-nighters, whiffing blood like spectators at a Roman circus, were on hand to watch Gibbs come to grief or glory."

(Read more)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203550304577138721083967732.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

View 'BACKWARD RAN SENTENCES: THE BEST OF WOLCOTT GIBBS FROM THE NEW YORKER' on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Backward-Ran-Sentences-Wolcott-Yorker/dp/1608195503/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325611806&sr=8-1

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MARK POLIZZOTTI ON ALFRED JARRY

(PolizzottI’s article appeared in the 2011/12 edition of Bookforum.)

Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames the passions of a fervent cult: Does one respect the insider’s code and eschew those aspects of the subject deemed vulgar, indiscreet, or commonplace? Or does one acknowledge that, for the general reader, such inconvenient or well-rehearsed truths are an integral part of the story?

In some ways, Alfred Jarry is the poster boy for literary cult figures. Like fellow turn-of-the-century French eccentrics Arthur Cravan, Raymond Roussel, and Jacques Vaché—though more famous than any of them—Jarry has left a legacy based partly on an enigmatic, often hermetic body of writing, and partly on an equally enigmatic, and more flamboyant, garland of anecdotes. Figures as diverse as Apollinaire, Picasso (with whom Jarry might have had a dalliance), the Surrealists, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and even Sir Paul of Liverpool have acknowledged his influence—one that owed as much to Jarry’s nonconformist attitude as it did to his writing. The literary historian Roger Shattuck enshrined Jarry as one of the four great French precursors to modernism (along with Erik Satie, Apollinaire, and Henri Rousseau) in his magisterial 1958 study, The Banquet Years; in France, Jarry’s works fill three volumes of the Pléiade—the ultimate literary canonization.

(Read more)

http://bookforum.com/inprint/018_04/8602

View ‘Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life’ by Alastair Brotchie on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Jarry-Pataphysical-Alastair-Brotchie/dp/0262016192/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323644824&sr=8-1

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‘CARDENIO’: GARY TAYLOR PUTS FLETCHER’S AND SHAKESPEARE’S LOST PLAY BACK TOGETHER AGAIN

 

(Taylor’s article appeared in the Guardian, 11/18.)

In the spring of 1613, the office of the Treasurer of the King's Chamber recorded two separate payments to the King's Men – William Shakespeare's company – for performances of a play called Cardenna or Cardenno. The two records presumably refer to the same play, since it is unlikely that the King's Men had two different plays whose titles differed by only a single letter. Court records almost always abbreviated play titles, and the clerks who wrote these draft accounts were primarily concerned with exactly how much money was paid to whom. Almost all scholars agree that both payments refer to Cardenio. 

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/nov/18/cardenio-shakespeares-lost-play

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FORD’S THEATRE BANS BILL O’REILLY BOOK ON LINCOLN

(Steven Levingston’s article appeared 11/12 in the Washington Post.)

Of all the places you’d expect to find Bill O’Reilly’s new history “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever,” Ford’s Theatre — the site of the dreadful act — should rank right at the top. But you’d do better to search for the bestseller on Amazon because it has been banned from the theater’s store.

The crime? O’Reilly and his co-author Martin Dugard have displayed a serial disregard for historical fact.

(Read more)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/bill-oreillys-lincoln-book-banned-from-fords-theatre-because-of-mistakes/2011/11/11/gIQAhJpyFN_story.html

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SPALDING GRAY’S JOURNALS PUBLISHED THIS MONTH FROM KNOPF

 

(Nell Casey’s article appeared in The New York Times, 10/8; video includes Gray monologue and Talking Heads music.)

Spalding Gray moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his mother’s suicide, when he was 26. He lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. To make ends meet, Gray occasionally worked as a stock boy, while LeCompte sold postcards at the front desk of the Guggenheim. But mostly they were finding their places in New York’s avant-garde theater world.

In 1968, they saw Richard Schechner’s critically acclaimed production of “Dionysus in ’69,” which included an onstage orgy. Gray and LeCompte were electrified by it. The following year, they would become members of Schechner’s experimental-theater troupe, the Performance Group, after the director cast Gray in his rather unusual interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Schechner recalls coming across Gray’s head shot and seeing a young man “staring out with eyes so far apart — he wasn’t trying to look pretty, he wasn’t trying to do anything.”

(Read more)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/magazine/spalding-grays-tortured-soul.html?_r=2&hpw

View this book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Journals-Spalding-Gray/dp/0307273458/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318273709&sr=8-1

One of Spalding Gray’s monologues ‘The Anniversary’ is included in One on One: The Best Men’s Monologues from the 21^st Century from Applause Books:  http://www.amazon.com/One-Best-Mens-Monologues-Century/dp/1557837015/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318273803&sr=1-1

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'ACTS OF WAR: IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN IN SEVEN PLAYS' IN PLAYBILL MAGAZINE

 

(via Michael Messina) 

View 'Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays' at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0810127326/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=stagvoic-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0810127326&adid=1TVMWR6HAENW7ECTP3YJ&

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