WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER: 6/19/24

PLACES, PLEASE - "MOTHER PLAY," "APPROPRIATE," "STEREOPHONIC," and "THE OUTSIDERS"

(Above: Sarah Paulson, who was awarded the Tony for Leading Actress in a Play for her performance in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, at the Tony party thrown by Rick Miramontez and John Gore at the Carlyle.)

(1) “One place understood helps us understand all places better,” wrote Eudora Welty, the Mississippi writer who helped me understand both my home state and, by doing so, the wider world for which I longed. Indeed, she helped me to understand the longing itself. It was a longing which led me to wanting to be an actor which then led me to Juilliard’s Drama Division and thus to New York City where forty-nine years ago this summer I finally found my place in the manner that all young people listing in their longing must set out searching for such a place in order to steady themselves. Some stay more firmly put. Others, like me, finding our footing wander toward our lust for a different life. Neither is luckier than the other. Just different. I am certainly no longer young. But wander on, I do, and long still because longing is where I feel most at home. It is why I love the theatre so much and find a sense of home there, a sense of place. I can find a heightened momentary stillness inside a theatre where a heightened longing, mine joined with that of others around me, is unleashed. Theatre: communal longing. Welty: “My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.” That too, is theatre. The curtain parts on our lives until what is conjured is our one shared human one.

I have thought a lot about a sense of place since being in New York for a round of theatre these last few days - not only because I find a sense of home inside a theatre but also because the plays I have seen have been about the hope and horror of home while finding instead a deeper sense of place in the world. Sarah Paulson won the Tony last Sunday for her role as Toni in Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It is a southern gothic tale - more Flannery O’Connor than Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams’s elbows on Edward Albee’s table - about three Arkansan siblings, two of their young children, one Jewish sister-in-law, and an Oregonian ingenue-as-interloper. But the main character is the generational homestead infused not only by the familial past - they are all there to go through the possessions of a deceased patriarch , one who hoarded even his most shockingly racist artifacts - but also infused by the presence of the spirits embedded in the soiled soil of the south where slavery poisoned the very earth the slaves themselves tilled, toiled over, owned and brutalized in the way they were, a societal past in which the familial is embedded. The fertile history of servitude is not interred in such tilled soil, but rooted from where it grows, rises, envelopes, the crime of slavery like kudzu covering everything down there in that neck of this country’s woods. “The past is never dead. It's not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, another Mississippian sentenced to the state, in his Requiem for a Nun which both he and Albert Camus adapted for the stage. Camus’s version was produced in Paris, Faulkner’s on Broadway. “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity,” continued Faulkner in the novel of the title in a kind of mission statement for this play, Appropriate, having been produced on Broadway - a play by a Black man from D.C. which can pass for the south in a swampy performative manner - 65 years after Requiem opened there.

I was haunted by that Faulkner quote as I tried to watch a Saturday evening performance of Appropriate. It proved difficult, so my mind did tend to wander. I had a second row mezzanine seat all the way to the side, house left. The way the Belasco Theatre is designed there is a big open space next to that part of the mezzanine and and double exit doors positioned there - not walled off - leading out to the street so that the noise from that street - the horns, the sirens, the fraught shouts of the unfriendly - kept filling my left ear as if a radio were playing John Cage music. And the audience itself didn’t seem to be there to see the play but Sarah Paulson herself and were fans from her work on television, especially the American Horror Story anthologies. In fact, they seemed to think they were at a taping of television show - specifically a Carol Burnett variety show episode. Or even a sporting event. When Toni, Sarah’s character whom she played in the first act with the fraught shouty one-note frenzy of the unfriendly, scored a rhetorical point or cracked wise with a nasty relish they erupted as if she had actually scored some points. I kept looking for a jumbotron screen and a running tally. Folks in the row behind me insisted on referring to her as Sarah and not her character when they’d too loudly whisper, “Go get’em, Sarah,” and then get the giggles. It all seemed to be throwing Paulson’s timing off as well as her cast mates, which includes Cory Stoll, who smartly plays his part in a less frenzied counterpoint to Paulson’s histrionics until he earns his own eruption in the second act.

The play is about on some levels navigating toxicity but Paulson - I assume this is the way Lila Neugebauer directed her alas - just kept playing the toxic aspect instead of existing in it so that for me she was passing for Toni in a swampy performative manner. Or maybe she was just trying to navigate the toxic glee her presence was eliciting in her rabidly happy fans. All audiences are finally the unseen but heard character in the play they are seeing but it helps when they are in the same play. There does seem to be a tendency with Broadway audiences - no matter the night - to cheer on their favorites and it is the audiences who now break the fourth wall, not the actors. It happens at Merrily We Roll Along each night now when the characters write a hit musical within the musical being watched and sing about winning a Tony for it and the audience erupts - sometimes even standing to do so - at the production and performances themselves being recognized with Tonys. Call me a curmudgeon, but I like my disbelief to stay suspended. I long for a bit more theatre decorum and etiquette and respect. But, hey, I guess if you pay the exorbitant prices being charged for some productions then you think you have to right to exhort your exhilaration at being there any way you damn well please, fourth walls be damned as well.

I enjoyed Paulson’s acceptance speech for her Tony award more than her performance that won it. In it she spoke of how the Belasco is also imbued with spirits in much the same way that family homestead in Appropriate is. “As a young actress I remember seeing Janet McTeer burst on the stage in A Doll’s House in the very theater I am currently living in,” she said. “And some nights when I’m backstage I think about the indelible impact of her. I think about the walls of theaters all over this magical town holding the impact of each and every one of you in this room, and all of those who came before and I think how lucky those walls are to bear witness to the relentless interrogation of human experience that we endeavor to explore nightly for each other, to give back to one another with the hope of finding some shared path towards the truth about being alive. This is the heart and soul of what we do, and I am so honored to be amongst you.”

She captured it all in that part of her speech even if she didn’t quite capture me completely with the awarded performance that prompted it.

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