WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER : 8/14/24*

OH, MARY!, SUFFS, THE VILLAGE, ILLINOISE, and JOB

(Above: Cole Escola photographed in their apartment by Matthew Leifheit for New York magazine. )

I have been remiss in posting my last two Wednesday Newsletters because of my traveling and work schedule. I just didn’t have the bandwidth because of deadlines for magazine articles and my interviews here at Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown as part of the programming of the Provincetown Arts Society which included a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin I had last week for an invited audience that served also as a benefit for the Society. Since Doris loves and admires Abraham Lincoln so much - a section of her book Team of Rivals was the basis of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln - I asked if she wanted to see Oh, Mary! on Broadway. She said she was longing to see it. I warned her that its transgressive histrionics might upset her historian’s need to cling calmly to the facts as she finds new ways to tell an old narrative. She laughed and said that, well, Mary Lincoln was rather histrionic herself.

I had been longing to see Oh, Mary! as well and was so grateful when a friend offered me her ticket for a Thursday 5 p.m. matinee when she suddenly had a conflict, her own busy schedule complicating her own crowded bandwidth. But like Doris, I laughed more in anticipation of seeing it than my actually being there. The production has been so hyped since its premiere off-Broadway that it has been both sold-out commercially yet culturally oversold. It’s only 80 minutes and for the first hour I chuckled a few times and appreciated the well-timed blackouts from scene-to-scene. But the histrionics were so highly pitched that the transgressive nature of the narrative felt trampled upon. It was all a bit too forced for me and I found myself wondering how Charles Ludlam would have handled its ridiculousness and instead of ratcheting it up would have found the nuance in its knowingness. I did like the last 20 minutes as the narrative took more bewigged hairpin turns. I am thrilled that Cole Escola is having such a big success and is receiving a wider recognition after their being a downtown sensation for years as one of the cultural heirs of Ludlam who reveled in the same kind of high/low comedic artistry which was engendered by his ginning up too the appropriation of the other gender as a way, in turn, of more deeply exploring otherness. Ludlam loved to get a laugh but he never played it for one. That was his fineness as an artist, and his finesse. Audiences are having great fun at Oh, Mary! but there is no finesse to it. And finally, I guess, I’m fine with that.

(Above: Nora Burns and a disco ball photographed by Jason Rodgers.)

Another downtown performance artist and writer of the generation between Ludlam and Escola is Nora Burns who is not only the third member of the sketch comedy group Unitard along with David Iku and Mike Albo, but also an actress and playwright and activist. Most recently she has had a tandem hit at the Soho Playhouse with her two hour-length plays David’s Friend and The Village after runs, respectively, at LaMama Theatre and Dixon Place. I saw David’s Friend when she was workshopping it a few years ago for a night in Hudson, New York, at Hudson Hall, In the piece, Burns more than keeps her best friend David’s memory alive; she keeps her love for him as well by manifesting it in her writing which takes the skill she’s developed in sketch comedy - a sharpened focus, the timing, the temerity, a wit that is wielded - but also the deep wells of tenderness that no amount of the toughening up New York City demanded of her when she moved there in 1979 could take away. David was only 31 when he died of AIDS. There is the trauma of generational grief for those of us in the LGBTQ community who lived through those AIDS years - survived them - but there is also the profound personal sort. Nora’s play is about both those forms of grief. But now that she is on the other side of grief she is able to grapple with it by telling its story, which is also David’s. And hers. Narrative is how we more fully navigate our lives.

The Village, which I saw on my last Friday night in New York this visit before it closed, is Nora Burns’s version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and pays it homage with its dramatic constructs and the curious universality of the bohemian outliers she centers in the play, including the1979 versions of her Greenwich Village tribe made up of rich older queers, gay sex workers, drag queens, disco boys, and the junkie next door. They all, bless’em, dance to the disco beat. Directed by Adam Pivirotto and choreographed by Robin Carrigan, the play is elegiac yet jaunty. I liked the cut of its gib. The jut of its jaw. Neither work is sentimental. Each play seethes at times with laughter just as we all seethed with sadness when AIDS came along and changed our young lives with so much death after so much suffering. We learned how to be kind to one another in new ways back then like historians clinging calmly to the facts and each other. We are still, bless us, learning new ways to feel joy after all our histories. Nora Burns is doing the teaching.

(Above: Shaina Taub as Alice Paul in the musical Suffs for which she also wrote the book and lyrics and composed the score.)

After that matinee of Oh, Mary!, I bought a last-minute ticket for Suffs at its evening performance. I wanted to see this musical about the women’s suffragist movement in its earlier incarnation down at The Public theatre but I was not in New York often enough to have done so. I am now glad I waited because it was only a few days after Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to her candidacy for the presidency and there was an added feminist frisson of hopeful fervor in the audience. There is even a line in the show spoken by Alice Paul - I assume it was always there, maybe it was freshly inserted - that has her telling someone that if they are going to say something about her, then say it to her face. The audience erupted at hearing that.

The whole evening was a stirring one. I had been moved and troubled and fascinated by the bravery of the activists in the suffragist movement when I watched The Vote, the two-part documentary about them on PBS a few years ago and was wondering how a musical could capture all that moved and troubled and fascinated me without cheapening or sentimentalizing it. Well, there is something to be said for being stirred that can help you overlook the daunting challenges of daring to take on noted subjects and set them to notes. I was also ready to see this production, directed with artful fluidity and force by Leigh Silverman, after Shaina Traub, who stars in the show at Alice Paul, won her Tonys for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score but the show itself lost the Best Musical Tony to The Outsiders. That didn’t quite make sense to me. Taub is a remarkable talent. She made musical sense of it all Two of the most stirring anthems she has written for the show are titled “Finish the Fight” and “Keep Marching.” I kept thinking of Kamala. Finish this fight.

(Above: Dancers Ricky Ubeda, Ben Cook, and Gaby Diaz in Illinoise. In the background are musicians Tasha Viets-VanLear and Sasha Nova. Photo by Matthew Murphy.)

I also saw choreographer and director Justin Peck’s Illinoise before it closed on Broadway after having missed it at Bard and the Park Avenue Armory. Peck won the Tony this year for his choreographic work within this show he conceived with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury set to the music of Sufjan Steven’s from his concept album Illinois. So it’s a concept within a concept. Or as I wrote on Facebook and Instagram after having finally seen it and posting a video of its ovation at it curtain call:

"The audience seemed to be replete with repeat attendees and fans of the show because of the music of Sufjan Stevens more than the choreography of Justin Peck. I liked it okay but I had a hard time getting over the tweeness of the wings worn by the singers who sang the music beautifully. The dancers danced beautifully . But the narrative about different narratives never quite worked for me. I am glad I saw it though . There were lovely moments but not really enlivening ones. There was personal sadness and communal joy but I never felt the jolt of theatricality I awaited. It was The Outsiders a few years later and moved to the Midwest. Oh. And there were zombies.”

(Above: Sydney Lemmon, Max Wolf Friedlich, and Peter Friedman on the set of Job. Photo by Andy Henderson.)

Before seeing Job on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre where it had recently transferred from its own earlier run at Soho Playhouse, I had been mispronouncing the title as if it were the name of the patient and pious man who had a book named for him in the Old Testament, the one whose lamentations about his misfortunes never made him, in turn, lament the goodness of God. The play instead alludes to the more pedestrian and generalized noun which refers to one’s employment although I did keep thinking about Job and the deepness and fury of his lamentations as this taut two-hander - another production that only runs 80 minutes - unfolded so skillfully in front of me. I was mesmerized by the two actors, Sydney Lemmon (Jack’s grandkid) and Peter Friedman, in their roles as the young woman who has had a breakdown at her tech firm where she was hired to uncloak the darkest corners of the internet as a last line of security against such darkness and the psychiatrist she then visits in order for him to sign off on her to return to her job. Director Michael Hurwitz has orchestrated that tautness in the tension of this play so expertly constructed by playwright Max Wolf Friedlich. There is a choreographic propulsion to the dramatic rhythm. Each actor is so fully immersed within the construct at this point that they are fully aware of the beats of the piece and within them fully psychologically committed to their characters. There is a performative parallelism at play as there is in all mysteries and Job is in its own dark corners of its dramatic heart drawing on the tradition of such plays on Broadway. Sometimes the narratives of our lives are not fully told because to do so would negate all navigation. We think we are keeping our darkness in check. But we are only as sick as our secrets. Or, as an old sponsor of mine in a fellowship where we tell ourselves our Job-like stories in order to heal and to help: we are only as sick as our sick ones.

Onward …

*This week’s NEWSLETTER is released from its paywall because it is the first one in a couple of weeks. Next Wednesday in Tunis, the paywall will be back and most of it will be for Paid Subscribers. Thanks.