Category Archives: Theater

David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow”

Speed the Plow

Recently I had a front-row seat at a performance of David Mamet‘s play “Speed-the-Plow” in London. The play has only three performers: Richard Schiff, best known for his role as Toby Ziegler in TV’s The West Wing; British actor Nigel Lindsay (the Jewish terrorist Levi in HBO’s exceptional miniseries Rome), whom I knew was British before the play began but whose American accent, gestures and delivery were so perfect that I doubted my own ears and eyes; and Lindsay Lohan, the ostensible star of the show, whose solo headshot graces every poster for the play.

Despite some early bad press over botched previews in which Lohan embarrassed herself by being unable to remember her lines, London reviewers have been pretty kind to her. Her role of Karen, a temporary secretary, was first performed on Broadway in 1988 by Madonna. Lohan was perfectly adequate in the first act of the show, but was painfully outclassed by her two costars—they knew better how to deliver Mamet’s rapid-fire but sometimes awkward dialog. Lohan was featured more prominently in the second act, when she was completely overshadowed by Schiff. She began speaking at an intensity level of about eight and kept her delivery right there throughout the act, never pulling back and leaving herself no way to build drama, and delivering her lines in awkward ways that showed a lack of forethought about the meaning of her words, which made them feel especially stagey. By starting out at that level of energy and earnestness, she left her performance nowhere to go. She missed all the dramatic dynamics that would have given her room to move and would have made her speeches feel more like actual dialog. She remembered her lines, but delivered many of them unnaturally, underscoring the difficulty some actors have with Mamet’s idiosyncratic rhythms and old-fashioned phrases.

David Mamet is a much better writer of male than female dialog, emphasizing as he usually does a particularly hardboiled hypermasculinity, so poor Lohan was already at a disadvantage. (Think of Alec Baldwin’s famously testosterone-fueled “steak knives” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross and you’ll get an idea of Mamet in his element.) Schiff reacted beautifully in every moment, with subtle emotions flickering across his face and just the right body language to make me feel like he was hearing those words for the first time. The third act brought Lohan back onto the scene only briefly, while Nigel Lindsay and Schiff got to share the powerfully angry chemistry of two middle-aged men engaged in a career-defining battle of wills. Their scenes together were compelling as they bantered back and forth in the way of jaded, hardnosed, behind-the-scenes players in the movie business, their strength and status shifting hugely during the course of the story. These men are “actors’ actors,” the sorts of performers who react perfectly naturally in the moment and make their costars look better in the process. Their mastery disappears into the seeming effortlessness of their performances.

Lohan was not bad, but she didn’t show the discipline required to have learned the lines well enough to seem to forget them, as the best actors do. Hers was not a subtle performance. And while there’s a great deal of macho bombast in the two male performers’ roles, they also have to show range and vulnerability behind their cynical posturing. The opportunity to see whether Lohan crashes and burns in live performance may fill the seats (and there were certainly many young female fans of hers in the audience and around the stage door waiting for her as I passed it after the play), but what made the evening worthwhile was the skill shown by her extraordinarily talented costars.

Feeling Good

Nina Simone’s dark, rich, beautifully bluesy version of the song “Feeling Good” is a classic, and with good reason. The version I grew up listening to is also extraordinary, but quite different. The song was written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd” and was sung on the original 1965 Broadway cast album by baritone Gilbert Price. His delivery is nothing like Nina Simone’s, yet I find it just as beautiful and arresting as her cover of the song. Few people nowadays know Price’s warm and powerful voice; give it a listen and hear what you’ve been missing.

Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

clown

 

I’ve never cared much for clowns. I don’t have coulrophobia (fear of clowns), though this fear is apparently surprisingly common. I just find pretty much everything they are and most of what they stand for annoying. I don’t hate them, but I avoid them when I can, and I’ve been sorely tempted to buy myself a “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me” T-shirt. Apparently many of my fellow Americans agree with me.

My beloved Uncle Steve is the exception to my anti-clown rule. He finally retired from his recurring role as Tidy the Clown in the annual Redwood City (California) Fourth of July Parade after 25 years of clowning around in public, and I must say I did enjoy him. But he was a gentle clown who pushed a bottomless garbage can down the street, popping junk into it and leaving a trail of trash behind him as the debris went right through the bottom of the can. When he’s a clown, the joke’s on him, and the audience gets to giggle at his cluelessness.

Steve’s alter ego, Tidy, recruited elementary school kids to be his clown sidekicks every year, and the result was charming and sweet. Tidy stuck flowers into piles of pucky left by the horses of the mounted police that went before him, and only approached people if they seemed open to it; he’d never force himself on a child. He’s more the sweet, Chaplinesque Little Tramp sort of clown, not the barrelling, bamboozling, freakazoid clown one finds on, say, ice cream cone packaging. (That is one horrifying dude.) I can make exceptions for someone like Tidy, but in general, keep Bozo and his ilk far away from me.

The sort of clown my uncle represents is endearing and enjoyable, a sort of old-style, mid-20th-century, fun-loving clown. But nowadays such cuddly clowns are rather rare. The cheerful, perky clown toys of the past have given way to more garish and ghoulish representations in the general media.

The general idea of the American clown, a white-faced social misfit clad in oversized and odd clothing, ignoring people’s personal space, attacking them with seltzer bottles or squirting flowers, and using them as the butt of public jokes as a way of seeking attention, pretty much sums up the worst of American behavior in one self-parodying, campy, over-the-top package. It’s nearly everything I hate about our embarrassingly accurate national stereotype: garish, self-absorbed, pushy, willing to trod on other’s toes, thinking our needs are greater than everyone else’s, ever ready to laugh at others’ humiliation but in a touchy, bad-humored funk when the table is turned and the joke’s on us.

To be fair, clowns of other cultures (e.g., buffoons like Pantalone and Arlecchino in the commedia dell’arte tradition, or Britain’s Punch and Judy puppet versions of clowns) are also caricatures with distinct, overscaled features, costumes, and gestures, all of which predate the founding of the United States by many years. I’m being unjust in blaming American culture for the American clown tradition, I know. They come from a long and, to my sensitivities, annoying tradition of making the audience the straight man, barrelling over others for laughs, and making light of humiliation and slapstick violence. It’s the sort of thing that Roberto Benigni did in his Holocaust-lite Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser, “Life is Beautiful,” a few years ago—much to my disgust and dismay.  For a description of the film that agrees with my take on it, see David Denby’s review, “In the eye of the beholder,” published in The New Yorker, March 15, 1999.  I found nearly everything Benigni did in that film either offensive, maudlin, self-aggrandizing, disrespectful, or embarrassing—or all of those things rolled into one.

I’m not actually a humorless prig; I can cackle and guffaw with the best of them, and I laugh so hard I snort more often than I care to admit. I can enjoy dark humor, tacky humor, vulgar humor, but I can rarely appreciate or enjoy slapstick physical comedy or farce, unless they’re so bizarrely irrational (e.g., my beloved Monty Python) that it’s impossible to empathize with the person playing the butt of the joke. Otherwise, I usually become uncomfortable when the laughs come at the expense of someone else’s pride, safety, or happiness. Even when the straight man is set up to seem an unpleasant sort who deserves his comeuppance, I generally don’t like seeing others derive happiness from the suffering of others. But then, I don’t appreciate most light romantic comedies, either. I can watch “Six Feet Under” or “The Sopranos” all day long (gimme that angst!), but ask me to watch ditsy women trip over themselves to get the attention of pretty boys with great abs for an hour and really, I’d rather floss my teeth or weed my garden, thank you very much.

Of course, I’m not alone. A quick search of eBay will find you scores of scary clown puppets, figurines, and posters that the sellers recognize as distinctly creepy. A walk through the aisles of your local Blockbuster shows DVD covers emblazoned with killer clowns in the horror section. “The Simpsons” even featured an episode in which Bart is so frightened by the clown-inspired bed Homer makes him that he stays up all night chanting, “Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me.” This is apparently the genesis of the refrain now printed on T-shirts worn by proud coulrophobes across the nation. (Leave it to Matt Groening to explore odd undercurrents of our nation in such a fun and funky way.)

I don’t know whether it’s worth it to resurrect cheerful, inoffensive clowns, since even they had elements that have scared children for centuries; outsized features, crazy make-up, and disturbingly child-like behavior coming from an oversized adult are just odd. I prefer my comedians to take the forms of everyday people, I guess. I like my fantasy worlds to feel as close to a world I can believe in as possible, so I can get lost in them more easily. Some like fantasy characters and scenarios to be as outlandish as possible in order to feel truly immersed in another world and way of thinking, but I’d rather have some emotional connection to fictional characters so that I can care about them and identify with them, and for me, that usually involves making them feel as much like realistic human beings as possible. I also prefer it if they don’t step out of their boundaries and squirt me in the face with a shot of seltzer water. I’m funny that way.

[Originally published in Laura Grey’s Little Hopping Bird blog.]