Southern Bookman

Farewell, Robert Brustein, contentious critic and American theater innovator

Robert Brustein's theater reviews in the New Republic invigorated American criticism.

Like New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, Brustein wrote with idiosyncratic passion, commitment to artistic rigor and an openness to non-conventional performances.

Brustein, who founded influential repertory theaters at Yale and Harvard, died Sunday at age 96 at his home in Cambridge, Mass.

The dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966-1979 and founder of Harvard's Institute for Advanced Theater Training, Brustein developed the careers of acclaimed actors and playwrights Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Cherry Jones, Sigourney Weaver, James Naughton, James Lapine, Tony Shalhoub, Linda Lavin, Adam Rapp, William Ivey Long, Steve Zahn, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet and Peter Sellars.

As the controversial dean of Yale's Drama School, he founded the Yale Repertory Theater, which drew attention for its experimental performances.

After years of criticism from detractors, Brustein left Yale when new President A. Bartlett Giamatti decided not to renew his contract.

Brustein found a home at Harvard as an English professor, founding the American Repertory Theater and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training, a two-year graduate program.

During his career, Brustein engaged in feuds with The New York Times' Frank Rich and other competing critics. He also battled major playwrights August Wilson and Samuel Beckett.

In 1984, Beckett threatened to sue to stop the American Repertory Theater's production of his "Endgame" because Brustein added a musical overture by Philip Glass and changed the setting specified in Beckett's stage notes. The main issue was Brustein's elimination of two windows from the set.

Beckett allowed the production to proceed, writing a condemnation of the production for the program.

Brustein and Wilson participated in a two-and-a-half hour debate in 1997 at New York City's Town Hall Theater over Wilson's call for an exclusively all-black theater. Brustein opposed Wilson's contention that only black actors could perform in his plays, and that women shouldn't play traditional male roles.

Another controversy rose when Brustein castigated regional theater companies for developing plays that later advanced to Broadway. Brustein believed that regional companies' main purpose was to give performances of theatrical merit, not serve as tryout venues for the New York stage.

His advocacy for regional theater led to a new vitality for local companies, which mounted more daring productions of plays and encouraged unknown playwrights. 

Brustein also wrote the well-regarded plays "Nobody Dies on Friday," "The Face Lift," "Spring Forward, Spring Back" and the Shakespeare trilogy "The English Channel," "Mortal Terror" and "The Last Will."

With his combative spirit and original views, Brustein changed the course of American theater.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Esquire magazine celebrates 90th birthday

Esquire's special 90-year anniversary issue this month barely acknowledges the magazine' s illustrious past.

The magazine arrived in October 1933, the depths of the Depression, with its founder and publisher Arnold Gingrich frankly declaring that the publication was "by, of and for men only."

Writers John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner Jr., Erkine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett and even Douglas Fairbanks Jr. appeared in the inaugural issue. Golf great Bobby Jones and heavyweight champion Gene Tunney contributed articles.

This year's special October issue salutes Hemingway, whose association with Esquire in its early years made the magazine a success, and Gay Talese, whose New Journalism classic "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" first appeared in the magazine.

But the magazine doesn't mention famous Esquire writers Tom Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Michael Herr, John Sack, Tim O'Brien, Norman Mailer and Terry Southern. None of George Lois' famous 1960s covers is reproduced. The great years of editor Harold Hayes, and the later reigns of Clay Felker and David Granger are ignored.

Current editor Michael Sebastian in his introduction to the special October anniversary issue does cite Gingrich, going on to explain that he decided to look to the future instead of rehashing the magazine's glorious history.

A special feature predicts which ideas and events might emerge over the next 90 years. Singer Post Malone, quarterback Patrick Mahomes, emerging actor Barry Koeghan and writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of the recently acclaimed novel 'Chain-Gang All-Stars," are profiled among 90 leaders expected to influence the next few decades. The magazine's boys club continues.

Longtime Esquire readers and Hemingway lovers will enjoy writer David Coggins' appreciation of the writer, who published "The Old Man and the Sea" and other famous stories in the magazine.

Coggins looks back on how Hemingway was able to purchase his beloved fishing boat the Pilar because of a $3,000 payment from Gingrich, giving the magazine exclusive rights to Hemingway's work.

For the article, Coggins visited Hemingway's home in Havana and the dry-docked Pilar, upon which Hemingway entertained well-known writers and actors on deep-sea fishing trips.

The 91-year-old Talese in a "What I've Learned" essay tied to the recent release of his book "Bartleby and Me: Reflections of An Old Scrivener" revisits his career.

Although it's undoubtedly a generational gap, I find that today's Esquire lacks the spark of the old magazine, which was one of the journalistic pillars of my youth.

But the magazine keeps going at 90 years old. I never thought it would last that long.

Tracy Daughtery details varied life of Texas author Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry wryly called himself a "minor regional novelist," even wearing a T-shirt with that designation.

In his long and varied career, McMurtry moved far beyond that self-mocking label, receiving international recognition for his novels and other work.

From 1961 through 2017, McMurtry published nearly 50 books of varying quality, ranging from essays, memoirs, histories and biographies to the beloved novels "The Last Picture Show," "Moving On," "Leaving Cheyenne," "Cadillac Jack," "Terms of Endearment" and "Lonesome Dove," which won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a hugely popular TV miniseries.

Accomplished literary biographer Tracy Daugherty's "Larry McMurtry: A Life," published by St. Martin's Press, traces McMurtry's improbable rise from a desolate West Texas ranch to literary acclaim.

Daugherty makes the reader feel the presence of McMurtry's personality, from his days as a book-hungry graduate student at Rice University in Houston, to his smashing debut seeing his first novel "Horseman Pass By" turned into the critically lauded movie "Hud," to his enduring career as a novelist, essayist, memoirist and historian.

The book unfolds like one of McMurtry's novels with moments like the comic visit of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters to McMurtry's home in Houston, to his relationships, mainly conducted by telephone, with a number of famous women, including actresses Cybill Shepherd and Diane Keaton and writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Susan Sontag.

Along with his regimen of writing 10 pages a day, McMurtry was a devoted "book scout" and rare book dealer, even opening a sprawling bookstore in his economically deprived hometown of Archer City. He also operated an elite enclave for book collectors in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown. 

Along with a thorough analysis of McMurtry's recasting of the Western cowboy myth with "Lonesome Dove," Daugherty examines McMurtry's novels, many of them series with repeat appearances of some of his memorable characters.

While McMurtry's late novels displayed declining abilities, Daugherty valiantly praises several of them.

Daugherty excels at detailing McMurtry's dealings with Hollywood, including the production of movies made from his books such as "The Last Picture Show," "Hud," and "Terms of Endearment."

In an amusing/harrowing set-piece, Daugherty revisits director Peter Bogdanovich's on-location filming of "The Last Picture Show" in McMurtry's hometown of Archer City, called Thalia in the book and movie. The Hollywood actors and crew encountered hostility from the town's residents.

Early in his career, McMurtry in an essay assailed the provincialism of Texas literature. He took a longer view, ranging from elegiac laments about the disappearing frontier to stories about the alienation of the state's burgeoning cities. Praised for his strong women characters, he was praised and condemned for his novels' explicit sexuality.

His autobiographical characters suffered his own travails of old age. In his later novels, he exposed the Western myths of characters like Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, satirizing the dime novels that first created the gunfighter legends.

Even as he aged and suffered deep depression after undergoing open-heart surgery, McMurtry continued writing each day. Daugherty looks at his close relationship and writing partnership with Diana Ossana, with whom he wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain."

In a poignant finale, Daugherty tells of McMurtry's late-life marriage to Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey's widow. The couple and Ossana lived together during McMurtry's last years.

When McMurtry died in 2021 at age 84, he was no longer a regional novelist. He belonged to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering my first trip to New York City

I remember the October nearly 50 years ago when I first visited New York City.

My romance for New York began in childhood, when my father brought home from business trips to the city a baseball signed by the Yankees, miniature Maris and Mantle bats and a Statue of Liberty snow globe. He always talked about the Broadway shows he'd seen, and the bar at the Waldorf-Astoria.

During my college days, I anticipated each week's arrival of the Village Voice, to which I subscribed along with the Paris Review. When I graduated, I had to go and see Manhattan.

The city exhilarated me with its frantic activity. Times Square pulsed with porn theaters, shouting buskers and small exotic businesses. Bryant Park behind the Fifth Avenue library was an open drug market. Gorgeous women rushed by in their heels and dazzling dresses, along with men who looked like Cary Grant.

I remember the New Yorkers' kindness to a wide-eyed 23-year-old. How proud they were of their raucous city.

Thanks to my father's business associates, I saw a bounty of hot new plays. William Preston and Bernadette Peters in "Mack and Mable." Keir Dullea, Fred Gwynne and the stunning Elizabeth Ashley in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I'll never forget her appearance on stage in her white slip.

Seeing Picasso's "Guernica" at the Museum of Modern Art enthralled me. I didn't know art could be so electrifying. The old Scribner's Bookstore on Fifth Avenue was a literary cathedral.

Golden weather blessed each day.  The afternoon light reflecting from the soaring buildings told me that a new life had begun.

Noted biographer Terry Daugherty examines life of Texas writer Larry McMurtry

I've discovered another book to add to my overflowing autumn reading list: Terry Daughterty's new biography of Larry McMurtry.

Daugherty's book, which received favorable reviews from Greg Curis in the Wall Street Journal, Dwight Garner in The New York Times and Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker, is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, the chronicler of Texas history and society who died in 2021 at age 84.

McMurtry gained widespread fame and won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic novel "Lonesome Dove," which tells the story of a late 19th century cattle drive from Texas to Montana. A TV series based on the novel generated an intense national following.

Before "Lonesome Dove," McMurtry built a devoted audience for his Texas-based novels and essays, especially "The Last Picture Show," the basis of the 1971 film that received eight Academy Award nominations.

Later in his life, McMurtry wrote memoirs about his separate careers as a book enthusiast, best-selling author and Hollywood celebrity.

Daughterty, who has written acclaimed biographies of Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and the Texas novelist Billy Lee Brammer and several novels and nonfiction books, is a Texas native praised by reviewers for his comprehensive look at McMurtry's rise from a childhood on a desolate west Texas ranch to international fame.

Here is the link to the Southern Bookman interview with Daughtery following the publication of his 2011 biography of Barheleme, known for his surrealistic novels and short stories.

Daugerty's biographies of Didion and Barthelme found riveting drama in their lives as writers, and I'm looking forward to enjoying the same excitement from his biography  of McMurtry, one of my all-time favorite authors.

 

 

"Oppenheimer" shows need for urgent global action against climate change

The world's relentless heat adds urgency to the apocalyptic message of Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer."

Atlanta's heat was relatively mild Sunday afternoon when we saw the three-hour film at the reopened Tara Theater.  The temperature will rise this week to the mid-90s, with the heat index above 100.

In Nolan's film about the conflicted physicist who led America's development of the atomic bomb in World War II, much is made of the scientists believing that the test firing of the weapon in the Nevada desert could ignite the world's atmosphere.

The movie ends with Oppenheimer, hauntingly portrayed by Cillian Murphy, telling Albert Einstein that the advent of nuclear weapons did imperil the world.

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the threat of nuclear warfare rises even higher. As the United States and NATO escalate military support for Ukraine and Russian troops suffer continued losses, fears increase that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will use atomic weapons. Ukrainian nuclear power plants have been damaged, raising concerns about a nuclear disaster.

The soaring temperatures, flooding and wildfires make clear that climate change is advancing beyond human control.

A massive global campaign like Oppenheimer's Manhattan project is needed to save humanity from the worst ravages of climate change. The world must act now to cut emissions and end the reliance on fossil fuels.

Like the Los Alamos clock ticking down to the first nuclear explosion, the world is running out of time. The atmosphere is igniting, as Oppenheimer's scienctists/warriors feared.

 

American theater in critical condition

While big audiences for "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" bring hope to strike-ravaged Hollywood, live theater is struggling across the United States.

Theater companies across the United States are laying off staff and canceling productions, as The New York Times reported Monday.

Even well-established operations like New York City's Public Theater have not recovered from the Covid epidemic shutdown. Audiences have not returned to pre-Covid levels, and government funding that kept companies alive during the epidemic has vanished.

Older audiences who most frequently attended live shows before the epidemic no longer attend performances, and younger people would rather watch TikTok videos.

While movie theaters enjoy a brief summer resurgence, streaming and other pursuits ravish live theater.

In Atlanta, companies like the Actor's Express Theatre forge on with productions like the recently concluded "Jesus Hopped the A Train." But even the vanguard Alliance Theater suffers losses, and the closing of the long-established Lyric Theater in March sent tremors through the theater community.

After flourishing for years, live theater is now endangered. Playwrights for years turned to Hollywood for living wages. Now, as the writers' strike illustrates, that once lucrative field has vanished. Theaters that once produced new plays no longer risk untested productions.

Years ago, Simon and Garfunkel sang "We speak of things that matter/in words that must be said/can analysis be worthwhile/is the theater really dead?"

American theater still lives, but its heartbeat grows faint.

Distinguished actor Wendell Pierce inspired by his father's patriotism

Wendell Pierce delivers an inspiring Fourth of July message in the "House Call" feature in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

The New Orleans native and admired actor tells of growing up in a then-segregated Southern city, his war hero father's refusal to give in to bitterness over racism and his stellar career in film, television and theater.

Compiled by writer Marc Myers, the entertaining House Call feature in WSJ's Friday "Mansion" section looks at the childhoods of show-business stars.

The celebrities give first-person recollections of the homes in which they grew up, their families and how they received their big breaks to achieve fame.

Pierce, who recently received acclaim for his portrayal of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in London and Broadway productions of "Death of a Salesman," recalls that his 98-year-old father, Amos, was for years denied medals for his heroism during the World War II Battle of Saipan, "known as the Pacific D-Day."

"At home, Dad never once let bitterness overwhelm him, nor did he stop loving his country," Pierce said.

The actor known for HBO performances as detective Bunk Moreland in "The Wire" and the New Orleans jazz musician Antoine Batiste in "Treme," grew up in Ponchartrain Park, a suburban-style New Orleans neighborhood developed after World War II for middle-class blacks. A ditch separated the community from the all-white Gentilly Woods.

His father used the GI Bill to purchase a house and attend Southern University, where he took classes for a commercial photography career.

After graduating from high school in New Orleans, Wendell Pierce was accepted at New York City's Juilliard School in 1981. His successful career also includes roles in the TV series "Suits" and the films "Ray," "Malcolm X" and "Waiting to Exhale." He's now starring in Prime Video's "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan."'

After Hurricane Katrina, Pierce helped rebuild his childhood neighborhood. He also gave the devastated city hope with a production of "Waiting for Godot," as recounted in his memoir "Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play and the City That Would Not Be Broken." The staunchly liberal Pierce co-wrote the book with the conservative writer Rod Dreher, a fellow Catholic.

Pierce discovered in 2009 that his father, now 98, was entitled to six medals for his heroism at Saipan. The Army presented the medals to his father later that year at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Pierce's brother, Ron, an Army officer, pinned on the medals.

Instead of bitterness, his father at the ceremony recalled the battle. "What I remember most are the many who died there."

Pierce was in tears when his father saluted and said "God bless America."

 

 

My late romance with Rachel Brosnahan and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"

I fell in love with Rachel Brosnahan as the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Amy Sherman-Palladino's show about a Jewish housewife becoming a major comedian didn't hook me when it first appeared on Amazon Prime in my first days of streaming.

But I recently watched the show's concluding fifth season, enthralled by the series' evocation of New York City's show-biz glamour in the early 1960s.

Like "Mrs. Maisel's" TV talk show host Gordon Ford, I developed a serious crush for Brosnahan's Mrs. Maisel, with her gorgeous face, perky comments and stylish 1960s outfits and hats.

I was also enchanted by the show's references to 1960s pop culture celebrities like Jack Paar, Princess Margaret and Jane Jacobs.

A deep admirer of Lenny Bruce in my college days, I was especially intrigued by Luke Kirby's sensitive portrayal of the drug-addicted comedian, persecuted by police and a free-speech martyr after his death from a heroin overdose.

The romantic themes, show-business lore and portrayal of Jewish culture captivated me. The parade of characters, from mobsters to black entertainers, TV comedy writers, nightclub owners and newspaper editors and reporters, created a tapestry like that of a great novel.

At low moments, I'll look back at the splendid scene of Brosnahan and Reid Scott as the smitten Ford dancing in a grubby New York City diner to Ella Fitzgerald's "I'm Beginning to See the Light."

I saw the light of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

Actor's Express boosts Atlanta theater with performance of Stephen Adly Guirgis' "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train"

The Actor's Express' staging of Stephen Adly Guirgis' "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" offers a daring theatrical experience all too rare in Atlanta.

While the production strains under the weight of Guirgis' ponderous themes, the dynamic cast directed by Eric J. Little delivers an electric performance.

Set in an isolation ward of Riker's Island prison in New York City, Guirgis' early play hurls trumpet blasts of theology, criminal justice, mortality, moral choices, natural beauty and redemption that often soar. Yet they can also crash, bringing more thunder than light.

In the play's central conflict, Seikou Laidlow as the serial killer Lucius and Christian Gonzales as the young accused murderer Angel explore an incendiary relationship in which fear and suspicion defeat offerings of compassion.

They face each other from separate cages aligned at each end of a central stage in scenic designer Seamus M. Bourne's setting. Like two rhetorical gladiators in a pit, they rage and equivocate as the audience watches from both sides of the stage.

Cara Mantella mixes misplaced idealism and ethical desperation in portraying Angel's passionate lawyer, bringing believability to the character's implausible downfall in seeking to subvert the criminal justice system. Yet, her strained effort to exonerate Angel by getting him to commit perjury remains dubious.

While his voice was at times rendered inaudible by the King Plow theater's poor acoustics, Luis Hernandez gives a complex performance as the sadistic, self-righteous prison guard Valdez, who stands as a rigid moral arbiter against Lucius and Angel's justifications for their criminal acts.  He symbolizes the state's power to impose justice upon individuals.

That extreme power is carried out with Lucius' execution for the vicious murders of eight people. Lucius' former compassionate guard D'Amico, replaced by Valdez at the start of the play, reappears to say he has witnessed Lucius' death, one of Aldis' too frequent uses of exposition.

Endearingly played by Jacob York, D'Amico decries the death penalty in delivering a poignant elegy for Lucius. Yet he reveals that traces of heroin and cocaine were found in Lucius' body, undercutting Lucius' claims to Christian redemption.

Angel, who has shifted from defiance to remorse,, closes the play with an expression of guilt that seems gratuitous, having no connection with previous events.

Tearfully recalling stealing the coat of a friend during childhood, Angel's at last totally defeated by the criminal justice system, to Valdez's satisfaction.

Despite that unsatisfactory conclusion, Actor's Express meets the challenge of Guirgis' ambitious but flawed play, the work of a major playwright not yet fully formed.