Southern Bookman

Darryl Pinckney gives warm portrait of Elizabeth Hardwick in memoir "Come Back in September"

Elizabeth Hardwick is the moral and cultural center of Darryl Pinckney's memoir "Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan."

Pinckney, who came to Columbia University in the 1970s from an upper middle-class upbringing in Indianapolis, signed up for Hardwick's creative writing course, which she taught at Columbia and Barnard.

The Southern-born Hardwick grows fond of the young gay black student, inviting him to her Upper West Side apartment and introducing him to many of the great books of Western literature.

The long-suffering wife of the mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell, Hardwick gained an independent reputation as a critic, journalist, short story writer and novelist, especially after Lowell's death in 1977. 

In Pinckney's remembrances, Hardwick regally conducts her tutorials from her red couch in the apartment's living room, taking books from her shelves for Pinckney to borrow. The reader pictures her elegantly dressed, as in the winsome photo on the book's cover.

She wittily regales Pinckney with literary gossip from the past and present, and stories about her own youth in New York City and upbringing in Kentucky. Her voice rises from Pinckney's pages.

Pinckney's elliptical, lyrical style gives the impression of overheard conversations from a dangerous, thrilling era of New York City, when art, music, theater and literature swirled in ferment. Hardwick both upholds cultural traditions and welcomes new creative energy.

While often visiting Hardwick, Pinckney was receiving another education as a member of New York City's avant garde gay scene, frequenting all-night clubs and engaging in drugs and wild sex.

He recounts adventures with fellow young aesthetes Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmuch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Luc (now Lucy) Sante, Howard Brookner and Nan Goldin. Athens' own B-52s appear several times as a favorite band.

The revels end with AIDS decimating an entire generation. Pinckney escaped succumbing to the disease but did require a stint in rehab. Whether for alcohol or a harsher addiction to heroin or cocaine is left unclear. In recovery, Pinckney heads to Europe, living in still divided Berlin and writing his first novel, "High Cotton."

A driving conflict of the book is Pinckney's efforts to keep his Bohemian lifestyle secret from his proper family. His father is a high-ranking NAACP official, and the family has ties with black leaders of the civil rights movement.

Pinckney treasures his family's prominence while seeking to escape their strictures. The serious health problems suffered by one of his two sisters gives a sad undercurrent.

Thanks to Hardwick, Pinckney falls into the New York Review of Books circle, working for editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick's neighbor and best friend. Epstein emerges as almost as important a mentor to Pinckney as Hardwick and the book is dedicated to Epstein's memory. Silvers is pictured as an unstable, bullying tyrant, whom Epstein endures.

Under Epstein's exacting editing, Pinckney gains his first publications in The New York Review, co-founded by Hardwick, Lowell, Barbara Epstein and her then husband Jason Epstein during the New York newspaper strike of 1963.

Now 70, long involved in a stable relationship with the English poet and political journalist James Fenton, Pinckney is known for his novels and the nonfiction works "Busted in New York and Other Essays," "The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy" and "Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature."

Fenton, a close friend of the late Christopher Hitehens and Martin Amiss from their days at Oxford, acts as sort of a Greek chorus, commenting on Pinckney's reminsceces and reading.

The powerful women writers Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy also play significant roles in the book. Pinckney especially grows close to Sontag., who  over the years rises as the third feminine grace in Pinckney's life. 

McCarthy makes more of a subsidiary appearance, mainly as an old friend of Hardwick. Along with literary events in Manhattan, McCarthy and Hardwidk were neighbors in Castine, Maine, where they both had summer homes. Like Hardwick, McCarthy overcame a doomed marriage to a prominent male writer, in her case the critic Edmund Wilson.

Pinckney gives a Proustian view of a vanished era. The book ends in 1989 with the death of McCarthy, and an image of Hardwick taking the cross-town bus to see her old friend in the hospital as McCarthy was dying.

Hardwick lived on until 2007, her reputation eventually surpassing that of Lowell. Pinckney launched a recent revival of interest in Hardwick's work, editing her Collected Essays in 2017 and a collection of her New York City short stories. Hardwick's autobiographi9cal novel "Sleepless Nights," recently republished by the New York Review of Books, is considered a classic.

In summing up Hardwick's work, Pinckney says "Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to honor the literature she cared for."

Pinckney's beautiful work does the same.

 

 

 

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."

 

 

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.

 

Kenny Leon sets "Hamlet" in contemporary Atlanta

"Hamlet" is transported from medieval Denmark to 2020 Atlanta in Kenny Leon's production of the play for New York City's Shakespeare in the Park.

Leon's hip-hop Hamlet, starring Ato Bankson-Wood in the lead role, officially opens June 28 and runs through Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Previews began June 6.

Shakespeare scholar and New York Public Theater adviser James Shapiro collaborated with the Atlanta-based Leon, cutting the scenes about European military rivalries and battles to reduce the play to two hours from the customary five. Leon, the founder of Atlanta's True Colors Theater, gained fame for his Broadway revivals of August Wilson's plays and other award-winning productions.

In an interview with Shapiro for the Atlantic, Leon said about the "Hamlet" production, "We're focusing on the relationships. We're focusing on the domestic part of the play. We're not focusing on the political, the military part of the play."

Solea Pfieffer, who stars as Ophelia, performs several new songs in the production, which opens with a musical rendition of the funeral of Hamlet's father.

While the production features a contemporary Atlanta setting and displays of black culture, Shakespeare's language is not changed.

Leon instructed his actors to carry out their lines as if to appeal to his late father, Leroy, an unsophisticated man who never left Tallahassee, Fla.

"This is a Shakespeare that we're trying to make clear for Leroy, a country guy who grew up in Tallahassee with outdoor plumbing," Leon told Shapiro.

The cast was also told to "let the culture in," Leon said.

"To me, it's not about reaching black people or white people or intellectuals or non intellectuals or theater folks," Leon said. "It's about reaching human beings, reaching people. And I think by making this specific to Atlanta, Georgia, without changing the words - making the the music specific, making the food specific, making their hair specific - we can do that."

Leon also placed Shakespeare in contemporary Georgia for the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of "Much Ado About Nothing," which later ran on the PBS show "Great Performances."

Bankson-Wood, who received a 2019 Tony Award nomination for "Slave Play," impressed Leon with a performance of the famous "To Be Or Not to Be" monologue, tying Hamlet's mental turmoil to "what young men were going through in America after George Floyd's death."

Shakespeare's 400-year-old play still speaks to us, as Leon demonstrates.

 

 

Iranian Pulitzer-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi discusses immigrant experience, why she turned to TV

Sanaz Toossi, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize this week for her play "English," can't make a living as a playwright despite a burst of success in the theater.

The 31-year-old Iranian-American writer said in a New York Times interview Thursday that she supports herself by writing for television, which allowed her to buy health insurance.

Toossi's now on strike along with other members of the Hollywood writers' union seeking increased pay and benefits from TV streaming. But media landscape changes threaten the abundant era for TV writers that has prevailed for more than a decade.

As cable TV channels and streaming services like Netflix expanded, successful playwrights turned to TV writing to earn lucrative livelihoods.

Yet changes in media technology and audience fragmentation brought reduced compensation for writers in recent years, culminating in the walkout. As the strike continues, TV production has ground to a halt.

Playwright and TV screenwriter Alena Smith in a revealing article for the Los Angeles Review of Books mourns the lack of sustaining theater income for American playwrights.

But TV opportunities for writers have also eroded, as the strike exposes. Smith in a sobering assessment of the future says that the Internet and decline of cable will disrupt the TV landscape.

Smith, a Yale Drama School MFA graduate, said she earned only $13,000 as a playwright over six years, including a federal grant. She supplemented her income with odd jobs before heading to Hollywood, where she created the popular Apple TV+ series "Dickinson."

Broadway and the New York theater once sustained American playwrights like Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

From 1920 to 1940, 130 new plays were produced on Broadway each year, Smith discloses. From 1980 to 2014, the number of new productions plummeted to 14 a year, and will fall even lower as revivals, musicals and juke-box confections vie for declining audiences.

Smith foresees a similar bleak ice age for writers as the TV landscape fragments.

Toossi, the single child of Iranian immigrants, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the theater, capped by the Pulitzer.

"English," in which four Iranians take English lessons at a storefront school outside of Tehran in order to pass a language proficiency exam, premiered in 2022 at the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Co.  Before capturing the Pulitzer, Toossi won the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding Off-Broadway drama.

The play is frequently produced around the country, and Toossi has received commissions from several local theater companies. Her second play, "Wish You Were Here," a comedy about Iranian women's travails in America, was produced in 2022 by the off-Broadway Playwrights Horizon Theater.

But like other playwrights whose first love is the theater, she's turned to TV to survive.

Now that sanctuary is closing too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

United Talent Agency's arts exhibit space elevates Atlanta's cultural scene

Atlanta's receiving a burst of attention as a fine-arts center.

The United Talent Agency, which represents actors, comedians, screenwriters, musicians and artists, recently opened a fine arts exhibit space at its Atlanta office in Midtown.

That's a significant boost for the Atlanta arts scene. The Atlanta gallery is only UTA's second, following an earlier one in Beverly Hills.

The new gallery gives Atlanta artists fresh hopes that they no longer have to go elsewhere to find success.

Yet an article Wednesday in The New York Times Arts section raised doubts about whether the UTA space will benefit Atlanta and Southern artists, or mainly represent those with already established international reputations in New York or Los Angeles.

Writer Tariro Mzezewa's feature titled "Can a Global Talent Agency Make Atlanta an Arts Destination" expressed local arts boosters' expectations that regional artists will find the UTA a nurturing home. 

Displaying a regional awareness, the new gallery opened with Atlanta artist and musician Lonnie Holley's exhibit "The Eyes Were Always on Us," which continues through the end of April.

The black Birmingham native's works examine racial violence in the South, the struggle for civil rights and the perseverance of black culture.

While the new gallery should aspire to encourage regional talent, a mixture of international exhibitions will boost Atlanta's global stature, moving away from from the city's long-established provincialism. As a major international presence, the UTA center can accomplish multiple objectives.

UTA's arts gallery is another jewel for Atlanta's Peachtree cultural corridor, encompassing the Woodruff Arts Center, the Museum of Design Atlanta and the Peachtree branch of the Fulton County Library.

The Fox Theater rises a few blocks south, near the Atlanta History Center's Margaret Mitchell House, which has not yet reopened after shutting down during the Covid epidemic.

While Atlanta's fine arts and entertainment scenes flourish, the city's theater community suffers from declining audiences and funding.

As the city's movie lovers welcomed the imminent reopening of the Tara Theater, the Lyric Theater announced its closure after 42 seasons.

The Lyric's shutdown mobilized the Atlanta theater community, which issued an emergency letter calling for more financial support from corporations, business leaders and local and state government.

Atlanta's theaters are spread across the metro area. The failure of a campaign to build a grand opera house at the Woodruff Arts Center led to the Atlanta Opera Company joining the Braves in moving to Cobb County. The Atlanta Ballet Company also performs outside the city.

While suburban theaters have done admirable work through the years, Midtown's art district needs more live theater along with the Woodruff's Alliance and the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern.

A new professional company on Peachtree would showcase the original work of regional playwrights, as well as perform worthy plays from elsewhere. Midtown also needs a new music venue for classical, operatic and popular performances

The UTA gallery is only one step in Atlanta fulfilling its artistic dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

400th anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio celebrated

Shakespeare lovers are marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright's First Folio.

The First Folio, compiled by Shakespeare's fellow King's Men actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death at age 52

One of Western civilization's central treasures, the First Folio preserved 36 of Shakespeare's plays, 18 of them printed for the first time, including "The Tempest," "12th Night," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Julius Caesar," "The Winter's Tale" and "Macbeth."

Heminges and Condell also established dividing the plays into histories, tragedies and comedies.

Artist Martin Droeshout's famous portrait of Shakespeare appears on the title page, along with a poem by Shakespeare's fellow poet and playwright Ben Jonson. Another Jonson poem calls Shakespeare the "Sweet Swan of Avon."

A total of 235 copies of the First Folio remain, five in the British Library. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., owns 82, the world's largest collection.

The First Folio set the standard for further editions of Shakespeare's collected plays. The texts, some of them from "foul copies" and production notes, are considered reliable, unlike some of the earlier "quarto" editions.

Mostly unknown workers in London's early printing industry produced one of the world's great masterpieces. Heminges and Condell preserved Shakespeare plays that audiences throughout the world still revere.  

 

 

Discovering Woody Allen's "Interiors"

Fruitlessly searching through streaming land for the Robert Gottlieb-Robert Caro documentary "Turn Every Page," I instead clicked upon "Interiors," Woody Allen's first "serious" drama.

Allen wrote and directed the moody 1978 film, not appearing in the production as he had in his previous comedies. The movie mixes Ingmar Bergman-flavored angst and New York intellectual despair. Not a lot of laughs, except for the unconscious self-mockery of the self-indulgent characters.

The film like Allen's later "Hannah and Her Sisters" explores the wounded love of sisters. Allen's wonderful cast mirrors the generational family dynamics: Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page and E.G. Marshall from the old guard and the then new generation of Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith, Richard Jordan and Sam Waterston.

Stapleton's appearance late in the movie as the raucous, earthy Pearl brings a welcome shot of energy to the film after long stretches of pretentious New York intellectual dialogue.

Marshall as the patriarch of the family, a successful New York attorney ready for an adventurous retirement, and Page as his mentally fragile ex-wife, an interior designer, give a masterful performance. Keaton, Hurt, Griffith, Jordan and Waterston rise to match their classical acting. .

Keaton, Allen's paramour and muse, stands out as the reflective Renata, perhaps named in homage to the New Yorker film critic Renata Adler. Her implausible success as a poet contrast with the career disappointments of her sister, Joey, played by Hurt, who resembles another winsome star of the time, Carrie Snodgress. Their conflicted relationship is the film's main dramatic fulcrum.

Waterston's performance as a long-haired counterculture radical amusingly displays the same mannerisms and vocal inflections exhibited in in his long-running role as the district attorney Jack McCoy in "Law and Order." Now 82, Waterston is again playing McCoy in a revived "Law and Order."

After unveiling the film's human relationships with dialogue and restricted settings, Allen impressively shifts to film's visual power with images of the sea, a homage to Bergman. Allen's imagery - a vase, flowers, the beach - complements his theatrical language.

The film ends with Keaton and her sisters looking out the window of their childhood home to a calm sea. They are at last ready to move on with their lives.

Allen was more European than other Hollywood directors. "Interiors" opens a different path for American cinema, sadly rarely followed.

 

 

 

 

Serious drama in spotlight for Broadway's fall season

Broadway makes an exciting comeback this fall with the strongest lineup of serious drama in years.

Pulitzer Prize winners abound. Along with Broadway premieres of Tom Stoppard's "Leopoldstadt"and Martyna Majok's "Cost of Living," the season offers revivals of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson," Suzan Lori-Park's "Top Dog Under Dog," Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" and Stephen Adlay Guirguis' "Between Riverside and Crazy."

Classic theater will have a moment in the lights with productions of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabbler" and Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale." 

Musical fans won't be disappointed: Along with a show based on Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" and a production of Neil Diamond hits, "1776" will be restaged, giving a colonial-flavored alternative to the long-running "Hamilton."

While Stoppard's examination of his long-ignored Jewish ancestry will be a major Broadway event, I'm most hoping to see "Death of a Salesman" starring Wendell Pierce as the tragic Willy Loman and Sharon D. Clarke as his long-suffering wife. The Broadway production follows Pierce and Clarke's acclaimed performances in the play at London's Young Vic and West End.

With vivid memories of seeing Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in "Fences" on Broadway, I also would love to head to New York for "The Piano Lesson," starring Washington's son, John David Washington as Boy Willie. The star power will reach full illumination with Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker Charles and Danielle Brooks as Berniece. Jackson's wife, the noted actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will direct the play.

For years, critics have bemoaned Broadway's domination by shows offering unchallenging entertainment to tourists. This season, serious drama takes the top billing on the Great White Way.

 

 

Farewell, Paul Sorvino

Paul Sorvino in a long and distinguished career never played a movie's leading character.

He was always the passenger on the bus rather than the driver, as he told Charlie Rose.

But Sorvino's characters always exerted a memorable presence.

One of America's most versatile character actors, Sorvino died Monday at age 83 of natural causes at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, according to media reports.

During Sorvino's career, his roles ranged from mobsters and detectives to drug addicts. He even played Henry Kissinger, in the film "Nixon."

Sorvino stood out among a stellar cast in Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas," giving his mob boss Paulie Cicero an urbane sophistication and fatherly calm lacking in the other crime figures.

He gave the same qualities to New York City detective Phil Cerretta in one season of "Law and Order." He quit, claiming poor communications and working conditions.

Ironically, he was replaced by Jerry Orbach, who portrayed the cynical wisecracking Lenny Briscoe for multiple seasons.

Like Orbach, Sorvino had a distinguished stage career, known for a memorable performance as the unscrupulous Phil Romano in 'That Championship Season."

He also shared with Orbach a musical background; Orbach was famed for performing "Try to Remember" in "Fantasticks" while Sorvino was trained as an opera singer and starred in several musicals and operas.

Sorvino also co-starred with Al Pacino in "Panic in Needle Park," co-written by Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

The father of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino, Sorvino was one of those special performers who brought a fatherly authority to his roles.