Out of the Past

Review: Other Desert Cities
Booth Theater, New York
June 9, 2012


Last weekend in New York, we went to Other Desert Cities the night before the Tony Awards. If there were an award for ensemble acting, attention should be paid to Joe Mantello's lacerating production. I'm glad I caught the show in New York, with five go-for-broke performances that filled in the cracks of a solid but often familiar play.


Well-off Republicans Polly and Lyman Wyeth (Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach) are spending Christmas in Palm Springs for the first time in years with her alcoholic sister Silda (Judith Light) and their children: courtroom reality TV producer Trip (Thomas Sadoski) and formerly hospitalized novelist Brooke (Elizabeth Marvel), who's overcome crippling depression. But Polly is quick to suspect that Brooke's newest "novel" is something far more personal and damaging to the family. Sure enough: it's a memoir of her other brother, who committed suicide.

Stockard Channing anchors the cast as the caustic, no-nonsense matriarch who once made Nancy Reagan cry at dinner. She will keep the Wyeths' reputation at any cost, even if it means disowning her daughter. Channing's always had a quick wit and sharp tongue, employed here to harrowing (even villainous) effect. As her husband, a former Western movie-star, Keach plays a man overshadowed by his wife and his spectacular cinematic death scenes. It's to Keach's credit that Lyman, so out of touch and haunted by his past, doesn't recede into the background. Neither does Sadoski, sincere as the do-no-wrong son who tries not to take sides.


Marvel's Brooke is on the edge, but she's a strong warrior against Channing's Polly. Her histrionics, though, sometimes feel out of sync with the other actors, pushing the emotional instabilities we already know Brooke suffers from. She's best in her scenes with Light, who starts as comic relief but reveals her determination to have the book published. Silda appears dimmed by the years, even if her outward wisecracks say otherwise.


Jon Robin Baitz's play is in the tradition of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, from the acerbic jabs to the enclosed setting, with the family trapped out in the open desert landscape, isolated but unable to hide. And like Virginia Woolf, everyone has their juicy outburst, and unconscionable secrets are excavated. But Other Desert Cities depends upon its twist ending to be satisfying drama, a revelation that warrants more aftermath than we see. How did they forgive each other? How did they move on from the unthinkable? There's plenty of acid along the ride, but I left wondering if we'd already been down this road.

I Miss the Highs and Lows

Review: Next to Normal
SpeakEasy Stage Company, Boston
April 11, 2012

"I miss the mountains / I miss the dizzy heights / All the magic manic days and the dark depressing nights." This is the moment in Act One when housewive Diana starts to grasp the reality (or un-reality) of her bipolar disorder. There won't be much balance. But the show depicting this, Next to Normal, covers the spiral of treatments and their effects on a suburban family with surprising delicacy. The score is often subdued, with a light pop-rock flair. Only a few songs go for the manic side of the disorder. Composer Tom Kitt keeps spirits high and has a knack for weaving multiple characters through a song, though he's stuck with Brian Yorkey's lyrics and their occasionally distracting rhymes that you see coming in advance.


Few musicals win Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, and in Next to Normal's favor, it won't be quickly dated like the previous Pulitzer-winning musical, Rent. Next to Normal shies away from brand names and fads, and the pharmacology and psychoanalytics are generalized. In workshops and Off-Broadway, there were more numbers orienting us in the "here and now," including an ode to CostCo. But Next to Normal eventually focused on emotional heft over satire.


What it does need is a cast that brings electricity to the material. Here Speakeasy's production falls a little flat. The staging space is effectively small, trapping Diana's family inside her illness. But what the actors find in intimacy, they lose in energy. Kerry Dowling's Diana ranges from cool and collected to mildly kooky; there are more ups and downs to explore. Her voice doesn't sound comfortable with the pop score, though she manages some belting here and there. And Timothy John Smith (who filled in for her husband Dan), charismatic in 2011's Nine at Speakeasy and Candide at the Huntington, is overly disconnected. Though his singing is great, he plays the already tight-lipped Dan with too much stoicism.


The younger cast fits better, especially Sarah Drake as perfectionist daughter Natalie, who starts to lose her firm control on every aspect of her life. The writers Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt are compassionate--maybe too much?--toward the whole family, and even their critique of modern tendencies to over-subscribe/analyze patients doesn't sting too much. The show could use more bite, which a more energetic production and actors could fill in. At least, unlike a lot of modern rock musicals, the anger and angst aren't adolescent. This musical (even when it's sentimental) is for adults.

Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part II)

Dear readers, it's time to unveil my Top Ten films for 2011. I didn't see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or A Dangerous Method or War Horse yet. But for the sake of argument, here's how I'd rank them today. (I reviewed them all but Weekend, which is a graceful, quiet indie about two gay men sharing three days together, a brief encounter more believable and honest than most romantic dramas. You can--and should--watch it on Netflix.)

Josh's Top 10

1. The Descendants

2. Melancholia

3. Take Shelter

The rest, in no particular order:

4. Bridesmaids

5. Drive

6. Hugo

7. Margin Call

8. Moneyball

9. The Tree of Life

10. Weekend

For some diversity of taste, I pulled strings and got two other Top Ten lists for you readers. The only movie where we three overlap is The Descendants.

Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part I)

For last year's roundup, I postulated that the Academy Award voters have moved toward comedies and genre films. We've seen dark films win Best Picture recently (No Country for Old Men, The Hurt Locker), but these past two years have gone in the other direction. Audiences are falling for comedies and movies about the movies.

Many of the top nominees were in the running before anyone saw them, but Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a pleasant surprise. Like The Artist, this film delights as it explores the history of movies. Scorsese makes a compelling case for 3D, playing George Melies's utterly charming 2D movies within the three dimensions of Parisian hustle-bustle. Hugo makes technology seem wondrous again: Melies was a superbly innovative artist, inventing the rules of cinema as he went along, and he's given a sensitive rendering by Ben Kingsley.

Oscar Contenders #6: Life, the Universe, and Everything

Review: The Tree of Life

Yes, there are dinosaurs. They pass by quickly, like many images in Terrence Malick's fifth film The Tree of Life. Their time is fleeting--blink and you'll miss it! And once you see dinosaurs, you know Malick doesn't intend to explain everything. His film captures an essence: pieces of lives as they're lived, memories imagined and real. Does it need to be more than that?

Most of the story focuses on a 1950s family in Waco, Texas: Mr. O'Brien, the engineer father with twenty-seven patents (Brad Pitt); his gentle wife (Jessica Chastain); and three adolescent boys. We see scattered childhood memories as their son Jack looks back (Hunter McCracken at 10; Sean Penn in the present day). The images feel like pure cinema; too much plot would be intrusive. Malick's screenplay feels like the beginning and endings of scenes, with conversations left on the editing-room floor.

Brad Pitt fleshes out a father conflicted between sternness and affection for his sons. Jessica Chastain's mother is more archetype than character--earth goddess, free spirit--but she's filmed with a gossamer beauty that's hard to resist. The story that's told is very male-oriented. But juxtaposed with the Big Bang, all the hangups of patriarchal society seem arbitrary, and I bet Malick intended that.

Every frame is full of light. We feel the stifling fifties suburbia waiting to be opened up, just as we see the universe expand. (This definitely owes a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey.) But the son Jack grows up to be a corporate worker (Penn), stuck inside a glass elevator, imagining his own escape. Penn's brief scenes were probably fuller in the script; his present-day role is a cameo that doesn't contribute very much to the whole. Where has Jack gone since childhood? Is the beginning the only part of life that Malick wants us to see? Why does Penn look so sad?

The emotions we experience are sometimes outside the story, but each image fills in the larger canvas. Sure, sometimes it reaches too far, as in Jack's afterlife reunion on the beach with his parents, transcending time and space. But focusing on just the O'Brien family in the fifties would have deprived The Tree of Life of its wonder. And this is a wonderful film, if you let it wash over you. What better subject for a sprawling epic than creation itself?