Bluebird

"good enough to slap your Mama..."

REX REED

CAT AT A HOT TIN STOVE

 

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED GOURMET NOVEMBER 2001

America's celebrated playwright was an accomplished cook with a penchant for anything "fattening, illegal, or on fire."

The excesses of Tennessee Williams, America's most prolific and famously tortured playwright, have been well documented. But in addition to sex, drugs, alcohol, and writing, food was also high on his list of passions. Dining well was an acquired taste he negotiated with no help from home, however. He once described his mother, Edwina, a faded steel magnolia immortalized as the cloying Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, as "an old trout terminally allergic to the kitchen, with the uncanny ability to make tinned soup taste like dishwasher detergent." So he learned, at an early age, to eat out. During the years I knew him, his two favorite words were "room service."

The first time I interviewed Tennessee was at Antoine's, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a city that was, quite naturally by way of its own decadence, his favorite. The meal that night seemed dedicated to his preferred dishes ("Anything fattening, illegal, or on fire!" he yelped in a voice like a lazy alligator's) but began, as always, with a dozen oysters on the half shell ("Better than mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a disintegratin' libido!"), washed down with a rye Old Fashioned, a crème de menthe frappé, a vodka Stinger, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. "I'm not as young as I used to be," he sighed with a hiccup. The next day at breakfast, at Brennan's, he requested a pitcher of Martinis. "I'd like to order a Waldorf salad but my doctor won't allow me to eat nuts." Pause. "He didn't say anything about cannibalism, though." He settled for eggs Sardou, and grits and grillades with Creole tomato sauce, topped off with a bowl of flaming Bananas Foster.

In a city where fried okra is considered a green vegetable, he was perfectly at home indulging his appetite for the kind of food best self-described as a remedy for depression. Despite the culinary adventures he experienced during his restless travels (the year he was unwisely invited to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, for instance, when he never rose before noon, seldom saw the films, and announced to me, "I'm just here because I was told you could get really good absinthe"), his tastes were, in fact, relatively simple. No pomegranate-nasturtium sorbet for him. His favorite memory was of the summer he and his friend Carson McCullers rented a shack on Nantucket, where they survived on Jack Daniel's, canned green pea soup with wienies in it, and an innovation dubbed "spuds Carson"—mashed potatoes mixed with olives.

In Key West, he lived in a small Art Nouveau candy box on Duval Street with a Boston terrier named Gigi, who looked like a canine Colette; an orange tabby cat named Gentleman Caller; and Mr. Ava Gardner, a ferocious iguana chained to the front porch to scare off marauders. Here, on hot mornings, he combed the waterfront for a rare catch of pompano and the shrimp and crabs that made their way into one of the elaborate gumbos he prepared for an illustrious guest list ranging from defrocked bishops to Anna Magnani. His favorite cookbooks were those compiled by junior chambers of commerce in every southern town from Baton Rouge to Boca, along with a treasured, dog-eared thing called White Trash Cooking. He once prepared for me a memorable dinner of smothered roast beef and a Girl Scout recipe for lemon icebox pie with a vanilla wafer crust ("None of that Key lime mush with graham crackers that taste like shirt boards from a Chinese laundry"). When a new play tanked on Broadway, or some critic published a punishing premature obituary, he would sigh, "Baby, I'll soon be forced, through penury, to resort to usin' Caviar Helper."

I think his happy hedonism, his zest for food and life, and his wicked sense of humor saw him through every crisis. He told Gore Vidal he slept through the '60s. Maybe so, but he didn't miss a meal.

Tennessee Williams's
Lemon Icebox Pie
In a food processor, finely crush 1/2 box of vanilla wafers. Melt 1 stick of lightly salted butter for flavor (not sweet butter). Pour vanilla wafers and melted butter into a pie plate and shape into a pie shell with your fingers. In a large bowl, mix 1/2 cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 can of Eagle Brand condensed milk, and 1 egg yolk. Pour mixture into pie plate. In another bowl, beat 6 egg whites* with 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 3/4 cup sugar until stiff white peaks form. Pour over pie and top with freshly grated lemon rind. Bake in oven at moderate heat just long enough for meringue to brown, about 20 minutes. Cool to room temperature and put in the refrigerator until ice-cold. The result, as Tennessee Williams always said, "is good enough to slap your Mama." —R.R.

 

Russian political poetry

Satirizing Putin With Boldly Poetic Flair

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: November 18, 2011

MOSCOW — An elegant after-work crowd packed into the Estrada Theater last week, having shelled out as much as $250 for an evening devoted to laughing at Vladimir V. Putin.

Yury Feklistov

 It was clear as soon as the stage lights went up that this was not some low-rent puny-autocrat shtick. Behind a desk on stage sat a fat poet, smiling wordlessly, like a giant cherub. Beside him stood an actor from a legendary Soviet theater dynasty, his long face projecting mirth and despair.

The “Citizen Poet” project — conceived by three friends after a night of heavy drinking — is pushing the edges of Internet programming in Russia, delivering political satire to an audience that numbers in the millions rather than the thousands. It has also tapped into the sour response of many Russians to Mr. Putin’s plan to return to the presidency, a mood made darker by the absence of any viable course of action.

Unless poetry counts as a course of action. The actor began an uncanny imitation of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose 1957 lament over a faithless friend had been rewritten to channel Mr. Putin’s hurt feelings last spring when President Dmitri A. Medvedev differed with him in public:

Here is what’s befallen me

My old friend does not come to me

He even feels free

To open his mouth and disagree

Yes, I taught him to put on skis

To keep the Kuril Islands from the Japanese

Back then he was not so loud

He barely ever made a sound.

A little while later, he recited a sentimental, folkloric classic by the Soviet poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, retrofitted as a commentary on Mr. Putin’s stage-managed outings:

Today after lunch

Having finished our cutlets

Medvedev and I were wondering

How can we shake things up?

We have done everything

Amused the whole country

We took the helm of airplanes

Immersed ourselves in the depths

We did not hide our tender friendship

Sang rock ’n’ roll

Milked cows

Twitter, sweater, Macintosh

Skiing, dancing, the whole nine yards

To the clatter of our teacups

The answer was spoken

We have never once played badminton on combines!

When they began, the progenitors of “Citizen Poet” — the poet Dmitrii L. Bykov, the actor Mikhail O. Yefremov and the producer Andrei Vasiliev — expected their weekly videos to be viewed at most by a few thousand people. But their first clip got 250,000 hits, Mr. Vasiliev said. Ten months and three dozen satirical poems later, that number is at 12 million to 14 million, according to Yuri Katsman, who publishes the poems on his Web portal, F5.

That is nothing compared with the televised satire of the pre-Putin era, which was powerful enough to affect politicians’ approval ratings. The puppet show “Kukly,” which was forced off the air in 2002 as the government took control of Russia’s popular channels, reached 80 million people every week, according to Viktor A. Shenderovich, who wrote scripts for the show.

Still, “Citizen Poet” has managed to engage Russians who are politically passive but nonetheless alienated, much as Jon Stewart did with “The Daily Show” during George W. Bush’s presidency.

“The government feeds us,” said Mr. Vasiliev, a longtime journalist, as he waited to take the stage as master of ceremonies, drinking what seemed not to be his first cocktail. “This is not a joke. The sillier they behave, the better our show is. Just imagine — the two of them went to harvest corn and to play badminton. Really, I cherish our government. They nourish us.”

Their act featured jokes about prison camps, however, suggesting at least a small edge of anxiety. In March, the general director of Dozhd, the progressive Internet television station that had commissioned the project, decided the Yevtushenko poem was too insulting to Mr. Medvedev. They edited the narrator’s harshest lines about the president:

He may at times cast glares of ire

And huff and strain to look a tsar

The shadow lies as I request

And we’ll be friends as in the past.

Ultimately, she decided to cut the whole thing.

At that point, the three men began to post their work on the Internet directly. They did not consult with officials about this decision, and the next month, when Mr. Putin invited Mr. Bykov and Mr. Yefremov to join him at a gathering of intellectuals and artists, neither man accepted. The project has since received sponsorship from the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who said he was proud to lend them his support, “even though I have been on the receiving end of their cruel and unjust humor (twice!).”

Mr. Vasiliev likes to joke that they would be in jail already if their critiques were not presented in the style of classic poets. He recalled getting a worried call from Mr. Yefremov’s mother, and responding: “How can they lock him up? He’s Lermontov! He’s even wearing a jacket!”

Mr. Yefremov, for his part, said the project had no political purpose. He described himself as “not Putin’s fan,” but said that the political alternatives make any change of leadership unappealing.

“I’m afraid that it will be even worse,” he said. “That frightens me much more.”

Anyway, he added, every king’s court includes a jester.

“I think it’s good that they don’t notice us so far, or pretend that they don’t,” he said. “Maybe this thing is too small for them, for what they are doing.” Otherwise, he added jovially, “I might be on a train to Magadan.”

But the project has landed at an uncertain moment in Russian politics.

Public support for Mr. Putin’s system appears to be declining steadily despite efforts to shore it up; last week, the independent Levada polling center released new numbers showing that support for the governing party, United Russia, had dropped by nine percentage points over the previous two weeks, to 51 percent. Mr. Putin’s approval rating is at 61 percent, still high by international standards but 17 points below where it was last November. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin’s announcement that he will return to the presidency has sent the message that there is no potential for substantive political change for years to come.

At the Estrada last week, that announcement was replayed on a huge video screen to sardonic voiceovers from Mr. Vasiliev, and the hall rang with laughter, the comforting sound of 800 people who shared exactly the same opinion.

But Mr. Bykov’s poems were not all funny, and they offered little in the way of hope. In a parody of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s utopian anthem of 1929, “Here Will Be a Garden-City,” he paints a landscape in which the only certainty is Mr. Putin, “a meek Lieutenant Colonel from the swamps of St. Petersburg.”

As agile as a lover, he found his way inside our skulls

I am looking at the Lieutenant Colonel and I see that he is us

All we can do is drink ourselves blind

That is the only garden-city we will find.

It takes a tiny village in a park on Wall Street

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Wall Street Occupiers, Protesting Till Whenever

By N. R. KLEINFIELD and CARA BUCKLEY

Published: September 30, 2011

A man named Hero was here. So was Germ. There was the waitress from the dim sum restaurant in Evanston, Ill. And the liquor store worker. The Google consultant. The circus performer. The Brooklyn nanny.

The hodgepodge Lower Manhattan encampment known as Occupy Wall Street has no appointed leaders, no expiration date for its rabble-rousing stay and still-evolving goals and demands. Yet its two weeks of noisy occupation has lured a sturdily faithful and fervent constituency willing to express discontentment with what they feel is an inequitable financial system until, well, whenever.

They arrived by design and desire. Or by sheer serendipity.

Like Jillian Aydelott, 19, and Ben Mason, 20. They are a couple, both having taken an indefinite leave from school in Boston to travel across the country, very much on the cheap. Stopping in Providence, R.I., five days ago to sleep at a homeless shelter, they encountered a man who called himself Germ and said he was an activist. He was coming to the protest. They figured why not. They have yet to leave.

Ms. Aydelott’s feeling was: “Nothing is happening. People on Wall Street have all the power.”

The stalwarts seem to range from a relatively modest 100 to 300 people, though the ranks swelled to more than 2,000 on Friday as the protest has begun to attract mainstream attention from those disaffected with the weak economy and to enlist support from well-known liberals.

The actress Susan Sarandon stopped by, as did the Princeton professor Cornel West and former Gov. David A. Paterson of New York. A widely reported episode last Saturday, when four protesters were pepper-sprayed by a police commander, elevated the visibility of the demonstrators.

On Friday night, many marched to Police Headquarters to criticize what they described as the improper tactics that the police have used against their movement. (The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has defended the actions by the police, though he has said they will be reviewed.)

Nicholas Coniaris, 35, came to the makeshift village in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street on Friday and will be gone soon. He is from San Diego, a counselor who works with homeless veterans, and was squeezing in protesting while awaiting a wedding he was attending on Saturday. A friend from Japan, a fellow wedding guest, was here as well.

Having brought a tuxedo for the wedding, Mr. Coniaris decided to get extra mileage out of it. He wore it while he stationed himself in the center of the park clutching a coffee cup that said “God Bless,” and a sign that said, in part, “Support the Rich.”

“Just a little something,” he said mockingly to passers-by. “Half a billion dollars. I’m not asking for a trillion.”

After a couple of hours, his cup contained $1.15.

It all began when a Canadian advocacy magazine, Adbusters, posted a call for action on its blog in July. A New York group naming itself the General Assembly, inspired by recent meetings in Madrid, began to hold organizing meetings in Tompkins Square and other public places, leading to a Sept. 17 march near Wall Street. Shooed away from Wall Street, the protesters wound up in Zuccotti Park, which is bounded by Broadway and Liberty Street and has become their base.

Most of the demonstrators are in their teens or 20s, but plenty are older. Many are students. Many are jobless. A few are well-worn anarchists. Others have put their normal lives on pause to try out protesting and see how it feels.

Not all of them can articulate exactly why they are there or what they want. Yet there is a conviction rippling through them that however the global economy works, it does not work for them.

“I’m angry because I don’t have millions of dollars to give to my representative, so my voice is invalidated,” said Amanda Clarke, 21, a student at the New School. “And the fact that I’m graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in loans and there’s no job market.”

Their politics zigzag wildly. An unemployed schoolteacher calls herself a fierce independent, while an employed teacher is a conservative. An anarchist photographer wants libertarianism to be reclaimed by the left.

“This is not about left versus right,” said the photographer, Christopher Walsh, 25, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s about hierarchy versus autonomy.”

A finance worker walked around with a dollar bill duct taped over his mouth and carrying a pizza box, on which he had written, “I could lose my job 4 having a voice.” Nikita Nikitovich, 44, a New York Pilates teacher, was working as one of the protest’s media contacts. A 38-year-old bicycle messenger with a shaved head and a long braid arrived early Friday by bus from New Orleans, and had been waiting for a protest to erupt since Hurricane Katrina. “That’s when we were shown the big picture,” she said.

For all the bedraggled look of the mattress-and-sleeping-bag-strewn camp, it has a structure and routine. A food station occupies the center of the park, where donated meals are disbursed, especially pizza and Popeyes chicken. Sympathizers from other states have been calling local shops and pizza parlors and, using their credit cards, ordering food to be delivered to the park.

There are information stations, a recycling center, a media center where a gasoline generator powers computers. At the east end sits the library, labeled cardboard boxes brimming with donated books: nonfiction, fiction, poetry, legal. There is a lost and found.

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A medical station was outfitted with bins holding a broad array of remedies: cough drops, Maalox Maximum Strength, Clorox wipes, bee pollen granules. The main issues have been blisters, including some from handcuffs, and abrasions.

There are also a few therapists. Some out-of-work protesters are depressed. They need someone’s ear.

Elsewhere is a sanitation station, with designated sanitation workers who sweep the park. The park is without toilets, a problem that many of the protesters address by visiting a nearby McDonald’s.

The encampment even has a post-office box, established at a U.P.S. store, and has been receiving a steady flow of supportive letters and packages. Someone from Texas sent a bunch of red bandanas, now draped on the necks of demonstrators. Others have sent camera batteries, granola bars and toothbrushes.

Two General Assembly meetings are held each day to conduct organizational business and work on objectives. “We meet every day to decide what our demands are,” said Hero Vincent, 21, an artist and singer from Charlotte, N.C., who has been here from the beginning.

Not allowed to use amplified sound, the protesters have devised their own means of communication. Each speaker says a sentence, and then everyone else repeats it, so it ripples outward. Decisions must be by consensus. Hand signals convey responses. For instance, holding your palms upward and wiggling your fingers means approval, while holding them downward means disapproval. Level hands mean uncertainty.

People are divided into committees, including town planning, child care, direct action and a de-escalation group charged with keeping things orderly. There have been a few arguments.

When will all this end?

One protester thought when the temperature fell below 50. Others were less sure.

Sid Gurung, 22, a student at the New School who enlisted because he said he was “extremely disappointed and angry that I have no future,” would agree to no timetable. “Our task is important,” he said. “We could be here for months. Our opponents are giants.”

A favorite movie goes to Broadway

‘Diner’ Musical, by Barry Levinson and Sheryl Crow, Is Setting a Place on Broadway

By DAVE ITZKOFF

MGMFrom left, Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern and Paul Reiser in Barry Levinson’s film “Diner.”

Will this be the first Broadway musical where you’ll have to pass a football trivia contest before they let you take your seats? A singing, dancing version of “Diner,” Barry Levinson’s 1982 coming-of-age comedy about a group of friends growing up in Baltimore in 1959, is headed to Broadway next year, its press representatives said on Tuesday. Mr. Levinson, who directed the original film and earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, will write the book of the “Diner” musical, and Sheryl Crow will write the music and lyrics; Kathleen Marshall, a recent Tony Award-winner for her choreography of “Anything Goes,” will direct and choreograph this production.

Mr. Levinson, whose films include “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Rain Man” and further Baltimore-based comedies like “Tin Men” and “Avalon,” said in a statement: “ ‘Diner’ was a pivotal moment in my career, and since then I have continued to live with the characters, realizing there is much more to their story. I’m excited to be embarking on this stage version, which affords me the opportunity as a storyteller to expand on my original vision and let the characters express their innermost feeling and thoughts through song.”

Ms. Crow, who is perhaps better known for her odes to sunny Los Angeles than salty Baltimore, said in a statement: “I was already a huge fan of ‘Diner’ when Barry first approached me about writing a score for a theatrical retelling of his film. I knew exactly who these men and women were and I feverishly began writing.”

The “Diner” film provided early roles for many film stars,  including Kevin Bacon, Timothy Daly, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Paul Reiser and Steve Guttenberg (whose character forces his fiancee to pass a sports trivia quiz before they can get married). A short-lived television series based on the movie was broadcast in 1983, with a cast that included Mr. Reiser, Michael Madsen and James Spader.

No theater was immediately announced for the Broadway production of “Diner,” and there was no indication whether its concession stands might sell popcorn.

An out-of-town tryout is planned for next summer. The musical will be produced by Base Entertainment with permission of Warner Brothers Theater Ventures.

Poor Oscar

September 15, 2011, 11:01 am

Grandson Disputes New Play Attributed to Oscar Wilde

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Oscar Wilde

Perhaps there is something worse than being talked about, and that is having words attributed to you that you never wrote. At least, that’s the case being made by Merlin Holland, the grandson of Oscar Wilde, who says that a coming play promoted as a rediscovered Wilde text is not the handiwork of his illustrious grandfather, The Guardian reported.

On Friday, the King’s Head Theater in London plans to open its production of “Constance,” a play that its Web site describes as “Oscar Wilde’s final play.” The theater says the play, about an industrialist, his loyal wife and her extended family, was written by Wilde after his release from prison in 1897 and given to the actress Cora Brown Potter, who in turn gave it to the French writer Guillot de Saix. With a collaborator, Henri de Briel, de Saix produced a French translation, which has been adapted by Charles Osborne for this production.

However, Mr. Holland, the grandson of Wilde and his wife, Constance, said his grandfather sketched out the scenario of the play in a letter in 1894, but “never wrote a word” of it.

“It is dishonest to foist this on the public,” Mr. Holland told The Guardian, calling the play “a pretty appalling piece of work” that is “peppered with a few aphorisms from other plays, marginally altered in order to sound a bit like Oscar Wilde.”

Adam Spreadbury-Maher, the artistic director of the theater, told The Guardian, “I’m completely comfortable calling it a play by Oscar Wilde,” adding that the production is careful to credit the lineage of the play and the hands it passed through.

Possibly opening himself up to further controversy, Mr. Spreadbury-Maher said it was similar to how Damien Hirst “doesn’t paint all his paintings.”

An all-time fave

Curtain Calls | John Lithgow

Culture

|

By STEPHEN HEYMAN

| September 2, 2011, 10:00 am

PhotofestPLAY MATE —  Center stage in “Bedroom Farce,” on Broadway in 1979.

In his revelatory memoir, ‘‘Drama’’ (HarperCollins, $27), John Lithgow, the consummate character actor, talks about infidelity, Oedipal striving and the awfulness of acceptance speeches.

There are many admissions in the book, most notably that in the 1970s you had eight affairs with different theater co-stars (including the “incandescent” Bergman muse Liv Ullmann) while married to your first wife. You likened yourself then to a “rampaging elephant.” How hard was it for you to reveal the affairs?
Of course they were difficult to write about, and I was very ambivalent about whether to press ahead. But I made a decision: Either I’m going to write an honest book or a dishonest book. And I thought it was sort of dishonest to leave those moments out. I have good friends who read the book and said, “My God, 90 percent of this I didn’t know about.”

You also admit to evading the Vietnam draft board while in England in the late 1960s. You soiled yourself and haunted some of the scuzziest streets of London, cultivating a persona of a strung-out maniac. The jig worked — you were classed as 4-F — but the performance left you feeling raw.
It was a crazy time and I felt like I was behaving in a crazy way. I was panicky and I presented myself as panicky. I always felt like I wasn’t really lying. I included it in the book just because it was a different version of acting. It didn’t make me feel comfortable about myself at all. It was very, very close to the bone. I knew I was going to be face to face with my audience. There was no cheating.

“Drama” begins with John Lithgow’s debut, at age 2.

You mention that winning a Tony was one of the proudest moments of your life but then go on to say, “acceptance speeches are generally a graceless cavalcade of pomposity, crocodile tears and egregious false modesty.” Did you have anyone in mind?
Of course. But I’m not going to tell you! Mainly myself. Early on, I was very ponderous about accepting awards and I became more lighthearted about it the more awards that I won. But they’re very emotional moments, no question about it. Actors, it’s our reflex — we make a big scene out of everything. Particularly theater actors. The Tony awards always strike me as akin to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Everybody’s full of helium.

Your father, Arthur Lithgow, was a great theater impresario, particularly noted for his Shakespeare festivals in the 1950s. He supported your career in various ways, giving you your first parts. But in the book he seems at times critically distant, not commenting — good or bad — on your performances. What did he think of you as an actor?
He was once interviewed about me for an A&E “Biography,” and he talked about my acting in ways that he had never spoken to me. It’s very typical. We’ll say things to millions of people that we would never say to the people very closest to us. But he talked about the opening of “M. Butterfly,” when I was alone on the stage looking out at the audience and just grabbing their attention in what he described as a very uncanny way. I thought, My God, my father never said any of that to me. Isn’t that life?

Tuesday eye candy

Jude Law Makes a Revelatory Performance in London

Jude Law and Ruth Wilson in "Anna Christie," one of Eugene O'Neill's early plays, at the Donmar Warehouse.

By MATT WOLF

Published: August 23, 2011

LONDON — Late August is supposed to be London’s theatrical silly season, that time of year during which things go quiet and cultural interest shifts northward to the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. How, then, to explain a recent array of openings testifying not just to ongoing activity in the capital but to arguably the most revelatory performance of Jude Law’s career?

You can glimpse that last achievement for yourself at the Donmar Warehouse, where Mr. Law has opened in “Anna Christie” for a limited run through Oct. 8. (The entire engagement is sold out, but there are always returns; a commercial transfer has been mooted, as well.) Cast as a swaggering Irish stoker last played on Broadway in 1993 by Liam Neeson, the slight-of-frame Englishman that is Mr. Law hardly sounds like the first person you would turn to for this role.

But that’s to discount the hours spent in the gym or with a trainer that are evident from Mr. Law’s bulked-up physique, which is on formidable view from the moment he first hauls himself in front of Ruth Wilson, playing the onetime prostitute of the title. Visual transformation aside, Mr. Law’s commitment to the brooding, near-animalistic intensity of the role impresses most, as if a film star whose stage forays of late have tended toward the decorative were in fact reinventing himself from the inside out.

The director of “Anna Christie” is Rob Ashford, the Broadway regular (“How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying”) who has found a second artistic home at the Donmar mining the American repertoire within the confines of a theater a fraction the size of even the smallest Broadway playhouse. Why hasn’t Mr. Ashford done the same on home turf? For the simple reason, I imagine, that directors can be typecast just as fully as actors, which makes it difficult for a proven song-and-dance man to shift gears and start directing early Eugene O’Neill; “Anna Christie” dates to 1921 and won its then still-fledgling author his second Pulitzer Prize.

Two years ago, Mr. Ashford surprised onlookers by making his nonmusical directing debut, again at the Donmar, with a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” that went on to win Olivier Awards — London’s equivalent of the Tony — for its distaff principals, Rachel Weisz, as Blanche, and Ms. Wilson of “Anna Christie,” as Stella. What’s fascinating this time around is to clock the affinities made clear by their director between that Tennessee Williams masterwork and an earlier, more flawed work that nonetheless overflows with feeling.

First seen entering the fundamentally male preserve of a bar, Ms. Wilson’s Anna warily catches the light, as if unsure how to continue but determined to carry on. Blanche DuBois would surely understand the hesitancy coupled with erotic hunger that drive Anna forward, this sea captain’s daughter keen to purge herself of a past that has left her unclean while allowing an awareness of life’s depredations that neither of the men in her midst can begin to share. (As played by David Hayman at full faux-Scandinavian tilt, her father in any case seems more in thrall to “dat ole davil sea” than to humankind.)

The cut-and-thrust between Anna and Mat in its own way foreshadows the mating dance fringed by brutality that unfolds between Blanche and her brother-in-law, Stanley. Referring to himself as “a clumsy ape,” Mr. Law communicates both the primal and poetic impulses raging within Mat, a lively talker who clearly thinks with his fists even when wearing a suit. (Note, by the way, the suggestion in Mr. Law’s body language that elegant apparel is not Mat’s preferred mode of dress.) “I’m beat out, beat out entirely,” he confesses, a battered spirit in need of healing no less fully than the stained woman whom fate has placed in his path.

But where “Anna” differs markedly from “Streetcar” is in a trajectory that affords its eponymous heroine the upper hand, the character in this production seen at the end tellingly perched above proceedings. The image recalls Ruth, the lone female amid the rapacious, blokish landscape of Pinter’s play, “The Homecoming.” This Anna is a woman ground down by men who has fought hard for a redemption that carries with it a tantalizing hint of power.

Physically, the staging can’t be faulted as Mr. Ashford plunges us into the world of the sea where “Anna Christie” is most at home. Paul Wills’s design, duskily lit by Howard Harrison, gives us tempestuous swells and storms, not to mention a bed that Mat sends crashing to the ground within minutes of wishing he could lead Anna tenderly toward it. The composer Adam Cork’s soundscape ensures that the play satisfies aurally, as well, sea shanties lending a clamorous texture to a play whose occasional crudenesses are inseparable from its lasting import. And when Mr. Law roars, you can feel the audience snapping to attention in full accord with a leading man you thought you knew only to discover the hint of a newly minted career still to come.

Songs in the clouds

Musical Couple Turn to Aviator and His Wife

TONIO and Consuelo, the wanderlusty aviator and the exotic widow at the center of the new musical “Saint-Ex,” give voice to their tempestuous relationship by singing, “Love is not a gaze that’s shared/But years spent gazing outward together.”

Enlarge This Image

Caleb Kenna for The New York Times

Jenny Giering and Sean Barry, a husband-wife team, collaborated on the musical "Saint-Ex."

The sentiment is only partly undercut by the fact that Tonio — better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44), the French author of the well-known fable “The Little Prince” and of stirring accounts of his life as a pilot — can barely seem to spend five minutes with his wife before heading outward himself, to Patagonia or the Sahara desert or Manhattan.

By contrast, for more than three years the composer Jenny Giering and her lyricist-librettist, Sean Barry, have been turning their relatively undivided attention to “Saint-Ex,” which opens Thursday at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont, where it runs through Sept. 10. Their focus has been made easier by the fact that Ms. Giering and Mr. Barry are married; when their attention is divided, the primary culprits are their 4-year-old son and the Berkshires home to which these former Brooklynites moved a year ago.

A few days before rehearsals began in Vermont the two stopped at a restaurant in Chelsea, and over drinks but not food (it was their seventh anniversary, and they had reservations for a highly anticipated 10-course dinner immediately after) they talked about collaborating onstage and in life.

“I don’t think either of us had a timeline in terms of when we would work together,” said Mr. Barry, 42, a poet and author of short stories and the family breadwinner as a freelance writer for the medical Web site Medscape. But when the couple wrote a song together for their own wedding, it was inevitable.

Ms. Giering, 40, with a bachelor’s degree in music from Harvard and Radcliffe and a master’s from the graduate musical-theater writing program at the Tisch School of the Arts, is the more seasoned theater writer. Ever since her song “I Follow” was included on Audra McDonald’s first solo CD, “Way Back to Paradise” in 1998, she has been a fixture within the realm that straddles traditional theater music, art songs and singer-songwriter folk-pop. In 2007 the theater company Transport Group presented “Crossing Brooklyn,” Ms. Giering and Laura Harrington’s musical about the aftershocks of 9/11, and like-minded genre hoppers often feature Ms. Giering’s stand-alone songs as well as material from pieces like the musicals “The Mistress Cycle” and “Princess Caraboo” in recitals. “She’s got a little bit of a pop influence,” Ms. McDonald said, “and then there’s the musical-theater influence, but she’s really got a talent to filter it into her own unique voice.”

The idea for “Saint-Ex” stemmed from Mr. Barry’s longstanding interest in the life and works of Saint-Exupéry, who was lost over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance flight for the Free French in 1944. “Sean spent a lot of time in France and grew up reading Saint-Exupéry,” Ms. Giering said, “and he was always talking about how terrible the English translations are.”

Mr. Barry’s first plan was to translate Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 memoir, “Wind, Sand and Stars,” himself. But then he began thinking of a musical about the man instead. The couple dived into the project in early 2008 and abandoned it almost instantly. “We wrote one song,” Ms. Giering recalled, “and it was terrible.”

But the idea of setting Saint-Exupéry’s life to music was still on their minds when Kent Nicholson, then the artistic director of TheaterWorks in Palo Alto, Calif., invited Ms. Giering to a writers’ retreat. She mentioned the germ of the idea that she and her husband had, and knowing nothing beyond that, Mr. Nicholson invited the couple to California. He has directed each iteration of the piece since and is also directing it at the Weston Playhouse, which gave the show a new-musical award in 2010 and offered to produce it.

“Saint-Ex,” which stars Alexander Gemignani in the title role, initially paid more attention to the pilots who started the Aéropostale commercial aviation line, a group whose camaraderie and dangerous flights provided Saint-Exupéry with much of the material for his books. And while many of these scenes are still in the script, each draft seemed to result in an increased role for Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, a tiny Salvadoran beauty who had been widowed twice while in her 20s. “It was always part of the plot,” Mr. Nicholson said of the central romance, “and now it kind of is the plot.”

Krysta Rodriguez (“The Addams Family”), who is playing Consuelo, joined the cast after hearing the score. “It’s not that unusual to look at lyrics and pick them apart to see why each character sings each note,” she said. “But you can do the same thing with Jenny’s music, which is unusual. It’s totally clear from the characters’ perspective why you’re singing in this key or why this new chord should be there.” Ms. Giering, a former pianist and not infrequent performer of her own material, explained that it took time before she understood how to tailor her music to whoever was singing it. “When I was in my 20s, I wrote a piece in ‘The Mistress Cycle’ for a 65-year-old woman, and I had all this stuff in this rangy soprano style. I look back at it and say, ‘Well, that was dumb.’ Now I pride myself on writing things that are very singable. Alex has been part of ‘Saint-Ex’ for years now, and Sean and I basically lob everything right into his sweet spot.”

“Saint Ex” marks a change of pace for Ms. Giering, who has often gravitated toward female protagonists and collaborators. She and the Chicago playwright Laura Eason are working on a musical about Maggie and Kate Fox, figures in the late-19th-century spiritualist movement. And Playwrights Horizons, where Mr. Nicholson now works, has commissioned Ms. Giering and Ms. Harrington to adapt “Alice Bliss,” Ms. Harrington’s novel about the teenage daughter of a soldier in the Iraq war. (The novel is based on “Alice Unwrapped,” a one-act musical the two women had written earlier; that piece, in turn, stemmed from a character who was cut from their “Crossing Brooklyn.”) Still, this “really isn’t by design,” Ms. Giering insisted. “I don’t feel the need to make parts for women.”

All the same, she and Mr. Barry have expanded the old flyboys’ club to include Consuelo and, to a lesser extent, Saint-Exupéry’s mother (played by Cass Morgan). As Saint-Exupéry put it in his 1933 novel “Night Flight”: “When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?” With “Saint-Ex,” he’s not the only one singing.

I don't even think of you that often...

A Last Night Among the Spirits at the Chelsea Hotel

By CARA BUCKLEY

Published: July 31, 2011

Her head was shaved on both sides, her Mohawk bleached and dyed blond and blue. As she leaned over the front desk of the Chelsea Hotel on Saturday night, her lower lip pierced with a ring and her Doc Martens tapping the floor, Kitty Ramona, a bass player from Baltimore, was every bit the nostalgic punk girl seeking refuge in a place dripping with history and on the verge of being swallowed by time.

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

Tenants gathered Saturday at an "end of an era" party hosted by Tony Notarberardino, who has lived in the hotel for 17 years.

 

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

The Chelsea Hotel, a New York landmark on West 23rd Street.

Saturday night was, by all indications, the last night that the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street would be open to guests, though the duration of the closing, the first in its history, was unknown.

The building is to be sold for over $80 million to the developer Joseph Chetrit, though the deal had not closed as of Sunday, according to someone close to the matter, who asked not to be named because the negotiations were confidential. Extensive renovations are expected to take at least a year. The hotel’s 100 permanent residents will be allowed to stay, but they have been told nothing beyond what the startled hotel workers learned late last week: that all reservations after Saturday were canceled.

“Where are all the punk kids? Maybe they don’t know,” said Ms. Ramona, an adrenaline-fueled, self-described “forever teenager” (in her early 30s) who had booked a room, hopped in her car and gunned it to New York City as soon as she heard the news. For a decade, Ms. Ramona has journeyed to the hotel several times a year, drawn by two of its famous guests from decades past. “Sid Vicious in caps, and Dee Dee Ramone,” she said. “If I could be anywhere tonight, this is the place to be.”

Mr. Chetrit, who did not return calls for comment, is said to want to keep the Chelsea as a hotel, but the plans are unclear. The building, a looming Queen Anne that opened as a co-op in 1884, is landmarked.

Gene Kaufman, an architect hired to oversee the renovations, said the plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems and the lobby all had to be overhauled, but added that much of the hotel’s original charm, including the wrought-iron interior stairwell and the art, would be preserved. “People should not be nervous about that,” he said.

But residents are nervous. The hotel has been owned by the same families since World War II. Scott Griffin, head of the tenants’ association, said he believed that the goal of the hotel’s two controlling shareholders was not to maximize profits but to empty the building.

“This is one of the greatest cases of corporate mismanagement,” Mr. Griffin said. Several shareholders, among them Marlene Krauss, the target of much resident vilification, either did not return messages or declined to comment.

Part of the allure of the Chelsea, beyond the creepy yet tantalizing feeling that the place is thick with spirits, is that from the inside looking out, New York can still feel gritty. Its cavelike hallways are lined with paintings, striking collages and old electrical wiring caked with innumerable coats of paint. A palpable heaviness lingers, especially in the first-floor room where Nancy Spungen was staying with her boyfriend, Sid Vicious, when she was stabbed to death in 1978. Artists, photographers, composers and producers still live there, making the place part art colony, part living museum.

Residents say the hotel’s character shifted irrevocably after its lionized former manager and part-owner, Stanley Bard, was ousted by the hotel’s board of directors four years ago. Mr. Bard had acted as curator, deciding who got to stay and how much would be paid, and overseeing the hotel during the days when the likes of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Robert Crumb roamed its halls. Residents said the hotel’s occupancy and room rates had suffered since Mr. Bard’s departure, with celebrities and artists replaced by budget tourists.

But most tenants lamented the departure of the guests. “It’s kind of fun to have this influx of people, even if you’re making fun of them,” said Meli Pennington, a makeup artist who has lived at the Chelsea with her husband for 16 years.

On Saturday, though, apart from crestfallen guests whose stays had been abruptly cut short, the goings-on at the Chelsea were, by its standards, relatively standard.

Wide-eyed tourists snapped photos of the lobby as residents swept past them without a glance. Steve Johnson, 29, visiting from North Carolina with his cousin, sat in the lobby gravely recounting the time he said he was approached in his room by a ghost. Gabriel Marchisio, a Uruguayan tarot card reader and hotel fixture, lingered by the front desk dispatching, for the heck of it, his signature “muah ha ha ha” monster laugh.

Shortly before dusk, police officers rushed in and up to the ninth floor. A guest had gotten into a fight with his girlfriend and called his mother to tell her he wanted to kill himself; his mother called the police, who in turn escorted the man to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward. “Never a dull moment,” a front-desk clerk said.

In the rooms above, people partied, prowled and slept. Hip-hop blared from Sid and Nancy’s old room. Hotel guests held earnest, drunken conversations from the balconies overlooking West 23rd Street. Ms. Ramona combed the halls with her camera. Tony Notarberardino, a photographer who has lived at the Chelsea for 17 years, hosted an “end of an era” party in an attempt to cheer everyone up. He scattered white rose petals near the entryway of his sixth-floor apartment, which is choked with chandeliers, beaded lamps, red walls and gilt-edged mirrors and feels like a speakeasy crossed with an opium den. “Let’s celebrate what we had,” he said, “and embrace change.”

Sometime before dawn, someone drove a fist through a swinging door on the first floor, leaving a wide penumbra of shattered glass. A worker discovered it in the morning.

“Already,” he said sadly, “they’re destroying the place.”

Shakespeare motherlode

Exhibition Review

Shakespeare Folios as Venerated Relics

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 7, 2011

WASHINGTON — Underground, not far from the handsome Great Hall at the Folger Shakespeare Library where a fascinating exhibition is on display, just beyond the institution’s reading rooms, down its back stairs and through a vault door that seems far more imposing than the “rocks impregnable” Shakespeare invoked in a sonnet, there is a wall on which more than 70 volumes lie flat on mounted shelves.

 

Andrew Councill for The New York Times

Owen Williams, a curator, examines the Shakespeare folios in a vault beneath the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

Each book has a different color; each has different dimensions. Some are boxed, others bound in goatskin. But once they were nearly identical. Each was printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. And despite the motley array, these shelves hold one-third of the world’s surviving copies of a book that one scholar called “the greatest contribution made in a single volume to the secular literature of any age or country.”

That book is the Shakespeare First Folio. Beginning in 1893, and for the next 35 years, 82 copies were obsessively purchased by the library’s founder, Henry Clay Folger. Only 232 such folios still exist anywhere. And since the highest price paid for one was more than $6 million in 2001, the fiscal value of Folger’s collection may be getting closer to the worth of the literary riches found within.

Those riches are something that this exhibition — “Fame, Fortune & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio” — nearly takes for granted, which it has every right to, given the Shakespearean halo that hovers over the Folger. One copy of the First Folio is always on view here (and online). This show displays another 10 Folios from the library’s vaults (along with one on loan from a private collector).

The First Folio is essentially Shakespeare’s collected dramatic works, posthumously compiled by his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. More important, it is the only source for 18 of Shakespeare’s plays. If it weren’t for the First Folio, there would be no extant copies of “The Tempest,” “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night” “As You Like It” or “The Winter’s Tale.” All the world wouldn’t be a stage; no countrymen would lend anyone their ears; and life wouldn’t be a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

What we would have instead are about half of Shakespeare’s plays, though since they were published as quartos— inexpensive editions, the early ones even lacking the author’s name — it is even doubtful they would have been preserved the way this imposing 900-something-page, double-column tome has been. Before the First Folio, its compilers tell the reader, “you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors.” The First Folio promises something else.

It also shows that just after Shakespeare’s death, his stature was considerable. It was printed in a size reserved for great classics and lectern Bibles. And it was prefaced by robust front matter, including a tribute by Ben Jonson (“Thou art a Monument, without a tombe,/And art alive still, while thy booke doth live”), along with the famous Martin Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare. There is only one other volume in the English language that has been as powerful and influential — the King James Bible — and it will be the subject of another Folger exhibition in September.

But this show, whose curators are Anthony James West, a research fellow at University College London, and Owen Williams, the Folger Institute’s assistant director, is not meant as a testimonial but as a survey of that book’s material life over nearly four centuries: how it fared in the marketplace and in the hands of its owners; how copies were damaged and restored; how scholars have analyzed its text; and even how it has been stolen and recovered.

We see too that after the First Folio’s debut, it took centuries for homage to turn into worship. A 1687 catalog shows one offered for auction at less than was paid for it on publication; in contrast, a 2006 Sotheby’s catalog is entirely devoted to the sale of a single First Folio. (It went for about $5.2 million.) From 1800 to 1950, we learn, purchases of the First Folio doubled every 50 years; recent rises in price have been greatly amplified by a worldwide market.

A touch screen shows the growth of that market and the geographical “diaspora” of Folio copies, beginning in London, spreading early (in 1781) to New England, migrating to Africa, New Zealand and Australia, and most recently finding homes in Japan.

Admittedly, this account is not in itself a highly dramatic Shakespearean tale sounding elaborate and passionate themes. This story’s greatest episodes of venality may be the way three copies were stolen from libraries in the 20th century; one was recovered by the Folger in 2008, when a supposed bibliophile asked the library to assess the volume. Its greatest example of foolishness may be the way the Bodleian Library at Oxford sold off a precious First Folio in the 1660s to purchase the Third Folio, which added errors to the first (though Oxford was able to re-acquire the First in 1906).

The tale’s greatest tragedy may be that during each rebinding, margins were routinely sliced, eliminating historically valuable marginalia. The greatest sign of piety here may be an 1866 casket, carved from the wood of the recently fallen Herne’s Oak, an ancient tree mentioned in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” commissioned by a Folio owner to house her treasure. And the greatest evidence of Shakespearean lust may have been Henry Folger’s relentless accumulation of 82 First Folios — the largest single collection in the world — a venture documented with examples of his negotiation and manipulation.

But who needs heightened Shakespearean drama when details have such a peculiar charm? We see a photostat of a forged letter of introduction from Middlebury College’s president, which, in 1940, allowed a shoe salesman to pose as an English professor and get his hands on a First Folio at Williams College. Working on behalf of a crime syndicate, he first measured the Folio’s dimensions and on his second visit brought a cut-down copy of “Reynard the Fox” in a cloth slip-on binding (also on display here). He exchanged “Reynard” for Shakespeare and walked out — a triumph, at least until he and the Folio fell into the F.B.I.’s hands.

 

Folger Shakespeare Library

The Old Reading Room at the Folger Shakespeare Library, with a First Folio in the foreground,

 

Andrew Councill for The New York Times

A replica of a burned First Folio owned by the 19th-century American actor Edwin Forrest at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The frontispiece of a First Folio in the Folger collection.

The Folger is also displaying the Hinman Collator, a 450-pound apparatus invented in 1952 by the Folio scholar Charlton Hinman. Two Folios would be put in the collator, and through cleverly arranged mirrors, their images would be overlaid in a binocular viewer, making clear the textual and typographical variations in nearly every copy. What would have been a 40-year labor of comparison and identification was completed in 19 months.

All of this means that the exhibition’s focus is not on the Folio’s content, but on matters that might seem incidental to it. Scholarly dissections of printing processes, surveys of the rare-book market, fetishistic treatment of prized possessions could all be considered secondary, perhaps much ado about very little.

But it is through such material concerns that humanity pays homage to what is less easily grasped. Original documents become hallowed as they absorb the reverence of centuries. And in the history of that reverence we begin to understand something about those documents’ meanings.

Consider the exhibition’s strangest artifact. The 19th-century American actor Edwin Forrest so revered Shakespeare that he purchased a First Folio and kept it in a specially built glass case. In his will he left it, along with much of his wealth, to the establishment of a Home for Decayed Actors in Philadelphia. But after his death a fire raged, reducing the Folio to ashes. Those charred pages are still kept at the University of Pennsylvania in Forrest’s case, “perhaps the only book,” the show tells us, “whose remains are preserved in a specially constructed sarcophagus” — or, to reverse Jonson’s tribute, creating a tomb without a monument.

It is a measure of the Folio’s importance, though, that its valuable ashes were considered too fragile to travel. So the Folger recreated them. We are looking at a replica of a destroyed book, an eerie tribute to its enduring life.

 

“Fame, Fortune & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio” runs through Sept. 3 at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol Street S.E., Washington; (202) 544-7077, folger.edu.