May 2010 Book Review by Joe Stead
The American Stage
There
is no substitute for experiencing the wonders of live theatre than
with an audience in a theatre. With that understood, I also
consider myself a much richer theatre-goer having absorbed as much as
I could from books, music, videos and reviews. I was therefore
extremely excited to open Lawrence Senelick's new book titled
"The American Stage," a collection of essays spanning over
200 years of writing on the theatre. I will say right off the
start that this is not a light read. With writers ranging from
Washington Irving to Tony Kushner, the time span of subjects is
almost overwhelming. We have the playwrights like Kushner,
Mamet, Wasserstein, Miller, Williams, Albee, Hansberry, etc., in
itself a vibrant collection of the greatest of the greats.
There are the critics too, from the so-called "Butcher of Broadway" also known as Frank Rich to Walter Kerr, Brooks Atkinson and John Simon among others. The directors include Anne Bogart and Elia Kazan, two vastly different interpretive artists of the stage. If anything there is a shortage of actors, surprising considering the contributions actors have made to the American stage, but somewhat understandable given the broad territory covered here. There is a very articulate and enjoyable introduction by the great John Lithgow, which in itself compensates for a few of the lulls that follow.
We get the poets (Walt Whitman), the novelists (Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe), the humorists (Dorothy Parker) and the monologist (Spalding Gray). Many of those featured in the anthology were trend setters or ground-breakers. We read of Charles Ludlam's influence on the gay theatre movement, Producer John Houseman's account of the historic, drama-plagued opening of Marc Blitzstein's satirical musical play "The Cradle Will Rock," and the rise of The Method school of acting, as pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia 100 years ago.
There are eulogies for vaudeville, burlesque and the American musical, which by some accounts has been dying a slow but fabulous death nearly since it began with "The Black Crook" over a century back. We get Mark Twain's wry assessment of that scandalous musical, with its scantily costumed ballet dancers purportedly wreaking havoc on the mores of the country, and a lament for the days of the more "respectable" blackface minstrel shows the author of "Huck Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" so enjoyed.
One particularly juicy chapter by Harvard and Yale scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a direct challenge to the great playwright August Wilson's call for plays written and produced exclusively by and for African Americans. Gates points out that such a theatre movement, labeled the "Chitlin Circuit" after the all-black vaudeville acts of the early 20th Century, is not only alive but thriving. Perhaps the gospel, farce and melodrama laden works like "Beauty Shop," "He Say, She Say, But What Does God Say?," "My Grandmother Prayed for Me," and "Mama, I Want to Sing" were not in the same artistic league as even Wilson's minor work (if he had any). But they have been a long source of entertainment for their niche audience and lucrative currency for their producers, who may have been geniuses of marketing if not always the creation of art.
We get a tour through everything from musical comedy to Theater of the Absurd, from mainstream to the avant garde, so somewhere along the way there is bound to be something to whet your theatrical taste buds. From a purely historical aspect, I commend Mr. Senelick and The Library of America for this significant, albeit exhausting 898 page effort. I am also bound to point out that this book will likely be more appreciated by the literary cognoscenti than the average theatre-goer.
Some of the selections, especially the older ones, were excruciatingly dry and long-winded, and it took me quite a few tries to get through some of them. In many of the essays, I missed any sense of the joy or passion their authors felt for their subjects. Some essays sounded like whining and sour grapes from practitioners who became disenchanted with their art. That isn't always the case, but I feel a book titled "The American Stage" should inspire rather than depress its readers. All too often I simply wanted to put the book down and be entertained. Thank God I still have live theatre to do just that. For more information on this title and others, visit www.loa.org.
About Joe Stead
Joe
Stead has enjoyed a lifelong passion for the theatre, which has
involved acting, directing, producing, designing and reviewing for
the past twenty-five years. He served as founder, producer and
Artistic Director of Curtain Up Productions in Baltimore, Maryland
and Four Star Players in Tampa, Florida. Favorite productions
have included "Life With Father," "Deathtrap,"
"The Odd Couple," "The Miracle Worker,"
"Brighton Beach Memoirs," "You're A Good Man, Charlie
Brown" and "Godspell". He has also performed
leading roles in "Fiddler on the Roof," "Pippin,"
"The Phantom of the Opera," "The Front Page," and
most recently as Hucklebee in "The Fantasticks" for
Waukegan Community Players. Joe holds a degree in Commercial
Art from Tampa Technical Institute. As a critic, he has
reviewed everything from Broadway to community theatre and major
regional theatres throughout the United States including the Kennedy
Center in Washington, D.C., Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey,
Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, and the Asolo Theatre in
Sarasota, Florida.
Since 1998, he has been a proud resident of Chicago, the greatest theatre city in America. He served for two years as Theatre Editor for College News and Central Newspapers. He created the website Steadstyle Chicago in 2000 to showcase the city's outstanding and diverse theatre scene. Joe was proud to serve alongside a distinguished panel of theatre professionals as a judge for two seasons of Speaking Ring Theatre's "Vitality" Festival of original short plays. His most fulfilling role, in addition to reviewer and all-around theatre fanatic, was as director of the 2007 production of Peter Shaffer's "Equus" at Actors Workshop (now Redtwist) Theatre, which was nominated for five Joseph Jefferson Award Citations and won for Best Actor (Peter Oyloe).