I just finished watching yesterday's TimesTalk  with Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald moderated by the late (as of last evening) great David Carr. I think everyone should watch it so I'm posting the link here: http://timestalks.com/laura-poitras-glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden.html  If you watch to the end, which I expect you will, Poitras and Snowden both offer up specific ways to protect internet privacy. 

In my not so humble opinion, CitizenFour is the best film of last year, perhaps of the last several years. The collective intelligence and social/moral responsibility of Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald is stunning. 

I don't really care if it wins an Academy Award because I think the people who have seen it and who are going to see it will, whether it gets an official stamp from the Hollywood community or not.   Sadly, those who were not interested before are not likely to develop an interest if it wins an Oscar. But for anyone who hasn't been able to see it in a movie theatre, it's going to air on HBO on February 23rd at 9pm. 



  

More on "Iceman"

I have been thinking a lot about "The Iceman Cometh" since I posted two days ago, specifically about who would make up the ideal cast.  I keep coming back to Edward Norton who I thought of as I watched the current production.  He would be an ideal Hickey.  10 or 15 years ago he would have been perfect for Parritt but he's aged and grown as an actor.  I could see Mandy Patinkin as Larry. I'm not kidding. Rupert Friend as Parritt?  And I can come up with a whole passel of fine young actresses to the play the "tarts" among them Betty Gilpin, Heidi Schreck and Hallie Pfeiffer.  More to come...

The Iceman Cometh or has he?

So.... I saw The Iceman Cometh, one of the great plays of our time, at BAM last night.   I'm still scratching my head figuratively.  Eugene O'Neill wrote grand, magnificent tragedies.  For a play to be a tragedy it is necessary to have at its core a tragic hero. O'Neill's heroes are huge and have great effect and so their falls are devastating, heart-rending and soul-emptying.

I'm too young to have seen Jason Robards as Hickey in the original 1956 Circle in the Square production but I did find a couple of videos on YouTube.  While I was there I checked out the Hickeys of Lee Marvin and Kevin Spacey as well.  They all had the appearance of being virile and physically towering men (yes, somehow, even Spacey).   Nathan Lane does not have the stature, the grandeur if you will, for the role.  He bursts onstage in all his vaudevillian splendor.  He's a Looney Toon animation, the hawker of sideshows at Coney Island, the best friend but not the leading man.  It's impossible to see why the drunks in the Last Chance Saloon wait eagerly for his return every year, how he is able to bend them to his will or to understand the long-suffering love his wife Evelyn had for him.  And so his fall is not from a great height but a stumble off a footstool.

The young anarchist on the run and fighting with his internal demons, Don Parritt, has been portrayed by the likes of Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.  Why choose an actor of diminutive stature and a ferrety look, Patrick Andrews, for this production?  Parritt is not the tragic hero of the play but he is conflicted and in the context of the play his life should mean more to us than it does here. He comes to Larry, played here by Brian Dennehy with great quiet stoicism, looking for safe harbour or, at the very least, an answer to the why of his very existence.  This Parritt we want to kick to the curb.

Dennehy is a large lumbering block of a man. He seems rooted to his seat for much of the play like the stump of an enormous tree. He says little but is the conscience of the play. It is he who first voices O'Neill's thematic "pipe dreams." I would have liked to see him bring more humanity to the role but the death mask that is his face in the final moments of the play is a crushing sight to behold.

Overall, I found Robert Fall's directiom to be static and flat.  The other denizens of the bar are caricatures, not living, breathing human beings, even the great John Douglas Thompson as Joe.  O'Neill wrote types but the material is there to make them real. I wanted to feel that I was really there, in this bar with people who had real lives before this moment and would continue to have them after even if their lives were only at the bottom of a shot glass.  Instead I felt like I was watching a sit-com.  Check out the YouTube videos if you want to see how it can be done.

Today I saw The River.  What was it supposed to be about?   Aside from getting to ogle Hugh Jackman's impressive physique for 85 uninterrupted minutes, I'm unclear.  Jackman, the "man",  is a recreational trout fisherman on a date on a river on a moonless night  ...spoiler alert!... told at least twice concurrently.  I'm afraid that about halfway through I began to think he was a serial killer. That would have actually given it some juice.  As it was the only juice came from the lemons used to cook - for real- a trout on stage.  However, I am going to try his recipe.  And I now know more about trout fishing than I will ever need to know.

Jez Butterworth author of the overpraised but engrossing Jerusalem wrote it and it has the same director, Ian Rickson.  I was not a fan of Mark Rylance's over-the-top emoting in that play but Hugh Jackman outdid himself trying not to match it.  No singing, dancing or even a flash of Wolverine here.  Cosh Jumbo's flat performance as one of the "women" did not do much to inspire me to see her in her upcoming one-woman show about Josephine Baker at the Public.  I did quite like the other actress, Laura Donnelly, who brought a little quirkiness to play with her odd posture, posturing and line-reading.  She can currently be seen on Starz in "Outlander" which I am now curious to see. But the best performance came from the understudy Kerry Warren who opened the show with a fresh and imaginative demonstration on how exactly to turn off our cell-phones. 

The Academy Award Nominations and Constellations or Is This Theatre Too Big For Us?

I missed yesterday because I was musing over the Academy Award nominations trying to figure out what to make of them and what and how much I should say .  I finally realized late in the evening that there was not much TO say(caps are my own to add emphasis).  I don't really have a big investment in the AAs.  I thought David Oyelowo was robbed though (It took me a couple of days to learn how to say his name properly and committ it to memory which I did because I wanted to be able to talk intelligently about his stunning performance in in Selma).  I know I will piss readers off when I say that it was head and shoulders above Chiwetel Ejiofor's one-note performance in 12 Years a Slave. Typical and not surprising for the Academy to nominate Eddy Redmayne's uninspiring performance as Steven Hawking in a film that would have been more comfortable on the small screen.  I spent much of that movie wondering what was so special about Steven Hawking as to make those around him so loyal.  It wasn't the science (My stepfather, a scientist, wouldn't even watch the screener I brought out over the holidays because he dismisses Hawking as a serious scientific mind).  Selma is a far superior film to 12 years a Slave.  It is quiet and small and thoughtful, near-perfect in every detail (o.k. I would have liked to see less of Oprah unnecessarily popping up in every scene but since her company financed the film I'll cut her and the director some slack).  12 Years was a big Hollywood film, a feel-bad but ultimately feel-good film for white people(because after all doesn't a white man, Brad Pitt, save the day?) and ultimately a throw-back to movies like Young Mr. Lincoln.  That's the kind of Hollywood film that the mostly white, mostly male Academy voters can get behind.  And in not nominating Ava Duvernay the Academy missed a chance to move into the present by nominating a black woman.  Ticking some other boxes here, I was not enamored of Boyhood, which, the accomplishment of filming the same boy over a period of 12 years aside, I found pedestrian aside from Patricia Arquette's magnificent and important performance.  I'll root for Birdman and Michael Keaton and everyone else involved in the film although I don't think Birdman should win.  Which brings me back to Selma.  In this time of racial unrest we need Selma to win to pack more people into the theatres to see it. Nuff said.

On the theatre front, I saw "Constellations" on Broadway on Thursday.  Ruth Wilson who won a Golden Globe for her performance in The Affair on Showtime and was magnificent in Luther with Edris Alba (another underused and underrated actor because of his blackness but hopefully the next James Bond) gave a beautifully nuanced performance as a geeky gawky Cambridge scientist in this small, intimate play.  Jake Gyllenhaal was the real suprise playing the equally gg beekeeper who is in love with her.  I have have always found him forgettable in his film performances with the exception of Brokeback Mountain but he got to me in "Constellations."  I think his element is the stage.  The play explores the multiple actions and outcomes possible in a relationship in our complex universe.  As Roger Ebert would say (whose posthumous documentary was also not nominated for an Academy Award), "I give it a thumbs up."  I only wish that I had seen it in the intimate setting of the Royal Court Theatre where it was first staged.  The large theatre and knuckle-cracking, hearing-aid equipped audience kept me from feeling the intimacy of the play that would have enveloped me in a smaller theatre.

P.S.  I would prefer that you comment in response to my opinionated rantings here on the blog and not on Facebook.  Thank you.

For Now

Patricia Arquette

Mish Mash of Albee on Broadway

One of the topics of my blog will be my mini-reviews of current theatre.  My first for 2014 is "A Delicate Balance" which is currently on Broadway directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Lindsay Duncan and Martha Plimpton.  I will start by saying that I really appreciate a good production of Edward Albee.  Recent tour de force productions have been Steppenwolf's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" which was perfection and Signature Theatre's "The Lady From Dubuque" which was close to.  I did not have great expections with respect to "A Delicate Balance" due to the star-studded cast (always a sign of disaster IMHO) but having obtained TDF tickets was willing to give it a shot.  My throat was killing me so I came equiped with Nyquil, a bottle of water and a sack of mentholated cough drops all of which were necessary for this 3 hour 2 intermission play. I have never been a huge fan of Glenn Close and I anticipated an over-the-top actorish performance from her.  Not so!  I was actually blown away by the subtlety and delicacy of her performance. You may ask, "Can a performance in an Albee play be subtle?"  Well, yes...  She glided through the play hitting all the right notes and not a single diva turn among them.  She perfectly embodied the part of Agnes. I have now officially joined the Glenn Close fan club. John Lithgow, I'm sorry to say, did not fare as well.  He hammed his way through most of the play which is awkward considering Tobias is a weak and retreating soul.  I would have liked to have seen the understated brilliance Tracy Letts would have brought to the part.  Lindsay Duncan, always a consumate actress, was moving and irritating in equal measures as the alcohlic Claire. She is so chamelian like that I didn't even realize it was her until midway through the first act.  I was thinking, "She's terrific.  Who is that?" and then checked my program. She's certainly not looking like she did in "Birdman" although in both roles she has a drink in her hand. Unfortunately Martha Plimpton who I generally greatly admire was miscast as Julia and shrieked her way through the play.  Bob Balaban gave a characture of a performance as good friend Harry possibly due to the absence at this performance of Claire Higgins as his wife Edna.  I'm inclined to be kind to understudies but in this case the less said the better.  The set(Santo Loquasto) and costumes (Ann Roth) were perfection with the exception of Martha Plimpton who looked like she was wearing cheap, ill-fitting knock-offs of Ralph Lauren (what happened there, Ann Roth?).  But I do recommend seeing "A Delicate Balance" for Glenn Close.  She will break your heart.