Through the Backward-Looking Glass

I’m hooked on Downton Abbey, that wonderful British soap with sharp production values and the catchy sense and sensibility of Austen mixed in with the storytelling panorama of James Cameron. Perhaps that is too literal since the Titanic’s sinking in 1912 is what starts off the show, and Downton creator Julian Fellowes is debuting his own Titanic miniseries in April 2012. But Downton’s affinity with Cameron’s retelling goes far deeper than the shared reference to a well-known historical tragedy.

Whether or not you like Cameron’s Titanic, he does manage to capture a bit of that zeitgeist told through a modern point of view. For example, Leonardo di Caprio’s Jack is absolutely heroic as he cuts through the priggishness of society and exists romantically as a well-traveled self-taught artist, a far more lucrative and respectable prospect today than a hundred years ago. While the wealthy guard their Monet and Degas paintings, only Jack manages to really appreciate what is special about them. In other words, he is a character from our time trapped among well-heeled moneyed barbarians. Poetic ironic justice is had because we all know that history will eventually catch up and take sides with our hero’s ideals.

Similarly in Downton, we have characters who struggle against the decline of the British aristocracy and others who embrace it. Such mundane aspects of modern life as applying for a non-servile job, answering a phone, driving a car, or even dressing oneself are treated as uncommon occurrences in the context of a rather rigid class system. And while most of the characters struggle against the decline of British aristocracy, a few characters embrace it and share our modern sensibilities. They are for worker’s rights, women’s rights, and also know somehow that applying for socially-mobile jobs, answering phones, driving cars, and dressing oneself will be the norms of a distant future. In a certain sense, the writers of the show mean to tell us that we ought to identify with these modern characters, because they have chosen the correct version of the future.

Shows like Downton Abbey and films like Titanic flatter us with the idea that we, the audience, live in a blessed world that has graciously overcome all the class struggles of the past. We can be who we want to be, and our rights extend equally to all members of society. In recent years, these backward-looking shows have gained steamed, and their poster boy, Mad Men, shows us an anti-Semitic, sexist world of well-dressed white men working in corporate advertising right as the 1960s counterculture will overturn all of their assumptions. Even last year’s breakout blockbuster, The Help, was a backward-looking film showing a racist, segregated world of well-dressed white women around the time when the Civil Rights’ Movement will overturn all of their assumptions. In all of these cases, we are presumed to be on the right side of history, and perhaps are supposed to be relieved that the prejudices of the past were indeed fought and defeated.

But were they?

As the events of recent days and weeks and months reveal, a lot of the same issues we “won” in the past have actually returned in new forms. Sexism is alive and well in the form of a Congressional hearing of all men denouncing women’s rights to health care and in Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” and “prostitute” comments which sent advertisers fleeing in droves. Unlike the servants in Downton Abbey, we live in a less socially-mobile era than our fathers did. Being an African-American teen means you can be falsely stereotyped as a drug-dealing thug, even after you’ve been senselessly murdered and your killer has not faced criminal charges. And while having a black President encourages us to see an historic victory for race relations in America, we also saw the ugly smearing of Obama’s credentials regarding his country of origin and his religion not to mention his policies.

What makes the backward-looking show particularly popular today is that we have become an age obsessed with irony. Even a modern-day show like The Office is populated with characters who only thinly veil their prejudices. On that show, a comment from the boss meant to demonstrate racial sensitivity comes off as racist and ignorant. What gives the show its humor are the reaction shots of horrified people who look into the camera to share their disgust and shock with the camera and, by extension, us. We are told that being a sexist, racist simpleton is funny, because we all know that sexism and racism has been vanquished. This has led to “hipster racism,” the phenomenon where good-intentioned and avowedly non-racist individuals attempt to show off how edgy (read “ironic”) and hip they are by repeating the horrifying epithets and stereotypes of the past.

At this year’s AWP Conference, I attended a panel called “Writing about Race in the Age of Obama.” The panelists consisted of two Asian Americans and two African Americans (notably, one also identified as Native American). While the Q&A session tried courageously to navigate the tricky world of writing about race, the discussion suddenly turned to the subject of an anonymous white woman who had walked out during one of the talks. The African-American speaker noted that she may have left due to being uncomfortable about race, but that it may also have been to go to the bathroom. No one knew. But in the Q&A, another white woman revealed that she forced herself to stay at the panel simply to avoid being viewed as being insensitive to racial matters though she did have to use the bathroom. From then on, it was a back and forth negotiation with tension always on the verge of escalating. Was the speaker attacking the woman who left? Was it an innocent observation? Was it simply an error to even have mentioned it in the first place?

What I came away with was the realization that it wasn’t that race bothered people; it was that anger about race bothered them. People don’t mind a calm discussion where they get to be equally on the “correct” side, but as soon as it gets accusatory and becomes a shouting match, people lose their rational thoughts about race and let loose ideas and comments which are ugly, even though the spark may have been something as innocuous as a white woman leaving a room for an unknown reason.

Recently, I found myself engaged in a debate about Ken Narasaki, a veteran Japanese-American actor and writer, choosing to walk out of a show based upon racist epithets against Asians in the show. Narasaki said that while censorship wasn’t the answer, he felt the carelessness of the epithet used was a cause for concern in driving him and possibly others away from theatre, and he ended by saying he’d most likely never return to that theatre. For some of us, this was a calm and reasoned argument and a source of pride that an Asian American had the courage to stand up for his convictions. For others, his statement was an attack on the theatre itself, a censorship screed, and above all a false accusation of racism. One of the counter-arguments made included reference to the play, Clybourne Park, which won the Pulitzer and deals with the difficulty of true racial sensitivity. The back and forth was flippant, ugly, and finally maddening, an endlessly vicious cycle of hipster racism and outrage.

Perhaps this virulence was best described by Bruce Norris, writer of Clybourne Park, who said in the a TCG-published interview, “We white people (because we are the oppressors) sit around going, ‘Is it time now? Has enough time elapsed? Can we now say ‘nigger’?’ But of course that never happens, so white people feel resentful because we realize the past is going to hang around our necks like millstones forever.”

As much as I like to believe we live in the world where all the evils of the past are now easily blown away like so much dust, instead I now see that these backward-looking shows, though designed to make us feel complacent, should really serve to remind us that we need to remain vigilant about what exactly we fought in the past and how to continue to live up to our ideals today. While we might be tempted to stand in place and to whack-a-mole the straw men, we might benefit more from thinking about how long the road still remains in reconciling our past selves with the ones we hope to become.

Give My Regards to the Movie Musical

The Hollywood Reporter just announced that Rob Marshall was officially on board to direct the screen adaptation of INTO THE WOODS, the Stephen Sondheim masterwork. This is great news for people who love musicals, but also a reminder also that musicals aren’t the cultural touchstones they once were. In fact, the marketing of these movies often obfuscates just how musical-y they are lest it scare off an uninitiated audience. By the same token, an INTO THE WOODS musical is likely to be completely rewritten with special effects and unnecessary action sequences in the hopes of attracting the all-important demo of teenage boys. I hope Marshall eschews studio logic and makes the movie it was meant to be, but history has led us to expect less from these movies.

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Broadway’s decline as a pop cultural artform has been well noted. PBS documentaries and history books have lionized the last gasp of Broadway’s relevance. It was Louis Armstrong’s 1964 cover of “Hello Dolly,” the last time Broadway topped the Billboard charts. The moment has become couched as pivotally as Bob Dylan going electric or The Beatles coming to Ed Sullivan, but in truth, it sounds much more like a whimper.

Between the 1930s and 70s, INTO THE WOODS would have been made into a movie musical within a decade. Today, we are over 20 years from its initial production without an INTO THE WOODS movie, and that speaks volumes. Sondheim lets us know in his latest book, Look, I Made a Hat, that despite having had two high-profile Hollywood readings with big stars in the major roles (Cher, Meg Ryan, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, etc.), the project had no green light.

And I wouldn’t blame anyone in Hollywood. INTO THE WOODS is a complex, postmodern, feel-good-then-feel-bad musical. Its fairy tale fantasy setting screams big budget with no guarantee of box office return. There are few seriously hummable tunes although Sondheim’s score is among his best. On top of that, it didn’t even win the Tony for Best Musical. It lost to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s behemoth operetta THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, whose film version itself only came out in 2004 to a lukewarm reception unbefitting its pedigree.

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INTO THE WOODS isn’t alone either. SWEENEY TODD took even longer to reach the screen. RENT arrived long after the prime of its topical subject matter. 1960’s THE FANTASTICKS had a movie that was dumped by MGM in 2000, never to be nearly as beloved as its longest running incarnation off-Broadway. NINE won Best Musical in 1982 only to underwhelm on screen in Rob Marshall’s 2009 version. LES MIZ will be coming soon to the movies this December after opening on the West End in 1985. With long stage-to-screen lag times, any enthusiasm these movies might have had during the buzz of their original Broadway runs will have substantially dissipated. At this rate, WICKED won’t be made until Kristin Chenoweth is fit only to play the older Madame Morrible.

Let’s face it. The movie musical as it was has become a dinosaur. Occasionally we still get hits at the box office (for example, CHICAGO and HAIRSPRAY), but only after being tweaked, coddled, and movie-fied. Whereas the old movie musicals like WEST SIDE STORY or THE SOUND OF MUSIC or MY FAIR LADY or OLIVER! (all Best Picture winners by the way) could just have characters break out into song, our new movie musicals require justification. Singing in a story no longer is a foregone conclusion, but one that has to be sold to the audience each and every time. CHICAGO had the conceit (stolen from CABARET by the way) of showing all the musical numbers as taking place in a dream-like cabaret world of the main character’s mind. Some musicals figure an audience will buy such sung exuberance if it stars celebrities and is scored by well-known pop tunes (MAMMA MIA! and the upcoming ROCK OF AGES). DREAMGIRLS needed to convince us of the singing by telling us we are really just watching musicians rehearse. Curiously enough, when the singing in DREAMGIRLS eventually takes the place of the dialogue, it feels jarring and anachronistic. With modern eyes and ears, our desire for realism and cynicism pervade new movie musicals.

Such things were unthinkable in the golden years. The purpose of the movie musical was to bring Broadway to Main Street. Hence, WEST SIDE STORY was not only co-directed by its original director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, but it was designed to capture and share the sensibility of the original show. In other words, these musicals looked stagey on purpose to remind viewers they were watching theatre. This can look strange and unfilmic, and many of them have not aged well despite the source material’s longevity. It’s no wonder then that the best movie musical of all time, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, was conceived as a film first.

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However, there is a genre of movie musical that didn’t exist in the heyday of the movie musical, one that could possibly redeem the whole enterprise. That genre is the musical concert film. Rather than giving the show a makeover, a documentarian simply captures the excitement of a live Broadway performance with few compromises. Adding in advancements in camera technique, these films can often feel more dynamic and in-the-moment than their narrative film counterparts.

While Rob Marshall’s hiring is good news, for many the idea of an INTO THE WOODS movie seems redundant since its concert film starring Bernadette Peters is already definitive. Similarly, on DVD, you can see Bernadette and Mandy Patinkin in SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and Angela Lansbury in SWEENEY TODD, all in their original glories. Experiencing closing night of RENT is a bittersweet sight to behold, and the brilliant but seldom seen rock musical PASSING STRANGE will live on forever as a Spike Lee joint. While the chance of one of these becoming a blockbuster or Oscar-winner is slim to none, they do offer musical lovers what they long for within Netflix’s long tail: to see these stories told as if they mattered.

What the playwright doesn’t (shouldn’t?) know…

So, a week or so ago, I just happened to show up in a classroom on the USC campus, where Brighde Mullins, director of the Master of Professional Writing Program, who was filling in for a friend who teaches in the theatre school, had invited her colleague Jon Robin Baitz to chat with a class of four writers. Sometimes you only have to show up—and what happens?—other people show up, too. Just moments after I sat myself down, in came Gordon Davidson, the founding artistic director of L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and Baitz’s original mentor. Baitz has gone on to win multiple honors and awards since they first worked together, not just for his plays, but for his achievement in film and television, too. Still, he considers himself a man of the theatre–his latest, Other Desert Cities, on its way to Broadway this fall. Here’s what Ben Brantley said in the New York Times about the “seriously satisfying” production at Lincoln Center at the beginning of the year.

“…this is a work in which not only every performance but also every character is created equal. Mr. Baitz makes sure our sympathies keep shifting among the members of the wounded family…Every one of them emerges as selfish, loving, cruel, compassionate, irritating, charming and just possibly heroic.”

And this is what Baitz said when I asked what he knows about his story and his characters before he begins a new project:

“I’ll tell you what I don’t know. I don’t know who’s wrong.”

For Baitz, the key to good dramatic writing is ‘psychological sophistication’—an understanding of human behavior, and most especially the ways in which we contradict ourselves. “I’m interested in ambivalence,” he said, and  he riffed around the idea that every playwright has his preoccupations and his themes. If Albee wants us to know that “life is brutal and short,” and Miller emphasized that, “attention must be paid,” Baitz himself is consumed with the idea that “hidden truths hurt.”

My own daughter, who is finishing her junior year of college with an English major, studied plays and playwriting at the British American Drama Academy last fall, more because she was determined to be in London, than because she was interested in theatre. But the immersion informed her sensibility in ways she hadn’t anticipated. It turned out, she recently wrote, that her courses allowed her to understand the genre “…in a new way: not as simple story-telling, but as a chance to experience a different world in stunning detail. I began to see plays as forays into other people’s lives, and the only way to do them justice was to get every last detail right.” Who cannot learn from theatre as literature? What writer or reader, in any genre, shouldn’t concern himself with specificity, and ambivalence, and the truth, hidden or glaring him down?

What else did Baitz and Davidson and Mullins discuss? The value of a mentor. Brighde asked how one play might inspire another, and Davidson affirmed that when he chooses to work with a writer, their relationship is as much about the plays not yet written, as the one they are currently workshopping. Baitz agreed that to have a safe home at the Taper when he was starting out had made all the difference. As the director and the writer recalled their long association, and how each production owed something to previous one, Davidson insisted, “Sequence is important.” Which, along with much else I heard in the course of the afternoon, is worth keeping in mind whether we write plays, poems, stories, or essays.

Whatever we’re working on–however difficult or frustrating or successful it does or doesn’t turn out to be–it’s essential to the next thing, isn’t it?