Presidential Death-Match Aaron Garrett Presidential Death-Match Aaron Garrett

Indies: Populists v the West

We know that no third party or independent has ever successfully become president- but not for lack of trying! Aaron and Dennis begin to take a look at the 1950s and beyond during a time of fringe candidates fighting for the restoration of segregation (and other melancholy times)!

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Aaron Garrett Aaron Garrett

Painting You (William Finn) and Waiting for Philip Glass (Wendy Wasserstein)

With these final two pieces we’ve reached the end of Love’s Fire a night of theater based off Shakespearean Sonnets which, from my vantage point, is not as exciting as it could have been.

Then again, I’m looking for humor, and not everyone wants to supply that.

Arguably these two authors, William Finn and Wendy Wasserstein, are the ones I’m most aware of (with the exception of Tony Kushner,) and their styles are much more similar to mine.

William Finn decides to produce his work as a song, which does make it difficult to parse (at least for me.) It’s a short piece, barely two pages of lyrics, describing the… woe? acceptance? nonchalance? of a painter presented with painting his subject/lover. He finds that he is much less able to do so than he was when they began their relationship.

I’ve said before that Tuesdays are hard for understanding because I get so little sleep, and today I was challenged (though pleasantly so) to understand the why of what’s happening. The painter has lost objectivity, and although he likes the relationship that has caused this he is worried about the loss of identity and nuance that comes from being able to ply his trade.

It is the best that it can be, I think: evocative, simple, elegant, and I think it would gain much from the staging.

Wasserstein’s Waiting for Philip Glass is something else altogether. A wealthy person throws a party for other wealthy people so they can appreciate, support, and hobknob with Philip Glass. Over the course of the short play people enter and exit, often being snarky about whomever has just left the room, and being frankly disgusting with the level of wealth “pop over to Spain to see the opening in Bilbao” is a sentiment expressed multiple times.

It eventually settles into a tense conversation between two ex-lovers (the host and a guest) and their shared disappointment over what happened, and their shared disapproval of their ex-partners’ new partner.

I loved every moment of the piece, but it felt like it didn’t resolve into anything, as though it were always right on the cusp of making its point, but in the end perhaps all it wanted to do was show something true and not comment on it (which historically makes me crazy, but I’m growing peaceful with that lately.)

At the end of the day Love’s Fire is a night of theater which doesn’t ignite anything in me, and I think it shows the limitations of an anthology by several writers: in the absence of a cohesive vision each writer looks to their bag of tricks which makes everything stand out, but rarely gel.

If my barometer for what makes a good sketch show is akin to a cubist painting: we have one subject (in this case romantic love) looked at from many different perspectives. In this collection we see jealousy, ecstasy, change, and neurosis, but I couldn’t say I’ve walked away from the collection with any new thoughts on the subject and so I think it is something of a let down.

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Moon Over Buffalo (Ken Ludwig), Lady Windermere's Fan & A Woman of No Importance (Oscar Wilde)

I originally slated these for separate posts, but after thinking on it realized that much of my thoughts echoed across them.

Both Moon Over Buffalo and A Woman of No Importance can be seen as moderate retreads of the author’s earlier successes (Lady Windermere’s Fan and Lend Me a Tenor) and the author’s in general can be seen as having a wide number of works without having a breadth in the variety of their work (at least according to me).

Which is to say Oscar Wilde does what Oscar Wilde does and is (mostly) celebrated for it, while Ken Ludwig applies his Ludwiggian filter and has also met with success (though probably not immortality).

At its best a formula can be seen as revelation rather than recipe and while many times the ire of people who lament artists “playing the same character” or “writing the same play” puts the blame on those artists- they just don’t have the talent, the ideas, or the bravery to try something else- I think this trend is just as well explained in the concept of audience capture.

The world is an uncaring place- it wants entertainment, and it extracts all it can. It can reward handsomely but can just as quickly turn its back on you. Artists, therefore, can easily be pigeonholed by the audience and be unable to find success (or support) outside of the niche they first gained prominence in. This is audience capture.

Ken Ludwig had dozens of unsold plays, rejected from everywhere and everyone, then he wrote Lend Me a Tenor- a bold farce about the backstage antics of an opera company struggling to cover up for the supposed death of their bank-making star. This catapulted Ludwig to fame and fortune on Broadway (such as it exists there). Is it any wonder that his future projects would play to the same crowd? It may be that he only knows how to tell one story. It’s equally likely that the world only wants to hear one story from him.

So too Oscar Wilde, who has one schtick (verbal reversal) which he applies constantly, often to great affect! The reason his plays are still revered is they still hit us in the same spot they used to.

Is this a problem? Hard to say. It’s almost like asking for substitutions on a burger, you can find the play that best suits your interests, theater on-demand. For my money I tend to tire of the Wilde Bon Mots quickly and Ludwig isn’t nearly as funny as he once was to me, but all three of the plays have something to recommend them.

Moon Over Buffalo
The basic Ludwig scheme is a tug-of-war between stability and normalcy or wacky and surprising, characters choosing or wanting to choose a “normal” life and being drawn back into a “wild” one, usually involving the arts in someway. Other traditional conceits are broken engagements, family strife, and people thinking they could be something if someone would give them a shot.

You can see this in Lend Me a Tenor, its distaff counterpart Lend Me a Soprano, Fox on the Fairway, Leading Ladies, and, of course, Moon Over Buffalo.

The Hays are an old theater couple who lost their shot at making it big in Hollywood a few years ago. They’re touring the provinces and have landed in Buffalo doing Cyrano and Private Lives. Their daughter has come to visit to introduce them to her new fiancee, and also runs into her old fiancee, who has started working for the Hays. A serious of contrived events (it is a farce after all) occurs sweeping through infidelity, mistaken identity, drunkenness, and divorces. In the end everyone is more or less ok, but the daughter has well and truly been drawn back into the world of theater.

Moon Over Buffalo has often been touted to me as the superior play to the better known Lend Me a Tenor, and I do have to agree that it seems like a tightened and cleaned version, the jokes are a little faster, tighter, involve more of the cast, etc. What it lacks, which Lend Me A Tenor has, is a neat moral to hang your hat on: whereas Max learns to believe in himself, no one in Moon Over Buffalo is asked to learn anything, and they don’t. They have a weird day that they then recover from.

Ultimately I didn’t learn much from it, though I am mighty tempted to produce it one day.

Lady Windermere’s Fan & A Woman of No Importance
I’m sure, I know, that entire graduate thesis can be hung on either one of these plays, but I have neither the time nor inclination to do so. Brief words on both will likely suffice since people are going to go and do Earnest anyway.

If Ludwig focuses on the tension between stability and the wondrous, Wilde focuses on what is proper and the lies and pain that can be hidden in tact. All of his characters are terribly considered with what is proper, what ought to be proper, what is boring, what is right, and reading his characters it becomes clear that Wilde would have had a brilliant career in the 90’s as an observational comic saying why men and women are different.

Although properly classified as a comedy of manners, and not as reliant on speed and hijinks as a farce, these plays have a similar love of contrivance as a farce.

Lady Windermere’s Fan concerns the titular character wrestling with doubting her husband’s fidelity after she learns that he has been spending time and money on a woman of limited esteem. He invites her to a party and through a series of situations the lady (Erlynne) covers for Windermere in a compromising situation and it is learned that she is Windermere’s mother who abandoned her at a young age. Erlynne has presumably been blackmailing Lord Windermere to keep this under wraps and her marriage to Lord Augustus at the end of the play ensures that this will happen.

This play has a remarkable amount of pathos and subtext absent in Earnest which I responded quite well to. The mystery is explained tediously by today’s standards, but the edgelordiness of the young Wilde and the variety of ways one can take the motivations of the characters created a show I liked much more by the end than at the beginning.

Wilde seems to stuck to the basic idea in A Woman of No Importance which can mostly be summarized as “long lost dad wants to get back into son’s life secretly”. While being far from boring it did take a much longer time to resolve into a coherent plot, being distracted as it was by all the quips flying back and forth. Is there more to say on this? Nothing truly speeds to mind.

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