One of the great comedies in the history of theater, produced first in 1773, seen by me in live production once, at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival iOne of the great comedies in the history of theater, produced first in 1773, seen by me in live production once, at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1972, and now again I listened to in a LA Theater Works audiotaped live production featuring, among other people Joanne Whaley and James Marsters (known best to me as Spike in the Buffy the Vampire TV series). Wonderful production. It was initially titled Mistakes of a Night and has been adapted several times into films.
As always seems to be the case in classic canonical comedies, such as School for Scandal, School for Wives, and so on, this play features two brash young men seeking the hands (or whole bodies, let's be honest) of two women. Charles Marlow is free and easy with working class women, but he stumbles around women of his own class. He approaches Kate Hardcastle assuming she is a barmaid, but it is actually she who has "stooped" from her upper crust life to "conquer" Marlow.
Marlow, tricked by his friend Tony, is operating under the false assumption that the Hardcastle house is actually an inn, and so he is rude, but we laugh at his class arrogance, as over time others are in on the trick and they all have him as the butt of their jokes. So it's a bit of a comedy of manners where we learn of the double standard some rich folks have for the poor, which Goldsmith endeavors to point out and correct. I liked it a lot, again!...more
One of my the great masterpieces of world theater history, one of three or four of such plays that Molière wrote in 1664, but The Church objected to iOne of my the great masterpieces of world theater history, one of three or four of such plays that Molière wrote in 1664, but The Church objected to its characterizations of (supposedly) religious people, and threatened excommunication to anyone associated with it, including the by-then-already esteemed playwright. So he took five years to tone it down by working with the Church censors, but it was nevertheless immediately a world-wide success when it was finally released.
Tartuffe is also subtitled in some editions as an "imposter" or a "hypocrite." He's pretending to be pious, and some characters in the play believe him, though most do not. Early on in the play his true moral character is much the subject of debate, as he does not appear on stage for a long time. Orgon is on the side of admiring him, to the amazement of the majority of those who know him, and he decides to marry off his daughter to Tartuffe. His daughter is one of those that sees through (the much older, and insufferably boring) Tartuffe's hypocrisy, so she is adamant not to marry him, and besides, she is in In Love with Another.
If we had any doubts about the issue of Tartuffe's true moral character, we watch as he attempts to seduce Orgon's wife, as he would prefer to marry her than her daughter. When his wife reports this news to Orgon, he refuses to believe her, privately signing off all his worldly goods to Tartuffe, though he confidently agrees to hide and listen in as his wife arranges a meeting with Tartuffe, who of course reveals his True (Dastardly) Purpose.
“Evil exists only when it's known. Adam and Eve were public in their fall. To sin in private is not to sin at all!”
Orgon is now finally convinced he was wrong about Tartuffe, but it appears too late to undo his own folly as he had indeed signed over his daughter and everything else to Tartuffe, who gives him 24 hours to vacate the premises. A last minute deus ex machina act of the King prevents his ruin, and allows his daughter to marry her True Love. It's a comedy, and all's well that ends well, which is to say happily, so we forgive the playwright for this sudden turn of events. We want the young woman to marry for love, and who she wants to marry, not the hypocrite Tartuffe!
Why is this so good? You know, Molière had in previous plays been working on buffoonish male characters such as Orgon who insist on complete control of women's lives, but are easily duped. Hypocrites such as Tartuffe abound in Molière, but this is just better written, funnier, obviously a playwright coming in to his prime. See it if you can! The production I heard is part of the LA Theaterworks Molière series, starring Brian Bedford, in an amazing translation by Richard Wilbur. I first saw it at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival Theater also starring Bedford in 1983! So good! on to The Misanthrope!...more
To "bunbury" is to create a fictitious scenario that provides an excuse for avoiding unwanted engagements; it was coined by Oscar Wilde, who uses his To "bunbury" is to create a fictitious scenario that provides an excuse for avoiding unwanted engagements; it was coined by Oscar Wilde, who uses his "sick friend Bunbury" as just such an excuse in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Bunbury, the play, is a clever farcical story about the fictional character Bunbury (who never of course appears in Wilde's play because he is twice removed from reality!) realizing he is fictional, and seeking out other, similar excuses for dramatic action, such as Juliet's cousin Rosaline, the ex of Romeo. Other such characters appear along the way who have been similarly (ab)used as convenient plot devices.
The subtitle of the play says it is a serious play for trivial people, a Wildean reversal on the truth, as you really need to have read or seen the other works of literature to fully appreciate the play's cleverness, but most of the refs are not really obscure.
It reminds me of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where those two interchangeable characters, seemingly peripheral but actually important in the plot of Hamlet, provide a somewhat serious reflection on what it means to be us, minor characters in the world drama, not royalty, not famous players such Hamlet or the President of the United States. Plot devices in someone else's play, the world stage.
Anyway, Bunbury (the play) is pretty funny, but more importantly, you now have a name for that lie you told in order to get out of that party....more
Just as a kind of break from my current, typical areas of reading, I thought I would listen to a play by Moliere, his first, published in 1665. I haveJust as a kind of break from my current, typical areas of reading, I thought I would listen to a play by Moliere, his first, published in 1665. I have loved reading and seeing productions of his more famous plays over the years, always hilarious, but this was my first experience with this play. It’s inspired by the Italian Comedia dell'arte, and bears some resemblance to some of Shakespeare’s comedies. I listened to as part of The Molière Collection, a digital audiobook by L.A. Theater Works of performances of six plays using Richard Wilbur's translations. The translations involve intricately and delightfully written couplets and the rhyming adds to the farce.
In 17th Century Sicily, a valet named Mascarille tries to help his boss Llie win the girl of his dreams only to find that Llie is a bungler who ruins every one of his intricate schemes. The schemes get more and more elaborate, and fail every time, because of the dimwitted Llie. This is not as good as Moliere’s more mature plays, but it’s still funny. I recommend listening to it and the whole collection I’ll work my way through. ...more
I may never have fully appreciated Andy Kauffman, though this was especially true of his later work, when he was wrestling women and saying demeaning I may never have fully appreciated Andy Kauffman, though this was especially true of his later work, when he was wrestling women and saying demeaning things about them, though this could indeed have been a commentary on machismo wrestling culture, I was never sure. I loved—as his mother did—his Elvis impersonations. At the risk of sounding hopelessly conventional, I very much liked his role of Latka on Taxi. I never knew at the time that he was seriously into professional wrestling, so when he went to Memphis in wrestling arenas to disdain southern “hick” culture, I thought I got that.
I had studied Lenny Bruce as a comedian who would move from political humor to anger--hey, is this comedy?!--but I couldn’t quite fully tolerate whatever point Kauffman was making as he worked to actually get audiences to hate him. Was he seriously unbalanced? When I heard he died of cancer at 35 I, like many people, thought it was one of his put-ons.
Box Brown, in this very sympathetic comics biography, helps us appreciate Kauffman as a basically good guy (okay, there’s some exceptions, for balance, some of them based in Las Vegas. . .) who was a brilliant comic innovator, and in the process I was both informed and convinced. Brown did another biography about pro wrestling, about Andre the Giant, which I also liked very much, but this is even better, more deeply researched. I think this is his best work so far.
The sixth and final play in the LA Theater works collecti0n of audiotaped productions of Moliere plays, all feLe Misanthrope ou l’Atrabilaire amoureux
The sixth and final play in the LA Theater works collecti0n of audiotaped productions of Moliere plays, all featuring the amazing translations of Richard Wilbur and featuring the M0liere whiz Brian Bedford as a main character, in this instance The Misanthrope himself, Alceste. I actually saw Brian B3edford perform this role in 1981 at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival Theater!
The six plays I listened to include The Bungler, The Imaginary Cuckold, The School for Husbands, The School for Wives, Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. The latter two are seen as two of the best comedies in the history of theater. All of the plays focus on the hypocrisy of men in power. Usually at the expense of women they tend to disrespect at their peril. Moliere wrote the plays with the key comedic role played by him, as he was one of the premier comic actors of his time.
The Misanthrope is about a guy who mocks/disdains almost everything in society, but he’s worse than most, so he gets his come-uppance in the end. He’s run out of town, if not tarred and feathered:
“Betrayed and wronged in everything, I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king, And seek some spot unpeopled and apart, Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart.”
Why is this better than the early ones? Because he has become a better writer, crafting real characters with complexity and depth and not just silliness. See it if you can!...more
“Heaven just got funnier, RIP” #DickGregory DL Hughley
Gregory, dead at 84, 8/19/17, was a ground-breaking comedian and a civil rights activist.
"Good e“Heaven just got funnier, RIP” #DickGregory DL Hughley
Gregory, dead at 84, 8/19/17, was a ground-breaking comedian and a civil rights activist.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night. . ."
Nigger, his memoir, is painfully hilarious. I read it in a high school sociology class with other books such as Black Like Me and Malcolm X's Autobiography. He dedicated the book to his mother:
"Dear Momma--Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember, they are advertising my book."
"In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun, but we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country."
Comedy Thriller Daiquiri, With a Dash of Shakespeare?
“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations. . . IComedy Thriller Daiquiri, With a Dash of Shakespeare?
“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations. . . I don't think even my country means all that much. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”—Beatrice, to Wormold
Okay, this may not be one of the very best of Graham Greene novels, but in re-reading it after all these years I appreciated so much what a great writer can do with a lesser/lighter story. Greene made distinctions between his books that some of us might contend with; he divides his fiction writing between novels (serious stuff) and “entertainments,” and this book he puts in the latter category, but I’d say it was better written than most novels anywhere. Why be a snob about your own spy thrillers and mysteries?! This is really good!
Our Man in Havana takes place during the Batista regime, 1958, one year before the Castro Revolution, some years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, but presaging all this in some ways. Greene had been a journalist in Havana. What did he know?! Well, what we know he knows is Catholicism and guilt and anguish, in masterpieces such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, but in Havana (and some other books) Greene here also reveals he knows his thrillers, opening surprisingly with clever humor, turning (deadly) serious in the end. Is this Greene’s ode to Hitchcock?
Wormold is a British ex-pat selling vacuum cleaners—and not very well—in Havana, with his daughter Millie who may want to be a nun but seems like an unlikely candidate, spending most of Dad’s money and hanging around with admiring males. So when the British Secret Service comes to conscript him to play a role in the anti-Commie cause, he reluctantly agrees, though as with selling vacuum cleaners, he doesn’t know how to do it, really. Desperate to get paid, he fabricates “reports” he conveys to MI6 in code using Charles Lamb’s Tale of Shakespeare. He takes photographs of vacuum cleaner parts and sends them with the cryptic Lamb/Shakespeare quotes back to London. This seems to work out pretty well, until it doesn’t, and some serious things happen to put the stop to the laughs, veering the tale in the direction of dark farce.
And then, there's this kind of prophetic aspect to the farce that emerges: Just a couple of years after the publication of this seemingly silly book Greene would appear to have known something, in that the Russians may have actually been building missile sites aimed at the US. Goofy Wormold "made-up" stories that ended up becoming actually true, in the end!
So: Wormold is a bad vacuum-cleaner salesman as spy. But he’s not quite a spy. And Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare is not really quite Shakespeare. The lust that Chief of Police Segura has for Millie is not quite love. The truths in Havana emerge out of shadows. We or they can’t always tell the real from the artificial. These twists and turns make their way into turns of phrase, told in the form of oxymoronic ironies and contradictions:
“As long as nothing happens anything is possible. . . ”
“You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”
“As long as you lie, you do no harm.”
“Don’t learn from experience, Millie.”
“Isn’t it wonderful that you always get what you pray for?”
“I believe you exist, so you do.”
That’s the real pleasure in Greene here: The language and logic play, with moral implications under all the cleverness. Oh! Right! Besides giving a nod to Hitchcock, I see it’s an ode to Shakespeare as master of language as well! And then, there are layers of that send-up of the politics of the situation that led to the ridiculous and dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. I really liked this and have ordered the movie with Alec Guinness as Wormold....more