Category: Smoke and Mirrors

[From New York Press, April 8, 2003]

Vincent in Brixton
at the Golden Theater

My Life With Albertine
at Playwrights Horizons

Vincent in Brixton, Nicholas Wright’s sentimental biodrama about the year and a half that Vincent van Gogh spent living in London in his early twenties, is one of those plays that seem to believe that if we knew what happened to a great artist, we could understand his genius. The play, which Lincoln Center is presenting at the Golden Theater, is set in the period from 1873 to 1876 and concerns the relationship between van Gogh and the inhabitants of a house in South London where he boarded for about a year: the owner of the house, Mrs. Loyer (Clare Higgins), her daughter (Sarah Drew) and another lodger, a class-conscious young man named Sam Plowman (Peter Starrett) who works as a house-painter/carpenter while he waits to be accepted at art school.

Plowman’s name is a matter of historical record. According to Wright, the number of the Hackford Road boardinghouse where van Gogh lived and the identities of its other inhabitants were determined by an enterprising London postman during the postal strike of 1971. But it is Wright who gives Mrs. Loyer’s second lodger Marxist views and dreams of becoming a painter, just as he posits a clandestine affair between Vincent and his landlady, to whom he ascribes a passionate devotion to art and a longing to be the cause of someone’s greatness. She is something of an intellectual (she reads George Eliot but scorns Dickens) and something of a free spirit (she lets her daughter and Sam share a bed without benefit of clergy). She is also given to wild mood swings and bouts of depression—of the very sort, funnily enough, that will dog van Gogh in later life.

One day, when Mrs. Loyer thinks she is alone in the house, Vincent comes upon her weeping and banging her head on the kitchen table, and before you can say “peri-menopausal,” he’s declaring his affections. Mrs. Loyer takes him to bed, and pretty soon she has discarded the widow’s weeds she’s worn for fifteen years and is flouncing about in pretty frocks. It’s a May-August romance—Mrs. Loyer appears to be somewhere in her forties—but Wright and his characters all treat it like a May-December romance. Not since the quickening of Sarah’s womb in Genesis has literature made such an issue of a woman’s age. “Do you know how old I am, Mr. Vincent?” Mrs. Loyer asks self-mockingly. “I love your age. I love your unhappiness,” he replies—which is as much as to say, “You’re only as old as you feel.”

Vincent in Brixton is largely based on van Gogh’s letters and on a memoir that Theo’s wife, Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger, wrote after the death of both brothers. In a program note, the playwright states that his version of events was suggested by “a mysterious six-month gap” in van Gogh’s letters home from London and by what he coyly refers to as “the well-known tendency of young men writing home to be less than frank about their most formative experiences.”

But Wright was almost certainly inspired, too, by a truly curious aspect of Johanna’s memoir, which, along with most of the letters, is available online. Johanna recounts how Vincent, on first arriving in London, lived in a boardinghouse run by two women who kept parrots but moved—because the place was “somewhat expensive”—to the house of a Mrs. Loyer, “a curate’s widow from the south of France, who with her daughter Ursula ran a day school for little children.”

Actually, Ursula was the name of the mother. The daughter’s name was Eugenie. Johanna goes on to say that Vincent “spent the happiest year of his life” chez Mrs. Loyer and that “Ursula made a deep impression on him.” According to Johanna, the key to Vincent’s happiness lay in the fact that he had fallen deeply in love with Mrs. Loyer’s daughter, whom she continues to refer to by her mother’s name.

He did not mention it to his parents, for he had not even confessed his love to Ursula herself—but his letters home were radiant with happiness. He wrote that he enjoyed his life so much—“Oh fullness of rich life, your gift O God.”

Vincent, Johanna reports, “celebrated a happy Christmas with the Loyers” that year, and “until spring his letters remained cheerful and happy.” Before summer, though, “he apparently spoke to Ursula of his love.”

Alas, it turned out that she was already engaged to the man who boarded with them before Vincent came. He tried everything to make her break this engagement, but did not succeed. With this first great sorrow his character changed; when he came home for the holidays he was thin, silent, dejected—a different being. But he drew a great deal.

The source of Johanna’s confusion over Eugenie’s name appears to be a letter that Vincent’s eldest sister, Anna, wrote to Theo in early January of 1874. In it, she refers to Miss Loyer as Ursula and quotes a letter from Vincent in which he does the same. It’s an odd document—all about how he and “Ursula” have agreed to regard one another as brother and sister, and how Anna should therefore love “Ursula” as a sister “for my sake,” but not imagine there is any more going on than meets the eye. Anna shares with Theo her speculation that there is a great deal more going on.

It’s possible, of course, that Anna herself was simply momentarily confused about the two names and a careless copyist. (Another letter, dated six weeks later, gets the name right: “I also got a very kind letter from Eugenie; she seems to be a natural and amiable girl.”) But Wright, understandably, chooses to speculate that Vincent was covering up more than the extent of his feelings. Lectio difficilior potior, say the laws of textual criticism (“The more difficult reading is stronger”—or in this case more fun) and besides, there are intriguing references in the family letters about “living at the Loyers’ with all those secrets” and how theirs “was not a family like others.”

Unfortunately, Wright’s hypothesis has led him merely to banality. Nothing in his little potboiler would be expected to hold the smallest interest for us if it were not happening to a character named Vincent van Gogh. “All I wanted was…some day, somehow…to be the cause of something remarkable,” Mrs. Loyer laments late in the play. But for all her admiration of George Eliot, she is no Dorothea Brooke, and nothing Ms. Higgins can do can make her into one or keep her from being, as she describes herself, “rather dull in most of the ways that matter.”

After a year in the West End (where Higgins and the play both won Olivier Awards this year), it’s understandable that the performances of Ms. Higgins and Jochum ten Haaf, who plays van Gogh, should have lost some former subtlety, but I was unprepared for the wholesale decline into broad comedy and histrionics that Richard Eyre, who also directed the play in London, seems to have allowed. Ms. Drew and Mr. Starrett seem like a breath of fresh air every time they appear, but then, they joined the cast in New York, as did Liesel Matthews, who may make the role of a stupid, small-minded and officious sister of Vincent’s—the Anna of the letters—even more maddening and repulsive than the playwright intended.

Or not. Wright portrays Vincent as a stereotypical Dutchman: dim, humorless, literal-minded—a sort of meta-stereotype, actually, since on top of being tactless and obtuse he’s always talking about being tactless and obtuse. Mr. ten Haaf underscores what’s in the script without filling in any details or nuance. “How,” the play seems to ask, “did such a conventional, unimaginative fellow ever become Vincent van Gogh?” Wright’s answer: by channeling his landlady’s depression.

Another production that seemed to expect us to salivate over the idea of the genius-artist was My Life with Albertine. A musical by Richard Nelson (book and lyrics) and Ricky Ian Gordon (music and lyrics) based on the “Albertine” portions of Remembrance of Things Past, it had a brief run last month at Playwrights Horizons and was a big disappointment. Say what you like about the idea of adapting Proust for the stage, I had high hopes of the project. The reasons against musicalizing Proust are fairly obvious. I was curious about Nelson’s reasons for doing it. The minute his name is joined with an unlikely project, in my view, it ceases to be unlikely and becomes intriguing. And Nelson has written with subtlety about several of Proust’s themes: the pretensions of bourgeois art-lovers (Some Americans Abroad), sexual awakening (Franny’s Way), and the tragic results of allying our lives too closely with art (Two Shakespearean Actors).

Actually, there are a number of reasons why Proust, like the Dubliners story, might lend itself to music-theater. The symphonic structure of the novel is a commonplace, but listening to parts of it read aloud, not long ago, I found myself struck by the fact that the novel is about the same things that music is about: memory, time and emotion. Moreover, what makes it so long, the digressions—those endless, page-long single-sentence paragraphs—make Proust’s prose itself innately musical. Music itself is an inherently digressive form.

Digression implies a return to the stated subject, though, which is why Ricky Ian Gordon was absolutely the wrong composer for this project. He writes bloodless, aggressively cerebral music that goes out of its way to thwart audience expectation—more often than not, by avoiding melodic and harmonic resolution. It’s a kind of music that Sondheim is often blamed for (unjustly) and that can only be redeemed if the lyrics are, like Sondheim’s, truly stunning—if their cleverness and sophistication are equal to the score. The lyrics for Albertine weren’t.

I have neither the space nor the inclination to whale on a playwright for whom I have as much respect as I do Nelson. Suffice it to say that I wish the piece had evoked a sense of time and place as beautifully as Thomas Lynch’s set did; that Chad Kimball, who played the young Marcel, seemed inappropriate for the role in every way; that it’s always a pleasure to see Brent Carver, who played the older Marcel (designated The Narrator); and that Kelli O’Hara brought a lovely stillness and simplicity to the role of Albertine.

I like the idea of making Marcel a composer and having the whole thing be a play within a play, but I wish it were being performed in the home of vulgar, bourgeois art-lovers, like the Verdurins, who would be always commenting and always missing the point. I think it’s a song-cycle, myself. But, like the fellow says, the desire to rewrite someone else’s play is the second most basic of all human urges.

New York Press, April 8, 2003

[From New York Press, March 18, 2003]

Stephen Adly Guirgis, John Patrick Shanley and Frank McGuinness

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at—a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby or a parochial school lounge. What’s curious is that the set should be so realistic, when—as the young men behind me were saying—we’re almost never supposed to take it literally. It’s there because most of the characters in Guirgis’s play have come to pay their respects to a teacher at the Catholic school they all attended. But Guirgis’s script seems, with the help of James Vermeulen’s artful lighting, to be forever taking us away from that room and relocating us in some even more transient place—a street corner, a confessional, a bar.

Guirgis’s characters are themselves transients of a sort. They’re latter-day O’Neill characters, damaged, disappointed and dispossessed: hookers and ex-hookers, alcoholics and lungers (well anyway, there’s an asthmatic), a closeted homosexual, an apostate amputee priest, a cop haunted by the moment of abstraction that led to his small son’s death, a man chained to his brain-damaged brother—you get the idea. Actually, Guirgis’s characters are more interesting than O’Neill’s. For one thing, they don’t keep saying the same thing over and over. Instead, they say things we haven’t heard before or have never heard expressed in quite that way. Also, they resist pity. Where O’Neill intends us to see his characters as tragic ruins of humanity, Guirgis writes in a way that commands respect rather than compassion for his characters, and he has no grand portentous literary agenda, both factors that keep his play from being a pretentious downer.

Our Lady of 121st Street was written for the LAByrinth Theater, where it was first produced last fall. Guirgis’s two earlier plays were both written for the LAByrinth as well; in fact, it was the actors John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman, co-artistic directors of the decade-old theater company, who encouraged Guirgis to begin writing for the stage. Since then, the New York Times seems to have anointed him God’s latest gift to American theater. No matter. Our Lady of 121st Street is worth seeing anyway.

One reason is that it’s full of wonderful voices. Another is that the LAByrinth seems to be fast becoming what Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater was to American theater in the 80s, not only a source for interesting new work but also the source of something like an esthetic. Originally founded as a sort of haven of artistic ethnicity (the acronym in the name stands for “Latino Actors Base”), LAByrinth has begun setting a standard for direction and ensemble performance that makes a good deal of what’s around it look phony, if it didn’t already look that way before.

Some of this is surely due to Hoffman, who has staged Our Lady with the same integrity and exquisite skill that informed his direction of Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living in 2001 and his own performances in such roles as the drag queen protagonist of Joel Shumacher’s film Flawless and Konstantin in Mike Nichols’ production of The Seagull in Central Park. Here, Hoffman has orchestrated a cast of twelve, the best of whom all seem to be company members: Elizabeth Canavan, Liza Colon-Zayas, Ron Cephas Jones, Russell G. Jones, Richard Petrocelli, Portia, Felix Solis, David Zayas—they’re too numerous to mention, but they’re all wonderful.

Our Lady of 121st Street resists the conventions of the various genres it draws upon; and, let’s face it, it contains elements of the reunion play, the nun play, even the wheelchair play—all justly despised forms. No one really gets reunited (or even reconciled) and nothing gets reaffirmed (or even affirmed). Nothing is resolved at all, and even poor Sister Rose—the disappearance of whose body provides the single strand of plot on which Guirgis has hung what amounts to a succession of wonderful episodes—remains largely unretrieved; at any rate, there’s less of her at the end than we started out with. It seems she has nothing more to offer her former pupils. One reason that ever-present set works so well is that it’s the play’s only concrete reference to the two things that have brought the characters together: death and the Catholic-school values they carry around with them wherever they go.

The latest from John Patrick Shanley, Dirty Story, which opened at the Harold Clurman the same week that Our Lady of 121st Street transferred to Union Square, is another LAByrinth production. To the best of my knowledge, it’s unlike anything Shanley’s ever done before, a political allegory that recasts American foreign policy and the Mideast conflict as a torrid love affair glimpsed through a gauzy veil of popular culture stereotypes. Whether you greet it with mirth or disgust will probably depend on how open-minded or confused you are about American foreign policy. I am the very soul of confusion, so I enjoyed it immensely.

Shanley has always had a gift for creating complex, idiosyncratic characters and setting them at odds with one another. Also for making neurosis both lyrical and surreal. Also for plumbing the deep recesses of fear and desire that drive heterosexual passions and hatreds. Shanley fans will rejoice to hear that none of these elements is absent from Dirty Story. They may also be glad to learn that the play reunites the wonderful David Deblinger and Florencia Lozano, who played the mutually murderous pair locked in a battle-to-the-death marriage in Where’s My Money? (also a LAByrinth production).

Here Deblinger is Brutus, a poet and essayist of gargantuan ego and intellectual capacity. Lozano is Wanda, a dewy-eyed graduate student and aspiring novelist who has sent him a manuscript. In the opening scene, set in a public park, Brutus eviscerates both Wanda and her novel, while a bumbling Englishman sits listening to Mozart on headphones, making alternately whingeing and inane observations. How quickly you begin reading between the lines will depend on how attuned you are to the potential layers of meaning in references to real estate and borders and seemingly inconsequential remarks like, “Even conflict requires common ground.” But even the most dogged hunter after subtext will become mystified when the second scene finds Wanda and Brutus in the midst of a romantic dinner at his place, and a comic bout of role-playing, growing out of a discussion of the sous conversation in “The Perils of Pauline,” turns sado-masochistically nasty.

I won’t describe the Act I curtain, though I probably could without spoiling the effect. My guess is that Dirty Story is probably critic-proof. There’s so much more going on in the play at any given moment than what is happening in the story that descriptions of this or that element leave it still-virgin territory. What delights is the phenomenon of experiencing the play on both levels, the human and the allegorical.

Act II is where the fun really starts, as Lozano and Deblinger, now full-fledged embodiments of the Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints, are joined by Chris McGarry and Michael Puzzo, playing two characters named Frank and Watson, who embody America and England respectively. Questions of self-interest and historical alliance, national guilt and moral responsibility briefly surface and disappear again, eclipsed by the flashes of rage that erupt from Deblinger and Lozano or engulfed by eddies of cluelessness that swirl around McGarry and Puzzo. Shanley isn’t for or against anything or anyone. His satire takes in everyone—us, the Brits, the Israelis, the Palestinians, even the French—and he gets everyone right, too. What makes it all so delightful and disarming—in every sense—is that he isn’t looking to make any political point. He has no agenda. Even here, it’s people he’s really interested in, with the result that the pseudo-human and pseudo-political aspects in the play shed light on each other.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, is a play that pays lip service to the idea of politics. An early work by the Irish playwright and screenwriter Frank McGuinness, it purports to explore the tragedy of the Western Front from the perspective of a platoon of Irish Protestant volunteers. In fact, McGuinness (himself a Catholic nationalist) merely uses the nationalistic and religious fervor of his characters as stepping stones on the way to the revelation that fanaticism leads to war which in turn breeds bigotry. (Who knew?)

The play’s only other apparent point—that some members of The Lost Generation were bent—will be equally unsurprising to Lincoln Center audiences (and anyone who’s ever heard of Siegfried Sassoon). McGuinness’ hero, Kenneth Pyper, a highly articulate—and unlikable, in Justin Theroux’s self-important performance—gay sculptor has cut short a sojourn in Paris on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, owing to a severe case of ennui. He aims to enlist in the hope of getting killed. Newly arrived at his barracks, he baits and provokes his less sophisticated comrades, seduces one, uncoils a bit, and eventually becomes less of an outsider. Meanwhile, there is much drum-beating and tub-thumping as well as prayer, hymn-singing. Incessant references are also made to the Red Hand of Ulster as well as her rivers, islands, battles, legends, archeology, and fraternal orders. It is all exceedingly tedious—the more so as Nicholas Martin has directed at a glacial pace. (The Titanic also gets considerable mention.)

It’s difficult not to draw an adverse comparison between Sons of Ulster and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, given the presence of the divine Richard Easton in the cast of the McGuinness play. It was Easton who gave such a haunting performance as the aged A.E. Houseman in Stoppard’s play last season. Here he’s utterly wasted playing Pyper at eighty, a role that gives him about five minutes on stage. Like Sons of Ulster, Stoppard’s play was full of esoterica—classical jokes and historical references. But Stoppard is actually interested in the abstractions he takes on. He dramatizes them for that very reason: to see where they will go. McGuinness’s play fails to dramatize or contextualize anything, so that we’re forced to fall back on the poorly written and edited program notes the Lincoln Center theater has provided, which (among other lapses) have the British following “the roles of trench warfare.” (Italics all mine.)

To my mind, the play also fails to make connections between elements in its own story. The “Carson” referred to in the phrase “Carson’s men,” for instance, which the program glosses Wikipedially as “Sir Edward Henry Carson…dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ulster,’ for opposing Home Rule…”) happens to be the same Edward Henry Carson who prosecuted Oscar Wilde (or, rather, defended Queensberry, which ended up amounting to the same thing). Yet McGuinness’s hero, an Irish homosexual artist who has spent time in Paris (where Wilde died and is buried) apparently knows nothing of this and lets the name pass without comment. I wonder what universe that would happen in.

There’s a bright golden haze on the medder—and on just about everything else in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma!—but it’s the hard, cold glint of lucre, not the burnished glow of harvest and renewal. This long-awaited production, which was hailed, when it opened four years ago at London’s Royal National Theatre, as a wholesale rethinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first-ever collaboration, arrives at the Gershwin looking strangely like a revival you might have expected to see at the Paper Mill Playhouse ten or fifteen years ago. It’s anxious to be liked but charmless, imitative rather than innovative or inventive, and very much of a piece with the poster art advertising the show here in New York—that garish computerized photo of a pretty, hay-sucking cowboy superimposed on a Chamber of Commerce vista of grass and sky. (The London artwork was more sophsticated.) Only two of the cast members from the RNT production appear here: Shuler Hensley, who plays the villainous hired hand Jud Fry as though he were playing Sparafucile, and Josefina Gabrielle, reprising her performance as an ingenue who might be a lot happier in a production of South Pacific.

So what gives? How could a production that caused such a stir over there be such a disappointment here?

A good deal seems to have hinged on casting. In London the role of Curly was played by the somber, laconic Australian actor Hugh Jackman, a then-newcomer who has since gone on to become something of a movie star. That he was sexy and smoldering and seemed innocent of Broadway-style vulgarity are easy things to imagine. (You can hear, on the London recording, how simply and unselfconsciously he sings; you can almost taste the absence of that dreadful Broadway ailment, a desire to please.) The young man who plays the role here in New York, Patrick Wilson, comes with a long string of regional and national-tour credits, as well as a recent stint in another big, boisterous musical (The Full Monty). Not surprisingly, he is about as laconic and unshowbiz as Ethel Merman.

It’s hard to imagine if you’ve never seen it happen how casting even a single role against expectation or tradition so as to distance it from a familiar style of performance can alter the terms of a piece of drama. That, certainly, was behind Nicholas Hytner’s casting of the leads in his 1993 “reinvention” of Carousel, which came to Lincoln Center the following year. Hytner cast Michael Hayden, a diminutive actor with virtually no training in musical theater as Billy Bigelow, and in New York, the unaffected but slightly mousy young Steppenwolf actress Sally Murphy as Julie Jordan. Opera aficionados beefed about the quality of their vocal skills. The fact was though, that with a runty Billy and an unglamorous Julie, the codependent relationship at the heart of the show became instantly intelligible.

The revival of Carousel had a great deal more going for it, though. What Hytner did, essentially, was bring to bear on a Broadway musical the same “close textual reading” that’s characterized British productions of Shakespeare for forty years. He looked at the show and determined, rightly, that on numerous levels it was really all about time—fleeting time, yawning time, seasons and ripeness, urgency and delay, nonfulfillment and the brevity of life. Time is everywhere in Carousel. It presides over the lyrics of all those songs about the future (“When I marry Mr. Snow…”, “When the children are asleep…,” “My  boy Bill will be tall…”); it is fractured by the bizarre structure and chronology of the show; and it teases our musical instincts and expectations with a barrage of melodic postponements, phrases that stave off resolution and hang tantalizingly suspended until the last possible moment. (Listen to “If I Loved You” again, if you don’t believe me.) it was all right there for anyone to see, and had been all along, but no one before Hytner had ever thought of making any of it visually explicit.

Following a design-to-text approach that had characterized mainstream British Shakespeare since the early 60s, Hytner devised a system of time-related imagery that grew out of the O of the carousel itself and informed and embraced the whole production.  Choreographing the overture—an unheard-of and dangerous thing to attempt—Hytner dressed the opening moments of the show in a succession of circles and revolves. It began with a giant illuminated clock on the wall of the textile mill where the girls worked—another first, bringing the factory onstage— giant illuminated face with moving hands before which a line of them sat working a loom. As the hands of the clock reached six, and the girls were let out of the mill, we watched the stage (itself a great revolve) become a world of circles and parts of circles-a bit of ironwork on the factory gates, the curve of a rail where the girls hung their coats, the slope of a hill, the bend of a white picket fence topping a rise. There was scarcely a curve that didn’t seem to echo the perfect O of the central image or the shape of the spinning earth, and when the lights of the carousel roof came down out of the flies at the climax of the overture, and a line of tiny matching lights appeared high up along the circumfrence of the Beaumont itself, it was as though Hytner had brought the theater within the embrace of this huge, turning world.

There’s nothing-nothing at all-even remotely like that in Nunn’s Oklahoma!, nothing visually interesting or enlightening, nothing that causes you to view the story in a different way or gives it a deeper meaning. None of the numbers have been noticeably reorchestrated or rearranged-the way Richard Eyre’s National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in the early 80s rethought “My Time of Day” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” the way Hytner reconceived “This Was a Real Nice Clambake.” With two exceptions-the overpowering Jud and a tomboyish Laurey-it’s all sub-Broadway casting and line-readings (or someone’s idea of them), every familiar pause or inflection, every hokey gesture in place. It’s a revival one could imagine oneself without going to the theater.

A number of things about this Oklahoma! were held up as noteworthy when it played in London. Jackman’s performance was one. Another was Nunn’s decision to throw out the old Agnes de Mille choreography and bring on board the American director-choreographer Susan Stroman. A third was Stroman’s notion of having the leading actors themselves dance the Dream Ballet, traditionally performed by dancers designated as “Dream Curly” and “Dream Laurey.” (Presumably, it was to this end that Gabrielle, a former soloist with the National Ballet of Portugal, was cast. Unfortunately, she’s not particularly enchanting to watch in motion. There are members of the female ensemble far lovelier and more graceful. Moreover, there’s a shrill quality to her singing voice.)

But the major claim made for the production-what led critics on both sides of the Atlantic to put it in a class with the Hytner revival-was Nunn’s putative discovery of a murky subtext, the idea that below the show’s ebullient surface ran a “dark” undercurrent expressive of a deep fear of sexuality and growing up. Accordingly, Nunn has Laurey tomboying it up in overalls and Stroman escalates the rape-fantasy implicit in the Dream Ballet into a full-scale sexual assault. Neither choice is particularly edifying.

In London, Stroman’s choreography won an Olivier award. Certainly it furnishes the show with its only high points. Best are the hoedown numbers, of course, but also the Dream Ballet is considerably less dated and cartoonish. Stroman has tried to revitalize some of the other dances as well, but often her approach has been to replace dance with dance-mime. This is nice for the kiddies but tough on the rest of us, and most of it’s jokey without being particularly witty or smart. And, alas, she hasn’t managed to solve the “chorus boy” problem. You never saw cowboys who looked so much like rough trade.

Anthony Ward’s scenic design relies heavily on the cinematic device where you keep showing the same landscape in different sizes and perspectives, like a series of establishing shots. (It’s a swell trick if you’ve never seen it before. Julie Taymor first used it in Juan Darien 14 years ago.) There’s also the obligatory Trevor Nunn turntable and a block of elephant’s-eye-level corn that came down out of the flies a few too many times for my liking.

For the rest, Andrea Martin’s Aunt Eller is unmemorable, Jessica Boevers’ Ado Annie downright vulgar and Justin Bohon’s Will Parker too young, too pretty and much, much too gay. More distressing is the performance Nunn has elicited from the writer-performer Aasif Mandvi as the “Persian” peddler, Ali Hakim. (New York audiences may remember Mandvi’s one-man, multicharacter play Sakina’s Restaurant, which the American Place Theater presented some years back.) I don’t know what possessed Nunn to reconceive this role, alone of all the roles in the show, or to think it wise to do so along racial lines. Perhaps he remembered the flap over Miss Saigon, 11 or 12 years ago, when he cast Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian. The idea here seems to have been to avoid casting an Anglo. Mandvi is Indian, though, not Iranian. He was born in Bombay.

I can’t help wondering, in any case, if the peddler is supposed to be a real “Persian” at all. The role was originally played by the great Yiddish actor Joseph Buloff, which would seem to suggest a mere Jew masquerading as an “exotic.” Certainly that would have been a better choice here. As it is, Nunn has Mandvi doing the worst sort of Stepin Fetchit acting, which really is racist, as well as being a betrayal of the actor’s considerable talents.

I don’t know that I buy this whole notion of a “dark” subtext to Oklahoma! anyway. I think it would be tough to find a Broadway musical whose fundamental discomfort with sex was less hidden. Nearly everything about Oklahoma! suggests a schoolyard mentality, from its childishly simple book and squabbling lovers to its all-or-nothing view of desire. Everyone in the world of the show is either virginal or promiscuous; there’s no in-between. Either interest in the opposite sex is absent or else it’s lewd. Because Jud has pictures of naked ladies up on the wall of the smokehouse, it follows that he must therefore be a psychopath. The gawping cowhands may giggle over Will Parker’s account of a burlesque show, and Aunt Eller may feign shock at the gizmo he brings back with him from Kansas City, through which scantily clad woman may be glimpsed, but the “Little Wonder” comes equipped with a hidden blade, capable of blinding or killing a man with the push of a button. The whole show-not just its heroine-wants to blot out the specter of desire. It’s all there in the score of the Dream Ballet: the music tells its own story.

[From New York Press, December 18, 2001]

Iwent to see the new Neil Simon play the other night. Oy, vhat an old-feshioned play! Even I don’ remembah ven dey yoosta produce plays like dis. Dey’s dis character in de show dat talks joost like dis on account he’s supposta be Jackie Mason de stend-up comic. He talks like dis all evenink long. So if dis don’ mek you leff, don’ go see de show—because this is about as funny as it gets.

45 Seconds from Broadway is set at the Cafe Edison, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Edison Hotel, also known as “the Polish tea room.” The Edison is located almost directly across the street from the Richard Rodgers Theater, where 45 Seconds is running—and that, except for a real live taxicab that rolls across the stage at rise of curtain, is about as close as the play comes to truth. Don’t, by the way, underestimate the thrill of seeing a real live taxi roll across a Broadway stage. It’s pretty terrific. Certainly it elicited little squeals of delight from me, and I clapped my fists together in girlish glee at the spectacle of John Lee Beatty’s recreation of 46th Street. What a wag that boy is!

On a wall of the coffee shop, a poster for David Auburn’s play Proof bearing the face of the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh tells us how up-to-the-minute the play is supposed to be. (Leigh only went into the show in September.) It’s too bad about the poster. It’s conceivable that 45 Seconds from Broadway might have had some charm if it were set twenty-five or thirty years ago. In a play that took place in 1970, Mickey Fox (the Mason sound-alike played by Lewis J. Stadler), Bernie, the gruff-but-kindly proprietor of the coffee shop (Louis Zorich), and Bernie’s wife, Zelda (Rebecca Schull), might have seemed like the avatars of a sweet, forgotten world (though actually even 1970 might be pushing it).

For most of the other characters in the play you’d probably have to go back to about 1964. These come in two varieties, stereotypical Jews and stereotypical non-Jews. The Jews include Bernie and Zelda (survivors of the camps, thankful for every day they’re alive); Mickey and his whiny, worshipful older brother Harry (David Margulies); and a pair of matinee matrons played by Judy Blazer and the usually droll Alix Korey, who overplays the notion of shrill vulgarity so ferociously here that she seems in danger of blowing the roof off the theater.

Among the non-Jews are an aspiring young playwright from South Africa (Kevin Carroll), proud but generally upbeat and respectful; a fresh-faced hopeful from the Midwest (Julie Lund) whose failed-actress mother still remembers Bernie and Zelda’s kindness from twenty years ago; a West End producer who wants Mickey to come to London in a show (he just adores New York and can’t seem to get enough of either Mickey or Jews); a plus-size blues singer (Lynda Gravatt) full of yo’-mama attitude and wisdom; and an old-money husband and wife (Bill Moor and Marian Seldes), the former of whom never speaks, while the latter suffers from a form of dementia that leads her to think herself always either at a cotillion or in a bar on the piccola marina. In most contemporary plays you would expect such characters to be angrier or better medicated.

Simon used to write characters. Now apparently he’s reduced to constructing plays around real-life celebrities. They’re not as interesting as real-life taxicabs. At any rate, his sanitized version of Jackie Mason isn’t. Simon seems to have missed the point about what makes Mason funny, which is the same thing that makes him interesting. It’s what folks who use twenty-dollar words call cognitive dissonance. Mason says mean, hostile things in that cute, cuddly voice. They’re objectionable things that often happen to be true, and because he says them in the funny voice, they’re more surprising and less objectionable than they might otherwise be. Simon’s Mickey Fox only says cute, cuddly things so there’s no dissonance, and not a whole lot that you could call cognitive, either.

In fact, there’s no dissonance anywhere in the play. You long for some dissonance—an unkind word, a barbed retort. Oh, how you long. But the play is all smarmy, showbiz warmth and heart. Everybody’s jovial and well-meaning, full of wide-eyed appreciation for everyone else. The oldsters want to help the youngsters, and the non-Jews want nothing more than to stand around contemplating the phenomenon of the cheese blintz. Conflict here—which rears its head only once, in the specter of Harry’s untalented lawyer son, who wants to be a comedian like his famous uncle, and whom Harry wants Mickey to take under his wing—is expressed entirely in terms of trips to the bathroom. (A late plot twist involving the sale of the coffee shop announces itself so clearly as a contrivance that poor Mr. Zorich seems embarrassed even performing it.) And everybody wins. Little Miss Hopeful gets a part, the South African writes a good play (about Mickey, of all people!) and hooks up with the producer, and it seems there will even be a part for the untalented nephew, whom Mickey has been coaching to do passable imitations of himself. Even Ms. Seldes’ psychopharmacologist comes through in the end.

Of course, Jackie Mason’s self-invented persona is a device, a construct built on the idea of out-caricaturing a caricature. If you exaggerate a stereotype, you can sometimes discredit it and disarm it. Mason is fond of pointing out to his audiences that nobody really talks the way he does, (a joke that Simon appropriates and defangs).

Mason’s stage-self, which may be no different by now from his real self, is really a hybrid made up of two very different and historically antithetical versions of the stage Jew. The old Elizabethan stage Jew had been a comic figure—part miser, part Satan (himself a comic character in medieval drama). His darker counterpart dates from 1741, when an actor named Charles Macklin insisted on performing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in place of a popular Restoration version of the play and reinvented the role of Shylock.

Macklin shocked audiences (and his fellow cast members) by playing the character as a realistic villain rather than a pantomime devil or a pantalone. In doing so, Macklin invented a new sort of stage Jew who partly survives today. Played straight, whether villain or tragic hero, Shylock is the embodiment of ugly, objectionable truth—and you can see this in any decent production of the play, even one as archly perverse as Trevor Nunn’s recent Royal National Theater version, which aired on Masterpiece Theater in October. Both in his person and his pronouncements, Shylock represents the harsh realities that the world at large would really rather have remain hidden (like Jews themselves) or at least not be made explicit—the need for money, for instance, and society’s hypocrisy in refusing to acknowledge that need.

Take from Shylock the element of usury, though—an aspect of the character that Shakespeare seems not to have been all that interested in anyway—and what you have is essentially the figure of the angry, truth-telling Jew. He’s a tragic figure, too clear-eyed and more candid than is healthy: a spirit of resentment and retribution with no retributive powers, a sort of non-Fury. That’s the interesting side of Jackie Mason—the subtext that Simon, perhaps understandably, purged from his play.

Off-Broadway audiences are encountering two rather intriguing versions of the stage Jew just now—the embittered older sister played by Robin Bartlett in the first act of Richard Greenberg’s ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling family saga Everett Beekin, and the demonic matrimonial lawyer played by David Deblinger in the last half of John Patrick Shanley’s Where’s My Money? Both characters are reality-mongers of the harshest variety, both endowed with a decidedly Jewish cast of mind, and both are portrayed with a loving attention to ethnic mannerism that keeps threatening to topple over into caricature but never does. Bartlett and Deblinger are engaging in a sort of actorly brinksmanship, a heightened realism that stops short of passing judgment on the characters or offering editorial commentary.

Lesser actors might have tried to distance themselves from these roles. Bartlett and Deblinger are both playing highly unpleasant people. Greenberg’s Sophie is a monster of inflected irony and over-interpretation, the sort of woman for whom schadenfreude is the breath of life, who can read negativity into the most neutral statement and detects slights wherever she looks. (She’s a literary descendant of the martyred mother in Neil Simon’s autobiographical Broadway Bound.) Shanley’s Sidney is a misogynist of epic proportions. He sees infidelity in marriage as a moral imperative and makes his perverse case for it with Talmudic thoroughness.

He’s a little like Milton’s Satan or the Vice figure in Medieval drama—a poet of perversity, irresistible but wrong. Actually, both characters are: they have a warped perspective that becomes, in each case, the most entertaining and compelling thing in the play. But Shanley isn’t as interested in Sidney’s Jewishness as he is in the discrepancy between the man Sidney presents himself to be and the one we see confronting his wife in the next scene. The marriage and the wife are both more interesting and complex than Sidney makes them out to be. They’re worthy (in every sense) of his rhetoric and the quality of his thought. As always, Shanley is interested in the pathology of heterosexual guilt, which he explores here in a sort of Schnitzlerian rondeau that substitutes spiritual malaise for the venereal disease that the characters in La Ronde pass on to each other. Matrimony itself, rather than promiscuity, is the incubator here.

Where’s My Money? doesn’t pretend to be any more than a shaggy-ghost story. Shanley’s characters are literally haunted by the shades of the people they fear they’ve wronged. Everett Beekin is a ghost story too, in a way. Greenberg is attempting a reverse-angle version of something he did in an earlier play, Three Days of Rain. There three actors portrayed six characters, a generation apart: first the children, then their parents. Everett Beekin leaps forward in time, showing us a Jewish American family in 1940s New York in Act I and some of their descendants in Southern California in Act II. Again, all the actors play different roles in each act, but Everett Beekin doesn’t rely on the same one-to-one correspondence between characters and their genetic forebears. Rather, Greenberg seems here to want us to draw connections between the two respective characters played by each actor as archetypes. The Jewish characters in the first half of Everett Beekin are all stereotypes—the operatic mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), the wartime wife (Bebe Neuwirth), the brisket-loving husband, the romantic youngest sister (Jennifer Carpenter), who is beautiful, talented, and offered an escape through marriage to a gentile (Kevin Isola.)

Greenberg is examining stock characters from life, asking us to view them as the beneficiaries of a literary inheritance. Except that they’re non-beneficiaries or it’s a non-inheritance. This is a play about assimilation and its discontents. Greenberg wants us to think about what this or that stereotype of Jewish family history has become—just as he wants to demonstrate that the fantasy of the easygoing gentile for whom success and achievement come effortlessly—embodied in the WASP of the title, a character we never see, who turns out never to have existed—is as much a part of Jewish American family mythology as anything else.

It turns out the youngest sister didn’t get away after all, but died—soon after the scene we witnessed—of a form of cancer that would be curable now. More interesting than either this revelation, though, or seeing her reborn as a perennially restless and bewildered Valley Girl, is what happens to the Robin Bartlett figure, Sophie. Like the other members of the family, she’s lost her Jewishness and with it all sense of purpose and identity. Greenberg’s point—that rootlessness is a bad thing—may be banal and not an ideal subject for the stage (Everett Beekin would probably make a better novel or movie), but it’s interesting that what he’s demonstrating on the stage of Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater is essentially what’s going on night after night in Neil Simon’s play at the Richard Rodgers—the assimilation of the stage Jew by a process that, robbing him of his Jewishness or his anger (they’re the same thing), makes him essentially harmless.

New York press, December 18, 2001

[From New York Press, January 8, 2000]

Anumber of shrinks of my acquaintance were heard to express impatience with Jennifer Melfi M.D. in the week before New Year’s, when HBO rebroadcast the first thirteen episodes of The Sopranos, preparatory to this Sunday’s launch of the new season. Dr. Melfi, therapist to Tony Soprano, is one of the central figures in the wildly popular series about a present-day Mafia capo who seeks counseling when the personal and professional pressures of his life becomes too great for him to bear.

Dr. Melfi is played by Lorraine Bracco, which is an interesting bit of casting. In GoodFellas, the film Martin Scorsese based on Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction account of the glory days of a minor Mafioso, Bracco played Karen, Ray Liotta’s naive girlfriend and wife, and if there’s one thing The Sopranos is aware of, it’s Mafia movies—particularly the Coppola and Scorsese oeuvre. Karen bore a certain resemblance to the character played by Edie Falco in The Sopranos, Tony’s wife Carmela. Both are essentially infantile women, capable of experiencing life on only the most physical and primitive level, in terms of status and material gain. Consequently, when Tony seemed to be developing a crush on Dr. Melfi midway through the first season, it was sort of charming. The scene in which he tried to explain why he wanted his mistress to dress less like a mistress and more like Dr. Melfi was the first time we’d seen him manifest any remotely endearing quality. It was as though not Tony alone but the very figure of the gangland antihero was growing up.

Dr. Melfi has offices in the Montclair Medical Suites, not far from the North Jersey suburb where Tony lives; but we don’t know that at first, any more than we start out knowing that his usual approach to the office-block is through the doughnut shop beside the newspaper stand, out the back way, and across an alley to a little-used service entrance. We only find this out in the episode in which Tony panics thinking that Silvio—the henchman played by Steve Van Zandt—might have followed him to Dr. Melfi’s. (Actually, Silvio was just visiting a dentist on the same hall.) “I thought we were making progress on your narcissism,” Dr. Melfi comments, sounding discouraged. It’s the sort of remark that drives the mental health professionals in my family crazy.

Growing up around psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, I’m used to hearing them complain about how shrinks are portrayed in movies and on television. It’s everybody’s story. I don’t care who you are—hit man or head doctor. We’re all misrepresented, stereotyped by the media and by each other. What’s interesting is where the analytic community breaks down on the issue of Dr. Melfi. I did a little informal investigative work the week after New Year’s—asking questions, jogging memories, describing scenes, putting this or that practitioner’s remarks before this or that colleague. To a man, the analysts I spoke with all described Melfi as a mediocre if representative clinician. What nobody agreed on was whether or not she’s supposed to be perceived that way.

Is Bracco supposed to be a good shrink or poor one? Nobody seems to know. It’s an interesting question—not least of all because of the show’s stance vis-a-vis the Mob. The Sopranos is about the Mafia in decline, after its heyday. But psychoanalysis is also arguably past its prime. Are the creators of The Sopranos aware of this? If so—if Melfi is merely supposed to be typical of the current state of psychiatry rather than a credit to it—it would mean that The Sopranos was about not one but two dynasties in decline, two empires under siege: the Mafia, under attack by witness protection and RICO, and Freudian psychoanalysis by psychotropic drugs and the waning of clinical supervision.

In a way, it’s not surprising that The Sopranos should be hard to read on the issue of therapy. Its attitude toward the Mafia also hard to read. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. It’s unambivalently ambivalent, unambiguously ambiguous—that’s clarity of a kind. The Sopranos focuses on the world of organized crime but without buying into the gangster mystique that is so much a part of the American consciousness and popular culture. I think it’s one of several reasons why I was slow in warming to the series: I couldn’t understand why we were supposed to care about these people.

I also had a hard time with the duck trope. The first thing we learn about Tony is the strange attachment he’d formed to a family of ducks who’d been living in the swimming pool in his backyard. It turns out to have been their departure, in fact, that triggered Tony’s depression and panic attacks. “They were a family,” Dr. Melfi points out in the sort of intrusive interpretation she is given to. A couple of episodes of this and I was thinking, “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”

I was also initially irritated by the self-referential quality of the writing. The members of Tony’s immediate circle are always invoking gangster movies. They quote The Godfather and allude to Scarface. One of them has a car-horn that plays the first few notes of “The Godfather Theme.” Carmela sits around watching Mafia movies with the parish priest, and Tony’s nephew Christopher is thinking of selling his story to Hollywood. He knows someone who knows Tarantino’s development person, and later we find him writing a screenplay and worrying about the “arc” of his life. An early episode even included an appearance by Mr. Scorsese.

Finally, I felt that David Chase, the series’ creator, was playing fast and loose with the gangster-movie genre, commenting on it without really understanding it.

There’s a wonderful essay called “The Gangster As Tragic Hero,” written in 1948 by a now-largely-forgotten critic named Robert Warshow, that sets out to analyze the gangster picture and it’s place in American popular culture. The first point Warshow makes is about the gangster’s connection with the urban landscape:

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring… For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world—in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country—but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it; not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.

According to Warshow, the gangster offers us a chance to experience Aristotelian tragedy at a visceral level: he is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.” Warshow’s second point is that the gangster film follows a Marxist trajectory: the gangster is the embodiment of enterprise who rises in order that we may see him fall—an interesting idea, if a little tendentious.

The gangster’s whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual… At bottom the gangster is doomed because he is under an obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression…

Warshow’s third point is that the gangster is primarily “a creature of the imagination…even to himself.” He cites Edward G. Robinson’s dying words in Little Caesar referring to himself in the third person.

It’s an eloquent account of the genre—up to 1948. But then came Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Puzio and Coppola made the mobster glamorous. Pileggi and Scorsese made him post-narrative. By focusing on the peripheral figure—the mechanic rather than the capo di tutti capi—and by allowing him to tell his own story in his own voice, Pileggi and Scorsese introduced the unreliable narrator into the formula. Scorsese’s big innovation was to see what it would mean for us to watch glamorous people—stars—do truly horrible things while we listened to the same acts being fondly—admiringly— recalled by one of the participants. GoodFellas showed us sadism and brutality through Liotta’s eyes—all the while suppressing the crucial fact that Pileggi’s book began with. It’s only in the last few minutes of the picture that we discover Liotta is telling his story to the FBI.

If The Sopranos manages to avoid glamorizing violence, that’s partly because we’re watching actors, not stars, do horrible things. You can’t cast actors like Brando and De Niro and not have them appear larger than life to us. The key to our perception of the characters in the television series is the fact that although the writing isn’t particularly sympathetic to them, the extraordinary performances by Gandolfini and Falco and company are.

Of course, if you inject enough realism and sophistication into a genre, it ceases to be interesting, ceases to be itself. At first it seemed to me that this was what was happening with The Sopranos. The idea of juxtaposing the gangster worldview with that of psychoanalysis—not for comic purposes—felt wrong-headed. It is the mutual exclusivity of the two ethics that make their confrontation in Analyze This so funny. The psychiatrist tells us to adapt to a world in which we can’t have everything we want. The gangster says, “Give me what I want or I’ll kill you.”

If the gangster was always, as Warshow argued, an artistic construct, a sort of self-made metaphor, Tony Soprano’s problem is something closer to meta-self-consciousness. Tony and his friends are not only conscious of living in a post-Scorsese world, they know what that means. It means it’s over. “I was thinking it’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony tells Melfi, referring to the day he first collapsed. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.” To which Melfi replies: “I think a lot of Americans feel that way.”

The Sopranos is about what it means to be a part of something whose chief characteristic is that over-ness, about living in a world in which the fat lady has for all practical purposes sung. It’s about the fact that in some sense we’re all living in a post-Scorsese world. In whatever way this manifests itself, we all feel our lives have become impossibly self-conscious. Bracco to Gandolfini: “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery of God or whatever you want to call it—and why we’re given the questionable gift of knowing that we’re going to die?”

Our problem, though, isn’t being aware we’re going to die; it’s being aware of being aware. In cinematic terms that manifests itself in the self-referential art form, the thing that cannot just be itself because it’s been so well observed and commented on. It’s the post-Freudian curse.

Is The Sopranos about two embattled value systems having a sit-down, confronting each other across the negotiating table? I honestly can’t tell. Certainly Tony thinks well of Dr. Melfi. “You were a good doctor to me,” he tells her with affection but no affect in the last episode of the first season, thinking he is going on the lam. And she’s certainly done her best. Still, it’s interesting that at this moment the patient should manage to achieve precisely the neutral-yet-caring tone that the doctor has so consistently failed to produce. It’s interesting, too, that the most insightful interpretations have come from characters other than Dr. Melfi—Carmela, for instance, who calls her friend the priest on his relationships with the married women in his parish, accurately diagnosing his need to create sexual tension that won’t be resolved.

Another bit of spiritual wisdom comes from Paulie Walnuts, the sweet-faced thug played by Tony Sirico. Paulie doesn’t know what Christopher is talking about when he starts using the language of story-structure. “Every character is supposed to have an arc. Where’s my arc?” Christopher laments. “Did you ever get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen to you?” he asks Paulie despondently. “Yeah,” says Paulie, “and nothing did.” It’s essentially the lesson that old-fashioned Freudian analysis used to teach. You went in wondering why fate had handed someone so special a life so filled with disappointment; you learned to adjust your expectations.

Contemplating the start of the new Sopranos season, I find I’m less concerned with what is going to happen in either Tony’s life or his therapy than I am with what is going to happen in his relationship with art. The series virtually began with Tony uneasily confronting a work of art—a sculpture in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room. He looked bemused. Later, we watched him take irrational umbrage at another piece of the decor of her office, an inoffensive painting.

There’s a good deal about art in the series that has nothing to do with Mafia movies—good and bad art, mostly bad music. There’s the dreadful choir that Tony’s daughter is a soloist in. There’s the no-talent band that Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana wants to champion and “discover,” and the hopeless script that Christopher is writing. And then there’s the good “art”: the W.C. Fields movies that Tony is always quoting, the hit single that Tony’s friend Hesh (Jerry Adler) “co-wrote” with a talented young black musician in the days when he was still in the music business, before he became a shylock. And there’s the music that gets played at the beginning and end of each show. Music is in the very name of the title characters, in the phrase “soap opera” itself. (The Mafia: America’s Longest-Running Soap Opera is the name of a book written by one of the talking heads in a television program that Tony and his pals are watching in an early episode.)

Meanwhile, art and the gangster confront each other in every reference to Scorsese, as well as in such knowing jokes as the casting of E-Street Band-member Van Zandt (whose other employer, Bruce Springsteen, is another “Boss” with ties to New Jersey). Finally, art and the gangster confront each other in the dream-like, more-than-verbal puns that help draw the series together thematically, puns like “hit”—“a beautiful hit,” one character says in a late episode, referring to the murder of a long-ago Mafia bigwig. It’s the same episode in which Adriana is trying to break into the music business and in which the “gangsta” rapper with whom she wants to develop a mutually exploitative relationship confronts Hesh about the misappropriated royalties from that long-ago single.

Is a hit something that you write or something you do? What kind of a “killing” does it entail? “Art isn’t like betting or cards,” Christopher warns Adriana, meaning that it cannot be “fixed” or controlled. But of course it can. I’m waiting to see if The Sopranos knows this, or if it will end up glamorizing art in the way the gangster picture used to glamorize violence, intentionally or not. It’s a real cliffhanger. Art is one of the few things as irresistibly seductive as violence.

New York Press, January 18, 2000