Category: Smoke and Mirrors

It’s a big relief to me that the television season has drawn to a close—particularly that there will be no new episodes of House to miss. I’d been having a terrible time since the show moved to Monday nights. I guess I’m not television conscious that early in the week. I did my best. Nearly every Monday a point in the day would come when it would occur to me that it was Monday, and that I had to remember to watch House that night. But something would always come up—even if I knew perfectly well at six o’clock or at seven that it would behoove me to finish whatever I was doing by eight, it would always slip my mind, and suddenly I’d look up and it would be twenty or ten or four or seventeen past the hour.

It’s not as though it wasn’t important to me. I like the way House episodes begin the same way I used to get a kick out of the old teasers for Law & Order. Remember those? The pleasant anticipation of waiting first for the gruesome moment when someone would stumble across a corpse and then for the tasteless crack that Jerry Orbach always made over the deceased? House teasers are formulaic in the same way. A knowing snippet of contemporary life leads us to expect that a particular person is about to fall writhing to the floor. Then someone else entirely falls writhing to the floor.

I don’t think I caught a single House teaser this season. Instead, I seemed to keep coming in on scenes between Chase and Cameron, and they bore me. Well, she bores me. Well, she bores me now. So I’d swear and sigh and promise myself that the next week would be different. And then the following week it would happen all over again. It reminded me of a phase I went through where I was trying to develop an alcohol addiction. I’d pour myself a drink and then put it down somewhere and forget all about it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t motivated. I just couldn’t focus. I couldn’t commit.

The season finale of House, as it happened, was about precisely this phenomenon—about a guy at war with himself because the right and left sides of his brain couldn’t communicate with each other. Of course, tuning in late, I didn’t know this; and having missed the show the week before, I had no idea that House and Cuddy had had sex in the previous episode after she’d helped him through a grueling night of Vicodin withdrawal. So the revelation that Cuddy and House had not actually had sex, and that all of it—including the detox session—had been an opiate-induced hallucination didn’t have the impact on me that it seemed to have on everyone else.

I’m not sure it would have in any case. More than any television series I can remember, House seems to me not to be about what happens in the story. Or maybe it’s just that what characters have to say about what happens in the story is always much more interesting—just as the metaphor, analogue, or association that ultimately leads to House’s diagnostic epiphany is always more interesting than the actual solution to whatever medical mystery is haunting him and his team.

Anyway, catching up on the series later, I couldn’t help noticing how much of the season past seemed to be taken up with this notion of The Divided Self.

At this point, I should really come clean about a condition I suffer from. It’s probably congenital—I know I’ve had since I was a small child: an impulse toward over-interpretation. It’s really more of a compulsion. I see patterns and motifs everywhere. I can’t stop seeing them, and even though I know they’re probably not there, probably don’t exist, I can’t stop finding them. I guess it’s like any other addiction: the truth is I don’t really want to stop.

Which is why, when I headed over to the online episode guides for House and began reading synopses to see where my viewing deficiencies lay, I seemed to see The Divided Self everywhere. I saw it in parts of the series I’d caught all or part of—in the episode about the teenage mother who changes her mind about letting Cuddy adopt her baby, and the one about Cuddy’s mixed feelings over the baby she does eventually adopt, and the one about her ambivalence over the continued need for her presence at the hospital.

Putting away the winter clothes, I caught up on episodes I’d missed and continued to see elements of psychomachia in various forms: in Cuddy’s attempt to have Cameron become more like her, taking over Cuddy’s job; in the incessant mood-swings the series seemed to be having over Chase and Cameron’s impending marriage; in the episode about the guy with “locked-in” syndrome, who was brain-dead to all outward appearances but very much alive and alert, albeit unable to communicate. I saw it in the episodes where House began hanging out with an apparition of Wilson’s dead girlfriend, Amber, which turned out to be the embodiment of his unconscious. And, of course, when I finally saw the episode that began with the suicide of the character played by the actor Kal Penn, I saw The Divided Self there, too—particularly given the way the script seemed to harp on no one’s having had any idea there had been anything wrong.

Some of this, of course, is legitimate; I understand that. (I saw there was even an episode called “House Divided.”) But some of the things that ran through my mind were just plumb crazy—certifiable. Like the thought I had during the scene after Kutner’s funeral and cremation, when everyone was standing around watching the smoke rise into the sky: I had the fleeting notion that the show had artfully managed to induce a state of schizophrenia in us, because we were simultaneously sad (well, sad-ish) and amused, knowing that the real-life circumstance necessitating Mr. Penn’s departure from the series had been his well-publicized decision to take a job in the Obama administration.

So, as you can see—and here we are back at The Divided Self—I’m of two minds about all this. There’s a part of me that wants to point out that the series creators could have chosen any number of ways to get rid of Kutner. They didn’t have to engineer it in such a way as to raise the specter of inner conflict. But there’s that other, more rational, side of me that knows that a television series like House is written by a committee of people, some working on one episode and some on another. And I ask myself how likely it is that they sit around plotting ways of making me smile and tear up at the same time. Or structuring a season so that a bunch of episodes that one character spends talking to a figure who responds but isn’t really there are balanced by an episode that a bunch of characters spend talking to someone who is there, even though he can’t respond.

Another example of how I can go haywire over a theme was what happened with The Sopranos. Early on, I’d taken it into my head that the series was about art on some very profound and interesting level—or about Tony’s relationship with art—and I wrote about this around the time the second season was about to air.

There was a certain limited validity to this. Tony certainly had issues with the artwork in Melfi’s office, for instance. The opening shot of the series showed him sitting in her waiting room framed between the feet of a life-size bronze—a nude that he was eying with hostility and suspicion. In another episode he took umbrage at a harmless painting on one of her walls—a landscape dominated by a large red barn. Catching sight of it, he frowned, walked over, and examined it more closely, zeroing in on a darkened doorway that, when the camera zoomed in, seemed to yawn eerily. In the next scene, he accused Melfi of having “a trick picture” in her office.

There was also an early sequence where Tony, dragged his bratty daughter into a church and waxed sentimental over the fact that his grandfather and great uncle had built it. When she was skeptical about their having built it alone, just the two of them, Tony was patient. No, they had built it with “a crew of laborers,” but the point was they’d known how to do it. In the next scene, we watched one of Tony’s “crew” blow up a restaurant.

I became a little obsessed with the theme of Art in The Sopranos. Then I decided that there was something going on with nature, too. Tony and his pals seemed to have a difficult time with art and nature both. They had artistic and idyllic yearnings, but whenever they got involved with art or nature, things seemed to go badly.

The fifth season included a sequence in which Tony commissioned a rather vulgar portrait of himself posed with a horse he had acquired a financial interest in. When the horse came to a bad end, Tony had asked Paulie, another subordinate, to destroy the painting, but instead Paulie had kept it and had the figure of Tony touched up to resemble Napoleon. Like everyone else, I thought that was hilarious, but I also pondered on how it figured in the art-and-nature schema.

Later that season, the painting came up again when Tony paid a visit to Paulie and saw it hanging in his living-room. He proceeded to have a rather complicated series of reactions: rage, indignation, bewilderment, something verging on awe, and finally a sort of lingering nostalgia as he gazed at the painting a last time before leaving it in the trash.

That was the episode in which Tony decided that his favorite cousin (played by Steve Buscemi) was going to have to get whacked and ended up doing it himself. In fact, in the very next scene—right after the one with the portrait and right before the one where Tony blew his cousin away with a shotgun—we saw Buscemi drive onto a property dominated by a large red barn and into the dark spooky doorway of another barn, which the camera lingered on as it had lingered on the dark doorway of the barn in Melfi’s painting.

Well, I went completely nerts, leaping up and gesticulating, shouting that it was the same scene. And my husband and the friends we were watching the episode with were all very kind. Because, of course, it was nonsense, sheer nonsense. As if David Chase and his crew of writers sat around mapping out complex systems of imagery, saying “We’ll put the scene where Gandolfini whacks Buscemi right after the thing with the portrait of Tony; oh, and let’s have the farm where the hit takes place look just like that painting way back three seasons ago.” I mean, really.

And yet…and yet. Not long ago, we started watching some of those late episodes again. I’d forgotten how unequivocally horrible everyone becomes in that last season. I’d also forgotten how Tony’s relationship with Melfi ends. Her own analyst (played by director and film historian Peter Bogdonavich) shames her into realizing that she has merely been enabling Tony all these years. (He draws her attention to a study suggesting that “the talking cure” simply gives sociopaths a chance to sharpen their skills rather than leading to insight.) Soon after, she terminates Tony’s therapy, offering to refer him to someone else.

Revisiting all this, I began to discern—or thought I did—a solution to some of the questions that the opening season of the series had left me with: about art and its importance in the series, about Tony’s relationship with it, about David Chase’s takes on psychoanalysis and on Melfi’s clinical skills, and even about the connection between psychoanalysis and art.

It seemed to me we ended up with a realization that the self-awareness that “talk therapy” engenders in the ordinary patient has merely offered Tony the tools and material with which to construct a false version of the truth and reinvent his own image of himself, and that this is the only kind of creative endeavor that people like Tony can every really successfully engage in. And I even found myself wondering whether David Chase might have read that Robert Warshow essay about the movie-gangster’s connection with the city and if there could be some validity to the uncomfortable relationship with nature that I’d wanted to ascribe to Tony and his crowd.

I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know which is less likely, that someone as steeped in American popular culture as Peter Bogdanovich would not know the Warshow essay about the gangster-movie genre, and wouldn’t at some point over the years have brought it to David Chase’s attention, or the idea that the twenty-some-odd people it took to write the series could fashion and sustain a thematic structure that complex over a period of six years.

I’m reminded of the only time I ever went for a tarot reading. There was this guy that I couldn’t seem to break up with, and a friend of my mother’s, tired of the situation, finally sent me off to see this psychic she swore by.

I took a taxi down to Mulberry Street. The psychic was waiting for me on his stoop. And right off, while I was still coming up the steps, he started telling me that the moment he’d seen me emerge from the cab he’d had this very strong, very clear feeling…I had an aura…he sensed that I was involved with a guy who was no good, who was trouble…he thought his name began with an R…“Robert”…or “Richard” perhaps…

The session was a disaster: I didn’t respond to the psychic’s inept guesses in a sufficiently helpful manner, and he ended up throwing me out. All the same, afterward I couldn’t decide which was more implausible: that my mother’s friend had actually gone to the trouble of calling him up and tipping him off about my boyfriend’s name, or that the guy really was magic.

Yasmina Reza’s Life (x) 3
at Circle in the Square

David Ives’s Polish Joke
at Manhattan Theater Club

I picked up a copy of Yasmina Reza’s Life (x) 3 a couple of days after seeing the play at Circle in the Square and was flabbergasted to discover that the opening scene between John Turturro and Helen Hunt is actually funny. Sonia and Henry are arguing about how to deal with their recalcitrant six-year-old.

HENRY: He wants a biscuit.
SONIA: He’s just cleaned his teeth.
HENRY: He’s asking for a biscuit.
SONIA: He knows very well there’s no biscuits in bed.
HENRY: You tell him.
SONIA: Why didn’t you?
HENRY: Because I didn’t know there were no biscuits in bed.

Sonia goes offstage to lay down the law. The child begins to cry and is still wailing when she re-enters. Henry suggests bringing him a slice of apple, but Sonia puts the kibosh on that, too. Henry goes offstage and comes back a moment later.

HENRY: He’s agreed to the slice of apple.
SONIA: He’s not having any apple, he’s not having anything, you don’t eat in bed, the subject is closed.
HENRY: You tell him.…I said yes to the apple, I thought the apple was a possibility. If you’re saying no, go and tell him yourself.
SONIA: Take him a slice of apple and tell him you’re doing it behind my back. Tell him I said no and you’re only doing it because you said yes, but that I mustn’t find out because I’m radically opposed to any kind of food in bed.

I’m not going to make any noises about not needing to have small children to find this funny. I am going to suggest that it doesn’t take Donald Sinden and Maggie Smith to make it play. It probably could use Brit actors, though, and they’d probably have to be performing Christopher Hampton’s translation from the French as written, not an Americanized version of the thing.

Problems of style, idiom, and cultural context tend to rear their heads when you decide that a West End hit will be best served by a cast of American movie stars and a dumbed-down script that Americanizes everything. Take the biscuit-cookie dichotomy, for instance. “Biscuit,” which appears in Hampton’s script, is a light-comedy word. It’s neutral. It allows us to get where the dialogue is going and focus on the politics of the situation. “Cookie,” the word that’s substituted in the production at Circle, isn’t neutral. It’s a joke word, almost a punchline in and of itself. Turturro is cute saying it—anyone would be. We’re derailed by the cuteness, and it doesn’t really matter what comes after.

Or take the subject of the conversation itself. Americans discussing questions of how to negotiate with their children isn’t satire, it’s sitcom. All Americans negotiate with their children, and all Americans argue about it. We take child-rearing seriously. Europeans don’t make such an issue out of it—that is, only a certain class of pseudo-sophisticated European does, probably in emulation of Americans. Spoken in American accents, the opening scene tells us nothing about Sonia and Henry. Spoken in Estuary accents, it would give us a hint about who they are.

Actually, though, the main thing you’d need in order for the opening of Life (x) 3 to be funny would be not to have Ms. Hunt anywhere in the equation. A limited actress to begin with, Ms. Hunt has taken to allowing the persona that made her America’s sweetheart (unaccountably, I think) to obtrude on every role she performs. It’s hard to believe that her mannerisms—the squint she levels at fellow actors, the whiny, strained, prosaically uninflected voice—ever seemed refreshing or even benign. She wields them now like weapons, encased in an impenetrable air of moral righteousness.

The actress playing the mother in the opening scene of Reza’s play should be able to forgo moral ascendancy. Within moments, she will be yelling for the child to “Shut the fuck up” and irrationally baiting him with visions of dessert delicacies. But Ms. Hunt brings the same emotional freight and crusading spirit to Life (x) 3 that she brought to the role of the doting mother in As Good as It Gets. It’s the same performance, for Pete’s sake, and it’s tiresome beyond belief.

In order to find anything witty or interesting in Reza’s play, you kind of have to redirect it in your head. Life (x) 3 is a slight, unassuming comedy—part gentle farce, part moth-like speculation on human behavior—that shows us the same disastrous dinner party three times in three different ways. Sonia and Henry and their guests, Hubert and Inez, are no more or less two-dimensional than the characters in a Noel Coward play. Like the foursome in Private Lives, like the theatrical family in Hay Fever and their pompous, conventional guests, Reza’s characters exist pretty much to be rude to each other. The fun lies in watching well-dressed, over-educated people misbehave. There really isn’t much more to it than that.

This is fragile stuff. Even the justification for the life-in-triplicate gimmick is gossamer-thin. Henry and Hubert are both astrophysicists, a circumstance that allows for passing references to cosmology and metaphysics (the phrase “modification of a presumed reality” comes up). But there’s no attempt to delineate a process of behavioral causality. The characters’ characters just change from scene to scene. Thus, one version of Henry is high-strung and self-dramatizing. Another is modest and self-assured. One version of Sonia is overtly hostile to Hubert, who is more successful than Henry and might help him to advance his career. In another version, Sonia and Hubert are contemplating a weekday tryst.

One of the things that’s been said about the play is that the variations are in the wrong order, and certainly the conceit seems haphazard in this production. Reading Life (x) 3, though, you realize that there may in fact be a progression. In each scene, the characters seem to become less simplistic, less oriented toward the exigencies of a specific genre. They lose their formulaic edge and take on, instead, a tinge of idiosyncrasy.

My guess is that each of the four actors in the play is effectively supposed to become three completely different people, and that our pleasure and fascination should derive from the artistry with which they do so. Reza is herself an actress (she played Inez in the original Paris production), and I suspect that Life (x) 3 is fundamentally a play about theater, just as Art was. People were wrong-headed in dismissing that first play because it seemed to raise long-settled controversies about painting.

The purpose of the white-on-white canvas—the reason why it had to be that and not anything else—was so that we would spend the evening watching actors pretending to respond to something when it looked to us like nothing was there at all. The white-on-white canvas meant that the actors in Art were doing the opposite of what actors in a play normally do. Instead of pretending to respond to a nothing that looks like something, they were responding to a something that looked like nothing. It was all a metaphor for theater—or for the metaphor that theater is itself. The closing speech in which images of whiteness vanish into nothingness—the clouds, the snow, the solitary skier who becomes “a man who moves across a space and disappears”—was a picture of the stage.

Subtext is, unfortunately, not an option with three-fourths of the New York cast of Life (x) 3. (The exception is Linda Emond, whom one could watch for hours.) As a result, the play becomes less and less interesting as the evening wears on. John Turturro is a god. I adore him, but light social comedy isn’t his key, and Brent Spiner has nowhere near the requisite edge of menace to bring off the role of Hubert. Matthew Warchus, who staged the production at London’s National Theater (where he had Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter and Imelda Staunton to work with, forsooth) must simply have thrown up his hands.

The guy you want playing the unpleasant but overwritten Hubert in Life (x) 3 is probably Walter Bobbie, the subtle, urbane, versatile actor who is appearing just now in David Ives’s Polish Joke to the great delight of Manhattan Theater Club audiences. Mr. Bobbie, I recall, did an elegant turn in a minor role in a minor Shaw play some years ago, then played Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the Jerry Zaks revival of Guys and Dolls, and spent the next ten years as artistic director of the Encores! concert series at City Center—too long, I feel, as it seems to have kept him off the stage. Mr. Bobbie is rare among American stage actors in his ability to project intellectual feeling without playing it as an abstraction (he’s like Kevin Spacey in this regard), and he finds nuance in the most intriguing and unexpected places, wild comic cameos and archetypal characters, more like a novelist than an actor. He’s at his best in Ives’ extremely funny if frustrating play.

It concerns a young man of Polish descent (Malcolm Gets) named Jasiu (pronounced “Yashoo”), who goes through life pretending to be an Irishman—or who already has gone through life doing that; it’s not really clear. The play begins with a lovely, wry monologue in which Mr. Gets—memory-play-style—proposes a vision of two kinds of ethnic doom, real and perceived. The speech gives way to a flashback in which we witness the childhood conversation from which he apparently derived all philosophy, a backyard chat with his beer-guzzling Uncle Roman (Richard Ziman) in which the latter had laid out for him the practical and existential pitfalls of being Polish.

The beauty of the writing in this opening sequence—and it’s one of the funniest set-pieces being done on a New York stage just now—suggests that the rest of the play will show us the consequences of this discussion. In fact, though, Ives falls into telling-not-showing mode, and from there until a poignant final scene, the play consists of Mr. Gets narrating things we’d like to see performed, while a succession of surreal, Christopher Durang–like nightmare episodes illustrate the same joke over and over again. It’s not that the scenes aren’t funny, but the excellent ensemble cast—which includes Nancy Opel and Nancy Bell, in addition to Mr. Ziman and Mr. Bobbie—are only allowed to become embodiments of ideas we’ve already heard expressed.

The director, John Rando, has orchestrated the whole thing joyously before a wonderfully inventive Loy Arcenas set that symbolically captures the image of the world as the hero sees it. But it’s tough to stay funny at the pitch of frenetic wackiness that Ives has striven for, and the longueurs begin to outweigh the pleasure of the witty one-liners. The joke version of Daniel Deronda you thought you saw coming never materializes. Instead, there’s a tiresome thread about a tiresome girl whom Gets leaves in his search for an identity, and he ultimately discovers (imagine!) the nobility of being Polish.

Mr. Gets is as endearing and piquant as ever, and Nancy Opel is, as usual, amazingly funny. And Mr. Ziman has one or two delightful moments toward the end of the play when Jasiu comes to see Roman, now dying, and discovers that his uncle doesn’t even remember the conversation in which he imparted the precepts the boy went on to live by.

There’s a truth there, but Ives skirts around it, giving us instead an ersatz moral—that all people everywhere are really the same. It seems a missed opportunity. Surely the point here is something more complicated—almost ineffable—about the haphazard way in which our childhood selves receive and interpret information, giving them a construction or importance that the grownups perhaps never intended.

New York Press, April 16, 2003

Ifound myself checking up on the parts of a horse the other day. It was after the Daily News had carried an AP story about some new prehistoric art found in the Perigueux region of France—engravings thought to predate the Lascaux cave paintings by 10,000 years. It was a burial ground of some sort, and the version of the story that Newsday carried included a quote from an official of the French Ministry of Culture: “The presence of graves in a decorated cave is unprecedented.”

But the drawings in the Daily News photograph didn’t look like decorations; they looked like sketchpad studies—partial (a mane here, a hoof there, an idea of musculature) and unarranged. They were all on top of one another as though the artist hadn’t wanted to take time to find a blank space on the wall for fear of missisng whatever he was trying to capture from memory or life.

Only one of the figures in the photograph—a horse—was recognizable. It seemed curiously realistic, so realistic that for a moment I wondered if the drawings might be a hoax. It didn’t seem stylized enough for prehistoric art. This was no flat, geometric artifact with characteristics one might interpret as equine; it was a proper horse, fully articulated, drawn in profile, and almost in perspective, complete with all the things a horse should have. You could make out every element of horse physiognomy: upper and lower muzzle, nostril, even the soft, fat, jowly part that covers a muscle I now know to be called the masseter.

There’s nothing to say that primitive artwork has to be more stylized than it is realistic. Or, to put it another way, there’s no reason to think that art wasn’t realistic before it was stylized—any more than there is to think it impossible that a more advanced technology than ours once existed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I mention the Perigueux horse because I’ve been thinking about realism and views of reality in the context of some of the summer’s more and less obviously cheesy movies. Mostly I’ve been trying to figure out why the picture of a world proposed by Steven Spielberg’s A.I. bothered me so much.

When it comes to matters of realism and stylistic form, it’s always interesting to find out what we are and aren’t prepared to accept. Detail is what tends to create problems. I remember once, some years ago, getting laughed at when I objected to something at the end of a horror picture. The werewolf-hero had been cornered by the SWAT team and would be blown away in a matter of moments, but first the heroine wanted to wish him a fond farewell and stepped into the line of fire. I said it was “ridiculous—unrealistic.” The friends I was watching the video with thought it hilarious that I hadn’t objected to the premise of the picture as “ridiculous” or “unrealistic,” but only that one small aspect.

We tend to hold different art forms to different standards of verisimilitude. We demand more literal truth from the narrative and dramatic, say, than the graphic arts. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibit of late Renaissance drawings earlier this year, you didn’t hear museum-goers finding a lot of fault with Correggio because some of the pictures deviated from natural truth. You didn’t notice anyone pointing critically, saying, “Look at the way that Madonna is holding the child! It’s ridiculous! No mother would hold a baby that way, it would slide right off her lap!” The point was the folds of her dress and the way they draped over her leg: these would have been obscured if the artist had taken the actual weight of a real-life baby into account.

It’s artistry itself, as often as not, that leads us to ignore some discrepancy between the truth as it’s depicted in a work of art and the way things are. If you go to see Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero at the John Houseman Theater (it reopened there in May and runs through Sept. 2), there may come a point when you find yourself noticing a particular unrealistic aspect of the play. Set in the foyer of a Manhattan high-rise, it concerns the relationship between four characters: a young security guard who works the graveyard shift at the apartment building, his supervisor, and two cops, one of whom is having an affair with a tenant in the building.

You’d look hard to find a visual stage truth as compelling as the way the shadow of an adjacent building on Allen Moyer’s set cuts off the sunlight from the sunken area just outside on the pavement, exactly the way the buildings surrounding those badly designed East Side high-rises always do. You know that building, you can visualize the whole exterior just from the way Mark McCullough has lighted that tiny sliver of stage, and the characters are equally well observed. All the same, it’s bound to occur to you that in the entire course of the two nights in which the play is set, no one other than the characters in the play crosses the lobby.

It’s unimportant. The truths contained in the characters’ expectations and treatment of one another are more interesting than the convention we’re being asked to accept—just as the folds in the drapery are more interesting than the bulk of the baby in Correggio’s drawing.

Sometimes what prompts us to accept a glitch in verisimilitude is the arrival of a new technique, a way of expressing something that a particular medium couldn’t have  expressed before. I remember that some years back, when the Met was holding one of its exhibitions of fifth-century sculpture, a wonderful bit of signage pointed out that the famous statue of Nike bending down to fasten her sandal both represents an important moment in the development of “realism” and is at the same time fundamentally unrealistic. The way the sculpture captures the fall of the cloth over the goddess’ body is lifelike beyond anything that marble had hitherto managed to express. Still, the curator noted, cloth falling exactly that way, that showed the outline of the body as the one in the statue does, would have to be gossamer-like, and fabric that light wouldn’t drape well. To express what he wanted to express, the artist had had to create another reality in which both a garment and the object it veils are visible at the same time thereby anticipating certain schools of modern art by a couple of millenia.

One of this summer’s cinematic talking points is Final Fantasy, a movie based on a video game, that uses computer-generated images of actors instead of real ones. It’s fascinating for the space of about ten minutes because of the precise way in which it doesn’t work. The moving figures that act out the story seem like neither actors nor animations, merely like an attempt to ape a simulation of life.

Animation—which we still use almost in its literal and etymological sense—takes nonliving entities and breathes life into them. Its wit historically resided in its ability to assign human attributes to nonhuman objects and creatures, thereby commenting on humanity. But the suggestion of life is dependent on spontaneity. The creators of Final Fantasy didn’t have that to work with, so they had to fall back on facial and gestural cliché: this expression for fear, that pose for anger or grief. For all its technical prowess, Final Fantasy turned out to be a throwback to the most primitive styles of stage and silent-movie acting.

Nevertheless, it’s caused a certain amount of consternation in the entertainment industry. The fear is that if such methods are found to be “successful,” computer images will gradually come to replace real actors on the screen. Interestingly, this development echoes a major plot point in A.I., Spielberg’s long-awaited movie about a boy-robot who develops mortal longings.

The film, which Spielberg developed from an idea that Stanley Kubrick had researched for years before turning the project over to the younger director, posits a postapocalyptic future (some polar icecaps have melted, drowning the entire globe except for a large part of New Jersey) in which human beings have so perfected the art of simulating humanity that the only thing left for a self-respecting Promethean to explore is whether a robot can be programmed to love and thereby become more “human.”

It’s odd that Spielberg chose to cast Haley Joel Osment, the child actor whose passion in The Sixth Sense was so moving and played so well against Bruce Willis’s trademark lack of affect, as the boy-robot David. In A.I., the young actor is himself required to simulate lack of affect and later, as David’s adoptive mother utters the words that program him to love her for all time, to simulate recently acquired artificial affect.

Actually, there are a number of curious things about A.I., not least of which is the widely noted “schizoid” quality that critics have enjoyed attributing to the Spielberg/Kubrick dichotomy. The movie’s singular plot keeps presenting us with recognizable tropes that we think will develop in such a way as to explore what it means to be “human.” (That’s Spielberg the bard, king of genre, storyteller extraordinaire.) But these setups keep petering out, wandering off into tough-minded existential gloom. (That’s Kubrick, genius and redoubtable intellect.)

Watching A.I., I found myself prey to the American Werewolf in London syndrome, willing to entertain the premise but stumbling over details. I was prepared to accept a world of punishingly planned parenthood serviced by a race of humanoid robots. But I kept wondering why the couple in the movie, David’s adoptive parents, have no friends and why they are so inexplicably wealthy. They live in a huge, beautifully appointed house, miles from anyone else, and can afford to have their birth son cryogenically frozen until such time as a cure is found for whatever it is that ails him.

Where are all the other people in this world? Apart from the factory workers who operate the robot plant, the only human beings in the picture are the rabble—the crowds of ugly, sweaty people who frequent the roving demolition festivals called Flesh Fairs (carnivals—get it?) where antiquated, damaged, or otherwise unwanted robots are ritually trashed. The Flesh Fairs are part theme park, part slave market, part revival meeting, part public execution, and the unkempt folk who attend them are there to exorcise their fears of extinction.

The friend who came with me to see A.I. pointed out that there’s nothing noble or uplifting about the climactic scene in which the mob turns on the carnival manager, rallying to defend the robot child because he is a child. The sequence simply replaces self-interested savagery and brutality with mawkish savagery and brutality. I doubt that was Spielberg’s intention, but then the whole movie is sort of one big glitch in verisimilitude. It’s the portrait of a society trying to make lifelike beings, drawn by a man who has been so removed from real life for so long that he doesn’t remember what it looks like. Or, rather, two such men—the reclusive genius who conceived the project and the commercial giant who completed it.

At least the movie based on a computer game knows that it’s junk. Ironically (or perhaps predictably), it carries the same message as the Spielberg epic: what makes us human is our dreams. But Spielberg here is being either disingenuous or naive: his point, surely, is that what exalts the human race is movies, not dreams themselves but dream-makers like himself and Kubrick. The whole picture is a series of self-absorbed allusions to Spielberg and Kubrick—their humanity, their achievement, their work. It’s telling (and potentially more worrying than anything in Final Fantasy) that the most compelling and lifelike performance in A.I. comes from a computer-animated teddy bear.

New York Press, July 24, 2001

Relatives of Frank William “Billy” Tyne, who captained the ill-fated Andrea Gail and went down with six of his crew during the brutal 1991 storm off New England, are thundering mad at George Clooney’s portrayal of their kin.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., against Warner Bros., Tyne’s family claims that the movie “falsely depicted” Tyne as “emotionally aloof, reckless, excessively risk-taking, self-absorbed, emasculated, despondent, obsessed and maniacal.” (New York Post, August 29, 2000)

Next Tuesday, as part of a weekly movie series at Symphony Space, John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby Dick will be shown in a double bill with John Ford’s The Searchers. The date is November 21, and I keep wondering whether Isaiah Sheffer, the artistic director of Symphony Space, knew when he made up the program that he was scheduling Moby Dick for the 180th anniversary of the incident that probably inspired it, give or take a few hours: the sinking of a Nantucket whaler by an enraged sperm whale in the South Pacific. The name of the ship was the Essex, and she went down on November 20, 1820. The Essex disaster is the subject of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, up for a National Book Award this week. I gather that Philbrick’s competition in the category of nonfiction is the great literary critic Jacques Barzun. All the same, it will be a shame if In the Heart of the Sea doesn’t win. Not only is it a thumping good read, more so even than your average first-rate humdinger of a sea-disaster story; it’s also an interesting piece of cultural criticism. In Philbrick’s book, everything one has never really understood about Moby Dick—why Ahab was kicking up such a rumpus, all that stuff about good and evil, and Calvinism and paganism, the incessant jokes about cannibals, even the footnotes and digressions—is all made intelligible through being put in the context of the Nantucket whaling industry. Reviews of the book largely focused on two elements of the story, playing up the sensational aspect and oversimplifying a literary point. In order to survive, the crew of the Essex, adrift for three months with only food and water enough for half that time, had been forced to resort to cannibalism, actually eating the bodies of their dead shipmates. Worse still, they had, at one point, gone so far as to sacrifice one of their number, drawing lots to determine who the victim and his executioner would be. It’s a haunting, horrifying tale; but almost more compelling than the story itself are Philbrick’s insights into why it so resonated with people at the time, Melville among them. The publicity material that accompanies the book describes the Essex incident as the inspiration for the ending of Moby Dick. In fact, Philbrick suggests (if he doesn’t come right out and say so) that the Essex story must have been a thematic starting point for the whole novel. More shocking even than the means by which the men of the Essex sought to survive was the unprecedented phenomenon of a whale attacking a ship. Such a thing had never happened before. Nantucketers went after whales, not the other way around. That was how it was supposed to be. Even when whales did fight back, moreover, they did so in a predictable, time-honored fashion—with their jaws and tails. But this whale had rammed the ship with its head—not once but twice—and had gnashed its teeth “as if distracted with rage and fury,” as first mate Owen Chase wrote in his account of the ordeal. Chase thought the whale’s behavior a result of cool reasoning, that it had attacked the ship in the manner “calculated to do us the most injury,” knowing that the combined speeds of two objects would be greatest in a head-on collision and the impact therefore most destructive. The image of the enraged, vengeful whale is the cornerstone of Moby Dick, of course. It’s what lies behind Ahab’s quest and his obsession, a point so obvious that it only needs to be made in passing. (“To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,” says Starbuck, but mostly so that Ahab can answer, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”) Ahab regards Moby Dick much as the crew of the Essex seem to have viewed the whale that attacked them, as a creature capable of rational action. One of the fascinating questions Philbrick raises, though, if only by implication, is where so weirdly modern a notion could possibly have come from. The Nantucketers who had harvested whales for generations, he points out, saw their vocation as part of the Divine Plan. But to ascribe rage to an object of one’s own aggression is to come perilously close to admitting a sense of guilt. You cannot, after all, discern anger or moral outrage in a fellow being unless you also grant it a point of view. Iam on something of a Melville kick just now. It started back in the summer when I went to see A Perfect Storm. That put me in a really foul mood, and I had to rent the Huston Moby Dick as an antidote. Not that I held any brief for Sebastian Junger’s book—I hadn’t read it. There are just certain themes and tropes that I expect to be moved by, and when I’m not, I know I am in the presence of fools: scenes of someone pulling away from land while someone else is left on shore; a chorus of voices singing “For Those in Peril on the Sea”; shots of a wall of names; glimpses of Leonard Craske’s famous statue commemorating the fisherman of Gloucester. You know the one: doughty mariner at the wheel, braced against the wind and peering out into sea above a fragment of the 107th Psalm (“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in the great waters; These see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep….”). A Perfect Storm had all of those elements, but it was imbued by a sort of “Wreck-of-the-Hesperus” mentality—the kind of thinking according to which, say, if the young lady lashed to the mast in the Longfellow poem had not been possessed of “a bosom white as the hawthorne buds that ope in the month of May,” the whole incident would have been somehow less worthy of our attention. This was a movie that thought the Gloucester men lost at sea in a 1991 hurricane had to be played by movie stars like George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in order for us to take an interest in them. It assumed that in order for their story to be tragic or poignant it would have to be established that one of them had a girlfriend and a mother who were going to miss him, that another one had a little boy who would be sad without his daddy, that a third, who never seemed to have much luck with women, had (irony of ironies) just met one with whom things might have worked out. I couldn’t understand it. How could you make a sea-disaster story so unutterably boring—particularly one based on a real-life incident? “Truth is boring,” said a friend, and I had no answer. It was only later that I realized what I ought to have said: “Truth is never boring; that’s reality you’re thinking of.” APerfect Storm got me started on Melville, but there were other things. I read the Philbrick book. Then Elizabeth Hardwick’s Melville entry in the Penguin Lives series came out, and a friend whose eyesight is going and who was listening to a recording of Moby Dick suggested that listening to the novel was actually the best way to experience it. So I did, and I found that she was right: that because it takes longer to hear things than it does to read them, images and phrases linger on in the mind, making more of an impression, so that you’re in a better position to see connections and confluences. It has something to do with the physics of time, sound, memory, and imagination. Finally, there was Rinde Eckert’s intriguing music-theater piece And God Created Great Whales, which swung through New York a couple of times. It concerned a brilliant but maimed and narcissistic piano tuner trying to write an opera based on Moby Dick, and it was striking for the way it heaped ridicule on such a foolish idea and at the same time succeeded in translating the intellectual impulse that Moby Dick is about into a piece of musical theater. It offered the same juxtaposition of human aspiration with human frailty. Eckert’s piano tuner (he sang the role himself) had immortal longings, but he also had a degenerative disease that entailed progressive memory loss. Consequently, he couldn’t remember from one moment to the next what he was writing, had written, or had been planning to write. He had a tendency to go off the deep end, so to speak, careening off into some never-never land of passionate philosophical musing or theoretical arcana. Fortunately, he had a muse, half imagined, half remembered—a retired diva he’d once known, who had perhaps loved him or whom he perhaps had loved—and she usually managed to put him back on track. The whole thing was cyclical, or nonlinear anyway, going back and forth between tape recorded messages the composer had left for himself and scenes from the opera that he was trying to write. And God Created Great Whales was part satire and part serious meditation on creation and creative failure. It was about a man who threatened his own muse, and it asked whether this is an act of heroism or folly. Eckert’s composer was destroying Moby Dick in trying to adapt it—not because he didn’t understand the novel but because of the nature of art. And watching Eckert go back and forth between imagining Ahab and impersonating him, one gradually understood the tragedy in the composer-hero’s predicament: his nagging fear that what makes something operatic is also what makes it trite. This is actually the point that Melville makes time and time again in the digressive sections of the novel (and what comes across when you listen to a recording). The definitions and catalogs and histories and phylogenies that have led students and critics of Melville to wonder if he was quite in his right mind are ultimately all about the impossibility of telling the story, of painting an accurate picture of the truth. There’s an extraordinary illustration in Philbrick’s book: an 18th-century map of the Island of Nantucket that, Philbrick points out, against all accuracy makes the harbor into the shape of a whale. Actually, there are two whales in the picture: the island itself forms another. It’s an index of how far Nantucketers allowed the specter of the whale to obsess them—they literally recast their own world in its image. They also imitated it themselves, unconsciously. One of Philbrick’s most telling insights concerns the way in which the society that whaling created—with its cycles, its matriarchal structure, and its long, long stretches of male absenteeism—perfectly mirrored the natural movements of whales themselves. Is Moby Dick Ahab’s muse or his nemesis? Does the blasphemy consist in making the whale human, or is it the other way around? And God Created Great Whales pokes fun at creative impulses; at the same time, it has great sympathy for its protagonist. It’s as though Eckert were saying, “Yeah, trying to turn Moby Dick into an opera is dumb, maybe. But it’s better than not having the urge to turn Moby Dick into an opera.” The attempt results in some foolish moments; it also produces moments of great beauty that may or may not owe anything to Melville. I’ve always had a soft spot for the John Huston version of Moby Dick. Most of my favorite bits never occur in the book at all: the prophecy, the wonderful scene where another captain begs Ahab to suspend the hunt and help search for his lost son instead, the scene where Queequeg comes out of his trance because someone is threatening Ishmael. None of that stuff is in the book. I don’t care. I love it. What I love best, though, is something that is in the book, only in a different form. It’s what was lacking in that silly George Clooney movie—so much so that one can understand Billy Tyne’s family wanting to sue the filmmakers. They’re absolutley right. They’re saying the movie version of A Perfect Storm turned Billy Tyne into Ahab, but without giving us any inkling of the forces driving him on. For that you have to go to the John Huston film. You see it on the face of an old sailor with a concertina, playing a few notes of a wistful air, and on the faces of the women standing on the dock as the Pequod pulls away—a sense of tragic inevitability.

New York Press, November 21, 2000

In the 1999 film adaptation of An Ideal Husband that recently came out on video, there’s a scene in which Lord Goring, the play’s hero, attends the opening of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. All London seems to have turned out for the occasion, which ends with Wilde himself appearing in response to cries of “Author, author!” while Goring, played by Rupert Everett, looks on approvingly. The scene (invented by Oliver Parker, who wrote and directed) is metaphysically daunting: a Wilde character at the premiere of another of Wilde’s plays. Chronologically, it has an historical elegance. An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were both running in the West End at the time of Wilde’s arrest in 1895 for the crime of homosexuality.

Parker’s film isn’t, as far as I know, based on Sir Peter Hall’s 1992 London production of the play, but I doubt if it would have been made if Hall hadn’t revived interest in the play. New York audiences who saw Hall’s production on Broadway four years later, with Nicky Henson in the role of Lord Goring, will find it hard to understand how revelatory it was. As Goring in the original production, Martin Shaw had been got up to look exactly like Wilde. He’d comported himself like Wilde, too, intoning his lines with the sonorous languor we’ve learned to associate with Wilde’s own speech mannerisms. In New York, Henson just wore a fat-suit and a poppy or a lily (I forget which) and trotted out the stock figure of the stage-dandy. Parker’s film goes a long way toward restoring the central mechanism of Hall’s production by casting Everett in the role of Goring.

What had been brilliant about Hall’s conception was its recognition of the coded message in the play. Hall was mining a literary observation: two characteristics that Wilde’s most likable heroes share with their creator are a flair for aphoristic reversals and a fondness for pretending to be something they are not. Lord Darlington, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, pretends to be “wicked” and is really the best of fellows. Lord Goring, in An Ideal Husband, pretends to be trivial and ineffectual and is really serious and resourceful. When Hall showed us Goring recast in Wilde’s own image, the double meaning of the title became clear: an “ideal” husband, whatever else he might be, was arguably a bisexual one.

Both plays actually contained covert references to homosexuality. An Ideal Husband was just a little bit more opaque than Earnest. The subtext of Wilde’s effervescent comedy about a sober, respectable young man inventing a secret identity for himself so as to be able to disappear periodically to do who-knows-what, seems so patently obvious to us now, it’s hard to credit even Victorian audiences with missing it. (What can they have thought all that stuff about “Earnest in town and Jack in the country” and going “Bunburying” was all about?) Of course it was essential that the majority of Wilde’s contemporaries not get the joke. What Hall’s production of An Ideal Husband brought out, which had hitherto gone unnoticed, was that Wilde’s dramaturgy operated on two levels, relying on a potent literary device that amounted to a sort of moral “drag.”

Actually, it was more properly meta-drag. We now use the term “drag” mostly to mean people cross-dressing for non-artistic reasons—because they like to, because it’s funny or fun. But of course theatrical cross-dressing is as old as theater itself, because before the invention of the actress in the restoration period, characters of both sexes were played by males. (One theory is that “drag” referred to the long skirts that boys had to wear to indicate the gender of the characters they were playing.) What I’m calling meta-drag emerges with plays in which characters themselves were cross-dressing and the fundamental meaning of a play was dependent on the audience’s awareness that they were watching a male playing a female playing a male. A boy playing Ophelia in Shakespeare’s day was drag; a boy playing Rosalind or Viola disguised as a boy was meta-drag.

Wilde’s plays presented saints who purported to be sinners—or rather good men who liked to pretend to pretend to be bad. For Wilde’s protagonists, the affectation of affectation was a moral imperative given the institutionalized hypocrisy of society. On another level, they really were “sinners”—in society’s view—if you were hip enough to get the subtext.

Wilde didn’t invent meta-drag, but he seems to have invented the idea of applying it to non-gender-based antitheses—wicked or pretending-to-be-wicked, frivolous or affecting-a-pose-of-frivolity, affected or just saying that you were. (Years later, Joe Orton would invent a brand of comedy based on the premise that homosexuality doesn’t exist, but whose whole force and authority really relied on an audience’s knowledge that it does.) Exactly what makes meta-drag so potent and dangerous—and it almost can’t help being subversive—is a mystery. But no self-respecting culture can afford to be without it, particularly one (like ours) that’s stuck in the idea that theater is supposed to be realistic.

Our drama thinks that the only way for theater to arrive at truth is by saying things directly, a notion that Wilde’s protagonists tended to dismiss and his plays to refute. A culture without meta-drag or its equivalent is one whose theater (like ours) is going to be short on irony, ambiguity, metaphor, artifice, and moral complexity—all the things that great drama tends to revel in.

I remember some years ago having a worried conversation with a friend about what would happen to meta-drag now that there was no longer any real need for it. (My friend is fond of Ronald Firbank, another master of covert homosexual literature.) We actually discussed, though probably not seriously, which was more important: the ability to lead an openly gay life or a form of literature that gave rise to works of such complex reverberating genius.

In fact, what’s happened is that new forms of meta-drag have begun to emerge in the last few decades, very much on the Wildean model but using other binary oppositions—questions of humanity, race, identity, species, even ontology and metaphysics. You see it all over the place, any time an actor purports to play something an audience knows he is not. You saw it years ago in the sitcom episode in which the straitlaced neighbor played by the openly gay actress hit on a man who turned out to be gay. You saw it in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Carousel, in which Audra McDonald played Carrie Pipperidge, and she and Mr. Snow marched around lily-white New England attended by offspring of all different colors and races. You saw it in American Beauty, when the character played by Kevin Spacey repulsed an unlooked-for advance from the gay-bashing colonel played by Chris Cooper.

More recently, you saw it in Being John Malkovich in the scenes in which Malkovich was supposed to be playing someone else inhabiting his own body. There may even have been an element of meta-drag in the episode of The Sopranos in which Michael Imperioli came close to writing his own character out of the series.

Meta-drag, which is “non-vertical”—it creates links of a moral and thematic nature after the fashion of hypertext—makes us momentarily question what does or doesn’t matter or what might or might not be true. For a split second, some piece of knowledge that you knew you possessed but had forgotten because artistry—good acting or the compelling nature of the story—had made you oblivious to it (someone’s gender, the rumors about them, their racial background) flits through your mind. The thought it prompts is gone in a moment, but it leaves an afterimage.

Meta-drag thinks it’s important to remember that nothing is as simple as black-or-white, real-or-fictional, alien-or-human, crazy-or-sane. And, yes—as with the earlier meta-drag, the fundamental opposition lurking behind all these others is probably the primal old right-and-wrong opposition. But that would be boring to dwell on. That would be banal. So meta-drag dresses it up in all these other outfits, the more elaborate the better. That’s what those often dizzying degrees of reality are about: they’re fun and impressive. Also, there’s a moral truth they tend to reenact over and over, which is that when you expose one hypocrisy there’s always another ready to spring up and take its place.

New York Press, July 4, 2000

[From New York Press, July 22, 2003]

What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright’s one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism—two of the most repressive regimes in modern history—and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living.

Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf—born Lothar Berfelde—amassed a small fortune’s worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.

Wright’s play is a bit of a puzzlement. The opening moments, in which we first glimpse Charlotte (as embodied by the actor Jefferson Mays) are riveting. Mays enters from stage left, a slim, sedate figure wearing a drab black housecoat and apron. Opening a door upstage, she appears to be walking into an empty room, but a step or two in, she stops and registers the presence of the audience. Her face lights up, and a self-conscious hand strays up to the strand of pearls at her neck. She opens her mouth to say something to us, then thinks better of it, turns on her heel, and goes back out the way she came. In a matter of seconds, Mays has managed to suggest a personality who is only ever really alive when holding court and a secret life that has to be got at indirectly, presumably by the play itself.

Unfortunately, I Am My Own Wife is less an examination of von Mahlsdorf’s life or character than an account of Wright’s attempts to gather material for a play about her. Von Mahlsdorf was no obscure figure by 1992, when Wright first learned of her existence from a journalist friend based in Berlin and contacted her with the idea of writing a play about her.

Wright traveled to Germany and visited the funiture museum, taping his thoughts, and getting the lay of the land. Back home, he wrote von Mahlsdorf a wide-eyed and effusive letter commending her on her furniture collection:

I must confess I was no less impressed by the mere fact of your survival. I grew up in the Bible Belt; I can only begin to imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich. The Nazis, and then the Communists? It seems to me, you’re an impossibility. You shouldn’t even exist.

Wright proposed that he “continue to study” von Mahlsdorf’s life, pointing out that with her cooperation he might be able to secure funding for a play. (“As far as grant applications go,” he quipped, “forgive me, but from where I sit, you’re a slam dunk.”)

The trouble is not that Wright has included this in the play, but that it is the play. Cued by lighting changes, Mays shifts among personae as he recites the letters exchanged between Wright and his foreign correspondent pal, performs excerpts from the tapes Wright made of his observations, and impersonates Charlotte on her guided tours through the museum as well as in the taped interviews in which recounted to Wright the story of her life.

We hear about Lothar’s brutal Nazi of a father, who beat Lothar’s mother; we hear about how in 1943 Lothar went to stay with his Tante Luise, who raised horses on an estate in East Prussia and dressed like a man. We hear about how Tante Luise surprised him one day in the act of trying on a closet full of girls’ clothes, and how she gave him a copy of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten along with her blessing.

We hear about Lothar’s narrow escape from death at the hands of an SS officer, and about Tante Luise whipping out a gun and chasing his father off the property when he showed up unexpectedly. We hear how at fifteen Lothar killed his father, beating his head in with a rolling pin; how at his sentencing he and his mother locked eyes in mutual understanding; and how his prison term was miraculously cut short by the Allied invasion. It is all absurdly swashbuckling, sentimental, and inconsistent.

We also hear about how in 1963, when a venerable gay bar dating from the time of Wilhelm II was to be closed down by the Communists and demolished, Charlotte thought to herself, “That is not good,” and bought the furnishings and reconstructed the bar in the basement of her museum.

And then came the wall. And for us here in Eastern Berlin, it was finished, gay life. The bars, closed. Personal advertisements in the newspaper, cancelled. No place to meet but the tramway stations and the public toilets…

So I thought to give homosexual women and men community in this house. Yes. It was a museum for all people, but I thought, “Why not for homosexuals?”… And there was over the bar an attic. When a boy or girl met a man, and wanted to go upstairs, they could. Two men, two girls, a boy and a girl—it did not matter….

And anyone with an interest in Sado-Masochism—whether it was two or four or six—could have the room to themselves for a few hours. Whips and things to beat on the behind.

“When the wall falls,” Mays tells us in Doug’s voice, “Charlotte tells me she had the only surviving Weimar Cabaret in all of eastern Germany.” (The stage directions in Wright’s script call for the actor playing Doug to speak “reverently—in hushed tones” at this point.)

Did Charlotte ever think to herself, “That is not good,” about any of the other things going on under “the two most repressive regimes the Western World has ever known”—the suppression of intellectual freedoms, the disappearance of the families and individuals whose heirlooms she somehow managed to acquire for her “museum,” the ruined lives of which those possessions were only the outward expression? Did Wright ever question her about such things? If so, he keeps remarkably quiet about it.

Shortly before the act break, Wright discovers what anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary knowledge of history will have assumed all along: that Charlotte’s much-vaunted “survival” was contingent on her having sold other people out—chiefly other homosexuals and, in one nauseating instance, an old friend and rival collector, who was, as it happens, a truly steadfast and courageous man.

Doug is devastated, though not in quite the right way or for quite the right reason. “So—at the end of the day what have I got?” he expostulates bitterly, seeing his play slip away. When his friend suggests that he go with the truth, he whines, “But I need to believe in her stories as much as she does! I need to believe that…Lothar Berfelde navigated a path between…the Nazis and the Communists—in a pair of heels.”

Putting aside the fact that Charlotte does not wear heels—that she never wore anything other than the drab uniform of a 1930s hausfrau—what kind of naif would believe there was no more to it than that? What kind of artist would not wish for there to be more? And what kind of moral idiot would equate an inability to post personals ads with people getting rounded up and shot or imprisoned?

Wright’s problem was not his lack of material but his own vacuousness, his pin-spot focus on identity politics to the exclusion of everything else. He seems perfectly content to make Charlotte the moral arbiter of her own story, buying into the notion that whatever she did, the mere fact of her having been a cross-dresser makes her admirable. Nowhere does he acknowledge that Charlotte did what she did out of self-preservation, not moral integrity—and to collect furniture.

Moisés Kaufman, who directed the play, specializes in this sort of reality-based theater. The two plays he is best known for, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard, were similarly constructed from real-life sources: transcripts, conversations, interviews.

For a while I asked myself whether Wright’s play would have been any less offensive if he had actually put any work into it, if he had done anything more than apply for a grant, do a bit of traveling, and conduct a few superficial interviews, or if Kaufman had been able to help him shape a dramatic piece out of this material. I honestly don’t think it would. This is the story of a woman who thinks furniture, not people, worth saving, whose most profound relationships are with inanimate objects. Wright doesn’t see this, or if he does, it doesn’t strike him as worthy of comment.

Charlotte remains a cipher, as much in Mays’ performance as in Wright’s script. After those first moments, he does nothing to probe her pathological narcissism or her flights of self-invention, and nothing to suggest why Wright might have been so easily snowed by her. As for the score or two of other characters he plays, with one exception—the man Charlotte betrays—they are all fairly heavy-handed stereotypes. The only truly authentic aspects of the production are its surface elements—the decor (by Derek McLane) and effects. (There’s some nifty sound design by Andre J. Pluess and Benn Sussman that evokes echoes of music and weather and battles long past.)

Toward the end of the play, Wright has Doug describe a photograph that von Mahlsdorf sent him shortly before her death:

Lothar Berfelde at ten years old. He’s at the zoo in Berlin. He’s wearing a sailor suit, with a blue collar and matching cuffs… He’s on a bench. Sitting on either side of him, two tigers. Cubs, sure, but they’re still as big as he is. And they’re not fond of posing either. Their eyes are dangerously alert. At any moment they might revolt: they might scratch or bite. But Lothar has one arm around each tiger, and they’re resting their forepaws on his knees.

Wright has Doug pound home the allegorical meaning he detects in the snapshot: brave, fragile creature toughing it out between two bestial regimes. Amazingly, a blow-up of the photograph is on display in the theater lobby as the audience files out after the play; and almost everything in Wright’s description is either false or inaccurate. The little boy clearly loves having his picture taken. There’s no knowing what color his collar and cuffs are; it’s a sepia print. Wright doesn’t even get the animals right. They’re not tigers at all. I thought they looked like lion cubs, but whatever they are, they’re plainly used to being photographed with children. You never saw such relaxed, contented-looking creatures. They look positively sedated.