ED SIEGEL

Rooted

ED SIEGEL — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:21:08 GMT

Jhumpa Lahiri tends her garden
Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize with her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies .

UNIVERSAL: Lahiri’s transplanted Bengalis dramatize the tumult of a post-boomer world.

Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize with her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her follow-up novel, The Namesake, earned her even more fame, particularly after last year’s movie. But if you thought this was all multi-culti fever, Lahiri is out with an even better collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth. And its place atop the New York Times hardcover-fiction list bespeaks more than a cult of readers.

Whereas some writers get weighed down by being the hot young thing, Lahiri’s early success seems to have left her knowing she has nothing to prove. As before, her transplanted characters share her Bengali lineage, but here they breathe easier, with a more assimilated air. Her younger characters do battle with arranged marriages, tradition-bound parents, and other holdovers from the old country — India — but they break free rather easily from any attempts to pigeonhole them. The title, in fact, comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House, in which he warns, “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted . . . in the same worn-out soil. My children . . . shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

That can result in a kind of devastating rootlessness, as Lahiri shows in ways both subtle and powerful. But then, why should her characters be any different from the rest of the post-boomer world, in which religious, political, and other institutions have no particular sway?

They’re not, and so they go about their lives in ways that seem universal and inevitable. And not just the younger generations. In the title story, the thoroughly assimilated 38-year-old Ruma worries about how her father is making out in the wake of widowhood. He, meanwhile, is afraid to tell her that in the European travels he’s undertaken since his wife died he’s fallen in love with another woman. Older parents upsetting their children’s expectations is a familiar theme in our 70-is-the-new-20 times, but Lahiri strikes chords that are beyond most writers. And like short-story master Alice Munro, she curls around her themes in layers rather than striking them directly, and her work is more memorable for how her characters react to situations than for the situations themselves. In the end this makes for pathos rather than sentimentality.

Game faces

ED SIEGEL — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:18:30 GMT

The Clean House at New Rep; Gary at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
There’s something awe-inspiring about watching an ensemble in which everyone is performing at the top of his or her game.

THE CLEAN HOUSE: Sarah Ruhl doesn’t allow artificial boundaries to define how we see the world.

There’s something awe-inspiring about watching an ensemble in which everyone is performing at the top of his or her game. The New England Patriots of the first half of the season come to mind — which makes that February 3 performance all the more painful.

But I have no painful memories associated with the New Repertory Theatre’s crack production of Sarah Ruhl’s 2005 Pulitzer finalist, The Clean House (through March 23). In fact, if the Pulitzer panel had seen this production, maybe Ruhl would have gotten the gold. (Her latest, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, with Mary-Louise Parker, has just opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons.) Not only do all five mega-talented actors turn in highlight-reel performances, but director Rick Lombardo and his design team make the space at the Arsenal Center for the Arts come alive. Some theater folk have complained that the New Rep sacrificed too much intimacy in its move from its former Newton-church home, but Lombardo uses the new stage space with a free-spirited swagger that the Newton stage could never have accommodated.

Of course, the primary inspiration for all the artistic frolicking in Watertown is the playwright’s fanciful concoction of off-center metaphysical speculation and comic social observation. Call it magical kitchen-sink realism. Brazilian born-and-bred Matilde is the maid for a pair of married doctors, but she’s too depressed to clean house because all she wants to do is tell jokes. In fact, she’s in search of the perfect joke, though she’s wary of that, too. Her mother died laughing at a joke her father told her.

The play opens with Matilde (Cristi Miles) telling a joke in Portuguese with enough sexual body language that you almost don’t need a translation. It’s a testament to the young Miles that she’s never in danger of being overshadowed by two of the great leading ladies of Boston theater making their first on-stage appearance together, Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll.

It’s been worth the wait. Plum plays Lane, the one character with two feet planted firmly on the ground, in this case her upper-middle-class floor. (“I did not go to medical school to clean my own house.”) But that expensive white rug is about to be pulled out from under her feet when she finds out that her husband has left her — not for a young nurse, but for an older woman on whom he’s performed a mastectomy.

The yenta monologues

ED SIEGEL — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:49:25 GMT

Judy Gold’s Jewish-mother complex
What do you call a Conservative Jewish lesbian mother of two boys? Very funny, in the case of Judy Gold.

Judy Gold

What do you call a Conservative Jewish lesbian mother of two boys? Very funny, in the case of Judy Gold, who’s performing her 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother at the Huntington Theatre Company’s Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 31.

When we say Conservative, we’re not talking right wing. She did, after all, get into some trouble with the Homeland Security folks — and her mother — for calling President W “a living, breathing sack of shit” at a Howard Dean rally during the 2004 campaign.

This is “Conservative” as in the branch of Judaism in between Reform and Orthodox. She is still a practicing Jew, though don’t invite her to the same party as those humorless prigs who think that having fun with Jewish stereotypes is a sin against some moral code. Gold has a doozy of a stereotype to poke fun at — her ultra-protective, totally dismissive, deliciously self-absorbed kvetch of a mother.

Sound familiar? Sure, and even though no one has been able to one-up Philip Roth’s Lady Portnoy for the past 40 years, Gold gets a silver for making something so humorous — and touching — out of her quest for trying to figure out what makes this species of humanity so, well, special. The comedian-monologuist set out with playwright Kate Moira Ryan to interview more than 50 Jewish mothers. In recounting those interviews, Gold, seated on the chair that’s the only prop on stage, shifts shapes and tweaks accents in bringing them to life, going from demure to demonic.

Not that she comes up with any great answers to the mother question. There are common threads, such as a distrust of outsiders exacerbated by the Depression and the Holocaust, though this anthropological analysis can seem a little pat.

But the big draw here — and she is big at 6’3” — is Gold herself. She’s a riveting presence for the entire 80-minute show, whether recounting how she was the angriest vagina ever in The Vagina Monologues or talking about giving birth to Ben, her second son. Speaking of anger, when she’s recounting some of the conversations between her and her mother, her index fingers flash like Exacto knives as they go for each other’s jugular.

Backstage masterpiece

ED SIEGEL — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:13:42 GMT

Is Slings + Arrows better than The Sopranos?
As much as I adored The Sopranos , I have to wonder about the rush to anoint it the best television series ever.

INSPIRED: You don’t need to know a thing about King Lear to be moved by William Hutt’s performance as cancer-stricken actor Charles Kingsman (here with Sarah Polley as Cordelia).

As much as I adored The Sopranos, I have to wonder about the rush to anoint it the best television series ever. In fact, I don’t think it was even the best series to leave the air this past season. Those honors go to another show in which the members of a dysfunctional extended family bedded and betrayed one another at every turn while we waited — breathlessly — to see whether a central character would get whacked.

We’re talking Shakespeare, but have no fear. This is Will of the 21st-century world, not of the 16th and 17th. Some people have said that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for television. I don’t know about that, but I’m willing to bet he’d love every minute of Slings & Arrows, the hilarious and hip series about a Shakespearean troupe in Canada that bears more than a passing resemblance to the real one in Stratford, Ontario.

The producers of the series, which aired on the Sundance Channel in the US, said they were interested in doing only three years, and true to their word, they finished up this past season — the final six episodes will join the previous two years on DVD shelves this Tuesday (Acorn Media). And whereas other great series in their last bow have gone for the mighty final gesture — Seinfeld and St. Elsewhere, in addition to The Sopranos — Slings & Arrows gracefully glides into an ending so sublime . . .

Unlike David Chase, I’ll finish that thought, but let’s start at the beginning. Oliver Welles — any relation to Orson is probably intentional — is the artistic director of the safely successful New Burbage Theatre Festival. He turns on the TV one day and sees his former protégé, Geoffrey Tenant, chain himself to the doors of his theater rather than let the landlord close it down. This is what theater should be about, thinks Oliver, who goes out and gets soused as he recalls how he lost his artistic vision. As he staggers about, he’s run over and killed by a truck carrying ham.

Don’t be afraid of the Dark

ED SIEGEL — Thu, 17 May 2007 01:11:40 GMT

Murakami’s noirish novel is playful, too
The typical Haruki Murakami protagonist is torn between women who are unattainably gorgeous and those who are just unbelievably cute. An excerpt from Murakami's After Dark (mp3)

MINIMUM MISHEGAS: But Murakami’s knack for making the everyday exotic, and the elusive tangible, is as sharp as ever.

The typical Haruki Murakami protagonist is torn between women who are unattainably gorgeous — often suicidal — and those who are just unbelievably cute — often young and unfinished. Both the guy and the dolls are present in his new short novel, After Dark, but there’s a twist: it’s the two women who are the protagonists and the man who’s the tertiary figure.

This might not sound like a big deal, but given how closely Murakami’s guys follow the same script, albeit in ever-fascinating variations, it’s refreshing to see him focusing on what women want. Not that he comes up with any startling insights, but the world he creates — of fast-food restaurants and strange hotels, people dying (almost literally) to make connections but able to do so only in fits and starts — continues to be one of the most intoxicating around. His knack for making the everyday exotic, and the elusive tangible, is as sharp as in his "bigger” works, such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. No wonder this cult figure is beginning to break out.

Listen to an excerpt from Haruki Murakami's After Dark (mp3)
Read the first chapter of Haruki Murakami's After Dark

The two women here are sisters. Mari is a 19-year-old bookish non-player whose midnight sojourn at a Tokyo Denny’s is interrupted by a jazz musician who was once infatuated with her older sister, Eri. He enlists Mari as a translator when a Chinese prostitute is beaten up in a “love hotel.” It turns out she’s joined the world of the night people because two months earlier Eri — the gorgeous one — decided to go to sleep, waking only to take care of the bare necessities to keep herself alive. Mari can’t get any shuteye with the creepy Sleeping Beauty in the next room, so it’s off to Denny’s.

Murakami keeps the action pretty much fixed on the two women — unusual given his penchant for epic sprawl. Maybe he needed a breather after his previous (and best) novel, Kafka on the Shore. After Dark reads as if he wanted to get the women through their psychic adventures, which take place from just before midnight to just after dawn, with a minimum of Murakami mishegas.

The importance of being Ridiculus

ED SIEGEL — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:06:35 GMT

Oscar Wilde at the ART
You wouldn’t think that an effective way into the heart of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest would be to play down the comedy’s slapstick farce, stentorian wit, fast pacing, or romantic heterosexuality.

Jon Haynes and David Woods

You wouldn’t think that an effective way into the heart of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest would be to play down the comedy’s slapstick farce, stentorian wit, fast pacing, or romantic heterosexuality. But only if you haven’t seen David Woods and Jon Haynes, who play all nine of Wilde’s characters. The duo, a/k/a Ridiculusmus, under the astute direction of Jude Kelly, are giving all the time-honored productions — including the classic 1952 movie with Edith Evans — a run for their money at the American Repertory Theatre (through January 14).

One way that ART artistic director Robert Woodruff, who just announced that he’s following Johnny Damon and Nicholas Martin back to New York at the end of this season, has distinguished himself and the theater during his tenure has been by importing first-class experimental theater from around the world. Ridiculusmus is based in London, where Woods and Haynes have established themselves as a comic duo specializing in new work. Kelly, a highly regarded and much-honored British director, became a fan, and they enlisted her to take on an established play.

Finding new ways to look at classic work has always been a large part of ART’s mission, so the collaboration fits the Loeb Stage like one of Lady Bracknell’s gloves, particularly when the talent is as jaw-droppingly good as it is here. This is not the camp exercise one might well expect from two males playing four women and five men in a comedy about mixed-up identities and romantic liaisons.

The natural tendency in drag is to highlight the differences between the sexes — stretching the vocal range from bass to soprano — or to reverse direction and make the women seem unnaturally gruff. Throw in a few facial distortions and you’re ready for Provincetown.

What makes Haynes and Woods riveting for two and a half hours is their ability to upend conventions of camp and traditional theater simultaneously. “Gender-bending” may be an overused term at a time when Dame Edna is a mainstream sensation, but these guys make her/his pursuits seem trivial. As they switch identities, snap off one-liners, and go about the stage changing the music, lighting, and scenery, their basic demeanor changes in mostly minimal ways from one character to another, relying more on wigs and costume changes than over-the-top switches in dynamics.

Players' prince

ED SIEGEL — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:13:14 GMT

ASP Hamlet takes the Strand stage
This Hamlet is as lucid a production as you’re going to see.

Benjamin Evett

It’s been two years of living Danishly for regional theaters, what with four major productions of Hamlet. The latest, by the hot young Actors’ Shakespeare Project, takes its road show to Dorchester’s Strand Theatre (through November 12). This is a space that has known more downs than ups in recent decades, and the company deserves credit for bringing Shakespeare to underserved audiences while luring tonier theatergoers to Dorchester.

ASP also gets points for the way it uses the space, putting actors and audience on the Strand’s large stage. The action is wonderfully intimate — though looking out into the emptiness of the theater, one senses notes of faded glory and cosmic silence.

This Hamlet is as lucid a production as you’re going to see. Even those who felt they OD’d on the play might find themselves thinking, “Ah, that’s where Shakespeare was going with that idea,” thanks in large part to the clarity of artistic director Benjamin Evett in the title role. Still, one wants more than lucidity from what might well be the English language’s greatest play. Under the direction of New Repertory Theatre head Rick Lombardo, the production alternates between smart moves and stumbles, inspired acting and silly posing.

Evett’s Hamlet is tremendously athletic, though you probably wouldn’t want anyone older playing the part. His father (Ken Cheeseman) looks younger than he does. But all Evett’s sturm-und-dranging makes him as unlikable as he is anti-heroic and might lead a Claudius or Gertrude (or an audience member) to say, “My boy, have you thought about decaf?” Speaking of coffee: given that the show runs almost four hours, you might want to come caffeinated. And speaking of Claudius and Gertrude: Johnny Lee Davenport and Marya Lowry are the most charismatic royal couple since Kyle MacLachlan and Diane Venora in the underrated 2000 Michael Almereyda/Ethan Hawke film. Lowry makes you feel the full weight of her character’s tragedy, her queen falling from the heights of romantic optimism to the depths of a misled woman in a world gone wrong. She’s the best of the four New England Gertrudes, no mean feat given that the competition includes Karen MacDonald and Tina Packer. Davenport starts out strong but degenerates — like too much here — into bombast.

There are excellent turns from Robert Walsh as a super-bureaucratic Polonius and Marianna Bassham as a wide-eyed Ophelia. Bassham’s first-act exit, after she’s been assaulted by Evett, is magnificent. Edward O’Blenis, on the other hand, isn’t up to the company’s standards as Laertes.

Zone clone

ED SIEGEL — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:01:22 GMT

Ryan Landry channels Rod Serling
The very thought of Ryan Landry doing The Twilight Zone is enough to bring a smile to the face.

Ryan as Agnes

The very thought of Ryan Landry doing The Twilight Zone is enough to bring a smile to the face. The iconic supernaturalism of the TV show that ran from 1959 to 1964 is perfect for Halloween — and Rod Serling as a satirical target is a man for all seasons. And there’s every reason to keep smiling as three classic episodes are sent up with good cheer and theatrical precision.

But wait — good cheer and theatrical precision? Admirable qualities, certainly, but when it comes to Landry, one hopes for other attributes as well: smart satire, inspired silliness, and an ability to make the jaw drop as well as tickle the funny bone.

Although almost everything about Live on Stage! The Twilight Zone (at Machine through November 11) hits the right Gold Dust Orphan notes, almost everything about it should be ratcheted up a notch. (In the case of Billy Hough’s bland impersonation of Serling, several notches.) Take Landry as Agnes Moorehead in “The Invaders,” an eerie semi-silent episode from the series’s second season in which a bedraggled farmwoman is beset by tiny visitors from another planet. Landry has a hoot rolling around on the floor fighting with the aliens and grunting in bewilderment. But as funny as it is, there’s nothing particularly surprising about it. In fact, like last season’s Death of a Saleslady , Twilight Zone is notable for how close it sticks to the original. “Living Doll” re-creates the episode in which Telly Savalas (here a very effective Larry Coen) tries to do in his daughter’s doll, Talky Tina, only to find out he’s messing with nobody’s plaything. Olive Another is pitch-perfect as Elaine Straighter, wife of Coen’s Eric Straiter. (I assume that’s a neat little joke, not a typo in the program.)

The dirty little secret about The Twilight Zone is that Serling was the show’s worst writer. The most satisfying episodes were written by Richard Matheson (“The Invaders”) or Charles Beaumont (who wrote “Living Doll” with Jerry Sohl). Serling never met an idea he couldn’t bludgeon to death. In “Eye of the Beholder,” a woman whose face is in bandages waits nervously to see whether the latest operation is a success. Doctors and nurses come and go, but all we see are shadows and profiles. It doesn’t take a Harold Bloom to see where this is going, but Serling inserts a Big Brother figure into the proceedings to blather on about the joys of conformity.