“Being there is not the same as understanding where I was.” Aaron Leonard, Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, and Upheaval at the end of the 1970s
“When we were working on Godspell we were just kids in this theater down in the West Village - the Cherry Lane where there was a leak and there were rats running around and we were like Mickey and Judy putting on a show in a barn. We did not think at all about the future. I never thought that that critics would come at some point and that we would have to create tickets.” Stephen Schwartz
Since my current lifestyle is more profoundly isolated than in all of the decades of my adult life until this point, I find myself compelled to reflect upon much of my past, which of course is only beneficial to someone attempting to write about their life.
I have written in previous posts about the immense amount of theatre I have experienced from the 70s through the 1990s and I have displayed on a couple of solo episodes some playbills of a few productions of those years. Moat of these productions I experienced in the Summer months. In those years New York City seemed to empty in those months. Was the city more affordable? Did people take the ubiquitous Fear City brochures literally and stay away? But because these were years of my youth overtime I learned to associate the theatre with Summer.
The word I often come back to in beginning to even regard or comprehend such artistic objects as live plays, musicals, revues, as well as recorded films is of course representation, perhaps the most critical word in any discussion of the arts.
“Aristotle defined all the arts—verbal, visual, and musical—as modes of representation, and went even further to make representation the definitively human activity:
‘From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things’.
Man, for many philosophers both ancient and modern, is the “representational animal,” homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs—things that “stand for” or “take the place of” something else.” (From W.J.T Mitchell, Critical Terms For Literary Study)
But I want to now depart slightly from this rather abstract kind of language sometimes needed to define things in their most basic elements so that we go further into how things, including all representations, appear and feel to us as they are undergone by us. It is the undergoing of experience that forms the purposes of art’s very existence. As I said in another context in all art we are led to reflect ourselves back to ourselves. We need to not simply just live lived in the natural flow of time but also reflect upon what we have already done or are about to do. We are not meant to just live life but evaluate it in some way, to observe it with an element of disinterestedness.
I reflect upon the meanings of it all from the specific and peculiar vantage of doing this podcast and living in our contemporary moment. When I say meanings in the plural this is so for some outsized reasons: it is for me the hardest matter to articulate, namely the vastness and immensity all these many productions, most of them excellent by any standard from any era.
Even when I “swapped” live theatre for recorded motion pictures so influenced was I by my theatergoing that my initial filmgoing habits were quite exclusive. I became committed to always the better work, or what I considered to be better, whether American or international and, for a time, I was a little dogmatic about this. Twenty years of being profoundly alienated from much of what goes under the rubric of popular culture is a big deal, particular when it was not something I really believed in like a religion, but was a way of organizing reality itself, in harmony with some sense of identity and any values that so constituted the identity.
This habit had changed radically in the 00s. I was without a television for much of the 90s and early 00s. There was also the conscious and deliberative goal of trying to educate myself in the humanities and all that such a project entailed for me at that time.
By the the age of twenty or twenty-one I had already seen hundreds of motion pictures, the kind of art objects that were released to theaters. For what felt like the longest time, from roughly the middle 1980s until halfway through the 1990s, I had to rely on what were known as video stores to watch the many pictures that were of particular interest to and were were not currently available in a given season in the theaters
If we look through a longer lens and consider my theatre going experiences overall, there was a period of my entire childhood until my mid twenties when live theaters played a considerable role. The volume of productions I experienced and was fortunate to attend is so vast and encyclopedic that it has occurred to me that I could do entire episodes, even a book, on some of the details of a few choice ones - whether Marisa Tomei in a socialist Dario Fo/Franca Rame agitprop play in Boston, the Mary Tyler Moore production of Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in Cowboy Mouth in the the early 1970s, Richard Burton in Equus, or Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in a duet performance with no more than a hundred of us in the audience.
Certain productions in this world are more memorable than others, even given the reality that I had experienced some of the greatest productions in New York City in that entire era.
For example there was the production of HurlyBurly from 1984 which will always be forefront in memory - if only for the cast and director: Christopher Walken, Jerry Stiller, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, and Judith Ivey, with Mike Nichols at the helm. I have already mentioned in a earlier post that I had attended another David Rabe work that had starred Al Pacino, which only reaffirms the extension of my theater going in the era. But I have not been able to find a context in which to even begin to approach HurlyBurly, so rich and dense a play it was.
It is interesting in that it is a thoroughly 1970s work of art in every conceivable way: it deals with a theme predominant in 1970s cinema, that of men behaving badly and is actually about people who happen to work in Hollywood. I found the fact that these were presented in a stage play fascinating.
Yet it is also in many respects very much at home in the first part of the 1980s ,in part because of the all star cast, most of whom were thriving, if not “stars" in the very years of the play’s production Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Ghostbusters for example, William Hurt in Kiss Of The Spider Woman and The Big Chill, Harvey Keitel in practically everything, Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, Judith Ivey in The Woman In Red with Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder, Charles Grodin and Kelly LeBrock. And so on. Now all of these films I had seen - whether the release dates were before or after the dates of the play’s run. We are also in the same era - that of the early to middle 1980s.
I think this one production stands out because its very details, including seeing on a live stage William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver simulating oral sex, my current memory unsure of “who was doing who”, especially given the strategic blanket covering in the stage directions, all the while these two actors engaged in humorous parody of psychological or spiritual jargon of the era.
What is important is how it felt to undergo things, in this case a work of art, and how undergoing such things in the duration of immediate experience is far removed from later reflection or any subsequent considerations. This is the one sense in which, to use a technical term from philosophy I am more interested in phenomenology. Thus, instead of checking the play from Samuel French or asking people who had seen this production, I want all the imprecise fuzziness to be present as I recount this, thus honoring both past and present.
Needless to say all commercially released art objects have to present summaries to the public. But you can be sure that these summaries will be thoroughly monitored and doctored to reflect the sensibilities of the age in which they are rereleased. The Samuel French blurb isn’t half bad:
David Rabe’s eviscerating dark comedy depicts characters nose-deep in the decadent, perverted, cocaine culture that is Hollywood, pursuing a sex-crazed, drug-addled vision of the American Dream.
One of my favorite objects in my 70s museum is the truly bizarre book The Pleasures of Cocaine (1976) which contains the line:
“We are living in an age of decadence. It can not be avoided. It is an inevitable part of history and progress”.
This is the same formulation Samuel French uses, but decadence is a curious word with a vexed history. Camille Paglia has written best about the word, one of the few to use it in a non-pejorative way, associating it with features of what she would call “late culture.” This is evidently something that, for her, simply happens in every known civilization. Of course I would reject the determinism and inevitability implied in such formulations but I think she is onto something. But as to what that something is I really have no idea,
Of course nonsensical pontification in a pro-drug book commercially published for one law violating subculture is of great aesthetic interest to me because I am not at all interested in it is a real life guide to anything, even living. I can certainly see the characters in this play owning a copy of this book. I don’t want to say that my response to HurlyBurly is bereft of concern or care about what to do in one’s life, or more to the point, what not do do, but my interest is ultimately a kind of curiosity about what this or that type of person or lifestyle is about. Again, this is the mode of reflection and not action. That art is seen today as essentially inseparable from clear courses of action, as one large drivers ed manual, is one of the great mistakes in our general comprehension and appreciation of art. (“The revolution does not belong on the screen”: Fassbinder)
The production itself was not the only reason for its powerful memorability. What was most amazing for me to discover was that Shirley MacLaine, of all people, was attending the same matinee, a few seats to my left! During intermission I could hear her conversation with some folks wherein she said “I think in the second act these characters are going to talk about Karma. I just know it”. I didn’t know what to make of encountering her as a theatergoer. This was a matinee and “previews” so maybe that was to be expected.
When I think back on the fact that only seven years later in 1992 I would see her on the stage performing with Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas (the only time I have ever been to Vegas) makes me continually convinced that there is something special and unusual about my experiences with all of these productions. And in the second act of the play William Hurt does mention Karma.
There were others that certainly were as memorable. I have mentioned the Peter Hall production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson that I only saw from which I saw only Act One. There was the Stephen Sondheim Sunday in The Park With George with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, and in what would be one of the last of the great Broadway shows I would attend, the original Tony Kushner Angels in America and Millennium Approaches for which Ron Liebman deservedly won a Tony.
The theatre going was inspired in large part by my father who not only loved the theatre at least sine he moved to New York City as a teen - in the fifties no less - but actually wrote plays and owned a theatre company in Tampa in the 1980s and 90s. He claims to have studied with Michael Chekhov as well.
Beginning in the late 1980s, upon moving to Boston, one of the major decisions of great autonomy on my part was to become a more ardent cinephile; the movie theaters became the major kind of theatre that captivated me. I think I really liked the flexibility and pop simplicity of them, qualities captured too by the affordability.
I was at one of the last screening at the Orson Welles Theatre before it was burned down, Jean Luc Godard’s Hail Mary, no
less, and became a decades long devotee of the Halloween Movie marathon at The Coolidge Theatre, where, amazingly and resplendently, sometimes I could be watching The Exorcist at 2 in the morning only to be followed by Carrie at 4:30 AM. I remember with greatest fondness watching a particularly awful moment in one of the many B or exploitation films being shown and having a movie theatre staff whisper into my ear “isn’t it beautiful?” I wish I could remember the film - it might have been Grizzly with Christopher and Lunda Day George. From 1977. I remember the great disapproval of the “so bad it’s good” attitude and sensibility but it was one in which I was immersed at this time.
The other decision I made was to become very knowledgeable about alternative about independent cinema of all kinds, including quite a bit of non-narrative and so-called “experimental” film. I am talking about, for narrative features, things like Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation and Todd Haynes’ Safe and for the non-narrative features, Stan Breakage, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow etc.
I became a devotee of Saul Levine’s weekly film screenings at Massachusetts College Of Art Film Society (MassArt) were I saw hundreds of the most unusual and important works of avant-garde cinema, including rare prints of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas On Earth (a personal favorite) all the early Andy Warhols, and more. I also met many filmmakers there, including our guest Maile Colbert.
During these years I was profoundly alienated from the middlebrow or “classical” movies that were so important to so many people. With very few exceptions I disliked or was bored by these. The films that stand out to me as being better than their peers were ones like Ghost World, The Ice Storm, Dazed And Confused and Romy And Michelle’s High School Reunion. Only now am I getting caught up on a lot of artistic output of that period. Indeed in a few occasions what I had dismissed at the time has begun to look a little better. (Television is a whole separate issue and I actually only now am becoming acquainted with the artistic productions on mainstream television in this same period).
All of this brings me to my initial question of what the meanings are of having witnessed these exceptional stage productions of the late 20th century, post 1960s period. I do try and see everything for what it is but this is, as they say, a complicated project for someone with my history.
And the reasons for some of my assertions aren’t necessarily what you would expect. They aren’t, for example, connected with the physical or spiritual presence of people in live performance - however good - even though these are values in themselves. Indeed I can say that there is not a single television show from the past twenty years of which I have seen (and I’ve seen by now all the hits) all from an era unanimously considered a golden age for television that surpass any of these stage productions in value and in many cases this means that I am saying two and half hours are simply better than 200 or 400 hours even when those 200 or 400 hours are quite great indeed. When I reflect further upon all of this I feel it might be a question not of mediums at all but an entire era when seen as an era. I might simply like the era artistically which is certainly not the same as saying that the times were better, but rather that for me the artwork was more relatable.
But I do have the flexibility to relate to cultural work on more than one level: to look for different values at different times even if the values are not initially my values. I think I was so intensely interested, for example, in those avant-garde films because I wanted to explore modes of art making that were not so dependent upon or involved with acting and narrative since I had experienced such elevated achievements in these aspects of dramatic art already - but on the stage.
Of course even though I am still the man with the suitcase on the road in the show’s illustration, I still love those stage productions as much now as I did when I experienced them. (Sometimes my affections have only increased, which does put me at odds with sensibilities that dismiss past art works as not having aged well).
A provisional conclusion to which I’ve come to now is that maybe every single thing any human makes in the arts is pretty much like the people in Stephen Schwartz’s anecdote from the outset of this post - whether anybody wants to admit this or not. (Admitting this would force many people to hold a little more lightly a lot of their poor commitments especially the cherished uniqueness that this or that medium or genre might hold for them). The phenomenology of making something is like what it is to experience a thing already made and the commonality is that it is not direct or real life but a reflection, that is representation itself which is why I sometimes joke that art is akin to “make believe” or play.
Because my temperament is pluralistic - pluralism is not only an intellectual identity but rooted in my character - I can find value in all sorts of disparate things in the world. Among other things this means that my period of exclusive concern for what would have been called at the time “high art” was destined to come to an end and not sustain for very long. It also means that my perception of these will evolve and change over time even as I retain may initial feelings into the present and, hopefully, the future.
Bravo!