The much-acclaimed play Red, about abstract painter (and favorite/obsession of mine) Mark Rothko, has just opened on Broadway. Why oh why does Broadway have to be SO EXPENSIVE?
Sigh. Since I don’t have a firstborn to sell, I probably won’t get to see this. But if you’re in NYC (so you can do the 1/2 price tickets thing) or you have the dough, you should go. Yes, you.
Antonia Fraser has written what sounds like a fascinating and beautiful book about her life with the late great Harold Pinter. The Guardian’s account of it made me feel quite weepy, actually; I had never pictured Pinter as the sentimental type, but with his second wife, apparently, he very much was.
At the same time, however, Fraser apparently makes clear that she was no muse, in a refreshingly honest fashion.
From The Guardian:
“In principle I can’t bear it when artists’ wives say ‘It was all me . . .’” Fraser writes, and her memoir refuses to play that game. She records Pinter’s exchanges with fellow playwrights (Beckett, Stoppard, Simon Gray), traces the evolution of plays such as Betrayal and Celebration, and offers some sharp observations (“the half of Harold which is not Beckett is Hemingway”), but doesn’t claim to be a muse or amanuensis. “Harold calls me his editor. Not so. I was the midwife saying ‘Push, Harold, push’, but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway.” There’s even a suggestion that he might have written more plays had they not met: “Happiness is not dramatic,” he once told her. But after the misery of his first marriage, it was a bargain he didn’t mind making.
I haven’t read Fraser since my college obsession with English monarchs, but I think I’ll have to pick this one up. It sounds wonderful and sweet and sad and celebratory, just like a eulogy should.
h/t to Arts and Letters Daily for the link.
Categories: Books · smart people · theater
Beckett: In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.
In a college acting class on Beckett, before we read a word we first were tasked with a fascinating exercise. We had to go to this really shitty zoo–the kind where the polar bear paces back and forth on a tiny piece of ice, full of ennui and sadness. We were asked to pick an animal, and to learn to full imitate one piece of behavior, one routine, with absolute precision. It wasn’t hard to choose a behavior. Most animals had only one or two, confined and listless as they were in their pens.
Then we had to perform our task, over and over again, keeping the absolute precision of every gesture perfectly strung in balance. And an interesting thing happened. In every case–whether the hippo, the gorilla, the tiger, the sea lion–watching the person pick at nits, pace, or lick a paw was monotony at first. Then, something happened–the task, repeated precisely, with nothing around to distract, became fascinating, absorbing. And then, again in every case, the same task, still being repeated endlessly, became hilarious. Tears rolling down your face, sides aching miserably hilarious.
And suddenly, we all knew why Beckett’s stuff is so goddamn funny. It’s not just the unhappiness, which Beckett wrote is “the most comical thing in the world.” It’s the precision of monotony, the absurdity of performing the isolated task, voicing the isolated phrase, in a landscape of extinction. Because even and especially in the wasteland, every animal (to paraphrase Beckett) must go on, can’t go on, goes on. And that’s the funniest schtick there ever was.
Categories: Writing · smart people · theater
