Intelligent Mischief

  

Tartuffe 

by Molière

“Beauty without intelligence is like a hook without bait.”   ― Molière, Tartuffe








One of the most divisive comedies ever written, Tartuffe was the focus of the biggest censorship dispute of the 17th century. Molière's remarkably beautiful drama concerning religious belief fundamentally altered the purposes and goals of comedy. It was extremely brave, if not foolish, of Molière to humorously tackle such a subject in a religiously sensitive era that still dealt with heresy at the stake. Tartuffe may have struck a nerve when his detractors interpreted the play's portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fake piety as an assault on religion in general. Still raw from Tartuffe's sting, it is easy to criticize the prejudice and blindness of his contemporaries. At the time of his passing, Molière's fellow clergymen were still resentful of Tartuffe. But the drama still manages to jolt and move spectators in tender places, and the urgency of being able to discern genuine devotion from fakery is as great now as it was in 17th-century France.

Moliere demonstrated that the caricatures of farce facilitated rather than hindered the investigation of human nature and social experience, and that both comedy and tragedy could delve into profound psychological depths and fundamental human concerns. His was a unique character comedy that drew laughs heartily at the mistakes and pretenses of human nature while portraying modern manners in a lifelike manner. Not everyone found it funny.

Sex Strike & The Thinkery

Lysistrata and The Clouds 

by Aristophanes

“What doesn’t polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair?

These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned “Lysistrata” as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.”  ― Gina Barreca

Lysistrata is a bawdy and demented fest of diatribes between women and men. When the women, led by the titular character, withhold their sex in their demand for peace the men seem to be at a significant disadvantage.

The name Lysistrata can be loosely translated as "she who disbands armies". That is behind both her mission and her leadership of the women of Athens who she encourages to withhold their sex from the men until peace can be brokered with Sparta. The play was produced during the Peloponnesian War and Athens had suffered a major blow when defeated in Syracuse with the loss of her navy. While they were recovering from that disaster the war continued with no end in sight (did I mention that these plays address very contemporary issues for those of us living in twenty-first century America?).

The play is famous for the roles given to women, particularly noteworthy since there is no evidence for women attending Athenian theater, and since it entailed the somewhat comic difficulty of having men, already in their phallic-oriented costumes, play the roles of the women. It is much more bawdy and extreme in its humor than The Clouds with the focus on the "battle of the sexes" centered at the Acropolis as a means used by the women, led by Lysistrata, to bring the men to their senses. The humor is magnified in the opening sections as the men who oppose them are old and perhaps a bit senile since the young men are all at war.

The pride of the old men is deeply wounded when Lysistrata declares that the women have assumed all civil authority and will henceforth provide for the safety and welfare of Athens. The magistrate cannot believe his ears when he hears Lysistrata say that the women have grown impatient with the incompetence of their husbands in matters that concern the commonweal. For rebuking the women, the magistrate receives pots of water poured on his head. When the ineffectual old men declare that they will never submit, the women answer that the old men are worthless and that all they have been able to do is legislate the city into trouble.

The women do have difficulties maintaining order within their ranks, but that just adds to the comedy. The result of this and further comic moments, including a riot surrounding the birth of a baby to one of the women, is a delight that transcends the centuries and overcomes many of the difficulties of translation. This has become my favorite play by Aristophanes.

While also a comedy critical of aspects of culture, in The Clouds Aristophanes takes as his theme the contrast between an older educational mode and the new interrogative style, associated with the name of Socrates. He begins with a prologue (lines 1-262), which introduces the two principal characters, Strepsiades (“Twister”), worried by the debts accumulating because of the propensity for chariot racing of his long-haired son, Pheidippides (“Sparer of Horses,” or “Horsey”). The idea occurs, with the assistance of “a student,” to have the son enter the school, the "Thinkery" next door, operated by Socrates, wherein by the logic of the sophists one should be able to learn how to talk so as to evade one’s debts. Not unlike sons in our culture, Pheidippides son refuses to attend, lest his suntan be ruined, and his father goes instead. He finds Socrates suspended in a basket from the roof, wherein rarefied thinking can be more appropriately done in the atmosphere of the clouds.

What follows is the entrance of the chorus of “clouds” singing and dancing (lines 263-509), following the incantations and chanted prayers of Socrates, to the alarm of Strepsiades. In brilliant repartee, the chorus is introduced as the goddesses, who, with wind, lightning, and thunder, patronize intellectual development. Yet the buffoonery that follows indicates that it is some weird intellect, for Socrates, in answer to questions about rain and thunder, assures Strepsiades that there is no Zeus but only clouds displaying analogies to the human bodily functions of passing water or gas. Strepsiades is convinced and agrees to become a student.  He proves to be incompetent as a student, for he cannot memorize what is required but only wants to learn how to outwit his creditors. Subsequent to his own dismissal, he forces Pheidippides to enroll under threat of expulsion from home. It here that he is exposed to the debate between “Right” (“Just Logic”) and “Wrong” (“Unjust Logic”), from which it is obvious that the argument of the latter will prevail.

Aristophanes is successful in parading buffooneries and a satiric presentation of his son's great success, he discovers that success means that his son now knows how to whip him. Along with a commentary on the ancient tragedians there are amusing anecdotes concerning child development in Strepsiades’ argument to Pheidippides, but Strepsiades has been defeated by his own intentions. 

I found Aristophanes somewhat more cerebral and obscure in this play when compared to Lysistrata, but the caricature of Socrates is enough to make the play worth while for anyone who is interested in the golden age of Athens.

Aristophanes, Women, and Peace

Lysistrata and The Acharnians 

by Aristophanes

“What matters that I was born a woman, if I can cure your misfortunes? I pay my share of tolls and taxes, by giving men to the State. But you, you miserable greybeards, you contribute nothing to the public charges; on the contrary, you have wasted the treasure of our forefathers, as it was called, the treasure amassed in the days of the Persian Wars. You pay nothing at all in return; and into the bargain you endanger our lives and liberties by your mistakes. Have you one word to say for yourselves?... Ah! don't irritate me, you there, or I'll lay my slipper across your jaws; and it's pretty heavy.”  ― Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Peace is a major theme of these plays. The Acharnians focuses on arguments against war among the men, while Lysistrata is a bawdy and demented fest of diatribes between women and men. When the women, led by the titular character, withhold their sex in their demand for peace the men seem to be at a significant disadvantage.

The Acharnians is set during the Peloponnesian War during the sixth year of conflict between Athens and Sparta. In Aristophanes play the protagonist is a farmer named Dikaiopolis who has suffered as the war has progressed. The Athenian military faces pressure to escalate the conflict for revenge against Sparta, while Dikaiopolis wishes to negotiate peace for his family alone. Throughout the play, Dikaipolis must use his wit to thwart his militaristic opponents. Democracy is presented as a vehicle for militarism and it allows many of the Athenian politicians to rally supporters under the guise of cooperation. A buffoonish and arrogant general, Lamachus, is held up as an example of the militaristic attitude that Greek democracy often produced.

The play is filled with outrageous puns and wonderful wit that skewers the military and the Athenian aristocracy as peace is sought. There is even a brief section that pokes fun at the then successful tragic dramatist Euripides. However, this play is definitely one about the men who are in charge whether in Athens or Sparta; thus it is easy to contrast it with the approach taken in Lysistrata.

The name Lysistrata can be loosely translated as "she who disbands armies". That is behind both her mission and her leadership of the women of Athens who she encourages to withhold their sex from the men until peace can be brokered with Sparta. The play was produced more than a decade after The Acharnians and Athens had suffered a major blow when defeated in Syracuse with the loss of her navy. While they were recovering from that disaster the war continued with no end in sight (did I mention that these plays address very contemporary issues for those of us living in twenty-first century America?).

The play is famous for the roles given to women, particularly noteworthy since there is no evidence for women attending Athenian theater, and since it entailed the somewhat comic difficulty of having men, already in their phallic-oriented costumes, play the roles of the women. It is much more bawdy and extreme in its humor than The Archanians with the focus on the "battle of the sexes" centered at the Acropolis as a means used by the women, led by Lysistrata, to bring the men to their senses. The humor is magnified in the opening sections as the men who oppose them are old and perhaps a bit senile since the young men are all at war.
The pride of the old men is deeply wounded when Lysistrata declares that the women have assumed all civil authority and will henceforth provide for the safety and welfare of Athens. The magistrate cannot believe his ears when he hears Lysistrata say that the women have grown impatient with the incompetence of their husbands in matters that concern the commonweal. For rebuking the women, the magistrate receives potfuls of water poured on his head. When the ineffectual old men declare that they will never submit, the women answer that the old men are worthless and that all they have been able to do is legislate the city into trouble.

The women do have difficulties maintaining order within their ranks, but that just adds to the comedy. The result of this and further comic moments, including a riot surrounding the birth of a baby to one of the women, is a delight that transcends the centuries and overcomes many of the difficulties of translation. This has become my favorite play by Aristophanes.

Love's Fine Wit

A Midsummer Night's Dream 

by William Shakespeare

 

"O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
   O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
   To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit. "

- Sonnet XXIII, William Shakespeare

Rereading this play for our local Great Books Foundation group was a delight. While this delight stems in great part from the comedy, the complexity of the play enhances that feeling as well. Consider the opening lines where Theseus announces the upcoming nuptials that he will share with his "fair Hippolyta". "Four happy days bring in Another moon." (I.1, 2-3) 
I will focus on the last word, moon, which will hover over many of the scenes of the play and heralds the importance of the titular Night for the play. This also suggests the importance of shadows and all that happens in the night, for there will be many strange occurrences that just would not happen in the bright sunlight of the day. It is in the night that we dream and in dreaming we lose touch with reality; thus here we find another theme of the juxtaposition of dream and reality. This is a theme that will be furthered by the actions of fairies and also the play that is produced by the "Mechanicals" among whom Ned Bottom stands out.

"The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander, articulating another one of the play's most important themes—that of the difficulty of love (I.i.134). Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love suffer. The fairies in the night heighten the complications of the lovers, yet not so much that the problems cannot be resolved. The resolution leaves Bottom commenting, "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream."

The tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience never doubts that things will end happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without being caught up in the tension of an uncertain outcome. And if anyone is still unsure of what they thought just happened, Puck ends the play with a suggestion that it was all merely a dream.

This play has inspired many musicians, notably Felix Mendelssohn who wrote an overture and incidental music for the play (source for the famous "Wedding March"). It also inspired Benjamin Britten to write one of his best and most impressive operas. Britten used the text of the play, relying on Shakespeare's own words, for his libretto which is rarely done. A fantasy, this is among Shakespeare's best and among my favorites of all Shakespeare's plays.

Confusion in Love

All Mixed Up

A comedy about love, betrayal, trust, 

and the things that keep us apart

by John J. Enright

What appeal can a play about a lesbian couple who are expecting a baby have for a single white male in his sixties?  A lot more than I expected as it turns out.  Last Sunday I experienced this mixture of Humour and Drama from the pen of John J. Enright.  And I found it is appropriately titled "All Mixed Up".  Considering the playwright's not inconsequential experience writing Romantic Comedies (see "O'Brien and O'Brian") any question I might have had seems upon reflection to be, shall we say, questionable.

The play opens with a couple who's expecting and facing turbulent doubts about both the nature and the direction of their joint endeavor.  We meet Beth in the lobby of a hotel where Carrie, a white lawyer, who has a bit of attitude joins her.  Beth is a Black woman in the latter days of pregnancy, who is nervous about aspects of the endeavor that she has not shared with her partner.  We find out that they are engaged, but Beth is no longer wearing her ring and the trust that led to the engagement seems to have evaporated.  The play adds to this couple a somewhat officious Security Guard and the baby's daddy. The mix-ups that ensue for this quartet provide more than a little humour as further tensions abound.

I was impressed with the acting of both Taylor Mason X as Beth as she brought a believable combination of nervous energy alternating with a stressed out tiredness. Her difficulty in sharing the secrets she kept from her partner seemed to emanate from an uncertainty about the relationship that was visceral.  Her partner Carrie was a demanding and difficult character that Paige Taylor handled well.  Both Eric D. Fisher and Jillian Leff in the other roles proved more than able to contribute to the mixed up action.

I was most impressed by the way the plot made the title of the play clear in multiple ways. The direction of Denise Smolarek complemented this to yield a successful production. With the playwright's signature wit ever present and a realistic portrayal of difficult relationships evident the play was thought-provoking while providing ample measure of laughter.  Any question about the potential entertainment value of this play for myself had evaporated early in the first act as I enjoyed a moving and often mirth-filled evening of theater.  

Complexities of Love and Desire

Twelfth Night 
by William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Act 1, 1.1-15



Every major character in Twelfth Night experiences some form of desire or love. Duke Orsino is in love with Olivia. Viola falls in love with Orsino, while disguised as his pageboy, Cesario. Olivia falls in love with Cesario. This love triangle is only resolved when Olivia falls in love with Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, and, at the last minute, Orsino decides that he actually loves Viola. Twelfth Night derives much of its comic force by satirizing these lovers. In the lines that open the play (above), Shakespeare pokes fun at Orsino's flowery love poetry, making it clear that Orsino is more in love with being in love than with his supposed beloveds. At the same time, by showing the details of the intricate rules that govern how nobles engage in courtship, Shakespeare examines how characters play the "game" of love. Viola (as Cesario) has the following lines in Act 1, scene 5:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia!' O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me. (251-259)

Twelfth Night further mocks the main characters' romantic ideas about love through the escapades of the servants. Malvolio's idiotic behavior, which he believes will win Olivia's heart, serves to underline Orsino's own only-slightly-less silly romantic ideas. Meanwhile, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch, and Maria, are always cracking crass double entendres that make it clear that while the nobles may spout flowery poetry about romantic love, that love is at least partly motivated by desire and sex. Shakespeare further makes fun of romantic love by showing how the devotion that connects siblings (Viola and Sebastian) and servants to masters (Antonio to Sebastian and Maria to Olivia) actually prove more constant than any of the romantic bonds in the play.

But there is more than love and desire in this amazing comedy. At the opening when Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria she bemoans that she cannot join her lost twin brother Sebastian in Elysium. Illyria is not Elysium however it reminds those familiar with As You Like It of the Arcadian forest of Arden. In both plays the setting is otherworldly--a place apart from the rest of civilization.

There is also melancholy,  for several characters in Twelfth Night suffer from some version of love-melancholy. Orsino exhibits many symptoms of the disease (including lethargy, inactivity, and interest in music and poetry). Dressed up as Cesario, Viola describes herself as dying of melancholy, because she is unable to act on her love for Orsino. Olivia also describes Malvolio as melancholy and blames it on his narcissism. It is this melancholy that represents the painful side of love.

Perhaps more central to this play in particular are the themes of deception, disguise, and performance. With these themes Twelfth Night raises questions about the nature of gender and sexual identity. That Viola has disguised herself as a man, and that her disguise fools Olivia into falling in love with her, is genuinely funny. On a more serious note, however, Viola's transformation into Cesario, and Olivia's impossible love for him/her, also imply that, maybe, distinctions between male/female and heterosexual/homosexual are not as absolutely firm as you might think. When you recall that the players in Shakespeare's Globe were all men and boys these issues become both more humorous and serious at the same time. You may get a more vivid idea of this theme by viewing clips of the recent all-male production of Twelfth Night starring Mark Rylance.*

This play rivals As You Like It for the title of the best of Shakespeare's comedies. While I prefer the former,  there are complexities of love and desire mixed with questions of sexual identity that make this comedy a fine way to experience and enjoy Shakespeare.

*Available on YouTube.

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Charlatanism and Comedy

The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years 
by Thomas Mann

"What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!"  - Thomas Mann


This is Thomas Mann's last novel and his comic masterpiece. The story of Felix Krull is filled with humorous episodes worthy of the Mann's story-telling mastery. Mann based the novel on an expanded version of a story he had written in 1911 and he managed to finish, and publish part one of the Confessions of Felix Krull, but due to his death in 1955 the saga of the morally flexible and irresistible conman, Felix, remained unfinished. In spite of that it is still one of the best novels dealing with the question of identity.
Early in the story Felix learns to deal with circumstances by changing his character as needed and he continues to shift identities becoming whomever he needs to be in all the ensuing predicaments that he encounters. The expression of a latent admiration for a human being who can metamorphose himself into multiple identities reminds me of The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. That earlier novel is a precursor to the modernity of Mann's unfinished opus. Felix Krull seems to view the world like a chessboard on which he can take pleasure in manipulating the pieces at will and cultivate his ambition and his knowledge of the ways of the world by spending whole days peering into shop windows. His own calm demeanor throughout his escapades did not transfer to this reader who found his episodic life in different identities full of nervous suspense in a strangely vicarious way. It seems that Mann still had more story-telling magic left at the end of his life after World War II and decades after his great beginnings with Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice. The only regret is that Mann was unable to finish the novel; yet, the "early years" of Felix Krull still amounts to a small masterpiece.

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An Evening of Humor and Wordplay

O'Brien and O'Brian

A Play by John J. Enright

Can two recent law graduates share office space when they are so different in temperament and personality that they cannot even agree on the appropriate spelling for their last names: O'Brien or O'Brian?  That is the main premise or at least the catalyst for the new romantic comedy from the pen of John J. Enright.  Following on his previous successes with "Ready or Not" and "Wild Flowers" his new play, "O'Brien & O'Brian" from Barely Concealed Productions provides more wit, complications, and laughter per minute than any play I have attended this year.
Dream Theatre on west 18th Street provides an intimate setting for this combination of wordplay and machinations both legal and erotic.  A potential client appears in the half-furnished office of our two young lawyers named O'Brien & O'Brian.  The client, Sam, appears with an urgent need of a lawyer, but which one will he choose?  His plight, an administrative hearing with a state EPA bureaucrat, is further complicated by his wife, an opinionated woman of Irish descent (with a quite convincing accent).  The edginess of their relationship is not the last complication and, as these multiply faster than you can say where is the Judge, there ensues a wonderfully wacky confusion of events that make this entertainment one that leads to laughter and delight of high order for the whole evening.
What sets this play apart is the wit and realism of the writing combined with great direction and acting.  Their are moments when the wordplay sparkles with enough wit to set your humor neurons on fire.  Each of the actors performed well, however Madelaine Schmitt as Darlene O'Brien and Bryan Hart as Alan O'Brian stood out as the leads with moments reminiscent of Tracy and Hepburn.  Nicole Roberts and Kate Donoghue were delightful with their Irish accents battling against the supposed "Irishphobia" of the EPA administrator played by Julie Soroko.  All the while the direction of Anna W. Menekseoglu kept the chaos of emotion and reaction of the ensemble on the stage under control.  The result is an evening of delightful humor with a message or two about the vagaries of love and life.

Comedy for Spring

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”  ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

This is among my favorite novels. After having stumbled through it as a teenager I have read it several times as an adult and find it a delightful and very humorous read. My most recent reading was with a group where we were able to explore our varied viewpoints on the travails of the life and love of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. D'Arcy.
I was impressed with the clarity and classical balance of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. From the balanced structure with three sections of almost equal length to the deliberate, yet pleasing, way that the story advances the novel seems designed to display both an intimate and timeless story with a reasonableness that does not deny the underlying emotions on display. Mr. Bennet's apparent sedate approach to life provides counterpoint to the dizzying distress displayed by Mrs. Bennet. She is concerned with life's little problems (yes they are little, in retrospect), while they seem large and insoluble at the time, and whether they will work themselves out. However her overriding and immediate concern is over whether and when her daughters will marry. Will the young Bennet women be able to demonstrate their marriageability, much less choose among the landowners, the clergyman, the overly-proud (?) and the gamester to find fitting matches? Interweaving the misunderstanding of misplaced perspective and the imprecision of unwarranted judgements Austen has created a classic comedy of manners and marriage with a sensible narrative. Within a limited time and space she illumines both the rational and irrational in the humanity on display in this seemingly sheltered world (the turmoil of the outside world is indirectly displayed in the presence of the militia). Austen would go on to more mature demonstrations in Emma and Persuasion, but this book continues to delight the discerning reader.

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Phonetics and Shorthand

Pygmalion 

by George Bernard Shaw

“Higgins: I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
Pickering: At what, for example?
Higgins: Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.”  ― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion


Although he based the tales in Metamorphoses on existing stories, Ovid presents them with a freshness and originality that made them uniquely his own. His writing is vivid, elegant, and succinct, with the stories including "Pygmalion"generally moving swiftly from beginning to end without tedious digressions or inflated language. Metamorphoses was highly popular with readers of the Augustan age (27 BC to AD 14, when Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire) and became one of the best read books of the Renaissance, influencing Shakespeare and other prominent writers. The themes and motifs are as timely today as they were 2,000 years ago.
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures that came to life and was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story in 1871, called Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. It is with this background that George Bernard Shaw took up this myth and made it his own with the first performance occurring in April, 1914. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.  Like all of Shaw's plays the wordplay is a delight rivaling Shakespeare in that realm.

I have attended several productions of Pygmalion over the years and was fortunate to see another yesterday afternoon presented at Theater Wit in Chicago.  Produced jointly by Stage Left Theatre and BoHo Theatre and directed by Vance Smith it was an excellent afternoon of theater.  It was an entertaining and straightforward production from director Smith and clearly brought a certain freshness and insouciance to this familiar, but invariably enjoyable, play.  The acting was energetic effectively communicating Shaw's humor.  The performances of Steve O'Connell and Sandy Elias as Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, respectively, were outstanding.  While not the best of Shaw's plays, this is undoubtedly the most familiar due to the popularity of the musical adaptation by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

Seaside Comedy

You Never Can Tell

by George Bernard Shaw

"The theatre should be a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple to the Ascent of Man." - George Bernard Shaw


When George Bernard Shaw wrote You Can Never Tell in 1896 he had already written five plays including Mrs. Warren's Profession and Candida.  But partially in response to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest he wrote another comedy set at a sea-side resort that would appeal to the mainstream while still incorporating some of his convention-challenging ideas.
While the play was not successful in its premiere run on the stage it was collected with three other light works published as Plays Pleasant in 1898.  It has been revived in New York City five times since then most recently in 1986, and at Court Theater in Chicago in 1982.  Fortunately, Remy Bumppo think theatre has brought it back to the Chicago Stage with a production directed by Shawn Douglas.  The comedy concerns the reconciliation of three children with their father after he has been absent for eighteen years.  In addition a young dentist named Valentine falls in love with the oldest of the children, a young woman named Gloria.  Their mother is an uncharacteristically strong woman who supports her family writing treatises on the proper behavior of middle class families entitled "Twentieth Century Treatises".  This is an occupation which she takes very seriously, but her children, especially the two younger ones, certainly do not.  The main action of the play is a series of comic scenes set at a sea-side resort.  These scenes comprise a comedy of errors and confused identities, with a friendly and wise waiter, Walter (most commonly referred to by the characters as "William," because Dolly thinks he resembles Mr Shakespeare), dispensing his wisdom with the titular phrase "You Never Can Tell." 
The performance of the cast was quite good overall with outstanding performances by Dale Benson as Walter and Greg Matthew Anderson as Valentine.  I also found C. Jaye Miller and Cory Kahane as the two younger children, Dolly and Philip, both effervescent and entertaining in their roles.  Both actors were making their Remy Bumppo debut and are recent graduates of University Theatre Schools.  The production of this witty comedy from the pen of George Bernard Shaw is a welcome addition to the long list of successful Remy Bumppo productions.

Above Photo: Dale Benson and Greg Matthew Anderson from the Remy Bumppo production of You Never Can Tell.

Classic Comedy

Tartuffe 

by Molière

Damis:

"Good God! Do you expect me to submit

To the tyranny of that carping hypocrite?

Must we forgo all joys and satisfactions

Because that bigot censures all our actions?" 

-        (Tartuffe, 1.1.18)

Less than two weeks ago I attended a lecture on "Why Comedy is No Laughing Matter". The lecture tilted toward serious literature that includes humor and comedy as an important aspect. On Sunday past I attended a performance of a classic comedy that has serious ideas as an important aspect.  The BoHo Theatre: Bohemian Theatre Ensemble presented Tartuffe by Moliere as adapted by Ranjit Bolt.  The afternoon of theater was exciting as the excellent production kept a smile on my face when I wasn't laughing.  BoHo's ensemble proved that this classic is still able to speak to audiences in the twenty-first century.  The direction was crisp with efficient use of small theater space that allowed a theater-in-the-round format.  Best of all the acting was great with a particularly exceptional performance by Saren Nofs-Snyder as Dorine.  Daria Harper's portrayal of Mme. Pernelle was also worth mentioning as she was effective in the role of Grand Dame trying, without success, to keep her extended family under control.  For example in Act 1  she comments:

"Children, I take my leave much vexed in spirit.

I offer good advice but you won't hear it.

You all break in and chatter on and on.

It's like a madhouse with the keeper gone." (1.1.5)

  As with all his plays, Moliere's Tartuffe is a comedy of ideas wherein the author uses humor, ridicules stereotypical, yet recognizable types to make a serious statement about his world. In the case of Tartuffe, which I first read more than four decades ago in a comparative literature class at the University of Wisconsin, there is a central character whose religious hypocrisy upends the lives of those around him. The hypocritcal character of Tartuffe and the critique of religion presented in the play resulted in its being banned after very few performances. The play survived, however, as demonstrated by its inclusion in the university curriculum three centuries later and its continuing presence on the stage. Tartuffe, along with a handful of Moliere's other great comedies are still worth reading and rereading for their insights into human foibles that are with us to this day.


Tartuffe by Moliere

On the Seriousness of Comedy

But Seriously, Folks: 

Why Comedy is No Laughing Matter

"G.K. Chesterton once rebutted a critic who 'thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because [he] thinks that funny is the opposite of serious.  Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.'" (from the introduction to the lecture)

Yesterday I had another enjoyable and edifying noon hour attending the monthly lecture in the First Friday Lecture Series presented by the University of Chicago.  The first speaker of the new year was Michaelangelo Allocca,  Instructor and Chair of the Basic Program of Liberal Education, presenting the topic "But Seriously, Folks: Why Comedy is No Laughing Matter." 
Beginning with a quote from G. K. Chesterton on the distinction between what is "serious" and what is "not funny" the talk presented by Mr. Allocca was wide-ranging in its defense of the seriousness of comedy and the comic in literature of both serious and not so serious sorts.  After an anecdote from the Dalai Lama in support of Chesterton's claims the talk provided examples from the Bible to demonstrate the existence of humor in what is generally thought of as a serious work.  What followed were both philosophical and literary citations that further demonstrated the importance, if not seriousness, of comedy.  While readers' perceptions may lead to misinterpretations it was clear from the lecture, and from my own reading, that Plato's Socrates often turned to humor in his dialogues, while literary examples abound in both comic texts like Fielding's History of Tom Jones and tomes generally thought to be more serious like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights.  Certainly the use of humor is essential in Shakespeare  to provide comic relief in tragedies from Macbeth to Hamlet.  
The psychological aspects of humor were also explored as noted above that there are often differences in the viewer or reader's perception of what is funny.  Maybe they just do not get it?  And sometimes the joke is on the narrator - with the resulting anxiety an aspect of the humorous moment.  The result is we may be left with the conclusion that "some day this will be funny", or not?  In my own experience my first reading of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (as a requirement of high school English) left me with the conclusion that it was a dull and serious novel.  Years later as an adult rereading the same novel I found that, while it was still serious, it was no longer dull but had taken on a humorous sheen as it was filled with comic moments.  In the passing years it had "become funny".  One other personal note: two of my favorite authors, both noted for the seriousness of their writing, concluded their careers as novelists with supreme comic novels - namely Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and William Faulkner's The Reivers.  Perhaps this too underlines the importance of comedy in literature.
When defining comedy one may turn to the classical authors, for example Moliere who claimed that the comic was based in incongruity.  Certainly it has this aspect and perhaps some bit of the illogical or the irrational or even the absurd. One may also turn to Aristotle's Poetics which, although it is focused on tragedy, does have some things to say about comedy.  The result of all these considerations of comedy and its seriousness was an entertaining hour of literary and philosophical reflection: Serious, yes;  but filled with laughter.


Here is a final thought from the pen of Henry Fielding:
"hath anyone living attempted to explain what the modern judges of our theatres mean by that word low; by which they have happily succeeded in banishing all humour from the stage, and have made the theatre as dull as a drawing-room!" (Tom Jones, V, 1)

A Day of Theater:

Play Reading in the Morning and Comedy at Night

 Yesterday was a day filled with drama and comedy for me.  I spent the morning at a reading of two short plays based on the work of Proust by Joel Rich, formerly an instructor at both the Newberry Library and the Basic Program of Liberal Education.  Joel has been teaching and lecturing on Proust for many years and these two plays, The Lady in Pink and Proust and Dreyfus, are demonstrations of his knowledge and love of the work of this author. 



 After a break for lunch and an interlude of surveying (my condo building is updating its survey plat) I hopped on the number eight Halsted bus for a ride to 18th Street on the south side of Chicago for an evening of comedy at the Dream Theatre.  I was glad that I attended both morning and evening productions for they provided superior entertainment. 

Wild Flowers

The evening theatrical event was a new play from the pen of John Enright, Wild Flowers produced by Barely Concealed Productions.  I was very impressed with all aspects of the production.  The play was entertaining both due to the presence of interesting ideas and believable characters.  
The Dream Theatre is an intimate setting for this romantic comedy that presents a young woman whose United States citizenship has come into question due to doubts about her birthplace.  Into the mix comes a stranger with whom she discovers she has been engaged with via the internet in on-line games with their identities hidden behind avatars.  Add to the stranger's advances an amorous boss whose scheming is apparent to all but the young woman at the center of the play, a surprise visit from a delightful Russian mother who may be a spy, and you have all the ingredients necessary for an entertaining evening.  What sets this play apart is both the writing and acting.  Each of the actors performed well however I found Hasket Morris as Jason Bolton and Denise Smolarek as the mother, Yuliana both stood out in their respective performances.  Denise almost stole the show when she was on stage with her delightful Russian accent and her uncanny ability to read the minds of the other characters (perhaps not so uncanny in the case of her daughter Maggie) -- she always seemed to know what was going on and what had just occurred the moment before she entered the stage.  Haskett portrayed the character of Jason with an almost perfect mix of shyness and geekiness under girded by the bravado of his online avatar, Thunderbolt.  I found the internal battle within his character as interesting as his struggle in wooing Margarita.  Their journey from nervous and contentious strangers to a relationship that I would compare to one like Bulgakov's Master and Margarita was one of the best aspects of the play. 
I thoroughly enjoyed the evening of comedy and, based on their laughter and applause, so did the rest of the appreciative audience.  

  Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

Travesties is not really a play at all but an intellectual vaudeville, frothier and more stuffed with factual arcana and philosophical inquiry than even Stoppard's Jumpers, to which it bears a certain stylistic resemblance. Its strength is not in its narrative (there isn't much) or characters (they're conceits), but in Mr. Stoppard's literate gags and glittering cerebral syntax, which finds or creates correspondences in the most hilarious places.


Stoppard's comedy is rooted in history here, although the roots don't go too deep. While World War I raged across Europe, a remarkable collection of uninterested or conscientiously objecting figures assembled in Zurich, in the still center of the storm: a brooding Russian named Lenin; the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, who was fomenting revolution of a different kind, doodling up the texts that would define (rather vaguely) the Dada movement in art; and James Joyce, embarking on a magnum opus that would shake the literary world to its foundations, Ulysses.


Mr. Stoppard's imagination was arrested by this odd footnote in European history, and in "Travesties" he created a mad tea party with all three in attendance, presided over, in memory, by Carr, a minor consular official who lived in Zurich during the same period. Carr came to know Joyce when the Irish writer founded a theatrical troupe that staged a single performance of Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, with Carr as Algernon Moncrieff.


This last, curious occurrence provides the narrative glue that holds together - just - a freewheeling romp through an encyclopedia's worth of artistic and intellectual concepts. Stoppard exploits this historical fact in large and small ways, making his entire play a parody of the plot and style of Wilde’s Earnest, and making a running joke out of one odd moment in the Carr-Joyce relationship. Unhappy with his recompense for playing Algernon, Carr apparently sued The English Players for the cost of the trousers he had purchased as part of his costume. Joyce then countersued Carr for the price of the complimentary tickets he had been given. When the dispute went to trial, the judge rendered a split decision; when Stoppard worked the moment into Travesties, by way of a frustrating dream Carr has, Joyce win hands down:
"…I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him — “And what did you do in the Great War?” “I wrote Ulysses,” he said. “What did you do?”
Bloody nerve."
Turning Wilde's subversive style on these proud subversives, to often hilarious effect, Mr. Stoppard allows his characters to intersect with actual or approximated scenes from Wilde's peerless comedy of manners. In the second act, for example, Lenin gives an inspirational oration to the masses that concludes with a swipe from Lady Bracknell: "To lose one revolution is unfortunate. To lose two would look like carelessness!"


View all my reviews

The Conquest of the South Pole

by Manfred Karge

On Sunday afternoon I attended a performance of the final play of Strawdog Theatre Company's  2010-2011 season.  It was an adaption of a 1986 comedy by German playwright Manfred Karge, but it could have been about out of work men in 2011 America.  The comedy fantasy, directed by Kimberly Senior,  is based in real-life concerns about the problems of endemic unemployment. The play focuses on four young men in a small German town, who stave off the despair of joblessness by re-enacting Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole in an attic.  The attic belongs to Braukman played with intensity by Tom Hickey (who I enjoyed in his recent performance in The Master and Margarita) and he and his friends never leave that attic.  The references to both Amundsen and Shackleton's famous expeditions yielded a dream-like hope where there was little to hope for.  The ensemble acted out a fantasy of deprivation in Antarctica that mirrored their own lives where for most of the play the only person with a job was Braukman's wife.  While the background of the playwright lies in a Brechtian approach to drama I thought of some of Shakespeare's famous fools when viewing the antics of Frankieboy played by Joel Ewing whose role as a dog in the expedition demonstrates most directly some of the child-like playfulness that engages the audience as the fantasy unfolds.  While it takes some imagination and the scenes are a bit uneven at times I found the myself laughing and enjoying the attic journey more often than not.  The production was filled with poetic wit and energy that belied the seriousness of the characters' plight.  I left convinced that their fantasy could promise a better day.

God of Carnage

by Yasmina Reza

"This is the worst day of my life."

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way, was how I described the characters in Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point in my review in October, 2008. The same description applies to the four characters in Yasmina Reza's play, God of Carnage, that is currently playing at the Goodman Theatre in downtown Chicago. More than one hundred years after Oscar Wilde's brilliantly witty comedy we have award-winning (Tony, Olivier, Moliere) comedy with wit, but without the soul. Not since attending Moliere who gave us The Misanthrope have I seen such misanthropic characters on stage. While I was yearning for some wisdom to show itself to reward the pain being endured on the stage -- both Veronica and Annette exclaim the comment quoted above -- there was little on the stage that approached anything other than sheer Bacchanalian chaos.  However, Euripides this is not.

The evening was made bearable by beautiful acting from the ensemble, great direction by Rick Snyder, an efficient set, and a well-constructed play.  The skill with which the ensemble slowly raised their passions and the ensuing chaos I would compare to the gradual and inexorable increase in sound of a Rossini crescendo. That the playwright succeeded in her presentation of comedy with wit and thought is a tribute to Reza, but this is a world that I would want to stay away from. The only thing more violent than the passions on stage last night were the missiles reigning down on an insane North African dictator thousands of miles away. The verbal missiles and bombs on stage made for comedy, but it was a comedy filled with laughter that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Chekhov Classic

The Sea Gull
by Anton Chekhov

"The point is, my friends, there's no use being theatrical. None whatever. The whole thing is very simple. The characters are simple, ordinary people."








On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, the first of his masterpieces, premiered in St. Petersburg. 
The opening night was such a disaster that by Act Two Chekhov was hiding backstage from the jeering, and by 2 a.m., after hours of walking the streets alone, he was declaring, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."


Yesterday I saw a performance of The Seagull at The Goodman Theater directed by Robert Falls.  It was a distinctive production with minimal props on a rough hewn diagonal set across the open space of the Goodman's Owen Theater.  The cast had several actors whom I had seen in previous performances, two of whom I knew from their work at Timeline Theatre.  The not so classic comedy/drama was well-received, as it has been for the century-plus since its opening night flop.  The individual characters were well-portrayed and gradually came together to create a microcosm of humanity that was in every sense Chekhovian.  It was not hard to see how the first audiences for this play might have been confused by the atomised almost chaotic appearance of the tale of lovers and strangers set in this small Russian summer retreat.  The simple ordinary people are not what audiences expected in the last decade of the nineteenth century and even today some of us would prefer stories of superheroes saving the day.  The Goodman production sometimes goes over the line and lets bombast interfere with the playwright's goal of a pianissimo production, but this is the exception and the combination of good acting and simple clarity prevailed.  The result was an afternoon of gentle comedy and human foibles combined with dramatic resolve on display as imagined by one of the masters of the theater.

Beyond the Fringe

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

- Alan Bennett

Beyond the Fringe, the British comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller, debuted at the Edinburgh Festival fifty years ago today. The show was conceived in 1960 by an Oxford man, Robert Ponsonby, artistic director for the Edinburgh International Festival, with the idea of bringing together the best of the Cambridge Footlights and The Oxford Revue that in previous years had transferred to Edinburgh for short runs. John Bassett, Wadham College, Oxford graduate and assistant to Ponsonby, recommended jazz band mate and rising cabaret talent Dudley Moore, who in turn recommended Alan Bennett, who had been a hit at Edinburgh a few years before. Bassett also identified Jonathan Miller, a Footlights star in 1957. Miller recommended Cook.

It played in London's West End and then on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satire in 1960s Britain. It was a series of satirical sketches and musical pieces using a minimal set, looking at events of the day. Although all of the cast contributed material, the most often-quoted pieces were those by Cook, many of which had appeared before in his Cambridge Footlights revues. The show broke new ground with Peter Cook's impression of then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The show is credited with giving many other performers the courage to be satirical and more improvised in their manner, and broke the conventions of not lampooning the Royal Family or the government of the day. However, the show wasn't all that satirical, merely making fun of things — such as war films — though even this was a step forward in comedy. Shakespearean drama was another target of their comedy. There were also a number of musical items in the show, using Dudley Moore's music, most famously an arrangement of the Colonel Bogey March which resists Moore's repeated attempts to bring it to an end.

Miller: Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do thee to Wessex, Exeter.

Fair Albany to Somerset must eke his route.

And Scroop, do you to Westmoreland, where shall bold York

Enrouted now for Lancaster, with forces of our Uncle Rutland,

Enjoin his standard with sweet Norfolk's host.

Fair Sussex, get thee to Warwicksbourne,

And there, with frowning purpose, tell our plan

To Bedford's tilted ear, that he shall press

With most insensate speed

And join his warlike effort to bold Dorset's side.

I most royally shall now to bed,

To sleep off all the nonsense I've just said.

[They exit. Re-enter all four as rustics.]

Miller: Is it all botched up, then, Master Puke?

Bennett: Aye, and marry is, good Master Snot.

Moore: 'Tis said our Master, the Duke, hath contrived some naughtiness against his son, the King.

Cook: Aye, and it doth confound our merrymaking.

Miller: What say you, Master Puke? I am for Lancaster, and that's to say for good shoe leather.

Cook: Come speak, good Master Puke, or hath the leather blocked up thy tongue?

Moore: Why then go trippingly upon thy laces, good Grit….

from So That's the Way You Like It, Beyond the Fringe

Delightful Comedy

Kevin Kline has returned to the cinema screen with yet another unique character that can only be described as delightfully quirky. The Extra Man, written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini from the novel by Jonathan Ames, is a comedy of manners and antiquarian sweetness. Young Louis Ives, a budding writer and Scott Fitzgerald devotee, moves to Manhattan and rents a room from Henry Harrison, one-time playwright and part-time "extra man". Paul Dano and Kevin Kline (both personal favorites of mine) fill the roles of Louis and Henry with an ease that belies the difficulty of comedic acting. That they succeed is evidenced by my, and the rest of the audience's, continual laughter from one moment to the next in this unusual film. The film plays against your expectations with Henry espousing outrageous opinions that are either antiquated or off-the-wall crazy or both. But, his character is so sincere, and opaque, that you find yourself laughing at statements that can only be described as outrageous. Polite people just don't say things like that, but Henry does.

Paul Dano's character, Louis Ives, is an everyman who tries to unravel Henry's persona with little success. But, what really sparks Louis’ imagination is his new home life. He rents a room in the ramshackle apartment of Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline), a penniless, wildly eccentric and brilliant playwright. When Henry’s not dancing alone to obscure music or singing operettas, he’s performing – with great panache -- the duties of an “extra man,” a social escort for the wealthy widows of Manhattan high society. The two men develop a volatile mentorship, which leads to a series of urban adventures -- encountering everything from a leaping lion to a wildly jealous hirsute neighbor to drunken nonagenarians to a shady Swiss hunchback.

Along his exploration into the heart of New York City, Henry and Louis have unexpected influences on each other and form a memorable bond that bridges their differences. In part, Paul takes on part of Henry's personality, through a sort of osmosis of character. I found both Louis's imagnative journey and Henry's eclectic character made an entertaining film.