Moon Over Buffalo (Ken Ludwig), Lady Windermere's Fan & A Woman of No Importance (Oscar Wilde)

I originally slated these for separate posts, but after thinking on it realized that much of my thoughts echoed across them.

Both Moon Over Buffalo and A Woman of No Importance can be seen as moderate retreads of the author’s earlier successes (Lady Windermere’s Fan and Lend Me a Tenor) and the author’s in general can be seen as having a wide number of works without having a breadth in the variety of their work (at least according to me).

Which is to say Oscar Wilde does what Oscar Wilde does and is (mostly) celebrated for it, while Ken Ludwig applies his Ludwiggian filter and has also met with success (though probably not immortality).

At its best a formula can be seen as revelation rather than recipe and while many times the ire of people who lament artists “playing the same character” or “writing the same play” puts the blame on those artists- they just don’t have the talent, the ideas, or the bravery to try something else- I think this trend is just as well explained in the concept of audience capture.

The world is an uncaring place- it wants entertainment, and it extracts all it can. It can reward handsomely but can just as quickly turn its back on you. Artists, therefore, can easily be pigeonholed by the audience and be unable to find success (or support) outside of the niche they first gained prominence in. This is audience capture.

Ken Ludwig had dozens of unsold plays, rejected from everywhere and everyone, then he wrote Lend Me a Tenor- a bold farce about the backstage antics of an opera company struggling to cover up for the supposed death of their bank-making star. This catapulted Ludwig to fame and fortune on Broadway (such as it exists there). Is it any wonder that his future projects would play to the same crowd? It may be that he only knows how to tell one story. It’s equally likely that the world only wants to hear one story from him.

So too Oscar Wilde, who has one schtick (verbal reversal) which he applies constantly, often to great affect! The reason his plays are still revered is they still hit us in the same spot they used to.

Is this a problem? Hard to say. It’s almost like asking for substitutions on a burger, you can find the play that best suits your interests, theater on-demand. For my money I tend to tire of the Wilde Bon Mots quickly and Ludwig isn’t nearly as funny as he once was to me, but all three of the plays have something to recommend them.

Moon Over Buffalo
The basic Ludwig scheme is a tug-of-war between stability and normalcy or wacky and surprising, characters choosing or wanting to choose a “normal” life and being drawn back into a “wild” one, usually involving the arts in someway. Other traditional conceits are broken engagements, family strife, and people thinking they could be something if someone would give them a shot.

You can see this in Lend Me a Tenor, its distaff counterpart Lend Me a Soprano, Fox on the Fairway, Leading Ladies, and, of course, Moon Over Buffalo.

The Hays are an old theater couple who lost their shot at making it big in Hollywood a few years ago. They’re touring the provinces and have landed in Buffalo doing Cyrano and Private Lives. Their daughter has come to visit to introduce them to her new fiancee, and also runs into her old fiancee, who has started working for the Hays. A serious of contrived events (it is a farce after all) occurs sweeping through infidelity, mistaken identity, drunkenness, and divorces. In the end everyone is more or less ok, but the daughter has well and truly been drawn back into the world of theater.

Moon Over Buffalo has often been touted to me as the superior play to the better known Lend Me a Tenor, and I do have to agree that it seems like a tightened and cleaned version, the jokes are a little faster, tighter, involve more of the cast, etc. What it lacks, which Lend Me A Tenor has, is a neat moral to hang your hat on: whereas Max learns to believe in himself, no one in Moon Over Buffalo is asked to learn anything, and they don’t. They have a weird day that they then recover from.

Ultimately I didn’t learn much from it, though I am mighty tempted to produce it one day.

Lady Windermere’s Fan & A Woman of No Importance
I’m sure, I know, that entire graduate thesis can be hung on either one of these plays, but I have neither the time nor inclination to do so. Brief words on both will likely suffice since people are going to go and do Earnest anyway.

If Ludwig focuses on the tension between stability and the wondrous, Wilde focuses on what is proper and the lies and pain that can be hidden in tact. All of his characters are terribly considered with what is proper, what ought to be proper, what is boring, what is right, and reading his characters it becomes clear that Wilde would have had a brilliant career in the 90’s as an observational comic saying why men and women are different.

Although properly classified as a comedy of manners, and not as reliant on speed and hijinks as a farce, these plays have a similar love of contrivance as a farce.

Lady Windermere’s Fan concerns the titular character wrestling with doubting her husband’s fidelity after she learns that he has been spending time and money on a woman of limited esteem. He invites her to a party and through a series of situations the lady (Erlynne) covers for Windermere in a compromising situation and it is learned that she is Windermere’s mother who abandoned her at a young age. Erlynne has presumably been blackmailing Lord Windermere to keep this under wraps and her marriage to Lord Augustus at the end of the play ensures that this will happen.

This play has a remarkable amount of pathos and subtext absent in Earnest which I responded quite well to. The mystery is explained tediously by today’s standards, but the edgelordiness of the young Wilde and the variety of ways one can take the motivations of the characters created a show I liked much more by the end than at the beginning.

Wilde seems to stuck to the basic idea in A Woman of No Importance which can mostly be summarized as “long lost dad wants to get back into son’s life secretly”. While being far from boring it did take a much longer time to resolve into a coherent plot, being distracted as it was by all the quips flying back and forth. Is there more to say on this? Nothing truly speeds to mind.

Look Back in Anger (John Osborne)

Now that I’m reasonably back into semi-full production mode (which I had a glorious four-ish months moderately off from) perhaps there needs to be some escape clause in my reading a play per day for tech week.

Look Back in Anger is a hard read in a good way. It presents a tense, tenuous situation which is all too real and far too uncomfortable for normal people to stand. We find ourselves in the unhappy marriage of Alice and Jimmy: in class-stratified 50’s Britain upper class Alice married low-class (but highly educated) Jimmy and things have gone downhill from there.

Jimmy is smart enough to dislike his station in life and applies his frustration to everything and everyone around him. He’s casually cruel, dismissive, doesn’t listen, and is unyielding in his opinions. Alice and Jimmy’s friend Cliff lives with them and he tries to keep the peace and absorb what blows he can. Osborne shows us just enough tenderness at different points to let us see what life must have been like before Jimmy let his worst parts consume him.

We learn that Alice is pregnant and concerned about whether she wants to abort the baby, raise the child without Jimmy, or bring the child into this tough situation.

During the second act Alice’s similarly high-stationed friend Helen stays with them while she’s working in town. Seeing Alice too timid to take action (or simply making a choice that Helen thinks is wrong for her) Helen confronts Jimmy and his worldview and calls Alice’s father to take her away. Here we see more of Jimmy’s passion turned towards something good (though still abusive) as he grieves the death of a friend’s mother (but ignores his own wife’s pain.) After Alice leaves Helen and Jimmy have a fight which turns steamy, as these things often do (not to me, but, you know, presumably to someone.)

In our final act many months later we find Helen in much the same position as Alice was at the beginning of the play, though things are a little worse now. Cliff isn’t as happy, Jimmy has a little more bite and a little less love. Alice returns, confused, Helen resolves to leave, now understanding a bit more why Jimmy is magnetic, and things end as they began in a sad, twisted situation.

As a Producer
As great as this play is it is far outside of what Pronoia wants to do. We are about the elevation of comedy and escapism and historically this play was written as a response against the escapism of the time.

As a Designer
It’s a period unit set, of an apartment. I’m sure exciting things can be done, but they’re not leaping out at me.

As a Writer
This play accomplishes the magnificent task of staying (largely) away from melodrama while still being intense and disturbing. Jimmy is almost unreal in his level of vindictiveness and pettiness, but there is always the tether that reminds you that there are people like this and you can’t ignore it.

In a world where we too often confuse understanding a villain with excusing one it is refreshing to see the power of a well drawn, awful character, whose redeeming qualities don’t need to be mythic in order to have sympathy and antipathy for him simultaneously.

Doubles: Wallace v Anderson (w/o Dennis Budde and Aaron Garrett)

Aaron and Dennis are separated by time, space, and fate. Still, they persevere and tell you the life and times of George Wallace and John B. Anderson.

Dennis does an absolutely hysterical bit, and Aaron does dry history stuff. The world is as it should be.

George Wallace is the last moderately electorally successful third party candidate and John B Anderson pleaded for a centrist lane against the progressive poles of Carter and Reagan.

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The General of Hot Desire (John Guare)

With the last few days bringing plays that are just slightly too large, lots of historical research and the need to set entire days aside, not to mention preparation for several shows, my reading got a bit backed up, and I needed a quick fifteen-minute play to jump on the tracks again.

I found it by skipping to the end of Love’s Fire, a collection of short plays based on Shakespearean sonnets, and leaving the penultimate bit for later reading. Today we’re taking a (expedited) look into John Guare’s General of Hot Desire.

I have only read one other work by Guare (but it was about a president, so I had to,) but I am to understand that he likes self-commenting on the form that theater takes, and that is evident in this play. We begin with the entire company desperately trying to understand the two Sonnets assigned to them so that they can get a hot take on it, and then turn it into something worth watching.

This is entertainingly realized by the stage being filled with books of commentary that the actors try to pull from, only to be distressed when all they keep coming up with is that the play is about the general concept of “love”. Not love for any particular person, not painful love, not tragic love, just “love” as a good force on its own, and who wants to see that on stage?

They eventually contort themselves into telling an abbreviated version of the Christian story of the universe, with the tree of knowledge being set apart as the bad guy for all time: it becomes a symbol of what keeps us from God. Knowledge keeps us from understanding, and when we try to scratch around expression of the unexpressable through means of art, we step too far and God curses us with more knowledge that we mistake for understanding.

I really do only have another moment or two to write this so it’s all I can spare to say that this is by far the most entertaining, and close to the most comprehensible, work in this collection so far. It makes perfect sense as a close to the program and I love the way that Guare merges humor with the broader tone poem he is trying to create.

The Mandrake (Niccoló Machiavelli, Trans. Wallace Shawn)

It’s often said, and I think frequently incorrectly said, that comedy doesn’t age well, just as it’s said that comedy relies on surprise, a statement which I think applies a part-to-whole fallacy. There is plenty of comedy which is timeless and plenty which can be enjoyed again and again, only we’re not in agreement about what that comedy is.

I’ve often thought, and indeed wanted to make a show about, my thesis that comedy relies on expectation, in order to subvert it, and that when you remove comedy too far from its original context you run a greater risk of disassociating it from an audience which will naturally make the expectations that the author expects. This can be done with time, but it can also be done with space (from country to country) or ideology.

Unfortunately for me Machiavelli’s The Mandrake seems to have been hit by all three: showcasing Italian prejudices, in a Renaissance time period, with his philosophy leaves me occasionally cold. It doesn’t help that the translation beat me to life by a decade and a half and Wallace Shawn doesn’t tickle my funny bone at the best of times anyway.

That being said, there is some timelessness and some humor in the show, just not enough to bowl me over in the way that a classical work often must do to breach my usual preferences.

Rich sod Callimaco comes to Florence in search of a beautiful woman, Lucrezia, only to find her married to an old fool. He enlists the help of many friends and hangers-on to hatch a ridiculous plot all of whom employ, in small or great part, deception to try to achieve their own ends. By the end of the play everyone is happy in the lies they’ve crafted for themselves and we could take this to mean that life is unaccountably dreadful, or that a little lying to craft one’s own universe is a good thing, provided it’s not going to come back and bite you.

The actual plot, which is pure farce, is that a friend-of-a-friend will posture Callimaco as a fertility doctor, and Lucrezia’s husband Nicia, will seek him out since they want children. Callimcao will provide a cure-all with the understanding that unfortunately the first man who has sex with Lucrezia afterward will absorb the poisonous properties of the active ingredient, the Mandrake root, and will soon die.

Therefore, the group of them must find a poor young fool that no one will miss, kidnap him to have sex with Lucrezia, then proceed forward as though nothing has happened. Naturally Callimaco will disguise himself as the boy and Nizia will be party to his own cuckolding. Some more confederates are necessary to get Lucrezia to agree to the (false) plan, but she does, and they do, and it happens, and lots of money moves around, and like I said by the end everyone seems reasonably happy with what’s happened, as far as they know.

For her part, Lucrezia, once the plot is revealed, takes it as God’s will that so many different movers would conspire to pull this off.

It’s a trifling story, one made more difficult by today’s sexual politics, but is by no means a poor option if you’re in the market for something centuries old.

As a Producer
The styling of the writing is actually quite close to something I might do myself, only the language and the topics are barriers to entry and so I’d pass on this show for Pronoia. I need to keep my eye on this Machiavelli though, he might be going places.

As a Designer
Like any classical work these days I’m sure the script just becomes a veneer for the director to put his spin on things, and in that way the script opens a lot of possibilities in that it asks for very little to be seen or heard. There is a small monograph at the back of my edition which talks about the design and approach the director who did the first production of this translation took, which was intellectually interesting, but not compelling enough to divulge here.

Basically though, it allows for a lot of different choices choices a person (not I) could make.

As a Writer
I don’t think I’m going to pull anything specifically from this work: there’s no great secret or lesson lurking behind this old translation of an old farce, except the one that is always useful to reinforce: if you commit to anything hard enough, no matter how silly it may be, it can yield thoroughly entertaining work. Best not to try to cut yourself off at the knees.