Clyde's

Three young ex-cons discover that taking pride in your work--in this case making sandwiches at a truck stop run by a volatile Uzo Aduba, herself a former felon--can put you on the right path in playwright Lynn Nottage's continuing exploration of the forgotten Rust Belt working class.  Wearing outfits that look as if they were designed by R. Crumb, Aduba regularly terrorizes the spunky Black unwed mom, the failed Latin bank robber who loves her and the tattooed White supremacist while Ron Cephas-Jones eventually makes them almost as cuddly as his grandchildren on "This Is Us"by teaching them to dream bigger. Great performances cut the treacle and you cut the play a lot of slack because it's so warm-hearted and funny in a good sit-com kind of way.

Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

1990 Photo by Fred Conrad for the New York Times

For someone who takes as much solace in art as I do, there's one less reason to go on living after yesterday's long dreaded news.

Stephen Sondheim by Al Hirschfeld (1977)

Aside from ignorantly loving "West Side Story" and thinking "Send in the Clowns" was a Judy Collins song,  I had a rocky introduction to Stephen Sondheim:  "Pacific Overtures" on Broadway with Cynthia not long after we graduated from Columbia.  I knew it was artful, but I could barely follow the book and the music lacked the disco beat that had been thumping in my brain since our first visit to Le Jardin.  I'm ashamed to say, the musical bored me to tears.

"West Side Story" by Al Hirschfeld

Stuart, my first boyfriend, and Barnet, my best gay friend, both were appalled. They worshipped at the altar of "Follies."

 

"Follies" by Al Hirschfeld

Then came David.  Just beginning his career as a set designer after moving to New York, he'd never even heard of Sondheim.  Masquerading as a New York sophisticate, I took him to see "Sweeney Todd." Even from the balcony of the Uris, we knew we were witnessing theatrical history when Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou sang "A Little Priest."  I can still recall David throwing his head back in delighted laughter. We bought the cassette tape which came in a long box and included the lyrics. I brought it along when my father and I drove to Alaska in 1980.  After a difficult sell, he began to hum "Nothing's Gonna Harm You," my favorite show tune for many years to come.

"Sweeney Todd" by Al Hirschfeld

Sondheim with Angela Lansbury & Len Cariou

Still, Sondheim didn't quite take.  Sure, like every other gay man of my generation,  I learned the sassy words of "I'm Still Here" from Carol Burnett and Elaine Stritch, and the Pet Shop Boy's remix of Liza's "Losing My Mind" was on repeat in the Pines throughout the summer of 1990, but whenever I read a review of the latest Sondheim show, I feared it would be over my head.  And unlike the rest of the world, I didn't much care for "Into the Woods," aside from Barbra's version of "Children Will Listen."

"Passion," another show I missed on Broadway, changed all that.  Barnet lent me tape his original cast recording which I listened to over and over again while re-painting my apartment, my heart breaking each time.  The "American Playhouse" broadcast with Donna Murphy and Jere Shea finally turned me into a Sondheim acolyte.  No one who didn't identify with Fosca could have written these gorgeous melodies and bitter words!

I began playing the back catalog and seeing all the discounted revivals I could afford.  I was equally determined to pass along my newfound enthusiasm.  Barnet and I took Magda to see "Follies."  And one rainy weekend in the Pines we played "Company" for Zoltan.  Audrey later told me with beaming pride "He's the only straight 2nd lieutenant in the Army who knows what's coming when he hears 'Bobby, Bobby . . ." 

But nothing quite prepared me for the reaction I had to the Studio 54 production of "Sunday in the Park with George," imported from the West End.  Barnet, who'd been given a pair of seats for his birthday,  asked me to go because I'd never seen it. Goosebumps, tears and saliva (we were in the 2nd or 3rd row of the center orchestra) to a degree I'd never experienced before even though none of the cast was familiar.  The end of the second act, when the players assemble in a tableau of Seraut's painting on the stage literally defines coup de theâtre.  And an equally strong intellectual reaction: surely "Sunday in the Park" is the finest portrayal of artistic creation in any medium.  Bravo!

"Sunday in the Park with George" by Al Hirschfeld

I paid $350 to recapture the magic less than a decade later in a Broadway production starring Jake Gyllenhaal.  At that price, I couldn't really enjoy it even with the added star power.  That revival also was indicative of the only bone I have to pick with Mr. Sondheim.  Shortly before his death, he was asked about the state of Broadway.  Wisely, he said he didn't care.  But I do:  how can we expect a younger generation to find its own Sondheim if they can't afford to go to the theater?

James Lapine & Stephen Sondheim by Gerry Goodstein (1983)

Still, that won't be my last memory of the 20th century-musical theater's greatest talent.  Netflix, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Bradley Whitford reveal in "Tick Tick . . . Boom!" that Mr. Sondheim really DID care about the future:  look no further than "Rent" for proof of that.  Miranda has said you can draw that line even further, straight to "Hamilton."

Stephen Sondheim, maestro and mensch, may you rest in peace.

 

Flying Over Sunset (5*)

 

I had to go back to "Sunday in the Park with George" almost a decade to recall a production that moved me more than "Flying Over Sunset."  My expectations weren't high: c'mon, a musical about Aldous Huxley, Clare Booth Luce and Cary Grant dropping acid in the 50s?  But oh boy did it deliver.  James Lapine braids believable epiphanies for each of them into a cord that binds beautifully by the end and serves as a compelling argument for the use of psychedelics.  Hummable melodies with lyrics that reflect the character's unique psychologies (they mostly sing only when tripping), terrific performances and tap dancing, surprisingly evocative set design and gorgeous costumes make me want to see it again, a rarity.  Alas, its focus on three long-dead white people may fail to curry favor with younger audiences but for old show tune queens like me, I can't recommend it highly enough.  And be sure to watch for Clare's "Jungle Red" nail polish, the perfect detail.

Pilgrimage

Given Philip Roth's homophobic attack on playwright Edward Albee in the mid-60s, criticizing "Tiny Alice" for "its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee," I suppose I should cancel him.  

Philip Roth by Ian Wright

Instead, I made a pilgrimage to his personal library, housed since his death in 2018 at the Newark Public Library downtown.

Why?  Because his books have given me so much pleasure ever since my mother hid her copy of Portnoy's Complaint in her lingerie drawer, a detail I'm sure he would have appreciated.  No one since Henry James inhabited the minds of his characters better, and James isn't nearly as funny.  Over time, I revered the writer, a generation older than me, as a guide to masculinity (the fact that even straight men think with their dicks came as a great relief!) and the future.  So that is going to be how it feels, I thought, particularly about aging.  

Roth read a lot more than he wrote, and he wrote a lot.  No other old white guy except perhaps John Updike deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature more. Read Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, Indignation and Nemesis if you don't believe me.

Terrible back pain forced him to write in longhand at this standing desk.

He used one of three Olivetti Underwoods to type up his manuscripts.

Many critics--especially Michiko Kakutani--complained that Roth fell short in his depictions of women which I find more than a little ironic at a time when writing about anything other than your own experience leaves you wide open to attacks of cultural appropriation.  He also failed miserably in his two marriages.  But Lisa Halliday, the young author of Asymmetry,  a brilliant novel, had only praise for her mentor.  Never mind that the relationship her protagonist has with a much older writer is rumored to be based on the affair she had with Roth!

Roth fondly recalls the time he spent at Newark Public Library as a child.  

So fondly that he donated his personal library to the institution and endowed its maintenance when he probably could have negotiated a profitable sale to a university.  That's the very definition of mensch in my book, although I wonder if nostalgia blinded him to the building's neglect.

It's certainly got great bones, including this skylight, atrium and mural. But none of them looked as if they've been refreshed since Roth spent his youth there in the late 30s and early 40s. 

How to Survive a Plague (3*) by David France

This account of AIDS activism reads more like "insider baseball" than the documentary of the same name (also directed by David France) that preceded it.  Act Up's ability to create news coverage and its relentless behind-the-scenes maneuvering to expedite federal government approval of drugs definitely are stories worth telling but they're not very compelling at more than 500 pages.  Lots  of meeting descriptions.  Lots.

But the passage of time unexpectedly adds an interesting dimension to the book.  Anthony Fauci, identified by France as the bureaucrat who did the most to thwart Act Up's agenda, has emerged as a national hero in the wake of covid, at least among mask- and vaccine-endorsers.  Many of these are gay men who, like me, rolled their eyes when Agent Orange endorsed hydroxychloroquine, an unproven therapy.  Rich, that irony.  It's also undeniable that male white privilege (ie Ivy League educations and Wall Street employment) both stimulated the formation of Act Up and is characteristic of most of the people so heroically profiled here.

As a gay New Yorker who avoided HIV infection, my overfamiliarity with the reputations of the usual suspects in France's account (especially Joseph Sonnabend, Larry  Kramer and Peter Staley) perhaps makes me a less-than-ideal reader.  If I were to recommend a book about the AIDS crisis, it would be And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts, a page-turner which puts AIDS in a much broader social context.

Still, there's no denying the emotional punch of the final meeting that France describes: the day that Merck announced the findings of its protease inhibitor trials and the critical role that Act Up played in them.  If only David had hung on a year or two longer.

My Name Is Lucy Barton (3*) by Elizabeth Strout

 

"So  much of life seems speculation," writes Elizabeth Strout in a novel that wrestles with trauma and familial relationships from the perspective of a young mother hospitalized in Greenwich Village during the 1980s.  It also describes the birth of a writer who speculates very little, preferring to examine instead her own reactions to the world.  Lucy appreciates her physician's kindness instead of trying to explain it and, thanks to advice given to her by a successful novelist, she accepts that she has but one story to tell, and that she will continue to tell it over and over again in different ways.

I couldn't agree more.  For me, that one story would have been my inability to come out to my father.  Lucy's story--one of poverty and abuse--is more horrifying than that, yet our fathers were contemporaries, and Lucy's father rejection of her gay brother is exactly what I feared most for my first 39 years and provides the central theme of my own unproduced play and unpublished memoir.

With just a couple of deft strokes, Strout also captures the tenuousness of gay life during the AIDS epidemic.  During her long confinement in the hospital, her upstairs neighbor, a cultured, single Frenchman who insists writers must be "ruthless," disappears.  True to the advice she's been given, Lucy never has speculated about his sexuality but suddenly puts the pieces together while "the gaunt and bony men continue to walk by."

I'll bet if I were a woman,  I would have given this novel five stars.

Beauford Delaney

Somebody needs to make a woke movie about Beauford Delaney who endured the double whammy of racism and homophobia.  I first became aware of this under appreciated artist thanks to Gay Gotham at the Museum of the City of New York.

Self Portrait (1962)

That exhibit featured one of his many portraits of James Baldwin.  A generation younger, but also Black and gay, Baldwin thought of Delaney as his "spiritual father."  In 1985, Baldwin wrote [he was]

the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognised as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Delaney, born in 1901 to a religious family in Tennessee, lived deeply in the closet, although you wouldn't know it from this portrait of Baldwin, a masterpiece of homoerotic art IMHO.

Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)  (ca 1941)

After formal training and some political consciousness raising in Boston, Delaney moved to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance.  But the geographical proximity of a brother, coupled with fear that other Black artists wouldn't approve of his homosexuality narrowed his social world to the whiter world of Greenwich  Village.  In 1953, just as New York was becoming the center of the art world, Delaney migrated to Paris abandoning most of his paintings he hadn't given away to friends.   His new bohemian life gave him more freedom, if not more recognition or contentment.    Alcoholism and Alzheimer's disease eventually killed him.  Penniless, Delaney was buried in an unmarked grave in 1979.

Young English Lieutenant (1943)

Edna Porter (1943)

Presence (Irene Rose) (1944)

Untitled detail by Beauford Delaney (1962)

Bernard Hassell (ca 1963)

Portrait of a Young Man (ca 1963)

James Baldwin (ca 1967)

It's hard not to see the Ku Klux Klan in this uncharacteristic work.

Untitled (1971)

Jean Genet (1972)

Abstract in Gold & Blue detail (ca 1965)

Georgia O'Keefe painted him in 1943.

 

I 💗 Weathervanes

Check out two centuries of weathervanes at the American Folk Art Museum.

(ca 1856-67)
 

St. Julien, a trotter, set world records for the mile, at just a little over two minutes.

St. Julien with Sulky & Driver (ca 1891)

George Washington chose this pacifist symbol for the cupola atop his home in Mount Vernon.

Dove of Peace (1787)

Archers were a common motif because an arrow's tip always pointed in the direction of the wind.

This vane commemorates the first airplane flight across the English Channel.

The Bleriot XI Monoplane (1909-14)

Archer/Sagittarius (ca 1860-80)

The Warren Dragon (ca 1891)

Squirrel Eating a Nut (ca 1870)

Setter (ca 1893)

People once left notes inside this pine weathervane.

Heart & Hand (1839)

Cast iron weathervanes like this one were extremely heavy to mount.

Farmer with Team of Horses and Plow (ca 1870)

Is This A Room (2*)

The story of Reality Winner, literally and figuratively, performed by excellent actors who stick to the verbatim transcript of Ms. Winner's arrest for leaking evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 American election.   It certainly works as an indictment sexist intimidation and federal government overreach during Agent Orange's administration--Winner got the longest sentence (63 months) ever imposed for leaking--but I can't say that I enjoyed it.  And while I'm sympathetic to Winner, I have a hard time understanding why a woman as intelligent as she didn't "lawyer up" from the get go.