January 19, 2023
What It's Like Seeing The Normal Heart During Another Pandemicby Randi / October 26, 2021Jed! It’s a play about suicide Jed!
(Yes, sorry, this is my Stockard impression, based on her West Wing persona, Jed!)
Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama ‘Night, Mother (ahh ahhh ahhhhh fighter of the Day Mother ahh ahhh ahhhhh) feels like it’s happening in real-time. Now playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre, the four-hander (remember) manages to create 80 minutes of straight intensity, like a tightrope of drama created by the question posed in the beginning that you wait until the very end to have answered: Is she actually going to kill herself?
The ‘she’ in question is Jessie (Rebecca Night), the adult daughter of Thelma (Stockard Channing (yes really) (she’s gonna be big you heard it here folks))(Jed! I’m gonna be in ‘Night, Mother, Jed!), who opens the action by asking her mother for old towels or plastic sheets for keeping a coming mess in check before announcing the type of mess she intends to make by the end of the night. Her mother, obviously, thinks she must be joking or exaggerating at first, but Jessie’s calm, measured, almost detached and monotone demeanor shows otherwise. She has been deliberating for a while and she has long since decided: she will commit suicide tonight.
True confession, while I have long been familiar with the existence of ‘Night, Mother, and equally the decades-long rumor of an ‘imminent’ production starring Audra McDonald and Oprah (huge if ever true), I never saw it before. I knew it was ‘about suicide’ but I didn’t know that it was entirely about a specific suicide and waiting to see if it would happen or not. And so I had no idea what the resolution would be, and this ignorance made for a gripping albeit stressful af experience, a waiting game to see which of these women would prevail in getting what they wanted. I thus can’t say whether the play would have as dramatic an effect on people who know how it ends, but the strong performances definitely made the intensity of the drama more harrowing. Stockard really is such a presence, and Rebecca held her own. It was like a subtle tug of war between the two women playing a game with no real winners, with Thelma little by little trying to get through to her daughter but using ideas and concepts that Jessie has long since rejected as being able to be swayed by.
The familiarity of their everyday routine, as Jessie fills all the various candy jars and goes through instructions for the milkman and the garbage collection, provides a kind of alarming contrast to the main subject of their discussion. A lot of their evening has threads of humor, like when Jessie requests a cup of cocoa even though neither of them like it, but the context keeps it all unsettling. The play’s structure takes the emotional family drama and heightens it with this overarching question, so you have the mother-daughter-conflict dynamic, with its familiar and unfamiliar aspects, and it’s put on this crazy other level when so much rides on their conversation, all the little things they say or don’t say having the power to determine what comes next. Everything they say creeps them closer to a final something. As the night wears on and as Thelma has fewer means of delaying Jessie’s plan, the anxiety increases. It’s like a (mostly) calm constant battle between the two about whether Jessie can be overruled, until the very end. Thelma uses what she knows – routine and familiar comforts and topics – to try to get through to her daughter, when these are exactly the things she wants no more of. The ways Thelma tries to make her realize how much life contains reveal how little their lives actually contain, and while for Thelma this is everything, and enough, it isn’t for Jessie.
I don’t know how I feel about what the play is saying, or trying to say. They show someone set on committing suicide who explains matter-of-factly that it is a logical and fine decision, as though it’s not in and of itself the sign of a need for mental help, as though the making of the decision doesn’t necessarily show that the person is not of sound mind (I know I just forked you right up there with double negatives, Jed!). Maybe the whole success of the play is in that strange uneasy confusion, about what shape our remorse is supposed to take, and for which character and why. Overall, you feel bad for everyone, and when you were distracted by the candy jars the provocative framing of the subject sneaks in through their mundane lives.
‘Night, Mother originally premiered in the UK (after Broadway) at the Hampstead in 1985, so it’s nice that this solid new production of such an important play in the canon is here, and with such a star as Stocks McBocks. It would be a great first production of the play for newbies like me. For people who know the show well, I am really interested in knowing whether it’s ever as interesting as the first time.
TRIGGER WARNINGS
The Hampstead, like all good theatres, provides content warnings on their shows. For this one it said simply “The play includes themes of suicide throughout.”
Now, I’ve noticed in recent years that shows’ warnings will include things like loud bangs, fireworks, flashing lights, and gun shots to help prepare audiences. And I am ALL FOR thorough warnings. However, I realize there is a line that many do not want crossed, for when warnings give too much away. When warnings are spoilers.
I have always argued for the balance to be on the side of people who need to be mentally prepared for certain content, and who can then make a more informed decision about whether they can safely consume the content or whether they should avoid it. And I still do believe that, for sure; it will always be more important to help protect someone’s emotional and/or mental state than to keep a show completely spoiler-free. (And theatres like the Hampstead have a great system: On their website, you have to click on a separate page for the content warnings for each play, so that people who have no trauma concerns and don’t want anything close to spoilers will never have to see the warnings if they don’t want to.)
However, for this show, I’m a little stuck on how they would ever do a more complete, and helpful, warning. Hampstead got around it by simply saying ‘themes of suicide’. But if the theatre decided to address the inclusion, or not, of gun shots, then they would be telling us how it ends. Whether or not there is a gun shot in this play, it would be spoiled by whether or not the trigger warning includes gun shots. (A literal trigger warning.) I don’t want to spoil this particular play (even though I’m sure I’m the only person who didn’t know what was going to happen), but my entire experience of this play was the suspense, that tension in not knowing how it would end. If the trigger warning had said “warning; contains gunshots” well, then, the suspense is gone, isn’t it? I’d assume what was going to happen. And that’s too bad. But, if I’m someone who has stressful reactions to gun shots (and I am!) and I wasn’t told that a play had one, then I would be upset at that too. I’m not sure how you could ever give a complete content warning for this play without spoiling the action. It’s an interesting problem to consider, I guess. I really don’t know how to solve it. This might be the first time I’m ending a theatre post by saying I DON’T know exactly what to do to make this experience better!
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Edinburgh Fringe Part 2: The Stand-ups, the Two-Handers: Janeane Garofalo, Josie Long, Afghanistan is Not Funny
Welcome to Part 2 of our Edinburgh Fringe round-up! Today we are talking the two stand-ups we saw: American Gen X favorite Janeane Garofalo and British Gen X favourite Josie Long. We’re also talking about the show “Afghanistan is Not Funny” from Henry Naylor. You may be like ‘that doesn’t seem like it goes with two stand-up performances?’ and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but we are making it work because a) they are all two-handers so it makes sense (as does my version of the phrase two-hander to mean one person and not two because how many victims of chain-saw accidents are there in the theatre world? not many) and b) Naylor is a comedy writer and, despite the title, definitely fancies himself a comedian in this show! Was it all funny? Some of it was! Did they all start late and go long? You bet your ass they did, in true Fringe tradition!
Janeane Garofalo: Pardon My Tangent
The key lesson I took away from this set is that I forgot her name was spelled like that! Janeane was great to see mostly for nostalgia’s sake, and also because her jokes seemed tailor-made for ME! Not for the Edinburgh crowd, no sirree, it was all for me, from the perspective of an East Coaster trying to make sense of British cleaning products (awful!) and Scottish culture. Just like me! It was super New York (walking dogs around the city and getting jealous of bigger apartments!), super ’90s-era Americana (jokes about James Spader!), super left-wing (unapologetically anti-Trump supporters!). She used the word ‘shanda’ (it means shame!), and even brought up my favorite TV show from one month when I was 13 “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” (I really only was interested because it was always on “The Soup”). I mean, no one has talked about that show since Kathy Griffin in one of her HBO specials from the early aughts! What a fun memory! “Ma, there’s a baby in the terlet!”
Janeane began her set in a remarkable way: by telling the crowd she never really was a stand-up comedian and is no good at it. Way to prime the crowd. She didn’t have a real set planned, just some notes and some off the cuff observations about NYC and Edinburgh. It was chaotic and messy, but still fun and enjoyable, at least for me, because I was the target audience. (I can’t say the drunk-off-her-ass-jerky girl behind me who was talking the whole time and kicking my seat enjoyed it as much.) The vibe I got was mostly that we could be, and should be, best friends.
She told a ridiculous story about how she was hit by a car in New York recently, but it wasn’t really the driver’s fault because “I was wearing these pants.” Reader, she was wearing camo print pants. I loved her jokes about her upper body strength, because as soon as she came onstage in her tank top I thought ‘man she looks ripped’. And lo and behold, later she talked about how we audience members may have assumed that she had muscle, but it was all an illusion she meticulously created: by pulling her bra straps and shirt straps high and tight behind her neck, almost like a halter (which she highly recommended we try) and by having strategically placed tattoos that made it seem like her delts were coming to a point. All of this together gave the facade of musculature from the front, while the people on the sides of the room could see it was all loose meatbags. I was dying, it was all so true, it really had worked on me.
The best thing about Janeane is how unapologetically left-wing she is, and rightly so. Now that Trump is out of office (omg hopefully forever but who knows) people seem less actively angry towards his supporters because it’s not as urgent a threat, but NOT JANEANE! She knows that we can never forgive, never forget, that they aren’t ‘decent peace-loving people’ BY DEFINITION. Loved her for this! I also loved that she makes relentless fun of Tom Cruise and got in a fight with her brother about it. Please let’s be friends!
INFORMATION: Janeane is playing at the Wine Bar at Gilded Balloon Teviot. It’s not even close to looking like a wine bar! There are some seats up in a balcony but mostly it’s very strangely laid out rows of chairs. The girl next to me was wearing a mask! First and only other masker of the whole Fringe!
Josie Long: Re-Enchantment
Let’s cut right to the chase (unlike this show because it started super late packing in last-minute wannattendees into the very hot basement (none of these venues had air flow, it was very concerning) which you can’t really fault because she is amazing and who wouldn’t want to see her?): This is one of the best, most cohesively written comedy specials I’ve ever seen. It was better than 90% of the specials on Netflix, all of which I’ve tried, few of which I’ve been able to finish. (No good!). Not since I saw Mike Birbiglia do his special “The New One” at the Leicester Square Theatre (which eventually went on to Broadway) did I find a comedy hour (plus 15) so well-written and performed.
The best part is that it seems so chaotic and casual, as Josie has such an open and friendly and spontaneous vibe, so it seems like she’s just talking, sharing with friends. But you see at the end that it was all perfectly planned and formatted. And HILARIOUS. She mainly talks about how she has moved from England to Scotland (all the cool kids are doing it!), about how great Scotland is (it is!), and about how urgently we all need to be fighting against impending fascism (we do!). For someone who looks like the nicest, sweetest mom at the preschool dropoff who brings cookies for the other moms, she is surprisingly and amazingly radical left-wing. LOVES IT! I loved that she told the crowd that we had to fight more, harder. That we had to stop making fun of groups like Insulate Britain because THEY’RE RIGHT. And they are! People complain about them and similar action groups because they don’t like their tactics, but, as Josie reminded us, that’s what people said about the suffragettes and MLK, and we’ve just conveniently forgotten all their controversial methods.
It’s funny that both of our female comedian shows made it super left-wing and political, but while Janeane gives off that great “don’t you dare f with me” energy, Josie has the energy of a little blonde girl in a flower dress wearing pigtails, despite being 40. Her bubbly joyousness is infectious and I have absolutely added her to my list of faves.
INFORMATION: The show is at Monkey Barrel 3 (downstairs) at the Monkey Barrel Comedy venue. It is VERY HOT and there was an AC unit, but Josie had them turn it off because it was noisy. If I didn’t love her so much I would be cursing her out for that one (okay I did a little). There’s a bar upstairs with water pitchers, but after the show they shoo you out directly to the outside world, so you can’t go back up for more water. There are small toilets downstairs in the back of the room.
Afghanistan is Not Funny, by Henry Naylor
Henry Naylor has some STORIES. This writer and actor and comedian was doing regular radio and TV gigs as a writer and actor and comedian 20 years ago yet somehow ended up in Afghanistan during the start of the war, alongside photojournalists and government operatives and unofficial government operatives. He went to research his previous show, but man, the average playwright doesn’t just up and go to a war to do some researching on a whim! He was here to tell those stories, and we wanted to hear them. Unforch, he’s focusing too much inwardly, and not on what those stories mean outside of his career and to the wider world, despite what he says to the contrary.
That first Fringe show, “Finding Bin Laden”, was a successful satire about media representation of the Iraq invasion. So successful, in fact, that it almost became a movie with Hugh Grant. We learn all of this, because the potential and then non-potential of this movie’s existence seems to be the crux of this show. Even though this guy saw the real effects of the American presence, even though he saw endless suffering especially among injured children, even though he was literally held at gunpoint by a group of Afghani mujahideen, the thesis of this show seems to be about him and his success and his almost movie-making, which it shouldn’t be. He even talks at length about how he knew that in this show, as opposed to “Finding Bin Laden”, he needed to tell the story of those suffering children, especially of a girl his photographer friend captured who was holding what could only be the wrapped body of a dead baby, this poor girl whose memory haunts him to this day, to finally tell the world her story. But he doesn’t. Sure he shows her picture in a big dramatic flourish that is clearly meant to move us emotionally, but it doesn’t because it comes without support — after he rants endlessly about how his movie fell apart because Russell Brand is an asshole who f-ed someone’s granddaughter, and he says this over and over and you’re like, wait, I thought this show was about the suffering of children in Afghanistan, not about this guy complaining about how Russell Brand’s lack of tact ruined his movie. It made such a brave and open man, who has been through and seen so much, seem self-satisfied in his storytelling, which I’m sure isn’t the case.
So, tonally it was completely off, and it felt unedited. It ran 15 minutes long, but it should have been 20 minutes shorter. It’s so interesting how much he spoke about his intentions with this show — he clearly wanted it to be about the people and the things he saw there, and yet he didn’t make it about that. There was a great format he used, going through four stages of awareness he learned in therapy (unconscious incompetence to conscious competence), but after the second stage it sort of fell apart in relation to the narrative. There’s so much potential for his storytelling — like I said, he was HELD AT GUNPOINT BY THE MUJAHIDEEN — he just needs to remember his purpose in sharing. We want to hear more of those stories, which would automatically convey the gravity he wanted to share, and all the real things he saw over there, and not hear vulgarities about Russell Brand.
INFORMATION: The show is in Gilded Balloon Teviot, in a slightly-more-professional seeming room than a lot of the others, but it’s set up in the worst way: it’s a very steep room, with all the seats reached from just one aisle, and the only door is on the OTHER side of that aisle. Meaning, you have to cross the stage area to get from door to aisle and vice versa. MEANING, if you have to pee or leave early, you have to literally say excuse me to the actor on the stage and force him to take a step back, as one guy did. yikes! And yes you may see that we were in Teviot for Janeane and you might think ‘oh how convenient’ but nope, we had a different show in between these two, so we were constantly running back and forth across town. Felt like a bloody boomerang! Plan your days wisely!
Tokyo Rose: New Musical has Potential but Needs Attention, + VEGAN PIZZA!
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Tokyo Rose, a new musical that played the Southwark Playhouse until October 16.
A new musical about a true story out of World War II recently played the Southwark…and I’m not talking about Operation Mincemeat! Seriously, if this is the new direction that Southwark Playhouse is going in, I’m not complaining. What a fun niche to specialize in! Today’s actual show, Tokyo Rose, has been making the lower rounds in the past few years and after some edits and extensions, it has hit London. It has promise and potential, but it needs further work to capitalize on that.
Tokyo Rose tells the story of Iva Toguri, the Japanese-American who became a wartime radio personality in Japan and was accused, convicted, and later pardoned of treason for possibly sharing Axis propaganda. Above all, Iva was an American-born young girl whose parents send her to Japan IN THE MIDDLE OF A GOTTAM WAR because her aunt is dying and her mom wants someone to be there with her sister, even though auntie and Iva never met ever and did I say it’s the middle of a GOTTAM WAR? Iva’s mother couldn’t go ostensibly for documentation reasons and that’s very sad but like how unbelievably stupid do you have to be to send your Japanese daughter to Japan IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR? (Also, I did further research and apparently Iva didn’t have a US passport either when she left…um…oh gosh. Maybe the mother just thought since Iva was a citizen she wouldn’t have any trouble? JE. SUS.) True Japan wasn’t yet in the war against America (that would come mere months after Iva’s arrival overseas) but for crying out loud it was already at war with China and Manchuria and Inner Mongolia and French Indochina and MORE and had already signed up with Germany and Italy by this time! I MEAN WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?
This makes it hard for me to believe that this family could really be this ignorant of what her trip would mean. But the musical does not portray her story as though there is any grey area around Iva’s intentions, or her alleged traitorous behavior as something for us to determine for ourselves. Instead, this show is firmly and unshakeably putting forth that she was the victim of horrible injustice with endless bad luck. And it’s probably true, that it was just a series of unfortunate events and bad decisions that led her to being found guilty of treason against the USA, but man, those are some REALLY bad decisions.
The musical tells of how Iva was just an adorable little college student ready to study medicine and become just the cutest little doctor you’ve ever seen, but then the parents make their horrible decision and off she goes to begin a life of injustice and survival. The book is pretty well constructed: It begins with her treason trial and tells the story of her life through flashbacks, coming back and forth to the trial along the way. (We have enough to talk about so I am not going to rail against the creators for not being legal experts in the portrayal of the trial, but can I just mention that the trial occurred in San Francisco, so not everyone needs to have southern accents.) Although I have one huge recommendation re the trial: At one point late in Act II, the judge says ‘we will now take a 20 minute recess.’ MY GOD, how did the people involved not make that line the interval break! I MEAN COME ON YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A DRAMATURG FOR THAT ONE! Would be absolutely hysterical.
Also — the whole part of her being on the radio in Japan – you know, like the main thing she’s known for – is very confusingly done. It wasn’t clear what was happening and what if anything was going to come back to bite her, so if you didn’t know the facts coming in I imagine you’d be lost. Especially since her big ‘ooh I’m broadcasting to soldiers’ moments were loud club numbers that didn’t tell story.
And so where the show needs to focus its revisions is mainly on the score. This score makes this show effectively the shrieking Olympics. Maya Britto as Iva can sing her heart out, but wow, she shouldn’t have to destroy her voice. People complain about how badly Wicked ruins voices but all these new British scores trying to be like Six are way too heavily reliant on belting, and oftentimes it’s just shrieking. And this is very clearly trying to be like Six and & Juliet and too many more. Anyone training in classical musical theatre nowadays would not be able to do this stuff long-term. But even more frustrating, the existing score is a lost opportunity for an original original score. This shit is taking place in the 1940s, and instead of amazing Big Band numbers and a take on the Andrews Sisters, we get dance club and flashing lights. I get that the whole ‘historical tale with modern music’ is a genre now but at this point in this genre’s hopefully not-too-long shelf life, it just feels tired.
And unfortunately, the lyrics don’t do the same-sounding songs any justice. The lyrics are primarily generic platitudes, repeated over and over, like greeting card messages. It’s a bit cringey too often. I think it full out needs a new score, maybe minus 2 songs (like Iva’s big 11 o’clock number, that was fairly strong.)
One more thing I found a little eek-face is that, in the last section, they kept repeating how Iva could be the first person ever pardoned after a conviction for treason, and framing it like it was this huge moment for justice to finally be done. But, guys, her situation was very specific. Hers was a huge injustice, but they said it like everyone’s was, like it was always a criminal charge that shouldn’t exist? But everyone else convicted of treason deserved it. It was a weird thing to harp on as though treason were an unfair thing to be accused of, you know?
Honestly this show has a lot of potential because the story it tells is interesting. I hope it works on the telling and gets to do it again.
INFORMATION
Yes we are incredibly behind schedule, sorry that this already closed but hopefully my opinions can guide revisions (lol fat chance).
It was almost exactly 2 hours 30 minutes, beginning at 7:30 and ending at 10:06. It’s felt a little too long.
Southwark, like every other London theatre, does the whole ‘we recommend you wear masks but we can’t make you’ farce and so most people were not wearing masks. (Luckily the people behind us were.) Aside from that, the audience was…pretty bad! Lots of phones and talking and, our favorite part, during Iva’s big climactic moment, there was an important silence and this asshole near the front decided to OPEN A CAN OF SODA during that moment. I just. what are people. burn it all down.
PIZZA
SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE HAS A PIZZA OVEN NOW. And they have vegan options (not just one!). And it was really good! They said they use Sheese cheese, which no one has used in years since Violife etc came on the market and honestly I am really happy with that decision. It’s much better than I remember and no one else is using it so it’s a strong choice. We are seriously going to have pizza there before every show. Could not be more excited for a theatrical development (except for mask mandates).
