The Arts Fuse Newsletter, April 17
The Beast, Who Owns This Sentence? The Drowsy Chaperone, The People's Joker, and Newtown
From The Editor's Desk:
Among the many grim American realities our theater ignores, mass shootings may be the most inexcusable. We are universally repulsed at the carnage, but the continual eruptions of gun violence have become accepted as an intractable phenomenon. And, of course, that is just where -- at Sophocles’ “bloody crossroads” -- great drama is found. The repetition of the heinous crime seems primal, its mechanized mayhem painfully heightened by our inability to do what might be done to mitigate, if not eliminate, the mass killings. Over the past few years there has been a smattering of stage productions of note on this tragic issue, none of it produced, as far as I can tell, in Boston.
That neglect was a driving force behind posting this week’s piece on the world premiere production of Dan O’Brien’s play Newtown at Geva Theater in Rochester, New York (through May 12). The script, which I have read, is based on the shooting that occurred on December 14, 2012 at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School In this drama, O’Brien’s makes use of his docudrama approach, an amalgamation of nonfiction and imagination that also inspired his True Stories: A Trilogy and The Ballad of George Zimmerman. The first part of Newtown is a monologue delivered by a character based on Nancy Lanza, the mother, caregiver, and deceased victim of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter. Part two presents a meeting between a mother and father of a child killed at Sandy Hook, and the shooter’s father. (The dramatist says this section “derives in part from Alissa Parker’s memoir An Unseen Angel, in which Parker briefly describes the meeting she and her husband had with Peter Lanza five weeks after the Sandy Hook shooting.”)
O’Brien’s fusion of unbearable fact and moral reflection is valuable now because the approach represents one way our theaters could pull away from their glib homages to empowerment. Docudrama seems to compel a more direct confrontation with the discordant challenges of a bedeviled world. Critic Janelle Reinelt argues that “documentary theater is often politically engaged; although its effects may not match its intentions, it does summon public consideration of aspects of reality in a spirit of critical reasoning.” The real life spirit of Newtown is as chilling as it is urgent.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Film Review: “The Beast” Is a Bungle
By Gerald Peary
Who would predict that this perfectly calibrated tale would be yanked out of its early 20th-century setting and become dystopian science fiction?
Book Review: “Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs”
By David Mehegan
This book is a fiery manifesto that charges that copyright law today is an outrageously unjust scheme that does nothing for 99 percent of authors, other creative people, and their fans, while it locks up a commodity that fills the coffers of large corporations.
Theater Review: “The Drowsy Chaperone” — A Refreshing Musical Tonic
By David Greenham
The Lyric Stage Company production almost meets the challenges posed by this delightfully inane musical farce.
Jazz Album Review: Noah Haidu’s “Standards II” — A Trio of Masters
By Michael Ullman
Pianist Noah Haidu’s impeccably performed and recorded Standards II is a winner.
WATCH CLOSELY: “Ripley” — A Man in Shadows and Light
By Peg Aloi
Ripley is one of the most entertaining and finely wrought thriller series to come from Netflix in years.
Film Review: “The People’s Joker” — Intellectual Clown Property
By Nicole Veneto
Whatever else 2024 has in store for queer filmmakers and audiences, there’s likely to be nothing else that’ll put a smile on your face quite like The People’s Joker.
Theater Interview/Preview: Dan O'Brien -- The Playwright as Documentarian
By David DeWitt
It’s not hyperbole to suggest that True Story: A Trilogy represents a distinctive achievement in theater history.
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Questions, comments, concerns?
Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
