Dr. Broadway

“Lysi-” what?!

If you’re like last semester’s crew of Intro to Theatre students, you probably hear anything containing the word “Lysistrata” and assume it’s either something that freshens your breath or that breakfast casserole my sister makes whenever company comes over.

Not so, my friends. Not so. In fact, you’re as wrong about that as the student who defined “Euripides” as the sinus condition that kept him from showing up for the last month of class (I see you, Sean!).

Actually, Lysistrata Jones is Broadway’s latest baby. Opening tonite, the show, with book by Douglas Carter Beane (Xanadu) and music & lyrics by Lewis Flinn, is billed as “Broadway’s Hilarious New Musical.”

Hilarious it may be, but new? Not so much. In some ways, Lysistrata Jones is old – really old. The evolution of the show began before television, before Broadway, before Christ! It began in ancient Greece with the work of a comic playwright named Aristophanes (which, Sean, is NOT what people in Athens say after someone sneezes).

Known for his bitingly satirical work, Aristophanes wrote a play in 411 BC about the women of Athens (who, given the theatrical conventions of the time, were actually played by male actors, a production concept whose performance implications are nearly impossible for modern audiences to get their minds around). These women, frustrated by the excessive warmongering of their husbands, decided to withhold sex until their partners decided to withhold their incessant battling with Sparta. It was pure political farce, written, as was Aristophanes’ custom, with the intent of bringing debate to (and poking a little fun at) the Athenian democracy. It was called Lysistrata.

The “hilarious new musical” called Lysistrata Jones has a similar storyline. Though I haven’t seen the show (I’m hoping for a pair of tickets to show up under the Christmas tree), I’ve been able to read an early print of the script. Here’s the basic plot: the title character enrolls at modern-day Athens U.  She is broken-hearted to learn that the basketball team hasn’t won a game in 30 seasons (as a sports fan, I can relate), so she proposes that none of the girls “give it up,” until the boys bring home a W.

The basic plot may be ancient,  but the content is more contemporary than tomorrow’s tweets.  Lysistrata Jones is full of pop-culture references – with characters blogging and texting, transitioning from iPhone to MacBook to Facebook as easily as today’s teens pull off a dress on prom nite. In fact, if anything, the show seems closer kin to High School Musical than actual Aristophanes. Think more “Zack & Cody Go to College” and less “Ancient Classic Revitalized for Modern Audience.” Needless to say, I first read the script somewhat haughtily, finding the Grecian connection to be tenuous – tedious – at best.

And then I thought about Aristophanes, about what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to write a classic. Leave it to Aeschylus to be all timeless and Eugene O’Neill-ish. No. Aristophanes wanted to amuse his audience – to hold a mirror up to the humanity gathered at those Greek theatre festivals and say, “Y’all, do you see what you look like here?”

And then I realized, THAT is Lysistrata Jones‘ tightest tie to the play for which it’s named. Like Lysistrata was 2,500 years ago, Lysistrata Jones is a mirror image of modern life. It’s fast; it’s fun; it’s the purest product of pop culture that Broadway has seen, since Legally Blonde, and it’s proof that, for as far as we’ve come, people are pretty much still the same as they were in Ancient Greece – trying to get what they want by getting it on, or, in the case of Lysistrata Jones, not.

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Interestingly, tonite’s premiere opens up a whole new line of discussion.  Lysistrata Jones is hardly Broadway’s first attempt to bring the classics back to life. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Stephen Sondheim’s  first outing as both composer AND lyricist, borrowed heavily from the works of Plautus, a Roman comedian, as did Rodgers & Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1938), which was essentially a revision of the ancient Menaechmi story (by way of William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors). More recently, Marie Christine, a vehicle for the incomparable Audra McDonald, updated the Euripidean tragedy Medea.

Of course, there are others, but the whole thing’s got me wondering – what other of the (few) extant Greek and Roman texts are ripe for retelling?  What do YOU think?

We have officially entered the “slow” part of the semester.

It always happens – just before exams, there’s this lull when you’ve studied through the syllabus, and the professor’s left with nothing to do but to vamp her way through a class hour, asking questions, like “Any questions about any thing?” which is usually her way of saying, “For the love of God, please someone: ask me SOMEthing!  Ask me ANYthing, or else I’m gonna have to start showing you my Facebook wedding album and coming up with discussion topics, like ‘How will the Penn State scandal impact theatre pieces created over the next decade?’”

It’s not at all a pretty picture. What should be a stress-less time (after all, you’ve done all you’d said you’d do!) becomes a day spent trying to justify to yourself why it’s okay to show college kids an irrelevant video, so long as it has some element that can be construed as theatrical.

Am I the only one?

Regardless, that’s the point I hit on Wednesday. I decided to not waste the day. Instead, inspired by this YouTube clip, I determined we’d engage in an impromptu discussion of Performance Art.

Call this a professor #fail.

Has anyone else ever made the mistake of trying to teach Performance Art to undergraduates? In a single setting? I should’ve known better, to be honest, as, to be honest, I don’t even understand Performance Art all that well myself.  My students – really smart ones at a really good school – were, understandably, dumbstruck. They couldn’t get their heads around Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, and I couldn’t seem to communicate to them what RoseLee Goldberg referred to as the “ephemeral” nature of the form (I was, however, able to successfully disgust them with my rudimentary explanation of Orlan’s surgery performances).

It was a difficult day for all of us.

The more I think about it, though, the more I’m bothered by Goldberg’s use of “ephemeral” – and even Kaprow’s warning that Happenings had to be “experienced” to be understood (by the way, Allan, my students agree wholeheartedly). The labels seems to imply that they can only be applied to the unwieldy non-genre known as Performance Art.

I don’t agree. In fact, for me, it’s the ephemeral, experiential nature of all live theatre that makes it most magical. It’s the intangible intersection of performer and audience that can never be captured, handled, or repeated. This – what Herbert Blau might refer to as “the ghost” – is what separates the live from the recorded. It’s what made me study Theatre History, as opposed to Film. It’s being completely convinced Faith Prince saw me in the second row, as she sang through Little Me. It’s wanting to wave back when Karen Ziemba took the stage in Steel Pier or feeling like I just had to hug Toni Collette after what she did in The Wild Party.

These aren’t things you feel, watching film.  They are little bursts of life inspired by the Live – anything live. Something tells me, I could’ve spared my students some emotional scarring (thank you, Orlan!), if only I’d thought this through before our last class.

How about you?  What sort of magical moments have you had while watching live theatre? Did I ever tell you about the time Ashley Judd waved at me during the curtain call of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof … ?!?

I don’t live in New York.

Not even close. In fact, in a lot of ways, my little home in the Carolina hills couldn’t be farther away from the Big Apple. Taxicabs?! Try pick-up trucks. Skyscrapers? Not unless you count the way Mt. Pisgah rises high above the horizon. It’s a happy place that moves at a slow pace, a tiny town where the people are as sweet as the tea.

This is my home, and it truly is where my heart is … until news like this breaks:

Death of Salesman, Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sets Dates at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre

Suddenly, I’m all “I’ll take Manhattan” and “When can I catch the next Delta Connection?”

Philip.Seymour.Hoffman as Willy Loman? Not since Denzel Washington’s turn as Troy in Fences has a casting announcement made me so excited. For me, this is must-see, can’t miss, gotta-get-there, because I cannot imagine a contemporary actor better suited to the role that has, for decades, bedeviled high school students trying to write English-class essays.

So, clearly, the casting excites me.

But there are about six thousand other things about the production that have me counting down the days to Opening Nite (on the Ides of March, for those who are wondering. This is eerily appropriate, given the name of Hoffman’s latest film).

As a college professor, however, I’m most intrigued by the teaching opportunities presented by the Mike Nichols-directed revival. The most obvious application of this is the chance to say “See?!  It IS still relevant!” when I assign the work to my Intro to Theatre students next semester.

But beyond that, Death of a Salesman is a masterfully-crafted case study in what Aristotle meant when he defined tragedy in his Poetics (c. 335 BC). Here, Arthur Miller’s plot, character, theme, diction, music, and spectacle combine to create a catharsis no “common man” – in THIS economy, anyway – can escape.

Speaking of “escapes,” what casting in which shows would prompt you to leave your cozy home for a big nite on Broadway? I’m thinking Jude Law as Paul Bratter and anything starring Sutton Foster …

Several sources reported yesterday that Christopher Tierney will return to rehearsals later this week.

In case you’ve forgotten – or just haven’t checked your Twitter account since last Thanksgiving or something – Tierney is the performer who plummeted 30 feet into the orchestra pit minutes before the end of the December 20th performance of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark. First of all, I am thrilled and so relieved that Tierney has recovered to the point of returning to work, and I respect beyond belief his commitment to the Spiderman company. He embodies the old showbiz addage “the show must go on.”

The show must also examine itself, however. His accident – and the ones that came before and after it – do raise questions. One of these, of course, is how in the world does Julie Taymor sleep at nite? Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Julie. In fact, I use a video of her 1986 Tempest production every time I teach Introduction to Theatre, and when she won the Tony Award for Best Director of  Musical – the first woman ever to win the award! – I was in the audience, weeping like a schoolgirl with awe and elation for the sheer genius she demonstrated in creating The Lion King. For all her genius, however, maybe Ms. Taymor needs a gently-worded reminder that, as it turns out, people are actually more accident-proned than puppets.

The second question raised by the rash of Spiderman injuries is this: can live theatre be expected to do all that its celluloid sister can?

Thanks to advancements, such as animation, computer graphics, and Steven Spielberg, the film industry has broken through the glass ceiling of possibility and, with the release of each new blockbuster, continues to boldly go where no show has gone before.

Can the stage keep pace?

Should it?

Are the two forms separate but equal, each with different strengths and weaknesses? For example, there is nothing to match the interaction between a performer and a live audience, while the distribution potential of a film is unparalleled by the stage. On the flip side, movies don’t engage their viewers in the same intimate way as plays, and plays are incapable of many of the  effects that are commonplace to film – well, they’re incapable of the effects that don’t end in the cataclysmic injuries of its performers.

Is it time to embrace these differences?  To extend the “sister” metaphor begun above, it may be that one is smart, the other pretty, but both stage and film are equal members of the same family – known, like the Cohans, for bringing mirth and merriment to a myriad of audiences.

Discuss.