The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels In America (book)

Theater artist Isaac Butler and journalist Dan Kois have contributed an historically important book with The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels In America.

A comprehensive oral history, this exciting and easy-to-enjoy record traces the creative path of Angels In America by Tony Kushner, arguably the greatest play of the late twentieth century; from the script’s prehistory in the revolution for gay rights and the origins of the AIDS crisis, through the heady development process on both coasts of America and in England, its resounding though by no means guaranteed acclaim and lauds (and a surprisingly successful adaptation to film) and significant re-mounts, up to and including its recent revival on Broadway.

It even includes a chapter on the ill-fated 1996 Charlotte Repertory Theatre production, which was almost closed due to threats that the cast would be arrested for indecent exposure. The controversy began when the theater critic for the Charlotte Observer took the opportunity of a rare front page byline to announce to the community that this production would feature homosexual acts performed live on stage and full-frontal male nudity.

That those are two different scenes, and the fact that the character Prior Walter removing his clothes was for a medical examination, exposing to the audience his weakened state and many visible skin cancers, was not in the Observer's lede. The alarm was sounded, and it took a Superior Court Judge to allow the play to proceed without fear of legal action.

The controversy continued, a slate of arch conservatives were elected to the Board of Commissioners, and arts funding was -- briefly -- eliminated in the county of Mecklenburg. Shortly after the Charlotte Repertory Theatre would cease operations.

Pro-Angels protest.
(Charlotte Observer, 1996)

A few short years later that theater critic, Tony Brown, who so titillated the readership of Charlotte, would move to Cleveland and begin an eleven-year tenure as chief theater critic for the Plain Dealer. He was either not asked, or declined invitation to be interviewed for this book.

One of the more startling images from Mike Nichols’ HBO miniseries adaptation is a scene between the doomed couple Harper and Joe, on the rooftop of their apartment in Brooklyn. The Twin Towers are clearly visible across the river. A trick of editing, this record of the play, created in 2003, was one of the early reminders that Angels is a period piece. I mean, it always was; it was and will always be 1985. But what we have gained and what we have lost in the years since, and as the years continue, will continue to mount and shape our perception of Kushner’s work.

And therein lies a question; does this play continue to be relevant? Almost every year a play receives a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for not only great writing but also social relevance. Many go onto long histories of production, but do they maintain their relevance, do they speak to a modern audience? Plays so familiar that their titles can be reduced to one word -- Streetcar, Salesman, Picnic -- they may be emotionally compelling, but are they urgent?

Jason Isaacs & Daniel Craig
as Louis Ironson and Joe Pitt
(National Theatre, 1992)

When the HBO series debuted it, too, won numerous awards. It was well-done. But the dire warnings of the text were not as sharp. HIV/AIDS -- in America at least, for those who could afford it -- was under control. Eight years of Bill Clinton gave the illusion that the Reagan revolution of the 1980s and the Gingrich-led uprising of 1994 were just part of the natural cycle of politics, and that the Supreme Court the character Martin Heller predicted, one that by the 1990s would be “block-solid Republican appointees” had not come to pass and would never do so.

And yet. Here we are.

The question of whether a piece of writing transcends its own time, that its meaning can be interpreted to reflect the crises present in those whose paths are different from those represented in the original narrative, that is the test which determines whether a play is truly classic.

Arthur Miller directed Salesman in Beijing in the early 1980s, just as China was only beginning to enact minor Capitalist reforms. In doing so he found a wide, new audience for a decades old work which affected his audiences as though it were written for them.

Two years ago the Play House produced his Crucible with a multi-racial cast, and I had the opportunity to get into a polite debate about whether doing so changed the intended message of the play. He argued the play is about religious persecution, not racial persecution. I argued it was intended to be about the Red Scare, and about persecution in general, and the kind of heartbreak and death that attends the creation and subsequent destruction of perceived enemies.

"Part Two: Perestroika"
(Ensemble Theatre, 2018)

The first production of Angels in Cleveland was at Dobama Theatre in 1998, a brisk, delirious event, with tiny sets flying in and out with breakneck speed and an indelible lead performance by Scott Plate as Prior Walter. It was a time when the word “Millennium” was très en vogue, the expectation of great or cataclysmic events just on the horizon. We were living in End Times that never ended.

As we limp further into the murky depths of the twenty-first century, Angels In America, with its deeply flawed but searching characters and lyrical wonderfulness, which provided rich humanity to a cohort of humans previously denied their rights or even their right to exist, has already shown itself to be open to vital reinterpretation. The great work begins. It is always beginning.

Source: 5 Things To Know About Charlotte's 1996 'Angels In America' Controversy by Tim Funk, Charlotte Observer (5/16/2017) 

Play a Day: The First Time

Tracey Conyer Lee

This morning I read The First Time by Tracey Conyer Lee. This is my first exposure to her work. Last night I was casting about on New Play Exchange and I found her solo performance Standing Up; Bathroom Talk & Other Stuff We Learn From Dad which she performed a few years ago at the New York Fringe.

I may come back to that, I guess I decided I wasn't in the mood for a solo piece? Reading all these plays is inspiring, which is the point, but I am also trying to get something down on paper myself and reading others' dialogue is helping with that mindset. What do we talk about when we talk?

One thing that struck me about this play, which focuses mainly on five individuals, it how each of them are incredibly forward, it was bracing. I remember first experiencing Death of a Salesman and while I know this is kind of the point, it was irritating, so irritating, that no one said anything they were actually thinking, or that no one was listening to each other. Each of these characters are unafraid to express what they are thinking, at that moment, and there is great energy in that.

There's a moment in this work, in a place at a time, which brought me right back to my own childhood. It made me question so much. That's where we are now. It occurred to me this morning that I knew everything when I was twenty, and how much less I know today. Soon I won't know anything at all. It is making me a better writer.

Death of a Salesman (1966)

Last night my colleagues and I watched Death of a Salesman, the 1966 made-for-TV movie, starring Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, who originated the roles of Willy and Linda Loman on Broadway seventeen years earlier, and also a young George Segal as Biff and a affecting Gene Wilder as Bernard.

Directed by Alex Segal (no relation) this CBS production was adapted and moderately abridged by the playwright, Arthur Miller, and it succeeds brilliantly in its edited state, with an urgency I have never before seen in a production of this play.

The truth is, I have never experienced a production of Death of a Salesman that I can honestly say I have enjoyed watching. Willy Loman has always been an unreachable character to me, distant, erratic and altogether unlikable. I could not understand why anyone in his family or anyone else cares or ever cared about him at all.

Most significant in this production is the very real sense that Willy’s memories are entirely false. Not that the facts are untrue, but we are never lulled into the sense that we, the audience, are experiencing Willy’s past the way it actually happened.

That part of the first scene, in which his teenage sons are washing his car and his wife comes smiling out of the house carrying a basket of laundry (her gray wig swapped out for a brown one) is almost cartoonish in its picture of domestic bliss.

And I have never been more convinced that “Uncle Ben” doesn't exist at all, that Willy doesn’t even have a brother, or that if he did, he went away when Willy was very small and never saw or heard from him ever again. No one in the real, present world of the play ever speaks of him, and neither does Willy himself. Ben is an absurd character, the personification of lost opportunity, but never actually human.

So, rather than just seeing an old man wandering in and out of his memories (like you do) there is this palpable sense that he has entirely lost his hold on reality, and that he is obsessed with his failures, his mistakes, that he lives every moment in perpetual doubt.

One of us watching last night mentioned that everything Willy says sounds like something Donald J. Trump has said or could say. When I repeated this observation on social media this morning, a friend objected, stating that unlike our transparently deceitful President-elect, “Willy actually believed in his platitudes.”

And you know what? I disagree. That is the thing. I used to believe that myself, that Willy Loman’s “tragic flaw” is that he was so wrapped up in his own bullshit he drove himself insane.

It is true I have not seen a great many performances of this play, but I can say, for example, that Dustin Hoffman (CBS, 1986) played him as a peevish asshole and Hal Holbrook (Great Lakes Theater, 1994) was very regal and collected. In each of those performances you got the sense that Willy did actually believe in his platitudes.

Cobb's Willy Loman does not.

Perhaps it is the element of the television close-up, where we can see Cobb’s Loman, slack-jawed and exhausted, but never at rest, we see him hearing what is being said to him and you know he is rolling through every action he has ever taken in his entire life and second-guessing every single one. But he can’t say it. He can’t admit it. That is his tragic flaw. His doubt. He knows. And he cannot accept.

It helps that Cobb is supported by a company that very clearly communicates not only their love for this man, but the reason for that love. John Malkovich (Hoffman's Biff) has never played an actual homo sapiens, but Segal is at once manly and childlike as Biff and his adoration of his father is real.

Then there’s Gene Wilder. He easily plays the goofy memory of “anemic” Bernard, but it as the confident, adult lawyer, a young man who is believably successful and prepared to testify before the Supreme Court, where he truly shines. He treats his former neighbor, a man who always picked on him and taught his sons to pick on him, with dignity, respect and above all that soft kindness with which fans of Wilder are so familiar. But his Bernard is also free of nonsense and artifice, and cuts directly to Willy’s soul with his one probing question.

Cobb’s response to that question -- What happened in Boston, Willy? -- that made me believe for the first time,that Willy Loman himself hadn’t put it together until that moment. And maybe he had, some time in the past, or countless times before, but it was like he was figuring it out again for the first time. It happened right then, it was heartbreaking, and that is the hallmark of a great dramatic moment.

Salesman In Beijing (book)

In 1983, only a few short years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the playwright Arthur Miller was invited to direct a production of Salesman in Beijing. He produced a book of his director's diary, which I picked up recently as a gift for a colleague.

Between getting it from eBay and wrapping it for presentation, I read the first chapter and promptly found another copy online for myself.

This was an odd thing to do for one significant reason -- I am tired of reading Arthur Miller talk about the works of Arthur Miller. As an undergrad I took a semester-long seminar with Al Kaufman on Miller, where I first dug deep into the works of this most-praiseworthy of American playwrights and was disappointed not only to discover that all of his plays feel pretty much the same (Crucible as one stand out exception) but that he spent an awful lot of time writing about what his writing means.

Didn't you say it in the play? Then why do you need to keep explaining it in The New Yorker?

However, this book is really about directing, and not about writing. His obstacles appear enormous, the most obvious that he has accepted the role of directing a play through a translator -- he speaks no Mandarin, his actors do not speak English. In addition, Salesman depicts a world which he does not believe his company (actors and designers) will be able to comprehend, that of Capitalist America.

But also too and on top of that the fact that the world of Salesman never existed in the first place. People do not actually talk like people talk in Arthur Miller plays. No one.

To his continuing credit, rehearsal day after rehearsal day, Miller reaches to explain his characters' incomprehensible motivations by asking open-ended questions about basic human nature. When one of his actors questions why a character like Charley is kind to Willy, who to them appears, at first, a consummate loser and somewhat deranged, Miller asks if the actor knows anyone they do not respect, but still likes. Of course they do, everyone does. At that time in China, however, such realistic human nature was not something they would choose to perform on a stage. It was not the stories they chose to tell, and so acting it was a challenge to be overcome, and Miller's script is full of those.

In his personal reflections, Miller learns as much about how his actors contribute to his work as his work contributes to their larger understanding of a world which had been closed to them for four decades.

He does have this grandfatherly racist way of describing the eyes of certain members of his company. As a writer, one who records what he sees, using, you know, words, I might have hoped that a man who fancies himself such a deep appreciator of human character could find some other way to look into the face of his Asian actors without saying that their eyes -----.* They don't actually do that, any more than anyone else's. His ignorance disappoints and knocks you back a bit. "Someone please ask grampa to stop talking."

By the end of the book (which concludes just as you would expect, after all the pitfalls and setbacks, opening night is perfect) I remain less convinced that Salesman is a transcendent work which addresses the universal longings and love of all humanity, and more convinced than ever that it is the medium -- live theater performance -- that can bring all peoples together to reveal our beautiful commonality.

*Update 10/5/2025: And here, in 2013, I had actually written the word. Some one ask grampa to stop talking, indeed.

Karamu House

Zelma Watson George

Located at the corner of Quincy and East 89th Street, Karamu House is the "oldest African American theater company in America." Founded in 1915 by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, that also means Karamu shares with the Play House the distinction of being the longest continually running theater company in Cleveland.

The theater club at Karamu was originally called the Dumas Drama Club, and later the Gilpin Players after actor Charles Gilpin. In 1941 they adopted the name Karamu, which is Swahili for either "a place of feasting and enjoyment in the center of the community" or the word "pencil" depending on whom you ask.

By the 1950s, Karamu's reputation as Cleveland's "Black" theater was firmly established, and had been for decades, premiering originally works by Zora Neal Hurston and once employing Langston Hughes as Playwright-In-Residence — one of only two to hold that title. However, from the original husband and wife team of the Jelliffes through the 1950s, the artistic and management directorships were held by whites.

"According to the record, Cleveland is one of the most progressive theatre cities in America."
- Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Interracial productions were the order of the day at that time — in recent days we learned that character actor Roberts Blossom got his professional start at Karamu, and Tedd Burr used to tell me he was half of a couple that engaged in the first interracial kiss on a Cleveland stage though for the life of me I can't remember what show he was talking about.

DID YOU KNOW ..?

Zelma Watson George (December 8, 1903 - July 3, 1994) sang the lead role in the opera The Medium for sixty-seven nights beginning in 1949 before the show transferred to Broadway? She returned to Cleveland, performing in The Consul at the Cleveland Play House and turn as Mrs. Peachum in a production of The Three-Penny Opera at Karamu. Later, of course, she was an advisor to the Eisenhower administration, as part of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Forces from 1954 until 1957, and that was just the beginning of an illustrious philanthropic career.

For the record, Karamu House gave me my first professional theater job. I was a member of their youth outreach, Drama/Theatre for Youth Project (D/TY) from 1991-92, traveling Greater Cleveland in a van with four other young actors, performing world folk tales to elementary and middle school students. I also got to play Howard Wagner in Death of a Salesman on the boards of the Jelliffe Theatre. I never got to meet ether of the Jelliffes in person — Russell died in 1980, but I did attend Rowena's funeral, she died in April, 1992 just a month after her 100th birthday.

Stealing Christmas, 1991

8/1/11 UPDATE: In 1997 the Zelma W. George Recreation Center opened in Luke Easter Park, which is also the site of the annual Unity Day Festival, an annual family-friendly event of fun and music in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, now in its seventh year. On the very evening I published this entry (July 31) George Clinton was headlining the event, when someone with a handgun opened fire, wounding three and killing one.

The shooter remains at large.

Sources:
African American Registry
Wikipedia
Showtime In Cleveland (John Vacha)
The Handbook of Texas Online/Texas State Historical Association

Spaeth on "The Crucible"

Also not from The Crucible

SHOW TIME

“Crucible” Looses With (sic) Hunt In Euclid-77th Play House
By Arthur Spaeth
Cleveland News, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 1954

In "The Crucible", being given stirring, disturbing life in the Euclid-77th Play House these nights, Playwright Arthur Miller has turned the pages of American history to strike a parallel with our times in the infamous witch trials of Salem, circa 1692.

It is not new to see Justice dramatized for us as a woman with bandaged eyes, being prodded and pressured into blind confusion by self-seeking men twisting truth and disregarding the rights of free men.

Cleveland’s Karamu theater is now showing us such a world in the sixth century before Christ when a wise Socrates must die because witch-hunting Athenian politicos elect him their expedient victim. There is brutally clear parallel with our hour in Maxwell Anderson’s “Barefoot In Athens.”

Hysterical Salem

And the parallel is implicit and as ominous in Miller’s angry poetic parable. The good and pious people of Salem trade sanity and reason for mass hysteria to accuse and hang helpless citizens as witches because of the tantrums of some silly Puritan girls.

I have said that such pictures of our imperfect world have been dramatized again and again. That is reportorial and not editorial. I meant no implication that there have been too many such plays or that our dramatists have gone overboard in rallying the theater to speak out against social cancer.

Alas, the contrary is too true. There can’t be too many such dramas. On hasty inventory, the writers in our theater today who have the courage to try to more than just entertain us can be counted on the fingers. Come to think of it, the fingers of one hand.

Lies & Gallows

Don’t get me wrong about Mr. Miller’s drama. It is no soapbox oration. The playwright does not cup his hand to your ear and demand you catch a modern echo. There is no ranting insistence that there, but for the Puritan garb, musical speech and 262 years, go you.

No, he trusts audience perceptivity and conscience as he looks into the lives of hard-working farmer John Proctor, Good Wife Elizabeth Proctor and their respected friends that are twisted to horror by the prattle of some silly girls.

At first the lies of the harpies seem too absurd but soon their splattering taint have become truth and the Proctors and others are tried and convicted of witchcraft in the Salem Meeting House. When doubt of its justice disturbs the court, John Proctor is offered the chance to save his neck by confessing to the lie of guilt. His refusal brings the roll of the drums beside the gallows.

No 'Death of a Salesman'

This is for the most part powerful and effective drama. But it is by no means on the lofty level with Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” There is a vagrant feeling that the author tried to compress too much shrill action and to crowd too many characters into his scenes. He achieves the hysteria of the witch hunt to the detriment of his forte for character insight.

You do not understand John Proctor and Goodie Proctor as you did Willy Loman and the wife who ate her heart out for her man. The other characters are largely the author’s chorus stepping out of the ensemble only long enough for each to contribute his single phrase to the collective insanity of the witch hunt. But for all this, “The Crucible” demands and gets your will to believe and be moved.

In this the author has zealous and artful collaboration in Frederic McConnell's staging and the excellent company with which he has peopled the Euclid-77th Salem.

Kirk Willis and Eve Roberts as John and Elizabeth Proctor ring wonder into those quiet scenes when they are alone on the stage. Rolf Englehardt’s with-hunting cleric who discovers too late the monster he has helped loose is pretty special, too. And that goes for William Paterson’s righteous deputy governor-inquisitor. Helen Watkins and Robert Allman as victims of the inquisition inject high spirit into their roles and Max Ellis’ malicious parson and Frank Stevens’ evil parishioner do the author and play no harm. And there’s Jane Squibb’s impure Puritan whose lies loose hell in Salem town. There is competence everywhere in the large cast.

And speaking of acting, that impressionistic setting by William McCreary, a framework of stained beams, is artfully primitive early American in pretending to be four varied locales in Salem of 1692.

So much for witch hunting in the Euclid-77th Play House, save an urgent, SEE IT!

Arthur Kennedy

Arthur Kennedy (February 17, 1914 – January 5, 1990) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts (full name: John Arthur Kennedy) and received a degree in theater from Carnegie Mellon, where they still give an annual award in his name. He was a notable film actor, probably known to most Americans for his performances in Westerns. He was also a remarkable stage actor, originating the role of Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (for which he won a Tony Award) and that of John Proctor in the 1953 Broadway production of The Crucible.

Brooks Atkinson in the The New York Times praised that production, calling Kennedy’s performance “superb” and that he is “clear and resolute, full of fire, searching his own mind.” Atkinson goes on to report that “Although 'The Crucible' is a powerful drama, it stands second to Death of a Salesman as a work of art.”

“The literary style is cruder. The early motivation is muffled in the uproar of the opening scene, and the theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of 'Death of a Salesman'.

“Miller has tried to pack too much inside his drama, and that he has permitted himself to be concerned more with the technique of the witch hunt than with its humanity. By the standards of 'Death of a Salesman', there is too much excitement and not enough emotion in 'The Crucible'.”

This is nonsense, of course. While the issues of Salesman may continue to resonate into the 21st century, its language and style become increasingly stilted and dated while Crucible becomes more poignant - or to look at it another way, I care about the characters in Crucible, and I dislike absolutely everyone in Salesman.

Cleveland Press theater critic Tony Mastroianni interviewed Kennedy in 1965 while he was playing a convict in the Steve McQueen film Nevada Smith. During this interview Kennedy spoke about his time in Cleveland, working as a performer at the Old Globe Theater at the Great Lakes Exposition. One particular piece of information will be painfully trenchant to all my little Cleveland theater friends, and teach them that things today are as they have ever been.

To wit:

“No, we didn’t use any Clevelanders. It was an imported company.”

Big sigh.

Sources:
Wikipedia
The New York Times
The Cleveland Press