9 posts from 2008

"You should see it," said the Asian-American guy with scruffy beard and windbreaker, on his cell phone to the missing three-quarters of his party. "It's a sea of hipsters in a dive Chinese restaurant." That serves well enough as a set description of Mission Street Food, currently in residence Thursday nights at Lung Shan (2234 Mission, near 18th). It's also a decent precis of the customers: hipsters protesting that they aren't. ("I'm not being ironic!" one of the women at my table kept insisting. Post-irony...that's so 2001. I mean it.)

 

Well, the good news is that the food isn't worried about being ironic or un-; it's well made but fun and fuss-free. Mission Street Food began life in October in a taco truck on Mission Street, where Bar Tartine line cook Anthony Myint served up PB&Js (pork belly and jicama sandwiches). After three Thursdays outdoors, he and his crew decided to move it inside. There have been just four nights at Lung Shan so far, but the concept seems to be on a roll.

 

I went to night #3 with guest chef Tia Harrison, executive chef of Sociale. The theme of the evening was "The Dirty South Cleans Up Pretty Good," and the menu was exactly that, southern food with an Asian twist. The PB&Js transformed to PBQs (a play on BBQ, I guess), Kurobuta Berkshire pork belly with potato salad, picked red cabbage, and a quince-onion sauce on flatbread ($6.50). One of the diners at the communal table where I was seated said that the PBQs were served fast, and indeed they did come out PDQ, hot, savory, slightly sweet, and of course full of fatty pork goodness. Perhaps it was the setting, but the thin, flaky flatbread reminded me of nothing so much as a green onion pancake, though overall the dish brought to mind David Chang's steamed pork belly buns with hoisin and cucumber at Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York. Which makes sense: Chang's a Korean-American who grew up in Virginia, and his menus mash up Asian and southern flavors. Chang's pork-belly buns are better--the PBQs were tasty but had one too many things going on; they'd be better with the potato salad on the side. (Apologies for the crappy photos, btw; I didn't want to blow my fellow diners' eye sockets with the flash. You can see better photos at Beer and Nosh.)

 

Next came the smoked duck beignet with sheep's milk cheese and cherry-shallot compote ($10), the dish whose listing on the Web site made me drag my carcass to the Mission. I mean, a donut stuffed with duck? You gotta try that. Actually, it was more like a fried wonton, and just as well, because the wrapper was thicker and didn't get soggy in the sauce as a true beignet would have. This, too, combined savory and sweet, with more of the latter than the PBQ, the cherries adding a lovely tart note to the smoked duck. It was rich enough that one was plenty. Probably.

 

I finished with the butter-fried cornbread with buttermilk panna cotta and a leaf of candied sage. Simple, down-home, no fuss, not too sweet, the kind of dessert you might expect from a non-pastry chef. My panna cotta wasn't properly gelled up, but I didn't mind--it tasted fine and, with the honey drizzled over the cornbread, rather reminded me of Greek yogurt. Besides, at $5 it was cheaper and yummier than many of the desserts I've had at established SF restaurants.

 

Other menu items included gulf prawns with grits, BBQ lamb shank (which my tablemates moaned over), creole catfish stew, dirty rice, and mustard greens. Though the menu was short, that's not a bad array considering, as the Web site tells guest chefs, that the restaurant has just four burners, two deep fryers, two woks, and an oven the size of a hotel pan. The ideal way to experience Mission Street Food, I think, would be to collect a few friends and order the whole menu, then get seconds on your favorites.

 

In keeping with the "dirty south" theme, the servers wore wifebeaters and trucker caps or do rags (conveniently, also a hipster uniform circa five years ago), and the beverages included 40s of Miller or Olde English for $5 (also available by the glass for a buck), as well as sweet tea spiked with soju (Korean grain liquor) for $2, surely the best cocktail bargain in the city. I had the sweet tea, but most tables seemed delighted by the 40 option. (Tablemate: "I'm contemplating another 40. [pause] That's what got me in trouble in Kansas City." Do tell.) Aside from the 40s, entertainment was provided by hiphop from someone's iPod.

 

Mission Street Food runs on Thursday nights from 6 p.m. to midnight, cash only. It doesn't take reservations, but the tables moved pretty quickly when I was there--I arrived around 7, had a seat within 15 minutes, and was out by 8. Check out the latest news, guest chefs, and menus at MSF's blog.

My June trip was off to a crackin' start with LaBute and Perilla, and on day two I added art to the itinerary with a visit to the Met, then showing Frank Stella sculptures on the roof and a Paul Poiret retrospective. Fashion-challenged me, I'd never heard of Poiret, so the exhibit was a fascinating introduction to the man who created the hobble skirt. That item was an aberration: we can thank Poiret for condemning the corset and inventing more draped, movement-friendly women's wear, including the chemise dress and harem pants. (Coincidentally, I recently read in Juliet Nicolson's The Perfect Summer, about the English summer of 1911, that the season's debutantes were forbidden to wear trendy hobble skirts, as these prevented women from curtsying to the Queen.) Fickle fashion turned against Poiret as more modernist designers like Chanel rose. Poiret once met her on the street in the '20s, and seeing Chanel dressed all in black, he quipped, "For whom, madame, do you mourn?" "For you, monsieur," she retorted.

It's an old story: the important but self-important elder, the irreverent upstart. And in fact that was the story at my next stop for lunch, Ed's Lobster Bar in SoHo: weeks after my visit, chef Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar sued Edward McFarland, the eponymous Ed and her former sous chef, for copyright infringement, claiming that he'd copied her restaurant, down to the Caesar salad recipe. "Total plagiarism," she called it. It was a strange and surprising accusation, the first instance I'd heard of a restaurant claiming that its entirety--concept, interior design, recipes--are intellectual property protected by the same laws that apply to art and published works. While I certainly favor protecting creative output, it does seem a step too far to claim copyright on a Caesar salad. After all, if there were such rights, shouldn't royalties go to the descendants of Caesar Cardini, who invented the salad and trademarked the recipe? (Oddly enough, the recipe was born in Tijuana in the '20s--around when Poiret met Chanel?--so that city has at least one item in the "pro" column to offset drunk Americans and donkey shows.)

In any event, the suit (now settled) was a couple weeks in the future when I visited Ed's. Indeed, I was present at a happier time--one waiter was telling the counter-barflies that the Post had just that day dubbed Ed's the best lobster roll in the city. That's a tall statement: lobster roll aficionados are, like pizza fans, martini wonks, and royal matchmakers, highly fussy when it comes to questions of provenance, pedigree, and authenticity. I am not an expert, but I can vouch that Pearl Oyster Bar and Mary's Fish Camp, both in the Village, make excellent models (and in the latter, you might also get served by Amy Sedaris, though I haven't).

 

So, let us consider the lobster, as David Foster Wallace says in a fine essay from Gourmet on the ethics of boiling live creatures for consumption. Lobster's a luxury ingredient these days, but not so long ago the Atlantic was so rich in crustaceans that they were considered a trash fish, lobstermen's children presumably peering into their shellfish-stuffed lunchboxes and tearily longing for Oscar Meyer or PB&J. As Wallace notes, some of the American colonies "had laws against serving lobster to inmates more than once a week, because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats." The lobster roll seems to be a 20th century, working-class invention, a toasted hot dog bun filled with lobster meat dressed lightly with mayo or drawn butter and minimal additions. As with crabcakes, an excess of other stuff in the mix usually indicates an incompetent cook and/or a cheap bastard who doesn't want to fork over market price. And the market price is a pincer nip in the wallet: you'll pay north of $20 for a lobster roll, probably the higher end of the 20s in New York. Of course, as the price of lobster has gone upscale, so has its cooking, though with rolls you'll see the expense in thoughtful ingredient sourcing rather than Alinea-like plating.

Mr. McFarland attended the French Culinary Institute and worked at Le Cirque and Picholine, so he knows starry cuisine and has obviously chosen to focus on flavor without fuss, careful preparation and homey presentation. The lobster is in big chunks, giving you the texture of the meat and a mouthful of its flavor, and it's minimally dressed with a slaw-like thin mayo, served as per tradition on a light, toasted bun. On the side are crunchy, sea-salted fries, house-made tart pickles, and a delicious slaw that got my vote by including shallots and cornichons, a little vinegary bite to complement seafood and salt (a trio that any fish-and-chip fan can vouch is The Way Things Ought to Be). None of those sides tasted like an afterthought, as is so often the case at fish shacks. For those people who don't like lobster rolls (do they exist?), there's a full menu, including lobster pot pie ($22), a raw bar, and a daily blackboard list of fresh fishy goodness, which when I went included an oyster roll, steamed mussels, and a fluke sandwich.

I arrived at the beginning of lunch service and was one of the first to pull up a stool at the bar, but the place was full within 30 minutes, and I'd bet on it being a mob scene in the evening. Still, if you're up for some treyf trencher, you'd do well to elbow your way in. I'd be happy to have a lobster roll in my lunchbox and was stuffing in every bite on my generous plate, giving thanks to Monsieur Poiret for excommunicating the corset.

Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos. That, says the Larousse Gastronomique, was the dog-Latin sign of one Boulanger, Parisian bouillon seller: "Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you." With that sign, Boulanger set up the first restaurant around 1765, the word derived from restaurer, to restore. Again according to Larousse, "gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consomme as restaurants." Soup, meat, and chocolate? Sound restorative to me, though I would've added wine and cheese to that list, especially the decadent triple-cream named in honor of that gastronome.

If restaurants are the place for restoration, there are few cities equal to the R&R (riot & restoration) offered by New York. So, after my ex-employer requested my absence, I was quite happy to fly to Manhattan for a week of food, plays, and art. And yes, I am 13 months behind in my blogging--so much for taking advantage of the medium's immediacy.

For a theater-chow double-header, it's hard to beat Greenwich Village--midtown may have Broadway shows, but have you tried to get a good, non-extortionately-priced meal there? And don't get me started on the crowds; I'd rather get lost in the Village diagonallies than salmon up Seventh Avenue any day. Thus my first stop was Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House at the Lucille Lortel, followed by a late late dinner at Perilla on Jones Street.

Perilla had just opened the month before, the first restaurant from the first winner of Top Chef, Harold Dieterle, and accordingly it had a certain amount of buzz. That buzz, though, seems to be what Perilla is not about: it's not a velvet-rope, see-and-be-seen scene, nor is it an exotic-ingredient, specialized-servingware, extravagant-tasting-menu temple of cutting-edge cookery. Nope, Dieterle has dared to be humble, opening a cozy neighborhood restaurant with an unpretentious menu. And that's quite all right: fireworks aren't for every day.

I arrived early, but the staff behaved as if they were the ones causing inconvenience. They asked that I wait 10-15 minutes at the bar, where they graciously and unnecessarily comped my wine and the host kept checking on me. I was glad to have a few minutes to scan the place: a long bar with about 10 stools on the right, 18 tables and banquettes along the left and back, and an old-fashioned pressed-tin ceiling.

Once at my table, I started with peekytoe crab salad with mango, avocado, and ginger vinaigrette. That's not a groundbreaking combination (and sounds like something you'd find at a nontraditional sushi joint), but it was delicious, creamy rich in texture, appropriately light for a hot night. Perilla is a serrated-leaf plant from the mint family, more commonly known in the U.S. as shiso, but I didn't see any shiso that day, and this crab is the only Asian-esque dish that I can recall there. Besides his CIA training, Dieterle took a cooking sabbatical in Thailand, so those eastern influences do pop up on the menu.

Wagyu skirt steak was my entree, not a slab of meat but rillettes on a bed of spinach creamed with sunchokes, with shallots and chanterelles and a fruity steak sauce the consistency of apple butter. I thought the sauce was made from cherries or plums, but the waiter said it's just reduced beef jus and red wine. It beat the hell out of A1--I was looking around to see if I could sneak a plate-clearing swipe with my finger. I love creamed spinach, too, though had my doubts about substituing sunchoke for dairy, but it was smooth and tasty. (And sounded familiar: sure enough, that combination was one of Dieterle's Top Chef recipes.) The wagyu was tender, pink, and flavorful, as you'd expect from well-marbled beef. Wagyu refers to several types of Japanese cattle bred for a judicious amount of fat in their flesh; Kobe is a subset of Wagyu. My understanding is that much of what appears on American menus as "Wagyu" or "Kobe-style" beef actually comes from cattle that are domestic Wagyu-Angus hybrids. In short, I wonder if Wagyu and Kobe are becoming menu marketing words more than a guarantee of superior quality.

Though I love sweets, I couldn't resist getting the cheese course instead, with selections from down the street at Murray's. Accompanied by grilled bread and quince paste, the trio included moussey, three-milk La Tur, mild here but it can get mushroomy and slightly pungent as it ages; gouda-esque Prima Donna (there are three types; I'm guessing this was the fino); and Bayley-Hazen blue (from Jasper Hill Farm, producers of Constant Bliss, which is), tasting a bit murky compared to the bitchen Colston-Bassett stilton I'd had the night before (still my favorite blue). Then it turned out that I didn't have to sacrifice dessert, because Perilla brought two quarter-sized oatmeal-raisin cookies for petit fours.

Six months later I was back with my father and step-mother, who couldn't come up with a Christmas wish list and so got dinner instead. I didn't notice a ton of menu changes or many changes period, which was fine--the food and service were as good as the first time. (Sorry, by the way, that I didn't take photos.) I started with a special, celery root soup with wild mushroom garnish, which was exactly what a winter soup should be, hearty but refined. Next I had pancetta-wrapped pork tenderloin slices (pig squared, hurrah!) on rutabaga puree (a mite sweet), with brussels sprout leaves, walnuts, and a black mushroom custard. That sounds like a lot on the plate, but it was a reasonable amount. This was one of the first times I noticed brussels sprouts peeled like a head of lettuce, which I've seen several times since, even a salad made of sprout leaves (which poor prep cook drew short straw on that task?). Finally, I had a rockin' dessert: four square, compact, "vanilla-scented" donuts with sides of lemon curd and dark chocolate to dunk them into. Ooee, those were good, hot and fluffy and not too sugary, with the curd and the chocolate offering two completely different shades of astringence to give a flavor punch to the dough. I believe Perilla has had donut variations on the menu since opening, and I'd definitely go for them again.

You have a mind-boggling number of restaurant options in the Village (and I'll be writing up some of those soon...or someday), and Perilla wouldn't necessarily be my first recommendation. It would be on the shortlist, though--I enjoyed everything I had there. It's on the money if you're not out for a "destination" restaurant but for a comfortable, reliable, fairly priced neighborhood spot with quality ingredients and well-prepared dishes. And don't forget the donuts.

Many years ago, during a stressful stretch of my life, I had a happy interval of five or six months in which funny dreams made me wake up laughing. In one, I was walking down a nondescript street, being badgered by a man who wanted a date. After several failed attempts to brush him off, I exclaimed, exasperated, "Look, man, I'm fat, insane, and tattooed. In some states that would make me a carny." Carny? Now there's a word one rarely encounters, popping into the sort of snappy retort I never produce in waking life. How marvelous! Of course, most dreams are not wish fulfillment but non sequiturs and humdrum reprocessing of our conscious world, the brain idling like a car engine on fumes of the day's fuel.

 

Also, not all dreams are sweet. Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia offers exactly what it says on the label: an absurd world of wonder and dissociation, funniness and brutality and nonsense, which may be dream, fantasy, delusion, or metaphor. It begins, literally, with discord, as our heroine Lisa (Christine Entwisle) sits alone at the front of the stage, tuning the E string on an acoustic guitar, turning the peg until the string's in tune...and then she keeps going until the string exceeds its limit and snaps.

The curtain then rises on Lisa's apartment, where a stranger calls to her through the mail slot. He's Victor Hesse (Barnaby Power), a Swiss watchmaker more than a little reminiscent of Freud, come to tell her that her watch isn't broken; her temporal continuity is. While flying through time zones, she has lost an hour, and she must reclaim it in the kingdom of Dissocia to set her life aright. First, she calls for information, which only wastes more of her time: "Thank you for calling the Dissocian Embassy. If you wish to report a conspiracy, please press one. If you think everyone would be better off without you, please press two. If you wish to correct a temporal disturbance, please press three. If you wish to press four, press five." Luckily, it turns out to be very easy to find Dissocia: her flat turns into an elevator.

And off we go on a fanciful journey that's reminiscent of Willy Wonka, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. For me, the persistent analogue is my favorite childhood book, The Phantom Tollbooth, in which Milo, a young boy killing time, ventures to the Lands Beyond, passing through Expectations, where the Whether Man sends him on his way, and Doldrums, where he meets the vigilant Watchdog--his torso is a clock--named Tock. Lisa is likewise on a voyage through expectations and doldrums in search of lost time, though this being so-called "in yer face" (a moniker that none of the playwrights so described seems to like) British theater, the trip is decidedly more R rated. As Neilson puts it, "If you like Alice in Wonderland but there's not enough sex and violence in it, then Dissocia is the show for you." Like Norman Juster, the Tollbooth author, Neilson likes wordplay: on her journey, Lisa meets insecurity guards and a live scapegoat, and finds the lost property office, where people have lost their humor, their arguments, their inhibitions (a man naked below the waist--for those of you counting at home, incident #4 of male nudity in the theater on this vacation--trend or weird coincidence?).

Neilson enhances his whimsical world with musical numbers that make it even more Oz-like. As he says in his introduction to the published script, "People are looking for something in the theatre that they can't get anywhere else, a sense of live-ness, a certain spectacle. There's no part of me that needs to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on stage, but all of me wants to see that car fly. And that's what we've got to do in the 'serious' theatre--we've got to have our flying car....We must be magical, or suffer the consequences."

Of course, like Oz, Dissocia is fanciful but not fancy-free: good Queen Sarah has been lost, and the people are plagued by the Black Dog King ("black dog" was what Churchill called his depression; the expression has entered British idiom). And that scapegoat, who first wants Lisa to blame him for something, anything, then attacks. As he's about to rape her, a woman steps in--Jane from the council (Amanda Hadingue), a bruised and bandaged social worker whose job is to take all the assaults in the area. The council's theory is, it may not be able to reduce crime, but it can reduce the victims of crime to one. It's a fine piece of satire, monstrous but not wholly improbable, like Swift's modest proposal. But it is genuinely awful, as we hear Jane being raped offstage, and Lisa, horrified that someone is suffering abuse on her behalf, screams and weeps. Then a polar bear (a puppet) pops up through the grassy lawn of the set to console her, singing "Who'll hold your paw when you die?". And then ravaged Jane comes back onstage with her clipboard and takes Lisa off on her pedal car, which flies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

So the first act goes, delightful and imaginative, dangerous and confusing. During the intermission, the set changes completely: grassy, technicolor Dissocia gives way to a stark white set, a hospital room, just as Lisa's state of mind has flipped from mania to depression. Dissocia, we see, is the result of Lisa forgoing her medication; she hasn't lost an hour, she's psychologically out of sync. This act of the play is the first act's opposite, minimal in dialogue, color, action, sound. To increase the sense of dissociation, the hospital room is not open to the audience but enclosed, so the audience is looking in like a visitor and the actors have to speak through wireless mikes, sounding that little bit less organic and near. Back on her meds, Lisa sleeps a lot, and we flash through several short scenes in which not much happens, reflecting Lisa's slow recovery.

She does rebel in one scene, jumping around as she listens to her Walkman (a solitary experience of music, unlike the Dissocian group musical numbers--though both are all in her head), and staff stop her and put her back in bed. This scene seems to argue for somewhat for mental health treatment slapping down self-expression and medicating away individuality, and one can't quite blame Lisa for preferring Dissocia to drugs. Those of us who've felt our brains compensating for stress, as I did with my funny dreams, are grateful for the psychic resilience. Neilson doesn't quite take sides--Dissocia is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. In the second act, we also see a brief visit from sister Dot, who snaps at Lisa, "It's just selfishness"--an unsympathetic but understandable view; Dot's no Jane, but Lisa's Black Dog King has caused distress and disruption to those who care for her. (And I can't help noting that Dot is an abbreviation of Dorothy, another Oz reference.)

In the final scene, the polar bear is back, a stuffed animal that Lisa cuddles as she sleeps peacefully, and colored lights circle like a kaleidoscope over her face. Is this a benediction, sign of her color coming back? Or the first hints of Dissocia returning? We can't tell, and it's a beautifully ambiguous ending.

The Wonderful World of Dissocia was commissioned for the 2004 Edinburgh International Festival, and this 2007 revival by the new National Theatre of Scotland played at the Royal Court, which also staged Neilson's latest, Relocated, last month. I have seen very few American productions of Neilson's works, which is a shame, because his belief that populism and experiment are not mutually exclusive is quite refreshing. As he says, "We must be accessible, yet still bold in form and content." Who says you can't have flying cars and intellect too? Though Neilson hasn't made a splash in the States yet, the National Theatre of Scotland has made a good start here with The Black Watch at UCLA and St. Ann's Warehouse (it's there again October 9 through November 30) and The Bacchae at BAM. Judging by the NTS's performance so far, I'd say catch any show you can.

I lost the plot in Faust--literally. This was not your typical revival of a classic but a hip, perambulatory production set in a warehouse in Wapping, across from the Tobacco Dock pirate ships in London's Docklands, where merchant vessels once anchored and sailors caroused. Staged by the appropriately named Punchdrunk company (all their works seem to incorporate liquor and violence), this Faust was well off the beaten track geographically and artistically. When I say the show was set in a warehouse, I mean that the entire warehouse was the set: a fully realized environment that the audience walked through, no stage, no fourth wall between audience and the actors.

Because this performance was all about immersion and atmosphere, let me walk you through the experience. Upon arriving at the warehouse (behind an industrial fence, with a sign that was not part of the set but was apropos: Dangerous Structure - Keep Out) and turning in our tickets, we met a guide who explained that we could roam anywhere in the building, at any pace we pleased. The guide showed us the bar, at which we were welcome anytime for a drink and live music (blues and country). Next we were issued white, full-face masks, which we were to wear at all times, except in the bar. These were a pest to keep on over glasses but really did contribute to the experience--they added mystery, made me feel part of the performance and less inhibited, and made it easier to identify ushers and actors. With that, we boarded an elevator, where an Elvis-esque character named Jed (our first clue that this would be an Americana, Beelzebubba take on Goethe's Faust, part one) took us to the top floor. There he asked for a volunteer--whom he shoved out of the car into a pitch-black hallway, then swiftly slammed the elevator gate down and, smirking, took us down a level. Here he asked for two volunteers and, surprisingly given what just happened, got them...and did the same thing. The rest of us cowards went to what I think was the first floor, and we were on our own--no program, no directions, no clue what we should do, which was both discombobulating and exciting.

At first the experience was like roaming through an abandoned movie location, because for about 30 minutes I ran into no one but other silent, masked walkers, like a ghost audience. The set was Southern gothic circa the 1950s: a beauty parlor, a bar, motel rooms, a roadhouse, shrines, a "Temple" that turned out to be a movie theater showing A Touch of Evil, an office with two manual typewriters, each with a sheet bearing Bible verses. Those rooms show the inspired, maniacal level of detail in Punchdrunk productions: every item is there for a reason, speaks to the time, location, and themes; and every room is complete.

I was getting into the mood, grinning behind my stuffy, slipping mask and wondering what I'd see in the next room--grinning but also more spooked than I would have expected, feeling as if I'd walked into the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, a mind-bending, fascinating corner of hell where anything might happen. And then a man in a gray suit and fedora brushed past, swaggering and snapping his fingers: Faust. Well, I figured out he was Faust after shadowing him for a while: the actors weren't wearing nametags, obviously, and there may have been dialogue, but I don't remember any. I had to identify characters through their interactions and movement (some of Punchdrunk are actors, some dancers), though I tend to think you could know nothing at all of Goethe and still enjoy the show. In fact, you might enjoy it more, not trying to follow the plot but experiencing things as they come. In any case, I followed the action downstairs to a red bar for the Walpurgisnacht scene, where there was a seductive dance and a topless Gretchen was handed from person to person. She then went, pregnant, into the woods, a room full of real pine trees. Perhaps because my senses were already on alert, I found that pervasive pine scent transporting, instantly felt a wintry chill, and thought that perhaps smell is an underused tool in performing arts (after all, scientists say aromas can summon strong memories and emotions). In any case, a man who I believe was Gretchen's brother defended her honor and was wounded in the duel, stumbled into the forest, cursed his sister, and died. Another woman, his wife, entered and cursed her as well. Grieved, Gretchen ran at a shack, slamming her belly into the wall until her baby died.

There I lost the plot again, which was frustrating--think about it, in a massive warehouse, how could one divine where to go next? Then I realized: Listen. Follow the soundscape, and soon I'd see lighting changing to illuminate a scene, or audience members gathering at an interesting spot, or an actor moving toward his or her next piece. Sure enough, it was mere minutes before I found myself in the basement--as you'd guess, hell--where Gretchen was being released from jail, I think representing an ascension to heaven. Then Faust was dragged down, stripped (instance #3 of male nudity in my spring theater schedule), and bound to a chair, where a devil began his torment. Choreographically, this was expressed by the demon swan-diving repeatedly onto Faust's lap, a maneuver that I'm sure was safe but looked nad-crushingly painful, not to mention the kind of creative torture one would expect from hell (or Abu Ghraib). Finally, Faust rose from the chair and walked slowly backward into blackness, a literal but eloquent visual of this man of enlightenment succumbing to the dark side. The end.

Of course, when you've been in an immersive environment like that, having all your senses engaged, it takes a while before the experience has truly ended. Despite my tired feet (which I didn't notice were sore until the show stopped), I half wished that Faust was like an amusement park ride, and that I could get back in line to ride it again and see what I'd missed the first time. I was glad to have a five-minute walk back to the Tube station, along those quiet, atmospheric Docklands streets. Passing a Muslim butcher shop, I looked for a minute at the sign advertising whole or half sheep--ritual animal sacrifice!--until I realized I was examining it as if it was part of the Faust set, which of course it wasn't, and I smiled and moved on. Now that's a sign of good art and entertainment: Change the way your audience sees things, and leave them wanting more.

Update: Congratulations to Mark Rylance, who took home the Tony for best actor, surprisingly beating Patrick Stewart (though I would've been happy for either to win). Extra brownie points to Mr. Rylance for reciting a poem as his acceptance speech. Forget thanking god and mom, that's what an artist should do: perform and shine some light on another artist.

Let us praise piffle! There's no shortage of woe in the world, but while tragedy weeps, drama tenses, and nihilism glowers, piffle giggles, tinkles the ice in its Caucasian, and sparks a spliff. Now, that's not to say that comedy is all lightness. As one of my favorite professors pointed out (and I have repeated often), Shakespearean comedies contain tragedy, or the potential for it, and the tragedies contain comedy, even slapstick, but one can tell them apart because at the end of a comedy, there's at least one marriage, and at the end of the tragedy there's at least one death, sometimes so many that just enough characters remain to serve as pallbearers. (This same professor, a gentle soul, once told the class that he'd seen a modern-dress version of Oedipus Rex so ill conceived that, as he said, "I was so mad, I...I nearly took off my shoes!")

Though comedy is a sturdy steed that can carry some weight and be the stronger for it, the lightest, most piffling end of the comedy spectrum, farce, is a miniature horse, there to amuse but not to labor. Farce is all flirtation and no (or few) consequences--oh, there may be risk, usually of a character being caught lying or cheating, but the risk's there simply to move the plot along; it's a delight, not a real danger. Farce is as weightless as a Watteau. We in the audience needn't do any mental heavy lifting, just sit on the swing and wait for the play to give us a push.

So, after a vacation full of excellent but heavy theater--The Seagull, The Tempest, Equus, King Lear--it was charming to settle into the Comedy Theatre for a revival of Marc Camoletti's French farce, Boeing-Boeing. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting the show to offer as much hilarity as a previous Comedy comedy, the fabulous Propeller's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In one scene of that all-male production, Bottom fell to the floor, and his very long, prosthetic donkey dong flopped over the front of a cushion in a funny way. Two seconds later, in a quiet theater, a single small child in the audience burst out laughing, and everyone lost it, including the actors. (And the hilarity continues: I'm writing this in the airport departure lounge, where Virgin just paged Rosie Cox.) I didn't expect to weep with laughter again but was happily wrong.

Camoletti's play dates to 1962, and this production wisely chose to stick to that time zone, a choice both fun and, I think, necessary, since the play depends on stereotypes that would be un-PC in the '00s. The central character and straight man, in more ways than one, is Bernard (Roger Allam, whom I'd seen previously playing German prime minister Willy Brandt in Democracy and Ray in Blackbird), a French architect with a sleek white semicircle of a pad (imagine what a modernist architect would do with Austin Powers, and you've about got the picture). Bernard has built what he considers the bachelor's ideal blueprint, an erector set to manage his erections, if you will: he has three fiancees, all air hostesses, all unaware of each other, because he lives by the airline timetables, timing their arrivals and departures to ensure they never meet in his apartment. This way, he gets the full girlfriend experience, times three, with no pesky monotony of monogamy.

In true farcical fashion, the three stewardesses are national stereotypes in brightly colored uniforms: a blond, brassy, no-nonsense American; a fiery, passionate Italian; and a ferocious, kinky German (played hilariously by Michelle Gomez, whom you may have seen on the BBC series The Green Wing). Helping Bernard manage is his housekeeper, Bertha (Frances de la Tour, Hagrid's giant girlfriend, to Harry Potter fans, also the lone female teacher in The History Boys), who makes sure that the right girlfriend's photo is on the nightstand and that the right national cuisine is served. She's the portrait of a put-upon woman, alternately tetchy and resigned, perfectly embodied by de la Tour, who already looks hangdog and who expresses more outrage through dusting than most actors can through ranting. Completing the cast is Robert (Mark Rylance), Bernard's old college chum visiting from the provinces, here played as a Welshman, tweedy, earth-toned, and down-to-earth in this candy-colored, plastic world. Soon after Bernard explains his fiancee rotation system to Robert, the timetables fall apart, all three stewardesses arrive at the apartment, and Bernard, Bertha, and Robert struggle to keep them from finding out about each other. Doors slam, hilarity ensues.

As you can tell, the play is paper-thin, so much so that I nearly didn't get a ticket. But this was a case of an outstanding cast turning nothing into something, especially thanks to the central threesome of Allam, de la Tour, and Rylance, theatrical thoroughbreds known more for their dramatic work. Rylance, here playing the rube, was for 10 years the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, and his presence convinced me to give Boeing-Boeing a try. (You may also have seen him as Papa Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl, a disappointing film that should have given him and the other actors some scenery to chew.) As an actor, he tends to convey gentleness and occasional whimsy, qualities well suited to Robert, and Rylance in fact proved unexpectedly hilarious (Michael Billington of the Guardian compared him to a head-scratching Stan Laurel), with timing as precise as a Swiss watch and gestures so telling he didn't need dialogue to get a laugh. At one point, one of the stewardesses finds a rival's airline bag, and Robert hastily claims it as his own. When she extracts lacy undergarments from it, he insists that real men can pull off those delicates, straps the handbag over his shoulder and swaggers around the living room a la John Wayne, kicking in a door and making pistol fingers. It was no surprise that Rylance was nominated for a best actor Olivier award. The whole cast, though, proved remarkably skilled, stretching their comedy muscles in plastic performances that required as much clowning and choreography as acting. They looked like they could crack each other up at any moment, particularly when Robert worked the handbag, or Bertha batted her eyes provocatively at Bernard. All in all, they made me think that deep is overrated: bring on more piffle!

If you find yourself with trifling urges, Boeing-Boeing will touch down on Broadway on April 19, with Rylance, Bradley Whitford, and Christine Baranski (dunno which character she's playing, but I have a hard time picturing her as the maid). Until then, you can get a second opinion on the show at my favorite theater-fan blog, West End Whingers, where they conveniently used Google's translator to render their review in French. Enjoy.

Update: The RSC's Lear will appear March 25, 2009, on PBS. McKellen will not drop trou, according to the NY Times.

Change! is the rallying cry of our 2008 presidential election--"change" being a perfect political word that means whatever the listener wants to hear. It implies discontent with the current administration without making concrete allegations, and sounds hopeful, grandiose, and revolutionary without promising anything specific the candidate might be held accountable for later. It's a phrase so much less exact than, say, "no taxation without representation," and certainly less committal than "give me liberty or give me death."

Watching King Lear, one can see that politics hasn't evolved greatly in the past several centuries: constituents are wooed only until politicians win, party peers jockey for power, factions lobby for their own interests (never mind what's best for the nation as a whole), and there's always a problem of succession. (Come to think of it, corporations have all the same issues.) And words are bled of meaning and intent; they're Potemkin villages built to look impressive but do not offer any shelter or real use. That's the first problem in Lear: the king prods his daughters for the words he wants to hear, the language of filial piety and flattery, and he gets false sucking-up from two daughters and simple, caring, unwelcome sincerity from the third, Cordelia, speaking truth to power and getting cast off for doing so.

In the RSC's most recent producton of King Lear, which I saw last March at Stratford-upon-Avon, director Trevor Nunn underlines the emptiness of ritual and language from the opening. Lines of Cossack-coated courtiers troop onto the stage to organ music, the set with its theatrical balcony looking more like a stage than a throne room. Lear (Ian McKellen) enters in a gold lame number, looking like an archbishop giving benediction to his daughters and adherents. By contrast, Cordelia is in virginal ivory, simply and elegantly corseted and ruffled, like a bride. Before a word is spoken, we understand that this court is full of actors with costumes, choreography, and lines, and only Cordelia is out of place, plain-spoken amid the pomp. Sisters Goneril and Regan are in their own costume world, too, dressed like Jacobean femme fatales one would expect in a Webster revenge tragedy.

What follows is a stripping away, literally and figuratively: as the king divests himself of crown, country, kinship, and finally wits, he likewise downgrades from gold lame to simpler uniform, to rough, loose-fitting trousers and shift, and at one point these come off, too. The sight of a 68-year-old Sir naked on the stage stimulated some discussion in Britain (and, I confess, startled me for a moment), but the stripping was textually justified. Going mad at the thought of his ungrateful daughters, Lear tells Poor Tom:

Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer
with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.
Is man  no more than this? Consider him well. Thou
owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep
no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on
's are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare,
forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!
come unbutton here.

Tearing off his clothes

Whatever one thinks of onstage nudity in general, here I found it not only justified but a key to this interpretation of the play: We're seeing the emperor's new clothes, a king stripped down physically and psychologically to an animal state. Much as boot camp sergeants and addiction counselors break a person down to help them build back up, Lear must remove all costume, props, and acting before he can find himself, and he must go mad before he can become sane. McKellen hit all the right notes, I thought, in a character that demands quite a range: from imposing to childish, mad to sane, rogueish to meek, frivolous to genuinely bereft. In the mad scenes especially, I was reminded of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients, losing their minds by degrees, confused and at times belligerent. More generally, I was reminded of retirees--Lear is, at one level, a man who lost his identity when he lost his job. Seeing this performance, I realized for the first time that Lear is also Henry V in reverse. Whereas Hal plays with Falstaff and friends, drinking, whoring, gambling, thieving, and staging pranks until the time comes to accept responsibility and his princely duties, Lear abandons his kingdom in a bit of playacting and goes off to drink and carouse with his rowdy friends. Going from wild oats to duty makes Hal a hero and that play a kind of comedy, while Lear, treating duty as a game, makes for a tragedy.
 

One other note on the mad scenes: the program--an unusually helpful execution of that genre--had an essay about the play's theological riskiness: Characters are constantly praying and having those prayers go unanswered. (Thanks to the program, too, for pointing out that from 1833 on, King Lear often had Stonehenge as a backdrop, right up to the 1981 televised version with Olivier. Another nice piece of vacation serendipity for me, having just visited the site.) Also, I notice that in this play (unlike Macbeth), disruptions in the political and social order are not represented as disruptions in the natural world. The storm reflects Lear's tempestuous mind, but it's just a storm, not the heavens tearing apart because the divinely ordained king is out of position. And Lear is not mad because of his loss of power but because of his unnatural psychic state, so degraded that he has mistaken the organic bond of care he should share with his daughters.

Though McKellen--and probably any actor in the role--dominates the play, there's much merit in the supporting roles, too. I was happy to see some familiar faces: William Gaunt (whom I saw in Humble Boy) as Gloucester, Romola Garai (Mrs. Wilberforce in Amazing Grace and nurse Briony in Atonement) as Cordelia, Monica Dolan (who was excellent in Shared Experience's Jane Eyre as the title character) as Regan, and Frances Barber--last seen as a viperous Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in Edinburgh--playing a viperous Goneril here, decidedly not down with Dad's power-sharing arrangement (but when have those ever worked?). I also liked Ben Meyjes's wounded and tender Edgar/Poor Tom, and though the performance divided audience responses, I thought Sylvester McCoy found something new in the Fool, here more vaudevillian than jester.

Last year I saw Rupert Goold's tremendous versions of The Tempest and Macbeth, which took chances that paid off. This production by the Royal Shakespeare Company showed that a classical, by-the-book interpretation of Shakespeare can still do the job quite well, too. King Lear wrapped up the RSC's Complete Works Festival, a yearlong, comprehensive project to present all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, plus some of the poems. The event drew many of the RSC's illustrious alumni back to the stage, including McKellen after a 17-year absence.

This production--and McKellen's performance--was competent and considered rather than showy, which I do not mean as faint praise. Sir Ian mused, in Deep Thoughts style, in an episode of Extras, "How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play." Funny, but it's true, there's merit in doing your homework but not showing your work, just letting the character be. Besides, with three and a half hours of intensity, you don't want the audience feeling that they've been worked over by an excessively exerting production. As it is, the part of Lear is not only emotionally demanding in range, it's physically challenging as well, with the actor onstage for much of the time, and in those scenes fighting, ranting, and in the end carrying Cordelia all the way from the wings to the front. That last scene got me: Lear bears Cordelia's body, yowling "howl" at the people he passes, sounding most deranged when he has, in fact, been jolted back to his senses, at a moment when he would probably most wish to be out of them, like his poor insensible daughter.

The RSC's Lear has left the stage now, but you still have one more opportunity to see it: it's been filmed and will show on PBS sometime this fall. Get those TiVos ready. In the meantime, you can also see video clips on the RSC's site, and though it's not online yet, the New Yorker's John Lahr did a fine profile of McKellen.

After a full day of Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Equus (yes, I'm still blogging last March's vacation), the next day I hauled my tired carcass onto a train for Stratford-upon-Avon. It's a pleasant surprise to see how quickly one moves from the cityscape to the pastoral, with the countryside full of rabbits, deer, grouse, ring-necked pheasants, and of course sheep and lambs.

As you might expect, Stratford-upon-Avon is well geared up for the tourist trade, half genuinely antique and half Ye Olde, but it's charming and not overly cluttered with tour buses. I was staying at the Shakespeare Hotel, a 16th century building that's been a hostelry since the mid-18th century, where rooms are named after the playwright's characters. I was a mite dismayed to room in Bardolph, named for one of Falstaff's pimply chums, but then I'd have to avoid the tub in Ophelia and would fret about stains in Macbeth. Before my matinee, I roamed up the street to Hall's Croft, once owned by Shakespeare's daughter Susanna and her husband, Dr. John Hall. It's not the best of the historical sites in town, but there is a good (scary) exhibit about medicine as it was practiced in the Elizabethan era.

And then I was away to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre, which was about to close for a major renovation that will go on into 2010. My matinee was a hot ticket, the Theater for a New Audience's The Merchant of Venice, with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, playing for just 12 performances. It was part of the RSC's Complete Works Festival, an ambitious, yearlong program featuring all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, plus the sonnets and the longer poems, performed by companies from around the world. TFANA was the first American company ever invited to the RSC, performing Cymbeline in 2001, an acclaimed production that I missed.

I wondered whether it was odd for the British to hear Shakespeare with American accents, but the audience seemed quite taken by this production, which was bold and fresh. Instead of giving us pseudo-Venetian Elizabethan costume drama, TFANA brought its Merchant into the modern world, with a set that evoked an urban, steel-and-glass office and characters dressed like investment bankers. Shylock entered with an espresso and a smart phone. Servant Balthazar was a flirty, gay PA with a wireless headset (played by the very funny Arnie Burton, demonstrating how to steal scenes when you have few lines). Gratiano was a high-fiving frat boy in a suit. Another servant, Launcelot Gobbo, looked like bike messenger. Perhaps most notably, in the original script, the noblemen wooing Portia must choose among caskets made of gold, silver, and lead; each contains a verse about whether his choice has won her hand (the correct selection is lead). In this production, the caskets were MacBooks, and when a suitor "opened" one, a video verdict played.

Removing Shakespeare from his time period can be an iffy proposition: often it's jarring, hearing a play's Elizabethan language and ideas dropped into, say, the Oklahoma dust bowl. But when the transposition clicks, it can be revelatory, as it was in Ian McKellen's Richard III on film, and as it was here. One of the interesting choices was to add African-American actors to the mix, playing servants Launcelot Gobbo and Nerissa. When the Moroccan suitor chooses the wrong casket and loses his opportunity to marry Portia, she says, "A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go./Let all of his complexion choose me so." Seeing Nerissa's offended reaction adds new nuance to the line, dimming Portia's plea for mercy later in the play. Similarly, when Shylock's servant Launcelot Gobbo tells his mistress Jessica that she's damned--as she interprets, "there's no mercy for me in heaven because I am a Jew's daughter"--what was funny in the 16th century now sounds nasty, an instance of ethnic tension.

When this production finds humor where there was none and, conversely, pathos where there were laugh lines, it is (like Portia's caskets) making a larger point about surfaces and the eye of the beholder. You see, Merchant is classified as a comedy, but I think that without knowing that, we modern viewers are more likely to call it a tragedy, even though in the end no one dies. It's difficult to see any of these characters as wholly (or mostly) good or bad. My opinion sometimes flipped from speech to speech, as with Gratiano, who in the beginning was funny as the kind of guy whose dress is financial district, whose behavior screams "Phi Delt," and whose only reading material is Maxim; but at the end we see his bullying side as he bays for Shylock's blood. For another example, Portia is one of Shakespeare's finest female characters, intelligent and high-minded, a catalog of virtues (and she was portrayed well and nobly by Kate Forbes), but by the time she got to her "the quality of mercy is not strained" speech, I couldn't help noticing that she calls for mercy, a thing that is given, as by a superior person to an inferior, rather than calling for tolerance or empathy, things that are shared. We may be in a multicultural Venice, but it's a mix based on mercantilism, not democracy. Here virtues can't quite be divorced from money: even in love, Portia's suitors are choosing among gold, silver, and lead, and Jessica goes to her lover with her father Shylock's gold and jewels.

Of course, questions about comedy, tragedy, and character get most complicated in the person of Shylock. Historically, he has been portrayed as everything from villain to victim, comic caricature to tragic character. That's not just because of changing social mores but because the play leaves itself open to interpretation: there's no clear hero in the play--after all, it's not obvious whether the merchant of the title is Shylock or his rival, Antonio. Shylock is perhaps kin to Falstaff, characters meant to serve as comic foils, moral warnings, and plot forwarders, yet who became three-dimensional, gained depth and pathos, and ran away with their plays.

Part of the interpretive problem has likely been the novelty of a Jewish lead character. (TFANA emphasized this when it performed Merchant in New York in repertory with Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, with F. Murray Abraham playing both Shylock and Barabas.) Throughout the play, characters' interactions with Shylock are colored by their perception of his faith, right down to his final scene, when he loses his case against Antonio and is ordered to forfeit all his wealth and to convert to Christianity--the latter verdict one that probably seemed like justice to Elizabethans but hardly seems like a punishment based on law, logic, or mercy. The Christians in the play diagnose his disease as religion, rather than as character flaws, by which we would ordinarily judge villains or tragic heroes. Similarly, actors and audience members have struggled to define Shylock, and I think that Abraham made an excellent decision to play the ambiguities of the character, a man both powerful and vulnerable, with gravitas and with humor (though perhaps the humor of an underdog trying to defuse dangerous situations), material and feeling, sinned against and sinning. In this production, when Antonio spit on Shylock, he spit right back. In the courtroom scene, Shylock was undeniably vengeful, delighted to be exacting revenge on Antonio, but it was impossible not to feel a pang for Shylock when, told that Antonio will force Christianity on him, he cried out a little in pain, crawled under a table, and lost his yarmulke. Abraham brought the folded handkerchief from his suit pocket and held it to his exposed crown, as if pressing a wound.

In that terrible moment, the questionable and subjective nature of justice was exposed, too. Despite Portia's eloquent advocacy of mercy, the results still look more like vengeance than justice--as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, no drop of blood has been spilled, but we can hardly call the parties untouched. Does a pure morality have a chance in this world where power--financial, legal, sexual--rules?

TFANA's production didn't pull any punches in the final scene, either, a typical comedic ending where there are no less than three weddings. However, they don't look like three happy endings: as the Observer pointed out, Portia's new husband appears to feel more than friendship for Antonio, Nerissa "sees that she's married a vulgar lout," and Jessica, who already seems alienated from the man for whom she forsook father and religion, finds Shylock's fallen yarmulke and picks it up pensively. The characters can't reliably put their faith in anything--family, love, money, or law (or, to put it more punningly, it's dangerous to put all your eggs in one casket).

This was a sensitively made show, funny, tragic, and a thoughtful look at the difficulty of seeing clearly and judging justly. It's easily the best version I've seen of The Merchant of Venice--it made the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon well worth it, and I was delighted to see an American company acquitting itself so well on the RSC's home turf.

TFANA does not seem to have any present plans to tour the play. However, the same director, Darko Tresnjak, will be staging Antony and Cleopatra in New York from March 22 to May 2.

I have an affinity for affinities--connections, coincidences, themes, the serendipitous ties you find the more you read and see. Here's one: On Monday, I went to the Joseph Cornell show at SF MoMA and saw a series of boxes he created in homage to Emily Dickinson. One was called Chocolat Menier, because Cornell had read in an introduction to Dickinson's poems that she used to write on any scraps she found around the house--paper bags, bills, programs, invitations, recipes, drugstore flyers, shopping lists, newspaper margins, and in one case, a candy bar wrapper from Chocolat Menier (the fragment: "necessitates celerity were better nay were im memorial may to duller [by?] or duller things").  I was familiar with the name because of the Menier Chocolate Factory, an 1870s outpost of that French company in London's Southwark district, recently turned into a well-respected small theater. So, kismet: three things I like and discovered separately--Cornell, Dickinson, Menier Chocolate Factory--with a connecting strand of cacao.

On my March vacation, one of the connecting themes was sheep, as I blogged earlier. Another turned out to be free willy at the theater: first Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) stripped off in Equus, then Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Magneto in X-Men) dropped trou in the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear, and finally an actor playing Faust in Punchdrunk's perambulatory production ended up in the altogether, tormented by demons. Now, I'm no Puritan, but I am a recovering Midwesterner, and at first my reaction was "Gah! Can't they warn a girl beforehand? What if I'd had front-row seats?" And then I decided the nudity was a good thing, both in accordance with dramatic demands and a bit of feminist fair play, since it's usually the women getting their kit off. Michael Billington of the Guardian has a fine column on nudity in theater, noting that it typically happens for one of two reasons: (1) the high road, artistic necessity, or (2) the low road, marketing, because nakedness sells seats (though you have to wonder what this approach does for an actor's ego, when they find their full monty's not selling for full cost at the half-price ticket booth). Billington makes a fair argument, I think, for a valid third reason: aesthetics. Art is art whether you're looking at a painting, a sculpture, a film, or a live human being acting, and if you find a nude form attractive or otherwise moving, doesn't that simply enhance the dramatic experience? We take prurient to mean unwholesomely interested in sex, but it come from a Latin verb that simply means to itch or to crave.

Well, we still have conflicted feelings about that itch. In England from 1737 to 1968, plays had to be licensed through the Lord Chamberlain's Office, effectively censoring works considered morally or politically unsavory, until the Theatres Act abolished that practice (thank you again, Mr. Tynan). (I am tempted to make comparison to America's current rating systems: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, The Terminator, and 24, with all their torture and imaginative murders, can make it past the censors, as long as the killers don't cuss too much or take off their clothes.) So, when Peter Shaffer's Equus made its debut at the National Theatre in 1973, onstage nudity had been a possibility for just five years and must have been startling and made the play that much more disturbing.

In the new production--oddly, the first West End revival of the play since the '70s--the producers have attempted to straddle the artistic/marketing arguments by casting the world's favorite junior wizard as the disturbed young man with a long nude scene. I think that's actually a positive thing. There's a turning point in the play where Radcliffe's character runs into his father at a pornographic movie theater, a mortifying situation, but it also makes him realize that his father is just a man with the same urges as every man. If, similarly, some of the audience members see Radcliffe in the buff and realize that celebrities are just human, and that the boy can in fact act, and even perhaps that theater has as much to offer as the movies, well then, those are all to the good.

With or without the nudity--and I don't think the play can do without it--the story is plenty unnerving: 17-year-old Alan Strang has, for unknown reasons, blinded six horses with a hoof pick, and child psychiatrist Martin Dysart must figure out how to help him. Radcliffe is believable and does well in the part, and that's not easy, as Shaffer targets the character not with a sniper rifle but with buckshot, a broad peppering of problems. Alan's mother, an ex-school teacher, is religious (though not in the scary, Piper Laurie-in-Carrie way), while his father is an old-school socialist who disdains god and television. Alan hasn't had much interaction with other teens, nor experience with young women. After his father destroyed a picture of Christ in torment, for which Alan seemed to have a fetish, the boy replaces the image with--and transfers his worship to--a photo of a horse, then develops a religion around it, complete with liturgy, chants, and self-flagellation. Then Alan meets a girl who gets him a job at a stable with real horses, which he takes on secret midnight rides, in the nude. The whole muddle climaxes in a single night, when the girl asks Alan to take her to a porno, they run into his dad, she takes Alan back to the barn for a roll in the hay, and he is unable to perform, presumably because the horses (his gods) are watching, and thus he blinds them. It's quite the smorgasbord of dysfunction, everything from masochism to religious delusion, yet for me it didn't add up to a clear reason for mental illness--his mother probably comes closest when she says the problem is organic to Alan, not something his parents have caused, but I think the contemporary audience, being perhaps more savvy about mental illness than our '70s peers, would like an actual diagnosis like schizophrenia. Also, I couldn't help thinking that today we consider 17-year-olds inexperienced but not naive--it's harder to credit his sexual confusion, and in court we would prosecute him as an adult.

Though the Alan Strang character is considered a lead, the prime mover in the play is the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart. Reading the script recently, I was struck by how much of the play's voice is Dysart's, so it says much for actor Richard Griffiths' skill and generosity that he showed the largeness of the character's personality and intellect without making him overwhelming. (You likely know Griffiths as Harry Potter's uncle in the movies, but rent The History Boys sometime to get a better idea of his charms.)

You would expect Dysart to be the voice of reason and compassion, and he is, but he is also experiencing what he calls "professional menopause": not that he cannot fulfill his duties, but that "I feel the job is unworthy to fill me" (and who hasn't thought that?). At heart he is a pagan, a lover of ancient Greece, when gods were in everything from breezes to streams; and they could appear as bull, swan, or horse; and they merged and meddled with their human worshipers. Dysart craves that animistic world ("Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus--no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person!") and the ecstasy of human meeting the divine, but his pagan experience is limited to his books, his holiday photos of Greece, his little statue of Dionysus that he pats for luck. Thus, although he knows that Alan is sick, he envies him, too, for believing that on his rides he becomes one with the god Equus. Indeed, when Dysart dreams that he is a pagan priest, he sees himself not as healer or reveler but as the surgeon in a ritual sacrifice, slicing open children one by one in a long line, growing increasingly nauseated and full of "implied doubt that this repetitive and smelly work is doing any social good at all." You don't need a textbook to interpret that dream.

I should mention that the set reinforces that dream theme. Designed by John Napier, who also created the original set, it's a stark, black semicircle (or horseshoe, if you prefer) with galleries onstage, filled with audience members and actors when they aren't performing. The set resembles a temple, an operating theater, an amphitheater, or (since I'd just seen it that morning) a site of ancient worship like Stonehenge. The horse costumes are anthropomorphic, in keeping with the god-and-man-become-one concept: the actors wear velvety brown outfits, boots with hooflike soles made of metal, and eerily beautiful wirework heads that do not conceal their faces. Will Kemp, formerly a dancer with the Royal Ballet and Matthew Bourne's company, has traded swans for horses and delivers a magnetic, wordless performance as the lead equine, Nugget.
 

Seeing Alan's joy riding Nugget, you can understand why Dysart feels deprived, a pagan without gods. His doubts and questions, he says, "are worse than useless; they're subversive," because he, the man of science, craves making a leap of faith. I have no idea whether Shaffer's a philosophy fan, but the play obviously flirts with philosophical questions. To my mind, the largest debt is to Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which the author posits that Greek tragedy was born from opposing forces he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The dualities are dreams versus intoxication, the illusion of perfection versus earthy, everyday reality, light versus dark. Later, Nietzsche would characterize Christianity as Apollonian:

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. Hatred of "the world," condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite...

(All quotations are from Walter Kaufmann's 1967 translation.) Against this, he embraced the chaotic Dionysian spirit, emotions that "as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness," and the bonds between man and man and man and nature are renewed: "he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art." This is a living transcendence, no godly intervention or afterlife required. Dysart, who is fixated on the Dionysian but living the Apollonian, is unable to resolve the duality in this modern tragedy--and it is rather Greek, with Alan's transposed Oedipal blinding, his maiming of gods.

While Equus has Greek elements, I think it also shows its 1973 roots rather often; Dysart's speeches are in some ways a precis of the desires of the "me" decade: spirituality, sex, freedom, rebellion, romanticization of madness and outsiders. "The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes--all right," Dysart says in a speech at the end of the play. "It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills--like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensible, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest." (The Birth of Tragedy: "Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, decline, and the final stage of culture? Are there perhaps--a question for psychiatrists--neuroses of health?") That proliferation of capital letters is a giveaway--unless you're German, succumbing to capitalization signals excessive fondness for the abstract. (The blurb on the back of the book is worse: "Shaffer creates a chilling portrait of how materialism and convenience have killed our capacity for worship and passion and, consequently our capacity for pain." Really? There's little in there about convenience or materialism. Also, one wonders if the editors would like to revise that opinion in this era of renewed fundamentalism and school shootings.) "Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created," Dysart affirms, as if mental health were subject to the same laws as energy and matter. "Can you think of anything worse one can do than to anybody than take away their worship?" Well, yes, actually, living in pain and delusion is no picnic, nor is mutilating animals a worthy act. Dysart imagines that, in making Alan "normal," he is effectively that pagan priest operating on children, giving him a lobotomy with a hoof pick. His argument is rather like the one you hear from bipolar people who don't like their meds: mania is more interesting than being on an even keel. That may be, but it's not to the greater social good (contrary to Dysart's doubts that his gruesome work has any), and I think we contemporary playgoers are more likely to see mental illness as a medical problem than a spiritual one.

Dysart is a thoughtful and compelling character, though, and I was moved by his affirmation of the fundamental mystery of the psyche and his doubts in treating it: "In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place--yet I do ultimate things." And it is true that science needs art, art needs science, and life needs passion; in this, Dysart would probably agree with Nietzsche:

Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from pessimism? A subtle last resort against--truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse?

Should you wish to see Equus in the flesh, the production is currently touring the UK with a different cast that includes Alfie Allen (brother of Lily) as Alan. (This despite producer David Pugh's previous assertion that “We could have replaced Dan and Richard, but the thought of having to do a half-cocked production into the summer didn’t thrill us.” Uh, was that pun intentional?) Come September, the show will have Griffiths and Radcliffe back and will be playing at a to-be-announced theater on Broadway.
 

On a final note, let me drop the meta from metaphysics, or as the Antipodean muse in her terrycloth diadem sang, "let's get physical." I expect that some of you have, since the second paragraph, been asking yourself the prurient (aesthetic?) question about wizardly comparative anatomy. So, here's your answer: Harry Potter has a wand, but Gandalf has a staff. Now you know.