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The Farnsworth Invention

Friday, February 15, 2008

I’ve never quite had a Broadway experience like Aaron Sorkin’s tedious, exposition-laden film-script-on-stage The Farnsworth Invention.  It is a play, in that it’s being performed  in a playhouse by a staggering nineteen actors.  But it is no more a work of drama than any of the various one-hour long History Channel documentaries currently filling my TiVo like unread books on a shelf, there simply to impress people.  “That’s right, baby, I recorded a special on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.” 

Instead this is the story of the creation of television told to you, told to you, TOLD TO YOU relentless by its two leading figures: media mogul David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) and misunderstood inventor Philo Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson).  It is a play-by-play of the process, so much so that I started to wonder why it wasn’t narrated by Al Michaels and John Madden.  If you’re going to the theatre hoping to see characters - in scenes - engaged in conflict than I recommend you go nowhere near The Music Box.  Characters in this play are rarely allowed to breathe under Des McAnuff’s frenetic, warp-speed direction nevermind stop for a few minutes and actually speak to one another.

And what an odd complaint for a Sorkin piece, perhaps, the best dialogue writer living today.  Sorkin is the man who wrote passionate anti-drug messages from the desk of Sports Night, allowed a religious president to put a cigarette out on his God’s altar on The West Wing and whose Christmas Episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a poignant elegy to the spirit of New Orleans musicians and one of the greatest pieces of television writing you’ll ever see.  So the question: why is a man so gifted at the art of dialogue so afraid to let his characters speak to each other in this play?  The answer may just be that it’s not a play at all. 

The Farnsworth Invention commits more than the mere mortal sin of being exposition heavy.  It is almost emotionally fraudulent.  When Sorkin wants you to feel a little something for one of the people in the piece, he throws in Cossack soldiers and dying children like he’s tossing Snickers bars into a little kids pillow cast on Halloween.  “Here you go, son, no big deal.”  We’re told about things like alcoholism and depression and shown none of it, with the painful exception of two drastically unintelligible bar scenes where all kinds of espionage is taking place. 

We’re told everything.  And when we’re finally shown something, we’re told that something never happened.  I think that’ll pretty much sum of the fate of The Farnsworth Invention.  Outside movie theaters all across the country, he’ll turn to her and say, “You know this was a play.”  She’ll look at him puzzled, “How?”  The answer: not very good.

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Review: The Glorious Ones Isn’t Good

Monday, December 3, 2007

The Glorious Ones is musical theatre as only Lincoln Center Theater could present it. It’s interesting if you live between 61st and 82nd streets on the West Side. It’s funny if the last piece of comedy you experienced was Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. It’s bawdy if you actually use the word bawdy or if you’re deceased.

The new musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty continues the trend in their careers of major LCT productions of their minor works. And make no mistake about it: The Glorious Ones joins the ranks of A Man of No Importance and Dessa Rose as heavily-flawed shows with some okay tunes. The latter two suffer from the same profound issue: they needed a playwright and Lynn Ahrens is not a playwright.

She is a pretty good lyricist but songs don’t matter when they’re in the wrong place and it’d be difficult to find more than a couple songs in the right place when it comes to The Glorious Ones. The show has such glaring structural flaws that one wonders how no one – Ahrens, Flaherty, Graciela, Andre Bishop – could point these things out in the lengthy rehearsal process. Not just songs in the wrong place, either, but songs avoiding drama altogether. Consider the following:

- We are introduced to every member of the company in an opening number but half of these individuals have no storylines at all. Ahrens then forces their stories to wrap-up via narration in the show’s finale (more on that to come).

- Instead of developing the relationship of our “lead” Flamenio Scala and his protégé Harlequino, the latter turns to the audience and sings a third person number about father/son relationships. It’s this kind of distance from her material that keeps Ahrens from finding the soul of the material.

There are many more issues throughout construction of the piece (most notably Ahrens’ use of narration over drama) but to breakdown such a mess of a musical feels like a waste of time at this juncture. The ending of the show needs to be discussed for its so laugh-out-loud obnoxious and stupid, one wonders how none of the aforementioned LCT intelligentsia ever said, “You know? We don’t need this. This is stupid.” After the musical actually ends, it ends for another twenty minutes, including an grotesquely titled number called Flamenio’s Sack and the entire company then rationalizing the very existence of the musical (which, if you listen closely, reveals that the show’s creator are actually unaware of comedy since the late 70s). Any of the dramatic relevance of the show’s finest, goose-bump inducing number “I Was Here” is washed away in a sea of safe drivel. But haven’t you heard? Ahrens and Flaherty aren’t allowed to end their tragedy with sadness. For A & F, both of the masks have bright happy smiles.

Someone must call into question these two writers before it’s too late. As one of the only living teams of musical theatre writers whose very name on the title page denotes the show will hit a major American stage, A & F have a responsibility to reach higher than this and – perhaps more importantly – try harder than this. The truth seems to be that LCT’s dedication to the writers has been bad for their artistry, as they’ve been unable to write a show of significant mention since Garth Drabinsky was riding their asses in the lobby of the Ford Theatre. Instead they’ve written some nice numbers for forgettable shows. A & F are rumored to be working on a musical version of Rocky. Wow. Because when I think of the gritty streets of Philadelphia, these two people are the first names that come to mind. I fear if these stories are true and these two venture into the world of Rocky Balboa, their careers might be on the mat.

5…6…7…8…

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What Is StageRage?

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

In the digital age, more and more of America’s popular ”entertainments” have been moved inside the home, leaving the door open for the theatre to once again establish itself as not only an insular, culturally-specific artform but as the universally relevant enterprise that produced Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun. The theatre can never die. It can never be replaced. But as near-sighted producers have transformed Broadway into a Disney-themed cruise ship and the institutional not-for-profits have become more interested in the ethnicity of their playwrights than the value of their plays, the theatre has become the playground of the Upper West Side. Stagerage will speak for those not represented on the culture pages of the New York Times. Stagerage will speak for those not wealthy enough to be a Friend of Lincoln Center. Stagerage will speak the truth about an industry being crippled by its narrow cultural lens of Ivy League elitism.

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