It’s hardly surprising to learn about a hit Off-Broadway show moving to Broadway. It’s been happening for years, both with shows that began at not-for-profit companies or as commercial ventures. Open small, get great reviews and sales, move beyond the confines of a much smaller theatre to reap the recognition and rewards of a Broadway berth, which then secures a long life for the show in regional, international and amateur and school markets.

In most cases, the Off-Broadway to Broadway transfers happen pretty quickly, to seize upon momentum. If they don’t happen in the same theatrical season (vaguely defined by awards timelines), then they turn up the following year. The lag-time between the Playwrights Horizons production of Clybourne Park and its Broadway run was longer than the norm (with numerous regional productions blooming in the gap).

But when Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest was announced for Broadway this spring, it joined a subset of shows that took protracted paths to the Great White Way. In the case of Miss Firecracker, it took more than 25 years – and it also marks Henley’s Broadway return after a hiatus of 30 years, ashocking gap for a major author.

This ultra-late path to Broadway is a slow-building trend to be sure, but in the past dozen or so years, some 20 shows that met with acclaim and countless productions after their Off-Broadway success have turned up on Broadway for the first time. In most cases, by the time they get there, they’re considered part of the theatrical repertoire to the extent that they’re revivals making their Broadway debut. In many cases, the Off-Broadway hits spawned movie versions, without a Broadway imprimatur.

Some of the examples: Margaret Edson’s Wit, Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, David Mamet’s Oleanna, Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain and Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio. Even the musical Little Shop of Horrors finally made its way from downtown to uptown, but after a hiatus of more than two decades.

What’s driving this stealth trendlet? There are several factors. One is simply that over time, even without Broadway status, the shows have grown so much in recognition that they’re not necessarily the risky prospects they once were (Wit, for example, sought a Broadway house back in the day, but no one would book it). Though most weren’t star vehicles in days gone by, a number were star-makers; Miss Firecracker launched Holly Hunter to stardom, just as Daisy did for Morgan Freeman; now that they’re recognized as having roles stars covet, which explains Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in the recent Daisy run. And with the aforementioned recognition that has built up, especially after film adaptations, the titles are simply more “marketable,” meaning producers don’t have the same uphill climb that they might with a wholly new work – although the fact that the movies are so indelibly etched that shows compete with those, rather than original productions.

Another key factor is that the environment that enabled shows like these to run for several years commercially Off-Broadway has largely evaporated. That’s not to say there are no commercial play productions Off-Broadway, but the prevailing wisdom is now that you can only succeed financially by taking a hit from The Atlantic or The Public to Broadway; that the economics simply don’t favor an intra-Off move.

I don’t have any particular reservations about this practice, since it’s typically one or two shows a year at most. It is worth noting that the majority of these plays had very small casts and required minimal scenery; by enlarging them to the scale of a Broadway house, there’s always the risk that the intimacy which may have helped them become hits in the past may be lost along the way.

What would prove truly exciting would be if producers looked beyond the iconic Off-Broadway successes and explored works which, for one reason or other, didn’t have long runs and didn’t move anywhere, despite being praised in their day.  I bet a quick read of Theatre Worlds (or my Playbill collection) from the 80s and 90s could turn up a number of forgotten gems. It’s worth remembering that John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, originally produced Off-Broadway, only found its place in the canon of major works after the Lincoln Center Theater revival in the 80s; Sam Shepard’s True West suffered from a troubled production at The Public in its New York debut, only to be a hit less than 10 years later when the Steppenwolf production came to town, though in that case, again Off-Broadway.

When Miss Firecracker was announced yesterday, I spotted several comments in my Twitter feed from those who were pleased for the opportunity to see the play on stage for the first time, and indeed it’s less of a known quantity than most of the shows I’ve cited. Their comments reminded me that I’ve been around long enough that these are, for me, unquestionably revivals, as I saw many of the original productions. I recall going into Miss Firecracker unaware of Holly Hunter and walking out with a serious crush; when I saw Rosemary Harris in The Road To Mecca last year, I often confused people by mentioning having seen Julie Harris in the same role in a regional production almost 20 years ago.

So today’s Broadway is now, on occasion, a home for yesterday’s Off-Broadway hits. There’s a certain irony baked into that, as well as a longing for the bygone Off-Broadway environment, but I’ll look on the bright side: these plays are proof that you don’t always need Broadway to be a success. But that opens up new questions as well: what other shows might be rediscovered, and 20 years from now, will today’s Off-Broadway prove to have been comparably fertile?

P.S. Cloud Nine, anyone?

“Can you imagine the readership if our critics exuberantly hated LOTS of things?”

To begin with, I would like to stipulate that I read Pete Wells’ now-legendary New York Times review/take-down of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant and I found it, as so many did, a striking and funny piece of writing. I read it, I imagine, with my mouth agape, but not watering. I also suspect, based solely on my own street-side reading of the restaurant’s menu before The Review had appeared, that Mr. Wells had more than sufficient grounds for his opinions of the fare. Donkey sauce, indeed.

With that out of the way, I would also like to say that I found The Review inappropriate as journalism, critique or opinionated analysis for the venue in which it appeared. It was, perhaps, more akin to a “Shouts & Murmurs” piece from The New Yorker, fact stretched to its satirical limits. After the first few paragraphs, the point had already been made, but Wells was allowed to go on, and on, to no other end than to demonstrate how skilled and witty a writer he was, and to insure that his evisceration of the establishment left no possible doubt as to how much he had not enjoyed his multiple dining experiences there.

So I was startled when The Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan, who I have admired greatly since she arrived at the paper, took time to write a Sunday essay which was a full-throated defense of “Reviews With ‘All Guns Blazing’,” because it struck me as just a bit more piling on by the paper of record (yes, I still view The Times that way) without in any way grappling with the deeper ramifications of reviews which don’t merely damn their critical victims, but gleefully turn the knife. Sullivan’s citation of Dorothy Parker’s famed quip about Katharine Hepburn is ironic, because while Parker needed only a few well chosen, subtle words for her takedown of Hepburn, Wells needed, or at least took, paragraphs, when perhaps two would have sufficed. (Sullivan’s defense was also slightly redundant, since her predecessor wrote a piece on the prerogatives of Times critics one day before his departure and her appointment were announced in July; I registered dismay then as well.)

I stand with critics for their right to say what they think, but when that tips over into being clever or cutting for its own sake, I’d like to lobby for erring on the side of restraint. I’m surprised that Ms. Sullivan doesn’t share that view. Reviews occupy a funny place in papers: they’re opinion pieces, although they’re not corralled on the op-ed page; they’re analysis, but based solely on the aesthetic values of the assigned writer, not any defined criteria; they’re consumer reportage unmoored from a narrowly defined constituency. While those in the profession being reported upon can clearly distinguish between a review and straight news or feature coverage, my own anecdotal experience has shown me time and again that average, casual readers often fail to make that distinction. The Times becomes The Borg for so much of its content.

I have read many famous and scathing reviews of theatre productions over the years and they are etched in my brain; Frank Rich on Moose Murders and the musical A Doll’s Life, both read when I was in college, are two that have stuck with me. But once reviews of that type were targeted at my colleagues and my friends as I became a theatre professional, I lost my taste for them; with the benefit of hindsight, of course, I take greater pleasure going over famously misguided reviews. By way of example, time has proven that one can frequently “draw sweet water from a foul well” in the theatre, even though no less than Brooks Atkinson thought it suspect after seeing Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey.

I’m even more concerned about the aftermath of The Review: how it “went viral”; how it generated enormous press coverage about the review itself and therefore The Times; how it is now the standard for critical disdain, waiting to be topped by an even more withering and witty assault. In an era when newspapers struggle for relevancy and attention, will the Wells review send the wrong message: that in order for old-line media to break through in the new media paradigm, it needs to become sensational? I’m not suggesting that The Times is about to become a tabloid, but when we start reading about how much of the paper’s web traffic was generated by that review, it’s impossible not to wonder whether some latter-day Diana Christensen isn’t calculating what periodic salvos like Wells’, skipping from department to department, might do for business. Also, with The Times a flag bearer for top-quality journalism, reviews like Wells’ give license to critics at other outlets to make their own writing more outrageous and attention-getting when possible, quite possibly without the talent the Fieri review employed.

“Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture?,” writes Sullivan. “I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic’s quiver, but reached for only rarely.”

I can support brutal honesty. I cannot support gleeful cruelty. Inventive? Sure. Over the top? Too much for a generally sober-sided publication. Piercing arrows in critics’ quivers? Yes. Thermonuclear weapons? No. And who is patrolling the armory at The Times, to insure this isn’t an incipient trend? It wasn’t Arthur Brisbane and apparently it’s not going to be Margaret Sullivan, at least insofar as criticism is concerned. And while it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for standing in any way on the side of Guy Fieri and his emporium, I have to. I may gag at the thought of Donkey Sauce as a food item, but if it were the title of a play or a painting or a book, I’d want that work treated honestly, directly, vigorously, creatively — and negatively if a critic warrants — but not excessively.

UPDATE November 26 at 3:15 pm: After posting this piece, I learned that less than a week ago, The New York Times‘ veteran book critic Michiko Kakutani had written a review of Calvin Trillin’s Dogfight in which she mimicked the book’s own verse scheme, reinforcing my thesis about critics going awry when they work to show their own cleverness rather than attending to the work at hand. Kakutani’s device is hardly groundbreaking; I see it often for works in rhyming couplets both in print and on stage, most notably Moliere and Dr. Seuss. In a bit of irony, she criticizes Trillin’s “unnecessarily blah” rhymes, but apparently sees no problem with her own ostensible rhyming of “shrub” and “flubs” or “oops” and “moose.” Having run only days after The Review, my concern about criticism that values novelty over insight is only reinforced by Kakutani’s poem.

I have yet to see Pinter in the Pinter or Sondheim in the Sondheim. I have, however, seen Ayckbourn in the former and, incongruously, Pee Wee Herman in the latter. For anyone confused, I am referring to the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End and Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre. I applaud the naming of these venues, and I am equally enthusiastic about the Caryl Churchill Theatre that will open in Surrey next year. They are manifestations of a topic I find myself musing upon: using theatre naming as a means of promoting the awareness of theatrical history.

On the one hand, the name of every Broadway and West End theatre carries history, since the venue name will be associated perpetually with famous productions that played there. However, names are not exactly fixed in stone. While Broadway’s Belasco and New Amsterdam may stretch back to a century ago, the current Helen Hayes Theatre is the second building to honor “the first lady of the American Theatre”; the original (which had two names before Hayes) was torn down some 30 years ago. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? premiered at the Billy Rose Theatre 50 years ago; today, that same theatre is the David T. Nederlander, named for a member of the family that now owns it.

The point is that theatre names are somewhat fluid, and the rationale behind their naming, past and present, can have a variety of motivations. It was certainly the style, once upon a time, for the impresario who built the theatre to name it after himself, but in New York, there has been an intermittently enlightened approach that has resulted in such venues as the Lunt- Fontanne Theatre (named for the husband and wife acting duo in 1958) and the August Wilson Theatre (renamed in 2005, just after the pioneering African American playwright passed away, the building’s sixth name). Among Broadway’s 40 theatres, two are named for legendary critics, the Brooks Atkinson and the Walter Kerr, and a third for newspaper caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, no small recognition for the fourth estate.

Other theatres are named for more practical reasons: when the not-forprofit Roundabout Theatre Company reclaimed a theatre on 42nd Street, part of the restoration and its ongoing funding was secured through a long term sponsorship that named the new venue the American Airlines Theater. Purists were dismayed, but to my mind, it was not affront, since it reestablished a working theatre where none had been for decades.

But I return to the Wilson, the Lunt-Fontanne, the Sondheim, the Hayes, because to me they are exemplars. Maybe, just maybe, patrons seeing shows in those theatres might take the time to find out about these storied names, both bygone and current. Perhaps programmes or websites can provide not just the history of the theatre, but of its namesake. Could our theatre capitals take the opportunity to make themselves billboards for theatre history with more judicious naming? In New York, what of a George Abbott, a Comden and Green, a Wendy Wasserstein Theatre? And they need not be posthumous. Harold Prince, one of the most influential figures in New York theatre from the 1950s to today, might be thusly honoured (even if he has had, at one time, not one but two theatres named for him in Philadelphia). In London, what of Ayckbourn, Stoppard, or Ralph Richardson?

This is not a decision that can be achieved through public opinion, since the authority rests with the owners of the buildings themselves. But perhaps while theatres retain the truly memorable, essential names, the more generic ones can become theatrical history markers. By way of example, both New York and London have Lyceums that might be better off personalized, if preservation regulations allow it. Since theatre is not a religious rite, why do London and New York both have St James Theatres if he was the patron saint of furriers and chemists?

Some theatres’ historic names have been proven outdated, the figures they were named for more fleeting than expected. Perhaps we must change these pieces of the theatre’s history in order to better promote theatre history and commemorate it for subsequent generations.

Do Kevin Conway and Mercedes Ruehl look liberal or conservative to you?

There is an oft-repeated cry from certain corners of the creative community lamenting the lack of political theatre on our stages. Yet I seriously doubt that the Republican Theatre Festival is what they had in mind.

I say this not to criticize the festival, currently on in Philadelphia, but because the conventional wisdom is that theatre is almost exclusively a liberal art. Those who want more stage politics presumably seek more activism on the part of left-leaning artists, not right wing-rhetoric.

Personally, I think there’s a place for theatre that addresses opinions across the political spectrum. But first and foremost, it needs to be good theatre, and I’m not sure that proclaiming theatre as liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, right or left wing does the work any favors either. Those labels are most likely to limit potential audience, rather than letting the work on stage speak for itself, artistically and politically. I don’t advocate telling any audience precisely what they should think of what they see, regardless of its content.

I can easily identify some well-known works of theatre that could be, at least on their face, considered conservative. In Annie, doesn’t the mega-rich Oliver Warbucks (wonder how he made his fortune, given that Dickensian last name) use his wealth to manipulate the Democratic administration to aid him in his efforts on behalf of a single child, while thousands go homeless? Doesn’t Our Town promote an idealized vision of a bygone era, leaving us longing for the simpler days when small town life was a microcosm of the world at large? How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying may poke fun at corporate ideals, but it seems to retain healthy affection for the very thing it gently satirizes.

These are, of course, simplistic and selective viewpoints presented for effect, not out of conviction. So let me turn to a popular play of almost 25 years’ vintage that can legitimately be viewed as conservative, or Republican, in its values, yet was a significant popular hit in its day: Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money.

OPM is the story of a privately-owned wire factory that becomes the subject of a takeover by a corporate raider, pitting the business mores of the 1980s against a small firm that is, in the view of the predatory protagonist, “worth more dead than alive.” It ran for several years Off-Broadway, played in numerous regional and stock productions and even spawned a Danny DeVito movie of the same name. At no time do I recall it being taken to task for its politics, even as limos lined up on narrow Minetta Lane before and after performances on behalf of the Wall Street crowd that embraced it; its dramaturgy was oft-questioned, but not its worldview. I was paying close attention, because the production that played in New York had originated at Hartford Stage while I was its public relations director.

I recall observing, and running, some of our post performance discussions of OPM in Hartford, where the audience consistently sided with Garfinkle, the raider, against Jorgensen, the factory owner, deriding the latter as out of touch and deserving of what came his way. I remember the line of businessmen at our box office windows at lunchtime, overturning the perception of women as theatrical decision makers and ticket buyers in their households. I watched throughout the brief Hartford run and lengthy New York run as a previously unknown playwright because a favored speaker at corporate annual meetings and business gatherings.

Coming at the end of the Reagan presidency and playing well into that of George H. W. Bush, OPM was an emblem of its era. But, cloaked in the comforting guise of a boulevard comedy, it was dismissed by serious critics for perceived theatrical deficiencies – although audiences lapped it up – allowing it to stealthily spread the philosophy of Milken and Boesky far and wide even as their era of rapaciousness began to wane.

I have often spoken of OPM with affection, for a variety of reasons – it was the first successful commercial transfer with which I had a role (albeit small); it gave me a chance over its long run and subsequent productions to see how a play changed every time a different actor went into the same production; I grew very fond of the show’s lead producers, who belied any stereotype of that profession. It is only in retrospect that I have considered the show’s messages, both implicit and explicit, more deeply.

But the play serves as a superb example of catching more flies with honey when it comes to disseminating a specific philosophy in the realm of theatre. The production didn’t shy away from trumpeting the bold-faced business names that attended with regularity, or its business setting, but it didn’t label the show as being for any particular segment of the audience either. In one of its slogans – “Greed. Lust. Power. Laughter. Nightly.” – certainly exploited some deadly sins, but I daresay that could have been applied to many shows, including those seeking to denounce those principles.

I have no qualms about the current Republican Theater Festival, especially since it may introduce some previously unheard voices to mainstream theatre and I applaud it for attempting to bring infrequently heard theatre viewpoints to light, even if I might not agree with them at all. As the now archly conservative David Mamet recently said of avowedly liberal Tony Kushner, “I’ll let [him] work his side of the street and I’ll work mine.” Indeed, there are two sides to every street, but all of those roads lead us to the theatre, where art trumps didacticism every time, no matter the perspective.

Hilda Cronje (left) and Bongile Mantsai in ‘Mies Julie’ at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

“Is that fog or haze?”

St. Ann’s Warehouse artistic director Susan Feldman asked that question to set and lighting designer Patrick Curtis, less than 72 hours before the first performance in the company’s new venue at 29 Jay Street in Brooklyn. It seemed like a mundane question with a major deadline approaching, but it was evidence of how smoothly everything was going elsewhere.

Her smoke-based question pertained to a special effect for the space’s opening production, “Mies Julie.” A South African adaptation and expansion of August Strindberg’s sexually charged “Miss Julie,” the play is reset from 19th century Sweden to present day in the barren karoo, where the restless daughter of an oppressive Boer farmer escalates the sexual attraction between her and an African worker.

Originally mounted by the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, “Mies Julie” was a hit at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, prompting a quick decision by Feldman to inaugurate the new St. Ann’s space with the production. It opens tonight and will run through Dec. 2.

“It’s very bold, very sexy,” Feldman said. “It captured a sense of South Africa in a way we don’t know in America, and it’s not taken from one point of view or another. Within two weeks of seeing it, we booked it.”

While that may have accelerated the timetable for opening – St. Ann’s had originally planned a “soft opening” with a few concerts, followed by a full launch with “Opus No. 7″ from Russia in January – Feldman thought it would be worth it. “I didn’t want to end this conversation about ‘Mies Julie’ and start again in May.”

As of last Tuesday, there was wet paint in ample evidence in public areas and stencils awaiting paint for signage, even as the “Mies Julie” team was running a dry tech and awaiting the arrival of the actors for the first time (the show had been touring, and so it required minimal rehearsal in Brooklyn). Fortunately, although they had been under an evacuation order from Hurricane Sandy, the new venue was left untouched, requiring only minimal compression of production time on the show.

The 29 Jay Street venue is officially a three-year interim space for St. Ann’s while it works to secure and develop Brooklyn’s old Tobacco Warehouse near its former 38 Water Street home.

“When I went into the church [where the company was founded],” Feldman said, “I had no idea that it would be for 21 years. Water Street was a temporary space for 12 years. We know there’s a future beyond three years, assuming conversion works in the Tobacco Warehouse. But we have made our new theater to work just as our last theater functioned.”

Indeed, the two venues are similar, and similarly flexible. While the stage and seating for “Mies Julie” echoes that used for Daniel Kitson’s recent show, the layout for “Opus No. 7″ will resemble the expansive playing area of “Black Watch.”

“When we packed up Water Street, we realized that we’d only built one and a half walls there. It helped me not to feel tremendous loss,” Feldman said.

The new venue required steel work in order to hang a lighting grid, curtains and support future scenery, a new set of exit stairs and the rehanging of heating units. Unlike more polished arts complexes, the work on Jay Street was economical. “The fit out here took between $900,000 and $1 million,” said Feldman, adding that was exclusive of rent. It did result in some adjustment, such as a merging of the box office and production office into a single space, or, in Feldman’s compression, “the prox office.”

Despite producing in an untested space, the adapter and director of “Mies Julie,” Yael Farber, said that she wasn’t subjected to restrictions, comparing the space to a “widening aperture.” “The conversation was always ‘how does the space accommodate the work’,” said Farber, upon arrival for the first time at St. Ann’s. “Not ‘how does the work accommodate the space’.”

The move is only a few blocks from St. Ann’s previous space at 38 Water Street, and its potential future space at the Tobacco Warehouse. While there is the potential for audiences to feel a sense of dislocation, Feldman said that’s not the case, given the very public wrangling over the company’s search for a new home, necessitated by new development of the Water Street site.

“There was a lot of drama over the Tobacco Warehouse, so when we told our audiences [about 29 Jay Street], there was great relief and joy, especially from this side of DUMBO,” she said.

As mirrors and strip lights were being installed in makeshift dressing rooms (flexible dressing spaces being standard for all St. Ann’s productions) on Jay Street, the company’s executive director Andrew D. Hamingson said they had already begun the design process for their next home at Tobacco Warehouse, pending full approval of the site.

“The conversion process begins this month, and will take from six to nine months,” he said. “We are the designee for the land, which will be converted from parkland to land for private use, within Brooklyn Bridge Park. Then we can go forward with the lease. We expect the process to be favorable.”

This follows what was originally expected to be a more direct move to the Tobacco Warehouse, with the company operating on an itinerant basis for perhaps a year, that was scuttled when park regulatory issues came to light.

But perpetual change, show by show, and now perhaps theater by theater, seems to be the standard for St. Ann’s Warehouse. Describing the past few months, Feldman said, “We went from ‘Festen,’ to our Puppet Lab, to moving out, directly into our build here. It’s been an intensive six months for the staff and crew.”

From the perspective of an audience member attending only the second performance, on Friday evening, the transition was seamless, right down to the signs greeting patrons with the warning, “Theatrical haze and fog effects will be used in this production.”

See the article at the Wall Street Journal here.

“Time, time, time, see what’s become of me.” – Paul Simon, “Hazy Shade of Winter”

Life, god willing, is long. Plays are short.

Though perhaps we don’t think about it often, it bears remembering that plays and musicals, which can encompass so much, usually run about two to two-and-a-half hours (including intermission). Three hours is long; Gatz is a marathon.

In the time allowed for them, or permitted by the author, they can be a slice of real time or a span of years; a single location or spots around the world (and beyond); we see stories told in chronological order, backwards, or even all mixed up (see Ayckbourn, Pinter and Priestley).  But compared to the lives of people, any individual piece of theatre is brief.

Theatre has proven fairly unconducive to stories told in multiple parts (like serialized TV) or as sequels (as in film). That’s not to see there aren’t assorted plays and cycles that have expanded beyond the usual time parameters of a single play, but they’re the exception, and, when fully assembled, they are greeted as special events, and usually have short theatrical lives due to the expanse and expense of producing them.

The Apple Family as seen in 2011 in Richard Nelson’s”Sweet and Sad”

This rarity is why I find the “Apple Family Plays” by Richard Nelson, as produced at The Public Theater, so compelling as a theatrical experience – because they are playing out the lives of their characters in snapshots of real time over a period of years. When I went to see That Hopey-Changey Thing in 2010, I think I was drawn by the novelty of a play set precisely when its theatrical run was happening; it was set on Election Day of that year and ran in the days just before and just after that night, officially opening on the day it was set. In 2011, when Nelson’s Sweet and Sad revisited the family on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the novelty meant less than the audacity of the playwright’s effort: same cast, same characters, in the same room, almost a year later. As I have written previously, I found the experience of the second play deeply moving.

Last night, I attended the opening of the third play in the planned quartet, Sorry, and I had yet a new response. I was genuinely delighted to see these characters again. They were people I knew, they had invited me as a silent guest to another gathering of the clan; I was a prodigal returning home, dutifully, so to speak. Deeply concerned about the presidential election, I preferred to share the evening in their company than with anyone else. Even though there were moments of sadness and tension, I think I sat with a smile on my face for perhaps the first 30 minutes (it’s hard to say, as the two hour running time flew by). I was just so darned happy to see these people.

The Apples had not worn out their welcome, as television characters can do with 22 episodes a year; I got fed up with Greg House, I don’t care who Ted Mosby marries, I don’t even know who’s threatening or sleeping with Sookie these days. Perhaps that’s why some of my favorite TV series have been so short: the obnoxiousness of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock doesn’t overstay, the New Burbage Theatre of Slings and Arrows won’t offer me another take on Hamlet; the first season of The Sopranos was perfect, while the subsequent seasons meandered, dissipating my awe.

In film, like theatre, most stories are told in the two-hour span that perhaps has evolved to match bladder capacity. The stories that go on are epics, or the so-called tentpole series (Bond, the Marvel heroes, hobbits, Luke Skywalker, Indy), and while I enjoy them, I don’t invest emotionally as I do in most self-contained stories. I will confess to one exception: as a childhood sci-fi geek, the death of Spock in Star Trek II was quite upsetting, precisely because I have lived with this character on TV (both live and animated), as well as in books, for many years.

While it was the “this is taking place right now” aspect of the Apple Family plays that first caught my attention, it is the span of time between them that has proven most captivating. They have become the theatrical equivalent of the British documentary series 7 Up, 14 Up, 21 Up and so on. We dip into the Apples’ lives over years, not hours; that is the verisimilitude that lifts them beyond their individual or collective worth as plays. They track our lives as we track theirs.

Inevitably, with a cycle of plays like this one, there is a desire in the audience and an urge among the creative tem (I imagine) to one day see them all in a single weekend. I am normally a fan of this kind of theatre: The Norman Conquests, The Orphans Home Cycle, The Coast of Utopia all become greater theatrical events when seen in a single day. Yet I now think that to do so with the Apple plays would not have the impact of their current method of production.

Yes, we would marvel at the skill and stamina of the cast and we would make more connections between the plays if they were performed in rapid succession. But we wouldn’t benefit from the incremental changes in the actors bodies, their voices, their faces as they age with us from year to year; on a single day or weekend, we wouldn’t have the joy of returning to old friends after true time away, merely the expectation of the next play after a meal break.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to see these plays produced, widely, in the years to come, under whatever schedule necessary. Time itself will alter them, as they become fixed at moments in the past, instead of playing as current, and practicality may dictate that the same cast won’t be available year after year in other venues. One actor was absent from this third play because of another professional commitment; his character will be forever absent from Sorry because of this.

The Apple Family Plays are a unique temporal experience in the theatre, and I treasure them deeply precisely because they use time and the outside world as no other show(s) I’ve seen ever has. I wish that Nelson would write the story of the Apples for many years to come, and that his original company would enact it far beyond the planned fourth play. I would plan my life around sharing in theirs.

But in the meantime, I look forward to seeing them next year for Thanksgiving, god willing.

Ha! Made you look!

Let’s face it, we click on tweets, or posts, with a headlines like this one all the time. Shrewd folks playing in the fields of social media know that to get your attention, they need a grabber. It’s what sold newspapers once upon a time and it lures you to all kinds of content on a daily basis, even if the content doesn’t always support the sensational come-on. As with every infomercial, we can’t help wonder if what’s promised isn’t actually as good as we’re told; as with every con game, we’re willing to be lulled by the belief that some people have a secret that has long eluded most of us. In an era when a highly trafficked source of news and information rigorously chronicles “side boob” photos, the title above is downright dull in its allure. Although not to the right readers.

Since you’re here, let’s take a few minutes and dissect that headline, and consider what makes it tick, o.k.?

1. Numbers: Apparently, people like to know what they’re getting into, so quantification helps them make a decision to explore. If I’d said 100, you might have thought that you didn’t have time. If I’d said three, you’d figure there’s nothing really there. 10 is a reasonable number —  high enough to avoid the appearance of simplicity, low enough to appeal to a generation that now calls in-depth reportage “longreads.”

This isn’t necessarily new. A number of popular religions subscribe to The Ten Commandments (the stone tablets, not the DeMille film), so Top Ten lists are fairly ingrained in the consciousness of many, reinforced by Letterman’s nightly humor by numbers. That’s right: I blame God, Moses and Dave for this redictive approach.

We also seem to be drawn to round numbers, even though I would argue they should make one suspect from the get-go. How can rules, guides, what have you, always manage to work out to multiples of five? Sure, if it’s choosing the 25 Best Side Boob Photos, you can impose an arbitrary limit, but neat numbers setting forth ideas suggest to me that there’s always been a stretch to make things align, so they’re padded, and not all equally of value.

2. Guaranteed: Nothing in life is guaranteed, and that’s abundantly true in social media. Don’t we all get a chuckle every time someone talks about just having shot a “viral video”? “Viral” videos happen, we don’t create them, they’re viral only in hindsight. If anyone knew the perfect formula for widespread attention in social media, we’d all be doing it, just as if there was a right way to put on shows every one would be a roaring success. There’s no question that if you claim to have nude pictures of Prince Harry, and actually do, you’re going to garner a lot of attention, but even a nude photo of your artistic director is going to have limited appeal in just about every case (exception: Spacey).

As someone who shares a great deal of content on Twitter and Facebook, I can tell you that my most popular content has proven the most surprising. The most retweeted items I’ve shared were a late 1960s music video of a singing Leonard Nimoy with Spock-eared go-go girls (554 RT’s) and a mock apology to England for Sherlock’s losses at The Emmys (429 RT’s). My most popular blog was about my wish for greater respect for community theatre; under the title “Theatre The Theatre Community Disdains,” it has been viewed 300% more than my next most popular post. Yet these are all small potatoes compared to what can be achieved by celebrities, or cute animals. They’re not viral; they’re the common cold.

3. Social Media: There is no singular, unified social media. Social media is now a pretty broad category of sites and apps that seek to connect people, known to each other and strangers alike, though some manner of electronic communication. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, Myspace (heh, heh), Instagram and countless others can all be easily categorized as social media, along with plenty of up-and-comers and also-rans (Google+, cough cough). So, unless you are actively engaged on every significant social media platform (and as an individual or small arts group, I suspect you don’t have time for that), it’s quite possible that some or all of the vaunted advice doesn’t even pertain to something you use, even if it is on target.

4. Hacks: While this word can mean everything from cabs & their drivers to incompetent, in this instance it’s derived from “hackers,” those greasy-haired, t-shirt wearing, basement-dwelling computer geniuses* that do everything from foul up corporate websites to reprogram the Kobayashi Maru scenario, exerting their will precisely where no one wants them to be. So “hacks” promise some illicit secret that will give you a competitive advantage in the dog-eat-dog social media jungle.

There’s only one problem. If it’s in a headline on a publicly available site, it’s hardly a secret, and therefore not much of a hack. It surely doesn’t involve fiddling with code or hardware like a real hacker. Use a rule of thumb I was once told about investing: by the time a great stock tip is featured on the front of a magazine, you’re too late. It may not be a complete waste, but you’re way late to the party.

You can’t hack social media. It takes goals, strategy, and a good deal of time to build an effective online community. Can you buy “friends”? Can you give them incentive to “like” you?Apparently, yes. But as in life, it’s not about the number of friends, but the strength of relationships. That can’t be bought.

5. The Arts: Exactly what does “the arts” cover, anyway? If you follow the editorial leadership of Sunday’s New York Times, it could be movies, TV, theatre, dance, rock music, classical music, opera, painting, sculpture. Although on Friday, they make a point of breaking out “fine arts” from the rest of the pack, so it’s not a one size fits all term – just like social media. The generality draws you in, often to find specificity irrelevant to your needs and interests.

But let me now turn that around, and suggest that if you’re only drawn to posts and tweets about the arts, or sharing those same items, you’re probably being too narrow. The social media practices of in other fields might be perfectly adaptable for your purposes; while there are wonderfully innovative people in the arts, there are also great ideas in other professions, and if you only stop for items about the arts, you could be missing out on a lot of great thinking that hasn’t yet trickled into the arts sector.

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Now that I’ve dissected this common come-hither construction, you have two choices. You can use it to save time by not reading every bit of ostensible wisdom you come across and looking at some things that may seem off-topic but intriguing. Or you can use its fiendishly clever ruses to draw more attention to your own work and ideas. It’s up to you.

* This is the stereotypical depiction of hackers as portrayed in works of popular fiction. My apologies to all fashion-conscious and hygienic hackers with elegant workspaces.

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Update 11/5/12 2:30 pm  Just hours after posting this piece, I learned of a brilliant, deadpan, satirical video produced by the Canadian ad agency John St., promoting a mythical service called Buyral, which purports to allow you hire clickers to give your online video the appearance of going viral. It’s quite superb. I hope it never comes true.

Sanjay at Froghammer must be so proud. You remember Froghammer, the firm brought in by the New Burbage Festival to shake up its advertising and audiences, to cast off their stodgy image. So bold, so vibrant. Oh yes, and (spoiler alert) in that scenario, a fraud.

It’s hard not to recall this fictional scenario, from the ever-brilliant Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, as the venerable Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada drops the middle word from its name…again, having jettisoned it in the 1970s and restored it in 2007. In the words of Stratford’s new artistic director Antoni Cimolino, who assumed his new post officially today, the name “is simple and direct, it resonates with people and it carries our legacy of quality and success.” It also eradicates the name of Shakespeare in the general promotion of the festival. How that plays out on its stages, and its materials, will be seen in the seasons to come.

Stratford is hardly the first theatre to diminish The Bard’s name. Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival began to transition as its Lafayette Street home became prominent and rose to co-billing in the portmanteau Joseph Papp’s The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, which later gave way simply to The Public Theater (which still produces Shakespeare in the Park, a catch-all that has included Comden & Green and Bernstein, Sondheim, and Ragni, Rado & McDermott in more recent summers).

Even the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, as it drew its last breaths in the late 1980s, rebranded as the American Festival Theatre, as generic a company identity as one could ask for but hey, doesn’t everybody love a festival? It left in its wake an assortment of Shakespearean named businesses around it, which survived for years, despite the closure of the town’s major claim to the name.

Professionally, for these companies, the rebranding is rooted in solid marketing theory. In the case of the two going concerns, they have grown beyond being solely Shakespearean companies, though it’s worth noting that the Shaw Festival has not yet renounced old G.B., even as it has expanded its own repertoire. If Shakespeare is less prominent on the stage, perhaps it is best to not fly him as the company banner, especially since conventional wisdom holds that many people find the works of the playwright to be difficult and off-putting, a perception aided by years of dull literature teachers in secondary schools. If your name is a misrepresentation or worse a deterrent, business sense dictates that you remove the obstruction; when I was executive director of The O’Neill Theater Center, I quickly moved to rework the company’s logo after multiple people told me stories about its caricature of Eugene being frequently mistaken for Hitler.

While these demotions of old Will are extremely prominent, he’s not about to disappear from the North American consciousness. His works are omnipresent thanks to their eternal brilliance, as well as the added bonus of their being in the public domain, free from royalties or restrictive heirs. Every summer, Shakespeare in the Parks blossom as far as the eye can see, not only in New York’s Central Park, especially his most arboreal works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. And of course we need only look to England where his works, and tributes to it, are a perpetual Shakespearean festival of which they are justly proud.

But there’s no missing the fact that the companies perhaps most credited with popularizing and sustaining Shakespeare in North America in the latter half of the 20^th century have shrugged off their inspiration and their mascot, in the interest of sustaining themselves as centers of theatrical creativity. It’s hard to argue with that latter goal.  After all, when theatre is restricted, or beholden to a limited, outdated artistic palette, it atrophies and dies.

But for all the business sense it makes, I can’t help feeling a pang of loss as Shakespeare’s name gets excised. Once a befuddled high schooler, who came to love Shakespeare as I saw ever-better productions following a dire Julius Caesar in 9^th or 10^th grade, it seems a small but significant chip away at Bill’s rep in The New World. For the theatres, it’s crucial re-branding. For The Shakespeare Brand, it’s a crucial loss.

Another round to Sanjay. Fortunately, after 400 years, I think Shakespeare’s still ahead. For now.

[Update 11/2/12: This post has been updated to reflect that the Stratford Festival has now dropped Shakespeare from its name twice in its history, which was not clearly reflected in the initial press reports that prompted this post.]

“Urk!” “Huff huff.” “Sshing!” “Fwoosh.” “Fwooom!” “Twackk!”

William Shakespeare is credited with inventing countless words and phrases that the stuff of our everyday speech is made on. But I daresay that the words which appear above—if words they be—are not of the Bard’s making. Yet I just read them in Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. That is, in the graphic novels of those plays from Capstone Press, where they’re employed like the “pows” and “bams” of TV’s “Batman.”

You might think that graphic novels of Shakespeare are a freak novelty, but in fact they’re an entire subgenre. I’ve amassed an incomplete selection of these works that stands some two feet high—a mix of comic books, paperbacks and hardcovers. And I know I’m only scratching the surface. (By way of example, Oxford University Press has a series that would apparently be contraband in this country; in North America, only Canadians can purchase it. No kidding.)

I plunged into this array of adapted Shakespeare as a fan of the plays but no expert, and as a novice in the world of comics and graphic novels. My interest emerged from my own experience, at age eight or nine, during Nixon’s first term, of reading The Iliad and A Tale of Two Cities, not in their original versions, but via the series of comic books called Classics Illustrated. Although they ceased publication in 1962, my brother and I scavenged barely vintage copies from paper drives and tag sales and secured them in a tin breadbox (also found curbside); we would withdraw them from their cask on a narrow loft in our garage to read about Sydney Carton and Helen of Troy. Why we required an aerie for this I don’t know—our schoolteacher mother wasn’t likely to have objected. As a result, I am no snob when it comes to this form, but rather a childhood fan looking to see how it has developed.

Remarkably, the original Classics Illustrated titles have been reissued, so I’m now able to see how Shakespeare was handled back in the day. There’s a mighty startled Macbeth on one cover, wearing a winged headpiece in a comic which first appeared in 1955 (and which now costs $9.99 as a reprint, startling me as well), staring at a floating dagger enveloped in a flaming nimbus that evokes the burning bush. The interior art, from the years before Jack Kirby, recalls Prince Valiant, but the language, albeit edited, is unmistakably rooted in Shakespeare (then again, the Norse comic hero Thor was derided in the film The Avengers as “Shakespeare in the Park” for his faux classical aspect). Rather than dumbing down the text too much, words like “thane” and “raveled” are footnoted. What’s most striking, looking at an original Classics Illustrated book after so many years, is that while it is all too obviously a product of another time, it doesn’t seem over-simplified for children; I imagine that those of us who read them once upon a time felt pretty smart without feeling pandered to.

The modern era, so far as I discovered, kicked off in the ’80s with Workman Publishing’s rather conventional Macbeth, illustrated by Oscar Zarate; its first notable creative mark came with what Workman billed as Ian Pollock’s Illustrated King Lear, Complete and Unabridged. Owing more to Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe than to DC or Marvel, this was a Lear of grotesques. I suspect it would send a purist running away quickly, despite fidelity to the original text. Applying the language of theatre, Pollock’s book is visually avant-garde, even almost three decades on.

Indeed, it was the language of theatre that came to mind most often as I traipsed through these recent volumes; primarily dating from the past decade or so, they mostly adopt the visual style of superhero comics or Japanese manga (there are three competing series of Manga Shakespeare). As a result, they resemble nothing so much as storyboards for intricate movies. Because most stay reasonably faithful to the text, the words often crowd the frames; they break loose when they portray action that would be blocked on stage, or offer us a normally offstage vision (we see the dead Ophelia just as the text describes her). Wiley’s manga edition of Julius Caesar is at its strongest as “silent” panels overtake the text in the final pages.

The storyboard parallel is most pronounced in one of the newest entries, the sci-fi epic Romeo and Juliet: The War, credited to four creators, including the august Stan Lee. The horizontal, hardcover, full-color book resembles one of those profusely illustrated tomes on The Art of Star Wars, created to sate the desires of die-hard fans. But don’t go looking for faithful language here: In their first meeting at the masquerade, our futuristic Romeo propositions Juliet with, “Maybe one day I can see you without your costume.” Though less visually epic, there’s also a sci-fi Macbeth graphic novel from Puffin that acknowledges its effort to blend Shakespeare with the works of authors Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey: If starting the story of the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor with him astride a dragon in the year “Stardate: 1040” sets your heart racing, this is your book.

A futuristic Romeo and Juliet may still startle today’s audiences/readers, long after the tale of star-crossed lovers has been adapted, manipulated, parodied and plagiarized in every possible permutation. But that’s where these many treatments of Shakespeare serve another purpose: to offer new interpretations in different settings and time periods without the expense of theatrical production. To be sure, the most explicitly educational books hew close to a traditional line, as evidenced by the series from Graphic Planet and Campfire Classics: Simon Greaves’s books from the Shakespeare Comic Book Company even subordinate image to text, offering side-by-side original text and simplified modern speech, as if subtitled. The books from Classical Comics, while drawn in superhero glory for the most part (though their A Midsummer Night’s Dream is appropriately pastoral), come in three “flavors” for each title: original text, plain text and quick text, suited to every entertainment or pedagogical need.

Emerging from this collection as among the most intriguing are the books that look least like conventional comics and instead adopt designs that play with visual style in new ways. Hamlet andMacbeth from “No Fear Shakespeare” bear a passing resemblance to the works of Art Spiegelman or Marjane Satrapi, while the Amulet Books Manga Shakespeare series offers the greatest variety—from an anime-inflected Much Ado About Nothing, to a roughly sketched, chiaroscuro Julius Caesar that eschews any shades of gray, to their pièce de résistance (of those I’ve seen): a Native-American King Lear. You may find it jarring to see an Indian chieftain declaring, “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester” and have trouble with a Cordelia who echoes Disney’s Pocahontas, but there’s no denying that a powerful imagination has been brought to bear.

Indeed, the play King Lear seems to have inspired the widest visual variety; in addition to Pollock’s early entry and the Amulet book illustrated by the one-named Ilya, Gareth Hinds’s stylistically eccentric version for Candlewick Press features typeset text that at times loops around water-colored images—but there’s no mistaking the impact of Cordelia’s death when the color drains from the page.

Although the artistic and textual approaches among these many volumes vary widely, it’s fairly safe to assume that at their root, all are efforts to make Shakespeare more approachable for the novice, most likely pre-college students. The importance of the standard middle school and high school curriculum is surely the reason for the plethora of graphic Hamlets, Tempests, Romeo and Juliets andMidsummers. I found no Titus Andronicus or Timon of Athens in my pursuits; they proved even rarer than stage productions of those plays. The volumes that attempted a more mass-market sales spin can run afoul of their own educational mission; for example, the folks at Spark Publishing, responsible for the “No Fear” series, apparently take an awfully benevolent view of Richard III, as they declareMacbeth to be “the only Shakespeare play with a villain for its hero.”

Depth of Shakespearean knowledge is evident among the creators of perhaps the most innovative of graphic-novel Shakespeares. The authors and artists of the Kill Shakespeare series from IDW Publishing have abandoned any singular work and instead dreamed up a massive Shakespearean mashup in which Hamlet and Juliet join forces to battle against such villains as Richard III and Iago, who seek to vanquish (in the words of their marketing copy) “a reclusive wizard named William Shakespeare.” While the characters are familiar, their quest is wholly new, and their challenge transforms even those we think we know well; the surviving Juliet, still mourning Romeo, has taken on traits more typically associated with Joan of Arc.

For those steeped in the world of graphic novels, Kill Shakespeare is the Elizabethan equivalent of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, or perhaps Jasper Fforde’s (unillustrated) novel Something Rotten, although Kill is unmistakably and distinctively its own achievement. Having only finished Volume 1 of the series (Volume 2 is available, while Volume 3 is in the works), I’m already eager to find out if the scantily clad vixen who beckons Iago on the final page is, as I suspect, the formidable Lady Macbeth; Classics Illustrated never looked like this (nor was it serialized).

Coming full circle, it’s worth noting that the Classics Illustrated trademark has been revived, for a new graphic novel series, by the Papercutz imprint. And while newly drawn and edited, these share a common trait with their predecessor of 50 years ago—they conclude with the same message: “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated Edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.” It’s a message that might well conclude every graphic novel version of Shakespeare—although perhaps it’s unnecessary, since these adaptations, if successful, make their own case for the plays. On the other hand, I never did read The Iliad, did I?

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Here’s a link to the article as it appeared online here.