The Best Theatre of 2009 Posted by Hilton Als

December 18, 2009
The Best Theatre of 2009 Posted by Hilton Als

When Frank Capra adapted playwright Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 Broadway hit, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” for the screen in 1944, Cary Grant took over the role of Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who’s as famous for his views on marriage—he’s very anti—as he is for the cruelty of his reviews. But when the movie begins, Mortimer’s in the process of contradicting his public image; he’s in love with, and marries, a sweet girl he grew up near in Brooklyn. One feels for Mortimer. Love rattles his cool nearly as much as his dotty aunts’ penchant for poisoning lonely old bachelors. Six years after Capra’s movie was produced, the film director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz presented his masterwork, “All About Eve.” In it, one meets a variety of theatre folk; among them is the waspish, aptly named theatre critic Addison De Witt. Cold, removed, and glittering like an icicle, De Witt doesn’t restrict his venom to the stage; through various machinations, he ends up controlling the movie’s titular anti-heroine. About himself, Addison says: “My native habitat is the theatre. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theatre.”

In actual fact, critics are more interesting to meet in the movies than they are in what we call real life; they rarely think of themselves as central to anything, let alone the life of the theatre: it’s the theatre that feeds us. While Brewster and De Witt are film’s most famous writers, one suspects they’d be still more interesting on the page, which is where most writers belong. (The possible exception is Gore Vidal.) While movies and novels generally characterize theatre critics as angry bottom feeders in a sea of creativity, the theatre critic’s real job is to articulate love and humility and a sense of wonder whenever the curtain rises—no matter how unpromising the enterprise under review turns out to be. While there was precious little to unequivocally love in 2009, there were sensational moments that reminded one of why looking and articulating what one saw onstage remains such a powerful experience, leaving the critic happily vulnerable to all that any number of actors, producers, designers, and directors mean to say. Or should.

1. Isabelle Huppert in Robert Wilson’s “Quartett.” Huppert’s glorious Gallic face, that turned-down mouth that hints at her perpetual disapproval and, if pushed, contempt, was beautifully utilized by Wilson in the late German playwright Heiner Müller’s masterful re-imaging of the Choderlos de Laclos classic “Dangerous Liaisons.” Huppert’s self-control—over her costuming, the rush of words, not to mention body—was without question the theatrical event of the season. For what Huppert managed to do, first through her mere presence, and then by using her laser-like intelligence and hunger to know more about the world and show it, was to remind audiences of theatre’s basic ineffability, and why it’s a tragic medium, akin to jazz: no one performance is or should be the same. And then the moment passes, only to be reclaimed in memory.

2. Alenka Kraigher in Richard Foreman’s “Idiot Savant.” Kraigher, who is also a filmmaker, was born in Slovenia, and she knows perfectly well how faces look on stage and in front of the camera. She’s a postmodern Lillian Gish, capable of melding two genres into one and coming out on the other side with something utterly new. Taking her cue from Foreman—he cramps his stage with obstacles—Kraigher uses her body minimally while throwing shade with a flicker of her eyelids. Kraigher could become a great new star if she can keep working with directors like Foreman, who gets at a performer’s soul by throwing out a character’s psychology.

3. Diane Keaton at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As dinner guests of mutual friends, it was fascinating to watch her bits of pantomime while the waiter took someone else’s order. She talked in one breath about what to eat and who she meant to be, while simultaneously laughing at her ability and inability to commit to either “persona.” A brilliant performance in real time.

4. Pablo Schneider in “Desire Under the Elms.” American men are not supposed to be aware of their sexual power onstage or off; that would make them less “masculine.” But part of what made Marlon Brando so great—and so singular in his effects—was his awareness that, as an actor, he liked being looked at, by men and women alike. Generally, if we like an American male onstage, it’s because he’s playing some version of the stolid, non-verbal, sports-loving Dad we all grew up with, or wish we had. But Schneider broke that mold with his deeply erotic and engaged portrayal of a love-sick, sensitive boy who becomes a man by seeking mother-love from a conniving older woman. He’s as much in love with her rot as he is with the maternal female flesh that crawls out from underneath it.

5. Justin Bond at Joe’s Pub, and at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center with The Pixie Harlots. Speaking of masculinity! The gender-bending performer told stories about pagan faerie rituals, the new economy, drugs in San Francisco, love, sex, and falling down the stairs in a haunted house, sometimes supported by incomparable “Our” Lady Jay on piano. His heartbreaking rendition of Radiohead’s “Little Fishes,” was all about the power and mystery and ultimate demise of the body, a performance that helped italicize one of the primary reasons we go to the theatre: to watch bodies, and thus truth, unfold as they tell stories.


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