Arts & Society

Gary Tischler •

Theater Critics love “Tynan,” the one-man show about the acerbic, outrageous, revolutionary British drama critic-as-hedonistic celebrity now at the Studio Theater.

I don’t mean they’ll be uncritical, although you can’t do much of anything but praise Philip Goodwin, who plays Tynan so well that you think you’re keeping company with the man who’s been dead for thirty years.

Rather, “Tynan” is a piece of theater about a piece of theatrical work, a man often lauded as an important figure in the history of theater in the latter part of the mid-late 20th century, for his energetic, stylish, dead-on and highly-intelligent criticism; for his steadfast zeal in championing new and cutting edge playwrights such as John Osborne and Samuel Beckett; and for his role as literary manager of the National Theater of England, headed by Sir Laurence Olivier.

His writings, made famous in English publications, as well as at the New Yorker, were always stylish, even moving, and sometimes came in the form of verbal missiles when attacking bad performances, bad choices, bad trends, bad direction, or worse, anything mediocre in theater. He was brilliant, trenchant, poetic at times, and he could get away with some of his most devastating judgments because simply put, he was just about smarter than anyone else around and not shy about saying so.

There’s a videotape of Tynan on an episode of Edward R Murrow’s talk show “Small World” of the late 50s and early 60s. He is in the company of Samuel Goldwyn and the Oscar-winning actress Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s wife. He looks like a sharp, intelligent, very thin, chain-smoking porcupine.

He had enemies, but as this production makes clear, the worst one, as is often the case, was Kenneth Tynan himself. He had a penchant for the outrageous for its own sake; he wanted to liberate the country from sexual repression by being perfectly frank about his own obsessions, which turned out to be a penchant for mild sado-masochism. He was the author and producer of a 1960s-1970s theater cause célèbre called “Oh Calcutta”, which can be best be described as intellectual smut, which of course was a huge hit. It contained brief episodes of frontal nudity, part and parcel of the sexual revolution of the times. In today’s age of worldwide internet porn, it is mild stuff indeed, although done with a certain intellectual panache.

Tynan, these days, is a dimly distant force— he’s like a star whose light you can see years in the distance, just not very well. Tynan died of the effects of emphysema, the symptoms of which, along with a tantalizing stammer, are evident in Goodman’s performance.

If you have no taste for or memory of theater history, you won’t learn much from this play, a one-man outing based entirely on the latter-day journals kept by Tynan during a period when most of his best life’s works—except for a series of astonishingly good profiles and writings in the New Yorker—was done.

What you will hear and see is the genuine voice of Tynan—he is here in more ways than as the author of his own life story—and it’s a voice that is pungent, gifted in story-telling and narrative, witty and sharply funny, and even self-deprecating in the predicaments he so often finds himself. His talent presides and resides within a wreck, emotional and physical.

Goodwin, who’s consistently produced outstanding Shakespearean and contemporary performances at the Studio and the Shakespeare Theater, keeps it simple. It is an accumulative performance, where the stories he tells, the announcements he makes, are like layers of clothing, being put on and being shed.

The tone appears right—acidity battling with a showy intellectualism, a kind of superiority over his peers mixed with affection, most notably when he’s talking about Olivier. There are theater tidbits here: Christopher Plummer getting canned from a part because he insisted on doing it his way and the like.

Actually, the more you listen to Goodwin/Tynan, the more a sad, somewhat wasted, frustrated man emerges. He was a raconteur and a bad boy, but not a bad man. Listening to Goodwin speak, talking about the pleasures of his particular obsession, about a lost vacation in Spain which turned out to be a harrowing illustration of Murphy’s law, or being caught in a police raid in a special brothel in Los Angeles, you see a man vaulted into a pitiable Laurel and Hardy movie.

Tynan in vivid rises above it, with dignity if not reputation intact. Goodwin is the one that elevates him to that position, by the precision of his words, the intelligence of his choices, the refusal to overplay the material, by the clarity he achieves in the spoken word. There’s a point where you forget to look at the backdrop projections. You don’t even know that they’re there. Goodwin by this time has convinced you that you’re in the company of Kenneth Tynan, good company, sometimes melancholy—he notes steadily the passing of old friends—but always smart and compelling.

“Tynan” has been at the Studio Theatre until February 13. For more information, visit StudioTheatre.org

Gary Tischler •

If you want to know a little bit about what’s going on in the vibrant Washington area theatre scene, as well as a little bit about its history, check out the Helen Hayes Awards nominations. They’ve always provided clues about what’s hot and what’s not, trends and directions.

The awards—both a celebration of the area’s ever-growing theatre community and a composite of its members—always provide an ebb and flow about the fortunes of different theaters and different types of theatre.

From the beginning, in the resident theatre arena, the long established Arena Stage has been a strong presence, almost routinely receiving loads of nominations and winning many of them, because Arena for decades was the mother ship of regional theatre companies under founder Zelda Fichandler. But judges, perversely, tended to reward grudgingly newer companies, except for the Shakespeare Theatre Company under Michael Kahn.

It took time for Woolly Mammoth to establish itself as a force, for the Studio Theatre under Joy Zinoman to be recognized consistently (its production of Tom Stoppard’s “Indian Ink” was a major breakthrough). Signature Theatre under Eric Schaeffer, on the other hand splashed, onto the scene with its production of “Sweeney Todd” and established itself as the leading interpreter of Sondheim musicals in the area. Likewise, critics and Helen Hayes judges alike immediately took to the Russian pantomime tones of Synetic Theatre and its movement-choreography oriented interpretation of classic works of literature and theater, forcing writers to spell Tsikurishvili (the last name of the star Synetic couple) over and over again.

Early on, nobody paid much attention to family or children’s theater, not to mention the more assumed-to-be sedate workings of suburban theater and dinner theater. This year Adventure Theater, under the energetic Michael Bobbitt, produced several nominations, as did Toby’s Dinner Theater under Toby Orenstein, a second time around for her.

And Folger, once the Kahn-led troupe that embedded itself at Lansburgh and later Harman Hall, never fared as well as it did this year. This year, all three of its produced plays have been nominated for Outstanding Resident Play: “Henry VIII,” “Hamlet” and “Orestes: A Tragic Romp.”

The Shakespeare Theatre did well for itself with 22 nominations, but none were in the outstanding resident play category, where it’s rotating majestic double bill of “Richard II” and “Henry V” were sadly missing. Nor was Michael Hayden, who wore both crowns, nominated for his acting tour de force here in playing both kingly roles, including the best Henry this writer has ever seen outside of perhaps Kenneth Branagh’s movie version.

Omissions and inclusions always cause a little controversy, even in this self-celebratory community, and the one that seemed to be almost uniformly decried was the absence of teenaged whiz June Schreiner for her dazzling, high-energy turn as Ado Annie in “Oklahoma,” a show that’s up for Outstanding Resident Musical and helped Arena snare 23 nominations. Schreiner got deservedly ecstatic notices for her work but failed to convince the Hayes judges.

“Oklahoma” gave a rousing opening to Molly Smith and Arena’s new multi-million dollar, elegant space out in Southwest, and the show, which looked as fresh as could be, will be clashing with the Shakespeare Theatre’s co-production (with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago), of Leonard Bernstein’s and Mary Zimmerman’s “Candide.”

“Candide” is an example of what you might call out of town resident shows—that is, there’s enough of a local presence in the cast or production to put the dazzling show into the resident category. If there was any justice, this would produce a tie, because I can’t pick between the two. One of my peers in the theatre world, however, loves the Toby Dinner Theater production of “Hairspray” to death.

Arena actually had three musicals in the outstanding resident musical category—two others, produced before the big move, were the smash hit production of Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Ladies” in Duke’s old neighborhood at the Lincoln Theatre, and “The Light in the Piazza,” with Molly Smith getting two outstanding director noms for “Piazza” and “Oklahoma.”

Some other highlights: Adventure Theater getting an ensemble acting nod in the resident musical category for its production of “”If You Give a Pig a Pancake,” which featured Hollywood as a tap-dancing pig.

The outstanding lead actor in a resident play produced a record ten actors vying for the award.

Theater J scored heavily with its production of “New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza.”

Per usual, the Kennedy Center dominated non-resident categories with 23 nominations of all sorts for such shows as “Thurgood,” “South Pacific” and “Golden Age,” part of a wonderful Terence O’Neill mini-festival.

Ted Van Griethuysen was nominated yet again, in kingly fashion, for “All’s Well That Ends Well.”

The Helen Hayes Awards will be announced April 25 at the annual ceremonies at the Warner Theater.

For a complete list of nominations and all things Helen Hayes Awards, click here!

Gary Tischler •

Forget what you thought you knew about Irish lit, Irish mores and Irish culture; the stuff you learned by way of John Ford and Victor McLaglen and the likes of all that.

The Druids are here. Temporarily, this time, but they’ll be back.

That would be Druid Theatre Company and the Atlantic Theatre Company out of Galway, embarked on a national tour of these United States. They are in town for a second visit here at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through this weekend, with a staging of Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”

McDonagh, the brash, storytelling whiz and star Irish playwright, is at the core of this company, which is producing some of the finest theater in the world.

For Druid general manager Tim Smith, the trip is a treat.

“I would never want to be anything else,” says Smith, a Londoner who seems to have acquired a bit of a Galway lilt in his voice. “I don’t aspire to writing plays, acting, that side of things. This is a dream job. You get to be around and work with so many gifted people, travel a lot—like this trip to the States. See what that’s all about.”

The Druid Theater Company has been under the direction of Garry Hynes for years. The company is also under the spell Ireland’s two pre-eminent contemporary playwrights, McDonough and Enda Walsh, and it has become a force in Ireland and in the theater world, presenting a high profile alternative to the Abbey and Dublin tradition in Ireland.

“The theater company’s been around a relatively long time, but they’re cutting edge and new, in a different setting operating with a distinct style, with a new generation of Irish playwrights,” Smith says. “They’re very smart here, and we’ve been very well received in the States.”

McDonagh, whose work has been seen at the Studio Theater, most recently with the woozy tall tale “The Seafarer,” about four besotted and befuddled Irishmen playing poker with the devil in a war for one of the men’s souls. By McDonagh’s standards, it was somewhat lighter fare, although “The Cripple of Inishmaan” also has his characteristic blend of sometimes profane, cruel humor, heartbreak and hooliganism, sadness and mirth, hope and vainglory. It is about a small town on the coast of Ireland subsisting on half-baked dreams until a Hollywood movie company led by the great documentarian Robert Flaherty arrives to film the natives.

It is Irish to the core, what with characters named Billy Claven (the cripple), and BabbyBobby, Mammy O’Dougal, Kate, JohnnyPateenMike, Slippy Helen, and Doctor McSharry.

McDonagh, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, is a big star on the theater horizon, with four productions staged by Druid, including “A Beheading in Spokane,” “The Pillowman,” “The Lieutenant Of Inishmore” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan”. Other plays by McDonagh include “A Skull in Connemar ” and “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” performed at the Studio with Nancy Robinette in the title role.

“He’s definitely a part of the core of what we do here,” Smith says. “Druid is representative of a kind of Irish new wave, that’s for sure, along with Enda Walsh, whose work kicks off a festival in the spring called “New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival.” The Studio Theater will have Walsh’s “Penelope” beginning March 25 and running through April 3.

The festival also includes two other Walsh plays, an appearance by Walsh herself, as well as Garry Hynes, the only woman to ever win a Tony for direction and other events.

Gary Tischler •

-You’d have to be damn near blind not to see what Kris Kristofferson looked like, even from a distance in the concert hall at the Music Center at Strathmore.

He’s got bluejeans, boots, somewhat unruly white hair, a shirt, a guitar, a harmonica strapped to him. Each gray and white strand of his beard is full of all the days of good and hard living, the cheers and the times when they might have stopped. It’s a past-70 beard, honestly earned, carefully combed by this singer-songwriter-movie star. It’s a beard, along with the voice that goes with it—raspy as a barking junkyard dog—perfect for the songs he sings.

Look him up on Wikepedia sometimes, and you have to wonder how a guy who’s done everything short of skiing down the Himalayas after seeing the wise man can write such rye and rueful songs. In his songs, which are mostly about him and the folks he’s met, loved and lost along the way, there is a certain amount of regret going on. But there’s also a lot of honest feeling, manly gut checks, and a certain sense of having let go of way too many worthy women.

Here is a guy who started out as an army brat, went to Oxford, was a captain in the U.S. Army, traveled around, was offered a job as a professor of English literature at West Point, did dishes and swept hallways as a janitor in Nashville, and wrote songs that everybody else sang and made hits out of. You know: “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “Me and Bobby McKee,” ”Loving Her Was Easier,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Why Me.”

And in the process he became a movie star, a handsome lad, catnip of the rugged sort that don’t go down easy. He played Billy the Kid with Sam Peckinpah directing, starred opposite Barbra Streisand and dated her, and survived all three experiences. He was Joplin’s swain for a while. He married a number of times, the result of which has been eight children and grandparent status. “This song,” he says of Daddy’s Song, “is for my children and their mommas.” He reminds me of E.E. Cummings’ Buffalo Bill poem now.

His voice doesn’t reach all the notes he’s composed, and it probably never did. But the emotions catch them just right, even now. “You know, he’s not much of a singer,” I hear a man tell the woman he’s with.

“Who the hell gives a damn?” she says, with just a little bite.

You suspect he’s got a lot of memories kicking around in there. He’s got a following still, a house full of Grammys and Country Music Awards, and legend status. He’s right up there now with Willie, Johnny, Merle, Waylon and the rest in the country music folk tales, even though his music spreads out over the land like a genre-less blanket.

He’s got a certain kind of audience. Guys around his age, perhaps a little younger, who look even less than he looks like his old self: his shirt off, waiting for James Coburn’s Pat Garrett to kill him, palling around with a knife-throwing kid named “The Kid.” The Kid, oddly, was Bob Dylan, who wrote the haunting “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” for that flick.

He loves the acoustics here at Strathmore—so much so that instead of playing a one-set concert, he opted for two, though ruefully, as always. “Man, this place is great,” he said. “I can hear every mistake I’m making.”

In his songs, he’s waking up with a hangover, he can’t find a restaurant that’s open, or scrounge up the quarter for a cup of coffee and “It’s Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Or he’s waking up in a strange bed and the woman he’s been with just shut the door on her way out, and Bobby McGee has slipped away in Memphis “looking for a home, and I hope she finds it.”

The guys in the audience cheer him on, not too loudly. He’s singing their stories too, I’m willing to bet. And maybe he’s singing parts of mine. A couple of guys are sitting next to me. They get the walk he walks and the songs he sings. The songs make up a kind of Superbowl of manly broken hearts and missed chances. In front of me is a young guy with a pretty young, long-and-dark haired girl, kind of generic. He’s in uniform from some other small-town time, the tight blue jeans hung a little low, a clean white shirt, a near-duck tailed haircut and a look-around-challenging kind of look. He hasn’t accumulated a single regret, except maybe dropping a pass in the open field once or twice. Might have been Kristofferson, growing up in Texas.

Gary Tischler •

When Kimberly Schraf, Holly Twyford and Nancy Robinette come back onto the set to take their final bows for their work in Horton Foote’s “The Carpetbagger’s Children” at Ford’s Theatre, you expect a whole bunch of people to follow them on out—Texas townspeople, family members, momma and poppa, brother and brother-in-law, swindlers and Confederates, best friends, children, sharecroppers, and lost loves and friends.

Nobody shows up of course, but they’ve been there through the whole hour and a half of this intimate, epic play, rich in stories, rich in language, rich in real people and ghosts.

That’s what happens when you marry a trio of gifted actresses—and these women are among Washington’s finest—to gorgeous writing, and a playwright’s ability to evoke a sense of place through memory and spoken stories.

Foote, who died last year, was among the top tier of American playwrights, not just by his output, which was large, but by his particular gift, which was to revisit the Texas places in which he grew up, delve into his own life and memories and, with writing tinged with hard-scrabbled poetry, bring to life characters that were universally American.

He didn’t always play by the rules, and he didn’t always play to the expectations of audiences. What fame he had seemed to come mostly from his screenplay writing and movies made of his plays. He wrote the screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” His play “The Trip to Bountiful” got a best actress Oscar for the late Geraldine Page.

Some critics have had trouble with the way Foote tells the story of the three sisters (and a fourth who’s never seen, but often brought up). The suggestion is that “The Carpetbagger’s Daughters” isn’t really a play, but a series of monologues. While that’s technically true, the work moves like a play, walks like a play and talks like a play. And it has the emotional impact of a play and story, so by my definition it is a play, and a fine, beautiful one at that.

So yes, the three sisters: Cornelia, the practical one, played with exasperation and a certain and affecting lonely reserve by Kimberly Schraf; Grace Anne, the one that got married, played with challenging rue by Nancy Robinette; and Sissie, the baby, played with utterly engaging charm by Holly Twyford. They all take turns pushing the story forward (and sometimes backward) by way of monologues. They are on stage against a dusty, open canvas background, together all of the time, but also apart. They rarely connect through dialogue exchange, but they do react subtly to what is being said and remembered.

The three are the daughters of a Union soldier who returned to the Texas town of Harrison as a carpetbagger after the Civil War’s end, taking on the critical position of tax collector, which allowed him to accumulate property cheaply, and to become an important figure in the cotton-land town over the years.

The monologues are a series of memories about getting from here to there. We never see momma and poppa, but we hear their voices, especially Momma who has by now passed through the gates of dementia.

The timeline takes us—through story and memory—from Reconstruction all the way through World War II, and along the way the usual tribulations occur. Right off the bat, Cornelia recalls the death of another sister, taken home from New Orleans after coming down with a mysterious and eventually fatal illness. Cornelia recalls how the townspeople gathered up straw and laid it down in the streets to prevent the wagon, which carried the sick sister, from jarring.

The story, told matter of factly and with a sad precision, sets the tone. Things never stop happening: Grace Ann, against her father’s wishes, marries a man without sharpness or ambitio. Cornelia takes over the running of the estate. Poppa dies. Sissie marries and becomes a mother. Love is not requited. Children grow up and move away. And Momma cannot figure out whose dead and who’s alive.

The town changes, fortunes are made and lost, and secrets eventually come out. The sisters—through a nod here, a raised eyebrow or head—do indeed communicate. When Twyford takes the stage for the first time as Sissie, the mood becomes light, sunny and sweet. She spreads warmth around through her personality on a family that sometimes badly needs it.

People get older—there are more funerals than weddings—and the land itself is eventually changed. Cornelia recalls telling the sharecroppers that she was giving in to technology and forcing them off the land they had worked for decades.

It seems like a small play because of the structure, perhaps, because of the way the women speak, intimately plowing memory like a farmer plows the land. They are personal stories, broken up by momma’s need to hear Sissie sing “The Clanging Bells of Time” so frequently.

This is the first time that these three actresses have shared a change, which is at once unbelievable and momentous. They live up to the expectations, using the monologues as a connection to each other. There is always “Lear” or “The Three Sisters” to offer a chance to reprise the occasion in a different way.

Gary Tischler •

-Even if she hadn’t announced herself, the voice on the phone, a little whispery, a little dramatic, not as strong as in some other years, was still instantly recognizable. “Hello,” the voice says. “This is Tammy Grimes.”

Of course it was. Tammy Grimes, the legend.

She came to Washington for a concert as part of Barbara Cook’s “In the Spotlight Series” on cabaret singers; a category which seems almost whimsically focused to define Grimes. Cabaret singers are by and large original in such a way that they can be compared to no one else.

As she was in the 1980s when we talked to her in the midst of a concert gig at the now defunct Charley’s, a tony, jazzy, New Yorkish night club on K Street in Georgetown, Grimes is in the Duke Ellington mold: beyond category.

And probably by now, so thickly is she held in the affections of New Yorkers and by people who care more than they should about Broadway lore and stories, she’s also probably beyond criticism. She continues, in her mid-seventies, to fiddle around the edges of her creation, that is, her story and herself.

“Well, I’ll be singing songs by Tom Waits, Jimmy Buffett…” she said almost blithely, as if they might be the standard repertoire for a woman who rose to become a Broadway star for decidedly un-Buffett, un-Waits-like material.

But then again, maybe not. If Grimes repeats anything a lot, it is a simple thing. “I like songs that tell stories,” she says to me on the phone, and again to us in the audience of the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The story she tells, of course, is her story, and so a concert like this, and others written about New York, are about her. They are familiar stories, and the songs are pertinent to them; about two ex-husbands, two Tonys (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “Private Lives”), about Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Truman Capote, about loss and love, family and children, theater openings, parts made her own and parts she never got.

Hence, “Moon River.” She tells me the story over the phone, and it’s like we’re just talking. There was the time that, ”Truman Capote–we were friends–said that he’d written “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with me in mind. He saw me as Holly Golightly, and he promised that he would get me the part in the film. And of course, Audrey Hepburn got it.” And on the phone it’s a matter of fact telling, a good story, with no hard feelings or regret in it, because those things happen and Truman is Truman and that sort of thing not said, but implied. On stage, she tells the same story, but here it becomes a no-regrets bridge, a way to launch into her anthem, “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” the Meredith Wilson musical about a particularly defiant survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.

For sure, Grimes is a legend, but it’s hard to say exactly what kind of legend. Noel Coward discovered her after her hearing her sing. he had dinner once with the shy Cole Porter, whose “The Oyster Song” she makes a hugely enjoyable enterprise in performance. “We were both shy, I think,” she said. “We spent the whole dinner not saying a word.”

Imagine that. She has plenty to say, of course, and more to sing. She talks about her ex-husband Christopher Plummer, the grand actor, “a beautiful man.” “He still is and now we get along just fine,” she said. “And we had our beautiful daughter, Amanda. Honey, if you’re listening anywhere, please call home.”

The higher registers of her voice are something of a tremulous adventure now, but the lower range is alive with danger, feeling and unpredictable adventure. She sits most of the time now during her concerts, although she will walk to the mike and grab it forcefully. And she sings “The Pirate Song” from Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera” and kills it. The song has all the vengeful menace that it offers up.

Sometimes you suspect people haven’t always known what to do with Tammy Grimes. She’s made a number of mostly forgettable films and done all sorts of unruly television work including her own brief show.

But it’s Broadway and New York that are the stars in her crown, where the cheering still goes on as it does with the Terrace Theater audience, as well as at the Metropolitan Room. Walter Kerr, a legendary drama critic, flat out said, after seeing her as Molly Brown, “She is a genius.” The question is: what kind of genius?

Listening to her sing-tell Waits’ “Martha,” or Buffett’s “He Went to Paris,” or “You Better Love Me While You May,” you pick up on her strength more than the fragility, and the tremendous loss the death of her husband, the composer/arranger Richard Bell must have been. She doesn’t hide it. She merely swings into “You Gotta Ring Them Bells” or something similarly fist-clenched and forward-moving.

For me, and I suspect for New Yorkers who have heard and seen her at the Metropolitan Room, she’s an urban unicorn, a legend for whom, when they appear, the slate is always clean and the stories always rich.

Grimes is the kind of performer who is a reminder that you don’t go to the theater or the cabaret to forget.
You go to remember. And Tammy Grimes, while she may forget a lyric here or there, has a rich store of memories and music.

She came back with everyone standing up clapping for an encore: “I’m going to sing ‘The Rose.’” I heard her sing that song on a wintry night in Charley’s, snow on the ground. Bad news in the news like today. She pushed up the rose and made you remember.