Thomas F. Cook

The Dog movie is basically a family enforcer — practically a tool of the Christian Nationalists, who I consider to be the most dangerous religion currently infesting our world. In the past, Islamic Fundamentalism was probably the most dangerous, but since the failure of the “Arab Spring,” this U.S. grown and international Christian terrorist organization is threatening everything.

Thus, it’s a good reason to stay away from a dog movie, which is ALWAYS about a: a dog suffering a separation from his family and making enormous strides to get back home — like Dorothy in Oz, which was also, basically, about a dog; or a dog that dies at the end, like Marley or Old Yeller, cementing the rightness of the heterosexual experience, including children to replace said dog.

I don’t doubt for a second that a dog can be loved by a human, but I also think it’s one aspect of love, not an equal love. And it’s for the simple reason that you mourn a dog for a few days and then get over it. If it’s a baby or a child you’ve lost, or even in the nearly heartbreaking “Adolescence,” which is now on Netflix, your 13 year old, you mourn for years and sometimes don’t recover.

But this movie is not about a dog healing a family, thank God, or returning to a family, or dying sacrificially so a family can move on. It is about a single woman and a Great Dane that her best friend — a human being — asked her “outside his last will and testament” — to take. Then he committed suicide.

The suicide is hardly talked about in the movie, but it’s essential. What the dog seems to do is two things: remind her, continually, of her best friend, and threaten, passively, to cause her to lose her rent controlled apartment.

It’s not chatted about too much in the movie, other than, “the dog has to go or you’ll be evicted.” But being evicted from a NYC rent controlled apartment which she finagled after her dad died, is like being kicked out of a productive gold mine. It’s huge. She will not find another apartment like that anywhere — only word of mouth or relations get you into those, and even then, the rent is raised, sometimes to market levels. She will have to go to the far edges of Manhattan to keep a home over her head, as well as the dog.

And I forgot what I was going to say.

I think, perhaps, it’s because it is a single woman who is a writer and editor, and not one who is desperately looking for the right man to make her life complete, that the movie works in its most subtle ways. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the typical tropes of a dog movie, and the dog itself, a Great Dane, is filmed in an unusual way in that he is probably the least expressive dog in any dog movie I’ve seen, and many that I’ve not seen. The dog is — in movie terms — the least human dog that’s been filmed. It doesn’t raise one eye, or cock its head, or act guilty for pooping (and in one case, for tearing up her apartment). The dog is mourning too — one of the characters makes that point. And the writer’s ultimate intent is to get her main character to realize that her friend didn’t just “kill himself.” He caused a great deal of pain, confusion, anger and the rest of the stuff that comes when someone commits suicide for reasons that can’t be understood.

I’ve known, I can’t even count, many suicides. Most were suffering from severe depression but another was suffering from AIDS and simply didn’t want to go through the end stage of that disease (this was long before there were any treatments). But I think the most common post-suicide effect was the long search most people took to understand why they did it. Eventually, people develop a half answer to that question, especially if it’s obvious, but ultimately, when death comes passively to one of our friends, lovers or neighbors, we accept it and our search for meaning in that death is, perhaps, not very important. They just died. That’s all. They had cancer and died. They had dementia and died.

But when it’s violent, early, self inflicted or caused by someone else, stranger or otherwise, we struggle in this valiant but ultimately useless search for meaning. And I think this movie deals pretty well with that search, although sometimes it seems a little too remote. She doesn’t often seem like someone in mourning or struggling to find an answer to the question of his suicide. Still, it’s such a relief to see something that doesn’t turn a dog into a version of a human being.

I got to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, the way it was meant to be seen, and what a joy it was to hear and see the full movie in the form it was meant to be.

But this time, I was deeply annoyed. Of course we know that the country went through an anti-Communist (red scare) period. But through the entirety of the movie, most characters are on the defensive about being liberal, leftist, progressive, or communist. The only one who isn’t is Florence Pugh (Jean Matlock is her character’s name, I think.) If they’re not trying to defend having been a member of the communist party, or even being interested in their ideas, then they are almost always on the opposite side — participating in a witch hunt to root out communists and communist sympathizers. That’s why Emily Blunt, (a powerhouse, albeit an alcoholic and terrible mother), repeats “16 years ago, sorry 17, no sorry, 18. 18 years ago.” Trying, in vain really, to point out that her communist party membership was so long ago it was irrelevant.

But it’s not irrelevant to people who have a vendetta or who are on a witch hunt or, for whatever reason, think that DEI is the root of all evil. This is what’s happening now — with the Trump government going after anyone and everyone who might have worked on DEI projects, etc.

Lost in both the communist witch hunts of the post atomic bomb era, and the current witch hunts for DEI sympathizers and policies, is the freedom to think AND, I would add, the notion that conservatism is identical to patriotism, which it is not, at all and that leftist ideas are anti-American. This has been going on for decades — even before McCarthy — and yet I doubt a single person in this government or past governments could even describe Marx’s “Capital,” or the contents.

It’s like the word Woke, that John McWhorter recently wrote about because it is one of the words that has transformed within a matter of years from meaning: “politically aware,” to “anti-white racism,” I guess, and basically “liberalism.” When DeSantis said, about Florida, “This is where Woke comes to die,” he was basically saying, stupid and uninformed people are welcome here.

It’s really just too sad to be going through this again. You have to wonder who’s going to be the next sacrifice.

Well I don’t know how to do much with this web stuff, so I can’t figure out how to put text next to this image.

This Jane Campion movie and the novel it’s based on, published in 1967 if you can believe — before Stonewall — is a remarkable work. The movie is very concise and mostly follows the book, almost to the letter. But there is one thing that has been pecking away at me since I first saw it three years ago, and then read the novel afterward, in part because of Annie Prouxl who was asked to advice the moviemakers.

First — the novel basically deals with closeted cowboys and hidden homosexuality. Peter is an effeminate boy who might also be something of a sociopath. Phil, the main character, appears to be an absolute hardened Montana rough neck. The book opens with him cruelly castrating a bull by more or less ripping its balls off with his bare hands. That scene is replicated later in the movie. It’s a shocking and horrific opening, but one of the reasons I think Thomas Savage is a unsung genius is because it more or less explains the main character, at least at the start of the novel, in a single, violent and shocking scene. He treats people the way he wants to treat himself, and he would, at least in the public world, like to rip his own balls off so he could stop feeling.

Second — Phil constantly talks about a dead cowboy named Bronco Henry and he keeps the dead man’s saddle oiled and clean in the horse barn. The cowpokes around him are constantly asking about Bronco Henry and he has nothing but praises for his former master. Eventually in the movie and in the book, you realize that he and Bronco Henry were in love. But the moviemakers, through no fault of their own, couldn’t figure out from the novel whether or not there was an actual sexual relationship between Bronco Henry and Phil. That’s when they asked Annie Proulx to chime in. She read the book and said something like, “Read the first pages of chapter xyz.” And the entire two or three pages of that chapter is about sapling trees — willows or something — intertwining endlessly, dropping their seeds on the ground where more trees grew and intertwined with others, fertilizing each other…. you get the gist. It’s an absolutely astounding way of dealing with the issues of 1967, and maybe our own time as well — how to write about gay sex without explicitly calling it gay sex. Anyway, this cove, which is almost like an egg, is impenetrable except for one narrow tunnel — more sexual imagery. Phil uses the cove to masturbate and rub himself with clothing of Bronco Henry.

And in the movie — I don’t remember if this is in the book — Peter, the sissy, accidentally discovers Phil’s secret cove and then finds a stash of “physique” magazines. I looked up the date of one of them and it was accurate. Body builder magazines began around 1899, maybe a bit earlier. But they are all labeled B.H. (Bronco Henry), so they all date back to around 1904 when Bronco Henry died.

Now this is what sticks in my craw, after that long intro. The movie takes place in 1925 and Phil keeps goading his brother George to remember what was special about this particular cattle drive. George can’t remember, because he’s a little dim, (but also kind,) and Phil reminds him that it was 25 years ago that Bronco Henry first taught them how to do a cattle drive. Neither Phil nor George have ever married and neither have children. We learn that Phil was educated at Yale or Harvard (I can’t remember), so he’s not really a young one. Their parents, who they call Old Gent and Old Lady, have retired and moved to Salt Lake City. So George and Phil are both 25 + x: x being their age in 1900. On a plaque above Bronco Henry’s saddle is his birth and death date: 1864 to 1904. He was 50 when he died in 1904. Which also means, I think, that he was 46 when he first took Phil and George on their first cattle drive in 1900.

So the math kind of works out like this for Phil:

25 + 0 = he was 0 when he met and had sex with Bronco Henry — not possible.
25 + 15 = Currently 40 years old.
25 + 20 = Currently 45 years old.

and so on. What isn’t easy is that we never learn how old the brothers are in 1925.

But judging by the parent’s age, the fact that neither brother is married or has children (and they share the same bedroom at the start of the movie, like children) and Kirsten Duntz’s son’s age — high school and then prep school — which makes her about 35 or older — the brothers have to be pushing 40 in 1925. Which means Phil was 15 in 1900 and Bronco Henry was 46. My guess is that the brothers were younger. Which makes the whole story about the victim of a pedophile — a willing victim. But the strange thing about the movie and the book, and maybe this is because they couldn’t write about this stuff in 1967, Phil gave his entire life — devoted his entire being — to a dead man, because that dead man taught him how to feel and love. And then to prove he wasn’t a pansy, he turned his back on it.

I’ve written it over and over and over, again and again and again. Addiction is boring.

I think William Burroughs is probably the only writer who got it right (write). (But I haven’t read a word by Bukowski.) When Burroughs wrote about his own addiction to heroin he wrote about the joy he found in coming across an almost endless supply of horse, because he wasn’t going to have to worry for a very long time. When he talked about quitting, he talked about Ayahuasca and how it probably was the only thing that cured him. But the one thing he didn’t talk about was “moral failings,” or “trauma,” or “internal pain.” He refused to turn addiction into a psychological issue, and that probably is another reason he refused to accept that his attraction to men was also a psychological issue. He simply didn’t believe the stories.

Now… huge caveat… I haven’t read a single William Burroughs novel in at least 35 years and the only one I read was Naked Lunch. I didn’t even read Queer. I was probably too frightened to buy a book with that title at that age in my life. So I’m think Queer plus my memories of Naked Lunch and they may be merging.

But what I can say is that it is repetitive. I am less than 100 days from quitting. I’d like to quit before I go to Africa in February. But basically this is the exact same position that happened the last time I quit. I am so incapable that I can barely get off the couch and one of the only reasons I go out at all is to get another bottle. In the old days, I had to plan ahead and make sure I had enough to last from Saturday to Monday because Sundays were “blue.” In the old days, I would sit on my couch and work on my laptop, until it was drink time. It’s no different now. I have a larger apartment so I have multiple places to sit, but sit is all I do until it’s time to drink. I then I feel relieved, a little bit, and especially elated if I haven’t gone through everything and don’t have to outside and pretend that I am okay. My friend Ellie is in the hospital and I can’t visit her because I’m not sure what she’d say if she saw me trembling from the DTs.

I’m sure some people know. They are too smart not to understand. But they also haven’t asked me to stop. BUT, it’s not their responsibility. It’s all on me.

And frankly, with the flood of incompetents and corrupt people supporting the rapist and felon in the next 3 days, I’m really not sure I want to quit anyway.

In Queer, the William Borough’s alter ego tells a doctor that he is in Mexico because the drug he is addicted to is not a crime, while it is a crime in the U.S. It was such an interesting and honest moment in the movie, you sometimes wonder why people in the U.S. can’t just say something so simply, and without guile or the need to flatter or the need to outdo a rival. This said, coming from New York City.

That being said, one time, on his ridiculous and truly awful reality show “The Apprentice,” Trump said something like, “New York is the most vicious city on earth.” Of course that’s not true. But it was a key to his addled mind. “I want to hate them.” That’s what he said about the Central Park 5, in his full page ads in the NYTImes, The NYPost, and the Daily News. The opinion piece was about bringing back the death penalty. As the anti-death penalty nun Prejaen reminded us, Trump went on a killing spree at the end of his term. He executed 16 people (or maybe 13) that were on Federal Death Row. He did it in January, after months of saying the election was stolen — proof enough that he knew he couldn’t stay. It was almost as if he said, “Oh, there’s something I forgot to do before I go. I want to kill a bunch of people.”

There is no one worse, in my lifetime, to take the job. And that includes his previous incarnation which was a shit show. But I don’t think it’s a reason to stay drunk.

Another of Coppola dynasty has become a director. Well she’s been a director for awhile, but this might be the one that gives her some fame, just like Lost In Translation gave her aunt Sophia her a taste of fame.

Fame as well as motherhood is, perhaps, one of the themes of this movie. I don’t think it was a revelation, but I think Pamela Anderson was more than a little good. It’s another one of those performances that is almost startling because you would never associate this actress with the Baywatch actress, or the big breasted girl who was first discovered on a Jumbotron at a football game, nor the woman who starred in her own sex tape with Tommy Lee.

As I’ve said before, all art is about the artist. It can’t be any other way because artistry demands sacrifice and this is where the theme of failed motherhood comes in. The character, Shelly, has a daughter who she has never really raised, preferring to devote her life to being a showgirl, and understandably there is a great deal of bitterness between the two. She has also never revealed who the father is — Dave Bautista — a man she sees every day because he is the stage manager of her show.

The show, called the Razzle Dazzle, is and has been failing, being gradually replaced by something called the Hot Circus. Shelly has been playing this role for 30 years, since she was 22, and although you kind of know what it is, it isn’t really until the very end of the film that we finally see the full show in all its Las Vegas tackiness. There’s something terribly sad about a character who has given so much for something so banal and awful. It’s like a writer, perhaps myself, who slaves away at a novel that turns out to be an absolute bore, or even incomprehensible, but not in a good way like Thomas Pynchon.

Jamie Lee Curtis is always brave in her roles — one that immediately comes to mind is the absolute horror of an Italian mother she played on The Bear. In this it is no different. In a locker room scene you see how much she is trying to keep her body together — to look sexy, even though she’s gained too much weight to really pull it off. She was one of the razzle dazzle dancers, but now she is cocktailing and basically letting men play grab ass for tips. She doesn’t care. But in one particular hard to watch scene, she dances alone on a podium, and doesn’t seem to turn even a single head. She looks pathetic.

The premise of this play is that in Tehran, or somewhere near it, in the late 90s I think, a woman at a school is teaching English to a group of students whose skills vary from struggling to almost perfect. The cleverest thing about it is that when they are speaking Farsi, they speak quickly and with American accents, but when they are speaking English they have thick accents and often struggle to find the right words.

The class is supposed to be conducted in English only, but they students often slip back into Farsi to make communication easier. Their teacher gives them tick marks each time they use Farsi and they are allowed 5 before they are sent home as punishment.

This reminded me of a terrible French teacher I had who deducted half or a quarter grade off your final grade point every time she heard you speak English. So in the end of my senior year, I walked away with a D in a class that I had loved. But it didn’t matter at that point. I was already accepted at University and would never need my high school transcript again. I just remember the hurt and viciousness of it.

What these students are actually trying to achieve is a good or greater than good score on the TOEFL which stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language. It’s the equivalent of the SAT and it tests non-native speakers for their ability to speak English if they want to enter a university or college. The fact that it’s set in Iran is of no consequence. But I got the sense that the author is probably one of those people who is in love with language (Farsi, based on what is said in the play), and attributes to language much more than is actually there. I know someone who is the same way about Yiddish. Most French people love their language. The Scottish have done amazing things with English. And in America, according to John McWhorter, we more or less hate our language, even though racists all over the country use English to discriminate against people like those in this play, who are struggling to sound more and more American. I don’t know if the nature of language is such that a society or a person can be changed by it, or that their personality is molded by it. Because while watching one of the characters wax rhapsodic about the beauty of Farsi and the balance of it, I kept thinking about all those war mongering men who also speak Farsi. Does Scottish slang make the Scots happier and funnier? This idea was explored very satisfyingly in Denis Villeneuve’s (Ted Chiang’s) Arrival, where Amy Adams mind was actually changed once she started writing and speaking in Heptapod or whatever it was called, which was more of a visual language like cuniform.

The play is an hour and 40 minutes with no intermission, and it moves somewhat slowly due to a classroom “cube” that rotates to a different side depending on the scene. But sometimes this movement takes longer than it should and there is a lot of classical music to go with it. In the end, it was satisfying.

I don’t feel qualified to review this Robert Eggers movie because unlike the others, I kept falling asleep. I didn’t see anything up until the titles because I was snoring away. Many points of the movie were lost (and not really “lost” exactly, because they weren’t that important).

There are just far too many movie directors and writers that overwrite and overexplain what point they are trying to make.

Basically, this horny young girl awakens the demon Nosferatu because she is so very horny, and during some unnatural dream, which is basically a sex and passion fear dream — she agrees to the demon that she will be his wife.

Cut to, the end, when the city is falling victim to the plague, we’ve already met umpteen characters who are going to be dead, and the sorcerer who knows how to read a book of codexes in a book he magically finds in a nearby closet or floor (I couldn’t tell which because the lighting is so bad), which claims the only way for the plague to end is for the woman to sacrifice herself sexually to Nosferatu (a vampire) who of course, eats her heart and drinks her blood instead of fucking her. But in line with most misogyny down through the ages, as soon as the vampire fucks her, he dies.

The End.

What the fuck was the point? I’d rather see Wicked, and Wicked is an absolute non starter for me.

Next, Nickel Boys, titled, “The Nickel Boys,” in Colson Whiteheads novel.

I didn’t really feel like searching for an image to go with this “take” on this movie. I didn’t even look up the writers. Reasons: 1) I have always hated his voice; 2) I have always disliked his face; 3) I never liked his songs.

They say Dylan’s an enigma. BUT, Daniel Plainview, in There Will Be Blood by P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis, was also an enigmatic person. But if you think and get ever closer to the main character, you’ll understand some of his behavior. One of many examples: in There Will Be Blood, at some point in a restaurant when he is sitting with his (now deaf) son, he throws a napkin over his face and says some things. It is so completely bizarre that you don’t even know what he’s doing, but when you think about it a little more, you realize he is making sure his son isn’t able to read his lips. Because his next act is to threaten to kill the men at the next table.

In this, I don’t think the writers allowed us to get “closer” as it were, to Dylan, even though I dislike him and probably wouldn’t have wanted to. What I did like about the movie were the small corners that were rebuilt of MacDougal and Minetta Lane, MacDougal and Bleeker Street, and various other spots and nightclubs. But it didn’t explain the legendary hatred between him and Joan Baez. His girlfriend and ultimate wife was relegated to a composite character and is mostly used to chastise him. It wasn’t even clear why he “went guitar” at a folk festival. They’ve written a movie about someone for whom they cannot answer the most critical question asked of any screenwriter, and to a lesser extent, novelist. “What does he want?”

You could sort of say that he loved folk music and wanted to make it in the city, like millions of other people, including yours truly. And instead of facing an avalanche of negativity, just got in. He made it, without doing much but singing his lyrics on an acoustic guitar. But at the end of this journey, after having destroyed his folk music career by going electric, someone says, “You’re free.” But is that what he wanted? And what the hell does that mean?

I think Timothee Chalomet probably deserves a lot of praise for portraying a character who doesn’t really seem to express his wants, his ambition, his drive, his passion. The most memorable line in the movie, for me, when talking about Joan Baez: “She’s pretty.”

Anyway, disclaimer, I knew Dylan’s business manager or catalogue manager for a number of years in the 80s. Naomi Satlzman was her name. She died a couple of years ago. She called him the great poet of the 21st century. She also raised most of his kids. Kept them out of trouble. I think I’d like to see her life and career more than Dylan’s.

It is so interesting when someone who just seems like a throw-away actor — an actor who will probably work but not get many great roles, turns out to be a brilliant writer or director.

But, the thing is, to contradict my calling him a throw-away actor, I did notice Brady Corbet in Melancholia, the Lars Von Trier movie about a very depressed woman’s wedding and her sister’s subsequent nervous breakdown. He had a very small part but it stuck out, sort of like Meryl Streep did in Julia when she only had about 5 seconds of screen time but used it so well it launched her career.

I had no idea what this movie was about. The trailer didn’t give much away but was unusual in that the title moved sideways. And the title is why I went because I’ve always found Brutalism architecture sort of fascinating. Most people are repulsed by it, and it can often resemble those horrible Soviet Union buildings that are cold and intimidating. But Gothic architecture is widely misunderstood too. It’s a matter of seeing, and maybe helping someone else to see.

When it began I was so worried that it was going to be one of those handheld nausea movies where the cinematographer or director are trying to capture the feeling of looking around or being distracted, because it began in almost complete darkness with only flashes of light here and there, and a lot of noise and a lot of people, and then suddenly a breaking into the light and the main character Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), sees the Statue of Liberty but from upside down, just as the poster shows. Laszlo was formerly an architect before the Nazis separated him from his wife (Felicity Jones) in the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. He studied under the Bauhaus. We learn from a letter that his wife has been able to take their niece, who has stopped speaking, to Russia — until then he didn’t know if she had survived.

He makes his way to Philadelphia to stay with a cousin who has Americanized himself: changed his name to Miller, destroyed his accent as thoroughly as he could, and married a Shiksa. He also converted to Catholicism. He sells furniture, but it’s of the old world style and Laszlo calls it ugly. Although it doesn’t get mentioned explicitly, his wife says she knows a man who can fix Laszlo’s nose and he says something about how he broke it in an accident. None of that’s true. She’s simply trying to make him hide his Jewishness. Eventually accuses him of making a pass and she has him kicked out.

In the meantime he has met an extremely wealthy industrialist Van Buren, whose children asked Laszlo to redesign their father’s library. He did, but in his modern way, and initially Harrison Lee Van Buren, Jr. (Guy Pierce) throws him out in a rage. Laszlo has to go shovel coal on a construction site and live in what looks like a homeless shelter run by nuns. When Van Buren’s new library gets a spread in Look Magazine, he tracks him down, brings him to his mansion, helps him get his wife and niece out of Russia, and commissions him to build a cultural center on the top of this pretty magnificent hill on his property.

There are highs and lows and plenty of arguments because what he is building is a massive Brutalist piece of architecture that no one really understands. It’s all concrete. There are no windows (except there are, but just not where you’d expect). And then a catastrophe which forces Laszlo and his wife to find a new way of living in New York City.

That isn’t the ending of course and the movie is long enough that it actually has an intermission, something I had thought I’d never see again since Titanic. There was something really great about an intermission — everybody running to the bathroom or getting more popcorn and food, quietly chatting, while on the screen there is a clock counting down the 15 minutes. Broadway theatre (not musicals) have mostly given up on the intermission, preferring to cut plays like “Our Town” down to 90 minutes or less. I’ll have to think on it some more because I found the feeling of waiting for the second half really interesting.

So on the way home I was in a cab and I thought, “let me look him up and see whatever became of that building.” Many Brutalist buildings have been torn down.

This is one in Orange County, New York which was partially torn down and replaced with this:

basically so that people don’t have to see it.

Anyway, I couldn’t understand why there was no entry for “The Van Buren Cultural Center,” so I finally just looked up the movie and there were no links to any bio for Laszlo Toth. And then as I read, I realized that I wasn’t watching a bio pic like Elvis or Elton John, where the details are fudged but the gist of his life proceeds basically from start to finish. This was an entire work of fiction. But it so well done I actually left there believing that Laszlo Toth was one of the great architects of the Brutalist movement. The last time something like that happened was with “Possession,” by A.S. Byatt, whose depiction of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabelle LaMotte was so full and humanistic, I had to look them up to see if they were actual historical poets. They weren’t. Like this they were entirely the invention of the writer. That’s when I realized that Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce made an absolutely monumental work, as they are saying all over the place. This is well worth seeing in the theatre and in 70mm if they have it. It doesn’t open until January but it’s open in Manhattan, probably to qualify for the Oscars.

I see a lot of theatre but not as much that’s out there, and a lot less than I used to when I worked for a theatrical law firm that represented many of the major Broadway musicals.

I’ve thought a lot about this production and although it got good reviews, I think it misses on several levels.

It chooses to be multi-cultural as you can clearly see from the program, but it’s confusing in the way it’s chosen to be multi-cultural. There is a white family and a black family, but I couldn’t tell (and it’s not in Wilder’s script anyway) whether this was meant to be non-traditional casting or whether they were actually white and black families.

Opera, oddly enough, doesn’t have this problem of non-traditional casting because singing is basically color blind. So with opera, you can have, for example, Leontyne Price singing Madama Butterfly — and no one blinks an eye.

But in this piece — and I read the director’s note carefully — he decided that it shouldn’t be “our town,” but “our universe,” or “our world.” Cast in a way that reflects the audience of today. I don’t object, but it created confusion — primarily because the Gibb family was all black actors and the Webb family were all white. So then I was thinking that the relationship between George and Emily was an interracial one rather than simply non-traditional casting. That, in itself, creates another tension that I don’t think really reflects the play’s theme — which leads to my other problem with this production.

The huge wall at the back. Our Town, though it’s like about 100 years old, is considered avant garde because it’s usually produced on either a bare stage or a blackened stage — with almost no props at all. The opening monologue by The Stage Manager (Jim Parsons) goes on and on about what props and sets you would be looking at if this were a traditional play. But Wilder was a genius, perhaps, and he knew that if he put anything on that stage for the actor to play with or for the audience to look at — other than the actors themselves — you would completely misunderstand the powerful 3rd Act where Emily tries to “relive,” like Scrooge, a moment from her past life. And that’s exactly what happened. Your eye kept being drawn to the massive back wall, which was painted to look like a barn wall. And in one of the most critical scenes — I believe it’s the end of Act I — where Emily says she wrote or received an envelope addressed to, so and so, on such and such street, in the town, in the United States, on Earth, in the Galaxy, in the Milky Way and the Eye of God — this hugely important speech was spoken through a whole in this wall, like the tv show Laugh-In. It’s one of the reasons, in fact, that the production has “partial view” seats, because the side seats, where I was almost sitting, can’t see that far back.

That scene, which establishes the relationship and love between George and Emily, needs to be tender and full blooded and right up front — as close to the front of the stage as possible. They are ostensibly talking to each other from the upper floor windows of their homes, which are next to each other. But there was no chemistry in this production between those two. And they are, ultimately, the main characters — at least the ones we are prone to follow.

The other (probably not the final or only) problem, was the choir master who is meant to be a stand-in for Thorton Wilder himself: an outsider and a homosexual who has probably never acted on his feelings, like Henry James. It’s there in the script, when (I think) Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas) says, “A small town is no place for a man like Mr. Stimson.” He is talking about the reason that almost every young gay man heads to a city. But in this production, the Stimson character is just enraged that his church choir can’t sing. At least that’s all I was able to pick up.

I’ll have to look through all my old Playbill programs — (I have every single one except “Scapin” by Moliere) — to see which of the revivals I saw before. I’ve seen “Our Town” at least 4 times, including my high school production. I won’t say this was the worst, but in my opinion, it was the least coherent and one that completely lost sight of Wilder’s insight: that human beings are too alive to know what life is; that we spend every moment taking it for granted; and that we can only understand life through death; and even after, that we must spend eternity trying to forget it.