Harry Heuser
. . . keeping up with the out-of-date
Books related to American and British Radio (1920s to early 1970s)
Claudette Colbert memorabilia
Collecting: Claudette Colbert—The 1930s
Collecting: Claudette Colbert—The 1960s and After
VD campaign posters (1946)
Cinegram and Cinegram Preview
Photographs and autographs: Radio celebrities
Digitized radio recordings
Graduate writing (PhD)
Eulogies and Unmarked Graves: Plotting and Character Disposal in Trollope's Barsetshire Novels
Finders Keepers: A Moment of 'Truth' in Donne's Third Satire
Nominal Control: Dickens's Little Dorrit and the Challenges of Onomancy
A Steinean Portrait
A Trollope among the Brahmins? Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham and the Reform of the Fallen Novel
Umbauen, Umgewöhnen, Umdenken: Romanticism as Translation
A Wildean Dialogue
Wood for the Fire-side? Melville's Redburn and Its Sense of Audience
Graduate writing (MA)
Meister Remastered: Carlyle's Interpretation of the Translator's Role
Escape Artist: Brecht's Pursuit of Galilei
Filling/Falling in the Gender Gap: Jane Eyre's Early Readers
The Framing of Frankenstein
Irony Trade: Reader-Responsibilities in Heart of Darkness
Raising Daedalus: A Close Reading of Joyce's Portrait
"A Sinister Back-Cloth": The Fabrics of Heart of Darkness
The Tempered Text: Three Roads to Udolpho
Windows in a Poet's House: Observations on Kafka's Prozess
Undergraduate writing
Child in the Hood: Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1931)
Even in Arcadia: The Dame Who Spoiled Our Daily Bread
Ladies in Loco-motion: Trains in Movies Starring Claudette Colbert
One Hundred and Four Degrees of Separation: Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait
A [Third-Class] Cabin in the Sky
Curated Exhibitions
(Im)memorabilia: Ephemerality, Resonance and the Collector's Item
(Im)memorabilia: Introduction
(Im)memorabilia: Idle Matter/Latent Meaning
(Im)memorabilia: Moving Pictures/Still Images
(Im)memorabilia: Radio Ties/Wireless Networks
Recapturing Mighty Joe Young: The Movie! The Memory!! The Make-believe!!!
Recapturing Mighty Joe Young: Introduction
The Mighty Joe Young Album at Aberystwyth University
Ray Harryhausen: Influence and Inspiration
Mighty Joe Young: Cast and Crew
Mighty Joe Young: Promotion and Propaganda
1940s Animation
Recapturing Mighty Joe Young: Drawing and Animation Workshops
The Raymond Durgnat Bequest
"To hell with nature!"': A Reappraisal of Charles Tunnicliffe Prints
"To hell with nature!"': Introduction
Home: Tunnicliffe's Autobiographical Etchings
Acclaim: Tunnicliffe's 'Fine Prints'
Survival: Tunnicliffe as Illustrator
Legacy: Tunnicliffe as 'Bird Artist'
Travelling Through: Landscapes/Landmarks/Legacies
Travelling Through: Introduction
Travelling Through: Platform Two (1985), Steve Whitehead (b. 1960)
Travelling Through: Banditti on the Bank of a River (c. 1650 – 1660), Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673)
Travelling Through: NYC, Travelling Through Me (1985 – 2018)
Unmaking the Modern: The Work of Stanley Anderson
Unmaking the Modern: Introduction
Stanley Anderson, Critic of Modernity
Disasters of the Great War
Tradition, Not Fashion
What Matters and What Sells
The Last of Their Kind
Overview of current teaching
Adaptation: Versions, Revisions and Cultural Renewal (Year 2)
Artworld (MA Fine Art)
Artworld (MA Art History)
Curating an Exhibition
Dissertation Preparation and Professional Practice for Students of Art History
Gothic Imagination (returns in 2021)
Looking into Landscape
Postmodernism and Contemporary Art
blog (broadcastellan)
broadcastellan: All blog entries
Posted on 24th May 2014 15th Oct 2020 by Harry Heuser
One Tough Act One to Follow
Theater ought to make for good theater. Noises Off. A Chorus of Disapproval. Stuff like that. Sometimes, though, it doesn't. And it doesn't because it doesn't quite become stuff. And when it ain't stuff, it fails to matter. The Lincoln Center production of Act One drives that home. And what a slow drive it is. You just sit there, or I did, thinking: when will it stop? Incredulous, I kept checking my watch to see whether time had stood still and I was stuck in the mind of a playwright who hadn't quite stopped revising, who hadn't quite figured out just where to go and how to end. And the end, when it came at last, couldn't have been less of one. You could have spelled it out in six letters. THE END. It'd be quicker that way. But that doesn't make an ending feel like any conclusion to draw from.
Granted, the question of how and where to finish is always a tough one when it comes to autobiography, a life unfolding and not wrapped up retrospectively. If only Moss Hart had done the adapting of his 1959 autobiography, the play might have had, if not necessarily a structure but at least an urgency, a currency that this nostalgic exercise in pointlessness woefully lacks. Instead, we end up with an adaptation that, in its second act, is mostly about the act of adapting.
That's just the problem with the second half of James Lapine's reworking of Hart's book. It tells – rather than compellingly dramatizes – the story of how Hart and Kaufman collaborated on Once in a Lifetime (1930). Watching two guys sitting around drafting a play isn't nearly as riveting as experiencing that play or the evolution of it. And, to me, at least, it didn't help matters that, several years ago, I saw a lifeless National Theatre production of Once in a Lifetime, starring David Suchet. What should have been sheer madcap felt drowsily close to one nightcap too many.
"The theatre is not so much a profession as a disease, and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifelong infection," Hart wrote. It's a line from Act One, the book, that makes it into Act One, the play, and it makes you aware how little blood there is in the latter. It is altogether too glossy to make us believe in the curative potency of make-believe, felt by someone brought up in "unrelieved poverty," as Hart put it. Such urgency could turn theater-crazy Aunt Kate, charmingly though she is played by Andrea Martin, into someone akin to Blanche DuBois.
If the play, in this production, at least, isn't quite a cure for drama dependency, that may be because it isn't sufficiently catching to be an antidote to theater madness. It has a cuteness about it that is merely subcutaneous. It doesn't prick you, or hook you, or infuse you with the passion of which it can only speak in borrowed words.
CategoriesAdaptation, Theatre TagsAdaptation, New York City, Theater
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