Below, Jeremy Irons appears as both Reader and Listener in Charles Sturridge’s 2000 production of Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu for the Beckett on Film project. More information about the composition of this short play — one of Beckett’s most intimate late dramatic works, not dissimilar to a Webern miniature (Stan Gontarski has written that the title suggests a musical impromptu such as those by Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin) — can be found in Adam Seelig’s “Beckett’s Dying Remains,” originally published in Modern Drama.
I’m continuing to enjoy the virtues of streaming Netflix, and over a few hours last night I was delighted to revisit yet another rarity — Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satire of beauty pageants, Smile, written by Jerry Belson and starring Bruce Dern and Barbara Feldon. It was released the same year as another satiric examination of American mores, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and shares with that film a narrative consisting of overlapping story lines and a caustic though affectionate portrait of the American experience, but it never achieved that film’s prominence. Chronicling the five days of a beauty pageant in Santa Rosa, CA, Smile is the product of a peculiar period in American filmmaking in which the assumptions of the American experience — of success, of striving, of optimism — were subjected to close and often withering examination.
It seems like a period piece but holds up surprisingly well; we still have American Idol and all its spinoffs and imitators, after all. It’s also, as the trailer below indicates, about much more than beauty pageants — it’s about the mythology of optimism and success, of competition and democracy. Dern and Feldon, in roles quite unusual for them (Dern plays a car salesman, Feldon a career woman married to a depressive), are memorable; and Broadway choreographer and director Michael Kidd, in a very rare film appearance, turns in a rich portrait of a cynical but clear-eyed and sympathetic choreographer. There’s a Mike Leigh quality to the film that renders it both charming and vicious at the same time. Critic Jeff Stafford writes about the film on the Turner Classic Movie Web site here; the film was also adapted into a Broadway musical by Howard Ashman and Marvin Hamlisch in 1986. It closed after 48 performances.
In the below excerpt from the 1984 BBC series Sea of Faith, presenter Don Cupitt discusses the role of Eastern religion in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought and quotes from the conclusion of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation. And in these quotations, dark as they are, Schopenhauer’s mordant wit is clear:
For more on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, see the hour-long conversation between Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston, posted here.
I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Abu Ghraib photographs of a few years ago. There are a few elements of the story that relate it to drama, not the least of which is that the desecration of the corpses of the enemy dead is a driving factor in one of the greatest Greek tragedies as well. Nor have the political and psychological elements that led to Abu Ghraib been explicitly examined by American dramatists, really. While I can name off the top of my head two or three British dramatists who might examine the dynamics that led to both events, I can name few American dramatists who might do so, and it’s not merely because we are too close in time, as some would have it, to these events. The great American dramatist of the Vietnam War, David Rabe, wrote his fine trilogy of plays about that conflict (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the midst of the war, and they remain powerful today. It is also telling that all three of Rabe’s plays are set in the United States, not Vietnam. Rabe’s explorations were incisive examinations of the cultural, social, and psychological cost of the conflict, not only to combatants but on the home front as well. His conclusions were dark, pessimistic, and brutal, resisting easy answers or a twee unwarranted humanistic optimism, and perhaps these are unacceptable qualities in the new play sector today, even as the sector congratulates itself for its cultural relevance and political acumen.
The painful domestic cost of American brutalist colonialism and imperialism were a concern of novelist William Gaddis as well, especially in his 1985 novel Carpenter’s Gothic, which he discusses in the 1986 interview with Malcolm Bradbury below. A master of dialogue, Gaddis set his novel among five characters in a Hudson River house — the location never extends beyond the confines of the house or its five characters, not unlike many American realist plays — but it describes in intimate detail the means by which the outside world spiritually cripples and physically destroys those in whose name the colonialism and imperialism are being imposed half a world away. The 30-minute interview with Gaddis is a rare treat, and it’s a delight to see the kind of slouched gentlemanliness that is all too rare these days, in the world of literature or anywhere else. I should also note that Gaddis’ The Recognitions and J R are being reissued next month by the Dalkey Archive Press.
In the below excerpt, the Romanian/French playwright Eugene Ionesco discusses his childhood, his early experiences at the theatre, his own particular sense of the absurd, and the close relationship as he sees it between comedy and tragedy:
