The River

Photo: Sara Krulwich

Playwright Jez Butterworth embraces the poetic in his work. In his 2009 epic Jerusalem (seen on Broadway in 2011, with Mark Rylance), he attempted to answer Blake's patriotic decree: "I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land." He ended up producing a play that matched the grandiosity of Blake's verse, which longtime readers of this blog will recall as not being one of my favorites. In his newest play, The River (currently on Broadway at Circle in the Square), both Ted Hughes and W.B. Yeats are name-checked, though its the latter who holds the key to understanding this intimate and beguiling chamber drama.

Post-Tony Snark

The Tony Awards are always my favorite awards ceremony, but this year they really pissed me off. And while I am the first to argue that the Tonys are never an accurate barometer of the broader state of commercial theater in New York or anywhere, I was nevertheless dismayed by the direction last night's broadcast chose to take.

Generally speaking, Broadway has been in a weird place for the past, oh, near-century or so. Once an epicenter for popular culture in this country, Broadway has been struggling to reclaim its legitimacy since at least the 1950s, when rock and roll came along and sent Tin Pan Alley packing. I sympathize--it's tough to be made to feel like you're past your prime. Thus, while I can be snarky and loudly critical sometimes, I'm nevertheless fairly supportive of whatever the theater industry chooses to do to keep musicals alive and relevant, not only because I love and believe in the theater (commercial and otherwise), but because, selfishly, I want to patronize it as much as I possibly can and would have to find something else to do with my life were it to go away.

That being said, last night's ceremony seemed to be imitating the bigger ceremonies--the Academy Awards, specifically--in ways that it shouldn't. I hope that next year's broadcast doesn't think these things were worth revisiting: