Barefoot in the Park, Boy Meets World, Jewish Media, and other seemingly unrelated thoughts9/17/2018
So, remember the culture wars of the 1990s?
I, personally, was not old enough to know that they were happening, but I was a (very) young consumer of media in the late 1990s, and I was cognizant enough to be aware of some of the results. One side effect of the culture wars was that children's television became very overtly moral. Take, for example, "Teacher's Bet," season one, episode of eight, of the 1990s/2000s hit, family-friendly sitcom Boy Meets World. In this particular episode, Corey, Sean, and Topanga are reading The Diary of a Young Girl in Mr. Feeny's class and learning all of the lessons I am sure you are aware come naturally with learning about Anne Frank. Meanwhile, Sean's older brother Eric is dating an Asian-American. At no point in the episode is her race discussed or pointed out or was it made to seem weird that Eric was dating a girl with a different racial background, and we actually see multiple mixed race couples through out the seven seasons of the show, which is pretty cool. Anyway, in the episode, Sean comes home from school to find Eric comforting his girlfriend who has just been made fun of for her race. They don't go into details about what was said, but the point is made- it is never okay to make fun of someone because of their race, religion, ethnicity, etc. The kids learn about it at school via Anne Frank's diary, and they learn about it at home when it becomes clear that the world, unfortunately, hasn't moved past prejudice. This motif of the lessons being learned in Mr. Feeny's classroom being unusually applicable in real life continues through out the series, and basically never happens in real life. All this is to say that this is 100% not how I felt reading Barefoot in the Park. Okay. Maybe 100% is too strong. But at least 97%. It's not because Barefoot in the Park is unrealistic. It actually struck me as more plausible than many of Neil Simon's wild farces. It's just become such a period piece, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I love when contemporary plays become period pieces over the natural course of time. Reading them is how I imagine architects or archaeologists feel when they discover rare cultural artifacts that are really just bowls. Sometimes when I'm at the Met or the Natural History Museum and I see all the bowls or mortars and pestles or what have you I think about the woman (or man, but let's be honest and just give the credit for early man's survival largely to our female ancestors) who made it purely for functionality. If only we could tell her that the bowl she fed her baby mashed up berries from is in one of the most important cultural institutions in the world. She would probably laugh. Anyway, Neil Simon's multiple Tony-nominated, long running Barefoot in the Park is not quaint in the way a handmade bowl is. It's just an image of a different time. The play takes place over the course of five days in the lives of newlywed couple Paul and Corie Brattner, who live on the sixth floor of a Brownstone on East 48th Street. Let's unpack this, shall we? First of all, Paul and Corie are delightful characters. Some people think Neil Simon doesn't write great roles for women, and while I agree that some of his female characters are definitely dated, I think Corie is the best part of this play. Before her first entrance, the stage directions describing the apartment read: "For all the room's drabness and coldness, there is great promise here. Someone with taste, imagination, and personality can make this that perfect love nest we all dream about. That person is now putting the key in the door." What a gift those stage directions are to any actor tackling this role (she writes, as a pretty firm Not Performer). Even though we continue to learn about Corie and all the wonderful quirks of her personality for the next three acts, these three sentences are arguably more than enough. Her husband, Paul, she describes as a "rising young attorney" and he is, naturally, her foil. Where Corie is spontaneous, silly, and not always thoughtful, Paul is very much rigid, careful, and stable. And charming, of course. The match doesn't make no sense at all. What DOES make no sense at all to me, a reader of the 21st century, is that Corie and Paul are 26-year-old newlyweds who live in an apartment below 125th Street and only pay $125 dollars a month in rent. I could cry. I do know plenty of people that live sixth-floor walkups, though I can state with confidence they are paying more than $125 a month. Other than that their relationship reminds me of some of the ones I witness in my daily life. I'm starting to reach that really fun phase of adulthood where I increasingly find myself to be the only single person in a group (which reminds me- if you aren't following progress on the female lead revival of Company I don't know what musical theatre-less rock you live under) and many of my friends are going through similar early struggles as Paul and Corie. Basically, even 55 years after Barefoot in the Park premiered on Broadway, it is still hard to be young and in love, and the famous fight of Act II, Scene II is probably still being butchered in high school acting classes across the English speaking world. Like many of Neil Simon's best plays, Barefoot in the Park was inspired by his own life, which is probably what helps make the relationships and quarrels still seem so real to a contemporary audience. The New York Times has a beautiful series called "The Last Word" where they interview obituary-worthy individuals and only release the video after their death. Will I ever be unconcerned enough with my mortality (or famous enough) to record a video like that? Probably not, on either account. Anyway, it's a really lovely video and it's wonderful to hear Neil Simon talk about the early days of his marriage to his first wife Joan, the inspiration for Corie and the love of his life.
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While we're on the topic of The New York Times and Neil Simon, I also love this article by Amanda Peet about her experience starring alongside my good friend and collaborator Patrick Wilson in the 2006 Broadway revival (and flop) of Barefoot in the Park. It's a fun read. I could go on, but I feel like in recent weeks everything worth saying has been said about Neil Simon. I know that reading his work today he came seem, as I said earlier, quaint, or even unoriginal, but that's only because he laid the groundwork for so much of the work we are now inundated with. He perfected the New York City living room comedy. Without the critical and commercial popularity of his plays we wouldn't really have living room comedies at all, or the sitcoms they inspired, like Seinfeld or Friends. We also wouldn't have literary managers banging their heads on their desks across the country at every living room comedy that comes across their desk. Neil Simon, along with Woody Allen, brought Jewish neuroticism to the stage and to mainstream media, but with much more light-heartedness (and without the child sexual abuse) than his bespectacled counterpart. Maybe it's the High Holidays or living on the Upper West Side or having spent another summer at a Jewish sleepaway camp, but I've been consuming a lot of Jewish culture recently. I'm ten pages from finishing Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, on Saturday I went to The Jewish Museum for the first time, I spent all day Sunday at the JCC, and I went to three different congregations for Rosh Hashanah last week. I'm going to two more for Yom Kippur. I'm basically a semi-professional Jewish person at this point. I think this post has gone on long enough and I'm rambling, but I think I'm going for a casual vibe with this site anyway. Is it working for you, whoever you are? My decidedly non-academic approach to talking about plays I didn't encounter in academia. Let me know, if you're feeling friendly. And if you want to read along, next up I am tackling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. I know. I read Hamlet in three different courses but never encountered Stoppard's take on what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were up to while Hamlet was freaking out. This should be fun.
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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