The Long and the Short of It

Oscar loves an epic. The Best Picture noms this year include a couple of films that clock in at 3 hours plus—Oppenheimer and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. In his recent films, in fact, Scorsese routinely pushes the 3-hour envelope: The Irishman, Silence, and even the madcap Wolf of Wall Street. If a film takes a mere 95 minutes to make its point, meh, it must not be that good.

Kelli Doherty and La Shawn Banks in Milwaukee Chamber Theater’s Moon for the Misbegotten.

The theater, however, is leaning the other way. In Broadway’s heyday, dramas like Death of a Salesman or Streetcar Named Desire routinely clocked in at three hours. Ditto for the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen. A full, uncut production of Hamlet….well, almost no one stages an uncut Hamlet.

But today the one-act, 90-minute play rules the stage. Theaters today face unprecedented financial strains. Staging short plays cost less than mounting longer ones. Attention spans are shorter. Streaming at home lets us hit "PAUSE” for a snack- or bathroom-break. In the theater, the “pauses” are up to the playwright.

Eugene O’Neill liked to take his time. The Iceman Cometh clocks in a around four hours. Long Days Journey into Night at 3 1/2 hours. And his epic trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, has been staged in a single 4 1/2-hour evening. He did write shorter, one-act plays, but his legacy lies in these later works.

Moon for the Misbegotten, which recently closed a three-week run at the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, is one of O’Neill’s final plays. It’s also one of his shortest major works, usually running around 2 1/2 hours. Written in the early 1940s, it follows James Tyrone (La Shawn Banks), a character imported from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to his family’s farm in Connecticut. It’s run by tenants, Phil Hogan (James Pickering) and his daughter Josie (Kelly Doherty), who hope to buy it from Tyrone. The spine of the story revolves around the possibility of that sale. The meat of the play, however, is in the long scene between Jamie and Josie, a bourbon-fueled baring of souls that is quintessential O’Neill.

James Pickering and La Shawn Banks in Moon for the Misbegotten. Photo by Michael Brosilow

In O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Hickey urges the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon to give up their pipe dreams and see each of their lives in its brutal, dead-end reality. In Moon, Josie and Jamie peel off layer after layer of lies and illusions, leading to a tender meeting of minds that turns out to be a mere rest stop en route to a tragic end.

It takes time. With each revelation comes retrenchment. Both characters cling to their familiar personas even as they try to unearth the flawed human that lies beneath. It is exhausting—for the actors and, yes, the audience—but it is exhilarating as well. When the sun finally shows itself on the horizon, you feel more than the end of a story. You’ve witnessed something profoundly human, and that’s the thrill that a long dramatic journey affords.

50 Years of Pickering

James Pickering in The Milwaukee Rep’s McCarthy in 1990. Photo by Mark Avery.

Speaking of long journeys, James Pickering will celebrate his 50th year on Milwaukee stages later this year. He became a resident actor at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 1974. I first saw him perform as Tybalt in The Rep’s 1982 production of Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t get to write about him until 1990, when I reviewed The Rep’s 1990 production of McCarthy, Jeff Goldsmith’s play about good old anti-communist Joe.

Shortly after the review appeared, Pickering wrote me a personal, hand-written thank you note. He doesn’t read reviews while he is still performing, he explained, but someone had told him that it was a positive review. He thanked me and told me how much the role meant to him. It was a gesture I’ve never forgotten.

He’s an actor of incredible facility and range. Over the years, I’ve heard him find music in the spare dialogue of Harold Pinter and watched him create the entire population of a small Texas town (Greater Tuna). He’s done Shakespeare and Shaw, Moliere and Mamet. He is a Milwaukee treasure, and his kind letter testifies to the power of theater that is grounded in the community. He’s always been partial to Irish-inflected roles, and it’s a joy to see him sparkle with wry, gentle malevolence in Moon for the Misbegotten. I—and is home town—look forward to his next role.

American Symphony

Suleika Jaouad and Jon Batiste in American Symphony.

The “symphony” of American Symphony refers to Jon Batiste’s ambitious magnum opus, a orchestral composition that attempts to capture the spiritual and musical breadth of America. But Matthew Heineman’s documentary is “symphonic” long before we see Batiste stroll down the aisle of Carnegie Hall to introduce his work.

Focusing on the year prior to the symphony’s premiere in September 2022, Heineman’s film—streaming now on Netflix—is itself symphonic: expansive, yet detailed; celebratory, yet rooted in the stuff of the everyday.

It is American in Walt Whitman’s sense—it contains multitudes. It focuses on two people (Batiste and his partner Suleika Jaouad) but embraces the full spectrum of a year in their lives—the painful, the mundane, the ecstatic. While working on his “American Symphony” they learned that Jaouad’s leukemia has returned after being in remission for over a decade. They also learned that Batiste had been nominated for 11 Grammy awards. At one point in the film, Jaouad says, “I feel like we’re living a life of contrasts.” It’s to Heineman’s credit that he embraces those contrasts and often jarringly sets them side by side.

So we see Batiste’s triumphant performance at the Grammy’s through Suleika’s eyes, watching at home as she recovers from a bone marrow transplant. We see his magnetism and confidence in rehearsal with his musicians, then see him sprawled out on a bed, his head covered with a pillow during a phone call with his therapist. We watch him conduct a final triumphant chord of the symphony, then cut to the hospital room conversation where they learn that Jaouad’s transplant has been a success, but that her chemotherapy will need to continue “indefinitely.”

Heineman’s previous work covered different kinds of challenges and contrasts: the world of the drug trade and Mexican cartels, anti-ISIS activists in Syria, the challenges of reforming America’s health care system. But like any good storyteller, he knows how to find the profound in the particular and the everyday. Here, the tension between the couple’s spirit—his buoyant energy, her gentle grace—is a moving and lovely story for our time.

Tom Shales

Tom Shales wrote about television for 33 years, but since he wrote for the Washington Post (mostly in the era before easy online access), I knew him primarily through radio. For two decades, he had a regular Friday slot on Morning Edition reviewing movies. They were, as the fund-drive solicitors like to call them, driveway moments.

Tom Shales

There are two kinds of good movie and television reviewers, I suppose. Ones that offer savvy, educated insights into the artistry behind a film and celebrate genius and innovation. And others who are just a helluva lotta fun to read. Shales was both. He justly celebrated now revered television series like Twin Peaks, The Wire and The Sopranos. And he wrote about blockbusters with an acerbic wit and dazzling sense of style.

Perhaps you can beg or borrow to subscribe to access the Washington Post website and zip around his body of work. If not, you can get a hefty sample at a section of RogerEbert.com called Tom Shales at Large. Written in the moment, his work is nonetheless worth looking back on. His takedowns of Friends and Gray’s Anatomy will warm the cockles of your curmudgeonly heart. But he had a knack for celebrating the weird and original as well, as in his appreciation of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Lynch has a gift for turning the everyday and ordinary into images that are mischievously sinister. The changing of a lonely traffic light over an intersection seems darkly portentous. When the sheriff and the FBI man walk into a bank's conference room, they see a deer's head lying on the table. "Twin Peaks" is "Mayberry RFD" as it might have been written by Franz Kafka and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Clues pile up, characters fade in and out of the shadows, and the two-hour premiere ends without resolving the mystery of Laura's death. Even so, "Twin Peaks" is one of the most intoxicating combinations of grimness and giggles ever made for television, or for anything else. (Washington Post, September 7, 1989)

On radio, his rhetorical marksmanship was both tempered and enhanced by a just-the-facts vocal drone that gave his brickbats bite and added gravitas to his acclaim. Click the link below to hear his wonderful celebration of the first Star Wars movie. He loved it so much he ran out of real words to describe it and just made some up. On NPR in 1977, he called the film “unquestionably splendibulous” and “indububitably fantasmical.” Right back at ya, Tom.

Toby Keith

I don’t follow the current country music scene and I barely knew of Toby Keith. But his recent death—at age 62 from stomach cancer—touched me via Stephen Colbert’s tribute to him on the February 7th Late Show. Colbert met Keith back in the snarky old days of The Colbert Report. Looking back on it today, it seems that his interviews with Keith were instrumental in persuading Colbert to turn down the snark a bit and not prejudge his guests. Their friendship eventually led to Colbert inducting Keith into The Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. It’s a sweet tribute, and it might even make you seek out a Toby Keith song or two. I know I did.

The Friday Five will return on February 23rd. Be well.