the new york observer's spring arts preview

ART by Robert J. Hughes, Phoebe Hoban and Rachel Corbett • THEATER by Jesse Oxfeld and Robert J. HughesFILM by Daniel D’Addario • OPERA by Zachary Woolfe • MUSIC by Daniel D’Addario • DANCE by Robert Gottlieb and Guelda Voien

BOOKS by Anne Diebel, Michael H. Miller and David Freedlander

Blonde? Maybe. Dumb? Hardly.

Telecharge.com or 212.239.6200BornYesterdayOnBroadway.com

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The exhibition is made possible in part by Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Chilton, Jr.The multimedia tour is made possible by The Jonathan & Faye Kellerman Foundation.The Audio Guide program is made possible by Bloomberg.

John Monteleone, Archtop Guitar, Sun King model (serial number 195), detail, Islip, New York, 2000, Private Collection. Photograph © Archtop History, Inc. from the book ARCHTOP GUITARS: The Journey from Cremona to New York by Rudy Pensa and Vincent Ricardel.

multimedia tour app at metmuseum.org Through July 4

GUITAR HEROES

Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York

observer.com | the new york observer2 March 14, 2011

spring arts preview

A little snow never kept a New Yorker away from an essential cultural event, but we could be for-given if this winter’s blizzards had us home reading old books and watching DVDs instead of wading through snow banks in Chelsea in search of the next John Currin. Now comes

the thaw, and we return to the theaters and galleries and bookshops to identify the latest genius and avoid the new-est dreck.

So it may be counterintuitve that what most intrigues this spring, in the midst of so much emerging talent, is a book by a dead guy—one he never got around to finishing. Brilliant “chunklets” (as he called them) of David Foster Wallace’s fi-nal, unfinished novel, The Pale King, have been popping up here and there for years. Inside, David Freedlander reports on “The David Foster Wallace Industry,” the sprawling field of cultural output, commentary and reputation-mongering that has bloomed in the wake of his 2008 suicide.

While Wallace may have been the novelist whose work prepared us for the coming of the Internet—an endnote, af-ter all, is sort of like a hyperlink—Blake Butler is a novelist in and of the Internet. Michael H. Miller talks to him about his new novel, There Is No Year, and the group blog he runs for writers, HTML Giant.

Tom Stoppard and Tony Kushner—theatergoers could hardly ask for more enticing playwrights—both have work in production this spring. We talk to Michael Greif, direc-tor of Mr. Kushner’s new play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scrip-tures, and Raul Esparza, one of the stars of the revival of Mr. Stoppard’s Arcadia.

Woody Allen, last heard from in September, returns with another of his European efforts, Midnight in Paris. Those who liked his trip to Spain in Vicki Cristina Barcelona may be interested in the evolution of Chris Messina, a congenial cuckold in that film, who tells Daniel D’Addario about his ef-forts to shed his nice-guy persona with his upcoming role in Monogamy.

Though they proliferate in cinema, nice guys can be hard to find in the real world, as recent events in Wisconsin have shown. The Metropolitan Opera, as Zachary Woolfe explains, is facing labor anxieties of its own, but these don’t diminish the allure of the company’s exciting spring lineup.

Yet what good is a new season without a new set of anxiet-ies? What are we missing? Or, more important, what should we be missing? Spring lasts only three months, and we can’t read, watch or look at everything. So we’ve tried to pick the best of the best. And as for the worst? Well, if we stay in, it’s not because of the weather.

—The Editors

Spring Brings a King

Property from the James and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection (#2510)22 March

Viewing: 18–22 March Anita Mehta [email protected]+1 212 636 2190

Indian and Southeast Asian Art (#2425)22 March


South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art (#2424)23 March


Japanese and Korean Art (#2426)23 March

Viewing: 18–22 March Japanese:Katsura Yamaguchi [email protected]+1 212 636 2160 Korean: Heakyum Kim [email protected]+1 212 636 2160

MagnificentQing Monochrome Porcelains and Earlier Works of Art from the Gordon Collection (#2516)24 March

Viewing: 18–23 March Michael Bass [email protected]+1 212 636 2180

Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art Including Property from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections(#2518 & 2427) 25 March

Viewing: 18–23 March Christopher Engle [email protected] Bass [email protected]+1 212 636 2180

christies.com

Auction CalendarNew York · Asian Art Week 2011

CHRISTIE’S NEW YORK 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020Join us for the presale exhibitions and auctions, all of which are free and open to the public

Monday–Saturday 10am–5pm and Sunday 1pm–5pm.For specific viewing times, please call +1 212 636 2000.

REGISTRATION IS EASYRegister to bid in person or by telephone by calling our Bid Department at +1 212 636 2437. If you are unable

to attend the auction, visit christies.com to arrange for absentee and online bids. Also available on christies.com are the international auction calendar, online catalogues, and a full listing of upcoming valuation days around the globe.

The Beauty of Art: Paintings and Calligraphy by Shi Lu from the Private Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth (Special Exhibition) 15–31 March

Viewing: 15–31 March Elizabeth Hammer [email protected]+1 212 636 2193

An Exceptionally Rare Blue-Glazed Flask-Form Vase · Qianlong six-character seal mark in underglaze blue and of the period (1736–1795) · Estimate on request

UNCOVER THE BEAUTY OF ASIA


spring arts preview l Table of Contents

cover illustration byKyle T. Webster

the arts: Who Matters now

A baker’s dozen of the season’s rising stars.By Robert J. Hughes

Judy chicago, MaD and angry

With a new show at MAD, the feminist, political artist is thriving at a time in which feminism and political art aren’t.By Phoebe Hoban

alexander McQueen, suddenly

After his suicide, the Met scrambled to salute the Brit designer swiftly.By Rachel Corbett

raul esparza’s Formula

The actor has the brains to play Stoppard.By Jesse Oxfeld

Directed suicideAt the Public, Michael

Greif helms Tony Kushner’s newest play.By Robert J. Hughes

When nice becomes vice

The hardening of Chris Messina.By Daniel D’Addario

anxiety takes the stage

Labor pains and other problems will plague opera’s spring season.By Zachary Woolfe

the last DanceThe Merce

Cunningham troop, on a farewell tour at the Joyce, unearths a rare work.By Guelda Voien

Filling your Dance card

What to see this spring.By Robert Gottlieb

Half an orphanA poet loses her

mother.By Anne Diebel

virtual literary colossus

Blake Butler and what happens when a novelist lives on the Internet.By Michael H. Miller

the David Foster Wallace industry

Dead author breeds big business.By David Freedlander

What we’re most looking forward to this season:TOP

10LISTS 8 Visual Arts16 Theater22 Film

26 Opera30 Music34 Books

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Support for Great Performers is provided by:

Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser

The Florence Gould Foundation

The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc.

The Shubert Foundation

Logicworks

Bank of China, U.S.A.

Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation

Great Performers Circle

Chairman’s Council

Friends of Lincoln Center

Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts

Corporate support provided by

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Endowment support is provided by UBS

Official sponsors

Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center, Inc.

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A vibrant musical kaleidoscope

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JORDI SAVALLTHE ROUTE OF THE NEW WORLD:FROM SPAIN TO MEXICO New York premiere

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Gertrude Stein

Photos: Alice Tully Hall: Nicole Szalewski; Lortie: © Elias; Savall: David Ignaszewski; Les Arts Florissants: © Guy Vivien; Stein: Donated by Corbis

LOUIS LORTIE PLAYS LISZTCOMPLETE ANNÉES DE PÈLERINAGEPianist Louis Lortie performs Liszt’s monumental Années de pèlerinage.

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SONGS OF WARS I HAVE SEENHEINER GOEBBELS New York premiere

Music director Heiner Goebbels returns to Lincoln Center withan innovative program that features his visionary compositionwith spoken selections of a memoir by Gertrude Stein.

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London Sinfonietta Orchestra of the Age of EnlightenmentAnu Tali, conductor Sound Intermedia, sound projection Heiner Goebbels, conception, music, and director

ALL–HEINER GOEBBELS PROGRAMSampler Suite, from Surrogate CitiesSongs of Wars I Have Seen

Jordi Savall’s vibrant, revealing take on centuries of musical and cultural history from both sides of the Atlantic.

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spring arts preview l Rising Stars

B y R o B e R t J. H u g H e s

With warmer weather comes the heat. Here are some of the fresher faces in theater, opera, dance, the visual arts, film and television—the ones people will be talking about this spring.

David Lomeli, singerNemorino, The Elixir of LoveNew York City OperaMarch 22 to April 9

In this production of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love, the action is trans-ported, illogically but (perhaps) in-ventively, from Europe to the Amer-ican Southwest in the 1950s. Think soda jerks, a convertible, a roadside diner. The young Mexican tenor Da-vid Lomeli makes his debut with the company as something of the ersatz cowboy on the scene. He’ll get to sing one of opera’s great show-stoppers, “Una furtive lagrima (One furtive tear),” a soaring aria that rarely fails to bring down the house. Mr. Lom-eli was born in Mexico City and won notice for taking first prize in Plá-cido Domingo’s 2006 Operalia com-petition. He’s the latest tenor—in the tradition of opera-geek idols Ro-lando Villazón or Juan Diego Florez, not to mention Domingo himself—to bring Latin ardor to the stage.

Holliday Grainger, actressLucrezia Borgia, The BorgiasBegins April 3, Showtime

Lucrezia Borgia. Beloved femme fatale of history and a strategic poi-

soner long before Connie Corleone, she’s played by the demure-looking Holliday Grainger in cable’s upcom-ing bloody historical thriller. Show-time had a hit presenting a sexed-up version of Henry VIII and his wives with The Tudors, so imagine what it will do with the infamous and even more dastardly Borgia clan of Renais-sance Italy. The series chronicles the rise and corrupt papacy of Rodrigo Borgia (Jeremy Irons). But the whole family is on hand, including Rodri-go’s illegitimate daughter, played by Ms. Grainger. She stars with—and pursues in the show—Robert Pattin-son, best known as brooding vam-pire Edward Cullen of the sadly un-killable Twilight franchise.

Seth Numrich, actorAlbert, War HorseLincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater Opens April 14

Few actors get steady work, nev-er mind right out of school. On that front, Seth Num-rich is downright annoying. He plays Albert, the young boy who’s the

owner of a battle-tested horse in the new play War Horse, at Lincoln Cen-ter Theater. He’s pretty fresh out of Juilliard, and he comes directly to War Horse from The Merchant of Venice, where he played Lorenzo, opposite Al Pacino. Heady company. War Horse, which begins previews at the Vivian Beaumont March 15, was a massive critical hit in Britain. It’s about a beloved horse sold to the cavalry and shipped to France in World War I, and the young boy (Mr. Numrich) who follows him blindly to the front. And, oh, for “Lion King” fans, the horses are played by giant pup-pets….

Cory Arcangel, artist“Pro Tools” The Whitney Museum of American ArtMay 26 to Sept. 11

The generation of people who grew up on video games, where a constantly shifting landscape is the only landscape,

see the world differently from ones with views shaped by movies and television. Digital artist Cory Ar-cangel, whose art work and perfor-mances use machines, the Internet and games, is one of the former. The popular and playful artist, who showed at the 2010 Whitney Bienni-al, is back at the museum again this spring, this time with a show, “Pro Tools.” Mr. Arcangel is an interactive artist—he allows people to access his code, he leaves bread crumbs of himself on the Internet—and one who’s immersed himself in an im-mersive game, creating art that re-flects back our own obsessions. Re-cent sculptures include humidifiers filled with Coke Zero and an instal-lation featuring the entire history of video bowling games, from Atari 2600 to Playstation II.

Joyce Yang, pianistAlice Tully Hall May 5

When pianist Joyce Yang stepped in for the superstar pianist Lang Lang, who had fallen ill before a con-cert in Buffalo, N.Y., at the end of Jan-uary, she had one of those “star is born” moments. Buffalo Philharmon-ic conductor JoAnn Falletta dubbed

her “the real deal,” and usually per-snickety reviewers praised her

muscular power and charis-ma, plus her playing of Ra-chmaninoff’s second piano

concerto (a toughie, and a Lang Lang special-

ty). Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, but now living here, she

is known for credit-ing her teachers, in-

cluding her (Tiger?) aunt, with much of her success. A pianist since age 4, and win-ner of the Silver Medal in the 12th Van Cliburn Inter-national Competition, she makes her New York solo re-cital debut May 5.

Paul Appleby, tenorBrighella, Ariadne auf NaxosThe Metropolitan Opera, May 7, 10 and 13

The world is al-ways on the look-out for the next tenor. Well, the op-era world, anyway. Paul Appleby may be it. The young Indiana native, al-ready something of a heartthrob to the Mozart set, won the Metropoli-tan Opera’s National Council Audi-tions, and is making his Met debut in May. He’s Brighella in Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’ brilliant combination of opera spoof and operatic sublimity. (The plot goes something like this: At the home of Vienna’s wealthiest man, an opera and a burlesque show are staged simultaneously.) New Yorkers have seen and heard Mr. Appleby before—he recently made his recital debut at Alice Tully Hall, singing Shubert’s “Die Schöne Mullerin” to excellent reviews. The tenor has a rich, beau-tiful voice that’s both commanding and intimate, and he is at the begin-ning of a possibly brilliant career.

Jez Butterworth, playwright, JerusalemMusic Box TheatreOpens April 21

Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the lead character in this Jez Butterworth play, is a washed-up daredevil mo-

torcyclist who lives in a trailer in the woods, drinking and drug-ging heavily and ranting about the world. American audiences might not know the work of play-wright Mr. Butterworth, unless they caught his Parlor Song, which eviscerated suburbia, in New York a couple of years ago. But this com-edy was a smash success in Lon-don when it opened in 2009 (win-ning three “Best Play of the Year” awards and the accolade “A Bucolic Noir” from the Sunday Times). The magnetic actor Mark Rylance is re-peating on Broadway the Olivier Award–winning role he played in London, of a ferocious, angry anti-hero on speed.

Kristina Hanna, dancerKeigwin + Company, EXITThe Joyce TheaterMarch 8–13

If this dance company sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because it is best known for staging Fash-ion Week 2010’s sparkly opening extravaganza around the Lincoln Center Fountain. Director Larry Keigwin hired one of the company stars, Kristina Hanna, right out of Juilliard a couple of years ago, and since then she’s become known for intelligent and vibrant perfor-mances with his contemporary dance troupe. She has the ability to stand out in a crowd—no small feat among dancers, though she has said that Mr. Keigwin encour-ages his dancers to be “individual movers.” She’s appearing, in black leather, in Mr. Keigwin’s new eve-ning-length work, EXIT (which, un-til recently, had the more tempting title Dark Habits). It’s inspired by the worlds of fashion and drama, and features music by Chris Lan-caster and Jerome Begin, played live at the Joyce Theater.

The Arts: Who Matters NowA baker’s dozen of the season’s rising stars

Joyce Yang.

Kristina Hanna.

Cory Arcangel .

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, actorJaime Lannister, Game of ThronesBegins April 17, HBO

Villain alert. Epic-fantasy fans are juiced for the premiere of Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of the best-selling A Song of Fire and Ice novels by George R.R. Martin. The lush big-budget series features kingdoms vying for power in an en-chanted land, and was adapted by David Benioff (a novelist who wrote the screenplay for The Kite Runner,

among others) and D.B. Weiss. The cast includes some known actors, but it’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who’s likely to make a splash, as the im-pulsive, arrogant and, best of all for cable, amoral knight Jaime Lannis-ter. Coster-Waldau, a Danish actor, starred in the short-lived Fox series New Amsterdam. As HBO knows, it’s the bad guys fans remember most.

Freida Pinto, actressMiral, directed by Julian SchnabelOpens March 25

So, far Freida Pinto has been the definition of a one-hit wonder. Of course, that one hit was the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, in which she was one of the three ac-tresses to play urchin-turned-bombshell Latika. It was her first major movie; she was previously known for for-eign television roles and for her years as a model in India. But since Slumdog, she’s filmed several mov-ies, and the first one, Miral, opens this month; in it, she stars as an orphaned Pal-estinian girl pulled into the Arab-Israeli con-flict. Miral is directed by artist Mr. Schnabel, based

on the book of the same name by Rula Jebreal, the woman he left his wife for in a recent art-world scan-dal. Ms. Pinto has a fighting chance of going two-for-two: Mr. Schnabel’s last film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was nominated for Best Picture, and Miral is produced by kingmaker (or queenmaker) Harvey Weinstein.

Kate Royal, sopranoEuridice, Orfeo ed EuridiceMetropolitan Opera, April 29 to May 14Carnegie Hall, May 20

The English lyric soprano Kate Royal has had her Beatles moment: She sang for Paul McCartney (on

the recording of his “Ecce Cor Meum”). But now she’s getting

her New York moment with her Metropolitan Opera de-

but as Euridice in the beauti-ful Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Although the opera stage—in particu-lar, the Met—marks the big leagues for rising sing-ers, Royal is also keeping her schedule busy with recitals. She dedicates about five months a year to the more intimate

performance form, and

is singing at Carnegie Hall in May, in a wide-ranging recital of songs by Schumann, Ravel and many others. It’s drawn from her new recording, A Lesson in Love, out March 8.

Maira Kalman, artist The Jewish Museum March 11 to July 31

Ms. Kalman has already been quite successful, in some arenas. Her covers for The New Yorker magazine and her line of bags and rain gear for Kate Spade have made her style more recognizable than her name. This survey may change that. The Israeli-born “narrative illustrator” presents 100 original paintings, fea-turing her trademark quizzical peo-ple and pets, plus her magazine cov-ers (“Reading, Riting and Ritalin” and “NewYorkistan,” among them), in an installation that includes piles of objects she collects. It’s titled

“Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World).”

Athina Rachel Tsangari, directorThe Museum of Modern Art CinemaMarch 31

Ms. Tsangari’s debut feature, The Slow Business of Going, a sci-fi road movie filmed in nine cities around the world, had a curious distinc-tion: It was voted one of “the best undistributed films” in a Village Voice poll. Her newest, Attenberg, is featured in the Film Society of Lin-coln Center’s New Directors/New Films series this spring (And will be

shown April 2 there). It’s the story of an ill architect who’s come home to a dismal industrial town to die, and his daughter, who is busy exploring her sexual orientation. The film has been controversial in the director’s native Greece for its frank discus-sion of sex, death and parenthood. fr

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observer.com | the new york observer March 14, 2011 7

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Watermill Quintet, Guggenheim Museum, March 13

Robert Wilson, the mind behind Einstein on the Beach and that ill-conceived Brad Pitt Vanity Fair cov-er a few years back, takes a break from his peripatetic opera-director lifestyle to present Watermill Quin-tet. Assembled by five less-well-known directors and choreogra-phers, the work was subject to Mr. Wilson’s mentorship and curation. Though it’s difficult to say what that means, sight unseen, the work promises to integrate performance art with video and musical elements and was assembled last summer at Mr. Wilson’s Long Island colony, the Watermill Center—hence the name. Mr. Wilson may be single-handedly responsible for ensuring Long Is-land produces great art besides the music of Billy Joel.

“Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” Cooper-Hewitt, opens March 18

Sonia Delaunay, who died in 1979, was widely noted for her use of vivid color in painting and textile design. This exhibit eschews the former to focus on Delaunay’s fashion work from the 1920s and textiles from the 1930s. Art connoisseurs may well flock to the design museum to check out Ms. Delaunay’s work, much of which is on loan from European col-

lections, but the show may most appeal to the fashion set. Even the swatches of brightly colored fabric that the museum is using to advertise the show look like they’d make great swatches for a kicky shirt-dress.

Gary Hill, “Of surf, death, tropes, & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment,” Barbara Gladstone Gallery, opens March 18

Gary Hill has presented his work at Barbara Gladstone four times be-fore, and this exhibition reiterates Mr. Hill’s concerns and interests, in-cluding, per the gallery, “an increas-ingly homogenized visual culture” and “the primary communicative function of electronic media.” In the absence of Matthew Barney, Mr. Hill will be the top video artist showing in New York this spring—fans of text (and we ask those who are not why and how they are reading this) will continue to be delighted at the art-ist’s introduction of words into his videos. Those who remain uncon-vinced should look at Mr. Hill’s Web site: The home page has individual sections for “Right brain” and “Left brain.” “Right brain” is still under construction.

The Andy Monument, Rob Pruitt, opens March 30

New York artist Rob Pruitt—the man behind the Guggenheim’s

.tongue-slightly-in-cheek Art Awards —is to erect a bronze monument to Pop Art’s papa in Union Square, out-side the final location of Warhol’s Factory. The sculpture is to be al-most 10 feet tall, and is only the sec-ond Union Square placement by the Public Art Fund—after 1993’s femi-nist bronze series Woman’s Work. The Warhol sculpture, says the Pub-lic Art Fund, will “celebrate War-hol’s artistic and cultural legacy in the neighborhood and city he helped define.” Warhol would have appreci-ated the epic scale of the monument and Art in America called him a ma-jor influence upon Mr. Pruitt in a De-cember 2010 review. Still, wasn’t an awards ceremony for art already the best memorial for Warhol?

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” Costume Institute of the Met, opens May 4

It’s not merely the McQueen ob-sessives who will enjoy this show. Fashion exhibitions can feel fusty: fancy 20th-century clothes, away from the human context, sometimes make the museum feel like a vintage shop. Would one rush to look at Mi-chael Kors’ sportswear, for instance, no matter how well constructed? But McQueen’s garments at their best took the human element out of the equation. The designer’s most notable recent wearer, Lady Gaga, has emphasized the alien dimen-sions of the designer’s avant-garde work. Merely to understand the points between what most wear now and our luxurious, directional science-fiction future, McQueen’s the one designer worth curating.

Robert Mapplethorpe, 50 Americans, Sean Kelly Gallery, opens May 6

Don’t expect a culture war to erupt over this show at Sean Kelly Gallery, which represents the Mapplethorpe

estate. The portraits here are neck-up—but their lack of private parts hardly affects their power and ability to move the viewer. Mapplethorpe’s interest in people, broadly, comes out in this series of a broad swath of Americans, not solely the perceived obscenity for which the right wing made sure he became known. The portrait of a black-jacketed youth that Sean Kelly Gallery uses to adver-tise the show bears, though, all the best of Mapplethorpe’s hallmarks: a striking contrast between black and white, an emphasis on slightly dan-gerous beauty. Perhaps the old Re-publican guard should be on notice, just in case.

Martin Kippenberger, Luhring Augustine, opens May 7

The German artist, who died in 1997, is remembered for his ability to shock. His best-known work may be a series of frogs on crucifixes, which evoked the ire of the Catho-lic Church. When the work was dis-played in Italy, museum curators described the frog-on-the-cross as a self-portrait of the artist “in a state of profound crisis.” Perhaps. Though the new show is not just self-portraits, it never wavers too far from an image of Kippenberger’s persona—either “bad boy” or “in crisis,” depending on one’s angle of approach.

“Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception,” MoMA, opens May 8

How does a museum follow up Marina Abramović? That may be impossible—but MoMA is giving a similar push to Francis Alÿs. Klaus Biesenbach, who once confessed his love to Ms. Abramović, is curating the Belgian artist’s project. While Mr. Alÿs may be less lovable for Mr. Biesenbach or less known to casu-al museumgoers, he’s a spectacle-maker: 2002’s When Faith Moves

Mountains, included in the exhibi-tion, entailed the movement of a Pe-ruvian sand dune by enlisting vol-unteers with shovels. Whoever said the artist had to be present?

“Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Primitive,” New Museum, opens May 19

The Thai artist and filmmaker is having a busy spring: on March 2, two months before his art debut, Mr. Weerasethakul’s 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives opened at the Film Forum. “Primitive” is thematically connected to the film, (scheduled to close at Film Forum March 15), which tells the story of a dying man in rural Thailand. The exhibition focuses closely on the vil-lage of Nabua, using videos to con-vey the area’s history of clashes be-tween the military and Communist farmers. If only “Primitive” and Un-cle Boonmee were running simulta-neously, art lovers might get the full Apichatpong Weerasethakul experi-ence—but happily, the director’s less likely to suffer a backlash this way.

“Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever,” MoMA/P.S.1, opens June 19

How long must an art figure be a “rising star” before we can just call him a star? This question (Mr. Trecar-tin was born in 1981) and many more may be resolved by Mr. Trecartin’s P.S.1 show, comprised of work from 2007 to 2010, with contributions from a number of other young art-ist’s, who P.S.1 refers to as “working child actors.” The Main Gallery will be given over to two video works, a 2009 trilogy and a 2009-10 quartet, each “interconnected spatially” with a warren of rooms. Charles Saatchi already collects Mr. Trecartin. Could things get any sweeter? That’s an-other question that this show and fu-ture ones stand to answer.

spring arts preview l Art

What we’re most looking forward to in art this season B y D a n i e l D ’a D D a r i o

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Francis Alÿs’s Rehearsal I (Ensayo I), 1999-2001.

Gary Hill’s Beauty Is in the Eye (detail), 2011.

Season 2010–2011spring season opens march 22!

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© Isaac Julien, Love, 2003© Isaac Julien, Love, 2003

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The composer of hit show Wicked creates a new psychological thriller starring Lauren Flanigan as an ambitious psychic who orchestrates an elaborate kidnapping scheme to win the fame she so desperately craves.

“An irresistible opera: silly and sweet and bubbling over with whistle-able tunes.” —The New York Times

Donizetti’s beloved bel canto classic receives a modern update in Jonathan Miller’s inventive production. Stefania Dovhan stars as the heart’s desire of the underdog suitor, sung by rising Mexican tenor David Lomeli in his City Opera debut.

Music, visual art, design, and dance collide in a triple bill of one-act operas by some of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Directed by theater visionary Michael Counts and choreographed by Ken Roht, this compelling dreamscape incorporates video by Jennifer Steinkamp and designs inspired by laser art pioneer Hiro Yamagata.

© Dash Snow, Untitled© Dash Snow, Untitled

Plus captivating concerts including John Zorn’s Masada Marathon, Where the Wild Things Are family opera, and Defying Gravity: The Music of Stephen Schwartz featuring Ann Hampton Callaway, Kristin Chenoweth, Raúl Esparza, and Victor Garber.

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By PhoeBe hoBan

on an evening last week at the Museum of Art and Design, Judy Chicago, vivid and flamboyant in a white silk bolero

embellished with black lace, pointed to a boldly graphic tapestry titled Paddle Your Own Boat, and laughed. “People never get that there is humor in my work, but I think this is funny.” The piece depicts a woman manning a canoe, whose progress is

being seriously impeded by wailing children, chiding relatives and a huge globe of the world. “I often say about this image that in all my years of working with women, I have never actually seen a situation where somebody set off to paddle a canoe and didn’t get grief from somebody—whether it’s the church, the community or their family.”

Ms. Chicago has had her share of grief. Her infamous 1970s piece The Dinner Party drew standing-room-only crowds at the San Francisco Museum of Art, where it opened in 1979. (It’s an instal-

lation of a giant triangular table, including the names of 1,038 fe-male innovators—39 of whom have their own place settings with plates depicting vulvas.) But some critics eviscerated the work,

and its museum tour was canceled amid Congressional debate over funding for the institutions that showed it. The Dinner Party itself was banished to storage for nearly three decades.

“The Dinner Party went into storage and I went into shock,” said Ms. Chicago, a small, passionate fireplug of a woman with short red curls and rose-tinted glasses. “It was the piece everyone wanted

MAD Womanof New York

Feminist, political artist Judy Chicago is thriving at a time when feminism and political art aren’t

Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party.



to see, and nobody wanted to show.”

This is not a problem Ms. Chi-cago suffers from much these days. The artist was included in three New York exhibitions last year: at ACA Galleries; at the He-brew Union College Museum; and in a Jewish Museum show. This month, a show of her tapestries, done in collaboration with weav-er Audrey Cowan, opened at the Museum of Art and Design and runs through June 19.

As for The Dinner Party, the piece is now on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. That’s a vindication for the artist, considering that it was widely and publicly panned—conservative Congressman Robert Dorman, dubbed it “ceramic 3-D pornogra-phy” on the floor of the House of Representatives, and The New York Times pronounced it “very bad art.” (“It reiterates its theme … with in-sistence and vulgarity,” argued the paper’s Hilton Kramer.) Today, nearly one-third of all the visitors to the museum view her artwork, ac-cording to the institution.

At first glance, the tapestries in the MAD show appear to be among the more decorous of Ms. Chicago’s works, which tend more

toward painting and sculpture. But, the woven works, along with the black-and-white and color im-ages, “cartoons” and woodcuts Ms. Chicago created as patterns for Ms. Cowan (who first worked with her when she did the stitch work on the Dinner Party Eleanor of Aquitaine table runner), they forcefully weave together many of the artist’s central—and reso-lutely political—themes.

Ever the radical, she’s subverted pretty much every-thing about both the medium and its message. She has used the ancient Aubusson high-warp weaving technique, employed to make the famed medieval Uni-corn Tapestries, which pregnant women were barred from practic-ing in the Middle Ages. They were told they might fall off the looms and miscarry, she explained. “Any excuse would do,” Ms. Chi-cago snorted. “The idea of using Aubusson [named for the city in France] was particularly deli-cious to me because it originally prohibited women because of their fecundity and capacity for birth.”

Ms. Chicago also reinvented the process of this ancient tech-nique for her own purposes. Tap-

estries were traditionally woven from the back, so the weaver never saw the design. In Ms. Chi-cago’s update of the process, the artist’s patterns are attached to the piece so that the weaver can see each section as she com-pletes it, giving her the right-

ful “agency” previously denied, she explained. There is also her offbeat subject matter, which ranges from the striking details of Creation,(part of “The Birth Project” shown at the Hebrew Union College Museum last year ) to the pigs hung for meatpacking in The Fall (from her “The Holo-caust Project: From Darkness to Light”). Powerheadache depicts a male head grimacing in much the way Bernie Madoff must have when his Ponzi scheme toppled.

Ms. Chicago, whose name is virtually synonymous with femi-nist art, acknowledges that there has been some progress toward equity in the art world (and in general) since she began her work. But she’s also aware that to many of the current genera-tion of women, feminism is con-sidered an F-word, a label to be avoided.

She continues on a crusade to change that. “Women’s history and women’s art needs to become part of our cultural and intellec-tual heritage,” Ms. Chicago de-clared. “If we all learn that, then women will learn pride in the history of women—and they will want to claim their history as feminists, instead of disassociat-ing themselves,” she said. “The

degree to which young people are unaware of the history of the feminist art movement is an indi-cation of the failure of our institu-tions to keep up with changes in consciousness. The key is institu-tional change.” The artist added: “When I was working on The Din-ner Party, I believed the story of erasure that I had uncovered and was attempting to recount was in the past. As we see the battles in Congress over reproductive rights, it becomes clear that era-sure is still a danger.”

That erasure of women is clear from the continuing lack of avail-able literature on women and their historical place in art. “You want to know the figures on pub-lications about women 10 years ago? One point seven percent. Today it is 2.5 percent.” To help combat the deplorable literacy level when it comes to women’s history, Ms. Chicago developed “The Dinner Party Curriculum,” a program for classes K-12. (It, like the titular artwork, references female pioneers from Sappho to Saint Bridget to Sacagawea to Georgia O’Keeffe as a teaching tool.) She also recently co-pub-lished, with art historian Fran-ces Borzello, Frida Kahlo, Face to Face, which, she said, “provided a

Ever the radical, in her new Museum of Art and Design show, Judy Chicago has subverted pretty much everything

about both the medium and its message.

Judy Chicago working on Grand Toby Head with Copper Eye.

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vehicle of exploration of a lot of ideas be-yond Kahlo herself—such as that women aren’t one-trick ponies. She did a lot more than just self-portraiture.”

As for the artist herself, and her best-known piece: “My abiding hope,” said Ms. Chicago, “is that before I die, The Dinner Party will be seen as one work in a huge body of work.”

But Ms. Chicago is the first to ac-knowledge that her seminal (no pun in-tended) work has “opened up many aes-thetic paths,” including the tapestries

(which evolved from the embroidered table runners of The Dinner Party) and glass (used in making the plates), the medium she has been exploring since 2003.

Ms. Chicago’s next big project is perhaps a good fit. As part of a multi-institutional $14 million Getty Trust art initiative called “Standard Pacific Time” that will premiere in Los Angeles in the fall, the artist will create a smoke-and-fireworks extravaganza, Atmospheres. It comes as no surprise that Ms. Chicago has a license to use pyrotechnics.

Rainbow Shabbat.

4 Part Temporal Connection.



B y R A C H E L C o R B E t t

t he Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala is perhaps the institution’s most famous and most

glamorous event, New York’s ver-sion of the Oscars. The event, a mil-lion-dollar fund-raiser for the Met, is planned out months, sometimes more than a year, in advance.

But when 40-year-old British designer Alexander McQueen com-mitted suicide last February, the Met began to scramble furiously. They scrapped plans for the sched-uled exhibition and got to work on the upcoming retrospective “Alex-ander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” that opens May 4.

Costume Institute curator-in-charge Harold Koda and exhibition curator Andrew Bolton reasoned they had to act quickly—there might not be another chance, since McQueen’s body of work would dis-perse and deteriorate over time. “If you leave a show too long, there’s a lot of revision that goes on,” said Mr. Bolton—revisions in history, both personal and couturatorial. At Vogue, whose editor in chief, Anna Wintour, serves as annual co-chair of the event, there was “a resound-ing desire, both publicly and within the fashion industry, to pay hom-age to Alexander McQueen,” said Vogue’s director of special events, Sylvana Ward Durrett, in an email. “This year’s Costume Institute Gala, she said, was “an opportunity to sa-lute his legacy.” Met director Thom-as Campbell, who’s had experience curating shows of textiles, was already familiar with McQueen’s work from the Met’s 2006 “Anglo-Mania” exhibit, and gave the show the go-ahead swiftly.

No doubt the drama of Mc-Queen’s death led to some of the early urgency in the fashion com-munity. “It was sort of like Marilyn Monroe dying right at her peak,” said Tiffany Dubin, founder of the Sotheby’s couture department and author of Vintage Fashion.

Mr. Bolton and Mr. Koda recog-nized that the theme had the for-mula for success—it was timely; he was popular; and McQueen was a natural provocateur: He once hired a double amputee to model a pair of hand-crafted wooden legs. He made a name for himself by parading bat-tered models down the runway for a “Highland Rape” collection.

Still, many samples of Mc-Queen’s most notable pieces, like his famously low-rise “bumster”

trousers, were missing. The house would have to track down the far-flung “club kids,” as Koda put it, who had purchased much of McQueen’s early work when he still needed the cash to pay rent.

In the main gallery of the Met-ropolitan, Mr. Bolton is refashion-ing McQueen’s “very raw, hard-scrabble” London studio, laying wood-planked floors and showing a selection of his earliest pieces. As viewers move throughout the rest of the exhibit, they will encounter hand-crafted wooden wings, Vic-torian corsets, ghostly projections of Karen Elson and Kate Moss, ac-cessories from McQueen’s jewelry and hat collaborations and about a hundred pieces of clothing, rang-ing from his postgraduate designs at Central St. Martins in 1992 to his posthumous “Angels and Demons”

collection. Judging by the hype al-ready surrounding the McQueen show, the switch was a prescient one. There’s already a wait list lon-ger than usual for the $10,000 tick-ets to the Institute’s annual gala, on May 2, co-chaired by Stella McCa-rtney, Colin Firth and Ms. Wintour. At a Council of Fashion Designers of America tribute to McQueen last year, executive director Steven Kolb remembered how “the audi-ence was so, so touched. What’s going to happen at the Met will be moving because he’s still part of a generation of young designers.”

Chimed in New York stylist and fashion commentator Mary Alice Stephenson, who will be dressing Hilary Rhoda and Joan Smalls for this year’s gala, “It will be a par-

ticularly emotional night because of what’s happening with John Gal-liano,” the recently deposed Dior designer. “There’s an amplification of attention to designers who have personal histories.”

Poor Charles James. Before Mc-Queen’s death, the curators were planning a show for this spring ti-tled “Against Nature,” which would have featured five houses helmed by “designers that dealt with the body in an interesting way,” said Mr. Koda. McQueen was already on that list, and Koda floated the names of Christian Dior and Mr. James as possible others. New York couturier James has been the sub-ject of retrospectives at the Brook-lyn Museum and F.I.T., but he has yet to receive his Met moment, and it was delayed again.

As for the McQueen show, the

Met curators originally worried there wouldn’t be enough material available for the kind of in-depth retrospective they had in mind. When they called London, though, they found that McQueen had kept extensive archives throughout his entire career. It was all “stuffed in a tiny closet,” and the designer used it primarily for his own research, often “cannibalizing” old pieces to design new ones, Mr. Koda said. There were still some 5,000 pieces and a repository of McQueen works at Givenchy from his tenure there.

It was a daunting task, but no doubt worth it to Sarah Bolton, Mc-Queen’s longtime assistant and the label’s current head, and the compa-ny. “This will cement him in fashion history,” Ms. Dubin said. “Going for-

ward, it means more awareness of the brand because exhibits produce catalogs and press. It will maybe extend his reach and create oppor-tunities for future licensing—Mc-Queen is not a mass-market brand and does not, as far as I know, have a huge amount of licenses.”

The clothes and accessories were mailed to the Met by late Septem-ber, and Mr. Bolton began editing them down into a few main themes. The production designers, Sam Gainsbury and Joseph Bennett, took inspiration, for instance, from McQueen’s 2001 “Insane Asylum” collection, in which the audience sat around a mirrored cube that lit up to reveal deranged models in-side. They reinterpreted this “box within a box” leitmotif in one of the galleries with a display of Mc-Queen’s signature romantic gothic

costumes, and within that room, in a box, will be a mini-collection of deconstructed pieces.

In a technical section of the exhibit, the recovered bumsters, kimono jackets, skirts and other trousers will make up a “study” of McQueen’s tailoring skills. But Mr. Koda didn’t want to focus too much on technique because McQueen “re-ally is about a spirit,” he said, “an approach to creativity that is the romantic hero, me against all, and making the unexpected beautiful—and that’s Andrew’s take on it.”

The ball is the Costume Insti-tute’s main fund-raiser, generat-ing “gobs” of money, according to Rogues’ Gallery author (and gadfly to the Met) Michael Gross. “It also has a halo effect, for both good and ill. It raises consciousness of the museum around the world, and the institute’s exhibits draw huge crowds who do contribute to the bottom line, but the party and its denizens—the fashion crowd and the skin puppets and rock stars who love playing dress-up for the cameras—also lower the museum’s image, turning it into one more mass-market circus.”

The exhibit will end July 31, but next year’s show is already in the works. Mr. Koda hinted that it will likely present one of the short-listed designers in the original “Against Nature” show. Could it be Dior, or perhaps feature Mr. James? His pieces are notoriously hard to find, but since the Costume Institute acquired the Brooklyn Museum’s archives two years ago—home to about 200 Charles James gar-ments—it now seems possible.

In the meantime, one thing is certain: We can expect to see ce-lebrities in “a parade of McQueen’s greatest hits” in May, Ms. Stephen-son said. “The whole fashion world will be peacocking.”

Alexander McQueen, Suddenly After his suicide, the Met scrambled to salute the Brit designer swiftly

Within the fashion world, ‘it was sort of like Marilyn Monroe dying right at her peak,’ said Tiffany Dubin.

Arcadia, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, opens March 17

Tom Stoppard’s mid-career masterpiece returns to Broadway. The cast and crew is stocked with veterans of the British play-wright’s work: Billy Crudup appeared in the 1995 production of the show and di-rector David Leveaux put on Jumpers and The Real Thing on Broadway. Arcadia is something of a mind-bender, dealing with pastoral gardening, Lord Byron, math-ematics and the relationship between past and present. It is a production that could all too easily become a muddle, though its success in London suggests that the vet-eran approach may just work.

The Book of Mormon, Eugene O’Neill Theatre, opens March 24

South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always seemed eager to write for Broadway—recall the South Park “Blame Canada” production number at the 2000 Oscars. They finally did it with The Book of Mormon, about missionar-ies in Uganda. The Scott Rudin–produced musical has already attracted an official response from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and healthy buzz about the show’s blasphemy. Mr. Rudin’s imprimatur may draw in audiences unim-pressed by the South Park pedigree or the appearance of hype for its own sake. Ei-ther way, this is the biggest and most con-troversial musical that will likely open on time this spring.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Al Hirschfeld Theatre, opens March 27

The iconic star of a tween-mania fran-chise returns to Broadway. We’re refer-ring, of course, to Night Court star John Larroquette. He’s joined by some British guy from those movies about warlocks— we kid, Daniel Radcliffe! As his co-stars have gone to college or set out on fledgling film careers, Mr. Radcliffe has been striving toward a stage career. Who can forget his alternately revelatory and revealing turn in Equus? This How to Succeed is referred to as a 50th-anniversary production—who’d have guessed that a story about a window-washer who rises to the top of his company has aged a day? Business success today is certainly not contingent on all manner of intangibles and connections and climbing in an opaque, vaguely malevolent system. Either way, Harry Potter!

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Richard Rodgers Theatre, opens March 31

Though he’s done his manic comedy-of-three-characters (look out for the mincing gay man! It’s still fresh!), Robin Williams has rarely acted on Broadway (though he

did star in Mike Nichols’ Waiting for Godot in the late ’80s). The star will add to that meager résumé this spring with a turn in last year’s Pulitzer finalist. It’s a meaty role; Mr. Williams is the tiger (no meta-phors in that title!) living through the Iraq war. When it opened in Los Angeles, The New York Times praised the show’s sympa-thy for man and beast alike. Playwright Ra-jiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries is playing Off Broadway now. Expect this, though, to be a splashy coming-out party for Mr. Joseph, alongside Mr. Williams, who may begin preparing his trophy shelf for the “T” in “EGOT.”

Catch Me if You Can, Neil Simon Theatre, opens April 10

Who’d have guessed we’d need a musi-cal adaptation of a Spielberg movie from the early 2000s—or that it would look better, even, than simply watchable? The team of Terrence McNally (book), Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Wittman (lyrics) unites for the glamor-ous story of a high-flying con artist. The movie was aesthetically splendid—and the Shaiman/Wittman team has dealt with 1960s nostalgia before, in Hairspray. The only pause the production gives The Observer is the detail that the show is constructed a bit like a jukebox musical, with the Beatles and Aretha Franklin as inspiration. Is Frank Abagnale’s associat-ing his life story with go-go ’60s fetishism the greatest con of all?

The Motherfucker With the Hat, Schoenfeld Theatre, opens April 11

Chris Rock makes his Broadway debut in this profanely titled opus about drug addiction—this is no comedy! Mr. Rock may be feeling the need to stretch rarely used dramatic muscles after years of on-screen diminishing returns. Working with Adam Sandler in Grown Ups is hardly comparable to being directed by Anna D. Shapiro (fresh off August: Osage County). As for that title—it may offend those with the funds to actually attend the theater frequently, but the giddy coverage since the production’s inception (“gloriously titled,” said New York) should continue to guarantee Cee-Lo–vian levels of buzz.

High, Booth Theatre, opens April 19

Many great movie actresses flee to tele-vision: Glenn Close, Holly Hunter and Sally Field among them. The cathode path is not for Kathleen Turner, who toured with the new play High in repertory companies across America before arriving on Broad-way. Ms. Turner plays a nun seeking to aid a drug addict, finding her faith chal-lenged. (Will she have such doubts?, The Observer wonders.) Ms. Turner’s become something of a familiar face—and voice!—

What we’re most looking forward to in theater this season B y D a n i e l D ’a D D a r i o

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observer.com | the new york observer16 March 14, 2011 observer.com | the new york observer16 March 14, 2011

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onstage, having been Tony-nominated for 2005’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Matthew Lombardo, the play’s author, last wrote Looped with Valerie Harper as Tal-lulah Bankhead: surely he, like his audi-ence, admires a strong leading lady.

Born Yesterday, Cort Theatre, opens April 24

There’s stunt-casting, and there’s Jim Belushi. The musical Born Yesterday, first performed in 1946 with Judy Holliday (who won an Oscar for the film adaptation), comes to 2011’s post-Chicago Broadway with as big a star as could get time off from a CBS crime procedural. Nina Arianda, recently profiled in The Times for her role in David Ives’ Venus in Fur, co-stars; as the paper wrote then, “If Ms. Arianda … seems like an overnight success, it doesn’t feel that way to her.” Ms. Arianda took the con-ventional route to Broadway—training, Tisch—while Mr. Belushi starred in an ABC sitcom from 2001 to 2009. The pair’s inter-play promises to evoke the Black Swan–ian eternal debate between training and intu-ition, or at least provide some laughs.

The House of Blue Leaves, Walter Kerr Theatre, opens April 25

Director David Cromer won the MacAr-thur “genius” grant in 2010, about a year after his star-free Brighton Beach Memoirs closed early. Unshaken by defeat or em-

boldened by acclaim, Mr. Cromer is mount-ing John Guare’s play with Ben Stiller and Edie Falco in leading roles. The production seems tailored for success: Mr. Guare was just produced on Broadway (last fall’s hot-ly debated A Free Man of Color).

The House of Blue Leaves, Mr. Guare’s first play, is by now a classic; Mr. Cromer is a still-rising star. So expect the same level of hype that met A Free Man of Color, but with far more raves and a box office akin to Mr. Stiller’s Little Fockers, if not Meet the Parents.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, Public Theater, opens May 5

Tony Kushner is the self-renewing voice of a generation. Just as memories of his talent flag, a new and ever-more elabo-rately conceived production comes down the pike. This play has been the subject of particularly loud buzz since its debut in Minneapolis in 2009. Its erudition be-gins with the title, inspired by the work of both George Bernard Shaw and Mary Baker Eddy—stop, Tony, you’re killing us! Mr. Kushner’s work is most exciting not for its sweeping statements but for how those statements resurface in small in-trapersonal moments, and the plot, about a Brooklyn longshoreman who hosts a family gathering at home, has plenty of promise.

March 14, 2011 17

Aaron Tweit and friend

in Catch Me if You Can.

observer.com | the new york observer



B y J e s s e Ox f e l d

R aúl Esparza was waiting for fried chicken and talk-ing about the mys-tery of existence. “The most beauti-

ful thing about the play, and what moves me every night, has to do with humanity’s search for some-thing greater than themselves,” he said. “Some sense of fitting in, whether it’s in time, whether it’s a sense of history.”

He was discussing Tom Stop-pard’s Arcadia on a day off from re-hearsal for the David Leveaux–di-rected revival of the play, in which he’s starring along with Billy Crudup. That night would be the fourth pre-view performance.

“That we exist beyond ourselves,” he continued, picking at a multigrain roll at 44 & X, a restaurant on 10th Avenue he’d suggested because he was craving its chicken. “That it goes on beyond us, further away than we can imagine. And that we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we’re capable of and the way the world or the universe or anything works. Even love. That everything is full of mystery, and that mystery is worth exploring, even if you fail at it. Because your contribution lasts. The fact that you were here is a per-manent sort of experience, of energy, etched in the world. And I love that about the play.”

Mr. Stoppard is a demandingly intellectual playwright; his Coast of Utopia, which Lincoln Center The-ater presented four seasons ago, spent nine hours over three evenings considering philosophical debates in pre-revolutionary Russia. Mr. Es-parza is an actor who likes to grap-ple with ideas. His most memorable performance was as Bobby, the mag-netic cipher at the center of Compa-ny, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s cerebral musical about love and life among neurotic New York-ers; he has since played in Pinter and Mamet and Shakespeare.

Arcadia, which debuted in Lon-don in 1993 and premiered here two years later, takes place at a grand English country house and inter-weaves a story about its 1809 inhab-itants with one in the present day, about a historian and an academic researching the earlier period. It is about the relationships between past and present and order and disorder, about the limits of knowledge and the entropic reality that things fall apart. Mr. Esparza plays Valentine, the modern-day scion of the aristo-cratic family that owns the house, a graduate student studying the fam-ily’s century-old hunting records in an attempt to devise a formula that

describes population growth among grouse. (The play is also about math. And Newtonian physics and Byron and the history of English gardening, among other things.) When Mr. Le-veaux directed a London revival two years ago, the Independent labeled Arcadia “perhaps the greatest play of its time.”

“There’s something that art can do that cannot happen, which is time travel,” Mr. Esparza said. “The

play proposes that these things all exist at once, and we can see it hap-pen. I find that very beautiful.” The chicken had arrived, a deep-fried boneless breast served, faux-South-ernly, with a wedge of waffle and a small mound of collard greens. “I never thought about the play in the sense of any search for God, of look-ing for something so much greater than you are. But it struck me one day in rehearsals.”

He quoted a bit of dialogue from the 1809 part of the play, an exchange between Thomasina, the precocious daughter of the house, and Septi-mus, her tutor: “Thomasina says to Septimus something like, ‘You know all your equations, but Newton’s equations only make arcs and angles. Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.’ Septimus says, ‘Well, he has mastery of equations which we can-not follow.’ And she says, ‘What a faint heart. We must work outward from the beginning of the maze.’”

“I was suddenly so moved by that,” Mr. Esparza continued. “Be-cause I never really heard that before in the play. That everybody is look-ing for some version of God. It’s man chasing the ultimate meaning of why we’re here and what exists beyond us. And then everybody has some version of that in the story. Every-body. And Chloe”—the modern-era daughter—“says, ‘Actually, the thing that drives us all is sex,’ which is the bottom line of the whole story.”

He was methodically working his way through his food while speak-ing intently and deliberately, lean-ing forward and focusing his green eyes on his interlocutor. Mr. Esparza is an excellent interview subject; he speaks thoughtfully, articulately and openly. He completes sentences and returns to conversational threads after tangential detours. He consid-ers questions and thinks about his answers; he’s not just another actor mouthing platitudes. (On the other hand, he is also an excellent actor, so perhaps he’s just good at playing the interviewee.)

“Sex is a huge factor because the play is proposing that every random encounter that you have with an-other human being can change your life,” he said. “You just don’t know how it will happen. It’s all about at-traction. Mathematical attraction. Magnetic attraction. Physical at-traction. Sexual attraction. In the second act, when everything’s go-ing really fast, the two eras are sort of banging against each other, and David”—Mr. Leveaux, the director—“kept talking about, ‘This is actually an example of the math that we’re talking about: atoms in motion, bod-ies bouncing off walls and space and lines going at once.’”

I’ll pause here to note that it had become frustrating to listen to Mr. Esparza talk about these things—sexual attraction, simulta-neity, a search for meaning—when I had previously promised his press representatives that I would under no circumstances ask him about his personal life. His personal life now seemed relevant.

In late 2006, just before the open-ing of Company, Mr. Esparza told The New York Times that while he

was still married to his wife, his high-school sweetheart, whom he married at 23 and whom he called in that interview his best friend, he was also separated from her and roman-tically involved with a man. It was a surprisingly frank revelation, and he discussed it with his characteristic thoughtfulness, puzzling through his sexual identity on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section. Mr. Esparza and his wife are still sepa-rated, and they are apparently still close, photographed together as re-cently as last month.

But I try to be a man of my word, which means I did not ask about his personal life. (This may also mean I’m bad at playing the reporter.) I asked if he regretted giving that in-terview four years ago.

“What I regret about the inter-view with The Times is that I ended up hurting people, people who had absolutely no business having their names in the paper or being put in that position,” he said. This, pre-sumably, is why such matters are now forbidden. “I regret that. I re-gret the feeling that I owed expla-nations about myself to people who didn’t know me.” His empty plate had been cleared, and Mr. Esparza was playing with the wrapper from his soft-drink straw, rolling it up be-tween his fingers.

“I do not regret being who I am, being as open as I’ve been,” he con-tinued. He was actually being si-multaneously—Arcadianly?—open and, via his publicist, closed. “And I am proud of myself for not apolo-gizing for it. I don’t fit into any of the boxes that so many petty-mind-ed little motherfuckers love to put me in, and I don’t really care.” He did not talk about his current ro-mantic life.

But Mr. Esparza kept talking about other things, thinking about the ideas in the play, thinking about the theater, discussing ideas. He was lingering over coffee, relishing a day off. He condemned the con-temporary fascination with actors’ personal lives. He worried about the state of Broadway, with high ticket prices and the reliance on big names and the difficulty of getting good new work produced.

He talked about seeing the initial New York production of Arcadia 15 years ago, and how clearly he re-called Robert Sean Leonard’s per-formance in the role Mr. Esparza is now playing.

“I remember him so vividly that what I’m conscious of is trying not to repeat what he did,” Mr. Esparza said. “But I remember—I think he was on the floor at one point, which has led me to want to be on the floor. Because I also like that quotation.”

Of course he does. These things—so many things—all exist at once.

Raul Esparza’s FormulaThe actor has the brains to play Stoppard

I don’t fit into any of the boxes that so many petty-minded little

motherfuckers love to put me in, and I don’t really care.

Esparza.

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A NEW MUSICAL from the team that brought you HAIRSPRAY


B y R o B e R t J. H u g H e s

Director Michael Greif’s works have addressed AIDS, mental illness, pov-erty and self-delusion.

And those are just the musicals. Brooklyn-born, Mr. Greif has

directed Rent, Grey Gardens and Next to Normal on Broadway, to considerable acclaim—Tony nom-inations for each—and, in the case of Rent, a robust 13-year run. He’s

also the director of the current revival at the Signature Theater of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, And now Mr. Greif is staging Mr. Kushner’s newest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. Per-formances begin March 22, and it’s set to run through June 12 at the Public Theater.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide treats a dark subject, too—it concerns a retired longshore-

man in Brooklyn, Gus Marcanto-nio, who asks his three children, an academic, a labor lawyer and a laborer, and his sister, a nun, to come home (some of their part-ners in tow) to discuss his deci-sion to end his life. One suicide attempt, in the brownstone’s

upstairs bath, has already gone awry.

The family fights and roars, negotiates and accuses; all their skeletons, and some cast mem-bers, come out of the closet. Sui-cide is a major theme in the time-ly show, but so is the sorry state

of America, the prospects for continuing social revolution, the institution of marriage, the al-lure of prostitution, parenthood, sex, the real estate bubble and more.

But Mr. Greif stressed that, as with all of Mr. Kushner’s work, it’s not gloom and doom. “There’s a lot of humor, dark humor, gal-lows humor, surrounding the subject.” It’s not a “morose or somber” play. It’s also a play that’s very much in the Ameri-can realist tradition, he said, ref-erencing Eugene O’Neill, Ten-nessee Williams, Clifford Odets and other great dramatists. (The show’s title is a riff on George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and the main charac-ter dubs himself a communist.)

Directed SuicideAt the Public, Michael Greif helms Tony Kushner’s newest play

Playwright Tony Kushner (left) and director Michael Greif.

“While this is an extremely dark subject matter, there’s an extraordinary vitality in these characters,” he said. “They’re ex-ceedingly intelligent, very artic-ulate, and they take big issues on, throughout the play. So there’s a real life force here, certainly fore-most in the man who’s consider-ing ending his life … and in that negotiation with his family.”

He compared the show in some aspects to Grey Gardens, the mu-sical about the lives of the trou-bled mother and daughter (and Jacqueline Onassis relatives) Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”). “Edie’s life force is perhaps askew, but what makes her so extraordinarily appeal-ing is that optimism, or that in-credible survivor’s instinct,” Mr. Greif said. “We see her knocked down in that musical, and it’s tre-mendously moving; it’s so out of character. It’s that intensity, that vitality, that struggle, that ex-citement, that hunger these plays and musicals all share.”

The play premiered at the

Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the spring of 2009 but is far from set in stone. “We’re still getting new pages and changes as we go into our fifth week of rehearsal,” said the director. “It’s undergo-ing a real refining process. Tony keeps writing. It’s both clarify-ing, in this draft, [what] didn’t quite land before, both in terms of what things mean and how things feel. Some things land with a little more clarity and ef-fect in this draft.” Most of the cast is also new in the Public The-ater production.

By and large, reviews in Min-neapolis were positive. Variety said: “The resulting three-act drama is a success—sprawling, yearning, at times emotional-ly violent, it is also packed with a level of complexity, sophisti-

cation and understanding that distinguishes it as a potentially important new American work.” But the show, performed with two intermissions, is still run-ning at about two hours and 40 minutes.

Mr. Greif first came to wide-spread attention, on this coast at least (he ran the respected La Jolla Playhouse in California for much of the 1990s), with his 1996 production of Rent, a mu-sical that dealt with a variety of struggles among young New Yorkers. A loose adaptation of La Bohème, set in New York among young bohemians, it takes place in the shadow of the AIDS epi-demic. The show’s creator, Jon-athan Larson, died just before the premiere Off Broadway, and didn’t see what a success the in-

fluential show was to become. His unexpected passing fo-

cused attention on the produc-tion and “gave us all a real sense of purpose, and joy, in being able to keep his voice alive.”

Mr. Greif added: “It was al-most unthinkable that Jonathan couldn’t share that moment—and see the effect that his work was having on the world. Jona-than wrote the piece in honor of friends of his who were strug-gling with their own mortality issues, circling with their H.I.V. status at a time when it was merely a death sentence. The irony is in the confluences; they mounted up in tragic ways.”

All the works he’s directed have something in common, Mr. Greif noted. “I’m drawn to material with theatrical chal-lenges, whether that means we move from reality to fantasy like we do in Angels in America, or a play like this play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, which shifts gears and turns so quickly and excitingly.”

Just as he’s aware of the spe-

cific dramatic sense that he wants to find in a musical—treat-ing songs as soliloquies, for ex-ample, or duets as scenes—he’s aware of the musicality in plays, too. “Certainly, Tony’s language is almost written as a score,” Mr. Greif said. “The language is very specifically written, and it’s im-portant to follow the specifics of his language. It’s very telling—in the same way that musical notes can be telling in terms of emo-tional states. A very thorough in-vestigation and a very thorough commitment to his language is like the commitment to music.”

Throughout his career in the-ater, though, Mr. Greif has found that audiences are looking for the same things. “People like to be surprised, and they also like to be able to believe in the charac-ters they’re seeing onstage,” he says. “They want to be able to be-lieve in something, and they also want to be completely surprised and taken someplace they’d nev-er imagined they’d go. That was true at the beginning of my ca-reer, and it seems true now.”


‘There’s a lot of humor, dark humor, gallows humor, surrounding the

subject’—a Brooklyn father’s decision to end his life, pending a family chat.

What we’re most looking forward to in film this season By Da n i e l D’a D Da r i o & U na l a M a r C H e

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10FILMS

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SCAN THIS CODE FORA SPECIAL SNEAK PEEK!


Desert FlowerNational GeographicMarch 18

Aside from George Michael’s “Free-dom ’90” video and its vamping super-models, the model-turned-actress con-cept does not have an illustrious history. Naomi Campbell played a phone-sex op-erator in Girl 6, Tyra Banks a bartender in Coyote Ugly, Cindy Crawford—of all things!—a lawyer in the thriller Fair Game. It looked as though a model might never make good onscreen, until Liya Kebede had the bright idea of play-ing another onetime model, the Somali activist Waris Dirie. Ms. Dirie’s story is an inspiring if challenging one—she was sold into marriage before fleeing Somalia, then gained catwalk fame before becoming a U.N. spokeswoman against female circumcision. It’s good to see a model like Ms. Kebede playing to her strengths, and doing something slightly more consequential than Coy-ote Ugly.

ArthurWarner Bros.April 8

The resistible rise of Russell Brand continues apace with yet another com-edy built around his gifts of “saying mindlessly provocative things” and

“having an accent.” (No American star can do both at once, it’s true!) In this re-make of the 1981 film, Mr. Brand takes Dudley Moore’s title role, as a wealthy heir about to be cut off from his family’s fortune; in the movie’s one lateral move, Helen Mirren replaces John Gielgud as Arthur’s stern caretaker. This film will be an interesting test of Mr. Brand’s stardom—his previous comedies were successful enough because of the Judd Apatow brand, but here Mr. Brand stands on his own. Hopefully he, too, won’t get disinherited.

Meek’s CutoffApril 8Oscilloscope

The stars of Meek’s Cutoff—Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood and Paul Dano among them—are barely recog-nizable under shrouds of Oregon Trail dirt or (in Ms. Williams’ case) puffy bonnets. The film drags Ms. Williams’ wagon-train party on a mad journey through the desert, led by real-life trap-per Stephen Meek (Mr. Greenwood). Ms. Williams’ last collaboration with direc-tor Kelly Reichardt was the dry wom-an-in-trouble yarn Wendy and Lucy, and this production is a chance for the pair to expand their palette to include shades beyond Ms. Williams swallow-ing hard and veiling deep sadness—or

Mirren and Brand in Arthur.

else to do more of the same in a different setting.

Your HighnessUniversalApril 8

Natalie Portman can’t retro-actively change her mind, post-Oscars, about starring in Your Highness, though she might wish she could—the stoner com-edy, set in medieval times, seems the quintessential post-Oscar stinker, taken directly from the Gwyneth Paltrow–flight-atten-dant–romantic-comedy mold. The person here with the most to gain post-Oscars, though, is James Franco, who needs the opportunity to prove he’s funny again after a squinting, dazed performance as co-host. Here, as Mr. Franco reteams with Pineap-ple Express director David Gor-don Green, his squinting dazed-ness is the point. The title, you see, has a double meaning. Who’d have guessed that Ms. Portman’s “It’s my turn!” outburst at the end of Black Swan would mean that it was her turn to cash in on a stoner comedy?

Midnight in ParisSony Pictures ClassicsMay 20

Woody Allen’s past half-decade is comparable to a prolonged se-mester abroad—he’s had some great experiences (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), some fun nights out early on that seem lamer in ret-

rospect (Match Point) and some travesties where Mr. Allen must have just felt lost and confused and ready to go home (last fall’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Strang-er). Midnight in Paris sends the director over the Chunnel to Par-is, where Rachel McAdams and Owen Wilson perform in what is being billed as a romantic com-edy. As with all of Mr. Allen’s films, pre-release details are scarce, but Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has a cameo in the film (she’s this year’s Marshall McLuhan!). The casting of Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy proves it yet again: As with all students overseas, Mr. Allen’s in-fatuation with his surroundings outstrips its interest to friends back at home.

Red Riding HoodWarner Bros.March 11

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not Catherine Hardwicke, the director who launched a thousand Twi-hards with her big-screen adaptation of Ste-phenie Meyer’s lusty YA jug-gernaut. With Red Riding Hood, Ms. Hardwicke ventures once again into dark, mythical terri-tory, but don’t expect something as pedestrian as a simple trip to grandmother’s house (especially when Grandma is played by a 69-year-old Julie Christie). With a cast led by Amanda Seyfried as a medieval beauty whose village is terrorized by a werewolf, and Gary Oldman as the mysterious

witch hunter summoned to put an end to the bloodshed, this grown-up fairy tale is poised to dominate the market for high-brow horror.

HannaFocus FeaturesApril 8

Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones) stars as the titular character in this thriller, di-rected by Joe Wright, about a young girl raised by her ex-C.I.A. agent father (Eric Bana) to become an expert assassin. When Hanna embarks on a mission across Europe, trailed by an intelligence opera-tive (Cate Blanchett, in what is hopefully a role more subtle than her ludicrous K.G.B. agent from the last Indiana Jones install-ment), she grapples with the existential angst that comes with being a teenage hit-woman. We have high hopes that Ms. Ronan, who’s been a riveting screen presence ever

since her breakthrough perfor-mance under Mr. Wright’s direc-tion in Atonement, will make the most chilling assassin since Anton Chigurh (but with better hair).

ThorParamountMay 6

Those of us who remember Vincent D’Onofrio’s smoldering, pre-bloat turn as “Thor,” an auto mechanic who ignites a little girl’s imagination in the ’80s kidnapping caper—and Elisabeth Shue vehi-cle—Adventures in Babysitting, may not feel the need for a new version of the Marvel superhero with the un-wieldy weapon. But it’s May, which means the summer blockbusters are coming, with Thor leading the pack. Aussie newcomer Chris Hem-sworth takes on the mantle of the Norse god with the magic hammer, and Anthony Hopkins tries to re-deem himself after The Rite in the role of King Odin—with a golden eye patch, no less! Oh, and guess who plays Thor’s scientist lady love? Natalie Portman. Thank God—it’s been forever since we’ve seen her in anything.

BridesmaidsMay 13Universal

Runaway Bride. Father of the Bride. The Princess Bride. Bride of Frankenstein. We could go on, but everyone knows that in Hollywood, bridesmaids have been, well, always the bridesmaid. No more. Director Paul Feig and producer Judd Apa-tow, creative collaborators since Freaks and Geeks, team up again on Bridesmaids, a raunchy comedy led by Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig (who also co-wrote the screen-play). The early buzz is that this is a sort of Hangover for the ladies—an attempt to make the boy’s club of gross-out humor coed. The last movie that attempted this feat was 2002’s cringe-worthy The Sweetest Thing. Let’s hope Ms. Wiig and Co. raise the (open) bar.

The Tree of LifeMay 27Fox Searchlight

Details about Terrence Malick’s fantasy-drama The Tree of Life (the famously unprolific director’s first film in more than five years) have been murky so far, but here’s what we know for sure: It starts in the Midwest of the 1950s. Brad Pitt plays Sean Penn’s dad, but he doesn’t have Benjamin Button disease again—Mr. Penn is his son in the future. Mr. Penn’s character is a “lost soul,” and the film will explore themes of truth, beauty, faith and other vague but admirable virtues. The poster that’s been released shows a newborn’s foot, which suggests that the tree of life might be like the circle of life. So, like The Lion King, but live action and without Elton John songs.


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10MOVIES

Dano in Meek’s Cutoff.

Portman, McBride and Franco in Your Highness.

B y D a n i e l D ’a D D a r i o

“W hen I was doing Vicky C r i s t i n a Barcelona,” said Chris

Messina, “and Rebecca Hall was, like, giving me the side of her lips to kiss, because she wasn’t into me, you go home with that, you go home feeling unwanted.”

Mr. Messina is a nice guy known for playing “nice guys,” with all that the phrase implies—shiny congeniality, a blandly accom-modating personality, unthreat-ening smirks. His characters in Six Feet Under (supportive, con-servative boyfriend), Vicky Cris-tina Barcelona (supportive, dull fiancé), Julie & Julia (supportive,

hungry husband) and Away We Go (supportive, secretly sad hus-band) weren’t all the same man, but they could all have been in the same frat together, about a de-cade ago.

Mr. Messina wants to blow that image up, or at least nudge it off track, with his new film, Monog-amy (to be released March 11 by Oscilloscope Pictures), the fea-ture-filmmaking debut of Mur-derball documentarian Dana Adam Shapiro. His character, en-gaged to an appealing Rashida Jones, becomes obsessed with a woman he’s paid to follow and photograph. For long portions of the film, Ms. Jones’ character is in the hospital, and Mr. Messina’s character, on a frolic of his own, neglects her.

His character in Julie & Julia,

on the other hand, indulges his girlfriend’s French-chef fantasies for far longer than any audience member was willing to. He was in the film to make Amy Adams look winning because she was dating a nice guy. His characters tend to be overshadowed by women with more intriguing struggles. There are no small roles, though, as the saying goes, and Mr. Messina has refused to be a small actor, inhab-iting the boyfriend-of persona with a barely visible effort.

So will Mr. Messina always be stuck playing boyfriend parts?

“It’s funny. I come from New York theater and did a bunch of really interesting, complicated characters here. When I went to Los Angeles, I got Six Feet Under, and I played a Republican lawyer who marries Lauren Ambrose’s

character. And everybody in New York was like, ‘Oh, that’s such a crazy character for you, because you’ve played these drug addicts and gang leaders.’ And it was kind of a blessing and a curse.” Six Feet Under, in which Mr. Messina sta-bilizes Ms. Ambrose’s manic-art-ist character, begot Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Mr. Messina says he was cast in Woody Allen’s Cata-lan romp because of the TV show. Interviewers began asking, “Are you really that nice?” It was time for a change.

A drug dealer or a gang mem-ber Mr. Messina is not in Monog-amy, but he’s also not the epitome of a supportive husband. Indeed, the entire movie is about his at-tempts to avoid the sort of fate that some of the actor’s other

characters have reveled in—sub-ordinate codependence. “This kind of, for me, was the first step away from those nice-guy roles. Because I am a nice guy, I can be an O.K. guy, but I’m also a compli-cated guy, like everybody else,” said Mr. Messina.

The complications of Mr. Mes-sina’s Theo drive the entire mov-ie: He and Ms. Jones’ Nat have a functional relationship that Theo torpedoes out of boredom or lust or angst. The role is somewhat underplayed—there’s no moment of bellowing à la Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine. But not every mov-ie needs a Stanley Kowalski. Mr. Messina and Ms. Jones (who, per-haps uncoincidentally, has played a nice girl in The Office and Parks and Recreation on television) drift apart slowly, and convincingly.


spring arts preview l Film

When Nice Becomes ViceThe hardening of Chris Messina

Messina, in Monogamy.

“I love the chameleon aspect of it,” Mr. Messina said of play-ing a character removed from what has been his wheelhouse. If Theo is defined by his relation-ship, he’s also the far more erratic and dramatically complex charac-ter, whose seeming sleepy enthu-siasm masks chasms of discon-tent. Mr. Messina considers Gary Oldman a paragon of this chame-leonic style of acting. While Mr. Messina may still, at 36, be too good-looking for what he terms “the long marathon of a character actor’s career” (character actors tend to look more like, well, Mr. Oldman) or too unambiguously nice and unthreatening to pull off an Oldmanian disappearance into a role, the tests are beginning in earnest. One of his next roles is as a street performer in silver body paint who falls in love—an eccen-tric turn and a chance to prove his range.

But Mr. Messina’s best mo-

ments in Monogamy—among them a tough conversation with Ms. Jones and wordless mo-ments of contemplation in which Mr. Messina’s chemistry with ac-tresses isn’t available to him—resemble the acting of Mark Ruf-falo. Mr. Ruffalo is an actor who can play only a limited array of roles: His career has been a gal-lery of impossible-to-pin-down aging free spirits. But within that framework he can evoke unex-pected emotions, and new com-binations of emotions with each film. That Theo starts the film as a basically uxorious boyfriend (and

diverges, afterward, from that) sets the film within the Nice-Guy Chris Messina canon; the varia-tions here are intra–Nice Guy. Mr. Messina didn’t have to learn an accent or train for years to prove his range for this movie, but he proved his range anyhow.

But there are other actors out there to idolize. Mr. Messina, who named one of his two chil-dren after Montgomery Clift, can scarcely believe that he worked with Javier Bardem on Vicky Cris-tina Barcelona. (The pair shared but a scene.) When he saw Mr.

Bardem at the junket for the film, Mr. Messina said, “my hair was longer and I had facial hair, and I was like, ‘We gonna get fucked up tonight?’ This was the pre-miere. And I was like, ‘We gotta get fucked up tonight! We’re gon-na get drunk tonight, right?’ And he was looking at me like I had 10 heads, and it was because I want-ed him to know, ‘I’m not that guy!

I’m not that guy!’”—i.e., the cuck-olded boyfriend of the film.

Mr. Messina has been re-searching post-traumatic stress syndrome in soldiers for an arc as a veteran on the next season of Damages, which is current-ly shooting. He grew a beard for the role, and is wearing a red-and-black flannel shirt; although he’s sitting in a posh-ish Manhat-tan hotel, he looks as though he’s back in Brooklyn, where he shot Monogamy in just 18 days and shot Damages yesterday. It’s a far cry from the preppy look he wore in Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Six Feet Under: He looks like his Mo-nogamy character, or himself. “I’d love to move my whole fam-ily out here,” he said. He got the role in Damages based on scenes from Monogamy, in a nice rever-sal of his last big television role, one that made him famous in just one way.

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When interviewers began asking, ‘Are you really that nice?’ it was time for a change.

Messina, with his Monogamy costar Rashida Jones.

The Queen of Spades, Metropolitan Opera, begins March 11

The Finnish soprano Karita Mattila shows up for Tchaik-ovsky’s penultimate opera, based on a Pushkin short story. The whole affair is suitably black Rus-sian: The opera’s title refers not merely to a femme fatale but to the card encountered while gam-bling. The opera itself deals with the card combination needed to win a pivotal match. (It isn’t card-counting if a friendly ghost tells you!) The—yes, Russian—tenor Vladimir Galouzine takes an un-usually demanding lead role in this opera, which boasts a libretto written by Pyotr Ilyich’s brother, Modest Tchaikovsky. Don’t mind the name: With a cast this stellar, the show is sure to be no modest achievement!

Bluebeard’s Castle, Avery Fisher Hall, begins March 18

The Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen continues his se-ries on Hungarian-inflected music, called “Hungarian Echoes.” The “echoes” are no louder because two of the composers—Haydn and Ligeti—were not Hungarian citizens (Haydn was Austrian and worked for Hungarian aristocrats; Ligeti was ethnically Hungar-ian but was an Austrian citizen). Austria is amply represented in the opera world, though, and this concert presentation of Bartók’s opera is the most Hungarian-flavored (tastes like sour cream!) music event in the series. Mr. Sa-lonen is to be joined by mezzo-so-prano Michelle DeYoung and bass Gábor Bretz. A post on Ms. DeY-oung’s blog reveals an infectious enthusiasm, “Esa Pekka guides Michelle through the 7 doors of the castle. Don’t miss it NYC!!!!!!” We could hardly resist.

Le Comte Ory, Metropolitan Opera, begins March 24

Bel canto star Juan Diego Flórez takes on Rossini’s infrequently per-formed opera—perhaps even more notable for another bounce back to opera from Met and Broadway di-rector Bartlett Sher (the man be-hind the Met’s Barbiere di Siviglia

and Tony winner South Pacific). Mr. Sher called Le Comte Ory “a place where love is dangerous. People get hurt.” (Funny—we’d describe every opera that way!) Mr. Flórez’s appearance on the stage is something of an event, though—the actor is placed op-posite Joyce DiDonato in the op-era equivalent of a Franco-Hath-away team-up of young stars. Given the pair’s reputation (and good looks), this should be one of the Met’s HD simulcasts for the season, despite the show’s lack of fame.

Monodramas, New York City Opera, begins March 25

Like opera, but hate that fusty feeling? That what you’re watch-ing is, how do you say, antique? New York City Opera has you cov-ered with a trilogy of 20th-centu-ry one-acts, each featuring a sin-gle soprano. Making the most of its smaller-stage reputation, the City Opera is taking its perfor-mances alternative, with work by video artist Jennifer Steinkamp and motionographer Ada Whit-ney spangling the performances. Good news, too, for opera fans who also love Pink Floyd—to bet-ter represent the forward-looking obsessions of the 20th century and the dubious artistic obses-sions of the 21st, a laser art “hom-age” to the artist Hiro Yamagata, will be included. Why spotlight one, or three, opera pioneers, when there’s modern art of all stripes to be thrown in, too?

Capriccio, Metropolitan Opera, begins March 28

Renée Fleming is recovering from last spring’s Armida at the Met—a role that, many said, sim-ply didn’t suit her. “The magic wasn’t there,” said the Post, dwelling on a cracked note. She was not “terribly believable as a villain,” said The Wall Street Jour-nal. (The New York Times liked it, but seemed amused and perplexed by Ms. Fleming’s spring 2010 pop-rock album, Dark Hope.) Thankful-ly, there’s always a second chance for a star of Ms. Fleming’s stature, and she returns to a role she has performed with great success. Ms.

Fleming’s character in Capriccio loves music to a degree that per-plexes and blinds her when it comes to making decisions. For the opera singer who covered Death Cab for Cutie last spring, it’s the role she was born to play!

Where the Wild Things Are, New York City Opera, April 9

The best path to money may be through the patrons’ children—or at least through the patrons’ belief and desire that opera is the best thing for their children. The New York City Opera’s Family Benefit is to revive Oliver Knussen’s opera Where the Wild Things Are—which significantly predates the film by Spike Jonze. Another difference between film and opera: the film reflected Mr. Jonze’s darkly adult aesthetic. The opera is to have artwork created by children in the City Opera’s education programs. There may be no better way to get

paretns’ attention than by forc-ing them to stare at their child’s artwork for hours during a family event. The guilt that forced parents to introduce opera to their child while that child was still at an age to read Maurice Sendak’s book will certainly kick into high gear.

Otello, Carnegie Hall, April l5

How does one get from Chicago to Carnegie Hall? Have Riccardo Muti on one’s side. The star Ital-ian conductor brings the Chicago Symphony to New York for a per-formance of the Shakespeare-inspired opera, more than a year after Mr. Muti’s Met debut with another Verdi show, Attila. Car-negie Hall’s second Great Ameri-can Symphonies series—which gives viewers the sense of hav-ing traveled to Boston, Atlanta or Cleveland—will end with this performance, and no other en-

semble performing has quite so boldface a name as Muti conduct-ing. Rising Met star Aleksandrs Antonenko is to perform the role of the Moor: Some things, like op-era stars, one can’t import from Chicago.

Séance on a Wet Afternoon, New York City Opera, begins April 19

This production comes from a new name in opera familiar to New Yorkers interested in theater. Ste-phen Schwartz composed Wicked (and Godspell, and Pippin) before taking a shine to the 1964 film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, the story of a “psychic” who concocts a kidnapping scheme in order to manipulate the kidnapped child’s parents into paying her money. (Sounds great! But isn’t this also the first half of Ghost, kind of?) The line between musical the-ater and opera may be blurred if the production is as well received M

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What we’re most looking forward to in opera this season B y D a n i e l D ’a D D a r i o

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10OPERA

Aleksandrs Antonenko as Otello.

The Great American Comedy is BORN AGAIN!

Telecharge.com or 212.239.6200 OCort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street

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BornYesterdayOnBroadway.comPhoto by Justin Stephens. Belushi photo by Jim Wright/Cigar Afi cionado


Juan Diego Flórez in Le Comte Ory.

in New York as it was in its Los Angeles debut. Mr. Schwartz, though, may see theater and opera as not terribly differ-ent: He produced a cabaret act in West Hollywood combining Séance with some of his show tunes before the show came to New York.

Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera, begins April 22

Good luck getting in: The hottest ticket this side of LCD Soundsystem is the second stage of the Ring cycle di-rected by Robert Lepage, whose first in-stallment bowed last fall. The New York Times’ coverage, in September 2010, focused on the show’s challenging ele-ments—a mezzo-soprano comes close to being crushed by a stage element, and singers complain about having to sing while flying. (This was before New York’s threshold for theatrical danger was raised when the dark was turned off.) It also indicated that the show’s here to stay, thanks to a tradition of

Ring longevity. Perhaps as the produc-tion ages, details of gigantism—a 45-ton set!—will diminish in the imagina-tion. But even if it’s just the hubbub of Ring fiends who’ll travel the globe for their next hit, they haven’t yet.

Stupenda! A Loving Tribute to Dame Joan Sutherland, Town Hall, May 17

Dame Joan Sutherland, who died last year, was termed “La Stupenda” in Venice; she is to be feted at a gathering of opera singers and the ticket-buying public. Video selections of Sutherland’s work (also available on YouTube) will be played, and performers will present tributes—though those performers were nearly all born in the 1930s. Perhaps the deficiency of young blood is unsurpris-ing: Sutherland, in 2002, noted that she no longer wanted “anything to do with opera anymore.” A person seeking to meet moneyed and graying opera pa-trons could do worse than dropping by this event.

B y Z a c h a r y W o o l f e

It is a time of uncertain-ty in the New York opera world. Well, not really, but in an art form as sta-ble and tradition-bound, not to mention as dra-

matic, as opera, any glimmers of unease are magnified into cataclys-mic anxiety.

Everyone, of course, is talking about the Met’s music director, James Levine, who just resigned his other directorship, of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, due to the health problems that have made him cancellation-prone in recent years. This move might stabilize him at the Met, or—or!—it might be the prelude to Mr. Levine’s deci-sion to move toward an emeritus-type position here, too.

While that situation plays itself out, there’s another one brewing more quietly. The Met’s contracts

with its labor unions expire this spring, and for more than a year, each side has been carefully stak-ing out its position. General man-ager Peter Gelb hired Joseph Volpe, his predecessor, to lead the Met’s negotiating team, and the unions have been studying media trends to try and predict where the op-era’s high-definition-broadcast ini-tiatives might go next.

Much of the Met’s workforce is unionized, and just as in strug-gling state governments, those employees’ salaries and benefits account for an enormous part of the company’s budget. Arts audi-ences aren’t used to thinking very hard about the unions behind the scenes of the performances they enjoy, even though there’s been no moment in the recent past when something as generally overlooked as union negotiations was as prom-inent as it is right now. The levels of news coverage and budget sizes may vary from the NFL to Wiscon-

sin to the Metropolitan Opera, but the issues at stake in discussions between management and employ-ees are largely similar: salary in-creases, health benefits, pension-plan structures, workplace safety.

As in state governments, the Met would like to shift employee pen-sions from a defined benefit plan, whereby employees receive a cer-tain amount regardless of econom-ic conditions, to a defined contri-bution plan, like a 401(k), whereby payouts are invested and therefore contingent on the economy. De-fined benefit plans are increasingly things of the past—the private sec-tor has almost completely elimi-nated them—but the Met’s unions have insisted that the current pen-sion structure is nonnegotiable.

Earlier in the season, union of-ficials had projected that negotia-tions would begin in the spring and be concluded during the Met’s tour of Japan in June. While the orches-tra union, widely believed to be

the most problematic for manage-ment, has reportedly already be-gun formal negotiations, the oth-er unions, including the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which represents the Met’s princi-pal singers, choristers, dancers, di-rectors and production personnel, will not begin until the end of the opera season.

“Negotiations will begin some-time in the middle of May,” said Alan Gordon, the executive direc-tor of AGMA, in a phone interview. “That’s later than usual, but a little earlier than we expected. Nobody wanted to negotiate in Japan, so we thought we’d start in August, but the Met wanted to have the first few sessions in May, before the sea-son’s over.”

Not coincidentally, that late start puts increased pressure on the Met to make a deal and avoid a strike that could threaten open-ing night, on Sept. 26. While both sides prepare to meet, there’s still

the ostensible reason for all these machinations and stresses: There’s a spring season to attend to. The soprano Karita Mattila is now starring in a run of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. The tenor Vladi-mir Galouzine sings Ghermann, and the performances are led by the promising young conductor Andris Nelsons, whose name al-ways pops up during conversations about potential successors to Mr. Levine. The mezzo Dolora Zajick, in a campy turn, will be the demented Old Countess.

Renée Fleming sings a rath-er younger countess in Strauss’ Capriccio (opening March 28), a role far better suited to her voice and temperament than Rossini’s Armida. And speaking of Rossini, the Met continues its forays deep-er into early-19th-century “bel canto” opera with that composer’s Le Comte Ory (opening March 24). The director, Bartlett Sher, was re-sponsible for a glumly uncreative Tales of Hoffmann last season, but his Barber of Seville in 2006 was livelier, and he’ll be joined for Comte by two of his original Barber stars—Diana Damrau and Juan Di-ego Florez—as well as Joyce DiDo-nato and Stéphane Degout.

We’re at least assured good sing-ing there, which is not certain to be the case in Wagner’s Die Walküre (opening April 22), the second in-stallment in Robert Lepage’s new Ring cycle. The singers were good if listless in Das Rheingold, but Walküre adds the wild card of Deb-orah Voigt’s first Brünnhilde. There was a time in her career when it seemed that Ms. Voigt’s big, gleam-ing, impulsive voice would transi-tion smoothly to the touchstones of the dramatic soprano repertory. But whether it’s a result of gastric bypass surgery in 2004 or just nor-mal wear and tear, her voice has gotten edgier, paler and more tired in the past few years. Her run of Puccini’s Fanciulla del West wasn’t


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At the Met any glimmers

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Deborah Voigt in Robert Lepage’s new production of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Met.

Labor pains and other problems will plague the spring

pretty, and in Walküre she’ll be in a cast with some blazing singers—Eva Maria Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann—in their vocal prime. Whether Ms. Voigt can pull it off; whether James Levine, who adores her, will be on the podium; and whether Mr. Lepage can bring to the opera a theatricality that was utterly missing from Rheingold are the questions here.

Meanwhile, across the Lin- coln Center plaza, New York City Opera is still struggling to find an audience despite doing generally excellent work since George Steel took over last season. It’s hard, in a crowded New York cultural scene, to build in five productions a year the kind of momentum and vis-ibility needed to consistently fill a 2,600-seat theater. The spring sea-

son has variety and great singers: a boldly creative evening of 20th-century monodramas, featuring works by Arnold Schoenberg, Mor-ton Feldman and John Zorn (open-ing March 25); Jonathan Miller’s wannabe–Peter Sellars production of L’Elisir d’Amore, set in a ’50s din-er and starring the talented young soprano Stefania Dovhan (open-ing March 22); and the first opera

by Godspell and Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz, a noir mystery opening April 19 and featuring a crazed medium played by City Op-era’s veteran house diva Lauren Flanigan.

It hasn’t made it easier for City Opera that the New York Philhar-monic has lately gotten into the opera game with the kind of exper-imental productions of 20th-cen-

tury masterpieces that used to be City Opera’s bread and butter. This season they’ll be featuring two: a concert version of Bartok’s Blue-beard’s Castle (opening March 18), starring mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; and Janáček’s Cun-ning Little Vixen (opening June 22), in a full production by Doug Fitch, the director of last season’s bril-

liant Grand Macabre.The scrappy Chelsea Opera per-

forms Lee Hoiby’s charming This Is the Rill Speaking starting June 9. Two recitals at Carnegie Hall look a little further back in the past, but the singing will be superb. On April 3, the soprano Dorothea Röschmann and the countertenor David Daniels sing an all-Handel program, the repertory at which these two are among the best in the world. And on April 25, the sopra-no Sylvia Schwartz, the mezzo-so-prano Bernarda Fink, the tenor Mi-chael Schade and the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff team up for a program of Schumann and Brahms. The city’s opera scene may feel un-certain these days, but these recit-als are about as sure as sure things can get.

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City Opera’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon.


The StrokesAnglesMarch 22, RCA

And we thought a career based upon ripping off Televi-sion couldn’t last. The saviors of New York rock—or of New York trust-fund-kid hauteur—faded away after their little-loved First Impressions of Earth in 2006. In the interim, Julian Casablancas made a solo record; Albert Ham-mond Jr. made two; Fabrizio Moretti started a new band and finally ended things with Drew Barrymore. It’s impossible to guess what public opinion will do with Angles, but the album’s over-stuffed first single, “Under Cover of Darkness,” sounds like the band at its best and its worst. There are moments of tight yearning and moments of loose, what-goes-here decompression—less angu-lar than flabby.

The Mountain GoatsAll Eternals Deck March 29, Merge

John Darnielle’s rotating troupe’s 18th album—its first on Merge Records—sounds grim, and not merely because four tracks were produced by death metal icon Erik Rutan. Mr. Darn-ielle compared the album to scenes in a 1970s “occult-scare movie” and cited influences like fake drug memoir Go Ask Alice and cult gang-war classic The Warriors. With such spooky in-spiration, we’re beginning to un-derstand just why Mr. Darnielle tends to pick up and shed band-mates.

Britney SpearsFemme FataleMarch 29, Jive

The long, strange trip of Britney Spears continues, with her new al-bum, Femme Fatale. Ms. Spears has had Forrest Gumpian success in the

pop music industry; without ex-erting any effort, she emerged (or was forcibly dragged) from pink-wigged mania back onto the charts just as dance music was returning to the mainstream. It’s hard not to miss the utter lack of persona in Ms. Spears’s 2007-era output when hearing her 2011 single “Hold It Against Me,” in which a humorless singer attempts to recite a raun-chy pun. And yet longtime Britney fans—are there any other kind?—shall be sated until the star’s next flickering emergence in two years.

Wiz KhalifaRolling Papers,March 29, Atlantic

The Pittsburgh rapper says his album title doesn’t—at least not solely—refer to marijuana. “I sort of got my ‘rolling papers’” from Warner Bros., Mr. Khalifa has joked. While his memory is sur-prisingly long for someone who so chronically uses … Twitter (War-ner Bros. dropped him before the

release of his last album, in 2009), it’s exciting to consider what Mr. Khalifa could do with a record label behind him. That is, if he can find another single with as much stay-ing power as the Steelers–themed “Black and Yellow.” Maybe a Pitts-burgh Pirates single?

LowC’MonApril 12, Sub Pop

The nearly un-Google-able Du-luth, Minn., band is nearing the start of their third decade—they got started in 1993, when their soft, slow melodies in the age of grunge inadvertently kicked off the mini-movement “slowcore.” They haven’t wandered too far from their roots: What’s available online sounds me-thodical and quiet as ever, though devoid of the explicit political reso-nances from the band’s last record, Drums and Guns. Apolitical, per-haps, but still willfully out-there—the record was made in a Catholic Church in Duluth.

TV on the RadioNine Types of LightApril 12, Interscope

Dear Science, TV on the Radio’s last album, came in at No. 1 on The Village Voice’s year-end Pazz and Jop poll. The band broke through with audiences, too, even get-ting a poorly sound-mixed spot on Saturday Night Live. What’s left for them to achieve? Post-stardom, it would seem: Their new album’s cover doesn’t feature the band’s name. They’re now so distinctive—though early tracks lack the weird blats of sound that made Dear Science so much like itself—that they don’t need your simple-mind-ed conventions!

Paul SimonSo Beautiful or So WhatApril 12, Concord

The venerable guitarist returns with his first album since 2006, and is presumably feeling, well, his venerability: The first single is SE

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spring arts preview l Music

The Mountain Goats.

Fleet Foxes.

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titled “The Afterlife.” Simon’s been popu-lar, cyclically, but has he ever been hip? His flirtations with world music (no word yet on what country inspired this album) are earnest, his depiction of a double helix on the So Beautiful album cover daddishly nerdy. The apocryphal reports that Mr. Si-mon had asked cool older brother of rock Bob Dylan to guest on the album are en-couraging. Adopting some of Mr. Dylan’s swagger (while still singing more compre-hensibly) can only help Mr. Simon.

Panda BearTomboyApril 12, Paw Tracks

Opining on this delayed release from Animal Collective mainstay Panda Bear (née Noah Lennox), the music blog Ste-reogum said the album’s cover “would make a decent tattoo.” While covering a record-listening party for Tomboy, The Village Voice wrote, “Panda Bear fans are the Justin Bieber fans of the indie uni-verse.” His songs “kind of have this weath-ering the storm attitude to them,” Panda Bear told Rolling Stone. To what storm is he referring?

Fleet FoxesHelplessness BluesMay 3, Sub Pop

Fleet Foxes seemed like they’d tire ev-

eryone out quickly. The Seattle band’s blend of folk and choralish harmonies just barely works artistically, and does not spell sales bonanza (hark, the lessons of pop choir the Polyphonic Spree!). Some-how, the band has thrived and is about to release a second album that frontman Robin Pecknold has said is inspired by Van Morrison and Roy Harper. Changes come all at once sometimes: The band also has a new member taken from the wreckage of two post-punk bands. Fleet Foxes’ vision of itself is apparently as capacious as any of the band’s songs.

Lady GagaBorn This WayMay 23, Interscope

The chattering classes were scan-dalized by Lady Gaga’s anxiety-of-in-fluence rip-offs of Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” What matters, though, is that Ms. Gaga hasn’t forgotten how to grab attention. It’s tough to criticize Ms. Gaga—she preempts all criticism not by being self-aware, but by constantly up-ping the ante with her crass stunt art-istry. Who knows what other “surpris-es” this album cycle will hold? Give her credit for this—it took Madonna seven albums to get into weird extraplanetary spirituality, on Ray of Light. With Ms. Gaga’s birth-of-an-alien “Born This Way” video, she got there in three.


spring arts preview l Dance

B y G u e l d a Vo i e n

it’s a famous image. Mer-ce Cunningham, chair strapped to his back, sus-pended in the air, some-how peaceful, not a hair out of place, effortless. His

signature: the eerily calm upper torso. The image is from a dance called Antic Meet. It’s a 1958 col-laboration between Cunningham and his close friend, artist Robert Rauschenberg, staged to the music of Cunningham’s longtime lover, John Cage. It will be performed in New York by the Joyce Theater this month for the first time since 1969, and, in some ways, for the last.

The Cunningham company, hew-ing to Cunningham’s wishes that the troupe not become a “museum” to his work (he passed away in 2009), will be disbanded at the end of the year. The first of their final hometown performances is March 22 through March 27 at the Joyce, and the company is looking forward to it in a bittersweet way. Some of the last dancers to be trained by Cunningham himself will perform. “It is especially rewarding to per-form for audiences in the city he called home,” said Trevor Carlson, executive director of the Cunning-ham company.

Within the dance world, the re-appearance of the historic work is keenly awaited. Wendy Perron, edi-tor of Dance magazine, has looked forward to seeing Antic Meet for years, she said. The idea that “‘anything is possible’—that was the original flavor of the stuff that Merce did.”

Indeed, looking back, Cunning-ham created the first postmodern dance. His performers’ bodies were toned to perfection as in ballet, but they moved in a vacuum, without meaning, symbols or overt theme. In Antic Meet and other pieces, they danced around Rauschenberg’s “combines” to the non-music of John Cage. The trio’s alliance was among the great collaborations of 20th-century art.

Cunningham met Cage in 1938 when the latter was playing piano accompaniment for the dance class-es at a Seattle school. Cunningham was married at the time, but the two men eventually came to live to-gether in New York. Rauschenberg worked with both of them at Black

Mountain College (a now legend-ary mid-century artistic cauldron) in North Carolina in 1953, and he introduced them to Jasper Johns, who was his downstairs neighbor, lover and sometimes collaborator. Johns went on to serve as an artistic advisor of the Cunningham dance

troupe. The four lived in New York in the 1950s at a time when the new arts scene was undergoing a revo-lution. Hanging out at Greenwich Village bars, casting the I Ching and drinking together, they formed a clique of artists and intellectuals that overthrew the status quo.

Antic Meet, when it was created in 1958, was something of an inside joke. With costumes (described as “zany”) by Rauschenberg, Antic Meet attempted “to satirize the more foolish mannerisms of the Graham dance theater,” wrote New

York Times critic Alistair Macaulay at the time. This was what Cun-ningham represented to dance: the departure from Martha Gra-ham, the departure from narrative, lyricism and gesture. All this was replaced by “chance operations,” as Cunningham called them, and

collaboration between movement, music, visual art and design,

But few artistic partnerships last forever. There was a falling-out: Rauschenberg’s comment that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was “his biggest can-vas” reportedly offended Cage, and other clashes over everything from punctuality (the artist was appar-ently always late) to more weighty matters led to their separation for some years. During those years, Rauschenberg “cheated,” design-ing sets and costumes for Paul

Taylor and Trisha Brown. But the men would collaborate again in their later years on such works as Interscape, Travelogue and, lastly, XOVER (crossover), a 2007 work Rauschenberg designed the sets for, a collage of photographs and blood-red arcs and slashes of paint.

In conjunction with the An-tic Meet performance, original Rauschenberg costumes and art-work and archival footage from many Cunningham-Rauschenberg collaborations will be exhibited at the Rauschenberg Foundation’s new West 19th Street space, open-ing March 21. The John Cage Trust has provided sound from Mr. Cage’s Essay (1987) as well.

“It will almost be a snow globe,” Christy MacLear, executive direc-tor of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, said of the show. “We want to celebrate the range of his work.” Many people do not real-ize that Rauschenberg did his own experimental performances, says Ms. MacLear, including pieces featuring turtles with flashlights strapped to their backs. The exhibit will feature archival film of many of Rauschenberg’s “performance-related works,” and the original costumes from Antic Meet. “It’s not something you can sell in a gallery,” said Ms. MacLear.

Rauschenberg, artistic adviser to Cunningham’s company from 1954

to 1964, arguably contributed more to dance than any other visual art-ist (Antic Meet’s “parachute dress-es” will be included at the exhibit). When Cunningham first began to tour, fresh out of Black Mountain, Rauschenberg stage-managed his performances. The pair collaborat-ed on numerous works, including Minutiae, for which Rauschenberg’s first “combine” was created, as well as pieces central to the develop-ment of postmodern dance, such as Summerspace and Crises.

Cunningham worked with other visual artists as well, hiring Johns in 1964 and later English artist Mark Lancaster. CRWDSPCR (1993), also set for the performance at the Joyce, was made in collaboration with Lancaster and with the aid of a computer program. Cunningham, never set in his ways, began using a computer in 1991 and employed it for all of his choreography after 1991. The program in its earliest forms presented an interesting challenge for Cunningham (and his dancers): It did not understand physical constraints. The result is a frenetic, mechanical-looking dance, one that absolutely requires the precision and technical prow-ess for which Cunningham danc-ers are known. Quartet (1986), a dance for five, with a score by Da-vid Tudor, is also on the program. The dance evokes isolation and es-trangement, and Mr. Cunningham himself originated the role of the alienated central figure.

The Joyce, a stalwart dance or-ganization which has nurtured “downtown” dance—smaller, less established companies doing work closer to the margins—for the last 30 years may also be in its twilight. Its lease, under the terms of which it currently pays $1 a year, is up in 2016, and a planned move to the World Trade Center area is look-ing increasingly untenable due to stalls in fund-raising and build-ing. Talks between Eliot Feld, the Eighth Avenue theater’s owner, and the Joyce Theater Founda-tion over who will retain the Joyce name continue. Mr. Feld rejected offers from the nonprofit to buy the space.

So this season is the last time MCDC performs at the Joyce, and the last time any of these works will be performed in New York City by MCDC. “It’s the end of an era,” said Ms. Perron.

The Last DanceThe Merce Cunningham troupe,

on a farewell tour at the Joyce, unearths a rare work

The alliance, and friendship, of Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg

suffered when the artist was quoted as saying the dance company

was ‘his greatest canvas.’

Antic Meet, Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

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o kay, dance people, buckle up—March is going to be a bumpy month. It’s a modern-dance invasion. (Paul

Taylor’s come and gone; everyone else is on his/her way.) Start figur-ing out your priorities now … next week will be too late.

To begin with: You’re going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce.

First up, Larry Keigwin, from the 8th through the 13th, with a full-evening work called Dark Habits. Keigwin is always smart, witty, New Yorky. Not everyone likes him as much as I do, but here’s your chance to judge for yourself. (He’s also a charming dancer.)

Next, from the 15th through the

20th: One of my favorite choreog-raphers, Doug Varone, also with a full-evening work, Chapters From a Broken Novel. Six years ago, I wrote here that his new work, Castles, was the best new dance piece I’d seen in a long time, and nothing that’s come along since has changed my mind. What’s so special? His unusual gift for com-bining kinetic excitement with humanity and highly charged emotion. I guess you could call it expressive excitement.

And then, from the 22nd though the 27th, the return of the Merce Cunningham Company, deep into its Legacy Tour—everything’s moving inexorably to its self-imposed dis-solution at the end of the year. This is absolutely required seeing for ad-mirers of the late, great Merce; soon his work will be solely in the hands (feet?) of other companies.

And let’s not forget the Foundress: The Martha Graham company is go-ing to be at the Rose from March 15 to March 20. The novelties will be a revival of the Robert Wilson Snow on the Mesa (1995) and a new piece by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, but the most emotional program for many of us will be the one on the 17th celebrating Martha’s collaboration with Isamu Noguchi: Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart and Embattled Garden.

Mark Morris? Yes, March 17 to March 27, at the Morris Dance Cen-ter, his studio across from BAM, with its intimate theater that can only accommodate under 200 peo-ple. He’s bringing us a world pre-miere—Festival Dance, to a Hummel trio—and two New York Premieres: The Muir, to a group of Beethoven’s arrangements of Scottish and Irish songs, and Petrichor, to a Villa-Lo-

bos string quartet. Small pieces in a small space, but with big expecta-tions. This, of course, is a must.

Trisha Brown? At the Dance The-ater Workshop, on and off from the 15th to the 26th.

Yvonne Rainer? At the Barysh-nikov Arts Center from the 16th to the 19th.

After all this, I give you permis-sion to relax for a little while, to gear up for the return of New York City Ballet (May 4) and ABT (May 16).

At NYCB, a new version of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and featuring Patti LuPone. (Not, alas, Allegra Kent and Lotte Lenya, who starred in Balanchine’s 1958 version.) Also Vienna Waltzes, La Sonnambula and Jewels. To be avoided if possible: Peter Martins’ Thou Swell and Susan Stroman’s For the Love of Duke.

At ABT: Don’t miss the company premiere of Ratmansky’s brilliant and hilarious The Bright Stream (a triumph when the Bolshoi brought it here several years ago). Also new works by Ratmansky and Wheeldon (oh yes, and by Benjamin Millepied). Plus an important revival: Tudor’s Shadowplay.

As for the full-evening specta-cles, it would be hard to say which is the bigger yawn, James Kudelka’s Cinderella or John Neumeier’s The Lady of the Camelias. Avoid both. But the old standbys will be up and running: Giselle, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty. Try to see Cojocaru in Don Q, Giselle or Beauty, Osipova in Coppélia or Beauty. And Murphy and/or Hallberg in just about any-thing—except Cinderella. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

[email protected]

Filling Out Your Dance CardFrom Merce to Martha to Morris, the spring performances you won’t want to miss Doug Varone dancers.


spring arts preview l Books

What we’re most looking forward to in books this season By Da n i e l D’a D Da r i o

TOP

10BOOKS

Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reasonby Anne Roiphe(Nan A. Talese, $24.95), March 15

The first-wave feminist Anne

Roiphe takes her reader back to New York at the turn of the 1960s, the era of Mad Men and Joan Did-ion’s “Goodbye to All That.” Ms. Roiphe, a former writer for The Observer, traces her marriage and affairs—including one with George Plimpton—for the purpos-es of reframing her own story, not merely dishing dirt. Ms. Roiphe’s story is told in relation to the sto-ries of successful or unsuccess-ful men she encountered: It was a man’s world, one Ms. Roiphe had to endure so that she might have the last word.

Day of the Oprichnik: A Novelby Vladimir Sorokin; translated by Jamey Gambrell (trans.) (FSG, $23), March 15

It was less than a year ago that the last Russian-infused dystopian nov-el landed on The Observer’s door-step, in the form of Gary Shteyn-gart’s Facebook fever dream Super Sad True Love Story. Vladimir So-rokin imagines a future overtaken by antisocial, not social, network-ing. The protagonist is a member of the New Russia’s elite—overseeing both executions and meetings with czarinas. The future will always have its lurid elements (here, it’s fish genetically modified for one’s con-sumption with psychotropic drugs), yet a novel of Russian cruelty in the technocratic age feels more strictly contemporary than it should.

Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reaganby Del Quentin Wilber(Henry Holt, $27), March 15

It’s been a good year so far for Ronald Reagan fe-tishists—the centennial of his birth brought all manner of trib-utes and fond memories of the 1980s. In death as in life, Reagan is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with whatever meaning the gazer imputes. Washington Post reporter Del Quentin Wilber looks at the early days of the presiden-cy—and how “Rawhide” (Reagan’s Secret Service handle) inspired his acolytes even after being shot in early 1981. Bill O’Reilly has al-ready weighed in with a positive review.

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piafby Carolyn Burke(Knopf, $27.95), March 22

Is the Edith Piaf moment still going? The actress Marion

Cotillard, in two movies—the biopic La Vie en Rose and the Piaf-scented Inception—has kept the legend alive, and now passes the torch of Piafo-philia to Carolyn Burke. Ms. Burke, who’s written biographies of poet Mina Loy and photographer Lee Miller, has to face down a far more (over-?) exposed subject in this vol-ume. Early reviews, though, indicate that Ms. Burke debunks Piaf’s self-created myths and reveals some un-told stories. Anything fresher than that familiar origin story, or with more subtlety and shades of possible meaning than a performance by Ms. Cotillard, will be welcome.

The Free World: A Novelby David Bezmozgis(FSG, $26), March 29

A stalwart of The New York-er’s “20 Under

40” fiction writers, David Bezmoz-gis has produced a collection of short stories—the well-reviewed Natasha—but is debuting as a nov-elist with The Free World, the sto-ry of three generations of Russian Jews headed west and stopping in Rome. Whoever said the ambitious young male novelist was dead? The expatriates-in-glorious-Roma yarn has always been a convenient and appealing one for novelists, but Mr. Bezmozgis’s perspective on the scene (the author emigrated from Latvia as a child) should provide a tale far longer on actual emotion, and shorter on so-called “white whines,” than, say, Tom Rachman’s hit Italian-expat novel of last year, The Imperfectionists. The imperfec-tions faced by characters in The Free World stand to be actually problem-atic, not merely convenient story-telling avenues.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trialby Janet Malcolm(Yale University Press, $25), March 29

All those who were boggled at the length of the re-cent New Yorker Scientology piece weren’t paying attention a year ago, when Janet Malcolm dropped a ream on a Queens murder trial and its dissection among the bor-ough’s Jewish community and the courtroom press corps. Ms. Mal-colm’s piece, less heralded than re-cent New Yorker feats now, became a work of stunt journalism when Ms. Malcolm inserted herself into the trial by providing evidence. The blend of attempted precision and emotional involvement—and the uneasiness with their merger—is what turned Ms. Malcolm’s Jour-nalist and the Murderer into leg-end. The target here, one specific trial, is smaller than the sprawl of the previous work, but who knows what Ms. Malcolm added on the way to hard cover.

Piaf.

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In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academicby Professor X(Viking Adult, $25.95), March 31

Professor X, the author of a 2008 Atlantic essay describing his expe-rience teaching college “in the northeast-ern United States” and condemning the cul-ture of widespread college attendance, has published a book-length rambling on simi-lar subjects. The author, whose essay is not so very dissimilar from a 2005–08 series of dispatches by adjunct professor “Oron-te Churm” at McSweeney’s, seeks to tell—without any too-revealing specifics!—just what financial contingencies drove him to the horror of teaching English to students who don’t belong in his classroom, and how, precisely, the education system works. (Fin-gers crossed for a “vampire squid”–level-of-hyperbole metaphor!) Not everyone de-serves an education, you see. But everyone, even the anonymous Professor X, deserves a book deal.

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetryby David Orr(Harper, $25.99), April 5

David Orr knows how to get that rare thing for poetry: public attention. In 2007, he penned for The Times a sav-

aging of Dana Goodyear’s reporting on the Poetry Foundation for The New Yorker, and the way the magazine uses poetry to begin with: “as a brand-enhancing commodity.” Readers will judge for themselves wheth-er Mr. Orr’s new book, “a tour through the world of poetry” seemingly aimed at infre-quent readers as well as devotees, is meant to enhance Mr. Orr’s brand—or whether Mr. Orr’s doing his best to enhance poetry’s.

The Pale Kingby David Foster Wallace(Little, Brown, $27.99), April 15

The novel was unfin-ished at the time of Wallace’s suicide, but still lands as a 560-page doorstop. If past

posthumous works like James Agee’s A Death in the Family or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 serve as indicators, The Pale King will sell wonderfully; booksellers are al-ways wishing they could dig up more un-finished apocrypha, and Wallace’s work never rested, entirely, on narrative. Whether the prose is good or bad—or impossible to discern in the noisy haze of hype—it will be the literary event of the spring. Surely Wallace would have a footnote to place under its success.

Reading My Father: A Memoirby Alexandra Styron (Scribner, $25), April 19

You’re no one until your children write a memoir about you. William Styron joins Anatole Broyard and Auberon Waugh

in the elite circle of subjects for the mus-ings of grown children seeking a topic. It should come as no surprise that Sty-ron was a complicated man—he wrote a memoir of his depression—and young Alexandra Styron was, by her own tell-ing, witness to his best and worst selves. William Styron remains such a stagger-ing, and staggeringly interesting, talent that this book may transcend score-set-tling. But if we see a memoir from one of Tom Wolfe’s kids, we’re giving up al-together.

William andAlexandra Styron.

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B y A n n e D i e B e l

nine months af-ter his mother’s death, Roland Bar-thes made a brief entry to his di-ary of mourning:

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.” In the notes that make up his Mourning Diary, Barthes reflected on the particularity of an individual’s experience of loss, lamenting at once the “egoism” separating the mourner from oth-ers and the absence of social ritu-als that could lift the mourner out of his solitude and make his suf-fering more comprehensible. Even in his frustration with French so-ciety for its failure to externalize mourning, as “all judicious societ-ies” have done, Barthes was able to endure his sorrow by putting it into words: “My suffering is in-expressible but all the same utter-able, speakable.” Suffering at one’s own rhythm does not mean suffer-ing silently.

In her searching, elegant memoir The Long Goodbye (Riv-erhead, 320 pages, $25.95), out next month, the poet Meghan O’Rourke describes just the same tension between outer and in-ner inherent in the experience of loss. Confronting the problem of suffering being inexpressible yet utterable, she gives an emphati-cally public account of her grief after her mother’s death at 55. Ms. O’Rourke tells the story of her mother’s battle against can-cer, crafting an intimate portrait of a family in its greatest joy and worst agony. Barbara O’Rourke emerges as an extraordinarily strong and loving mother, mag-netic and demanding. “Like a

fool, I fell in love with you,” Ms. O’Rourke thinks, after her diag-nosis. “But you were always likely to die first.”

For all her mother’s vividness, the book is not about her life; it’s about Ms. O’Rourke’s own strug-gle to make her way through ex-treme and lasting sadness. This struggle is deeply personal, but Ms. O’Rourke insists that her dif-ficulty is also the result of our culture treating grief as a private psychological process, leaving us without language and social rituals to guide us. Asserting that “in our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely si-lent,” Ms. O’Rourke moves deftly between recording her particu-lar experience of disorientation and loneliness and analyzing our general cultural obsession with accepting loss—letting go, mov-ing on—and intolerance for pro-

longed or complicated sadness. Friends are presumptuously sym-pathetic or awkwardly evasive; lovers are inexplicably distant or inconveniently needy. But, Ms. O’Rourke suggests, it’s not re-ally their fault; the inadequacy of their support is symptomatic of a cultural uneasiness with death, with total loss.

In the year after her mother’s death, Ms. O’Rourke finds that nothing has prepared her for her grief, least of all language. She feels “heartsickness, like the sad-ness you feel after a breakup, but many times stronger and more desperate.” She seeks a new vo-cabulary, turning to metaphors to capture her specific loss: Her mother is the wind, her loss is an amputation, her mourning is a tree growing around an obstruc-tion, but she finds such substitu-tions unsatisfying. She dutifully

reads clinical literature on grief, but uses its terms warily. She points out that we don’t have a word for having lost a parent, only “orphan” for having lost both. She surveys great works dealing with death, from Shake-speare to Tolstoy to Proust to Woolf, and incorporates poetry with great facility.

Ms. O’Rourke’s relationship to language throughout the book reflects her ambivalence about communicating her experience in the first place. As strongly as she calls for a shared language and shared rituals to work against the idea that grief is private, or that it’s universally surmount-able, she refuses to portray her grief as representative, as any-thing but hers. “I am writing about my grief, of course,” she says, not “because I think it was more extreme, more unusual,

more special than anyone else’s.” Her voice wavers between star-tlingly beautiful turns of phrase and aggressive repetition, estab-lishing a vocabulary for loss that is at once idiosyncratic and pre-scriptive.

For Ms. O’Rourke, the problem with communicating grief is not just that the intensity of emo-tion exceeds the language that serves as its vehicle. It’s also that seeing or hearing our feelings in language makes us feel guilty for having expressed them at all. Opening up a cut on her arm with an “ivory-handled dinner knife” one night, Ms. O’Rourke realizes that she wants “to create some embodiment of the heartbreak eating me up.” But while self-muti-lation is obviously not the solution to the incommunicability of her grief, what this graphic episode illustrates is the particular expe-

Half an OrphanA poet loses her mother

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rience of wanting emotions that feel too intense for language. Ms. O’Rourke finds this incident “clar-ifying,” but leaves it to the reader to understand how grief and self-punishment relate to each other in the mind of the writer.

Ms. O’Rourke is not alone in wanting to connect grief and guilt. Just weeks after his mother’s sui-cide, Austrian writer Peter Hand-ke declares in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams that the worst thing for him would be sympathy: “I need the feeling that what I am going through is incomprehensible and incommunicable; only then does the horror seem meaningful and real.” What moves Mr. Handke to write is an almost physiological desperation: He has experienced moments of “dull speechlessness” and needs to “formulate” them, to let the horror startle him out of insensibility and into speech, even if it contains or reduces his suffering. Ms. O’Rourke does not

venture to this level of reflection on the violence involved in turn-ing the inexpressible into some-thing utterable.

As an act of communication that is at times resistant to the idea of communicating, The Long Goodbye is caught between two impulses: arguing that we lack a social structure for dealing with loss, and telling a story about loss that reveals a rich European and American cultural inheritance for talking about death and mourn-ing. Ms. O’Rourke is better when telling her own story, which is itself a story of confronting a cul-tural lack, than when comment-ing directly on a “silence” that, given the plenitude of sources she cites, including Joan Didion’s and Barthes’ recent books, isn’t as pervasive as she suggests.

While Ms. O’Rourke may ar-gue that America’s silence and uneasiness around the sadness

of death makes grief an unneces-sarily long and painful process for many, she is surprisingly reti-cent on the subject of another loss she suffers: divorce. Ms. O’Rourke and her longtime boyfriend mar-ry shortly after her mother’s di-agnosis, but they separate only eight months later. “It is impos-sible for me to know whether—or to what degree—the separation was an expression of my grief,” she writes early in the book. She dates other men before and after her mother’s death, struggling to form intimacy in a time of isola-tion.

It is only when she sees an at-tractive young woman, married and with children, visiting her own dying mother in the hospi-tal, and feels “a flicker of envy, of what-might-have-been,” that she admits her loss: “Your grief is not like mine, I thought spitefully. You’re going home to your family. I am newly divorced. I have no fam-ily. All I have is this.” Ms. O’Rourke suffers a double loss, divorce and death, but her focus on death and her project of cultural analysis prevent her from attempting any comparison between the two kinds of loss, even though she de-

scribes both forms of attachment with the same words. By privileg-ing death as the only real loss and treating the pain of breaking up as a mere byproduct, she misses the chance to explore the relation-ship between absence and loss, between social death and death itself.

Ms. O’Rourke writes passion-ately and intelligently about losing and feeling lost, and she argues convincingly for making mourning a more formally public process. But The Long Goodbye is split in two, a memoir trying to be cultural criticism, and cultur-al criticism excusing itself from depth in the name of individual experience. It wrenches the heart, and it raises urgent questions about death in a secular, thera-peutic culture, but it leaves its fundamental assumptions about loss—how it feels, what to do about it, which kinds matter—unexamined.

O’Rourke points out that we don’t have a word for having lost a parent,

only ‘orphan’ for having lost both.

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B y M i c h a e l h . M i l l e r

“i am going to see how fast I can write a novel,” Blake Butler wrote on his blog, gillesanddeleuze-committedsuicide-

andsowilldrphil.com, on April 14, 2008. “I am going to write non-stop on it until I am done. I start-ed today at 12:30 p.m. and now have 4,500 words at 8:18. I hope to have a draft of a 30,000-word novel in 10-15 days. I am going to try to blog about it while doing it as a form of motivation. I am go-ing to minimize my eating and only drink coffee/water. Tonight I am going to watch INLAND EM-PIRE again if I stop writing long enough.”

That night Mr. Butler re-watched David Lynch’s script-less, surrealist epic (he saw it four times in one week) until the scene when Laura Dern goes through a window in Los Angeles and ends up in Poland. He did not sleep for several hours after that, though it was very late. Eight days later,

still writing, Mr. Butler—a chron-ic insomniac—found time to move apartments and watch both Fun-ny Games and Crumb, the docu-mentary. He had written 34,689 words. That day, an email arrived in his in-box from Gene Morgan in Houston with the subject line “Project.”

It read: “I know you’re into a lot of different projects in the imme-diate future, so this may be more of a burden than a question, but I’ve got an idea for a site that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I wanted to run it by you.” The email explained that on the Inter-net literature suffers from lack of exposure and a concern over its legitimacy.

“I think the best way to combat that is through being professional as fuck, and classing-up what we do,” Mr. Morgan wrote. “I think if it’s fleshed-out correctly, it could serve as a hub for the communi-ty. Here is the url I’ve got on hold: http//htmlgiant.com.”

The next day at 9:30 p.m., 40,000 words later, six pounds lighter and exhausted from lack of sleep, Mr. Butler finished the first

draft of his novel. He’d get to the email later.

“The day Gene asked me to take part, it was like we’d both been thinking with the same brain apart and then suddenly bumped them back together,” said Mr. But-ler, whose then untitled first draft is now called There Is No Year and will be published by HarperPe-rennial in April. “I was trying to push my own stuff rather than get an agent to do it, and there was kind of a scene developing online where all these people were do-ing the same thing in their own town, blogging about it, starting their own little magazines. Gene and I were thinking the exact same thing: We need to get some of these people who are doing it in their bedrooms to all talk in the same place.”

HTML Giant has become the blog for writers by writers. It was something new when it came out, less an aggregator of book chat or reviews of small presses—like Bookslut or The Millions—than a kind of round-table discussion among writers about fiction in the comments section. It has spawned

a slew of imitators, such as Big Other, We Who Are About to Die and Trick with a Knife. A few weeks ago it reached its peak traf-fic: 40,000 unique visitors over the span of a couple hours.

“What books have actually got-ten you wet or given you an erec-tion?” asked Mr. Butler in a one-line post titled “Hornbook.” The answers ranged from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to Nich-olson Baker’s Vox to the first Sweet Valley High book. “Who is the horniest writer?” he asked in another. Mary Gaitskill, Mi-chel Houellebecq, Philip Roth and Michael Crichton were all men-tioned, as was Helen Keller.

Longer posts can take on the quality of manifestos or rants, as when Mr. Butler enumerated doz-ens of items under the heading “Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing”: “Stories,” read one point, “involving relationships, sex, dialogue, magical animals, magic at all really that presents it-self as magic, metaphor that pres-ents itself as metaphor, metaphor at all really, party scenes, band scenes, scenes that connect the

dots, scenes that pretend like they aren’t connecting the dots, expo-sition I could have figured out on my own, stories about illness that are actually about the illness and don’t have shit in them, dick jokes that don’t involve the dick being slathered or crushed.”

Mr. Butler calls the site a “ball of energy” and his novel a “connective field.” It opens with an image of an “ageless eye of light” suffusing the air above the Earth. That the rhetoric Mr. Butler uses to describe his life online is so similar to There Is No Year is no coincidence. The book’s structure recalls the stacking of informa-tion and ephemera of a Web site. The novel is a series of images stemming out of the book’s open-ing sentence: “The father and the mother sat close together with-out touching.” To say the book is “about” something would be as futile as a plot summary of Inland Empire. Like that movie, there is no script, so to speak. The novel lacks dialogue. Characters have no names nor are they developed in any conventional sense of facing

Butler.

Virtual Literary ColossusBlake Butler and what happens when a novelist lives on the Internet


‘What books have actually gotten you wet or given you an erection?’ asked Butler.

a problem, overcoming that prob-lem or failing to, and then coming out changed for better or worse. There Is No Year is a rickety sculp-ture of images piled atop one an-other, all centered on a family in a house that resembles the set-ting from another of Mr. Lynch’s films—Lost Highway. A lot of ink is spent on characters walking down dark hallways, falling into giant anthills beneath boards in the floor, discovering their bodies to be entombed in piles of hair.

At the climax, a character dis-covers a box filled with sheets of paper and a stack of photos of 43 deceased artists: Antonin Artaud, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Bruce Lee, end-ing with David Foster Wallace. The names are arranged on the novel’s pages into a column, each with a footnote containing the de-

tails of the person’s death, their meaning crushed beneath the weight of such finality (“Antonin Artaud died alone, seated at the foot of his bed, holding his shoe”; “David Foster Wallace died with a massive and uncompleted manu-script found bathed under light in his garage”). The images frighten and blister, moving forward reck-lessly but never once suggesting a beginning, middle or end.

“A lot of books and movies, people want to know an answer,” Mr. Butler said. “But as soon as you answer that question, who cares?”

The novel could only come out of the mind of someone whose full-time job is to be on the Inter-net, another collection of words and images with no conceivable

beginning or end (and definitely no answers). Mr. Butler, who earns his living as a freelancer, mostly writing about poker online, said he’s “basically been in front of the computer for 10 years.” He broad-casts himself through a variety of mediums, from his personal blog to his hilarious, often un-comfortable Twitter feed, which sometimes recalls the hazy, night-marish sentences of his fiction (“Burped so slow & deep just now it was like vomiting into a cave full of vomit, which is what a day is”). Like Mr. Butler, his contributors have been experts at sharing and over-sharing their thoughts pub-licly for years, creating their own communities of followers, which helps explain HTML Giant’s quick rise since Mr. Morgan’s email less than three years ago.

“I was on LiveJournal!” said Roxane Gay, who has written for HTML Giant since the beginning and chronicles on her personal blog everything from trying to lose weight to being interviewed about over-sharing by The Ob-server. “To be honest, I’m com-pletely delusional. I pretend no-body is reading what I write on the Internet. But with HTML Gi-ant, I blog about things I’d like to talk about with a larger group of people. It’s basically a love story. It’s all these really smart people trying to show off for other really smart people, but not in an obnox-ious way. It’s just a bunch of word nerds. It fills a really big void.”

It is hard not to look at Mr. But-ler as a new kind of fiction writer, one who defies the archetype of the guarded figure alone with a

manuscript in a room filled with books. It’s not just that talented writers can be open about screw-ing around on the Internet like ev-eryone else, but that his blog, his Twitter, his novel and HTML Giant are all continuous with his perso-na as a writer, all working toward a single style. They cannot be sep-arated.

“The idea of the writer at all has become overrated,” Mr. But-ler said. “To think that you’re this orchestrating wizard and that you have to have this story to tell and you have to have lived and seen crazy shit to be able to put it out there is absurd. To me it’s just as crazy or scary or fucked up to go outside to the grocery store. You know? I feel like going out into the world, you just never know. You never know anything.”



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W hen David Foster Wallace hanged himself with a black belt and his arms bound by duct tape on the patio of his

home in Claremont, Calif., on Sept. 12, 2008, he had published a history of the concept of infinity, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and two novels. The last of the novels—the towering, 1,088-page Infi-nite Jest—came out in 1996.

More than a decade after the magnum opus was published, Wallace devotees voiced worries that their hero’s reputa-tion was on the wane. They noted that for the 10th-anniversary of Infinite Jest, the publishers chose Dave Eggers to write a new introduction—a sign, they feared, that Wallace needed the imprimatur of a broadly popular figure (though Mr. Eg-gers had called the novel “extravagantly self-indulgent” upon its first appearance) in order to make him palatable to the next generation of readers.

The death of the author, it would seem, has changed all that. Next month will see the publication of The Pale King, the un-finished novel Wallace left stacked in a pile in his garage. This comes on the heels of two other posthumous books in the 30 months since his passing: This Is Water, a 4,000-word commencement address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, which was stretched to book length by the neat trick (one critic termed it “un-Wallace-like”) of printing only one sen-tence per page; and Fate, Time, and Lan-guage: An Essay on Free Will, Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis, padded with a number of essays by distinguished philosophers.

We have not heard the last of him. In-deed, the 34 document boxes and eight oversize folders of Wallace’s drafts, let-ters and juvenilia deposited at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Tex-as, along with 300 books from his per-sonal library, promise a posthumous flow that will be, if not infinite, then certainly robust. There may be another book of un-published fiction soon in the offing, and one of uncollected nonfiction, as well as potentially two books of Wallace’s letters, one of which is said to be devoted almost entirely to his correspondence about the art of writing.

Then there are Wallace’s Boswells. Da-vid Lipsky, who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to shadow the author on the Infinite Jest book tour (the piece was killed), last year re-purposed his tran-scripts of their road trip into a 300-page book, And of Course You End Up Becom-ing Yourself. D.T. Max, who wrote a fea-ture-length obituary of Wallace for The New Yorker framing Wallace’s suicide as the end of a long struggle against both depression and avant-garde tendencies, is expanding his efforts into a full-blown literary biography slated to appear later this year.

The critics, too, must have their say. One volume of critical essays, Consid-er David Foster Wallace, came out on a small press last year, and another, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, includ-ing appraisals by icons like Don DeLillo and contemporaries like Jonathan Fran-zen, has been promised by the University of Iowa Press.

“I think what we are looking at is some-thing like the beginnings of the David Foster Wallace industry,” said Matt Buch-er, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt textbook editor, an independent Wallace scholar and the administrator of Wallace-L, a 1,000-subscriber strong Wallace listserv. “I think it will be big, on par with James Joyce or Walt Whitman. Look at all the stuff there is out there about them. Peo-ple gobble that stuff up. Look how many books there are on Kennedy.”

So far no conspiracy theories have emerged around Wallace’s life or death, but since 2008 there have been at least a dozen Ph.D. dissertations entirely or partly devoted to Wallace’s work. And where there are academics, there are soon enough academic conferences. A panel about Wallace’s legacy was staged at the Modern Language Association con-ference in 2009, a year that also saw en-tire conferences about his work at the University of Liverpool and at the City University of New York. A conference on The Pale King is scheduled for September at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, and next week the urge to discuss him in public leaks out of the academic world and into the South by Southwest festival, where a panel next week will consider “David Foster Wallace and the Internet.”

Part of the newfound fascination with Wallace has to do with the ur-gency of his subject matter and the

kind of readers it attracts. Wallace’s ear-ly fiction arrived just as Internet culture was forming, and his work anticipated a world where people think it worthwhile to broadcast in 140 characters the con-tents of their sushi lunches.

“He connects very strongly with men, especially young men, and especially IT men, the kind of guys who would be into sci-fi and that kind of thing,” said Mr. Max. “These guys need writers, they need cultural figures and they need guys who help them understand their role in the culture.”

Publishers and scholars say that the Internet fans who flocked to Wallace were able to create an instant online archive in the wake of his death. Instead of uncov-ering a slow trickle of uncollected or lost pieces, fans tracked down, for example, Wallace’s undergraduate thesis (now a book) and the story “The Planet Trilla-phon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” which Wallace published as an undergraduate in a 1984 issue of Amherst Review (and which would appear after its rediscovery in the journal Tin House), and posted these writings online for immedi-ate inspection and debate. It is like the long tail, only in reverse, where a small coterie of fans keep the work alive online long enough for the rest of the culture to discover it. A clearinghouse for this phenomenon was The Howling Fantods!, a Web site that has obsessively chron-icled Wallace’s career since 1997. It has reported receiving nearly 280,000 hits per month in 2011, up from 110,000 in the months leading up to Wallace’s death.

In his recent essay “David Foster Wal-lace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline,” the Irish scholar Adam Kelly wrote that Wallace criticism has begun in a “democratic vein. The ease of publication which the internet allows has meant that the detailed close read-



ing of Wallace’s texts, tradition-ally the preserve of academic en-gagement, has in great part been carried out by skillful and commit-ted non-professional readers, who publish their findings in the public domain of the web.”

“It’s all sped up now,” said Mau-reen Eckert, a professor at UMASS-Dartmouth who edited Fate, Time, and Language and describes her-self as a “head-over-heels fan” of Wallace. “You think about people finding a lost manuscript of Hem-ingway or a Sylvia Plath poem; it’s a moment of celebration. In the case of Wallace, we have the tech-nology, and so there are a lot of PDFs just floating around online.”

Last week a blogger at lazenby.tumblr.com posted a document comparing word by word the ex-cerpt of The Pale King that ap-peared in The New Yorker and a transcription of the same pas-sage that Wallace read at the Lan-nan Foundation in New Mexico in 2000.

Scott Esposito, writing on his blog Conversational Reading, posted a quick reaction: “What we see,” he wrote, “is a vision of what The Pale King might have looked like, if its editors had chosen to leave it in the disarrayed state it was discovered in. Surely this would have been a book with less mass appeal than the ‘completed’ Pale King that will be published on April 15, but would it have been truer to Wallace the writer?”

Asked about the editing process that has brought The Pale King to the public, Michael Pietsch, Wal-lace’s longtime editor at Little, Brown, told The Observer, “I am going to save that for another time. I am not sure how much I want to talk about that at this time.”

Bonnie Nadell, the Los Ange-les–based literary agent who discovered Wallace when he

sent her a chapter of his first novel, The Broom of the System, told The Observer that at least once a week she receives a query from someone writing a thesis about Wallace or hoping to appropriate some por-

tion of his work for their own proj-ect. So long as the petitioners seek to violate neither good taste nor copyright, the Wallace estate has been open, Ms. Nadell said, and added that she has been pleasantly surprised at the demand.

“I am not doing anything [to promote Wallace],” said Ms. Na-dell. “If anything, they are coming to me. We have other authors we represent who have died, and we deal with their estates, but David’s work continues to touch people. It’s like nothing I’ve seen.”

Beyond academia and the Inter-net, a legion of artists, filmmakers and playwrights have been moved to re-interpret or pay homage to Wallace. A video-art exhibition, “A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza,” inspired by a foot-note from Infinite Jest, has gone up at Columbia and Virginia Com-monwealth universities. Wallace’s story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which was made into a film with his blessing, has now also been adapted for the stage. The Mountain Goats, of in-die rock fame, honored the author with a song on a recent album.

Some grumbling about exploi-tation has been heard from the Fantods, especially when

the work is widely available on the Internet, like when the Kenyon speech that became This Is Water becomes copyrighted and avail-able for $14.99 by the checkout desk of the local bookstore.

“Clearly, anything else pub-lished under his name will be just scraping money out of his coffin,” Mr. Bucher said.

But mostly the faithful are pleased that after poring over footnote placements in Infinite Jest among themselves for 10 years, they have now been joined by a culture at large that suddenly seems extremely interested in the life and work of a self-deprecating writer who once described himself as being about as famous as the lo-cal weatherman.

Scholars and Fantods have a

few theories about the surge of interest. Part of it is simply that, like James Dean, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, Wallace died young, 46 years old and still in his prime. With no more new work to look forward to, readers are left to fill in the gaps and pounce on any shred of lost writing that surfaces. In 2007, few would have thought that Wallace would stand to be men-tioned in the same breath as liter-ary giants like Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose “senescence” Wallace announced in a 1997 criti-cal essay in The Observer. Mailer died 10 months before Wallace, and Updike five months after. Be-yond the requisite appreciations in newspapers and literary journals, their afterlife has acquired noth-ing like the interest that has sur-rounded Wallace.

The tragedy of Wallace’s suicide and depression has played a part in heightening attention to his work and changed the way readers think about him. During his lifetime, Wallace was perceived as a diffi-cult high postmodernist who chal-lenged readers’ attention spans with sentences that branched off in several directions, abounded in neologisms and might spawn sev-eral discursive footnotes. In one of his earliest and most famous ex-perimental gestures, the 467-page Broom of the System ends in mid-sentence. But all that perplexity was really a way for Wallace to de-pict what a mind is like in the pro-cess of thinking. The knowledge that he endured an epic struggle with depression allows readers an-other window to see the human-ness in his prose.

“There are some readers who approach him now as almost like a secular saint, as someone who was too good for this world,” said James Ryerson, an editor at The New York Times Magazine who wrote the introduction to Fate, Time, and Language. “By all ac-counts he was someone who strug-gled intensely and openly in his writing with his attempt to live a life of moral integrity. There seems to be some kind of truth to him.”

“I couldn’t even take it when he died,” said Ms. Eckert. “It was like our reality failed him.”

All of this activity has helped move Wallace from the ec-centric periphery of Ameri-

can letters to the center. In their recent book All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dor-rance Kelly casually refer to Wal-lace as “the greatest writer of his generation”—a reckoning many would have thought incomplete, like declaring the winner of a ten-nis match after one set.

Mr. Lipsky, who won a National Magazine Award for his postmor-tem feature on Wallace in Rolling Stone, believes Wallace altered the landscape of the American liter-ary vernacular toward a maximal-ist aesthetic—though one that still accommodated emotional depth—in much the same way that after Hemingway, most American writ-ers wrote minimalist prose; and Salinger begot a generation of chatty adolescent narrators; and after Carver the literary journals were filled with Kmart realism.

“Let me put it this way,” Mr. Lipsky told The Observer, “I don’t think a week goes by that the editor of Rolling Stone doesn’t get a pitch from a writer who says, ‘I would like to do a David Foster Wallace kind of take on X.’ He is the young writer who did the most change to how young writers write.”

“It’s kind of amazing when you think about it that The Corrections won the National Book Award when it came out and Infinite Jest wasn’t even nominated,” said Mr. Bucher, the administrator of the Wallace-L listserv. “But you are calling me. How many other writers out there writing now have fan sites devoted to them? How many are getting the kind of critical reception that Wal-lace is getting?”

Mr. Franzen, 51, the author of The Corrections and a longtime friend of Wallace’s, declined to comment for this article because he is writing his own essay about

Wallace for The New Yorker. In his recent interview with The Paris Review, Mr. Franzen compared his own career to Wallace’s: “I per-ceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writ-er who was pursuing art for art’s sake [Wallace] and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art’s-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about his or her work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don’t know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way.”

In other words, Mr. Franzen may be selling books and appearing on television, but the Mountain Goats have yet to write a song for him.

It is hardly worth speculat-ing what would have happened to Wallace’s work and reputation had he continued publishing. Peo-ple who have read parts of The Pale King say that Wallace’s fic-tion was becoming more humane, addressing the moral questions he was laying out in the Kenyon commencement speech. There may have been more novels, more stories, more debate.

And how would Wallace have reacted to his undergraduate the-sis being published by a universi-ty press, his teenage poems avail-able to the public in an archive in Texas?

“He was deeply, scrotum-tight-eningly ambivalent about fame,” said Mr. Max. “He left Pale King to be published. But did he want to become a cultural icon? I don’t think he would have been so sur-prised.”

“[H]e was a troubled person and was tormented by the possibil-ity of people misperceiving him,” Mr. Franzen told The Paris Review. “His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let the work speak for itself, and I do know that he en-joyed the status he’d attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true things at different moments.”

‘Wallace,’ said Max, ‘was deeply, scrotum-tighteningly ambivalent about fame.’

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