Last Week's New Yorker Review: 🌱 The Weekend Special (June 16)
The Weekend Special
Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.
🌱 Fiction
“The Queen of Bad Influences” by Jim Shepard. No Boyles. silence, sinking, singularity. Publishing gay tragedy by a straight (presenting) dude (presenting) – who’s written at least one other enervatingly bleak story about historical lesbian lives – during Pride?? Not the move! In general, I think it’s troublesome to make art in which horrible things happen to marginalized people not for any political reason but just because the author wills it. (This is my big issue with children-in-peril stories more generally.) And this particular instance is so comically exaggerated that if the story wasn’t played so deadeningly straight I’d think it was satire. Really, you’re dooming your imaginary spunky queer child to death on the Lusitania?! It’s hard to see it as anything but sadism – yes, young queer people face plenty of challenges; torpedo strikes are generally not considered one of them. If you enjoy a very particular type of historical fiction – the sort where gratuitously period-appropriate language spouts from an unidentified third-person narrator, as if the story is actually being told by the ghost of 1913 – Shepard executes the conceit reasonably well. (As I’m sure you can tell, it’s a choice I find annoying. If the narrator is incorporeal, why the hell are they talking like that?) The romance does not transcend its cliché, but neither is it totally sparkless. But the Lusitania segments are so horrid and offensive on every level (that culminating paragraph, in which being closeted is compared to not jumping for a lifeboat, by a character who is literally watching people not jump for a lifeboat, is catastrophic) they make this a must-skip. Don’t go down with the boat.
🌱 Weekend Essay
“Why Do Doctors Write?” by Danielle Ofri. No Harrimans. wounds, work, words. Raises plenty of interesting questions, but fails to really dive into them, turning away from material on patient consent, back to Ofri’s personal experiences with doctoring; suggesting that “shedding” a certain “remove” might be helpful in medical writing, and pointing out the importance of storytelling and narrative, but never actually articulating how a profession that is increasingly quantitative might meet this need for narrative (or what the counterargument might be.) I’m not especially comfortable with the idea of caring for patients by telling their stories without explicit permission, and it does edge close to an idea of “making use” of suffering that is both harmful and near to the heart of the capitalist healthcare system, where a “good” (useful, logical) patient will receive better care than a “bad” patient. There is an unwillingness to interrogate the medical field here that ultimately means Ofri can’t really answer her own question. “Why A Doctor Writes” is not the same as “Why Doctors Write”, and the answer to the latter question has a lot more to do with the ongoing self-justification of a field under threat. Ironically, it’s the health workers that now have to frame their needs correctly, lest their funding get cut. Healthcare is a human; write.
🌱 Random Pick
“Kearns by a Knockout” by A.J. Liebling. Two Parkers. swing, shove, strike. Makes the most of a straightforward boxing-match story by focusing at first on the “rutilant” Jack Kearns, a manager who refers to his fighter in the first-person and has the airs of a con man (apparently not deceiving), but the sections describing the match (which you can watch on YouTube, though you’ll probably have a better time reading about it) are just wonderful, especially because there’s a (pun intended) double hook – extreme, unbearable heat, and Sugar Ray Robinson up against a much larger man. Sugar Ray was knocked out for the first and only time, and Liebling gives a fantastic beat-by-beat, (“...when he came out for the thirteenth, he walked as if he had the gout in both feet and dreaded putting them down”) intimating that Robinson’s real foe was the heat. You don’t need to read about a seventy-year-old boxing match, but who doesn’t like some Sugar on a hot day?
🌱 Something Extra
The Tonys happened! Frankly I thought the ceremony was quite bad from a production standpoint. I continue to be peeved by the complete sidelining of the “technical” categories including book and score (??!) – I don’t even hate broadcasting them earlier, but there should at least be a reel. I find Erivo charmless. The lack of clips for the play-acting nominees is totally annoying; when they do show clips, it’s probably my favorite part. (They did last year, as I recall, and people liked it!) The projected backdrops were ugly and paltry in most cases; Dead Outlaw had the best performance of the night and it was largely because they actually had the set there. (And they played with the strengths of the TV form, cutting to actors positioned around the room, instead of trying to disguise the weaknesses.) The Maybe Happy Ending performance sucked; I love that show but the magic of that particular scene is entirely in the precise blocking. Just do “The Rainy Day We Met”, y’all. The order of operations was often bizarre – why is Play before Play Revival and also Play Directing? Why is the Hamilton reunion so early in the night? The celebrities felt entirely unrelated to the things they were saying, and the writing for them was generally awful. It was a very good year for musicals, so it was still a fun night, but largely frustrating whenever nobody was singing.
As for the winners, I agree with the choice (not just in the sense that I think they’re deserving but specifically that they were the most deserving choice of the entire season) in thirteen of the twenty-six categories; in four more, my favorite was the favorite of the nominees. Dorian Grey, which I haven’t seen and can’t afford, won two more; I saw Natalie Venetia Belcon’s understudy. That leaves only eight winners who I wouldn’t have chosen – the three Sunset Boulevard wins, which alone are practically enough to sour me; smarmy cynicism triumphs (Four more years!) – Purpose over Oh Mary for best play (though in context that seemed fine, in part because the bizarro-world order of operations meant that the Oh Mary wins felt far more climactic) – Darren Criss, who I was very happy to see win and was basically tied for first – Sound Design, which I know nothing about – and Francis Jue, who was perfectly fine and whose speech was among the best of the night, so while I was definitely rooting for Ricamora I’ll take it. Basically, set aside three wins for a certain fake SNL intro (and two associated robbings of AUDRA) and I couldn’t have scripted it better.Â
I have tickets in the future to John Proctor and Pirates and Old Friends (I reckon I ought to rush Just in Time just so that I can say I saw every single new musical on Broadway this year) but I did manage to see Purpose before the ceremony! I had some quibbles; the show never pays off any of its political material, pivoting to become a show about people and their personalities and pathologies. (“Mental health” is too narrow a description, but probably gives you a better sense of what I’m talking about.) I suppose that’s the same trick as Appropriate, but there the bravura final few minutes widen the scope; here, they narrow it substantially. The writing noticeably slackens and grows overdetermined in more subdued scenes, which creates a sense of waiting for the acting showcases to arrive that the overly straightforward staging doesn’t help with. I didn’t mind the monologue-asides universally, but when they’re used to explain the joke we just heard, they’re incredibly grating – although the audience reactions suggested that people like the help. Still, the acting is universally strong and in places phenomenal, and the best two or three scenes in the second act (the parents with Aziza on the couch, the final Aziza confrontation) are so breathtaking they make up for bumpiness elsewhere. It is easily the least of the three Pulitzer finalists (The Ally and Oh, Mary were the others) and it’s also the least of the last three Jacobs-Jenkins plays (The Comeuppance and Give Me Carmelita Tropicana – imagine if that won the Pulitzer?!) but it’s excellent theater. And I think I would pay to watch Kara Young butter scones for three hours.
I saw an absolutely bizarro-fantastic show last night called BOWL EP at Vineyard Thursday night; it’s up until the 22nd, and I’m gonna refrain from posting my review for a week, so you can see it and be surprised.
Sunday Song: