Dream Opera

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

There is something about Handel’s operas and oratorios that stimulates an astute inventiveness in modern-day directors. Or so it seems, at any rate, from the five fully staged productions I’ve attended in the last three years. Of these, one was a dud, one was a fascinating near-miss, and three were all-out terrific — amazing odds that have not been matched, in my experience, by any other composer.

The latest in this series of triumphs is New York City Opera‘s production of Semele. From the libretto (written by William Congreve, with emendations by John Milton and Alexander Pope) to the title role (performed with antic grace by the beautiful Elizabeth Futral), everything about this production is first-rate. And though the onstage talent is superb, a great deal of the credit must go to those who conceived of the production — namely, the director Stephen Lawless, along with his set and costume designer, Anthony Baker, his lighting designer, Pat Collins, and his choreographer, Lynne Hockney. Each of these people contributed to a central vision which is so powerfully unified that it seems to be Handel’s — if one can imagine a Handel who, at the ripe old age of three hundred or so, could work out the parallels between the royal politics of the early eighteenth century and the presidential affairs of the late twentieth.

Lawless’s brilliant conceit is to transpose the Olympian court of Jove and Juno, which in Handel’s time stood in for the Hanoverian house of George II and Queen Caroline, to the Camelot of JFK and Jackie. Jove’s mortal love-interest, Semele (a heroine borrowed from Ovid, but with a brassy, ambitious patina imposed by Congreve), thus goes from being George II’s German-born mistress to the Kennedys’ Marilyn Monroe, and the jealous Juno acquires a pill-box hat. Hefty Secret Service men in dark glasses surround Juno and (as needed) clear the stage; the bright flashes ofpaparazzi cameras, wielded by the ever-resourceful chorus members, stand in for the lightning bolts hurled by Jove. All of this may sound forced or silly in my description, but the analogy has been so fully thought through that everything works: even Jove’s embodiment as an eagle — alluded to in the libretto when he flies down to earth to capture Semele — reappears in the form of the Presidential Seal.

This successful transposition would be nothing more than a good trick, however, if the opera itself lacked a solid core. What propels this production of Semele, finally, is the deep emotional reality that fuels the opera’s plot. Like virtually all Handel plots, it involves the behavior of obsessives (which is why it makes sense that Handel characters have to repeat their lines over and over), and here they have been given appropriately obsessive emotions: luxuriant self-indulgence and burning ambition on the part of Semele, unbridled lust on the part of Jove, equally unbridled jealousy on the part of Juno, and pathetic, soul-destroying envy on the part of Semele’s less attractive sister, Ino. But the true genius ofSemele‘s construction, in psychological terms, lies in the fact that the roles of Juno and Ino are played by the same soprano (in this case, the marvelously persuasive Vivica Genaux). Not ony does this double casting account for Juno’s ability to disguise herself as Ino in the crucial scene where she tricks Semele into asking for her own death; it also gives a powerful meaning to the end of the opera, when Ino is left free to marry Athamas, the suitor Semele left at the altar when she took off with Jove. Browbeaten and black-clad, Genaux’s Ino is evidently in love with Athamas from the start, but is too shy or oppressed or hopeless to do anything about it. Yet the whole arc of the opera — Jove’s abduction of the bride, Juno’s carefully engineered deception, and the annihilation of Semele when she sees Jove in his immortal form — seems, at the end, to be a product of Ino’s unconscious wishes; and the fact that she is both the reporter of Semele’s fate (in her Ino incarnation) and its manipulator (in her Juno incarnation) only strengthens this impression.

The things that lie behind superficial appearances — the unconscious wishes, the hidden jealousies, the secret stratagems of the spurned, the private lives of public rulers — are at the heart of Semele, and the production at New York City Opera makes the most of that fact in its staging. We begin by looking at a relatively bare, shallow stage set up for a chorus and four soloists, with an organist seated in their midst; a sign tells us that we are about to witness “Semele, A Secular Oratorio.” The unsuspecting audience member might be forgiven for thinking that he is about to endure three hours of stand-alone, stilted singing. But no sooner have the singers appeared onstage, all clad in black and white to match their surroundings, than a screwball comedy element enters in. Semele misbehaves from the start: she won’t enter on cue, but needs to be dragged on by her father (played by the wonderful baritone Sanford Sylvan, who also doubles as Somnus, the God of Sleep); she won’t open her score when it’s time for her to sing, and instead voices her complaint as if she has just made it up herself; she won’t marry the chosen bridgegroom, Athamas, and openly prefers her lover Jove. And then, when Jove comes down to rescue her, all hell breaks loose, and the set cracks open to reveal the Olympian universe behind the false front — in color now, like the land to which Dorothy descends after leaving drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.

Here, in a three-sided room that moves forward to meet our gaze, Jove indulges Semele but also keeps her prisoner. Here Ino comes to visit her sister, carried there as a gift from Jove. Here, in perhaps the most musically thrilling moment of the opera, the back wall glides open to reveal the instrumentalists seated behind the set (the gods behind the gods, as it were). And here Juno enters like a tempting worm, offering the platinum-haired Semele a series of false mirrors that show her as a goddess and stellar celebrity. The movies and their gossip industry are pertinent here, for they were both the making and the breaking of the actress on whom this Semele is modeled. When the slip-clad body of the dead Semele lies across her bed at the end, captured in the flash of the same cameras that initially fed her self-regard, we cannot help but think of Marilyn Monroe’s sordid death scene.

How are we supposed to feel when Semele dies? “Happy, happy!” sing the resilient chorus members, who by this time have taken up their public role and stand behind the reunified Juno and Jove. But even without Lawless’s explicitly pessimistic staging (Jove spies a new platinum blonde in the crowd), we might sense that this song is heavily ironic — or, if not ironic, then insufficient to the complicated feelings the opera has aroused in us. Handel’s Semele is not a purely innocent victim, like Ovid’s, but she is nonetheless a victim of forces beyond her control. Whether these forces lie inside or outside her — whether we choose to call them ambition, self-love, and uncontrollable lust, or Juno, Somnus, and Jove — is up to us. But Handel cannily suggests that the choice doesn’t much matter, because we are all subject to their influence, just the same.

—October 1, 2006

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A Different Kind of Reality Show

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

Last night I saw a rather amazing movie called Paper Dolls. If I told you it was a documentary about Filipino transvestites taking care of old people in Israel, you would think you didn’t want to see it. But you would be wrong. Paper Dolls is neither preachy nor grotesque. It is made by an Israeli, but it is not pro-Israel: in fact, it uses this tiny and seemingly eccentric corner of Israeli life as a way of looking at the whole culture (ours as well as Israel’s) from an odd and telling angle. The film is as powerful as a novel, in emotional terms, and as subtle as a short story — that is, it trusts us, the audience, to pick up the necessary information and make the necessary judgments. Its portrayal of character is grippingly complex and yet in some curious way nearly instantaneous: we leave the theater feeling we know these people well, though we have barely peeked into their lives.

The movie’s success is largely due, I suspect, to the intelligence and sensitivity of its young director, Tomer Heymann. Though he apparently set out to make a film about that perennial documentary concept, The Other, in the form of these not-real women who call themselves “paper dolls” precisely to signal that unreality, he soon found himself enveloped in their story, and his presence on the screen turns out to be an essential part of the narrative. Tomer Heymann is like the anti–Michael Moore: his investigative method is gentle and delicate, the epitome of negative capability. This is not to say that he shuns directness (“But what do you do with your dicks?” he asks one of the transvestites, and gets a detailed answer), and he is by no means a pushover: when one of the Filipinos gets arrested as an illegal immigrant, he calls up the prison authorities and heatedly asks, “Can I come visit him?…Well, who can I speak to who isnot just a small cog?” But despite his strength in moments like these, Heymann conveys an overwhelming quality of softness—not something we are used to seeing in Israelis of any political stripe. It becomes clear, when we see him onscreen, exactly how he won the confidence of these foreign transvestites and converted them from “subjects” into “friends.”

What we see, in the course of the movie, is a small community of Filipino cross-dressers who hang around the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. They take care of frail old people during the day (having been brought to Israel precisely to do this kind of work—that is, to fill a role that the Israelis are unable or unwilling to fill), and at night they meet to perform a song-and-dance act in various transvestite dives. There are five whom we get to know well: Chiqui, Giorgio, Cheska, Jan, and Sally. In addition to following them about during their off-hours, Heymann shows us scenes of them with their elderly charges, where the primary impression conveyed is one of tenderness. This kind of labor is not just a way to earn money (though it is, crucially, that); the Filipino “guest-workers” happen to be very good at care-taking, and they put their hearts into their work.

Some hearts respond more deeply than others. At the center of the movie is the almost filial relationship between Sally (perhaps the most appealing of the transvestites) and Chaim, the old man she takes care of. Chaim cannot speak—throat cancer has claimed his voice—but he writes things down for Sally to say on his behalf, and she has learned Hebrew well enough to read what he writes. He corrects all her little grammar errors, too, and takes the trouble to teach her more Hebrew by having her read aloud from the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. This relationship stands in sharp contrast to the obliviousness of most of the other old people (a Hasid with Alzheimer’s, a paralyzed man, a wheelchair-bound wreck in a skull cap) who are served by Filipino caregivers. But whether the difference lies in Chaim’s personality or in Sally’s, or in some unpredictable combination of the two, remains an open question.

Paper Dolls is not afraid to look at the seamier side of life in Israel. A bomb explodes in the region of the Central Bus Station, and foreign residents are urged to go to the hospital for care; a television report assures them that they will not be prosecuted for being illegal. Later we see the immigration police sweeping over the area and making arrests. A nasty cab-driver spits venomous comments about these “disgusting” creatures who are neither man nor woman, and passers-by cast superior, unfriendly looks at them. A well-meaning but rather sleazy impresario tries to spiff up the Paper Dolls’ act by converting them into Japanese geishas; they try it out once, at a big-time gay nightclub, but soon decide that the heartless limelight is not for them, and they retreat back into their own warm community. This sense of warmth, against a background of poverty, discrimination, and violence, is perhaps the movie’s most startling characteristic; it is not sentimental, but it will probably make you cry.

Paper Dolls will not be playing soon at a cinema near you. After it leaves the Film Forum in New York, it is scheduled to continue on its journey to various international film festivals, searching for its audience. But try asking for this movie, in whatever way you can, and perhaps it will someday come your way.

—September 12, 2006

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Javier Marías’s Dance and Dream

Posted on July 11, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

This past week I’ve been reading Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, the second volume in his projected trilogy, which New Directions, his regular American publishers, are bringing out in this country. If you’ve never read any Javier Marías, this is probably not the place to start. (For that, I would recommend A Heart So White or perhapsAll Souls — both excellent, both still in print from ND and therefore readily available from your local good bookstore, if such a thing still exists in your neighborhood.) But Your Face Tomorrow is shaping up to be one of the great fictional achievements of the century, so sooner or later you too, if you have not already done so, will want to climb aboard this slowly moving, heavily laden bandwagon.

The first volume, subtitled Fever and Spear, left us with a proverbial cliffhanger, as we waited for the narrator and protagonist, Jacques Deza (also known as Jack or Jaime or Jacobo or, very occasionally, Iago), to answer the door on a rainy night in London. How Deza got to London from his native Spain, and what exactly he is doing there, I leave it up to you to find out. Suffice to say that he is separated from his wife, Luisa (all wives in Marías fictions are called Luisa), about whom he thinks often and fondly; and he is working at least temporarily for some kind of shady agency that requires him to “interpret” people — not from one language to another, though he does that too, but to interpret their very character, their motives, their possibilities, frequently on the basis of a single short meeting. This agency, which is run by a rather monstrous but also fascinating man named Tupra (also known as Reresby, or Ure, or Dundas, depending on the circumstances), seems to have deep connections both with private corporations of the most dangerous type and with secret governmental departments like MI5 and MI6.

That sounds thrilling, I know, and Your Face Tomorrow is indeed thrilling, but not necessarily in the way you are expecting it to be. Very little happens; much gets pondered, or remembered, or reconsidered; and by far the most attractive and compelling aspect of the work lies in the distinctive thought processes of its narrator. Once you have been drawn into Deza’s complicated, digressive, and richly allusive way of thinking about the world, you will barely be able to tear yourself away.

This is even more true of Dance and Dream than it was of Fever and Spear — perhaps because the shape of the whole project is clearer now, perhaps because Deza himself has become more familiar to us over time, or perhaps because the proportion of event to reflection has increased ever so slightly, to the point where the balance between the two is now perfect. The feeling that infuses Dance and Dream is a strange mixture of suspense and suspension. You will be desperate to move forward, to find out where it is all leading, but at the same time you are likely to feel endlessly engrossed in the present sentence or the particular page (often the same thing, since Marías’s sentences tend to go on at Proustian length).

If you have read other Marías works, including the anti-novel Dark Back of Time as well as the more straightforward fictions (but I use the word “more” advisedly, since nothing by Marías is absolutely straightforward), some of the material in this new book will be familiar to you, and it will seem to be resurfacing in much the same way your own recent dreams and distant memories do. This will be true even if you have only readFever and Spear, which came out in America last year, and which puzzled many longtime Marías fans. We lacked the experience, at that point, to understand where he was taking this book. But now the book itself has become our experience, holding us aloft in its own watery element, preventing us from drowning in its sea of new ideas and observations, “suspending” us in yet another sense.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Dance and Dream is hilariously funny in places. This is especially true of the moment — a very extended moment, lasting scores if not hundreds of pages — when Deza encounters a compatriot of his, one Rafita De la Garza, in a loud, expensive disco in London. De la Garza, whom we have already met and despised in Fever and Spear, is some kind of diplomat, a minor attaché, not to mention an idiot, a buffoon, a moron, a “dickhead,” a crude, obnoxious fellow to whom all women are merely “a bit of pussy” or something worse. He is dressed, when our narrator meets him at the disco, as some kind of cross between a black rapper and an escapee from a Goya painting, complete with an oversized earring and a ridiculously empty hairnet, or “snood,” as he calls it when speaking of it to Deza. (The translation, by the brilliant Margaret Jull Costa, is superb throughout, careening as it does from the demotic to the archaic with barely a pause for breath.) The pace of the narrative invariably picks up when De la Garza appears, if only because the level of vitriol that Deza feels toward him is so high. Reading these passages is like encountering the hateful characters in Jane Austen or the objects of Lucky Jim’s scorn — always the best part of a certain sort of serious English comic novel. And for a while we imagine, happily, that we are occupying just that sort of novel, until suddenly (or at least it feels sudden, but really it takes dozens of pages of preparation) we are frighteningly plunged into the kind of brutality that characterized, say, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. The analogy is not mine: Marías makes it explicit by drawing in the recollections of Deza’s beloved, humane father, interleaving terrifying stories from Spain’s twentieth-century history with the much later incidents set in England. By the time De la Garza has both suffered and escaped horrific violence, we are so morally exhausted, and at the same time so literarily satisfied, that we are almost relieved to have the volume end in another gentle cliffhanger.

Comparisons between Your Face Tomorrow and Proust’s multi-part masterpiece have already been made by several critics, and they are not amiss. But what is remarkable about the two volumes that are already out — and particularly Dance and Dream, which has fewer obligations to scene-setting and therefore more chance to venture forth in all directions — is the way the author combines the coarse materials of our contemporary, fallen, corrupt existence with the highest literary techniques of the past. This is first-class literature that includes among its subjects the Botox-infused face of a well-known movie star, the look of a bathroom designed for the handicapped, the thrashing dance style of a cocaine-addled dandy, and the sinister yet endearing qualities of aging Oxford dons. It is a book that derives from Ian Fleming as well as Shakespeare, from last night’s television show as well as Spain’s (not to mention the western world’s) first novel. It is of our time and of no time in particular, and I am willing to bet that it will still be here when most of what is published this year has dissolved into dirt.

—July 11, 2006

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Mark Morris and the Idea of Camp

Posted on June 15, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

I would never have thought to put the two together. But that is my point: we hardcore admirers of Mark Morris’s choreography see nothing at all campy about it, and yet many other viewers (including some people who like his work just fine) apparently feel otherwise.

I did not fully realize this until this past March, when an acquaintance who had attended one of the “Month of Mark” anniversary performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music came up to me after the show. Knowing he was not a Morris regular, I was eager to proselytize.

“Didn’t you love it?” I said of the particularly stellar pair of dances to which we had just been treated.

“Well, it was okay,” he answered, “but it was just so camp.”

I suppose I would have been taken aback in any case, but I was especially surprised because the pieces we had just seen were Four Saints in Three Acts and Dido and Aeneas. What, if anything, was camp about either of those? Four Saints admittedly has some humorous bits (a lone dancer turned away from a club-like entrance to which everyone else is officiously admitted; the St. Ignatius figure skimming sideways across the stage, like an icon on a conveyer belt, in synch with a rapid burst of Stein-speak), but unless anything funny or anything by Gertrude Stein counts as camp, I don’t see it.

The argument is even weaker in the case of Dido and Aeneas, which is one of Morris’s most starkly beautiful and touching pieces. In its recent BAM incarnation, Dido’s classically rigorous structure was more visible than ever, because Morris—who used to dance both the role of Dido and the role of the Sorceress—had for the first time given away his two parts, one to a woman and one to a man. There were losses entailed in this changing-of-the-guard, but there were also gains. Without Morris to draw your eye every time he was onstage, you could actually see the precise details and careful symmetry of the other dancers’ steps. And though I missed the presence of Morris himself—and missed, as well, the implications of the traditional double-casting, whereby the victim of the tragic love affair was also the manipulative destroyer of that affair—I understood that this version had a clarity and purity that offered us something new. Amber Darragh made a lovely, sorrowful Dido; if she was almost too humorless, too virginal in her strong, archaic beauty, well, that was one reasonable interpretation of the role. And Bradon McDonald was simply outstanding as the Sorceress. If I had not been present to witness it, I could not have believed that another dancer could do this signature Morris part with so much personality, so much power, so much delicacy, and such an amazing combination of raging narcissism and utter self-abdication. McDonald disappeared into the role and became something magical, like Yeats’s dancer-from-the-dance: pure Sorceress, with only a hint of humorous tribute paid to the other marvelous dancer who had originated this role. So, yes, a man was playing a female part in Dido—but if that is camp, then all of Shakespeare and most of baroque opera are also camp, and I don’t think we want to go that far, do we?

Mostly, when people call something camp, they mean that it is so bad it is good—bad becomes good because we, with our superior sensibility, can laugh at it. This is so counter to anything Mark Morris is doing, or has ever tried to do, that I find it remarkable anyone could even think to apply this notion to his work. He is always trying to make something good (I am tempted to capitalize Good—that’s how important such discriminations are to him). Usually he succeeds; and on the few occasions when he fails, the result is never laughably bad, but frustratingly difficult to absorb. In fact, Morris’s least successful dances are, in my opinion, the least likely to be called camp, because they leave the audience feeling blank. It is the ones that provoke laughter in some and tears in others that are most often saddled with this label. And for those of us who lean toward tears (in the snowflake scene of The Hard Nut, for instance, or the final dance of Going Away Party, or the moment when the eponymous nymph learns she’s been duped in Platée), nothing is more annoying than the laughter of Morris’s so-called fans. We want to leap out of our seats and smother them; we want awed silence, not knowing chuckles and hoots of I-get-it appreciation. We take our Mark Morris seriously — perhaps too seriously — and we resent it when other people do not.

One of the most stalwart members of the taking-Mark-seriously club was Susan Sontag. Like Woody Allen hauling Marshall McLuhan out from behind a post to settle a stupid argument in Manhattan, I wish I could call upon the author of “Notes on ‘Camp'” to testify in person that Mark Morris’s work is not campy. In the absence of the person (who was for many years a board member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, and to whose memory one of the new pieces presented in the Month of Mark was dedicated), I am obliged to resort to the essay itself.

I probably hadn’t re-read it since about 1971 and, as with so many things read in one’s youth, my memories of it were not entirely accurate. For one thing, I had no idea Sontag was so ambivalent about her subject. “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” This, it turns out, is one of the best things about the essay, for it enables her to see her subject from both inside and out.

It is also, from this distance, a movingly personal document. “Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves,” commented this extremely serious young person (she was about thirty when she wrote the essay). But “one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.” The thought of the youthful Sontag sneaking off to have her lighthearted enjoyment on the sly is very endearing. Camp, it seems, offered a way of releasing oneself — specifically, her self — from the bonds of the eternally moral and high-minded. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious,” she finally comes right out and says. “Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” As someone who was not temperamentally drawn to the comic, in life or in art, Sontag apparently valued Camp in part because it enabled her to laugh.

“Notes on ‘Camp'” has been treated, since it first appeared in 1964, as the very opposite of the tentative jottings Sontag intended to give us — as, on the contrary, a fixed and scholarly definition of the idea of Camp. In a sense, I am treating it this way myself, by mining it for nuggets that I can use to defend Mark Morris. I go down her checklist — androgyny, yes; extravagance, yes; the glorification of character, yes; but failed seriousness, no; out-of-date, no; good because it’s awful, no; completely naïve or else completely self-conscious, no — and arrive at the conclusion that, weighed in the balance, Mark Morris is not camp.

But to tally things up like this is to misread both the essay and its relation to Morris’s work. Sontag had not seen Mark Morris dance when she wrote “Notes on ‘Camp'” (he was eight years old at the time, and was not to form his company for another sixteen years), but something of what made her write that essay also made her able to love his work when she later saw it. “Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy…Camp is a tender feeling,” she wrote. Susan Sontag did not, as a rule, manifest tender feelings, but Morris’s work allowed her to indulge in them without shame.

At the time Sontag wrote her essay, Camp was a largely homosexual sensibility. Perhaps it still is (though certainly some of the cliquishness has declined as the word itself has gone lower-case). Is this what people mean, then, when they say that Mark Morris’s work is camp? Are they simply saying it seems gay?

It is easy to imagine and even to point to homosexual art that is not at all camp — Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos, for instance, or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. But I am uncomfortable with the very notion of homosexual art. Is this a Jewish essay I am writing, or a female one? I would hope not, though I happen to belong to both those categories. Does the fact that Mark Morris is a very outspoken, out-of-the-closet, occasionally outrageous gay man mean that his art is necessarily gay? I have always assumed not. But perhaps I am being prudish in my refusal to allow this in: since everything else in the world is brought into Mark Morris’s capacious dances, why not his own homosexual identity?

Well, of course it’s there. It is pretty near impossible, for instance, to imagine a straight choreographer inventing, much less performing, the role of the Arabian Princess in The Hard Nut — a part that Morris himself has always danced, in see-through veils and come-hither eye makeup. There is certainly something exaggerated and epicene about the role (to use two of Sontag’s definitional terms). But I would call the overall effect histrionic rather than camp. A small child would find the dance funny; there is no need for adult knowingness to come into play. When we laugh at this role, we are laughing not at the artifice of a man dressed as a woman (something that is not inherently funny, as Diane Arbus’s photos make clear), but at the performance of a brilliant clown who can use his eyes alone to project expression all the way up to the balcony seats. Our laughter, in this respect, is naive and unthinking rather than contrived and sophisticated — though I doubt the two kinds of laughter can ever really be separated in that way, for laughter must always have an element of the natural and the unwilled if it is to be real laughter for ourselves, and not just display for others.

I have left aside the whole question of Mark Morris’s special mixing and matching of male and female dancers. But surely it is not a sign of campiness that his women dancers occasionally lift his men, or that the men sometimes wear toe shoes and skirts. The stage has always been a place where we can become something other than what we physiologically are. And yet our origins can’t be transcended completely: dance, in particular, depends on the physical constraints and talents that individual dancers were born with. It is the interplay between these two modes, the given and the created, as well as the tension produced by their conflict, that makes Mark Morris’s work endlessly interesting.

Morris himself has always been the most fascinating and powerful dancer in his own company, but this year, during the entire month-long celebration at BAM, he performed in only one piece. The dance wasFrom Old Seville, which Morris choreographed for himself, Lauren Grant, and John Heginbotham in 2001. Heginbotham, who is brilliant as St. Ignatius in Four Saints, uses nothing but his dramatic talent in this role: he stands to the side of the stage, pouring drinks, waggling a cigar in his mouth, and casting knowing glances at the other two. But Morris and Grant, as the male and female Spanish dancers seducing each other in an Andalusian bar, really dance.

It is important to the dance that Morris is very large and Grant is very small, and it is equally important that his gestures are extremely masculine whereas hers are utterly feminine. At nearly fifty years old, Morris can still perform a role like this one beautifully. He is sexy and funny and graceful and ludicrous all at once — just as undiluted masculinity is — and as he accompanies his rapid-fire steps with the furious click of his castanets, he is full of intense purpose even as he seems to be enjoying the hell out of himself. The dance makes nonsense of such categories as comic and serious, artificial and natural, naïve and sophisticated, tender and mocking. It is the farthest thing possible from camp. But it is also, I suspect, exactly what people mean when they call Morris’s work camp. We can’t both be right, can we?

— June 15, 2006

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