Long Pauses

Tag: Author: Marber

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • Patrick Marber

    I spent last evening — which, like tonight, was cold and rainy — wrapped up on our living room love seat, reading two fantastic plays by a young British writer named Patrick Marber. My dissertation director recommended them after listening to me ramble on and on about how I was now utterly convinced that Angels in America is actually about grace, whatever that means.

    I began with Howard Katz (2001), the more recent work. It’s the story of a middle-aged talent agent whose life suddenly collapses around him. I’m tempted to describe it as “Death of a Salesman with a happy ending,” but that seems awfully glib. Like Angels, this play forces its characters and its audience to “wrestle with the Almighty” (still my favorite line from Perestroika), and I’m beginning to wonder if this spiritual (if not explicitly Christian) concern can be called a trend. Marber and Kushner are essentially of the same generation. Both should be deeply cynical and ironic, impervious to the barbs of genuine emotion and longing. But here they are, both of them longing for substance. Howard Katz ends with a moment of redemption that, to be honest, doesn’t read particularly well. Successfully staging the scene must require real care, or I imagine that it would slip quickly into melodrama. But the lines themselves are quite beautiful:

    To live.
    I want to live.
    Tell me how to live.

    With Closer (1997) I began to make sense of the frequent comparisons between Marber and Pinter, though the play that most often came to mind was actually Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Closer is likewise built from a cast of four characters, two men, two women, who torment one another with their particular brands of sadism. Like Albee’s masterpiece, Closer creates a brutal, palpable tension by forcing the audience to identify personally with these characters whose actions we often loathe. It’s quite a balancing act. Marber describes it:

    The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure — the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play — and inelegant emotion.