The Week 07Feb2020

Review of reviews: Art & Stage ARTS 25

“Black comedies about broken families are

tricky beasts to marshal,” said Tim Teeman

in TheDailyBeast.com. But Bess Wohl’s first

Broadway play deftly blends comedy and

drama, and the opening scene is “a crisp

piece of domestic ballet.” In a bland apart-

ment in a senior complex, Nancy and Bill,

an elderly couple, are wordlessly setting a

small dinner table. Finally, they sit down,

Nancy announces, “I would like a divorce,”

and Bill’s gruff “All right” wins laughter.

From there on out, co-stars Jane Alexander

and James Crom well are “wonderful to

watch” as they imagine new futures and try

Alexander and Cromwell: How it begins

Grand Horizons

Helen Hayes Theater, New York City, (212) 239-6200 ++++

to persuade their adult sons that 50 years of

marriage is enough. Alexander is so good

as a woman tired of expectations that “this

critic hopes she earns a Tony nomination.”

The comedy quickly turns so rote, unfortu-

nately, that “I have to remind myself that

Wohl is one of our cleverest playwrights,”

said Jesse Green in The New York Times.

Though “perfectly structured,” Horizons

plays as so canned that I decided the creator

of Small Mouth Sounds has here adopted

the falseness of 1960s Broadway comedies

to point out the falseness of marriage. The

always elegant Alexander can pull off even

that era’s cheap blue humor—“you haven’t

lived until you’ve heard a woman who once

played Eleanor Roosevelt sing the praises of

cunnilingus.” Still, the play feels contrived.

So don’t take it all at face value, said Helen

Shaw in NYMag.com. We get a clue how

to read Horizons when Bill takes a stand-up

class and starts telling take-my-wife jokes.

As he does, “we start to wonder if comedy

itself is the language we use to talk ourselves

out of our own best interests.”

On other stages...

A Soldier’s Play

American Airlines

Theatre, New York City

++++

This Pulitzer-winning

drama “deserves to

be staged regularly

all over America—

though it’s hard to

imagine that it will

ever be done better than this,” said Terr y

Teac hout in The Wall Street Journal. In

the Broadway premiere of a Charles Fuller

drama from 1981, Blair Underwood plays

an Army lawyer who in 1944 Louisiana is

tasked with investigating the murder of

another black officer. Some suspect the

Ku Klux Klan, but Underwood’s character

soon learns that the victim, played in

flashback scenes by David Alan Grier, so

abused his men that one of them could

be guilty. Crime procedurals told through

flashbacks have become common since

1981, and this one could be tenser, said

Peter Marks in The Washington Post.

But a “magnetic” Underwood holds our

attention, and though A Soldier’s Play no

longer feels fresh and daring, “it’s familiar

fare that is well-served.”

Underwood

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Käthe Kollwitz possessed a “trifecta

of artistic gifts—a keen eye, steady

hand, and an emotional honesty that

grabs viewers by the viscera,” said

Sammy Dalati in The Magazine

Antiques. What the Prussian native

(1867–1945) might have done had

she lived in happier times remains

unknowable. Instead, the trailblazing

printmaker and sculptor is widely cel-

ebrated for her depictions of violent

eras, including in Germany, which is

home to three Kollwitz museums. In

a current exhibition at the Getty—

featuring etchings, woodcuts, and

drawings selected from more than 720 works

donated by a California collector—violence,

terror, and despair “stare out of picture after

picture.” Though Kollwitz called herself

a pacifist and was born into a family of

middle-class socialists, “for her, there seems

to be no reassuringly simple dichotomy

between oppressors and oppressed.”

Despite the emotional immediacy of her

imagery, Kollwitz “rarely made work in

the heat of crisis,” said Jori Finkel in The

Art Newspaper. Instead, she was “one of

Kollwitz’s Charge (1902-03): The peasants revolt.

Exhibit of the week

Käthe Kollwitz: Prints,

Process, Politics

Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,

through March 29

modern art’s greatest revisionists,” a per-

fectionist who “meticulously and skillfully

worked to create different versions of her

prints before arriving at the most tren-

chant composition.” In works such as The

Downtrodden, a 1900 etching, a working-

class family huddles around a “shockingly

pallid” child who’s perhaps already dead.

Among the highlights of the Getty’s survey

of Kollwitz’s career is “Peasants War,” a

print series completed around 1908, said

Allan Jalon in TheForward.com. Inspired

by a book detailing a bloody 16th-century

German peasant rebellion, the seven

images depict oppression, revolt, and

anger. “Then comes one of Kollwitz’s

most shattering prints, and a pioneer-

ing work by a woman about sexual

violence.” Rape depicts the body of

a woman lying amid clumps of desic-

cated leaves, “seeming to suggest the

act as a crime against fertility.”

Though banned from showing her art

in Germany after the Nazi takeover,

Kollwitz was more celebrated in her

time than our own, said Friderike

Heuer in ORArtsWatch.org. In post–

World War II Germany, her works

became ubiquitous as leaders singled

them out as ideal for memorializing

both the nation’s fallen soldiers and

the millions of victims of Nazi perse-

cution. Younger artists rebelled, label-

ing her work Betroffenheitskitsch—a word

for the point where empathy for the suffer-

ing verges into tackiness. But that’s unfair.

Though preoccupied with death, Kollwitz

“possessed an extraordinary life force.”

Her 1919 aquatint In Memoriam Karl

Liebknecht, which shows mourners gathered

together after the assassination of a left-wing

revolutionary, exudes sadness but also a mov-

ing humanistic sensibility that was one of

her hallmarks. “She was strong, demanding,

ahead of her times,” and as the Getty’s show

reminds us, “her artwork is extraordinary.”