Media:
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA each episode. I'll get back to the moose. Cicely is a...
...There is, then, The Royal National Theatre's production of Alan a tough political point at the heart of Madness, but the work Bennett's The Madness of George III is present- is more playful than dark in expressing this theme...
...Death Foretold The Letters of The Jesuit Murders in El Salvador Teilhard de Chardin Martha Doggett and Lucile Swan TML JESUIT MuRDERS IR eL SALVADOR "Important reading...
...tion...
...John Mahoney, S.J...
...The wonderful thing about "NE," though, is that from episode to episode this decline keeps not happening...
...Mary Tyler Moore," etc...
...Madness would have pleased him...
...Of course, pastoral as high playfulness can turn into mere silliness and infantilism, just as tragedy as high seriousness can turn into brutality and cynicism...
...the other is a history chronicle, which as the rambunctious Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo and is in fact a satiric play about politics and medicine...
...al., know cination not just of its inhabitants, but of its inhabitants and what they're doing, and Joel doesn't...
...unreconstructed Reagan-Bush cold warrior...
...or novel or TV, can really do...
...Marshall McLuhan, more of the tale-is a sensitive, cinematically literate guy who sees than thirty years ago, suggested that TV, with its unprecedented life as a series of situations from classic films, Bergman to powers of instantaneous intimacy, would ultimately turn the Coppola and beyond: not a Noble Savage but an Innocent whole world into a "global village," where the sheer flux of Sophisticate...
...That's why "Gilligan" actually isn't The Tempest...
...scholars among the Jesuits murdered in Translated by Brian McNeil 1989...
...gag machine, one of the oldest schlockmeister tricks in the "Northern Exposure," hereafter "NE," is an hour-long schlockmeister trade, from "The Andy Griffith Show" to soap/sitcom/melodrama set in the mythically remote town of "Gomer Pyle" to "Beverly Hillbillies" to "Green Acres" to the Cicely, Alaska...
...the Special Place is not just "where everybody knows your name"-but where, stunningly, you do, too...
...Art and saints lies, who would like to see the king permanently out of his have this in common, that they don't wait for official canon- mind-and William Pitt, the prime minister, and the rest of ization to do the good stuff they do...
...Ed, a young Native pitch (with variations) for any of the earlier shows I have menAmerican who works for Ruth Ann-or Maurice-and who tioned, most beautifully "Gilligan's Island...
...His verbal collapses are much more frightening than dress at 58th Street and the cat at 55th...
...I can imagine an Elizabethan nerd asking the same thing, In the political play, the Prince of Wales and his Whig alin 1592, about a piece of fluff like Much Ado...
...Paper: ISBN 0-87840-546-1 $19.95 The complete extant text of more than DEATH Cloth: ISBN 0-87840-545-3 $40.00 200 letters from Teilhard to Swan, with FORETOLD selections from her letters to him-all Riding Time Like a River previously unpublished-tell the story of The Catholic Moral Tradition a remarkable friendship and offer new since Vatican II insight into the life and works of an Edited by William J. O'Brien important intellectual figure...
...Bennett suggests in formers tell personal and theatrical anecdotes, do scenes from a program note that George was suffering from porphyria plays in which they have appeared, recite poetry, generally rather than dementia, but, ill or mad, the king had several pe- make themselves likable...
...One more City Mouse meets Country Mouse Let me elaborate...
...It was a testimonial to the Near the end of the play, Lord Thurlow, who has just been power of the actor...
...His Majesty's Government, who would like him to display Ah, yes: the moose...
...Cloth: ISBN 0-87840-522-4 $45.00 Richard A. McCormick, S.J...
...But, lance rock-and-roll philosopher who is also an ex-con and in a funny and lesser way, Cicely is the global village McLuhan whose quirky humanism has all the bitter, ironic charity that dreamed of (as was the bar in "Cheers" and the newsroom in maybe only ex-cons are fully capable of...
...The glory of pastoral is that it recognizes play as a profoundly religious act...
...The theatrical excerpts-particuriods of incoherence and spent his last ten years insane and in larly the bits torn out of Major Barbara-are not very efisolation...
...for those who Edited by Thomas M. King, S.J., care about human rights...
...has a shady past...
...It becomes the holy place, the greenwood, when you believe it is, or better, when you make believe it is...
...And aha...
...and has contracted-with Maurice, of course-to spend some years (two...
...Cicely is a self-contained but odd little heterocosm-as what community is not...
...FRANK McCONNELL The king returns to sanity under his care, but if George is suffering from porphyria rather than madness, Willis's disSTAGE ciplinary treatment may have nothing to do with the cure...
...It would also be dreams of being a filmmaker like his hero, Fellini...
...It isn't the realization in the soCicely, in other words, like all great pastoral, is a myth called "real world" of a return to the Garden, but it is a brilthat knows it's a myth and invites us, every week, to share liant imagination of that return, which is all-all?-art, drama the secret that the lies of our innocence are our innocence...
...The role Jackson as the hilarious analysand in Oh Men...
...HAMPDEN STATION...
...That place can be anywhere: the Forest of Arden, the dance floor in Astaire-Rogers films, the bar in "Cheers," or of course Cicely...
...GERALD WEALES 20: 5 November 1993 Commonweal...
...Sidney Callahan...
...One is a vehicle thing appropriate...
...at all...
...Think about it...
...BOX 4866...
...Shelly, a wide-eyed young mix of innocence The Tempest and "Gilligan...
...And, as it begins its perborean eccentricities of his neighbors and, naturally, carnew season, I've decided that it's because of Shakespeare, ries on a bantering-to-hostile semicourtship with the charming Marshall McLuhan, and the blessed irrepressibility of O' Connell...
...Ruth Ann, the wise- And I wouldn't be at all surprised if the show were origily ironic (ironically wise...
...I felt ity and power...
...Bennett ly on a short tour in this country...
...Joel `NORTHERN EXPOSURE'S' PEDIGREE Fleishman is a nice Jewish boy from New York who has just gotten his M.D...
...the town's one radio station, whose voiceover commentaries That itself was a pastoral myth, and a poignant one...
...tidian), and are playing at being simple smalltowners, just For, like all of the really heartbreaking pastoral places in litas Joel Fleishman is playing at being a hipster amongst erature, Cicely exists only as a fiction: the consensual halluyokels: the delicious difference is that Maurice, et...
...For that reason, I sus- From what one heard in the lobby, playgoers pect that it would be more effective in a smaller space than the flocked to BAM more for Nigel Hawthorne than cavernous BAM...
...the same token, must be real, because we all dream it so desFor openers-as in Shakespeare's pastorals-it turns out perately...
...you say...
...I particularly recommend the woman in the polka-dot king...
...This is the end of the real king's tragedy, but the story fective, and much of the staging in the tiny space at the Bennett tells is of a first collapse (1788-89), during which the Kaufman Theater is too busy or too cute...
...NE" reminds us that we dream It's a consensual hallucination of the primal Garden, and with- of Eden, and makes the dream worthwhile...
...And a young moose, that "pastoral...
...obvious in the tiresome figures of the doctor who constanta strategically placed reader can see it right now ly carries a chamber pot to consult the king's stool and a young at the Colonial Theater in Boston...
...I don't mean just "self-consciousness"-an overused critical term-but some18: 5 November 1993 Commonweal thing more like "self-sharing...
...MD 21211-4866 PHONE 410-516-6995 FAX 410-516-6998 Commonweal 5 November 1993: 19 And can a mere TV series bear this weight of interpreta- the physical ones...
...As the only really "natural" thing in at least the semblance of sanity-struggle to get or to retain the whole show, that hairy and charming fellow reminds us power...
...Even Ed-the Caliban the folks who watch its story unfold...
...Cloth: ISBN 0-87840-537-2 $35.00 Paper: ISBN 0-87840-523-2 $25.00 (JEoIGEITOWN UNIVERSITY PRIj.SS P.O...
...part of tiny clusters of characters in conversation or in confrontation with the presumably mad king...
...The two perending...
...BALTIMORE...
...Maurice, Ruth Ann, Holling, Shelly, O'Connell-and "NE" is also, to be sure, a TV show: a TV show that, on nuone I haven't told you about yet-are all from somewhere merous occasions, makes reference to the fact that it is a TV else (i.e., from the complicated world of the city and the quo- show...
...And at the opposite end of the scale-the char- information would annihilate our differences and make us all, acter I haven't yet told you about-is Chris, the deejay for finally, brothers and sisters...
...Although the play opens with man, being touted by his uncle for a royal appointment, who the king and his court sweeping down a great flight of stairs, is so stupid that he can only stand dazed while unanswered and ends with a similarly grand exit, it consists for the most questions float past him...
...explicable habit of dying on her (one of them, in the first sea- The great name for the kind of story we're talking about is son, killed by falling satellite debris...
...the suffering of their patient, thinking of him abstractly as a A real moose in a made-up town: wasn't it Mary Anne Moore case and concretely as a source of income...
...that all the rustics in this pastoral center aren't really rustics How metaphysical of me: sorry...
...A similar but very different introduced to King Lear by King George, tearfully recounts the testimonial can be found in In Persons, which end of the play, lamenting the deaths of Lear and Cordelia...
...hands of the doctors who are supposed to be curing him, and It is probably not a theater critic's place to say so, but the brings him back again, is a dream part for an actor...
...The callousness of the doctors is a symptom of the HAWTHORNE AS GEORGE III political disease affecting most of the characters-an inability to respond sympathetically to the suffering of the king, who is for them little more than a prop, and a necessity to mask their selfishness in the platitudes of concern...
...and O'Connell, a member that the Bard, as a writer, was strictly a money playself-possessed young woman bush pilot who is Cicely's main er: were he alive today, do you think he'd be writing for the link with the outside world but whose boyfriends have an in- stage...
...And what all pastorals have in common-since the wanders through the main street during the opening credits of form was invented by the Alexandrian poet Theocritus in the third century B.C.-is the myth of the Special Place-the Secret Garden, if you will-where you can take all your everyday cares and, by playing at a simpler, more natural life, have them clarified and healed...
...as long as the show runs, maybe) as general practitioner in town to pay off his 've been trying for some time now to understand why med school...
...Oh Women...
...Willis, the who defined poetry as imaginary gardens with real toads in clergyman turned mind doctor, is a more ambiguous figure...
...I found myself thinking warmly of Wallach for a talented performer...
...How did the and experience who speaks fluent Californian, would make Gilligan bunch get to that island in the first place...
...of George III, which takes the character from amiable ec- Perhaps a fond forty-year-old memory was the right response centricity to logorrhea, violence, and excessive pain at the to In Persons...
...But the hook, the gimmick that kicks FOLLOW THAT MOOSE off "NE" as a series, is that an outsider comes to town...
...them...
...That Serves Its People Cloth ISBN 0-87840-542-9 $36.00 The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits Edited by John Hassett Moral Demands and Hugh Lacey and Personal Obligations Selected writings of the three significant Josef Fuchs, S.J...
...And that, for me, is maybe the pitch of its intelligence...
...There's a certain quality about works of artyou know it when it's there, but it's hard as hell to namewhereby the work lets you know that it knows what it's doing, and invites you to join in the daydream...
...It celebrates Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who have been is a tragedy, he concedes, but he would have preferred a happy partners on and off stage for almost fifty years...
...older woman who runs the General nally pitched that way to the producers...
...three...
...Cicely's remarkable inhabitants include most, nobody-will-admit-they-liked-it show of all time, Maurice, the mayor, a war vet and NASA astronaut who is an "Gilligan's Island...
...that we ought to sing "Happy Birthday"-or, at least, someThere are two plays at work in Madness...
...He is, then, just another of Bennett's medical cartoons and an occasion for satire about insiders vs...
...Holling, the pitch for Shakespeare, selling to his fellow Globe stockthe long-in-the-tooth owner of Roslynn's Cafe (where every- holders any of his great romances from A Midsummer Night's body in Cicely meets), who comes from a violent family and Dream to As You Like It to The Tempest...
...Cicely, like the Forest out the skeptical Fleishman it would fall apart just because of Arden, is really wherever you are when you watch its tale Joel's skepticism, like that of Shakespeare's fools, keeps re- unfold...
...cheerfulness...
...It just happens to be true...
...Whatever it is, it's a stan- minding us that this ideal little place can't be real: and, by dard that "NE" consistently meets...
...Hip, hypertense, and used to having his salmon "Northern Exposure" is my cherished favorite of ev- scaled, smoked, and on a bagel, Fleishman chafes at the hyerything on the Tube these days...
...Going to In Persons crown is almost taken from him by the vain, preening Prince has less the feel of a theatrical evening than of a party in of Wales, but which ends with George III's return to rational- which the honored guests have been asked to perform...
...Louis Dupre, John R. Don- Towards a Society ahue, S.J...
...outsiders within the proA MAD KING'S MAD DOCTORS fession...
...And the often conclude and obliquely summarize each episode, a free- years since Vietnam have only underscored its poignancy...
...Contributors: Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J...
...It would also be the Store, in continual conflict with Maurice...
...Congress- and Mary Wood Gilbert man Joe Moakley Foreword by Pierre Leroy, S.J...
...John T. Paper...
...I saw it at the has a taste for broad caricature that can be seen at its most Brooklyn Academy of Music in late September...
...Just remember your eighth-grade class picnic, and you'll be able to read The Tempest...
...The doctors, each of whom has his pet treatment, are at the beginning of every installment how fictional, constructed, allies of one group or the other, and they are indifferent to and human is all that follows his initial stroll through town...
...And reDostoevsky weep, and lives with Holling...
...Nigel best show in New York at the moment is the string of Botero Hawthorne gives a remarkable performance in the role, statues decorating the center strip from 54th to 61st on Park making a funny, sly, vituperative creature of the troubled Avenue...
...for Bennett's play...
...ISBN 0-87840-524-0 $24.95 Noonan, Jr...
Vol. 120 • November 1993 • No. 19
