A lapse in taste
Pfaff, William
ecution. Reza has balanced ninety minutes of human and intellectual insight onto a witty premise: three men--devoted friends for years--find their relationship crumbling after one of...
...Reza gauges the temperaments of her characters with a surgeon's precision, and the script's ever-changing currents of anger, resentment, and sympathy create astonishing suspense in a play that is basically one long discussion...
...Newhouse, Jr., is a failure...
...She said "I do believe in lapses of taste...
...The legacy of naturalism was responsible for the New Yorker short story, in which, supposedly, nothing happened...
...This set represents the apartment of each of the three friends in turn, with alterations of lighting and the substitution of a single painting making it echo the personality of each I/ mel t is unseemly to take pleasure in the failures of others, but there is reason to do so in the news that the New Yorker magazine of Tina Brown and S.I...
...To demonstrate his confidence he raised circulation guarantees and advertising rates...
...Does an art work have inherent value, or is value created by the market, or the era---or by a spectator's caprice...
...and its circulation and profits were in slow decline, but it still was the country's best and most influential magazine...
...This curiosity made the New Yorker into the most important and original magazine of factual reporting that probably ever existed...
...could admit them to a deconstructionists' convention...
...9 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate Commonweal | _9 May 8, 1998...
...It was up to a reported 800,000 last year (as against 500,000 under Shawn, when the magazine was profitable...
...Since Newhouse and Brown have been in charge, when the only reason for publishing the magazine has been to make money, it has lost $100 million...
...But this still is a fickle readership, or the magazine would not have lost $11 million last year--and a reported $100 million since Newhouse bought it...
...Katherine White, who went to work for Ross six months after the magazine began, was largely responsible for making it the most important influence of its time on American short fiction...
...He was too proud to back down, so when subscriptions were not renewed he kept buying circulation...
...Three contrasting chairs--one hyper-modern, one antique, and one somewhere in-between--serve as both furniture and symbol...
...Indeed, the production is a testament to the way set, lighting, costume, acting, and direction can work together to turn a script to best account...
...The set's stark, unnaturally high walls, dwarfing the actors, flavor the scenes with absurdism reminiscent of a New Yorker cartoon...
...Reza has balanced ninety minutes of human and intellectual insight onto a witty premise: three men--devoted friends for years--find their relationship crumbling after one of them buys a white-on-white painting...
...The New Yorker, which Ross sometimes called a "comic paper," by publishing cartoons, humor, news of the racetrack and nightclubs, columns on golf, baseball, and football, together with serious nonfiction, and fiction, poetry, and literary and arts criticism, was simultaneously democratic and cosmopolitan...
...Commonweal | 6 May 8, 1998 Magazines do have a natural lifespan, connected to the society in which they exist...
...The New Yorker was profitable when the Fleischmann family sold it in 1985...
...That is something very rare...
...He purchased it believing that he could reverse its decline and increase its profits...
...Ross, and then Shawn, simply wanted to do something very good, and did so by letting others do the best work they could do...
...The New Yorker was the creation of newspapermen, at a time when Americans read...
...As the trio lurches ever closer to violence, the canvas becomes a window onto aesthetic, linguistic, and emotional abysses...
...The old New Yorker has its revenge...
...Is there such a thing as disinterested friendship...
...I firmly do...
...Mark Thompson's stylized design gives the visual composition a tinge of antinaturalism...
...From the opening moments, when Alda peers at Serge's painting, tilts his head, takes off his glasses, steps back, and peers again, expertly-tuned performances by the three stars keep the intellectual debate churning beneath histrionics and deadpan comedy...
...What happened to the magazine's fortunes under Newhouse has a commercial explanation...
...Its writers went out to learn about and then write about absolutely any subject that interested them...
...The dialogue has the paradoxical versatility of an optical illusion: Serge, Marc, and Yvan criticize each other by criticizing art, and each betrays himself when attacking the other guy...
...Plain, exact writing was a reaction against the bombast and insincerity of much nineteenthcentury "fine" writing, and was also an expression of that American instinct for an accessible "democratic" culture, a plain man's culture, expressed by Lincoln and Twain, among others...
...It has been losing money ever since Newhouse bought the magazine thirteen years ago, and now it is to be folded into the operations of Newhouse's other fashion and celebrity magazines...
...Think twice before announcing your critiques, it seems to warn the audience: you may yourselves embellish some tableau whose features you cannot perceive...
...Its decline, in my view (as a contributor from 1971 to 1985) was due chiefly to its having become an anachronism in an American society greatly changed not only from 1925, when the magazine was founded, but from the 1940s and 1950s when it had found a new voice and authority under the influence of William Shawn, who became editor after the magazine's creator, Harold Ross, died in 1951...
...The New Yorker was a product of a certain America, parochial in its way, but very sure of itself, and sure of its identity, which by the 1980s was dissolving under pressures of cultural ideology and social division in the country, and which by now has all but disappeared...
...There was plenty of editing (when it was needed), and editorial conflict, but in the end the writer decided...
...The irascible Marc (Alan Alda) thinks it is a joke...
...She also pushed Ross to publish serious poetry, which, like fiction, has all but disappeared since 1992, when Tina Brown became editor...
...Harold Ross had been an itinerant newspaperman, an ignorant one, he said, a hick from the West, who was interested in everything, and wanted to learn...
...Her formula, which works elsewhere, has not worked for the New Yorker...
...The same was true for the New Yorker sketch, or "casual...
...Of course a very great deal happened in a New Yorker short story, but the reader was expected to understand what had happened without being told about it...
...It had become somewhat predictable man...
...Profundities skim by like ping pong balls...
...As Serge, Marc, and Yvan sputter over the tenets of art, the production calls attention to the fact that they themselves are fabrications...
...And their quibbles over words and concepts (Is it the white in the painting, or the idea of whiteness, that is so upsetting...
...Capitalizing masterfully upon this conceit, Reza probes the ambiguities of art and affection in scenes that are taut, ingeniously structured, and often hilarious...
...Are modern artists trying to pull one over on us...
...Brown, who is undoubtedly the most brilliant tabloid editor of her day, took the magazine down-market, making it a brilliant and vulgar celebrity, gossip, and insider-dope politics magazine...
...The New Yorker was created to succeed, but from the start commercial and editorial functions were scrupulously separated...
...Today's is a television and entertainment age...
...Yvan (Alfred Molina), always a moderate, comes down in the middle, to the fury of the other two...
...The brooding Serge (Victor Garber) thinks the painting is brilliant...
...And is there any delicate way of disposing of olive pits...
...Its understatement was influenced by the Midwestern literary naturalism that by the 1920s had become the dominant current in American modernism...
...How about absolute truth...
...The newspaper heritage was responsible for the magazine's plain, eloquent, grammatically exact writing...
...To get the additional circulation, he bought i t - - which is to say, he sold cheap subscriptions which had to be renewed to become profitable...
...Even the actors' matching costumes-blue shirts and ties beneath black suits, for example - - subtly undermine the realism...
...It was always a writers' magazine...
...No one has ever satisfactorily explained why so fundamentally serious a magazine should have become an enormously successful and profitable consumer magazine...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 9
