Shouts from a Third Act

Standing on a crowded New York City bus in my late twenties, I overheard the schoolgirl seated near me say to her equally young companion, “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Today–decades later–the memory makes me smile, but it no longer makes me gasp. Last week I was back in the city that never sleeps to see what I could see, and among the best of the best was seeing the great Glenda Jackson in the new Broadway play Three Tall Women. If you’re a millennial, you might be scratching your head. Glenda who?

Glenda Jackson is no braggart. If she were, she could easily brag about the two Oscars and the Golden Globe she won for Best Actress, she could opine about her two Emmys and the many other awards she received here in the States and in her native England. Her name still not ringing any bells? Ms. Jackson is eighty-one. Ancient to a millennial but probably not to your average 70-year-old hoping to cross the finish line at age 100. Lo and behold, age–what it looks and feels like from three different points on the foot race to The End–is what this Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Edward Albee is all about.

If you saw the list of Pulitzer winners announced earlier this week, naturally Albee’s name wasn’t on it. He died in 2016 at the moving-on-up age of eighty-eight, but he won three Pulitzers, including the one for Three Tall Women in 1994. Despite that honor, the play never made it as far as Broadway–until now. And yet, Three Tall Women and the Pulitzer he received for it helped revitalize Albee’s career after a string of critical and commercial flops. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was his most iconic play, but Three Tall Women was his most autobiographical–and he had his mother to thank for it (sort of.) Oh, what a piece of work she was! Her son, however, is considered one of the finest playwrights of his generation.

Three Tall Women opens in the elegant bedroom of a 92 year-old widow. Her broken arm’s in a sling, and she’s being looked after by her middle-aged caregiver and the attractive young female lawyer who’s been sent to straighten out the financial affairs she’s been ignoring. The widow commands, reminisces, complains and rebukes. The other two women do their best to mollify her or sometimes they thrust and parry, depending on how exasperated they are. It’s a harsh but comic portrayal of physical aging, memory loss, fear of death, and a certain kind of courage. Act II is where the true genius of the playwright shows itself. The women have changed clothes. They’re all wearing pretty dresses and the widow’s arm is no longer in a sling, but they’re in the same bedroom. It takes a few minutes, but you soon realize the “three tall women” are in fact the same tall woman at different stages of her life–26, 52, 92.

The young woman, unsettled in life and love, looks forward to what she’s sure will be a wonderful future and wonders, what will be the best time of my life? The middle-aged woman has lived through many disappointments, but she’s still strong and thinks she’ll have the stamina to get herself through old age. She’s a cynic, but prefers her 360-degree view. The old woman is staring at impending death but feels this is the best time: life will stop and she won’t have to worry about anything anymore. Sounds grim, but somehow it isn’t. Unless, of course, you’re twenty-six.

Albee’s mother died in 1989 in her early nineties. A few years later he wrote the play, which he described as  more “exorcism” than revenge. Albee was adopted by well-to-do parents who raised him in a suburb of New York City, but they gave him little time and disapproved of his desire to become a writer. He floundered through four high schools and was expelled from college for failing to go to class. He moved to Greenwich Village and, at thirty, wrote and sold his first play. His career was off and running, but he’d been estranged from his parents for about ten years. The fact that he was gay was the other thing they didn’t like about him. It was only after his father’s death that Albee reconciled with his mother. She shared stories about her life and went to his plays, but they never grew close emotionally. At the end of her life, she decided to cut him out of her will–again. Fortunately for him, he didn’t need the money. (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the play, followed by the movie, took care of that.) But he did want another hit play. Like his mother, the main character in the play is tall–a shop girl who caught the eye of a dapper short man with money. She moved up in the world, her husband cheated on her, she emasculated him, and they had a son who turned out to be gay. And so art imitates life.

British actresses like Judi Dench (M to Daniel Craig’s James Bond) and Maggie Smith (the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey), both 83, are contemporaries of Glenda Jackson but more widely known at present. They’ve had long careers on stage and screen. Unlike Ms. Jackson, they didn’t quit acting for 23 years to serve in Parliament. To serve her constituents well, Glenda Jackson felt she couldn’t do both. In 2016, she returned unencumbered to the theatre, but not just to any role. She played Lear–the King himself–for a limited run at the Old Vic in London, and she received rave reviews and a couple of major awards. And after that, Broadway and Three Tall Women came calling.

The standing ovation was a spontaneous combustion the night I saw the play. Every single one of us in the audience jumped to our feet at the same moment, as if choreographed. We were cheering and applauding all three actresses–all magnificent in their parts–but the combustion was all for Glenda Jackson. At 81, how does she remember all those lines? How does she enunciate her words so clearly? And with such expression? Where does she get the energy to play such a formidable woman for almost two hours non-stop? (There’s no intermission.)

Glenda Jackson is still relevant. The play is still relevant.

The young schoolgirl who knew about Paul McCartney but was clueless about a band called the Beatles? She’s probably entering early middle age right now, and life undoubtedly looks different to her. I hope she laughs at her younger self. I hope she’s happy in the present and looking forward to growing old. Not to feeling old, but to living long enough to make some attitude adjustments.

In a televised interview in 1994, Edward Albee said his job as a playwright was “to make people pay more attention to the things they should be paying attention to.”

“I don’t mind people having false illusions as long as they know that they’re false. If people want to kid themselves, it’s important that they know that they’re kidding themselves. Life is too short to take the middle ground.” Edward Albee

 

In Isle of Dogs, man’s best friend is under attack. Even if you don’t own a dog or love somebody else’s, even if you prefer cats to canines or want no pets at all, Wes Anderson’s new film is a joy to behold. Couldn’t we all use a smidgen of joy right now?

Twenty years in the future in make-believe Megasaki City, Japan, the long-time Mayor is running for re-election against a Scientist candidate. The cat-loving Mayor has whipped up the citizens into a state of frenzied fear: dog flu is in danger of spreading to the human population, and the Mayor plans to save the day by shipping all canines to Trash Island. His Scientist opponent claims he is six months away from a vaccine-cure, but the Mayor disparages his claim and makes a showy “sacrifice” of sending off the first canine, a guard-dog/companion to his ward and young nephew. Spots is ceremoniously flown across the river and unceremoniously dumped on the garbage heap of an island–in a locked cage with no key. All other dogs soon end up there, too. Six months later nephew Atari steals a small plane and crash lands on Trash Island. In all that time, not a single adult has tried to rescue a beloved pooch, but 12-year-old Atari is fearless and determined to find his. The furry islanders rally around the boy and lead him to a locked cage containing a skeleton and a dog tag. Spots appears to be dead.  Or, what if he isn’t? In the company of his four-legged acquaintances, Atari begins a journey to discover the truth, a quest that will ultimately decide the fate of all dogs in Megasaki.

Isle of Dogs is Anderson’s first film since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which took home the Golden Globe for Best Picture and was nominated for numerous Oscars, winning several. As imaginative as that film was, its entire cast was of the human variety, and I generally prefer grown-up films to animation. But times they are-a changin’. Not only is this new film for and friendly to grown-ups, but it’s got an irresistible mix of dogs voiced by actors like Bryan Cranston (Chief, a stray), Liev Schreiber (Spots), Scarlett Johansson (Nutmeg, a husky-voiced former show dog), Bill Murray (Boss, the former mascot of a local baseball team), Tilda Swinton (Oracle, the only dog who can understand TV and predict things that will subsequently happen) and the list goes on. Not long ago, the term Stop-motion Animation meant nothing to me. Now I’m a big fan. The dogs in this film wouldn’t be nearly as appealing in computer-generated form as they are as “puppets” that were painstakingly created and then moved on their way, frame by frame by frame. As for the people puppets, they’re pretty irresistible, too, including a minor character like Assistant Scientist Yoko-ono, voiced by–you guessed it!–Yoko Ono.

The plot has more story threads than I’ve described. The dogs, of course, have their own threads. The Mayor is corrupt and not just because he’s a cat person. (Girl Scout’s honor: I still like cats, even though my first dog persuaded me to permanently switch my allegiance.) The mayor’s corruption extends beyond his cat-fixation. It extends to the dog flu itself and all the way to murder. The dry humor in the movie caps the waves of melancholy, such as this funny bite towards the end: the narrator, in a voice over, says “Graft and political corruption were reduced to sustainable, acceptable levels.” By then, the Mayor has won the election, confessed to his crimes, and been sent off to prison. About that election: the Mayor got over 98% of the vote, with less than 2% going to the deceased Scientist candidate.(How did that happen? All I’ll say is that a sushi chef can work wonders with his simple ingredients.) I couldn’t help but think of Putin’s recent re-election, when his only real competition was from the candidate who was barred from running. Or of Egyptian President el-Sisi, re-elected last week. His only opponent was one of his biggest supporters, a politician who made no effort to challenge him. Earlier in the year, a string of much stronger candidates were arrested or forced to withdraw.

Is Isle of Dogs a perfect film? I’ve seen some criticisms scattered about like dog droppings a few careless masters have failed to clean up. Let me reach into my pocket for my own pooper-scooper bag. Some complain there are no English subtitles for the Japanese-speaking characters. (I had no trouble following the storyline, plus an English-speaking translator–voiced by Frances McDormand– inserts herself at key times.) Some have suggested that it’s culturally insensitive to have an American exchange student (Tracy, voiced by Greta Gerwig) lead the charge at the high school newspaper to investigate the Mayor. Me, I choose to look at the Big Picture. It’s an animated dog movie by a talented filmmaker with an inventive style all his own. It has a big heart and not a lick of mean spiritedness in its portrayal of Japan and Japanese culture. Each scene is meticulously executed and beautiful to look at, even when the setting is rat-infested Trash Island and the dogs–some injured, some filthy, some undernourished–are scavenging for food among the piles of rubbish. I choose to give Isle of Dogs my unconditional love.

My dog Dexter is curled at my feet while I write. He looks a lot like Spots–without the spots and without the pink snout and blue eyes–even though Dexter is a Goldendoodle and Spots, I’ve read, is supposed to be something called a short-haired Oceanic Speckle-eared Sport Hound. Most likely your dog or your friends’ or neighbors’ dogs resemble at least one of the pooches trying to survive on Trash Island. And while Atari is a hero who helps save the dogs, the dogs help save Atari and set him on his future life path. (See the film to find out what that is.) Spots is a hero, but so is Chief, the stray who never wanted to answer to a master, but who realizes a change of heart could be mutually beneficial.  All the dogs we meet seem to be heroes, each in his or her inimitable way. Glamorous Nutmeg is also a role model. “Show dog doesn’t describe who I really am,” she tells Chief.

Wes Anderson started making this movie more than two years ago. He’s said he didn’t have any political agenda in mind, but it’s funny how a good story, even if it’s complete make-believe, has a way of touching on some important truths. Politics corrupt. Unconditional love heals. If we really want to “drain the swamp,” are Sex, Lies and Vindictive Tweets the best way to go about it? Maybe we need to give our country to the dogs–and to the children. It’s they who will inherit the Earth.

“Who are we and who do we want to be?” A line from Isle of Dogs.