AUTOMATIC VAUDEVILLE by John Lahr, Alfred A Knopf, New York, NY. 241 pp, $15.95
The title of John Lahr’s Automatic Vaudeville refers to that turn-of-the century penny arcade on New York’s Lower East Side where spectators eyed vignette entertainments through the viewfinders of hand-cranked machines; the book’s subtitle is “Essays on Star Turns.” I’m not sure that either the arcade or the subtitle have much to do with Lahr’s 15 essays, which range from infuriating to perceptive, from banal to brilliant. Maybe that’s the vaudeville part.
Lahr is best on Noël Coward and Sam Shepard. He is most irritating when he slams away at “the American People” or when he takes pot shots at easy targets (Dallas and Neiman-Marcus in a long, only fitfully interesting chapter called “Hog Heaven: Scenes from Dallas”). He is absolutely wrong-headed when he takes on the work of Stephen Sondheim. A discussion of Eugene O’Neill is less than enlightening, as it ignores the influences of Catholicism and Irish literature on the playwright’s work. Lahr mistakenly sees the decline and fall of the U.S. even in the career of that “schlepper triumphant,” Woody Allen.
But Lahr enjoys picking at aesthetic scabs, and he does what he does well. His book is fun to read and get angry with—and if he occasionally turns a juicy phrase at the expense of good sense, if his petulance frequently overpowers his intelligence, well, that’s the fun of being a critic.
Not nearly all of Automatic Vaudeville is about the theatre—fully a third of it is literary criticism. It’s notable that the essayist has a fascination with gay artists: Coward and Joe Orton (to both of whom Lahr has devoted full-length books), “Dame Edna Everage” (the alter-ego of Australian comic Barry Humphries) and Walt Whitman, among others. Except in the Orton piece, Lahr treats gayness with haughty aloofness, even referring to it as “abnormal sexuality.” For that, Sir Noël would have slapped his wrists and Whitman might have slugged him.
Of the theatrical material, that on Coward is the most perceptive and on-the-mark. Lahr reminds us of some excellent plays which might have been overlooked (A Song at Twilight and Waiting in the Wings), and he shrewdly analyzes both the writer’s work and his “belle of the ball” persona. The attack on Sondheim which opens the book, however, descends into hyperbole and invective. “As America’s Dream becomes increasingly threadbare, so has the art form that best promoted it,” Lahr asserts.
“In this, at least, the musical remains the perfect metaphor for the time.” Sondheim’s “lack of heart…has been his real nemesis,” he continues. I’d have said Sondheim was all heart—but then if you find, as Lahr does, that the character Sweeney Todd “shares with the show a capacity for making emptiness elegant,” there isn’t much room for argument.
Lahr writes knowingly on Sam Shepard, who, since the essay was written, has soared to greater heights as a film actor in addition to his work as a playwright and director. Lahr is interested in Shepard’s early days, some 20 years ago now, when Operation Sidewinder was mounted for New York’s uptown audiences at the Beaumont in Lincoln Center. The production was a disaster, critically and otherwise; Lahr, who was dramaturg-literary adviser to the company, attributes this to the “failure of the avant-garde to shape or change American theatre.” He may be right, but Shepard’s plays, still not Broadway material, have proved themselves viable in New York, the resident theatres throughout America and the rest of the world.
The book’s final section proceeds to belabor the obvious: fame. Is fame really a peculiarly American affliction? I doubt it. Lahr seems to have an odd distaste for America and things American; in fact, his complaints have the reckless ring of the heady days of the ’60s. Yapping away at American failures, he seems out of touch with new American dreams and hopes and needs in the ’80s. Perhaps Lahr’s expatriate status—he lives in London and visits the U.S. occasionally—contributes to the slightly skewed perspective. In any event, his Automatic Vaudeville is consistently interesting, sometimes unfocused, occasionally giddy, frequently outrageous—and well worth the read.
Arthur Ballet, a contributing editor of American Theatre, is a critic and professor of theatre at the University of Minnesota.
