ANOTHER TIME
These issues are all too often forgotten, or simply ignored, in a media-saturated world where art is a commodity–in which consideration of the emotional (as well as ethical) issues involved in a work of art, and of the artist’s compulsion to make art, takes a distant second place to considerations of how it will affect the celebrity the artist must be seeking. (Why else be an artist in the first place? goes the reasoning.) There is, as they say, no business like show business.
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I think more than a few American playgoers will feel put off by Another Time’s lack of engagement of the political circumstances that surround its story and by the emotional restriction that pervades the play. But Harwood is being true to his characters; he eschews overt intensity in favor of inferred psychological turmoil. Even the action that brings the drama’s crisis to its climax–when Leonard, 35 years after the fact, finally cries for his dead father and everything connected to that relationship–feels restrained, held back, and therefore very real given the people and place Harwood is writing about.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
