TONY Awards: Celebrating the New: Network, Rodgers’ & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

Not so long ago, having dinner with a friend at Café Un Deux Trois, a stone’s throw from the Belasco Theater where Network was doing brisk business, I could see the actor Tony Goldwyn on the street walking pensively. We waved and he waved back. Having not yet seen the show, I did not know that in a minute he would be in a fierce embrace with co-star Tatiana Maslany and that the audience for Network was watching too, thanks to some inventive camera work. The show’s star Bryan Cranston was already dubbed this year’s Best Actor in a Drama, word of mouth, and I was determined to see Network before its closing. Suddenly it was the last week of the show and somehow I snagged the very last ticket for the last week’s Wednesday matinee.

Briskly moving about on a sound stage, the actors were in some truth telling rage: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it.” The audience was exhorted to shout the same, even the row of diners to the side, adding a busy look to the spectacle. One diner, a coifed matron conspicuously jewel bedecked, was asked, “How do you feel?” To wit, she was stunned awake, and replied, “Fine,” when she was supposed to shout the play’s angry anthem. Maybe it was the wine, but she never got the memo. Viewer interaction was all part of director Ivo Van Hove’s grand design. Howard Beale is of course a fictive truth-telling reporter and Cranston’s acceptance speech for his TONY, dedicating the award to journalists, was a class act.

The win for Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! for Best Musical Revival was a nod to a daring show that played hard and fast against notions of tradition. At the Circle in the Square, you need only notice the rifles adorning the walls to realize the spectacle may not be celebrating the expected golden cornfields of a kosher America. Director Daniel Fish did not change a word of the original text and yet by tweaking a prop, a gun for a knife, in our time updates meaning in a play that harkened to a rosy nostalgic edenic frontier. Note: what can be more disturbing than the image of bloodstains on a wedding dress? The news on any random day reminds us of our democracy, and like it or not, owning and using guns are part of it.