Jeff VanderMeer's "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that's been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I'd say he's the man to beat. Which is why when Matthew Cheney—an NHR contributor, among many, many other things—asked me if I'd contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer's new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it.

I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer's writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. "The Goat Variations," which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don't know how to stop it. Oh, right—this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there's still a sense that VanderMeer's too close, that there hasn't been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn't have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in my mind to VanderMeer's vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do.

And then there's "Three Days in a Border Town," which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've read in years; it's no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it's about so much more than that. It's about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it's about figuring out how to move on. Matthew Cheney has said why this story is amazing as well as anyone, and he's right. It's Beckett, it's the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story "Until Gwen," with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it's VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. "Three Days in a Border Town" is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer's writing at the top of his game—which is pretty much all the time—it's foolish to talk about beating him, because you can't.

Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen

The closing of Clark's Dairy, and the news that Rudy's will be relocating to a location that bears absolutely no resemblance to the place it's been since it opened in 1934, have bummed me out significantly, but I think I can handle it. What made me realize I had to snap out of it (particularly in regard to Clark's) was the act of stumbling on a copy of Enjoying New Haven: A Guide to the Area, by Betsy Sledge and Eugenia Fayen. This is a little paperback that I remember my parents having a copy of in the late 1980s. I don't think I ever looked at it then but I do remember throwing it out when they moved out of their apartment downtown. The edition I remember -- and which is now sitting on the desk next to me -- is from 1989 and was published by Sledge and Fayen as East Rock Press, Ltd., and it is a fine little guide to the city with some really lovely prints. I found a copy of it a couple of Saturdays ago. I had spent the day at the Institute Library, a wonderful quiet place to go when you need a place that's wonderful and quiet, and on leaving, I went into the English Building Market, which is a couple of doors down. I cruise the place fairly regularly but hardly ever do I look at the books; however, this book caught my eye: I thought, "Oh, what the hell," and bought it.

So let me tell you: reading a guide to New Haven from 1989 is a trip. It's really a strange experience. I found myself remembering shops that I had really and truly forgotten about, though they were once landmarks of downtown New Haven. Scribbles, a shop on Chapel Street, beneath the Yale Center for British Art: you went there for stupid doodads, stickers, obscene greeting cards, and other things no sane person would spend money on. I'd forgotten all about that place. And what makes that awful is, I actually worked there briefly. For about two days. The job was so deplorable that, at the age of 16, I phoned them and said, "Yeah, hi, I won't be coming in. No, I don't need to pick up the paycheck. Keep it." I never wanted to set foot in there again.

How could I have forgotten about Scribbles? And yet I did.

The guide mentions Gentree's, a fairly dignified restaurant that used to be on York Street, in a building that no longer exists because Yale tore it down. It was on York near Chapel, a site now housing the new part of the Art and Architecture school. Gentree's was originally a men's clothing store; I own an overcoat from there, which I acquired at a tag sale on Orange Street simply because I wanted an article of clothing with the Gentree's label. The men's shop closed, and somehow Gentree's was re-conceived as a restaurant, the kind of place where you could get decent burgers and serious drinks. Plants; dark wood; 80s yuppie heaven. Gentree's closed, and I was sad; it wasn't that it was such a great restaurant, but it was reliable. Fitzwilly's, which was on the corner of Park and Elm Streets, was a similar establishment, but much larger, and I was very sorry when they closed, too.

And the Old Heidelberg! Which is now a Thai restaurant! How can it be that the Old Heidelberg is a Thai restaurant? Well, it is the case, my friends. Been that way since 1991. Which means that the Old Heidelberg has been gone for almost twenty years. Which means that there's at least one generation of people to whom that space has "always" been a Thai restaurant.

A sobering thought.

New Haven is, I suspect, no different from any other small city, or even town, in this regard: any business establishment that opens and then lasts longer than three to five years becomes, simply out of its survival, an institution. Some institutions are more entrenched than others: Rudy's may thrive in its new spot, but it won't be Rudy's, really; it'll be something else -- but even so, you know that for the next ten years, there will be people sitting around bars around town going, "Man, remember Rudy's, that night when...." I know that's how it is with the Grotto, a club on lower Crown Street that closed in I think 1988 or maybe it was 1989. New Haven is filled with sentimental chumps like me who remember every club, every restaurant they ever ate at, every store where they ever bought shoes, and lament their closings. If you don't believe me, there is proof on Facebook, even about the shoe store: Cheryl Andresen's shop Solemate, which started on State Street and moved to York Street, is much missed by many. I still wear shoes I bought from Cheryl and her shop closed in 2000. Are people more sentimental in New Haven than in other places? I have no idea. But when I meet someone who has been here a long time, inevitably our first conversation includes a litany of "do you remembers": the Daily Caffe; the Willoughby's on Chapel Street; The Moon on Whalley; the Third World International Cafe... it's always sort of romantic, actually, these conversations. We woo each other with our memory banks of the Nine Squares and the streets that radiate from it. Tight friendships are born out of these shared memories of places long gone.

Mamoun's is still here. Mysteriously, Clarie's Corner Copia is still here. Ashley's is here. All true.

But I miss Thomas Sweet. I miss the pancake restaurant that used to be on York Street. (Not the crepe place; I mean the pancake place; it was where Bangkok Gardens is.) And don't even get me started on the bookstores.

Do You Believe in Magic?

Director Devin Brain and the cast of the current Yale Summer Cabaret show, The Phoenix, have given themselves quite a task: to render a situation that could be either fantasy or reality, when either is potentially alienating.  Based on a haunting story by best-selling Australian author Isobelle Carmody, the play has been derived by the cast via an improvisational process of discovery, which means that the presentation is not scripted so much as agreed upon through trial and error during a long period of gestation.

If that sounds daunting, it should.  But it also may be the best way to approach a story like this which relies so much on shared fantasy among its characters.  The logic seems to be: if the actors are making things up together to make the play exist in the first place, they'll be all the more convincing as the fantasizing characters they portray.

William (Ben Horner), we're told, is the "local feral child" -- an amusing appellation, but one that means his character will be hard to read.  He addresses Ragnar (Shannon Sullivan) as a princess -- and not figuratively.  He actually seems to believe they are foundlings from another world, left to wander a beach deserted but for a wounded gull Ragnar names Greedy.  In addition to using a bird puppet, the play fleshes out the bird via William Demeritt, complete with feathers at his temples, a brace, and a crutch, appearing at times like a guardian spirit fallen on hard times as he manipulates dolls that emulate the scenes the actors play out.

Though the dark backstories of Ragnar and William are a bit sketchily thrown at us before we have much idea of what's going on, Horner and Sullivan fascinate us with the strange mix of desperation, denial, and happy inspirations that unite the duo.  One device I particularly liked was Sullivan showing us, mutely, a series of photographs while looking at us with facial expressions that telegraphed exactly how Ragnar felt about each image and how we should read them.  That didn't mean we necessarily grasped the narrative, but the effort to communicate it was palpable.

But when Torvald (Joby Earle), a charismatic boy from a different class and school, enters the scene, things really begin to click.  Before that we're just trying to follow the logic of a folie à deux that seems harmless if unsettling; once the third character is introduced we have a conflict.  Will he enter -- as he seems to -- the rather grand, Dungeons and Dragons-like world the other two mentally inhabit, or repudiate it?  And if he does enter it, is he sincere or after something?

At this point in the story, the three principals act out their interactions via the dolls, and suddenly a feeling of truly being transported to those fabled lands of childhood playtime comes to life.  And once Brain and company has us entertaining how wonderfully trusting and expressive and vulnerable that world of shared make believe can be, they've got us primed for where they want to take us.  It becomes an uncompromising and tragic play about the unwritten laws we intuit and then either respect or betray when entering into private, personal bonds with one another.

As ever at the Cabaret, it's the unexpected touches that impress us as theater: the song William makes up, seemingly on the spot; Ragnar's bike helmet; Torvald's inspired use of an overhead projector; moody musical tones, particularly an expressive acoustic guitar part, that surrounds the action, provided by musical director Nathan Roberts; and, finally, that frail craft -- a boat upon a boat -- that gives us poetry as closure.

The Phoenix, from the story by Isobelle Carmody; adapted by Devin Brain and the cast; directed by Devin Brain

July 1-17, 8 p.m.; additional 2 p.m. show on the 10th; Yale Summer Cabaret, 203.432.1567

Strange Bedfellows

David Rabe, Girl By The Road At Night, NY: Simon and Schuster, 228 pgs. One could say that David Rabe is obsessed with the Vietnam War.  Best known for a trio of award-winning plays in the '70s that deal with that conflict and its effect on those who fought in it, Rabe has more recently turned from theater and taken up fiction-writing and now, with his latest novel, returns to the war that made him famous.  We could say that he does so because he knows he can write about it well -- Rabe served in Vietnam in the mid-'60s -- and because, perhaps, it's a part of our history that never goes away.

I found myself questioning that last supposition in the early going of this poetically spare, episodic novel.  Is Vietnam a national obsession still, or is it Rabe's more than ours?  Perhaps more to the point -- regardless of what you think of the war and its era -- is the question: is there anything more to be done with it?

It may be an unfair question, but when you see the novel's rather taciturn and self-involved protagonist Joseph Whitaker, on the eve of his depature into the army, hanging around in DC hoping to get laid by a war-protesting flowerchild, you might be excused for thinking it all a bit too familiar.  But when Whitaker drops in on his former girlfriend, now involved with a new guy, he begins to come alive a bit more, taking on dimension due to a feeling of unfinished emotional business that could lead him to more interesting experiences.

Rabe alternates the chapters depicting Pfc. Whitaker's misgivings about service in the war and his general lot in life with chapters that introduce us to Quach Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute plying her trade at Madame Lieu's, where GIs can get their jeeps washed and their junk moved simultaneously.  Rabe is very effective at rendering how the GIs view these locals, but there aren't many surprises here amidst the general racism and, occasionally, grudging appreciation of what would've been thought of as "oriental mystery."  But gradually the interiority of Lan, attenuated as it may be by lack of education and a rather elemental sense of life, becomes louder and louder for the reader as her pidgin English -- where Rabe gets to show his command of dialogue -- comes to seem not a limitation so much as a unique form of communication.  Her motives and her actions are often glimpsed through the viewpoint of others, but Rabe's greatest achievement is making us feel not that we know Lan but that we would very much like to.

Is Lan the all-too-familiar whore with a heart of gold, and Whitaker the GI who tries to save her from a world they never made?  Frankly, Rabe's tale is not as far from that soapy terrain as some readers might like, or, alternately, doesn't wallow in it to the degree that others might wish.  There is a connection between the two and it might mean something, but Rabe keeps us furnished with enough sense of the grim realities of the setting to prevent us from expecting any improvement for either of them.

But what the interest of Girl hinges on is not its depiction of prostitution and the war -- as forms of exploitation that put both Whitaker and Lan in something of the same position as expendable vassals -- but in its willingness to look unsentimentally at the power that even a minimum of communication and connection can provide between people who are strangers to one another and, to some extent, the situation in which they find themselves and each other.

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" Shakespeare said, and the journalist Charles Dudley Warner famously stated that "politics makes strange bedfellows"  Rabe's novel takes for granted that the politics of the war and the misery it gives rise to create a condition that might throw together unlikely bedfellows, and the novel's best effect is making us believe they might have something to offer each other.

David Rabe reads at RJ Julia Booksellers, Wed. June 23, 7 p.m., $5, which may be used toward purchase of the book; 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT; www.rjjulia.com

Rock'n'Roll Diva

28337_1511823638164_1311570800_1368637_7342905_n

The Yale Summer Cabaret debuted its 2010 season with cult favorite Hedwig and The Angry Inch, text by John Cameron Mitchell, songs by Stephen Trask.  Directed by Jesse Jou, artistic director of the Cab this summer, the working conceit of the piece is that we aren't watching theater but rather a rock band, The Angry Inch, led by Hedwig, perform in some dive.  Between musical numbers, Hedwig regales us with tales of her life in an ongoing monologue -- and colorful, kinky, comical, disheartening and inspiring it is.

Hedwig began life as a boy named Hansel living in East Germany before the Wall fell.  An American soldier named Luther falls in love with the "girlyboy" and in order for them to marry, Hansel, who adopts his mother's name and passport, also agrees to have a sex change operation to become female in fact.  The operation is botched and Hedwig is left genitally indeterminate -- neither male nor female, a perfect character to explore the in-between manner of transgenders.

As Hedwig, Chad Raines is phenomenal.  His Hedwig is slyly insinuating, an introvert who has become an extrovert in self-defense.  The special condition of Hedwig's sexuality is both a trial by error that makes her grimly ironic about fate, but also a badge of honor that gives credit to her tale.  For this to work, Hedwig can't seem campy -- simply a guy in drag -- and Raines brings it off admirably.  He gives Hedwig an aloof Dietrich air that can veer into Janis-like vocal lacerations at will.

The latter are fueled by the vulnerability of Hedwig's romantic attachment to Tommy Gnosis, a bigtime rock star whom she had an affair with in their youth (when Tommy was a repressed Christian in a Bible Belt trailer park), and whom she now trails about the country as he enacts musical self-celebration in huge arenas, performing songs Hedwig wrote with and/or for him.  According to Hedwig, Tommy is her missing other half, separated from her à la  Aristophanes' story in Plato's  Symposium.  The double whammy -- thwarted romance, thwarted career -- makes Hedwig a true rock diva, showing us the scars on her heart.

But our Hedwig is also cruel (the East German accent helps with that, ja) to herself and to her smitten assistant Yitzhak (Adina Verson), a one-time drag queen whom Hedwig insists wear butch clothing -- in this production, vintage Grunge.  Yitzhak gets no spoken lines -- except for two 'unprintable' epithets directed at her lover/boss -- but Verson's eyes speak plenty as Yitzhak shares the limelight with Hedwig, providing powerful vocal backup, or cringes somewhere in the background as Hedwig confides -- or performs confiding -- in the audience.

The backing band kicks ass and theater-goers who aren't used to musicals that really rock may be somewhat taken aback.  This is not a rock musical with songs cleaned up for the stage in Broadway's neutered idea of what rock sounds like. The Cab space is, appealingly, just the sort of basement venue Hedwig might be playing in the play's reality, and it's easy enough to feel like a spectator in a club, fascinated by a performer who lets it all hang out, even throwing tantrums at the band that may be real or may be staged, or both.

At the heart of it all is the girlyboy with the brittle wit, the belting voice, and an array of costumes -- the Ziggy Stardust get-up was a dead ringer -- that, like the songs, trigger glam memories and rock'n'roll dreams.

As the song by Spoon says: "when you don't believe, it shows, they tear out your soul / when you believe, they call it rock'n'roll."

I call this rock'n'roll.

Yale Summer Cabaret presents Hedwig and the Angry Inch; text by John Cameron Mitchell; music and lyrics by Stephen Trask; directed by Jesse Jou; music directed by Nathan A. Roberts; photo: Nick Thigpen

June 4th-19th 2010, 8 pm. (No performances on Sunday or Monday evenings.) Additional performance, June 12th, 11 p.m.  To purchase tickets and for more information, please visit summercabaret.org or call (203) 432 1567

Playing the Players

Steven Dietz's Private Eyes is a playful play.  We're never quite sure what we're watching.  Sure, it's a play, and we accept that plays are supposed to be a likeness of reality.  A stage with a desk and a round table and a few chairs can be a space where a woman (Rebecka Jones) tries out for a part with a man (Philip M. Gardiner) who seems to be a director; when later the woman, Lisa, working as a waitress, finds the director, Matthew, at her table, we accept, for the sake of make believe, that the action has moved to a restaurant.  And that's what lets Dietz produce his "gotcha" effect: they both are still on stage, we find, and both scenes, the try out and the restaurant, are part of a rehearsal, and the two are married, and in a play being directed by Adrian (Robert Resnikoff). Scenes that seem like they're happening in real life -- Lisa and Adrian debate how to reveal to Matthew that they have been having an affair -- turn out to be a narrative Matthew is telling to his therapist Frank (Jackie Sidle).  At any moment what is real, what is staged, what is fantasized is in question and sometimes the switches from one "level" to another and back are lightning fast and quite comical.  For instance, Adrian and Lisa are cuddling in bed when suddenly Adrian speaks offstage to Matthew telling him that's how he'd like him to play the bed scene -- the bed is literally on stage of course but at that moment we realize it's actually on stage and that Matthew has walked into the scene.

It might sound like the play is about play acting, about how to represent plausible reality on stage and how to keep breaking through the fourth wall, playing on the audience's willing acceptance of staged activity as actual behavior.  But the play has more to offer than that.  The theatrical sleights of hand keep us off-guard and laughing; meanwhile, we're witnessing how staging scenes -- of seduction, of concealment, of confrontation, of confession -- is a part of the theatricality of everyday life.

Like sociologist Erving Goffman's study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Dietz's play accepts that human interactions always contain an element of performance.  In a sense, we never get to the bottom of these characters because they, like us, are always in a play.

The performance style of contemporary theater is key to making the shifting levels effective:  roles requiring minimal costume change, staged with minimal props and sets, vocal deliveries that stress a declamatory approach to speech -- as if people don't converse so much as aim monologues at each other or try to use verbal cues as a means to assert themselves -- all add up to an open-ended performance that is "like" life only because we accept such theatrical conventions as true to reality, which of course they aren't.

In a way, it seems that Dietz's play is questioning those conventions, but if so, not in any very critical way.  As played by Theatre 4, the play was mainly good fun -- Gardiner in particular made the most of his character's comical state of knowing and not knowing what was going on.  And Mariah Sage, as supposedly a detective tailing Adrian at his wife's request, added some unexpected and racy fun to Matthew's life.  Jones had the task of generating sympathy for a cheater and managed it by suggesting the dramatic thrill of secrecy and the fact that, in theater and in life, we mainly want something to happen.

Steven Dietz's Private Eyes, directed by Janie Tomarkin for Theatre 4, plays June 4 & 5 at Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown, 203.654.7111, $20 suggested price; and June 10-13, at The Kate in Old Saybrook, 877.503.1286, tickets $32.  For more information: www.t4ct.com.

Hitch-22

By Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 2010)

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’s magnificent new memoir, Hitch-22. I hated his last book, the one about God — or, as he would have it, god. Well, fair enough. I always thought the big-G god thing was an unfortunate bit of deck-stacking. But it was a truly ill-informed book, one written in bad faith (so to speak), one whose main use was to remind one of the utility of Cicero's dictum that we must state our opponent’s position in the strongest possible terms. When writing about religion, Hitchens never misses a chance to ridicule, or to understand. But this new book...

Well, it should have been obvious that the best book he could write about now would be a memoir. As he tacked from political left to right over the past ten years or so (although he makes a good argument in the book that the shift was much longer coming), his persona, and his writing, have increasingly been self-centered. Even when unintentionally so: whether or not he chose to foreground himself, we the readers certainly began to read him as much for the Him as for the ideas.

So it is a treat, now, to have a book that gives the whole Bildung. And it's just delectable, sassy fun to read about swinging London in the 1970s, when he was part of a set (he reluctantly uses the word) that included Martin Amis and James Fenton, and later Ian McEwan and many others. Their “Friday lunches” became the Algonquin on the Thames, full of wit and wordplay and political swordsmanship.

And those weren’t the only swords unsheathed. The man had sex with a lot of women — and, one is intrigued to learn, a lot of boys and men. Hitchens here makes a convincing and sympathetic case for the public-school incubation of the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name as a rather beautiful thing, something one can develop a taste for. He is quite frank about his homosexual “relapses” that continued into his twenties, before he gynocentered himself for good.

My one complaint: that he never comes clean about his caddish end to his first marriage, and that he only briefly, economically confess what an absent father he has been, before moving on to more achievements and (wholly convincing) self-justifications about this, that, and the geopolitical other. He has suggested elsewhere that he doesn’t talk about his ugly disregard for his first wife and children because, well, it’s their story to tell, not his. I am not quite buying that. But one friend did make the very cogent case that his glaring omissions actually say something good about him: "Look,” she said to me, “he is open about sleeping with men, but obviously ashamed of the way he has treated those close to him. That actually shows he has a pretty good moral compass — he knows what is shameful and what isn’t.” That makes sense, I suppose. But I still wanted to watch him wear the hairshirt a bit more enthusiastically.

That said, this book is intelligent and humane, and it tells you more about Cypriot history than you thought you wanted to know. Hitch-22 reminded me why I love the author of The Missionary Position, his fervent slapping of Mother Teresa, and his book about the war crimes of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.

Le Grand Meaulnes

by Alain Fournier (multiple editions)

I had known for a long time that Le Grande Meaulnes was author John Fowles’ favorite book. Since he was one of my favorite authors, I half-heartedly searched for a copy of this lost French classic. But something always stopped me, until I read Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life and realized that Fournier’s tale was one of his favorites as well. I immediately bowed to the wisdom of my elders and found a good translation.

The title itself does not translate well into English. Our word "great" doesn’t really capture the subtleties of the French "grand." So, this title sometimes gets changed to The Wanderer or The Lost Domaine, which I prefer. It captures the essence of the novel’s heart, Meaulnes’ mystical journey to a bizarre masked world that he and his narrator friend can never find again.

Fournier died in World War I and never had the chance to develop into what he surely would have been—one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists. The delicate descriptions and marvelous evocations of youth have never been more real and bittersweet. This is a book that can be enjoyed for its magic by a child or for its nostalgia by an adult. Still, this is a novel of the in-between time, of adolescence, of growing from that child who wonders happily at the mysteries of the universe to the adult who must take sorrowful responsibility.

We all wish for a place like the lost domaine and a magical experience like Meaulnes has there. But these experiences can consume us until the rest of life seems dry and flat, just as it does for the French wanderer and his friends. Never have the transitions and compromises of life seemed more painful than when Fournier’s fragile characters face them. And this is the central message of the text, that growing up is painful and even the most rebellious of us must bow to the inevitable.

Eric D. Lehman is an English professor at the University of Bridgeport.

My Baby just wrote me a letter.

Continuing a theme: on letter writing: I’ve written and mailed two handwritten cards in the last few days, and I’ve been a magnet, recently, for books about letters. One is a book that came out a couple of years ago, Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See, edited by Bill Shapiro. The other was Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do.

Bill Shapiro’s book appeared before me, in perfect condition, at a tag sale. I’m not sure it had ever been read. It had almost certainly been given as a romantic gift to someone (the book lacked an inscription, so I can’t prove that; but experience as a bookseller tells me the odds are good). The book looked unread. Clearly the owner had decided, “All right: enough’s enough, I don’t need this anymore.” And the book was banished to the church tag sale donation pile, along with old children’s books, dogeared and chewed up, and bad cookbooks, bought with good intentions but never used.

I bought it because its appearance was, I felt, a Sign. A few days previous to this, an old friend of mine -- someone with whom I engaged in extensive written correspondence for years and years (we now communicate, sporadically, via email) sent me a copy of Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories. My friend clearly thought, “Hm, stories about letters. Who would want to read this? Oh: Eva.” I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’ll take it. The book was sent, received, and read pretty much in the same little windows of time in which I acquired and read the Bill Shapiro book, and it’s been an interesting little experiment, continuing what seems to be an ongoing concern of mine: what it means to write letters to anyone these days.

I don’t have any hard and fast proclamations on the subject but one thing is clear to me: people can say all they want that letter writing is dead, but it clearly is not.

Shapiro’s book is fascinating in that voyeuristic way you’d expect. It’s fun to leaf through -- some of the letters are just beautiful to behold, some of them are really works of comic genius, and some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad; you remember every stage of your own roller-coaster ride through romantic life as you go through the book -- but it’s not a book I lingered over.

Greenman’s book, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. The book isn’t a collection of letters; it’s a book wherein letters are central characters in their own right. The fourteen stories in What He’s Poised to Do are set in different places and different times. Each story starts with its title and a postmark serving as a dateline (“Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” Lunar City, 1989; “Against Samantha,” New York City, 1928), which is a nice touch.

I’m afraid that, the older I get, the less good I am with fiction. I read it less and less, and I have a harder time just enjoying it. So I balked, a little, but I found Greenman’s collection houses really delicately good pieces. This will not surprise Greenman’s fans. He is a nimble and clever writer. His essays are always a pleasure to read; I now would actually like to go take a look at the novel he recently published, Please Step Back.

In What He’s Poised to Do, there were several stories that left me uninterested, unintrigued, completely, in what the characters had to say. But then, others crawled into my head and wouldn’t leave. Greenman’s collection is noteworthy. To elaborate on that much would, I feel, crush the stories -- they’re kind of like butterflies that way -- but the last story in the book, “Her Hand,” really struck me particularly. I read it once and immediately read it again, though it was hardly heartwarming. It’s a four page long quiet sigh of resignation.

The personally-directed written word -- letter, postcard, email -- written to be read by one person and one person only, is alive and well. Even if reading it doesn’t always make you happy. I’m going to go listen to the Bay City Rollers’ “Rock and Roll Love Letter,” followed by the Box Top’s “The Letter,” and see if I can cheer myself up.

Hello Dolly!

The Long Wharf Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House managed a surprising feat: it made the play more entertaining without significantly altering it.  If you're a purist who wants to see Ibsen played straight, it does that; but if you think that a play like ADH, with its winsome wifey who gets into some hot water due to an "innocent" forgery, then gets out of it only to slam the door on her happy-ever-after home, is a bit dated and could use some kind of make-over, well, this show does that too.

And that's what I found surprising: first, that one could perch Ibsen on the terrain of a sitcom or a soap; second, that I found myself thinking, well, isn't ADH simply a more revered soap?  After all, the plot of the story is pure soap opera, and there's nothing in the dialogue that aims beyond the play's basic premise, which is something like: happiness is only skin deep.  Scratch it, and it bleeds.  So why not give us an A Doll's House (1879) that resonates in a world of McMansions where -- as is only too timely -- a bit of financial chicanery might bring the whole cloud castle down on a bank manager's ears.

Gordon Edelstein, who did the adaptation and directed, deserves great credit for mining the comic potential in the material.  It mainly seemed to be a matter of emphasis.  The dialogue, a bit modernized, was close to any version of the play we might already be familiar with, but this production included laughs that might be in Ibsen's script but which a less enterprising director might overlook.  There was a breeziness to it that kept it from taking itself too seriously, a breeziness derived from the giddy fun of looking into our neighbors' glass house.

What's important, for a modern production, is that we not be laughing at Nora, the little bluebird, squirrel, chipmunk, as though she were simply in over her airhead and deserving of a little domestic contretemps for our amusement.  Ana Reeder made the most of making Nora likeable, cannily dim rather than actually so.  She managed the protean shifts that are necessary -- the play makes us see -- to be the "perfect wife": temptress, adoring partner, household manager, confidante to friends both male and female, defender of the threatened nest, even sacrificial victim (the latter a melodramatic touch that can't help seeming a bit 19th century).  When, in the end, she does what she's got to do, the shifts from comically desperate to happily saved to proudly determined occur a bit too fast for realism, but Reeder "kept it real," as they say, helped by the change to casual jeans and sweatshirt after the hiked skirt, hose and low neckline of her belle of the ball costume as a dancing peasant girl.  The "street clothes" underscored that her role in the household had been a command performance all along, and it was time for a curtain call.

In the supporting cast, special mention goes to Tim Hopper as Dr. Peter Rank, the ailing best friend of Nora's husband Torvald who carries a torch for her himself.  Their scenes had enough heat to make up for the rather lukewarm affections of Torvald, and Hopper's doomed departure, in cowboy costume with a big cigar going, deserved an ovation.  As Torvald, Adam Trese kept a part that could easily be a caricature sympathetic, even up to his panicked outburst at Nora for exposing him to his enemies.  I liked him best at the end as he babbled about how he forgave her, sitting in his big papa chair, and his attempts to defeat her logic resonate so well, even 21st century males might easily hear Ibsen laughing at us.

As the villain in the piece, Mark Nelson's Nils Krogstad had a kind of shaky petulance that worked well enough in confronting Nora with her wrongdoings, and in his pleas to be reinstated at the bank, but made it hard to see what her friend Christine Linde (Linda Powell) could see in him.  He seemed more eager to end it all rather than able to blackmail a boss's wife or rekindle an old romance.

Michael Yeargan's set was a wonderfully detailed doll's house, its fakery part of its appeal, with plenty of floorspace for Ibsen's and Edelstein's playthings to move about and grope toward some satisfactory vision of the future.

And what of the kids?  It may be much easier for today's male to accept without much soul-searching Nora's claim that she needs to educate herself and find a place in the world; but does today's woman find it any easier to pursue that goal at the sacrifice of her ties to her children than women would in Ibsen's day?  "You've come a long way, baby," since Ibsen's Nora first walked out -- but, Edelstein's production seems to ask, "how far would you go?"

LONG WHARF THEATRE, Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Ray Cullom, Managing Director

presents:

A DOLL'S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted and Directed by Gordon Edelstein, Set Design by Michael Yeargan

through May 23, 2010

The Art of the Matter

  “Art” by Yasmina Reza first appeared in Paris in 1995.  Shortly afterwards it was translated into English for the British stage and turned up at the Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) on Broadway on March 1, 1998.  The cast was stellar for this three-person play, performed without intermission.  The six-month Broadway run included Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, all well known film and theatre performers.

 The recent weekend performances of the play at the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville this April were perhaps a little less glamorous but were easily just as powerful as its Broadway version—in some ways even more so. Where the Royale Theatre seats 1,100, Kehler-Liddell’s impromptu bleachers and 60 some chairs transformed what on Broadway can only have been an all-too-impersonal experience into an intimate tete-a-tete between audience and performers. Placing the play within a gallery reflected, if anything, the mutual trust exhibited by gallery staff and the Elm Shakespeare Company, which was responsible for this production.

This element of trust is no small matter in a play as powerful as Reza’s. The setting is simple enough: the living rooms of the three characters—Marc (James Andreassi), Serge (Tom Zingarelli), and Yvan (Raphael Massie)—which remains unchanged throughout the hour and twenty minute performance. The key conflict is unsettling, one that should worry any gallery owner in the business of selling art. In brief, Serge, a dermatologist and divorcee, has purchased for 200,000 francs a five-by-four-foot painting of white lines on a white background. This decision immediately upsets Marc, an engineer who condemns the work as trash, to the dismay and disdain of Serge. Their seeming arbiter is the hapless and “chaotic,” soon-to-be-married Yvan.

 While hardly a tale of war or woe, Reza’s play disturbs the universe of art and, as becomes shortly evident, human relations. The opening gambit in Reza’s backhanded criticism of postmodern art—and possibly of poststructuralism, a distinctly French phenomenon that Reza undoubtedly had to live through—is the all-white painting that is the object of Serge’s veneration, Marc’s rage, and Yvan’s confusion. But “Art” goes beyond the obvious conundrums formerly presented by Marcel Duchamp’s institutionalized snow shovels and urinals. (Does something become ‘art’ by virtue of hanging in a museum? What if you pay 200,000 francs for it?) It goes after the relationships among the characters, since it’s on the blank whiteness of the canvas that their relationships are ultimately inscribed, evoking a range of emotion that drives them through the convolutions of feeling that by play’s end leaves the audience near breathless with the verbal pyrotechnics of it all.

This is where mastery of the material makes all the difference, and the ensemble put together for this production really does have firm control of that material. The snugness of the venue and the simplicity of the set demand a conciseness of body language that is belied by the explosiveness of the characters’ pent-up feeling. The contrast of so much energy to be conveyed in so contained a setting ultimately creates a bond between players and spectators that only a great performance in the right environment can convey.

This simpatico between audience and ensemble seems exactly the intended goal of this experiment by Elm Shakespeare Company and Kehler Liddell Gallery to bring high art of high quality to New Haven’s neighborhoods. “Westville is something of an arts district already strong in the visual arts with its many galleries,” noted Elm Shakespeare founder and director James Andreassi. “Elm Shakespeare’s goal was not only to find an indoor space for performing smaller plays but also to take advantage of the artistic energy in Westville and deepen it by bringing the theatrical arts to the neighborhood.” In that regard, Elm Shakespeare both follows in the wake and leads along with works that have been aired by New Haven Theater Company, Broken Umbrella Theatre, and Theatre 4.

This article is cross-posted at the New Haven Independent.

Nature Boy: A Review of Edward Abbey

Review of Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside by Edward Abbey

Holt Publishing, 1984

Edward Abbey--who reflects not only a personal need for expatriation and that delicate hint of misanthropy in my demeanor --has subdued Bruce Springsteen’s place in my heart.  Abbey’s Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside seems, at first glance, easy to dispense with as another example of environmentalist earth-mother literature. But for one sufficiently sensitive to the nuances of writing in this genre done well, a reader is able to see like Abbey, feel like Abbey, and travel with Abbey through “Eden at the dawn of creation.”

In Abbey’s essay collection, notwithstanding its focus on the cascade  of nature's plethora, one can see signs Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan and their ideas on how the tools of technology have red-lined the natural tools of society: humanity’s own brain power and its ability to use that power having become dependent on a technology of effortlessness.

To be fair, Abbey had me harboring some guilt of my own as I took a distinctly indoor pleasure in this book of the outdoors.  Abbey travels natively and minimally, carrying only what is necessary to survive, not to live comfortably in a technologically-dictated world.  He brings water, careful observation, and a decisive love for a rough and unlovable desert region, reminding readers that nature is intended for all, not merely the affluent who purchase land only to destroy it by building million-dollar homes and strip malls.  As McLuhan says, “affluence creates poverty.”  Abbey’s desert wasteland exemplifies in its unique way that sad fact of modern civilization.

Much like Neil Postman’s Technopoly, Abbey’s Beyond the Wall illustrates in tender detail how we have quite literally given up everything that gives meaning and direction to this ephemeral, all-too-rapidly lived life, clawing, like kittens, at the conveniences technology dangles in front of us.  Abbey forces his readers to question their decisions, their comfy cubicle chairs, their guaranteed health insurance and to get up and let “the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse [their] reverie” and do something that does not leave them just emptier.  Emptiness--even in a barren desert--is not inevitable, and maybe readers need Abbey to remind them of this.  In Abbey’s desert, it is the fact of this isolation—expatriation, as he terms it--that leads the imagination along to affluence of mind instead of bank account.

Dare I say that I find myself envying Abbey?  How he is able to find perfection in nothingness, in what appears as miles piled upon miles of destitution.  Having emphatically placed himself in a location from which anyone else would willingly die to escape, he is happy.  He is at peace as a “desert rat.”  I find myself secretly desiring to hitchhike back to the farm between a cornfield and a horse ranch and to relish what I personally had forsaken for so long.

Moreover, his keen sense of specificity and willingness to violate his readers’ comfort zones let him write with wit, perceptiveness, peacefulness, and a surprisingly brusque sarcasm—quite the change from your typical earth-mother literature!  If not because his inspiration or his sincerity, then for his wit and wisdom, one must appreciate Edward Abbey and dare to trek “beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security of fences . . . beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air . . . [to] another world waiting for you, . . . the old true world of deserts, mountains, forests, islands, shores, the open plains.  Go there.  Be there.  Walk gently and quietly deep within it.”

Out of Africa

Bernard-Marie Koltès' Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it's a "construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria," where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you'd call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes -- particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he's going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she'll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other -- does the fact that she's reciting the well-known poem "The Erlking" help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he's not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as "sir" initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the "nègre" of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of "négritude," which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent's Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play's most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be -- at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is -- rather believably -- meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It's a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous -- it's Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it -- it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play's plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it's the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn's description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below -- and more naturalistically furnished than -- the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

In the Sea's Grey Suit: The Poetry of Don Barkin

Review of That Dark Lake by Don Barkin Antrim House, $19

The misty mountains that grace the cover of Don Barkin’s That Dark Lake suggest what lies within this collection of poetry. It also bespeaks the atmosphere that pervades the sensibility of this New Haven poet. Barkin’s work is divided into four sections, each with its unique character, which at times creates a dissonance that can be either welcoming or off-putting by virtue of their congruity.

The energy that underwrites the collection, modified, as it were, by that darkness, is evident in poems like“Eighteen”:

In Springtime a young brook throws the whole mountain in an uproar.

It crashes through the rocks like a blind man in a hurry. Its froth leaps like a stallion’s spit in terror of the bridle.

Don’t get upset. Think of the day when you’ll smile a little sadly as the brook disappears in the sea’s grey suit.

At the age when in Western society, a child becomes an adult, Barkin captures the cusp of that transition through the liquid metaphors of “brook” and “froth” and “spit,” whose vigor dissipate into the grey stream of adulthood. In this respect, many of Barkin‘s poems bear the linguistic stamp of modernists like William Carlos Williams, who could capture and even subjugate readers’ hearts and minds with a few, simple words.

Sometimes Barkin constrains this rare prowess by letting stringent rhyme schemes tie down his lyrical, even chaste gems of insight. Fortunately this is not omnipresent, and many of the poems reflect the sincere, almost affable ambience, of That Dark Lake as a whole. The collection delves not just into human emotion but the everyday bustle of life. Experience serves as root and cause of all artistic experience in the world, that “lonely hour of the single light bulb,” as Barkin frames it. Consider such lines as

In the weight of the great trees on the lawn, In the timid, curving love Of the tree limbs on the bright grass, They can see that really Nothing ever goes anywhere

or

In middle age you smell the end The way you smell the snow …

Paradigms of innocence possibly lost suffuse Barkin’s voice. In the smallness of things lies the greatness of reality, of Being itself. And yet, the collection is domestically minded enough to grasp the solace offered--as this collections offers--mental creature comforts: a good book to pick up after a day of “rush[ing] off, then com[ing] back…walking in too fast” and listening to the “office women” gossip. It’s a book meant to slow you down, to remind you that “out there / water flows somewhere / and the quiet people rule.”

Travels With a Donkey

By Robert Louis Stevenson

I searched for this out-of-print travel classic for long time, combing used bookstores across Connecticut. Finally, I found a red, cloth-bound pocket edition. The cover was gorgeous and the print inside oozed adventure. There was only one problem: The copy was falling apart. So, I taped and glued and then took it out into the bush with me.

On a rock outcrop overlooking a hidden tarn, I read Stevenson’s twelve-day solitary journey through Gevaudan and the Cevennes Mountains in southern France. In the late nineteenth century, when the famous author took this path, adventure still lurked around every corner of these rocky hills, but this journey is really more pleasant ramble than arduous trek. The chapter “A Camp in the Dark” may be the most beautiful argument for camping alone in the woods ever written. “The wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan," he writes. " I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses.”

Stevenson’s only companion is a donkey named Modestine, acquired specifically for the occasion. His relationship with the unruly beast slowly changes from frustration to acceptance. And then, as he exits the mountains, leaving Modestine behind, suddenly the recalcitrant animal becomes a true friend, a nostalgic memory equal to the trip itself, in the way that the difficult journeys in life become the most meaningful. And that is the lesson for us in this charming travelogue—anything valuable is difficult, and afterward we love it that much more.

A missed opportunity

Here at NHR, we try to lean more heavily on good books, but every once in a while a book is such a missed opportunity that it's instructive to point out how. Hence my review of Daniel Menaker's A Good Talk, posted this morning to the New Republic's web site. Menaker is a major publishing macher (is there any other kind?), having worked at the New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins. And his editor, Jonathan Karp, is quite savvy. So one wonders how the stone and the flint failed to ignite. Or something like that. Menaker had a hand in a recent slight disappointment, Judith Shulevitz's book about the Sabbath, which I reviewed here. I don't know if he was the final editor; he acquired it and then left Random House some time later.

Both books — and Shulevitz's is by far the better book — seemed to need tougher editing. Having just gone through some tough editing for this forthcoming book, I know the process isn't always fun. But it's usually necessary, and it's the writer who loses out when the editor gives him or her too much of a pass. (Heck, if I were editing Shulevitz, I would probably be too ginger: she is very smart, and she knows her stuff.)

Enter, If Ye Dare

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming GeeksEthan Gilsdorf Lyons Press, 2009 $24.95

If we’ve learned anything from Sigmund Freud and J.K. Rowling, it’s that we members of the species homo sapiens sapiens exhibit a strong fantasy life.  From the family romance to  wingardium leviosa—frame it however you like—our predilection to imagine ourselves as something other than what we are is as old as the first storyteller regaling listeners around a campfire with tales of thrilling hunts, noble deeds or, indeed, anything that takes us out of ourselves and puts us elsewhere.

Ethan Gilsdorf’s Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a meditation on this all-too-human fact of life.  [Full disclosure: the acquiring editor for Lyons Press, Keith Wallman, is a subscriber to New Haven Review.] Gilsdorf's starting point is personal and, at times, painfully confessional, a saga that prompts his grand tour of the Anglo-American obsession with medieval fantasy and faerie.  That obsession ranges from beer-bellied, bearded role play gamers gathered in Geneva, Wisconsin, to relive the pre-corporate glory days of Dungeons & Dragons to middle-aged housewives whacking orcs and ogres in the virtual realms of World of Warcraft. There are middle-class couples who don wings and tunics on weekends to swing Styrofoam swords and fling confetti-filled fireballs at one another, as well as “Tolkien tourists” who descend en masse on the New Zealand of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings to walk the grassy plains of Rohan and sniff the cindery ash of Mordor.

Gilsdorf's survey, however, is more than an act of journalism.  It is an inner odyssey that gets its first push with the devastating stroke that transforms his mother from a bright, ebullient woman, for whom the world was her middle-class oyster, into the “Monster”: a shambling, chain-smoking, emotionally explosive terror whose son finds solace in a regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons game with high school friends.  This, at least, is the personal motivation behind Gilsdorf's re-entry into geekdom.  Like so many others—myself included—when Gilsdorf left for college, he had put childish things away, supplanting the joys of casting sleep spells and slaying giants with the more mundane adult pursuit of grades, sex, money, work, family.  In Fantasy Freaks, Gilsdorf takes the opportunity proffered by authorship and a book contract to revisit this phase of his life and indulge himself. But this indulgence is hardly a shameless one since Gilsdorf is clearly unsettled by the passion with which he returns to his teenage roots.

Mostly it’s a question of image. Anxieties about how he looks to his peers resonate throughout. This explains in part his not infrequent mention of how normal his respective guides through the subcultures of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, live action role playing, and DragonCon are.  And then there is his own baldly stated yearning for adult things he is without at the time of writing—a long-term relationship, marriage, children.  The underlying story of cultural anxiety combines elements of projection (“What’s so weird about pretending I’m a half-elf warrior? The guy who plays the dwarf wizard is an assistant VP of finance at the local bank!”) with reaffirmations of normal urges (“OK, so I’m dressed in a funny costume at this DragonCon, but everyone’s doing it and maybe I’ll meet a girl and have real rather than role play sex”).  But Gilsdorf's projections are no different from those of every guy or gal who lives, in one way or another, a Clark Kent-Superman double life; while his reaffirmations  have their merits inasmuch as fantasy play can serve as a conduit to culturally normative goals, such as networking for love or money.  Looked at squarely, who can argue with either of these?  Four guys huddling over funny-shaped dice and stacks of rulebooks, which may end in a shared beer or job lead, is no stranger than watching four guys huddling in a green field over a dimpled white ball that rests on a little piece of wood, which they will spend some three to five hours swatting with one of ten differently shaped, club-footed poles.

Gilsdorf does make several pop psychology efforts to explain the penchant of a certain class of Americans (and Englishmen and Australians and Frenchmen, etc.) for these types of recreations.  Much of this pop psy 101 stuff comes from his own intuition. Nor do I think him that far off the mark.  These various forms of role play, whether table-top, digital, or “live action,” do reflect our collective need to escape the dullness of our daily reality, supply ourselves with the illusion of control over the chaos of modern life, feed that never absent desire for child-like, consequence-free play, and give release to our pent-up stores of aggression. It is all of these, and more. Indeed, if I had but one criticism to make, it would have been a fond wish for Gilsdorf to have shed some of the habits of personal journalism and donned more academic vestments.  (He certainly is capable, as a former Harvard graduate.)   In brief, I and, I suspect, any of his readers would have liked to have seen more of the academic literature—assuming there is any—on these various behaviors.  Otherwise, Fantasy Freaks is an eye-opening romp through what continues to strike me as a culturally specific juncture in our collective psychology.

Niels Lyhne

by Jens Peter Jacobsen (trans. Tiina Nunnelly; Penguin, 2006)

Niels Lyhne is one of those forgotten masterpieces that, when he finds it, a reader cannot believe he or the rest of humanity has gotten along without. I found Jacobsen through Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, not knowing that the nineteenth-century Danish writer had also found admirers in Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, T.E. Lawrence—the list goes on. This small novel influenced a whole generation of European thinkers and writers to an extraordinary extent. And rightfully so. Here is a book in which, as Rilke says, “there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held, lived, and known in memory’s wavering echo.”

Niels Lyhne is also a book about belief, about a poetic soul feeling its way through an ordinary life. The eponymous protagonist falls deeply in love, only to disagree with his lifelong love on the subject of faith. He struggles with these questions, right up to the point of death, when his friend tells him, “Opinions are only to live by—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you die with one opinion or another?” Yet, to Niels it does matter, and he dies what Jacobsen calls “the difficult death.”

One apprehends in this book the seeds of the great works of the early twentieth century: Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and all of Hesse’s earlier works to name only a few. In a way, these books seem less original, more reflections of Jacobsen’s effort, after reading it. Of course, these later novels may be greater and more developed in some ways.  But after reading this lost classic, it becomes clear that they could not have existed without the brilliant, haunting Niels Lyhne.

Eric D. Lehman is an English professor at the University of Bridgeport.

Connect at the Cabaret, Old Chum

It’s Valentine’s Day (aka VD).  Maybe you’ve got it covered with your favorite mating personage, your significant other(s), your steady, your squeeze, your spouse (or the person who would be that if the laws of the land permitted), but ... maybe not, maybe you’re looking to connect, somehow, someway. Maybe you turn to craigslist, home of the online hookup, or maybe you’re not quite ready to go virtual yet, so you look at “Missed Connections” hoping against hope that someone out there, someone whose path you’ve already crossed -- in line at Subway, at the bank, on that same path you walk every day to class, on the subway -- is desperately seeking you again, to get your digits, your screenname, the key to your city . . .

Chad Raines, of the local band The Simple Pleasure, has concocted the music, lyrics and book for Missed Connections, a guilty pleasure based on online personals, up for its final showing today at Yale Cabaret, and it’s a blast of sound, movement, and cagey, collective jeering at the pathetic losers we all risk being when we’re lookin’ for love, or, if not love exactly, then at least that special someone who will let you massage his or her feet ...

Pick your favorite moment: the phys ed girl, suffering from diarrhea, pining for the guy who will examine her stool (how much more intimate does it get?), or the guy at the Subway, intoning, in a hilarious Barry White take-off, how he noticed that girl in line with him, but was scared off when she ordered for two; or the gent with binoculars who likes to watch his neighbor take out her trash; or the pissed-off, stood-up woman who gives us a lesson in etiquette: if you’re married and seeking discreet connection on the side, it’s just not cool to be a no-show to someone else who’s married and seeking same ... there might even be a sitter’s fee involved!

The songs are high volume and extremely active.  Jennifer Harrison Newman once again choreographs the impossibly small “stage”at the Cabaret -- including a line dance, led by Raines, that’s so close you might catch a spray of sweat.  Director Christopher Mirto keeps the show loose and juicy, but also cheerily inviting -- it feels at times like we’re at “dating camp” and the cast are our counselors, trying to get us out of our shells.

There’s never a dull moment because you never know what’s coming next -- erotic tableaux, condoms flung to the crowd, a get-up and boogie number with lyrics shouting “woman for woman, man for man” rather than “celebrate good times, c’mon!”

And who knows, when it’s over there might even be a line on craigslist for you: You were at Yale Cab last weekend with some bozo and/or bimbo you clearly weren’t that into. I was the ____ with the ______.  Hope to see you there in two weeks (Feb 25-27) when the Yale Cab will feature Radio Station, inspired by the work of Shogo Ohta and the Pacific Performance Project/East.   Come alone, if you dare...

Missed Connections a new musical by Chad Aaron Raines directed by Christopher Mirto

Special Valentine's Performance! Sunday Feb 14 @ 8pm

How you gonna meet your missed connection?

What's in a Word?

Meyer Levin, a writer best-known for his novel Compulsion, the story of the Leopold-Loeb murder and trial, wanted to be known as the man who wrote a play based on the diary of Anne Frank.  He met with Otto Frank to discuss that possibility before Anne’s book had even been published in the U.S.

But the task of writing a play from the diary went to the Hollywood screenwriting team of Hackett/Goodrich, and their play won a Pulitzer Prize.  In Levin’s view, their play succeeded by downplaying the overt Jewish elements in Anne Frank’s story, universalizing it into a tale of unjust suffering and a young girl’s moral insight.  Levin himself called his effort to present a more authentic theatrical version of Anne Frank an obsession.

Rinne Groff’s new play, Compulsion, opened Thursday in its debut at the Yale Repertory, directed by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, which, along with Berkeley Repertory, commissioned the play.  The play recreates Levin’s struggle -- fictionalized in the person of Sid Silver and incarnated on stage by a bristling, touchy, sincere, sarcastic, soulfully suffering, and at one memorable moment, light-heartedly soft-shoeing Mandy Patinkin.

But the title, in opting for Levin’s word “compulsion,” used to characterize what drove Leopold and Loeb to murder, rather than Levin’s word “obsession,” chosen for his autobiographical account of his struggle with the Anne Frank material, indicates the problem the play presents us with.  It suggests that Silver is not righteously obsessed -- as one might be with an injustice, trying to alter a situation that nags at one -- but rather under a compulsion, as one might be when neurotically driven to certain behavior, such as having to repeat the same lesson over and over.

Both things might be true, and it’s up to the audience how far they go along with Silver in his crusade, first, to be the one who makes a play of the diary, and, when that hope must finally be relinquished, to get recognition that the Hackett/Goodrich play stole from his, then to mount a staging of his play (though he had signed away any right to do so) to show that his play is, as a friend says, “the more important play.”

Groff’s play is fast-moving, enough, in these arguments over Silver’s play -- though they rely on an interest in show biz that all viewers may not share.  Silver’s character is further fleshed out by his life with his French wife (Hannah Cabell), a writer herself, who offers a few erotically charged moments and also provides moral support, until driven to almost suicidal despair by her husband’s obsession.  At that point, just before intermission, the drama between the two becomes the greater focus of the play, though the figure of Anne stills presents its fascination.

In what may be the play's  most memorable scene,  Anne, rendered as a marionette, appears in bed beside Mrs. Silver to discuss  her husband.   The scene stages the triangulation among Silver, his wife, and Anne, and further complicates the relation via Silver's identification with Otto Frank.  Anne, voiced in this scene by Patinkin, expresses the pathos of her father, a man Silver excoriated for betraying their beloved Anne after her death.

Compulsion's use of marionettes -- not only for Anne, but also for scenes from the two different plays based on her book -- is a brilliant idea that occurred to Groff when she learned that Levin had once worked in puppet theater.  The marionette of Anne allows the play to convey Anne’s indeterminate age in the present -- is she the age she was when she died, or the age she would be had she lived?  The marionette also registers the extent to which Anne Frank has become “a puppet” of her representations, and, thus, no longer a flesh and blood entity.

Ultimately the play’s theme is the question of whether Silver’s cause is important for Jewish identity, as he insists, or whether it is simply a personal matter involving his obsession with Anne and what she suffered.  (In real life, Levin was a war correspondent who did see firsthand the horror of the Nazi camps, and it was his review of The Diary of a Young Girl in the New York Times that was pivotal in catapulting it to bestseller status -- both attributes are retained for Silver, so we do see him as a man to be taken seriously.)

The script makes Silver more of a wordsmith than he perhaps has a right to be -- using coinages such as “cash cow” and “in the loop” in the Fifties, a decade or two before they had become common currency.  Though it has more than a few entertaining exchanges, the play offers little in the way of dramatic reversals, recognitions, or romantic complications to add entertainment to what is essentially a hard-luck show biz tale.

At yet the play is more compelling than a tale of someone passed over on the road to fame and glory, and that’s because of the figure of Anne Frank.  But we have to be willing to see the meaning of the Holocaust as implicated in her cultural status, and, as Silver insists, in the fate of his play.  But again it seems more fitting to highlight Silver’s obsession with Anne and what she represents, rather than his compulsion to insist on that relation.

COMPULSION By RINNE GROFF Directed by OSKAR EUSTIS Featuring HANNAH CABELL, MANDY PATINKIN, STEPHEN BARKER TURNER January 29 to February 28, 2010 Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel Street A co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre