En Français, s’il vout plaît

Treason.  Poems by Hédi Kaddour.  Translated by Marilyn Hacker.  Yale University Press, 168 pp. 2010. Hédi Kaddour writes a verse with clear antecedents in the meditative, ironical poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine.  If that dates him a bit, so be it.   Kaddour’s poems enchant with their ability to retain an intonation we immediately associate with Romanticism and Symbolism, hardly “state of the art” these days, combined with a wry sense of how a poet of that tendency inhabits uneasily, or maybe at times breezily, our much less “poetic” world.  The flâneur of today must live in a world where “a man declares / That buying books will soon become a clear / Sign of derangement, yes, insanity” (l’homme affirme / Que l’achat de livres sera bientôt un signe / De très forte aliénation mentale).

The world Kaddour’s poems partake of is a world where that possibility has always been the case inasmuch as “the Poet” has always been a figure of “très forte aliénation mentale” – a view that became commonplace after Romanticism, and, one suspects, Kaddour finds no reason to relinquish it.  He wears that outlook, we might say, as a mask over the features of his more persistent strain of polite skepticism about the Poet’s grand sense of outsider status, the inspired “folie” that makes poetry possible in that tradition.  “‘Save your tears,’ his mother told him early on, / ‘For more serious things.’ Poetry, / Grief contained by meter.” (“Garde tes larmes, disait très tôt la mère, / Pour des choses plus graves.” Poésie, le chagrin contenu par le mètre.)

Can this interplay with familiar territory in French verse come across in English?  I have my doubts, but those are doubts of long-standing since French is simply too flexible to suffer transformation into English, so that translations tend to seem hamfisted in comparison.  Take for instance a poem on the rather phallic bust of Verlaine in Jardin du Luxembourg:  “Verlaine?  He stands erect there on the grass, / Lyre and palm tree behind him, a bronze bust / Of Verlaine atop three good yards / Of cement prick around which writhe three / Unlikely Muses …” (Verlaine?  Il est dressé sur l’herbe / Lyre et palme dans le dos, Verlaine, / En buste, au sommet de trois bons / Mètres de pine granitique où se tordent / D’improbables muses…).  Kaddour’s “lyre et palme” references symbols for Apollo, but "palme" can simply mean the leaf, generally a symbol of success, the way we use the term "laurels," whereas "palm tree behind him" causes us to imagine an actual palm tree behind the statue which is a bit surprising, given that "dan le dos" suggests "on his back" as much as "behind him".  And we lose that repetition of the great man’s name that Kaddour uses with a shrug as if to say “eh, Verlaine, as a bust” (with all the attendant irony at the spectacle) that “a bronze bust of Verlaine” cannot convey, simply a flat declaration of the object of the poem.

Which is to say that I’m very pleased that this edition contains the French on facing pages.  Reading Hacker’s Kaddour without the French tended to leave me with very little impression of the tone of the poem.  She renders faithfully enough the words of the poem, but even there I have my cavils, as for instance here in “The Double,” one of the denser poems.  Kaddour says: C’est presque aussi la même folie de poussière / dans le même rayon de soleil; Hacker says: “It’s almost the same dusty madness / in the same sunbeam.”  Literally the phrase is: madness of dust, not very felicitous but closer to what Kaddour wants: the image of dust motes in their “mad” dance in the sunbeam, a figure that I can’t find in “dusty madness” – which reminds me more of my unvacuumed desk.

Ultimately, all I’m pointing out is how hard it is to render the effect of verse like Kaddour’s in English.  In French such effects may seem a bit staid, but I’m enough of a classicist in things French to appreciate the effort of these poems, most of which begin with lines that are rhetorically quite graceful.  And every now and then there’s a jab of that Gallic spleen we expect from the French:

Knothead wears jeans knothead Wears blue he writes to be A writer writes that he is a writer And gets his pals to write That no one could be more a writer His photo says it all it’s the face Of a writer with a flair for writing.

Hédi Kaddour reads his poetry (in English) at the Whitney Humanities Center, Room 208, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, Wednesday, October 27th, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.

The Life of the Party

Raucous, lively, veering toward chaos, with longueurs that seem to partake of the very social ritual it sought to recreate, Anton Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception, directed by Alexandru Mihail, offered the most fully integrated use of the space at the Yale Cabaret that I’ve witnessed.  Seated at the big white table between spaces “reserved for the wedding party,” I got the full effect of this hyperkinetic staging. This was a show where watching the audience reactions could be as fascinating as watching the characters, and with the latter at times seated amongst us, or questioning, jabbing, fondling, kissing, sitting on audience members, there was no possible way to uphold the polite convention of the fourth wall.  Granted, audience members didn’t get up on the table and dance (as almost everyone in the cast did), but if anyone had I’m sure the game cast would’ve accommodated any outbursts without missing a beat.

Updated in Mihail's production to the 1980s from the 1880s, the play is a one-act farce and only glancingly like any of Chekhov’s famous plays, though there are hints of Chekhovian tensions, most notably in the figure of garrulous, sentimental, sensual, and tactless Ivan Mikhailovich Yatz (Babak Gharael-Tafti), constantly apologizing for his “expressivity” as he gets carried away and insults his hosts, implying that the marriage was undertaken for money by the groom, Epaminondas Aplombov (Brian Lewis), and out of desperation by the bride, Dashenka.  Elsewhere, we might catch lines that suggest typical Chekhovian themes of resentment, self-abasement, and pretension, but this is Chekhov broad and loose, having fun caricaturing a host of boors, drunks, and phonies, each eagerly making utter spectacles of themselves.

Leading the incredibly active ensemble were Gharael-Tafti who seemed to be everywhere at once, looking every inch the East European disco lout he was meant to be; Sarah Sokolovic’s Anna Zmeyukhina, a comically drunken party girl, popping gum, flaunting herself to the audience, and begrudgingly belting out a “torch song” (Journey?) at the beseeching of Ivan, while demanding to be fanned; William DeMerritt as Dimba, a Greek whose Zorba-style antics undercut any sense of decorum; Lucas Dixon’s hilarious and Pythonesque turn as doddering Fyodor Revunov-Karaulov, supposedly a general paid to attend by oily Andrey Niunin (Brad Tuggle), but actually a retired chief petty officer given to shouting out sailor’s jargon from his days at sea, leaving everyone in the wedding party at sea until they demand, at first respectfully and then with increasing rudeness, that he change the subject or simply shut up.

In the wedding party proper, Brian Lewis was clean-cut and uptight as the groom with a tendency to robotic dancing and more interest in the receipts than in his bride.  The bride, played by Martyna Majok, both hid beneath the table and literally floated above it, held up by wires and the doting Ivan (I told you he was everywhere), and otherwise disported herself as a sullen woman on the verge of hysterics.  The actual hysterics were left to her mother, Nastasya Timofeyevna (Emily Reilly) who veered all over the place from steely hauteur, to whining and crying, to certain undisclosed activities under the table with her husband Yevdokin Zaharovich Zhigalov (Colin Mannex), a fairly upright guy, warmly bland.

Finally a word must be said for The Master of Ceremonies (Jack Tamburri), wearing darkened glasses in the style Chekhov (and John Lennon) wore, in vest and goatee, he seemed effectively positioned between the unctuous sybarites of Chekhov's time and the wily capitalists in a communist state at the end of the stagnant Brezhnev Era in which the Cab’s version was set, giving us a feel for the clash of cultures to come when the Wall comes down.

In the end I felt as one does at the end of a long night with aggressive partyers, glad to get out with a shred of dignity.  And if that's not Chekhovian realism I don't know what it is.

Anton Chekhov's The Wedding Reception; translated by Paul Schmidt; directed by Alex Mihail

Yale Cabaret, Oct. 21-23, 2010

Getting Through the Door

The Yale Cabaret keeps you guessing.  When you enter the downstairs space at 217 Park Street, you never know what to expect.  Last week was no exception, and the show I saw was sold out.  There’s nothing quite like experiencing odd theater with a full house.  It means reactions are everywhere, a situation the Cab thrives on. The feature was a series of one acts given the collective title Future Oprah Lovesong, but consisting of three plays written by Justin Taylor: “The Future, Gone Out of Business,” directed by Ethan Heard, featured a young boy and his doting dad, dismayed to learn that the portal to the future is closed because it’s “out of business”; “Oprah-Ganesh,” directed by Jack Tamburri, in which a young woman wants to pass through a different portal (this time a door decorated with a huge replica of a human vagina), only to discover that she first has to get in touch with her inner Oprah, or maybe her inner Ganesh (the Indian elephant-headed god) – masks/wigs provided – to do so; and “Lovesong,” directed by Heard, a two-person play in which the same lines are delivered in a variety of contexts – lovers in love, lovers fighting, mother and son, and, my favorite, woman and her dog.

The main fun of a night at the Cab – not knowing where it’s going – was entertainingly sustained by the production.  The first play seemed like it might be a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy/drama – especially with the child’s (Martha Jane Kaufman) tricycle, balloon, cap and gleeful expletives, and the father’s bond with his child, both amusing and touching.  But when the father (Will Cobbs) ends up dead for refusing to cease and desist in his insistence that the future be opened back up, and the child takes matters into his own hands, the play has suddenly veered into areas more unsettling.

And that’s where we stayed, with “Oprah-Ganesh.”  Though played for laughs, a play in which a burly Mask Technician (Ryan Hales) sports at his crotch a phallic squirt bottle that dispenses a milky fluid – which the Playwright (Hannah Rae Montgomery) is encouraged, by prompts to the audience, to drink – is bound to be a bit off-putting to some.  Or maybe not.  Certainly the need to get through the portal became more allegorical as we went – initiation into sex, birth canal, recognition of feminine power as Oprah herself might encourage?  Perhaps a vagina sculpture can be all things to all people.  Seeing Montgomery, a small white woman, imitate, in Ganesh mask and Oprah wig, Oprah’s gushy manner was certainly amusing, and the trio of uncredited participants, called upon to interact lasciviously with the pudendal portal, was also diverting.

In “Lovesong,” the portal remained, sans its distinctive decoration, and allowed one or the other of the duo (Miriam Hyman and Will Cobbs) to come and go, each time setting off a new riff on the interchange, involving words of apology, desire, forgiveness and love, that, come to think of it, are pretty much the standard tropes of any love song you’d care to name.  This inventive piece, with immense talent displayed by Hyman and Cobbs, got the biggest hand of the night.

As sometimes happens with theater that pushes in various directions at once, the star of the evening could be said to be the audience that gathered to help the Cab do its thing.

Next up, a re-invention of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception, transposed to an Eastern European disco of the 1980s.

Future Oprah Lovesong; written by Justin A. Taylor; directed by Ethan Heard and Jack Tamburri; October 14-15, 2010

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven.  203.432.1566. www.yalecabaret.org

Starting Thursday at 8 p.m.: The Wedding Reception; written by Anton Chekhov; translated by Paul Schmidt; directed by Alex Mihail; October 21-23.

Annihilation

By Piotr Szewc, trans. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough (Dalkey Archive Press, 1999)

In what is perhaps the best use of jacket copy I've ever seen, we learn from the back of the book that this novella is about a day in the life of a Polish town in 1934, a few years before it is completely destroyed during World War II. It's tempting to wonder if Szewc and his editor intended to use the jacket to divulge the single major plot point from the onset; maybe I just don't know enough about Polish history to catch the clues (very likely), or maybe something is lost in translation (very unlikely), but this sharp, beautiful book itself gives very, very little indication of the catastrophe to come. Certainly without the jacket copy, I would have missed it.

But the copy does divulge its single, overwhelming fact, and as a result, in Annihilation—which really is, no more and no less, a snapshot of a single day in the life of a town doomed to destruction, a single day in the lives of a handful of its inhabitants, who are not going to live much longer—every detail hums with urgency and, yes, meaning, carried along by some of the most exquisitely understated prose I've read in a while. The book is almost unutterably sad, because it doesn't succumb to the pretense that by documenting these characters, they've somehow been saved; that's a copout. It's the other way around: For all the calmness that the narrator describes, the narrator himself is frantic, running from street to street, from person to person. Look at this house, he says. Meet him. Meet her. Because they aren't going to be here when you come back.

Yet somehow, in all that frenzy and sadness, as the details mount and the day progresses and draws to an end, the mourning starts to feel like celebration, and at the same time, defiance. When I finished it, I didn't want to crawl into a grave, or ruminate on how lousy people are; I wanted to hug my wife and kid, to call my parents and my sister, to visit my friends. To walk around my neighborhood and fly around the world, to meet as many people as I could. Because if you believe that everything is temporary, this book opens your eyes again to how important it is, as Marvin Gaye once said, to love before it's too late.

Spymasters

One of the real pleasures in perusing writers’ meditations on the books they read is the occasional flash of real insight they offer because they have not hemmed themselves in by the standard views agreed upon by, say, literary scholars of a genre or literary tradition.  That at least was my experience reading P.D. James’ recent collection of essays on the mystery, Talking about Detective Fiction. What caught my eye were not so much her thoughts on Edgar Allan Poe or her fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle or even her views of Dame Agatha, but her almost off-the-cuff inclusion of John le Carre. Most know Le Carre as the most revered of spy novelists.  James suggests that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the first novel to feature spymaster George Smiley as a main character, is actually a mystery—an idea that got my attention, especially since the novel had been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years. In fact, it was one of several Le Carre novels in my possession that for years I had been meaning to get to but never set aside the time to actually read.  Now I was intrigued.

Although Le Carre’s earliest breakout novel was The Spy Who Came in the From the Cold, it is Tinker, Tailor that lets the curious peer at the clockwork of a British spy agency (referred to throughout as “the Circus”).  I let no cats out of bags by pointing out how this 400-pager has, at its center, the story of ferreting out a mole who has corrupted nearly every one of the Circus’ covert operations.  Like most locked-room mysteries, there are five suspects and Smiley, as Le Carre’s Hercule Poirot, has set himself to the task of uncovering the mole’s identity.

It all works as far as the tropes in spy novels and detective fiction go.  But there is something more to LeCarre—something with which his readers are already familiar and for me was a bit of a shock to discover, albeit a pleasurable one.  In brief, the life of a spy is a shabby one.  Not morally shabby…well, that, too, of course…but materially shabby.

Through Tinker, Tailor—and you see this repeated in Le Carre’s Looking Glass War—there are interminable complaints about lack of funds for necessary resources.  The spymasters are always looking over their shoulders to make sure that there is enough data to show their superiors, enough action to be had to justify next year’s budget.  Even as the mystery reader in me consumed pages in Tinker, Tailor to see who that damned mole was selling British assets (human ones, that is) up the river, the culture critic noted how the success of the mole and the support unknowingly granted by others in his artful mendacities were all the direct result to keep budgets intact by supplying higher ups with a steady flow of information (or “intel,” as today’s wonks call it).

There’s no getting around how much the novel’s actors are driven by the filthy lucre.  There are drafty rooms, unpainted walls, old file cabinets, dirty teacups, and never, never enough coal for the fireplace.  The offices of the Circus are not even close to the squeaky clean hallways and super-secure labs of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible’s or the more mundane, but still nicely situated glass-walled offices of the Bourne Ultimatum.  For the staff of the Circus, piles of paper, undusted shelves, and peeling paint reflect the daily drudgery of the spy trade, which involves mostly a lot of bureaucratic wrangling for the spymasters and twiddle-your-thumbs waiting for the agents.

Still LeCarre manages to make it all work because of these quotidian realities.  To be blunt, it’s almost impossible nowadays—for me at least—to watch any of the spy shows and their now-ridiculous comic spoofs, from the newest James Bond flicks to Spy Kids, and not in the end be bored by the unreal and usually ridiculous exploits (Transporter 2 comes to mind, having done laundry through it a few days ago).

It’s rare to find books and movies clearly enmeshed in a genre (in this case, “spy thriller”) that are brave enough to deflate our culturally projected fantasies.  I like the Bourne movies (they’re actually better than the books) because they try, albeit feebly, to “humanize” Jason Bourne.  But they are still kung fu fighting fantasies, ones where we admire the Jackie Chan-like ingenuities of battle from the flung ashtrays to rolled-up magazines-turned-truncheons.

Perhaps the best cinematic equivalent to what Le Carre did to the spy novel—an essential defrocking of the genre—is Steven Spielberg’s Munich.  Here is a movie about spywork where everything that can go wrong does, without the film devolving into comedy.  In Tinker, Tailor, the same can be said for the participants of the Circus, who show themselves to be preening careerists with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.  By the novel’s finish, you can’t help but feel that the true “spymasters” are not the agency’s directors—in Tinker, Tailor the former agency director brought down by the mole is ironically named “Control”—but the accountants who keep the books and have the power to dry up the resources that make possible the spy fantasies that we indulge in the act of reading books of this ilk.

It's Got That Swing

Ella Fitzgerald was known as “the First Lady of Song” for a reason.  Her way with a lyric was impeccable, her delivery making the listener discover nuances in even the most well-known standard (her versions of the Cole Porter songbook are for me the best of both worlds: Ella at her best and Porter rendered superlatively).  And her improvisational ability – her famed scatting – was likewise incomparable. One of the interesting moments in the show Ella the Musical, currently playing at the Long Wharf, is when she hits upon scat as a way to counteract the charge that her precise diction makes her sound “too white.”  Indeed, the best aspects of the show are such moments that recreated the feel of a performer’s life, trying to cope with what “the audience wants.”

In the first half of the show Ella (Tina Fabrique) is rehearsing with her band and speaks to us, the audience, as though we’re her confidantes as she, a very private person, tries to wrestle with her manager’s idea that she provide some revealing “patter” as part of her performance.  In the second half we’re treated to a ficitonalized dramatization of a show Ella played in Nice shortly after the death of her half-sister whose child Ella had raised, though with much absenteeism, as her own.

There was some dramatic tension in going from “insiders” at the backstage session to a generalized audience treated to the professional stage Ella.  What didn’t work, for me, was the dualism of the vulnerable and forthright Ella of the first half and the more vapidly entertaining Ella of the second half.  And when she had to breakdown and cry on stage it felt to me like a betrayal of the controlled and personally self-effacing Ella we got to know in the first half.  In other words, the breakdown seemed like “show biz” though ostensibly it wasn’t meant to be.

But that’s just me quibbling about the script.  And the script is incidental to what makes this a great show to go to.  It’s the music – provided by George Caldwell (piano), Rodney Harper (drums), Ron Haynes (trumpet), Cliff Kellam (bass) and the full-throated vocals, with feeling, style and, yes, swing delivered by Fabrique.  When Ella teases early on with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and doesn’t do it (“haven’t I done that enough”), I didn’t mind – as with most signature songs I found myself wondering why that was the tune synonymous with her name.  For me, the show-stopper was “The Man That I Love,” but then I'm a jazz ballad aficionado.  And don’t worry: Fabrique as Ella on stage does the great lady's most famous song with all the exuberance you’d expect.

And about that band: not only did they provide great support, turning the Mainstage into a hot jazz club, but they also interacted very effectively with Ella’s story, as for instance, Harper playing Ella’s first manager and band leader, Chick Webb, or Kellam as Ella’s supportive husband, or Haynes’ Satchmo imitation for a sparkling Ella / Armstrong duet in the second half.

“It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing” Ella sings at the beginning of the show, and, musically, this show means all it needs to.  If the drama didn’t always swing it, it at least let us in on the trials faced by even a consummate professional like Ella, for whom hitting the right musical note was never an issue, but the right note as a public personality might be a bit more hit or miss.

Ella the Musical; book by Jeffrey Hatcher; conceived by Rob Ruggiero and Dyke Garrison; directed by Rob Ruggiero; music direction by George Caldwell; music supervision and arrangements by Danny Holgate

Long Wharf Theatre, Sept. 22-Oct. 17

for my review of Crumbs, the current Yale Cabaret show, go to: http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/culture-vulture/crumbs-and-clues

Something Fishy

Vaska Vaska, Glöm, the third show of the Yale Cabaret’s season was written by an acting student, Stéphanie Hayes, and directed by second year directing student Lileana Blain-Cruz.  Blain-Cruz directed last year’s Cab show Salome, based on the Oscar Wilde play, and I’m beginning to wonder if she has a thing about fish. In Salome, Seamus Mulcahy swallowed a live goldfish at each performance.  In Vaska, Adina Verson, as Fiska, a girl who lives in a barrel of water, chows down on a whole fish each performance, a fish seemingly raw but actually smoked.  The moment is a bit unsettling: young Fiska strains upward from her barrel, blackened teeth dismembering the meal proffered by her two guardians, Hedda (Mulcahy again, playing a woman this time) and Ulli (Sarah Sokolovic).

The two women live in some remote Scandinavian area, apparently, where they lead a simple peasant existence, washing sheets and engaging in vaguely Beckettian rituals (one involved Ulli watching a video tape of a young woman enjoying a lake, which seems to quiet Ulli’s primal angst).  Hedda clues us in on their lives by commencing a story in which a pregnant woman shows up at their door (which looks like a door on a ship or sub), demands they act as midwives and, after delivery, requests that Hedda and Ulli destroy the child as the woman goes on her way.  The two elders can’t do it, instead they name the child Fiska and put her in a barrel of water where she thrives, except for those unfortunate teeth.

The charmingly odd duo make for doting if simple-minded parents and Fiska is a rather uncanny child, so there’s a likeable and quite watchable rapport on display for this segment of the play (feeding time notwithstanding), until the guardians decide it’s time Fiska found a mate.  And who should appear at the door but Horace, “the only guy in town,” a one-legged fisherman who woos Fiska twice.  The first time he’s got to go away again before he can claim his prize, and by the second time Fiska is starting to fade and can barely remember what happened moments ago.  Nothing deterred, Horace (Fisher Neal) overcomes her misgivings and carries the day.  This segment provides the most drama because the interchanges between Horace and Fiska were appealingly forthright and because, in a tale this strange, a love story gives us familiar rooting interest.

We then return to the rituals of Hedda and Ulli we began with, only now with the difference that we understand their sadness was motivated by the loss of their little fish-gobbling, aquatic charge.  Enter pregnant woman Number Two whom Ulli identifies as the woman from the video tape.  Unfortunately, her child is stillborn and so she takes Fiska’s place in the barrel.  It’s about this point that I found myself thinking of William Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” with its repetition and concluding line “and all is done as I have told” – I fully expected the play to end with the repetition with a difference, but not so.

Instead Minna (Hannah Rae Montgomery) launces into what seems a trance-delivered rant, bringing to mind Lucky’s monologue in Godot, which is to say the speech has plenty of non-sequiturs and bits that run on to no appreciable purpose.  Hedda and Ulli sit spellbound until the verbal torrent stops (it seemed about ten minutes) then in unison depart, only to appear on the TV where they enter the lake.

I think I was with it until Minna’s babble began, at which point we’d been in this somewhat grotesque environment for a quite a while and I had a sense of the play groping for an ending.  Further, Mulcahy and Sokolovic were fascinating to watch the first time through but rather less when we came back around to where we started.  And yet, I couldn’t help feeling that we needed to turn the big wheel to get to where we had to go.

If Blain-Cruz’s Salome and Vaska have taught me anything, it’s that this director is not going to let you out the door until you feel somewhat uncomfortable, possibly bored, and almost certainly surprised by something you see, often involving fish.

Vaska Vaska, Glöm; written by Stéphanie Hayes; directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Yale Cabaret, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2010

Home Sweet Gloom

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) celebrates social dysfunction.  Whatever one’s opinion of the oddball Blackwoods – Constance, in her twenties, Mary Katherine (Merrikat), eighteen, and old, wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian – one can’t help feeling that their seclusion from the townsfolk of Bennington, VT, is merited, that something sets the Blackwoods apart from the hoi polloi, and that “something” makes the Blackwoods worth knowing about. The “something,” as so often happens in Gothic fiction, is a dark past, but in this case, it’s not a secret, but rather something everyone knows: Mrs. Blackwood and Mr. Blackwood, the latter the brother of Julian, and Julian’s wife, and Tom, the girls’ younger brother, all died of arsenic consumption six years ago.  The poison, which Constance bought to kill rats, made its way into the sugar, you see, sugar which was used as topping for early raspberries served by Constance at a particularly fateful dinner.  Constance, who never eats sugar, was spared, as was Merrikat, sent to her room without any dinner.  Julian, who sweetened his dessert sparingly, was left an invalid.  Constance, of course, was acquitted of murder, but condemned for the deaths by the townspeople.

Adam Bock and Todd Almond’s musical of the novel, directed by Anne Kauffman, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre, opens with Merrikat, played with a sly and wiry girlishness by Alexandra Socha, stepping to the footlights to regale us in song about “We Blackwoods.”  The upshot of Merrikat’s every pronouncement is that insular families, whatever their oddities, are preferable to intrusive neighbors, who should simply butt out.  Certainly that’s the point of Jackson’s novel, where some personally important aspect of the inner life must resist attack by the forces of uninspired and uninspiring conformity, tiresome normality, and aggressive mediocrity.

In the musical, those qualities take the form of a stock cast of locals who like to amuse themselves with catty remarks and provoking jokes at the Blackwoods’ expense.  But the real bearer of a threat comes from within the Blackwood clan itself.  Young cousin Charles (Sean Palmer, with a good voice and engaging dance moves), son of the other Blackwood brother, Arthur, shows up after the death of his destitute father to see what’s doing with the branch of the family that still has at least a large, crumbling property to their name, a name now primarily upheld by retiring, yet charming Constance (Jenn Gambatese), tireless cook and gardener and caretaker of Julian.  Constance, played with a light, maidenly obtuseness by Gambatese, seems content with her twilit spinsterhood, until Charles arrives and makes her think about herself and duets with him (the sprightly “She Didn’t Get Very Far”) and dancing (to a wry little ditty called “The Stomp”) and longing (the evocative “come to me” interlude).

If this were your typical musical, we’d be rooting for Charles to sweep Constance off her feet and rescue her from this premature mausoleum.  But this isn’t that musical, and we aren't.

In part it’s because Merrikat got there first: she sweeps us away with her confidential songs, her winning manner, her knowing certainty that Charles, ultimately, only wants to take away the sisters’ peace without giving anything of value in return.  By the time the townfolk stage an outright siege on the castle – echoing all those horror films where the villagers attack the stronghold of Frankenstein to destroy the monster they can’t understand – Merrikat, who had more or less challenged Charles to a duel, has proven her point.

The stage business in this play is captivating enough to make us want to stay in the castle with the Blackwoods – the American Gothic gloom of David Zinn’s set, Ilona Somogyi’s gorgeous costumes for the ghostly ancestors who mainly keep to the upper story, intoning their musical support of the surviving Blackwoods’ isolation, the at-times sharp, at-times senile comments by Uncle Julian (a usefully comical portrayal in Bill Buell’s show-stealing hands), the musical numbers, directed by Dan Lipton, that are revealing dialogues, and the arch musings of Socha’s irrepressible Merrikat.

The World Premiere of We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Book and Lyrics by Adam Bock; Music and Lyrics by Todd Almond; Based on the novel by Shirley Jackson; Directed by Anne Kauffman

September 17 to October 9, 2010, Yale Repertory Theatre, at the University Theatre, 222 York St.

Which Side Are You On?

For the second feature in the Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season, Artistic Director Andrew Kelsey, project initiator Louisa Proske, director Flordelino Lagundino, and producer Jennifer Newman offer a truly surprising and striking work, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), a vision of dystopia whose full horror sneaks up on you, a horror perfectly etched with inspired absurdist control. Churchill’s plays typically explore themes of social and political dysfunction, but unlike some of her work, Far Away does not reference any overtly topical themes.  Instead, Far Away maintains a grasp on the political realm by suggesting how “regularized” or “normative” the most appalling circumstances can become.  The totalitarian state functioning beyond the scenes we see portrayed can only be inferred, and that is what makes the play so lethal: the way references to the status quo always presuppose the logic – and an acceptance – of the situation, whatever it may be.  As we gradually get up to speed – in three scenes taking place over an indeterminate span of years – we find that the world of the play has either gone entirely mad, or is literally comprised of endless war efforts, not only international, but interspecies in scope.

The great strength of this play is how good the dialogue is.  In the first scene, a woman named Harper (Alexandra Henrikson) tries to command her niece Joan (Laura Gragtmans) to return to bed, only to uncover gradually that the niece has witnessed her uncle involved in an act of brutality, an act that Harper denies, then reinterprets for Joan’s benefit so that it seems a benign act, all for the best, though one that must be kept secret.  What we don’t know, for a fact, is whether or not this couple is trafficking in abducted children or is actually helping them escape while brutally punishing traitors, but in either case, the slow burn by which the step-by-step discussion takes place establishes a world where normality is a thin veneer over inhuman acts, whether desperate or depraved.

The second scene is a workplace, a hat-making shop.  But the oddities of the headgear being prepared by Joan (now young adult) and her senior co-worker Todd (Chris Henry) add an element of humor to what soon becomes another appalling situation.  In the midst of their amiable workplace flirtation are little dropped facts like watching televised trials late into the night, or arbitrary problems with the workers’ job security.  We learn that the hats are for parades, and shortly after we witness an example, as limping, zombie-like figures cross the stage, drably attired but for fantastical hats.  It was a stunning moment of theater, implying both a complete loss of human dignity as well as gesturing to what we might think of as totalitarian aesthetics, adding a touch of the circus on the way to the gallows (a tip of the hat to Costume Designer Ana Milosevic for the entertaining chapeaus atop figures from a gulag).

In the final scene, the world is at war, as we learn strictly from the dialogue between Harper and Todd, waiting in Harper’s bland living room for Joan to return, and debating which animals and other creatures have joined forces with which nations.  Churchill pushes the idea that “everything is political” to its logical, absurd conclusion: even the animal kingdom is political.

The revelation for me in this production was Henrikson’s performance – in the first scene she was young and maternal, a bit steely perhaps, but we are not sure at once who is the problem: her or her niece.  As the dialogue unfolds we remain uncertain: is Harper completely duplicitous, making up things to explain away Joan’s fears, or uncertainly initiating the girl into the harsh realities of their world?  And it is that uncertainty about Harper’s character that makes her so intriguing.  In the final scene, Henrikson conjures an older Harper, not bitter so much as run ragged by maintaining a grasp of the world that necessitates knowing, for instance, which side the deer are on.  As she berates Todd for his slips in the party line, her hectoring tone – despite the absurdly wild things she is saying – never slips into comic histrionics.  We see a woman who actually lives in the world she describes, thus making it vivid and real to us as well, and unforgettable.

Far Away has two more performances: tonight, Sat. 25th, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Far Away, written by Caryl Churchill; directed by Flordelino Lagundino

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven; 203.432.1566; www.yalecabaret.org

A Play of One's Own

Last Friday and Saturday nights The Wicked Wolf in New Haven hosted the inaugural Second Sex Play Fest ("second sex" as in the title of Simone de Beauvoir's famous classic, NOT the second "sex play fest").  Under the auspices of the New Haven Theater Company, the project was conceived to address the lack of significant parts for actresses in the dramatic literature. According to Producing Director Kaia Monroe, of Southern Connecticut State University, in the last three Broadway seasons thirty-two plays were produced; of the two hundred fifty-nine characters in those plays, only seventy-one were female.  The Second Sex Fest seeks to address the disparity by producing a new works festival in which all the characters in the all the plays are female, and by publishing an anthology of the winning works so that the parts can be made available to acting classes and theater groups hungry for female-based drama.

So, what were the five plays produced, out of the forty submitted, like?  Well, for starters, it was a bit odd, perhaps, that all the chosen plays were written by men.  I say "perhaps" because, while I don't believe characters of a certain gender can only be convincingly written by authors of that gender, it may seem a bit one-sided to give only male playwrights the limelight.  Be that as it may, one must accept the judgment of the choosing committee that these were the best of the bunch.

As roles for women, the plays seemed mainly to offer caricatures: Erik Christian Hanson's Jean Awareness gave us two women who had been busted for protesting the Oscars on behalf of Jean Arthur, an Oscar-less actress famous for screwball comedies and regular gal roles; the actresses, Kerry Tattar and Bethany Fitzgerald, were quite engaging in parts that called for broadly conceived coarseness to bring out comically the women's emotional engagement with their heroine; D. Richard Tucker's A Very Lovely Dress, the only play that wasn't a comedy, in which a very maternal tailor (Elizabeth Reynolds) converses with a young girl (Susannah Resnick) selected to represent her people at a public ceremony -- the drama of the piece centered on the anxiety of a woman having to present herself as emblematic at such occasions; Jack Rushen's Jane in Hell in which Amanda Ratti played the appealing and promiscuous Jane who, in hell, has to periodically enact disco moves (because she said she hated disco) and who welcomes a former male sex partner Ira (Adrienne Brown) who has been condemned to endure eternity as a female while spied upon by his Jewish mother (Judy Lenzi-Magoveny) no less; John C. Davenport's Tough Love in which two manly biker girls, Tanya (Kaia Monroe) and Patty (Hallie Martinson) assert their heteroness the way manly male bikers might and Tanya shocks herself and Patty by deciding to become a wife; and Michael Ragozzino's Everything You Own in a Box to the Right, a political satire in which a Republican candidate Martha Margaret (Margaret Mann) finds herself catapulted into the big time where ambition dictates she align herself with the ultra-right wing aspects of the party as comically enacted by a trio of ideologues (Kelly Boucher, Patricia McCarthy, Barbara Hensel) sent to counsel her, over the protests of her more moderate assistant (Sandra Rodriguez).

For the most part the plays moved briskly, as dialogue-driven situations that could be quickly grasped.  Rather than full-scale productions, these were more like workshop presentations, script-in-hand.  Most of the appeal came from exchanges in which the actresses could bounce off one another verbally -- as for instance the great comic timing in Tough Love -- or from moments of physical comedy, as for instance Adrienne Brown having to disco while enacting a man in a tearful woman's body, or the priceless moment when Kelly Boucher, as a faux Southerner, coached Margaret Mann and Sandra Rodriguez in how to grab their balls.

Everything You Own, directed by T. Paul Lowry (who kept the comedy crackling in NHTC's production of the all-male play Glengarry Glen Ross last spring), was the most ambitious play presented.  Its portrayal of political machinations voiced and enacted entirely by women was a telling choice in the age of Hillary and Sarah, but the script could have used some trimming as it rambled a bit and the transformation of Martha into a spit-perfect mouther of Tea Party truisms, while sustained by an undercurrent of anger, only offered skewering of the GOP with no real surprises -- unlike, for instance, Jane in Hell 's introduction of a stereotypical Jewish mother into hell, which included her shock at Jesus' "I told you so" smile when she faced his judgment.

All in all, the offerings demonstrated a few points: male characters aren't necessay for successful plays, and plays with all female characters needn't be Soaps full of Oprahesque uplift.  If the plays still fell short of giving us complex female characters, well, there's always next year.

So we beat on . . .

muse, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2010 season, is an original dance-theater piece, a two-character drama that presents the story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the point of view of the afterlife. Brenna Palughi conceived the idea, scripted it in collaboration with her production team, Danny Binstock, Walter Chon, and Adina Verson, directs and choreographed the show, and stars as Zelda.  She finds in the story of these literary icons the kind of vivid fascination that, these days, attaches to the likes of Brangelina.  Scott and Zelda lived lives that were not only passionate and artistic, but were also emblems of their era, the Roaring Twenties, forever associated with them, both because of Scott's works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925), and the couple's lifestyle.

To present the reality of the couple, Palughi's script uses only the duo's actual words -- mainly from their considerably articulate correspondence.  But rather than try to recreate the events of the couple's life, Palughi cannily creates a retrospective fantasy, a kind of Satrean "no exit" space where the couple have to face eternity by trying to make sense of what they were to each other and why it went so wrong.

One of the most unforgettable moments, as a glimpse into the abyss the public couple tried to skirt, derives from a transcript of a session at the Fitzgeralds' home with a  psychologist (voice of Joby Earle) in attendance to act as arbitrator.  Zelda, who had wanted to be a dancer, published a novel, thus treading on her husband's territory.  Worse, she was now working on a novel based on events Scott was trying for years to draft as material for what would eventually become Tender is the Night (1934).  To hear Scott baldly declare the conditions under which his wife must live, in order to continue being his wife, is rather appalling to anyone who expects something closer to mutuality in marriage.  On the other hand, the position Scott speaks from is not really one of bullying strength, no matter how his words sound.  He is in need of Zelda, hence the title of the piece: muse.  Without Zelda's participation in his life, Scott seems to fear a loss of his bearings, but at the same time, any act she might take in her own interest would be considered a complete betrayal.

As Scott, Binstock enacts vividly Scott's nature via dance and dialogue.  He displays graceful self-control in a lengthy dance piece with Palughi that narrates the couple's entire story with considerable economy and aplomb, but we see the pressures he faces take actual physical toll on his movements.  And in his spoken protests and pleas Binstock shows us a Scott verging on a loss of control that, if it were to occur, might have been a saving grace.  Instead, we always feel Scott's grasp of himself, so thoroughly buttoned up in his lovely suits, no less tenacious for being tentative and vulnerable.  Only when he dances do we see some of the "light fantastic" that makes the prose so golden, so self-assured.

In a segment where word and movement are particularly well matched and powerful, Zelda kneels on the stage reading a letter from Scott comprised of nothing but hurtful, insistent, resentful, relentless questions while behind her Scott performs a marionette's series of jerks, slaps, and contortions.  Here we see the perfect visual realization of something almost inhumanly mechanical -- the way his concept of himself as a writer controlled Scott just as fiercely as his need to control Zelda.

As Zelda, Palughi's dancing is able to express an openness and abandon that seems, from all accounts, to have been part of Zelda's fascination.  But it's also fascinating to hear how lucid she could be, even when threatened with an asylum.  Palughi's voice at times gets strident but never veers into the kind of hysteria we might expect.  Her Zelda is verbally in control, even if her expression at times becomes a doll-like fixity, the mournful gaze of a spirit trapped forever in her husband's vision of her.

For all the tensions and darkness of this marriage, Palughi's sense of the material highlights its romantic potential.  Elizabeth Groth's costumes are lovely; her set is a world literally papered with words; the music -- Gershwin for instance -- breathes with rapture and jaunty melancholy; Sarah Lasley's newsreel-like projections add the necessary touch of the mediated reality that encroached on these lives, making them famous and a part of our nation's permanent record.

In the afterlife, "hell is other people," but if the people were truly a couple -- overriding even "til death do us part" -- it may be possible to see that the feeling "to be young then was very heaven" might also override all-too-human failings with the heady thrill of being "beautiful and damned" for all time.

muse;  conceived and directed by Brenna Palughi

July 29-August 14, 8 p.m.; August 7, 2 p.m.

Yale Summer Cabaret: 203.432.1567; SummerCabaret.org

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

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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.