McGrath's American Hero

Campbell McGrath, Shannon. Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009. $23.99 This long poem’s opening, spoken in the confiding, companionable first-person voice of a young man eager to stand out on Lewis & Clark’s team in the summer of 1804, rolls through unsettled American land near the Missouri river. Determined to prove himself, this youngest member of the Corps of Discovery rides out, without much food or ammunition, after runaway horses. He finds the horses the first day. Two weeks pass before the Corps finds him, starving, with buffalo all around him (no bullets left). The subsequent sections of the poem mark the days of the young man’s solitary trial.

The historical George Shannon—c. 1785-1836, eventually a Missouri judge known as “Peg-Leg” after an Indian ambush nearly killed him—left no journal or memoir, so the poem’s language is entirely McGrath’s. His Shannon is alert to every sight, sound, smell. He’s working. And wise, right away, to more than the surface: “the fugitives appeared/Not unhappy at sight of me.” He’s curious, excited, humorous, ambitious, self-conscious—all in the first moments of his first day alone.

For Shannon McGrath has found language that opens the mind of this emblematic New (white, Christian, colonizing) American without intruding on the reader’s experience of him. There’s Action: killing one rabbit with hard wood in place of a bullet. Suspense: in the quest for food; more, in the struggle to register every lesson in the landscape. And fantasy sex, reluctant theology, geopolitical prophecy, ant visions, buffalo dreams. It’s a film you want to watch again and again.

Actual journal entries by William Clark record Shannon’s departure before he begins to speak and his rescue after he stops on the fifteenth day. The lines of irregular length feel transparent, at the far end of the poetic scale from the charged, boisterous lines of the work McGrath is best known for. In Shannon it’s the line-breaks that make music:

Small herds Of elk coming out from the arroyo To silver water & shadows Of clouds over the same hills & wind Amongst the grasses grown Ceaseless now.

Shannon enjoys time to think. At first a conqueror, naming the place around him “Shannontown,” he begins to question

. . . our grand purpose Here, that being to keep moving To forge if even blindly Onward.

All the political fury and rhetorical dazzle McGrath packed into “The Bob Hope Poem” in Spring Comes to Chicago (1996); all the fire of his quest for America in road-trip poems from his first book, Capitalism (1990), through his prose-poem book, Road Atlas (1999), to his lumpy, fascinating journal book, Seven Notebooks (2008), take new form in Shannon (2009), his eighth book. All to ask: How do we (Americans) serve—let alone deserve—this glorious land we have lucked into?

Shannon’s hunger for food NOW becomes his ambition for the future; his awareness that he’s lost in the land becomes the new nation’s uncertain development. McGrath enlarges upon Shannon’s ambitions in this major work that has been under-noticed because Shannon doesn’t sound like “McGrath,” and because readers balked at the subtleties of Seven Notebooks. Concluding his Afterword, McGrath links our hopes to his hero’s: “George Shannon often got lost, but he always got found. May the same hold true for those who continue to follow in his footsteps, the majestic land he wandered, and the nation he was proud to call home.”

It's Not Easy Being Blue

The most recent Yale Cabaret offering was inspired by the art theory of Wassily Kandinsky, the modernist painter and Bauhaus instructor who earlier was a founder of the avant-garde group The Blue Rider.  If you’re wondering how art theory can supply the basis for drama, you have to imagine a series of dialogues between blue and yellow. For Kandinsky, these two primary colors represent the first principles of color in painting—yellow, terrestial warmth; blue, celestial coolness.  In Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm, a dramaturgy student at YSD, and directed by Elliot B. Quick, the Cab’s Associate Artistic Director this semester, Blue and Yellow become, respectively, an artist (Jack Moran) and his model (Jillian Taylor).  “Art can only begin at the point where love and compassion end,” Kandinsky wrote, and with that statement as the tagline for the play, you can intuit that whatever the desires of the individuals might be, the pursuit of art is going to overwhelm any attempt at intimacy.

In the play, Yellow represents the aggressive nature of human interaction, always trying to make something happen between people, and Blue represents the withdrawal from interaction, the attempt to remain solitary and unprovoked.   If that sounds incredibly abstract, that’s appropriate to Kandinsky’s view of art, but in practice it produced several amusing vignettes in which the artist figure became a French monk, a Russian explorer, and an American Man in the Moon.  In each case Yellow became the figure for human interest, the busy destroyer of solitude, arriving to insist on a relation to other people.

Back at the painting studio, the artist has to explain to his mother why he dropped out of art school, and overcome his model’s aggressive suggestion that he represent her entire body, not just her hands.  Both actors expressed the qualities of their respective colors, with Moran moody and detached, Taylor bright with bonhomie.  The set (Kristen Robinson, designer) and lighting (Yi Zhao, designer) added dimension by providing painted blue shadows to objects—a chair, an easel, a bookshelf—bathed in yellow light.  And there were slide projections (Hannah Wasileski, designer) that seemed derived from a personality test in which the viewer was asked to describe the relation between a yellow triangle and a blue circle.  The fact that the circle seemed at times like an ovum subjected to the triangle’s efforts to penetrate only added to the old notion that the artist is “feminine,” and the imagination a world unto itself.  And yet, the play suggested, looking at art, no matter how detached from the everyday worlds we inhabit, might still bring us together.

Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm; directed by Elliot B. Quick

The Yale Cabaret, February 10-12, 2011

Unfinished Business

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson has returned to The Yale Rep where it debuted in 1987.  The play is part of a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, that Wilson wrote to depict African American experience.  With that sense of epic reach in mind, one approaches The Piano Lesson a bit awestruck, ready to watch a master work through family history and racial history in telling ways, making his characters “representative” but also fully weighted with individuality.  The play, as written and as presented, stands upon venerable traditions of naturalistic theater, with a grasp of character dynamics that recall Chekhov and O’Neill, playwrights celebrated for their ability to make dramatic points arise out of what seem to be everyday conversations. But that may be a misleading claim, for the plot of The Piano Lesson hinges upon events unusual in themselves, beginning with Boy Willie’s bumptious visit to his sister Berniece, coming all the way from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in 1936 as a man with a mission.  But once he gets there, with his slow-spoken friend Lymon along, the first mission—to sell a truckload of watermelons—doesn’t seem too pressing, and the other mission—to convince Berniece to let him sell the family heirloom piano—becomes the occasion for all sorts of reminiscences, grandstanding, arguing, haranging, and hauntings.  And there the feel of how porous is the difference between the usual and the unusual, the natural and the unnatural, becomes more portentous, investing the Charles family heirloom with a fetishistic quality that partakes of different forms of magic, all tellingly presented in the play.

The house is haunted by the ghost of Sutter, grandson of the slave owner who sold off Boy Willie and Berniece’s great-grandmother and grandfather to buy the piano.  He has died recently, pushed down a well, and that means his land, which the Charles family worked as slaves, is now available for Boy Willie to purchase.  And that’s why he needs to sell the piano.  Though we never see the apparition, it appears to different members of the family, indicating to Berniece that her brother may have been responsible for Sutter’s death, but also seeming to indicate that, even beyond the grave, Sutter is concerned with what becomes of the piano, a piano that was stolen by Boy Charles, father of Boy Willie and Berniece, along with his two brothers, Wining Boy and Doaker, and brought to Pittsburgh.  Carved into the piano are images of the two who were sold as well as images of other notable moments in the Charles family history (all this history comes out in Scene II in a wonderful speech, delivered as collective memory,  by Uncle Doaker).

Giving an object such historical and familial meaning is significant enough, but Wilson goes further, letting us feel the appeal of music—the prison worksongs (another great moment is when Boy Willie, Lyman, Doaker, and Wining Boy all join together on the song “Berta Berta,” beating time on kitchen implements), the boogie-woogie tunes (Wining Boy is an aging former saloon singer and piano player), the hymns and ballads that the piano seems to incarnate.  Berniece’s most persistent suitor, Avery, is an elevator attendant who aspires to be a preacher and his attempt to exorcise Sutter by blessing the house brings into play the strong evangelical magic that speaks to these folks to varying degrees.  Then there is the magic attraction of the loose woman, Grace, that speaks to both Boy Willie and Lymon, to say nothing of the alleged magic of the silk suit and Florsheim shoes Wining Boy convinces Lyman to buy from him, "guaranteed" to get him a woman.

In other words, talismans abound, and cultural reference points, and songs, and fluent rhythms of speech, all coming together to form a vast expressive fabric.

The battle between brother and sister about how best to live up to what the burden of the past means is the heart of the piece, as everywhere there is unfinished business—between Willie Boy and Berniece (she blames him for her husband’s death), between the Charles family and the Sutter family—the slaves and the masters—and between the North and the South, the rural and the urban, as sites of African American identity.

The question of who carries the day and why is what we leave discussing.  If we’re meant to sympathize with Berniece and her intentions to retain the emblematic piano, the performance by Eisa Davis made that difficult.  Her Berniece sounded brittle and strident, only appearing warm and appealing in her touching quasi-courtship scene with Lyman (Charlie Hudson, III) where the latter’s easy-going nature brought her out of a settled irritability.  LeRoy McClain’s Boy Willie, while engaging, energetic and instantly likeable, appeared at times so wrong-headed and insistent we can’t completely sanction his claim nor entirely dismiss his intention to sell off the past to improve the present.

The siblings’ struggle was fleshed out entertainingly by Charles Weldon as Wining Boy, a pivotal figure every time he was on stage because his command of a repertoire of moves and voices made vivid a character of vast experience, and by Keith Randolph Smith’s Doaker, a stolid figure with an air of bedrock solidity.  We might feel at times a taint of cliché hanging about these characters: the plainspoken railroad man, the feckless entertainer, the prim widow, the naïve hayseed, the sexy city-woman, the knockabout with a plan, but that sense of the familiar only proved uninspired in one instance: as Avery, the upright worker turned preacher man, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson was neither comical nor wholly convincing, there being an earnest dullness in the character he couldn’t quite overcome.

At times, there were places where the play could move more quickly, but time seems to be part of the burden Wilson wants to present, and director Liesl Tommy gives us a play we have to settle into and learn how to live with, providing just enough jolts to keep us off-guard, but also giving us a lesson in naturalistic action and ensemble work.  The piano may be all too obvious as an emblem of slavery, song, and family, but the genius of the play is in making the past—like the uneasy revenant Sutter—a real presence.

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson; directed by Liesl Tommy

Original music by Eisa Davis; lyrics by August Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre, January 28 to February 19, 2011

Lebanon (Film Review)

Lebanon is an Israeli film that played in U.S. theaters for a few weeks last summer.  For those who missed its initial release, it just came out on DVD and is worth catching.  While not the absolute masterpiece that some of my fellow critics have claimed, it is a very good film that boasts the ability to milk unbearable suspense out of war film cliches. Set during the First Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli tank crew.  Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is the gunner and the new member of the crew.  Assi (Itay Tiran) is the ineffectual leader who fails to command the respect of his men.  Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) is the ammunition loader and the closest thing in the film to a live wire—his constant challenging of Assi’s authority quickly becomes a nuisance for everyone in the tank.  The final member of the crew is Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the quiet driver who tries to stay out of everyone’s way.

Accompanying a squad of paratroopers into enemy territory, the tank moves into an urban area where it’s hard to tell the difference between civilians and fighters.  Most of the film is seen through Shmulik’s scope as he scans the area for fighters.  But Shmulik is fresh from training where the only thing he was asked to shoot were barrels.  When he is faced with firing on a truck full of enemy fighters, he freezes, focusing on the panicked face of the driver which, through the scope, looks to be only inches away.  Despite repeated calls to shoot, he cannot do so and this action results in a firefight that finds not only the enemy dead but also one of the Israeli soldiers.  With no way to evacuate the body from the area, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), the major in charge of the operation, orders the body placed in the tank.  This is done as much as a punishment to Shmulik as it is for pragmatic reasons.  Inevitably, the next truck that comes along is not the enemy but still pays the price for Shmulik’s inability to fire on the first truck.

The story is one we’ve seen many times before.  It simply morphs from a film of “men on a mission” to one of “trapped behind enemy lines.”  But for the most part writer/director Samuel Maoz is not interested in plot.  He was a member of a tank crew in the First Lebanon War, and this experience informs every frame of the film as he focuses on the smallest of details.  From the myriad indignities of being stuffed inside a tank (the heat, dehydration, claustrophobia, choking fumes, and being forced to urinate in metal boxes) to the horrors of war (fear of the unknown, confusion of battle, grisly sight of mangled bodies), Maoz keeps the film uncomfortably intimate.  Taking cues from claustrophobic war film classics like Das Boot and Kanal, Lebanon isn’t a film you watch so much as smell and feel.  “Everyone knows war is hell,” Maoz seems to be saying, “but did you know it smells like smoke, blood, and shit?”

While it may be obvious, this intentional demythologizing of warfare is the only overarching message that Maoz seems intent on exploring.  He avoids any political statement about the situation in the Middle East that led to the war and, aside from one extremely heavy-handed shot (the only point that Maoz loses firm control of the tone), there is no reference to the numerous problems the region has seen since the war.  All that matters in the film is that war is a dehumanizing, horrible experience that no one should find entertaining.  This is reinforced by the constant use of seeing the war through Shmulik’s scope.  This perspective gives much of the film the same look as a first person shooter video game.  But unlike a video game, much of what is shown is horrific or mundane, never exciting or fun.

If this doesn’t exactly sound entertaining, that’s because it isn’t.  It’s a film that I find myself reluctantly recommending.  Despite the familiar genre tropes on display, it manages to carve out its own identity through Maoz’s stellar direction and solid work by the cast.  It’s effective at what it wants to do, but that’s also where it becomes difficult to watch.  It’s a film that deserves to be seen, just don’t expect a popcorn flick.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

The Eyes Have It

Bernard Berenson, the famous art connoisseur, made his name and reputation through a seemingly unfailing fidelity to his own cognizance of what constitutes the characteristic style of a master; his attributions made the fortune of the dealers and collectors who sold and owned the works he authenticated, or, likewise, could undermine a buyer or seller who tried to pass off as a masterpiece what was in fact an apprentice work. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters, now playing at the Long Wharf Theater, is set at a time when Berenson’s (Sam Waterston) expertise is not commanding the prices it had formerly; not only that, his beloved Italy, where he and his wife reside, is now being run by “the Duck” (aka Il Duce), and, not only that, the big buyers in the art world are no longer men who aim to acquire taste as well as prestige–such as Mellon or Frick—but rather men whose fortunes are made by, for instance, a string of five and dime stores.  In other words, the old verities are no longer quite so veracious, and perhaps even Berenson’s imprimatur can be had for the right price.

At least that’s what art dealer Joe Duveen (Brian Murray) hopes.  He wants to sell Mellon a Giorgione; unfortunately, Berenson insists the painting is an early Titian, a breakthrough in which the pupil comes close to the master, but not quite getting there.  The sparring between these two old masters, B.B. and Joe—as the latter tries to convince the former to concede that he might be mistaken—is the main dramatic substance of the play, the only scene where Gray’s mastery of his own medium is in evidence.  Early on, the proceedings are much slimmer, consisting of busywork aimed at dramatizing the ménage à trois of the Berenson home.  B.B.’s ailing but forceful and likeable wife Mary (Shirley Knight) suffers her husband’s amours with his private secretary, Nicky Mariano (Heidi Schreck), who must also suffer his amours with his Swedish masseuse, apparently, but all these references to B.B.’s erotic interests seem to be present primarily for the sake of running time and because Gray has obviously based much of this material on Mariano’s memoir.

The scenes between B.B. and the women add, arguably, a grasp of the great man’s character through knowledge of his domestic dealings, but Waterston’s truculence undermines any amorous interest.  And, though Schreck  is gamely graceful and Knight ruefully doting in their attitude to the man in their lives, Waterston’s irritable, blustering B.B. simply shines brightest with a male foil.  And that’s what Murray provides with delightful panache.  With a twinkle in his eye, a leonine head of hair, and an elegant moustache, his Duveen, ailing and driven, uses all his powers of persuasion, and the two men evince all the fascination of old counterparts perilously close to becoming enemies.

The sets are sumptuous, as befits a man of consummate taste, creating a sense of the style beyond means of the Villa I Tatti.  The pacing is too slow in the early going and the final scene seems a largely extraneous afterword.  In between, the best scenes are Waterston and Murray, then Waterston, Murray and Knight—her genuine affection for Joe as well as her sense of their need for his financial benefits add poignancy to the fact that the old friends cannot see eye to eye.

And it’s B.B.’s faith in his eye—not in art per se, nor in love, nor in loyalty—that is the driving force of the play because it’s what makes B. B. who he is, a factor of pride and authority that he can’t surrender without losing, no matter the financial gain.  But what the play ultimately dramatizes is how untenable are claims for art in an absolute sense.  What Gray wants to give us, it seems, is grounds for seeing the status of the art object, the very aspect that makes art Art, as inevitably up for grabs, nothing more than a gentleman’s agreement, quaintly doomed if gentlemen no longer call the shots with their accustomed integrity.

The Old Masters, by Simon Gray; directed by Michael Rudman

Long Wharf Theatre, January 19-February 13, 2011

The Ship of Death

Oh build your ship of death, your little arkand furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.--D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death"

How do they do it?  How does the Yale Cabaret take a story of utter desperation—the doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean in 1845—and make an entertaining evening of it?

Maybe it’s because director Devin Brain heads to the dark side the way most kids go to their favorite playground, and because the ensemble cast are clearly having so much fun in this dire tale of dwindling hopes.  And maybe it’s because the many tunes in the show, sea shanties like “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” and jigs like “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” are so irrepressibly infectious.

Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson, who is luminous as Franklin’s indefatigable wife back home, resolutely refusing to consider herself his widow, Erebus and Terror is credited to the cast, and that could be why the parts seem so perfect for each actor: Max Gordon Moore, clipped and distinguished as Officer Downing; Ben Horner, swarthy and bawdy as Ferry (his eager pursuit of Lady Death is a high-point, to say nothing of dining upon the deceased Downing); Andrew Kelsey as Oxford, a sympathetic bloke who gives an effective delivery of the seductive speech of Titania to “translated” Bottom in the crew’s impromptu enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Stéphanie Hayes, skittish and fearful as Paddy, a young Irish lad (her shrieks of joy from the crow’s nest have a “top of the world, ma” feel); Dipika Guha, wide-eyed and mesmerized as Fin, a mate going “off his tit,” and Irene Sofia Lucio, as Timmy, or Kid, the youngest and most comical of the swabbies.  Add Pierre Bourgeois’s songs, richly evocative of the world of these seamen, all bound—in a string of distinctive endings—for Davey Jones’ Locker, and you’ve got the main elements for a successfully gripping show, supported by Ken Goodwin’s watery sound effects, by Lighting Designer Alan C. Edwards’ dramatic variations of light and dark that, playing on Aaron P. Mastin’s authentic costumes, put me in mind of Rockwell Kent’s nautical drawings, and, through the exit door that was opened a few times as part of Julia C. Lee’s set, by mounds of snow provided by Nature, making the effort to imagine the frozen wastes surrounding the ship that much easier.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Erebus and Terror, Songs of Ghosts and Dreams Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson; Written and Created by the Ensemble January 13-15, 2011; Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. The Yale Cabaret

The End of the Line: Literary TV and Showtime's 'Brotherhood'

As popular wisdom would have it, the end of TV’s Golden Age of Drama may already be upon us.  But while its possible deathblow is up for debate (the end of Lost? The rise of Glee?), bloggers and critics of all stripes agree on its birth. It is no coincidence that the form-defining triumph of The Sopranos marked a retraction from the over-hyped New York that we sipped in a trendy coffee shop through the 90s, to offer in its wake a macabre kind of success story from across the bridge. Wall Street and high fashion gave way, for the most part, to McMansions and the hot-pink thongs of a Jersey strip club, while Manhattan became just a place to take your wife out to dinner or to hawk a movie script. HBO’s crown jewel ushered in an era of self-consciously literary television, capitalizing on the shifting, ambivalent viewer involvement that long-form narrative demands. David Simon of The Wire compares his magnum opus to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare; hip college professors are inclined to agree. “David Chase is Dostoevsky for television,” Blake Masters once said of The Sopranos’ creator. This was a high bar for Masters’ own show to live up to.  But though Brotherhood—a little-known Showtime series that fuses elements of mob drama with the best of urban dejection—ran for only three seasons from 2006-2008, it is an indispensable stop on the line from the metropolis to a smaller, post-industrial enclave just an Amtrak ride away.

Brotherhood takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, a city more like our own New Haven than perhaps any of the other TV-drama settings. Its neighborhood of focus is a fictional, but insistently particular, place called The Hill, a working-class Irish Catholic stronghold struggling with lay-offs, new immigrants and gentrification. In terms of literary comparison, the show conjures up nothing so epic as The Brothers Karamazov or King Lear: the larger-than-life gangsters of The Wire’s “Bodymore, Murdaland” are replaced by the day-to-day headaches of low-level ambition. In its unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be from somewhere, Brotherhood is more like Saul Bellow’s Chicago novels: to be from a place means to “stick to your guns”—to know it before and against signification.

Brotherhood’s creator is from New England, and it is evident in the way he treats both the show’s financially beleaguered city—which he likened in an interview to the world’s biggest high school—and his two main characters. Michael and Tommy Caffee are at the top of their game, on opposing teams: one is a local mob boss, and one is a rising star in state politics. They both do some bad things and wind up in good places, and they both do some good things that don’t lead to much. It’s a narrative constructed as all means, no end, and major events seem to happen at random. Even Michael’s return from years of exile to kick off the series is oddly humdrum—he simply shows up one night for Sunday dinner and pulls up a chair around his mother’s dining room table.

The characters in Brotherhood develop, but the plot refuses to arc: when mobster Michael kills an FBI agent in one of the show’s most brutal scenes, he does it because he’s pissed off. He is not the victim of grand social injustice that we are privy to while he is not, and we shake our heads in dismay rather than bristle with indignation. There’s no symmetrical interweaving of anti-heroes on either side of a blurred ethical or institutional line, like in The Wire’s finely wrought structure. This leads to a show that is grim but convincing, and which commands admiration for its refusal to mythologize the condition it brings to life.

It may be this hermetic quality that kept Brotherhood from catching on, in spite of its strong acting and a soundtrack that had me rewinding just to sit and soak it up (one episode closes with a suicide and the Martin Sexton lyrics, “I’m tired, scared and wide open…to the rest of my life”). And while Meadow Soprano lands at Columbia to begin her climb into Manhattan’s good graces, the Ivy League university of Providence is as far off the Caffee family radar as the tri-state glitz of Mad Men. We know this city’s problems link it with others like it, but we don’t quite know how. It is a testament to the nuance of Masters’ writing that the stakes we do experience keep us focused on what he shows us.

For better or worse, then, Brotherhood is a peephole into life as it is, not life as it aspires to be. It’s about a city whose troubles define it from inside, because the people there aren’t trying to get out. It’s neither galvanizing, nor glamorized, nor likely all that eye-opening to the viewers it would probably appeal to most. But the show does satisfy, showing that small places have big stories to tell.  And even if that’s the whole point, right there, getting that story right makes Brotherhood worth a look.

A native of Meriden newly transplanted to Boston, Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a doctoral candidate at Yale, working in Russian and Afrikaans fiction.

Palimpsest

By Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Books, 2009)

Through incredible energy and talent, Catherynne M. Valente has been steadily building a name for herself pretty much since the day she started publishing. Her two-book story cycle, The Orphan's Tales, was at one point perhaps her best-known work, nominated for several awards and winner of a few, too. That was until Palimpsest was nominated for a Hugo, while Amazon's editors deemed it the best science fiction and fantasy novel of 2009. All of this success, however, still doesn't quite prepare you for—and perhaps disarms you against—the fact that Palimpsest is kind of freaky.

As the gossip preceding its publication went—possibly lifting a phrase from the author herself—Palimpsest is about a sexually transmitted city; that is, you're only allowed to visit if you find someone who has already been there and have sex with them. When you fall asleep afterward, you go to the city in your dreams; and if you are so blessed—or so unlucky?—after you visit it once, the waking world seems much diminished, and you do everything you can to return. Aiding you is that everyone who has visited is marked with a tattoo—perhaps small, perhaps large—that is itself a piece of a map of, a part of, that dream place. So you spend your time moving away from the life you knew, looking for those other people, for those tattoos, to connect with them, just to stay, in your dreams, in Palimpsest, as long as you can. The plot of the book follows four people who arrive in Palimpsest at the same time, first relating what each of them are willing to do just to get back—and then what happens when they discover that they are connected in a deeper way than they first understood.

Those of you who aren't habitually science fiction or fantasy readers—and maybe some of you who are—may be turning away at this point. You should not. Because Palimpsest, to me, works best as an extended metaphor: for addiction, disease, and profound loss; for the ways disparate people build their own tribe based on a common need, a dissatisfaction that overrides their differences. It's a fantastical book about some very real things, and in its fantasy, comes perhaps closer to letting the reader touch the real than a more realistic portrayal of the same thing ever could.

Which is another way of saying that the best reason to read Palimpsest is because it's absolutely beautiful, heady, hopeful and sad. This isn't just because of Valente's muscular imagination, her seemingly inexhaustible ability to create image after arresting image; it's also because she writes as well as anyone out there. The idea that literary fiction has all the best writers is as false as it is shopworn—obviously, there are great (and lousy) writers in every genre of both fiction and nonfiction. But Valente is a particular feast for those who love language and literature. To me, her writing is folkloric, medieval, Romantic, and at the same time, startlingly modern. There aren't many people who can write sentences as eerie and gorgeous as hers. How gorgeous are they really? I can hear you asking. You'll just have to find the book and find out.

P.S. Here's the word palimpsest in Merriam-Webster:

1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.

Yes, I had to look it up. You're welcome.

Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play, Bossa Nova, now in its world premiere run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, addresses the notion of identity—particularly African-American cultural identity—as a theatrical experience, a matter of roles, costumes, lines, demeanor, comportment, and all the other aspects of theater that lend themselves as metaphors for social expectations.  The play gives us five distinctly mannered characters—four adults and one child—and a protagonist, Dee Paradis (twenty-seven, but seventeen in flashbacks), as the loose cannon, the figure who hasn’t quite accepted any manner as definitively her own. Dee’s mother, Lady Paradis, tries to help her daughter by training her.  As played by Ella Joyce, Lady is self-assured, definite, judgmental, a woman who, by her own admission, has scraped and clawed to escape the taint of her race, the aspects of being “colored” that she wouldn’t let mark her and determine her place.  She spends most of her scenes as an haute bourgeois matron at her dressing-table, putting on her face, choosing her wardrobe and accessories, and exhorting her daughter to find a face she can wear, to make the most of the privileges her parents have gained for her.

In flashbacks to Dee’s school days at a boarding school called St. Ursula’s, we hear of her outcast status among the daughters of the privileged.  The only people to befriend her are her equally misfit roommate Grace Mahoney (Libby Woodbridge) an Irish girl from Southey in Boston, eagerly attempting to discover her “talent,” so as to have a purpose, while sending school-girl crush vibes toward Dee, and Michael Cabot, a history teacher desperately trying to become hip by listening to jazz and by extolling black experience: naturally, he seduces Dee and that’s where the trouble really begins, not only because of the inevitable complications, but because Michael would place a costume on Dee supposedly authentic, as relics from tribal Africa, but as artificial to the girl as her mother’s painted face.

As Michael, Tommy Schrider gets all the comedy he can from the teacher’s gyrations as he rather anachronistically praises bebop jazz as “the future” (in the early Seventies!), and speaks a lingo that suggests Jack Kerouac is not only still alive (he died in 1969) but in his first flush of success.  Where’s this guy been, we wonder, and why the bossa nova (a “new trend” in the early Sixties)—when this should be the era of late Motown and Stevie Wonder?  In other words, either the time-frame of Dee’s school days are askew, partaking of the mid Sixties rather than the early Seventies in which they ostensibly occur, or Michael is a colossal throwback.  Either way, he’s the most fun character in the play.

The other fun thing is director Evan Yionoulis’ staging: very sparsely decorated, Ana M. Milosevic’s scenic design propels furniture and characters about the space for scene changes, and, with Laura J. Eckleman’s lighting design and Michael Vincent Skinner’s sound design, creates wonderfully integrated effects as we move through three different settings, two different periods, and a range of sounds, from old records to barking dogs to a busy paintbrush on canvas.

The other strengths of this production are its two main actresses: Ella Joyce wrings all the fait accompli dignity she can from Lady, with a weathered but musical voice that speaks its owner’s strong will, and, as the mercurial Dee, Francesca Choy-Kee has to act girlish for twenty-seven, and precocious for seventeen (its her essay that first gets Michael’s attention), straight-laced one minute and an Aretha-style “natural woman” the next, and, before the play’s over, call up an outcast’s heart-rending cries.  Hers is an intelligent, wary, and finally emotionally convincing performance in a play that could be, without her and her director’s grasp of the character, somewhat dubious.

Yale Repertory Theatre presents the world premiere of Bossa Nova by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Evan Yionoulis

November 26 to December 18, 2010

Monsters Among Us

Whether he intended to or not, writer/director Gareth Edwards has crafted a movie in Monsters that is all about defying expectations.  It’s an alien invasion film that avoids the usual pitfalls of the alien invasion genre.  There are no massive scenes of aliens or spaceships laying waste to everything in their path.  The aliens are barely glimpsed until the final ten minutes of the film.  There are no scenes where people of different races, religions, or socio-economic classes put aside their differences to fight back in a rousing display of violence inflicted upon the invaders.  All of these choices about how not to approach the genre are refreshing.  What’s even more of a nice change-of-pace comes from what the film is: a quiet character study. Much like last year’s District 9, Monsters takes place in an alternate universe where aliens landed on Earth several years ago.  Here, they landed in northern Mexico, which has become known as the infected zone.  The aliens are gigantic, tentacled beasts that basically keep to themselves, only coming into contact with people when they migrate and their paths bring them into small towns.  These encounters usually end with devastation as large portions of the towns are destroyed and many people are killed.  Some of this damage and loss of life is the fault of the aliens, and some of it is collateral damage caused by joint Mexican-U.S. military troops assigned to fight the aliens.

Into this chaos goes Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photographer working for a huge media conglomerate.  He’s busy photographing the aftermath of the latest battle in a Mexican village when he’s ordered by the owner of the media conglomerate to find and accompany his daughter, Sam (Whitney Able) back to her home in Los Angeles.  When their tickets and passports to take a ferry to the Baja peninsula are stolen, they are forced to take a guided trek through the infected zone to reach the United States.

While that setup sounds like a survival thriller waiting to happen, the film is actually a road movie about two quietly desperate people running away from their real lives.  Kaulder has a son that he didn’t know about until the child was few years old.  The mother allows him to see the boy, but doesn’t want Kaulder to tell him the truth for fear of confusing him.  He goes along with the lie, but as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that the situation is eating him alive.  As a result, he spends his life skulking about the wreckage that has become the areas along the border of the infected zone, avoiding the situation that awaits him at home.  Sam is engaged to be married but doesn’t want to go through with the wedding.  Why she was in Mexico is never made clear, but it’s intimated that she may have run away.

As they make their way through the infected zone, Kaulder and Sam bond with each other as they survive the occasional harrowing attack by the aliens.  As they get closer, they draw out details from each other that fill in some of the blanks of their back stories, but thankfully, are allowed to keep just as much hidden.

This is the first feature from Gareth Edwards.  Prior to the film, he was a visual effects artist, a point worth the raising only because most effects artists that make the leap to directing do so through their taking the reins for some special effects extravaganza.  Often these films are hollow spectacles, devoid of an interesting story or characters.  Monsters is the exact opposite.  While he pulls off some impressive shots of the aliens in the third act climax, Edwards largely avoids using his effects background as a crutch.  He instead concentrates on his two leads, letting the impressive, sympathetic performances by McNairy and Able carry the story.  The film thus is leisurely paced, allowing the camera to linger on the people and destruction that Kaulder and Sam encounter on their journey.  This lends an apocalyptic mood to the film that is more effective than any of the big-budget destruction on display in films like Independence Day or Cloverfield because it keeps the action on a more intimate level.  It’s hard to believe in an entire city being destroyed by aliens, but a few buildings in a small village?  Despite the elemental ridiculousness of the alien invasion genre, that destruction is believable and all the more horrific.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film.  There is some forced material about the current illegal immigration situation (the U.S. government has built a wall along the border to keep out the aliens) that feels out of place with its lack of subtlety.  But it is a very good film.  By focusing on a believable world in the wake of an unbelievable event, Edwards has crafted a film that is as personal as it is ambitious.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

On the Trail of a Myth

Greg Berger’s Underneath the Lintel, the final show of the Yale Cabaret’s Fall 2010 semester, was a tour de force performance by Max Gordon Moore, directed by Blake Segal, of a monologue by turns comically amateurish, donnishly fussy, nervously awkward, passionately determined, and profoundly shaken. Moore plays “The Librarian,” a nebbishy Dutchman who works in a library in Holland and seems relatively content with his methodical life and work: his blustering pride in his date stamper—“it contains every date that ever was or will be”—gives a good indication of his fetishistic involvement with his trade. Thus when he comes across a Baedeker returned 113 years overdue, his professional curiosity is piqued.  Before long, he’s taking trips to London, then to Germany—while projecting slides of his travels, both generic and historically specific—and eventually to China, all in pursuit of a phantom who travels relentlessly, cannot sit, has lived an extremely long time, and is apparently Jewish.

The Wandering Jew, of course!  The Librarian, as librarians will, fills us in on the background of this mythic figure—traced back to Christ’s pre-crucifixion schlepping of the cross through the streets of Jerusalem when he paused to rest on the shopfront of a tradesman.  Provoked by soldiers, the latter tells the Savior to shove off, only to be told that he will never rest “till I come again.”  Thus is born a figure who cannot even recline—much to the dismay of the woman somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century who wrote a love letter to the man known only as “A.” (for Ahasuerus, our pedantic sleuth presumes—the name traditionally associated with this legendary figure).

The fascination of the play—besides the non-stop monologue that creates a character fleshed out by his particular mannerisms and asides—derives from the leaps of imaginative and deductive insight that the Librarian undertakes and relays with the enthused conviction of a discoverer of a “believe it or not” fact, possibly even of a new faith, since, as he tells us dramatically, if the Wandering Jew exists, then God exists.

The play almost strays a bit too far into metaphysics to be simply good fun (which it undoubtedly is), but there is an undercurrent of serious thought compelling its Stoppardian interplay of the kinds of jokes fate plays: in following the Librarian’s monologue we come to questions about the nature and purpose of our time on earth and whether the satisfactions of any walk of life can calm the existential uncertainty of what life is for.

Moore, whose father, Todd Jefferson Moore, played The Librarian in the Seattle premiere in 2003, was, as ever, eminently watchable and vastly entertaining, attacking the role with astounding energy and verve.  Starring in an actor’s play, Moore showed the command of an actor’s actor, directed by Segal and produced by Danny Binstock, both actors in the Drama School.  Praise goes as well to Set Designer Meredith Ries whose set of boxes, file cabinets, chalkboard, slide projector, and other ephemera gave the Cab’s stage the kind of musty, underused air that one can only find in the dimmest reaches of Sterling’s stacks.

Underneath the Lintel, written by Glen Berger, directed by Blake Segal

Yale Cabaret, November 18-20, 2010

Social Ties

The Other Shore, Yale Cabaret’s most recent production, was written by Chinese Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, and presented a fascinating example of East meets West.  Gao, influenced by European dramatists associated with “theater of the absurd” (he translated Beckett, for instance), creates in this play a nowhere space that could be anywhere, but there are also elements, as presented under the direction of YSD’s Cheng-Han Wu, that seemed to have a strong folk element, as well as a sense of contemporary Cab improv. The production opened with the five cast members (Brian Chen, Walter B. Chon, Babak Gharaeti-Tafti, Marcus Henderson, Jillian Taylor) roaming about the space, speaking at times to each other, at times to members of the audience, crouching, searching, laughing, arguing.  From the start it seemed clear the five individuals were in fluid roles relative to one another, a telling representation of how social purposes often define who or what we are.

The play consists of quick vignettes, short snatches of stylized encounter that present a variety of possible social occasions and interactions, some very comical—such as a teacher’s instruction to infants about the parts of the body—others, such as a rape/murder and a sort of mock trial, playing on a certain threat of violence or of madness that ran as a strong undercurrent throughout the play.  Aaron P. Mastin’s costume design helped in that regard: the loose, somewhat generically “Asian” outfits made the cast resemble either adepts of a certain form of training or inmates in an asylum, or both.

In a play so quickly changing in tone and situation, one can only offer impressionistic comments: certainly a particularly strong scene was early in the play when the cast grabbed strands of a tangled rope which they eventually strung across the space—using audience members as supports—to resemble a giant spider web, a symbol of the kinds of connections the play investigates, but then treated the web as if an obstacle to bypass as each tried, moving through imaginary water, to reach “the other shore.”  At that point, one was watching under two possible views: either they all drowned and “the other shore” they reached was spiritual—in which case, the instructions about the body were a way of suggesting rebirth—or they actually reached a physical other shore where such lessons were a form of indoctrination (it was interesting how quickly the harmless naming of body parts evolved into constructions of self: “me: you” “us: them” and to statements aimed at self and other—“you hate me,” “I will kill you”).

And that’s pretty much how the evening went: we were always on a shifting ground, where group mind could, at one moment, sound like the voice of the law against an innocent man accused of a crime, at another, like a community ostracizing the one who thinks differently or has no need for the communal rituals.  In both cases Gharaeti-Tafti, as the one persecuted, and Henderson, as the one generally persecuting, stood out from the others, indeed Henderson, in his mercurial shifts, seemed to embody a sort of trickster figure, appearing at times as an old woman, as Gharaeti-Tafti’s mother, as killer, as judge and jury.

Special mention should be made of the contribution of Junghoon Pi, as composer, musician, sound designer: the slightest word or sound in the space was made to echo, certain moments were attended by very precise and arresting sounds, at other times—an on-your-feet-and-dance moment, for instance—he enveloped us in music that created specific aural contexts.

Ritual, in its many meanings—from chanting to courtship to fighting to all sorts of tasks—played through the entire piece, making a case each time about how our learned behaviors define us, unless, perhaps, we look at them from the other shore.

The Other Shore, written by Gao Xingjian; translated by Gilbert C. Fong; adapted and directed by Cheng-Han Wu

The Yale Cabaret, November 11-13, 2010

Next up at the Cab: the final production of the semester: Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel, a one-person play originally written for and first presented at the Yale Summer Cabaret in August 1999, with Glen Berger in the role of “the Librarian.”  This time, Max Moore will undertake the role, directed by Blake Segal. 203.432.1566. www.yalecabaret.org

Sudden Death

What if the job you perform daily caused someone else’s death?  A death someone chose, using your regular performance of your duty as the means to her deliberate end?  The relation of the killer to the killed in that equation is explored in renowned playwright Athol Fugard’s recent play, The Train Driver, now showing at the Long Wharf Theater Mainstage. The Train Driver is a two man play set in a makeshift graveyard in South Africa dedicated to those who die with no identities, with no one to claim their bodies after death.  The set by Eugene Lee is harsh, as are the spotlights simulating the glaring sun that shine in the audience’s faces during the daylight hours of the action.  Comprised of sandy soil, surrounded by barbed wire, the graveyard looks like a sight of devastation, boasting  discarded bits of automobiles and furniture that Simon, the caretaker/gravedigger, uses to differentiate one grave from another.  For shelter there is only a dilapidated shack open to the audience, its structure formed by a wall and a debris-strewn roof.

The set’s naturalism amplifies the story of the two men – Simon, the caretaker (Anthony Chisholm), and his distraught, maybe even somewhat deranged, visitor, Roelf (Harry Groener) – persons who inhabit a space that feels like the end of the line. As Simon, Chisholm gives us a brusk but thoughtful man used to being alone, working at his humble trade, but also used to being in control of the space he presides over.  No one cares about the people buried there so he has no need to interact much with his boss or any sort of public.  All he need be concerned about are wild dogs and Amaginsta, the roving gang members he avoids by never going out at night.  Simon tries at first to get at what it is Roelf wants – a white man visiting the grave of nameless blacks – then becomes a confidante, a confessor, and finally the one who gives Roelf the task that might help him move on, freed from his idée fixe.

For Roelf was a train driver, a man with a family, living a normal working life.  And then tragedy and heartbreak struck him – not personally but impersonally.  A woman wearing a red scarf (or doek), with a child on her back, deliberately stood in the path of the oncoming train in order to be killed instantly.  Her eyes and Roelf’s eyes locked for one horrible instant.  Since then Roelf has been tormented by her – his victim, his assailant – first he wants simply to curse her grave, but which one is it?  Unsure, he stays on, telling his story, serving a kind of penance, trying to “put right” what can never be made right.  Groner’s Roelf is high-strung, grasping at loose ends, not always making sense, but relentless in his pursuit, maybe for the first time in his life, of a conviction that comes from a sense of outrage and horror at humanity, himself included, and from a sense of communality with victims of the indifferent brutality of a merciless system.

Fugard has called this “the most important play I’ve written” because it is “in essence, a final statement for me” about his relation to South Africa and “the legacy of racial prejudice.”  Fugard sees himself in Roelf and, for the play to deliver its greatest force, so must the viewer.  The Train Driver, in its stark drama, asks us to feel for a moment as shattered as Roelf, as sympathetic as Simon, as at a loss to deal with the violence of the world except through words that find a voice for what no one ever says.

The Train Driver by Athol Fugard, directed by Gordon Edelstein.

Long Wharf Theatre, October 27-November 21

2010's Best Movie: Winter's Bone

As a film critic, there are certain occupational hazards you have to face.  Namely, that every time you sit down to watch a film, you risk the chance of wasting 90 to 150 minutes of precious time on a turkey.  But then you aren’t done with said turkey.  You then spend one to two hours writing a review about why the film was a turkey.  And then, if you’re like me, you spend another fifteen to twenty minutes rehashing all of your thoughts about the same turkey on a podcast.  For those of you keeping track, that’s up to five hours spent on one bad film.  That’s a big chunk of your life spent watching, thinking, and writing critically about a film that can probably be summed up by simply muttering: “What a piece of crap!” I suppose spending hours of my life that I will never get back on movies like Grown Ups, Jonah Hex, and the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is what makes me latch on to a movie like Winter’s Bone, and work overtime to get people to watch it.  This is the second time I’ve written about the film for a website, I’ve talked about it on two podcasts, and I’ve encouraged all my friends and family to watch it.  Why would I do this for a film that I have no personal investment in, either financially or emotionally?  The answer is simple enough: to this point, Winter’s Bone is the best film of the year.

I’m not alone in this view.  Winter’s Bone was universally hailed by critics, a difficult feat for a film to pull off.  It’s understandable why the film received such a gracious reception from the critical community and did surprisingly well at the box office.  It’s a dark film noir that manages to have a true emotional center in Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old girl charged with keeping what remains of her family together.  Equal parts detective story, character study, and slice-of-life observation, the film benefitted from a star-making performance by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree and a career-best turn by John Hawkes as her uncle, a frightening, meth-addicted man of violence.  That he is one of the few people that Ree is able to count on says a lot about the dark places to which the film is willing to venture.

But for me, the greatest strength of the film was the fact that it was shot on location in the Ozark Mountains.  Taking place in and around the small town of Forsyth, Missoui, director Debra Granik captured a stark reality about the overwhelming poverty that has adversely affected many of the rural areas of our country.  This was the element of the film that affected me the most.  It’s also the point where I need to come clean.

I grew up only seventy miles from where the film was shot.  Like the characters in the film, I lived in a very poor, rural area.  Thankfully, I didn’t grow up in poverty (and if I did, my parents did a great job of hiding that fact from me), so no one in my family was forced to resort to cooking meth to put food on the table.  I lived in southern Missouri for nearly the first 28 years of my life before I moved to Chicago.  Even as I put my rural upbringing in the rearview mirror, I didn’t recognize the fact that I was basically reinventing myself as an urban liberal and that I was no longer a dairy farmer’s kid from the middle of nowhere.

After eight years of living in Chicago, the Windy City came to feel like home.  Earlier this year, when I relocated to New Haven, I grew homesick for Chicago in a way that I never felt for southern Missouri.  This didn’t surprise me because, quite frankly, I never liked living in my native state.  What did surprise me was how many memories of my childhood had gone missing in my eight years away from Missouri.  What was even more surprising was the fact that many of those memories came flooding back to me as I sat in, of all places, a darkened theater in downtown New Haven.  I didn’t see that coming.

Maybe that’s part of the reason that Winter’s Bone hit me so hard—it nailed all the little details of what everyday life is like in that region of the country.  From the rundown houses hidden away on dirt roads to the large, round bales of hay on which children chase each other, I found myself nodding in appreciation at everything that Granik got right.  When I saw a detached garage with old license plates hanging on the doors, I had a brief moment of strange panic when I wondered if that scene had been shot at my childhood home.

For the last few months, I began to wonder if the reason I threw so much support behind the film was because of this connection to my childhood.  Had I been blinded by an unconscious nostalgia?  With last week’s DVD release of the film, I was able to watch it again.  As it turns out, it stands up perfectly well on its own.  This is a story that could have been set anywhere and, as long as the acting and writing were as strong, would have been a great film.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.  Movies this good don’t come along everyday, especially from the low-budget indie world.  The film industry is a business that responds to financial success.  Winter’s Bone did better than expected in theaters.  If it becomes a hit on DVD, that kind of financial success will be hard to ignore.

Or just watch it because it’s the best film of the year.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

Fear's a Man's Best Friend

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance first appeared in 1966.   It’s now playing at the Yale Rep, directed by James Bundy. Going in, the main question on my mind was whether or not the play – which says it’s taking place NOW – would feel adequate to today or would seem as though it still had a foot in the pre-Nixon era of its origins. Some references – topless bathing suits, a marijuana cache busted nearby – certainly harken to the old days, but not necessarily. The marijuana reference, at least, has become timely again with a new movement afoot to legalize it. But the aspects of the play that do feel a bit dated are perhaps deceptively so. One is when Julia, daughter of Tobias and Agnes, well-to-do bourgeois of the type that immediately bring to mind the grand tradition of Ibsen and Chekhov, describes the (fourth) husband she has left as someone who is simply opposed to everything. We hear Albee’s lines describing a nascent radical of the Left, back in the day when the young were rife with such.  But, today, could he not be a radical of the Right more easily?

At one point Tobias, newspapers in hand, disparages the Republicans for being as brutal as ever.  It’s a line Albee updated in 1996 to reference Gingrich et al. (the plays seems to be produced only when Democrats are in office).  Tobias and Agnes are clearly meant to be “liberals,” and much of the play’s drama consists of them trying to decide what to do about another couple – their oldest friends, Harry and Edna – who simply turn up one night, claim they became frightened in their own home, and proceed to move in with Tobias and Agnes, while at the same time Julia, often shrill and sulky across the generation gap, has returned home as well.  It’s Julia (played with the requisite petulance by Keira Naughton) who claims her father’s “house is not in order,” and while we know that the Great Society was getting shaky in 1966, with the effort to accommodate everyone’s demands a strain on civility, how much more is that the case in 2010, as new movements attempt not only to undo Clinton and Johnson, but FDR as well?

I’ve mentioned all this at such length because it seems to me that Albee’s play, in Bundy’s recreation of it, has triumphantly entered the 21st century with its nimble allegory intact – “as we get older we become allegorical,” Agnes tells her husband, at times seeming to speak for her author.  In our times, it’s easy enough to imagine the “terror” or “plague,” as Agnes calls it, sweeping over Harry and Edna as tied to seismic economic change instead of to the alterations in mores of the Sixties. Certainly the couple's fear could be existential, but Claire, who seems in many ways the most savvy – “the walking wounded” are often “the least susceptible” to “the plague,” Agnes allows – jibes “I was wondering when it would begin, when it would start.” The statement comes from a perspective balanced precariously above a deluge to come.

All of which is to say the delights of this play tend to be thoughtful ones. Though it’s not a light night of theater, Bundy’s direction does find the surprised laughs, the quick wit, the rueful chuckles in the material, perhaps intruding a bit too much comedy into Edna’s initial annoucement of the couple’s fear. For a second we might think that Edna (Kathleen Butler) is simply immensely silly, but that’s not right. Edna, who is elsewhere rather flinty, has sense enough to deliver at least one of the morals of the story: that social life is always a testing of boundaries, of what is permitted, of what may be requested.

Most of the laughs come by way of Ellen McLaughlin’s Claire – wry, spirited, often performing for her sister and brother-in-law to provoke them from their rather formidable settledness. Stretching out on the floor, upending orange juice on the carpet, tootling an accordian, yodeling, recounting her grim days as a “willful drunk,” sniping at Agnes, who sees her as a knowing observer, Claire first appears in a sort of retro-punk ensemble, with spikey Laurie Anderson-like hair, but later cleans up nicely in a designer outfit. She’s nothing if not mercurial and McLaughlin makes the most of this plum role.

Kathleen Chalfant’s Agnes is much drier in her humor, just as pointed in exchanges, but much more self-reflexive in her speechifying. She has immense dignity and character. Not really likeable, most of the time, her statement of her wifely position in Act Three humanizes her to a surprising degree, allowing her to assert her role as the one on whom nothing can be lost, so that we understand why she opens and closes the play wondering, in very reasonable tones, if she may one day go mad. Her least “liberal” moment is her statement that Harry and Edna’s fear is an infectious disease that may infect them all. Has it already, we wonder.

The great asset of this production is Edward Herrmann as Tobias. Tall, broad-shouldered, with fluent hair and a graying beard, he mutters, constantly makes drinks, and drifts around his well-appointed livingroom, a wonderful Yale-ish space with dark wood and cathedral-like verticality by Chien-Yu Peng. Whereas Agnes says she is the fulcrum upon which all balances, Tobias is the one for whom she balances things. The women of his life are a context of incessant voices but to Tobias are given two of the most memorable speeches, the one about a cat he killed because she no longer liked him, and the other an “aria” or passionate outburst to Harry on the question of whether or not he wants his friend and his wife to stay. Herrmann, so bulkily patrician (he has played FDR, after all), has a great knack for delivering Tobias’ lines so that we can hear Tobias listening to himself, considering the impression his own words make on him, and in the outburst we hear Tobias desperately trying to sound and be sincere, to demand of himself sacrifice, to say that, yes, there is room for all, even if he has to dredge up caring from some forgotten cupboard in his soul.

In the film of this play, directed by Tony Richardson in 1973 for American Film Theater, the two leads are played by Paul Scofield and Katherine Hepburn and, great as those actors are, neither felt quite right to me, Scofield too tragic, Hepburn too tremulous. I found Chalfant’s Elaine Stritch-like clarity much more effective, and, great as Scofield is, think that Herrmann’s Tobias, a tower crumbing, will be the one I remember whenever I read this play.

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance; directed by James Bundy; Yale Repertory Theatre

October 22 to November 13, 2010

The Whole World

By Emily Winslow (Delacorte Press, 2010)

For a while, I've been obsessed with what you could call the line of plausibility in fiction, and how it differs from the line of plausibility in nonfiction—or, for that matter, real life. There are coincidences that we accept in real life that we don't accept in fiction; somewhat contradictorily, there are also ways that we expect a fictional story to come together at the end in ways that we don't expect real stories to. And everyone's lines of plausibility are in different places, aren't they? One person's exasperation is another person's thrill.

My own lines of plausibility lie across the source of both my difficulty and my admiration for Emily Winslow's The Whole World. See, I'm a reader who, generally speaking, likes his plots messy; I like them to resemble what I see as the chaos of real life to the greatest extent possible. I like them to make just enough sense. But The Whole World is not like that. Like Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight, which The Whole World reminded me of in a few places, Winslow's novel is a puzzle, a machine, working at several levels, and the fun of the book—as with most mysteries—is in trying to figure out how it all fits together before the book tells you. That the pieces fit together so neatly is almost a little dissatisfying; it requires a certain tolerance for coincidence that I'm not sure I possess. One could say it makes too much sense. But it's also what makes the book so elegant, and ultimately so affecting.

Because The Whole World is a mystery, I will tell you only that the plot revolves around two American exchange students at Cambridge, Polly and Liv, who are friends and like the same young man, Nick, who, in turn, has confused feelings for both of them as well. The students have been working on a research project with an older professor, Gretchen, who has been looking into writing a biography of a famous writer to whom she is related. Then Nick disappears, drawing in the authorities. The plot's machinations are further complicated by Winslow's excellent decision to reveal the truth of what happened—to everyone involved—by switching viewpoints from Polly to Nick to Morris (the cop put on Nick's case) to Gretchen to Liv, each of whom are observant and unreliable in their own way. All these moving parts make for a really absorbing read; even when the plot occasionally crossed my own line of plausibility, I didn't really care all that much.

What has kept the book in my thoughts since I finished it, however, is not its formal complexity, but the prose it's written in—like Handler's book, revealing just enough to chill and compel through the final pages. The Whole World also takes up what for me was a surprising theme in a mystery: parenthood. Many of the parents in Winslow's book are, well, kind of bad. But just when you think that The Whole World is an extended riff on Philip Larkin's famous statement on how "they fuck you up, your mum and dad," along comes Morris, who takes fatherhood so seriously that it turns heroism into stupidity. It's my favorite moment in the book, and one that, as a father myself, I'll carry for a long time.

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.