Life During Wartime

OBIE Award winner Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, playing through Nov. 14 at the Yale Rep, is set in the camp of a rebel Liberian warlord in 2003.  There we meet three women: two are his ‘wives,’ which means: forced into service, sexual and otherwise, for the man they call the C.O.  The third woman, younger, has just arrived, and soon becomes #4 (the women refer to each other by number).  The absent wife, #2, we learn, has joined the rebel forces as a soldier.

The play’s plot mainly concerns what will become of #4, the youngest woman and the only one of the four able to read and write.

If this sounds grim, no doubt it is.  But the play, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t.  The four women are extremely lively company; their personalities make for considerable entertainment, and their situation creates a level of tension that never completely subsides.  Driven by dialogue more than action, Eclipsed demonstrates that interpersonal dynamics are the key to all drama, no matter where we find them.

Before the end of the first act Rita, an educated woman who is one of the “Peace Ladies” endeavoring to persuade warlords to lay down their arms and make peace, arrives, completing the cast.  Rita is also in search of a lost daughter, who may or may not be #4.

While the play can’t escape a certain didacticism, if only because the vast majority of its audience will need to be educated about the plight of Liberia, it is much to Gurira’s credit that the harshness of the situation is set very much in context.  First of all, in the tribal areas these women hail from, polygyny is not uncommon, even in the 21st century; thus the women, in their acquiescence to the situation, are not writing off their selfhood.  What they have dispensed with is having to fend for themselves in a war-torn land, ruled by men with guns, but also, as they are swift to tell #4, they are preserved from camps where women are shared among all the soldiers.  Being at the beck and call of one man is deemed both preferable and more traditional.

Indeed, Gurira establishes these women as types we might identify from tales of slavery in our own country, a fact that makes the play resonate beyond our sympathy for “those poor people over there.” #1, Helena (Stacey Sargeant) is much like the complicit “mammy” in many versions of plantation life in the south: she doesn’t really question the C. O.’s right to lord it over them and make what demands he will.  But this doesn’t make her servile so much as dependable and loyal.  She believes in a pact between herself and the C.O.

#3, Bessie (Pascale Armand) is more or less the comic relief; pregnant and somewhat vain and silly, she is also quick-witted.  Not only does she accept the harem-like conditions, she is determined to do everything to promote her standing in the pecking order. #4, known only as “The Girl” (Adepero Oduye), is the impressionable new-comer, but also, in a sense, the prize.  Will she accept her lot and bond with the mammy-like Helena, or will she seek a greater freedom and autonomy, like #2?

Gurira has said that it was a photograph of rebel women soldiers such as #2, Maima (Zainab Jah), “feminine, glamorous, intimidating, powerful, belligerent, and African,” that inspired her to learn about the conditions of their lives and write the play.  And indeed Maima, who takes the warrior name “Disgruntled,” becomes central to Act II as she tries to indoctrinate The Girl into the way of the warrior.  Tough, savvy, with no illusions, she is the voice of reality in wartime: to carry a gun means strength and autonomy, but, as becomes clear, it also means choosing to oppress rather than be oppressed.

And that is the moral dilemma of armed-insurrection that the play ultimately turns on, with The Girl as the test case.

Focused through the interactions of a group of women who must make do with a situation not of their making, the question of how to cope becomes a personal decision met by each woman individually.  And, though the women can be viewed as types, it is our strong belief in their reality, and in the personal significance of their actions, that drives the play.  One can’t help liking each of them, but for different reasons.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Eclipsed is a true ensemble piece where no one is ever front and center with the others only offering support.  Speaking a dialect that will be foreign to most listeners, the cast deliver their lines with an emphatic poetry that charms the ears and is always intelligible.  They are so convincing in their roles, one would be stymied to hear the actresses suddenly speak in their normal accents.  The set is naturalistic, spare yet lovely. The lighting effects -- including rain, early morning sun, dappled forest -- very effective.

Perhaps the strongest impression the play leaves us with is not of the struggle for self-determination, but of the basically supportive and companionable aspects of human life, even in the most unpromising circumstances.  And on that front, it is perhaps #1, Helena, who emerges as the play’s key figure, for it is she who has the furthest to go to grasp the new world that comes with the end of the war.

ECLIPSED, directed by Liesl Tommy, features sets by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos, costumes by Elizabeth Barrett Groth, lighting by Marcus Doshi, sound by The Broken Chord Collective, dramaturgy by Walter Byongsok Chon, vocal and dialect coaching by Beth McGuire, and stage management by Karen Hashley

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The Economics of Improvised Music

This weekend's New York Times had a great article about the New Haven Improvisers Collective, an awesome—and extremely welcoming—group of musicians who gather on the last Monday of every month at Neverending Books on State Street to explore the range of possibilities that improvised music has to offer. As the NYT article rightly points out, improvised music is most closely associated with jazz, but that genre doesn't have a lock on improvisation; one of the real pleasures of playing improvised music, in fact, is to explore the ways in which musical genres can be bent, broken, combined, or, in some magic moments, superseded. (Those with a keen eye will notice that I'm on the list of members of the collective. In the interest of full disclosure, this is because I played with the group for a few weeks in 2005 to write a story for the New Haven Advocate about the collective and their encounter with improvisational conductor Butch Morris. I haven't been back, for a variety of reasons that will all sound like excuses now, but I've been wanting to return for a long time—now that I'm a better musician and almost have the right gear. I learned more about music in the weeks I spent with them and Morris than I had in a couple of years, and I'm still to this day drawing from those lessons.)

The NHIC and Firehouse 12, a terrific club and jaw-dropping studio that routinely puts on shows of non-mainstream jazz and other music that defies categorization, deserve every bit of praise that the article heaps on them. But they're also emblematic of a larger characteristic of New Haven that I've found myself repeating many times over to people who ask me what it's like to live here.

As just about everyone who's lived in this area for longer than a year or so knows, New Haven labors under a reputation that is probably about ten years out of date. Many people outside of New Haven think of the place and imagine a city in trouble. But we know that it is not so. New Haven has its share of struggles, of course—and I do not mean to belittle those troubles at all, or perhaps even worse, aetheticize them—but it is a positive thing as much as it's a problem. It energizes the place, makes it vital. It makes the people who live here give a damn about it. And right now, New Haven is that wonderfully unstable combination of interesting and affordable. It is ethnically and culturally rich, thanks to both the town and gown sides of things. It is economically diverse. And it's a place where something like Firehouse 12 and the New Haven Improvisers Collective can exist without having to fight, every single minute, for survival.

The month or so before CBGB closed, you may remember, was a great time to write an article about a) the death of New York City as a vital cultural force or b) the inability of American pop culture to replicate anything like the heady heyday of the late 1970s. Obviously both of these statements dramatically overstated things. But nestled within the hyperbole is a kernel of truth: It is difficult to innovate and take chances—artistically or otherwise—when the cost of simply living is too high. God help me, I can't find the interview, but if I remember right, a reporter asked Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads if New York could ever produce another CBGB. No, said Frantz, it was just too expensive to run a business in New York and book bands the way Hilly Kristal, its owner, did (Though Brooklyn club Barbes challenges that assertion). Then he said something really neat: The next influential club, he argued—the one that incubates the bands that go on to have a strong effect on pop music—was probably going to be in a strip mall someplace, away from a huge urban center. I saw what he was saying. I thought of The Space, nestled in an industrial park in Hamden; it helped build an audience for the Providence-based band The Low Anthem, which led to their signing to Nonesuch. And I thought of Firehouse 12, providing a home—and a gorgeous home at that—for music that has trouble finding a stage. Based on the consistent tastes of their owners, both clubs have managed to develop scenes, and audiences. They've created that crucial vibe whereby people will go to see a show of someone they've never heard of simply because they trust the club to book someone good. This speaks a lot to Steve Rodgers (of The Space) and Nick Lloyd (of Firehouse 12) as excellent club owners. But it's also the town that they're in, full of people who want to hear good music—and make good music—and don't have to go broke to do it.

New Haven Review Occasional Paper 2: Creepy Hollow

As the title of this post suggests, now and again we at the NHR get a piece that is perhaps too long for the blog, or too timely for our glacial twice-a-year publishing schedule, or just too much fun to keep to ourselves for long. Just in time for Halloween, greater New Haven-area novelist and critic Gregory Feeley regales us with a thoroughly original reread of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I know, I know, you think you know everything there is to know about this shopworn piece of early American fiction. Think again. Feeley's first order of business: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" isn't even a Halloween story. Download the paper here. You'll never think about Ichabod Crane's nose the same way again.

Trial and Error

The Yale School of Drama has just completed its presentation of Phedre, penned by French master playwright Jean Racine in 1677. In this production, dramaturg Brian Valencia and director Christopher Mirto opted for the 1998 translation by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's widower, but in the end, there is no knowing if any other translation—such as those by John Cairncross or R.C. Knight or Robert Lowell—would have helped much in the mighty struggle that ensued to bring this tragedy to life. Back story is critical to grasping what's going on, and the playbill aids mightily in this regard. The tragic figure of this tale of lust and betrayal is not Phaedra (I'll be sticking to the anglicized spelling for this review), but her husband Theseus, famed slayer of the Cretan Minotaur. At this late stage in his career, his reputation lies largely in his womanizing, and by the time of the play's action, his reputation for selfish indulgence has begun to overtake that for heroics. Minotaur slaying notwithstanding, the play's cast of characters is already more than familiar with his abandonment of former lover and one-time savior, Ariadne, on the Greek isle of Naxos; his wooing and fathering of Hippolytus on the Amazon Antiope before his desertion of her; and finally his return to Crete, where, adding insult to injury, he takes Ariadne's sister, Phaedra, to wife. But poor Phaedra! In the noble tradition of ancient Greek bedroom drama, her heart belongs not to Theseus, but his son, Hippolytus, whom she persuades Theseus to banish, figuring out of sight, out of mind. Such reasoning works well enough until Theseus, Phaedra, and their two children are exiled in turn by Theseus' father, Aegeus, to Troezen, Hippolytus' current home. Poetic justice indeed!

Now Phaedra must confront the tabooed passion for her stepson, while, Hippolytus, frustrated by his years of exile, has fallen hard for another prisoner of Troezen, Aricia, descendant of Pallas and his line, the sworn enemies of Theseus, who originally placed her there. Who knew Troezen was such a hothouse of intemperate decisions and mad passions! Telenovelas clearly have nothing on Greek mythology, which renders all the more difficult the performative challenges of this particular play.

To put it bluntly, the drama school students simply bit off more than they could chew. This production illuminated only too well the hurdles presented to any modern theatre company by a play featuring an overwrought story of ancient Greece told by a 17^th-century French playwright translated by a 20^th-century literary patrician for a 21^st-century audience. The connective tissue of problems in this production stems from variety of sources: set design, body language, line delivery, plotting. Untangling the web is no small matter, but it is, without doubt, educative.

Let's start with set design. It is notably at variance with the fairly traditional presentation. This version of Phaedra is not some gussied up modernization—although Racine's script could easily support, in artful hands, a campy soap opera. No, this is a straight shot, through and through, so why the set design effect of doors that open in all parts of the stage (lower story and, upper story doors, ceiling hatches and trap doors)? Perhaps the arrangement is intended to convey a certain lack of privacy—everybody seems to know everybody's business, or will eventually, which is the nature of tragedy. Perhaps it is to bring to the fore a certain dynamism that the play lacks because of its Racinian stiffness. One can't be sure, however, the net effect hurts the entire production for one very critical reason: the upper doors require stairways—in this case metal rail versions—that take up stage space, specifically back stage right and front stage left (the latter of which has the equally deleterious effect of "screening" off back stage left), and end up forcing the actors to crowd the corner of front stage right or work the stairs themselves, considerably limiting their ability to move about and gesture freely.

Consequently, too many characters stand block still during their recitations or when ostensibly listening, no doubt to avoid falling off the stairs. One notable exception stands out: Shannon Sullivan's Ismene, who quite literally writhes like a pole dancer during an exchange over her mistress Aricia's yearnings for the seemingly disdainful Hippolytus. Overplayed perhaps, it is still one of the few instances that the stairs as props aid instead of hinder the play's emotional dynamic. Otherwise, this "stairway" effect of tableau-like posing not only impedes much of the play's potential dynamism, but comes to infect the floor action as well. Too often body language is so minimal that there is sometimes none at all. In other instances, it's just too modern. Andrew Kelsey's Hippolytus' line work is not bad, but the military swagger is just a little too New York City. The military stiffness we expect of ancient Greek military bearing—even if that expectation is itself a modern fiction—was just not there.

The stiffening character of this stairway effect also enters too much of the dialogue itself. A great deal of this can be directly attributed to the difficulties of performing "high drama" of this sort. Our modern sensibilities, heavily shaped by dialogue as rapid-fire exchange and not as declamation or soliloquy, present one of the greatest challenges to the modern actor. How the hell does anyone today deliver Shakespeare or Racine, Corneille or Ben Jonson, and actually connect with their audiences instead of putting them to sleep or evoking laughter? I don't envy the actors who face this challenge. But as audience members, we know when actors pull it off, and we know when they don't. Indeed, when it works, we admire that much more the thespians who seem to make it seem so artless. So, yes, I have more respect for Emma Thompson than Julia Roberts because Thompson can do Shakespeare and do it well. Roberts? Your guess is as good as mine.

In this production, they don't pull it off. Far more attention and training needed to be given to line work, to beats and pauses, slow downs and speed ups, to muttered asides and changes in pitch and volume. Christina Maria Acosta's Aricia gives a rather good show at this level, but there was too much stillness of body for a character so potentially riven by passion. On the other hand, there is absolutely no doubt that the show belonged entirely to Austin Durant's Theseus. He growls and howls; speaks low only to erupt in shouted imprecations; he holds his arms up high to rain down curses upon his falsely accused son; he kneels, head in hands, to bemoan his foolish actions. Durant's Theseus moves, both verbally and physically, literally bestriding the stage like a giant. Cannily, Durant stays off the ladders, using what space is available liberally, letting gesture of body match, and then magnify, inflections of speech. It was easily a professional performance and ought be studied by fellow actors, dramaturg, and director alike for how period plays of this sort must be performed if they are to work at all in a day and age as jaded as our own.

Without a Hurt the Heart is Hollow

The FantasticksLong Wharf Theatre, October 7 to November 1

I was first introduced to The Fantasticks, of all places, by the Guinness Book of World Records.  Even then, some thirty years ago, it held the record as the longest continuously performing play amid the less effulgent lights of New York's off-Broadway Sullivan Street Theatre.  A few years later, my father did me the courtesy of taking me to see this old standby and, what is perhaps strangest of all in the microhistory that exists between The Fantasticks and myself is my not having had the pleasure of seeing it again since then.

This is no small matter when considering a play with this kind of pedigree.  Any proper New Yorker knows that up until The Fantasticks' closing on January 13, 2002, some 17,000 performances later, a trip down to the Sullivan Theatre, adolescent in hand, was a rite of passage for parents seeking to bestow upon their kinder the kind of cosmopolitanism that Broadway show attendance bequeaths.  Unlike today's overproduced albeit entertaining extravaganzas for children and teens—from The Lion King to Wicked—The Fantasticks recalls a quieter time, a more intimate encounter, and, yes, a far, far more sophisticated experience than any childhood viewing can properly take in.

Long Wharf's current production of The Fantasticks' recognizes this all-too-literary quality of the play.  This production features a distinct set of innovations in the dramatic interpretation: the play's narrator El Gallo is recast as an illusionist; the environ is Rocky Point, an actual amusement park in Warwick, Rhode Island, that has been closed for over a decade; the thematic thrust is the carny atmosphere  (recalling weirdly enough Carousel, of all things!).  But all seems almost superfluous for a play that is so obviously about theatre and its illusions.  This is not a criticism of director Amanda Dehnart's decision to relocate the play's traditional pair of homes with gardens separated by a wall through which the separated lovers whisper their sweet nothings to one another.  The conceit of moving the action into Rocky Point is a sound one, , despite the strange geographic dynamic of the self-same wall and gardens  sitting somewhere within or nearby the lonely amusement park. Indeed, one feels the abandonment of the park in the play's set design.

But it is a strange location for other reasons because the very weirdness of the arrangement underscores what is so fascinating about The Fantasticks as a play.  When it first opened on May 3, 1960, reviews were mixed at best and despite poor initial attendance, the production stayed on eventually building itself up into—what exactly?  This is the question that couldn't help but nag as I compared my middle-aged experience of the more than solid performance delivered by cast and musicians, director and set designer, with that of my dimly remembered early teen years.  In watching, I recalled the frankly disturbing character of the play, its illusion-shattering comparison between the happy ending of the first act and the far more hardened sentiments of its second act, musically expressed with alliterative harshness: "Without a hurt the heart is hollow."

But watching The Fantasticks this time around opened up an entirely new vista for me, one leavened not only by personal experiences of pain and disillusionment, but a much expanded knowledge of arts traditions.  The Fantasticks is notable for how much it turns to classical Western literature for its moorings: there are references to Greek and Roman mythology and history, Dante Alighieri, Washington Irving, and James Barrie.  But the stage belongs to Shakespeare, and not just any stage.  No, notwithstanding references to Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, the play that really stands behind The Fantasticks—but receives nary a mention--is The Tempest, which delivered the now hackneyed but in the case of The Fantasticks all-too-applicable revelation "that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Tom Jones' libretto, as a consequence, is really part of another strand of Western culture.  While it makes pretense, perhaps a little too presumptuously, to be a part of the tradition of great playwriting—The Fantasticks is, in fact, far more than another Kiss Me Kate—there is no arguing that, as musicals go, the philosophical sights it sets are enormously high.  By stripping down as musical from the Broadway marquee hits it was trying in some ways to emulate—the Long Wharf production features eight actors, one piano, and one harp, and a simple set design, making it one of the easiest plays to stage regionally –Jones' libretto can focus on the very theatricality of theatre.  The experience is distinctly of a piece with Brecht's alienation effects, from the narrator's proleptic announcements to the highly stylized acting ("See, see, we're acting!" this production, like every other version of it, screams).

As a result of this minimalism, The Fantasticks can't help but be a distinctly postmodern play, a label I assign in the most intense and complimentary of senses.  Behind El Gallo's sleights of hand and the washed-up Arthur's comic manglings of Shakespeare, young Matt's sunny effusions and even younger Louisa's starry-eyed exclamations, and their fathers' soft-shoe, shuffling duets (excellently rendered in this production), the worm of literary deconstruction eats away at the play's philosophical foundations.  The easy reading is that the pretend happy ending of the first half is an illusion of moonlight and our penchant for story-telling, an illusion that the harsh glare of the sun and life itself dissolves.  But this thesis is so theatrically presented, and The Fantasticks is, if anything, utterly self-conscious of it play-ness, that it is impossible to see how life can be anything other than actors strutting the stage.  It is in that sense a remarkable play, a Worm Ouroboros, that eats its own tail endlessly  The Fantasticks strives to escape its own theatricalism through philosophy—that there is such a thing as "real life," which delivers real hurts from which we gain an "true" education and deeper understanding of love—but never really can, offering us either empty slogans about real life or, dare I suggest, a more "Matrix"-like understanding of the epistemological nut that Kant and his phenomenological successors have still failed to crack.  Namely, what we perceive is life and it may all be an illusion, but swim on we must.  And that reason alone is enough to see The Fantasticks.

Strength in What Remains

By Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009)

I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.

First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it or not; Home Town; and one of the best titles ever, The Soul of a New Machine, which among other virtues always reminds me of the Police album Ghost in the Machine). But he now has two terrible titles to his name. First, there was Mountains Beyond Mountains, a portrait of the saint on earth Paul Farmer. And now comes Strength in What Remains, about Farmer's also quite saintly Burundian colleague Deogratias Niyizonkiza. There's something about good people that, for Kidder, makes for bad, treacly titles.

I also didn’t want to read a book about genocide. Having skipped Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, avoided David Rieff’s writings on genocide and intervention, and missed every book about death and destruction in Iraq (except Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, which I correctly suspected would be fun to read because it’s all about what incompetent boobs the Bush administration were), I thought I might as well keep up my streak: no books that threaten to convince me that mankind is irredeemably evil and God, if he exists, doesn’t care.

But I read a review of Kidder’s new book on the day in August that my annual birthday gift from my in-laws, an Amazon gift certificate, arrived in my e-mail inbox. So I bought it. And in the last week I have finally read it.

And it’s warm, and humane, and at times funny. There’s no shortage of intense misery, described all too well. Of the frequent flashback scenes that take us from Deogratias’s more comfortable life in the United States back to the hell he endured less than ten years ago in his native Burundi, where as a Tutsi he was hunted by Hutu génocidaires, the most haunting involves an orphaned infant whom Deogratias could not save. I won’t tell you any more than that—partly because I don’t want to give away too much, partly because I just don’t want to re-live it in the typing.

For me, the book’s most unusual achievement is to show us a big American city, New York, through the eyes of a penniless refugee. Before Deogratias was taken in by generous Americans, before he enrolled at Columbia, before his graduate work at Harvard and then Dartmouth, he was delivering groceries for below minimum wage and sleeping in Central Park, hoping to one day figure out that subway system. No matter how impressive the accomplishments that bracket this period—surviving, on foot, and evading his would-be killers; becoming an educated American and building a hospital back in Burundi, a hospital which opened in 2007—it’s Deogratias’s early days as a nameless, faceless, dark black man in a city where he knew nobody that I will always remember best.

'How can we know the dancer from the dance?'

Yeats’ famous rhetorical question at the end of his poem, ‘Among School Children’ suggests that the dancer and the dance are fused into one, as an actor should be in his role, as a musician might be in the music she plays or sings.  The power of that symbiosis is always striking when it occurs, making the audience also lose a part of themselves in what is transpiring before their eyes and ears. Such, we are told, was the effect of seeing Vaslav Nijinsky dance.  Here was a being who seemed to live to dance, for whom performing was the only life.  The fact that the great, innovative, legendary dancer and choreographer succumbed to schizophrenia, a condition that ended his career, means that he has become not only a figure for greatness in performance, but also for madness in the arts.

Norman Allen’s play, Nijinsky’s Last Dance, which is ending its three night run tonight at the Yale Cabaret (shows at 8 and 11 p.m.), seizes on both aspects of Nijinsky -- the inspired genius, the struggling schizophrenic -- to present a monologue in which the dancer regales the audience with his view of his life and accomplishments.

It is a life that is now all in the past, except to the extent that every moment is still intensely alive in the character’s telling: his loss of his father in childhood; his meeting with and affair with the infamous impresario Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes; modelling nude for Rodin; the scandalous shows -- Le Sacre du printemps and L’après midi d’un faune; his marriage, the birth of his daughter; his sojourn in popular music hall entertainment in London; his tour of America; his final dance at the St. Moritz in Switzerland during World War I.

It’s a role that requires amazing physical stamina, notable comic and dramatic gifts, a dancer’s body, and a grab-you-by-the-lapels urgency.  Danny Binstock, in the Yale Cab production, has all that.  His Nijinsky is simply rivetting from first to last.  Taking us into his confidence from within his cell in an asylum, Binstock delivers Nijinsky’s lines with a feverish sense of need -- he must try to make his world intelligible because -- as he shouts, sighs, pleads, again and again -- ‘I am Nijinsky!’

Few sights can offer more gripping pathos than a major innovator, past his glory, having to insist upon his triumphs -- which only exist, now, as memories in the minds of those who saw them or participated in them.

And so we are presented with the mind of Nijinsky, the only place we can turn to try to grasp what this extraordinary life was like.  We hear at times the voices of people from Nijinsky’s life, to which Nijinsky reacts in various ways, sometimes mouthing their lines, sometimes seeming to argue back in distracted muttering, sometimes taking refuge in movement.  Director Charlotte Braithwaite departs from the script in these voice-overs, since they are written to be spoken by the actor playing Nijinsky, but the innovation works well.  Rather than watching Nijinksy become Diaghilev or his own wife, sister, or mother, we see instead the effect these voices in his head has upon the dancer.

Further, the play calls for quite a bit of physical movement.  Not abounding in space, the Yale Cab is a risky place to put on such a show -- if the actor goes a little off his mark, he could find himself in a spectator’s lap or amid the remnants of someone’s dinner.  So one can only marvel at how precisely Binstock uses the space available to him, while suggesting a whirlwind of movement.  Brathwaite, Binstock, and producer/choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman very inventively mime the ballet routines that were part of Nijinsky’s repertoire.

When at one point Binstock sits upon a chair to eye his audience in a pause prolonged to become uncomfortable, we see how the director has adapted the play to its space with great bravura.  That moment, and the final segment in which Nijinsky upbraids the audience for allowing the war to happen, brings the play suddenly from the past, c. World War I, and the mind of a long-dead dancer, into our time-frame, where the voice of a genius -- who hears God say ‘enough!’ at the end of his last dance -- speaks to us fully in the moment.

The most intense and spirited production at Yale Cab so far this season.

Like a Jolly Elf

Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart (Columbia) When I first heard that Bob Dylan was releasing a Christmas album, I immediately began to wonder what form it might take.  This spawned a series of possible carols, using take-offs of Dylan song titles: “Like a Jolly Elf,” “Just Like a Reindeer,” “A Big Sleigh’s a-Gonna Call,” “Sleddin’ in the Wind,” and, my favorite, “Stuck Inside of Macy’s in the Santa Suit Again” (I even went so far as to compose lyrics for that last one, in case Bob might be having trouble).

Of course, Dylan’s Christmas album, like anyone’s Christmas album, would not be comprised of new compositions, but would trot out old familar chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and so forth.  The question really was: would they be done in some bluesy or folky style familiar to Dylan’s listeners, or would he take some other tact, full of Christmas kitsch, with choirs or orchestras, or even a brass band?

The answer is: a bit of Dylan’s recently signature style -- involving his usual studio musicians -- is discernible in some of the songs, sorta: “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is as scruffy as that song could ever be imagined, though it has some nice guitar licks and he does manage to get fairly high and clear at the close; “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” -- well, forget Dino’s sentimental delivery -- Dylan sounds like a guy permanently ostracized by his clean-living relatives at Christmas (the video should have him huddled around a sterno can); “The Christmas Blues” matches a song to Dylan’s strengths and he owns it by the end.  And David Hidalgo’s accordian makes a polka out of “Must Be Santa,” and that can’t be bad, especially when Dylan and company reel off those reindeer names: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon / Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.

But most of the album pretty much features straight-forward arrangements, with back-up harmonizers who also fill in with peppy, glee-club voices, that would be perfect for Bing or whatever mellow-voiced crooner popular c. 1945.  “Winter Wonderland” is so completely a throwback, one imagines little Bobby Zimmerman, back home in Minnesota, happily entoning “when it snows, ain’t it thrillin’ how your nose gets a chillin’?”  It’s kinda cute.  “Silver Bells”’s arrangement is a bit country, but Dylan plays it too straight.  A little twang would’ve helped.  I’ve never liked “Little Drummer Boy” because it’s often given a big production that drowns the simplicity of the song in schmaltz.  I gotta say: Bob’s version is now my favorite, even with those singers.

Then there are the religious hymns.  It brings to mind what Johnson said about a dog walking on its hind legs (or a woman preaching): “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”  Did you ever wonder how Bob would deliver “Hark the Here-rrrr-ald Angels Sing”?  Now you know.  How about a run-through of the Latin version of “O Come All Ye Faithful” -- “Adeste Fideles”?  Personally, I’m happy that Dylan’s recorded output now includes him singing in Latin.  Take that all you people who feel he’s insufficiently lettered to be a national poet!  But you can’t help feeling like the guy next to him in choir, trying not to laugh as he sounds it out.

But isn’t that what Christmas songs are about anyway?  In my childhood we had those “Sing Along with Mitch” records and everyone was supposed to chime in, regardless of whether they could carry the tune.  “First Noel,” for instance, is like letting the worst rasper in the room take the lead.  You can imagine the twinkle in his eyes at actually getting through it.  But you gotta ask yourself: does he hear what we hear?

The lyrics of the secular songs are mostly sentimental, the lyrics of the religious ones fairly solemn, but, either way, they stay in the mind.  And I can’t get past a certain surreal feeling: I know more Dylan songs off by heart than by any other songwriter -- and to hear him sing a group of songs that everyone knows the words to, is ... like some alternate reality, but it’s also about as “folk” as you can get.  And when he gets through, at his own pacing, “someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow, so hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” almost choking on the final word, well, it does make that star feel kind of fragile against whatever the fates allow, so, yeah, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.

All proceeds from the album are being donated to “Feed America,” and other charities in other countries, so only a thorough Scrooge could completely denigrate the effort.  Who ever suspected the “jingle jangle morning” would become the “jingle jangle” of Santa’s sleigh bells?

What I Don't Like about Blogs

I am not a blogger. That sounds defensive, but what I really mean is that I don't have the mind for it, the same way I don't have the mind to be a beat reporter: I don't see a story wherever I go; I don't see something every day that makes me want to write five to six hundred words about it. Now that sounds condescending, but I don't mean it that way. There are people who have proven to be outstanding bloggers—people whom the form suits almost perfectly, which suggests, to me at least, that blogs really are a new kind of literature, even if its conventions haven't been fully defined. It is thrilling to be alive at its creation, to see humans find another way of expressing themselves, and I'm a little envious that I don't have the mind for it. But there are certain aspects of blogs that I don't like. Yes, there's all the yelling, but hey, that's part of the fun. I'm actually more annoyed at the sort of blog post espousing a shaky yet strongly held opinion that seems designed solely to piss people off in order to get them talking, because for a website looking at its hit count, I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity. There are lots of egregious examples out there, but I'm more interested in talking about the phenomenon in its moderate form. My example: Jody Rosen's October 12 post on Slate's Brow Beat about NPR's supposed DORF matrix, i.e., its assumed taste in black music. (Yes, I'm aware that I'm about a week late to this party. See above re: not having the head for blogging. I'm also aware that I'm totally falling for it by talking about it. I'm trying here, folks.)

For those of you who don't want to read the original post, Rosen argues that NPR, and All Songs Considered in particular, "maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." Instead, it seems to like its black musicians dead, old, retro, or foreign. Hence, the cute acronym. Rosen uses the DORF matrix to mock NPR listeners for being too white, but also throws in a little political angle. "Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?" he asks.

Here's what I don't like about Rosen's post. First, as a surface-level comment, he's basically pointing out the obvious. Why comment on it at all, except to piss off NPR listeners who consider themselves to be progressive? (Full disclosure: My musical taste could easily be described as DORF, except that it would apply equally to musicians across racial and ethnic lines. I suppose this makes me ultra-conservative. Or whatever.)

Second, given how obvious Rosen's premise is, it's a surprisingly shaky one. Rosen himself points out a few exceptions to NPR's taste in his own post—Mos Def, Danger Mouse—that he writes off as the exceptions that prove the rule. Has that argument ever really worked? But the shakiness runs way deeper than that, especially given the political angle Rosen throws in.

Assuming something about someone's politics based on their music taste is a dangerous game. In suggesting that Top 40 listeners are perhaps more progressive than NPR listeners, does Rosen really mean to suggest that being a big Lil' Wayne fan indicates that you're liberal? I'll just let that question lie. More oddly, Rosen essentially argues that NPR's taste in black music simply reflects its white, college-educated listeners' taste in music. (Again, full disclosure: I donate money to NPR, and am both white and college-educated. Too much, really.) But there's another explanation for it that has not that much to do with politics, and as much to do with creating taste as reflecting it: As one of the only nonprofit forces on the radio dial, NPR has the opportunity to play music that isn't popular, and it takes that opportunity to play artists that otherwise don't get radio play—like many college radio stations do, or other forms of radio, like Bridgeport's own WPKN. Would Rosen—who, as a music critic, I assume is a big fan of lots of different kinds of music—prefer that NPR cover the same small set of artists that commercial radio covers? I'm guessing not. But then what is the point of the post? Aside from making fun of NPR? (I know, I know: generating hits for the website. But isn't there another way?)

In truth, I have no idea how NPR determines which black musicians it decides to pay attention to. But here's my point: it doesn't seem like Rosen does, either. Now, I know that blogging and journalism are two different things, but Rosen could have added a bit of substance to his post—the kind of substance that, say, a twenty-minute conversation with someone at All Songs Considered would have provided—and still made his point that contemporary African-American musicians are woefully underrepresented in NPR's music programming. Perhaps Rosen did have this conversation. If he did, though, it doesn't show. Which means that the argument never gets past whether NPR's taste in black music is lame or not. Which is, in a nutshell, one of the things I don't like about blogs. Even when I've been guilty of it myself.

The missing lung and The Resurrection Trade

The other day, I woke to the radio reporting, “Lung stolen from Peru exhibition of human cadavers.” And then later that morning, I read Leslie Adrienne Miller’s fifth collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade and the missing lung in Peru began to make more sense. The collection of poems knocked my socks off. It left me quite gasping after a few particularly brilliant poems. The impetus driving The Resurrection Trade is Miller’s exhaustive study of the ancient practice of “trafficking corpses.” For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the study of anatomy and medicine heightened a need for bodies. Scientists paid and so people robbed graves, and some made art of the science and the dead.

Miller’s scientific and poignant craft provides a sort-of answer to the question of why humans are so interested in dead bodies. She writes about her own life as a mother and poet and the 18th century sketches intermittently, and in doing so, there is a certain stitching together of these two worlds.

The title poem is a mediation on the illustrations in an 18th century French text entitled, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration. In this text, Miller focuses on the particularly striking portraits: a woman, a pregnant woman, and a woman in labor-all dead and rendered as study, sketched as figures in various stages of flayed and grotesque beauty. (The cover of the book is one of the mezzotint illustrations, and as Miller points out, the woman was left with her “ rococo face.” Apparently, these women often were depicted in medical books with still, quizzical and romantically flushed faces.)

The back of the book is rife with mini history lessons as addenda to many of the poems. Her poem “Rough Music, Edinburgh, 1829” was written about a rush of 17 women in Edinburgh who were murdered, and whose bodies were sold (at a good price) to anatomist Robert Knox. One of the women whose cadaver was portrayed was named Mary Paterson,“too fresh/for legitimate death” and delivered to Surgeons Square “still warm.” She was a:

gift to men of science, and so also to me, woman of the new world digging through old books to resurrect her murdered parts, to offer her my own rough music, the strange collusion of imaginary science and real art.

She draws with her words, not just the lives of the sketched the flesh, but of those sketching and cutting, like Knox himself. In “’The Flayed Angel’” I began to wonder who was the artist portraying whom:

If she were a photograph or simple lines less art or more science, what we’d miss is the man who had to be there in the flesh with a tray of graving tools and pair of living eyes, who had to read her with a knife and scrape the burr from every rib, who had to know the permanence of every cut.

And there is the sense in here of archeology: that in order to discover more about a place, people, or body, the layers of dirt or skin must be destroyed. To “read with a knife” is a phrase that comes up a few other times in the collection. This idea that in order to learn more, we have to uncover and wreck is a wonderful paradox that floats through the book.

Maybe this is the same idea that makes the stolen body parts from The Bodies Exhibit seem so compelling. It is the missing piece that calls attention to the meaning behind the exhibit-why we’d want to go. The lung, gone missing, sheds light on the human need or want to see the body, to understand it. We learn, too, by making art. Did the thief need to touch or sketch, or photograph the lung? If so, why?

Think of the thief’s hands hovering over the cold organs before sliding a lung into a knapsack; such a stunning portrait that would make! A portrait of a basic human trait: uncontrollable curiosity- or so I’d like to think. But, This is exactly what makes The Resurrection Trade work. It is uncontrollably curious and surprising and honest. It makes art of the grotesque-made-art. It’s honest as an open heart and mind would be.

The lung has since been returned to the exhibit in Peru. No questions asked. Maybe the whole thing was just a dare.

Dirty Pond Issue 1 Out!

The Dirty Pond, New Haven's newest art and literary journal, has published its first issue, and you are mightily encouraged to check it out here. It contains contributions from the Dirty Pond editors—Anelise Chen, Philip Lique, and Alexis Zanghi—as well as art and poetry from David Larsen, Paul Panamarenko, Katie Yates, and the NHR's own Donald Brown. Congratulations to all involved! In a mission that is near and dear to our hearts, The Dirty Pond is dedicated to creating, in their own words, "a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers and artists, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future." One of these days, we'll have to party together. And in the meantime, Greater New Haveners of the writerly and artistic persuasions, submit to these fine people. Show them what you've got. And keep an eye out for Issue 2.

I miss my clotheslines.

When we moved to this house in 2002 one of the things I liked about it was that it came with two clotheslines attached to it, stretching from the back porches (first and second floors) to a very tall maple tree in the backyard. I'm not someone who uses a clothesline because I think it's environmentally correct, though I'm sure it is. I'm someone who likes a clothesline because of two things: one, sometimes I am seized by fits of cheapness and don't want to pay for the electricity to run the dryer; and two (much more important to me, really), I own things that get laundered regularly that cannot be put in the dryer. Namely, I own a lot of old linens and tablecloths and these things would suffer horrible indignities if tumble-dried. What they need is a clothesline. A drying rack will do for smaller things like tea towels or handkerchiefs or pillowcases, but when we're talking hand-embroidered sheets and and tablecloths, what you want is a long, long clothesline you can spread the fabric across just so, so that you can then hear the fabric snapping neatly in the breeze. No wrinkles. Nice. Ideally, all of these articles are spread artfully down the line, a little of this, a little of that.

Some weeks ago we realized that the maple tree behind our house was rotting and a hazard -- not in an immediate sense, probably, but we were alarmed sufficiently that we called an arborist and arranged to have the thing hacked down. I am now without a clothesline. My husband claims to feel bad for me, but I know he doesn't; he hated my clotheslines. (I hadn't installed them, mind you, but of all the residents in this house, I was the only one who used the lines, so they're "mine.") I am told that some day, when we get a new fence, we'll have a post installed that's tall enough that I'll be able to have my clotheslines again.

I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I'm looking out the window and thinking about how I need to do laundry, and how, if I had my clotheslines, it would be a perfect day for it: it's sunny, the air is crisp, and there's a nice breeze going -- just enough to make my pretty tea towels and tablecloths flap around, but not so much to knock them off the lines.

I know some people are offended by the sight of clotheslines, and I suppose I could understand it if I were hanging out the family's unmentionables, but -- is anyone offended by the sight of tea towels and tablecloths waving in the breeze? The occasional handkerchief that's embroidered with violets or "Edna"? I just can't imagine it. The linens are so pretty to look at on the clothesline. Walking around the neighborhood this morning I saw other people's things on their clotheslines -- not vintage linens, either, just t-shirts and jeans and towels. It made me jealous. I miss my clotheslines.

A Serious Man

Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.

Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.

Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in A Serious Man say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.

Not that religious seriousness ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote Blood Simple and Barton Fink and Fargo and The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota--or so A Serious Man, set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors? Hashem’s?

No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.

Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch F-Troop or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club. It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.

Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.

What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. A Serious Man makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.

It’s illuminating to have A Serious Man in theaters at the same time as Where the Wild Things Are, whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.

The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.

What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.

So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.

2nd Town Meets Gown Read In

Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. New Haven Review and Yale University’s McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life will host its 2nd Town Meets Gown Read In, where writers from New Haven and the Yale communities come together to share original works of poetry and prose. The “Read In” features five writers from each community and is approximately two hours long, with discussion afterwards. Refreshments will be served for this event, which is free of charge.  The New Haven Review (www.newhavenreview.com) is the literary arts journal of the Elm City; the Yale University McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life hosts events by and for graduate students on a regular basis.

Admission is free.  Readings are at McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, 320 York Street, New Haven

Smoke & Mirrors

SmokeBy Chuck Richardson 236 pp. BlazeVOX $16.00

Truisms are called truisms for a reason. They’re not exactly the same as truthiness, as promulgated by right-wing demagogues. Truisms, by their nature, are hackneyed. But they contain more than just the traditional “element of truth.” They do not sin by omission. Rather they bespeak the obvious and are often useful by bringing our attention back to what is obvious.

I have a truism in mind: where there is smoke there is fire. This expression exercises and belies David Hume’s deconstruction of causation. As Hume noted, how do we know that particular effects follow from certain causes? How do we infer specific causes from quantifiable effects? Hume’s radically pedestrian assertion was instead of nature, God, or the Devil, we hold to causation from force of habit. We associate causes and effects within our minds through repetition and imaginative thinking that is predicated on experience. We believe the sun will rise the next day not merely from an abstract understanding of earthly rotation (which we never really feel) but from having seen it occur day after day. How do we know the wine glass I’m about to drop will fall to the ground and not float upwards, will shatter and not merely bounce? Of course either of these less likely outcomes is possible. But no, it will fall and it will shatter. This I know from my experience of other falling objects and the witnessing of bursting light bulbs and beer bottles on kitchen floors and street corners. True, there is an extension of imagination within this assumption, but it is imagination grounded in experience, expectation, some trauma (I’m always shocked by shattering glass), and the brute force of a lifetime of habit-formed association between actions and reactions.

So where there’s smoke, surely there’s fire? The beauty of literature done well is when truisms fail miserably. And in Chuck Richardson’s Smoke there is smoke, but it’s not clear there is any fire. Mind you, this is not intended as some sort of backhanded figuratively-cast literary criticism. (All smoke no fire signifying some failing of literary imagination.) Quite literally, there is no fire in Smoke because smoke is what it’s all about.

Smoke is a classic example of what troubles genre of literary fiction as a business proposition—troubled, that is, not by any lack of quality but lack of market. Personally, I thought Smoke a great read and thus deserving of a hell-of-a-larger audience. First it appealed directly to my penchant for science fiction and background as an erstwhile scholar of dystopian fiction. (If Margaret Atwood can get away with it, why can't Chuck Richardson?) Second, it is, like any work of dystopian fiction done right, told through the fish-eye lens of multiple characters, not all of whom fully understand what is happening or why, who struggle to assay the truth of their situation but only see parts of it, as if wading through smoke themselves. After all, isn't what makes fiction fiction its smokiness, its insubstantiality, the penumbra it offers only of reality, of life seen through a glass darkly?

I’ll be blunt and a little lazy and not even dig into the details of the story’s plot line—which is fuzzy anyway. Enough to say that the setting is a future America where there is an “Agency” that takes in individuals for questionings that amount to all-orifice, sodium pentathol-like, half-pain, half-ecstasy torture sessions. It is also an America where your loyalty is to the never properly defined “Tribe” and where the aforementioned entire Agency is after the mysterious and much too earnest Zbigniew “Ziggy” Fumar and his rebel supporters—who may not even know that they are supporters.

Although Ziggy is not necessarily the protagonist—whatever that may mean in this particular work—he is the voice of the author, authority, and perhaps the ultimate lack of it, which all authors experience once their work graduates into the hands of readers. As Ziggy offers in the letter? manifesto? confession? that the Agency's agents, the novel’s “authorities,” study for clues as to what Ziggy's movement is about:

So let me start by saying that I don’t get you. It’s easy when a writer writes something and he knows his reader; because it makes it easy to leave out things the two of you already know. But I don’t know what you know, and don’t know what I know, and nobody knows what they don’t know. And that’s the truth. Honest. The truth always wraps itself in a dynamic paradox. In this case, it’s the writer’s paradox: All writers are liars; I am a writer. Or, all writing is lying; I am writing. Or, all reading is sucking; I am reading, and so on, etc….You’re not against fiction; you’re against my fiction. You oppose my make-believe. And you believe your make-believe is real. I’m sure it is, but so is mine. You dream up your stuff and I’ll dream up mine. This is fiction, and that you are reading anything and believe it’s not fiction, well that’s a fiction, albeit a non-literate one. It’s me who should be torturing you…

We are Smoke’s readers and Mr. Richardson, like any author, cannot know what we do or don’t know in fine detail. As such the novel has and takes the liberties of literary expressionism, steeped in equal parts George Orwell and Robert Coover, compelling its readers to find their way through the haze: What is this world? What is the Agency really after? What is the Tribe? Why do some characters seem little more than the ghosts of Pirandello’s players in search of an author? Why do they change form or divine the future or see their stories merge, split and merge again in some macabre waltz of unsettled identities, an unsettled future, and an unsettled literature.

If this review itself seems hazy, don’t let that obscure the fact that Smoke is actually a pleasure to read. OK, so every question is not answered; so truisms and false-isms are liberally mixed producing a powerful concoction of literary speculation on our modern politics, authorial deceit, and epistemological yearning, but I’d be more than happy to order another round. Smoke is more than “speculative” fiction in the traditional senses as applied to highbrow literature and science fiction respectively. It’s a fine read that compels even as it disturbs, compels because it disturbs, which, in a sense, is how life is, if not ought be, ultimately lived.

An Arresting "Orestes"

The Yale Cabaret states its mission to be “a gauntlet thrown in the face of our future, a scar in the memory of our audience, a ballerina dancing with a stick of dynamite.”  If this sounds a bit in your face, can that be a bad thing?  Theater can’t cuddle its audience, that’s what TV is for.  And unlike an audience watching a film in a moviehouse, a theater-going audience shouldn’t be allowed to hide in their darkened seats, secure in the fact that whatever they’re watching is already in the past. At Yale Cabaret, the audience sits at tables at the same level as the performers.  There’s nowhere to hide.  And for the first show of the 2009-10 Season, the audience had to sit or stand outside along two of the four sides of a courtyard in the middle of which Euripedes’ blood-thirsty and manic Orestes was enacted by a small ensemble cast of seven players.  In fact, we were gestured to a few times as an ugly mob, and Elektra even demanded we keep alert and pay attention.

The play is a good choice for the Cab’s stated goal.  For if any classical author lives up to that mission statement, it’s Euripedes.  Brechtian “alienation effect,” Artaudian “theater of cruelty,” Beckettian “theater of the absurd” -- none of them have anything on Euripedes.  Reading his plays, one is never sure whose side we’re supposed to be on.  It’s not that everyone is equally bad, it’s just that no one is really good, or noble, or virtuous, or even tragically misunderstood.  It’s as if his characters suffer from the hubris of believing the gods give a shit; worse, they sometimes think they understand what the gods want and try to act accordingly.

Orestes, in Devin Brain’s production, was even more than usual denuded of the voice of reason.  By cutting the figure of Tyndareos, who counsels his young grandson to give into what the polis decides, and by removing a speech which describes the arguments in the agora, this Orestes knocked away the prop supporting the contention that the play is about the need to replace blood-vengeance with civil proceeding -- which should have been used against Orestes’ husband-murdering mother and her paramour in the first place.

Instead of such city-state thematics, we have a tale of two siblings, Orestes and Elektra, wrapped together in a rather sensual folie à deux: they plotted the killing of their mother and now are pariahs who have only each other.  The pair becomes a trio with the introduction of Pylades, a stalwart friend of Orestes to whom Elektra is promised, should they live.  But one can’t help feeling, after the trio exchange full kisses with one another, that, if they live, they should all live together happily ever after in a ménage à trois.  Does that make us less sympathetic to them or more?

Hard to say, but when they try to murder Helen (whom they hate and whom Euripedes seems really to enjoy pillorying), and grab her unsuspecting daughter Hermione as hostage, running up a fire escape above the courtyard  to hurl taunts at Menelaos while insisting on negotiating a way out of their death sentence, they become gleeful would-be killers, a kind of mini Baader Meinhof cell, asserting their rights, but more than anything their detestation of the likes of Menelaos and Helen, the bourgeois beginners of battles that others must die to fight (Elektra -- played with suitable heart-wrenched woe by Emily Trask -- even gives a very affecting speech to that effect, mourning all those fallen Greek heroes at Troy).

Indeed, with Elektra so distraught, and Orestes, as played by Babak Gharaei-Tafti as somewhat of a maunderer, so clearly in need of her (and so happy he can call her a man in a woman’s body), and Helen so vain, and Menelaus so bureaucratic, it’s hard not taking the side of the kids, blood-lust, sex-lust, and all.

Then Apollo steps in.  As played by Kevin Daniels -- hairless bare chest, hairless bare head, black, in white flannel -- he steps in like the guy from upper management who has to put the peons in their place.  He’s scathing, indifferent, and incontestable.  Hermione and Orestes will marry!  We can imagine the wonderful get-togethers they’ll have at Menelaos’ place, or maybe Hermione will one day complain that her hubby never holds a knife to her throat any more like when they first met.  It matters not to Apollo -- or to Euripedes either.  We get the gods we deserve, and seeing the imperious shrug of the Sun god as he doled out just deserts put a big smile on my face.

It’s hard to say who Euripedes has more contempt for: these mythic figures whose messy lives have to be rehearsed again and again, or the audience that expects theater somehow to make sense of what makes no sense.  For a modern audience, that level of absurdity is always to some extent comforting, for it shows us that someone else has noted, and determined how to enact, mirth in passion, doubt in belief, randomness in justice, death in sex.

A great start to the season!

In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali

By Banning Eyre (Temple University Press, 2000)

Journalist Banning Eyre is one of Connecticut's great unsung musical treasures; he and Sean Barlow are the driving forces behind Afropop.org, one of the best sources I've come across to learn more about Africa's various styles of music, as diverse as they are infectious. But Eyre is also a stellar guitarist in his own right. He has recorded with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, perhaps the biggest band to ever come out of Zimbabwe and certainly one of its coolest (and Zimbabwe has a lot of cool bands). And he has performed with the Super Rail Band, one of Mali's greatest acts. The latter, however, is for a more direct reason: Several years ago, Eyre effectively apprenticed himself to Djelimady Tounkara, the lead guitarist in the Super Rail Band. He spent the better part of a year in Bamako, learning as much as he could from Djelimady about Mali's musical traditions, and venturing out to meet—and hopefully play with—as many other musicians as he could find.

The written result of his exploits is In Griot Time, a book that's part travelogue, part character study (of Djelimady and the many other musicians Eyre meets), and part love letter to the music that Eyre went to Mali to learn how to play. In the course of the book, Eyre freely acknowledges his debt to John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythms and African Sensibilities, perhaps one of the best books ever written about African music for a Western audience. The parallels between Eyre's experiences and Chernoff's are many. Both went to Africa—Eyre to Mali and Chernoff to Ghana—to learn to play music. Both knew that playing the music well required them to understand something about the culture and history that created the style in the first place, and both strove hard to immerse themselves as much as they could. Chernoff's immersion was perhaps more successful: He emerged from his experience with a book that reads in parts like a Rosetta Stone to understanding Ghanian drumming in particular and African music generally. As a musician myself, I am still learning from Chernoff's book, and it's been ten years since I read it.

Eyre's book, by design, doesn't have that kind of insight. Unlike Chernoff, he doesn't dwell on how the music is put together so much as what it was like for him to learn how to play it. While it seems clear that he played music for at least a couple hours a day, most of the book is about what happens to him when he's not playing music—the conversations he has with people, the things he sees and does, the other musicians he hears—all written with a clear eye, an astonishing sensitivity, and a willingness to wrestle with some difficult questions about cultural frictions and the legacy of colonialism. The result, I believe, is a much more accessible book than Chernoff's. Where Chernoff's book is perfect for people who already love African music—particularly other musicians who are trying to figure out how to play it—Eyre's book is just the thing to make people who don't know much about African music want to learn more about it. Its own effect on me has already been profound. Chernoff's book in some ways scared me away from trying to play African music even as it made me want to all the more. But it was Eyre's book (and Eyre himself, who I finally took a lesson from) that finally made me pick up a guitar and try to play. I know that I'll never play like either Chernoff or Eyre—let alone the African musicians they have played with—but In Griot Time gave me the courage to play with the required humility, and evident joy.

How is Loneliness Pure? And why?

I was hankering for a good adventure movie the other night- something 18th century and swashbuckling. I stumbled upon The Red Tent, on the cover: a tattered crew huddled in a wreck in the middle of an Arctic landscape-and a headshot of Sean Connery. I was sold. What Andy and I settled down to watch that night was not just a fun and harrowing adventure movie, but an artfully shot, psychedelic and psychological mediation on Loneliness and its close relation to the extremes of Nature.

The movie was about Umberto Nobile’s famed and follied trip to the North Pole in 1928. He piloted the Italia, an ill-fated blimp that crashed and ripped apart leaving six crewmen trapped in the ice floe in the Arctic circle. There the men waited for 48 days while a rescue mission of 20 ships, 23 planes, and numerous dog sleds tired to reach them in time. It’s a true story of a frozen zeppelin, Fascism, international aid, and snow-blindness.

The narrative was told as a flashback, in a dream sequence. Past characters from the adventure convene in the middle of the night in Nobile’s apartment to rehash the technical and logistical details of the expedition. They were in search of blame and justice, and to some extent forgiveness. It was your typical ‘play within a play’ set up, and there was something Star Treky to it-the characters in a Modern Italian apartment walking around in bearskins and with disheveled hair.

The most most striking concept in the movie though, (aside from the anomalous scene of the Swedish meteorologist Finn Malmgren and his nurse girlfriend laughing on the back of a reindeer pulled sled and then rolling down a snowy hillside together,) was Malmgren’s monologue in the bar before embarking on the Italia. In reply to the question about why he was going out on the blimp across the North Pole, he said that it had “something to do with Loneliness. With Purity.”

How is Loneliness pure? And why?

The Norwegians call it Polarhulle: “a yearning forever to return to the far, dark, cold places.” Is that what made General Nobile want to fly a dirigible to the North Pole? The accounts for longing in Polar explorations, the polarhulle, seem to have something to do with a human need for a Loneliness that emulates, or is at least well acquainted with, death. Then, there is a relation of that feeling to Purity.

Shakleton wrote after one expedition to the South Pole, “After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.” It is as if going to the brink of death, (and of the planet) Shakleton discovered a need, so as to stimulate a sublime sense of his appetite for life.

Funny.

I’ve been reading Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? and in this memoir too, is this inexplicable hunger for loneliness as a sort of frontier to charter. Nuala lived a most uncharacteristic life for an Irish woman of the mid-20th century. She never married, was frank in her hunger for passion; she was an intellect and a bisexual. Arguably, her most famous quotation is that of when she rejected chemotherapy as a form of prolonging her life, when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She said “It isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life."

Here is a portrait of an internal exploration, and the stakes are different. It was as if in being told that she was going to die, an axis or a Pole was crossed internally for Nuala. There was then no need for a vigorous life. She said “there is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die -- an absolute difference.” The absolute difference seems absolute, and relative in light of The Red Tent.

Nuala said of her passion at the end of her life, “passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.” And that’s what Finn Malmgren was talking about in boarding the Italia. Abandon, and Passion taking a leap at itself. But why? The surviving men from the Italia painted their tent-on the center of an ice floe- bright red so they could be seen through the snow. And in their need for survival, perhaps they became the North Pole of Nobile’s dreams- they were a new sort of axis upon which their world would continue to turn.

I am curious about Abandon and how it seems to be in the business of Life, Loneliness, and Purity. I don’t understand it. I think it has to do with each person’s own self.

The other night, I was driving back from my tutoring job at Johnson State college, a small state college on the edge of the North East Kingdom of Vermont. I found a new way home that took me across open fields and paralleled a backbone of the Green Mountains. The Green Mountains are now every color but green. They were alight in the dark. I knew that as my headlights lit up the curvy road ahead. It was freezing outside. There was no one else on the road. Many of the houses had not a light on inside.

That was enough of a feat for me. I sped the whole way home.

A post-holiday musing on Jewish literature: Paul Rudnick is my Isaac Bashevis Singer

Come the High Holidays, as previously mentioned, I re-read certain books; the cycle is repeated around Passover. This year's High Holiday season gave me more time than usual to contemplate my personal canon of Jewish literature. My thinking was further prodded by reading in the New York Times of the death of Paul Rudnick's mother. Rudnick wrote one of the books high on my list, a novel called I'll Take It, which is about a young man traveling through New England one October with his mother and her two sisters. They're ostensibly leaf-peepers, but Joe and his mother have an agenda, which is to rob L.L. Bean so that she can get the money to redecorate the living room. I love this book but feel like no one's ever read it except me and my mother. The voracious reader's canon of Jewish literature apparently always has on it Serious Major Works by Serious Writers. I did a casual survey via Facebook (that tells you a lot right there) asking "What Jewish writers or books make up your personal Jewish canon?" Oddly, more Gentiles than Jews responded. But overwhelmingly the names were just what you'd expect to see on a college syllabus for a course entitled "Survey of 20th Century Jewish Literature." Potok; Singer; Roth; Bellow. I was bored thinking about this. One young woman, the brilliant Bekah Dickstein, posted a response immediately that warmed my heart, though: S.J. Perelman. Oh, yes.

To Bekah's eminently sensible suggestion, let me tack on my own list, a short list that came to me with shocking speed once I started thinking about it.

Sydney Taylor's All of a Kind Family books, which are the best way I know to introduce anyone to the Jewish calendar, to Jewish rites and rituals, and to the world of immigrant Jewish life in the early 20th century. The books are written with humor and love and the illustrations (in three of the books by Mary Stevens, in one by Beth and Joe Krush) are imprinted in my head. The Stevens illustrations have a delicacy that I particularly love.

Paul Rudnick's I'll Take It. There will, I'm sure, be someone out there's who's read this and who will be offended by my putting this on my list, saying, "It perpetuates negative Jewish stereotypes" or something like that. Well, it does. On the other hand, it's incredibly funny. Rudnick wrote this before he got big as a screenwriter and the number of genius throwaway lines in here is just astounding.

E.L. Konigsburg's About the B'nai Bagels: a Young Adult novel about little league, being bar mitzvah'd, and stuffed cabbage. Illustrated by Konigsburg, this is one of her earlier titles, and one which I feel gets short shrift, possibly because most people feel its appeal is too specific. That may be. But I don't give a crap about baseball and I read this book all the time.

Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem. I admit I haven't read this in quite a few years but I've always really liked this book. I enjoyed it a lot more than her other novels, which got a little too brainy for me, and I freely admit I've never read any of her non-fiction (what, like I'm going to read a book about Spinoza?).

A recent addition to the Eva Geertz canon of Jewish literature is Elinor Lipman's The Inn at Lake Devine, another light comic novel, about anti-Semitism in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Somehow that sentence strikes me as sounding absurd and heavy-handed, but really, that's what it is.

The essays of Fran Lebowitz are on my list. Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself would make the cut.

Someone pointed out to me that my list is essentially bigoted, that I've got a bad attitude about people like Roth and Bellow, etc. etc. "Just because they're on everyone else's list doesn't mean they're not worth reading," he said, more or less accusing me of being a snot and a whiner. I'm not saying they're not worth reading though; what I'm saying is that I don't personally want to curl up with a little Saul Bellow when I'm looking for a comforting read. This is not material I'd read for fun, entertainment, relaxation, or escapism. I don't want books that try to ask or answer Big Questions. If anything, clearly, I'm interested in books that will say, "Ok, so, there are Big Questions. Very nice, all well and good but -- do you want another slide of babka? A cup of coffee? I can heat up the milk for you if you want."

A Masterful "Master Builder"

Henrik Ibsen’s dramas are classics of the theater, and his best-known plays lay bare the stultifying social mores of the late 19th century: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler.  The later Ibsen, while still based in the naturalism of his main period, moves toward drama that is more symbolic, perhaps even allegorical -- dramas where the astute student of theater might see possibilities opening up for a new age of stagecraft.

The Yale Repertory’s production of The Master Builder is gloriously evocative of the fresh face of contemporary theater.  If the name of Ibsen brings to mind over-stuffed drawing-rooms with imperious stage-directions where neurasthentic types pine with Norwegian yearning, banish those thoughts at once.  The set design by Timothy Brown is wide open, expressionistic -- the characters stand on a stage that seems to be the side of a house climbing into the heavens upstage -- and allows the actors to make full use of space as they ricochet off one another in an urgent ballet of feeling.

Given the theme of the rapturous climb to great heights -- both literal and figurative -- in the play, the set alerts us at once to the possibility for soaring above the quotidian that master builder Halvard Solness finds in Hilda Wangel, a young visitor from his past.  Swept off her feet as a girl of thirteen when the mighty master builder climbed to the top of a high tower he designed to plant a victory wreath, she also insists he kissed her ‘many times’ when he found her alone later, and claimed he would come carry her off ‘like a troll’ to a kingdom in ten years’ time.  The ten years are up, and Hilda wants her kingdom.

The Halvard Hilda finds is a driven man, but one who is also desperate -- worried about ‘the young’ who will make him step aside (particularly in the form of Ragnar Brovnik, an apprentice architect who Halvard ‘keeps down’ by not giving him any projects of his own), and preying upon youth by beguiling Brovnik’s fiancée, Kaia, so that she will remain in Halvard’s employ, thus giving Ragnar reason to stay.  It’s an untenable situation that is beginning to fray and Halvard knows it, not least because Ragnar’s father, once Halvard’s superior, is near death and wants to see his son amount to something on his own before he dies.

Into this dense situation, Hilda arrives with the force of visionary destiny, suddenly inspiring Halvard with her muse-like presence and youthful attachment to his former grand figure, but also sharing in the confidences of past tragedy and loss in the Solness marriage, as well as learning of Halvard’s great burden of guilt.  Can the master builder put all this aside and rise again to the glory he finds in her eyes?

As Halvard, David Chandler is as mercurial as the part demands -- at times, forthright and earnest, at times cold, unyielding and almost diabolical.  He is tender about his wife, in her absence, but uncomfortable in her presence.  He is direct with the doctor who tries to sound him out on his relation to Kaia, but is also arrogantly superstitious about his ability to control others through his own mind.  Coiled with the exasperation of the man of talent beset by the demands of others, Mr. Chandler flings his expressive body all about the stage with the passion that Hilda brings to the surface.  We see a man struggling, in almost every movement, to determine if his desires can overcome his misgivings.

And as Hilda, Susan Heyward is a thrilling delight.  Girlish, willful, and remarkably quick on the uptake, Hilda, as written, could easily seem more sprite than person, a creature of Halvard’s Id suddenly incarnated in the flesh.  As incorporated in Ms. Heyward, Hilda is nearly ecstatic with the force of her effect on her revered master builder, and plays with him through an intuitive grasp of what they might mean for each other.  And though, as Ibsen not doubt intended, Hilda’s actual psychology remains a mystery, Ms. Heyward gives us every reason to believe in the spell that Halvard falls under in her presence -- a spell predicated on her unshakeable conviction of his greatness.

In the supporting cast, Felicity Jones’ Aline Solness is regal in a gorgeous black gown, displaying, with her mere presence, the sad memories that cling to the marriage, but also giving the dialogue a comic edge as the long-suffering wife all-too-knowing about her husband’s need for young, female devotees.  And Slate Holmgren, as Ragnar, does much with a part that’s easy to overlook, particularly in his scene late in the play with Hilda, where, though she mocks him as a mere upstart, we can see in his self-possession possibly another master builder in the making.

Credit for this version’s success rests most securely, no doubt, on director Evan Yionoulis.  In the “Talk Back” with the audience after the Saturday matinee performance, several in the cast spoke of her ability to ‘calibrate’ their performances to the right nuance -- and much of that nuance itself depends on the translation by Paul Walsh.  The dialogue seems unforced and direct -- even when Solness and Hilda extemporize on Vikings and trolls (figures of baleful power Ibsen felt himself at times to be in league with) -- and sounds modern without straying into contemporary locutions.

And what does the play say to us now, more than a century and a decade after it was written?  Ibsen’s strong presentations -- of a man of power abusing that power, of a man of talent seeking some new inspiration, of a man of years trying to revitalize himself, of a marriage that persists without ever freeing itself of its past, where tragedy, rather than ending the couple, made them what they are, and of a young woman’s seeming power to see the future and be the future -- never become dated.  So, what do you see when the still striving, but slipping, figure climbs that tower in the end -- hubris? inspiration? despair? need?  A struggle against time, against mediocrity, against God?  Or a deluded effort to assert something whose day is done?  Then ask yourself: what does Hilda see?

The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen. Translated by PAUL WALSH. Directed by EVAN YIONOULIS. Yale Repertory Theatre: September 18-October 10, 2009. Set design by Timothy Brown, costume design by Katherine Akiko Day, lighting design by Paul Whitaker, with sound design and original music by Scott L. Nielsen.  Photograph© T Charles Erickson