Speak, I Will Listen

Have You Seen Us? at Long Wharf Theatre November 24-December 20

Have You Seen Us? is what one may call an "incident play," a story driven by a singular event. As its protagonist Henry Parsons (Sam Waterston) frames it in his prologue to this one hour-and-twenty minute meditation on racism, displacement, and addiction, sometimes it takes the nudging of one domino in the supposedly well-designed life to bring the rest falling down. The chaos of strewn dominoes that follows in the wake of that crash is Henry's story; the pattern that emerges from what has been tipped over is all playwright Athol Fugard's.

Performed without intermission, Have You Seen Us? tells a seemingly straightforward story. Bookended by Henry's direct address to the audience, the chain of events is simple enough. Our protagonist is an expatriate South African professor of Old English living in his fifteenth year in the United States. The event he recollects from two years earlier is actually a pair of closely linked moments that, he asserts, would change his life. The setting for both is a sandwich shop in a Los Angeles mall run by Adela (Liza Colón-Zayas), a Mexican immigrant of unclear status. Serving as prelude to the second, main event, the first finds Henry exiting the shop after a verbal knockout punch rendered by the store's proprietress in—as Henry sees it—their regular contest of mutual insults.

The blow delivered is her spot-on tagging of him as un borracho perdido, "a hopeless drunk." This precipitates an anti-Semitic outburst outside the shop directed by Henry towards an elderly Jewish couple that had responded to his "Happy Christmas" greeting with a "Thank you, sir, but we're Jewish." What follows in the sandwich shop a month later is a delicate dance of anger, shame, confession, and repentance as the full quartet—South African expat, Mexican store-owner, and Jewish-European couple—come together to make Fugard's portrait of guilt and absolution come alive.

Bringing to bear the full weight of the role's studied South African accent, Sam Waterston’s muscular portrayal of Henry carries much of the show's weight. This is hardly a surprise since the third-person limited narrative suggested by prologue and epilogue makes this story first and foremost Henry's. In the actor talk back that followed the December 8 performance, Waterston admitted that to help him master the accent, Fugard recorded Henry's part, although there is no question that Waterston invests the role with his own distinct interpretation. Henry is, at times, gruff and combative; at others, defensive and plaintive. The overall effect works wonderfully well. In a role that could have tipped into melodrama, Waterston manages to keep the lid on. True, Henry is intemperate and aggressive—hardly unusual for an alcoholic who struggles to stay on the wagon but appears to fall off with an implied regularity—but he is not given to histrionics. It is certainly not what Fugard would have intended, and any such presentation would have been deadly for a play that depends heavily on the relative bathos—yes, bathos—of the climactic event, which amounts mainly to the calling out of an ethnic slur.

At the heart of Have You Seen Us? is its title, which is as these things should be. It refers to the missing persons postcard Henry uses as a bookmark and tries to make light of in his hostile banter with Adela. However, Liza Colón-Zayas' understated Adela will have none of it, humanizing for Henry those who have gone missing, substituting story for stereotype, stopping cold Henry's largely guilt-driven efforts at a type of humor marked—and marred—by contempt. Have You Seen Us? is fundamentally about, if you will, "clothing" the stranger in human garb, no small matter in a play where all of the characters are not only of foreign origin, but have arrived for different reasons. The elderly Jewish couple, Solly (Sol Frieder) and Rachel (Elaine Kussack), are suggested to be Jews who had escaped a war-torn Europe; Henry is an evictee of an apartheid-free South Africa that is no longer familiar to him; Adela is no more—and no less—than a recent arrival looking for work but not trouble. All are displaced persons struggling to bridge the gap of language and attitude: Henry is perturbed by Adela's Spanish and often insists on translations of it; Adela is flabbergasted by Henry's ignorance of Mexican soldaderas (women "soldiers" during the 1910 Mexican Revolution) and continually castigates him as a gringo, a jarring appellation considering how un-Yankee-like Henry really is; Solly is completely befuddled that he can't get a bowl of chicken soup from Adela and equally mystified why she would propose chili as a substitute.

The only link that bridges this chasm is music. Granted Have You Seen Us? is no musical, but music is its language: Henry is enamored with Adela's voice and repeatedly importunes her to sing for him in her native Spanish; to an amused Adela, he eagerly belts out a rugby club "fight song" in Afrikaans; and finally, Solly's soft croon to Rachel and, at Henry's request, to us offers in Yiddish a lost world's insight into matters religious. Solly's song—the last of these—is also the most pointed since only when he sings will the semi-catatonic Rachel eat. As Fugard is at pains to point out, music is, indeed, life, for without it we starve and die.

It is Solly, poignantly played by Sol Frieder—from slightly stiffened walk to painfully hushed tone—who offers absolution to Henry, who wrestles with the guilt of the simple sin we all harbor but dare not speak: prejudice, hard and cold, without mercy or thought. When Henry bends knee to Solly and begins his confession, it is the latter's simple response, "Speak, I will listen," that more than anything drives away this darkness that shadows our better selves. Is there hope in actually being heard? Is there anyone indeed who will listen? It is all, Fugard suggests, we can ask for. And yet, when someone does make that offer and it is accepted—speak, I will listen—a world can change. For me, this production spoke: I have, indeed, seen it, and, yes, I did listen.

Smoke Signals

Once I've finished something I feel detached from it, almost as if it were written by someone else. It's like something actively blocks a particular type of memory from allowing me to feel responsible for it. So when a recent review of my novel Smoke appeared in New Haven Review, it seemed as if the review it were about something other than my novel. This is not a knock on the reviewer, however, since what I experienced—and expressed to the reviewer—was my sensation of reading the review. This strangeness of sensation has much to do with the way I wrote Smoke, or better, what technology I used to write it. Had I written this novel twenty years ago, I’d have an office full of paper drafts and scratched-through pages. And, knowing me, I’d probably have them “filed” in a way that made sense to me, which I would have kept up on as part of the work. There’d be a massive paper trail of my hand-written trains of thought. The neuropathy of the process would be slower and vastly different. This method, process, train of thought, as it were, would provide more steeping time. The result, I think, would be a more “rational” text.

Of course, I wrote Smoke just a couple years ago on a computer with an Internet connection. So I had instant access to an unbelievable library to research chaos and string theories and deep ecology, etc. & et al., and could copy and paste and re-write at lightning speed, edit and delete, and so on, but in the end have no paper trail, no record or “train” of thought, only an end product constructed in such a way that hopefully somehow reflects this negation of memory. The result seems a form of nihilism to the old rationalistic approach to writing a text. Not only is narrative story an illusion, but the process from which it emerges is also an illusion, an unreliable memory where everything seems part of an intuitive fictioning process. And what happens in the end is simply the method or stream or whatever runs dry and dies and goes away. It often has the same effect, due to the speed of its occurrence, as waking from a dream. A text is a fossilized form of a living dream. The waking is literally a separation from the mind into the body, from the text into the self.

Proust once wrote something along the lines of—if memory serves right—as time passes by every lie we’ve ever told gradually becomes true. I’m sure I butchered that, and who knows the translation I read may have butchered the French, and I can’t remember or find where the quote came from, so the whole thing is probably a fiction. But the point is that every day I sit down to write fiction, I do so assuming I’m already a critically acclaimed literary genius. It’s a useful fiction, but then to read the first review of my first novel and have it be so positive, gave reality to the sensation of being fiction, which I’ve long theorized it actually is. The out-of-body experience of reading this review was, in a sense, anecdotal verification of my pre-existing convictions. That feeling is transcendent, or one step beyond the normal bounds of experience. Put quite frankly, for a delusional narcissist like me to be told I’m not so delusional fosters an out-of-delusion delusion that's a hell of a lot of fun…a transcendent joke on everything.

So this review was not so much out of body as into mind, like a dream beyond the memories that Smoke still speaks to me.

Finally, I’ll mention the writer’s paradox, which my late, great mentor Raymond Federman stated this way: “All writers are liars; I am a writer.” And I weave tangled webs everyday that I’m guaranteed to forget tomorrow. So in the end it will always seem someone or something else puffed out that Smoke…those signals, or whatever else I may write today or yesterday.

Chuck Richardson's fiction has appeared in Thieves Jargon, Mayday Magazine and BlazeVOX , which published his novel, Smoke. His next novel, So It Seams, will be published next year.

This Catalogue is Analogue to the “Seen and not heard” rule -a quick look at J. Crew

We are getting mail in droves. We aren’t getting holiday cards, we’re getting catalogues, by the dozens. The people who lived here before us were certainly eclectic-Parts-Unlimited Snowmobile Catalogue, Orvis, and my recent study: the seemingly innocuous J.Crew glossies. It didn’t take a very long or discriminating glance through a few catalogues to notice something strange is going on with J. Crew. Something smells one-sided to me in their advertisements-and it’s not the Europhile merch they are pushing. It’s the fact that the catalogue is working hard to humanize their male models and is therefore glaringly objectifying their women models by that light.

Now, I know catalogues are only picture advertisements, not literature; and models are only models, not meant to be real people, but idealized concepts of human form and beauty. But, something is awry. Why has recent J. Crew marketing chosen to give real life “voice” to their male models, who aren’t models at all, but local production designers, or Brooklyn artists. And why are their female models still just quiet and cute, silent representations of our best awkward, adolescent female selves?

A quick look at their website supports this male/female model discrepancy too. The intro page of the Women’s shop is a pretty, red-lipped waif (stepping off her soap box!) in a belted “puffer” coat. The advertisement snippet: “It beats the cold (and looks good doing it!-next page, the “Boyfriend Fatigue Jacket”) That’s it.

The intro web page of the Men’s shop is a striking picture of twins, Dexter and Byron Pearts. It is the introduction to a life story. Both Pearts are designers for the company who have been recurring characters in the last two catalogues. In big red letters behind them, “Family Guys” appears, asking us to click and read on about what “holiday tradition” these handsome and talented designers “most looked forward to.”

Click on the red, “See what they said” and the online and catalogue reader is charmingly introduced to four more handsome men and their pulled quotations about holiday traditions. Each man is ostensibly a J. Crew employee-outside of the modeling department. They’ve been brought in to model-just this once-because they are attractive and interesting. They represent how every person wants to see him or herself. They are portrayed as dynamic humans who happen to be wearing J. Crew clothing.

Furthermore, each man is seen with the accompaniment of someone “near or dear” to them. Two models, Pedro Gomez and Christopher Brooks, are with their equally handsome children. Christopher has his wife with him in too, and the family sits around him Cosby Show style. And one other model, Mark Welsh, is accompanied by his dog, Agnes. Spencer Lyons, a J. Crew creative director made it to the shoot too. His sister and father were lucky enough to be suited up to join him. Wait a minute, I know the names of every male in this catalogue! Who are these people? And why do they get names and pulled quotes, and the women models get none?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not dying to read the personal lives or favorite holiday traditions of catalogue models. I may be interested in storytelling and the things pretty people say, but a grocery line skim through US weekly can satisfy me for months. It just seems to me that this compelling marketing scheme by J. Crew is glaringly one-sided, and one that still ‘objectifies’ women models as nameless nymphs flitting about arm in arm, from party to party (many of the pages market the women’s clothes as the “Friday” coat, or “ready to party!”) and that is it. While their male models are not just made models: they are creative directors, husbands, pet owners and dads too-and we know what they think about. Pedro Gomez philosophizes on page 114, “Giving and getting are opposite sides of the same coin.” What gives?

In spite of our economic (dep)recession, J. Crew has had the golden touch, ever since they outfitted Michele Obama. In May, Time Magazine reported, ‘no retailer owes more to the First Lady than J. Crew. In October, amid the Sarah Palin $150,000 wardrobe scandal, Obama wore a $340 J. Crew set on the Tonight Show. "Ladies, we know J. Crew," she said to the studio audience. J. Crew's Web traffic shot up 64% the next day, and the yellow blouse, cardigan and skirt she wore on the show sold out immediately. Later she wore a J. Crew camisole, cardigan and pencil skirt in the March 2009 issue of Vogue. A hefty wait-list immediately started for all three fall items.” The Obama girls have also been seem wearing J.Crew-cuts, outfits for little people. What does that mean? Did they figure they have Michele Obama speaking for them to all women customers, and stop there? The market would suggest this. But if I know J. Crew, I know from their catalogues that male and female customers are marketed differently, and therefore valued differently.

In March of last year, The New York Times reported on Dexler, the CEO of J. Crew, and they applauded him as a bold leader who ‘wants to get to know his customers. “ At J.Crew he’s (Drexler) intent on doing what he does best — visiting stores every day; reading, responding and acting on customers’ emails; and asking customers for input. He told Nocera (reporter):

“People want to be listened to and they want to be respected. Besides this is how you learn what is on their minds. What can be more important than that?”

Maybe he’s only talking to his male customers, because his female models, we are told, have nothing on their mind. And are they respected?

How can we ever know what is on the minds of the pretty young thing on page 29 in this week’s Holiday Catalogue? She’s got her Metropolitan Suede Ankle Boots on -one of them is hiked atop of a TV that is playing a video of a yule log burning. Her hands are in her pocket, she looks defiant. She isn’t saying “Holidays are an over commercialized joke--on you! Ha! Ha!” or even, “ I am killing my TV!”

The catalogue's only quotation on that page is, “Send warm wishes-shop out coat collection at JCREW.COM.” Maybe what she is saying is, “Shop!”

Fair or not, if you want conversation, and “real-life-J.Crew-wearing people,” skip ahead to page 114 where the men are. Ladies, we know J. Crew!

Nicholas Rombes, again. But it's relevant, I promise.

I learned recently about an interesting little plot regarding literature (or, at least, literary writing) and getting real mail, which is, as you can tell, kind of a thing with me. (Previously in this forum I've talked about letter writing and how no one does it anymore. Only, and happily, to be proven wrong by a reader of this very website.) It seems that Nicholas Rombes, who wrote the Cultural Dictionary of Punk I wrote about here a few months ago, is writing a novel called Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint, and he plans to publish and distribute it via the U.S. Postal Service. In other words, it's a serial that will reach its readers via snail mail. He's publicizing his work via the web, and signing up subscribers that way, but the readers will receive their chapters in the mail, along with their bills and L.L. Bean catalogues and flyers about political candidates. (I don't know about you but that's mostly what's in our mailbox.)

I think Rombes is a little crazy to do this, but you know what? Good for him. It's a weird little experiment but I can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't do it. I wonder how many subscribers he'll get. I bet some people will sign up simply for the pleasure of receiving mail that isn't a bill or something sent at bulk rate. I'm tempted, myself.

Losing my religion

Reading today's cover story in The New York Times Magazine, by Elizabeth Weil about her couples therapy with husband Daniel Duane, was for me a bit like reading a second novel by an author whose first book I loved: I want to read it—indeed, there is no chance I am not going to read it—and I hope it turns out well, but the whole situation is fraught because I will be devastated if it turns out badly. The things is, I really love Daniel Duane's writing. Let me put it this way: I am from Springfield, Massachusettes, land-locked and cold, and yet he made me enjoy reading about surfing. In fact, it would be a uncomfortably accurate to say I have a man-crush—OK, let's call it a crush—on Duane. He climbs mountains, he surfs, he cooks, he makes a living as a freelance writer, he re-built his own house, his house is in the Bay Area. What's not to love?

But could my love survive his wife's article?

The answer turns out to be yes, my love survives. But it is weakened, and will probably never return to full ardor. To judge from her article, he is a loving husband and father, but he is a serial obsessive of the kind I can't abide in person for more than about ten minutes. He mastered climbing—then surfing—then carpentry—then cooking! (What am I missing?) To know his passions through his writings is endearing; to know them through his wife's long-suffering observation is to make me realize how unlikely it is that he and I could be friends. Partly this is because of the inferiority complex all of us ineffectual, lazy non-starters have when in the presence of real doers; partly this is because of the moral valuation I find myself placing (perhaps unfairly) on anyone who would rather cook really well than order pizza and have more time to play with his kids. (Don't believe me? Read the article.)

I am not sure how to sort this all out. The issue of Daniel Duane is way too close to my face for me to see it clearly. I love his writing, envy his career, sometimes envy his life, don't envy his wife ... you get the idea.

Does this all bore you? Well, at least his books won't. Read them.

Love is a many-creatured thing

Strange Love in Outer Space, the final show by the Yale Cabaret this semester (two shows tonight; three on Sat, including an early show for kids), was written by Janyia Antrum, a twelve-year-old student who participated in the Dwight/Edgewood Project last summer.  The program gives local 6th and 7th graders from Augusta Lewis Troup and Wexler-Grant Community Schools an opportunity to work with Yale School of Drama theater people. Janyia was mentored by Brian Valencia, a dramaturg. The one-act that Janyia wrote in two days at the D/EP’s weekend retreat got a second act after she went home and dreamed about the characters’ further adventures.  The Yale Cab commissioned a third act to find out where the characters were going, and the full trilogy, produced by Jorge Rodriguez and directed by Christopher Mirto, has now had its debut.

What kind of characters?  The main figure is Splontusia (Alex Hendrikson), a four-eyed, one-armed creature who gets transformed into being mean and evil by an injection from the mean and evil Dr. Roswald Tuscanium (Dr. T, for short; Valencia), a worm-like creature with a slit for eyes, truncated arms, and a long trailing body.  By end of act one, however, these two would-be antagonists have admitted that, yes, there’s something charming about that slit and something bewitching about the gleam in that fourth eye...

Romantic complications ensue with the addition, in act two, of Grumis (Mirto), an aquatic creature with a rather dim-witted if likeable delivery who has always loved Splontusia, and, in act three, of the outrageously named Bonegettagettaquisha Star Jones (Dipika Guha), a pirate woman who happens to be part dog, and who has kinda had a crush on Dr T ever since science class back in high school.

And, yes, there are songs.  In fact, be prepared to get on your feet for the rousing “the way love moves in outer space” finale.

I don’t know if Janyia has ever seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I assume that her cast and mentors have, and they maintain a similiar level of zany engagement and campy silliness that made that film such a hit.  Dr T laughs diabolically and snivels pathetically; Grumis sings like an insecure kid on Sesame Street and then belts out his beloved’s name, “Splon-tuuu-syaaaaa,” like Stanley Kowalski with fins (and how he does those fish-hops I’ll never know).  And once Splontusia starts vacillating (Dr. T did chain her to a toilet, after all), B.S. J. arrives as a possible new match for Dr T; she growls and howls yet still manages to exude the charm of a funky Puss In Boots; and Splontusia herself, all in white, at a regal height, towering above the rest of the cast, veers in a mercurial manner from ditzy to heart-felt to aggressive to, finally, someone ready to be her own person.

See it to support young talent!  See it to meet creatures you won’t find anywhere else!  See it for the toilet bowl song!

Strange Love in Outer Space What does it take to make a relationship work? by Janyia Antrum (2009 Dwight/Edgewood Playwright) Directed by Christopher Mirto December 4 @ 8 and 11PM December 5 @ 4, 8 and 11PM Love just got a whole lot stranger. A trilogy of plays begun in the Dwight/Edgewood Project.

When Bad Sex is Fun

A response to Donald Brown

Donald Brown's comment on Philip Roth's nomination for the UK Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award got me thinking, about that award, about writing, and about what ever happened to all the fun in the world. See, every year prestigious literary prizes come and go—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize—and I can't shake the feeling that they're, well, sort of boring. Not the books, mind you; the awards, for all the reasons that critics of those awards criticize them. I realize that they lead to great things for those who win them, and they draw attention to books in general, and these are both wonderful things. But somehow the race itself—that period of time between when the nominees are announced and the awards ceremony—doesn't really fire. It's more like a stately procession, like a parade without a band. There are plenty of spectators, obviously, but they're not making a lot of noise. The same cannot be said of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The award was created in 1993, ostensibly "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." I don't buy this for one second. This award is, first, a terrific publicity stunt, drawing coverage from several major UK outlets. Second, it routinely does the thing that you wish more major awards would do much more often: It pits newcomers against old pros, and sometimes, but only sometimes, the newcomers win. Third, the qualification for the award rests solely on the quality of the writing. Plot? Characters? Who cares? This award is about how well people can put sentences together, period.

And maybe it's just me, but the first thing that hits me when I read the excerpts is: This writing isn't bad. (Those of you who might think so have never laid your eyes on cheap pulp smut, such as that collected in the NYU Library—look at the titles under "Sexuality" and you'll see what I mean. And this isn't even getting at what the prose is like.) The worst that can be said about them is either that they're funny (which is not even remotely a bad thing, and in any case, it seems clear that the authors almost always intend it to be so) or that they're mildly appalling (which, again, often appears to be the author's intent). And in every case, you can judge for yourself: It is ironic to me that the runup to the award involves excerpts from the various texts that are longer than what appears in most serious outlets for book reviews. If I were drunk right now, I would argue that the judges of the Bad Sex Award actually care more about good writing than the people at the National Book Award do, but thankfully for you, it's 10:00 in the morning on a Friday.

Most of all, though, the Bad Sex Award is fun. It's noisy and alive. It reminds us how books can stay vital and real without sacrificing fantastic prose, great ideas, and all the things that avid readers feast on. It makes you wonder if there can be other awards like it—Best Fight Scene Award? Worst Funeral Award?—that pull us in, make us laugh, and then make us read.

Performance Anxiety

Philip Roth, The Humbling, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 140 pp, $22.00 In The Humbling, Philip Roth has created a three-act tragedy for famed stage actor Simon Axler, now in his mid-sixties.  In act one, “Into Thin Air,” Axler mysteriously loses his ability to act, his wife leaves him to his misery, and he finally checks himself into a psychiatric clinic.  In act two, “The Transformation,” in his seclusion in rural NY, he begins an affair with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the forty-year-old daughter of old acting friends.  Pegeen has been a lesbian since college, and the affair with Axler, which occurs after her lover had decided, with no input from Pegeen, to undergo an operation to become a man, surprises them both.  Finally, in act three, “The Last Act,” Axler must cope with Pegeen’s termination of the affair, an event he had more or less expected but which he had convinced himself wouldn’t occur.

Laid out thus schematically, it’s easy to see the trajectory of the novel, but it takes a bit more delving to see what’s at stake in such a tale.  Roth brings to the story a serious and powerful grasp of final things that has driven his other recent short, emphatically focused novels Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007); all evoke the rueful feeling of aging and of no longer being able to take for granted one’s gifts and one’s ability to fulfill one’s desires.  An actor unable to act makes the predicament of age become not only an artistic problem, but allows Roth to push at the basis of social interaction.  For the idea of self that keeps us coherent is a role, or a series of roles, we have learned to play.

The notion that how we play our social and sexual roles is amenable to change, and that we can create all sorts of new frissons by opting for other possibilities, is the theme signaled by Pegeen Mike’s sudden change of sexuality.  In exploring “the transformation,” Roth, whose fiction is firmly planted in the contested realms of sexual politics, has fun with the notion that gender is a role, and that a lesbian, as a phallic woman, creates new sexual possibilities with other women and with men, if she so chooses. The fluidity of desire becomes very heady for Axler, but also, because of his vulnerability in losing his metier, emotionally dangerous.

But Roth is enough of an ironist to avoid the simple reading of Axler as castrated male (loss of acting ability) who finds recovered potency as clinging, aging “sugar daddy” to a woman-loving love object who allows herself briefly to become his “make-over,” from tomboy to Prada-wearing femme fatale, only to abandon him.  It’s not that that reading isn’t present, it’s just that it’s too apparent to the characters themselves.

What is more telling is that the break-up occurs after Axler helps fulfill Pegeen’s fantasy of a threesome with Axler and another girl, Tracy, a drunken pickup.  Axler gets to witness Pegeen wield a strap-on dildo to fuck Tracy, and become “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.”  The scene takes place to underscore that Axler, formerly the hero in the world of sexuality, is no longer “the god Pan,” and that that role has been taken, in our time, by the polymorphously perverse women of the world.  As an ironist who sees that the surest way to misery is to let a man get what he wants, Roth makes Pegeen’s sexual virility a blow to Axler rather than a turn-on.

For Axler there is no irony in his situation with Pegeen, even though he knew she was playing against type from the beginning.  But for Roth, who sees that, for men of Axler’s generation, losing the comforting roles constitutes the loss of their magical selfhood, the irony is that Axler ends up where he started.   Pegeen, as the new god Pan, giveth and taketh away -- and who would base his well-being on such fleeting transformations is, as they say, in for a world of pain.

But Axler was already in a world of pain, contemplating suicide, due to the loss of his gift.  The transformation of Pegeen he engineered merely lets him play at being a director, casting her as the object of desire he most needs.  The fact that she involves her parents in her life when she begins her affair with him indicates the extent to which Pegeen really isn’t playing the character Axler has cast her as, but is in fact playing with some oedipal urges of her own.  All of this is plain to him, as Roth’s narrator, wonderfully attuned to Axler’s inner voice, makes clear.  And yet Axler persists.  If only to forestall death with one last manifestation of the pleasure principle.

In this, his thirtieth book, Roth, whose first book was published fifty years ago this year, demonstrates again his astonishing ability to delineate the prickly realities of desire.  Few authors come close to his ability to chart evenly, with comic touches and gripping pathos, the ups and downs of women’s effect upon men.  If that means his women are primarily occasions for male reflection, and that his fiction is generally a one-sided dissection of libido, it’s still true that nobody does it better.

We deliver!

Yesterday, a beautiful sunny day in New Haven, the NHR crew began its hand-delivery of issue #5. A video crew was on hand to capture the happenings: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5si2LNI95mg[/youtube]

We partied like it was ten years ago

1999, to be exact. On Saturday, the New Haven Review took over Lyric Hall, the antiques and restoration house on Whalley Avenue. Owner John Cavaliere has retrofitted the old vaudeville space in the back, and so what choice did we have but to throw a party to celebrate issue #5? First, we ate and drank for an hour. The mango champagne punch was swell. Then the 75 or so guests retired to the theater, where NHR editor Brian Slattery (violin, guitar, piano), Craig Edwards (violin, guitar), and Joe DeJarnette (upright bass) played backup music as local notables (“locables”) read stories by their favorite authors. (Thanks to Laurel Silton for taking the pictures.)

Actor Bruce Altman read from Philip Roth’s Indignation and The Breast.

Alice Mattison read Grace Paley.

Janna Wagner read Lorrie Moore.

Nora Khan read James Salter.

And Lisa Sanders read Ian Frazier.

And then we drank again. And we ate more. Arlene Ghent catered, with pastries by Manjares. Have you had their brownies? I ask you—have you had their brownies?

We raised some money in pledges—low four figures, since you asked—but that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing people, meeting people. Tom Gogola was there. New Haven native Darius James, late of New York Press, was there. Katharine and Nicholas Fox Weber were there. My mom was there. Pang-Mei Chang was there, seeing John Cavaliere for the first time since high school. Bruce Tulgan and Debby Applegate were there. Betty Lockhart was there.

You were there. And if you weren’t, you should have been.

Or were you home watching this?

Upcoming Stuff in New Haven

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, who is currently the James Weldon Johnson Fellow at the Beinecke, is reading at that august repository of valuable manuscripts, 121 Wall St., this Wednesday, Nov. 18th, at 4 p.m.  Read my discussion of her book Native Guard here. Local poet Don Barkin, author of That Dark Lake, will be reading his poems on Friday, Nov. 20th, 7 p.m. at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave.  The event is co-sponsored by the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.  Check out my article on Don's book in this Thursday's Advocate, or online.

Both events are free and open to the public

And on Thursday night, Nov. 19th, The Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., is holding a fundraiser.  In this unique event, audience members will be hit up for suggestions, and the Yale School of Drama folks (students, faculty, staff) will have 60 minutes to bring the audience desiderata together in 15-20 minute pieces, to then be performed for the audience who will judge the best piece, according to announced criteria.  So if you've ever wanted to be in on a creative team, as well as a critical voice in awarding merit, here's your chance.  It's also a chance to support this very worthwhile theatrical endeavor.  Tickets are $20.  Doors open at 6 p.m. for seating and bar service.  6:30-7 p.m. is the time of the teams and planning; 7-8 p.m., dinner service is on; 8 p.m., the show begins.  Contact: 203.432.1566, or online at www.yalecabaret.org.

Dirty Pond Issue 2 up!

The Dirty Pond's second issue is now up, with work from Christina O'Connor, Greg Maurer, Patricia Dickson, Ryan Cyr, Derek Leka, and yours truly (though don't hold that against them). The Dirty Pond is New Haven's newest literary outlet, dedicated to showcasing the talent that New Haven harbors and creates. Submit to it, support it, but most of all, read it.

Loose Ends, Now Tied

In previous essays here at the New Haven Review, I've written about the death of letter writing and about my misty memories of flyers around downtown that proclaimed "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s." I wondered who it was that put up those flyers, and thanked them for their efforts, and expected nothing to follow. Yesterday I got quite shock when I received in the mail -- via the U.S. Postal Service -- an actual, real, hand-addressed letter from a man who tells me that he did it. He's the "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s" guy. Somehow he found my entry here from months ago, and he wrote me a letter to thank me for it.

Made my day. Hell: made my week.

The mystery is solved, my friends. I'm not going to reveal his identity, but I want you all to know, all is well, and the world is now, in my view, a slightly better place than it was twenty-four hours ago.

The tale of Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” as told in 10 lines of its own dialogue

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

Shirley Jackson Gets Hers

Some months ago, I wrote a little thing for the New Haven Review about my love for Shirley Jackson's book Life Among the Savages. I've just gone back and looked at the date on the piece (which can be found here on the website) and my word, it was almost a year ago I wrote that tribute. Goodness. I've lost track of time in precisely the same way that Shirley Jackson lost track of her blankets. Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller wrote an article about Jackson which will get a lot more attention than anything I'd ever write about Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to thank him for writing the piece because from it I learned some really good news. The Library of America is going to publish a collection of Shirley Jackson's work. Though I see no mention of the book on the Library of America website or on Amazon.com, the book is apparently scheduled for a June 2010 release. I for one am looking forward to it.

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.