A Great Failing on My Part: One Reader's Confession

I don’t think about this very often but every now and then it occurs to me that I must be the only woman in the reading population of the U.S. who did not devour the Little House books when she was a little girl. The subject came up again tonight. It comes up maybe once every two years.

A number of women were gushing over their love of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s oeuvre, and they turned to me expectantly and all I could do was say, “I read a chapter of one once in Cricket when I was little; I liked that story.” But beyond that, nothing.

When I was a little girl I owned no Little House books. I owned hundreds of books; my mother never refused to buy me a book I wanted to read, at least not that I can recall. I had a thousand stupid young adult novels and the complete Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and I had every single Trixie Belden book. But I never wanted to read Little House on the Prairie, I think mostly because it was set in the country, and my reaction to the country, even as a child (and -- notably -- even as a child who spent her summers down a dirt road in New Hampshire), was, “Eh, who cares?” And my mother never suggested them to me. She never presented me with a lovely boxed set -- you know the set I mean, in the checked box -- I think probably because she had never read them either.

What's more, I grew up when Little House on the Prairie was a crazily popular TV show, and the few times I watched it, it bored the daylights out of me. Even as a kid, I preferred Barney Miller and Taxi. So I went on with my life, totally ok with my ignorance of the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The thing that made me wonder if I’d missed out was reading Laurie Colwin, who in one of her essays cites Farmer Boy as being some of the best food writing out there. She quotes a passage in which a young boy (Almanzo?) goes to some country fair and eats an absolutely ridiculous amount of food and then he draws a long breath and eats pie.

Some time around 2002 I decided to finally have a gander at Farmer Boy; I remember finding a copy at Book Trader Cafe and thinking, “Well, ok, for two bucks, why the hell not.” It sat on my shelf for a few years before I finally read it. But I did read it. And now all I can remember of it is the bit that Laurie Colwin quoted. And have I read any of the other Little House books?

No, I have not. And I feel kind of bad about this. I feel sufficiently bad about it that I am seriously considering taking the first book out from the library and having it be a book I read aloud, slowly, chapter by chapter, to my little girl, who’s now old enough to enjoy something like that. Something long and sustained. We did James and the Giant Peach over the course of a week, and she loved it. We’ve done all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles, except (tellingly!) Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm, my copy of which I cannot find for the life of me -- and I have looked.

It’s August, but this will be my New Year’s Resolution. I will try again with Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Story Playlist 8: The Monkey's Paw

W. W. Jacobs: “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the scariest stories ever written, a classic of the subgenre of tales of wishes gone wrong. Who wouldn’t want to see a son one never expected to see again, to welcome him home? What if you had just buried him?

Mr. and Mrs. White host a military man who has recently returned from colonial India. While there, he acquired a mummified monkey’s paw, which he shows his hosts, telling them that it will grant its owner three wishes. Thinking this a marvelous find, the Whites are enthusiastic. But the military man warns them that he intends to dispose of it. He got it from a colleague who had all three wishes come true, and his third wish was for death. The military man spells out the lesson that the Whites will learn, if they should choose to use the paw. “It had a spell put on it by an old fakir, a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did it to their own sorrow.” He hurls the paw into the open fireplace, but Mr. White retrieves it, ignoring the man’s warnings.

Part of the pleasure of this foreboding and rather heavy-handed opening is that it provides its own warning—the Whites will surely be lured, as we might be, by the seductive idea of wish-fulfillment. But there always seems to be a catch in these stories, whether the wish-granter is a genie emerging from Aladdin’s lamp (Arabian Nights), a magic talking fish (Indian folktale), an elf living in a fallen tree (Grimm fairytale), or a wrinkled monkey’s paw. From the very start, we know that the wishes will lead to trouble. We read on with the appealing sense of dread, while a part of us wonders what we would wish for, trying to contrive wishes that could not possibly turn against us.

Why three wishes? In fairy tales, and in rhetoric, all things tend to come in threes. We have Cicero to thank for the way we construct arguments. He codified the idea that a good debate argument or essay should begin with an introduction, go on to make three arguments in support of the thesis, and conclude by reiterating the introduction and concluding. It always seems to be three wishes, just like it’s three little pigs, three blind mice, and three billy-goats gruff. Jokes almost always feature a punch-line on the third repetition of a situation (the first time he did this, the second time he did this, but the third time…) Two feels too few, four too many. I wonder if humans are wired that way, with three being this magic number, or whether, from the time of Cicero forward, we have grown accustomed to three as a magic number? Either way, it is always three wishes, and it is always the third that wreaks havoc. In this case, it is the second wish that the Whites will come to regret, and the third will save them.

For the Whites, wish number one comes out fairly well. The sum of £200 would cover the remaining payment for their home, and the Whites wish for this cash as a sort of test, to see if the paw works. It does but, as we might have expected, not in the way the Whites hoped for. Whoever or whatever is the God of Wish-Granting is an evil, vengeful type of Old Testament Yahweh, granting something but with a devilish angle that makes the wisher regret the request. For the Whites learn that their son, Herbert, has been killed, falling into the machinery at a factory, and in compensation they receive from the company for damages a check for . . . £200.

Distraught with grief, the couple tries desperately to undo what they’ve done. They can’t take back the wish, so they wish Herbert back to life with wish number two. Mr. White is reluctant to do so—he recognizes that horror accompanied the granting of the first wish. But Mrs. White convinces him. After all, what else have they to lose? After the wish is made, there is a long pause and it appears that nothing has happened. Then comes a knock at the door.

Mr. White realizes how the wish-giver, with his macabre sense of humor, could bend the wording of the wish into yet another horror. The delay between the wish and the knock at the door is because their son was buried at a cemetery some distance from their home. He has broken out of his tomb and slowly walked home, and is now banging on the door. Mrs. White is distraught, and rushes downstairs to open the door. Mr. White is torn—he loves his son, but the “thing” at the door is not their son, but his freshly-buried, maimed corpse. Before his wife can open the door, in a breathless flurry, he makes the third wish, and the walking corpse of their son disappears.

The suspense in this thriller is intense. From the moment of the second wish to the rectifying third wish the reader is sitting on a hot poker. But what sells these evil little story with its folk-tale trappings, is the character-study at its heart. There is palpable grief at the loss of the son, combined with the guilty recognition that it was greed and the foolish act of tempting fate that led to that loss. Then there is the overwhelming desire to undo a recent catastrophic accident, to turn back time, and to see again the mourned son, thought lost forever. This feeling sends Mrs. White down those stairs, seeing in her mind’s eye only the son she loves. But, because this is a horror story, we are also forced to imagine, with Mr. White, what they will find if they open that door. Something much worse than grief at what must be.

Such very real emotions, channeled through a supernatural story, are what make the plot so powerful, and make “The Monkey’s Paw” one of the most indelibly chilling stories ever. Once you read it, you won’t forget it.

Be careful what you wish for.

Theater News: Keeping Company

The New Haven Theater Company has built up a local reputation for their staging of economic and effective productions of well-known plays—Urinetown, in 2012, is still a high-point, as well as some grab-ya-by-yer-lapels Mamet plays like Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, not to mention slices of vintage Americana like Waiting for Lefty. Rarely, it seems, do they show off brand new plays. But tonight, thanks to newish member Drew Gray, a product of Bard College, key players in the NHTC family—George Kulp, Peter Chenot, Megan Chenot, Steve Scarpa, Hallie Martenson—will give staged readings of two brand-new plays written by Gray and being work-shopped by NHTC for eventual production. The reading is free, open to all, and takes place at The Luck & Levity Brewshop at 118 Court Street at 8 p.m., preceded by a reception at 7:30.

The new full-length play is “The Magician,” about a less-than-stellar magician on the less-than-five-star Vegas circuit. It’s after another lackluster performance and Mark Wonderton is shooting the shit with his manager Ronnie when he receives news that, as they say, "changes everything," leading to a new performance ethic that might just knock ’em dead. Billed as being akin to “two Mamet characters stuck in a Beckett play,” “The Magician” sounds like the kind of pithy little confrontational drama NHTC can really rock.

The play is paired with a short called “A Tall Hill… …A Warm Day,” in which a somewhat sad-sack character mourns a lost love, a sort of poetic coming to terms with the one that got away.

Both plays will have brief talk-backs with the playwright.

And, in case you’re worried that NHTC will shun their task of giving us grassroots theatrical evenings of American classics, how’s Our Town in the fall strike you? Thornton Wilder’s text has bedeviled many a high school English class to say nothing of all the high school stages it has graced with its winsome, wholesome charm. And yet. Wilder was something of a modernist who did things like read Finnegans Wake in his free time (or “Work in Progress,” as it was known then), so maybe NHTC will bring out the avant-gardey hi-jinx rather than the cuddly Grandpop Walton aura. Wilder attended Yale and ended his days in Hamden, and the play is 75 years young this year. All good reasons—coupled with NHTC’s way of doing this kind of thing, as directed by Steve Scarpa, who directed Clifford Odets’ Lefty in the midst of the OWS winter—to roast this chestnut yet again.

Story Playlist 7: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is a work of magical realism, though it was written before that critical term came into use. The principle is simple: what would happen if a baby was born as an old man and “grew up” in reverse, getting younger and younger, until he “died” as a newborn? It’s a wonderful idea, rife with comic potential and also allegorical possibility. In Fitzgerald’s hands, the story succeeds with a sense of gentle satire and no need for much in the way of flash.

Fitzgerald’s writing is spare and cool, with a somewhat cartoonish sense of the absurd. The absurdity of the story is heightened by the matter-of-fact method of presenting its facts. One has a sense throughout that the characters themselves are rolling their eyes at the absurdity of their situation, as when the doctor at Benjamin’s birth cannot bring himself to speak outright to Mr. Button about his son’s condition. With quick and masterful sketches, Fitzgerald provides some enduring situations: wrinkled old Benjamin in a bonnet, shaking a rattle to please his parents, when he would rather be sharing a cigar and a chat with his grandfather (who is, emotionally, the same age as “baby” Benjamin); Benjamin late in life, appearing as a young child, in the care of his now-adult son, Roscoe, who feels like his father is growing in reverse on purpose, just to spite him, and should have stopped the process at some point; Benjamin in his fifties setting off with a commission as a general in the First World War, only to be turned away at camp because he looks like a twelve-year-old boy.

The tale is most touching at its end, where it even triggers an element of longing in the reader. When we die in old age, we die with a full knowledge of impending death, with all of our memories of those who died before us held in a thread-bare sack (emptier the less our memory stays with us). Benjamin Button, on the other hand, grows younger and younger, losing memories and consciousness, but not in the way of Alzheimer’s, a condition that is upsetting because we are conscious of what we are losing, frustrated at what we fail to recall. Benjamin, rather, loses his memories in the way one sponges away the writing on a blackboard; it’s as if the life he lived hasn’t happened.

The story’s matter-of-factness subverts emotional effects. Fitzgerald is more interested in having fun with such elements as the proverbial disparity in the maturation of the sexes: Benjamin finds in Hildegarde a college girl happy to marry a man of eighteen who looks and acts fifty; but when Benjamin reaches fifty and looks eighteen, alas, his wife has become a frumpy matron in his eyes. There’s also much sport when Benjamin, thrown out of Yale as too old when he’s young, becomes in his maturity a wonder on the gridiron for Harvard, besting the Crimson’s staunchest rival.

Fitzgerald could have gone into more depth, to add perhaps melodramatic interest in Benjamin’s mental state around the point at which his sense of the diminishing future and his youth coincide. The reader is privy to none of Benjamin’s thoughts about how, when he becomes too young to play ball for Harvard, he must realize he will die in about ten years. We might expect some consideration of the fact that counting backwards means that Benjamin can determine the years he has remaining, doing away with the blessing that we generally do not know, precisely, when we will die. But to expect Fitzgerald to explore that might be to demand existentialism before its time. Instead, we simply see Benjamin grow ever younger until, absolutely unconscious as to what is happening and what has happened, he takes joy in kindergarten pastimes and finally becomes a newborn and passes away. The void of unknowing is powerfully rendered, and the point seems to be that the tabula rasa of birth and death may be one, an idea that may sound pretty good for those of us who fear death. Fitzgerald conjures the old idea that “an aged man is twice a child,” but subverts it as Benjamin had never been a child until the end of his life.

The flippancy of Fitzgerald’s style maintains an emotional distance, creating the kind of magical realism that treats the absurd and uncanny as plausible. We are allowed to paint what allegory and message we will onto the canvas prepared by Fitzgerald, who seems mainly interested in the reversal of the natural order and, like many modernists, in finding a way to thematize time’s relativity in a linear narrative. Oddly, “Benjamin Button” seems both of its time and ahead of it.

Theater on the Fringes

Last month Playbill ran an article on theater groups raising money for their projects through Kickstarter. One example was Old Sound Room, a troupe comprised of current and former Yale School of Drama students. In June, the group’s inaugural production, Old Sound Room Lear, played for 9 performances in Harlem. The show presented an interesting mix of Shakespeare's King Lear—significantly condensed in running time, shorn of many characters and combining others—and contemporary theater touches, such as movement, musical interludes, and the voices of interviewees at the Lilian Booth Home for retired actors. OSR Lear placed front and center the story of Lear as a tale of aging, of the aged coming to terms with their changed status—loss of youth—and with the freshness of the next generation, compelled by ideas of its own. If that doesn’t quite sound like the play you remember, that’s the point. Old Sound Room side-stepped the tragic aspects of the play in an effort to find something more upbeat.

YSD students gain great training in how to speak Shakespeare, so that element of the show was strong—King Lear being one of the greatest plays ever written, of course—and they also undergo immense challenges of compression in what are called “Shakespeare Quartets” where an extremely scaled-down cast of four or five tackles one of the Bard’s plays in intensive workshop productions. Such skills served OSR in good stead in their version of Lear.

Special mention should be made of Brian Wiles as Lear—head shaved for the occasion like a sort of sinister Daddy Warbucks; his rages were in-keeping with a Lear not mad so much as vain with an old man’s self-regard that added pathos to the performance. The scene on the heath in the storm was particularly memorable with Wiles bound by several ropes he tugged this way and that, making scary lunges at the nearby audience. As the evil sisters, Goneril and Regen, Elia Monte-Brown and Adina Verson, respectively, managed to find some good in the girls, as daughters beset by an unruly and uncooperative elder who has “ever but slenderly known himself.” It was easy to picture the offspring of aged Baby Boomers joining forces against the spoiled brats their parents have become, with Sophie von Haselberg's Fool a kind of doting stepchild.

Fisher Neal, as Kent, engaged Lear from time to time with lively argument, and Laura Gragtmans gave an affecting aura to Cordelia who combined with the role of Edgar—Gloucester’s good son—and ended alive by her father’s side. Here, with no Gloucester in the cast, Lear endured the blinding that befalls the latter, ending his days in peace with his faithful daughter, à la Oedipus, blinded and beggared at Colonus. The condensation of the play created a more recuperative evening, but it made of Edmund (Dan O’Brien) a more toothless villain such as is found in Shakespeare’s comedies. O’Brien did a nice turn as the discontented upstart, unmatched, here, with any good brother to "gall his kibe."

In some ways, the effect was a bit like watching half the play, but OSR found a way to extend their chosen theme by enacting the interviewees from the Booth retirement home. This turned out to be one of my favorite features, as the cast was uniformly entertaining in their staging of aged actors and actresses commenting on Lear and recounting what the process of maturing has meant for them. The movement segments were less clearly apropos, though they made for some swift transitions, while other touches—such as Gragtmans’ very eerie rendition of “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly”—added striking interludes.

So, what’s next for the group? According to Adina Verson, she and OSR Lear’s director, Michael McQuilken, have put together a show called Machine Makes Man which they are preparing to launch in the Amsterdam Fringe Festival under the umbrella of OSR. The Festival is smaller than some—such as New York’s—and is more selective, with the participants put up for the duration of their 6 performances. The show received input from the other OSR members, and there is talk of trying to get the piece installed within an alliance of 9 to 10 different Fringe Festivals in Europe and South Africa, which would give the group a base on a touring circuit. There’s hope too that MMM will find its way to New York, perhaps as early as the fall.

Machine Makes Man is based on the idea of “the singularity” as espoused in the writings of Ray Kurzweil, wherein technological advances overtake the human species’ ability to process them. In other words, living in the future will require “enhanced humans” who have developed beyond “an outdated homo sapien,” to use Ray Davies’ line. In the not-too-distant future, a married couple face the ramifications of enhancing themselves. Specifically, the husband has opted to become “a cloud of energy” and the wife pays a visit to the company responsible for the technology to complain, which sets off a flashback about how the couple got to that point.

Kurzweil, now the head of engineering at Google, has been a major player in the development of technologies with strong human interface, such as translating between languages and the text-to-speech synthesizer, and argues for mankind's improvement through technology. Taking its cue from how transgender characters are portrayed in our culture, Machine Makes Man aims to dramatize the condition of the “transhuman”—an idea Kurzweil sees as key to the future.

And what of the future of OSR? The group has been learning the ropes of being an up-and-coming DIY theater group—which means writing grants and applying for non-profit status—and, because the group’s first show followed hard upon the group’s founding, OSR has still to hash-out what kind of company they want to be. Clearly, the main design is for collaborative theater, though it may be that various theatrical outings may join beneath the OSR banner so long as some of the members are at its core. There are further plans to workshop Lear, though it can’t be done for the same kind of venue due to the “showcase code”—which means that something more in-depth and definite is likely to emerge by and by that is very like Lear and yet not.

For now, the 12 members of OSR have dispersed their divers ways—some returning as students to YSD productions in the fall—to meet again anon.

Story Playlist 6: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Rudyard Kipling: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (1836) To begin any tale with an announcement 1) that what you are about to read or hear is a story, with the implication that it is invented, and 2) that the narrator will be an overt presence leading you through the tale, is to set a tone that is decidedly unpopular in contemporary fiction. Most fiction published today tends to rely on the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of readers. The narrative voice attempts to disappear into the background, presenting a story without the filter of the overt narrator. The only times that we are aware of a narrative voice as such is when the author over-writes.

Right from the start, Rudyard Kipling tells us that we are about to hear the story of a brave little mongoose who saves a family from cobras. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is the most popular tale from The Jungle Book, a two-part collection of stories of humans and their relations with partially-personified animals. The tone is intelligent and playful, ideal for children who might like to believe that animals think like humans do, and enjoyable for adults. Among modern writers, relatively few opt for demonstrative narration to tell their tales, though some do. Salman Rushdie, for instance, is a novelist who feels like a story-teller. The narrator, whether or not introduced formally or speaking to his audience directly, is an overt presence, constantly reminding us that we are reading a work of fiction. In Kipling’s case, the story-teller guise makes the story feel more apt for children, whom we can imagine gathered round the narrator, gazing at his knowing eyes and sweeping gesticulations.

I first encountered Kipling’s story in the form of Chuck Jones’s 1975 animated film version, which I loved. For better or worse, it was with the animated Rikki in mind that I read Kipling’s original version. The tale is of a young mongoose, orphaned from his family when a flood washes him out of his nest. He is aided by a British family, recently moved into a bungalow in India, who find and resuscitate him. The bungalow has been long empty, during which time a pair of cobras, Nag and his wife, Nagaina, have enjoyed complete rule of the garden. The two cobras plot to kill the family, and thereby reclaim their territory.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, as he is called because of the sound he makes, is partially personified. He has animal instincts, but he appreciates the assistance and affections of the British family in a human way or, to be precise, in the way that we humans would like to believe that wild animals might appreciate our affections. He becomes a sort of house pet, cuddling up to his new family, as well as acting as their bodyguard.

Darzee, a bird in the garden, tells him about Nag who then obligingly arrives. He and Rikki confront each other and then Darzee warns Rikki that Nagaina is about to strike him from behind.  Rikki instinctively attacks but, being still immature, doesn’t do any real harm to the snake. The cobra couple escape, leaving Rikki to brood.

Shortly after, Karait, a dust brown snakeling as poisonous as a cobra but more dangerous because more easily overlooked, attempts to strike the boy Teddy. Rikki attacks the creature and leaves him for dead. Kipling’s fight scenes are gripping, with plenty of action clearly described, but with a tone that never loses its charm for children, as when he speaks of Rikki wanting to eat the snake “after the custom of his family at dinner.”

Later, a melancholic musk rat warns Rikki that Nag and Nagaina are up to no good, and in a brief horror-story moment, Rikki hears the distant scratching sound of the snake’s rough body against bathroom tiles. Rikki investigates and overhears Nag and Nagaina discussing their plan to regain control of the garden by killing the family, mentioning as well their eventual offspring from eggs hidden in the garden. Nag hides in the water jar to await the man’s bath in the morning while Nagaina withdraws. Rikki attacks and in a ferocious fight, Nag is killed with help from the father’s gun. Rikki is praised by the man for having saved all their lives.

While Nagaina mourns her dead husband on the rubbish heap where his carcass was thrown, and Darvee sings Rikki’s praises for the deed, Rikki enlists the help of Darvee’s wife to feign a broken wing and distract Nagaina long enough for Rikki to destroy her eggs. The plan seems to work. Rikki rushes to the hidden eggs and destroys them all, biting off their tops and crushing the baby cobras within (in a brief glimpse of something more gruesome than one might expect in a children’s book). But then Darvee’s wife calls to him, shouting that Nagaina has gone onto the verandah where the family is having breakfast.

With one last egg in his mouth, Rikki rushes to the bungalow to find Nagaina dancing before the pale, terror-stricken family. Rikki uses the last egg to lure Nagaina away from the family, but Nagaina grabs the egg and rushes for the hole in the garden that is her lair. Bravely, or foolishly, Rikki chases the cobra into her lair. There is a long wait, as the narrator warns us that few mongooses ever survive an encounter with a cobra in her den, and Darvee sings a song of mourning.

Oddly enough, my recollection of the animated film version of this story was that Rikki kills Nagaina, but is bitten in the process and dies a hero’s death. But in Kipling, Rikki does emerge unscathed from the lair, and has saved the family and the garden from the cobras. The tale is ideal in length, action, exoticism, and tone—just about the perfect short story for children.

Kipling’s sense of local color came to him easily, as he was a wonderfully well-traveled writer. Born in India, he studied in England, worked in Pakistan and India as a journalist, then traveled the world, residing for a time in Vermont and South Africa, before settling in England. He won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to win and, at 42, the youngest still.

Some have searched for allegory in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and, I suppose, we could do the same. A white British family moves into an Indian bungalow and, with the help of an Indian “pet” mongoose, drives out the evil Indian former residents of the area. One might see an analogy to English imperialism, with which Kipling is often identified, notably for poems like “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). We could look to the awful moment when Rikki kills the cobras’ offspring in their eggs, surprisingly graphic, as an image for genocide, and see Rikki himself as a running-mongoose lackey of his colonial overlords. But as Freud once said, “Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.” Kipling has given us a wonderful children’s story, celebrating the bond between humans and animals, and that’s good enough for me.

Story Playlist 5: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) Washington Irving’s marvelously spooky tale of revenge, set in early New England, is the best-written story I’ve encountered in the first week of my short story project, and yet it is the earliest. Poe and Hawthorne are fine writers, but seem both stuffy and over-stuffed, like pillows with too much goose-down inside, what with their murderer’s row of adjectives and contorted word orders. Sure, that was high literature during their time, but reading it now feels old-fashioned in a way that Irving (and Ambrose Bierce) do not. Irving’s story predates Hawthorne and Poe, but feels fresher. It would not seem out of place in a contemporary lit journal. The balance of humor to action to description is just right, making Irving a truly timeless author.

His story has also haunted readers since its publication, and has inspired countless variations. Ichabod Crane is an awkward, gangly school-master in a rural Dutch settlement of 18th century New England (specifically in what was once North Tarrytown, NY, and which renamed itself Sleepy Hollow, NY). Despite his physical oddness, Crane has a way with the ladies, and his eye falls on Katrina van Tassel, the Rubenesque daughter of a local wealthy farmer. Vying for Katrina’s affections is the local macho male, Brom Bones (if this were set in the 1990s, Brom would be captain of the football team and destined for fraternity fame). Brom and his gang of lads toy with Crane, but there’s a real feeling of competition for Katrina. Ichabod teaches Katrina singing, and therefore has an “in.” He also has a vivid imagination, and gets the jitters on his trips home from dinner and fireside stories at the homes of the locals.

Crane receives an invitation to a big party the whole community will attend. At the party, Katrina seems to favor Crane over Brom’s muscled and manly courtship display, and the skinny, turkey-necked Crane looks to have won her hand. As the party winds down, several guests, including Brom, tell of their encounters with the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian mercenary whose head was blown off by a cannonball during the Revolutionary War, and who was buried in the local graveyard. By night he roams the lonesome forest roads, returning each morning to his grave. In true alpha-male fashion, Brom claims that he raced the Headless Horseman, and was winning too, when he crossed a covered bridge near town, at which point the Horseman disappeared.

With these stories planted in Crane’s percolating imagination, the party disperses, and Crane heads home. Along the dark road he wonders if his mind is toying with him, as he hears strange sounds and fears he is being followed. Turns out he is. The Headless Horseman comes charging out of the woods and begins to chase him. As Crane flees, he recalls Brom’s experience of having escaped the Horseman by crossing the bridge into town. If only he can reach it, he might just escape. Crane gallops to the bridge and crosses it. He looks back to the Horseman, reared up at the far end of the bridge. But the Horseman lifts his severed head, which he has carried by his side, and hurls it across the bridge at Crane.

The next morning, Crane is nowhere to be found. But on the town side of the bridge there is a shattered pumpkin. Brom goes on to marry Katrina van Tassel and, as Irving notes, “was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin, which led some to suspect that he know more about the matter than he chose to tell.”

Irving leaves us with a proto-Scooby Doo mystery. Is the Headless Horseman real, as many in Sleepy Hollow believe? Or did Brom Bones decide to do away with his rival and embody the legend himself, posing as the Horseman in order to dispose of Ichabod Crane? Such question-mark endings are popular in more recent fiction and film, stories in which it is up to the reader to determine whether something supernatural has taken place, or whether the supernatural appearance is a cloak to cover over natural means and motivations.

Unlike Scooby Doo, Irving doesn’t feel the need to spell out the ending, openly unmasking the culprit behind the supernatural occurrence. His rhetorical means of implicating Brams is a bit more subtle. By the same token, he doesn’t completely disabuse readers who want a supernatural experience, by providing an authorial explanation. A clear-cut ending allows you to close the book and consider the case closed along with it. You can get on with the next text on your list, or consider what groceries you need to pick up the next day. Stories like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” refuse to allow this, prompting you to hold off on that next book, and lie in bed with the lights out, wondering whether the Horseman was Brom Bones or the ghost of a headless Hessian. Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” lets the reader eat his cake and digest it too, giving a lesson in the value of hints over statements.

Odd Couple

Tennessee Williams’ In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is not one of his better-known plays and it’s easy to guess why. The situation of its leads—he’s an artist of the American Neo-Expressionist variety, she’s a rapacious female of the liberated sex object variety, and they’re abroad in Tokyo in the Sixties, at a hotel where the only other in situ character is a Japanese barman rather nonplussed at their erratic ways—is a bit too specialized perhaps. We know Williams can write good female characters, and Miriam is no exception; it’s a plum role and one would expect top actresses to want to give it a try. The problem is the character of Mark who is having a nervous breakdown and creative difficulties. The imperfections of the male lead, one assumes, is what has kept the play from getting much revival. The production directed by Chris Bannow at the Yale Summer Cabaret, then, is to be applauded for giving it a shot and for succeeding so well. Watching the play, there’s no reason to suspect we’re experiencing a “problem play” and that’s in part because the approach here is to accept the play’s oddities, neither turning them into camp nor trying to smooth them over with earnest naturalism. We have to allow for Miriam’s soliloquies, spoken into a spotlight; we have to accept the staccato deliveries of unfinished lines, the many times a statement is stopped and redirected in mid-flight. One suspects that those who panned the play couldn’t distinguish dialogue where characters cut each other off and leave their thoughts hanging from dialogue where actors flub their lines and forget how a speech ends. It’s risky to be so erratic in speech, but Bannow’s cast manages, for the most part, to make the lurches in communication part of the communication.

The effect of the whole is greatly served by the set (Seth Bodie, Scenic Design)—it exudes the cool rigor of a Japanese restaurant, with plenty of neon and colorful liquor bottles that avoid the seediness Williams often reeks of. With the impeccable barman (Mitchell Winter) in place and the Formica tables all gracefully decorated with a single flower in a thin columnar vase, the bar is more formal than inviting. It’s the kind of place that should help one keep the demons at bay. And that’s why—we imagine—Miriam is hanging out there.

But, as she quickly makes us aware, Miriam is the kind of woman who sees no point to a man unless he wants her. So, her task is to use her wiles to convince the barman he should be interested. The fact that he isn’t, and is even comically put out by her overtures—some simply coy and flirtatious, some outright indecent—is the business that occupies the opening segment, with Winter providing spirited support as the kind of non-character (he never drops his “I’m just a barman” demeanor) so essential to the scene. This part of the play establishes Miriam, in Celeste Arias’s very capable hands, as an entertaining character with full emphasis on the latter term. Miriam is a “character,” a life of the party type only too happy to praise her own vitality and her tendency to “manipulate” male genitals in her free time. In her lime green dress with straight lines out of Mary Quant, her hair and false eyelashes à la Twiggy, Miriam is a creature of the late Sixties that all concerned—Williams, Bannow, Arias, and Kate Noll’s moddish costumes—get exactly right. The voice, the cigarette, the body language bespeak an “It Girl” still looking for “it.”

The play’s problems start when Mark enters the picture, flaunting his paint-daubed suit and so clearly not the kind of man we’d expect Miriam to be mixed up with. An eventual stab at back-story lets us know that she was aroused by his timidity and seduced him. And her utter disparagement of his current work seems to stand upon the fact that he used to be something. In other words, the man she’s with is not the man she married and we meet Miriam around the time that she’s decided to escape one way or another—either by means of a little poison pellet she carries around in a snuffbox or by means of having Mark shipped—sedated on a stretcher—back to the States, leaving her free to pursue that world of hotels and room service she’s been longing for.

All well and good, but what’s the deal with Mark anyway? As played by Mickey Theis, the artist still seems to have plenty of vitality even though he’s a shaking mess unable to walk very far on his own who needs his wife to—literally—pour drinks down his throat. And, while it may seem a bit monomaniacal, a claim to have just “invented color” is not unusual as the kind of hyperbole artists use about their vision—and it’s a cue for this production to achieve some wonderful effects with lights (Oliver Wason) and color, as when Mark bangs a gong and shifts the color scheme dramatically at the end of Act I. (Kudos as well to the interesting shifts in soundscape via James Lanius.  The production values of this show are superb.)

Mark’s a shambles yes, but his dealer—the dapper, gay, and somewhat Southern Leonard who arrives thanks to a summons from Miriam—seems to think Mark’s ravings are par for the course. One suspects that Williams wants Leonard to be a sympathetic character, a man who sees worth where Miriam sees only ravaged delusions, but the production here seems not to back that up. As Leonard, Mamoudou Athie is affected in a way that puts us on our guard. He seems to have no real warmth or regard for the realities Miriam is living with. He finally steps out of his coolness, but only to upbraid Miriam with an anecdote from his childhood that Athie makes both terse and affecting.

So, Mark. I keep returning to my sense that Williams didn’t really know how to write this character. Given the playwright’s penchant for macho brutes—Stanley Kowalski—and dissolute athletes—Brick—we might think that a macho and dissolute Abstract Expressionist—à la Jackson Pollock—shouldn’t be a stretch, and yet…. It’s hard to say what Mark is on about—when he starts raving about needing a long white beard and a step-ladder so as to equal the Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel, to recreate the creation of the Creation, we know we’re supposed to see the torment of someone trying to be a grand “Creator,” but one can’t help wishing that Williams made Mark one of those sloppy drunks who likes talking about when he was a boy. Something anecdotal would help sell this guy. Theis does his best with the grand ravings, at one point on top of a table, and there’s some well-choreographed wrestling between Mark and Miriam that lets us see what it’s all come to.

In the end Mark as artist figure seems a bit mismatched. Who works in hotel rooms? Writers, not painters. And why Tokyo? We might assume Miriam speaks for her author when she touts the discovery that, to her liking, Japanese men have not much hair on their bodies, so that slumming in Japan might just be one of the things one does as the Sixties come to an end, far from home and lost in translation.

I really wanted Miriam to have her way—ditch the stiff and get on with the grand tour. The end, in which a refusal to mourn morphs into a stripping away of falsity, makes for a borderline mad scene that feels true enough, and lets Arias pull out the stops, but, because her Miriam looks so good, we have to work to imagine her as pathetic as Williams wants her to be. Yes, as she says, at some point she’ll look in the mirror and know it’s all over for her, but “ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—”

In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel By Tennessee Williams Directed by Chris Bannow

Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Scenic Designer: Seth Bodie; Costume Designer: Kate Noll; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: James Lanius; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret July 25-August 3, 2013

Story Playlist 4: The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) Live burial was a significant fear circa 1839, when Edgar Allan Poe’s renowned story of Gothic horror was first published. In the days before medicine could clearly distinguish between a comatose state and death, it was not uncommon for doctors to declare patients with no apparent vital signs to be dead, when in fact they were merely in a coma. Alternatively called premature burial, live burial, or vivisepulture, such cases inspired a widespread fear of being interred before one had expired. For those with an irrational fear of premature burial we have the medical term taphephobia. Apparently, George Washington suffered from taphephobia (although in his time the fear was not so irrational): he ordered his servants to wait two days before burying him. Since the 1890s, medical advances permitted greater certainty about time of death, and the instances of premature burial, as well as a common fear of it, declined.

Scholars have suggested that some of our ghoulish horror stories may originate in instances of premature burial. Whether we’re talking about zombies (from Haitian folklore), vampires (from Eastern Europe), or other embodiments of the walking deceased, such legendary creatures might be given a semblance of reality when villagers spotted the occasional animated “corpse” of a premature burial, escaped from the tomb and scaring the wits out of anyone who witnessed a graveyard exodus. In an attempt to prevent premature burial—and to cash in on taphephobia—so-called “safety coffins” were invented, including an 1882 patent for a coffin with a breathing tube that doubled as a signal device. A Belgian count witnessed the revival of a friend’s daughter, just as her coffin was being lowered into the grave. He went on to patent a safety coffin that mechanically detected movement within. A burial vault in Pennsylvania was built with escape hatches that could be opened only from the inside. Creepy!

With this in mind, it’s not so surprising to find the theme of premature burial amply illustrated in the stories of Edgar Allen Poe (he even has one called “The Premature Burial”), but nowhere more strikingly than in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The unnamed narrator, a former school friend of Roderick Usher, is invited to spend some weeks at the family’s ancient manor house. The story opens with a well-known description, in wonderfully over-written detail, of the façade of the house, which seems to be crumbling and ruinous, though no stones are out of place. Nietzsche’s phrase, “When you stare into the abyss, know that the abyss is staring back at you,” seems apt for Poe’s description of the House of Usher: twice within one page, the narrator likens the windows of the house to eyes.

Like the family’s estate, Roderick Usher seems to his friend to be decrepit, suffering from an unspecified illness that might be mental or moral but which creates almost hysterical hypersensitivity. The narrator has a single meeting with Usher’s sister, Madeline, who, it seems, is even more sickly. Usher himself has become obsessed with the paintings of his ancestors, as emblems of a family history of aristocrats suffering from debilitating illnesses. Poe implies that Usher is a hypochondriac, suffering the symptoms of a disease that is all in his mind, grown out of his morbid condition. Shortly after the narrator’s arrival, Usher tells his friend that Madeline, his beloved twin sister, has died. The friends place her coffin in a basement room once used for the storage of gunpowder, and thus lined with non-reactive copper.

Usher’s condition worsens and he grows ever more nervous, paralleled by strange sounds that the narrator begins to notice, seeming to come from somewhere far off in the house. There is a pseudo-comic moment at the climax when neither Usher nor the narrator can sleep. The narrator reads Usher a melodramatic story and, as sounds are referred to in that story, similar sounds resound throughout the house. Usher swivels his chair to face the door, anticipating a climactic revelation. The door bursts open, and his sister Madeline, who was buried alive and has escaped from her coffin and burial chamber, is upon them. Usher and Madeline both die, and the house itself cracks and crumbles, and the narrator alone is left to tell the tale.

Is the story melodramatic? Absolutely. Over-written? You betcha. But I’ve loved Poe since I gorged on his horror stories in my early teens. I also (unfortunately) tried to emulate his writing style, which, if ripe in content, is over-ripe in wording. Other writers of the time, such as Ambrose Bierce and Washington Irving, seem positively minimalist in contrast to Poe’s prose as-over-egged sauce. But Poe’s prose conveys the sense of decay, dis-ease, and dread that is the theme of so many of his renowned stories, from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” to “The Cask of Amontillado” all, incidentally, like “Usher” with a slow buildup to an instantaneous crescendo as climax. “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees a murderer tormented by the illusion that the heart of his victim, buried beneath the floorboards, still beats—he is so plagued by the imagined beating heart that he goes from calm to hysteria in moments, while under police questioning. “The Pit and the Pendulum” features an elaborate execution device in a dungeon, in which the victim is strapped in place on a plinth in total darkness, surrounded by a deep pit while a bladed pendulum swings back and forth over him, slowly descending to the point at which it will slice him through. The nervous tension of the prisoner’s attempt to escape builds to a sudden deus ex machina. “The Cask of Amontillado” sees a jealous man, in the midst of a party, lure his rival to the wine cellar to show him a particularly fine bottle of Amontillado dessert wine. The lengthy “prank” is turned to horror at the moment the final brick is set in place, walling the enemy into the wine cellar forever.

The real horror in all of these stories is not the murderous action itself, but the psychological trauma that surrounds it. In the case of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the psychological torment is suffered by the executioner. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” it is the torment of the victim, anticipating his slow demise (or the reader, empathizing with the victim’s demise).

The moment of overt horror in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is when the undead Madeline, in her burial clothes, bursts into the bedroom to confront her brother/executioner. That’s the “boo!” or “gotcha!” scare, Hollywood film-style. The more interesting and subtle stab is the understanding of what has wracked Roderick Usher for the past few days, since his sister’s “death.” We feel that Usher realized that he had buried his sister alive early on, but he did nothing to rectify the situation. It is unclear as to whether he buried her alive knowingly, as a form of execution, or whether he genuinely thought she was dead. We can’t determine if he made a mistake, in which case the sounds of her escape are real, or if he is suffering from hysteria at her death. The fact that the narrator hears the sounds gives them reality but until the last moment we don’t know what their source is, and since Usher dies at the revelation of his sister’s moribund but living condition, we never learn what Usher actually knew. Was he hearing his sister trying to escape her punishment or was he being haunted by a woman he believed to be dead?

There is some suggestion of an incestuous relationship between the twins, and we might look to the gruesome tradition of Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome, buried alive with a single candle, a loaf of bread, and a jug of water if they broke their vow of chastity. Usher’s idealization of his sister, and the suggestion that they may have been closer than was natural, might lead us to believe that this premature burial was an intentional execution due to his guilt over what had passed between them. But such guilty secrets, if they exist, never come to light outright. I find the other interpretation, in which Usher is less villainous and more psychologically torn, more intriguing. He buried his sister, genuinely thinking that she had died, and mourning her. It was only after the fact that he began to wonder if he had erred. But he could not bring himself to check, for fear of what he might find were he to do so. Then come the sounds of Madeline breaking through the screwed-down coffin lid, and then scraping open the copper-covered iron door of the basement burial chamber, before coming to confront her brother.

The horror is in knowing that you have done something horrible, yet unable or unwilling to try to right it. Usher’s shift from anguished victim to passive executioner may be more disturbing than the idea that he is a calculated executioner all along. Though in either case, the idea pertains that “evil deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” Usher, we suspect, was nearly mad by the time the narrator enters the story and everything he does is generated by his morbid condition, his obsession with his degenerate ancestry, and his unhealthy relation to his dying sister.

But, again, Poe’s theme of premature burial is not simply his own dark imagining. In fact, scholars have identified a historical event that likely inspired “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Usher House, a building that stood until 1800 on the Lewis Wharf in Boston, is said to have been the site of a revenge-burial. A sailor was caught having an affair with the young wife of the house’s owner. The husband locked the pair into the room in which they were caught and, shades of “The Cask of Amontillado,” walled them in. In 1800, when the house was demolished, their skeletons were said to be found together in the rubble. Whether true or apocryphal, the story made the rounds in Boston in the 19th century, and Poe would surely have been familiar with it. By making the Ushers brother and sister, Poe adds a more sinister incestuous theme, richly thrilling even for pre-Freudian readers and perhaps even more uncanny for audiences today.

Story Playlist 3: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Mark Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) In Mark Twain’s first big hit story, the narrator, on behalf of a friend, goes to ask an overly-talkative barman named Simon Wheeler about his friend’s former acquaintance, Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley, who may or may not have stayed in the mining camp at which the barman works. Wheeler doesn’t know Leonidas W. Smiley but he does recall a Jim Smiley, and he quickly launches into a story about the latter.

Twain’s short, short story—only 2,631 words—is the narrator’s word-for-word recollection of Wheeler’s monologue about Jim Smiley’s gambling escapades. Smiley would bet on anything, even that a friend’s wife would not recover from illness. He didn’t care what he bet on, or which side he took, as long as he could make a bet. He once had a dog named Andrew Jackson that developed a technique to win dogfights bloodlessly, grabbing hold of his opponent’s hind legs with his maw without biting until the opponent had to give up. Knowing of Andrew Jackson’s strategy, an opponent set an invalid dog, missing its hind legs, against Andrew Jackson, and Smiley’s prize dog lost.

Later, Smiley takes an interest in training the story’s eponymous hero which he named Dan’l Webster. He spends three months teaching the frog to jump until he is pretty sure that Dan’l Webster can jump better than any other frog in the county.

An unnamed bettor appears and Smiley engages him in a $40 bet (no small change back then) that Dan’l Webster can out-jump any other frog. The bettor takes a good look at Dan’l Webster and comments, “Well, I don’t see no p’nts about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” He wants in, but laments that he has no frog of his own—indeed, if he had brought his own jumping frog, we might wonder about his sanity as much as we do about Smiley’s. So Smiley offers to catch him a frog to use in the competition.

While Smiley is off in the woods frog-hunting, the bettor decides to hedge his bets, just in case this Dan’l Webster really is as good as his owner claims. He spoon-feeds buckshot into Dan’l Webster’s mouth until the frog is full, then places him gently on the ground. Smiley returns with a frog for his opponent, which he places beside Dan’l Webster. Each bettor prods his frog’s rear end to send it jumping, but only the newly-caught frog jumps. Dan’l Webster remains stock still. Smiley is confused, but pays his loss. As the bettor walks briskly away, pleased with his victory, he restates, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s better’n any other frog.”

Smiley notices that Dan’l Webster “’pears to look mighty baggy,” and might not be well. He lifts him up and exclaims, “Why, blame my cats, if he don’t weigh five pound!” Turned upside-down, the frog belches buckshot. Smiley realizes he’s been had, but the stranger is long gone.

Wheeler is then interrupted in this uninvited story by business at the bar. He tells the narrator to wait, and when he returns, he begins the story of Jim Smiley’s next escapade, involving a one-eyed cow. But the narrator, having realized that his errand to learn about Leonidas W. Smiley is fruitless, slips away before he can be cornered again.

Quite aware of his tale’s irrelevance, the narrator begins his story with a warning, directed at the audience, that let’s us know his tale, far from satisfying the errand and any curiosity about Reverend Smiley, will be “as long and tedious as it should be useless to me.” The narrator even wonders if his friend sent him to speak to Simon Wheeler as a sort of prank, knowing that he’d be roped into listening to a pointless, if charming, story.

Part of the humor of Twain’s text is in the narrator’s use of dialect, with words spelled out to imitate his characters’ pronunciation: “Dan’l” for “Daniel,” “p’nts” for “points.” Today, this is viewed as a dangerous technique as it can misfire and seem to condescend to characters or make them regional stereotypes. Twain gets away with it, in part because we sense that the sound of his speech is key to the character of Wheeler the raconteur and Smiley, the archetypal bet-maker. Much of the story’s charm relies on its folksy, I’m-gonna-tell-you-a-tale oral tradition.

Twain’s stories deliberately court the feel of an old man in a rocking chair, telling you a story on a cricket-infused summer night, with iced tea in beaded glasses and mosquitoes round your ears. Twain made a great deal of money by performing his stories, essentially story-telling on stage, and key to his success was his genius at approximating the mannerisms of speech, the way that phrasing and word choice create character. But along with reproducing the homey way that unschooled people speak, Twain captures the way that anecdotal story-tellers can spin yarns apropos of little and keep it up indefinitely.

The narrator’s tale allows him to play straightman to a lonely old man who is pleased to find an interlocutor, even an unwilling one. Wheeler “backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair.” Smiley is a pure caricature, relentless, none-too-clever, and all-too-eager to display his failings, not only with the dog, Andrew Jackson, but with his celebrated frog, Dan’l Webster. A gambling addict, Smiley has the time and wherewithal to dedicate three months to frog-training, only to be bamboozled by a cleverer stranger. If we enjoy Wheeler’s company, then we should be curious to know what Smiley got up to with his one-eyed cow.

Twain himself rewrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” several times, giving it different titles, and it was widely translated. He wrote an essay about the writing of “The Jumping Frog Story,” and he even demonstrated his anti-Gallic sentiment by retranslating into English the French translation of the story, retaining the French grammatical structure to humorous effect, in his “The Jumping Frog Story: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil.” Twain was a master at making one effort earn multiple times, as evidenced by at least three versions of this story published in books and magazines, his on-stage performances of it, and his addition material in the form of an origin essay and his re-translation from French.

In his 1903 essay, “Private History of the Jumping Frog Story,” Twain tells how pleased he was to learn that a similar story about a frog had appeared as an ancient Greek fable, along the lines of Aesop. Of this he wrote, “I think it must be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not the case of a good story floating down the ages and surviving because too good to be allowed to perish.” He would later learn that this rumor was mistaken—there was no ancient Greek fable about a jumping frog, but his own story had been adapted by a Professor Sidgwick in his book on grammar, Greek Prose Composition. The idea that the story has ancient origins suggests that Twain’s version might be either an allegorical or a moral tale with a didactic purpose, as with Aesop’s fables.

And yet Twain’s apparent confusion about an ancient antecedent sounds a bit like a shaggy-dog—or buckshot-filled frog—story itself. Is the uncertainty surrounding the origins of folk tales the point, or is Twain simply ribbing us with the possibly of allegory—in which animals take on the names of important American personages? Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, while certainly historically significant individuals, are also figures of folk lore and tall tales. Is there an allegory behind Twain’s story, or merely fun with the very notion of moralizing fiction? There may be less to it than meets the eye, but the “Jumping Frog” story is undoubtedly charming, funny, was hugely popular a good fifty years after its first publication, and has been duly “celebrated” ever since.

Story Playlist 2: The Minister's Black Veil

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) René Magritte, the surrealist painter, once said, “a face is not a face unless it’s facing you.” Some of his best-known paintings feature an anonymous businessman with his back turned to the viewer, or a businessman in a bowler hat whose face is covered with a large green apple, or a young man facing a mirror that reflects the back of his head. These effects are disconcerting. Faces make us feel we know someone—recognizing them, reading emotions and back stories into the contours of a visage. Masks unnerve us. We might assume it hides something horrible, but at least it alienates us from the familiar. To enjoy the creepiness of Halloween is all well and good, but imagine how upsetting it would be if your child’s little friend, who looked so cute in his Friday-the-Thirteenth hockey mask, refused to take it off for the duration of his sleepover at your house…

Magritte created mysterious paintings that begged to be engaged with, the visual riddles within them solved—and yet Magritte offers no solution. Magritte went a step further, and even denied reasonable solutions proposed by art historians. For example: Magritte suffered a formative trauma in his youth. His depressive mother drowned herself, and young Magritte saw her corpse, with a wet, white nightgown pulled over its face. Later in life, Magritte frequently painted a women without faces and figures draped in cloth. It takes neither Sigmund Freud nor Sherlock Holmes to link Magritte’s trauma to this ghostly mother-figure in his paintings. Yet Magritte denied any such interpretation.

Magritte’s paintings draw in the viewer to make us active investigators into the mystery of the painting, but then leave us with an unsolved mystery. Such is the effect of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s much-analyzed short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” We do not know if Magritte ever read it, but if he had, he would surely have approved.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” takes place in the late-18th century New England of Hawthorne’s parents’ Puritan generation, and it deals with themes of guilt and innocence and sin, with who is chosen for the afterlife, and with the reactionary and hypocritical actions of the upright citizens of the new United States of America. Hawthorne provides a simple set-up, but one layered with clues to the “solution” of the overt mystery of the story—if only we know how to read between the lines of text.

Mister Hooper, a Puritan minister, is quiet, staid, but well-liked and admired by his congregation. One day, without any explanation, he appears at Sunday prayer wearing a black veil made of double-thick crepe, the sort that a woman might wear at a funeral. It hangs over his forehead and down to his mouth, and it flutters gently as he breathes. In that week’s sermon, he preaches about “secret sin,” but all his congregation can do is wonder at the veil. They immediately find it repulsive, “awful,” disconcerting, though they do not know why. Mister Hooper even smiles, as if nothing is the matter, but no one dares to ask him directly why he wears the veil.

Hooper’s choice of mask is wonderfully creepy. There is a cross-dressing element to it (the mesh black crepe is decidedly feminine), and funereal. When asked, at first playfully then seriously, by his fiancée Elizabeth to remove the veil, he refuses, stating that he must wear it until his death. He offers no explanation and, understandably, Elizabeth leaves him. He pleads with her not to leave him lonely, but he could hardly expect her to stick around.

Hooper confides in no one and offers no explanation beyond the general ministerial concept of bearing a sort of cross for the sins of others, doing so in an overt manner. Indeed, his wearing of the veil makes him a more effective minister, with throngs coming to hear his sermons (both to stare at him and to hear him speak) and those with their own burdens seeing, in his veiled person, someone in whom they can confide.

The question that prompts the reader to read on impulsively: why does the minister wear the veil? It is a question Hawthorne chooses not to answer, though there are clues from which we might cobble together a solution. Certainly the story can be read as an allegory, but Hawthorne is no surrealist; we may seek a rationale for the veil within the context of the story.

Critics have picked apart this story, among them Edgar Allan Poe. A master of detective stories himself, Poe noted, early on, that the minister’s veiling was a mystery for readers to solve. First, we must assume that the wearing of the veil has meaning for Hooper. Hooper’s desperate pleas to Elizabeth not to leave him, despite his refusal to remove the veil, suggests at once the desire for self-punishment (no one is making him wear the veil), and a desire for companionship as he carries his cross.

The next question is, why now? Hooper showed no inclination to odd behavior before he showed up at this Sunday service wearing his black veil. The timing must, therefore, be significant. After his first appearance with the veil, Hooper had to preside over the funeral service of a young woman. As he leaned over the open coffin in prayer, the veil slipped forward. Hawthorne describes Hooper reacting with horror, as if he were afraid to show even the dead body what lay beneath the veil. A superstitious woman at the funeral claims to have seen the corpse in the coffin shudder when Hooper’s face was momentarily revealed to it. Others claim to have seen the ghost of the young woman walking hand-in-hand with Hooper en route to the burial ground.

This provides our best clue as to why Hooper has decided to punish himself. First, a veiled sermon on secret sin, and then the funeral in the afternoon. These two factors lead to a noted correspondence with the story of Reverend Joseph Moody (1718-1753) of York, Maine. According to his own diary, written in code in Latin, Moody accidentally killed a friend when the two were young. Moody’s father required his son to sit through the night beside the friend’s corpse, as a means of atonement. Moody took the idea of atonement to an extreme. From the time of his friend’s funeral, Moody wore at all times a “black handkerchief” over his face, even while preaching in church. He was nicknamed “Handkerchief Moody” for his trouble. It is a safe bet that Moody’s haunting true story inspired Hawthorne’s brilliantly creepy work of fiction.

Taking Moody’s story as a backdrop, we return to Hawthorne’s mystery. Without warning or confiding in anyone, Hooper wears a black veil, preaches about secret sin, then recoils at showing his face above the corpse of a young woman over whose funeral service he must preside. Some say that they saw the ghost of the young woman walking hand-in-hand with Hooper en route to the graveyard.

Add it all up, and we’ve got a potential back story. Hooper did something for which he feels he must punish himself. The act of veiling leaves him, literally and figuratively, alone for the rest of his life, all interactions filtered through wearing a woman’s funereal veil. He tells no one why he wears it, not even his fiancée. He has an unusually strong reaction to the corpse of a young woman he must bury.

What Hawthorne does not overtly state, but what is implied, is that Hooper either had an illicit affair with this deceased young woman, and/or he was complicit in her death. The affair is implied by the vision of Hooper hand-in-hand with her ghost. Hooper was engaged to Elizabeth, and adultery was a serious sin in Puritan New England. But Hooper’s strong reaction at the funeral, and his choice to wear the veil beginning with the day of the funeral, coupled with the inspiration of Handkerchief Moody’s story of manslaughter, suggest that Hooper was also somehow responsible for the woman’s death. We cannot know more than this, and of course this all only suggested. Hawthorne states relatively little, but leaves clues in the silences, in what is not said, that allow us to piece together a plausible solution. And what we cannot know for certain is far more suggestive and enduring than a last line that removes our doubts and conjectures with a neat explanation, tying off the story into a bow.

Examples of this can sometimes frustrate: viewers loved the TV series Twin Peaks and Lost, but neither began with a solution to their myriad mysteries in mind. When the shows had to end, writers struggled to come up with a satisfying solution (it’s hard to write a whodunit when, from the start, you didn’t plan who did it) and, according to many viewers, they failed to satisfy. But such open-ended mysteries prompt discussion of allegorical and symbolic meanings. Hawthorne, far advanced for his time, shows the power of unresolved mystery.

Story Playlist 1: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

In the Summer 2013 edition of NHR, Noah Charney describes his decision to create and read through a “playlist” of 30 great short stories, written in English. Here on the website, we will be posting his reflections on each of the stories in turn. For the full list, see the essay “Story Playlist.” Noah welcomes comments on his comments, and feel free to suggest other stories that might be included.—Eds.  

Ambrose Bierce: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890)

It is always difficult to write about a work, particularly a short work, without including spoilers. This is no exception.

If you’ve not read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” you should really put this down, go read it, and then come back. The story is only about 3,000 words long, but packs a wallop into its few pages. You’ll want to read it twice. I know I had to.

We love magic tricks, whether in film or fiction. Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek” provides just such a magic trick, in the flip in its final line. Something happens in the last line that reverses our expectations and prompts us to immediately read the story again, to make sure that we understood the ending correctly, and also to check that the author did not “cheat.”

When it works, the “flip” is a hugely popular author’s trick, akin to an illusionist’s sleight-of-hand. Think of a film like The Sixth Sense, or take The Usual Suspects.

The first 9/10ths of Bryan Singer’s film, written by Christopher McQuarrie, leads us to think of the quasi-legendary criminal known as Kaiser Söze as a powerful, charismatic strongman, whose story is being hesitatingly told by Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), a hunched, stuttering, limping low-man-on-the-totem-pole of criminal life, crippled by cerebral palsy. It seems that the haughty detective interviewing Kint has bullied him into confessing the truth, and is in complete control of the interview.

The great pleasure at the end of that film is when we suddenly realize, in tandem with Detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palmintieri), that in fact Kint has been controlling the interview, cobbling together on the fly a plausible story, using words and names that he sees scattered around the detective’s office to weave a web of fiction. Detective Kujan realizes this too late, as Kint is already out of his office and on his way to disappearing from the law’s reach. The director then lets us in on one further secret that some of us may already have guessed: Kint is not an invalid at all. He is, in fact, Kaiser Söze.

As soon as I finished watching The Usual Suspects the first time, I immediately had to watch it again. I wanted both to see if I had understood it correctly, and to ensure that I had been legitimately fooled by the flip at the end. Was there enough foreshadowing of the ending? Absolutely. The film is laden with clues, once we know what to look for. The flip is honest, and brilliant. It takes an absorbing crime film and makes it an ingenious one.

This first thing I did, upon reading Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was to double-check the publication date. That’s right, 1890. The story feels so modern—had it been published in 1990, I would not have been surprised. And that’s largely because of the “quick-cut” of Bierce’s flip.

Here’s the story: During the American Civil War, a southerner named Peyton Farquhar is about to be executed by hanging, for a failed attempt to sabotage a bridge near his Alabama home. As he is about be hung from Owl Creek Bridge, Farquhar looks down at the river below and imagines his escape. If only he could free his hands, he could slip the noose off his neck and dive into the river, evading the bullets of the soldiers standing guard.

Farquhar’s mind then leaps back to before his arrest. While making conversation with a soldier dressed in Confederate grey, Farquhar had learned that the Union Army would shortly try to cross a railroad bridge near his home, and that the bridge might be sabotaged by burning the driftwood that had gathered around the pylons supporting it. In a miniature flip—one that might cause us to question appearances—Bierce tells us that, while appearing to Farquhar to be a Confederate, the soldier was actually a Union scout in disguise. With that, we can put two and two together and understand that Farquhar, who had been itching to help the war effort, attempted the sabotage suggested by the enemy scout—and was caught in the process.

Back at the bridge, the plank on which he stands shifts, and Farquhar drops toward the river, the noose around his neck, his hands still bound.

Here Bierce freezes time and toys with our sense of perception. The world slows down, as Bierce describes everything that Farquhar feels and thinks in the few seconds of his freefall. Suddenly, Farquhar feels the noose snap tight, but his neck does not break. Before he is strangled, he feels the rope tear above him, and he plunges into the river. Perhaps implausibly, he manages to free his hands from the rope that binds them, while rising to the surface of the water, then dodges the first volley of bullets from soldiers. He then evades a cannonball fired at him and floats downstream and around a bend, just as a cannon-load of grapeshot pierces through the trees above him. He runs through the thick woods until, without knowing how he found his way, he is again at home, where he falls into his wife’s arms.

Had the story ended there, Bierce would have provided a wonderful adventure story, an escape from certain death and a homecoming, punctuated by the incredible realism of death (or near-death) in Farquhar’s mind. We see what he sees, feel what he feels, in an ultra-sensory experience marvelous in depicting the heightened clarity and subjective time-sense of Farquhar’s distress. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” would still be remarkable, and deserve its place in all the classes that assign it as a great example of story-telling.

But Bierce provides us with one more treat, the aforementioned flip. Just as we see Farquhar return home, improbably escaping death and running to his wife’s arms, Bierce whops us on the head with this: “Peyton Farquhar was dead: his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.”

The entire escape occurred in Farquhar’s mind in the seconds of his free-fall, before his death.

It is important that Bierce makes his last line its own paragraph. If it did not stand alone, distinct from the previous paragraph, we might be thoroughly confused. We need that ever-so-brief pause that comes between the end of one paragraph and the start of the next. That pause is a key tool, governing both time and space. The space indicates the end of one place, where Farquhar is alive, and another, where he is dead. And the time it takes for our eyes to navigate the blank space takes us out of one narrative, that is still going forward with the “happy-ever-after” of the Farquhars, and into another, where a life has ended.

What Bierce offers us is a complete reversal of what we expected to read next. That flip encourages us to return to the start of the story, to make sure that the flip was legitimate. In retrospect, there are a number of clues that should have given us pause, and made us wonder what was really happening: the improbabilities of surviving the drop with one’s neck in a noose, of the rope breaking, of being able suddenly to free one’s bound hands, of dodging rifle fire, of the cannon being fired at Farquhar when we were told it was trained on the bridge, not the river, of Farquhar finding his way home through the woods. And there’s the tease of the false-flip, when Farquhar imagines how he might possibly escape, while he still waits, bound, upon the bridge. We think we see an example of mind over matter, that what the hero imagines comes to pass, only to realize that life, in Bierce’s hands, doesn’t work that way.

In case we were in danger of misunderstanding the situation, Bierce’s last line specifies that Farquhar suffered a “broken neck,” so there can be no confusion as to whether the last line could be the start of his surprise escape—it is, in fact, the end of it.

Games with time are popular now, as seen in films like Memento and Donny Darko, a film which uses a flip with time indebited to “An Occurrence.” Bierce showed his truly avant-garde prescience to write such a complicated yet hyper-realistic story more than a century ago.

The end of Bierce’s life might have been inspired by one of his stories. A renowned journalist for a variety of San Francisco newspapers, Bierce was covering the revolution in Mexico, accompanying Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, when he disappeared. Last noted in Chihuahua, he was never heard from again, his body never found. This mysterious disappearance has inspired a number of works of fiction and film, its suggestion of the uncanny worthy of an Ambrose Bierce story.

Diary of a Madhouse Wife

The third play in the Yale Summer Cabaret “Summer of Giants” is Federico García Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, a play that departs from the naturalism of the previous play—Strindberg’s Miss Julie—as much as the latter departed from the rhymed farce of Molière’s Tartuffe. Lorca’s play is typical of what we get in theater once naturalism bit the dust—stylized acting, amorphous sets, significant props—and the Cab production, directed by Artistic Director Dustin Wills, goes further, with puppets, projections, a mayor on stilts, comic turns and ambient music. The setting has been transposed from Spain to West Texas, and that’s where the fun starts. The story centers on a young wife (Prema Cruz) married to a shoemaker (Gabe Levey) and the fact that they make each other miserable. As the shoemaker says at one point, “my house isn’t a house, it’s a madhouse!” The wife spends a lot of time chatting with the many interested men in the town—when she’s not reviling her husband or screaming out the window at the townsfolk who mock the couple as a local entertainment. Enough is enough, and so, cursing his sister (“may God rest her soul”) who made the match, the 53 year-old sets off from town and trade, leaving his 18-year-old wife to fend for herself.

If you expect her to dress for fun and flirt like crazy, guess again. She opens up a tavern to pay her way and is no-nonsense with all her drowsy customers, men who congregate but who accept that she’s not up for grabs. But there’s more to it. Lorca fashions a play that explores the wife’s psyche without engaging in psychological realism—providing, for instance, a child from the town who acts as her confidante and informant, and former suitors a bit mythic, and Wills follows Lorca’s logic into some strange byways.

First of all there’s that mayor on stilts (Mickey Theis, sounding and looking like Howard Hughes by way of Leo DiCaprio) who walks softly and wields a big stick (ok, “no symbols where none intended,” as Beckett would say); then there’s Ato Blankson-Wood as the wide-eyed Boy, who is also a puppet and who bursts into a lovely trance-like song about a butterfly, and he also plays Don Blackbird, one of the wife’s admirers equipped with a talismanic version of his namesake; then there’s those neighbors—Ceci Fernandez and Michelle McGregor—who generally carry around windows to suggest their incessant voyeurism, but also become croaking old crones to tell Mr. Shoemaker “the best thing is to take it easy.” And then there’s Mamoudou Athie sporting outrageous accents and insinuating his way into the play in a very amusing fashion.

As the Wife, Cruz isn’t quite as winsome as we might expect an 18 year-old to be but she excels at the “at wit’s end” frenzy that drives her husband away. She always has a soft word for the Boy, and during her husband’s exile grows in stature, but Wills’ production seems loathe to play her for laughs—until the ending. And as Mr. Shoemaker, Levey is a study in constrained complaint, crouched on a low chair with knees high, hugging himself and beseeching heaven. As the Puppet Master who visits the town late in the play, Levey comes into his own, narrating, with the warm manner of a born raconteur, a comic drama uneasily close to home for the Shoemaker’s Wife.

Lorca’s play provides the kind of satisfying closure that we expect from fables and folk tales, though with high irony as well. The Cab’s production respects the material all the way, adding great touches like a Colts-drawn stand-off worthy of a Sergio Leone Western or Quentin Tarantino, and projections that serve to remind us that what we’re watching is taking place in a conceptual space—the play opens with a puppet of The Dramatist (Fernandez, queen of oddball voices) to let us know it’s all “theater”—where the inner landscape is dreamy and tinged with surrealism, like that weird moment with the trampled lamb.

Original music, from Mickey Theis, is atmospheric and pointed enough to carry some scenes on its own, which means that the play gets to take its time, working into moods and out again, while at other moments it switches gears in deliberately jarring ways. Anything to keep us from settling in too easily. Like Theis’ moody guitar, Kate Noll’s set recalls Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, that morality tale from the Eighties that also featured a husband on a hegira, with its receding telephone lines in an otherwise desolate place. The openness and depth of the stage works too, giving the set distinct spaces that never quite cohere—light-years away from Miss Julie’s real-as-a-skillet kitchen space.

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is a pointed comedy, poetic and quizzical with many interesting touches.

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife By Federico García Lorca Directed by Dustin Wills Translated by Gwynne Edwards

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Nok Kanchanabanca; Production Manager & Technical Director: James Lanius III; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro; Artistic Intern & Program Designer: Rocky Bostick; Management Intern: Jonathan Esty

Artistic Director: Dustin Wills; Managing Director: Molly Hennighausen; Associate Artistic Director: Chris Bannow; Associate Managing Director: Anh Le

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret July 11-July 20, 2013

Let's Rock

Smokey Joe’s Café, now playing at the Long Wharf Theatre, is a “juke-box revue”—which means it’s a non-stop sequence of songs by Leiber and Stoller (some with others) with no dialogue or scenery. The strength of this Grammy-winning Broadway show is in the material—L & S were great!—and in the performers, and everyone here gets to show-boat at some point in this invigorating show. The songs are sequenced and choreographed so as to give the proceedings a certain continuity, beginning in the “Neighborhood” and, after some dallying with “Young Blood” and “Ruby Baby,” getting on board a train to “Keep on Rollin’” to “Kansas City,” “Searchin’” for and sometimes finding “Trouble.” Well, “Fools Fall in Love,” some with “Don Juan,” some with “Poison Ivy.” Eventually we arrive as an aspiring wanna-be “On Broadway,” followed—pointedly—by “D. W. Washburn,” about a skid row derelict who rejects charity, followed in turn by “Saved,” a big gospel number with Dawn Marie Driver bringing down the house (or raising the dead) for an Act I closer.

Act II gets into the straight-out rockin’ part of the show, beginning with “Baby That is Rock & Roll” and taking us through teen-focused hits like “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown.” If you’re surprised that Driver covers Elvis’ hit “Hound Dog,” don’t be—it was written for, and was a big hit for, Big Mama Thornton, and that’s the way Driver delivers it after an intro that’ll give you goosebumps. But don’t worry, there’s ersatz Elvis to be had elsewhere—check out Jay Rivera flinging his hips to “Jailhouse Rock” or Johnathan Celestin swallowing the vocal King-style. Other great moments in Act II: Stevanie Anita Williams torching up “Pearl’s a Singer”; the four female singers giving “I’m a Woman” a definitive treatment; Farmecia Ward, who is great at flirting with male audience members—even sitting on the lap (and taking the wallet of) one lucky soul—gives “Some Cats Know” plenty of feline sleekness, and Jose Figueroa, Jr. pulls out all the stops on “I (Who Have Nothing)” which gets almost operatic in its pathos. Meanwhile, Ron Lucas sends up tear-jerky songs on “There Goes My Baby” and lets the crowd join in on “Love Potion #9.” Then there’s Driver taking it on home with a “Fools Fall in Love” that will leave you breathless. Finally, “Stand By Me” gets a full spiritual treatment to end the set.

Along the way, the members of the cast have fun with audience members—which might include getting your hair tousled by a slinky siren, or pulled up on your feet to dance with a guy or a gal. Audience members in the lower seats should be warned that their participation may be required. The night I saw the show there were some impressive impromptu moves from the stalls. Like Ray Davies says, “everybody’s in show-biz.”

And how about that band? They fill the Long Wharf space without overwhelming the singers, backing an upbeat show that will have you—if you’ve got a pulse—bopping along, chiming in, and on your feet by the end. Even if you didn’t grow up with these songs—I have to admit that most of them are before my time—you’ll find yourself reliving an era of pop music that’s the basis for so much of what once flourished on AM radio. After all, how many composers can boast that they were covered by both Elvis and The Beatles?

The Irving Street Rep’s Production of Smokey Joe’s Café Featuring the Songs of Leiber and Stoller Directed by A. Curtis Farrow

John Bronstein: Musical Director & Pianist; Darius Frowner: Musical Director; Hassan Wilkerson: Stage Manager

The Cast: Vida Allworthy, Derrick Baker, Johnathan Celestin, Dawn Marie Driver, Jose Figueroa, Jr., Ron Lucas, Jay Rivera, Famecia Ward, Stevanie Anita Williams

Musicians: Piano: John Bronsten; Drums: Bruce Jackson; Sax: Rick Matt; Bass: Jeff Fuller; Guitar: Dominic Landolfi

The Long Wharf Theatre July 10-28, 2013

Seeing is Believing

Like Circa, the acrobatic-dance-theater troupe that visited last year’s Arts & Ideas Festival, Sequence 8 is all about defying the limitations we normally expect the human body to obey. Unlike Circa, Sequence 8, by Les 7 doigts de la main ("seven fingers on one hand")  is more purely entertaining, much less interpretive. Indeed, with Colin Davis acting as comic MC, the show winks at symbolic significance and the interpretive buzz of on-the-air commentary, as when Davis “interviews” Eric Bates, a wonder of dexterity and timing, about his “new book.” Davis has great audience rapport and adds to the show a nice flair for deflating pretensions. The skills on display are truly astounding and there are many visceral thrills at seeing what this talented and rigorously trained group are able to do. The show begins with acrobatic dancing on a bare stage and, though relatively tame in terms of daring, the expressive power of seeing spot-on tumbling and flying leaps in the midst of choreographed movement provides an immense charge. The show starts in a joyous manner and proceeds to inspire and amaze.

Each viewer will walk away with a different favorite sequence, I expect. But there’s no way not to be awed by Devin Henderson. Like some comic-book film super-hero, he seems able to fly, swoop, leap and land with no sense of strain or even of weight. Watch him ascend a pole as though he had reversed the pull of gravity. Watch him leap through hoops in a variety of approaches and configurations—it’s hard to explain why seeing this done so fluidly and effectively is so damn satisfying. One might like to give it a symbolic meaning beyond its sheer skill and bravado, and I suppose it amounts to seeing the will and the body so fully one in such a split second of impressive precision.

Or check out the astounding Alexandra Royer who gets the gasps going early in the show with her stunts on the Russian bar, leaping high, higher, flipping, turning and landing at the exact spot she started. Much later in the show, she works with a hoop and rope way above the stage, lit dramatically. Her work, and the beautifully choreographed trapeze work by Maxim Laurin—which involves interaction with the rest of the troupe as a sea of hands and bodies—are the more poetic moments in the show, but most routines have a kind of subtext that makes them more than stunts. A good example is Laurin and Ugo Dario using a teeter-totter to send each other catapulting high above the stage. To step back from the sheer brilliance of their skill is to see an image of, as they say, the cause-and-effect, give-and-take action and reaction of any kind of human interaction.

Then there’s Bates and his boxes. Or as he says, his routine is inside the box you’ve got to think outside of. Working with precise movements and exact timing, his dance with gravity takes the form of juggling a trio of boxes, making them seem alive rather than inert, yet finding them always exactly where he wants them to be. As with a magic trick, one would like to see his routine replayed in slow motion to “get” fully what he’s doing. In real time, we watch a melding of mind and matter that is enthralling.

As well, every stunt demonstrates the necessity of working together and the great benefits of finding a supportive group. At various times in the show I found myself musing on how such unusual talents would be wasted without the right setting. Davis refers to this aspect in his amusing opening monologue: without an audience there’s no show, and without a show what would we get from looking at an empty stage. Sequence 8 gives the audience plenty to see, and there’s an engaging sense that the troupe is watching us too, to see how we react and to gauge what impresses us most.

There’s one more show this afternoon. Go see it, and be prepared to be made giddy with the high spirits of the high-flying and talent-flaunting troupe that is Les  7 Doigts de la Main.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Sequence 8 Les 7 doigts de la main

Production and artistic direction: Shana Carroll, Isabelle Chassé, Patrick Léonard, Gypsy Snider, Sébastien Soldevilla, Samuel Tétreault

Direction: Shana Carroll & Sébastien Soldevilla

Cast: Eric Bates, Ugo Dario, Colin Davis, Devin Henderson, Alexander Royer, Maxim Laurin, Camille Legris, Tristan Nielsen

June 27 & 28 at 8pm June 29 at 2pm Shubert Theater

Of Thee I Sing: Laurie Colwin, Geraldine Coleshares, and 20 Feet from Stardom

Forgive me, dear readers, for returning once again to Laurie Colwin. But it's unavoidable right now. A couple of weeks ago I became aware of a movie, a documentary, about rock and roll backup singers. It's titled "20 Feet from Stardom," and there was a review of it in the New York Times that knocked my socks off. I read the review almost without breathing and kept waiting for the article to refer to Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving, which is probably the best novel ever written about rock and roll backup singers (not that I can name another one). But no such reference ever appeared. I thought, "Well, that is an oversight."

The movie focuses on singers like Merry Clayton and Darlene Love -- voices you know, even if you don't know that you know them -- and it does seem to be the case, as Colwin's character Geraldine says, that not everybody in rock and roll wants to be a star. One of the stars of the movie, Lisa Fischer, was interviewed and the Times quotes her as saying:

“I reject the notion that the job you excel at is somehow not enough to aspire to, that there has to be something more,” Ms. Fischer explained, speaking with her eyes closed, as she tends to do. “I love supporting other artists.”

She continued: “I guess it came down to not letting other people decide what was right for me. Everyone’s needs are unique. My happy is different from your happy.”

The upshot: Ms. Fischer has paradoxically emerged as a star partly because of her decision not to seek stardom." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/movies/the-voice-behind-mick-and-others.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Colwin's reluctant heroine, Geraldine Coleshares, seems to be cut from the same cloth. In a scene where an old rock and roll scenester, Spider Joe, interviews Geraldine, seeking awesome stories about the good old days, and how climbing the ladder to stardom was the best thing ever, Geraldine disappoints Spider Joe:

"...The fact was, I loved to sing, but it was my heart's desire to be a backup, not a singer. I said this to Spider Joe.

"You lie, babe. Everybody wanted to be a star." "Actually, everybody did not want to be a star." " (Goodbye Without Leaving, p. 137.)

Spider Joe tells Geraldine she's a drag and leaves, off to find someone more fun to interview.

20 Feet from Stardom is playing at the Criterion downtown right now. I know it's unlikely that there will be an act of God to allow me to go see it in a theater, but I wish I could. I will settle for watching it at home some day, some day soon. I wish that Laurie Colwin were around to see it, though; I bet she'd've gotten a real kick out of it. I know I will, when I finally get to watch... and listen....

UPDATED, June 30: Having written this piece I decided it would be a huge mistake to wait to watch the movie at home, because I'd never be able to hear the voices properly. So I did some juggling and made it to a Saturday matinee screening. This movie is WAY worth seeing. It will be at the Criterion at least through this coming Thursday, and I urge anyone who has even a fleeting interest in seeing the flick to go see it in a theatre and not wait to watch it at home, no matter how good your "home theater" is, I don't want to hear about it. If I could, I would arrange for a private screening for all former staffers at Cutler's Records.

Mistress and Man

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the second offering of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s “Summer of Giants,” finds the Cab even more surprisingly naturalistic than in their production of Tartuffe. Kate Noll’s set is a wonder. If you’ve been to the Cab more than once, you know that the space tends to rely on a lot of make-believe in turning the basement space into anything approaching a “real place.” Not so here: the kitchen where all the action happens has the kind of “below stairs” look we’ve all gotten to know from Downton Abbey or (for elders) Masterpiece Theater. And why not? Miss Julie is a masterpiece by a master. Strindberg doesn’t pull any punches and he knows exactly what he’s doing every step of the way. What we might find mystifying, not living in a rigid, class-bound society where a lady dancing with a lackey at a Midsummer’s Festival can cause tongues to wag, his text spells out for us. We get, right off, that Julie (Ceci Fernandez) is young and contemptuous of social niceties. She might even believe in sexual democracy, which is to say that if a guy is good-looking and can dance, does it matter that he’s her father’s bootblack? Well, no, we say, being so egalitarian ourselves and all. Yeah, right, we say, realistic about such things, even in 21st century America.

And that is very much Strindberg’s point. Doesn’t matter when and where you live, hypocrisy is pretty much the stitching in the social fabric. We all pay lip service to ideals we’ll never live by and, when others live by them, we get profoundly uneasy. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? If even some members of our Supreme Court can’t get with that, than how so the landed gents of 19th century Sweden? Julie is stirring things up—just to stir them up, we might say—and, as the adage says, “play with fire, get burned.”

What she stirs, among other things, is a cauldron of sexual feelings, above-his-station longings, and even tender memories of her childhood in the breast of Jean (Mitchell Winter), a house servant.

And as another adage says “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Is there really fire between Julie and Jean? That’s where directing and acting choices matter, to let us know whether or not we should believe these two, after coupling, are meant to be a couple. At times they do make sounds that suggest they might actually believe in each other, but…

As director Chris Bannow presents it, our Julie (Ceci Fernandez) is the type who can cry on cue, but also the type who can be genuinely shocked, and even hurt. By giving us a somewhat tender and even desperate Julie, Bannow and company tip the sympathy toward her, even if there is a certain “serves her right” view available, not least because she seduces Jean away beneath the dozing nose of his girl of his own class, Kristin, the cook (Celeste Arias).

The possible ethical and social dimension between the women, we might say—today—is where Strindberg slips a little, and that would be true if the two women were anything like “equals.” But when Julie nearly invites Kristin to run away with her and Jean, it’s not exactly a ménage à trois she has in mind (though such was not unheard of among the free-love types of Strindberg’s day, and he lets us hang fire a bit as to how “scandalous” this modern woman is willing to be). Rather, Julie sees, it seems, a life of togetherness as Mistress, Man, and Menial. The idea even makes her giggle.

Fernandez is a mercurial actress and so she has the requisite skills to render a Julie who, if not a mess of contradictions, is at least charmed by her own headstrongness while also abashed by it, and excited by Jean’s boldness while contemptuous of everything about him that makes him less than her social equal. She fans the fire if only to see how close her fingers can get before they’re burnt.

Much falls upon Mitchell Winter as Jean. He has to be believable as the kind of man a lady-in-making might go slumming for, and he has to have qualities that make us want him to be a class hero. All that comes through wonderfully well, thanks to Winter’s ability to convey Jean’s high opinion of himself. His charm is a weapon, though, and we do well not to forget that he—like any man—might be playing with a woman for kicks or even out of a grudge against the powers that be. Winter never comes across as truly malevolent, but he does convincingly seethe and grovel when he has to confront how unequal he is to the heroism expected of him.

And that’s what makes Miss Julie a more twisting tale of the battle of the sexes than found in an older contemporary like, say, Ibsen. The ending shows a terrible restitution of the powers that be, with Kristin prating about the Lord’s forgiveness and Jean acting the lackey because the lord (of the manor) has returned. That leaves Julie to end it all like any melodramatic “ruined woman” or—and that’s the note this production seemed to strike—to walk out “a better where to find.” Is Julie—to use comparison to Ibsen—a Nora or a Hedda? I’ve always thought the latter, but Bannow’s production—and Fernandez’s show of soul—makes me plump for the former.

In any case, this Miss Julie is riveting from start to finish, and its trio of actors fine at the turns on a dime of Strindberg’s script (even Arias’ Kristin has to get from clueless surprise to righteous superiority pretty quickly). It’s the kind of play where it matters not only what is said, but how it’s said, so…pay attention.

Miss Julie By August Strindberg Directed by Chris Bannow Translated by Kenneth McLeish

Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Jacob Riley; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

June 20-29, 2013

The Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street, New Haven

A Bike of One's Own

Freewheelers, the new production by A Broken Umbrella Theatre featured in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, takes place in a renovated space at 300 State Street, a large room entered, via a subterranean passageway—and a grand old elevator—from Chapel Street, where Horowitz Brothers once stood. The work done simply to make the space available was considerable and the little trip to the playing space lets one reflect on the layers of history that ABUT projects tend to excavate. Since 2009, the diverse troupe has embraced the past of New Haven as inspiration for shows that create a sense of community while making entertaining use of facts about our city. The current show is not quite so grand as the Library Project last fall, but what it lacks in range it makes up for in focused story. The story of Anne (Lisa Daly), a factory worker with a yen to cycle on the exciting new invention the bicycle (patented in New Haven in 1866), is paralleled with the story of Elizabeth (Robin Levine), wife of Isaac the factory owner, who has some health issues that cause her to faint at times. What does the modern doctor (Lou Mangini) prescribe, to the consternation of conservative Isaac? Why, cycling! It does wonders for the constitution, of course, but…

But this is the 1800s and women mustn’t do anything unseemly—especially not in public! To make matters worse that factory Isaac runs happens to be rather new-fangled itself: it’s the first factory to manufacture woman’s most necessary accessory—the corset! Mr. Isaac Adler (played with measured if questionable authority by Ian Alderman) isn’t likely to embrace the idea of his wife cycling, nor is he amused when Anne shows up for work in male attire, the only way to cycle comfortably, you see. . .

As you might expect, the women may have to come to an understanding. Along the way, there are lovely songs to set the mood, factory routine that smacks of Metropolis, Levine’s dance routine with a chair—we all know Flashdance, sure, but here the pas de deux with a Chippendale actually serves a thematic purpose and is quite expressive—and some verbal fun via overlap when Isaac and Bigelow, his 2nd in Command (Mangini), plot how to make “boning” more flexible (no jokes, please, this is a kid-friendly production) while the women get flexible on their wheels. The men are referring, of course, to whalebone, the stiffening ingredient in the torso-confining strait jacket known as the corset.

As Anne, Daly is fresh-faced and earnest—not subversive, just common-sensical. As the more “vaporish” Elizabeth, Levine has the right waxen look for a wife being discussed in the third person by her husband and her doctor, and her reaction to Anne’s response to her inadvertent humor gets a big laugh. As Amelia, one of the children employable at a factory in this benighted time, Remsen Welsh is charmingly wise beyond her years. Mangini is deferential as the doctor, dedicated as Bigelow, and slightly conflicted as the bicycle store owner selling to a young woman a tool in her liberation. As the factory workers, Megan Black, Cynthia Miller, and Malenky Welsh do simulated sewing in synch and let their tongues wag with the resentment of exploited labor. Adler’s got a lot of headaches ahead of him…maybe there’s the possibility of a sequel as we follow the course of the corset from its heyday through its decline and onto the pages of Victoria’s Secrets.

Freewheelers, with its effective score and songs by Chrissy Gardner, does a fine job of combining the troupe’s historical interests with a contemporary vibe to arrive at a little machine as efficient as a well-oiled bike.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Freewheelers Conceived and created by A Broken Umbrella Theatre

Story Development Team: Rachel Alderman, Ian Alderman, Dana Astmann, Jacy Barber, Lisa Daly, Brandon Fuller, Chrissy Gardner, Robin Levine, Jes Mack, Lou Mangini, Michelle Ortiz, Ruben Ortiz, Jason Wells

Director & Playwright: Rachel Alderman; Composer, Lyricist, Musical Director: Chrissy Gardner; Movement Director: Robin Levine; Set Designer: Brandon Fuller; Costume Designer: Jacy Barber; Lighting Designer: Trui Malten; Sound Designer: Dave Baker; Production Manager: Janie Alexander; Stage Manager: Katrina Lewonczyk

June 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 at 3pm June 16, 23 at 7pm June 15, 19, 22, 26, 29 at 8pm

No Exit

The idea that the story of a take-out Chinese delivery man trapped in an elevator in Brooklyn for 81 hours could be the basis of a play may not seem too big a stretch, but the basis of a quasi-operatic musical? Stuck Elevator—music by Byron Au Yong, libretto by Aaron Jafferis, directed by Chay Yew—is an inventive, amusing, affecting, and thoughtful show that takes us into a slice of life few of us may have first-hand knowledge of, but that anyone can enter imaginatively. Certainly, anyone would be interested in how someone would cope with such a situation, but what Stuck Elevator dramatizes is the entire context that would keep a man from summoning emergency help from the authorities, and that context, of course, is immigration issues in the U.S. Guang (Julius Ahn) speaks little English and is an illegal alien and knows that a police rescue would involve a pro forma request for an ID he doesn’t have.

Once we know that, we find there’s much more to learn—about his wife Míng (Marie-France Arcilla) and son, Wáng Yuè (Raymond Lee) back home, about his exploitative boss’s wife, about the chiding of his co-worker Marco (Joel Perez), about his fears—including the threat of pissing his pants after hours become days with no rescue—and even an elaborate fantasy involving a Pro Wrestling confrontation between Guang as Delivery Man vs. Elevator Monster (Francis Jue). And all this is presented in musical numbers that let us enter easily into the spirit of Guang’s trials and show us, in quick strokes, the characters who people his world.

The musical settings are many and varied and nothing stays too long to wear out its welcome. There are Guang’s melancholic “is this the end?” ruminations, charming turns from his family, fast-speed raps from Marco (very entertaining), and a host of threatening characters, including a mugger, guards, an agent of Homeland Security, and Snakehead (Lee), to whom Guang owes money. Jafferis’ libretto ranges through a battery of injuries added to the insult of being trapped in an elevator while also being trapped in the “no exit” space of an illegal alien. It’s to the show’s credit that its themes all arise naturally as the fever dreams of a man trapped with no means of communication with the outside world—Guang sold his cellphone to Marco. Feelings of guilt and shame surface as Guang finds he has no means to help himself and no one else he can turn to.

While it may sound like a somewhat polemical play, Chay Yew’s direction accentuates entertainment and the show’s actors/singers are all skilled with a comic touch—particularly Perez and Jue, whose parts in the ensemble tend toward comic relief. To Ahn, Arcilla and Lee fall the more affecting scenes, including the latter’s role of a nephew who died en route to America, smuggled in a cargo hold, and one of the more lifelike aspects of the play is the variety of turns Arcilla undergoes as Guang’s wife, a figure loved, feared, pitied and pined for.

At the heart of it all is Ahn’s Guang as a man able to burst into song about orange beef, hot sauce, and every aspect of his stranded anxieties, in a rich tenor. He is depicted as a man of resources, but simple in spirit, driven by the need to make money as quickly as possible for the sake of his family.

Stuck Elevator boasts a stripped-down, elegant set and lighting, and colorful and engaging costumes. It’s ready to go on tour (this is its second staging after a premiere in San Francisco) and it would be interesting to see how the show plays in parts of the country remote from big cities like NYC and SF, where the kind of subcultural associations that are simply givens of the situation might be a little opaque. And of course the show should be seen across the country as the question of immigrant rights and struggles are part of the social fabric at present. The show does a service in dramatizing a true story in terms that ring true as a look at the cartoon that is our contemporary, multicultural world.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Stuck Elevator Presented in association with Long Wharf Theatre

Music: Byron Au Yong Libretto: Aaron Jafferis Director: Chay Yew

Cast: Julius Ahn, Marie-France Arcilla, Francis Jue, Raymond Lee, Joel Perez

Musicians: Byron Au Yong, piano; Lee Caron, percussion; Shenghua Hu, violin; Frederick Alden Terry, cello

Daniel Ostling, Scenic Designer; Mikhail Fiksel, Sound Designer; Myung Hee Cho, Costume Designer; Frederick Alden Terry, Music Director; Ted Boyce-Smith, Associate Lighting Designer; Alexandra Friedman, Associate Scenic Designer; Naya Chang, Assistant Director; Philip Rudy, Production Stage Manager; Victoria Nidweski, Assistant Stage Manager

Producers: ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann Associate Producer: Alexandra Rosenberg

June 20-22, 25-29, 8pm June 22-23, 26, 29, 2pm Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II

Perchance to Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that rarely works its magic on me. It’s hard not to find the lovers insipid, the gods arbitrary and vain, and the mechanicals—Bottom, Quince, and the rest—grossly condescended to. Any production that disabuses me of these views is all to the good. The best way is to make the lovers actually funny, but that rarely happens. And as for the humor of the mechanicals-as-thespians, well . . . can it ever be too broad? The production by the Bristol Old Vic, in association with Handspring Puppet Company, brought to New Haven as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas has the distinction of creating a workshop atmosphere in which the mechanicals dominate. Before the play even begins, Titania (Saskia Portway) stands on stage hammering away.  The stage set (Fred Stacey, Andy Scrivens, Cliff Thorne) has great openness but also a dusty backstage feel that suits the production. We feel like we’re in the props room of a modern version of Athenian drama and that adds dimension to the play-within-a-play of Piramus and Thisbe that Quince (Colin Michael Carmichael) and company put on.

That aspect of the play—a farcical performance that nearly gets out of control—is quite inventive, with “Moonshine” (Jon Trenchard) perched on a ladder with a lit candle on his hat, and “Wall” (David Emmings) careening about the stage due to the top-heavy bricks affixed to his.

The intention of the Old Vic/Handspring production is to make puppetry intrinsic to the vision of the play. At times, this makes for striking effects—as when wood planks become musical instruments or a living forest or a walkway in space—and adds to liveliness when Quince starts handing out roles for the mechanicals’ play and Bottom (Miltos Yerolemou) disports with a large wooden beam, moving it about with a fluidity that is almost a special effect. And when he is “translated” into an ass, well…no spoilers from me, but it must be seen to be believed and, once seen, will always be remembered. Suffice to say he helms an amazing device that is both funny and grotesque.

Other puppetry moments produce more confusion than wonder. Why are the lovers puppets at times and at other times not? If that’s a too literal question, so be it. The program invites the audience to “suspend their disbelief”—something we do anyway when faced with a play featuring gods, Athenians, fairies, and nincompoops putting on a play, but when we also have to allow for puppets gripped like mini-me’s to this or that pining lover, it’s not so much a question of disbelief as of the meaning of the staging.

Such moments don’t intrude too much, and it’s easier to experience the enlivening aspect of puppetry when we see the fairies as an interesting collection of toys, found objects and moveable parts. Or when the gods disport giant heads and that fascinating big hand Oberon (David Ricardo Pearce) wields.

Among the lovers, Alex Felton as Lysander is the most amusing in his drastic change from adoring Hermia (Akiya Henry) to adoring Helena (Naomi Cranston), though Henry gets to bristle and make the most of her smaller stature (called for in the play) in lively physical comedy. Cranston’s Helena adopts the breathless delivery that is often the preferred manner of Brits doing the Bard. I would’ve appreciated more diction, less effusion in her speech to Hermia about their girlhood.

The best actor in the show is Yerolemou, who, besides hamming broadly as Bottom ("ham" and "bottom" being the key terms here), also gives greatly appreciated clarity to Egeus, Hermia’s fuming father. The disruption between Oberon and Titania (Saskia Portway) never felt particularly dramatic, but the interaction between the same two actors as Theseus and Hippolyta had much more feeling to recommend it.

The best aspect of the show are the visuals—set, lighting (Philip Gladwell) and the attention to movement (Andrew Dawson, Movement Director)—as well as the fascinating puppetry that could use a little tweaking to blend more seamlessly with Shakespeare’s somewhat hodgepodge play.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Bristol Old Vic production In associations with Handspring Puppet Company

Directed by Tom Morris Puppet Design, Fabrication, and Direction: Handspring Pupptet Company

Vicki Mortimer: Designer; Philip Gladwell: Lighting Designer; Dave Price: Composer; Christopher Shutt: Sound Designer; Andrew Dawson: Movement Director; Laurel Swift: Choreographer; James Bonas: Associate Director; Molly Einchcomb: Associate Designer; Katerina Hicken: Costume Supervisor; Joseph Wallace: Puppetry Associate

Performers; Saikat Ahamed, Colin Michael Carmichael, Naomi Cranston, David Emmings, Alex Felton, Fionn Gill, Akiya Henry, Kyle Lima, Saskia Portway, David Ricardo Pearce, Jon Trenchard, Miltos Yerolemou

June 15 & 18-22 at 8pm June 15, 16, 19, 22 & 23 at 2pm University Theatre Yale University