WeAreAllWinnie.blogspot.com

Today, 12/21/14, the exceptional actress Billie Whitelaw died at 82. I did not see her as Winnie in Happy Days (pictured above), but did see Fiona Shaw at BAM in 2008, and wrote this post that the woman buried in the sand, with just ritual and verbal/intellectual exercise to pass the time, defines a blogger. Yikes. Beckett, as genius: check.


Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again,
So let's sing a song of cheer again,
Happy days are here again.

I was never a student of Samuel Beckett, Ireland’s great, bleak ultramodernist, master of black humor. When I was at college at Southampton University (England, not Long Island), one of the dons performed Krapp’s Last Tape. It was compelling, and the intimate nature of the performance was memorable, but it did not send me running to a Beckett tutorial.

The chance to see Fiona Shaw, however, sent me running to BAM for her limited engagement in Happy Days in 2008. I went with few preconceived notions. I had seen photos of Irene Worth somewhere along the way. Her aging music hall woman, with flapper headband, stuck in the sand never looked very appealing. I did not know of Billie Whitelaw's embodiment, which is immediately more appealing.

But from the moment I walked into the Brooklyn theater, I was carried away. Tom Pye’s “mound” is a visually stunning mixture of English seaside gone nightmare and post apocalyptic landscape. The lighting is piercingly LCD bright, unnatural, startling.

An elegant white parachute material curtain rises to the ceiling, and when it gently falls, Winnie is there, buried to her waist in the sand, gently folded over herself, with her head and arms resting on the ground.

A loud, jarring, ugly alarm sounds—jolting everyone--and Winnie wakes up. Her day is book ended by the buzzer that tells her to sleep.

She begins her morning rituals by brushing her teeth, and reading the toothpaste tube.

The absurdity of the situation is heightened by the familiarity of it—-both in the normalcy of brushing your teeth in the morning, and in the fears being embodied before your very eyes: the fear of being stuck, or buried alive, or isolated from all humanity.

It turns out Winnie is not completely isolated. There is Willie, her husband, who lives in a hole to the side of her mound. He grunts monosyllabic answers to her questions and reads headlines from his paper. Winnie speaks of how wonderful it will be if/when he moves to the front of her mound and she’ll be able to see him without straining her neck.

The rest of Winnie’s world is a parasol and a black bag that contains her mirror, a revolver, and a hat. The sun is merciless, and she is baking. The hat offers a little protection, as does the parasol, until it mysteriously blows up.

Winne As Blogger.
Winnie’s life is ritual punctuated by verbal utterances. Her conversation is peppered with quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Browning, Keats, Byron, authors who make her feel less alone. (Here is a guide to them--scroll down to the Literary Allusions). Even her oft repeated “sorrow keeps breaking in” is apparently from Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

The fear that she articulates is that there will be no one to listen to her. "Just to know that in theory you hear me even though in fact you don't is all I need." Just how much of blogging did Beckett foreshadow?

All of our voices are “out there” in the barren landscape of the blogosphere in the hope that someone is listening. In the hope that we don’t come across as the droning, tedious wife. We bring as much of life as we can into the void, soldiering on through anxiety and angst. From the other perspective, Winnie herself is the consummate blogger, with her daily entries of conversation.

Back in her theatrical world, what comes across most in Act I is the life force at its purest. Fiona Shaw is luminous. Her “chatter,” as it has been called, is not grating in the least, but engaging, measured, rhythmically inflected, with extraordinary facial gestures and arm movements.

There is a lot going on here. The piece could be a metaphor for what happens to married couples when they settle into the coexisting grunting state. Willie as the henpecked husband, who has shut himself off from his wife’s eternal yammering. Winnie can’t stop yammering because she literally can do nothing else. Willie could leave the mound, could leave Winnie, and we have no idea why he doesn’t.

The gun is an ominous presence. Winnie kisses it, and could use it to end her situation, at least in Act 1.

In Act II, with no relative time to Act I, Winnie wakes up and is buried up to her neck; she can no longer do her morning rituals, or reach the gun. Winnie doesn’t comment directly on her worsening condition. She continues to try to organize her time as best she can, knowing that the song must be sung before the bell to sleep. That she shows no outward sign of complete despair is deeply unnerving.

At the end of the play, Willie moves to the front of the mound, ‘dressed to kill” as it says in the play in formal mourning trousers and top hat, and Winnie is excited that he is reaching out to her. She sings “The Merry Widow Waltz” (I love you so) since she can no longer open the music box. The last moment is Willie reaching up toward her, and the two looking at each other.

But is he reaching for the gun? Is it to use on himself, or her? It is a haunting ambiguity.

I grew attached to Winnie in the course of the play, drawn in by her spirit and determinism. “This will have been another happy day.” I could say the same from my mound here in blogspot.com. Lucky for me Steed always responds in full sentences and doesn’t like guns at all. In fact we BBBBBUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZ.

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 Mapeel     12/21/2014     blogs, theater   

“Three Irishmen Walk into a Ferry Waiting Room . . . Again“

 If they had walked into a bar, Kevin, Dermot, and Joe would have been no more than an obscure trio in the long tradition of Irish jokes.

But instead, they are part of the memorable fictional world of Conor McPherson’s 2002 play Port Authority, which I saw in 2008 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and again today in the closing performance at the Irish Repertory Theatre, under the direction of Ciaran O'Reilly. It is one of the joys of theatergoing, to see different stagings of the same play.

Our characters are in a ferry dock waiting room in Dublin harbor, erroneously referred to as bus station by many critics back in 2008, I guess because New York's Port Authority is a bus terminal. But that was the jetty of Dublin harbor on the Playbill cover. The set at the Irish Rep was more successful in conveying the time/place, with the blue sky over a horizon of water.


Each of our trio is a million miles away in his own thoughts, which he gives voice to as we all raptly listen in.  It is a tour de force of monologue writing and acting across three stages of man: the senior (Jim Norton/Peter Maloney), the middle aged (Brian D’Arcy/Billy Carter), and the twentysomething (John Gallagher/James Russell). They speak of life from the perspective of their age, and of love, which knows no such boundary.

With the barest of sets and the absence of any action, it is the sheer power of language and tale-spinning that pulls you in. Each is able to give you a sense of the entire life of that man, just from these revealed thoughts. That's what makes this such a special, powerful play. That primacy of the spoken word reminded me of HBO’s In Treatment, where another Irishman, Gabriel Byrne, absolutely commanded our attention, all the while sitting in a chair.

A line in Terry Teachout’s rave review of the play back in 2008 surprised me. He described it as a “series of interwoven monologues by three unhappy Irishmen.”

Unhappy Irishman. It never occurred to me that these men were unhappy. From my own experience, there is something about the Celtic soul that doesn’t think in happy/unhappy terms. Life is. There are highs and lows, joys and disappointments. So be it.

I saw Martin Sheen back in 2008 on The Graham Norton Show. Graham asked him what the secret was to having such a long and happy marriage. Sheen answered, it’s not really about happiness. What makes a loving marriage work is if your partner helps you to experience joy. It’s a subtle, important distinction which McPherson understands.

Each of our waiting-room Irishmen speaks of specific moments of joy within his tale. There is also deep disappointment all around, and they all wish many things were different.

But they are Irish. Their wit and wisdom and whisky will sustain them, until the final Ferryman comes to take them across that other river.

(photo, Doug Hamilton)

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 Mapeel     11/16/2014     Ireland, theater   

Happy Birthday, Mick Jagger & George Bernard Shaw

It's Mick Jagger's birthday---the Stones account has produced a video of him on stage through the years---and @BritishMuseum just reminded me it is also the birthday of George Bernard Shaw.  How poetic. 

The Irishman who wrote a lot about "marriage and the hypocrisies of monogamy"—and the Englishman who seems to agree on those two points, who is a Shavian man flecked with the attributes of the Superman, fleeing and embracing the LIFE FORCE (usually in supermodels), with an appetite that propelled him to superstardom—were born on the same day.


Mick Jagger is now 71 years old, and as we see, a remarkable life force in his own right. 




And some thoughts on Shaw and seeing Man and Superman at the Irish Rep.

"If men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music and painting and poetry. Well, you can't have them, because they don't exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must go without: that's all. 

Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood husbands---and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to put up with flesh-and-blood wives. [The Devil looks dubious. The Statue makes a wry face.] I see you don't like that, any of you; but it's true, for all that; so if you don't like it you can lump it."

Ana, Don Juan in Hell, Man and Superman

I swear that last line was uttered by Joanie Cunningham on Happy Days.

But no, it's from George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950), a Victorian socialist and literary force of nature who does not have a broad cultural reach these days, even though his ideas and language are so very contemporary, even in our 21st century. He was the Irishman who emigrated to London for good at 20, following his mother after his parents divorced, and as an ex-pat wrote novels (which didn't do very well), music and literary criticism, political tracts, and 63 plays, 11 or so of which are absolute masterpieces of the stage. He died at 94, having witnessed Queen Victoria, World Wars 1 & 2, the very beginnings of rock 'n' roll, and clearly, having inspired Garry Marshall.

I learned about Shaw in high school, thanks to a used book my father picked up for me: Ellen Terry & Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence. I was very sensitive then that there were no famous L.N.s, an idea my dad wanted to disabuse me of (although the fact that he had to reach back to a prominent British stage actress to do it wasn't lost on me).

That's the thing about Shaw: his is the world of the Fabian Society, the founding of the London School of Economics, the likes of Terry Ellen, Henry Irving, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. It's a world not that well known today. His countrymen Oscar Wilde perhaps fares a little better, with revivals of his most Ernest pieces, keeping the drawing room comedy somewhat in the contemporary consciousness. And we've had some similar sparks with Stoppard's 1993 Arcadia wrapped in Chaos theory and Ayckbourn 's 1973 Norman Conquests. Each "rom coms for eggheads" as Terry Teachout said of the new revival of Man and Superman at the Irish Repertory Theatre that I saw last weekend. If I can inspire anyone, it would be to go see this excellent night of the theater.

So, We've All Seen Pygmalion

Shaw's best known play is Pygmalion (1912) because Lerner & Loewe set it to music, keeping whole chunks of original dialogue to bring us My Fair Lady.

GBS has several themes he comes back to again and again: the absurdity of the English class system and its rules; the struggles between men and women; the necessary independence of women (an early feminist), a horror of hypocrisy and religion; "free thinkers." What makes him a master playwright is that he does not sacrifice entertainment for his soap box. He verbal wit is thrilling, and he is able to use it in service to "the big ideas." It's actually very subversive to put across such challenging ideas in such a pleasing and funny way.

I have seen 4 of Shaw's plays, and they were all exquisite moments in the theater, perhaps because his writing demands the very best from actors.

Heartbreak House (1919, first performed in 1920): I saw this in London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1983 when my brother came to visit me. The cast: Diana Rigg, Rex Harrison, Rosemary Harris, Paxton Whitehead, Frank Middlemass, and Simon Ward. Just looking at the playbill still makes me skip a breath.

From Wiki: Heartbreak House is not often performed due to its complex structure, however it is argued that the genius of the play cannot be fully appreciated without seeing it in performance. Its subject-matter is the ignorance and indifference exhibited by the upper and upper-middle classes to the First World War and its consequences.

Arms and the Man: (1894). In 1985 John Malkovich directed a revival production at New York City's Circle in the Square Theatre starring Kevin Kline as Bluntschli, Glenne Headly as Raina and Raúl Juliá as Sergius.

Taking its title from the first line of the Aeneid, Arma Virumque Cano, it's a polemic on the futility of war, but the characters are so funny you are dazzled, and when its Kevin and Raul, well, the words sweep you off your feet.

Mrs. Warren's Profession: The play about prostitution where the word is never mentioned. Performed at the Irish Repertory 2006.

Man and Superman

A drawing-room comedy that goes to Spain, then Hell and Back again, finds John Tanner, a rich political-philosopher, his ward, Ann Whitefield, who has set her sights on him, which makes him flee for his life, and their small world of friends and family. Shaw had been asked to write something about the historic/literary Don Juan, and he alit on the Mozart opera with its Donna Ana, the charming Devil, and the Statue of the Commendatore, who drags him down to hell, all within a drawing-room comedy.

Heaven and Hell are much bantered about in Superman. As written, the scene, a dream sequence no less, is an hour and half long, with very long monologues from the Devil with GBS's view that H & H are simply a matter of sensibility and temperament. (You can read the entire act here.) The people in Hell find Heaven boring, and could move up if they so wanted. Of course the ghosts of Wagner and Nietzche waft into the scene to, which is a little blah, blah, blah to me, but still the twists and turns in the dialogue are so entertaining that I don't mind the philosophical musings (which is a G-rated word for it).

The other big theme is that of the Life Force, which George sees as animating women to trap men into marriage. He believes it has never been the man who seeks the woman, beyond the most base and basic seduction. It may be noted that Shaw married a fellow Fabian who so fervently did not want to bear children that the marriage was never consummated, and Shaw had a series of affairs with other married women. Free thinking indeed.

[Updated from 2012.]

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 Mapeel     7/26/2013     current events, music, theater   

Leap of Faith: A New Ministry on 44th Street

Elmer Gantry's greatnephew Jonas Nightingale has opened his tent on 44th street at the St. James Theatre to swindle chumps, I mean save souls. I went to the last preview courtesy of a very talented friend, whose company produced an important element of the production (which I can't specify because it's a spoiler).

There are many ghosts swirling around Broadway's new musical, Leap of Faith, and much infectious high school spirit, but for a story that is about religion/spirituality, there's not much of a presence of the real thing. It's Old Time religion for those who would rather not.

Leap of Faith was an original screenplay by Janus Cercone for the 1992 film starring Steve Martin and Debra Winger. The story is fairly simple: a crooked faith healer with a kick ass Gospel choir roams the midwest to bilk people out of cash in carefully orchestrated 3-day scams. It's an interesting choice of property to bring to the Great White Way.

"Can I Have an Hallelujah"

The culture of Evangelical revival tent meetings has little presence today outside of their television grandsons. One touchstone film buffs have for the crooked variety is Burt Lancaster's riveting Academy Award winning performance as Elmer Gantry, who manipulates the true believer Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) to tragic ends. (Not sure why these preachers gravitate to bird surnames.)

Sinclair Lewis's novel Elmer Gantry was published in 1927, the same year the theater Jonas is in was built by Abe Erlanger as The Erlanger. When he died in 1930 the Astors, who owned the land, took control and, great Anglo-American Episcopalian snobs that they were, renamed it the St. James Theatre, after London's St. James's Theatre (but wisely giving up what actually is the correct punctuation of a proper name ending in "s": an apostrophe with another "s.") And thus was the ground for Jonas's Broadway tent sanctified by the name of two of the 12 Apostles.

Another by-chance spiritual benediction for Jonas is Broadway history: the main set of Leap has a row of realistic cornstalks against the changing sky in the very theater that Oklahoma! debuted and played all 2,212 performances. Jonas is in Kansas, not OK, but surely the set designer is tributing the granddaddy of American musicals.

Sing It, Sisters

The centerpiece of the musical is the Angels of Mercy Gospel choir. The singing is uniformly excellent. What a thrill. It starts with Kecia Lewis-Evans as the Gospel song leader with the enormous range---the real, solid, alto notes up to the dizzy heights of the commanding soprano---opening up the first number, "Rise Up." Her two children, Krystal Joy Brown and Leslie Odom, Jr. (yes, of Smash) have effortlessly beautiful voices filled with rich musicality.

The music is by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, and it's good in what is for me a generically, pleasing Broadway way. There are no songs you will com out humming ("Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. . ."), no song that matches "Popular" or "Defying Gravity," but nothing clunky. The songs move along the themes of how good people can talk themselves into doing bad things, and so book and songs are tight.

But. This Gospel choir should be singing some actual Gospel hymns. Where is "I Saw the Light," "Blessed Assurance" or "My Faith Looks Up to Thee" (both in the movie), "How Great Thou Art." Having the choir occasionally be, well, a choir, would have added a much-needed depth to the story. I didn't even hear a sample of a hymn in any of the songs, not even a nod to other faux Broadway hymns like Loesser's "Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat."

(And, as if to underscore the point, on the subway home,  I realized the "doors are closing" tones are the opening notes to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!)

Devil in the Red Coat?

This is a star-reaffriming vehicle for Raul Esparza, as though he needed one: he easily pumps up his natural charm to the snake oil variety for Jonas. His singing is thrilling throughout, but really powerful at the end when his devil side is being challenged by simple human decency and the power of faith in people and in Christ.

Everyone's favorite Glinda, Kendra Kassebaum, matches Esparza's acting and singing chops as his sister, and Jessica Phillips as the Sheriff is strong though given some less-than-believeable action points.

So, What Are We Worshipping?

The musical frames the action in a cute way: when it opens, it's as though the audience is in the tent, which is the main set, imaginatively constructed to sometimes blend into the proscenium curtains. The action is the present moment on 44th street, with Jonas calling everyone a sinner and testifying his tale.

Then the action goes back several years to Sweetwater, Kansas, and the corn stalks.

Besides the tent, there is one other piece of the set that dominates the beginning and end: an Arco gas sign at the gas station where the revival bus has broken down, bringing them to the town. It's enormous, it towers over the actors and the corn, like a real-life one is tall enough to be seen from a distance. It is cross-like in shape itself, and lists today's obscene prices of gasoline.

Contrast that with the small neon cross that hangs on the tent. Hmm.

It's true that tent ministries had very simple altars and the sign of the cross was modest. And the character Isaiah, who is visiting from Bible college, tries to confront the Angels that if the are scamming people, they are no longer followers of Jesus. Which is an important point: Sinclair Lewis was writing about a con man. For the early decades of the 20th century the likes of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson brought true Christian community to isolated towns across the midwest.

But, in today's world, is it a subliminal accident that the symbol of much of modern life's power struggles--oil---hovers over this story of taking a leap of faith? One could argue that the love/need of oil is the root of much evil: Middle East conflicts; corporate greed/price gouging; environmental disasters from the Exxon Valdez to BP in the Gulf.

Everyone in the tent will have his or her own revelation in the St. James Theatre, and you can't ask for more than that from art. As they say, God works in mysterious ways.

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 Mapeel     4/26/2012     Film, theater   

The Great War & Modern Memory: The Sublime Gash of War Horse

"Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected... Its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends... Millions were destroyed because two people, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, were shot... But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing meliorist myth... It reversed the idea of Progress."
Paul Fussell

I entered college with an attachment to the First World War, if that’s what you can call it, because of T.E.Lawrence. I had read through Seven Pillars of Wisdom in high school and fallen under its heady romantic spell. Lawrence was a gifted writer who embodied the English literary tradition from the inside, and he wrote his own mythology simply because he could: he knew the power of the trope and how to wield it (and saw an opportunity in the newsreels of his own personal Barnum, Lowell Thomas).

To my Freshmen amazement, there was a class on World War One Literature, taught by Paul Fussell, based on his own National Book Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory. It’s a cultural study/close reading of the literary tradition before WW1—particularly poetry--- and how it changed during and in relation to the war. We didn’t study Lawrence, but I discovered the vast and profound literature of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and the work of Sir Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, and Bernard Bergonzi.

All of which came to mind at a recent performance of War Horse at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

The Western Front

The play is an adaptation of a children’s book written by Michael Morpurgo and published in the UK in 1982. Morpurgo knew a WWI veteran from his local pub who had been in the Devon Yeomanry and worked with horses. He wrote the book to tell of the experience of the last war with substantial cavalry forces, and all the suffering modern warfare brought to man and beast alike.

And so the story of Albert, a boy from a poor farm family, and Joey, the horse he raises from a foal amid a tangle of family tensions and sadness. His dad sells Joey into the army, and when the captain who promised he would look after Joey is killed, Albert runs away to France and joins the Yeomentry to find him.

The play is engaging on many levels. The puppetry of the horses is as spectacular as everyone says it is. It doesn’t take long before you don’t even “see” the talented puppeteers. The story draws you in, although in the second act it devolves into clichés, and the French mother and child are shrill and painfully overacted. The battle scenes are compelling, with their flashes of painfully bright lights and seriously loud shell explosions.

But for me, the piercing artistic element is Rae Smith’s gash of a rear projection screen that hovers above the action.

The Rend in History

On her website Smith calls the screen shape a “torn page,” referencing the sketchbook of Captain Nicholls, who draws Joey. Sketches of the town and the farm are projected there as scenery, as well as more abstract images for the shell explosions (which one critic saw as Vorticism echoing the short-lived literary magazine, BLAST).

But it’s so much more than that, even if not by conscious design. It symbolizes the great gaping gash in the universe that was World War One, which cut the 20th century off from the rest of history. The carnage was so unspeakable—-from the use of gas warfare to the 500,000 who died in the mud of Passchendale--that civilization shattered.

Artists captured that shatter, not always consciously, but simply because it was real. T.S. Eliot reflects the rupture in The Waste Land: April is no longer the sweetest month (Chaucer) but the cruelest, breeding lilacs out of the dead. Voices are adrift; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Hemingway knew that language could no longer be trusted, language that once talked of the glory of dying for your country. He could use no adjectives, no adverbs, just safe, simple words. Isn’t it pretty to think so.

And so that piece of stagecraft is a startling visual, in the 21st century, of where we have been. It’s the rend in the universe we are all still suffering from. I felt comforted that this concept was an element in the play. In the middle of one of the battle scenes that gash is filled with a projection of enormous poppies. It's a beautiful visual moment.


Who’s War Was It Anyway?

Who'll sing the anthem and who'll tell the story?
Will the line hold? Will it scatter and run?
Will we at last be united in glory?
Only remembered for what we have done

I first saw War Horse in London, in the West End in July 2009. As the second act battle scenes come to a close, I kept waiting for some reference to the American troops. Not a whole scene, just a line of dialogue about the Yanks coming over. Just some nod that something happened between the battles in France and Armistice Day.

But there was nothing. This struck me as bad history at the least, and a terrible cultural snub at worst. Especially in a play that opens with a man singing “Who’ll tell the story? Only remembered for what we have done.” So this story does not remember the American allies.

The forgetting goes beyond the play. Last year before the 2012 London Olympics I wrote about my recent experiences of Englishmen of a certain age honestly not knowing the Americans fought in World War 1, offering a photo of King George pinning a medal on an American Doughboy, and the list of the 8 American World War 1 cemeteries in France, Belgium, and England.


Paul Fussell offers some explanation for this cultural blind spot in an intro he wrote for the 25th anniversary edition of his Great War & Modern Memory in 2000. He was commenting on the reception his book was given twenty-five years earlier:

“From England came evidence of further annoyance at my book. There, some readers seemed to feel that no American has a right to probe into what they regard as their business.”

National identity is a deep-seeded construct. Tribal feelings can only be “civilized” out of us so far. That’s something I can respect.

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 Mapeel     9/20/2011     literature, theater   

And the Summer MELTs Away Beautifully

I don’t follow the dance world, but I was happy to connect with it last night because Marcy Schlissel who owns and runs the pilates studio I go to, Body in Motion, was performing in Noemie Lafrance’s site-specific dance installation, MELT.

To describe the piece reads like a Salvador Dali painting: the site is the Salt Pile (where the city stores mounds of salt, patiently waiting for snow season), under the Manhattan Bridge. The salt is under an open-sided shed within a large chain-fenced area, the south side of which has a huge concrete wall. On this wall are hanging 8 chairs, anchored by hooking onto the top (think of over-the-door hooks for wreaths), of varying heights.

From LaFrance’s Sens Production website:

“Eight dancers perched on a wall and wrapped in sculptural beeswax and lanolin costumes are slowly melting away, progressing in euphoria and exhaustion as if approaching the sun, melting until their souls escape their ephemeral bodies and disintegrate into light.”

The lanolin makes their bodies shine-—it’s what is actually melting from them onto the wall.

My first impression of the site was Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days—-that stage has piles of sand and Winnie, buried up to her waist. Alastair Macauley of the NY Times had the same thought:

“ ‘Why then just close the eyes — and wait for the day to come — the happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees,” says Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” up to her waist in earth. Later she mentions “this hellish sun” to whose light she is exposed. It is by no means sure that the day of eventual melting will indeed be happy.’ Winnie’s words come to mind while watching Melt.”
(Ah, memories of Fiona Shaw as Winnie at BAM.)

Macauley likes the picturesque nature of the piece, but doesn’t like the whole. “As theater, however, it’s tedious. . . . There’s no real drama in the changes or contrasts of movement. For more than half an hour, a single idea is on display.”

I agree that there is not a clear narrative idea on display, but it is not tedious at all.

A Haiku for Life

It was a satisfying experience all around: being in that strange, sweet spot under the Manhattan bridge, hearing the F train loudly rumbling above; the presence of the salt pile itself—-every New Yorker knows of its importance after a blizzard. The sky turned from a vibrant cyan when they started to night, complete with the Evening star. The piece had interesting undulations—-the first time the dancers snapped to a complete horizontal pose was alarming. There is a sense of frustration and defiance in the motion: the women's movements are restrained by their circumstances. In the energy in their leg and arm movements you feel that they long to move more freely, but since that's not possible, they do the most with what they can. A perfect haiku for life.

Lighting creates moments of shadow and darkness between the blinding moments, the electronic crickets bring the sense of the country in mid August. There are flashes of synchronized swimming, and solo moments. One thing our experience did not include was personal meltings. It was a coolish 70 degrees when the piece started.

MELT was first conceived and performed for the Black and White gallery in Brooklyn in 2003 for 3 dancers. From those pictures, it’s easy to see how much it has developed and deepened, and The Salt Pile has to be its prime site. LaFrance is reworking another earlier work, Rapture, that she staged for 2 aerial dancers on the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center/Annandale-on Hudson. The new piece will be performed on Frank Gehry building around the world. I’m really looking forward to seeing it at the IAC building.

Have a great weekend everyone.



(The Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan Bridge. My photos, expect the yellow one, Guy LaFrance.)

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 Mapeel     9/05/2010     dance, theater   

A Day of Aiding and Abetting

Two Saturdays ago my day began early in Central Park, volunteering for the Central Park Conservancy Run for Central Park. I was pitching in for the team that I’m training with,the Running Club, although I’m not in contention to race yet. But people on the team need to guarantee a certain number of volunteers for various New York Road Runner events, and so I was helping them.

The Run for Central Park is only a 4 mile run/walk, and yet the behind-the-scenes machinations are still fairly elaborate: teams of people pick up water and post-race goodies at warehouses at 3:00 a.m. By 6:00 a.m. or so long tables are put in place for water along the route, and after the finish line cases of apples and bags of pretzels. The starting line and finish lines themselves are set up, as well as the volunteer tent, check in table, medical tent, lost and found.

It’s all a well-run machine, staffed by hundreds of “professional” volunteers, many who work for the city in different capacities, supervised by a small staff of paid Road Runners staff.

I checked in with my team at the volunteer tent, and was given an orange safety vest and emergency phone numbers badge.

My little subgroup was assigned to the pretzels table after the finish line, which comes after the water table and just before the apples.

5,000 runners were signed up. It was 93 degrees at 9:00 in the morning. A little crazy to be running in such weather. But more than 3.500 people finished, and every one of them had to pass by my station at the pretzel table.

The elite male runners came through very fast, DROWNING in sweat with all the humidity, followed a few minutes later until the first women came through. Then the second tier guys. And then, a sea of humanity. It was quite a sight, thousands of runners finishing in that ungodly heat.

I was struck by the range of the legion going by: truly every shape, size, height, width, age. Everyone struggling to different degrees, but united in the struggle, and that was the beauty of it.

I was also struck by the range of interaction, from people who say thank you and then politely asked for a second bag of pretzels, to other who literally grab bags out of every volunteer’s hands. Small behavior moments that I’m sure scale up to much more important issues.


Then I Was an Accomplice


Only because Neil Patrick Harris told me to. He played the one in New York and went on to produce the one in Hollywood. What is Accomplice? “Is it a Show? A Game? A Tour? It’s an Experience” says the website.

Another way to describe it is The Game (1997 Michael Douglas/Sean Penn movie) meets “Dead Man’s Treasure” (season 5 of The Avengers), striving to be Scorsese’s After Hours.

It’s a RL game of sorts, think scavenger hunt with a plot. You buy a ticket---so it’s like a show. Then you are called the day before and given the first place to meet. Once there, someone contacts you with your first clue, and you’re off and running.

Our first meeting place was South Street Seaport. We were 4, so we were paired with 6 strangers. The first clue was a series of cropped photographs of nearby places that we had to figure out, which then lead us to the next clue. Along the way we meet actors who move the story along.

The plot of the show is broad and kinda cheesy. The interesting moments depend upon the improvisational skills of the actors, which varied: some were much more adept in the impromptu exchanges than others. There were a couple nice fake-outs, and we were all taken in by the ending. Don’t want to say more. In general, the Downtown NY game is not as sophisticated as you might want it to be, but it’s still fun. It’s ideal for out-of-town guests: the downtown loop is a nearly 3 hours of walking, and you cover a good chunk of ground.

Maybe an actual car rally, like “Dead Man’s Treasure” is in my future. Now, if I only had a car . . .

Clue 1: The vaults at Mithering
Clue 2: Swingingdale, get a move on!
Clue 3: The village of GALDING Mr Smith's Hammer
Clue 4: HAVING BARRELS OF FUN AT TREETOP FARM
Clue 5: BACK AT MY PLACE - WHAT A SHOCKING PLACE TO HIDE THE TREASURE

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 Mapeel     7/30/2010     television, theater   

Lincoln Center Festival: The Brits and the Dutch, and then the Americans

In the beginning, there was Mostly Mozart. The year was 1966, and the innovation was that Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall (known to we later generations as Avery Fisher Hall) was air conditioned, giving rise to this first indoor music festival in the United States.

Some thirty years later, Lincoln Center decided they needed a broader-based festival, and so created the international-focused Lincoln Center Festival, with John Rockwell serving as the first director, 1994 to 1998. (Wonder what he is up to these days?) It showcases a dazzling array of theater, music, dance, and multimedia. I first attended in 2000, to see the Olivier Messiaen tribute, comprised of Turangalîla-symphonie (1946-48), Des Canyons aux Étoiles . . . (1971-74), and Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà . . . (1987-91). The two evenings were transcendent, spending time in the sound poems of that genius. Messiaen is not in the usual repertoire rotation, and it was thrilling to hear the theramin, ondes Martenot, and other pieces in that exotic orchestration.

This year is the first I’ve attended since. I went, partly, because I have not been drinking of the well of “deep, serious think” for a while, something a friend commented on. My thoughts of late have been engaged in the realm of popular culture, and so I took this sojourn back to the grownup table of intellectual pursuits.

A Disappearing Number, a.k.a. Vanishing Passion

To make a longish story short, A Disappearing Number, which is being presented for a short run by the Lincoln Center Festival 2010 and the David H. Koch Theater, is a thrilling, thrilling, thrilling play -- perhaps a surprising statement for a work about mathematics, a subject that can instantly make eyes around the globe glaze over. David Finkle, Theatermania

The reviews for this theater piece were consistently good. Simon McBurney and his cohorts Complicite juxtapose two tales: a contemporary one of math professor Ruth Minnen (an engaging Saskia Reeves) and a businessman Al Cooper (a sincere Firdous Bamji) falling in love, marrying, trying to have a child; against a tale from 1914 of Cambridge math professor G. H. Hardy and the Indian phenom Srinivasa Ramanujan (Shane Shambhu), who writes to Hardy with his theories and whom he joins for a time at Cambridge. The tie between the two stories is that Ruth teaches Hardy’s classic work A Mathematician’s Apology, and Al’s parents are Indian.

The production is visually stimulating, with the staging combining conventional screen video as well as Matrix-like effects for the dancing numbers. The play tackles life, death, love, infinity, time, cultural identity: all “big think” ideas. But for all its depth, for me it lacked passion, real spark. I generally find mental gymnastics sexy, but this prattling left me cold, even the Grecian ending, with the “libation bearers” pouring out the “potassium phosphorous and calcium” that the body distills to. The only small moment that pinged my ear was “ a blast of statistics about the disappearance of honey bees in America that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else.” I thought it was a knowing goof amidst the proofs, the great X-Files meme about the disappearing bees.


Stranger in a Stranger Land, a.k.a. Governor’s Island

The festival put two performances on Governor’s Island, that odd white elephant with beautiful views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, et al between NY and NJ. The one I didn’t attend was the 12-hour Peter Stein adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Demon.

The other was the Dutch interpretation of Pieo Pasolini’s original 1968 film Teorema. Ivo van Hove and his Toneelgroep Amterdam troupe brought a stark story starkly to life in black and white: the venue was a warehouse, allowing for an enormous stage of an Ikea-like house. Into the lives of Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, and Housekeeper comes a Stranger, although in the program he is called “the Guest,” an important refinement.

The family is alienated from each other, and collectively soulless. The production tried to update the 1968 script with current pop culture references, including Meekrat Manor playing continuously on the TV, and Nirvana and Who songs.

So the Guest comes into this family and has sex with absolutely everyone. And that shocks them out of their false ways, until the father is literally naked amid a primal scream, and the housekeeper is floating, Christ-like arms outstretched, amid some dry ice.

A few people left midplay. The NY Times reviewer Jason Zinoman didn’t like it: “Instead of rising miraculously, her feet stay lodged to the ground. So does the entire production.”

It also left me cold. Except for the warm memory of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle—-similar idea, although the “Stranger” there is clearly the Devil--and my editing of a piece of Potter’s writing when he contributed an essay to the catalogue of his work that I put together for the day job. The acting was very good, but it was striving too hard to be deep.

I’m done with my conscious “big think” sojourn. I find satisfying richness and depth in Terry Teachout’s list of 15 favorite songs written for Hollywood movies, everyone one of which I know every note and word of. And I love Teachout's observation, “that seven of these songs were written for Fred Astaire to sing on screen, a statistic that speaks for itself.”

• "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Blane-Martin, from Meet Me in St. Louis)
• "How About You?" (Lane-Freed, from Babes on Broadway)
• "I'm Old Fashioned" (Kern-Mercer, from You Were Never Lovelier)
• "Let's Face the Music and Dance" (Berlin, from Follow the Fleet)
• "The Man That Got Away" (Arlen-Gershwin, from A Star Is Born)
• "Moon River" (Mancini-Mercer, from Breakfast at Tiffany's)
• "One for My Baby" (Arlen-Mercer, from The Sky's the Limit)
• "The Shadow of Your Smile" (Mandel-Webster, from The Sandpiper)
• "Something's Gotta Give" (Mercer, from Daddy Long Legs)
• "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" (Loesser, from Christmas Holiday)
• "Swinging on a Star" (Van Heusen-Burke, from Going My Way)
• "That's Entertainment" (Schwartz-Dietz, from The Band Wagon)
• "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (Gershwin-Gershwin, from Shall We Dance)
• "The Way You Look Tonight" (Kern-Fields, from Swing Time)
• "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" (Porter, from Something to Shout About)

There's so much "deep think" in them thar songs . . . .

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 Mapeel     7/21/2010     Film, music, theater   

Mr. Monk and the Hilarious Hooey

I saw the revival of Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor this weekend with Mater. The New York Times didn’t like it either in 1989 (Frank Rich) nor today (Charles Isherwood). I’m not usually a fan of farce (high or low) or slapstick, or endless double entendres or playing broad. But this show is a delight. I got excellent orchestra seats 9 rows from the stage thanks to a 50% discount code that appeared on the Monk Facebook page just as after the series ended. Thanks very much, Mr. Monk. It’s a thrill to sit close to a Broadway stage because you really feel the live energy. If you sit in the back, it’s like watching tv.

Isherwood and Rich quibble about the plot of Tenor. Kind of makes them look silly. They are SO missing the point. Let me explain it to them and you with a perfect, appropriated description from Gary Giddins (via James Wolcott): it’s “absolute hooey, but it is a hooey of master craftspeople, working together like apprentice in a Renaissance studio, each one a specialist in light or fabric or hands or eyes, held in balance by their master’s supervision. In this instance, the master was director Stanley Tucci.” (Okay, Giddins was actually talking about Joan Crawford’s film Sadie McKee directed by Clarence Brown.)

Sparkling hooey isn’t about plot. It’s about ridiculous set-ups that play out in inane ways, with just a soupcon of wit. It’s actually the ensemble of pros that make for the laughter. For me, Tony Shalhoub is the master of the subtle look within the over-the-top lunacy going on around him.

Shalhoub’s impresario is a man used to giving orders and getting what he wants. It’s the control of his performance that I loved. He is a very elegant man, and you can feel the intelligence below the reaction shots. I find that very rich and appealing.

Anthony LaPaglia had the harder role, Il Stupendo. He looked less at ease in his roll than Shalhoub, although his confusion in the second act was very, very funny.

The discovery for me was the young Justin Bartha who plays Max, the nerd factotum who blossoms before our eyes. He’s in The Hangover, which I now must see, and the National Treasure series with Nicolas Cage where he plays Riley Poole. Don’t think too many of his under 30 film friends have the chops for the stage that he has.

And so I found myself laughing and laughing at stupid lines and silly moments in my own willing suspension of disbelief.

The Memory of Those Who Make Us Laugh
It was a beautiful day in Gotham, and this hilarious hooey shared with Mater felt like such a gift. I don’t laugh enough (with a notable exception on my recent trip to China): I’m an Ox, and so I got a of cosmic dose seriousness (with a little artistry thrown in from the Libra side). Performing art of any kind that makes people laugh is extremely important to the human condition. It literally helps to lighten our load, to counterbalance the veil of tears that is so much of our human equation.

Preston Sturges knew this. That scene at the end of Sullivan’s Travels when the convicts and churchgoers start laughing while watching the 1934 Walt Disney cartoon Playful Pluto with Mickey Mouse and Pluto is one of the great moments in cinema.

The dedication at the film’s beginning:
"To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated."

The film’s last line, spoken by John L. Sullivan
"There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!"

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 Mapeel     4/26/2010     Film, television, theater   

St. Patrick's Day: Irish Altered States

I recently saw two powerful expressions of the grip that alcohol has on the national imagination and soul of the Irish: the film Kings from Tom Collins, and the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson.

I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation by the British. (See post below.) Maybe.

Spoilers abound now for the film and play, but knowing what happens wouldn’t diminish the experience of seeing either. The acting in each is superb.

Kings is a lyric film based on the play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road by Jimmy Murphy. It tells the tale of 6 young Irish guys of Connemara who leave home in 1977 because there are no jobs for them and go to London (of all places) to be day construction laborers. Before they leave, they make a pact that they will only speak Irish to one another. And so the audience reads subtitles for most of the film. (Because most of it is in Irish, it was nominated for Best Foreign Film, 2007. Very cool.)

Of course Irish as a national language was stamped out centuries ago. Its only toehold is in the West where it held on in small pockets from generation to generation.

The film picks up with the friends in middle age, although two of them look like very old men; they are serious drinkers who live only to get from one pint to the next. It follows the tensions between the friends, particularly with Joe (Colm Meany, yes of Star Trek: TNG), the most successful of the lot, who would not give Jackie a job because he was an unreliable drunk amongst the serious drinkers. Jackie was a walking, drowning man, and the friends feel guilty when they can't save him from the ultimate act of despair.

In flashback sequences we see the crew as young men, so full of hope and potential before the years of drinking wore away their life.

Theirs is world without women, although Mairtin is married, and has gone on the wagon for his wife. It’s been two days that he’s been dry when the story starts. But the wake for Jackie proves too much. He feels the pull of being with the lads much more strongly than any desire to be at home with this wife.

Jackie’s father comes over from Connemara to take his middle-aged son home to bury. It’s a very poignant scene as the little Aer Aran plane touches down at dawn in Ireland just as the the lads, barely keeping body and soul together in London, stumble home. The Irish language is a constant reminder of how alienated the men are in their London surroundings, and how deeply they are bound to each other.

The Seafarer is an engrossing, surprising play by Conor McPherson. We are in the lower working-class Dublin squalor of 2 brothers on Christmas Eve Day. The older brother Richard is a somewhat stereotypical happy drunk, as is his friend Ivan. Dick has the spirit, playfulness, and easy devotion of a child, with the mouth of a sailor. He went blind from an accident recently, but does not pity himself. His younger brother Sharky has recently returned home from a failed job opportunity in County Claire. Sharky is considered a failure all around, although from the minute the play begins we see how he does care about his brother and tried to care for him. He is on the wagon when the play opens.

Not so Ivan, the classic “Oh, me head, me head; I’m too drunk to go home to my wife” character.

Into this little wreck of a male trio comes 2 more: Nicky, a friend of the brothers now married to Sharky’s ex-wife, and Mr. Lockheart, although it is not clear how Nicky knows him.

The 5 gents are going to player poker on Christmas Eve. With a snap of the fingers to freeze time, Mr. Lockhart reveals that he is the Divel himself, come to collect Sharkey’s soul.

It’s a startlingly chilling moment. When Lockheart starts to talk about the cold isolation of hell, even nonbelievers in the audience are deeply spooked.

The luck of the Irish is with the men, and they outwit the Devil in cards, with the help of 100 proof potcheen, in time to go to Christmas morning mass, partially attracted by the beer that the monks brew. It’s an alcohol-soaked play, from start to stop.

These pieces both addressed drinking with a consciousness I hadn’t seen before: there is a resignation to alcohol in these men’s lives. Alcoholism is a disease, but most of these blokes seem to be in the grey area between alcoholics and more willfully out-of-control drinkers. Kings in particular makes the distinction that Jackie was in the jaws of the disease, while his friends were just serious drinkers.

Can all these Irish souls be in such constant pain that they need to be continously anesthetized? I don’t know if that’s how McPherson and Collins see it. Some of the characters dance around stereotypes, but then become more dimensional. As for the cosmic root of the drinking--the centuries of oppression idea is not so far-fetched. It's certainly part of what created the Irish epithet: "their wars are happy and all their songs are sad."

To someone on the outside, it’s hard not to see an underlying sadness in these daily lives, and you admire them for getting on with it all, as best they can.

Erin Go Bragh.

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 Mapeel     3/16/2008     Film, Ireland, theater   

39 Steps and 1 Very Scary Blow

At Christmas I went with the time-honored tradition of buying my mother theater tickets for a Saturday matinee, with lunch included. That is how we came to be walking through the Amtrak part of Penn Station, en route to brunch at an Irish restaurant on 8th Avenue and 33 street late on a Saturday morning.

The Amtrak section is enormous, with a large rotunda-like space lined with stores. It was very uncrowded today, as we leisurely walked toward the 8th avenue exit. About midway through this rotunda space, I noticed a man ranting, raving, not making sense—not so unusual. But he was brandishing a detached metal luggage frame, with wheels. So we started veering to the left away from him. I think he ranted something at us, but we kept walking away from him.

In an instant, he came up behind us, and lifted this luggage frame above his head and slammed it down on us. We were walking somewhat arm and arm, and I felt the force of the metal frame hit my left arm, wrist and hand after it had crashed onto my mother's shoulder, before landing on her right forearm.

The rest is a little blurry. I started screaming “call the police.” The guy picked up the frame again, slammed it on the floor, then ran away. I’m sorry to say no one really came over to help. I had to go to the Amtrak security office myself and get them (they are a private security force, not NYPD.)

I brought the security officer back to where it had happened. A guy did come over and said he’d seen the whole thing and gave a description of the attacker, and the security guys went after him.

My hand and wrist were stunned and swelling and I was afraid maybe broken. My mother had a huge welt on her arm and an enormous blood blister formed immediately. And it was so shocking, to be attacked from behind.

But we were otherwise unharmed. We went to the Amtrak office to file a report; some Fire Department medics were in the area and them came for the medical side. They took pictures of the injuries.

The security guy told me that our attacker is a regular in the station, and that he has attacked people before. He gets locked up, and then he’s released, and the cycle starts over. They caught up with him, and took the luggage rack as evidence. They are going to file as Assault 2, but it’s likely to be pled out. If not, then we might have to testify at a grand jury.

That would be in the future. Today, we decided to continue on the path we’d planned. The whole incident had taken less than 45 minutes, and since we had allowed plenty of time, we still had time to eat.

We went to a fabulous Irish place called Tir Na NOg. The Irish pub is a place Mom and I would always feel secure and welcomed: the regulars are watching rugby with pints of Guiness, tables with several generations are having Sunday brunch, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

If the attacker had hit either one of us square on, on the head or even the shoulder, we would not be enjoying the rashers of sweet Irish bacon and Irish cheddar omelette. The force of the blow was immense, but because it fell between us, we were saved.

Then it was off to the Roundabout-—not the one my mother knew back in the day, but the American Airlines version.

The London import The 39 Steps is as frivolous and entertaining as the critics say it is. Mr Brantley again gives a very fine review. 4 people—three men and a women—perform over 60 characters on a barren stage and bring their world to life with one other character: light. The lighting effects are pure THEATRE. The adaptation is faithful to the 1935 films staring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. It’s light and frothy, funny and happy. That’s what it is, a genuinely happy theactrical experience. It was another comforting embrace from the universe after being attacked.

I’m sorry that the man who attacked us lives in an alienated world of some kind of mental insanity. I’m sorry that society doesn’t know what to do to help him. We all bear some responsibility for society’s failings. My share, right now, is a throbbing, swollen, stiff, bruised hand and wrist.

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 Mapeel     1/19/2008     theater   

In the Bleak MidPinter & Rossetti's Poem

The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just the vessles of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken.

John Lahr, The New Yorker

But like most great art The Homecoming operates on a mythic as well as an immediate level. It insists that some shadowy part of you is part of it. It burrows under your skin and festers.

Mr. Pinter, you see, knows where you live.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Then he knows I live about 60 blocks away from the current Broadway revival. Lahr and Brantley’s writing about this happening homecoming was so compelling that I bought myself a ticket to the Boxing Day matinee.

It was not a life-changing experience, but I am very happy to have seen Ian McShane onstage. He is a solid, self aware actor. He knows where to locate, where to center his character, and that makes him a compelling artist to watch. I am a huge Deadwood fan, and loved the perfect match-up of Swearengen and McShane. He certainly calls on some of the territory he explored through Al in his portrayal of Max, his much less successful Brit cousin.

Brantley has a very clear review of the revival here.

I do not know Pinter’s works, so let me offer a fresh, nonacademic perspective. The story in a nutshell is this: an English philosophy professor working in the US brings his English wife to London to visit his family, whom she has never met, and she decides to stay there, as wife, mother, and whore to his 2 brothers and father. In generous terms, it’s an updating with sly twists on a Levirate marriage, if we want to throw some Old Testament its way; well, the wife is named Ruth.

Max, the patriarch, has three grown sons, whom we’ll call Hewy, Dewy, and Louie—-taking our cue from Pinter’s playful nature—-and a brother, Uncle Donald, of course.

When we first meet Professor Hewy and his wife Ruth, she is a bit catatonic. When they run into brother Louie, she wakes up and starts to flirt with him when Hewy has gone up to bed. Shades of things to come.

When Max first meets Ruth, he’s abusive, relentlessly calling her a whore, a scrubber. Hewy stands up for her, finally convincing the family that she is his WIFE, the mother of their three children. Oh. Then. All is sanctioned, all is well.

Until . . . Ruth alludes to her life before her marriage, before she met Hewy and had her children. She tells Louie she had been a model-—no, not of hats.

It’s a quick, slippery slope to her making out on the couch with Dewy, while Max, Uncle Donald, Hewy and Louie look on. Hewy is now the catatonic one, glued to his chair. Stage to black. When we come back, Hewy is still in that chair, Dewy comes downstairs—he’s been upstairs with Ruth for two hours,

When she comes down, Max and the boys have hatched a plot to ask her to stay with them, rather than returning with her husband to their children. She’ll have to pull her own financial weight; no problem, Louie is a pimp and he can get her work for four hours a night for bread and milk money. That way she’d have her days free to service them, and cook, and clean.

Ruth decides to stay—-she negotiates terms she wants. Hewy says goodbye, he can manage their kids as Ruth takes her place in Max’s chair, now the center of this London family.

It’s a funny play, in a discomfiting way. Ruth enters this house of losers, and decides she can be queen. Anything to save her from the life of an academician’s wife. That is pretty funny.

But it’s also bleak, that marriage could be so repressive that a woman would walk away from her family so easily and into such a bizarre situation.

There are hints that it’s the mendacity of our lives that causes such psychic damage to relationships. Uncle Donald reveals a secret, that Max’s wife and best friend were lovers before they died.

Besides the hints that Ruth’s pre-marriage life was promiscuous, I think there are hints that Hewy isn’t really a professor of philosophy. In Act 2 brother Louie starts teasing/grilling him with some psycho-babble questions about the nature of reality and the logic of Christians tenets. Hewy isn’t able to retort at all. He keeps saying something like “that’s not my province.” If he had Ph.d in philosophy, he would at least be able to psycho-babble back in kind. And there are people who think Hewy and Ruth may not be married, because Hewy restates it SO many times.

One reading of this little tale is that the lies need to be exposed in order for the characters to start to return to health. Hence Ruth “wakes up” and takes control when her true nature is uncovered. (Keeping in mind that that "true nature" is Pinter's fantasy.)

This made me think of Dennis Potter, a challenging playwright whose work I do know. He took this idea to a further extreme in his 1976 Brimstone and Treacle. Pattie, who is brain damaged in a car accident, is brought back to consciousness when she’s raped by Martin Taylor, the young man whom her parents let into the house. Martin is likely Satan, the Devil incarnate, and so we see that evil is conjured by all the lying surrounding Pattie’s accident, including her father’s adultery.

Pinter doesn’t have that sense of evil in his house. It’s just Max and the ducklings being clods, as my grandmother might have called them. The story is told with remarkable economy of line, both verbal and visual. It is a good night at the theater.

And the Original Rossetti Poem to Song

English carol singing was much enriched in 1906 when Gustav Holst set a Christmas poem by Christina Rossetti to music. In 1909 Harold Darke reset it as a more complex anthem, one of the most beautiful of all time.

This arrangement is Bob Chilcott, and sung by my very own choir at Ascension Roman Catholic Church in NYC, under the direction of Preston Smith.

In the bleak mid-winter / Frosty wind made moan, / Earth stood hard as iron, / Water like a stone;/ Snow had fallen, snow on snow,/ Snow on snow, / In the bleak mid-winter / Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him / Nor earth sustain; / Heaven and earth shall flee away / When He comes to reign: / In the bleak mid-winter / A stable-place sufficed / The Lord God Almighty, / Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim / Worship night and day, / A breastful of milk / And a mangerful of hay; / Enough for Him, whom angels / Fall down before, / The ox and ass and camel / Which adore.

Angels and archangels / May have gathered there, / Cherubim and seraphim / Thronged the air, / But only His mother / In her maiden bliss, / Worshipped the Beloved / With a kiss.

What can I give Him, / Poor as I am? / If I were a shepherd / I would bring a lamb, / If I were a wise man / I would do my part, / Yet what I can I give Him, / Give my heart.

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 Mapeel     12/26/2007     theater