Stone Soup
Book Review: "Stone Work," by John Jerome. Viking, New York, 1989.How sweet it is, for us lazy incompetents, to watch someone else working hard and well. Sweeter still to watch a world-class watcher watching himself at work.
Such is the rarified pleasure of this unsung little masterpiece. By the time he died at age 69 in 2002, author John Jerome had proven himself as a self-trained jock, instinctive naturalist, amateur stone-mason and writer's writer.
In mid-career, after a modicum of success as a magazine hack, Jerome gave up the "jokey, aggressive, distracted" life of the urban workplace. He and his wife withdrew to the country to "get some kind of sensory reconnection with the physical world" – an impulse well-known to many a Trinity transplant.
I'd never heard of him until I stumbled upon "Stone Work" at an Oregon thrift store. The book and its author both deserve way more recognition, but Jerome just might have gotten a perverse kick out of his relegation to the 25 ¢ bin.
After all, he's the definitive Bard of Thankless Undertakings, to judge from the wry, "contrarian" voice he adopts in his first-person vignettes. Nothing seems to delight him more than an insurmountably strenuous task – rebuilding a vintage truck from scratch, say, or training as a competitive swimmer at age 50.
In "Stone Work," we find him dismantling a quarter-mile wall of boulders and reassembling it way at the other end of his New England homestead, just to "organize the open space" of his front yard. This Sysiphean effort also serves to organize the open-ended chatter of his hyper-active mind.
The wall triggers meditations on physics and mechanics and physiology, light and seasons, work versus play, human versus various animal perceptions. We learn about Jerome's family dynamics and we get to job-shadow some of his craftsmanly mentors. We join him on a scuba-diving vacation in the Caribbean. Any sort of digression's allowed in a book like this: the sheer, automaton imbecility of his stone-stacking task sets his mind "as free as a colt turned out to pasture."
That sense of freedom frisks across every page of Stone Work. "His curiosity was inexhaustible," wrote his hometown paper, The Ashfield (Massachusetts) News, in the only obituary that marked his death four years ago. "He found his subjects in the world immediately around him. and it must have been a joy for him to rise in the morning."
Maybe so, but, for a colt at play, he worked most conscientiously, turning out at least a thousand words a day. With writing, as with any other strenuous obsession of his, the sheer effort of the thing was its own reward – mindful, all the while, that it was a quest for effortless awareness that had inspired his retreat to the country in the first place.
The irony of this predicament was not lost on Jerome. "Words, I am beginning to think, are the specific barrier against seeing things clearly in these woods," he wrote ruefully in Stone Work. "At the same time, [they are] the only specific tool I have for penetrating the barrier … the writer's curse."
So he set himself the task of penetrating "the uncommonness of common things," according to the eulogy delivered in 2002 by his brother-in-law, Bruce McCall. The result was a body of work that was "pitched … both too far over most readers' heads and too far below their threshold of interest."
In other words, just about right for a those of us here in Trinity in tune with Jerome's back-to-the-country wavelength. His dozen volume opus may be (in McCall's phrase) "so devoid of commercial sizzle as to give agents the fantods and hip editors the yawns."
But they are (still quoting McCall) "solid, meaty, meditative books of a terse lyricism." Well worth the dollar or two that they now cost on Amazon or Powells.com; a rare instance where you actually get way more than you pay for.
"Pillowman" @ Berkeley Rep
Tortured Logic
Play Review: Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
To help fend off your mid-winter blues, Berkeley Rep has extended (through March) the run of this cerebral little comedy about the torture-death of children. With such a shocking mismatch of form and subject, playwright Martin McDonagh compels our guiltily voyeuristic attention to his theme: the real-world consequences of the fictions we
so compulsively generate.
McDonagh’s provocative scripts have earned him an Academy Award and made him the enfant terrible of the New York and London Stage. By the age of 29, he’d already become the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays running simultaneously in the West End. “Pillowman” rates as one of his most troubling efforts.
In the claustrophobic interrogation chamber of its one-room set,nightmare fantasies tend to become self-fulfilling. Yet story-telling also holds out the only hope of redemption for the doomed protagonists. This is a paradox well worth revisiting in an age when we find ourselves mired in endless war and torture on the basis of nothing but flawed, irresponsible narratives our “leaders” told us.
“Pillowman’ starts out with a narrator in the dock. Katurian (Eric Lochtefeld) is a virtually unpublished short-story writer whose only real audience, so far, has been his autistic brother, Michal (Mathew Maher). The two siblings find themselves hauled in for questioning about a string of mysterious kidnappings that have beset the capitol of a nameless dictatorship.
They’re grilled by an urbane senior detective (Tony Amendola) and his sadistic acolyte (Andy Murray). “I’m the good cop; he’s the bad cop,” the detective helpfully advises the hapless writer.
Both cops have read through Katurian’s entire 400-story opus. The confiscated manuscripts are all about children who wind up murdered, or murderous, or both.
No wonder; the stories are the product of a “literary experiment” in which Katurian’s parents kept the two brothers ignorant of each others’ existence in adjacent rooms. One of them, the future writer, was cosseted while the other brother was noisily tortured right next door every night.
Under this subliminal influence, Katurian developed a Kafkaesque turn of mind and phrase, as shown in several of his stories which are recited or dramatized onstage. So, in literary terms, the parents’ “experiment” succeeds. But the ordeal turned Michal autistic. When the outraged writer finally discovers the ruse, he smothers Mom and Dad with their pillows in their sleep.
The two brothers live on in obscurity until they’re hauled in for a police grilling. It turns out the modus of the current crime spree all-too-closely matches some of the artful touches in Katurian’s gruesome tales. After “softening up” by the police, the two brothers are dumped together in a holding cell, where the horrified Katurian discovers that Michal has, in all idiotic innocence, taken the stories as literal prescriptions for action.
To spare Michal the ordeal of police torture, Katurian snuffs his brother with a jailhouse pillow and then summons the two cops for a plea bargain. In exchange for a pledge to preserve his manuscripts as part of his police file and publicly release them 50 years later, Katurian offers his confession. In page after lurid page of his best prose, the writer admits to six killings: his parents, his brother and three local kids.
But upon interrogation, Katurian trips up on the details of the child-slayings – unsurprisingly, since he wasn’t there for any of them. The sadistic underling (himself a product of child abuse) wants to beat the truth out of him, but later comes to sympathize with the two brothers.
The senior detective, however, is unappeased. Since Katurian has made a false confession, all bets are off, including the promise to preserve his stories. The “good cop” summarily executes the writer and orders the manuscripts burnt – a directive that his “bad cop” sidekick quietly chooses to ignore.
And, strange to tell, we wind up somehow cheered that the stories survive. Even though these are the same stories that triggered the killings. Even though the stories came about through such a gruesome “experiment” to begin with. Yet these looming shadows leave us feeling more than a
little queasy about our own sense of relief.
And that, I think, is exactly the ambivalence McDonagh aims to achieve. He’s helped in it by Les Waters’ taut direction and, above all, by masterful casting (thanks to Amy Plotzkin and Janet Foster).
Katurian is Lotchefeld’s second Berkeley Rep appearance in less than a year in the role of a tortured writer. Last summer he played Tennessee Williams’ fictitious alter-ego in the autobiographical “Glass Menagerie.” The intensity and integrity he can bring to two such different parts is testimonial to Lotchefeld’s range as an actor.
Murray’s explosive Cockney bluntness, as the police bully, provides a perfect foil for the world-weary unctuosity of Amendola’s senior detective. Maher, as the autistic brother, manages to make idiocy eloquent with his stammer
and shuffle and hyperthyroid stare.
Waters paces the play briskly enough to move you from horror to gag lines and back without missing a beat. Russel Champa’s stark lighting and Obadiah Eaves’ percussive music help underscore the pervasive sense of menace.
The net effect is a wholly absorbing evening of theater that makes you wonder about your own attitudes and responsibilities as an audience and consumer of narratives. A timely reminder, these days.
Stoppard @ ACT
*Relentless Cleverness*/Play Review/: Travesties, /by Tom Stoppard, at the American
Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), //San Francisco//./
Had enough of the mud-slinging crudities and simplistic over-certainties
of the 2006 election cycle? Then try /Travesties /as an antidote.
This hyper-refined and resolutely inconclusive play of ideas pits
artistic and political revolutionaries against radical conservatives.
Each side gets its fair share of rhetorical dazzle and endearingly
slapstick /shtick/. Yet author Stoppard remains above the partisan fray,
never taking sides.
Instead, he leaves the polemicizing to his three historic stars:
founding Bolshevik V.I. Lenin, avant-garde Irish novelist James Joyce
and dada send-up artist Tristan Tzara. All three nurse revolutionary
visions that are mutually exclusive.
Lenin aims to harness all classes, including "arts workers," to the
urgent historical imperative of a total societal makeover. For Joyce, on
the other hand, artistic achievement is the only justifiable /raison
d'être/ for the otherwise meaningless "nightmare" of history. Tzara, for
his part, is a scissor-wielding artistic anarchist with his own recipe
for poetic "freshness" – slice all texts into snippets so they can
randomly rearrange themselves.
Coincidentally, in 1917, all three of these revolutionary icons happened
to be waiting out World War I in neutral Zurich, although there is no
evidence that they actually interacted. To bring them into
juxtaposition, Stoppard invokes a fourth co-star: one Henry Carr, a
historic non-entity who also happened to live in Zurich at the time as a
totally undistinguished British consul.
Carr is far more interested in his own wardrobe than in the maelstrom of
the Great War, with its swirling political and intellectual headwinds.
He's militantly incurious, as radical in his know-nothing conservativism
as the other three are in their revolutionary zeal.
Just to mix things up, Stoppard lets Carr and Tzara haunt the same
Zurich library in pursuit of Cecily and Gwendolyn, a pair of
bluestocking bookworms. And he makes Carr's butler a closet Leninist.
Then he has Joyce, as a fund-raising ploy, recruit Carr to star in an
amateur theatrical production of Oscar Wilde's /Importance of Being
Earnest/.
If all this makes no logical sense, never mind. The whole point is to
set up an epigrammatic dialectic between the protagonists' clashing
ideologies. And anyway, the action is framed as a series addled
flashbacks in the recollection of a senile Carr nearly half a century
after the fact.
Geordie Johnson, as Carr, shuttles with ease across the age divide,
equally at home as a dotty dotard or a callow dandy. Just as fatuous as
the young Carr is Gregory Wallace's Tzara, whose dada provocations seem
no more than the bratty mannerisms of a spoiled rich kid. The banter
between these two fops liberally echoes /The Importance of Being
Earnest/, an allusion reinforced by the saccharine bitchiness of Cecily
and Gwendolyn (Allison Jean White and Rene Augeson), who are even named
after Wilde's female leads.
Master mime Geoff Hoyle juggles two roles with aplomb: as Lenin, he's by
turns a shabby émigré or a charismatic firebrand. Then, after a
lightning costume switch, he turns into Carr's self-effacing valet,
mouthing incendiary Bolshevik dogma with unflappably servile decorum.
Anthony Fusco plays Joyce with a myopic squint, lilting brogue and
diffident slouch that all belie the character's acerbic insight and
implacable egotism. As far as the Irish genius is concerned, the most
important event of the war decade is /Ulysses/.
To fully savor a lot of the play's "in" jokes, it helps to know your way
around Joyce's masterpiece, as well as Wilde's /Earnest/ and even
Lenin's /Critique of Imperialism/. Stoppard is not just showing off with
these allusions. They speak to one of his key themes: that humans and
their historic legacies are as mercurial as texts, in a constant flux of
reinterpretation.
So Carr's senile recollections shuffle the deck of canonical "reality"
just as radically as Tzara's scissors. Even the visual aspects – Douglas
Schmidt's sets and Robert Wierzel's lighting – reinforce the allusive
subtexts of the play, quoting period idioms that range from the pastel
"floating world" of dada artist Rene Magritte to the stolid Red kitsch
of Soviet "socialist realism."
A play this relentlessly clever could all too easily wear audiences down
over the course of two acts, but A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff
– a veteran of half a dozen Stoppard productions in San Francisco –
paces /Travesties / lightly enough for us to enjoy the jokes without
getting bogged down in the footnotes. Not to be missed.
Labels: Reviews
One-Man Farrago @ Berkeley Rep
*Stew, in His Own Juices*/Play Review:/ Passing Strange, /by Stew, at //Berkeley// Rep/.
Even though it boasts a talented cast as well as a bevy of top-tier
collaborators and designers, /Passing Strange/ feels like a one-man
show: a personal vehicle for Stew, its composer/lyricist/narrator. He’s
in your face for pretty much the entire two-act farrago – singing,
riffing, whacking his guitars (electric and acoustic), goading his
characters to action or challenging the audience with sly asides.
He’s a rotund, deadpan little fellow with curiously truncated gestures,
like a Mister Potatohead. His one-syllable sobriquet, Stew, well befits
his onstage persona: meaty, nourishing, but somehow warmed-over, an
improvised assemblage of odd tidbits.
The name is evidently self-invented. So is his musical idiom (mixing
rap, punk rock, beerhall ballads and cabaret) and even his diction (by
turns street-smart jivey or allusively erudite).
Stew’s process of self-invention forms the slender plotline of the show.
His nameless, but evidently autobiographic, protagonist (Daniel Breaker)
starts out as a reluctant choirboy in a black, middle-class Baptist
church in L.A. He toys with pot and acid and all kinds of music in a
self-conscious quest for what’s “really real.” Nobody at home
understands him, not even his dotingly bemused mother (Eisa Davis).
So he follows the James Baldwin trail to Europe, first basking in the
free-love-and-dope Lotusland of Amersterdam and then plunging into the
edgy political and artistic milieu of Berlin. As a black, he’s lionized
in Europe for his presumed first-hand insight into American perfidy and
hypocricy.
Yet his mother’s constant phone calls keep him naggingly aware that his
supportive, middle-class background hardly matches up to his Berlin pose
of ghettoized grievance. Year after year he keeps ducking his mother’s
entreaties to come home for Christmas. In the end he misses one
Christmas too many and winds up flying back to L.A. only in time for her
funeral – an inkling, at last, of what’s “really real.”
All this could be ponderous or mawkish if related in deadly earnest. But
Stew mostly steers clear of such pitfalls and teases out the ironies of
his story.
In this he’s mightily helped by his cast – not only his two protagonists
but also a quartet of supporting actors (De’Adre Aziza, Colman Domingo,
Rebecca Naomi Jones and Chad Goodridge). They play everyone from teenage
heart-throbs to crusty old uncles to flutey church ladies to stoners to
drag queens to German anarchists. They shift roles with dizzying
panache, equally at home singing, dancing or acting.
All the more impressive given the booby-trapped theater-in-the-round
apron they’re playing on. At the start of the play, Stew shares the
stage with a keyboard-player, a drummer, an all-around sideman and
bassist Heidi Rodenwald (his co-composer and longtime partner). But,
after the opening number, the musicians and their instruments half-sink
into the floor on four separate elevator platforms.
To keep the frenetic cast from tumbling into these pits must have
presented no mean challenge to director Annie Dorson and choreographer
Karole Armitage. Mercifully, at least, designer David Korins has given
them a cool, uncluttered set to work with – just some chairs and a
couple of clothes racks for the many quick costume changes.
For the L.A. scenes, these props are set in front of a scrim of white
parachute cloth, lit from behind with either solid colors or spangles
and splotches as the mood of each scene dictates. Only when the action
shifts to Europe is the scrim-curtain drawn back to reveal the
underlying light source: an array of fluorescent tubes and incandescent
bulbs that are switched in constantly shifting colors and patterns to
match the onstage action.
In the final scenes, back in L.A., the scrim returns, but this time in
black. Back-lit by the lightbulb array, it makes for an effect a bit
like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
With such ingenious touches, such an energetic cast, such an original
concept and such a humane heart, there’s a lot to like in “Passing
Strange.” It’s an A-list effort; everyone connected with the show boasts
a first-class pedigree of Broadway, regional and European credits.
And yet, for me at least, the music sometimes palls. In a program note
interview, when asked about his transition from cabaret performance
(where he made his fame) to a full-length play, Stew declares that
crating Passing Strange felt like “just writing one big song.” All too
often it sounds like it.
There are a few stand-out numbers, mostly where he spoofs other genres
to underscore an irony, as in a wonderful soft-shoe number in which our
hero flaunts his chic negritude to European fans. But a lot of the
connective tissue is ploddingly pedestrian hip-hop, hard-pressed to
sustain musical interest for a production this long.
Still, Passing Strange is well worth a run down I-5 before early
December, when it ends its run here and decamps for New York’s
prestigious Public Theater (which joined Berkeley Rep to co-produce the
show).
Labels: Reviews
Richard, Meet Will
*From the Sublime to the Ridiculous*/Opera Review:/ Tristan and Isolde /by Richard Wagner at the //San
Francisco// Opera./
/Play Review:/ As You Like It /by William Shakespeare at CalShakes,
//Orinda//./
"Act One is two women walking around the stage. Act Two, two people
seated on a bench. The Third Act, a man keeps getting up and lying down
again."
That synopsis, from the official S.F. Opera program notes, pretty
accurately sums up the stage action in /Tristan and Isolde/. And yet
Wagner's masterpiece holds audiences rapt for its entire five-hour
length through its psychologically nuanced portrayal of a fore-doomed love.
Tristan (Thomas Moser) has conquered Ireland and won its young princess,
Isolde (Christine Brewer), as a trophy bride for his elderly uncle, King
Marke (Kristinn Sigmundsson) of Cornwall. On ship-board she plots to
kill her captor and herself, but her devoted sidekick (Jane Irwin)
secretly substitutes a love potion in lieu of the intended poison.
So, after draining the shared chalice, instead of dropping dead, the
title characters swoon in mutual rapture. The guilt-wracked lovers, only
able to meet under cover of night, come to hate the light – a dichotomy
that Wagner develops as a metaphor for the death-wish at the core of
romantic love.
The protagonists' photophobia, of course, provides a field day for
lighting designer Duane Schuler. And David Hockney's stage sets, with
their oppressive vanishing point perspective, underscore the story's
sense of inexorability.
For this potion is no casual date-rape aphrodisiac. As Wagner's
self-scripted libretto makes clear, the magic draught revokes
inhibitions – Tristan's sense of honor, Isolde's sense of shame -- that
had stymied their long-standing, but unavowed, passion.
Although first staged in 1865, a generation before Freud ever dreamt of
"superego" or "id," this opera fully anticipates the psychobabble of our
modern introspections. No wonder there's so little action and so much
vocal self-analysis.
Just as well, though. Constitutionally, Moser and Brewer are no spry
actors, but rather grand vocal instruments. And this score gives them so
much to work with, musically.
Wagner assigns each emotion a recurring musical signature phrase, or
/leitmotif/. He builds up psychological complexity by layering or
inter-cutting these /leitmotifs/, both in the vocal and orchestral
lines. No distinct arias or recitatives, no whistleable tunes, barely
even a consistent key signature in his scores; just a constantly
shifting chiaroscuro of emotions – revolutionary in an age when Verdi's
mellifluous melodramas dominated the opera stage.
Not every singer can muster the sustained intensity of a Wagnerian role.
Moser, for instance, occasionally founders under the weight of the heavy
orchestration. But Brewer more than holds her own. Her climactic
/Liebestod/ – a paean to the grandeur of obsessive passion – is truly
sublime.
Such sublimity, of course, only makes sense in the closed context of a
single, mutually-obsessed couple. If, like Shakespeare, you recognize
the commutative property of passion, then you can have a lot more fun
with the ridiculous side of romantic love.
/As You Like It/ starts out, like /Tristan and Isolde/, with a perfectly
straightforward mutual obsession: Rosalind (Susannah Schulman) and
Orlando (Stephen Barker Turner) have fallen in love-at-first-sight. But
she's the daughter of an exiled duke (L. Peter Callender) and he's the
younger brother of a jealous courtier (Hector Correa), so both have to
flee the ducal court for refuge in the forest.
Orlando finds refuge with the ousted duke and plasters all the forest
trees with clunky love poems to his inamorata. Rosalind's exile is more
complicated: she goes in drag, accompanied by her cousin Celia (Julie
Eccles), daughter of the usurping duke (who's also played by Carpenter).
For entertainment, the two women bring along their court jester (Dan Hiatt).
The exiles encounter forest denizens with romantic inclinations of their
own: a shepherdess (Domenique Lozano) falls for the jester, while a
local swain (Max Gordon Moore) has his heart set on a sylvan damsel
(Delia MacDougal). But she, in turn, becomes eneamored of Rosalind-in-drag.
About the only character without a love interest is the dyspeptic
courtier Jacques (Andy Murray) – a tree-hugging, animal-loving,
melancholic quibbler who is perfectly content to spend the rest of his
life in wilderness exile; in other words, a Democrat. He gets to recite
some of the choicest lines in Shakespeare, including the famous "seven
ages of man" speech.
Some other choice lines are set to gypsy-themed music by composer Gina
Leischman, who doesn't confine herself to Shakespeare's designated songs
but even scores some of the blank verse dialogue. This comes off less
hokey than it sounds, thanks to the understated efforts of a
violin-accordian-bass trio which gives the music a jazzy, vaguely
/klezmer/ undertone.
It all hangs together, as long as you don't dwell upon any of it too
long. Director Jonathan Moscone keeps it all moving with his brisk
pacing and hyperkinetic stage blocking. The net result is, in the words
of Celia, "wonderful past all whooping."
Labels: Reviews
Peace Prize for Yunus
*You Can Tell That It's Swell; It's Nobel*Seeing all the saturation coverage of the new Nobel Peace Laureate
Mohammed Yunus this week I was struck by how little he's changed since
we shared a pot of cardamom-scented Bengali tea nearly two decades ago.
Still the same twinkle, the same graying mutton chop sideburns, the same
little paunch and the same quiet ebullience.
In 1987, Yunus – founding director of the Grameen Bank – struck me as an
owlishly wise elder statesman, although, at age 47, he was only a few
years my senior. Nowadays, in his interviews, he projects an elfin verve
that makes me feel a bit old. If only I could jinn myself up to such
optimism.
Back then I was a freshly-minted foreign correspondent, having come to
my senses after a brief lapse of insanity in which I took an MBA and
worked as a London merchant banker syndicating Euroloans. With this
background, I landed a job with a Financial Times subsidiary covering
South Asia's economic "liberalization" out of Bombay.
From time to time, I even got to venture into neighboring countries for
"regional color." Stock stuff, mostly, that I'd glean from diplomats,
bankers and local "technocrats" -- glowing paeans to Nepal's
constitutional monarchy, Sri Lanka's tourism boom or the CIA's crafty
use of Pakistan as a platform to mobilize a pan-Islamic /jihadi/ force
against the Soviet puppets in Kabul.
Finding something to cover in Bangladesh proved trickier. The place
didn't even / have/ a financial sector to speak of, nor any discernible
geopolitical importance. Nothing bankable in sight and no visible means
to collateralize any credit.
All that Bangladesh had going for it was nearly 150 million of the
poorest people on earth. This, however, was no mean asset, as a worldly
Belgian development specialist explained to me.
"It assures a perpetual drip of foreign aid, enough to sustain this
complex here and all those out there," he pronounced with a sweeping
wave towards his double-glazed, cool-tint window. Beyond the AC-frosted
pane gleamed the futuristic government and diplomatic tower blocks that
had risen, in the country's brief decade of independence, from the
steamy fens surrounding the old capital, Dhaka.
When I recapped this conversation later that night at the Dhaka Press
Club, my local host, veteran Bangla journalist Sayyed Kamaluddin,
decided I needed to meet Yunus as a corrective to the country's "basket
case" image. He set up an interview for the very next day and introduced
his friend as "a mad Chittagong professor with a sort of benevolent
Ponzi scheme to get beggars to lend each other money."
At this arch characterization, Yunus just shrugged. "Mad you may call
it, but the loans get repaid. And, next thing you know, the beggars quit
begging."
The secret was economies of scale – /micro/ scale. His customers were
beneath the notice of any commercial lender, let alone government
bureaucrats or international aid-/wallahs/.
Why, most of his borrowers were women, who were supposed to be
economically invisible in conservative Bangla society. They lived in
villages (or "/grameen/," in the local language) that were too small to
even appear on a map. But they were visible to each other, and that was
all the "collateral" Yunus needed.
His bank could run with virtually no paperwork – no promissory notes or
loan covenants – since just about every villager knew perfectly well who
was borrowing what and why. The manageable $10-50 loans were always
repaid on time because otherwise the bank’s limited seed capital
wouldn't be available for the next neighbor to use. And that would put
the villagers once again at the mercy of high-handed usurers and /
babu's/ (officials) from the city.
This flew in the face of everything I'd been taught in MBA school or the
Euromoney markets. How could any financial institution survive by
banking on the sheer altruism and mutual responsibility of ordinary
people? Illiterate and penniless peasants, no less.
Well, that's how it /is/ at the micro-credit level, Yunus assured me.
Like sub-atomic physics, the "laws of nature" all change below a certain
scale.
I pitched a Yunus profile to my Hongkong editors, but – after learning
of the Grameen Bank's risibly thin capitalization -- they wouldn't buy
the story.
Since then, of course, the likes of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates – and
now the Nobel Committee – have bought into Yunus' vision of a caring
society. The Grameen model of micro-level self-help has spread beyond
finance into such areas as health care and education, inspiring
imitators on five continents, including North America (in Chicago
neighborhoods).
But I'm still reserving judgment. Back when I had tea with Yunus, his
notions of "social collateral" still seemed pretty theoretical to me,
since I'd never actually been to a Third World village.
Now I live in one. Here in Trinity we may think we're a world away from
the Bengali /grameen/, but there are some commonalities: we, too, find
ourselves on the wrong side of a widening relative income gap, beneath
the notice of such "service providers" as cellphone operators or
hospital management conglomerates. Self-reliance is our only option.
Yet / still/ we're pondering whether it's worth our while for each
household to assume less than $10 a month of mutual responsibility to
retain baseline medical services in the county. For Yunus, I suspect,
this would be a no-brainer. Here, the jury's still out. We'll see on
Election Day.
Labels: Reviews
Anne Frank at Ashland
*It Can’t Happen Here*/Play Review/: “The Diary of Anne Frank,” /Angus Bowmer Theater//,
//Oregon// Shakespeare Festival, //Ashland//./
A thought experiment: Suppose our duly elected Great Decider proclaims a
class of enemies that pose a life-or-death challenge to all we hold
dear. A threat so dire that our Unitary Executive must assume power to
unilaterally determine who is or is not an enemy.
And suppose the Executive could detain these deemed enemies
indefinitely, or inflict upon them any degree of degradation or torture,
even unto death. All without having to explain, justify or even declare
any of what’s done, as long as it’s targeted at “enemies.”
Suppose the Decider erected a vast archipelago of camps and pens to
process these detainees. How vast? Don’t ask; the question itself is so
treasonous it could get you into trouble. After all, the same Executive
has also ordained a secret system of domestic surveillance – all for
your own protection in ways that are, specifically speaking, none of
your damn business.
So how, just as a thought experiment, to retain your basic humanity
under such circumstances? Of course the whole grotesque set-up is almost
unimaginable to modern Americans. Yet that was the milieu in which Anne
Frank, a Jewish teen, had to come of age in Nazi-occupied Holland.
For two years, 1942-44, her whole world was bounded by a pinched garret
suite atop an office block. There Anne, together with her parents and
older sister plus another middle-aged couple and their teenaged son, hid
out from the Gestapo. They were joined, early on, by another stray
refugee, a dentist.
Crammed into such close quarters, the oddly matched octet went through a
whole gamut of responses, from altruistic mutual solicitude to cheating
and bickering. The mood in the garret could swing from holiday gaiety to
cowering terror at the merest creak of a floorboard downstairs.
A key component of Anne’s particular recipe for retaining humanity was
her diary. The book was lost when the Nazis finally burst into the
hide-out. But, after the war, Anne’s father – the group’s sole survivor
of the death camps – retrieved the precious record from the wreckage of
the garret.
Published in English in 1952, the Diary immediately turned Anne into the
poster child for the Holocaust – all the more so after the Broadway
(1955) and Hollywood (1959) versions. Putting a particular (and winsome)
face on the millions of martyred innocents helped Americans get their
minds around the unprecedented enormity of the genocide.
Sadly, we’ve all learned a lot more about genocide since then, so the
simplistic Anne Frank of those early editions now seems less persuasive.
It turns out that Anne’s father, in line with the assimilationist
instincts of war-traumatized Jewry and the strident conformity of 1950’s
America, had toned down the initial versions of the Diary. Gone were
many particularly Jewish allusions, all reference to Anne’s sexual
awakening and much philosophical speculation about the evil that had
overtaken her world.
Instead we were left with what became Anne’s signature quote: “In spite
of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Well, she /did / write those words and they /do/ resonate with our
innate American optimism.
But, plucked out of context like that, the quote sanitizes Anne as a
character and trivializes the hideous mystery of the Holocaust. A fresh
1997 stage adaptation by Wendy Kesselman went back to the original diary
text to restore much of the lost depth.
For instance, the famously upbeat closing quote is balanced out with
Anne’s anguish at how “the world is…transformed into a wilderness.” And
all these ruminations are summarily cut off by the brutal endgame
(unshown in the 1950’s versions) of the Nazi raid.
This is the script that director James Edmondson chose for the Ashland
production. To emphasize the claustrophobia of their confinement, he has
all eight of the refugees onstage together almost all the time. Thanks
to set designer Richard Hay’s multilevel cutaway dollhouse-style set, we
get to view all the rooms of the garret at once.
Laura Morache, in the title role, moves from room to room, lighting up
each scene with her incandescent performance. Anyone who has ever raised
(or been) a teenager knows well the world of difference between a
13-year-old and a 15-year-old, the age span Anne covered in hiding.
Morache explores this unfolding personality in all its nuance.
Others in the cast also make full use of the richer characterizations in
the Kimmelman script. Anne’s father (Tony DeBruno) is impressively
judicious and her mother (Linda Alper) forbearing and empathic.
The other couple (Catherine Coulson and Michael Hume) both falter as the
privations of hiding magnify their private vices. But they stand by each
other in one of the play’s most affecting scenes. And the puppy love
between their son (John Tufts) and Anne is all the more poignant in
light of the inevitable ending.
These garret denizens, of course, are all on the Executive enemy-list of
their era. They’re branded with the hated yellow star that leaves its
indelible trace even after it’s been peeled off in the “freedom” of a
hide-out. For them, the riddle of how to retain humanity in a time of
horror is relatively simple: all they can do is lay low and try to grow,
even in deepest shadow.
Tougher choices face such non-“enemies” as the Gentile protectors
(played by Linda Morris and Brad Whitmore) who, at infinite personal
risk, usher the refugees into hiding, provision them for the duration
and guard their secret.
And what of the other non-“enemies” who never appear onstage? Not the
collaborationists who back up the Gestapo raid, but rather the simple
multitude who merely got on with their lives. Did they just not know
what was going on? Or did they /choose/ not to know? Were they, as Anne
dares to hope, “good at heart?” Or were they complicit in mega-crimes?
How would they have voted, given the chance?
Labels: Reviews
Batty Burlesques
*Double Header*/Movie Review:/ Little Miss Sunshine, /by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie
Faris, at the Trinity Theater through September 28^th /.
/Opera Review: /Die Fledermaus (The Bat), /by Johann Strauss, Jr., at
//San Francisco//'s War Memorial Hall, through October 13^th /.
Full disclosure: the original reason for combining these two titles was
simply that I happened to see them in the same week. And they were both
such fun that I wanted to let readers know about them while they were
still playing. But, in writing the column, I've found – strange to tell
– more than a coincidental connection between the two.
Strange because, on the face of it, two more dissimilar works would be
hard to imagine. The newly released indie flick (a likely Oscar
contender) follows a family of all-American losers on a VW jalopy jaunt
en route to a bush league juvenile beauty pageant. The 130-year-old
classic operetta peeks into the private lives of Viennese glitterati at
the height of Hapsburg grandeur.
Yet there's a thematic common denominator between the two: the vanity of
over-reaching and the redemptive value of letting go.
/Die Fledermaus/ is all about social and sexual one-upmanship. The title
character (Brian Leerhube) has been secretly thirsting for revenge ever
since his "friend," von Eisenstein (Wolfgang Brendel), abandoned him,
drunk, on a park bench in a bat costume after a masked ball. Tonight, at
the social event of the year – the grand fête of a Russian nobleman
(Gerald Thompson) – the Bat finally gets his chance for redress.
By rights, the target of this vendetta should be starting a brief jail
term tonight for slanging a cop. But the crafty Bat contrives to have
his nemesis, as well as Mrs. von Eisenstein (Christine Goerke), their
chamber maid (Jennifer Welch-Babbage) and even the prison warden (Eugene
Brancoveanu) all show up at the Russian party. There, incognito, they
flirt, jive and insult each other in ways that are sure to haunt them in
the cold light of the morning-after.
In /Little Miss Sunshine/'s Hoover family, the over-reaching takes on
more peculiarly American forms. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a wannabe
self-improvement guru waiting upon an elusive franchise contract. Sonny
(Paul Dano) is an aspiring Air Force cadet whose readings in Neitzche
have launched him on a surly vow of silence. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a
clapped out hedonist bent on a last-ditch glut of porn and smack.
Brother-in-law (Steve Carell) is a defrocked professor fresh out of a
nuthouse after a failed gay romance and a suicide bid. The pre-pubescent
baby of the family (Abigail Breslin) longs to reign as a junior beauty
queen. Even Mom (Toni Collette) – the only sane adult of the bunch – is
a world-class striver; she toils full-time just to keep the rest of
these loonies from flying off the rails.
Both /Die Fledermaus/ and /Little Miss Sunshine/ climax in gala,
flamboyantly pretentious scenes designed to showcase the particular
genius of their creators – the Russian masked ball for "Waltz King"
Strauss and a kiddie beauty pageant for a pair of veteran MTV producers
like Dayton and Faris (a husband-and-wife duo who've never made a
feature film before).
Yet these /auteurs/ use all their technical mastery to spoof precisely
their own art forms and the underlying value systems that sustain them.
Strauss' grand ball scene is practically exhausting in its phony, forced
gaiety – an irony underscored by designer Wolfram Skalicki's set, which
neatly mirrors the rococo pomposity of the San Francisco Opera House.
And cutesy MTV tropes look all the more plastic and meretricious when
grafted onto 10-year-old beauty contestants.
So we instinctively cheer as our protagonists overthrow prescribed norms
– when the von Eisensteins and their jailer reconcile in prison, or when
the adult Hoovers all take to the stage to fend off the outraged pageant
organizers while their own little kewpie gyrates her way through the
raunchy dance routine that Grandpa's choreographed for her.
The performances in /Little Miss Sunshine/ are all so spot-on and
winsome that it's hard to single out any one of them for special notice.
Rather, kudos are due to two behind-the-scenes stars: cinematographer
Tim Suhrstedt and editor Pamela Martin.
As for /Die Fledermaus,/ Goerke stole the show. Her bittersweet /Kaffee
mit Schlag/ delivery is perfect for Viennese operetta (though she /does/
carry around an extra dollop of /Schlag /onstage)/. /Thompson, a
countertenor, plays the Russian prince with all the campy virtuosity of
a Liberace. Prison warden Brancoveanu and his jailer sidekick, Jason
Graae, bring a Buster Keatonish grace to the slapstick jail scenes at
the opening of Act III.
For all its seeming Gemultichkeit, Strauss' operetta shadows dark days
ahead for Hapsburg Vienna. High society had just been devastated by a
financial crash and the empire was suffering a string of military
defeats. Looming in the not-too-distant future were the dark insights of
pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the paranoid Kampf of a
Viennese housepainter named Adolf Hitler.
No wonder Strauss' characters all seem so determined to bed each other
and drink themselves to oblivion. I wonder what forebodings future
cultural historians, with benefit of hindsight, might detect in /Little
Miss Sunshine/.
Still, for neophyte opera-goers, /Die Fledermaus/ is about as easy an
introduction as you're likely to find. Whether you know it or not, much
of the lightsome music is already familiar: you've heard it since
childhood as the soundtrack of many a TV cartoon. What's more, in the
San Francisco Opera version, the libretto is all sung in English with
subtitles (supertitles?) projected on a screen above the stage.
This came in handy for me, as I'd not seen /Die Fledermaus/ in over 40
years. Back in P.S. 188, New York , my sixth grade teacher, Mrs.
Warhaftig, chose it as our class play. What was she thinking? Yet
somehow, at the time, I managed to convince myself that it was all about
tea and cakes, rather than adultery and drunkenness. Until the truth was
explained to me by my classmate, Elliott Abrams, who sat next to me in
Assembly and had the .lewdest mind I'd ever encountered.
Elliott also regaled me with his own, original, ribald revised libretto
of Die Fledermaus which has ever since pre-empted the canonical version
for me. He has now become Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor in
charge of global "democracy promotion" (after having pled guilty to
lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair and only escaping jail by
presidential pardon). He is evidently as obscene as ever, although a
good deal less funny.
Labels: Reviews
"Mother Courage" at Berkeley Rep
*Up Against the Wall, Mother** */Play Review: /“Mother Courage and her Children,” /by Bertolt Brecht,
at the Berkeley Repertory Theater./
War, Von Clausewitz tells us, is just “diplomacy by other means.” Not
so, says Bertolt Brecht, the maverick Communist titan of early 20^th
century theater, in his preface to “Mother Courage” – war is actually
"business by other means."
Maybe this message is due for a reprise these days, for Brecht’s
repertory classic is enjoying a coast-to-coast spate of revivals this
season. Meryl Streep opened (to mixed reviews) last month in the title
role in New York. An /avant garde/ troupe in Los Angeles just staged a
hip-hop rendition. And now the Berkeley Rep treats Northern California
to its own brisk and literate adaptation with an all new musical score.
Brecht’s title character crisscrosses Northern Europe dragging her
hand-pulled canteen cart behind the ravaging armies of the Thirty Years’
War (1618-1648). Nowadays, the soulless Halliburtons of the world have
given war profiteering a bad name, but there’s actually a lot to admire
in Mother Courage: her tenacity, her unflinching realism, her fierce
determination to protect her brood.
Her three children are just about all (aside from profits) that she
cares for. Yet, one-by-one, the war swallows them up until she’s left to
shoulder the wagon yoke alone in her (literally) staggering
determination to “get back to business.”
This denouement moved crowds to tears when the play premiered in neutral
Switzerland in 1941. Brecht couldn’t oversee the production – he was
busy fleeing the Nazis via Sweden, Finland and Siberia en route to the
U.S. But, when he learned of the sentimental opening night reaction, he
was furious.
The last thing he’d sought was to make audiences “lose themselves” in
empathy with the characters. As a good dialectician, he wanted people to
retain enough objectivity to think through the underlying contradictions
of his subject.
So he rewrote the play to deliberately distance the public from the
onstage emotions. In the process, he pretty much invented the whole set
of stage conventions that define his “Epic Theater” movement.
He chopped up the action into disjointed episodes. To diffuse any
suspense build-up, he synopsized each scene in advance through narration
and text placards.
Cabaret-style songs were strewn like speed bumps throughout the
storyline. And, just to underscore the “unnatural” artifice of the whole
endeavor, he stripped the stage down to its bare walls and made do with
minimal props, no sets and stark, white lighting.
In lesser hands, this sort of Epic Theater could prove grimly didactic.
But, for a dramatic genius like Brecht, it offers endless opportunities
to fake-out the audience with abrupt mood shifts: from slapstick to
bathetic to epigrammatic and all shades in between.
The revised “Mother Courage” finally debuted in East Germany in 1949
(Brecht having fled America after run-ins with the Hollywood blacklist
and McCarthyite inquisitors). The production, under the author’s own
direction, starred Helene Wiegel (i.e. Mrs. Brecht) as its gutsy heroine.
It became the showpiece of Epic Theater, much revived in the
English-speaking world in the “definitive” Eric Bentley translation with
the original, bombastic Paul Dessau score. It takes a fair bit of nerve
to depart from this canonical version.
Yet that’s precisely what director Lisa Peterson has dared in the
Berkeley Rep rendition. For her script, she’s bypassed Bentley and opted
for the less declamatory David Hare translation. And she commissioned a
spare, new score by Gina Leishman, who backs her singers with a
minimalist combo of piano, accordion and tuba – “the meeting point
redux,” as she describes it, “of circus, military and cabaret music.”
By way of sets, scenic designer Rachel Hauck offers only some moveable
door frames, ladders, catwalks and pulleys, plus the bare stage walls –
all painted black, the better to chalk the many text blurbs that Brecht
includes in his script. Nothing gets erased, so, by the end of the play,
the grafitti have piled up into an unintelligible palimpsest – a nice
21^st century touch.
Ivonne Coll, in the starring role, plays up her Latina roots – an
inspired bit of casting, in a way. On the one hand, she brings an apt
and attractive Hispanic stoicism to the role. But her dialect-tinged
diction might have been better suited to the broader Bentley-Dassau
version than to Hare’s spun-out riffs or Leishman’s free-form,
recitative-like musical settings.
Coll is ably supported by the two men in her (onstage) life – a
sniveling leech of a chaplain (Patrick Kerr) and a past-prime gigolo of
a camp cook (Jarion Monroe). As Yvette, the camp-following
whore-with-a-heart-of-tin, Katie Barrett brings off exactly the right
mix of vulnerability and grandiosity. With her classical vocal training,
she manages to sing just flat enough to crack up an audience in her
show-stopping cabaret numbers.
Mother Courage’s two sons, the swaggering hero Eilif (Justin Leath) and
the honest dimwit Swiss Cheese (Drew Hirshfield), convincingly trigger
their share of maternal sorrow. But the real heartbreaker of the brood
is the mute altruist Kattrin.
In the climactic scene of the play, she mounts a farmhouse rooftop to
warn a nearby sleeping town of an immanent genocidal raid. She sounds
the alarm, frantically beating a drum until she’s shot down from her
perch. Katie Huard plays the role with all the eloquence of an
accomplished mime.
Classically, Mother Courage is a sturdy old VW of a play – a quirky, but
indefatigable vehicle for its cargo of ideas. Instead, the new Berkeley
Rep production offers us the raffish elegance of a second-hand Benz. The
gears may not always quite mesh, but the quality of the components is
high enough and the whole ensemble weighty enough that it gets us where
we need to go.
Labels: Reviews
"Cyrano" @ Ashland
*Top Banana*/Play Review: / “Cyrano de Bergerac,” /by Edmond Rostand, at the
Elizabethan Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Ashland/.
In the course of this swash-buckling tragicomedy, you’re guaranteed to
learn at least one word of French: /panache/. We once had it in American
English, too, as a loan-word, but now we’ve lost it, ceded it back to
its country of origin in favor of its dumbed-down TexMex cognate,
/machismo/.
Yet / panache/ still appears in Webster’s with two definitions: its
literal meaning as an ornamental feather-in-the-cap, and its figurative
sense – “dashing elegance of manner…spirited self-confidence, or style.”
Rostand’s title character, a down-at-the-heels poet/grenadier in Louis
XIII Paris, displays lavish /panache/ in both senses of the word. The
white, “triple-waving plume” in his hat is the only extravagance in his
otherwise threadbare garb. As for flamboyant personal élan, count on
Cyrano to single-handedly fend off 100 hired assassins or to extemporize
a ballade in classic rhyme while simultaneously skewering a dueling
opponent.
It’s not hard to get into a duel with Cyrano; you have but to mention
his nose. Like everything else about him, it’s heroic – grotesquely
outsized, “a promontory, a peninsula.” His hyper-sensitivity about it
keeps him from confessing his long-cherished secret love for his
blue-stocking cousin, Roxanne.
His hopes rise when she requests a discreet assignation. He thrills to
her admission that she, too, has been nursing an unspoken passion. But
then she goes on to name the object of her crush: a handsome young baron
newly arrived in Paris to join Cyrano’s own military company, the Gascon
Guards.
She fears that her little baron will be mercilessly hazed as a
Northerner by his Southern fellow-cadets. The only thing these Gascon
swaggerers can be counted on to respect is Cyrano himself, that paragon
of Southern gallantry.
Would he, as Roxanne’s devoted cousin, kindly undertake to befriend
young Baron Christian? And, while he’s at it, please prod the dear boy
to send her some flowery /billets doux/?
Hiding his chagrin, Cyrano tackles the assignment with zeal, going so
far as to ghost-write love letters for the tongue-tied baron and
prompting him from the sidelines as he whispers sweet nothings under
Roxanne’s balcony. When this type of ventriloquism gets too cumbersome,
Cyrano even dares to directly declaim his own rhapsodies from the garden
shadows – but it’s still Christian who climbs up the vines to collect
the proffered kiss.
And when the Gascon Guards get flung into the thick of combat at the
siege of Arras, Cyrano not only maintains Christian’s correspondence
with Roxanne, but steals twice a day through Spanish lines to post the
letters. So irresistible is his eloquence that Roxanne braves the war
zone to rejoin her love on the frontline (in the process breaking the
siege, / á la française/, to bring the Guards a coach full of pastries
and wines).
At this point, Christian can stand the deception no longer; he insists
that Cyrano reveal the truth. But just as that’s about to happen, a
Spanish bullet catches the little baron, who dies in Roxanne’s arms with
his secret intact.
It’s still intact 20 years later as Roxanne continues to mourn her lost
love in the seclusion of a convent where she’s retired ever since Arras.
Her only regular visitor is Cyrano, who regales her with a weekly update
on court gossip.
This week he’s late for the first time ever. When, at sunset, he finally
arrives, he asks to see Christian’s farewell letter, which she’s
cherished ever since the fateful seige. As he intones the elegiac lines,
she realizes that he couldn’t possibly be reading from the page in the
fading light; he must be reciting from memory. The truth of authorship
finally dawns on her: “those tear-stains – they’re yours!”
“Ah, but the blood-stains are his,” Cyrano grandly replies, and gets on
with his recap of the week’s gossip. The final item in the day-by-day
gazette relates how Cyrano himself has been done in by one of the many
enemies he’s made with his mordant pen. Since nobody could beat him at
swordplay, they had to brain him with a falling hearth log in a cowardly
ambush.
Whereupon Cyrano breaks off his account and unbridles his steel to parry
the phantasms he feels closing in around him. In a grand delirium, he
slashes away at such allegoric foes as Falsehood, Flattery and Bigotry.
Wrest all from me, Cyrano taunts his enemies, but there’s still one
thing that remains inviolate as I sweep across the threshold of
eternity. And that is (pause here for a flourish of his plumed
/chapeau/) my /panache/!
At this point, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house the night
we were there – especially since that performance turned out to be the
end, for a while, of Ashland veteran Marco Barricelli’s run as Cyrano.
He had to leave, suddenly in mid-season, due to his mother’s illness. He
may be back later this year, but the OSF is unsure just when.
The show will go on, of course. Director Laird Williamson has paced the
production with enough momentum to keep it rolling even without its
star. Then, too, there are plenty of other worthy supporting actors,
starting with Rex Young as Christian and the ever-versatile Robin
Goodrin Nordli as Roxanne.
Derek Lee Weedon is at his snarky best as de Guiche, the well-connected
nobleman who tries to snake Cyrano and annexe Roxanne. Heart-warming
performances, too, from Cyrano’s faithful groupies, the grenadier LeBret
(David Kelly) and the poet/pastrycook Ragueneau (Robert Vincent Frank).
But the linchpin of any Cyrano production must always be the title role,
and for Barricelli – as for any actor in his prime – it’s a career
highlight. He doubtless had a lot on his mind that night, yet for
three-and-a-half hours he maintained just the right mix of athleticism
and lyricism.
And then, at the curtain call, he peeled off his putty nose and tossed
it into the wildly cheering crowd. How’s that for /panache/?
Labels: Reviews
