Six Characters in Search of an Author at the WSC, Arlington: splendid theatricality

Emblematic logo for production

Dear friends and readers,

I write to urge anyone reading this who lives within driving or Metro (or walking) distance of the Artisphere in Arlington where a group of Washington Shakespeare Company players are performing Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author — to go see it! It was still in inexpensive previews; I say this not that the play is costly to go to once “opened,” but as explanation for why I can find no photos of the cast in costume or acting out their roles on line, only some photos of the cast out of costume.

It’s superb. I’ve seen only one version of Pirandello’s play before, a film on PBS, and it didn’t begin to convey the strong tragic center of the story that the characters are (apparently) driven to repeat over and over, though we get to see them do it but once. That’s enough. The trauma of their seething feelings is so exhausting to them that it becomes farcical at the edges; we feel in our minds there is something absurd about their hysteria and yet the events of their lives are not much worse than any other family, and probably banal or par for the course for many a life. I had recalled that a troupe is researching a play, and as the director begins to get annoyed with them, these characters in black barge in seeking their author who has disowned them. No wonder. This is a parable of incest, adultery, emotional and economic betrayal, unjustified accident death, mortification, driven continual ceaseless hurt which is intended to be a kind of nightmare mirror. The director at first tries to get rid of them, but finds himself having to allow them to take over his stage and soon is trying to direct them too; he cannot stop them from acting out their story until its final conclusion. Along the way there are many comments about drama, about reality and illusion (the stage takes a beating here), comedy over the actors’ response to these real characters who are indignant at the idea they are just a game.

I don’t know which of the principals to praise more: Bruce Alan Rauscher as the director (I saw him recently in Marathon 33, marvelous there too), the great Brian Hemmingsen as the father, the truly perfect (such an off-putting word but it’s accurate) acting of Nanna Ingvarsson who is pitch perfect down to the way she walks so lightly at one point as she moves over to the older son she is grieving for. The hardest role which demanded the most emoting is the Stepdaughter: Sara Barker was up to it. Joshua Dick so quiet during most of the play startles the audience when it’s his turn to act out his inner seething self insisting he made no scene, there was no scene. The little girl who drowns very sweet. Liz Dutton as Madame Place suitably over-the-top arch, complete with red whig and high voice.

The director Tom Prewitt perhaps had a core idea of the gothic meets the wry comic. The stage was done minimally as the company is not rich, but it was more than adequate to the case. We are watching a rehearsal after all. The translation by Carl R. Mueller seemed perfectly naturalistic.

If you value evenings of high theater, this is one to go to.

Ellen

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Ades & Oakes’s Shakespeare; Keenleyside’s Prospero: at the Met DH Opera

Simon Keenleyside as Prospero

Dear friends and readers,

Lest it be thought I’ve gone over-the-top in my praise of so many of these Met Operas transmitted by HB, my reaction to the first act of Ades’s and Oakes’s Tempest was it’s so still, and “there’s nothing doing.” I didn’t like the (to me) screetch-y high notes of Ariel, nor the lack of long melodic arias. The costumes were trying too hard. Keenleyside with his skin tattoos, feathers on his head, was still not US Indian-like; Ariel in pink fluff with ludicrously heavy-make-up – all green eyes; the lovers far too well-fed and smooth, he like something out of When Knighthood was in Flower, she like some fairy tale maiden in the Blue Fairy Book. Robert LePage’s re-building of aspects of La Scala on stage could have made for a disconnect, it added nothing.

What took time to emerge was the focus on an ethical-psychological relationship between Caliban and Prospero: when Prospero loses Ariel, he’s left without consolatory dreams. Ares really gave us an adaptation, serious interpretation of Shakespeare’s play (Enchanted Island was more Dryden/Davenant).

Audrey Luna as Ariel

The play-story does not depart from any of the hinge points of Shakespeare’s; Meredith Oakes’s script brought over to operatic music Shakespeare’s austere visionary core with its intimations of dream aspiration and realities of brute animal creatures and vicious envious evil (Caliban and the Milanese apart from Ferdinand). The young lovers were appropriately innocent for their short beautiful songs and their and all the music was like Debussy (Pelleas et Melisande) — ever there quietly beautiful. After a while the set also turn of the century, with its conceit the people are in an opera house grew tiresome. Yes there was a computer island, soft sea, and we began to see the slow emergence of Prospero’s character as regretful, remorseful, bitter yet in act willing to forgive began. That’s part of the play’s naturalistic miracles.

The last part or act was so moving to me. Keenleyside showed how well he can act: I identified with him as the older person having to give over, to let go, and I liked the presentation of Caliban as an aspect of the solitary Prospero. None of the really powerful lines were omitted, and Prospero’s response to Miranda’s “O brave new world,” was plangently disillusioned.

Alan Oates as Caliban

I’d like to see it again so I could enter into Act 1 from the perspective of what is to come.

As to the interviews, Deborah Voight can carry these off. To some extent she asks real questions about singing technique. You could see in Ades’s eyes a moment’s oh I wish I didn’t have to do this hype but he managed and gave eloquent interviews where he spoke more simply and directly about writing and putting on the opera and his relationships with the singers. He said that he saw himself as their support.

Some reviews: this review particularly insightful and with good photos and stills. See New York Times review. Another review.

Ellen

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Turtles, pussycats, glitter & a new coat at last, not to omit Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City: NYC 5 days & nights

An internet photo (we do not yet carry an ipad camera as a regular thing)

A cat curled up in its pod (Detail from A Lady with a Harp below)

We spotted the turtles before we did the pussycats, probably because the turtles moved and the pussycats didn’t. Also we were out-of-doors and it was earlier in the day.

Saturday morning our plan was to return to Madison Square garden & exchange our 5 o’clock train on Sunday for one much earlier in the day since for Sunday the reasonable prediction was much colder and heavy rain all day, and thus far our three visits to NYC had involved much living in the streets, walking, eating, watching, strolling, gazing. We’d had our Starbucks coffees and croissants in Bryant Park on the usual teetering pastoral green chairs and wobbly table while reading the New York Times, then succeeded in the exchange ($120 extra), taken the subway up, and entered the Park at 76th and found ourselves in the Ramble.

A lovely thick green lake with people rowing beckoned, so we got on that path, and following the stones I thought I saw a fake (stone sculptures very small) set of 4 turtles sitting very still on some stone or log. In Alexandria, where we live there are fake ducks in some of the ponds so life-like you think they are bobbing for fish. We came up to the log and I thought I saw one of the turtles move its head. Nothing unexpected. Often in Alexandria I see real live ducks come up to the fake ones. But then a much smaller size turtle began to climb the log. It struggled to pull up, and almost fell back, but somehow held out and heave-ho, up it got. Then I saw another turtle on the log appear to squiggle in response, and realized the whole lot of them were alive. This new medium-sized one, then four adults, each with a flipper on the others, and finally a very tiny baby turtle, at first hidden by the mother and facing another way.

We had happened on turtle pond. Over across the other side, nests of turtles.

I don’t know how long we walked, it was such a beautiful morning, in the 70s, sunny, breezy. We passed by some area where people were bird-watching: cameras, binoculars, special outfits, alert-looking with books all announced this. One man smiled from a bench and said hello as we passed.Past a playground named after its benefactor (the one with the three-bears statue) took us to the piazza before the Met museum and we went in.

It’s a vast people’s playground nowadays. We tried two of the exhibits and found one was done from a curator’s perspective (the Bernini clay models a vast distance from the blown up photos of the spectacular installation art (so to speak) everywhere in Rome, another mindless (how people love to fake photographs with no sense of what this implies). On the roof this Escher contraption for which one has to get a timed-ticket. So we visited a couple of favorite places — a room of Hubert Roberts badly hung and badly in need of cleaning amid the formal detritus, all uncomfortable to live in, of the super-rich 1% of ancien regimes (“period rooms”). This day for a time the museum, with its continual atavastic scary animal-like bizarre gods (a middle eastern room) and high hierarchical (wealthy, war-like) subjects (everywhere), reminded us how 90% of art has ever been deplorable.

Jim joked to a guard, where is the nearest elevator. He not getting it, I said “we want to get out.” “Get out!” the astonished man smiled. “Don’t we love it here?” I excused myself that my feet were hurting and I am old. He pointed to a corridor leading to stairs and an elevator.

I don’t mean to say it was all loss. A few good moments here and there. The Hubert Roberts. A Reynolds of a small woebegone young boy aristocrat not yet trained out of his humanity. And Marianne Dorothy Harland (1759–1785), Later Mrs. William Dalrymple by Richard Cosway (English, Okeford 1742–1821 London), which used to be exhibited as A Lady with Harp:

Bad picture, absurd posture, showing off what luck had thrown the young woman’s way (as long as she obeyed all materialistic and rank demands), it had nonetheless caught my attention because of the title (I thought of Austen’s Mary Crawford, of Mansfield Park fame), and when we went over what did we notice but that 200 years ago people were providing pods for cats to curl up in — just the way our scared-y cat Ian loved to. The thought crossed our minds that in this era only rich cats might have this luxury, but then when over an hour later we happened on a museum-school we had never heard of before, the National Academy Museum, and went inside to view its collection, we came across an American picture with a perhaps not quite so rich little girl and lo and behold near her feet, a cat curling up in a more home-made pod.

We’ve become very fond our our two pussycats and as a consequence stronger animal lovers, more alert to the presence of cats than we’ve ever been before and to how others treat them and other animals too. I’m convinced we were too young when we had our dog, Llyr, and were not sensitive enough to her presence and needs.

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We spent 5 days & nights to NYC, the first full day of which I had attended a Burney conference, and the second morning I was with a long-time (constant) Janeite friend and her son. I’ll blog about the conference separately on Austen reveries. Herewith is another travelogue, a record of Jim and my good times together away from home. And again our choice was the exhilarating tolerant good city.

For the first time ever we bought ahead for all 4 evenings plays we wanted to see. The last three times we’d been back to the city this year and last year too we had had some good times, but managed never to see even one serious play. A combination of family emergencies & tragedy, the reasons we had come to the city, and just plain bad luck had got in the way: nothing on at half-price tickets we wanted to see or there between times when the opera or ballet is on or when the Delacorte did one of its marvelous performances of Shakespeare and other plays.

So we determined to make up for lost time. After Obama’s empty-chair indifferent performance against an exultant bully-boy Romney, we needed their inspiriting rebelliousness. How do New York City’s stages differ from those of DC, Virginia, & Maryland? Well, with no effort and on particular aim to see anything closely commenting on the political and economic catastrophe wreaked on the world for the last 30 years by a succession of US reactionary militaristic regimes and all their allies, client states, collusive victims and flunkies, three of the four did just that, and the fourth was not far off.

I’ll begin with the most magnificent and powerful of the lot, the great Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, at the Irish Repertory Theater, on 22nd and 6th (not far from where Jim and I lived for well over a year — 22nd and 10th)

Joseph Sikora as Skinner dressed up in the Mayor’s robes, Napoleonic hat on head, cavorting about on the Guildhall

The play’s occasion was the slaughter of 13 people when on January 30, 1972 British soldiers shot down a peaceful civil rights march in Derry, Ireland (“Bloody Sunday” it became known as). The Commission and judges set up to investigate found no one responsible, no soldier or officer was tried or even disciplined. Only in the last 10 years has another enquiry been set on foot which reversed the findings of the early court and the Tory PM apologized.

Way too late. One of the awarenesses Friel’s play brings home to the audience is the three people who in the play stumble by mistake and panic into the guildhall will never be brought back. Nothing can ever undo what was done nor make up for it. The fantasy elaboration is to put before us three characters, Michael, an embittered young seemingly permanently unemployed man who longs to live a productive self-respecting life with wife, children, goals, good work; Lily, an impoverished mother of 11 living in a condemned shack behind a railway, with no hope of any improvement in her life or for that of her family (she has had no access to contraception), and a loner outsider, Skinner, refusing to be coopted into, or justify the stupefying displacements and compromises the other two seem silently to accept — all the while endlessly talking. These three inside are interwoven with the cold impassive judge coming to his inexorable conclusion they are dangerous armed terrorists, using the evidence of a constable, and a psychiatrist; a ludicrous professor with her deconstructionist understandings; a reporter. Hovering over them the British soldiers armed, in camouflage outfits, with terrifying weapons at the ready. I reread the play tonight and was so moved. I can’t find any reviews so link in just the wikipedia article on the play itself.

At the Booklyn Academy of Music The Paris Commune, a Cabaret by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman as directed by Steven Cosson. BAM is now made up of 3 (!) theaters: beyond the opera house, this modernistic building with its black box, and another I saw across a parking lot disguised as a green park.

Most people seem not to have heard of this bloody slaughter, much less know that as many people were killed by the French military in this 4 month period as were murdered in the 1792 Fall Terror so often detailed as a peculiarly horrific occasion in order to indite the French revolution. Basically what happened was the people of Paris took over the gov’t of France and for a time succeeded in holding on and beginning to reform and plan a sort of new deal (separation of church and state, no night work, pensions, remission of rents, ease of debts). This time it did not take the armies of four countries (England, Prussia, Spain and Russia united to defeat Napoleon’s armies) to crush and slaughter the rebellion.

Daniel Jenkins as the baker

Cosson and Friedman present the incident by a combination of rousing songs, actively rebellious character types in soliloquies and scenes interspersed with (ironic) songs of a soprano (Offenbach) and citizen types (baker and his wife, seamstress, politician). Everyone had to work very hard to give us a sense of a large crowd in frenetic activity. The language at the end and final song made the parallels with our own time and the recent destruction of the Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere.

Cock: the title refers as much to the staging of the play (in an apt cock-pit) as the lead actor’s penis

Cock by Mike Bartlett has (I think) an unfortunate title. It is not at all pornographic, not salacious: I took it to be the playing out of the lives of three unlucky people involved with a self-indulgent bisexual young man, John (Cory Michael Smith): M (Jason Butler Harner) the unfortunate male lover who supports him in a fantastically expensive apartment in London, W (Amanda Quaid), a young woman he meets and brings to a dinner cooked by M; and John’s father, F (Cotter Smith) who wants his son to marry and produce grandchildren. The acting is superb, controlled; I didn’t find it funny but rather poignant, a stinging representation of relationships endured under the circumstances and pressures of our era.

The two brothers confronting one another with Kathleen McKenny as Katherine, Dr Stockmann’s wife, as moderating influence

The least exhilarating (the proscenium stage realism creaks) and yet most directly relevant and at moments suddenly so eloquent was the fully (elaborately) staged Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in a new translation by Rebecca Lenkiewicz in an elegant Broadway theater, formerly the Biltmore now called the Manhattan Theater club (probably the first time Jim and I had been to Broadway in years). The acting was again superb, minor and major roles, but especially Boyd Gaines as Dr Stockman who has discovered the water of the town is contaminated, and Richard Thomas as his brother, Peter, a politician. Reviews have been rightly excellent (see highlights). I just wished that the central speech was not against what the majority wants or needs. Ibsen’s language derives from his own rebellion against the restrictive social mores of his country and class when what is on the minds of US people today is a political and economic and military oligarchy enforcing vast capitalist profits for a very few at the expensive of the decent lives and the earth itself for everyone else.

The four theaters were all just about filled. We also in the DC area do not have a population which goes to the theater like this. To be fair, we are talking about millions living in, close to, or near Manhattan, while in my area we have suburban distances to travel and theater is scattered across the area. This matters.

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What else did we do?

Mickalene Thomas: this tiger cat image conveys some of the glittery texture of her work

We made it to the Brooklyn Museum for the first time in a few years, and were fascinated by Mickalene Thomas’s determined reversal images of much French impressionistic and white male art in The origin of the Universe: she replaces the white men & women with black women, and her pictures of the natural world and art in-doors sparkle with glitter and bold colors. It’s true that central to her project is supposed shock, but what has not been emphasized anywhere I can see is there is a story she tells here: of her and her mother’s supportive relationship (many of her pictures are of her mother), of her mother’s hard life (one where she endured physical abuse in a coerced marriage for many years). If you go, you’ll find this one touching rather than just about hard success. We again saw Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, some favorites in the American collection (new ones brought up) and the kind of odd new art (like a covered wagon made out of Christmas lights) found everywhere in active museums nowadays. There is a real attempt at the Brooklyn to mirror its surrounding population’s history and culture too. We were too tired to go very far into the Botanical Gardens once again.

We did, though really look at some some 300 out of 7000 [!] pictures said to be owned at the National Academy of Art. We just happened on the place later in the afternoon. A thin townhouse, its sign for an exhibit of self-portraits by women artists caught my eye, and we went in. It was like a trip through the history of American academic art, and quite revealing it was — we spent 2 hours there. Modernity and women’s art first hit these people around 1970, but they are making up for lost time. I now know what one of my favorite modern artists, Jane Freilicher looks like. Unfortunately, the feel of the place is exclusive, the behavior of some of its patrons snobbish, and online they don’t share much. By contrast, the Neue Galleries make the experience comfortable for all, even non-members. (This business of membership is creating little coteries — one is now found on the fourth floor of the Metropolitan museum.)

I won’t omit Lord and Taylor’s flagship store. Everyone who looks like they have money enough to spend is welcome. It too is filled with lovely art: really nice women’s clothes (probably men’s too) galore set out beautifully. I discovered that just like Kohl’s, L&T today indulges in putting prices on garments they don’t mean. When you get to the cash-register you just may find (not always) several different sales at once. The styles, choice, price and help everywhere account for the store becoming filled by the time Jim and I left. I bought myself a new fall jacket — and when we got back to the Princeton threw out my now ragged black one. Bras, a warm hat, neat thin woolen elegant gloves. I had to restrain myself not to go for more.

And we didn’t miss bookstores. At the Strand I got myself a new edition of a new translation of Lampedusa’s masterpiece, Il Gattapardo (complete with new introduction, notes, appendices), a new volume of Leopardi, a pleasurable and not too untrue anthology of bellestristic essays on Central Park (well chosen and inroduced by Andrew Blauner), a novella by Wm Dean Howells, A Sleep and a Forgetting, I’d never heard of.

Jim did not buy himself any new clothes nor books. I should perhaps have labelled this blog good or magical moments from our celebratory time away: Jim’s 64th birthday (yes we sang the Beatles’ song) and our 44th wedding anniversary. He seemed content to be open to experience, have it accessible, among the endless stream of people, seemingly sleepless once you go outside, staying again at the Princeton, enjoying what we did, being alive together at liberty. We ate out in fancy restaurants two different evenings, once Italian, and (recommended) once French (a place called the Marseille). We inhabited the bar for a time each night, and twice were content just to dine on its snacks, and sometimes talking with the other like-minded circumstanced inmates.

As I trundled my bag behind me on our way home through the tunnel and a narrow space where another person was standing I said to her, “I don’t want to hit your feet” so she smiled obligingly moved them.

Ellen

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Dennis Potter’s Cream in my Coffee & Curran & Nyswaner’s Painted Veil (out of Somerset Maughn)

Peggy Ashcroft in her fifties (promotional photo)

Kitty (Naomi Watts) and Edward (Walter Fane) floating down the river (2006 Painted Veil)

Dear friends and readers,

Here am I trying to keep my word and make shorter blogs. I’ve two movies to urge you to see. Rent them at Netflix or buy or download from Pirate Bay and luxuriate in the beauty of the photography and depth and sensitivity of what’s presented: Dennis Potter’s rightly valued 1980 Cream in My Coffee and John Curran and ron Nyswaner’s wrongly ignored Painted Veil (a film adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel).

In the first case you want see more Potter-scripted films of the 1980s, and in the second you will long to read Maugham’s novel.

Jean now old, first near close up (Peggy Ashcroft, 1980 Cream in my Coffee)

I am now able to say a Dennis Potter film can be as stunningly powerful as people say. He is a much praised (adulated) script writer of the 1980s in BBC and other British TV films and plays. I had tried two films, both with great actors: in the first I found Bob Hoskins continually breaking into song, as a working class man holding up his pride against great odds, half-broken puzzled, seemingly bewildered, yet continually breaking out into song. In the second Michael Gambon (the great Gambon Ralph Richardson calls him — and certainly nothing comes up to his Squire Hamley in Davies’ 1999 Wives and Daughters out of Gaskell), Gambon anticipated the time I saw him on stage doing a Becket play. I realized Beckett plays hate drama; they are set up so actors can do so little. In that one Gambon was imprisoned in a can; in the Potter he was swathed with bandages in the last stages of dying life in a hospital. A situation rich, but it was like watching Beethoven making some music instruments can hardly play. Yet in both I was unbearably moved.

This time the script was doable and utterly fulfilled.

Here the great presence is Peggy Ashcroft: it takes a while to realize we are watching the same couple. First Jean and Bernard, when old coming back to one of these genteel style elegant hotels that are so endemic in British novels and plays (especially plays, think Separate Tables) when he is very old, ill, dying and she a woman cowed for many years by his irascible bullying and hard nasty spiteful even tongue, picking at her:

First of series of photos panning hotel and beach (Cream in my Coffee)

Then series of photos of elderly couples

Then from one to another versions of youth

Sitting in room (Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries)

Second, as young Jean and young Bernard over 40 years ago they had stolen away for a weekend before they married, apparently very much in love, soft focus photography

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(Peter Chelsom as Bernard, Shelagh McLeod as young Jean)

Placed against the second older version we slowly begin to see how what was to come – an embittering life — is anticipated, but also how it could not quite have been predicted. Like life too much is enigmatic. We see during this time the young Bernard despises the young Jean partly for her lower class origins and partly for coming away with him before marriage. Young Bernard’s father is killed in an accident during the three days (bad luck) tehy are away, and he returns home to a narrow repressed somehow very English lace and there is this dreadful scene with his harridan mother who wants to control him and prevent this marriage. How she scorns Jean.

(Martin Shaw as glamorous matinee idol singing songs like “You’re the cream in my coffee/you’re the salt in my stew … “)

But while young Bernard is gone, young Jean succumbs to the kindness, and aggressive romantic words and gestures of the orchestra singer, a cad type. Lonely, feeling herself denigrated and uncomfortable, she gets “squiffy” (very drunk) and is half-coerced (but only half) into spending a long pleasurable night with him – more than any she ever had with Bernard. When Bernard returns, there’s no sign he guesses and yet …

The life to follow he has gotten back.

The bitter ironies, poignancy, plangency, occasional comedy of the two relationships and what we glimpse about the hotel, by the pool, on the beach are caught in songs whose lyrics comes out as on the spot precisely awful. You’re the salt in my stew. Right. Lots of these 30s to 40s songs. Fast forward and instead of creamy violins and big band we have hard rock and they are just as ironic, just as false.

The way each place is filmed, the dialogues just reeked to me of England and English people of a certain milieu. I need to see it again and read an essay I have on Potter’s films, but will tell a joke Jim and I had.

I said to him, we never went to such a place when we lived there. It was beyond us. We didn’t have the money. When we returned 20 years later or more (1990s), we were way beyond that and would know it’d be miserable snobbish and somehow tawdry in all its efforts. We went to Landmark recreations — a joke too time capsules and all that. He stopped and said he has never known anyone who went to such places. Did they ever exist? are they a myth that captures something in English class ridden minds?

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Why do Edwardian stories and films seem to speak home to us? Forsyte Saga (which I’m watching the 1967 version of over these two months now — 26 one hour parts — about which I’ll be blogging soon), Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs. Maughn’s post-colonial Painted Veil is a brilliant epitome of this subgenre.

In part the greatness of the film is sheer photography: breath-taking beauty in China, especially of waterways, slow montage, background French music, evocative:

What it’s about is two people finding themselves as they journey “out” into a wild natural place and leaning some humility and tolerance; the triangle is contrasted to another couple, disillusioned ugly man, Waddington (Toby Jones, as great as Gambon) who lives with a native girl, in a kind of retreat from the world both came from — with records from the 1950s. This anticipates or imitates (depending on whether you are thinking of Greene’s novel or the recent film with Michael Caine), The Quiet American. Edward has left his cushy job in England to do research in China and she can get no one to marry her so she follows him.

Toby Jones as Waddington explains how he came to live there, and how the girl he loves was rescued from a short life of beating and prostitution

I’m writing about this partly because I’ve seen it so mis-described. A denigrating way of describing hero and heroine dominates all blurbs: “shunned by scientific research husband,: wife “ignites passionate affair;” or “British medical doctor trapped … in loveless marriage with faithless wife …” We do have the Maugham triangle of the selfish woman who takes over the shy young man and seems set to destroy him. But this is not what happens at all. We see his science is a form of self-gouging and how she turns to want to help him, the school (Diana Rigg is a nun running the place), the helpless women, all the diseased people. We see the way the tribal leaders are murderous towards one another and so no help can come from there:

One of her stations of the cross

One of his

It ends in tragedy — reminding me in its savagery of Before the Rains. This is like Paul Scott: while written by a white man, it is a take from a point of view that shows the European corrupt. She gets to go back and gives birth to a child; we last see her rejecting the old life, her old lover, and walking with the child away. Older now than when I read the book, Of Human Bondage (blotted out in my memory probably by the film’s take and Bette Davis as Bitter Destruction with Leslie Howard in the abject role), and aware Maugham was homosexual (he lived in south France with his partner).

I’d like to read the book and then re-see film. We’ve said we’ll do it on Trollope19thCStudies. Alas it was a flop, so no features or voice-over commentary.

An intense psychological investigation in the context of sharp disillusioned picturing of snobbish colonialism, it’s a heroine’s text, Watts turned a perhaps misogynistic story into one of a heroine coming of age (she was one of the producers).

Ellen

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Hamlet At the Folger: the Globe way of doing Shakespeare

Michael Benz was a superlative Hamlet — within the limits of the kind of acting used

Dear friends and readers,

Jim and went out last night to see the London Globe company act Hamlet at our Folger Shakespeare Library. Like last time (8 summers ago now, in the Globe Theater itself in London where we were groundlings), the company’s way of doing the plays left me cold. They again enacted actors acting the parts. For me the result is too stylized.

The dress this time reminded me of the way people costume the rude mechanicals in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and before the play started two actors, one playing Polonius (Christopher Saul) and one Claudius (Dickon Tyrell, a superbly effective presence even in stylized patterns), mingled with the audience. They were people like us you see, their costumes not so different from ours. The era imitated was 1940s mostly, with Miranda Foster having her hair in a snood, buns on top of her head, seamed stockings, 1940s pump shows. One problem was, why 1940s? This choice of era was not addressed. Like the Shenandoah play, the company do it in the light. Minimal props. I loved all this in a way. And I can’t really complain that they depend wholly on the lines spoken beautifully in a talk way. That means you’ve got to listen — and you appreciate the words both how they still speak to us and how they are Elizabethan in feel, outlook, nuance. But during the intermission I heard people talking about how hard it was for them to keep up, to follow. Those who had read the play rejoiced. I’ve read it many times so I could follow. I loved the folk dancing before and aft. They do get across the comic moments of Shakespeare’s even most pessimistic of plays.

A couple of the younger actors were weak. There were but 8 of them, lots of thoughtful doubling. Tom Lawrence most notably as Horatio stood out as somehow embodying a quintessential English Renaissance player look. The actors playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern came in with sheepish comic looks, carrying suitcases, tennis rackets, vacation stuff. The whole feel alluded to Stoppard’s play — so the aesthetic control could be broken to allude to another art world.

But finally I prefer modern psychological enactment because I was not moved until near the end. The acting keeps me at a distance: the pace is too quick, and the gestures somehow slightly frozen, graceful in frenetism would be the way I’d characterize the Hamlet-Gertrude hard encounter. The American Shakespeare Company players (formerly Shenandoah express) do their plays using modern psychological mimesis with direct connections to our lives and norms today. I also much preferred the more abridged Hamlet we saw this summer: this Globe version was shortened too, lines sweated, here and there a speech omitted).

Go see it as an attempt to bridge the past into the present.

For a list of the company, director and notes, see Globe on Tour with Hamlet (they come to the Folger).

Ellen

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They shoot horses, don’t they?: from a woman’s memoir?

Dear friends and readers,

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (ABC/Palomar, 1969) opens with a prologue I didn’t understand until late in the movie. We see people training a horse, something seems to go wrong, and it’s shot dead with a gun. A small boy is part of the sequence. Since I’m more than 40 years too late seeing it (I know I have often been out of it) I’m not going to worry about giving away the ending of this once Oscar-nominated widely-seen and justly still-remembered film.

It’s that the film comes full circle. At its close its heroine, Gloria (Jane Fonda), beyond the desperation which made her talk with great bitterness throughout the movie and act out the extreme choice of trying to win a lot of money from a dance marathan; Gloria, I say, wants only the release of death. She asks her dance-partner of weeks, Robert (Michael Sarrazin) to shoot her in the head with a hand gun as she can’t manage this herself. He, another wounded soul, but one whose pain emerges in a responsive passivity, obliges. During the course of the movie his face has dissolved into fragments of memory of a distraught childhood where he looks like that initial boy and then turns into the present young man apparently answering a serious charge in court. We were headed to this moment all along, only we didn’t know it.

A moment where he is trying to inspirit her

I’ve wanted to see this movie since Jim and I went to a play by June Havoc (we were told) which presented itself as a three-hour enactment of a 1930s dance marathon. The bill seemed to suggest the later movie was somehow indebted to the earlier play, and had been an effective experience and social critique I thought. I’ve learnt since then that in fact the memoir the movie is based on, Horace McCoy’s novel was written in 1935, while June Havoc’s memoir was 1959 and probably indebted to McCoy and the play written in the later 1960s indebted to the movie.

There are so many places where the play parallels the movie, only in each case the movie is stronger or (if you prefer) bleaker, bitterer, takes the story to its logical conclusion. For example, when at the close of the long marathon, the hard driving MC, Rocky (Gig Young), well-named (his facial expressions, suits, way of holding his body reminded me of Romney) tells Gloria she had better accede to marrying Michael for the amusement of the audience in order to make $200 to $300 because otherwise the costs of her food, bills, maintenance will be charged her if she wins the prize and leave little left-over, Gloria refuses to go through with the wedding. In fact, she dresses and leaves. What’s the point? IN the play, the couple agrees to wed fakely. It makes sense that destructive and cold sexual encounters would occur as they do in the movie (not the play). That an aging man would die, Red Buttons as Harry Kline:

and it would be lied about. The movie makes explicit as the play never did, that the marathon embodies a series of unacknowledged or perhaps distorted American values, and “the American way of life:” never give up, all can win, let’s cheer the losers for trying so hard and then dismiss them; it’s fine for us to enjoy watching misery and striving against unfairness, let the losers suffer; winner takes all, each for him or herself.

We see the actress who collapses near the end of the play go mad in the movie. She had wild dreams of being discovered which the MC encouraged; he steals her fancy dresses lest she offend the audience; and slowly exhaustion puts her over the top in the shower:

Susannah York delivers an unforgettable performance as Alice LeBlanc (blank, also ironically named)

The play had the advantage of going on for 3 hours and using the present audience members as members then. Jim told me we did clap when the dancers were singled out and asked to perform — the difference is that we know they have not been there for weeks but otherwise we are cheering them on. The songs were updated, not necessarily of the 1930s which they were in the play.

In the movie those who perform this way have money thrown at them which they scurry about picking up off the floor. It has live people. The movie did carry on for 2 hours (long for a movie) and of course the camera could give us surreal sequences of suffering we can’t get in real life. Apparently these marathons would include periodic races where those who were left were forced to run around the stage and the last three to cross a line were out. The close-ups here were powerful as the people fell and stumbled and drove themselves and one another.

The parallels with reality shows and viewer-voting contests made the film feel fresh once again — like today. And we are having a depression now too. 23% of New Yorkers are unemployed. The actual figure for unemployment across the US is said to be near 25% in some populations (black, young, disconnected) if you count everyone not just those still looking for jobs, and this omits those with part-time jobs and jobs with very low pay.

I found from the responses of my friends on facebook, it’s too large to urge people this one is a “must-see.” Several had seen and remembered it. But if you haven’t or if you only half-remember it, rent it from Netflix.

The film won one academy award and was nominated in 8 categories, nominated for Golden Globes, BAFTAs and the like. It reminded me of how Jane Fonda’s career as a serious actress came to an end after she was so vilified for her role in trying to stop the Vietnam war: once it was over, the roles she took were compromising kind of conventional women roles. In screening The Ox-Bow Incident for my students last spring, I had occasion to watch a documentary on her father, Henry, and learnt that he deliberately chose thoughtful serious roles in liberal and radical films (e.g., also The Grapes of Wrath); in this film she was following in his footsteps.

Wikipedia says:

The actress at first declined because she felt the script wasn’t very good, but her then-husband Roger Vadim, who saw similarities between the book and works of the French existentialists, urged her to reconsider.

Meeting with Pollack to discuss the script, she was surprised when he asked for her input. She read the novel with a critical eye, made notes on the character, and later observed in her autobiography, “It was a germinal moment [for me] . . . This was the first time in my life as an actor that I was working on a film about larger societal issues, and instead of my professional work feeling peripheral to life, it felt relevant.” Experiencing problems in her marriage at the time, she drew on her personal anguish to help her with her characterization.

In one memorable moment in the film Gloria is remembering her childhood and a dog that got in everyone’s way. She seems to have had affection for it, but it becomes wounded somehow (crippled) and she takes it downstairs and places it on a pillow. She then grimaces intensely at what happened to the dog next. I hoped I was not expected to imagine she had shot it. But if she had, she punished herself for it by enacting the same fate for herself.

Young may not resemble Romney literally (though he does have the same squarish face), it’s more in the expression as slick bully-boy plays at making himself humanly appealing.

If you see it, you can ask yourself if you really want this MC for president.

Ellen

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Capital Fringe & Castleton (the 1%): Mitzi’s Abortion, Children in a Mist, Sade’s company; Arlen/Berlin depression cheer

Promotional image for Mitzi’s Abortion

Dear friends and readers,

I was saving up a few events from Capitol Fringe to make a third omnibus blog treating of four shows (See Midsummer … In Full Swing and Midsummer … Pinky Swear … Hamlet), but find that I now insensibly have somehow gone to five, never wrote about the final gala afternoon at Castleton and have another evening coming up, this time Alice in Wonderland “as conceived by the Manhattan Project under the direction of Andre Gregory.” Jim bought us what’s called bulk tickets (you get a discount this way) and we added on another, so when the 3 weekends are over, we will have seen 14! Thus I had better hurry up and write reviews thus far.

I’ve discovered the question people ask genially, concisely, is, Which are your two best? Of the five we’ve seen since I last wrote, we’ve seen a small dramatic masterpiece, a play done with hardly any props or costumes, just the actors acting their hearts and bodies out: Elizabeth Heffron’s Mitzi’s Abortion. It’s this play that prompts me to write this blog as I hope it will eventually gain a place in the American repertoire. If I include the previous 5 Capitol Fringe events, the second finest original work I’ve seen was Andrew Simpson’s Outcasts of Poker Flat. The finest adaptation of a classic, Hannah Todd’s Hamlet. A great cabaret group (without trying to compare to others): Pinky Swear.

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The Young couple

Mitzi’s Abortion takes the over-wrought attitude towards abortion that has taken over the public media: the young woman who finds herself pregnant, Mitzi (brilliantly acted by Natalie Cutcher) begins by quietly doubting whether she wants to go through with this pregnancy, as it is truly inconvenient in every way: the father, Chuck (also done expertly by Christian Campbell, who alternates as an expert at a podium lecturing to us on supposed phases women go through when they are pregnant) is about to be deployed to an American war abroad somewhere; they have little money, are not married, don’t live together, the list goes on. By the end of the play, when she’s had a late term abortion (which is presented as if it’s done on a 16th century birthing stool when it’s not) of a fetus which developed in a deformed manner so it is an anancephalic non-viable entity – that is, the baby if it could survive, would be without a brain; but of course it could not as it lacks a vital organ to run a human body, when she’s had a late term abortion, I say, she saves what we are told are its bones, has these cremated and is determined to hold a funeral. She sits over this box weeping hysterically.

I half-think or would like to think that we are not simply to identify with what this girl has gone through, now feels and thinks and has become. It’s obvious she’ll never get pregnant again. She breaks up with the father — on very good grounds. In contrast, when told she is pregnant, he begins with absolute joy at this proof of his masculine prowess, a sign of just how powerful his penis is and how effective his sperm, with no doubt “they” should go through this pregnancy. (I’ve seen this use of the third person plural pronoun before — my view is the pragmatic real one: he’s not pregnant, she is.) He moves to horror at the news of what these technological tests have to say, to saying how he doesn’t blame her at all and she’ll do better next time, and maybe she needed to take better care, to demanding she carry this dead entity to term. There are other contrasting voices. Towards the end Mitzi’s father (John Kevin Boggs) is overheard telling older male friends how years ago these were women’s issues, men didn’t get involved, and he just overheard his mother going off for her “fix” (abortion) and coming back and nothing was said. She went for two such fixes, didn’t die and the family was spared all this. It’s implied that she did suffer but was also freed of nature’s cruelties and injustices. Mitzi’s mother (Elizabeth Richards Bailey) is humoring her daughter at the funeral; “whatever” you want, I’ll do to help you through this — as she did the abortion, bringing magazines, sitting with or near her daughter the whole time, no matter what berating talk the daughter aimed at her.

But I half-think not since the play dwells so insistently on this idea there’s a baby inside this girl and she begins to take on an attitude that its fate is more important than hers and her grief is treated with such dignity and serious gravity. As I watched her with that little box, I remembered (as perhaps some other women in the audience did if they have had such experiences and miscarriages are very common), my miscarriage which turned into an abortion to save my life (I was bleeding to death in a small Kendal hospital), and how I asked what caused the miscarriage and what had been done with the fetus. I was told by a British nurse that often these miscarriages are “nature’s way” of “washing away” something that was not developing right and not to worry about the fetus; it had been disssolved in the blood and was gone. I remember feeling sad but also relieved. When I was under the terrific pain of the miscarriage, I had one thought: get rid of this pain, make it stop, and they did or had.

The play included a scene with an insurance agent (Louise Schlegel) who tells the doctor the insurance people will not pay for a termination as that is not allowed. No abortions. But they will pay for care of the anancephalic baby as it lies dying, which it must. She says she hates these rules, but there they are. She suggests to Mitzi that had she not been attached to a machine to test the fetus, Mitzi would not have known anything was drastically wrong (except she had stopped gaining weight as she should have been), had the nearly stillborn baby and then it would have died. So go ahead and do that as the cheapest easiest thing.

Easiest? walk around for 3 months with a dying or dead thing in you; just then it was continually kicking as a frog would.

Mitzi’s mother goes to her church (improbable place to go, but for her to defend her daughter against this group’s prejudices was part of the point) to beg for $10,000 to cover the termination. The doctor finds a way around the rule by redefining what he’s doing (this may have been improbable) and they go through with this termination.

The play has much doubling. Louise Schlegel also plays a 16th century midwife who just turns up on the stage — a dream figure. Her arms are covered with blood scars. It seems she was burned at the stake as a witch. She did in her time try to help women abort children too. Barbara Ehrenreich has written a historical pamphlet, persuasive, arguing that huge numbers of the witch trials were ordeals inflicted on women who worked as health professionals in effect, sometimes midwives. They were blamed and by the 17th century a ferocious attempt was made to stifle them and replace them with men and institutional control of women.

John Kevin Boggs also plays Aquinas who gives us the church’s positions over the ages, contradictory. His soliloquys were filled with ironies and very funny.

What we are shown is a deeply morbid self-destructive culture. Everyone who is not a professional dresses in rather poor clothes. Entertainment is Esperanto meetings, going to fast good joints; they shop in supermarkets whose array of food choices (and magazines) is depressingly meager. Their choices are limited by their range of understanding. Chuck argues that Mitzi has no right to try to spare herself since he cannot spare himself in whatever country he is deployed in. Killing or being killed is clearly not what he would have chosen as his life’s work to have a salary and place.

I fear many leaving that theater would simply have identified with Mitzi and not realized that she was driven to bring this on herself by all the cultural artefacts, economic and social pressures, deluded norms that shape her every thought. Heffron’s play is really also a portrait of contemporary US life.

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Sean Pflueger as the father with his son

Not the worse done, but the worst show I’ve seen thus far was the horror opera Jim and I saw Saturday afternoon, Sean Ffleuger’s Children in the Mist, an adaptation of a short story by the best-selling gothic-horror writer, Stephen King . We were told it was an abridgement even though it took 2 hours and was at times tedious and repetitive. Jim said the music was “uninteresting,” and when I reminded him that to me Philip Glass’s music seems endlessly repetitive, he said it wasn’t, but subtly nuanced and continually stimulating. I know Pflueger’s music felt dull and didn’t arouse me to nervousness and distress the way Glass can. It reminded me of other contemporary American operas we’ve seen in that the centers were were not individual soliloquies, but rather everyone singing apparently meditatively, a huge folk ensemble, only it did go on making me restless (while I feel I could never tire of listening to Copeland’s music). The language was demotic, very short kinds of sentences one might hear in a supermarket or drug store. The only general statements were about God and how one must live for one’s children.

It was not the music or even lack of intelligent utterance that made the opera pernicious. Rather it was the story and characters and meaning. If (as I think she meant to), Elizabeth Heffron exposed the wretchedness and delusions fostered by our cryingly (egregiously) unjust social and economic arrangements, rules, reinforced by the way we use our machines, this one made that sickness into reality that we as people cannot escape, one engineered against us by mysterious forces we can call God. It was a sick experience. I turned to ask Jim what he thought. He came out with the word “sick” first.

We probably should have left, but I was curious to see if the play had anything intelligent or redeeming about it. I had read with my students this term 3 chapters of Bob Dixon’s Catching Them Young. One of these is an analysis of popular fantasy and supernatural stories given to children: he shows these are 20th century versions of the worst aspects of religious allegories, starting with Pilgrim’s Progress. Evil is a mysterious force; people are bad, sinful and deserve to be punished; the way they can atone for what they are is passivity and obedience to their authorities, especially the Godhead. Then when they die, they are rewarded partly by escaping a violent hell. He only included authors like C. S. Lewis, Tolkien (yes), Ursula Le Guin, Madeline L’Engel and the syndicate creations like Star Trek, so I never thought about books for adults. Now I know something of why Stephen King appeals.

I could say that poor Mitzi and her family would certainly have found copies of Stephen King at their local Safeway. As Dixon says, how can such a book teach you anything helpful in getting through life with some fulfillment? There was no sense in this opera anywhere that the explanation for the evil mist enveloping the town and killing people as if they were being painfully electrocuted could be anything but God. Half the people stuck in a supermarket cling to a woman who rants over her Bible, but the other half have no argument against this half when they refuse to succumb to hysterical praying. They just look irritated and try to flee the religious fanatics; this is the best Pflueger can come up with.

The opera’s climax includes the most violent and stubborn of the religious fanatics trying to kill those seeking to flee the situation. Many die, four escape. The four get into a station wagon that is soon out of gas, so our chief hero turns around and shots them dead with a gun. (Of course everyone has guns.) He is not left standing, oh no, a military soldier suddenly runs in and tells him, all is under control and he can return to his apartment now. We are to take this as a kind of relief. All clear go the sirens.

It put me in mind of the way Muslims pray five times a day. The stoges who work for and in the American theocracy were before me. The composer had the chief role in the cast. I noticed a few people left at intermission and the applause was not strong. However, in the audience near me were some “big” people in the festival who put on plays and act in them and they appeared very proud. The auditorium was pretty full.

Best and worst? One could say Pflueger is contemporary. Two days before we saw Children of the Mist, there had been this huge circus at an Aurora cinema where thousands gathered at midnight, taking their small children, to see another supernatural fantasy about good and evil with lots of killing, only to be interrupted by someone with real powerful weaponry (intended for wars) who massacred as many people near him as he could. Children in the Mist is the weak pablum sold to the minds of the people who go to such movies, those of them who do read.

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What else have we gone to at the Fringe? In the Company of de Sade, written and directed by Timothy R. King. This was actually very preachy — as is Sade. The cliched story of a group of people trying to put on a play was the core of the plot-design, and the players came out individually to tell us their sad histories of unemployment, despair, or high dreams of an acting career. There was especially at the opening obligatory transgressive sex not so much enacted but suggested symbolically. The basic text was Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir, and what we really saw was people bickering with one another over their discomfort with the roles they were expected to play, the conditions of employment and some of their own dreams of self-esteem, who they are.

The play is interrupted by a “Christian” woman with a gun (she had only this one pathetic gun and yet it was formidable as it could kill or wound others quickly) who loathes “free sex” and our atheistic society. Bit of black humor here. She rants and raves and finally the actors jump her and she is killed by accident. But at least silenced. Everyone is discouraged and the rehearsal ends for the evening, leaving on stage only one actor who appears to have read Sade, be sympathetic with his libertarian and anarchist ideals and the actress who has befriended him. They are left alone and lonely by this body. Curtain falls.

Had the actors not been directed to try to entertain us by becoming so loudly argumentative or amuse us by self-denigrating jokes about sexuality in general or their own, it would not have been bad. I suppose in the context of the two plays I’ve gone over in this blog the characters on the stage were at least not self-destructive, tried to keep calm and through Sade’s story and words presented complicated political ideas and the quirks of human nature driven by need, vulnerability, self-delusion. I think the play could use more work.

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Maazel owns a huge swathe of land in Rappahannock

Two musical shows and one — what shall I call it — dud. I enjoyed both musical events. Jim and I discovered that when we went this past Sunday to what looked like a long program of “bleeding hunks” (Jim’s terms for this), famous arias, scenes, moments from famous operas, we had stumbled on (or least I had for I didn’t realize this is what we were going to) the graduation recital of the whole summer school. Every single young adult aspiring singer and all the young adult musicians were there, and, under the direction of their many teachers, in the lovely festival theater Loren Mazeel’s money built, they put on a smashing show.

Number after number of some of the most moving, witty, subversive, and traditional single arias, duets, trios, several singer-scenes, and two powerful monologues took about 3 hours of performing time. They began small with lighter pieces (“Cinque … dieci” from Le Nozze di Figaro), the transition was one of Jim’s favorites, Rossini’s Duetto buffo di due gatti, two young women singing miaow and hissing and making cat yowl sounds to invigorating music, and we ended with final scenes from Don Giovanni (Jim predicted the powerful baritone young man singing Leporello would indeed have a career as his voice has unique feel and range, was memorable), Eugene Onegin, Der Rosencavalier. I realized it was a graduate recital (like Isabel had only she was the only one to sing for two hours) when I realized most of the audience were parents and relatives and the young people were going home this afternoon or tomorrow.

I have increasingly ambivalent feelings about Castleton. In-between the acts, we walked onto his terrace and looked out at his 600 acres. Nearby the most picturesque of gardens, a place to boat, a fountain, all sorts of employees everywhere. We are invited to come partake of this man who is indeed representative of the 1%. He is filthy rich. He does good things with his money but because he and others have so much, the people of Mitzi’s Abortion and Children in the Mist have so little. The tickets are not cheap to Castleton and I often have the feeling of invading a particular’s man’s house. Each year the arrangements for refreshments and snacks are different; not everything is announced to everyone (games of exclusion and inclusion played). He decrees what he wants to share and what he doesn’t. Jim mentioned that Mazeel was wrong not to have subtitles or surtitles for the gala. He has the system in place. He has more money coming out of his ears than he knows what to do with. He has rebuilt the theater in the tent three times. Was it that he or his employees just couldn’t be bothered? It would have been a lot more enjoyable to me had I known what the words for in each scene. I was not there as a “proud” family member.

I rejoice for the strong heathly excellently fed dog I saw trotting along side Mrs Maazel (well fed herself, much much younger than her husband, an ex-actress) but the rest of us are called upon to take positions just to eat and have shelter whose central purpose is to protect this place, this man’s wealthy, it’s asked that we give up our lives doing bad, corrupt or just foolish things to keep this establishment going.

Pam Ward singing Somewhere over the Rainbow

Izzy came with us to this summer’s contribution by Carla Huber’s In-series folks: an evening of song by Arlen and Berlin. Jim didn’t chose the events we went to because they were in keeping with one another and would enable me to write a coherent blog, but it does turn out this way. Whoever chose the songs stuck with depression era cheer. While at first it was indeed spirit-uplifting to listen to songs like “Let’s have another cup of coffee” (another piece of pie), to be asked to smile, smile, smile did become enervating. There was not enough plangency and when the evening ended with the singers holding up signs saying that they still believed in the American dream, to a chorus of “God Bless America” this was too much.

Tellingly, it was tamely done. We needed more “The Man that Got Away” and less “I love a parade.” Fine poignant moments were the irresistible (nostalgic) “Over the rainbow” and “Last night when we were young.

Well, what was the dud? If gentle reader, you are still reading and remember my references? the one-woman show we saw last night on a (foolish) impulse it turns out: Monique Holt called her far more than one hour performance Men don’t Listen to Naked Women. She did sign that line but it had no thematic shaping. We found ourselves in a show meant for deaf people; Holt signed everything and a man spoke the language for the sign-impaired. It seemed to me she was taking advantage of the enjoyment deaf people seemed to be having of a performance done in sheer signs. She didn’t need to have a real program (so to speak). It was slapstick, with occasionally superficially innuendoes; she made comedy out of people who smell. I noticed the couple of times she even came near something controversial (like the banks being bailed out to the tune of billions and not yielding an inch to stop foreclosures), she punted; she hesitated and seemed to sign how she wasn’t really angry at what had happened. It was a contentless hour. Did she think her audience doesn’t have any information?

My two worst (another version of this question people ask one another under the Baldachinno tent), if I take the previous 5 we went to into account, was this Men Don’t and Madame (the lame musical about Helena Rubenstein at least had a reasonable story, was trying to show something of the woman’s life and character). Men don’t show cost us more than usual as we didn’t buy it as part of our bulk.

What happened was we did miscalculate time intervals. After Mitzi’s Abortion we had a lovely yummy meal in a Chinese restaurant on Chinese restaurant row, which is near the center of the Fringe where the ticket booth and the baldacchino tent are, and the two shows we had bought for. We had egg rolls, a single eggplant claypot we shared, beer for him and white Riesling wine for me. But there were more than two hours in-between and we thought we might get bored sitting in the tent and I can’t walk that much and it was not that cool anyway. Turned out we would have done better to sit said tent which was at the time right next to a repeat performance of Pinky Swear. We could have heard it clearly and drunk more Prosecco together.

Next time we’ll know better and stick with our planned choices. Four more to go.

Ellen

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Midsummer: Capital Fringe, Pinky Swear, the Brontes, Hamlet

Karen Lange reading entries aloud (Pinky Swear)

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve seen four more productions, and, as might be expected, since we are going to twice as many this year as we went to last (Izzy is going with us but 3 times and last time she went to nearly all), we did at last find ourselves at a real dud. But we’ve also had two memorable, so alive, stirring, and very contemporary experiences.

Pinky Swear is an all girls’ band, raunchy, angry, sexy; they are “in your face” in the way they apparently break all sexual taboos. They don’t quite break all, but they break several: dildos abound; they get into quarrels, they insult one another, are sarky, their songs range from a desire to fuck or be fucked, to grating irritation with the nature of life, to (sometimes) romantic longing and muted heartbreak. Masturbation is the way to go as you can do it anytime. If you can’t have the one you love, love the one you’re with was this year’s theme.

All four: Karen in the back, next to her Allyson Harkey the guitarist Christina Frank, and with the black tambourine Toni Rae Brotons

Last night (Thursday), there were three young men with them as support band, and sometimes they played music from the 60s and 70s; while I enjoyed these (they were written before the performers were born), I thought the electrifying moments came from the contemporary music, the stances the girls took.

The witty and wry Karen Lange who read aloud slips of paper on which members of the audience were asked to write the “weirdest place they had sex.” The weird experiences were not that transgressive, or odd or wild. One read loud: “We had sex under a bush in Central Park. The gravel underneath was a problem.” That prompted jokes about what positions the gravel would make most uncomfortable. Then there was a second on having sex in Central Park, and Karen remarked Central Park must be a busy place at night. The singers said they were going to put some of these on face-book, but I could not find any. An informative pdf. They were in the large (but un-air-conditioned) Baldacchino Gypsy Tent next to one of the central bars and meeting places of the Fringe.

Since the tent is across the street from the (famed) restaurant, poets-reading and performing theater space, Busboys and Poets, Jim and I went there for our dinner afterward. I had a pizza, scotch and ginger ale, and Jim had beer and burger and fries. The night was hot, but there was a breeze, and we sat outside under an awning near a working fan and were happy.

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Tonight (Friday) we saw a spectacularly well-acted Hamlet. Powerful, fast-moving sizzling performances, especially by 1) Christ Genebach who was Hamlet and his father’s ghost, and the player king: he was just magnificent; his face and gestures reminded me again and again of Ralph Fiennes; and 2) Sandy Gainum as Gertrude and the Gravedigger, she probably was directed to be this sentimental and shocked Gertrude when Hamlet comes to her in her bed to tell her not to go to bed with Claudius, but otherwise she was sharp, gesturing and face just right, ever on the move. Raven Bonniwell did another unlikely doubling of Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Osric and was particularly good in the first two. As Laertes Billy Finn was violent emotionally as well as physically. The final duel is not with swords, but fists and the two men murder one another with blunt knives.

Directed by Hannah Todd, it was said to be much shorter than the original, abridged. And it ran only 1 hour and 40 minutes, but that is not just one hour (as most of the events are) and a lot was included. Horatio was the only major character cut; they chose to sweat lines rather than cut whole soliloquies. The director’s notes said she saw the play as a violent one, an outcropping of Hamlet’s feverish imagination, trapped by his own fantasies. The play began with Hamlet half-dreaming on the floor and ended with him dead in the same posture. He and all the players were driven people. I felt we really experienced the play. There was no intermission and that helped sustain the move.

Chris Genebach as Hamlet

Everyone clapped hard, and people stood for the performers whose lines had come so swiftly and naturally (it seemed) off their tongues. The company calls themselves the Flashpoint theater and their specialty is similarly abridged classics. Lauren Katz also thought it one of the strongest productions of Hamlet she’d seen in a while.

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You can’t win ‘em all. Wednesday night we went to a musical based on the life of Helena Rubinstein in America, Madame it was called. The performers had worked very hard, the costumes were lovely, the choreography was well-worked out; the problem was the content of the lyrics and “book” and story line. Excruciatingly lame, sentimental where they should have been prosaic, including even a love duet which belonged to Carousel, and a major male role going to an actor who was wooden and couldn’t sing.

Apparently the management of the whole festival is aware of which shows are not likely to please or lure an audience, as this one was held in small basement room of a church, there were few chairs, and even these were not filled up. To be fair, here’s a reviewer who saw some good things in the show and tries to like it

Two of the actor-singers rehearsing

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Not as tedious (we stayed at Madame because we felt we’d hurt the actors-singers’ feelings), but their musical rock show nowhere as good as last year (Finn McCool) and last year not as good as the spectacular brilliance of the year before (Oreisteia), Dizzy Miss Lizzy Doing the Brontes was something of a disappointment. The idea of each rock show has been the same: interweave some story or intense anguish or misery with the upbeat of hard rock. This time it was the Brontes and I’ll give it to them, they didn’t pollyanna the story of these four finally unlucky geniuses. The frustrated outcast Branwell became an alcoholic; Anne died so young; Emily unable to integrate at all into any social life and dying fairly young; and Charlotte left alone, also unable to build a life of fulfillment with people gifted like herself, also dying, of a miscarriage; their isolated lives as children on the moors.

Narrator, Branwell and accompaniment

Izzy came with us and I can’t better her commentary.

It’s true that Jim and I probably didn’t get all the jokes because we didn’t recognize some of the pop references. It’s hard for me to believe I was the only person in that tent besides the performers who had heard of Anne Bronte — does no one watch PBS movies? there was a splendid Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with real stars in the leading roles, and on most of the listservs I’ve been on, admittedly literary ones, people have read this and/or Agnes Grey (a governess story). I was the only person to clap and call Yay! when “Anne Bronte” came forward and told us the titles of her novels. A woman sitting next to me told me she had never heard of Branwell Bronte, so I recommended Daphne DuMaurier’s powerfully passionate The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, which reprints what is left of his poetry. Considering the lamentable state of ignorance then about the Brontes, I suppose it’s picky of me to complain Dizzy Miss Lizzy did not seem to know that Emily was a great poet, but still I wish they had known it. Some of her verses set to rock might have stirred the audience.

Untitled:

Redbreast, early in the morning
Dank and cold and cloudy grey,
Wildly tender is thy music
Chasing angry thoughts away.

My heart is not enraptured now,
My eyes are full of tears,
And constant sorrow on my brow
Has done the work of years.

It was not hope that wrecked at once
The spirit’s calm in storm
But a long life of solitude,
Hopes quenched and rising thoughts subdued,
A bleak November’s calm.

What woke it then? A little child
Strayed from its father’s cottage door,
And in the hour of moonlight wild
Laid lonely on the desert moor.

I heart it then, you heard it too,
And seraph sweet it sang to you;
But like a shriek of misery
That wild, wild music wailed to me.

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I go out to plays, to operas, see movies, look at pictures, listen to music, even walk in landscapes for the same causes I read. These experiences are meaningful to me, speak to me at some level that counts, help me endure. Funnily of these four, the one I came away with repeating an idea the artists had voiced was Pinky Swear. Karen had a song whose refrain was you end where you start out, find yourself what you were. That’s my case. Soon I shall be driven to retire (they are beginning to harass me at GMU because they want me to turn my English humanities into a business computer-based course and I cannot) and I find I end where I began.

Just being me, living alongside Jim, and the real irony is what I love after the few human beings who I am attached to and whom I hope are attached to me are books precisely those I started out with (Austen among them) and a set of 18th century historical romances, whose hero and heroine were norms for me in my conscious teenagehood: the Poldark series.

It’s not that Hamlet does not have much to say. But I’ve read and seen the play so many times it’s hard to have a fresh reaction. Maybe I did tonight. When Hamlet took Yorick’s skull, and said to his imaginary lady, to this you will come, I identified. I’ve few teeth, bad feet, my lower back hurts, my hair grey, my handwriting is terrible (when I go to make a letter it’s hard to make it come out clearly and often I will write another letter or number than the one I consciously intend), I’ve forgotten multiplication tables (and never could do percentages, fractions, long division), I can’t read late into the night or watch movies without napping, when I get on the Metro people actually immediately get up to give me a seat. Yes to that I am coming.

Do people know Sylvia Plath also drew? yes, lovely touching drawings of everyday things, houses, street scenes. Here’s a pair of shoes I can no longer wear except for a few minutes at a time unless the miracle of really soft leather is achieved.

Sylvia Plath, Large Size Shoes (maybe she thought she had “big feet”)

Ellen

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Don Giovanni at the Barns at Wolf Trap

Sketches for the production of Don Giovanni (left to right, the Don, Elvira, Leporello and Zerlina’s outfits)

Dear Friends and readers,

Our first summer outing was a bit of a disappointment. The air had been burning hot today, brutal heat that left me breathless when I went out, so we were looking forward to a little cool in the evening at the park around the Barns. That we did have and a yummy meal of salmon, pesto fat spaghetti salad, artichokes and Riesling wine. The singing and some of the talk before the opera was fun to listen to and the crowd was big and enthusiastic. But the opera itself as done just didn’t jell, had far too many gimmicks. Her thinking seems to have been superficial, and done with an eye to “pleasing the crowd.” She did not trust the audience to have an intelligent awareness of what we were seeing, or herself wanted to avoid the opera’s central themes.

It may be that I’ve seen too many Don Giovannis lately, and it would be hard for a company to come up with yet another brilliant, relevant and thoughtful dark, or just an alive exhilarating production with terrific interactive performances. The competition is keen. Well this one, while clearly well-meant, didn’t have some central idea or mood fueling it, so it really felt like one or two characters coming on stage each time, doing their bit and getting off. There was no sense of a real individual interactive relationship between Leporello (Craig Irvin) and Don Giovanni (Ryan Kuster). Kuster’s best singing was the serenade in the second act, and his sudden vicious beatings or arrogance didn’t fit his mode of singing. Irvin as Leporello was not tired of his job, not irritated or conspiratorial, just there taking pictures (a conceit was he loved to take photos). Don Octavio’s (Jason Salyden) best arias were cut, and Donna Anna (Marcy Tonikas) and he were dull bores: no terror from her at having been raped, no comedy later when she refuses to marry him after all his devotion. So the primary rich woman (as I’ve seen before) became Elvira, played marvelously (as has become typical) as a woman still deeply in love and even wanting to go to bed with this man who seemed on the edge of beating her up:

She was one of the strongest singers with a voice that was lyrical and projected

There was no anger from Masetto (Aaron Sorenson), who was easily brutally beaten by the Don and all gentleness with the kewpie-doll comical Zerlina (Andrea Carroll) who showed more life in her reluctance to let Elvira boss her around than in her scenes with the Don. The masquerade didn’t look like fun; everyone was going through gyrations that showed a kind of Marat/Sade corruption (including buggering) which just didn’t belong. The 18th century supposed thrift-shop type outfits just looked odd. The best moments were those which were reminiscent of 18th century comedy, with, for example, the Don to the back of the stage making funny comments as Leporello pretended to be him wooing Elvira.

Kim Witman’s half-hour talk before was perhaps a warning signal. She went through the history of productions cursorily, concentrating just on those which turn the Don into a romantic figure, but then turned around and defined the opera as basically comic (dramma giocoso, or jocular) and all she said about the production as a whole was they decided to use contemporary dress to try to evoke contemporary types. In other of her talks I’ve seen her come out with ideas about the themes of the opera. How are we to take the opening rape? Is it a rape? The Don’s attitude towards his male servants? why is he a half-mad promiscuous man who never seems to have any sex during the course of the play? Is it about the irrationality of everyone which they carry on with after the curtain goes down? or a morality play? any or all of these? If she thought about it, it did not appear from the production.

I must say that I have seen nobody on stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust — Jane Austen, on a pantomime-burlesque, Don Juan, or the Libertine Destroyed, adapted from Thomas Shadwell’s Libertine, 15 Sept 1813, showing even casual pantomime can evoke thought

Worst of all was Witman’s reliance on computer gimmicks. She turned the stage into several movie screens and while the first time we saw on some of them images familiar from the Internet made relevant, it seemed funny, after a while the jokes paled and were intrusive. Yes some in the audience laughed and laughed (some always do), but I noticed she did drop these jokes towards the end of the opera when things were getting serious as our two heroes went into the graveyard with the usual stone effigy.

People applauded the cast who were eager and had worked so hard. We sat next to a couple where the man was himself an opera singer and we had some talk with them about the instruments which were right in front of us. We were in the first row of four seats to the left, and just before us were the musical instruments that played for the Don’s party as well as piano and cello that didn’t fit in the pit. During intermission I suggested perhaps we were having too many gimmicks, too much of a good thing the jokes about computer usages (Leporello keeps his records of the Don’s conquests on an ipad). The man said the lights which kept traveling up and down the movie screens (to me like some Mondrian painting gone electric) made him think of Romney as an etch-a-sketch man.

You can’t win ‘em all. Mozart’s music is so alluring and some of the singing was entrancing.

The theme of this summer’s two Barns productions is the 18th century aristocratic debauched or macho male. In the era such a figure was often presented morally. Next up (in August) is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, libretto by W. H. Auden. I hope Kim thinks about Hogarth’s powerful pictures.

Rake’s progress: the orgy at a brothel

Don Giovanni’s primary title is Il dissoluto punito; perhaps the two singing males were too wholesome-handsome:

Lunchtime special performance

Ellen

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John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: On Doing a Sexually Radical Play in the Shenandoah Valley

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Patrick Earl as Giovanni, the lover-brother, and Denice Mahler as his sister-lover, Annabella), from the ASC’s production 2012

Dear friends and readers,

This is a “must-see” production. So wrote the “Mid-Atlantic Travel Blogger” who while anonymous had enough clout to see a “private” performance of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by the group who used to call themselves “The Shenandoah Shakespeare”. He or she couldn’t or doesn’t explain why; indeed seemed puzzled how such a “twisted” play could please, and put it down to “shock.”

Within a few seconds of the start of the second act, I realized this was the production Ford’s daring play calls for: its note throughout is a gleeful exposure of the angry cynicism, amorality or sheer stupidity (imbecility) of all the authority figures of the play: some are amoral such as the cardinal (Rick Blunt), who is disinclined to prosecute the murder of one citizen because the murderer has some connections, and who gathers up all the gold left by dead strewn across the stage at the play’s close; some are justifiably cynical like Hippolita (Stephanie Holladay Earl), rejected wife of a nobleman; or Vasques (Eugene Douglas) a kind of Iago who pronounces moral lessons. There are simpletons who enforce unexamined norms: Florio (Daniel Abraham Stevens), Annabella’s father who forces her to marry the vicious treacherous Soranzo (Jake Mahler). There are the complicit for their own appetites and interest’s sake, Putana, Annabella’s “nurse” (Bridget Rue as brothel madam); Grimaldi, willing to murder at the drop of a sword (typical type of this era, played by Michael Amendola). Dark farce is the way much of these interactions are performed, with over-the-top garishly sexual costuming for the women. The story is complicated but it’s told simply at wikipedia).

Really though there’s nothing new here for us in 2012. Old hat since Marat/Sade. What is startling and commendable is from the second part of the play on, the players did Giovanni and Annabella’s love for one another as totally passionate, a beautiful thing, two souls made for one another with the most idealistic soaring of the spirit. Here’s Annabella telling Soranza what Giovanni is:

This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human, as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You! why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him. (Act 3, sc 3)

The look of aspiration in Earl’s eyes is pitch perfect:

The twisting of this young man from within until he goes mad by the end of the act and himself cruelly murders Annabella (Othello-like, and Ford alludes to Othello, he cannot bear to have his woman taken by Soranzo nightly) and stalks about covered with the blood of Soranzo crazed and vehemently assailing the world from the top of his lungs on the top of a high table — these final moments are where the plot-design of the whole play had been heading.

As ever, our players “did it with the lights on,” and so they had no technology to rivet or distract us with. Earl as Giovanni was up to absorbing an audience into awed silence watching him. At the play’s close he has not the problem of what to do next since Vasques comes up to stab him from behind and then has his hired assassins (several in black who turn up whenever needed) to finish the job off:

The woman imitates a police offer, the men without the religious symbols FBI and spy-detective types, and then there’s a priest

The second half of this production was thus much braver than the Capital Fringe Festival group two summers ago who drew out of an abridged version of the play a socially acceptable feminist moral: at one point Annabella tells us (in this production from a high window) we are seeing “A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy (Act 5, sc 1). But the dignity with which she is endowed, and the way the previous production managed to suggest this play was about men oppressing women was not followed here. This Annabella grovels on the floor:

The lines emphasized are those which present the two people as gripped by love, unable to do without one another surrounded by these “vile” types. The production used “mash-up” techniques for the intermission and during the play we were treated to 1950s rock-n-roll ballads that were very familiar to me, strains of them which I could not quite place: about love a blind passion, about loneliness. Soranzo’s bullying becomes a raping of Annabella nightly instead of justifiable rage at finding himself stuck with a pregnant woman who will not tell her lover’s name; he orders her to bed (the lines are there) where he will again do what he wants. Coerced marriage is rape.

The play put me in mind of Simon Raven’s unfortunately little known masterpiece novel, Fielding Gray: the life of the homosexual male is twisted and perverted by having to hide it, being subject to blackmail and abuse. Heterosexuals can be as nasty and horrible as they please in their sex life, it remains okay as it’s heterosexual; homosexual sex is not prima facie no good in itself; it’s what the society does to it that makes it base and wild (see my blog on Andrew Davies’s film adaptation of Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty). So too incest here. Ford’s play differs from the many Jacobean plays enacting incest or incestuous desires and vicarious sex (Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Women Beware Women): Ford empathizes with the lovers. As Eric Minton puts it, Giovanni and Annabella are just these “true-hearted individuals who just happen to have fallen in love with someone sprung from the same womb. Theirs may be the squirmiest sin, but many other characters prove more loathsome in their violent natures, their greed, their infatuation with revenge, and their self-serving self-righteous.” Minton then goes over the downright silly in the play but omits one young woman, Philotis (Bridget Rue), who is sent to a nunnery in a sort of daze: she had on a shiny satiny skirt with a petticoat which reminded me of outfits made for little girls who are given tap-dancing lessons by middle class US parents for the once-a-year stage performance.

Alas though, reading the Mid-Atlantic Traveler, and finding hardly any reviews of this play, and remembering how the previous production I have seen (so to speak) normalizes the action in terms of 20th century values, perhaps the players and their director were rightly cautious in the introduction and first half. They had an added on introduction which both trivialized the coming play and warned us against it, going so far as to tell us Giovanni was a bad villain. It was all a joke we were going to see, but if we couldn’t take some (whisper the word) “incest,” perhaps we shouldn’t stay. Then the first act had the actors at first turning to the audience as if to ask for boos. What they discovered was there were several fools in the first row who took this seriously and began to call out heckling comments which was then half-clapped by further idiots further back. The play-acting in this first act was oddly artificial and over-the-top strident, rather like a clown show. The way of playing the love of Giovanni and Annabella and the betrayals of the other characters seemed to suggest it was a mystery what could possibly have fuelled Ford to write such a ridiculous piece. Maybe the heckling did some good, for I could see the actors begin to stop appealing to the audience, back off, speed up, though not until the second act did the front row people begin to realize they were not supposed to boo Giovanni or call him out as a “bad guy.” Perhaps the gouging out of Putana’s eyes after Vasques manipulates and deludes her into revealing that Annabella’s lover is Giovanni did the trick to silence them. I admit they interfered with my enjoyment in the first act and was relieved when they fell silent.

During the intermission for the first time in all the many times I have seen ASC productions (a lot of them by now), I began to think well, at long last they have goofed. Or maybe it was that in such a conservative era, and in this mid-Virginia Shenandoah valley (not so far off is Evangelical Jerry Falwell country) they were scared off of doing justice to the very material they had chosen. I might have suggested to Jim we go home, only it had been a 3 hour drive to get there. But I remembered the choice of ’50s music during the intermission and hoped it was deliberate and stayed.

In the event, the actors switched gears totally and the last hour and a half was magnificent in energy, bravura, acting, poignancy.

From a Brooklyn Academy of Music production

It may be that the day we went there just happened to be a number of naive audience members in the first row. I have seen actors on stage make the mistake of inviting an audience slightly to cut up, and have to actually not just back up but even half-scold said audience to get them to be courteous in their interactions again. One must not forget that the actors on a stage are in a state of abjection to the audience: they may seem to be individually triumphing, releasing themselves, showing off, but they are performing for us, nailed down to their scripts, often showing themselves, costumed in dangerously vulnerable ways. Actors have sometimes had overtly to separate themselves from evil characters to protect themselves from the audience’s identification of them with their roles. I have read insightful accounts of theater which make this point about the reality of the actor’s rightly unacknowleged position of supplication (See Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: 18th Century Players and Ideology on the long-hard slog actors of the 18th century performed to gain respect stop heckling and abuse, and protect the actresses.) I had not actually experienced what this means before this.

Jim had a different take — while just as surely recommending going to see it if you are at all within driving distance. Over dinner Jim argued that Ford is playing with ideas, at a distance from them (in the way I think of the Fletcher plays, Middleton and Massinger in his comedies). The play, Jim says, is misogynistic. Ford judges Annabella to be a whore, using the term in a general vilifying way to mean any woman who has sex outside marriage even if with just one man. (Izzy protested that Annabella cannot be a whole because she is paid nothing, has no money; she used the 20th century definition of whore means prostitute which is the way I use the term.) Jim maintains the text of the play blames Annabella. Her looseness starts the evil spreading. PUtano had it coming to her. Vasques is the Vindice (revenger on behalf of God and providence) character and that’s why he is left standing. Jim suggested that since a modern audience would dislike this very much, and want to empathize with a tragic character and feel for the victims, the people who do Ford must alter the play into black farce. Then we don’t worry who is to blame. Or they can, like the Capital Fringe people, impose a modern anti-misogynistic message by abridging.

Tragic heroine from The Broken Heart

I’m not sure. I find it hard not to read Ford’s The Broken Heart as feminist. If we are to blame Annabella, why not Giovanni who is cursed by several authority figures in the play. Surely Soranzo. Vasques recalls Shakespeare’s Iago.

So don’t miss the play. This is a play where the behavior spectacle of the audience may become part of the play and the play itself of real interest.

Ellen

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