Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" -- this boy never grows up

What got a'hold of me and made me read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)?

I don't know. It was lying there on the discount table at the Barnes and Noble in Brookline, a beautiful hardbound edition, with the Winslow Homer painting, Boys in a Meadow, on the dust cover, and a sticker with $4.95. I had to buy it. The nostalgia? The longing for the pastoral youth that I never had? Maybe. (By the way, that Barnes and Noble is closing down -- yet another book store about to disappear.)

I'm glad I read it. It's always readable. And I remember that I loved, and was surprised by, the novel Huckleberry Finn (it was a great novel). Tom is not a great novel, but I guess it is a kind of warmup for Huckleberry. Many parts are very funny, of course. You can just sense Twain unloading at his favorite targets. The satire is constant, and is still timely. It's worth the time. Here is the town minister:

"He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'

"And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church, for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the country; for the state; for the state officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for...."

A disappointing thing about the book: despite all he goes through, Tom is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. He's still the very same child, still quick to dream in the very same childish way as when we first meet him. He hasn't grown at all. We like him, of course, but think he should've learned a thing or two.

Tobias Wolff's memoir-novel, "Old School"

I was engrossed with Tobias Wolff's novel Old School (2003). It is written in the form of a memoir recounting the narrator's years at an exclusive prep school somewhere in New England. He is one of a very few Jewish boys in the school. He masks his "Jewishness" for most of his time at the school. He doesn't speak about it to anyone. He desperately wants to be a writer, and much of the novel is about the urgent sense of competition among the boys to write and be rewarded for their writing -- the school mounts writing contests in which the winning boy gets a private meeting with a famous writer visiting the school. We get to see and meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Earnest Hemingway. The portraits of the writers are vividly detailed and realistic -- they feel as if they must be based on actual journalism.

The narrator does something unexpected in the climax of the story. It surprised me that a voice and a person that I had come to know and trust would suddenly do something so untrustworthy.

It was great to read about a school where literature is taken so seriously! Writers and writer wannabes are heroes in this school.

It reminded me a little of my all-boys high school, Hutchinson Central Techincial High School, in Buffalo. We were a public school, and not exclusive in terms of wealth; we prided ourselves in being smarter than the other public high schools in the city; in my first year, we wore ties and white shirts to school. Like the claustrophobic world described in Old School, we were all boys, and each day you had to make your place in the locker room scenes and bravado.

The environment and scenes are so realistic, they stand out and I remember them now (a few weeks after reading the book) more than the story itself and the thinking of the characters. The book was stoically old fashioned -- no highfalutin language, no obscure allusions, no scrambled time sequences. Just a real story with realistic characters.

One of Wolff's achievements here is that the language is clear and fluid. It seems to disappear and simply leave you with the story itself.

The Masterwork Chorale's surprisingly modern Petite Messe Solennelle, by Rossini

A belated posting on the Masterwork Chorale's performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which we attended on November 16, at Sanders. This mass surprised me -- a couple of the early movements sounded almost folklike, you could dance to them. I loved the harmonium. Other movements were operatic. And other movements were more traditionally liturgical and mass-like. It takes you on quite a journey. The entire piece sounded surprisingly modern -- yet Rossini wrote it in 1863.

The conductor, our friend Steve Karidoyanes, seems to be steadily shaping the sound of the Chorale. They seem to have a tighter, and lighter, sound then they did a year ago.

Cambridge community Chorus's Messiah

We enjoyed the Cambridge Community Chorus's performance of Handel's Messiah (an abbreviated version) on Saturday afternoon. Their new director, Jamie Kirsch, seems like a great find for the chorus. He seemed energetic, and the chorus seemed to respond to him. Their sound was clearer than it was when we last heard them, in the spring. The sopranos especially sounded good. The movements sung by the soprano soloist Danielle Munsell Howard stood out for me -- she has a powerful and controlled voice.

And who'd have thought that over a thousand people would come out for the Messiah on a sunny Saturday afternoon!

MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players "Pirates of Penzance" is a hoot!

We saw MIT's Gilbert and Sullivan Players performance of Pirates of Penzance last Friday night, and really enjoyed it. What a hoot! What a terrific production! And for only $10 a ticket! (We get the MIT community discount, $12 otherwise.) They're still performing through this weekend.

I know Mark Costello, the fellow who plays Frederic, because he sings with me in the bass section of the Brookline Chorus. He was very good. I knew he had a wonderful voice, but was surprised that he could sing tenor this well. And he was very funny, and seemed like a good comic actor (he seems like a natural ham). The student who sang the role of Ruth, Kaila Deiorio-Haggar, had a surprisingly strong voice and comic presence. As did, of course, the soprano Emily Quane in the role of Mabel (she's a conservatory grad, so I expected her to be good). And Lyman Opie in the role of the Major General was excellent (how does he get the words out so fast?).

Lots of funny bits and great touches (the troop of policemen made me laugh out loud every time they took the stage, and the sergeant was very good). This had the feel of a sincerely felt, well-prepared energetic amateur production.

The Huntington's "Rock 'n' Roll": well-crafted, significant, boring

We saw Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington on Saturday, December 6. The play is hard to summarize. It follows a handful of people through the decades as they live through, or in relation to, the Czech velvet revolution.

It's dull.

I know, I know, it's well-crafted. The vicious hothouse atmosphere of left-wing academic politics is nicely detailed, at times funny, and sad. Max, the older professor (played by Jack Willis), is a standout character, and he plays an interesting True Believer (that is, a True Believer in Marx). The scenes of student life in Prague and Oxford will seem comically familiar to most people who lived through the 60s and 70s. And the set design (a sky placed as the background, with our perspective from street level looking up) is striking, and I suppose it has some relevance to the play's stories.

But there are long, long scenes of dry trivia, long discussions about arcane philosophical details. The fellow sitting in front of me (he looked like a professor of some sort), turned to me at the intermission and said, "My snoring wasn't bothering you, was it?"

The rock 'n roll reference...I don't get it. The play seems to have little to do with rock 'n roll. There are references to it, there are short music bits during scene changes, but I couldn't make out anything special about rock's influence on events, other than the usual one about rebellion against authority. As so often happens with a long, turgid play, the director blasted loud music in the last seconds of the play (the Rolling Stones in this case), perhaps to make one final desperate attempt at making you think that maybe you HAD seen something exciting after all.

It seems as if Stoppard wrote this play for a pretty narrow academic audience. How many people would understand the historical and political contexts?

Finally, near the end, there's some life, some drama, as the family starts bashing each other in front of us, some connections are revealed, people do unexpected things. But there's so little to get excited about at this point, after nearly three hours.

Does the Huntington think it can build an audience with this type of play?

David McCullough's 1776

The history 1776 was published in 2005. A very readable, even thrilling, account of the first year of the American Revolution. McCullough is such a good narrative writer I almost felt I was reading a page-turning detective novel. Yet, although he doesn't go deeply into the philosophical and social background of that time (he couldn't in a book this length), he writes with a lot of subtlety about the people and events from both the American and the British perspective. The British and their loyalist North American supporters are sympathetically described, and their perspective on the colonies is given what I feel must be a fair reading. King George comes across less a tyrant than an amiable man deeply out of touch with the events in North America. The same could be said about many of his supporters in Parliament. It was interesting to read about the number of British voices that loudly argued against militarily subjugating the colonies.

But the hero and center of the story is George Washington, and his army. Washington lost battle after battle, and was consistently outsmarted by the British for much of 1776. He is described as indecisive, and that surely is how he comes across. Yet, leading an undisciplined army, without an established administration, almost no battlefield intelligence, with unpredictable officers and soldiers, and with no actual personal experience leading a large force, the reader can certainly understand Washington's predicament, and his propensity to delay making a decision.

It is clear that Washington learned from the early battles, and from his mistakes. He got better as the year went on, and Congress somehow maintained its faith in him. (In a modern media age, would the public have tolerated the terrible defeats in New York without firing Washington? I doubt it.)

He comes across as a real patrician, and bit fastidious (writing detailed letters to his estate agent about remodeling the house while preparing to fight a battle in the muck and cold). He also comes across as loyal to his subordinate generals, and reluctant to punish, even when they have personally betrayed him. His most trusted personal aide carried on a correspondence with General Lee that was critical of Washington to the point of denunciation. This during the worst months of 1776. Washington discovered the correspondence by accident. He must have been painfully shocked. Yet, he benignly notified both men that he was simply aware of their correspondence. He took no punitive measures against either man. He did nothing that would harm the war effort. McCullough is practically reverent in his depiction of Washington as a humane and wise general. Perhaps Washington really deserved this depiction.

Another surprising point is how amateur the American army truly was. Men came directly from their farms, mills, and fishing boats. Some of them were made generals. And some of them turned out to be amazingly good generals.

Willa Cather's novel, "My Antonia" -- if Jim is Willa

I always liked the title of this novel, though I never got to reading it until now. Aside from indicating a permanent attachment or possession (as with a married couple or a close relative), the "my" can imply that one can keep and love a version of a person, or a particular cherished image of the person, regardless of what the real person does, or even if the person is far away.

This book was published in 1919. The novel's main character and narrator is Jim Burden, who is sent as a young boy to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie frontier. The time seems to be the 1880s or 1890s, before motor cars and rural electricity. Jim develops an affection for Antonia Shimerda, a Czech girl four years older than he is, who lives with her dirt poor immigrant family on a nearby farm. The book follows their lives and their affectionate (but arms length) relationship into adulthood. Antonia eventually gets pregnant with a local lout, but then marries a kindly older Czech and has a huge happy family with him. Jim moves East, to New York, where he becomes a successful railroad lawyer.

Along the way, the characters and their families endure hardships, romances, rural intrigues, death, small town life, small and large incidents. I read the he first part of the book avidly, and loved the details of pioneer life as seen through Jim's eyes. The harshness of life, the never-ending farm work, the warm bonds with the people around him (even people he didn't necessarily like), and Antonia herself -- all detailed with a nostalgic, dreamlike intensity. He loves Antonia, and she loves him. Yet, there seems to be an undefined distance between them, and a sort of agreement that they will never close the distance. It's mysterious. Once they become adults, and Antonia's age (four years older than him) is no longer such an obstacle, what prevents them from being more than cousinly? It's as if both of them are already married to others. But they're not. The book gets sentimental towards the latter part, and seems a bit long.

I've read that Willa Cather was remarkably open about her own lesbian sexual persona (remarkably open for that time, at least). What if we imagine Jim Burden as a woman -- that the narrator is actually a woman growing up on the prairie, with a powerful desire for Antonia? Then, their forbearance would make more sense. Given the mores of that era, the two of them simply could not express their affection for each other in other than a chaste fashion. Perhaps this is Willa Cather, truly writing about her own Antonia.

The Chorus Pro Musica's performance of Rachmaninoff's Vespers

The Chorus Pro Musica performed Rachmaninoff's Vespers at St. George's church this past Sunday, November 9. Lisa Graham conducted (she is also our conductor in the Brookline Chorus). The Vespers are sung acapella. I immediately enjoyed the beautiful tone of the chorus. They moved so well from the loud to the soft passages, with many tricky layers of music in between.

I loved the poetry of the verses. I've always been moved by the simple hymn, Bless the Lord, O My Soul (Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Ghospoda), and these lines, familiar to me from the Greek service:

Thou art clothed with honor and majesty.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord.
The waters stand upon the mountains.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
The waters flow between the hills.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
In wisdom hast Thou made all things.

To me, the verses say that the infinite complexity of nature -- seemingly random in its ends -- from which we humans draw the ability to live our lives, is in fact God's work.

The alto Marion Dry sang with a throaty, solemn sound, her voice vibrating with...fear (fear of God was a common expression throughout). The tenor Charles Blandy sang intensely, and transmitted a kind of purity and innocence, in a voice full of longing for God.

Penetrating the visual design of the network election broadcasts

Watching the network election returns on Tuesday night (NBC, CBS, ABC), I was surprised by the distracting amount of visual information the set designers crammed into the screen. Always, one or more news anchor spoke, seen from waist up. Behind him or her were flashing moving screens and maps. The front of the anchor's desk had lit panels. The network logo fluttered in the lower left corner of the screen. Two lines of barely legible block letters (NY, CN, MO) flipped and moved across the bottom of the screen announcing results and names from states. Checkmarks everywhere. Behind it all, a background of even more moving color and light framed everything and screamed for whatever attention we had left.

Were viewers actually expected to absorb information from this cacophony?

There wasn't a warm tone or an expanse of quiet color anywhere. The set designers must have studied at a Vegas strip mall. NBC was the worst. The other two networks were marginally better. I suppose this reflects the infiltration of an internet web design mentality into these live broadcasts. I think the producers and designers should reconsider their strategy: when it comes to news, an unobstructed person speaking on TV should be the focus of our concentration. After all, Tim Russert was remembered and sought out by viewers for his work with a whiteboard and a black marker.

Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father"

I almost abandoned Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father (published 1995) after thirty pages or so. He is a cool writer, not unlike the character he represents in public life. I sometimes felt that it was only his best face that was put forward -- as if he was running for some kind of office. (The book was published in 1995, I believe before he had attained political office.)

But I kept on. Fortunately, that politico tone doesn't dominate the book. And now I think this is a fairly good book. He's a better writer than I expected.

He describes his boyhood with his mother and grandparents, in Hawaii and Indonesia, his years working as a community organizer in Chicago, and his search for the details and connection to his father's Kenyan family -- the central theme of the book. I felt a kinship with him in my own attempts to learn about my parents, and to stay connected with my Greek relatives and their histories.

His hungering for his African self -- for his Kenyan father, whom he barely knew firsthand -- is good reading.

I finally decided that it was overall a good thing that he's cool as a writer -- he shows us the characters of people around him by how they look, what they say, how their eyes and bodies work.

In the best passage in the book, he finally attends Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and hears a sermon there (he was not an avid church goer to that point, some time in his early 20s). He repeats a portion of Wright's sermon: "The audacity of hope! Times when we couldn't pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn't ever going to amount to anything...at the age of fifteen, busted for grand larceny auto theft...and yet and still my momma and daddy would break into a song...Oh yes, Jesus, I thank you...."

And then Obama concludes the chapter on Chicago like this: "And in that single note --hope!--I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones...As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those were walking to he altar to accept reverend Wright's call, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. I looked down to see the older of the two boys sitting beside me,his face slightly aprehensive as he handed me a pocket tissue. Beside him, his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back toward the altar. It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks."

It must have been wrenching for Obama to reject Reverend Wright earlier this year, when Wright gave that sermon about God damning America. But Barack Obama did it. As far as we know, he took his family and left.

As far as what the book says about him as a potential president, I can think of three things.

1. He trusts subordinates and other people. More than that, he promotes other people, putting them forward to accept the glory, as he does with his fellow organizers, whom he was managing in Chicago. (And sometimes he puts unprepared people forward to face a hot crowd, while he stays somewhere in the background.)

2. He believes in collective solutions to problems. But they don't have to be governmental solutions. His organizing days involved work with private community groups, often trying to motivate and organize neighborhoods to work on their own.

3. He naturally empathizes with people, and is able to understand and argue an issue from more than one perspective. With a white mother and a black father, this must come naturally to him.

Gutenberg! the Musical!-- a workshop idea stretched into a paying show

The New Repertory Theater's Gutenberg! the Musical! is about a pair of young actors who want to put on a brilliant musical. They need producers and financial backing, and we, the audience, serve as the producers for whom they audition the show. What follows is a frantic spoof of musicals and musical songs and story lines.

I appreciate the idea to give new and "cutting edge" (dreaded phrase) productions a chance, I like the energy and talent of the two actors, and I like the idea of getting some laughs. But this is a poor thin show. It feels like a college theater workshop idea that's been stretched into a show that people are expected to pay for.

I did get the premise, that these guys are spoofing musicals. How could you not get it? They explain it to you. But no amount of screeching, dancing, frantic gestures and diving around can hide the miserable story line, the empty songs that are supposed to be ironic and funny, and the labored cliches presented as new. They simply copied bad musical shtick. And did we need all the sight gags about masturbation? This must be the result of theater people raised on Betty's Summer Vacation. If they shorten it to 15-20 minutes, well, that might work.

We left at intermission. We like the New Rep a lot, and have been attending their shows for years. But we left at intermission.

Edmund Hillary's autobiography, "Nothing Venture, Nothing Win"

Sir Edmund never explains the odd grammar of his 1975 autobiography's title, although after reading a few chapters, you will realize that the old adage "nothing ventured, nothing gained" perfectly summarizes his attitude to his mountaineering exploits, the people around him, and his life.

The great Everest expedition is the heart of the book, of course, and he added more details and interesting impressions about fellow mountaineers and the Sherpas who accompanied the expedition than were included in his 1955 account High Adventure (see further down). His writing is earnest, a bit dry, humble, occasionally funny, and full of his passion for detail. I admire him. He spent much of the latter part of his life working to build schools and hospitals in Nepal, for the Sherpa people. It's not an exciting, juicy book -- it's just a depiction of an admirable life.

In fact, how is it that he seems to have remembered the location of every handhold, the width of every crevasse, the shape of every minor slope, the feel of the snow at each step? It's amazing. He seem to replay every step of his expeditions. How did he record those details there, at 27,000 feet? I can only assume that he wrote prolifically in his journals at every possible resting moment. After all, he wanted others to be able to retrace his steps.

The New Reportory Theater's exciting "Eurydice": unforgettable scenes of eternal love and eternal loss

Sarah Ruhl's play is an exciting re-creation of the story of Eurydice, who dies on her wedding day, and Orpheus, her husband who descends into the underworld to save her. It's a wonderful play, and Rick Lombardo, the director, does a great deal with the actors, a small stage space, and a very few spare props.

I felt as if we watched an inspired group of actors, as if they were very young, and struggling to make names for themselves. Zillah Glory is very good as Eurydice, spontaneous and sexy. Ken Baltin, her father, is terrific.

There are two powerful scenes that will stay with me:

• Eurydice's father in the underworld, aware of her upcoming wedding to Orpheus, happily and silently miming his role in her wedding (holding out his arm, feeling her arm in his, stepping with her towards the imaginary altar);

• and Eurydice at the end, drinking water from the river Lethe in order to save herself from a hideous fate as eternal concubine to the clownlike and vile Lord of the Underworld, knowing of course that Lethe will erase her memory and everything that makes her Eurydice -- she truly surrenders to death as the only escape possible. Her last motion is to take her father's dead hand into hers and pull his arm around her.

Ruhl employs a number of artificial theatrical devices that seem evocative and natural: the father building a "room" for Eurydice in the underworld out of string, written messages accurately sent between the lovers from the world to the underworld and back -- carried "hopefully" by a worm, an elevator delivers characters to the underworld. It all works magically well.

Eurydice might have been a bit too ditzy in the beginning of the play, the three stones being played by young girls got tiresome, the music has a New Age cliched air, and the getup of the lord of the underworld was a bit like something from Alice in Wonderland. But these were small flaws that only made me love the production and its cast more.

The Huntington's "How Shakespeare Won the West": what were they thinking?

A letdown. I'm baffled that the Huntington would produce this as their first play of the season, and the first play in the tenure of their new artistic director, Peter DuBois. A very long hour and forty minutes of theater!

For a generally (and inexplicably) upbeat view of the play, you can read Louise Kennedy's review in the Boston Globe.

The playwright Richard Nelson starts out with a great premise -- in the 1840s, a likable group of out-of-work New York actors in a tavern get the bug to go west and perform Shakespeare for gold miners. They'll find their own gold and fortunes out there. You can imagine the comic possibilities and are anxious for them to get going. We love Will LeBow, and the whole cast was fine.

What follows for the next hour is a tedious compilation of small barely connected story bits on their journey. The stories are abrupt, and the characters' personalities remain thin, never escaping the caricatures we meet in the beginning of the play. I kept thinking that the playwright was taking us somewhere and this was all going to take off any minute now...maybe he was, but I never saw it, despite the actors finally staggering into San Francisco. I could feel the writer struggling to mechanically fill out the scenes.

The last ten minutes -- in which the troupe puts on a hilarious production of Hamlet -- was where the play should have continued early on.

Should the Huntington put on a play that takes up less emotional space than an early episode of Bonanza?

What was the Huntington thinking?

Edmund Hillary's awesome and humbling "High Adventure"

This book is Hillary's account of the exploratory and Everest summit trips of 1951-53. He writes in a matter-of-fact style that I imagine reflects his character. It certainly suits the character that comes through in the narrative -- an unassuming man of endurance, focus, and courage, not without a warm and funny side.

I am two thirds of the way through this book, and constantly impressed by the effort demanded of these men. Even exhausted from a day of clinging to icy handholds and near-death events slipping and falling into crevasses, they eat a small dinner and prepare to wake up at 3:30 AM so that they can hike to a new route. They do this day after day for months. Each mission to the Everest area took about three months.

I'm struck by the number of people involved -- it's not just Hillary up there. There are teams. Dozens of people. (Surprisingly, he freely uses the word "coolies" to describe hired porters, men and women villagers who are not necessarily mountaineers. Perhaps the word was not seen as derogatory in 1955, when Hillary wrote this account.) They make frequent exploratory trips searching for better, safer routes to Everest. The first two years were reconnaissance trips. It's a huge logistics effort within a finite amount of time. All the while, they work in freezing cold and wind or extreme heat, sometimes both within a few minutes. Their food seems to be barley gruel, potatoes, some chocolate, tea. I wish Hillary had written more about the details and logistics. He doesn't write much about the type of gear and clothes they wear, their training, the food, the reasons for choosing the spring or fall months.

It's the mental toughness that's truly impressive. Trying to sleep in a tent with a howling wind, wind chills of -50 F, exhausted, hungry, afraid of being blown off the mountain, and knowing that you'll be getting up in a few hours regardless to carry on -- because you have no choice, you'll die if you stay there -- it's awesome and humbling.

It's Not Just Google That's Making Us "Stoopid"

Nicholas Carr's essay in the July/August Atlantic Magazine, Is Google Making Us Stoopid?, attempts to make the point that using the Web and hopping from link to link has changed the way we think -- that we are now less able to concentrate on and finish longer pieces of writing or work of any kind, even written content on the Web itself. We now grab a snippet of info and jump to the next somewhat-related snippet. Carr contends that our brains are actually working differently as a result -- they are "wired" differently. The essay's title singles out the Google search engine and environment as the culprit, but that's just a handle for his main argument that the Web is at the bottom of this supposed change.

That a medium of a communication influences the message and shapes the audience as it interacts with it is not a new observation. Carr got 5-6 magazine pages and a cover story out of this point. He offered only a few weak bits of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

My sense is, he is not wrong. But I think that if it is harder for us to concentrate, it's because we simply have less time to do so. A number of changes have occurred in the last forty years to fragment our attention, with less and less time available to us for us to apply that attention:

1. In most families, both parents work. With both adults working, household tasks get pushed into the evenings, where they compete with everything else that has to happen in the evening.
   
   
2. There are more single-parent families than ever, and families with divorced parents. Life is complicated in these families, with parents and children dealing with multiple schedules and connections to family members inside and outside the house.
   
   
3. The proliferation of media, including cable channels, DVDs, games, the Web, mobile phones. All of it competes for our attention, so we have to give all of it smaller and smaller bits.
   
   
4. The technological unification of work. Corporations can now cram more and more disparate tasks onto individual workers, and thus employ fewer workers. A corporate worker with a computer has the tools of dozens of different professionals.

In each of these changes, don't we see the same pressures to fragment our attention that Carr writes about in his essay? We have more and more things to do in the twenty four hours of every day.

Judith Herrin's Wonderful Book about Byzantium

Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin

In 28 chapters, most of them 10-12 pages in length, Judith Herrin shows us how the Byzantine empire survived for over 1,100 years. The theme that runs throughout the book -- whether the topic is about life in Constantinople, the Moslem conquests of Christian lands, taxes, Venetian allies and enemies, monks, the crusades -- is that Byzantium articulated and defended a centralized governing system that was creative enough to modify itself, regroup, and endure repeated crises until the final siege in 1453.

A few years ago, I read John Julius Norwich's three volume History of Byzantium. I loved his story telling ability, but I remember thinking that the narrative was almost entirely on the big battle scenes, the ugly successions from one emperor to another, and one conquest after another, all of which was exciting to read, but did not tell me much about how people lived their lives.

Judith Herrin's book is different. She writes interesting portraits of individuals: emperors, scholars, patriarchs, solders. She quotes from their letters. I can practically hear the one emperor, scolding his son in Greek, that he must closely follow the advice he leaves him in his autobiography about when to start a war and when not. I can see him thumping the table with his finger while the boy stares back, bewildered.

A number of points in the book stuck with me, and are worth remembering.

• The iconoclast movement that banished icons from religious observance was deeply influenced by the Arab invasions of the 8th century. The empire suffered a number of major defeats to Arab Islamic armies bent on spreading Islam. The Byzantines lost Jerusalem, and much of Syria. The defeats shocked them -- if they were Christians, and anointed by God, why did they lose so badly to infidels? Some, many from the eastern provinces, who had long established connections with Arabs and Islam, felt that God was punishing Christian Byzantium for an obvious heresy -- the veneration of icons in their worship. Islam forbids any human images in worship. To them, this was proof that God was unhappy with the Christian eastern Roman empire. The iconoclast movement among the Byzantines lasted over a hundred years, and many icons and mosaics were destroyed, until the empress Theodora finally established icons in the religious life of Byzantium and the Orthodox church in 843.

• The empire recovered from the Arab invasions, and even reclaimed some territory. The overall decline of Byzantine power began later, with the devaluation of the nomisma, the gold coin that emperors had maintained for seven hundred years, and had not permitted to fall below 90% gold content. In 1048, the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, because of pressing military campaigns on all sides -- Pechenegs, Normans, Seljuk Turks -- raised money and paid for his campaigns by devaluing the gold nomisma. He undermined internal and foreign faith in Byzantine money, and signaling the weakness of the empire. Which of course encouraged the empire's enemies further. (Obviously, something to think about in modern times.)

• Byzantium was unjustly derided by Western classical historians as corrupt, weak, and morally cowardly in part because the derision provided justification for the West after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the fourth crusade. The West's view of the Constantinopolitan Greek emperors was contemptuous: the Greeks were willing to compromise and negotiate with Arabs, Turks, and other infidels; the Greeks were untrustworthy allies; the Greeks refused to follow the pope; the Byzantine court employed eunuchs; the Byzantines dressed like Asiatics; and the Byzantines spoke Greek instead of Latin. It all went into justifying the destruction and looting of the city, from which the Byzantines never fully recovered.
  

• The tenacious ability of Byzantium to survive, even fragmented, and flourish in times of crisis. After the 1204 loss of Constantinople, it wasn't until 1261 when Michael VIII Palaiologos regained the city and re-established Byzantine rule. Yet, even in that interim period, the empire continued, forming autonomous despotates in Asia Minor and the Greek mainland. They not only managed to carry on, but the artistic and scholarly achievements of this period were among the greatest in Byzantium's history.
  

Throughout, Judith Herrin's love of her subject and sympathetic, fair treatment of the heroes and villains makes this a wonderful book. I was sorry to finish it.

Two Beethoven Sonatas and a Trio -- yet, the music wasn't enough

At the Boston Chamber Music Society concert (all Beethoven) Saturday night at Longy, no one from the BCMS got up to introduce the concert, to talk about the other three August concerts, or to urge people to attend the coming season. The two performers of the first piece, the Cello Sonata in C major (Wilhelmina Smith, cello, and Pedja Murzijevic, piano), simply marched onto the stage from the side door. Their shoes boomed loudly through the hall for a few steps until the audience of mostly retired professors realized the concert was about to begin, and began clapping.

To me, that's no way to start a concert or a recital. I want somebody to say something.

The second piece was theViolin Sonata in C minor (with Steve Copes, violin), and the third was the Piano Trio in D major.

I usually like the heavy, not to say morbid, sound of the cello in sonatas and trios. But Wilhelmina's playing, while obviously accomplished, didn't seem to me to have enough emotional range. The level of intensity in the Cello Sonata was so unvarying that it sounded...boring. The violin sonata had a little more color and feeling. The trio was okay.

I felt disgruntled. We could have just played CDs at home. A concert or recital has to have some element, something, I'm not sure what, that makes the music seem important, that we're here for a purpose. I think just baldly presenting the music is not enough.

Marilyn thinks that sonatas and trios in general just don't have enough range and color to keep her interest. I don't think that's true for me, but in this case, there was something hollow to the experience. (Maybe it has something to do with this being the last year for the main cellist and artistic director of the BCMS, Ronald Thomas. At the end of last season, he had announced he's leaving at the end of this coming season.)

"The Genteel Companion" concert at Longy's Baroque Institute

The full title of the program was "The Genteel Companion," an evening of vocal and instrumental music and dance by the students and faculty of the International Baroque Institute at Longy. It was Saturday night, July 26, at the Longy School.

And it was pleasant and genteel. In the first half of the concert, a number of small ensembles played the music of Henry Purcell, Peter Phillips, Handel, and other composers we didn't recognize. We liked it, but found it a little too much andante. Maybe I was still tired from my insane hour and fifteen minutes of running in the 90 degree sun in the middle of the day.

Hey, the food during the intermission was terrific. Marilyn had a memorable piece of pound cake. The strawberries were some of the best I'd eaten all summer.

The second half was livelier, with dancing, faster pieces, and comedy. One dance number (by Jean-Baptiste Lully) brought two "French Country Gentlemen" onto the stage to cavort with two ladies. The two country gentlemen, it turned out, were themselves women wearing breeches, and Three Musketeers-style hats with feathers. At first I thought this was a statement of some kind, based on someone's dissertation: "Gender Transactional Role-reversal in a French Medieval Village", or something like that. But then it seemed more likely that they just didn't have any male dancers enrolled this year. They all looked great in their costumes, and they danced beautifully.

A hilarious bit from Thomas Arne's "The Judgment of Paris" had us laughing. A flock of sopranos attempt to get the attention of guy reading a newspaper in a cafe ("Turn toMe Thy Gentle Youth"). One soprano did some very funny things with a roll of toilet paper.

We liked it all. But there could have been half an hour less.

And we found a parking ticket on our car. The only parking tickets I have ever gotten in my life have been in Cambridge.

Wall-e, can you save us all?

There's a lot to like in this movie. How can you not like it? Wall-e, an adorable, lonely, trash-compacting robot finds eternal love with Eve, a cute, tough, and curvy robot who can fly and blast her way through several feet of concrete and steel (or whatever materials they'll be using seven hundred years from now). Their victorious love is eternal as long as they can keep recharging their batteries. The two of them save humanity. They have plaintive, child-like voices. You practically sob when Wall-e thinks he has forever lost Eve. I like all that!

It's obvious that this is the old story about humanity letting technology and monopolistic capitalism run amok until it all finally controls us. A few brave and plucky souls manage to break free and wreck the inhuman, infernal machinery. (Surely the scriptwriters had read E.M. Forster's startling 1909 short story, The Machine Stops -- here's a link to a Wikipedia article about it.)

The innovation proposed by this film is that it is two robots, not humans, who rebel against the machinery and reclaim their world -- and humanity. The two robots are similar to the Disney animals we loved as children, and similarly, adults will have to suspend their sense of credulity as to whether animals and robots can talk, feel, and love.

It is not a particularly deep or resonant film. Ty Burr's review in The Boston Globe strangely overpraises the film. The characters are pretty thin, the plot has numerous detailed illogical tangents and sidetracks that don't tell us much, and the whole thing looks like an updated version of 60s animated TV comedy, The Jetsons.

But hey...what about all those children in the audience? They don't know Forster or The Jetsons or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or any of that stuff. This is news to them. (Or rather, it's fun to them, hopefully.) That's true.

Yet, watching the careening colorful pixels on the screen ricocheting from one end of the screen to the other, Wall-e and Eve flying at warp speed from one part of the intergalactic spaceship to the other, I thought, "Do children even know what's going on here?" I couldn't make out what was happening half the time. I just knew something was happening and we were moving toward something. Can children catch the details here? Those early Disney films were slow and simple, the little creatures talked, sang, and explained their way through what was happening there in the forests. In this film, can anyone explain the storyline, why the auto machines take over, why the corporate despot/president appears in ancient videos and warns the captain not to return to earth even though it's part of the original program for humanity to return?

Or doesn't it matter?

A few observations about Greek women's shoe culture

In our recent trip to Greece, we visited our niece's new shoe store several times. An unchanging part of Greek life is the presence of at least one shoe store selling mostly women's shoes every block or two of every neighborhood. A lot of time and money is spent on shoes, especially women's shoes. Here are a few observations about Greek women shoe culture that may have some sociological benefit.

1. The most desired color of a shoe for a woman who is not in mourning is either shiny metallic gold or silver. A limited number of other non-metallic colors (red, bright lemon yellow, fluorescent green, depending on the year's fashions) can be considered acceptable.

2. The height of the shoe's heel for a woman not in mourning should be at least 3.0 inches (approximately 7 centimeters). The woman's height and age is not relevant to the height of the heel, nor is her occupation. This rule can be relaxed if the woman is in mourning, or is a grandmother.

3. The heel of a woman's shoe should be able to neatly pierce a watermelon.

4. The shoe should expose the majority of the woman's foot from the bottom of her ankle bone to the tip of her (usually bright red) toenail -- approximately 96% altogether of the foot should be uncovered.

5. It is always summer in a Greek shoe store.

6. The size of a woman's foot must never be measured or suggested by the shoe store owner. Instead, the woman is expected to announce her shoe size, which will be 2 or 3 sizes smaller than the actual size. The owner will shrug and bring out the requested shoes in sizes that are even smaller, suggesting out loud that the woman's foot is in reality smaller than she herself thinks. The woman will smile and gratefully try on the shoes, then angrily reject them as obviously too small and that the size she requested from the blockheaded store owner, as she well knew, was the correct size. She will buy the shoes in that relatively larger size. Which will still be too small.

7. Number 6 is true whether a woman walks ten meters each day or ten kilometers.

8. It is unwise for the shoe store owner to use the descriptive words "sensible" or "practical" in regards to any pair of shoes when speaking with a woman customer. The customer will be offended. The insinuation is that she suffers from a podiatric condition or disability requiring shoes that are ugly but practical.

Sandra Patrikalakis's Certificate Voice Recital

Our soprano friend Sandra Patrikalakis gave a wondeful recital last Sunday at the New England Conservatory. It was a wide range of songs, in five different languages! I especially liked Five Greek Folk Songs, by Maurice Ravel, not because of the Greek connection, but because Sandy sang as if French was her native language, and she seemed to have a special feeling for the songs.

She was very confident and comfortable on stage, very comfortable with what her voice can do. It was startling. Having heard her for so long in a choir, or as part of a larger chorus, it was startling to hear her voice by itself. It was as if we hadn't actually heard her before.

Sandy sings with the Masterworks Chorale and Cantilena, and is the president of the board at Masterworks.

The movie, "My Father My Lord" -- his name is Abraham

We liked this Israeli film about a Hasidic Rabbi and his son and wife very much (director David Volach). It's lovingly and slowly detailed.

Ty Burr's review in the Boston Globe was laudatory and sympathetic.

The elderly Rabbi Abraham (he seems to be at least in his 60s, with his wife Esther in her early 40s) is devoted to the Torah, his community, and his small family. He defines his life, his world, strictly through the Torah. His young obedient son Menachem gazes up at him while he prays and studies, and senses the instinctual conflicts in the boundaries and dictates of the Torah and his own feelings. You can feel the boy thinking: is it right to expel a mother dove from her nest, dooming the chicks, even though the Torah demands it? Is it right for the Rabbi to angrily demand Menachem tear up a picture of an African native, because the native is an idolater? Is it right that only those who follow the Torah are righteous, as the Rabbi thoughtfully proclaims?

Yet the Rabbi doesn't perform his role without agonizing. It pains him to carry out the demands of his life. He does it because he must. As if to give up on even one of the demands or laws would be the end of his whole construction.

So his name is Abraham: his devotion leads to the film's devastating ending. He can't be blamed for it, can he? Yes, he can be. He can't be responsible for what happens, can he, he who was wrapped up in prayer? He can be.

I would have liked a little less well-mannered reverence in the film, a little less constraint. The tensions between the Rabbi and his wife Esther could have been drawn out more. She's reverent and worshipful to the point of being saintly, yet you can sense her unhappiness and unease. In their bedroom scene, the Rabbi arrives and is apparently disappointed to find her having already said her prayers. She does not speak to him (I think she is not permitted to speak to him, having said her prayers, but she writes on paper to him). Perhaps he was hoping for sex with his wife, and is surprised to find her unyielding. "Are you mad at me, Esther?"

Several times, I was reminded of my last visit to Mount Athos -- the sense of claustrophobia. One day, I was standing in in Daphni, the administrative town on Athos, and looking up and down the streets. I felt a kind of panic. Not a girl or a woman anywhere. Only men. It was a sort of dread, and I felt that several moments watching this wonderful movie.

Brookline Chorus's "Sacred Concert" by Duke Ellington

On May 10, the chorus I sing with, The Brookline Chorus, sang Duke Ellington's Sacred Concert. Although I found myself struggling to rehearse the music, the concert was success for both the chorus and the audience (there were about 600 people in the First Baptist Church of Newton) -- and I felt great.

It was a struggle to rehearse partly because time was tight in the weeks leading up to the concert, because I had never actually heard the music (there are no CDs), and I because I was not especially fond of the music at first. Without hearing and sensing the music, it was difficult to fully express it until the final dress rehearsals. There, finally, we had the White Heat Swing orchestra, the soloists (Rochelle Ellis, the soprano, and Aaron Tolson, the tap dancer). Then it all made sense. Then I could move with it. And naturally, at the concert, Aaron Tolson stole the show. He generated a lot of excitement and pleasure when tapped and leaped in the center of the stage.

Cambridge Community Chorus's last concert by William Thomas

On May 25th, we attended the Cambridge Community Chorus's last concert at Sanders Hall, directed by William Thomas, who is retiring. There were two pieces, Haydn's Harmony Mass, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding. Our friend Kate was singing in the chorus as an alto. We really enjoyed the concert. I especially liked Haydn's Mass, and enjoyed hearing another chorus performing Haydn (last spring, the Brookline Chorus sang Haydn's Creation Mass).

Loved "She Loves Me," at the the Huntington

We loved it. How could you not? A sentimental story line with Shakespearean comedy overtones about lovers whose identities are hidden from each other, likable characters whose failings and weaknesses are forgivable, great choreography (especially in the bravura nightclub scenes), great acting and singing (Brooks Ashmanskas -- he's so frantic you think he's going to collapse on stage, and yet he always holds holds back just enough to be in confidently in control).

A big crowd on Saturday night, probably the biggest we've seen all year.

Do you have to like and love the characters -- even the characters who embody evil -- for it to be good theater? Is that what it takes to fill theaters?

There's not a lot of like and love in modern plays. Is it enough to simply recognize and empathize with the alienation, disorientation, and amoral vagueness we see in so many plays? It's certainly not enough to make you love the play, and want to see it again.

And of course, the playwright has to write a good play to begin with.

El Greco and Antonio Lopez Garcia's paintings at the MFA

I liked all of Lopez's work, and his cityscapes in particular (contemporary views of Madrid seen from the concrete rooftops of apartment buildings). The building colors, faded from the sun, give off a kind of granite pink pastel light. They're huge. The city, painted in almost realistic detail, takes up only the lower third. Above is the pale almost white sky, dusty and smoggy, mounted like a summery halo.

I thought, "almost realistic". Where was the graffiti? Where were the parked and moving cars clogging all the narrow streets and alley? His Madrid is serene, spiritual.

Earlier, we saw the "El Greco to Velasquez" exhibit. What a great idea, having the two exhibits of Spanish artists staged at the same time!

El Greco's people are pale and gaunt. More than pale, they're chalky and starving. As if everything they've got is put into their prayers and devotions. One exception in the exhibit, in the painting, "Saint Martin and the Beggar", Saint Martin, mounted on a powerful white horse, gives half his beautiful green robe, to a beggar. The beggar is a young man, nearly naked, clean shaven, oddly fresh out of the barber shop -- and he's darker skinned than anyone else in El Greco's paintings.

Jose Saramago's novel, "Blindness": would people really do that?

It's been two weeks since I finished Blindness, but life at work and in my chorus has been too busy to post, and I wanted to think about the book. I frequently think about it.

The very first sentence does what a first sentence should do -- grab you. People in cars at an intersection are waiting for a traffic light to turn green so they can go. They cannot. Something is holding them up. At the front of the line of cars, a man is desperately yelling inside his car. He has suddenly gone blind. And his blindness is contracted by all who come near him. The blindness spreads from person to person like an electric current.

It was hard to put down. The characters don't have names. They have identities -- the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the sunglasses, the first man (the first man who went blind). I felt I was reading about a real world of flesh and blood people suddenly caught in a kind of hell where they faced extinction.

An entire world gone blind is that -- extinction. There can be no food, no organization, no leaders no followers, no future. Everyone will die.

I kept asking myself: would people act this way? The government treats the blind with immediate and brutal internment. Confined, the blind try to organize themselves. But the thugs among them are better organized; they form a gang that controls food and water in the detention center. They have a gun. They demand that women -- fellow blind inmates -- succumb to gang rapes. That rings true. Saramago tells us that we will behave like animals once our organizing structures and resources are denied us, and many will act instinctually to seize food and power. All will act, to some degree, without regard for the pain they inflict on others.

This is not so far from the moral atmosphere Primo Levi described in his books about the Nazi labor and death camps.

Panayiotis Terzakis singing "My Black Swallow"

We heard Panayiotis Terzakis and Maria Georgakarakou on Saturday night, in their concert, "Graecia Magna: Byzantine Hymns, Laments and Historical Songs from Early Modern Greece".

It could have been sleep-inducing -- the repetition of the minor keys, the melancholy of the poetry and the sounds -- but it was not. We loved it. The dark Taxiarchae church was the right setting. His voice is a little bigger than it was last year. Hers gets better after she warms up. There's a harsh edge to it early on. I like the wild yelps and inflections she gives the folk songs.

One song, "Mavro mou khelithoni -- My black swallow" was a small miniature of the whole concert. Here are the last few lines (taken from the program), about a man who wants to write a letter home:

They forced me to marry here in Armenia,
To an Aemenian girl, the daughter of a witch.
She put a spell on the ships, and they do not sail.
She put a spell on the sea, and it does not swell.
She put a spell on the rivers, and they do not flow.
She put a spell on me, and I do not come home.

When character is everything -- Alice Munro's short stories in "Castle Rock"

I finished Alice Munro's book of short stories, "Castle Rock," and was moved by her respectful depiction of the people in her family tree and childhood. The stories of ancestors are of course fictionalized, and they move on to stories apparently from her childhood in rural Ontario.

The stories themselves are slight narratives. They're less important than the characters, their thoughts, their obsessions, their moments of in-character or out-of-character behavior. I got caught up in them and felt fondly of the people, even those who weren't likable. It's so old fashioned in some ways. She almost seems lazy, simply recording seemingly inconsequential events lived on a boat crossing the Atlantic, of a young girl on isolated roads, of a father in a barnyard. The events barely come together to make a story. But I feel as if I can still see their faces, and expressions, and gestures.

About the "Big Bang theory" of ending a play

A friend sent a link to an interesting op ed piece by Ed Siegel, the Boston Globe's former theater critic, about finishing a work of art powerfully. This is in regards to Conor McPherson's play, "Shining City." Siegel argues that a powerful ending sears the images of the work in our memories, and he feels the appearance of the "ghost" at the end of Shining City is such. I replied:

"I totally agree with Siegel -- a "big bang" ending can really shock and illuminate the story. In the last instant, we can get a profound understanding of what we've seen or heard, and what will happen from that moment on, after we leave the theater.

"But the audience has to "get it." In McPherson's ending seconds, what we get is confusion. Why are we seeing that macabre actress standing behind the door? The grieving older fellow in the play saw the ghost of his wife -- as he describes it, it looked like his wife, for all he knew, it actually was his wife, and that's what chilled and disturbed him. What was that bizarrely dressed actress at the end, behind the door? Did she look like the therapist's girlfriend? Not to me. If it was the ghost of the therapist's girlfriend, or a ghost of some other soul or demon appearing to him as an image of what he has to atone for...why would that be? Isn't shutting down his office and moving to be closer to the girlfriend and their daughter? The therapist says he doesn't believe in ghosts, and the play has almost nothing substantial to do with ghosts. Why introduce that image in the last instant?

"So I don't get it."

The Huntington's "Shining City": a short story made into a play

That a therapist would himself be in less-than-admirable moral or psychic shape is a truism. The play is based on that, and there's a parallel between the stories of Ian, the young ex-priest turned therapist, and his patient, John.

I thought it was fairly good theater. A bit static, since the heart of the play was really John's recitation of events off stage, troubling events that had happened earlier. There are one or two short stories basically being read aloud. And they would have been fine as literature. Here, they are dressed up as theater (with theater prices).

John the therapy patient (a middle aged fellow grieving the death of his wife from an accident, who believes his house is haunted with her ghost) recalls their life together and, in particular, his clumsy attempt to have an affair with an attractive woman he met at a party not long before his wife died. The affair was never consummated, as both people timidly, and wisely, shrunk back at the last moment.

There are plays that a group of actors with modest acting abilities would do well in, but this isn't one of them. Because so much of the play depends on the ability of a particular actor -- John -- to act and recite his story, without an excellent actor we would have a dreadful play. As it was, the four actors were very good, and we had scenes of good theater. (Well, at least I was able to understand about 70% of what the actors said, given their heavy Irish accents.)

There's a lot here that makes no sense at all -- Ian (the ex priest) brings a loutish "rent boy" to his apartment, Ian decides to move to be closer to his "fiance" (who is taking care of their daughter), and the appearance of a ghost in Ian's apartment in the last instant of the play (a silly and illogical attempt to strengthen the parallel to John's story). Our focus is painfully narrowed on the individual characters as they give their long monologues (like seeing a closeup on a movie screen for a long, long time).

Yet, I feel like I've seen decent Irish theater -- at least these are live flesh and blood characters, with live flesh and blood problems.

The Masterworks Chorale's "St. John's Passion"

I neglected to post last Sunday, after we saw the Chorale perform Bach's St. John's Passion. Many phrases sounded familiar to me, having just finished our own work on the two Bach cantatas. It seemed obvious that Steve Karidoyanes had gotten the Chorale to hit this Sunday just right. They gave off an energetic tension from the very first notes, as if this was genuinely important. The tone was lighter and tighter than we'd ever heard it.

Jason McStoots, the tenor, sang the role of the Evangelist. What a voice! It's high and sweet, with a pure consistent enunciation that never seems to lose its energy. Ulysses Thomas was the powerful baritone who sang Jesus's role. He has a beautiful rich voice. When he sang, "Mother, behold your son," my eyes nearly filled with tears.

The anti-semitic edge to St. John is there. (When the people are benignly referred to, they are simply, "the people." But when they want Christ's blood, they are "the Jews." As if somehow they were not all Jews, including Christ and his disciples.) He must have been a nut, or a propagandist. Sadly, what he did is preserved.

Brookline Chorus: Two Bach Cantatas and Benjamin Britten

Our Brookline Chorus concert on Saturday night surprised me with the size of the crowd -- who knew that around 250 people would come out on Saturday night to hear a community chorus sing Bach and Britten?

We performed the pieces (Bach Cantatas 149 and 19, and Britten's cantata, "The Company of Heaven") better than we had ever sung them before. Lisa Graham, our conductor, had moved us through the preceding rehearsals just right. She radiated energy. The soloists (Alexandra Lang, Ethan Bremner, Stephanie Kacoyanis, and Sepp Hammer) were each terrific. The basses rolled through the endless snaking sixteenth notes of the Bach more crisply than ever before.

And the Britten piece sounded almost shockingly modern, by contrast. And yet, its subject was angels and Satan, and St. Michael. As if to talk and sing of such things in the 20th century was somehow still possible. How can you not feel captivated by lines that refer to God with, "...He, Whom angels with veiled faces adore...."?

"Julius Caeser" at the A.R.T. -- tuning out the claptrap

We saw Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" at the American Repertory Theater this past Sunday. As usual, we had to fight hard to ignore the A.R.T.'s laughable and absurd directorial flourishes. I felt that the actors and the play managed to overcome the claptrap and show us a Brutus whose torment is the central issue in the first act -- does Brutus, a patriotic nobleman, act against Caesar when he threatens to become a despotic tyrant, even joining the plot to kill him, or does he acquiesce and become, in his terms, a well paid slave? The second act is about the bedfellows you make and the consequences after you've joined that plot and carried out the crime.

Of course, it would have helped if Shakespeare had shown us a Julius Caesar who actually seemed to be a tyrant, somebody willing to hack off a few heads or pluck a a couple of eyes out of his opponents before breakfast. Instead, we get an uncle-like figure who enjoys having his breakfast tea with his beautiful wife, calling for the day's augury from the local priestesses (Rome's version of the Times).

The lines were acted straightforwardly. Cassius is ravenous and terrific. A real schemer, with a genuine lean and hungry look. The actor who played Mark Antony, although not much in the way of a stage presence, did have the wonderful presence of mind to save the funeral oration scene -- Brutus walked off center stage before he was finished. He'd forgotten that he had more crucial lines. Mark Antony made two subtle whispering asides, the second loud enough for the audience to hear, and Brutus, startled, remembered the rest and bounded back into the rest of the oration.

The claptrap: black suits, hats, and sunglasses on the squad of conspirators -- yes, I got the insane grassy knoll allusion to the supposed CIA plotters who took part in the assassination of JFK -- which made them look like the Blues Brothers. Caesar rises up all bloody from the dead at the end of the first act and lets out a long primal (very primal) scream. I suppose that was to tip us off that his ghost was going to be around in the second act. The acrobatic stage entrances and exits by the lesser characters. The misplaced songs by the quite good jazz trio ("Suicide is dangerous"). The ensemble dance scene at the end of the play.

All of this only distracted from the drama. You can only feel embarassment for the actors.

From Moby Dick: "Oh, my Captain! My Captain!"

Moby Dick was sighted by another ship. They're racing after him, and in his wake. Starbuck, struggling with his own precepts to save his men and himself from disaster, and to remain loyal to Ahab, makes a final appeal to Ahab.

"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's --wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away! --this instant let me alter the course! "

For a moment, Ahab softens, and takes part in the dream; he talks of his young wife and small son.

But it's over in the next moment. Crazy Ahab reminds himself at the last instant that he's bound to his fate, and demands that the ship and its men be the instrument of its fulfillment. Starbuck is in despair.

The next day, they sight Moby Dick, and the three day hunt begins.

"Third" at the Huntington -- when characters are too nice

I keep expecting to dislike Wendy Wasserstein's plays: the characters are always appropriate and stereotypical emblems of their types -- the brassy domineering mother with a heart of gold, the self-assured publishing academic who still has an air of dittziness about her, the successful lawyer who knows all the lawyer jokes and tells them before anybody else can. Yet, I always enjoy her plays always laugh my way through them. They don't disappoint.

I enjoyed this play. Wonderful performances. Funny lines. Lovable characters...in fact, that's the hole in the play for me. Laurie Jameson, the professor, is such a likable woman, so composed and self-assured, so articulate, so dynamic, and full of warmth (she obviously loves her ailing friend, and puts up with her aging, difficult father) that when she accuses the supposedly right-wing student, Woodie, of plagiarism, and then doesn't relent -- what can we think other than that the playwright has not finished working on this play? We don't see the hot resentment in her that would make her do such a thing.

And Woodie. He is supposed to be a firebrand politically conservative right winger, a kind of lonely outcast in this rural liberal arts college in New Hampshire (or maybe it's Vermont). He is no such thing. He's nice. He is the boy next door. He practically idolizes professor Jameson and would gladly have an affair with her. And she likewise.

It doesn't make sense.