Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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.

Monday, September 22, 2008

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?