Grounded, a play written by George Brant, produced by the Nora Theater Company, starring Celeste Oliva.
We saw the new play "Grounded" last night, and neither of us liked it. I'm surprised at the generous reception it's gotten, including in this review by the Boston Globe's Don Aucoin. It's played in ten different theaters recently, around the country.
I was bored with it after the first few minutes. The main character, a female fighter pilot, has almost no depth to her character. She's a sort of male jock-pilot, in a woman's body. Her entire 83 minute monologue is delivered in a harsh, terse and unvarying voice. The predictable events, sketchy themes, and what little drama there is -- a female pilot is assigned to pilot drones flying in the Middle East looking for enemies to kill, from a base in Las Vegas -- seem straight out of the recent headlines and columns. There is no doubt good material here -- the moral drama of killing at a safe distance, with your own life kept in god-like security, is good stuff. But it's largely undeveloped. The pilot's language and expression stays close to cliche throughout. The slight uptick in interest at the end, when the pilot hallucinates the presence of her own young daughter onto the video screen, and thus refuses to pull the trigger to kill the "guilty" bad guy, is just not enough. It felt more like an artificial ploy to give the play a climax.
This struck me as more of a sketch for a play than a finished play. So why does it get so much attention and praise? The professorial-looking Cambridge audience gave it a brief standing ovation at the end. Was it the female character in a role overwhelmingly filled by men, a gratifying salute to liberal sensibilities? Was it the insertion of the little girl, the target bad guy's daughter, that humanizes and evokes sympathy for a man otherwise vilified as a terrorist?
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" -- is it really "bad writing"?
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translation Constance Garnett.
My first reaction as I read Crime and Punishment was that this must have blown the minds of Russian readers in the nineteenth century. Reading this novel is to live in the paranoid, obsessive mind of Raskolnikov. He barely has a grip on reality. I wondered how he had managed to get as far as he had as a student! That he carries out the brutal murder of two women (one who is an innocent that happens upon the scene of his murdering the first) is not surprising, and seems strangely logical. The murder scene is mesmerizing.
And although he believes himself above the law, that is, that the criminal law does not apply to him because he is an extraordinary person, he is aware enough to try to avoid and evade the law and the investigators as they pursue the murderer. He hides the stolen money. He prepares his words carefully to throw suspicion off him. It's an exhausting book -- I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it.
It's startlingly different from reading Tolstoy. With Tolstoy, the nuances of the dialogs and narration are always clear. Not so in Crime and Punishment -- people speak in loopy sentences and paragraphs often negating their own meaning within the same sentence. With Tolstoy, you come to understand and feel sympathy for almost everyone. But in Crime and Punishment, almost everyone remains an enigma. There are endless dialogs that I can hardly follow. There are tedious long sequences, sometimes semi-comic, such as the dinner scenes and the domestic dramas among the poor denizens of the neighborhood. I don't know what role Garnett's translation played. I believe I read that Nabokov had problems with Dostoyevsky, and preferred Tolstoy.
And yet, amid all the dead wood, the book comes to life and surges with power. You've got to know what Razumikhin has in mind to help Raskonikov, and why he's so loyal to him. You've got to know if Raskolnikov's sister Avdotya will fall in love with Razumikhin. You've got to know how Porfiry Petrovich will cunningly bring about Raskolnikov's confession. It deserves to be read. These people are so painfully real -- their rants, scuffles, smells, cowardice, paranoias, avarice, delusions -- all of it takes hold of you and you forgive Dostoyevsky for the "bad" writing.
My first reaction as I read Crime and Punishment was that this must have blown the minds of Russian readers in the nineteenth century. Reading this novel is to live in the paranoid, obsessive mind of Raskolnikov. He barely has a grip on reality. I wondered how he had managed to get as far as he had as a student! That he carries out the brutal murder of two women (one who is an innocent that happens upon the scene of his murdering the first) is not surprising, and seems strangely logical. The murder scene is mesmerizing.
And although he believes himself above the law, that is, that the criminal law does not apply to him because he is an extraordinary person, he is aware enough to try to avoid and evade the law and the investigators as they pursue the murderer. He hides the stolen money. He prepares his words carefully to throw suspicion off him. It's an exhausting book -- I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it.
It's startlingly different from reading Tolstoy. With Tolstoy, the nuances of the dialogs and narration are always clear. Not so in Crime and Punishment -- people speak in loopy sentences and paragraphs often negating their own meaning within the same sentence. With Tolstoy, you come to understand and feel sympathy for almost everyone. But in Crime and Punishment, almost everyone remains an enigma. There are endless dialogs that I can hardly follow. There are tedious long sequences, sometimes semi-comic, such as the dinner scenes and the domestic dramas among the poor denizens of the neighborhood. I don't know what role Garnett's translation played. I believe I read that Nabokov had problems with Dostoyevsky, and preferred Tolstoy.
And yet, amid all the dead wood, the book comes to life and surges with power. You've got to know what Razumikhin has in mind to help Raskonikov, and why he's so loyal to him. You've got to know if Raskolnikov's sister Avdotya will fall in love with Razumikhin. You've got to know how Porfiry Petrovich will cunningly bring about Raskolnikov's confession. It deserves to be read. These people are so painfully real -- their rants, scuffles, smells, cowardice, paranoias, avarice, delusions -- all of it takes hold of you and you forgive Dostoyevsky for the "bad" writing.
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