John M's Blog

Theater by Market Research: the Huntington Theater's "God of Carnage"

2012-01-23T22:20:00.000-05:00

God of Carnage, a play by Yasmina Reza, directed by Daniel Goldstein, at the Huntington Theater, Boston, January 21, 2012.

I had read good things about Yasmina Reza, and about this play. She is a serious playwright, and she's found success. A review by Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, from 2009, described the play as an interesting and subtle exploration of human motivations.

Two upper middle class married couples meet in a pricey-looking Manhattan apartment to analyze and negotiate the aftermath of a schoolyard fight between their sons. One boy knocked a couple of teeth out of the other. After apparently reaching a sort of contractual agreement, the parents begin stabbing at each other. Each parent takes a turn in ranting and exploding, for reasons that aren't clear. One couple rages against the other, then the men team up against the women, and vice versa.

The play seemed formulaic and tired to me -- put a group of people together, keep them together -- they can't escape -- and watch the meltdowns, the revelations of Real Human Nature. The initial premise is all right, but after half an hour, the tiresome gags and static comedy wore me down. I kept wondering why the visiting couple didn't simply leave. To write characters who choose to inexplicably suffer and torment each other is Reza's prerogative. But there's little insight or entertainment gained from watching this.

An exception to the stiff comedy was Brooks Ashmanskas, who plays Alan Raleigh, a conniving attorney for a large drug company. He expressed an easy, comic naturalness that made me like him in spite of what he was supposed to be.

A friend who attended the production with us suggested that the play owed a lot to television sitcoms, and I immediately thought that was right. The unprovoked attacks, sarcasm, slapstick, all looked to be taken from any Two and a Half Men or some other show. And there were laughs from the audience -- though to me it sounded like a nervous type of laughter, of people laughing because a sign just told them to laugh.

And like sitcoms, the play's formula seemed derived from some marketing research panel -- press the right emotional buttons, and you get 40% to laugh.

We Never Change -- about Season's Greetings at the Wellesley Summer Theater

2012-01-14T20:32:00.001-05:00

"Season's Greetings", a play by Alan Ayckbourn at the Wellesley Summer Theater.

This production really deserves to be seen. Ayckbourn is a British playwright, and although the play is set in England (it was written in 1980, but Wellesley has updated the play), most people here will immediately feel connected and familiar with the family members who make up the cast.

The story takes place over four days: Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day, and December 27. The adults and children of the extended family are all squashed together in Neville's house. The resentments, frustrations, and animosities reach a comic boiling point when one sister, Belinda, attempts to have a tryst under the Christmas tree with the young man invited for the holiday by Rachel, Belinda's sister. There are plenty of farcical jabs and funny bits in the Fawlty Towers tradition. The play tends to sag towards the end, as it runs out of ideas, but that's ok. In the end, it seems that each character remains in character, is no better than we thought they were in the beginning, despite having the chance to change, or to exceed expectations. It reminded me of Chekhov. As if the characters say, "We never change, we can't change, we did our best. That's life."

The cast is wonderful, with a veteran ensemble feel to their performances. Ashley Grimolini struck me as just right as Belinda, the somewhat officious wife who's willing to throw herself at Clive under the Christmas tree in the middle of the night (with the usual laughable consequences). She's all business, yet gives off enough sensual spark to make it possible. I could say good things about everybody else in the cast too, Christine Hamel as the plain Rachel, Derek Nelson as the always-defeated Bernard, and Ed Peed as the big-voiced lunatic uncle Harvey.

The set is great. I really liked the way the family occupied the open space of the house, so we could see all the action, while the actors looked around corners, giving us the sense that these were separate rooms.

This was the first time we'd gone to Wellesely Summer Theater, and we didn't expect a production this polished and professional (perhaps the name made us expect a more amateur, student production). This was really good, really funny theater as good as any regional theater we've seen. I really appreciate what the directors, Shelley Bolman and Nora Hussey have done.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- the passable movie from the terrific book

2011-12-26T22:05:00.001-05:00

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film directed by Tomas Alfredson, based on the 1974 novel by John le Carrie.

The new Tinker Tailor movie, based on the John Le Carrie novel, is absorbing and passably entertaining, especially if you've recently read the novel (as I did), or saw the brilliant seven-part PBS series twenty-five years ago (as we did). It's dense with murky circus interiors and damp gray street scenes. Gary Oldman as George Smiley is a little too prim and reserved for me. The guy barely registers a raised eyebrow through the whole film.

The plot is about Smiley's mission to uncover the mole in British Intelligence, the mole responsible for sending information to the Russians (this is the cold war, late 60s), and for drumming out Smiley himself and his boss, Control. It should be exciting. It almost is. With so little time -- just over two hours -- and a long list of characters, it's difficult for the movie to hook us into the emotional lives of the characters. The screenwriters do a good job of compression, but you can only do so much. Cinematically, I found the scenes of Smiley in his cheap hotel room too similar to the other interior scenes in their grayness -- we don't very much distinguish the emotional and physical environment of Smiley and his team from the other interiors.

If you haven't read the novel or seen the old series, you might be baffled by the whole thing. I'd like to hear from someone without those background experiences.

I'd also like to hear what current veterans of the British Intelligence services think of the movie. Were the internal competitive politics so ridiculous?

The book is terrific. So was the old PBS series with Alec Guiness. If you experience either of those after seeing the movie, you'll see what you're missing.

And Quiet Flows the Don -- the great book hardly anybody has read

2011-12-09T16:24:00.001-05:00

And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhael Sholokhov (originally published 1934, Vintage edition 1989)

Some forgotten college professor must have mentioned this novel to me once, and I've remembered the enigmatic title ever since. And I've read mentions about the book in other Russian books or books about Russia. Years have gone by. Finally, we saw a used Vintage softcover edition in the Bryn Mawr book store, in Cambridge, and I bought it. After thirty pages, I could hardly put it down. It's a great book.

A brief summary. The story follows a group of Don river Cossack villagers in the years 1910 to 1920. The books is divided into chapters titled, Peace, War, Revolution, and Civil War. Gregor, a young Cossack, is the central character, but the list of characters is long. In peace we see the Cossacks working their farms, engaging in village trysts and petty village conspiracies. In war, the army life and battle scenes are almost Tolstoyan in their expanse. In civil war, the political confusion is overwhelming -- which side to be on, the Reds or the Whites? At any moment, one's life depends on the answer. And does your answer change from moment to moment?

I was struck by the sense of reality Sholokhov conveys. Village life is mean, dirty, vulgar. Love and light are hard to find. The Cossacks are no less cruel to each other than they are to the Germans and Austrians they fight in the war. It's hard to find characters to like. Many times, when I'd close the book for the night, I thought, "This must be the way it was. And this must be the way it is".

Only in the characters Bunchuk and Anna do we meet characters we might like as people, sympathetic lovers with some sense of gentleness (though they're each ready to machinegun the enemies of the revolution). Yet, these two are also the most wooden characters in the book; they seem to stand for something other than themselves. When Anna expresses her hopes for Socialism, it's hard to know what to think:

"And won't life be beautiful under Socialism! No more war, no more poverty or oppression or national barriers--nothing! How human beings have sullied, have poisoned the world!...Tell me, wouldn't it be sweet to die for that?" p. 480

She is meant to sound sincere. Yet this is not quite a full human being talking any more.

Solzhenitsyn mentions Sholokhov, and the novel. Apparently, he and others have challenged the book's authorship. Several critics have said that before Quiet, Sholokhov had written nothing approaching this literary scope and value, and that he could not be the author. I don't know much about that argument. As a side note, I think Solzhenitsyn must have been inspired by Sholokhov (or whoever is the author) -- Solzhentisyn's war and battle scenes have an immediacy, style, and rhythm similar to Sholokhov.

How did Sholokhov survive as a writer, even to be honored by Stalin, given some of the novel's depictions of the Red Army? He shows the Red officers to be just as venal and cruel as their White enemies. We witness Red army atrocities. While other writers were imprisoned or murdered by Stalin for the smallest rebellions and infractions, how did Sholakhov succeed to become a Soviet literary hero?

The finest moment in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis

2011-11-09T17:18:00.000-05:00

(Thoughts from the Masterworks Chorale November 4th performance of Missa Solemnis, where I sing as a bass.)

For me, it came about two-thirds of the way through the Gloria, soon after the Miserere section. Along with the four soloists, we'd already sung a lot of music by that point, some of it at a very fast tempo. And a lot of it at high volume. Then it arrived. The tempo slowed down. The atmosphere suddenly changed. Most of the instruments in the large orchestra were quiet. But I heard the kettle drum pound. The chorus alone sang.

Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris, amen.

Together with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father, Amen.

There, in the middle of this driving symphony with a chorus and soloists, we suddenly had a stately march, a procession. As if we were at a coronation, being led by a patriarch or pope. It was beautiful.

---

It was a great experience. Our conductor was Steven Karidoyanes. The four soloists: Barbara Kilduff, soprano, Pamela Delall, mezzo-soprano, Charles Blandy, tenor, and Dana Whiteside, baritone. We had two reviews, one review in the Boston Globe, and one in The Boston Musical Intelligencer.

Some useful notes in "Moonwalking with Einstein"

2011-10-20T14:14:00.002-04:00

"Moonwalking with Einstein", by Joshua Foer, (Penguin, 2011)

Foer's account of how he got interested in the world of competitive memory contests, the personalities in that little world, and his journey to becoming the United States memory champion, is readable and has a few interesting insights.

Foer reviews the history of memory techniques (think Homer) and describes the essential importance of these techniques to being an educated person in the past, particularly in the time before mass printing technology. He also includes some topics in current medical research on the workings of our brains, particularly in how we learn. That actions or behaviors that we learned long ago and now take for granted -- such as typing -- can be improved only by intense effort and detailed measurement of progress is not a new insight, but Foer makes some interesting connections to memory. The memory techniques he describes, including the Major system, can be practiced by anyone. In fact, I managed to remember and use a credit card number two weeks after I learned it with the system.

The chilly "Degas and the Nude" exhibit at the MFA

2011-10-18T16:13:00.001-04:00

We visited the "Degas and the Nude" exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. It's worth reading Sebastian Smee's review in the Boston Globe for the history and background of Degas' work. I never warmed up to Degas, but this sounded like such a big deal, we decided to go.

His young girl ballerinas that are popularly known always struck me as cold, as if the girl subjects were lab specimens. I found the same to be true of all those nudes at the exhibit -- I simply couldn't connect with them. The most interesting paintings were his bordello scenes, probably because of their documentary aspect. What a cruel life.

The young Occupy Boston crowd on the Boston Common

2011-10-12T16:23:00.001-04:00

We visited the Boston Common on Monday afternoon, to see the Occupy Boston gathering there. It looked to me as if most of the people there were college-aged, though there certainly were older people, as well some parents with children.

It did not look like many blue collar workers or suburban types were attending. Unless they were like us, and just there to watch. A drummer with a full drum set pounded out a pretty good rhythm for a few people with bullhorns to lead chants. Some of the old chants from the 60s and 70s were revived: "The people, united, will never be divided". Somebody carried a sign that read "Jewish Labor Committee". "End the Fed" was another one. Lots of anti-corporate slogans and chants. Lots of left-wing rhetoric.

No doubt, there are different groups trying to push this movement, and use it for their messages. I can't make out what Occupy Boston and the other branches of the movement are about. Mad at the banks? Mad at corporate executives making millions while laying off 40K a year employees? Mad at high tuition costs? It's all there. And almost everybody can get mad at these things. Maybe that's all there is here -- a place to vent.

Some people regard this as the left version of the Tea Party movement. I don't see that yet. The Tea Party could summarize their messages -- less federal government, less taxes. They targeted politicians to promote and to defeat. That's not true here with the Occupy movement -- at least not yet. How will they affect any change? Won't the whole thing just peter out, once the weather gets colder?

Candide, at the Huntington Thater

2011-10-01T21:14:00.001-04:00

We saw the Saturday night, September 24 performance.Some great songs. Has to be, with Bernstein doing the music. The actress who plays Cunegonde, Lauren Molina, has a great voice. There's something purposely uneasy and uncomfortable about the play.After young Candide is expelled from the Baron's castle for loving the Baron's daughter Cunegonde, near the start of the play, he is thrown into a kind of chaotic hell. Unprotected and idealistic, he is press-ganged into the Bulgarian army, is often beaten and threatened with death, and ends up killing a villainous prelate. His youthful idealism and optimism is slowly beaten out of him, though he is stubborn.Something that bothered me about this production (directed by Mary Zimmerman) is that so much of it is farce. Most of the violence is played for comic effect. Was that in the original playbook, or is this the director's interpretation? If the violence, greed, and human malevolence Candide confronts are bits of comedy shtick, then I find it hard to take serously his disillusionment and pain. The actor Geoff Packard has very pleasant tenor voice, but when he despairingly sings, "My world is dust now, and all I loved is dead....", his voice contrasts jarringly with the jokey scenes we've just watched. The play is sort of an academic's delight. Music, romance, death, philosophizing: this is a serious play, not a trivial entertainment. A test will follow.

An actor's apology for Stalin

2011-09-19T16:41:00.001-04:00

My Russia, by Peter Ustinov (Little, Brown, 1983). Beautifully designed in a larger format, with many prints, illustrations, and photographs.

Not sure I should spend the time on this. Ordinarily, I would not buy such an odd book, or post about it. Ustinov was an actor, not a historian, and he did not grow up in Russia. He has no professional expertise as a historian or historical analyst. But we had seen him in a few movies that we enjoyed, so I bought it at Bryn Mawr Vasser used book store. The book is a breezy history of Russia, with a concentration on the cold war period. It's Ustinov's idiosyncratic take on Russian history.

What is perhaps worthwhile is that he represents Russians as I think many of them would like to be represented. He emphasizes that this is a country and a people that has forever had to defend itself against foreign threats -- the Mongols, the Swedes, the Germans, the Poles, Napolean, the Turks, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans again, and finally the United States and NATO. A country with a border that big naturally has a lot of neighbors, many of them with aggressive designs. That long, difficult and distant border shaped the behavior of the czars and of the Politburo.

He interprets many of the Soviet Union's actions in WW II and the cold war as reasonable behavior in light of Russian history. He doesn't get very specific. But this leads him to make some odd rationalizations, even suggesting that Stalin's pact with Hitler at the start of World War II was simply a way to buy time and prepare for when the German armies would invade the Soviet Union itself. There is nothing in the book about the Gulag Archipelago, although he wrote the book long after Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ustinov writes about Stalin's crimes involving "thousands" as opposed to the millions of dead. There's almost nothing about the domination of Eastern Europe following the war, or the oppressive clampdown on its own population for most of the twentieth century until the Soviet Union's demise. Ustinov comes across as a remote, sympathetic apologist for the old regime.

Wish we had not paid for Rent

2011-09-16T22:03:00.000-04:00

Rent, at the New Repertory Theater in WatertownThis was painful to sit through. It was hard to understand the screamed lyrics, and most of what I could hear was pretty thin. I don't know La Boheme to understand the reference to it, but it struck me as odd to call the characters poor. They were slumming, which is much different from being poor. I can't summarize the story because I'm not sure what it was. The program book indicates that much of the romance around this show involves the untimely death of Jonathan Larson, the show's creator, from an aneurysm just before it opened in 1996.There were a few decent songs, powerfully sung, Roger's One Song Glory, Seasons of Love, I'll Cover You. But I found a lot of this musical obnoxious. And I hate seeing naked people on stage.

Travels with Ian Frazier in Siberia

2011-07-06T20:19:00.000-04:00

Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Frazier's account of several trips he made through Russian Siberia, from the 90s to 2005. He confesses that he is "infected with a love of Russia". The main narrative of the book is about an interesting six week road trip in a Renault van with two Russian guides, Sergei, the chief guide, and Volodya. There's a fair amount of humor as Frazier deals with Siberian roads, restrooms, mosquitos, beautiful Russian women in stiletto heels, and trash. Frazier himself is a somewhat nervous type who at first seems an unlikely candidate to rough it for three thousand miles in a small van, and his hopeless confrontations with the increasingly irritated and bossy Sergei give us some moments of real hilarity. Driving through the endless taiga forest day after day can drive even the most amiable companions a little crazy.

Along the way, Frazier meets businessmen, academics, local historians. They're impressive, energetic people. The academicians seem well informed and current. But aside from them, I was struck by the ramshackle nature of most peoples' lives and the haphazard way things worked. Decaying cities and towns, horrible roads that sometimes ended and then resumed, a bureaucracy that depended on bribes. He noted some isolated improvement on his return trips after Russian oil money had been spread around.

A big part of the pleasure of reading this book is the Russian and Siberian history he introduces. From Ghengis Khan to the Decembrist revolutionaries to Stalin's Gulag, Frazier demonstrates that Russian history is for him a consuming passion. Surprising for what is basically a book of amiable travel writing: there are twenty five pages of notes and a seven page bibliography!

The book has a serious vein running through it. Frazier is interested in the past of a place, particularly an unhappy, tragic past, and how that past is treated in the present. Siberia has been a place of exile, suffering, and mass death. Not surprisingly, Frazier finds Russians more comfortable talking about the two hundred year old Decembrist revolution as opposed to the sixty year old Gulag work camps (which are now hard to find empty hulks).

Although I haven't been to Russia, I hope to go someday. Having read and loved Solzhenitsyin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, I can understand his Russia love.

Richard III at the Huntington -- a pleasingly unrepentent psychopath all the way to the end

2011-06-06T22:22:00.000-04:00

There was a lot I didn't like in the Propeller Company's performance of Richard III yesterday at the Huntington Theater. But there was so much I liked that I think the play was the best theater we saw at the Huntington all season. Richard Clothier is so unpredictable as Richard, snapping from straight soliloquies to slapstick humor, that he upsets our ability to understand him. He's scary.

The play seems to be set in a Victorian-era asylum, with white-masked characters resembling orderlies moving people and props quickly around the stage (those orderlies also sang Elizabethan tunes beautifully).

The direction chose to depend on speed, sacrificing the audience's ability to follow some nuances, and I liked that. One noisy murder after another pretty much tells us what's going on, and the workings of evil mind that's behind all the blood and pain is there to see.

It's an all male cast. This didn't work for me, or Marilyn, or our friends. The men who played the female characters were not made up as women, other than the dresses they wore. The effect was bizarre, and made me notice the incongruity.

The odd touches of slapstick obscured some scenes. I know that Shakespeare sprinkles comedy throughout, but this was over the top at times. The two murderers who kill poor Clarence in his cell are buffoons, okay, but as I remember them, at least one has genuine pangs of conscience. But that's lost in their Abbot and Costello routine.

What's a chainsaw doing in Victorian England? There's no good explanation for that. Never mind that Shakespeare inserted malapropisms in his plays.

Why did Tyrrell's soliloquy get axed? I was disappointed. Unlike the two clowns who kill Clarence, Tyrell is a fully thinking adult criminal. We lost out on his remorse and horror.

Yet, the energy of this production overcomes its flaws. It's worth seeing.

A reply to Jeff Jacoby's column -- can Hitler be explained?

2011-05-02T21:10:00.001-04:00

Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, writes the following in his May 1, 2011 column, A demon gone, but evil remains:

"The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The 'Final Solution' was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths."

I don't disagree, but that explanation is not enough -- it leaves Hitler's motives as mysterious and circular: he hated the Jewish people because, well, he hated the Jewish people. The scope of Hitler's and the Nazis' evil is hard to comprehend, and I know there is ultimately no conclusive explanation for it. (How can you fully explain why the gas chambers kept working even as the liberating Russian and American armies approached within sight?)

Yet, the historian Richard J. Evans, in his Third Reich trilogy, devotes many pages to showing why Hitler and the Nazis behaved as they did.There are two arguments that I think clarify Jacoby's thoughts.

One is that Hitler, like many Germans of that era, believed that Jews were indeed animated by an unswerving drive to dominate and destroy the German people. Evans shows that many Germans believed the "stab-in-the-back" conspiracy stories of Germany's Jews colluding to rob the German armies of their deserved victory in World War I, instead leading to their devastating defeat and years of chaos. Hitler saw the mass murders of Stalin and the communist Russian state as the work of the Jewish people. Totalitarianism and Jewish life were one and the same to him, and Nazi propaganda frequently referred to Russians as simply pawns of Jewish interests. Hitler mission, as he saw it, was to defend Germany from this menace, to destroy it before it destroyed Germany.

These were insane delusions, but delusions Hitler and millions of Germans believed.

Secondly, Nazi Germany's rise to power and conduct of the war was under-financed from the start, and depended on the takeover of resources, labor, and money of the conquered or massacred populations. Robbing and confiscating the businesses and money of Germany's and Europe's Jews was part of a wider policy. The German armies consumed all the resources of the Jews they captured, going so far as to retrieve the gold fillings of their victims' teeth, or melting down family silverware.

So I think it's not enough, as Jacoby implies, to say that Hitler acted out of a demonic antisemitism. It's more convincing to me to say that he acted on a paranoic delusion that Jews were actively working to destroy what he saw as the Aryan race. Jacoby's column comes close to mystifying and obscuring the tangible goals and motives that the Nazis had set out for themselves. And I think that should be corrected.

Insights into the lives of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich

2011-02-26T20:32:00.000-05:00

On Richard Evans's great and very readable three volume history: the Coming of the Third Reich, the Third Reich in Power, and the Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2003 to 2008.

I'm now at the start of the Third Reich at War.

Sprinkled throughout these three books are depictions of the lives of ordinary Germans, often as excerpts from their journals and diaries. They're wonderfully revealing, and offer some relief from the detailed, ominous, and terrible public events. I particularly appreciate when Evans follows the same person over a span of years.

Here is an excerpt from the first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich, from Victor Klemperer's journal. Klemperer is a professor of French literature, and a veteran of the first World War. He was Jewish, but his wife was not (a situation that placed him in a somewhat less abused category with Nazi bureaucrats). He writes here about the financial chaos of Germany in 1920:

Germany is collapsing in an eerie, step-by-step manner...the dollar stands at over 800 million, it stands every day at 300 million more than the previous day. All that's not just what you read in the paper, but has an immediate impact on one's own life. How long will we still have something to eat? Where will we next have to tighten our belts?

We hear more from Klemperer and others throughout. In the second volume, The Third Reich in Power, the Klemperers feel the strain of Nazi rule and its steady invasion of their lives.Evans summarizes:

Living outside town, the Klemperers escape the violence of 9-10 November 1938 [Kristallnacht], but on 11 November two policemen subjected their house to a through search (allegedly for hidden weapons): Klemperer's wartime saber was discovered in the attic and he was taken into custody. Although he was treated courteously and released after a few hours without being charged, it was nevertheless a considerable shock.

Not all these excerpts are from the victims of the Nazis. We also read from the letters of Germans who supported and loved Hitler, or at least held ambiguous feelings about him and did not oppose him. Here are some lines from The Third Reich in Power, discussing a Hamburg schoolteacher, Louise Solmitz catching her first sight of Hitler.

"I shall never forget the moment when he drove past us in his brown uniform, performing the Hitler salute in his own personal way...the enthusiasm of the crowd blazed up to the heavens..." She went home, trying to digest the 'great moments I had just lived through".

And later in the same volume.

Yet even she found the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops carried out on 1 April 1933 a cause for concern, "a bitter April Fool's joke". "Our entire soul," she complained, "was oriented towards the rise of Germany, not towards this." Nevertheless, she reflected, at least the Eastern European Jews were no longer in evidence ("the underworld creatures from East Galicia really do seem to have disappeared for the moment").

The quotes and excerpts express turmoil and anxiety, a constant sense of insecurity.

I've enjoyed reading these books. One thing I might wish for is more of a journalistic perspective from the outside world. Because Evans's focus is the workings of Hitler and the Nazis as seen within Germany, we don't see a wider perspective very often. There are only occasional hints at what foreign newspapers and leaders are saying about the events in Germany. I would have liked more of that. After all, the entire world was consumed with the war started by Hitler. But it's a small criticism.

Hysteria, at the Nora Theater -- high comedy, darkness, and the Three Stooges

2011-02-02T21:11:00.001-05:00

Hysteria, a play by Terry Johnson, performed by the Nora Theater Company, January 30, 2011. Directed by Daniel Gidron. An excellent, restrained performance by Richard Snee, as Sigmund Freud. And there's an intense, hot performance by Stacy Fisher, as Jessica.

This is a comic takeoff on what might have happened when Sigmund Freud met Salvador Dali, in 1938, at Freud's London home (he had just escaped Austria, following the Nazi takeover). There are many funny moments, as when Freud talks about Jung as "that lunatic", and tries to get the intrusive Jessica out of his study. There's good chemistry between the two, like an elderly grandfather sparring with his agile, brilliant granddaughter.

Jessica has darker motives for being there than we understand, at first. She wants a kind of revenge, she wants Freud to recant. She doesn't exactly blame him for the sad death of her mother (one of his patients years ago), but she wants him to confess he was wrong about his theories, that what Jessica's mother suffered from was real, not just a result of her hysterical imagination, that she was, in fact, raped by her father. This would be pretty hard to bear without the comedy, but the comedy veers uneasily into slapstick. The character of Salvador Dali was a bit too bufoonish for me, reminding me of Manuel in John Cleese's old Fawlty Towers series. In fact, there seemed to be a lot of John Cleese in this comedy, which isn't a bad thing.

Despite the embarrassing moments (we had to endure a completely naked young actress on the stage, for reasons none of us could make out except that, well, it was Freud up there on stage), we came away having enjoyed the play. I'm going to have to finally read Civilization and its Discontents.

"Ruined" at the Huntington -- a hard play, worth seeing

2011-01-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

Ruined, a play by Lynn Nottage, at the Huntington Theater. Directed by Liesl Tommy. We attended Saturday night, January 22, 2011.

What I liked about this play is that it took us places we don't think about or read about very often. We learn from the program notes that the Congo has undergone a civil war in which over 5 million people have died, and more than 200,000 women and girls have been raped. Many of our electronic devices depend on a rare earth mineral mined there, and the money from which helps to fuel the conflict.

It's hard to watch this play. It takes place in a brothel and bar near the mines, with rival soldiers roughing up the place and the women on different nights. What the women characters endure is what the play is about, their fear, their exploitation by the brothel mistress, Mama Nadi, and their savage handling by the men. Nottage demonstrates that attacking women, raping them, is a an act of revenge by all sides in the amorphous, chaotic war. That they continue to live, to talk about their suffering, and thus intimidate the enemy, makes it all the better for the attackers. Most of the violence happens off-stage, yet Nottage and the director, Liesl Tommy, find a way to express the brutality through frenzied dance. The soldiers and miners dance pantomimes of rape.

The story is mainly about the girls' attempt to survive and perhaps escape the brothel one day. We come to see Mama Nadi as a sympathetic mother figure. She is about survival, her own, and ultimately her girls.There are powerful moments as she maneuvers around the different sadistic commanders who spill through the bar. She generally outsmarts them. I wished she hadn't become such a saint by the end of the play. I did like Tonye Patano's portrayal of Mama Nadi, and Oberon Adjepong's Christian, the soulful trader who ultimately offers to love and save Mama Nadi. The dancing, though abhorrent in its objective, was well done in making clear that objective.

The movie True Grit reminds me of the old song, "Gimme that old time religion"

2011-01-03T21:27:00.009-05:00

True Grit, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen. Jeff Bridges as Reuben Cogburn, Mat Damon as Ranger LaBoeuf, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross. Set some time in the 1880s. Based on the novel True Grit, by Charles Portis.

Fourteen year old Mattie hires Marshal "Rooster" Cogburn to track down and capture the murderer of her father. They're joined by Ranger LaBoeuf. There's a lot of action, and a lot of dead bodies by the end of the movie, almost all of them outlaws. I didn't see the first True Grit, with John Wayne and Kim Darby.p

I liked it. In some ways, it's an old-fashioned Western, with the action, the search for justice, and the clear story line. But the film makers seem conscious of a responsibility as myth-makers, as if they believe the material is sacred. There's a reverential feel to the movie (though, revering what, I'm not sure). A line from the Old Testament begins the film, I think it was, "The wicked flee even when not pursued". Everyone speaks in a formal diction akin to some translations of the Bible. The score has a gospel sound throughout.

And Mattie has the authority and wisdom of an Old Testament queen. The men can't figure her out, but they obey her, and seem to fight for her attention (she's the only young woman in the film). She executes justice on the man who murdered her father, taking justice in her own hands. She pays for it.

Jeff Bridges's voice is worth the price of the ticket. It's true, the rumbling, boozy, nicotine-choked voice is a cliche of the seen-it-all, done-it-all bluesy hard guy, but I enjoyed it.

I loved the scene, early in the film, when Mattie refuses to be left behind by the two men, left behind because she's just a child. She plunges into the muddy river (more Biblical imagery), gripping the reins of her horse, yelling him on, her head just above the water, to reach the two men on the other side. The horse strains wildly, snorting, pulling Mattie. The black horse's head and the girl's head charge through the current until they splash onto the shore.

Can a fourteen year old girl be so courageous, so savvy, so steely, so world-wise? I haven't met one. But this is Hollywood myth-making, and I was mostly willing to go along with the myth. There are false notes. Apparently, the original novel was set in Oklahoma. The movie was shot in New Mexico, with grand mountain views. You have to believe that all the outlaws with guns can't shoot straight, which is a good thing for the good guys.

As I watched, and the body count surged, I couldn't stop thinking that this was also hokum. All some concoction meant to satisfy modern audiences and our sensibilities. Yet, I'm grateful to the Coen brothers. They gave us a movie that we can talk about for a long time.

Especially enjoyed Navidad Nuestra, by Ariel Ramirez, at the recent Cambridge Community Chorus Concert

2010-12-18T20:50:00.002-05:00

Cambridge Community Chorus concert, Sunday, December 12, 2010, at Kresge Auditorium. Jamie Kirsch, Music Director.

It was a good concert. (And a packed auditorium, on a rainy afternoon! Probably at least 500-600 people.) I especially liked the lively Navidad Nuestra, by the Argentine composer Ariel Ramirez. I loved the combination of the South American folk melodies, guitars, and the real immediacy of the Nativity text. Ramirez's lyrics moved me in their earnestness and simplicity. Here is two lines from the second movement, The Pilgrimage:

On the road, on the road,
suns and moons,
almond eyes,
olive skin.

Oh, little burro of the plains,
Oh, ruddy ox.
My child is coming,
make room for him!

Mary comes alive as a young flesh and blood woman. Usually, she is depicted as a divine being, without human form. Ramirez's lyricist was Felix Luna. What a wonderful text.

The Chorus did a nice job, making it a lively afternoon.

Huntington Theater's Vengeance is the Lord's -- family members that can never escape

2010-12-04T22:07:00.005-05:00

Vengeance is the Lord's, a play by Bob Glaudini, at the Huntington Theater, November 27, 2010. Directed by Peter Dubois.

A type of family drama. Instead of the usual diner or candy shop, the family business is small-time crime. They're not above murder. The family is ruled by the patriarch and matriarch, Mathew and Margaret Horvath. Good performances all around.

A good play. Despite the profanity, dog-eat-dog morality, and glimpses of loathsome personalities, Glaudini got me to believe that these people were, in fact, a real family. They treated each other as family members, even when they were swearing at each other and Woody was twisting his younger brother Donald's arm, or the mother was beating Donald with her cane. Something kept them all together, observing family holidays, hierarchies, and traditions. The affection went along with the beatings.

In fact, they were better at being a family than most families I've known. And that seemed a bit hard to believe. It's touching to see Woody (played with a measured, restrained menace by Lee Tergesen) helping his mother up the stairs. Yet, what is it in this mother that makes her worth helping up the stairs? Why would a Woody stay in this house? He seems to be trapped, like everyone is this family.

A Film Unfinished, an admirable film by Yael Hersonski

2010-10-15T22:55:00.004-04:00

A Film Unfinished, documentary film by Yael Hersonski. We saw the film Saturday night, October 9, at the West Newton Cinema.

I admired Hersonski's work in this film. She managed to identify a historical series of events -- how German soldiers staged and filmed scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto of starving and dying Jews being ignored by more prosperous-looking Jews as a way of further vilifying Jews -- and we believe in her reconstruction of those events, using the Germans' own film footage, and the testimony of Willy Wist, the only cameraman ever connected with the project.

I think the agonizing scenes of the Ghetto are worth preserving and seeing. Starving, dying people, Jews forced to drag and bury the dead, and the very subject of the film itself, the making of Nazi propaganda and the manipulation of victims in their own humiliation, are not easy to see. It's fortunate that Hersonski is a good filmmaker and artist.

One of the survivors interviewed in the film remarked about how crowded Ghetto life was, and I was interested in this. Strangers, whole families, were forced closer and closer together, into smaller and smaller apartments. There were numerous similar revealing details.

A few points left me a little confused. I was not always sure whose narrative I was watching, and would have liked a little more help from the filmmaker. In a sequence of scenes, were we seeing the work of a Nazi editor, or of Hersonski? This is an important point, given that the film centers around the Nazis' manipulation and forced staging of scenes. Sometimes the film narrator helped us with the context, but I would have liked more.

There were a number of references by the film narrator to the German effort as amounting to a theatrical-cinematic level project, not unlike a Hollywood project. That would involve large film crews, sound engineers, lighting specialists, squads of laborers. But we don't really see evidence of that. Willy Wist, the cameraman, refers to himself and three "reporters" assigned to the project. They were definitely creating propaganda, but a handful of reporter-cameramen doesn't make this a large-scale theatrical project as claimed by the documentary. Was something left out, or did I not catch something?

And there was Wist himself. Was that him interviewed on camera, in a Nurembergs style setting? Was that an actor? I don't recall a clarification in the film on that point, or if there was, I missed it.

But none of this detracts from Hersonski's achievement in constructing a subtle film narrative that we believe. Her film deserves to be seen by all types of audiences, particularly in a time when we are saturated with imagery and video, much of it staged, edited, and manipulated, yet presented to us as a supposedly truthful record of events.

The Huntington Theater's production of William Inge's "Bus Stop" -- are we laughing at our poor country relatives?

2010-10-07T21:32:00.006-04:00

We saw Bus Stop, by William Inge, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, October 3. The play was directed by Nicholas Martin.

There is a scene in the play in which the lecherous professor Lyman and the young waitress Elma act out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Elma recites the lines badly -- the scene could be very sad or very funny. The director Nicholas Martin had the actors play it funny -- Elma is depicted as so naive and earnest in her over-acting, so inexperienced on how to deliver lines of a play, so awful, that she is very funny. I laughed, as did almost everybody else in the theater.

But there is a meanness to our laughter, isn't there? The actress didn't have to mouth the lines so awkwardly. Martin makes her a clown. It made me feel a little guilty to laugh. And angry at the director.

I know, all humor supposedly has some element of cruelty in it. But laughing at Elma's ignorance, and all the small town, country characters on stage, seemed like a way to make us urban theater goers feel good -- we're better, smarter than they are. We're relieved to realize the ridiculous condition in which other people live their lives.

It's a sad play. The main story is predictable -- you know that Bo is going to soften, that Cherie is going to marry him in the end. What you don't know is that Bo and Cherie's happy ending (or happy beginning) comes with a sense of loss.

Catch-22's subversive attack on authority

2010-07-25T10:34:00.014-04:00

As much as I liked listening to Catch-22 on an audio book, there was something significant about the book that bothered me.

In the book, anybody with authority was depicted as a self-aggrandizing buffoon. The officers who commanded the lives of the men in Yossarian's group were stupid, self-serving incompetents. They enforced their control over the men with the Army's rules and punishments. Their real mission was their own advancement. They were impossibly (and hilariously) greedy, egotistical, and ambitious.

But eventually the officers became more than just funny caricatures. They were evil. They blithely sent their men to their deaths. They threatened and persecuted the kind-hearted ineffectual chaplain. They ignored the crimes of a murderer and rapist, but arrested Yossarian for going AWOL and becoming a malcontent.

Heller seemed to say that authority itself was evil, at least, all authority in the fictional world of the novel. At some point, the endless satire became too much for me. I didn't like the book's relentless attack on all authority.

Catch-22 is still fresh thirty years after my first reading

2010-07-08T21:46:00.009-04:00

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1961)

I last read this novel about thirty years ago and recently listened to it again, this time on CDs while driving to work. Heller made me laugh over and over again. The main "catch" of course, is that Yossarian, the main character, (a World War II bombardier with lots of missions) wants to be declared insane so that he can be sent home from the war, but anyone who would want to be sent home from flying dangerous missions in which people are trying to kill him obviously cannot be insane, so he must keep flying missions.

The repetitiveness of the book surprised me. Some of the gags, such as those involving Milo Minderbinder's schemes, are repeated over and over until they lose their ability to make you laugh. Some of it got tiresome.

The book is not so much a plotted narrative as it is a series of scenes that magnify and detail the characters trapped in the war: Yossarian and his increasingly desperate attempts to get out; Major Major's forlorn humiliation as he struggles to avoid any decision-making or conflict; the sensitive chaplain Tappman's futile attempts to make his beliefs and moral arguments meaningful; the surprisingly courageous hypochondriac, Doc Daneeka; the screamingly funny and incompetent commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart. They all attempt to either escape the war, change the circumstances of it (with no luck), or exploit it.

Or rather, it is not the war, but the army. I have read about Catch-22 described as being anti-war. It of course depicts the terrifying absurdity of the war. There is a lot of pain and grief. A number of the characters that we come to laugh at and like, die. But mostly it is an anti-organization book. The organization -- the system -- is what makes possible and encourages the absurd behaviors. It is the army that promotes and protects the incompetent Colonel Cathcarts and Scheisskopfs of the world with their crazy drive for promotion masked by raving patriotism. It is the army that enforces their orders and behavior, no matter how petty and insane. It is the army that makes possible Milo's impossible capitalist schemes to make money on the black market in the middle of huge suffering. It is other officers that interpret and give absurd orders, usually for their self-protection, or reward. While it is people and characters who act out the story, you feel that it is truly the army itself that is Yossarian's tormenter.

The Huntington Theater's "Prelude to a Kiss" is a modern fairy tale that needs a re-think

2010-05-30T20:53:00.006-04:00

Last night, we saw Craig Lucas's play, "Prelude to a Kiss" at the Huntington Theater. The story depends on the audience suspending belief and accepting a supernatural event -- the exchange of one soul with another, in this case the soul of a young bride with that of an old man in declining health, thanks to a kiss.

I think the playwright has created two likable characters in Rita, the bride (played by Cassie Beck, who has a wonderful nasal voice that makes every syllable reach the balcony, and a hefty real body to match), and Peter, the young man (played with breezy authority by Brian Sgambati). The performances are strong. They meet, fall in love, and seem happy.

I like what seems to be the main idea here -- that once you marry (that is, once your relationship is formally bonded), there comes a point where you say to your spouse, "Hey, you aren't really the man/woman I thought you were! You...you lied to me!" You might be right, and you may have been deceived, and you may have been involved in your own self-deception.

But why is the soul-exchange kiss performed between Rita and an old man? I had a hard time making sense of the mythical situation. If it had been an old woman, and Peter was then forced to come to grips with the old woman that his wife would someday become, and thus with his own mortality, should he stay married with Rita, it might have made more sense. As it was, the exchange with an old man seemed like a writing workshop gaffe that Lucas couldn't figure out how to handle. The slight homo-erotic buzz of the relationship between Peter and the old man seemed more ridiculous than enlightening.

Everything comes out right in the end. We have a happy ending. It's a little sappy, in fact. After reading the glowing reviews of the play (here is Louise Kennedy's review in the Globe), I wanted to like the play. I liked the characters, but I think the play is slight.

What the old sensibility of James Russell Lowell says to us

2010-05-26T11:14:00.008-04:00

As a bass member of the Brookline Chorus, I sang in our final concert on May 15 at All Saints Parish church in Brookline. Included in our program was a new ten minute choral work by Kirke Mechem, "Once to Every Man and Nation". The text for the piece is from a poem by the 19th century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell. The song is tuneful in an old-fashioned way, its melody based on a Welsh folk song. The poem itself expresses a sensibility very different from our time. Lowell wrote poetry to inspire people to fight slavery in America. Though I don't listen much to modern pop music, I think the idea of poetry or music inspiring action now seems odd. The last time that happened was, I think, in the 60s, with Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and a bunch of others.

Here's a couple of examples of what I mean. Lowell's poem starts:

Once to every man and nation,
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with false-hood,
For the good or evil side;

Do people nowadays believe that any decision will confront us "once" in a lifetime, in a "moment to decide"? The choice is stark, between truth and false-hood, between the good or evil side (between abolition and slavery). One might use the terms good and evil, especially if one is a religious conservative, but we don't see any decision as an irrevocable between good and evil. Partly, we think of this as realism, a recognition of the world's complexity and ambiguity. And we try hard to see things in shades of gray, so that we can compromise and maintain some benefit from each side. We believe that thinking in stark terms is not very sophisticated. (I struggle with almost every decision I face, like a neurotic in a Woody Allen film.)

The poem is a call to action, a call to be brave. Once you choose the "good", then you must be prepared for sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the Civil War, from both sides. Perhaps our modern avoidance of that type of thinking is a way to avoid that type of sacrifice.

---

I enjoyed singing the piece, and I know the rest of the chorus did as well. (I'm sorry that Kirke Mechem wasn't able to attend our performance -- he fell ill in the days before the concert and had to return home.)

Here is the rest of the poem:

Some great cause, some great decision,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever,
'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses,
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue,
Of the faith they had denied.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet the truth alone is strong:
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,
AND, BEHIND THE DIM UNKNOWN,
STANDETH GOD WITHIN THE SHADOW,
KEEPING WATCH ABOVE HIS OWN.

Reading The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald

2010-05-05T21:27:00.004-04:00

The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald (first published: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag, 1992)

At my mother's house, we have an old black leather suitcase filled with family pictures. They are mostly 2 x 3 and 3 x 5 black-and-white pictures, many of them of our family members in Greece from over the last 60-70 years. We used to take out the suitcase, open it on a table, and pull out the pictures (though we haven't done that in years). We would spend an enjoyably melancholy hour two talking about the people in the pictures.

Reading The Emigrants is a little like shuffling through those family pictures. Sebald was a German Jew who himself had emigrated to England, where he lived much of his adult life. There are four chapters in the book, each chapter devoted to a family member that the narrator either knew slightly, or not at all. Each chapter explores the life of that relative, pieced together by the narrator from interviews with surviving cousins, friends, and other relatives. The four people are each emigrants: an artist living in northern England, a peripatetic waiter who traveled through much of the world, a German schoolteacher, a retired professor. The time span of the lives is from the 30s to the 70s. Their generally sad lives are reconstructed, at times vividly so. The Holocaust is not referenced directly, but it seems to be there in the background.

There are no plots, no dramatic events. There are a few interesting conversations with people who reveal unknown facets of the lives being investigated. It is very much like sitting at home, for hours, talking about family members we've known, or hardly knew. To me, it's completely absorbing.

It's not exactly memoir, but an investigation in memoir. It is fiction, even though it may be based on real people, and real events. The very real photographs interspersed throughout the text give the book a documentary feel. But then, I believe almost all writing, even memoir, is either definitely fiction, or closely akin to it. This is a wonderful re-creation of lives, and it's full of life.

MetroWest Opera's Magic Flute -- a lot of fun, and don't worry about the story line

2010-05-03T21:32:00.003-04:00

We saw Mozart's "Magic Flute" Saturday night in Weston, put on by MetroWest Opera. I didn't know that the company was founded by Dana Schnitzer, the soprano soloist who sings for the Brookline Chorus. It's an amazing feat of energy and organization to sing (and sing well) and to organize an opera company. And to not grab a leading role for herself in the opera, despite having the talent to justify such a move, said good things about her.

I had never been to The Magic Flute, though years ago we had seen and since forgotten the movie Ingmar Bergman made of a performance in Stockholm. The music was wonderful, the singers were wonderful. The bass who played Sarastro, John-Paul Huckle, filled the hall with his big voice. His voice startled me, full of the deep conviction and weight you expect from the character. The Queen of the Night, Christine Teeters, sang the amazing aria scene where she gives Pamina a dagger and orders her to kill Sarastro, with a surprising amount of menace (why did Mozart compose those cheerful soprano notes for that aria? And it works). And Matt Wight, as Papageno, sang well and was really moving, particularly in the scenes where Papageno (this silly clownlike man) sings that all he wants in life is a Papagena and family.

But the story line of the opera -- we couldn't make it out. It's very convoluted. We heard from a friend that Mozart was influence at the time by the Masons. There's a lot of mumbo jumbo about quazi-religious rituals, trials, citadels, membership among the elect. It was painful to follow. Better to concentrate on the music and singing, which was a lot of fun.

Singing Brahms's Eine deutsches Requiem

2010-03-21T22:01:00.007-04:00

March 7, 2010 performance of Johannes Brahms's Eine deutsches Requiem by the Brookline Chorus at All Saints Parish church in Brookline, MA

A belated entry (I've been busy the last month, didn't have time to blog).

It was an afternoon concert on a sunny Sunday. The sun lit up the huge stained glass windows of All Saints. Friends were in the audience. I can't imagine a better place or time for this Requiem.

I loved singing this more than anything else I've sung since joining the Chorus, except perhaps for Carmina Burana. It's challenging and long. You have to pace yourself in order to have enough energy left for the last movement. It's a terrific journey.

To me the most heart-stopping moments come early, in the second movement, when we sing:

Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.

For all flesh is as grass,
and all the glory of man,
as the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower thereof falleth away. I Peter 1:24

We sing the words at first as a funeral march, a dirge, an acquiescent, resigned lament about the temporary nature of all life.

But then, a few minutes later, we blast out the very same words in an almost violent complaint against God and the universe. There's an orchestral buildup to this fortissimo over many bars. The music builds in tension and volume. You can see it, of course, in our director, Lisa Graham; with her increasingly tense gestures and her face, she makes you, the orchestra, and the audience understand that these are also very angry words.

The Huntington's "Becky Shaw" just manages to be a play, and not a sitcom

2010-03-21T21:28:00.016-04:00

The Huntington Theater Company's production of "Becky Shaw," a play by Gina Gionfriddo, directed by Peter DuBois. We saw it Saturday night, March 20, 2010.

15 minutes into the play: what is this, television? A sitcom?

25 minutes: the moving sets -- whole sets sliding ostentatiously onto and off the stage, does it mean something? Am I not getting it?

The names of these people...Suzanna Slater, Max Garrett, Susan Slater, Andrew Porter, Becky Shaw. Not only is it television, but it's daytime soap opera. From the 60s. Maybe the town they're in is called Middleville or something like that.

Well, a high toned soap opera, actually, with some witty lines, a few laughs. Parts sound like a Woody Allen parody. The premise -- a group of academics or academically trained characters generating drama out of their neuroses, loves and self-loves. Yes, it's been done. This is a 2009 version.

Why are they swearing all the time?

30 minutes: The actor Seth Fisher, who plays Max Garrett -- he's very good. He takes over the stage whenever he's present. As soon as his cynical self is present, the energy level rises, and the story make sense (sort of).

60 minutes: wait, you mean this woman, who has lived with her adopted step-brother most of her life, who has a tormented relationship with him, finally has sex with him when they're in their thirties? Wouldn't they have worked all this out by now? Seems implausible.

80 minutes: the swearing, maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe they don't really mean it. The words don't carry the same weight for these 30 somethings as for us 50ish types. Really?

90 minutes: the cover photo of the program book is actually a good snapshot of the play. Becky Shaw, an adult woman, sits in a floral dress, showing a good bit of cleavage, yet her white-socked foot is turned in, in the manner of a little girl. Her blind date with Max gives her an opportunity to not so much seduce as to trap someone with her neediness.

110 minutes: This isn't a bad play. It's barely a play. A bit static. But it has a few laughs. The ragged nature of the relationships, the chaos, the emotional damage -- it all does seems real.

At one point, Susan says that love in marriage is a matter of "putting up" with your spouse. A lover is there to support you, despite your rottenness.( I'm not saying this is the playwright's belief -- it's what the characters express.) And whether you agree or not, Gionfriddo does capture this cynical view of what might be termed love on the stage. Love and marriage as devotion, as self-sacrifice, that's not here. For better or worse.

Honore Balzac's "Pere Goriot" -- it's all the same

2010-03-06T22:23:00.002-05:00

Pere Goriot, by Honore Balzac (first published in 1835; I listened to it on CDs from Recorded Books).

It's a good story, how Eugène de Rastignac, a poor student from the country, his family's great hope, decides to take a short cut to fame and wealth by ingratiating himself into Parisian society. It's risky. He meets up with the most cynical people you could imagine, and acknowledges that he himself becomes one. It's old Goriot, Jean-Joachim Goriot, an old vermicelli dealer, who calls him back to reality with the example of his selfless (and cloyingly bottomless) love for his daughters.

I wondered if there was anything new in this book, compared to Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette, the two other Balzac novels I've read. The cast of characters are similar (maybe even the same in some cases). The experiences and motives of the characters -- all based on greed -- are similar. It's a decent pot boiler. But I'm not sure there's a good reason to read it if you've already read the the other two. Or even Lost Illusions alone.

Malone Dies, by Samuel Beckett: who cares?

2010-02-11T21:35:00.005-05:00

Malone Dies, by Samuel Beckett (a Naxos Audiobook, originally published 1951)

Who cares?

Who cares about Malone's story, his life, his impending death? After hearing Malone describe the minutiae of his dying days, the routines of the asylum he finds himself in, the contents of his pockets, morbid scenes from his life as a parent, morbid scenes from his own youth, morbid scenes that I can't even place the time or location of...I was ready to say I don't really care about that guy, that old man in the asylum room.

Yet I kept listening/reading. All the way to the dispiriting, nightmarish end. That there is nothing there is surprisingly gripping. And after having spent time in nursing homes over the last few years, I do think Beckett has the environment right. Day after day, what else can the patients (or inmates) become to the staff other than objects to be moved and washed, like Malone?

And who cares that Beckett wrote the book? When I started writing this post, I was ready to say, "I don't". And now (with a few days pause in between), I'm ready to say that I'm glad he wrote it, and that I heard Malone's story.

Viewing the great movie "The White Ribbon" is a disturbing experience

2010-01-30T21:27:00.006-05:00

"The White Ribbon" directed by Michael Haneke. In German, with subtitles.

This is an imperfect but very powerful film about a particular Protestant German village, in a particular time, 1913. The movie does not boil down to simplistic maxims about paternalism or repression, as some reviewers have suggested. It does show a drama of how people commit and respond to evil, and there's no single maxim you can put on that.

It is a well crafted film. The details of the characters' lives, their clothes, their hair, their manners, the flies in summer -- it all made me think that this was how it had to have been. There's a lot of Bergman-like cinematography here.

Is it possible that the village children committed the crimes depicted in the film? We don't know for certain. The schoolteacher who narrates the story has his suspicions. There are several scenes in which a window's curtains are drawn, the window opened suddenly, and there they are -- the group of them, blond children, presumably innocently inquiring about the health of a stricken classmate. I found myself gripping the arm rests. It's like a Hitchcock horror film in those moments.

It may be that the film's story dramatizes one of the deep currents that led to the rise of Nazism twenty years later -- that intimate, brutal repression results in the repressed himself committing small and large acts of evil. Of course, Nazism had many other roots (the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the economic and social chaos after WW I, the German longing to recover and avenge their lost territories, and on and on), but those are themes for other movies and stories.

Arthur Miller's play "All My Sons", at the Huntington Theater

2010-01-27T21:21:00.003-05:00

We saw the Arthur Miller play "All My Sons" this past weekend at the Huntington Theater. The word "intense" was used often by local reviewers, and that's obvious enough as you watch the play, but I thought the words "improbable" and "overwrought" were better adjectives. I appreciate the clear moral drama, the nicely formed characters, and the actors were quite good (especially Will Lyman as the father, Joe Keller), but there was something way overheated about this play. The anguished yelling from every direction went on for a long time.

Woody Allen's humorous story, "Udder Madness" in the New Yorker Magazine

2010-01-18T21:49:00.002-05:00

Udder Madness, a short story by Woody Allen, in the January 18, 2010 New Yorker Magazine. A first person narrative from the point of view of a cow who decides to murder a guest at the farm.

I read it aloud to Marilyn. We laughed so hard, we were gasping and nearly crying. "Imagine my surprise when I lamped the triple threat I speak of and registered neither a brooding cult genious nor a matinee idol but a wormy little cypher, myopic behind balck-framed glasses and groomed loutishly in his idea of rural chic: all tweedy and woodsy, with cap and muffler, ready for the leprechauns...lunch was served on the lawn, and our friend, made bolder by a certain Mr. Glenfiddich, proceeded to hold forth on subjects he hadn't a clue about...misquoting La Rouchefoucauld, he confused Schubert with Schumann...midway, the insufferable little nudnick beat his glass for attention and then attempted yanking the tablecloth from the table without upsetting the china...I needn't tell you that this proved to be a major holocaust...catapulting a baked potato into the cleavage of a tony brunette...."

It was like the younger Woody Allen, but even funnier.

Eric Jay Dolin's readable "Leviathan: the History of Whaling in America"

2010-01-18T21:29:00.002-05:00

Leviathan: the History of American Whaling, by Eric Jay Dolin (Norton, 2007)

Full of detail and scenery, I found this an earnest, very readable history of whaling in America, with much of the book describing the destinies and fortunes of whalers in the ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts during whaling's heyday (about 1830 to 1860).

I was surprised to learn how important whale oil was to American industry, and to the history of American industry in general. It was the best lighting fuel in the world, and made life at night possible in cities all over America and Europe. There were other important products that came from whales -- ladies' corsets get mentioned a lot. But it was chiefly whale oil that industrialists and financiers made big money on.

Dolin navigates away from the moral issues that moves modern Americans, whether it's right to kill these wild, large, warm blooded mammals, and kill them nearly to extinction. He reports without contradicting the prevailing philosophy of people of the seventeenth and nineteenth century -- that these animals were meant to be hunted and harvested. I think that's fair, despite how I feel about whale hunting.

It's well researched, sometimes reading a little like an academic work. Dolin includes 75 pages of often interesting footnotes.

More about Native Son: Max's appeal for Bigger's life

2010-01-06T16:27:00.009-05:00

More thoughts on Richard Wright's novel, Native Son (which I listened to on a Harper Audio recording).

Max, the white-haired, Jewish, Communist lawyer, defends Bigger Thomas in the court room and attempts to save him from execution. Bigger is the most despised man in America at the moment of his trial, a black man who has murdered two women, the white Mary Dalton, and his black girl friend, Bessie, though everyone knows that it is for Mary's death that he is to be executed. He is surrounded by people who hate him, except for Max and Jan (the young Communist white man who was Mary's boyfriend).

In his jail cell, Bigger wonders, "What was Mr. Max in it for?" (or thoughts to that effect). He thinks Max is "all right". But he doesn't see why Max has put himself forward to defend him. I wondered that too.

It's confusing. Max must want to clear the party of blame for involvement in Bigger's crimes. The police initially thought Bigger was inspired in some way by Communists (Bigger did, after all, sign his blackmail note as "Red" and drew a hammer and sickle in an attempt to mislead the police). But as Wright presents him in the novel, it's apparent that Max has larger motives for defending Bigger.

Near the end of the novel, during his lengthy appeal to the judge for Bigger to be spared the electric chair, Max accuses and indicts American society. This must be Richard Wright speaking through Max. His argument is the basic Marxian analysis -- we live in a system in which the labor of the poor, the oppressed, generates wealth for the upper classes. And in the process, the debasement of the poor leads to the creation of Bigger Thomases, and will continue doing so.

What an argument for saving a confessed murderer's life! Max depicts Bigger as a kind of soul-less agent of historic forces, without much of a will. Bigger's personality and character are hardly visible. There's no attempt to use the only possible argument for clemency -- sympathy for Bigger's impoverished background, for his mother, brother and sister. Max even insults the Dalton's (calling Mrs. Dalton's outlook and sensibilities "...as tragically blind" as her eyesight). The Daltons (who have lost their daughter to Bigger) are the only ones in the courtroom who could make a meaningful appeal for Bigger's life, but Max ignores that. Instead, Max gives out a lengthy ideological spiel. Max comes close to challenging the judge: send Bigger to the chair, and you contribute to the time when they (the blacks and poor whites of the country) will eventually rise up and get us.

This is an appeal guaranteed to fail. Richard Wright may have found a good stage, through Max, for presenting his ideology, but he did it at Bigger's expense.

And yet, this doesn't sink this novel. Despite its flaws, there is truth and power in this book, in its depiction of its characters and events. I can't get the scenes and words out of my head.

The novel's moving last scene, of Max talking with Bigger in his cell, just hours before Bigger is to be executed, are unforgettable, and probably make one of the best arguments for ending the death penalty I've ever read -- because it is an act of vengeance that forever ends the potential for redemption.

Sherlock Holmes, the movie -- great fun, even though it's ridiculous

2009-12-28T13:50:00.003-05:00

Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes (a pretty good Holmes), Jude Law as Watson (bears no resemblance to the original Watson -- this Watson is a street-fighting stud who dresses nattily), and Michael Strong, as Lord Blackwood (who looks like a 30s movie Dracula).

The new Sherlock Holmes film (no title other than the name?) is a lot of fun. It's really an action film, from start to finish. Much of the time, I had no idea what was going on. And what was going on was preposterous. Doesn't matter.

A couple of things I missed, that I wish they would think about for the sequel: 1) the Holmes stories were always, at bottom, realistic. They presented Holmes and Watson with an inexplicable event or mystery (a person disappears, a crime is committed with seemingly no clues left behind). Holmes always proves that the crime CAN be explained. If we go too far over the edge into the fantastical and unrealistic, then we're left with Holmes and Watson as cartoon figures. 2) We're in late 19th century London and, as Doyle did with the original stories, it's good to linger on the details of the story, or of life. The movie does that a little, but in its rush to get to the next action scene, it obliterates Holmes's background solidity. He meditates. He thinks. He walks slowly and ponders sometimes.

But it's a decent romp all the same.

Up in the Air, a movie that does not make sense

2009-12-25T20:05:00.008-05:00

Up in the Air is a modest film that tries hard to say something profound and yet be light and bouncy. I didn't dislike the movie. I like George Clooney, the main character, and I liked his depiction of a man whose job it is to fire people, a man who must stay up in the air flying, always moving, striking and then flying again to the next spot unencumbered by family, possessions, or steady relationships. It's no coincidence that he speaks warmly of sharks in his motivational speeches to audiences of corporate managers.

In the movie, he seems to discover that he might want that family, possessions, and steady relationships after all. He sees his life as vacuous. He attempts to recover these things through Alex, a female flying shark. But it doesn't work out. We end the movie with George Clooney looking gloomy and unsatisfied, which is how I felt.

Up in the Air looks like it was shot over a weekend. I know that the director and screenwriter, Jason Reitman, gets a lot of hype for having serious film creds, but the filmcraft here is uneven. The sound ambiance is unchanging. Clooney is addressing a conference hall full of people, through a microphone, yet we hear his baritone voice no differently than when he speaks to his boss in an office. We don't hear the sound of an amplified voice, nor the room ambiance. Thus, the sound fails to contribute to the movie's emotions. Is this just laziness on the part of the director? An unforgiving deadline? The soundtrack consists of a few cheesy songs meant to mirror the plot. And there is the constant use of closeups. Clooney's face constantly fills the screen, as do the other characters. There's rarely a long shot showing a larger scene, or the relationships of the characters to each other. It's boring visually.

This is a movie about inner, spiritual turmoil. What should I do with my life? What should I do next? Yet, religion doesn't exist in the film. It doesn't exist in any American film I can remember. Priests and rabbis are generally either buffoons or rapacious hucksters, if they're depicted at all. Even the wedding in Up in the Air is devoid of religious scenery. Religion doesn't help sell movies, or the product placements (American Airlines seems to be the only airline in America, and a giant economy size A1 Sauce is naturally what a bachelor wants in his fridge). Yet, the movie can only make sense with some attempt to confront Clooney's spiritual and religious consciousness. And since that's absent, the movie does not make sense.

Richard Wright's Native Son is gripping and painful

2009-12-22T20:28:00.008-05:00

Native Son (Harper, 1940), by Richard Wright . A novel on CD by Harperaudio.com. Excellently read and performed by Peter Francis James.

I have listened to more than half of the novel, and I am always sorry when I either get to the parking lot at work, or the garage at home, and I have to turn off the car.

Once Bigger Thomas, the young black man whose mind and thoughts and skin and sweat is detailed in the story, commits murder, I felt as if his nightmare were mine. I found myself imagining a different sequence of events for Bigger, that he would have found a way to control his fear when Mrs. Dalton appeared in the doorway, that he would not have suffocated Mary Dalton, that he would go on to work for the Daltons as their driver, that he would move his mother, brother, and sister out of the rat-infested room they live in, that he would make sure his brother and sister went to school -- a happy ending. But no, Bigger thinks out what he's going to do, and he does it, and it's not happy -- it means carrying a dead white woman down the stairs in a trunk, stuffing her body into a burning coal furnace. It's ghastly. It's depraved. It's hard to listen to.

All the characters act with an almost scary realism. The blacks and whites are as I, and I bet most other Americans who haven't lived sequestered lives, have known them to be.

The saddest line spoken anywhere:

2009-12-12T22:23:00.003-05:00

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

- Macbeth (upon hearing that Lady Macbeth is dead)

He goes on:

"Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!...."

Macbeth -- a murderer goaded on to his crimes by his now dead wife.

Anderson Cooper's book "Dispatches from the Edge"

2009-12-11T22:43:00.004-05:00

Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper (Harper Collins, 2006)

Cooper's desire to see and be where the action is (usually natural and manmade disasters, wars, upheavals) propels him to work on the edge, reporting for CNN and others on the human misery he encounters. The book journals his coverage for the year 2005, and includes Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. His own misery (a retelling of his father's early death, and the suicide of his brother) is intertwined with the reports, though I'm not sure to what end.

His narrative of the behind the scenes activities reads as a somewhat repetitive amplification rather than clarification of the events themselves. There isn't a lot of insight. He's not really interested in illuminating the events and places. What he wants is to give us a sense of what it's like to be Anderson Cooper. He partly succeeds, though he probably doesn't need an entire book to accomplish this. The workings of the media are presented, and his groping to understand his role in it, but he doesn't turn much attention on his employers (perhaps because they are, after all, his current employers). We're convinced that he's a good guy, but that's not a big enough subject.

Cantalina's Sunday afternoon concert "Northern Lights"

2009-12-11T22:12:00.004-05:00

Cantilena (a women's chorale) in a "Northern Lights" concert of Scandinavian choral music (Hovland, Grieg, Heiller, Sallinen, and others), Sunday, December 6, 2009.

It was a likable concert last Sunday afternoon. Their new director Allegra Martin looks like a teenager. We loved the Elgar, and the Sallinen Songs from the Sea. We thought the instrumental musicians were excellent, adding some tonal variety to the concert. The pieces they did with the choir were very effective. The Rautavaara pieces based on Lorca's poetry filled the place with an eerie, dissonant unease.

I can't say that I'd want to listen to an all women's chorus frequnently, but we enjoyed it. A surprisingly good crowd, probably more than 120 people.

An interesting note in the program book: the Scandinavian countries have a higher rate of participation in choral groups than any other nations. Perhaps 10% of Sweden's population sings in a choir.

Brookline Chorus's concert British Cathedral Sacred Works

2009-11-29T21:10:00.005-05:00

We performed this concert last Saturday night (November 21). There were a number of short pieces, including John Tavener's acapella Village Wedding and The Lamb (the latter for which I sang as part of the chamber choir), and Hubert Parry's I Was Glad. The highlight was the Britten cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb. I came to love the Britten piece for its melody lines and evocation of music and the creation of music as an expression of the will to know God. The text (from a poem by Christopher Smart) sings that every creature with "the breath of life" searches in its own way to know God.

This was a well constructed program by our conductor, Lisa Graham. The shorter, more traditionally pious pieces contrasted nicely with the modern abstractly religious Britten cantata. In The Lamb, the young shepherd sings, "I a child and thou a lamb, we are called by His name" and the association is on a very personal, intimate scene. Later, in the Britten piece, we sing, "Rejoice in God O ye tongues, give the glory to God and the Lamb...." A much bigger focus on a panoply of lives and creatures.

The Huntington's earnest, instructive, and odd Civil War Christmas

2009-11-29T20:24:00.004-05:00

The Huntington Theater's Civil War Christmas, a play by Paula Vogel.

A very earnest play. There are good bits of singing (bits only -- we don't hear the entire songs, which annoyed me). A procession of characters, many of them black, enter and exit the stage, acting out separate vignettes and narratives around Christmas Eve of 1864, around Washington D.C. It all seemed well-intentioned and instructive. Vogel and the cast did somehow make all the narratives intersect, and this is a respectable theatrical feat.

But the characters, aside from sergeant Bronson (the angry former slave, now a soldier, who vows to "take no prisoners" of the Confederates) are thin. There are so many stories going on, we just can't get to know them very well. It didn't add up to much of a theater experience for me.

I can't call such an earnest, heartfelt play a bad play -- we do care about the lost little girl and her mother in Washington searching for each other, we do care about the foolish young man who desperately wants to join up with the rebels to "serve my country", we do care about president Lincoln avoiding his kidnappers. The sentiments are certainly there (a little too much at times), and many of the scenes are skillfully constructed. I just wish Vogel had edited out some of the narratives and given us a more focused play.

Ernest Hemingway's awful yet lovable "Across the River and Into the Trees"

2009-10-28T21:46:00.003-04:00

Across the River and Into the Woods, by Ernest Hemingway. Listened to on CD as I drove to and from work.

Harry, 50+ army colonel a few years after WW II, takes a holiday in Venice to shoot ducks, drink, eat, sleep with his 19 year old Venetian girlfriend (she's from Venetian noble family), talk nonsense with Italian war comrades who adore him for leading them in battle during WW I, drink some more, punch out a couple of sailors, squeeze the girlfriend, drink again, reminisce about Rommel and Patton, eat some venison and cheese...well, that all doesn't sound so bad, does it?

What kept my attention was that Harry is such a created character, a literary construction. Every conceivable aspect of the macho, world weary, hard bitten soldier is here in one man. It's absorbing and ghastly at the same time. The couple's relationship is at times howlingly funny (the language Hemingway used to describe their sexual groping in the gondola nearly killed me -- I shouldn't have been driving 65 mph on the turnpike).

But...it's still Hemingway. The torment described, and the will to move forward is still there, and still worth reading.

I read that E.B. White wrote a parody in the New Yorker, called Across the Street and Into the Grill. A good title. Hemingway deserved it. But I still liked the book.

Thea Halo's suprisingly gritty and intimate "Not Even My Name"

2009-10-19T09:47:00.009-04:00

Not Even My Name, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000)

Thea Halo surprised me. I expected a sad, sentimental biography of her mother, Sano Halo, and a sad, horrific re-telling of what her mother suffered in the death marches forced on Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman empire, just before the final expulsion of the Christian populations from Turkey in 1922. Instead, Thea presents the characters of her family as she saw, heard, and experienced them, as both loving and hurtful, generous and petty. The book is full of scenes of intimate family dramas.

Sano Halo's girlhood in the Pontic Greek village of Iondone in Asia Minor glows in her memory like a kind of Eden. I've heard many old Greeks describe their villages in the same way.

The death march that Sano, her family, and the Greeks of her village endured under the whips and guns of Turkish soldiers is agonizing to read. How could people do such things to other people?

Thea Halo, the daughter who wrote the book, is a capable and intelligent writer. She knows her mother well, has heard and researched her life's story, and produced a readable and gripping book about a young girl's loss of her family. As the book's title says, even her name was lost, as she was placed as a ten year old with an Arab family in a desperate attempt to save her life and escape the fate of the rest of her family. Her eventual marriage to a harsh Lebanese-American man, Abraham, and their life together in America, made for surprisingly good reading in the tradition of becoming-an-American novels.

Sano's recalled narrative forms the center of the book. The beginning and end involve mother Sano and daughter Thea on a late 1990s trip to Turkey to find Iondone. The village had largely disappeared. All that's left were a few ruined foundations. Not unlike the empty villages you see in Greece, the remaining inhabitants old people, the young having left for the cities. Or America, or Australia.

The book is valuable if only for its many insights into village life in the Pontic Greek world, circa 1900. We read about how the villagers work, how the farms and animals are maintained, how the family grew their own food, how they cooked, how they subsisted on bare essentials -- and it's all fascinating. Sano's narrative describes clear-eyed depictions of family quarrels, village disputes, petty n, andeighbors, and the presence of threatening forces at the edges of their lives. (Sano refers to oddly dressed strangers, unexplained outsiders, who appear and lurk in the shadows of trees and rocks in the months leading up to the expulsion from the village by Turkish soldiers.)

I don't doubt the details of the death march, though they are written from a memory long past. They are too vivid and distinct not to have been lived.

The main story (from the village, to the death march, to life in America) is ostensibly told by Sano herself. Yet, I was aware of Thea, the creator of the book, with her literary gifts, taking on Sano's voice for her. The book might have been stronger had Sano been allowed more of her own speech, with her own inflections and vocabulary.

Abraham, Sano's husband (whom she married by an arrangement), can be a hard man to love, yet he seems noble and loving in his own befuddled way. Sano and Thea love him. I think there is a perspective here that illuminates the old immigrants from that generation-- rather than rejecting him for his obtuseness, his roughness, his obstinacy, for better or worse Sano and Thea love and protect him.

King Lear: more sinned against, but still quite a sinner

2009-10-07T20:51:00.006-04:00

King Lear, by William Shakespeare.

I listened to the exceptional recorded CD set produced by Arkangel Shakespeare, and supplemented the performance with the Everyman Shakespeare edition of the play.

I loved the play and the production. I hope to listen or see it performed again soon.

There are lots of oddities and logical lapses, however, none of which prevented me from the loving the thing.

In the play's opening, when Cordelia fails to express her filial love for Lear in the exaggerated fulsome terms used by Goneril and Regan, Lear throws himself into a rage. He disowns her. Yet, isn't she his favorite daugher? She is. So he must already know how she feels about him. Dramatic foreshortening and all that aside, it's an odd premise that he decides to demand this kind of vocal fealty from the daughters. I suppose this establishes our view of him as an aged arrogant fool.

And Cordelia -- I don't quite understand her coldness. "Nothing" is her reply. We understand that she sees through the oily praise of her sisters, but isn't her reply needlessly cold? If she's the favorite and most loving daughter, wouldn't she express that love a bit more warmly?

So Goneril puts up Lear and his one hundred rowdy camp followers. They like to party. She can't take it any more. Well, who could? Put up a hundred fun-loving knights indefinitely? After three days the fish stinks, the Mediterranean saying goes. Hard to blame Goneril for clamping down on the old blowhard. It's hardly abusing him!

Of course, he does eventually understand what an arrogant bastard he's been, in those sad scenes out in the storm, in the open, and finally with the dead Cordelia in his arms.

The Huntington's Fences: what's great about August Wilson, and what isn't

2009-09-27T21:46:00.009-04:00

In the first act of Fences, the main character Troy Maxson (in a big performance by John Beasley) radiates everything that is great in August Wilson's plays. He's enraged at the white world that denied him his chance to play baseball professionally. He's a dictatorial father who demeans and brutalizes his son Cory who dreams of playing pro football -- Troy doesn't want his son dreaming of anything other than a steady job. Troy himself is a steady wage earner (a trash collector in Pittsburgh) who loves his wife (or seems to). I felt as if Wilson had put everything he had into this man.

The second act crumbles into an odd melodrama. Troy reveals to his wife that another woman is about to bear his child. And he's not sorry. He demands that she and the rest of the world accept this fact, and him, and still love him. He throws Cory out of the house -- Cory can't take it any more.

I wanted the flawed hero of the first act to show us in the second act, to prove to us, why we should love him, why he really is heroic. He didn't do that. Instead, Troy makes a complete mess of his life and his family's. Troy dies near the end of the play, and I suppose that's supposed to absolve him. But all it does is prevent us from blaming him, which is what we want to do.

For a substantial and interesting review of Fences and August Wilson, read Thomas Garvey's article at Hub Review.

The Boston Globe's review (Doc Aucoin) was admiring but thin.

Loved Jame's Joyce's "Dubliners," even with its mundane passages

2009-09-24T21:28:00.007-04:00

On my sometimes long drives to and from my new work location (Marlborough, thirty miles each way), I have started to listen to books-on-CD. The CDs come from the Watertown Public Library. The first book I listened to was James Joyce's Dubliners (published in 1914). I last read these short stories in college.

This was a a Caedmon CD. The stories are clearly and artfully read by a variety of Irish actors and actresses.

I was moved by many of the stories (I didn't get to The Dead, deciding that would be better read in a book than listened to). The small domestic dramas kept me listening, and imagining scenes from my life. They're pretty good listening for driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Here are the last lines from Eveline, in which a young woman, after much agony, has decided to go with her lover to Argentina to start a new life. Her life in Dublin is miserable, stifling, and yet she finds herself held by it. Here they are, at the station to take a steamer and begin their trip. He calls to her:

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

I played the scene over and over in my head for days -- Eveline gripping the iron railing. The better Dubliner stories have that power.

Yet, I was surprised by how pedestrian some of the stories were, and how bland and drab some of the writing was. Some of it is cliched. Here is some text from After the Race:

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth...Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy's excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals...The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle lamps....

A cargo of hilarious youth -- these are cliches. You find them here, and sprinkled around some of the other better stories. It's sort or reassuring in a way -- even James Joyce occasionally passed off the mediocre as finished work.

What is missing from "Peeling the Onion," by Gunter Grass

2009-08-30T21:32:00.008-04:00

Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass (Harcourt, 2007).

There is one scene in particular in this memoir that has stuck in my mind. In a village behind Russian lines in 1945, Grass is an 18 year old member of the Waffen SS, trapped in a basement with five or six other German soldiers. Grass writes that he does not remember how he got there. Russian troops are firing at them. Across the square are German troops. The sergeant orders the men in the basement to each grab a bicycle (it is apparently the basement of a bicycle repair shop), and get ready to escape. "Now or never!" Grass informs him that he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle, so the sergeant tells him to stay and cover their escape with a machine gun, assuring him they'd return later for him. Grass takes his position at a window.

"I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles -- including girls' bicycles -- and all, than they were mown down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere, that is, from one side of the street or other, or both."

Grass watches as the pile of men wriggle and move for a short bit, and then all is still except for the spinning of a bicycle wheel. He has not fired a shot. He turns and makes his escape from the basement, running in the opposite direction taken by the men.

We have to take Grass's word for what happened in the basement, of course. He is the only survivor. His behavior throughout, at least as he describes it, is of a scared young man trying to stay alive amidst the collapse of the German army facing the advancing Russians.

I was struck by the sudden change of perspective in referring to himself -- "the doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire" instead of "I never had a chance to fire". It's an affect that Grass uses suddenly and repeatedly, as if he wants to express an objective point of view that cannot be assailed.

Apparently, Grass wanted to write this memoir to disclose his involvement in the SS as the involvement of a naive teenager, more interested in adventure, heroism, and escaping his stifling family life, and less interested in killing Russians, Jews, and all the other enemies of the Fatherland.

There are many enthralling passages. I don't think of Grass as a likable man. An air of comfortable self-importance emanates from the book, with frequent references to "Oscar," the first name of the main character of The Tin Drum, his most famous novel, and to other characters and scenes from his writing, as if the reader would naturally be familiar with them all. (It's true, this is his memoir -- why would you be reading it if you weren't at least somewhat familiar with his writing?)

I found him believable. I didn't sense strategic silences on details, such as to what really happened in that basement, before or after. What he is silent about is what he was taught about the Jews. The Poles. Or all the other populations who deserved extinction, according to Hitler. As a young man who read constantly, and as an SS recruit, he must have known the propoganda. Perhaps Grass handles those subjects elsewhere. If so, I haven't read them. He doesn't handle those subjects here, there is barely a word about them, and that seems like a strange and unsatisfying omission.

Publication news

2009-08-17T21:51:00.007-04:00

Some good news: the Greek-American newspaper The Hellenic Voice has published my short story, How You Catch A Cold. It appears in the August 12-19 issue of the paper. I'm thrilled to see the story in print, and hope it reaches a few readers.

If you don't have a subscription to the paper, you can read the story by clicking the link in the right-hand column of this blog page, under one of my "short story" headings.

Aurelia's Oratorio, at the A.R.T.

2009-08-01T23:35:00.010-04:00

We saw Aurelia's Oratorio with friends at the American Repertory Theater on Saturday night, August 1. Aurelia is Aurielia Theriee Chaplain, the daughter of Victoria Theriee Chaplain (the creator and director of the show) and a granddaughter of Charley Chaplain. Jaime Martinez is the other lead performer in the show.

We saw imaginative circus acts, mime, puppetry, acrobatics, dancing, illusion, and magic. I was mesmerized. Aurelia and Jaime perform acrobatic stories, sometimes together, but mostly as individuals. In the opening sequence, she appears and disappears from inside a chest of drawers. A little later, she struggles with a scarf, the scarf grows and becomes as long as one of those vines that Tarzan used to swing through the jungle with, and she lifts herself into the air, ten or twenty feet above the stage, twirling, tying and untying, play-acting at creating a hammock and falling asleep, struggling to stay aloft as the entire set shakes as if it was hit by an earthquake.

Any slip and she could fall to her death.

Aurelia is beautiful. She races around with a kind of breathless energy, as if she cannot ever rest, or ever get enough satisfaction out of life. She seemed to be less about grace than about furious activity.

Jaime is graceful and powerful. He danced and moved like a ballet dancer, even when performing those improbable stunts, like walking up a wall as if it were level ground.

What was it all about, the skits, the little comic reversals and pratfalls? I found myself a little annoyed in the early part of the 70 minute show, wondering whether there was an overall story. Were they lovers in an elaborate apache dance? Were they people constantly struggling against absurdity?

I didn't care after a while. We just enjoyed the show, and the pleasure of watching the circus.

Louise Kennedy gave the show a good review in The Boston Globe, and I can't disagree with her.

Running and living a small lifetime in a 10K

2009-07-23T17:14:00.011-04:00

I ran in the Newton 10K race on Sunday morning, June 7. Although it had been a cool, chilly spring up to then, that morning was very hot for a race -- at least 70 degrees in the shade, and much hotter in the direct sun. I am not a good hot weather runner.

It was the first 10K (6.2 miles) I had run since 2001, when I ran in the James Joyce Ramble in Dedham. In that race, I finished in 49:37, finally finishing a 10K in less than 50 minutes, after several years of trying. That was nine years ago, and I was now 54 years old when I lined up in the crowd of other racers at the Horace Mann School in Newton. Most of them were much younger runners.

We were a couple hundred people, probably none of us professional athletes. Most of us would not receive a prize. Certainly I knew I would not. Yet, we were willing to strain to our limits for 6.2 miles.

I suffered in this race. The first few miles were steadily uphill. I was gasping hard. My time at mile 2 was over 17 minutes. With the sweat blurring my eyes, I knew I was not going to make it under 50 minutes that morning.

A race is a kind of theater, a ceremony. It offers a stage on which a small lifetime is completed. Along the way, you experience running in tight spaces, nearly tripping, running too fast, too slow, pacing yourself according to somebody else's pace, privation, exhaustion, not enough water, pain, early disappointment, irritating runners. In the end, there's the finish line, and small bits of joy at seeing your wife there. With a bottle of water.

I suffered through this race. My time was a disappointing 54:25. I was 9th out of 18 other geezers in my 50-59 age range. I felt sick (nausea and stomach aches) for most of the day, and sat in my comfortable chair with my head laid back.

These races are strange cultural events. A little lifetime for each runner. I am thinking of running another one in the late fall, when the temperature won't be so high. I want to do it under 50 minutes again, the way I did eight years ago.

"Grant" - Jean Edward Smith's thorough biography of Ulysses S. Grant

2009-06-22T21:51:00.016-04:00

Grant, by Jean Edward Smith (Simon and Schuster, 2001) is a well-written book about U. S. Grant, the man who led Union armies to victory in the Civil War, and who served two respectable terms as president of the United States afterward. It is a quicker read than its 628 pages would suggest. (There are also over 70 pages of notes at the end, many of which are worth reading.)

Smith likes his subject, and set out to improve Grant's historical image; he felt Grant has been unjustly maligned as a lazy, hard-drinking simpleton, a mediocrity both as a general and as president. The Grant depicted is an analytic thinker, a flawed but inspiring leader, a humane man who cared deeply about the plight of African and Native Americans.

As a soldier and commander, he made mistakes but quickly learned from them and modified his approach. The battle scenes in the book show him formulating an overall strategy and entrusting his subordinates (notably Generals William Sherman and Phillip Sheridan) to carry out his plans, often with a great deal of independence.

He was not the drunkard depicted by some historians and popular writers (Smith indicates that a number of the histories written soon after the Civil War, books on which Grant's later reputation was founded, were written by Southern historians who wanted to discredit him). He did drink heavily at times, throughout his life. Smith contends that those instances were rare, and quotes a number of friends who refer to Grant's constant sobriety.

As a soldier, he believed in constantly attacking. He liked Sherman and Sheridan because they were aggressive -- they attacked, they charged. In the exciting battle scenes that make up two thirds of the book, Grant's greatest irritation was with generals (such as Meade, Buell, Wallace) who were slow to act and too conservative.

Grant was surprised by the Confederate resistance at the battle of Shiloh. The losses were in the tens of thousands on both sides. That battle (which the Union forces won) convinced Grant that only total victory -- total surrender of the Confederacy -- would be enough. A compromise strategy, one of holding some important land, town, or resources, in order to force a compromise, was not enough. He felt he had to destroy the Confederate army.

As a man, Smith shows him to be a good judge of character (at least in military matters), and he was very loyal to those who were loyal to him. To a fault. His honesty and commitment to ethical behavior made him seem quaint and odd to his associates, and much loved by his friends. Loyalty got him into trouble as president, where he gladly appointed his friends and comrades from the war, even though their qualifications were slight.

He was a terrible businessman, and was frequently duped out of his money. Over and over, he lost money on business ventures that reminded me of Ralph Kramden's schemes from the old TV comedy, The Honeymooners.

As president, he vigorously protected the freed black Americans of the South. He sent troops repeatedly to suppress the Klan and to remove southern white supremacist governors and mayors from office. (Smith details the savage riots and lynchings; Grant felt they were nothing less than an attempt to reverse the outcome of the war under the banner of "states rights".) He enacted a reconstruction policy that asserted the rights of black people as full citizens. Grant's defense of black voting rights was the strongest by any American president until president Johnson's enactment of the voting rights bill in the early 60s.

Grant enforced a realistic and humane policy toward American Indians. He believed them to be a wronged and oppressed people, their lives destroyed by settlers and government suppression and interference. Although his attempts to assimilate Native Americans (mainly by assuming they would relinquish their way of life, and essentially be Christianized) would strike us as unethical today, looked at in the perspective of his time, he seems a surprising defender of American Indian rights.

Grant may have been an anti-Semite (naturally, even great, noble men are capable of vile behavior). The book depicts a single event during Grant's generalship in the South -- at Vicksburg, Grant expelled all Jews from the army and government of Tennessee (he was convinced that Jewish traders had profiteered at the expense of the Union army). Happily, Abraham Lincoln countermanded the order immediately. Smith doesn't mention Grant's anti-Semitism again, remarking only that he shared in the common prejudices of that era.

I would like to have learned more about Grant's interior life. He lived in a religious era -- you were expected to go to church and attend Bible study regularly. Did he? He certainly seems to have loved his wife, and he was a devoted father. But the book is mum about family or husband and wife scenes and interactions. There is not much detail about life in the Grant household, and I missed reading that. Smith enjoys writing about the big, public, military, political and diplomatic events, which he does with a terrific narrative style.

I felt both awed and perplexed by the men that served Grant and fought under him. They willingly faced death day after day under terrible conditions. They raced towards well-defended positions, running over the bodies of dead and wounded fellow soldiers, charging directly into rifle fire. They died in the tens of thousands. Sometimes in one day. Why did they do that? Would we do that, today? Would I? Smith shows us how Grant inspired the men with his steadiness, his good sense, his folksy manner, his self-confidence, his brilliance. But I wanted to know more about why they were willing to charge. What was it about Grant, and the cause of the North, that made them charge?

Pirates! at the Huntington Theater -- if the Marx Brothers did Gilbert and Sullivan

2009-06-02T09:17:00.003-04:00

We saw Pirates! (or Gilbert and Sullivan Plundered) on Saturday night -- I enjoyed it and laughed a lot. It was good-natured fun, as if the Marx Brothers invaded and took over a Gilbert and Sullivan production. There is a lot of acrobatic dancing and humorous singing in the style of G&S. I thought they stayed true to the spirit of G&S, even with some of the updating of sensibilities.

I can, however, understand Louise Kennedy's damning review in the Boston Globe. This isn't for everybody -- you have to like the non-stop slapstick and broad humor (some people call it "energy", other people call it "low burlesque" or something like that). I think Louise actually did everybody a favor -- the Globe got a lot of irate people hitting their web site to rant about the review, and the Huntington got a lot of buzz. A win-win situation!

Our good friend who saw the production with us didn't like it -- he said it was "too much", that Gilbert and Sullivan is great, and witty, and funny, just done straight. Why make a parody of something that is already a parody? It's a good point. But it didn't prevent us from liking the show.

This was the strongest show in an otherwise mediocre season at the Huntington.

The anti-modern sensibility of Haydn's Stabat Mater

2009-05-20T21:40:00.007-04:00

The Masterworks Chorale performed Franz Joseph Haydn's Stabat Mater on Sunday, May 17, at Sanders Theater.

Stabat Mater means "sorrowful mother" in Latin, referring to Mary, the mother of Jesus. I was struck by the insistent and sometimes graphic desire to share Christ's and Mary's suffering:

"Fix the stripes of the Crucified deeply into my Heart."

"Make me a sharer in His Passion and ever mindful of his wounds."

"Let me be wounded by His wounds."

In these lines, Christ and his mother are not abstractions, distant figures of another era. Each singer longs to know them, as if they could be touched and felt.

Whether we're religious, irreligious, agnostic, or whatever, few people actually think and feel this way today. We don't think of Christ in such intimate terms, perhaps because we're afraid of being ridiculed -- it's just not the way a modern educated man thinks.

The experience of the concert reminded me of my conversations with my father, when I was a boy, and we worked together in the back of our candy shop. I went there after my high school classes were finished for the day. We worked alone for hours each night. Often we came around to talking about Christ, the apostles, Mary, Judas -- all of them as if they were people we might know, perhaps from our family, as if Doubting Thomas could appear in the doorway and could tell us, wasn't it perfectly normal to doubt that Jesus had returned? Or for Pontius Pilate to say to us that the crucifixion wasn't really his fault, that he had a state to govern for Rome. We discussed their motives. Did Christ have girlfriends? How could it be that Mary was a virgin? Did we really believe that? We had lots of time, of course, making candy, and talking.

It was brave of Masterworks to perform Stabat Mater.

The Brookline Chorus's Elijah

2009-05-10T14:51:00.010-04:00

I sing as a bass in the Brookline Chorus. We performed Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio, Elijah, at Sanders Theater in Harvard Square, Saturday, May 9. This was the first time I have ever sung in Sanders. It was the first time the Chorus had ever sung in such a large, prestigious hall.

All week, through the dress rehearsals with the 40+ piece orchestra, I felt the tension and excitement building among the other members of the Chorus. I saw the tension in our conductor Lisa Graham's face -- normally so young-looking, at moments in the week before the concert her features were taut, almost grim in her concentration.

We had a crowd of about 800 people, maybe more. As we stood in the wings, waiting to make our entrance, we strained to see the crowd through the doorway. Was it sold out? No, not quite. But it was more than enough.

The orchestral overture ended with a rising set chords that climaxed with the chorus's "Help, Lord!" -- and we were off. The people of Israel were suffering through three years of drought, brought on by their sins, and were pleading for help from God. What a blast of sound. And it sounded right. Despite our singing at top volume, it sounded right.

I could tell the audience was deeply involved throughout. During quiet passages, I heard an odd rustling sound -- hundreds of pages in the program book being turned at the same time, as people followed along with the libretto. It was troubling to think of that distracting interruption, yet oddly gratifying -- I edited and formatted the program book. How often do you get a demonstration of people using something you've helped create?

David Kravitz was our baritone soloist. What a huge voice, yet he stresses the syllables and consonants in such a way that he doesn't overpower the words. You understand what he's saying, and you understand the emotion. And Ethan Bremner, the tenor who sang Ahab and Obadiah, sang so easily, and yet I'm sure everybody in the place heard every syllable.

At the end, the audience stood and clapped and cheered for a long time. Lisa and the soloists (Jenni Samuelson and Krista River were the soprano soloists) came out twice. Lisa beamed, pointed and waved at the Chorus, at the orchestra, at the cellist, at the concertmaster, giving everyone their due.

David Kravitz came out center stage alone, and modestly tapped his chest, that gesture that says, "I'm overwhelmed. I'm so grateful." Everybody in the Chorus felt the same.

Two weeks ago: singing Carmina Burana with the Wellesely and Brandeis Choruses

Lisa had asked for bass and tenor volunteers to help fill out a Carmina Burana concert with the Wellesley and Brandeis choruses. I was pressed for time, but I love Carmina so much that I volunteered. There were a handful of us older men, surrounded by students. The concerts (there were two of them, one at Brandeis and one at Wellesley) were wonderful, and the students were wonderful singers. I was so glad to see younger people interested in Carmina Burana.

I especially loved hearing the soprano soloist, Andrea Matthews. I've heard many good sopranos now in the last few years, but her singing is different. She doesn't just sound great, she expresses the sentiment, the subject of what she's singing. I was moved by her singing. She's not a young woman herself, but when she sang, "Sweet boy, I give myself to you," she sounded so young.

Noel Perrin's book of essays, Third Person Rural

I read these essays about country life in Vermont a few weeks ago. He's not as engaging or dramatic as E.B. White describing life on a Maine farm, but Perrin is very good at describing the reality of farm life (or being a part-time farmer, which is how he described himself -- he also taught English Literature at Dartmouth). There's no sentimentality in his work, and his prose at times seemed a little too matter-of-fact and dry.

The Masterworks Chorale's concert, Sunday March 15

2009-03-22T20:57:00.004-04:00

Because we know Steve, the director, and Sandy, one of the singers and have attended so many of Masterworks' concerts, these afternoon concerts really have taken on a friendly, relaxed feeling to them, as if we were spending time with friends.

The music was friendly as well. Selections from Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Mendelssohn's Six Songs to be Sung in the Open Air, and Mendelssohn's opera Son and Stranger.

I knew the Brahm a little because the Brookline Chorus had included some of the songs in one of our concerts last year. They're wonderful pieces, and the Chorale sang them well, particularly the one that was sopranos only (though I forget the name of that one).

For the Six Songs, I imagined a German family picnic, in which the townsfolk formed up in choirs and sang. Did they do that?

The opera was the highlight of the concert, of course. It's a rarely played opera. I could really sense how deeply the singers were invested in their roles. I found it a bit hard to follow the story. Yet, there was enough acting to pretty much demonstrate what was happening. And it was in English, after all. All the singers were wonderful, especially Sumner Thompson, the baritone as Kaus. He's got a big, hall-filling voice, and he showed the right sense of comic timing and acting skill to make the role come alive. It's a light opera, not dramatic, and it doesn't have big, defining moments.

Recent events I haven't blogged about

2009-03-09T21:29:00.005-04:00

I'm going to quickly catch up on a few events we attended recently, but which I failed to blog about.

The Huntington's production of Two Men of Florence, March 7

This is a recent play by Richard Goodwin (who happens to be the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin). A very earnest play. It's excellent that large issues of God and Reason are explicitly argued in front of us, here with Pope Urban and Galileo acting as spokesmen for the respective sides (though here, the pope appears to be the man of Reason, and Galileo is the more religious). I felt as if I were watching a very well acted historical re-enactment not unlike what we see on PBS. And that I've seen this same show several times. I found a lot to like in the characters, and the performances, but the play is short on drama and overly talky, like a slightly senile professor.

The New Repertory Theater's Exits and Entrances, a play by Athol Fugard, March 5

Really wonderful performances by Ross MacDonald as the young playwright, and especially Will Lyman as the grisled veteran actor. Some touching scenes as Lyman recalls his past in the theater. But very little drama. A little too earnest. The younger man-older veteran story is a good one, but there's not much story here. I kept wondering if there was a sexual component here that Fugard never explored. It seemed like a possible undercurrent, but too far under.

The Brookline Chorus concert Songs of Freedom, February 28

(I sing in the bass section with the Chorus). A very short concert. I think the centerpiece of the concert was the Kirk Mechem songs from his opera, John Brown. I enjoyed singing them. Overall, the theme of "Freedom" is too diffuse. Going from Horizon (a tragic South African song by Peter Van Dijk about a Bushmen tribe that includes claps, hisses, finger snaps), to John Brown, to the Greg Bartholomew piece The 21st Century: A Girl Born in Afghanistan (set to excerpts from Koffi Anann's Nobel Peace Prize lecture), didn't quite hang together for me. I didn't feel the thread that held it all together, though Lisa Graham, our director, tried mightily to make it work musically and thematically.

Chameleon Arts Ensemble recital, A Tale that's Told in Ancient Song, February 15

Not easy for us to get to, down on Beacon Street, at the Goethe Institute. But we enjoyed it. Especially the Manel de Falla songs sung by Sabrina Learman. Liked the Smetana Trio in G Minor too.

Lexington Symphony concert, February 7

A wonderful orchestra and concert. I especially wanted to hear Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, a nostalgic piece. It was sung beautifully by Janna Baty. It's haunting and scary, even as the singer describes a protected and beloved childhood. "After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." So the song ends.

Jonathan McPhee seems like a wonderful conductor.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Militon

2009-03-05T17:12:00.008-05:00

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Milton (2008)

The title Paradise Lost works as a pun on two levels. The British writer Giles Milton is the author (no relation, I assume, to the classical poet John Milton). "Paradise" was the name of the Smyrna neighborhood of wealthy British and other European merchant families that had made Smyrna their home for several generations. This neighborhood was certainly "lost" to those families, as Smyrna was lost to the Christian population that had lived there for nearly two thousand years. But since the events described in the book amount to a horrifying tragedy in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed, the punning should have been avoided.

The title aside, this is a terrific book. It recounts the history leading up to the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, and the expulsions of their populations in 1922. The Greek army's ill-conceived occupation of the city following WWI, and its nearly insane expedition to defeat the nationalist Turkish forces that followed, along with the atrocities by both sides, and the ultimate defeat of the Greek army, are all dramatically recounted.

I found it hard to put down, and the last few chapters, which narrate day by day the terrible weeks of September 1922, kept me up at night reading. Milton does the right thing by telling his story from the point of view of members of these wealthy clans. It's a fresh perspective on the Smyrna tragedy, and one that most modern day readers will be better able to understand. These family members, with their middle class British sensibilities, probably seem familiar to most modern American readers, more so than the village Greeks, Armenians and Turks of that era.

For American readers unfamiliar with those events, this is a great book to read. The awful scenes in the streets of Smyrna and on the Smyrna quay were created by great power politics combined with the constantly-stoked frenzy for ethnic revenge. This is foreign to most Americans -- no foreign country has ever manipulated armies and politics and resources here, nor pitted one ethnic or racial group against another. We have the racial and class divide, and memories of slights and injustice, but nothing on this scale. We don't know what it's like.

And what can you say about Asa Jennings? I haven't read his story before, but if we're to believe this account, Jennings was the American YMCA director who took it on himself to cajole and con the demoralized Greek Navy and the reluctant navies of the major powers into rescuing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees desperately waiting on the quay for days. There should be statues of him and streets named after Asa Jennings all over Greece.

The Huntington Theater's production of "The Corn is Green"

2009-01-26T16:15:00.005-05:00

The Huntington Theater's wonderful cast and their performances (Kate Burton, her son Morgan Ritchie, Will LeBow, and all the rest) was not enough to keep me from feeling that this was a dated, tired play. It does have some good moments, the third act finally has a little tension, and there are the performances, especially if you simply want to see Kate Burton.

In its time (I think Emlyn Williams wrote it and first produced it in 1940), I suppose the depiction of the headstrong independent Miss Moffat might have seemed more original. We're to take it on faith that Miss Moffat is brilliant -- there's little evidence of it shown onstage. In the first act, the village boys are unruly childish louts. During the intermission, they become receptive bright-eyed eager-beavers, with Morgan surpassing them all as a natural genius (sort of like Tarzan, growing up in the jungle and learning to read and speak English in time for Jane). What Miss Moffat did to make this happen is unexplained. She is just magic.

The sets are homey and comfortable looking. The occasional background music between acts (Welsh choral music) is pretty but I can't tell if it has anything to do with the play. I guess the biggest reason to see this, aside from Will LeBow's humorous and lovable Squire character (a character he excels in), might be to watch Kate Burton. Except that she's simply playing Kate Burton. In the three or four performances we've seen with Kate Burton, she plays pretty much the same character -- Kate Burton, the center of attention, an actress who gives off a sense of energy and heat.

The New Reportory Theater's "Cabaret" is menacing and satisfying

2009-01-18T21:35:00.004-05:00

We liked The New Repertory Theater's Cabaret. It's the third time we've seen the Kander and Ebb play in the last 15 years, and I'd say this was the best production.

How do you write about a play as complex as this? Some of the numbers are rollicking "fun" -- and yet we know about the rise of Hitler and the enormous tragedy to come. The director, Rick Lombardo (who's leaving the New Rep for San Jose at the end of the season) struck a good balance between the fun and the menace. This production brought out the sinister undertone of the play in a coherent way. It all made sense, whereas previous productions I'd seen left me confused -- why are these people enjoying themselves so much? In this production, we sense the desperation of the characters, despite the laughs and the jiggling Kit Kat girls.

Those Kit Kat girls -- they were hilariously dirty, and almost over the top with the sleazy bump and grind numbers. They were explicit and raw. And therefore perfect for the play.

I thought the stage was a bit big for this show -- with so much space, I didn't always feel the claustrophobic, crowded ambience of a cabaret. Aimee Doherty, who was wonderful as Sally Bowles, was reaching a bit in her "Cabaret" song near the end, a little too intent on producing a Lisa Minelli showstopper. And Cliff Bradshaw (nicely played by David Krinnit) puzzles me. If he is, or was, gay, then how can he be in a love affair with Sally? His sexual persona is ambiguous, yet the play depends on their love. That didn't make sense. Finally, John Kuntz was an excellent Emcee.

B.R. Myers's "A Reader's Manifesto": I agree with him, but why do these authors sell?

2009-01-10T22:23:00.007-05:00

B.R. Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto in 2002. The subtitle, An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, pretty much sums it up. The chapter titles themselves are satirical bits of lit-crit-speak: Evocative Prose, Muscular Prose, Edgy Prose, Spare Prose, and so on. It's a fast, entertaining read and -- unlike the lengthy quoted sections he takes from famous current authors -- it's well written. His basic premise is that much of what is praised as great current literary fiction is actually laughably mediocre.

Myers asserts that fiction, and the literary culture that surrounds it, has become pretentiously high brow and and that celebrated writers have come to ignore basic precepts of clear narrative story-telling in order to mystify and scam their readers.

It's easier to produce a gushy incomprehensible word soup than swift, thoughtful prose. Readers have to accept it or risk being considered unsophisticated. Myers pretty well demolishes Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson, using them as examples of what is bad, and yet critically praised.

When Myers quotes from novels, he's devastating. And after he has blasted each writer in turn, he makes the rubble bounce.

Myers: "Sure, Proulx has plenty of long sentences, but they are usually little more than lists:"

Annie Proulx (from a piece of her fiction): "Partridge black, small, a restless traveler across the slope of life, an all-night talker; Mercalia, second wife of Partridge and the color of a brown feather on dark water, a hot intelligence; Quoyle large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere."

I did start to feel sympathy for these writers, they're so thoroughly gutted, and their quoted excerpts so terrible. I've tried to read Annie Proulx, and found her constant stream of disconnected images too much. I've tried reading DeLillo, and felt bored. The others I haven't read.

I'm surprised Myers didn't make more of the academic background of literary fiction. Many contemporary "serious" writers have (or had) academic positions in English and Writing departments (by necessity). I think these writers find it hard not to write for their academic colleagues and their literary agendas -- a writing professor is naturally interested in gaining the esteem of fellow professors and department chairmen, and not necessarily that of readers in Butte, or Buffalo.

I agreed with a lot of what Myers says in this book. And I see the parallels to some of the theater we've seen produced in the last ten years. Yet, I wondered -- how do these writers keep getting published? I know that some people really like Annie Proulx, McCarthy, and the others. Can it really be that it's lit-crit cultural pressure and bullying that's making people buy their books?

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

2008-12-28T21:36:00.006-05:00

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"

2008-12-28T21:26:00.008-05:00

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

2008-12-15T15:43:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-15T15:31:00.004-05:00

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!

2008-12-11T16:17:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-10T14:49:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-08T11:24:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-17T13:51:00.006-05:00

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

2008-11-13T17:22:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-06T09:20:00.004-05:00

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"

2008-10-24T09:43:00.008-04:00

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

2008-10-10T10:04:00.007-04:00

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"

2008-09-24T21:32:00.005-04:00

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

2008-09-23T10:53:00.007-04:00

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?

2008-09-22T11:07:00.001-04:00

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"

2008-08-19T10:21:00.003-04:00

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"

2008-08-11T21:48:00.007-04:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

2008-08-05T09:46:00.010-04:00

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

2008-08-04T21:40:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-28T20:58:00.005-04:00

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?

2008-07-06T09:41:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-29T14:55:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-29T08:57:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-28T21:22:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-02T14:08:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-02T13:50:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-02T10:49:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-25T11:50:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-05-18T21:58:00.005-04:00

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"

2008-04-14T22:05:00.003-04:00

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"

2008-04-03T16:35:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-03T16:28:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-24T09:44:00.005-04:00

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"

2008-03-22T15:46:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-17T09:49:00.002-04:00

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

2008-02-21T08:56:00.004-05:00

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.