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

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

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

About the "Big Bang theory" of ending a play

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

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

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

"So I don't get it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brookline Chorus: Two Bach Cantatas and Benjamin Britten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn't make sense.

"Streamers" at the Huntington Theater

Leaving aside our reactions that David Rabe's play is full of stereotypes and cliches about young men in a barracks waiting to be sent to Vietnam, and that we are subjected to a series of dutifully instructive scenes meant to inform us about the nature of manhood, expressed and repressed homosexual identities, and the madness of war, and that the play careens toward a violent melodramatic climax that is completely nonsensical, and that this is not a play I would choose to see on Thanksgiving weekend...I do think there were solid theatrical moments here. Men do go crazy from something--from fear. Whether it's fear of being sent to Vietnam, fear of the two comically psychopathic sergeants, or fear of not being a man acceptable to the army and your bunkmates, the fear and menace is palpable.

If only Rabe had worked on the play a few more drafts.

The Brookline Chorus's "Carmina Burana"

The 22nd movement makes your heart race -- Tempos est iocundum, "This is the joyful time." The chorus sings, baritone sings, the women sing, the children sing, the men sing, then everybody sings, and we lead right into the soprano singing the brief 23rd movement, Dulcissime -- "Sweet boy, I give everything to you."

Then comes the 24th, Blanziflor and Helena, about the victory of these two lovers (about whom we know nothing), about the victory of love, both sensual and spiritual, as your reward for enduring all of Fortune's struggles, deprivations, failures and sacrifices.

And with hardly a pause, we come down into the final 25th movement, O Fortuna, a reprise of the very first movement, but bigger, more ominous. The bass drum pounds. We're back where we started, back on the Wheel. We pick up tempo and sing hushed and curt, semper crecis, aut de crecis, "Ever waxing, ever waning." And we're back again, resigned to accept a new round. When we boom out the final massive wall of sound, we're proclaiming our willingness to endure, to keep turning on Fortune's Wheel.

Last Saturday night (November 17), when our director Lisa Graham cut the air with her baton for the final note of this Brookline Chorus concert, there was a second of silence in the huge church. Then the crowd jumped to its feet. They didn't just clap, they jumped up yelling. I've never seen a crowd at a classical music concert get to its feet quicker. From where I stood on the top riser with the other basses, it looked like a rock concert audience. But better dressed.

For a second, Lisa looked drained. She faced us. Then she smiled and spread her arms out, as if to thank and hug everyone around her. She's tall, with long arms and fingers that seemed to stretch further with the rising noise from the crowd. The soloists (David Kravitz, baritone, Kristen Watson, soprano, Matthew DiBattista, tenor -- all great that night) bowed, the percussionists bowed, the pianists Jenny Tang and Eliko Akahori bowed, the chorus clapped and nodded (we can't bow, we don't have enough room on the risers).

This was joy, this was why we make music.

We're having an open rehearsal and auditions Tuesday night, November 27. You can find out about us at The Brookline Chorus website. Our March concert has Bach cantatas and a Britten piece, and in May we're performing parts from Duke Ellington's "Sacred Concerts." If you want to ask me about the chorus or the concert, you're welcome to leave a comment.

Jerzy Kosinski's "Blind Date" and a definition for pornography

It's been thirty years since I read "The Painted Bird," or "Steps," but I immediately recognized the narrative style that grabs you from the first paragraph and doesn't let go.

The main character is Levanter (don't recall if he has a first name). The book pieces together sketches of his life, many of them revealing aspects of a personality that do not seem possible to abide in the same person. He seems to be rich. He sometimes acts with savage, unfeeling cruelty to people who have not harmed him -- a rape (meticulously detailed by the narrator), a hideous murder of a supposed spy. He also acts with sensitive warmth and compassion, with no memory of that other Levanter. How can this be? Is it possible for these two beings to not be in communication with each other, while sharing the same body?

Kosinski makes me squirm. Reading the rape scene is like suddenly being expected to find pleasure in the degradation and humiliation of another human being. And Levanter seems to find that pleasure. Something about Kosinski's details puts the reader in that position. Is that his intention, to expose the reader unexpectedly to a pornographic event, and to make the reader squirm, as if to say, "You've been accepting degradation and humiliation all around you, all your life, and you just let it pass. How can you?"

It's more than Kosinski simply instigating a physical sensation in the reader (repulsion, confusion), just for the sake of creating a riveting literary effect. I'm just not sure what it is.

Bored with James Watson's "Avoid Boring People"

It's possible that this autobiography would interest Watson's old colleagues and students, particularly those nursing a grudge or fearing a rebuke of some kind. I found the writing dry and rote. The other personalities in his life rarely have much life. He ends each chapter with a number of "lessons learned," which ostensibly can guide us in our own lives and careers. Except that I soon found the lessons to be common cliches about academic life and vague pontifications.

Worst of all is that Watson himself seems bored. Wasn't this a chore for him to write? So I abandoned the book a third of the way through.

Have taken up "Blind Date" by Jerzy Kosinski.