Wish we had not paid for Rent

Rent, at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown This 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

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

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?

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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?

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.