The various shocks of reading Tolstoy

This occurred to me while reading Tolstoy's "Sevastopol in May". Reading any Tolstoy work now, I'm almost shocked at how contemporary his sensibility is. He's always inquisitive with his characters, describes their desires and conflicting feelings realistically in a way I understand, and doesn't sentimentalize his people. And it must have been shocking for Russians of his day to read him. His Russian soldiers act out of fear and self-preservation as well as loyalty and bravery.

"He [Kalugin] had been ordered by the general to find out how the works were progressing. But when he met Mikhaylov he thought that instead of going there himself under such terrible fire -- which he was not ordered to do -- he might as well find out all about it from an officer who had been there. And having heard from Mikhaylov full details of the work and walked a little way with him, Kalugin turned off into a trench leading to the bomb-proof shelter."

So, Kalugin could go himself to examine the works by the bastions, where the bombs were falling. But he thinks to himself, conveniently, and understandably, that he was not ordered specifically to go there under "such terrible fire", and he takes the quicker, and safer route of questioning an officer who was returning from the bastion. Who can blame him? Kalugin had seen a number of dead and wounded men that night.

There are many similar passages. I wondered what Russians of that time thought when they read about the czar's soldiers in this light. Were they shocked, thinking that Tolstoy depicted the soldiers in an unacceptable light? That he had defamed them? (I'm thinking of the way Americans reacted to reading and seeing accounts from the fighting in Vietnam -- we didn't like it, many thought the journalists behaved as traitors.) Were they shocked that he presented their soldiers as actual men?

Wonderful "Musical Offering" recital: Joyeux Noel

We went to hear a program of French Baroque Christmas music -- titled Joyeux Noel -- this past Sunday at the Church of our Savior, in Brookline, performed by the ensemble called Musical Offering. The excellent instrumentalists and singers had a great time, and so did we. Very well assembled program of instrumental pieces and songs. A number of Charpentier pieces, and I heard the melody lines of his Midnight Christmas Mass in the "Nativitatem D.N.J.C Canticum", which I learned a few years ago in a chorus. The singers, especially the soprano Claire Raphaelson and mezzo Julia Cavallaro, were poised and sounded great, especially together. It was fun hearing Un flambeau, Janette, Isabelle, performed live by such a wonderful group. Musical Offering is directed by Matthew Hall, who is also the organist. We liked the program, and the overall feel of the group.

"Being thrust into a narrow, deep black sack:: The Death of Ivan Illych

Not far from the end of Tolstoy's great and terrifying short novel, "The Death of Ivan Illych", Ivan realizes his case is hopeless, that he is going to die of his illness. He and his consciousness will simply end. He suffers unbearable pain. He doubts God's existence, is agonized by the meaninglessness of his life, is baffled by why this is all happening to him. We read these lines:

"It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust into a narrow, deep black sack, and though they were being pushed further and further in they could not be pushed to the bottom...He was frightened, yet wanted to fall through the sack; he struggled yet cooperated."

As someone who suffers from claustrophobia, I read these lines and stopped and put the book down for a minute. This connection between approaching death and narrow confinement certainly seems right to me. In one sense, we all steadily fall, like Ivan, inevitably, into this narrow confinement.

Despite it all, see Lincoln, the movie

Lincoln, the movie, directed by Steven Spielberg. Lincoln is played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Despite the constantly reverent treatment of Abraham Lincoln himself, and the sentimental music that swells whenever we should be instructed that something meaningful is happening, we enjoyed seeing this movie. The movie centers on Lincoln's efforts, in the weeks just before the Civil War ended, to get Congress to add the 13th amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery for good. It's not a high-minded process. It's amazing that a dramatic and at times funny 2+ hour movie was made about the workings of the democratic political process! Of course, we know how the movie ends, but that doesn't detract from the film's impact. I'm still thinking of Daniel Day Lewis mulling over his strategy in his sepia-toned office, with William Seward (played by David Strathairn) barking at him about how many more Congressional arms they have to twist, or buy, for the amendment to pass.

"Betrayal" at the Huntington: great staging, a tense non-drama

"Betrayal", a play by Harold Pinter, which we saw at the Huntington Theater, Saturday November 24, 2012.

I loved the staging of Betrayal. Each scene is introduced by text announcing the location and time period of the upcoming scene projected onto a black curtain background, the text in an old fashioned serif book font, as if we were watching a silent film. We have a number of brightly lit interior sets (a pub, a comfortable office, a flat) where the three main characters act out, and at the close of each scene the black frame of the stage seems to narrow smaller and smaller until a small frame of the scene remains (not unlike a photographic image being cropped in a darkroom), and then it goes dark. The staging emphasizes the tense focus on the emotional story line animating the characters -- their marital betrayals of each other. Allen Moyer is the Scene Designer.

The three main actors were very good -- Gretchen Egolf as Emma, who looks beautifully English and seems to have a lot going on inside her, Alan Cox as a cunning Jerry, and Mark Dold as an unpredictable and slightly scary Robert.

The play itself gave me mixed emotions. We know what there is to know at the very start of the play -- that Emma has told her husband Robert about the long affair she had with Jerry. Robert and Jerry are supposedly best friends. We go back in time, scene by scene, and watch the affair proceed. So there is no suspense or drama. I began to feel as if Pinter were taking us on a mechanical trip -- I've set up the play to backward in time, and dammit that's what I'm going to do until we get to the beginning! I didn't sense there was much new to learn, or be surprised by, with each earlier scene. And it started to feel boring.

It's not quite boring. But it's something to think about. As with the other Pinter plays we've seen, the impulse that moves people has something to do with the desire to act, to do something (anything), to not be bored, to leave a mark on the world. It's not that Jerry desires Emma as much as he simply desires to feel alive.

Something that bothered me about Jerry -- is he really enough of a magnet for Emma? I mean, he's kind of pudgy and schlumpy and tentative (only when drunk can he profess that he adores her, to trigger their affair). What is there to make her want him in return? I wasn't satisfied with the character, or perhaps with the performance.

And the end -- it comes about 65 minutes after we've started. The whole stage opens up from our tight focus, and we see all the sets, all the scenery in a multi-tiered tableau, all the scenes of these characters' connected lives. I thought something beautiful and wonderful was about to happen. Maybe it did. I couldn't tell. The play ended.

The surprisingly gripping all-Brahms concert of the MetroWest Choral Artists

A program of Brahms, by MetroWest Choral Artists, Saturday, October 20, 2012

We went on Saturday night. A church in Wellesley -- Saint Andrew's Episcopal church. At first, when thinking about it, we thought, oh no, a concert of all-Brahms. Guttural German consonants. Overblown romantic poetry. Sopranos belting out about lost youth and loves. Basses gloomily rumbling about death.

But we were wrong. This was really interesting and satisfying, with a wide range of songs and styles. Great solos. Especially liked the pieces from "Four Serious Songs" sung by the baritone Ron Williams. One song, "For that which befalleth the sons of men" is taken from Ecclesiastes 3:19-22:

"Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals...Everything is meaningless, all go to the same place...So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot...."

Williams sang powerfully, with the right kind of rueful, awe-struck tone. It's interesting that Brahms chose these lines. Ecclesiastes frequently addresses or mentions God, but not in these lines.

And of course it was nice to hear a fellow singer from Masterworks Chorale, Rebecca Clark Lightcap, sing her solo, from Zigeunerlieder. It all made for a wonderful concert, and the director, Leonardo Ciampa, deserves a lot of credit for assembling this group.

The contrived outrage of "Good People", at the Huntington Theater

Good People, a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Kate Whoriskey, at the Huntington Theater

We saw the play a few weeks ago. While I still feel the play has significant problems and flaws, I have found myself thinking about it (most of the plays we've seen are forgettable after a few days). Margaret, a woman from South Boston ("Southie"), gets fired from her low-paying cashier's job for constantly being late, supposedly because of complications caring for her adult retarded son. She decides to approach an old boyfriend from Southie (Mike) who has now become a prosperous doctor, for a job. She is so aggressive that what we see is basically a shakedown. We learn that her son is possibly the doctor's son, and in the course of some prolonged and unlikely screaming matches with him in his living room, with his African-American wife present, we aren't sure whether this is true or not.

I didn't like the sitcom humor (someone's always being insulted in a sitcom -- as if every gratuitous insult pushes the laugh button). There are some good scenes, affectionate depictions of Margaret's friends, decent sets. The bingo scenes have nice touches and laughs. The prolonged shouting in Mike's living room, with his wife oddly abetting Margaret's attacks on Mike, went about ten minutes too far. And why is this woman attacking this man? He says he doesn't have a job for her. Instead of end-of-story, she persists. Oddly, we get strains of the current presidential and senatorial political debates in the meandering arguments -- does the have-not Margaret deserve her position in life? Was it all bad luck that kept her poor all her life? Does Mike owe her anything? What if it's Mike's baby? What does that top 1% owe the people on the bottom of the 99%?

When Margaret launches a high-volume blast at Mike about her hard luck, I can't help but feel sorry for her. Of course, she never got any good breaks. She is a disembodied voice screaming at us as well as Mike. The problem is that Mike's presence seems like a contrivance. The playwright needed a "somebody" -- preferably wealthy -- to be the butt of humor and Margaret's outrage. So I finally started to feel most sorry for Mike. If Margaret's child is not his, what did he do to deserve all this?

There must be something more to Noel Coward that I don't get

We saw Noel Coward's play, Private Lives, at the Huntington Theater on Saturday, June 9. A good cast. Sharp stage design. Good crisp delivery of the lines -- we really heard the jokes. Some of the slapstick scenes (especially when Amanda and Elyot dance and wreck their pensione after they've run off together) are quite funny.

But holy cow, this is fluff. And worse, it's repetitious fluff. If the repeated gags were taken out, we would cut twenty minutes out of the play, to its benefit. I Love Lucy, for half an hour, is great. For two hours, it's a drag.

I realize Coward wrote to give us an engaging way to spend an evening, accompanied by friends, dinner at a nice restaurant, drinks. I like all that. But I didn't find Private Lives all that engaging. The characters and their inner human convulsions and expressions of selfishness and ignorance all stand up as decent stuff for humor. But the story seems too dated and prosaic.

There must be something more to Noel Coward that I don't get, and I admit it.

Ma Rainy's Black Bottom is not what it's about: at the Huntington Theater

Ma Rainy's Black Bottom, play by August Wilson, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, March 24. Directed by Liesl Tommy.

I think we've now seen almost all of August Wilson's cycle of plays. Many of the same character types and themes recur in the plays, and that's a good thing. There's always a wise older philosopher, always a young impatient and rebellious hothead, always a conservative realist, always a shrewd and patient mother who carries on. We came to look for these people. It's a little repetitious, as we've heard their soliloquies before, and you wish Wilson would shorten things up a little. But that's a small complaint. Ma Rainy was apparently the first play in Wilson's cycle.

Ma Rainy has a lot of good stuff in it. A group of black musicians are hired to play with Ma Rainy in 30s recording studio owned by a white man. By the end we realized that the character Ma Rainy is not really the center of the play (the title is from a song that Ma Rainy sings). It's Levee (played by Jason Bowen) for me. He absolutely burns with ambition -- for his trumpet, for women, for his vision of his life as big success. Wilson gives him moments of over the top rage against God and the world -- he must have loved this character. Bowen is terrific at modulating Levee. He's sometimes touching and thoughtful, though the sarcasm and impatience are always just under the surface. When he rages, you think something awful is happening, something unexpected, right there on the stage.

Why does Levee kill old Toledo the philosopher (played by Charles Weldon)? Toledo accidentally steps on Levee's new shoes while Levee is boiling. Of course I didn't like it, because I liked Toledo. It felt as if Wilson did this artificially, in order to make a point, that the defeated Levee (he just found out painfully that Sturdyvant, the white studio producer, was not really interested in Levee's compositions, and was just stringing him along) acted out of rage at the nearest scapegoat, the gentle old Toledo. As if we were being instructed on how black men wind up taking their rage out on other black men. There may be truth and deep feeling there, but it feels a little too much like instruction. And Toledo didn't deserve to die.

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

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

"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.